Dave and Mikey interview Slavoj Žižek! for the Theory Underground book launch + Elton and Bryan
Interview · theory underground ·
published 2023-09-07 · 3:42:17 · 31,991 words
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
psychoanalysisideologyhegel-dialecticscapitalismcommunism-socialismliberalism-political-correctnesstechnology-ai-cyberspacephilosophy-generalsubjectivityethics
An online interview between Žižek and Theory Underground, a US working-class philosophy platform, held for their book and tour launch. Žižek addresses the ethics of psychoanalysis at length, the relationship between desire and drive, Laplanche's enigma of the Other as the original form of lack, his critique of Miller's conservative Lacanianism, and then turns to cancel culture as a structural paradox of exclusion (énonciation vs. énoncé), class struggle as self-negation rather than identity assertion, and AI singularity as the latest figure of the big Other. He also critically assesses Nick Land's accelerationism (too optimistic, a fantasy projection onto an ontological gap) and briefly discusses Baudrillard and the Zupančič reading of Antigone. After Žižek departs around the 85-minute mark, Theory Underground members present their books and projects.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 24
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Against simple liberal universalism (universal human rights that ignore particular biases), Žižek invokes the Hegelian notion that every universality must be interrogated with respect to its particular-ideological distortions.
as “useful idiot / fellow traveler”
Žižek applies Stalinist vocabulary ironically to Susan Neiman: she does useful work criticizing wokeness but from a position of mere liberal universalism that will 'need to be purged' at a later stage.
The illicit supplement of enjoyment built into ideology's own functioning; illustrated here by the audience member who reads Žižek on the job as bouncer, the act that sustains rather than undermines the system.
The small-object cause of desire; invoked playfully through the audience's joke about Žižek misspelling 'McGowan' as 'MacGowan' because he has a thing for the little a.
as “l'énoncé / l'énonciation”
Lacan's distinction between the content of a statement (what is said) and the act of enunciation (what is performed); Žižek uses it to expose cancel culture's paradox: the énoncé is inclusion, but the énonciation is pure exclusion.
as “cancel culture paradox”
Žižek's structural diagnosis: cancel culture's enacted logic (énonciation) of exclusion directly contradicts its stated aim (énoncé) of diversity and inclusion, an elementary Hegelian paradox of universal vs. particular.
as “singularity as the big Other”
Žižek's thesis that AI singularity (the god-like collective mind) is the latest ideological figure of the big Other, a fantasy projection onto an ontological gap in the present rather than a real future.
as “lumpenbourgeoisie”
Extending Adrian Johnston's reading of Hegel, Žižek applies the term to figures like Trump: today's oligarchs who lack the 'great bourgeoisie's' function of large-scale social organization, functioning as a vulgarized ruling class.
Lenin's term for privileged layers of the working class whose strikes can benefit only themselves at the expense of others; Žižek applies it to Slovenia, where only state employees can afford to strike.
The libidinal glue that keeps subjects locked into ideological formations; not pleasure but an excess that underlies both drive's closed loop and desire's metonymic flight.
Žižek's ironic label for the hysterical formula 'whatever you give me it is never that', the endless metonymy of the missing object, which he contrasts with the Lacanian insight that lack always appears as excess.
as “original enigma”
Laplanche's concept: the infant senses the other's libidinal investment but cannot identify what the other wants from it, the original form of lack is not one's own but the opacity of what one is for the Other.
A closed loop of satisfaction that repeats the very lack it ostensibly seeks to fill; exemplified by the Fort/Da game where the child enjoys the repetition of the object's disappearance and return.
Freud's example of the child's game of hiding and retrieving an object; Žižek uses it to illustrate drive: the child does not simply want the object, he enjoys the very repetition of its disappearance and reappearance.
Žižek's formula for the irreducible gap between desire (excess as lack, metonymy) and drive (lack as surplus, closed loop): they are two sides of the same coin in an extimate relation, with an ontological gap that neither captures.
Derived from Lacan's extimité: desire and drive are not simply opposed but intimately external to each other, each is the other's outside folded inward.
Žižek argues there is no enjoyment without surplus enjoyment, enjoyment as such is already a surplus; when you renounce a form of jouissance you begin to enjoy the very rituals of exclusion.
as “big Other”
The symbolic order as ultimate guarantee; Žižek insists the ethics of psychoanalysis requires not relying on any figure of the big Other, whether God, natural law, historical progress, or AI singularity.
Drawing on Kant and Schelling, Žižek argues the most radical freedom is experienced as inner compulsion, falling in love, joining a political cause, where the subject does not choose but retroactively owns the necessity.
as “not-yet Hegelians”
Žižek's ironic label for readers who think Hegel was right but jumped to his conclusion too early, exemplified by Fukuyama, young Lukács, and AI thinkers who defer reconciliation of subject and substance to a future moment.
as “Hegelian materialist”
Žižek's self-description: a Hegelianism that reads the divine as always rooted in finite, concrete social constellations, to become infinite (singularity) is to lose both humanity and the divine dimension.
Žižek treats desire as a reaction to the deadlock of the drive's closed loop, a metonymic displacement toward an always-missing object; he argues fidelity to desire (without big-Other guarantee) is the core psychoanalytic ethic.
as “antihumanism”
The structuralist thesis that at the heart of being human there is a constitutive madness or gap, not a fixed human nature, which Žižek endorses and links to the fundamental ontological disorder depicted by quantum physics.
as “formal vs. real subsumption”
Marx's distinction in Capital between capital subsuming pre-existing production forms (formal) and reshaping the material process of production itself (real); Žižek uses it to endorse Baudrillard's critique of orthodox productivism.
Stories he reaches for 3
When you fall passionately in love you never make the choice to fall in love, it arrives after the fact as a deeper necessity, yet you are fully responsible for it. Used to illustrate Kant/Schelling on freedom as inner necessity.
“you never make the choice to fall in love all of a sudden you experience yourself as being in love and this always comes after the fact”
Explorers ask a tribe if there are still any cannibals among them; the answer is no, yesterday we ate the last one. Žižek links this to cancel culture: the very practice of exclusion eliminates the excluded.
“explorers come to a tribe and ask them are there still any cannibals among you the answer is no yesterday we ate the last one”
German high-school teachers in St. Louis around the 1870s thought the world spirit had moved from Europe to America and then to St. Louis; their followers pushed to East Coast, West Coast, and now some Chinese thinkers claim the spirit ends in China. Žižek uses this as a comic illustration of the 'not-yet Hegelian' syndrome.
“some German high school teachers who around established the first Hegelian school there it was pretty influential even the great pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce originated from this Hegelian sources”
Works invoked 28
Capital book
Marx's major work; Žižek cites the formal/real subsumption distinction to show Marx's analysis is more sophisticated than the productivist reading suggests.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own book; referenced in discussion of China's ban on time-travel fiction, Žižek read it as banning images of alternate futures.
Antigone play
Žižek gives three versions and endorses Zupančič's fourth: Antigone's act is not liberal-inclusive advocacy for the excluded but a singular fidelity to one specific bond (her brother) that short-circuits the symbolic order.
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book; mentioned by audience member who read it during his bouncer shift.
Žižek's own book; Lyotard didn't like it; mentioned by interviewers as foundational text.
