Communism – A New Beginning?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012 · 1:54:19 · 6,762 words
communism-socialismcapitalismhegel-dialecticsideologyrevolution-violencedemocracytechnology-ai-cyberspacephilosophy-generalpsychoanalysis
Žižek delivers a closing address at a communist conference, weaving together several interconnected arguments: the paradox of cloud computing as a new form of privatization of the general intellect, the Kantian distinction between public and private uses of reason as a model for communist universality, the need to defetishize both democracy and violence, and the Hegelian negation of negation illustrated through Wagner's radical rewriting of the commandments. He engages with Jameson's analysis of unemployment and the 'rabble' as structural features of capitalism, argues that totality as a critical concept is indispensable, and defends the legitimacy (though not necessity) of emancipatory violence.
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The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Althusser's concept, which Žižek's interlocutor inverts (subjects interpellated as capitalists rather than by capitalism) and which Žižek treats as the site of biopolitics, today subjects are interpellated primarily as self-enjoying organisms, not as bearers of an ideological cause.
Implicitly operative in Žižek's critique of enlightened hedonism and the regulation of enjoyment under biopolitical capitalism.
Used by Žižek to name the contemporary mode of interpellation in which subjects are not hailed for a cause or idea but are constituted as self-enjoying organisms whose pleasures are then regulated.
as “enlightened neo-Buddhist hedonism”
Žižek's ironic label for the ideological form of contemporary biopolitical subjectivation: subjects are told to realize their potentials, enjoy their lives, and be what they truly are, replacing political interpellation with managed self-cultivation.
Brecht's concept of 'crude thinking' or vulgar directness, which Žižek invokes approvingly as his method for reading Baudelaire's poem as a portrait of the internet user.
as “Big Other”
Lacan's concept invoked by Žižek to argue that the objective-asubjective norm ('one doesn't do it') is constitutive of subjectivity itself; inability to relate to this level is the definition of psychosis.
The process by which tech companies (Apple, Murdoch) consolidate ownership of both hardware/software and content, creating a monopolistic privatization of universal digital access.
Marx's concept of collective knowledge as a productive force, which Žižek argues capitalism now privatizes through cloud infrastructure and intellectual property regimes, contrary to Marx's optimistic prediction that it would undermine capitalism.
as “privatization of the general intellect”
The process by which cloud computing and vertical integration allow monopolistic corporations to own access to the universal digital commons, a structural possibility Marx failed to anticipate.
as “becoming rent of profit”
Žižek's formulation (citing Negri and Hardt approvingly but critically) that post-industrial capitalism increasingly extracts value in the form of rent rather than profit, requiring direct state authority to impose arbitrary legal conditions.
as “private use of reason”
For Kant (as Žižek reads him), reason exercised from within particular communal, institutional, or national identifications, which Žižek identifies with what Althusser calls ideological state apparatuses.
Rancière's term for those excluded from the social body whose position nonetheless directly embodies universality, Žižek uses it to define the proletarian subject position as the point where public reason becomes immediately practical.
as “democratic illusion”
The acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the ultimate frame for any possible change, which Žižek (following Badiou) identifies as the primary obstacle to radical transformation of capitalist relations today.
Badiou's formula, emancipatory violence should be reserved for moments when the state uses violence to crush liberated zones; Žižek accepts the term but rejects the underlying distinction between normal state functioning and excessive state violence.
Žižek's application of Chesterton's satirical concept: a cultural-political apparatus that detects dangerous philosophical notions (totality, Rousseau, Plato) as proto-totalitarian crimes, which Žižek argues actually functions in liberal intellectual culture.
Žižek's reading of Wagner's Jesus of Nazareth as exemplifying Hegelian negation of negation: the true violation of marriage is not external adultery but loveless marriage itself, just as property in itself is theft.
The properly Hegelian move Žižek illustrates through Wagner: first an external negation of a norm (theft, adultery), then the realization that the violation is already inscribed in the norm itself (property is theft, loveless marriage is adultery).
For Žižek following Hegel, not an ideal organic whole but a critical concept: to locate a phenomenon in its totality means to include its antagonisms, distortions, and inconsistencies as integral parts, not external accidents.
as “unity of opposites”
Dialectical concept invoked by Žižek in relation to Jameson's analysis of unemployment: capitalist success (raised productivity) is itself the cause of unemployment, making blessing and curse identical.
Marx's concept, which Jameson (as cited by Žižek) expands to include permanently unemployable populations, failed-state inhabitants, and slum-dwellers as structural products of capitalist accumulation.
as “rabble”
Hegel's category (Pöbel), which Žižek (following Frank Ruda) argues is structurally re-emerging in the core of emancipatory struggles as the category of the permanently excluded-yet-included in global capitalism.
Stories he reaches for 5
From Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday: a special corps of philosophical policemen who go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists, reading books of sonnets to anticipate crimes, Žižek uses this to show how liberal anti-totalitarianism actually functions as cultural-philosophical policing.
“The ordinary detective goes to coffee houses to arrest thieves. We go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists.”
Congo exemplifies those apparently 'excluded' from global capitalism who are in fact structurally included: without Congo's minerals there would be no computers or digital technology, making exclusion a mode of extreme inclusion.
“Congo is not excluded my god without minerals from Congo we wouldn't have all the computers all the stuff that we have.”
In the History of the Soviet Communist Party (co-written by Stalin), Stalin writes that the congress 'with a large majority of votes unanimously rejected the oppositional platform', a logical contradiction that Žižek treats as a genuine Freudian slip revealing the tension between majority and unanimous will.
“the delegates of the congress with a large majority of votes unanimously rejected the oppositional platform”
Žižek invokes Brecht's dictum 'what is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?' and updates it: 'what is robbing a bank compared to organizing a good bankruptcy where you get hundreds of billions?', to illustrate the second-order crime inscribed in the system itself.
“what is robbing a bank comparing to organizing a good bankruptcy of a bank no where you get hundreds of billions”
In Wagner's unpublished draft Jesus of Nazareth, Christ rewrites the commandment against adultery: the true adultery is not copulation outside marriage but a loveless marriage, which violates the law's spirit from within. Žižek reads this as a paradigm case of Hegelian negation of negation.
“The commandment says you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you: you shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into”
Works invoked 10
Capital book
Marx's Capital; Jameson's re-reading to foreground structural unemployment as central is endorsed and extended by Žižek.
Kant's major work; the concept of public vs. private use of reason and the world civil society as paradox of universal singularity are drawn from here.
Empire book
Hardt and Negri's book; criticized for not emphasizing enough how deterritorializing capitalism requires and produces stronger state authority, and for implying communism is already latent within capitalism.
Chesterton's novel; the philosophical policeman passage is quoted at length and used to diagnose the liberal anti-totalitarian intellectual tradition as a form of ideological policing.
Jesus of Nazareth play
Wagner's unpublished dramatic draft; the central textual exhibit for Žižek's argument about Hegelian negation of negation: Wagner's Christ rewrites the commandments to internalize the violation within the norm itself.
What is Enlightenment? essay
Kant's essay; the distinction between public and private use of reason is Žižek's central Kantian reference for communist universality.
Frank Ruda's book on Hegel's concept of the Pöbel/Rabble; used to argue that the rabble is re-emerging as a structural category within global capitalism's emancipatory struggles.
Co-authored by Stalin; cited for the famous slip of tongue about 'a large majority of votes unanimously' rejecting the opposition, used to open the political problem of universality vs. majority.
Baudelaire's prose poem; read via plumpes Denken as a portrait of the internet/cloud user, the stranger who loves only clouds becomes the digital subject.
Badiou's book on Sarkozy which played on 'rat-man'; mentioned in the context of the year-of-the-rat/dog joke, with warmth toward Badiou.
People invoked 31
Charles Baudelaire positive
His prose poem L'Étranger is read as a portrait of the internet user, a 'vulgar' plumpes Denken reading Žižek presents as his opening thesis on cloud computing.
Udi Aloni positive
Described as 'my friend'; his formulation of the liberal motto (violence is sometimes necessary but never legitimate) is the foil Žižek inverts.
Richard Wagner positive
Treated as an 'old Wagnerian' with evident admiration; Wagner's Jesus of Nazareth draft is the central textual exhibit for the Hegelian negation of negation argument; Wagner is also described as a confused Proudhonian-Bakuninian leftist at the time of writing.
Theodor W. Adorno negative
Criticized for subscribing (with Popper and Levinas) to the philosophical police logic, detecting totalitarianism in the concept of totality, and for misreading Hegelian totality as harmonizing rather than critical.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Grouped with Popper and Adorno as exemplifying the philosophical police: treating totality as proto-totalitarian crime.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the Big Other as the asubjective norm constitutive of subjectivity; also present in the concept of the part of no part (via Rancière) and the general psychoanalytic framework.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Described as 'my beloved Chesterton'; two citations, the quote on free thought preventing freedom, and the philosophical policeman from The Man Who Was Thursday, both used approvingly as diagnoses of ideological mechanisms, though Žižek identifies a Hegelian limitation in Chesterton.
Louis Althusser positive
Cited for the concept of interpellation, which Žižek's interlocutor consciously inverts; Žižek connects Althusserian ISAs to the Kantian private use of reason.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Invoked as the exemplar of a non-totalizing view of capitalism: talking only about the ideal liberal-democratic capitalist system while bemoaning that some countries haven't reached it yet.
Mentioned only as the target of the 'right-wing deviation' that Stalin's congress voted to reject in the famous slip of tongue passage.
Frank Ruda positive
His book on Hegel's Rabble (Pöbel) is cited to argue that the rabble category is re-emerging in the core of emancipatory struggles in global capitalism.
Briefly mentioned alongside Proudhon as part of the anarchist tradition Wagner drew on in his leftist phase.
Étienne Balibar positive
Praised for emphasizing that Negri and Hardt admit the becoming-rent of profit; Žižek notes their Hegelian exchanges at the conference as a highlight.
Antonio Negri negative
Criticized with Hardt for failing to emphasize how deterritorialization coexists with increased state authoritarianism, and for the implication that communism is practically already here within capitalism.
Alain Badiou positive
Invoked multiple times: his formula that democracy is our ultimate enemy is endorsed; his four invariants of communism (including terror) are noted critically for the interlocutor's omission; his book on Sarkozy and his love of Wagner are mentioned with warmth.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited approvingly for two pertinent proposals: shifting emphasis in Capital to structural unemployment, and expanding the category of the unemployed to include populations excluded from modernity. Žižek qualifies and supplements Jameson's four-category schema.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Invoked for both plumpes Denken (crude thinking) as a methodological ideal and the dictum about robbing vs. founding a bank, updated to bankruptcy fraud.
Jacques Rancière negative
The police/politics distinction is found 'a little bit problematic', Rancière risks aestheticizing authentic protest as spectacular blurring rather than evaluating it by its concrete change of police-order. Žižek uses Rancière's 'part of no part' concept positively but the overall theoretical framework critically.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon positive
The formula 'property is theft' is Proudhon's, which Wagner consciously echoes; Žižek uses both as examples of the Hegelian negation of negation.
Briefly mentioned for the distinction between antagonism with enemies of the people and antagonism within the people, as a framework for thinking through political representation problems.
Mentioned as one of the philosophical sources the philosophical police would detect as potentially criminal (alongside Plato) for his social contract concept.
Karl Popper negative
Grouped with Adorno and Levinas as exemplifying the philosophical-police function: drawing a straight road from Plato to totalitarianism.
Joseph Stalin negative
The slip of tongue in History of the Soviet Communist Party is analyzed as revealing a genuine political problem (majority vs. unanimity); Stalinism is identified with reduction of public to private use of reason.
Plato positive
Žižek claims to be a 'well-known partisan of Plato' who was right to expel poets; the road 'from Plato to NATO' is cited as the false philosophical-police logic that Žižek rejects.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked throughout as providing essential but incomplete tools; praised for the concept of general intellect but criticized for failing to foresee its privatization and for a residual economistic determinism.
Michael Hardt negative
Criticized alongside Negri for the same reasons: their celebration of deterritorializing capitalism as quasi-communist misses the simultaneous strengthening of state authority.
Paul the Apostle positive
Cited via Badiou: Paul's declaration that from a Christian standpoint there are no men/women, Jews/Greeks exemplifies universal singularity bypassing particular identifications.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The key philosophical reference: negation of negation, totality as critical concept, and the Hegelian reading of Wagner's Christ are all framed as properly Hegelian operations.
Simon Critchley negative
Named as the most elaborated liberal position on violence: violence is sometimes necessary but never legitimate, a formula Žižek directly inverts.
Immanuel Kant positive
Central figure: Žižek defends and reworks Kant's public/private use of reason distinction as a foundation for communist universality, and partially defends the 'think and obey' formula as potentially strategic.
Briefly cited for the phrase 'anti-communists are dogs,' used as a springboard for a joke about Badiou's rat-man and the year of the dog/rat taxonomy.
What it argues
privatization of the general intellect through cloud computingKantian public versus private use of reason as communist universalitydefetishization of democracylegitimacy vs. necessity of emancipatory violenceHegelian negation of negation and the violation inscribed in the norm itselfstructural unemployment and the 'rabble' as constitutive of capitalismtotality as a critical rather than harmonizing concept
Dialectical moves 12
“The more the user experience is non-alienated, the more it is regulated and controlled by an alienated network.”
The apparent liberation of personalized technology is the inverse of the intensification of structural alienation at the infrastructural level.
“The more the individual user has access to universal public space, the more this space is privatized.”
Universal digital access and monopolistic privatization are not opposites but co-constitutive: more access means more concentrated ownership.
“Today the name of our ultimate enemy is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or whatever, but democracy.”
The democratic frame, not capitalism itself, is the principal obstacle to radical change, because it forecloses questioning the conditions of production.
“Violence is always legitimate but never necessary — whereas the liberal says it is sometimes necessary but never legitimate.”
Žižek inverts the liberal formula: all emancipatory violence is defensive and thus legitimate by definition, but whether to deploy it is always a strategic question.
“The universalized crime that Chesterton projects onto lawless philosophy already exists in the guise of the existing rule of law.”
The most radical transgression (abolishing property, the totality of civilized life) is not the philosopher's fantasy but the actual content of existing norms.
“The true adultery is not to copulate outside marriage but to copulate in marriage without love — marriage without love is adultery.”
The negation of negation: the violation is not external to the norm but inscribed within the norm's own letter when pursued without its spirit.
“Property in itself, brought to its end, already is theft.”
Wagner's Proudhonian move: the second-order violation (property) contains the first-order crime (theft) in a more totalized, universalized form.
“The whole is the true — but this does not mean the harmony of the all; it means no system is consistent, and what ruins it is its integral part.”
Žižek redeems Hegelian totality against Adorno: the whole encompasses its own contradiction as constitutive, not as external accident.
“The very success of capitalism — raised productivity — produces unemployment: what should be a blessing becomes a curse.”
The unity of opposites at the heart of capitalism: accumulation and expansion are structurally inseparable from generating a surplus population.
“Those excluded from global capitalism (Congo, failed states) are included precisely as excluded.”
Exclusion is not external to the capitalist system but a structural mode of inclusion, Congo's minerals are integral to the digital economy.
“Free thought is the best of all the safeguards against freedom — the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave.”
Abstract intellectual freedom (Chesterton, as Žižek endorses here) functions ideologically to prevent concrete emancipatory action.
“If you are not ready to say 'fuck communism, I want to talk about Hegel,' you are not a communist — you are a petit bourgeois who feels guilty.”
The authentic communist can subordinate the political agenda to pure theoretical interest; guilt-driven ideological loyalty is the mark of the petit bourgeois, not the revolutionary.
Claims 22
asserts
Cloud computing intensifies alienation: the more personalized and transparent the user interface, the more the underlying infrastructure must be controlled by an opaque, monopolistic network.cloud computing, alienation, technology
asserts
Marx failed to anticipate the privatization of the general intellect, which is precisely what intellectual property struggles and cloud monopolies enact today.Marx, general intellect, capitalism
asserts
Post-industrial capitalism is characterized by the becoming-rent of profit, which requires stronger (not weaker) state authority to impose legal conditions for rent extraction.post-industrial capitalism, rent, the state
rejects
Hardt and Negri are wrong to conclude that capitalism is practically dissolving into communism: the deterritorializing tendency coexists with and depends on increased state authoritarianism.Hardt and Negri, Empire, communism immanent in capitalism
asserts
The proletarian position is the point where Kantian public use of reason becomes immediately practical, because it is the position of the 'part of no part' that directly stands for universality.Kant, public reason, proletariat, universality
asserts
Stalinism represents the reduction of Marxist theory to the private use of reason — party-state ideology replacing universal reason.Stalinism, public vs. private reason, Kant
asserts
Today, democracy functions as the name of our ultimate enemy, not capitalism, because the democratic illusion forecloses radical change of capitalist relations.democracy, radical politics, Badiou
asserts
Bourgeois individualism produces unprecedented uniformization, not genuine individuality.individualism, ideology, capitalism
rejects
Rancière's police/politics distinction is problematic because it risks aestheticizing protest as spectacular rather than evaluating it by how it changes police-order the day after.Rancière, politics/police distinction, emancipation
asserts
From the radical emancipatory perspective, violence is always legitimate (as defensive) but never necessary (as a matter of strategic consideration).emancipatory violence, legitimacy, strategy
reframes
The liberal formula that violence is sometimes necessary but never legitimate must be reversed: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate but never necessary.violence, liberal ethics, emancipation
asserts
Peaceful everyday capitalist life is itself sustained by structural violence — one cannot separate violence from the existence of the state.state violence, capitalism, structural violence
asserts
The properly Hegelian insight is that the universalized crime Chesterton projected onto lawless philosophy already exists in the guise of the existing rule of law (property is theft, loveless marriage is adultery).Hegel, law, crime, negation of negation
reframes
Totality is not an organic harmonizing concept but a critical one: it means including antagonisms and inconsistencies as integral parts of a system, not accidents external to it.Hegel, totality, Adorno
rejects
Adorno was wrong to reject Hegelian totality: 'the whole is the true' does not mean harmony but that what ruins a system is its integral part, not an external accident.Adorno, totality, Hegel
asserts
The Occupy Wall Street moment marks a historical consciousness that the mismanagement of the system is inscribed in the system itself, not a contingent abuse of it.Occupy Wall Street, capitalism, systemic critique
reframes
Jameson's fourth category of the excluded should be supplemented by the illegally employed (black markets, slavery) as a crucial structural component of today's capitalism.Jameson, unemployment, informal economy
asserts
Those excluded by global capitalism (Congo, failed states) are included precisely as excluded — they are not outside but structurally integrated through their resources and marginalization.global capitalism, exclusion/inclusion, Congo
asserts
There is a problem of representation and universality that cannot be dismissed as Stalinist: when the Third Estate says 'we are the people,' they claim to represent a universality against a part.representation, universality, French Revolution, Stalinism
asserts
Psychoanalytic categories legitimately extend to the social field not by analogy but because the gap between individual and social is always already inscribed within individual subjectivity.psychoanalysis, social theory, collective dynamics
asserts
Free thought as such functions as a safeguard against actual freedom — abstract doubt about whether one wants to be free prevents emancipation.freedom, Chesterton, ideology, thinking vs. acting
reframes
Kant's 'think and obey' formula is not simply a betrayal of reason but potentially a trick: subtraction from action opens space for new social practice.Kant, obedience, public reason, political action
Quotes 18
“The more this experience is non-alienated, the more it is regulated and controlled by an alienated network.”Slavoj Žižek · cloud computing paradox / technology and alienation
“The more an individual user has access to universal public space, the more this space is privatized.”Slavoj Žižek · digital access and monopolistic privatization
“Post-industrial capitalism can be characterized by the becoming rent of profit.”Slavoj Žižek · becoming rent of profit