Young Lukács reading of Marx where communist revolution reconciles subject (labor) and substance (capital); cited as an example of a 'not-yet Hegelian' deferral of reconciliation.
Žižek's own book; cited for his elaboration of why AI singularity is immanently impossible as a consistent god-like totality.
Anti-Oedipus book
Žižek calls it arguably the worst of Deleuze and Guattari's books; its image of the 'new earth' and desiring production is the same type of fantasy projection (big-Other substitute) as AI singularity.
Logic of Sense book
Žižek's preferred Deleuze text; Oedipus here appears as unlocatable outcast rather than agent of reterritorialization; the book takes strong ontological positions Žižek admires.
Mentioned as preferable to Anti-Oedipus; Žižek endorses this preference for Deleuze's solo ontological work over the Guattari collaborations.
Žižek's own book; mentioned by interviewers as part of his major philosophical output.
The Ticklish Subject book
Žižek's own book; mentioned by interviewers as part of his major theoretical works.
The Trial book
Kafka's novel; the priest's reply to Josef K, the law is not true but it is necessary, is identified as the formula of contemporary cynicism that Miller unknowingly quotes.
Christian Atheism book
Žižek's forthcoming book (mentioned as 'my new book'); totally materialist despite provocative title; contains a long chapter on the Nirvana/Samsara inversion and sharpens his debate with Buddhists.
A Thousand Plateaus book
Žižek rates it better than Anti-Oedipus but still below Logic of Sense.
Surplus Enjoyment book
Žižek's own book; referenced when discussing Miller's Kafka-quoting formula, Žižek notes he made this observation 'in my surplus enjoyment book or I forgot where.'
Žižek's own book; mentioned by interviewers as part of his core philosophical corpus.
Looking Awry book
Žižek's own book; quoted by an audience member for the key formulation on desire as yielding to drive: 'to desire means to give way on the drive.'
Aeneid book
Virgil's epic; Žižek cites 'Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo' as the correct theoretical motto for Theory Underground, moving the underworld/unconscious when one cannot move heaven.
America book
Baudrillard's travelogue; Žižek calls the description of landing in LA as 'landing in hell' a 'fantasy immanent to reality itself', Baudrillard's outsider eye captures the phantasmatic structure of America.
Antigone’s Parallax book
Zupančič's book; Žižek calls it an 'epiphany' that 'instantly converted' him; reads as a friendly polemic against his own reading of Antigone, adding an anti-liberal fourth interpretation.
Essays on Otherness book
Laplanche's volume; cited for the thesis that the primordial form of unconscious is the infant's inability to identify what the Other's libidinal investment in it is, the original lack is in the Other.
Baudrillard's book; Žižek's agreement with it is 'even deeper' than expected: Baudrillard exposes how Marx inherits a productivist logic that mistakes the mirror of exchange for an epiphenomenon of production.
Underground Theory book
The Theory Underground anthology that includes Žižek's gifted manuscript; Žižek supports it and endorses the project's aim of moving the underground of unconscious fantasies.
Why Woke is Not Left book
Susan Neiman's book; Žižek agrees with its target but critiques its argument as mere liberal universalism (universal human rights) rather than concrete universality.
Žižek calls it Marx's worst text for its evolutionary schema where production develops until it no longer fits the old mode, Capital itself does not follow this schema.
Mentioned by name in the discussion of Baudrillard; Žižek does not directly assess it in this talk.
What Is Philosophy? book
Deleuze and Guattari's last book; Žižek calls it 'a little bit better' than Anti-Oedipus.
People invoked 36
Alenka Zupančič positive
Slovenian inner-circle friend; her Antigone's Parallax converted Žižek to her anti-liberal reading of Antigone; he calls it an 'epiphany' and the 'highest sign of friendship' is that she disagrees with and corrects him.
Todd McGowan positive
Close friend and ally; Žižek endorses his super-ego theory of cancel culture but disagrees on using 'lack' as synonymous with antagonism, preferring 'excess/surplus' as the primary form; consistently misspells his name as 'MacGowan.'
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited for the concept of workers' aristocracy applied to Slovenian strikes; also mentioned for his admiration of big American corporate managers as models of large-scale social organization.
Georg Lukács positive
History and Class Consciousness cited for the reading of Marx where subject and substance (labor and capital) are reconciled only through communist revolution, an example of a 'not-yet Hegelian' position.
Mentioned as contributor to the Underground Theory anthology with a piece from his book I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It.
Jacques Lacan positive
Foundational throughout; Žižek credits Lacan with the insight that even a psychotic is formally responsible for what they are; his task, Žižek argues, was to avoid the false choice between drive and desire.
Jean Baudrillard positive
Žižek agrees deeply with Mirror of Production's critique of productivist Marxism; appreciates America travelogue as a fantasy immanent to reality; but ultimately critiques Baudrillard as still too deconstructionist, we need big ontological projects. Baudrillard reportedly sent word he liked Žižek before dying.
Gilles Deleuze positive
A great thinker whose 'big moment' is Logic of Sense, not Anti-Oedipus, Žižek appreciates his willingness to risk strong ontological theses; contrasts his Oedipus reading in Logic of Sense (Oedipus as unlocatable outcast) with the Anti-Oedipus Oedipus (reterritorialization agent).
Mentioned as originating from the St. Louis Hegelian tradition, an example of unexpected intellectual connections in American philosophy.
Did not like Sublime Object of Ideology; Žižek confesses not to have read enough of Lyotard to make strong statements about him.
Never-before-seen piece gifted to Underground Theory by the McLuhan estate; Žižek mentions this with approval.
Neil Gaiman positive
Cited for the formulation that falling in love is a catastrophe that ruins your daily life, used to illustrate that unconditional love is in itself a sacrifice beyond the pleasure principle.
Sabine Hossenfelder positive
German quantum physicist cited for asking why we presuppose AI will be a consistent totality, Žižek endorses her suggestion that it would more likely be 'a breathtaking total inconsistent mess.'
Judith Butler positive
Cited for the insight that when you renounce jouissance you begin to enjoy the rituals of exclusion, surplus jouissance; Žižek credits this point to Butler positively despite disagreeing with her standard reading of Antigone.
Cited as exemplar of the lumpenbourgeoisie: does not deserve the title 'great bourgeoisie' whose historical function included large-scale social organization.
Chantal Mouffe negative
Same critique as Laclau: the hegemony theory wrongly serializes working class alongside feminist, environmental, and other struggles without privileging class.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Former vice president of Bolivia; Žižek credits him with developing the insight that today's working class is not simply wage workers, and that Bolivia's relative success came from understanding this expanded conception.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just positive
Cited for the metaphor of revolutionaries as captains of a ship without compass in a stormy sea, Žižek initially misattributes it to Robespierre then corrects himself.
Susan Neiman positive
Author of Why Woke Is Not Left; Žižek agrees with her target but calls her position mere liberal universalism; ironically dubs her a 'useful idiot' and 'fellow traveler' who will eventually need to be 'purged' (Stalinist irony).
Félix Guattari negative
Co-author with Deleuze; Anti-Oedipus is their worst book, its image of the 'new earth' and desiring production is the same fantasy projection Žižek critiques in Land.