“Dynamic deterritorialization coexists with and relies on more and more authoritarian interventions of the state.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of Hardt and Negri / the state is strengthening
“Far from disappearing, the state is strengthening today.”Slavoj Žižek · against post-state optimism
“Today perhaps more than ever one should bear in mind that communism begins with what Kant called the public use of reason.”Slavoj Žižek · communist universality grounded in Kantian public reason
“Free thought is the best of all the safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave.”Slavoj Žižek · abstract free thought as obstacle to emancipation (Chesterton)
“Today the name of our ultimate enemy is not capitalism empire exploitation or whatever but democracy.”Slavoj Žižek · democracy as the ultimate enemy
“From the radical emancipatory perspective for the oppressed violence is always legitimate but never necessary.”Slavoj Žižek · legitimacy vs. necessity of emancipatory violence
“The marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into and who so has wooed without love already has broken the wedding.”Slavoj Žižek · Wagner's negation of negation: loveless marriage as adultery
“What is a simple adultery compared to the adultery that is a loveless marriage?”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian negation of negation applied to marriage and law
“The shift from criticizing the distortion of a notion to realizing that the distortion is already in the notion itself is the basic dialectical move.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian negation of negation as the basic dialectical operation
“Totality for Hegel is not an ideal organic whole but a critical notion.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian totality as critical not harmonizing
“To locate a phenomenon into its totality means to include into a notion a system all its distortions antagonisms inconsistencies as its integral parts.”Slavoj Žižek · totality as inclusion of contradictions
“If you are not ready to do this — to say 'fuck communism I want to talk about Hegel' — you are not a communist, you're a petit bourgeois guy who feels guilty.”Slavoj Žižek · authentic communism vs. guilt-ridden petit bourgeois leftism
“It is the very success of capitalism — raised productivity — which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless. What should be a blessing becomes a curse.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's unity of opposites: productivity generates unemployment
“Congo is not excluded — without minerals from Congo we wouldn't have all the computers all the stuff that we have.”Slavoj Žižek · excluded nations are included-as-excluded in global capitalism
“The key to actual freedom rather resides in the apolitical network of social relations from the market to the family.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx's insight: real freedom is in the apolitical not the political sphere
Transcript 18 turns
Slavoj Žižek
First just two short remarks I cannot refrain... sorry yes I cannot refrain making them. They are not substantial but I think first this last vicious question of Bruno no? Was it Bruno? What happens with Do you know that in Stalin you find an excellent slip of tongue which deals precisely with this I quote it often. It's a book history of Soviet Communist Party co-written by Stalin himself of course no? And there he describes a certain I don't know which congress in and he said it's precisely this problem. He said listen carefully he says attacking the Bukharin right-wing deviation whatever that the delegates of the congress with a large majority of votes unanimously rejected the oppositional platform. You know that's the moment Bruno was aiming at. sorry Frank yeah yeah. Not you you're a bad guy you're okay. No but you know what I want to say? This is a very very important question and it cannot be simply dismissed as Stalin's perverted totalitarian reasoning. You have the same and I'm totally for it in one of the great moments of French Revolution. When does French Revolution really become an event? Not when if they did it ever I don't know the Third Estate says the first two estates has too much power we want our part also in dividing the common piece of cake but when they say: We are the people. We as a Third Estate stand for all of the people they are only... So what I'm saying is that there is a problem here and I think it's a brutal problem because what you cannot solve it doesn't necessarily mean terror and typically my Stalinist remark. Remember when you enumerated the invariants of communism of Badiou? I noticed a conspicuous absence. For him one of the four is terror and you instead of terror get lost in multiplicities this that all the you know like many good things must think the one thing which... Okay but sorry. So again there is a problem here. It doesn't work that you will say all of a sudden to put it in Mao's terms the antagonism with the enemies of people will turn into an antagonism within people they will simply become... There is a problem here. Second before I go to the substantial point I like how you mention Sartre anti-communists are dogs because we all know that Alain Badiou got into trouble with his book on Sarkozy where he played on rat rat-man. So maybe you know in this wonderful Chinese way year of the dragon we should write a history of our struggles like after years of the dog years of the rat you know like that the name we use. Now slightly I'm sorry to tell you more serious points. First individualism and so on. But isn't it here that every authentic Marxist communist whatever has a clear answer that bourgeois individualism is a wrong one? Not in any authentic ultra sense but what is this bourgeois individualism? It's all conditioned by same publicity mechanisms and so on they are all the same my god what what you get in bourgeois individualism is precisely an I claim unprecedented uniformization. So we should... Okay that... Now let me go on with a more another more problematic point which is crucial. What is happening today? Was this a slip of tongue or did you mean it consciously subverting Althusser? Because I'm sorry I'm like a secret policeman I wrote down your exact words. According to Althusser capitalism interpellates subjects as... I inverted it on purpose. You inverted it yes because again I think that this is maybe the best definition of what I see as biopolitics. That you are... we are no longer today primarily interpellated in this great Badiouian sense for a cause for an idea. It's just you enjoy your life and usually this is put in some way of enlightened what I ironically call enlightened neo-Buddhist hedonism no realize your potentials be what truly are. So and then this should be regulated. Okay. Now comes the big... now comes the truly big point. I still think what some other people were aiming at here. You know this Jacques Rancière distinction between police politics. I find it a little bit problematic because I think the the price Rancière pays is he comes for me all too close to seeing an authentic protest as a kind of aesthetic spectacle aesthetic blurring of... For me the way I would read in a very brutal plumpes Denken way your... was it you? Some... okay someone used this formula that event exists in its consequences no? That screw le politique le politique... political event its truth is how it changes la police. How you know like what interests me is how the day after when policing goods returns how things change at that level. Now I'm sorry just the last crucial point I don't want to go into that fascism populism and so on. I agree that there can be clear distinctions made. That Susan's question which is crucial. Like in other words you put it very brutally and I like it like what does this all help amount to calling this category of desire? Well my answer would have been here a parallel with Marxism. Isn't Marxist theory that we do have collective forms of willing? We can call them whatever we want desire drive I will not go into
First just two short remarks I cannot refrain... sorry yes I cannot refrain making them. They are not substantial but I think first this last vicious question of Bruno no? Was it Bruno? What happens with Do you know that in Stalin you find an excellent slip of tongue which deals precisely with this I quote it often. It's a book history of Soviet Communist Party co-written by Stalin himself of course no? And there he describes a certain I don't know which congress in and he said it's precisely this problem. He said listen carefully he says attacking the Bukharin right-wing deviation whatever that the delegates of the congress with a large majority of votes unanimously rejected the oppositional platform. You know that's the moment Bruno was aiming at. sorry Frank yeah yeah. Not you you're a bad guy you're okay. No but you know what I want to say? This is a very very important question and it cannot be simply dismissed as Stalin's perverted totalitarian reasoning. You have the same and I'm totally for it in one of the great moments of French Revolution. When does French Revolution really become an event? Not when if they did it ever I don't know the Third Estate says the first two estates has too much power we want our part also in dividing the common piece of cake but when they say: We are the people. We as a Third Estate stand for all of the people they are only... So what I'm saying is that there is a problem here and I think it's a brutal problem because what you cannot solve it doesn't necessarily mean terror and typically my Stalinist remark. Remember when you enumerated the invariants of communism of Badiou? I noticed a conspicuous absence. For him one of the four is terror and you instead of terror get lost in multiplicities this that all the you know like many good things must think the one thing which... Okay but sorry. So again there is a problem here. It doesn't work that you will say all of a sudden to put it in Mao's terms the antagonism with the enemies of people will turn into an antagonism within people they will simply become... There is a problem here. Second before I go to the substantial point I like how you mention Sartre anti-communists are dogs because we all know that Alain Badiou got into trouble with his book on Sarkozy where he played on rat rat-man. So maybe you know in this wonderful Chinese way year of the dragon we should write a history of our struggles like after years of the dog years of the rat you know like that the name we use. Now slightly I'm sorry to tell you more serious points. First individualism and so on. But isn't it here that every authentic Marxist communist whatever has a clear answer that bourgeois individualism is a wrong one? Not in any authentic ultra sense but what is this bourgeois individualism? It's all conditioned by same publicity mechanisms and so on they are all the same my god what what you get in bourgeois individualism is precisely an I claim unprecedented uniformization. So we should... Okay that... Now let me go on with a more another more problematic point which is crucial. What is happening today? Was this a slip of tongue or did you mean it consciously subverting Althusser? Because I'm sorry I'm like a secret policeman I wrote down your exact words. According to Althusser capitalism interpellates subjects as... I inverted it on purpose. You inverted it yes because again I think that this is maybe the best definition of what I see as biopolitics. That you are... we are no longer today primarily interpellated in this great Badiouian sense for a cause for an idea. It's just you enjoy your life and usually this is put in some way of enlightened what I ironically call enlightened neo-Buddhist hedonism no realize your potentials be what truly are. So and then this should be regulated. Okay. Now comes the big... now comes the truly big point. I still think what some other people were aiming at here. You know this Jacques Rancière distinction between police politics. I find it a little bit problematic because I think the the price Rancière pays is he comes for me all too close to seeing an authentic protest as a kind of aesthetic spectacle aesthetic blurring of... For me the way I would read in a very brutal plumpes Denken way your... was it you? Some... okay someone used this formula that event exists in its consequences no? That screw le politique le politique... political event its truth is how it changes la police. How you know like what interests me is how the day after when policing goods returns how things change at that level. Now I'm sorry just the last crucial point I don't want to go into that fascism populism and so on. I agree that there can be clear distinctions made. That Susan's question which is crucial. Like in other words you put it very brutally and I like it like what does this all help amount to calling this category of desire? Well my answer would have been here a parallel with Marxism. Isn't Marxist theory that we do have collective forms of willing? We can call them whatever we want desire drive I will not go into
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that
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Slavoj Žižek
consciously which are
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collective. Isn't the whole point of Marx of the the Marxist point of a capitalist as an agent of capital is that okay privately that capitalist can be a humanitarian a sadist a good charity guy but his very being part of the capitalist machine
collective. Isn't the whole point of Marx of the the Marxist point of a capitalist as an agent of capital is that okay privately that capitalist can be a humanitarian a sadist a good charity guy but his very being part of the capitalist machine
Slavoj Žižek
involves a certain non-psychological form of willing desiring I consciously don't go into it which precisely shouldn't be reduced to private properties. I think this use is legitimate it's not Jungian bullshit we are not talking about collective unconscious. In the same way when we say there were some paranoiac mechanisms in Stalinism it has absolutely nothing to do with saying Stalin was a paranoiac. Its theory if you read the biography of so-called Stalin's henchmen that they were quite different. One was clearly a hysteric another an obsessional blah blah it doesn't matter. The collective space has its own dynamic. And again in the same way for me this is how I would prefer to squeeze out of your very diff... You know because let me make a crucial point concerning you know because what I suspect in the background of your thi... is this old reproach you didn't mean it but this would be even more brutal version than yours. That isn't psychoanalysis with its categories of desire pathology blah blah basically describing individual pathological phenomena? Do we have the right to extend them onto social? Of course there are vulgar examples which don't work like I'm doubtful of this idea you know religion is a collectivized obsessional neurosis or what. My solution for me is the following one: yes but this gap between individual and social is always inscribed into an individual itself it's within you. How for example in order to be for me which obviously as you can see in five seconds I'm not but in order for me to be a normal person I have to relate in a sense to what Lacan would have called Big Other as part of my own identity. You know a simple example: if I do something that is wrong. It's not enough you are still a psychotic or whatever when you say the majority is not doing things like that. You become a human being when you say one doesn't do it. And this one is a certain level of collective objectification which is not the same thing as majority. To put it very clearly even if most of the people violate it it's still an objectified norm one doesn't do it. And this norm is part of my subjectivity. If I am not able to see this asubjective objective norm then I am a psychotic that's the definition of a psychotic. He thinks precisely that behind the Big Other as asubjective fields there is a secret master another will which really... So I will stop now but you see our point at this level I would look for an answer. Well I think we're well we're going to... but let her... no I don't have any... we are all anti-feminists but we must conceal it precisely by pretending that we are... no no but I... I consulted I consulted yeah. Okay let's break for five minutes and come back for Slavoj. But I and I was thinking about you know what question you could ask of Slavoj that would stumble him you know? So I would ask Slavoj: yeah you know you're you have all these very interesting ideas and you're a very you know energized thinker but when are you going to publish your first book? Now the question I am asking you after he do is that you know tomorrow you will asking be asking a certain question: who has seen him? Who was the last to see him alive? Here you know I just confirm my previous proposal start to gather money for cigarettes for him and buy this type of cigarettes which can also function can be lighted in freezing cold in certain eastern parts of Russia you know. Okay sorry let me do it. First let me nonetheless begin by saying how glad I am to be here. I think even if it was not full maybe precisely because of that this was a good conference. Finally some serious work was done we break out of this falsely populist mood of you must propose some formulas it was possible to do it. What I especially liked is the spirit of you know me and Etienne those couple of Hegelian exchanges because if at a certain point in the middle of a conference of communism you are not able to say or to practice the attitude of well my god this is so interesting fuck communism I want to talk about Hegel if you are not ready to do this you are not a communist you're a petit bourgeois guy who feels guilty and has to you know push him in. So let me begin. I would like to begin by reading you a poem. Now this may... I'm a well-known partisan of Plato he was right poets out but nonetheless. It's a well-known poem by Baudelaire stranger L'Étranger. Tell it's poem in prose. Tell me enigmatic man whom do you love best? Your father your mother your sister or your brother? Answer: I have neither father nor mother nor sister nor brother. Your friends? Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known. Your country? I do not know in what latitude it lies. Beauty? I could indeed love her goddess and immortal. Gold? I hate it as you hate God. Then what do you love extraordinary stranger? I love the clouds the clouds that pass up there up there the wonderful clouds. My thesis is pure plumpes Denken extremely vulgar reading. Does this poem not provide a portrait of a fanatical internet aficionado? Alone in front of the screen he has neither father nor mother neither country nor God all he needs is a digital cloud to which his internet device is linked. This wonderful new world of clouds is however only one side of the story which reads like one of the well-known doctor jokes on first the good news then the bad news. Users are thus accessing programs and software files that are kept far away in climate controlled rooms with thousands of computers or to quote a propaganda text on cloud computing: Details are abstracted from consumers who no longer have the need for expertise in or control over the technological infrastructure in the cloud that supports them. End of quote. Two words I think are telltale here: abstraction and control. In order to manage a cloud there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning and this system is by definition hidden from a user. The paradox is thus that the more the small item smartphone or a tiny portable PC I hold in my hand is personalized easy to use transparent in its functioning the more the entire setup has to rely on the work being done elsewhere in a vast circuit of machines which coordinate the user's experience. The more this experience is non-alienated the more it is regulated and controlled by an alienated network. This of course holds for any complex technology. A user has no idea of how a remote control TV works. However the additional twist here is that it is not just technology but also the choice and accessibility of content which are controlled. That is to say the formation of computer clouds is accompanied by the process of so-called vertical vertical vertical sorry integration. Everything is accessible but mediated through a company which owns it all software and hardware data and computers. Apple doesn't only sell iPhones and iPads it also owns iTunes from where users buy music films games. Apple recently made a deal with Rupert Murdoch so that the news on their cloud will come exclusively from Rupert Murdoch's media. Global access is more and more grounded in the almost monopolistic privatization of the cloud providing the access. The more an individual user has access to universal public space the more this space is privatized. Partisans of the openness of of the internet like to criticize China for its attempts to control internet access. But are we all not becoming like China where our cloud functions in a way not dissimilar to the Chinese state? To grasp this new form of privatization one should critically transform Marx's conceptual apparatus. Because of his Marx's neglect of the social dimension of what he calls general intellect social field of knowing Marx didn't emphasize the possibility of the privatization of the general intellect itself. You know Marx I think when he mentions general intellect is at his best but at the same time at his worst. At his best he saw something new emerging at his worst because he almost gets caught there almost not quite in a kind of worst economistic determinism. The idea is once knowledge becomes the main factor in the production of wealth capitalism somehow becomes inoperative will collapse by itself. But precisely it doesn't. This is what is at the core of the struggle for intellectual property today. This is why exploitation is more and more appears more and more in the form of rent. Post-industrial capitalism can be characterized by the becoming rent of profit. And I claim Negri and Hardt admit this as it was nicely emphasized yesterday by Etienne Balibar. But I have nonetheless a critical point to make here. They don't emphasize enough how for this very reason direct authority is more and more needed. It is needed to impose the arbitrary legal conditions for extracting rent conditions which are no longer spontaneously generated by market. Perhaps therein resides the fundamental contradiction of today's postmodern capitalism. While its logic is deregulatory anti-statal nomadic deterritorializing etc. all these features on account of which Hardt and Negri claim that wait a minute capitalism is practically sorry communism is practically here we are already there we just have to throw off the the capitalist frame. The key tendency of the becoming rent of profit signals I claim the strengthening role of the state whose not only regulatory function is more and more all-present. Dynamic deterritorialization coexists with and relies on more and more authoritarian interventions of the state and its legal and other apparatuses. What one can discern at the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a society in which personal libertarianism and hedonism coexist with a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. Far from disappearing the state is strengthening today. For this reason today more than ever one should bear in mind that communism begins with what Kant called the public use of reason with thinking with the egalitarian universality of thought. When I'm sorry if I mention it regressing as you would term it when Paul says that from a Christian standpoint there are no men and women no Jews and Greeks he thereby claims to put it in Alain Badiou's terms that ethnic roots national identity and so on are not a category of truth or to put it in Kantian terms when we reflect upon our ethnic roots we engage in a private use of reason constrained by contingent dogmatic presupposition presuppositions. We act as immature individuals not as free human beings who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. For Kant you know the paradox what he calls public space of the world civil society designates the paradox of the universal singularity of singular subjects who in a kind of short circuit bypassing the mediation of the particular directly participate in the universal. This is what Kant in the famous passage of his What is Enlightenment? means by public as opposed to private. Private is not one's individual life as opposed to communal ties but the very communal institutional order of one's particular identification while public is free exercise of reason. So again precisely public state apparatuses ideological institutions all that Althusser vaguely refers as ideological and other state apparatuses this not private life is for Kant the very core of private use of reason. Now of course you will tell me am I not here too naive? Didn't I take the basic lesson of Marxist criticism of Kant? That is to say is this Kantian couple of public versus private use of reason not accompanied by what in today's terms we can call the suspension of the symbolic efficiency or performative power of the public use of reason? Kant as you probably know does not reject the standard formula of obedience don't think obey. He does not reject it by asserting its direct revolutionary opposite don't just obey follow what others are telling you think with your own head. His formula is think and obey or obey but think. That is to say think publicly in the free use of your universal reason and obey privately as part of a hierarchic machinery of power. In short thinking freely does not legitimize me to do anything. The most I can do when my public use of reason brings me to see weaknesses and injustices of the existing order is to make an appeal to the ruler for reforms. One can go here even a step further and claim like Chesterton that the abstract inconsequent freedom to think to doubt actively prevents actual freedom. A quote from Chesterton: We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him the slave to worry about whether he wants to be free and he will not free himself. End of quote. But I want now to