Adrian Johnston positive
Friend who establishes a link between Hegel's critique of the British electoral reform act and the concept of lumpenbourgeoisie; Žižek endorses this connection.
Mladen Dolar positive
Slovenian inner-circle friend; part of ongoing gentle polemic between the three (Žižek, Zupančič, Dolar).
Kojin Karatani positive
Cited for supplementing modes of production with modes of exchange in a very Baudrillardian direction, Žižek endorses this as showing Marxism need not be purely productivist.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Žižek disagrees with placing the working class as simply equal to other antagonisms in a hegemonic series.
Pierre Legendre negative
Lawyer and Lacanian who argues that even if social prohibitions have no true foundation we must accept them as necessary, Žižek calls this formula horrible.
Martin Heidegger positive
Cited for the lesson that what we experience as divine is always rooted in our finitude and concrete social constellation, used to refute the transcendence implied by AI singularity.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Miller's formula, accept the paternal law as necessary even though untrue, is dismissed as the 'contemporary form of cynicism' and unknowingly replicates Kafka's priest in The Trial.
Mentioned as contributor to the Underground Theory anthology alongside Žižek; her presence caused backlash against the project.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited alongside Kant for freedom as inner necessity; Žižek notes repeatedly that for Schelling (as for many great thinkers) the best work is not at the end, his peak moment is in the middle.
Jean Laplanche positive
Essays on Otherness cited for the thesis that the original lack is not the subject's own but the enigma of what one is for the Other, the infant cannot identify what the Other's libidinal investment in it is.
Wang Huning positive
Chinese state ideologist; Žižek respects him as 'not an idiot,' whose position is based on an accurate insight into modern capitalism, even if the neo-fascist solution (modernity with Confucianism) will fail.
Nick Land negative
Žižek had not heard of him before; critiques his accelerationism as too optimistic, as a fantasy projection of a Deleuzian desiring-machine onto an ontological gap in the present; rejects his teleological conception of time.
Karl Marx positive
Foundational but his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy is his worst text (evolutionary schema); Capital's formal/real subsumption distinction is praised; his dismissal of the lumpenproletariat was too hasty.
Sigmund Freud positive
Foundational; Žižek insists unconscious is a meaningless term without subjectivity, Freudian unconscious formations are answers to a deadlock constituting the rise of the subject; the Fort/Da example is central to the drive/desire analysis.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Foundational throughout; Žižek identifies as a Hegelian materialist; uses Hegel's point that philosophy grasps a form of life only as it declines, and his logic of concrete universality against abstract universalism.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited alongside Schelling for the thesis that the highest form of freedom is experienced as inner necessity; Žižek describes himself as a 'Hegelian Kantian' acceptable for Marx on the question of radical ethics.
What it argues
desire vs. drive: the ethics of psychoanalysiscancel culture as structural paradox of exclusionclass struggle as self-abolition, not identity politicsAI singularity as the latest figure of the big OtherNick Land and accelerationist fantasyfreedom as inner necessity (Kant and Schelling)Laplanche: the original lack is what I am for the Other
Dialectical moves 10
“What you question in class struggle is your own fixed identity—it is not the exclusion of the other but the self-negation of your class position.”
Class struggle inverts identity politics: the point is not to assert who you are but to undermine the social order that constitutes your identity.
“Cancel culture's topic is diversity and inclusion but what it actually does is exclude—its very practice contradicts its stated aim.”
The énonciation of cancel culture is exclusion even when the énoncé is inclusion, exposing a structural contradiction between universal claims and particular practice.
“Lack always appears in the form of excess surplus; the two are two sides of the same point.”
Against the 'poetry of lack,' Žižek insists that every experience of lack is simultaneously an experience of surplus, jouissance as excess is the flip side of the missing object.
“Desire is already a certain yielding, a defense against intractable drive; to desire means to give way on the drive.”
Desire is not the pure ethical stance but a retreat from drive's deadlock, this inverts the common reading of the Lacanian maxim of not ceding one's desire.
“The original form of lack is not mine—it is the enigma of what I am as an object for the Other; the lack is in the Other itself.”
Žižek via Laplanche reverses the subjective location of lack: the primary opacity is not 'what do I want?' but 'what does the Other want from me?'
“The only way to be truly friendly with somebody is to presuppose that in some sense they are evil.”
True trust does not project goodness onto the other but acknowledges their opacity and potential malice, a Lacanian point about the big Other's lack.
“AI singularity is not a future possibility—it is the latest figure of the big Other, a fantasy projection onto a gap already present in our situation.”
The singularity thesis repeats the ideological move of positing a guarantee of reconciliation (subject and substance) at a deferred moment rather than confronting the present antagonism.
“Already as humans today we are not fully human—the constitutive madness is here now, not a future event.”
Žižek inverts the transhuman narrative: rather than humans becoming something else in the future, the non-human kernel is always already at the heart of the human.
“The most radical freedom is the freedom that we experience as inner necessity—when you fall in love you do not choose, yet you are fully responsible.”
Freedom and necessity are not opposed; the highest freedom is experienced as a compulsion that the subject retroactively owns, following Kant and Schelling.
“The true question is not how to rise from Samsara to Nirvana but what went wrong with Nirvana that we fell into the finite world—Nirvana is a retroactive projection out of the gap.”
Žižek inverts the Buddhist hierarchy: the void/Nirvana is not prior to and above our finite world but is produced retroactively from the ontological gap that constitutes it.
Claims 27
reframes
Wokeness and political correctness are not equivalent to the left; liberal universalism (Neiman's position) is a necessary but insufficient critique of wokeness.wokeness / liberalism-political-correctness
asserts
Cancel culture's practice of exclusion directly contradicts its stated aim of inclusion—this is an elementary paradox of the tension between universal and particular.cancel culture / ideology
asserts
Class struggle is not a logic of exclusion but of self-negation: what you question in class struggle is your own fixed identity as conferred by the existing legal order.class struggle vs. identity politics
asserts
The working class should aim at its own self-abolition—the point is not to assert working-class identity but to destroy the conditions that produce wage labor.working-class politics
asserts
Lack always appears in the form of excess/surplus; the two are two sides of the same point, especially with respect to antagonism.Lacanian lack and surplus
asserts
The original form of lack is not one's own subjective incompleteness but the enigma of what one is as an object for the Other (Laplanche).ethics of psychoanalysis / subjectivity
asserts
There is no enjoyment without surplus enjoyment; enjoyment as such is a surplus—this holds even when you renounce a form of jouissance and then enjoy the rituals of exclusion.jouissance / surplus enjoyment
asserts
Desire and drive are not simply opposed but have an extimate/parallax relation: drive is a closed loop of surplus enjoyment, desire is the escape from that loop toward an always-missing object.desire vs. drive
asserts
Totalitarianism at its purest has the structure of drive—the stupid closed loop of satisfaction.totalitarianism / drive
asserts
The ethics of psychoanalysis requires fidelity to your desire without relying on any coherent figure of the big Other—whether God, natural law, historical progress, or AI singularity.ethics of psychoanalysis
rejects
Miller's formula—accept the paternal law as necessary even though it is not true—is a form of contemporary cynicism and is unacceptable.Jacques-Alain Miller's conservative Lacanianism
asserts
The serial killer follows the logic of perversion—assuming the position of instrument of the Other's desire—not the ethics of desire; the subject is radically responsible for what they are.ethics of psychoanalysis / subjectivity
asserts
The most radical freedom is the freedom we experience as inner necessity—falling in love, political commitment—where the choice arrives retroactively but is fully owned.freedom / ethics
rejects
AI singularity is immanently impossible, and even at the level we know today, it cannot be a consistent god-like totality—it would more likely be an inconsistent mess.AI singularity
asserts
AI singularity is the latest figure of the big Other—a fantasy projection onto an ontological gap already present in our situation.AI / ideology
rejects
Nick Land's accelerationism is too optimistic: it posits a clear teleological line of development and its catastrophic endpoint is a desired goal—a classic ideological fantasy.Nick Land / accelerationism
asserts
Anti-Oedipus is arguably Deleuze and Guattari's worst book; their best is Logic of Sense.Deleuze and Guattari
asserts
The divine is always rooted in finitude; if we become infinite in the sense of participating in a god-like AI entity we lose not only our humanity but the divine dimension itself.theology / AI / finitude
asserts
Already as humans today we are not fully human—there is a constitutive madness in the heart of being human that echoes a fundamental ontological disorder.antihumanism / subjectivity
asserts
Marx's worst text is the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy with its evolutionary schema; Marx's own work in Capital does not follow this schema.Marxist methodology
reframes
Baudrillard is still too deconstructionist; we need to move beyond readings of readings and risk big ontological projects.Baudrillard / deconstruction
asserts
Today's strikes in Slovenia tend to benefit only the already-privileged state employees and become strikes of a workers' aristocracy rather than genuine class struggle.strikes / working-class politics
asserts
Uber structurally blurs class tension by making workers who own a car feel like small capitalists—the ideology presents everyone as a mini-capitalist.platform capitalism / ideology
asserts
The left needs popular fronts and inclusionary politics rather than the permanent suspicion and exclusion that characterizes the spirit of cancel culture.left politics / cancel culture
rejects
Laclau and Mouffe wrongly place the working class as equal to other antagonisms in a series; working class must have a privileged structural position.Laclau/Mouffe hegemony theory
reframes
Nirvana is always already a retroactive projection out of the ontological gap—the true question is not how to rise from Samsara to Nirvana but why we fell from Nirvana into the finite world.Buddhism / ontology
asserts
Trans people are the third element that embodies sexual antagonism as such—not a mere identity alongside others but the figure that marks the irreducibility of sexual difference.sexual difference / trans
Quotes 12
“there are only two types of people complete idiots and not complete idiots and that's the highest that we can get you know the non-complete idiot”Slavoj Žižek · taxonomy of idiots / everyone is incomplete
“the topic of what they want to assert is diversity and inclusion but then all they are actually doing is excluding people who don't fit their definition of inclusion”Slavoj Žižek · cancel culture's structural paradox
“what you question undermine in class struggle is your own fixed identity as it is conferred on you by the existing legal order”Slavoj Žižek · class struggle as self-negation
“lack always appears in the form of excess surplus the two are two sides of the same point especially a propos of antagonism”Slavoj Žižek · lack and surplus as two sides of the same coin
“the original form of lack is I don't know what I am as an object for others and that's the original enigma”Slavoj Žižek · Laplanche: the original lack is what I am for the Other
“there is no enjoyment without this surplus enjoyment enjoyment as such is a surplus”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment is the form of all enjoyment
“singularity in the sense of god-like artificial intelligence is the latest figure of the big other”Slavoj Žižek · AI singularity as ideological fantasy
“the most radical freedom is the freedom that we experience as an inner necessity”Slavoj Žižek · freedom as inner necessity (Kant/Schelling)
“already as humans today we are not fully human that's why I remain faithful to the old structuralist notion of antihumanism”Slavoj Žižek · constitutive non-humanity at the heart of the human
“the only way for me to be friendly with somebody is to presuppose that in some sense they are evil you know you project evil this is for me the only form of true trust and friendliness”Slavoj Žižek · true friendship requires presupposing the other's opacity/malice
“it's not true but you are afraid that if you abandon this appearance you get lost everything disintegrates so let's stick to it and I think that this was already the formula of contemporary cynicism”Slavoj Žižek · cynical ideology: it's false but necessary
“I think it's a way too optimist theory really you know optimism can for me optimism is precisely this stance of seeing a clear line of development”Slavoj Žižek · critique of Land's accelerationism as optimism
Transcript 189 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Sorry please let's use this time now seriously for give me first first I give you all the rights Stalinist rights to you if I get lost don't be disappointed I'm in a bad mood you can cut it montage it whatever I give you all the Stalinist freedom second thing please to avoid any misunderstandings give me precise instructions if there are any written unwritten rules to follow you know what I want to say no like how is it I got the message you begin you an idiot I include myself introduces me gives the word to another idiot who asks questions blah blah blah I get all that the public is did I get it concretely people who are well-disposed towards theory but maybe not fully professionally acquainted with high-level philosophical speculation so I can talk to about serious stuff but not too technically am I correct
Sorry please let's use this time now seriously for give me first first I give you all the rights Stalinist rights to you if I get lost don't be disappointed I'm in a bad mood you can cut it montage it whatever I give you all the Stalinist freedom second thing please to avoid any misunderstandings give me precise instructions if there are any written unwritten rules to follow you know what I want to say no like how is it I got the message you begin you an idiot I include myself introduces me gives the word to another idiot who asks questions blah blah blah I get all that the public is did I get it concretely people who are well-disposed towards theory but maybe not fully professionally acquainted with high-level philosophical speculation so I can talk to about serious stuff but not too technically am I correct
unknown
sure but but with us too like we don't want you we know normally you're always trying to be as clear for the general public but when it comes to the theoretical questions we have so many of us are students of you we've read so many of your books you know we're we're we're well-versed in Lacanian Hegelian theory I got it I got
sure but but with us too like we don't want you we know normally you're always trying to be as clear for the general public but when it comes to the theoretical questions we have so many of us are students of you we've read so many of your books you know we're we're we're well-versed in Lacanian Hegelian theory I got it I got
Slavoj Žižek