defend Kant. Is the subtraction of thinking from acting the suspension of the social performative efficiency of thinking really as clear and unequivocal as that? Is Kant's secret strategy intended or not here not like the well-known trick in court battles when a lawyer makes a statement in front of the jury for which he knows the judge will find it inadmissible and order the jury to ignore it? Which of course is impossible since the damage has already been done. So is the withdrawal from efficiency in the public use of reason not also a subtraction which opens up a place for some new social practice? It is all too easy to point out the obvious difference between the Kantian public use of reason and the Marxist revolutionary class consciousness. The first is neutral disengaged the second is partial and fully engaged. However I claim the proletarian position can be defined precisely as the point at which the public use of reason becomes in itself practical efficient without regressing into privacy of the private use of reason since the position from which it is exercised is that to use Jacques Rancière's often referred to terms is that of the part of no part of the social body its excess which directly stands for universality. And what happens with the Stalinist reduction of the Marxist theory to the servant of the party state it's precisely again the reduction of the public use of reason to the private use of reason. What then is this public use of reason which today is maybe threatened more than ever? All the university reforms that we are getting in Europe and around. In Europe we have a nightmare called Bologna High Education Reform. I think this is an insult to the great city of Bologna to Bologna spaghetti and all the great things we refer to it. Namely it's literally an attempt to streamline education to serve as they say social needs. They want to change us into experts. Or I was in France some time ago at a debate and the guy defending Bologna reform told me referring to those cars burning this was years ago in the suburbs of Paris look here it is we need educated people. We need a psychologist to explain to us the mob psychology and how we can disperse the protests we need urbanists to tell us how to change the disposition of the suburbs to make more difficult whatever whatever. But is then the public use of reason just the name for a critical attitude? Here things become complex. There is no lack of anti-capitalism today we are even witnessing an overload of the critique of the horrors of capitalism. Books newspaper in-depth investigations TV reports are everywhere on companies ruthlessly polluting our environment on reports on corrupted bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks have to be saved by public money of sweatshops where children work overtime and so on. There is however a catch to all this overflow of critique. What is as a rule not questioned in this critique ruthless as it may appear is the democratic liberal frame of fighting against these excesses. The explicit or implicit goal is to democratize capitalism to extend democratic control onto economy through the pressure of the public media parliamentary inquiries harsher laws honest police investigations etc. but never questioning the democratic institutional frame of the state of law. This remains the sacred cow even for the most radical forms of this kind of ethical anti-capitalism. It is here I claim that Marx's key insight remains valid. Today perhaps more than ever. For Marx the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper: does a country have free elections are the judges independent is the press free from political pressures are human rights respected and similar lists of questions that different independent or not so independent western institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgment on a country. The key to actual freedom rather resides in the apolitical network apparently apolitical of course of social relations from the market to the family where the change needed if we want an actual change is not a political reform but a change in what appears as apolitical social relations of production family relations and so on. We do not vote about who owns what about relations in a factory. All this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political and it is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by extending democracy into this sphere say by organizing democratic banks under people's control. It is in this precise sense and in this sense only I know Alain Badiou is playing with fire here that I think he was right in his claim provocative I'm not the only crazy guy who likes to make provocative statements that today the name of our ultimate enemy is not capitalism empire exploitation or whatever but democracy. It is the democratic illusion the acceptance of democratic mechanisms the way they are defined today by our predominant ideology as the ultimate frame of every change which prevents radical change of capitalist relations. Next step. Closely linked to this defetishization of democracy is the defetishization of its negative counterpart violence. Badiou recently proposed the formula of defensive violence. One should renounce violence the violent taking over of state power as the principal *modus operandi* of emancipatory activity and rather focus on building free domains spaces at the distance from state power subtracted from its reign like one of his examples is the early Solidarity in Poland. So we should only resort to violence when the state itself uses violence to crush and subdue this liberated zone. It should be defensive violence. The problem I think with this formula is that it relies on the deeply problematic distinction between the normal functioning of the state apparatuses and the excessive violent exercise of state violence. I still cling to one of the fundamental Marxist theses that the peaceful social life in capitalist everyday functioning of thing is itself sustained by violence that it is an expression and effect of the temporary victory or predominance of one class the ruling one over the others in the struggle. What this means is that one cannot separate violence from the very existence existence of state. From the standpoint of those who are subordinated and oppressed the very existence of a state is a fact of violence. In this sense I'm ready to go here to the end every violence of the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is ultimately defensive. If we do not concede this point we volens nolens normalize the state and accept that its violence is only a matter of contingent excesses. This is why as my friend Udi Aloni put it the standard liberal motto apropos violence this is the position most elaborated among others by the well-known liberal theorist Simon Critchley that violence is sometimes necessary sometimes we have to resort to it but it is never legitimate. You know it's this liberal worrying oh my god it's horrible we have to fight it back but we are doing something horrible we should just do it as an extreme option. I claim we have to turn this around. From the radical emancipatory perspective for the oppressed violence is always legitimate but never necessary. That would be my formula. It's always legitimate since it's by definition defensive. It is never necessary because it is always a matter of strategic consideration to use violence against an enemy or not. Let me give you a concrete brutal example. Here on Wall Street I totally agree that any violence in the sense of physical additional violence I don't know breaking shop windows attacking would be totally catastrophic. But for example you remember when there were what is it now one year and a half two years ago the not the riots recent but a year ago the student demonstrations in London where they did break some windows of of of of exclusive shops? I claim it was absolutely justified. Because let it be clear without that minimum of violence where again practically no one was even hurt but it was violence the the protest wouldn't have the shocking echo it had. It would be something for the footnotes of the second page of the newspaper and so on and so on. So again of course we should be extremely careful in the sense of I'm not advocating oh let's just kill people or whatever but I'm saying is that nonetheless I want to have all the options free. It's a matter of strategic reasoning. What does this mean not to glorify violence? I'm sorry if you know this quote but it's so beautiful that I want to repeat it. I return you will really hate me to my beloved Chesterton who a century ago in his book I think it's the the novel The Man Who Was Thursday ironically proposed to to a state to install a quote special corps of policemen policemen who are also philosophers. Quote it's a wonderful idea: The work of the philosophical policemen is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to coffee houses to arrest thieves. We go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. End of quote. Now you may laugh at this but would thinkers as different as Karl Popper Theodor Adorno Emmanuel Levinas would they also not subscribe to a slightly changed version of this idea where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is mostly condensed in the notion of totality? For all these thinkers more or less a straight road leads from the philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism as they used to say it when I was young from Plato to NATO to NATO no. And the task of philosophical police is to discover from a book of Plato's dialogues or a treatise on social contract by Rousseau that a political crime gulag or whatever will be committed. The ordinary policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest terrorists revolutionaries the political policeman goes to symposia like ours here to detect proponents of totality. The ordinary anti-terrorist policeman tries to detect those preparing to blow up buildings and bridges the philosophical policeman tries to detect those about to deconstruct the religious and moral foundations of our societies. It's a nice idea don't laugh at it too much. This is how things effectively function. But I think nonetheless there is a faithful limitation in what Chesterton is saying here. It's a Hegelian point. What Chesterton failed to perceive is that the universalized crime that he projects into lawless modern philosophy like he says that for example that a thief still basically respects property he just wants to re to redistribute it a little bit no? Like I want your car but still we should own cars and so on it's just that I want yours no? That the the philosopher is much more dangerous because she really wants to wants to abolish the very institution of property the totality of civilized life. What I think Chesterton doesn't get is that this universalized crime already exists in the guise of the existing rule of law. What does this mean? This point was made nicely by a guy who at least at that point was a communist and I here speak as an old Wagnerian Richard Wagner. Alain told me a wonderful thing when we discovered that we both like Richard Wagner. He told me he had to oppress this love for decades and he told me that now he understood what does it mean for an American gay who had to conceal this to come out no? That now the fashion of our intellectuals is for leftist Wagnerians to to come out like gay no. And he did did something wonderful. It is and I will show what it means for today it's an elementary communist operation. Where in Wagner did this in his draft of the play Jesus of Nazareth. He wrote it somewhere between late and early and in his version Jesus's supplements to the original commandments don't steal don't commit adultery are changed I claim in a much better way than Christ himself. Why? Let me quote what Wagner in Wagner's version Christ does with the command you shall not commit adultery. I quote Wagner. The commandment Christ speaks here Wagner's Christ: The commandment says you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you: you shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into and who so has wooed without love already has broken the wedding. End of quote. The shift from Jesus's words is crucial here. For Wagner the true adultery is not to copulate outside marriage but to copulate in marriage without love. Why? It's not just romantic idea we should marry only out of love. The simple adultery just violates the law from outside while marriage without love destroys is from within turning the letter of the law against its spirit. So to paraphrase Brecht's well-known dictum what is robbing a bank compared with founding of a new bank or rather we would say today what is robbing a bank comparing to organizing a good bankruptcy of a bank no where you get hundreds of billions. What is a simple adultery compared to the adultery that is a loveless marriage? It is not by chance that Wagner's underlined formula marriage is adultery recalls Proudhon's property is theft. At that time Wagner was a kind of a confused Proudhonian Bakuninian leftist. So Wagner is radical enough to do the same also the Proudhonian twist to the