it yeah yeah yeah yeah because I have many problems now stances which may appear politically incorrect but I really think one should take them into account there are now incidentally some new stuff leftists against political correctness and wokeness but I don't totally trust it it's too standard liberal did you hear about this German speaking philosopher of ethics Susan Neiman she now published a book recently with an open title Why Woke Is Not Left or something like that it's basically I agree but it's but her point against wokeness is simple liberal universalism you know like particular identities no we need universal human rights blah blah blah oh oh it's not as simple as that because we as at least indebted to Marx have to be very careful here you know there is also this kind of how should I put it concrete universality in the sense of every universality could be questioned with regard to its particular biases and so on and she is just doing a useful job but may I put it in Stalinist terms she is how do you say this will be so evil I hope she will not listen to this she is more or less a useful idiot or a good fellow traveler which means we need her now but at a later stage one never knows she will have to be purged you know but okay that's another thing thanks very much do you have any messages of what I should be attentive to now in advance well I mean basically what I'm I'm the idiot who's going to introduce you and so after I introduce you and then who is the mega idiot okay the mega idiot it's me but who is the idiot who asks the questions oh yeah we're Žižekian so you've made us idiots so it's all your fault oh I will put another term which I take very seriously you are not a complete idiot which I'm I'm also not a complete idiot I don't think there are only two types of people complete idiots and not complete idiots and that's the highest that we can get you know the non-complete idiot no no not complete idiots in the sense of not idiots at all sorry I haven't yet encountered this type of human
it yeah yeah yeah yeah because I have many problems now stances which may appear politically incorrect but I really think one should take them into account there are now incidentally some new stuff leftists against political correctness and wokeness but I don't totally trust it it's too standard liberal did you hear about this German speaking philosopher of ethics Susan Neiman she now published a book recently with an open title Why Woke Is Not Left or something like that it's basically I agree but it's but her point against wokeness is simple liberal universalism you know like particular identities no we need universal human rights blah blah blah oh oh it's not as simple as that because we as at least indebted to Marx have to be very careful here you know there is also this kind of how should I put it concrete universality in the sense of every universality could be questioned with regard to its particular biases and so on and she is just doing a useful job but may I put it in Stalinist terms she is how do you say this will be so evil I hope she will not listen to this she is more or less a useful idiot or a good fellow traveler which means we need her now but at a later stage one never knows she will have to be purged you know but okay that's another thing thanks very much do you have any messages of what I should be attentive to now in advance well I mean basically what I'm I'm the idiot who's going to introduce you and so after I introduce you and then who is the mega idiot okay the mega idiot it's me but who is the idiot who asks the questions oh yeah we're Žižekian so you've made us idiots so it's all your fault oh I will put another term which I take very seriously you are not a complete idiot which I'm I'm also not a complete idiot I don't think there are only two types of people complete idiots and not complete idiots and that's the highest that we can get you know the non-complete idiot no no not complete idiots in the sense of not idiots at all sorry I haven't yet encountered this type of human
unknown
beings you know yeah basically what I'm gonna do I'm gonna give a brief introduction and then we you know we want you to elaborate we want you to have time to do that but
beings you know yeah basically what I'm gonna do I'm gonna give a brief introduction and then we you know we want you to elaborate we want you to have time to do that but
Slavoj Žižek
we do
we do
unknown
each have I don't
each have I don't
Slavoj Žižek
know two three main questions we want to get to and you know just let you riff off of just
know two three main questions we want to get to and you know just let you riff off of just
unknown
to warn you I'm in a bad mood blah blah not because of you here it was a heat wave flooding
to warn you I'm in a bad mood blah blah not because of you here it was a heat wave flooding
Slavoj Žižek
I am is this strange weather when from a heat wave you pass all of a sudden to cold weather so I'm all the time with some kind of allergies so again the point is do whatever you wanted me cut it short I said that you don't have somebody to imitate my voice so that you could even simply do we just use ChatGPT to have have it talk for you get another guy to say what I am not aware but I really want to say according to your judgment you know yeah everything alright I want
I am is this strange weather when from a heat wave you pass all of a sudden to cold weather so I'm all the time with some kind of allergies so again the point is do whatever you wanted me cut it short I said that you don't have somebody to imitate my voice so that you could even simply do we just use ChatGPT to have have it talk for you get another guy to say what I am not aware but I really want to say according to your judgment you know yeah everything alright I want
unknown
to see if this can you all hear me okay on this computer
to see if this can you all hear me okay on this computer
Slavoj Žižek
yes I do I see you and I hear you
yes I do I see you and I hear you
unknown
all right everybody um Slavoj it's so good to have you here with us thank you so much for joining
all right everybody um Slavoj it's so good to have you here with us thank you so much for joining
Slavoj Žižek
and good to be with you I appreciate very much what you are doing yeah
and good to be with you I appreciate very much what you are doing yeah
unknown
thank you Slavoj um so everybody welcome to the official book and books and tour launch for Theory Underground I'm holding up the books but I guess they kind of got the computer's making them not show up but anyway we've got the Time Energy book and the Underground Theory book both of them are now available as of today on Amazon and today is the day that we begin the tour across the United States and back again and then we'll go into Europe in April of next year we're kind of planning that one out a little bit more ahead of time but this tour basically it's our first real foray foray into the world and Slavoj came just to sort of give us that boost and to say you know good luck on your travels and so thank you it means the world and Mikey and I basically we kind of have you for an hour we just have some questions we've always wanted to ask you and so I'm about to sorry
thank you Slavoj um so everybody welcome to the official book and books and tour launch for Theory Underground I'm holding up the books but I guess they kind of got the computer's making them not show up but anyway we've got the Time Energy book and the Underground Theory book both of them are now available as of today on Amazon and today is the day that we begin the tour across the United States and back again and then we'll go into Europe in April of next year we're kind of planning that one out a little bit more ahead of time but this tour basically it's our first real foray foray into the world and Slavoj came just to sort of give us that boost and to say you know good luck on your travels and so thank you it means the world and Mikey and I basically we kind of have you for an hour we just have some questions we've always wanted to ask you and so I'm about to sorry
Slavoj Žižek
to interrupt you but I hope we agree that if I don't collapse one hour is for us Marxists a dialectical notion not a mechanical materialist notion you know like you look to the lesson from quantum physics you can stretch the time and so on you know this is not fixed time this is variable time right traditional right the time of symbolic exchange so um okay so everybody welcome I'm a little frazzled I'm not going to say very much about Theory Underground or the books themselves because we have
to interrupt you but I hope we agree that if I don't collapse one hour is for us Marxists a dialectical notion not a mechanical materialist notion you know like you look to the lesson from quantum physics you can stretch the time and so on you know this is not fixed time this is variable time right traditional right the time of symbolic exchange so um okay so everybody welcome I'm a little frazzled I'm not going to say very much about Theory Underground or the books themselves because we have
unknown
speakers who will talk about that after this interview but I will just say that the Theory Underground is a platform it's a teaching platform it's a social media site there's an app for it it's also a publishing house and when Slavoj found out that it's a publishing house he said well I'll give you a manuscript then and so he gave he gifted that to me and I said okay well then it would be unfair of me to not open this up to some others and so other people who've been with Theory Underground in the courses who wrote really good papers for some of the courses they get an opportunity to be in the volume and then also some other colleagues also are in the volume and some of the names in the volume created a lot of backlash some people were not very happy apparently about some of the people including Slavoj um and he's been canceled a few times this year and so we've come to his defense for at least a couple of things maybe not everything but I'm just
speakers who will talk about that after this interview but I will just say that the Theory Underground is a platform it's a teaching platform it's a social media site there's an app for it it's also a publishing house and when Slavoj found out that it's a publishing house he said well I'll give you a manuscript then and so he gave he gifted that to me and I said okay well then it would be unfair of me to not open this up to some others and so other people who've been with Theory Underground in the courses who wrote really good papers for some of the courses they get an opportunity to be in the volume and then also some other colleagues also are in the volume and some of the names in the volume created a lot of backlash some people were not very happy apparently about some of the people including Slavoj um and he's been canceled a few times this year and so we've come to his defense for at least a couple of things maybe not everything but I'm just
unknown
kidding but the I don't know I I just I think that all I really need to say about Theory Underground is wait for Nance and Anne after this they will both explain what the books are explain what the tour is but for right now Michael Downs is somebody that I've been in dialogue with for years he's a warehouse worker in Raytown Missouri he's probably the most enthusiastic supporter of Slavoj Žižek that I've ever known he teaches Slavoj better than anyone else I've ever heard I've learned a lot about Slavoj and Lacan through Mikey Mikey taught sorry
kidding but the I don't know I I just I think that all I really need to say about Theory Underground is wait for Nance and Anne after this they will both explain what the books are explain what the tour is but for right now Michael Downs is somebody that I've been in dialogue with for years he's a warehouse worker in Raytown Missouri he's probably the most enthusiastic supporter of Slavoj Žižek that I've ever known he teaches Slavoj better than anyone else I've ever heard I've learned a lot about Slavoj and Lacan through Mikey Mikey taught sorry
Slavoj Žižek
to interrupt you so maybe I should call him if I don't understand something from my old books you should he'll explain inherent transgression to you you
to interrupt you so maybe I should call him if I don't understand something from my old books you should he'll explain inherent transgression to you you
unknown
definitely should yeah and so basically what I thought would be cool is because a lot of people are hearing from Mikey about Žižek for the first time today I just wanted to give Mikey an opportunity to talk about why he cares about the theory of Slavoj Žižek so Mikey go ahead and take it away you can introduce Slavoj
definitely should yeah and so basically what I thought would be cool is because a lot of people are hearing from Mikey about Žižek for the first time today I just wanted to give Mikey an opportunity to talk about why he cares about the theory of Slavoj Žižek so Mikey go ahead and take it away you can introduce Slavoj
unknown
okay yeah I mean there's somebody in philosophy who needs no introduction it's Slavoj Žižek but I think a lot of the time who he is in in the world of philosophy gets obfuscated by his media image and for us most importantly Slavoj Žižek is the guy who wrote Sublime Object of Ideology Tarrying with the Negative For They Know Not What They Do Ticklish Subject Parallax View Less Than Nothing Slavoj for us is a serious philosopher working at the highest levels of the German idealist tradition mixing it with Lacanian psychoanalysis and so for those of us who are in Underground Theory and and big into philosophy online he's primarily a serious philosopher and I think that gets lost a lot of the time because he is so entertaining he has so many great examples from pop culture but we've seen how the media wants to turn him into the Elvis of cultural theory or a philosophical clown and that's not who he is for us he's he's on that level of Hegel Kant Schelling and then you know Freud Lacan and so that's how we engage with Slavoj's work is as a serious theoretical position and for us it's primarily two things it's how Slavoj has taken Lacanian theory and Hegelian ontology and worked at it book after book after book refining this philosophical paradigm this philosophical view and that is without a shadow of doubt Slavoj's longest lasting impact on the history of philosophy is going to be how he read Hegel through Lacan and read Lacan through Hegel and it's very easy whenever you see somebody talking Lacan and Hegel to act like it's just Lacan or it's just Hegel no Slavoj did that he made that connection and that's where his lasting contribution is going to be is in this ontology of extimacy this ontology of dialectical contradiction and that's where we primarily focus and I mean the second thing of course is the theory of ideology which has been so influential on me and on us because the problem with traditional ideology is that it always situated the problem at the level of ideas or representations or meaning and what Slavoj figured out using Lacan is like no it's there's this facet of enjoyment this thing with jouissance that keeps us locked into certain ideological formations it's the glue that keeps us hooked on ideology and you have to get beyond thinking about ideology as just merely false consciousness or you know deceptive representation and understand it as a libidinal effect and that's where it's been so influential on me and just on a I mean
okay yeah I mean there's somebody in philosophy who needs no introduction it's Slavoj Žižek but I think a lot of the time who he is in in the world of philosophy gets obfuscated by his media image and for us most importantly Slavoj Žižek is the guy who wrote Sublime Object of Ideology Tarrying with the Negative For They Know Not What They Do Ticklish Subject Parallax View Less Than Nothing Slavoj for us is a serious philosopher working at the highest levels of the German idealist tradition mixing it with Lacanian psychoanalysis and so for those of us who are in Underground Theory and and big into philosophy online he's primarily a serious philosopher and I think that gets lost a lot of the time because he is so entertaining he has so many great examples from pop culture but we've seen how the media wants to turn him into the Elvis of cultural theory or a philosophical clown and that's not who he is for us he's he's on that level of Hegel Kant Schelling and then you know Freud Lacan and so that's how we engage with Slavoj's work is as a serious theoretical position and for us it's primarily two things it's how Slavoj has taken Lacanian theory and Hegelian ontology and worked at it book after book after book refining this philosophical paradigm this philosophical view and that is without a shadow of doubt Slavoj's longest lasting impact on the history of philosophy is going to be how he read Hegel through Lacan and read Lacan through Hegel and it's very easy whenever you see somebody talking Lacan and Hegel to act like it's just Lacan or it's just Hegel no Slavoj did that he made that connection and that's where his lasting contribution is going to be is in this ontology of extimacy this ontology of dialectical contradiction and that's where we primarily focus and I mean the second thing of course is the theory of ideology which has been so influential on me and on us because the problem with traditional ideology is that it always situated the problem at the level of ideas or representations or meaning and what Slavoj figured out using Lacan is like no it's there's this facet of enjoyment this thing with jouissance that keeps us locked into certain ideological formations it's the glue that keeps us hooked on ideology and you have to get beyond thinking about ideology as just merely false consciousness or you know deceptive representation and understand it as a libidinal effect and that's where it's been so influential on me and just on a I mean
unknown
on a personal note I mean that's why he matters theoretically but I want to say why he matters to me personally is during the pandemic my my mom she always owned she had owned a small business since I was a kid and the reason I had a lot of time and energy to work on philosophy is because I helped at the the family business during the pandemic the the business closed it shut down we lost it and I had to figure out how to go into typical wage labor and I got a job as a bouncer working at a bar a barcade and
on a personal note I mean that's why he matters theoretically but I want to say why he matters to me personally is during the pandemic my my mom she always owned she had owned a small business since I was a kid and the reason I had a lot of time and energy to work on philosophy is because I helped at the the family business during the pandemic the the business closed it shut down we lost it and I had to figure out how to go into typical wage labor and I got a job as a bouncer working at a bar a barcade and
Slavoj Žižek
are you strong enough to do it I would be afraid to do this
are you strong enough to do it I would be afraid to do this
unknown
it's terrible like I absolutely hate wage labor it's the worst thing in the world
it's terrible like I absolutely hate wage labor it's the worst thing in the world
Slavoj Žižek
to me no no no sorry I was more concrete I thought about bouncing this means you were throwing out or supposed to throw out yeah we got to break up fights
to me no no no sorry I was more concrete I thought about bouncing this means you were throwing out or supposed to throw out yeah we got to break up fights
unknown