idea of you shall not steal. I quote Wagner: This also is a good law you shall not steal nor covet another man's goods. But I preserve you from the sin inasmuch as I teach you: love your neighbor as yourself which also means: lay not up for yourself treasures whereby you steal from your neighbor and make and make him to starve. End of quote. Again what happens here in both cases? Now comes please this is only part when I ask you to listen carefully. It's the properly Hegelian negation of negation. You have a certain it's very simplified what I'm saying Hegel is much more complex but nonetheless. You start with a certain position: marriage property. And first you begin with the external negation: theft adultery. And then the negation of negation is a moment when you realize that this negation is already inscribed into the very universal norm. That property in itself brought to the end already is theft that marriage in its normal loveless form already is adultery. Just universalized much stronger adultery. And I claim that that that this shift from criticizing the distortion of a notion to realizing that the distortion is already in the notion itself is the basic dialectical move. And this is what confused as they may be but I wouldn't count too much on it because I think maybe they know more than it appears people on Wall Street what they want. This is I think the historical moment. They realize that we are not dealing with mismanagement abuse of system that the mismanagement abuse is inscribed into the system itself. Now I want to defend a category which is absolutely crucial for us today along these lines: the category of totality. The tool which allows us to see how violation of a notion is part of the notion itself is totality. Don't forget that totality for Hegel is not an ideal organic whole but a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in its totality into its totality does not mean to see some hidden harmony of the whole. You know like things may appear conflictual to us but if you look from a totality you see how everything serves a higher goal and so on and so on. That you saw it only your gaze was too narrow you saw only conflict you must see the harmony of the all. I think on the contrary for Hegel to locate a phenomenon into its totality means to include into a notion a system all its distortions antagonisms inconsistencies as its integral parts. Totality means pre... what does totality
involves a certain non-psychological form of willing desiring I consciously don't go into it which precisely shouldn't be reduced to private properties. I think this use is legitimate it's not Jungian bullshit we are not talking about collective unconscious. In the same way when we say there were some paranoiac mechanisms in Stalinism it has absolutely nothing to do with saying Stalin was a paranoiac. Its theory if you read the biography of so-called Stalin's henchmen that they were quite different. One was clearly a hysteric another an obsessional blah blah it doesn't matter. The collective space has its own dynamic. And again in the same way for me this is how I would prefer to squeeze out of your very diff... You know because let me make a crucial point concerning you know because what I suspect in the background of your thi... is this old reproach you didn't mean it but this would be even more brutal version than yours. That isn't psychoanalysis with its categories of desire pathology blah blah basically describing individual pathological phenomena? Do we have the right to extend them onto social? Of course there are vulgar examples which don't work like I'm doubtful of this idea you know religion is a collectivized obsessional neurosis or what. My solution for me is the following one: yes but this gap between individual and social is always inscribed into an individual itself it's within you. How for example in order to be for me which obviously as you can see in five seconds I'm not but in order for me to be a normal person I have to relate in a sense to what Lacan would have called Big Other as part of my own identity. You know a simple example: if I do something that is wrong. It's not enough you are still a psychotic or whatever when you say the majority is not doing things like that. You become a human being when you say one doesn't do it. And this one is a certain level of collective objectification which is not the same thing as majority. To put it very clearly even if most of the people violate it it's still an objectified norm one doesn't do it. And this norm is part of my subjectivity. If I am not able to see this asubjective objective norm then I am a psychotic that's the definition of a psychotic. He thinks precisely that behind the Big Other as asubjective fields there is a secret master another will which really... So I will stop now but you see our point at this level I would look for an answer. Well I think we're well we're going to... but let her... no I don't have any... we are all anti-feminists but we must conceal it precisely by pretending that we are... no no but I... I consulted I consulted yeah. Okay let's break for five minutes and come back for Slavoj. But I and I was thinking about you know what question you could ask of Slavoj that would stumble him you know? So I would ask Slavoj: yeah you know you're you have all these very interesting ideas and you're a very you know energized thinker but when are you going to publish your first book? Now the question I am asking you after he do is that you know tomorrow you will asking be asking a certain question: who has seen him? Who was the last to see him alive? Here you know I just confirm my previous proposal start to gather money for cigarettes for him and buy this type of cigarettes which can also function can be lighted in freezing cold in certain eastern parts of Russia you know. Okay sorry let me do it. First let me nonetheless begin by saying how glad I am to be here. I think even if it was not full maybe precisely because of that this was a good conference. Finally some serious work was done we break out of this falsely populist mood of you must propose some formulas it was possible to do it. What I especially liked is the spirit of you know me and Etienne those couple of Hegelian exchanges because if at a certain point in the middle of a conference of communism you are not able to say or to practice the attitude of well my god this is so interesting fuck communism I want to talk about Hegel if you are not ready to do this you are not a communist you're a petit bourgeois guy who feels guilty and has to you know push him in. So let me begin. I would like to begin by reading you a poem. Now this may... I'm a well-known partisan of Plato he was right poets out but nonetheless. It's a well-known poem by Baudelaire stranger L'Étranger. Tell it's poem in prose. Tell me enigmatic man whom do you love best? Your father your mother your sister or your brother? Answer: I have neither father nor mother nor sister nor brother. Your friends? Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known. Your country? I do not know in what latitude it lies. Beauty? I could indeed love her goddess and immortal. Gold? I hate it as you hate God. Then what do you love extraordinary stranger? I love the clouds the clouds that pass up there up there the wonderful clouds. My thesis is pure plumpes Denken extremely vulgar reading. Does this poem not provide a portrait of a fanatical internet aficionado? Alone in front of the screen he has neither father nor mother neither country nor God all he needs is a digital cloud to which his internet device is linked. This wonderful new world of clouds is however only one side of the story which reads like one of the well-known doctor jokes on first the good news then the bad news. Users are thus accessing programs and software files that are kept far away in climate controlled rooms with thousands of computers or to quote a propaganda text on cloud computing: Details are abstracted from consumers who no longer have the need for expertise in or control over the technological infrastructure in the cloud that supports them. End of quote. Two words I think are telltale here: abstraction and control. In order to manage a cloud there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning and this system is by definition hidden from a user. The paradox is thus that the more the small item smartphone or a tiny portable PC I hold in my hand is personalized easy to use transparent in its functioning the more the entire setup has to rely on the work being done elsewhere in a vast circuit of machines which coordinate the user's experience. The more this experience is non-alienated the more it is regulated and controlled by an alienated network. This of course holds for any complex technology. A user has no idea of how a remote control TV works. However the additional twist here is that it is not just technology but also the choice and accessibility of content which are controlled. That is to say the formation of computer clouds is accompanied by the process of so-called vertical vertical vertical sorry integration. Everything is accessible but mediated through a company which owns it all software and hardware data and computers. Apple doesn't only sell iPhones and iPads it also owns iTunes from where users buy music films games. Apple recently made a deal with Rupert Murdoch so that the news on their cloud will come exclusively from Rupert Murdoch's media. Global access is more and more grounded in the almost monopolistic privatization of the cloud providing the access. The more an individual user has access to universal public space the more this space is privatized. Partisans of the openness of of the internet like to criticize China for its attempts to control internet access. But are we all not becoming like China where our cloud functions in a way not dissimilar to the Chinese state? To grasp this new form of privatization one should critically transform Marx's conceptual apparatus. Because of his Marx's neglect of the social dimension of what he calls general intellect social field of knowing Marx didn't emphasize the possibility of the privatization of the general intellect itself. You know Marx I think when he mentions general intellect is at his best but at the same time at his worst. At his best he saw something new emerging at his worst because he almost gets caught there almost not quite in a kind of worst economistic determinism. The idea is once knowledge becomes the main factor in the production of wealth capitalism somehow becomes inoperative will collapse by itself. But precisely it doesn't. This is what is at the core of the struggle for intellectual property today. This is why exploitation is more and more appears more and more in the form of rent. Post-industrial capitalism can be characterized by the becoming rent of profit. And I claim Negri and Hardt admit this as it was nicely emphasized yesterday by Etienne Balibar. But I have nonetheless a critical point to make here. They don't emphasize enough how for this very reason direct authority is more and more needed. It is needed to impose the arbitrary legal conditions for extracting rent conditions which are no longer spontaneously generated by market. Perhaps therein resides the fundamental contradiction of today's postmodern capitalism. While its logic is deregulatory anti-statal nomadic deterritorializing etc. all these features on account of which Hardt and Negri claim that wait a minute capitalism is practically sorry communism is practically here we are already there we just have to throw off the the capitalist frame. The key tendency of the becoming rent of profit signals I claim the strengthening role of the state whose not only regulatory function is more and more all-present. Dynamic deterritorialization coexists with and relies on more and more authoritarian interventions of the state and its legal and other apparatuses. What one can discern at the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a society in which personal libertarianism and hedonism coexist with a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. Far from disappearing the state is strengthening today. For this reason today more than ever one should bear in mind that communism begins with what Kant called the public use of reason with thinking with the egalitarian universality of thought. When I'm sorry if I mention it regressing as you would term it when Paul says that from a Christian standpoint there are no men and women no Jews and Greeks he thereby claims to put it in Alain Badiou's terms that ethnic roots national identity and so on are not a category of truth or to put it in Kantian terms when we reflect upon our ethnic roots we engage in a private use of reason constrained by contingent dogmatic presupposition presuppositions. We act as immature individuals not as free human beings who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. For Kant you know the paradox what he calls public space of the world civil society designates the paradox of the universal singularity of singular subjects who in a kind of short circuit bypassing the mediation of the particular directly