yeah oh my god or or make sure that we diffuse fights or whatever but here's the funny thing Slavoj I think so our our mutual friend Todd McG- Todd's basically like my teacher in all things Lacan Žižek Hegel and I Todd means the world to me but I told him about this and I think he might have told you at some point but so my form of inherent transgression at my job as a bouncer is so they were real strict on us carding everybody who comes in and I got tired of it and it was so boring just to sit there for eight hours doing it what I would end up doing is I would just start reading your books on my phone and throughout my whole shift so I would read Parallax View or Sublime Object or whatever over and over and just kind of bullshit act like I'm carding but I had more important things to do which was read your books but seriously on a personal level reading your main theoretical works is what got me through this incredibly rough patch of my life and so you know on the one hand it was you know a kind of therapy in a sense it it got me through my hard times but on the other it was my form of inherent transgression where I'm like I hate this fucking job so you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna read Slavoj all night and pass the time that way and so that's really where my understanding of you came from was through reading your books being my form of inherent transgression at my shitty job and so that's that's just you know I I again it was just um it was really important for me like it really got me through but um the last thing I'll just say so um I I came up with a joke for you I know how much you love jokes jokes are so central to your work but it is a Žižekian if they are
yeah oh my god or or make sure that we diffuse fights or whatever but here's the funny thing Slavoj I think so our our mutual friend Todd McG- Todd's basically like my teacher in all things Lacan Žižek Hegel and I Todd means the world to me but I told him about this and I think he might have told you at some point but so my form of inherent transgression at my job as a bouncer is so they were real strict on us carding everybody who comes in and I got tired of it and it was so boring just to sit there for eight hours doing it what I would end up doing is I would just start reading your books on my phone and throughout my whole shift so I would read Parallax View or Sublime Object or whatever over and over and just kind of bullshit act like I'm carding but I had more important things to do which was read your books but seriously on a personal level reading your main theoretical works is what got me through this incredibly rough patch of my life and so you know on the one hand it was you know a kind of therapy in a sense it it got me through my hard times but on the other it was my form of inherent transgression where I'm like I hate this fucking job so you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna read Slavoj all night and pass the time that way and so that's really where my understanding of you came from was through reading your books being my form of inherent transgression at my shitty job and so that's that's just you know I I again it was just um it was really important for me like it really got me through but um the last thing I'll just say so um I I came up with a joke for you I know how much you love jokes jokes are so central to your work but it is a Žižekian if they are
Slavoj Žižek
politically incorrect but this is very difficult to do politically incorrect vulgar but in a sense that they are not really antifeminist blah blah you know the problem is to be apparently vulgar but with a much more ambiguous finer message so please do it okay well I hope not to disappoint this isn't really a political joke it's more of just for those of us who are in the world of Žižekian theory right so um there's a funny thing that you you've done in a couple of your books where you spell Todd's last name with an extra a you turned it into MacGowan instead of McGowan and um I was joking with Todd
politically incorrect but this is very difficult to do politically incorrect vulgar but in a sense that they are not really antifeminist blah blah you know the problem is to be apparently vulgar but with a much more ambiguous finer message so please do it okay well I hope not to disappoint this isn't really a political joke it's more of just for those of us who are in the world of Žižekian theory right so um there's a funny thing that you you've done in a couple of your books where you spell Todd's last name with an extra a you turned it into MacGowan instead of McGowan and um I was joking with Todd
unknown
about it so here's the little joke um uh why does Slavoj Žižek
about it so here's the little joke um uh why does Slavoj Žižek
unknown
purposely misspell Todd McGowan's last name as MacGowan because Žižek really has a thing for that little a
purposely misspell Todd McGowan's last name as MacGowan because Žižek really has a thing for that little a
Slavoj Žižek
that's politically correct perfectly done I agree that I insert the small a you know although you know why I also admire Todd not because I always agree with him but precisely because I don't always agree with him and that's what I also aspect expect from you with all my inner circle friends for example here in Slovenia Alenka Zupančič Mladen Dolar and so on we are best friends personally but whoever reads us closely will soon notice that in a very noble gentle way there is a deep polemic between the three of us going on all the time for example the last book which really hit me as a kind of epiphany Alenka's Antigone's Parallax let's cut the bullshit this book is a friendly polemical reply to my reading of Antigone she takes into account my three versions and adds a fourth version and the reason I that's the highest sign of friendship that I can express the reason I really hate her is that she instantly converted me convinced me the way she reads Antigone which is precisely the anti-liberal Judith Butler way you know the standard reading is that Antigone Polynices stands for all those excluded trans gay whatever this is for me just radicalized liberalism you know this typical liberal worry but it's our liberal notion of universal rights really owning all-inclusive blah blah blah but again that's not she converted me that's not what Antigone does what she does is the exact opposite you remember those famous lines which are the key although I also quote them but she gives the full reading where she says if it were for my sons for my husband blah blah let them rot I wouldn't care it's only because for my brother that I'm doing this and then in a wonderful way another secret of her reading one would have expected a vulgar psychoanalytic reading yeah of course incest sister brother no she doesn't go into this but she does talk about incest but in a much more refined way in the sense that I shouldn't lose too much time but that the topic of incest it's not simply ultimately it's not at all about having sex with your parents or brothers or sisters or children or whatever it's about a certain short circuit which is a constitutive illusion implied by our language itself and then she not to lose time I'm sorry links this to the wonderful old saying in my new book there will be a long chapter on it you know this old paradox which she rehabilitates or reuses the old joke explorers come to a tribe and ask them are there still any cannibals among you the answer is no yesterday we ate the last one isn't it that's my just to provoke you isn't something similar going on with cancel culture at its worst we should use here the Lacanian tension between what Lacan calls l'énoncé the topic of what we are talking about and process of l'énonciation what you are doing what is inscribed into the very mode how you are doing it that's for me the problem of cancel culture the topic what they want to assert is diversity and inclusion but then all they are actually doing is excluding people who don't fit their definition of inclusion so it's a clear case of how with their very discursive practice they exclude more and more people and for a Hegelian like me this is an elementary paradox of the tension between universal and particular that's my problem with cancel culture what we need today and here I deeply sympathize with you is the inclusionary leftist politics we need popular fronts how to bring together women workers those who fight for the preservation of our environment and so on and so on but isn't if I may put it in this naive way the spirit of cancel culture precisely the spirit of permanent suspicion and exclusion well what do you think about how Todd links it to super-ego he thinks like what the left is caught up in is a kind of super-egoic morality that it's so based on bombarding everybody with guilt that it actually undermines what we're doing exactly exactly and uh I would I totally agree what Todd is saying here and just to I'm very sorry I have some kind of allergy just to bring it even maybe a step further I agree with Ed's Todd's sorry more general point that the typical right-wing mode of enjoyment is that of exclusion even in the grand scheme of you exclude Jews or whomever and so on and so on like in anti-Semitism and this is for me sorry this is for me the problem how the complex more theoretical but as you told me I will nonetheless do it do it go for it go for it how the logic of exclusion is the very opposite of class struggle class struggle does not imply the logic of exclusion why not ah because exclusion is always self-affirmative the problem of the anti-Semites other racists is how to preserve our identity a foreign body is presented as the disturbing factor so let's exclude them Jews or other races and we will assert our identity while the central point of Marx's notion of class struggle is that what you question undermine in class struggle is your own fixed identity as it is conferred on you by the existing legal order here although I don't follow them all the way I agree with those feminists but I don't want to go into it now who claim that against this pseudo-hardline feminism feminism is not about asserting feminine identity and then exclude men or whoever poses a threat to it but it's this exclusion of course we have to fight enemies should be always accompanied by a self-reflexive twist to what extent is our identity already part of the situation that we are trying to get rid of I'm coming here back to your back to your sorry do I talk too much no no no you're doing really good I just want I don't want you to say our thing we have to say it ourselves is that we as blue-collar workers very sorry if I went so far yeah yeah yeah okay listen I like what you did now I need to be very brutal that's why you Mikey you are the only one as far as I can see properly dressed in black I need a male or female figure of domina you know domina in the