participate in the universal. This is what Kant in the famous passage of his What is Enlightenment? means by public as opposed to private. Private is not one's individual life as opposed to communal ties but the very communal institutional order of one's particular identification while public is free exercise of reason. So again precisely public state apparatuses ideological institutions all that Althusser vaguely refers as ideological and other state apparatuses this not private life is for Kant the very core of private use of reason. Now of course you will tell me am I not here too naive? Didn't I take the basic lesson of Marxist criticism of Kant? That is to say is this Kantian couple of public versus private use of reason not accompanied by what in today's terms we can call the suspension of the symbolic efficiency or performative power of the public use of reason? Kant as you probably know does not reject the standard formula of obedience don't think obey. He does not reject it by asserting its direct revolutionary opposite don't just obey follow what others are telling you think with your own head. His formula is think and obey or obey but think. That is to say think publicly in the free use of your universal reason and obey privately as part of a hierarchic machinery of power. In short thinking freely does not legitimize me to do anything. The most I can do when my public use of reason brings me to see weaknesses and injustices of the existing order is to make an appeal to the ruler for reforms. One can go here even a step further and claim like Chesterton that the abstract inconsequent freedom to think to doubt actively prevents actual freedom. A quote from Chesterton: We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him the slave to worry about whether he wants to be free and he will not free himself. End of quote. But I want now to defend Kant. Is the subtraction of thinking from acting the suspension of the social performative efficiency of thinking really as clear and unequivocal as that? Is Kant's secret strategy intended or not here not like the well-known trick in court battles when a lawyer makes a statement in front of the jury for which he knows the judge will find it inadmissible and order the jury to ignore it? Which of course is impossible since the damage has already been done. So is the withdrawal from efficiency in the public use of reason not also a subtraction which opens up a place for some new social practice? It is all too easy to point out the obvious difference between the Kantian public use of reason and the Marxist revolutionary class consciousness. The first is neutral disengaged the second is partial and fully engaged. However I claim the proletarian position can be defined precisely as the point at which the public use of reason becomes in itself practical efficient without regressing into privacy of the private use of reason since the position from which it is exercised is that to use Jacques Rancière's often referred to terms is that of the part of no part of the social body its excess which directly stands for universality. And what happens with the Stalinist reduction of the Marxist theory to the servant of the party state it's precisely again the reduction of the public use of reason to the private use of reason. What then is this public use of reason which today is maybe threatened more than ever? All the university reforms that we are getting in Europe and around. In Europe we have a nightmare called Bologna High Education Reform. I think this is an insult to the great city of Bologna to Bologna spaghetti and all the great things we refer to it. Namely it's literally an attempt to streamline education to serve as they say social needs. They want to change us into experts. Or I was in France some time ago at a debate and the guy defending Bologna reform told me referring to those cars burning this was years ago in the suburbs of Paris look here it is we need educated people. We need a psychologist to explain to us the mob psychology and how we can disperse the protests we need urbanists to tell us how to change the disposition of the suburbs to make more difficult whatever whatever. But is then the public use of reason just the name for a critical attitude? Here things become complex. There is no lack of anti-capitalism today we are even witnessing an overload of the critique of the horrors of capitalism. Books newspaper in-depth investigations TV reports are everywhere on companies ruthlessly polluting our environment on reports on corrupted bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks have to be saved by public money of sweatshops where children work overtime and so on. There is however a catch to all this overflow of critique. What is as a rule not questioned in this critique ruthless as it may appear is the democratic liberal frame of fighting against these excesses. The explicit or implicit goal is to democratize capitalism to extend democratic control onto economy through the pressure of the public media parliamentary inquiries harsher laws honest police investigations etc. but never questioning the democratic institutional frame of the state of law. This remains the sacred cow even for the most radical forms of this kind of ethical anti-capitalism. It is here I claim that Marx's key insight remains valid. Today perhaps more than ever. For Marx the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper: does a country have free elections are the judges independent is the press free from political pressures are human rights respected and similar lists of questions that different independent or not so independent western institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgment on a country. The key to actual freedom rather resides in the apolitical network apparently apolitical of course of social relations from the market to the family where the change needed if we want an actual change is not a political reform but a change in what appears as apolitical social relations of production family relations and so on. We do not vote about who owns what about relations in a factory. All this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political and it is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by extending democracy into this sphere say by organizing democratic banks under people's control. It is in this precise sense and in this sense only I know Alain Badiou is playing with fire here that I think he was right in his claim provocative I'm not the only crazy guy who likes to make provocative statements that today the name of our ultimate enemy is not capitalism empire exploitation or whatever but democracy. It is the democratic illusion the acceptance of democratic mechanisms the way they are defined today by our predominant ideology as the ultimate frame of every change which prevents radical change of capitalist relations. Next step. Closely linked to this defetishization of democracy is the defetishization of its negative counterpart violence. Badiou recently proposed the formula of defensive violence. One should renounce violence the violent taking over of state power as the principal *modus operandi* of emancipatory activity and rather focus on building free domains spaces at the distance from state power subtracted from its reign like one of his examples is the early Solidarity in Poland. So we should only resort to violence when the state itself uses violence to crush and subdue this liberated zone. It should be defensive violence. The problem I think with this formula is that it relies on the deeply problematic distinction between the normal functioning of the state apparatuses and the excessive violent exercise of state violence. I still cling to one of the fundamental Marxist theses that the peaceful social life in capitalist everyday functioning of thing is itself sustained by violence that it is an expression and effect of the temporary victory or predominance of one class the ruling one over the others in the struggle. What this means is that one cannot separate violence from the very existence existence of state. From the standpoint of those who are subordinated and oppressed the very existence of a state is a fact of violence. In this sense I'm ready to go here to the end every violence of the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is ultimately defensive. If we do not concede this point we volens nolens normalize the state and accept that its violence is only a matter of contingent excesses. This is why as my friend Udi Aloni put it the standard liberal motto apropos violence this is the position most elaborated among others by the well-known liberal theorist Simon Critchley that violence is sometimes necessary sometimes we have to resort to it but it is never legitimate. You know it's this liberal worrying oh my god it's horrible we have to fight it back but we are doing something horrible we should just do it as an extreme option. I claim we have to turn this around. From the radical emancipatory perspective for the oppressed violence is always legitimate but never necessary. That would be my formula. It's always legitimate since it's by definition defensive. It is never necessary because it is always a matter of strategic consideration to use violence against an enemy or not. Let me give you a concrete brutal example. Here on Wall Street I totally agree that any violence in the sense of physical additional violence I don't know breaking shop windows attacking would be totally catastrophic. But for example you remember when there were what is it now one year and a half two years ago the not the riots recent but a year ago the student demonstrations in London where they did break some windows of of of of exclusive shops? I claim it was absolutely justified. Because let it be clear without that minimum of violence where again practically no one was even hurt but it was violence the the protest wouldn't have the shocking echo it had. It would be something for the footnotes of the second page of the newspaper and so on and so on. So again of course we should be extremely careful in the sense of I'm not advocating oh let's just kill people or whatever but I'm saying is that nonetheless I want to have all the options free. It's a matter of strategic reasoning. What does this mean not to glorify violence? I'm sorry if you know this quote but it's so beautiful that I want to repeat it. I return you will really hate me to my beloved Chesterton who a century ago in his book I think it's the the novel The Man Who Was Thursday ironically proposed to to a state to install a quote special corps of policemen policemen who are also philosophers. Quote it's a wonderful idea: The work of the philosophical policemen is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to coffee houses to arrest thieves. We go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. End of quote. Now you may laugh at this but would thinkers as different as Karl Popper Theodor Adorno Emmanuel Levinas would they also not subscribe to a slightly changed version of this idea where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is mostly condensed in the notion of totality? For all these thinkers more or less a straight road leads from the philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism as they used to say it when I was young from Plato to NATO to NATO no. And the task of philosophical police is to discover from a book of Plato's dialogues or a treatise on social contract by Rousseau that a political crime gulag or whatever will be committed. The ordinary policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest terrorists revolutionaries the political policeman goes to symposia like ours here to detect proponents of totality. The ordinary anti-terrorist policeman tries to detect those preparing to blow up buildings and bridges the philosophical policeman tries to detect those about to deconstruct the religious and moral foundations of our societies. It's a nice idea don't laugh at it too much. This is how things effectively function. But I think nonetheless there is a faithful limitation in what Chesterton is saying here. It's a Hegelian point. What Chesterton failed to perceive is that the universalized crime that he projects into lawless modern philosophy like he says that for example that a thief still basically respects property he just wants to re to redistribute it a little bit no? Like I want your car but still we should own cars and so on it's just that I want yours no? That the the philosopher is much more dangerous because she really wants to wants to abolish the very institution of property the totality of civilized life. What I think Chesterton doesn't get is that this universalized crime already exists in the guise of the existing rule of law. What does this mean? This point was made nicely by a guy who at least at that point was a communist and I here speak as an old Wagnerian Richard Wagner. Alain told me a wonderful thing when we discovered that we both like Richard Wagner. He told me he had to oppress this love for decades and he told me that now he understood what does it mean for an American gay who had to conceal this to come out no? That now the fashion of our intellectuals is for leftist Wagnerians to to come out like gay no. And he did did something wonderful. It is and I will show what it means for today it's an elementary communist operation. Where in Wagner did this in his draft of the play Jesus of Nazareth. He wrote it somewhere between late and early and in his version Jesus's supplements to the original commandments don't steal don't commit adultery are changed I claim in a much better way than Christ himself. Why? Let me quote what Wagner in Wagner's version Christ does with the command you shall not commit adultery. I quote Wagner. The commandment Christ speaks here Wagner's Christ: The commandment says you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you: you shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into and who so has wooed without love already has broken the wedding. End of quote. The shift from Jesus's words is crucial here. For Wagner the true adultery is not to copulate outside marriage but to copulate in marriage without love. Why? It's not just romantic idea we should marry only out of love. The simple adultery just violates the law from outside while marriage without love destroys is from within turning the letter of the law against its spirit. So to paraphrase Brecht's well-known dictum what is robbing a bank compared with founding of a new bank or rather we would say today what is robbing a bank comparing to organizing a good bankruptcy of a bank no where you get hundreds of billions. What is a simple adultery compared to the adultery that is a loveless marriage? It is not by chance that Wagner's underlined formula marriage is adultery recalls Proudhon's property is theft. At that time Wagner was a kind of a confused Proudhonian Bakuninian leftist. So Wagner is radical enough to do the same also the Proudhonian twist to the idea of you shall not steal. I quote Wagner: This also is a good law you shall not steal nor covet another man's goods. But I preserve you from the sin inasmuch as I teach you: love your neighbor as yourself which also means: lay not up for yourself treasures whereby you steal from your neighbor and make and make him to starve. End of quote. Again what happens here in both cases? Now comes please this is only part when I ask you to listen carefully. It's the properly Hegelian negation of negation. You have a certain it's very simplified what I'm saying Hegel is much more complex but nonetheless. You start with a certain position: marriage property. And first you begin with the external negation: theft adultery. And then the negation of negation is a moment when you realize that this negation is already inscribed into the very universal norm. That property in itself brought to the end already is theft that marriage in its normal loveless form already is adultery. Just universalized much stronger adultery. And I claim that that that this shift from criticizing the distortion of a notion to realizing that the distortion is already in the notion itself is the basic dialectical move. And this is what confused as they may be but I wouldn't count too much on it because I think maybe they know more than it appears people on Wall Street what they want. This is I think the historical moment. They realize that we are not dealing with mismanagement abuse of system that the mismanagement abuse is inscribed into the system itself. Now I want to defend a category which is absolutely crucial for us today along these lines: the category of totality. The tool which allows us to see how violation of a notion is part of the notion itself is totality. Don't forget that totality for Hegel is not an ideal organic whole but a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in its totality into its totality does not mean to see some hidden harmony of the whole. You know like things may appear conflictual to us but if you look from a totality you see how everything serves a higher goal and so on and so on. That you saw it only your gaze was too narrow you saw only conflict you must see the harmony of the all. I think on the contrary for Hegel to locate a phenomenon into its totality means to include into a notion a system all its distortions antagonisms inconsistencies as its integral parts. Totality means pre... what does totality
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means? It
means? It
Slavoj Žižek
means let's go to today's capitalism. It
means let's go to today's capitalism. It
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means you want to talk about today's capitalism don't talk just about in Fukuyama way the perfect liberal democratic capitalist
means you want to talk about today's capitalism don't talk just about in Fukuyama way the perfect liberal democratic capitalist
Slavoj Žižek
ideal
ideal
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and then we bemoan oh my god some countries unfortunately are still out didn't yet approach it. Totality of capitalism means you want to talk about what would be
and then we bemoan oh my god some countries unfortunately are still out didn't yet approach it. Totality of capitalism means you want to talk about what would be
Slavoj Žižek
the ideals I don't know if they are ideals for you for me they are not Scandinavia they okay it is relatively good Singapore or whatever talk also about Haiti Congo and so on and so on. You see Hegelian notion of totality here Adorno was wrong I think. It's not that the whole is the true doesn't mean that oh totality swallows... No the whole is the true means no system is consistent means what ruins the system its negativity is not something which accidentally hits [unintelligible] occurs its integral part. So now I'm coming to the second part at least briefly how does this work today? I follow here although I know his knowledge of economy is not exactly the best but he had at least good sources here I would like to refer
the ideals I don't know if they are ideals for you for me they are not Scandinavia they okay it is relatively good Singapore or whatever talk also about Haiti Congo and so on and so on. You see Hegelian notion of totality here Adorno was wrong I think. It's not that the whole is the true doesn't mean that oh totality swallows... No the whole is the true means no system is consistent means what ruins the system its negativity is not something which accidentally hits [unintelligible] occurs its integral part. So now I'm coming to the second part at least briefly how does this work today? I follow here although I know his knowledge of economy is not exactly the best but he had at least good sources here I would like to refer
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here to some recent of the recent works by Fred Jameson where he made two very pertinent proposals. The first one is to shift the accent of our reading of Marx's Capital to the fundamental structural centrality of unemployment in the
here to some recent of the recent works by Fred Jameson where he made two very pertinent proposals. The first one is to shift the accent of our reading of Marx's Capital to the fundamental structural centrality of unemployment in the
Slavoj Žižek
text of Capital. I quote Fred: Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and expansion which constitutes the very nature of capitalism as such. End of quote. In what is arguably the extreme point of the unity of opposites in the sphere of economy it is the very success of capitalism raised productivity and so on which produces unemployment rendering more and more workers useless. What should be a blessing less
text of Capital. I quote Fred: Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and expansion which constitutes the very nature of capitalism as such. End of quote. In what is arguably the extreme point of the unity of opposites in the sphere of economy it is the very success of capitalism raised productivity and so on which produces unemployment rendering more and more workers useless. What should be a blessing less
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work needed becomes a curse. The world market is thus with regard to its immanent dynamic a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer and in which labor has everyone began to price itself out of the system. That is to say in the ongoing process of capitalist globalization the category of unemployed acquires a new quality beyond the classical Marxist notion of the reserve army of labor. One should consider in terms of the category of unemployed also I quote Fred those massive populations around the world who have as it were dropped out of history who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of first world capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases. So-called failed states or rogue states: Congo Somalia victims of famine or ecological disasters caught in pseudo-archaic ethnic hatreds objects of philanthropy and NGOs or often the same people of the war on terror. The
work needed becomes a curse. The world market is thus with regard to its immanent dynamic a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer and in which labor has everyone began to price itself out of the system. That is to say in the ongoing process of capitalist globalization the category of unemployed acquires a new quality beyond the classical Marxist notion of the reserve army of labor. One should consider in terms of the category of unemployed also I quote Fred those massive populations around the world who have as it were dropped out of history who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of first world capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases. So-called failed states or rogue states: Congo Somalia victims of famine or ecological disasters caught in pseudo-archaic ethnic hatreds objects of philanthropy and NGOs or often the same people of the war on terror. The
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category of the unemployed should thus be expanded to encompass a wide span of population from the temporary unemployed through no longer employable and permanently unemployed up to people living in slums and other types of ghettos.
category of the unemployed should thus be expanded to encompass a wide span of population from the temporary unemployed through no longer employable and permanently unemployed up to people living in slums and other types of ghettos.
Slavoj Žižek
All those often dismissed by Marx as lumpenproletarians. And finally to the whole areas populations or states excluded from global capitalist process like the blank spaces in ancient maps. And here I refer to Frank Ruda's book Ruda's book on Rabble I claim that this extension of the circle of the unemployed brings us a little bit back from Marx to Hegel. Rabble is back emerging in the very core of emancipatory struggles. We should nonetheless I think qualify a little bit criticize Jameson's deployment of this idea. First Jameson says then that we have four categories in today's capitalism: workers those who still can work; reserve army of the temporary unemployed; the permanently unemployable and the formerly employed but now unemployable. I think that the permanently unemployable and formerly employed I would put them together and I would add a much more important but crucial category for today's functioning of capitalism the fourth term
All those often dismissed by Marx as lumpenproletarians. And finally to the whole areas populations or states excluded from global capitalist process like the blank spaces in ancient maps. And here I refer to Frank Ruda's book Ruda's book on Rabble I claim that this extension of the circle of the unemployed brings us a little bit back from Marx to Hegel. Rabble is back emerging in the very core of emancipatory struggles. We should nonetheless I think qualify a little bit criticize Jameson's deployment of this idea. First Jameson says then that we have four categories in today's capitalism: workers those who still can work; reserve army of the temporary unemployed; the permanently unemployable and the formerly employed but now unemployable. I think that the permanently unemployable and formerly employed I would put them together and I would add a much more important but crucial category for today's functioning of capitalism the fourth term
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should be illegally employed those working in conditions of black markets different markets different forms of slavery and so on and so on. Second I think that Fred fails to emphasize how those excluded are nonetheless included precisely as excluded. Again take Congo. Congo is not excluded my god without minerals from Congo we wouldn't have all the computers all the stuff that we have.
should be illegally employed those working in conditions of black markets different markets different forms of slavery and so on and so on. Second I think that Fred fails to emphasize how those excluded are nonetheless included precisely as excluded. Again take Congo. Congo is not excluded my god without minerals from Congo we wouldn't have all the computers all the stuff that we have.
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So
So