that's politically correct perfectly done I agree that I insert the small a you know although you know why I also admire Todd not because I always agree with him but precisely because I don't always agree with him and that's what I also aspect expect from you with all my inner circle friends for example here in Slovenia Alenka Zupančič Mladen Dolar and so on we are best friends personally but whoever reads us closely will soon notice that in a very noble gentle way there is a deep polemic between the three of us going on all the time for example the last book which really hit me as a kind of epiphany Alenka's Antigone's Parallax let's cut the bullshit this book is a friendly polemical reply to my reading of Antigone she takes into account my three versions and adds a fourth version and the reason I that's the highest sign of friendship that I can express the reason I really hate her is that she instantly converted me convinced me the way she reads Antigone which is precisely the anti-liberal Judith Butler way you know the standard reading is that Antigone Polynices stands for all those excluded trans gay whatever this is for me just radicalized liberalism you know this typical liberal worry but it's our liberal notion of universal rights really owning all-inclusive blah blah blah but again that's not she converted me that's not what Antigone does what she does is the exact opposite you remember those famous lines which are the key although I also quote them but she gives the full reading where she says if it were for my sons for my husband blah blah let them rot I wouldn't care it's only because for my brother that I'm doing this and then in a wonderful way another secret of her reading one would have expected a vulgar psychoanalytic reading yeah of course incest sister brother no she doesn't go into this but she does talk about incest but in a much more refined way in the sense that I shouldn't lose too much time but that the topic of incest it's not simply ultimately it's not at all about having sex with your parents or brothers or sisters or children or whatever it's about a certain short circuit which is a constitutive illusion implied by our language itself and then she not to lose time I'm sorry links this to the wonderful old saying in my new book there will be a long chapter on it you know this old paradox which she rehabilitates or reuses the old joke explorers come to a tribe and ask them are there still any cannibals among you the answer is no yesterday we ate the last one isn't it that's my just to provoke you isn't something similar going on with cancel culture at its worst we should use here the Lacanian tension between what Lacan calls l'énoncé the topic of what we are talking about and process of l'énonciation what you are doing what is inscribed into the very mode how you are doing it that's for me the problem of cancel culture the topic what they want to assert is diversity and inclusion but then all they are actually doing is excluding people who don't fit their definition of inclusion so it's a clear case of how with their very discursive practice they exclude more and more people and for a Hegelian like me this is an elementary paradox of the tension between universal and particular that's my problem with cancel culture what we need today and here I deeply sympathize with you is the inclusionary leftist politics we need popular fronts how to bring together women workers those who fight for the preservation of our environment and so on and so on but isn't if I may put it in this naive way the spirit of cancel culture precisely the spirit of permanent suspicion and exclusion well what do you think about how Todd links it to super-ego he thinks like what the left is caught up in is a kind of super-egoic morality that it's so based on bombarding everybody with guilt that it actually undermines what we're doing exactly exactly and uh I would I totally agree what Todd is saying here and just to I'm very sorry I have some kind of allergy just to bring it even maybe a step further I agree with Ed's Todd's sorry more general point that the typical right-wing mode of enjoyment is that of exclusion even in the grand scheme of you exclude Jews or whomever and so on and so on like in anti-Semitism and this is for me sorry this is for me the problem how the complex more theoretical but as you told me I will nonetheless do it do it go for it go for it how the logic of exclusion is the very opposite of class struggle class struggle does not imply the logic of exclusion why not ah because exclusion is always self-affirmative the problem of the anti-Semites other racists is how to preserve our identity a foreign body is presented as the disturbing factor so let's exclude them Jews or other races and we will assert our identity while the central point of Marx's notion of class struggle is that what you question undermine in class struggle is your own fixed identity as it is conferred on you by the existing legal order here although I don't follow them all the way I agree with those feminists but I don't want to go into it now who claim that against this pseudo-hardline feminism feminism is not about asserting feminine identity and then exclude men or whoever poses a threat to it but it's this exclusion of course we have to fight enemies should be always accompanied by a self-reflexive twist to what extent is our identity already part of the situation that we are trying to get rid of I'm coming here back to your back to your sorry do I talk too much no no no you're doing really good I just want I don't want you to say our thing we have to say it ourselves is that we as blue-collar workers very sorry if I went so far yeah yeah yeah okay listen I like what you did now I need to be very brutal that's why you Mikey you are the only one as far as I can see properly dressed in black I need a male or female figure of domina you know domina in the
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sense of master somebody has to whip me and cut me short so I had this right Mikey yeah so the point say what you've got Dave so just it's something Mikey and I have been talking about a lot because you know Theory Underground it's by and for like blue-collar
sense of master somebody has to whip me and cut me short so I had this right Mikey yeah so the point say what you've got Dave so just it's something Mikey and I have been talking about a lot because you know Theory Underground it's by and for like blue-collar
Slavoj Žižek
working-class people people who don't really have upward mobility blah blah blah when people hear this they think oh okay it's like they think in terms of identity politics so they basically think in terms of working-class identity politics we're trying to be seen as workers the what you were just getting at is that no we're not trying to be seen as workers as workers we're saying we advocate for our own our own self-abolition we don't want there to be a working-class we don't want to be wage laborers we want to destroy this identity we're trying to free ourselves from this identity right is this a question already or do you want to finish it because oh I mean but isn't that get at the heart of what you I mean because
working-class people people who don't really have upward mobility blah blah blah when people hear this they think oh okay it's like they think in terms of identity politics so they basically think in terms of working-class identity politics we're trying to be seen as workers the what you were just getting at is that no we're not trying to be seen as workers as workers we're saying we advocate for our own our own self-abolition we don't want there to be a working-class we don't want to be wage laborers we want to destroy this identity we're trying to free ourselves from this identity right is this a question already or do you want to finish it because oh I mean but isn't that get at the heart of what you I mean because
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both you and
both you and
Slavoj Žižek
Todd you have this thing you're both champions of universalist politics and so the difference is a real universalist politics is going to have to center the movement around a contradiction antagonism at the heart of society that all of us are struggling from you call it an antagonism or um uh contradiction Todd will call it a lack but both of you are are tapped into this thing where it's like no there's a there's a deadlock in society that everybody is struggling from and if you focus it on one identity or the other that universal dimension gets lost and if we're gonna change society on a universal scale we all have to get tapped into this fundamental antagonism or lack that we're all dealing with here again a very friendly I wouldn't say even distance but shift of accent from Todd okay Todd MacGowan with an a you know my Todd whom I appreciate very much you know my problem with using the term lack as synonymous or in the same line with with with antagonism and so on is that I the the basic lesson for me is that lack always appears in the form of excess surplus the two are two sides of the same point especially a propos of antagonism look this is one of my now things as you challenged me we'll go a little bit get a little bit more complex all intelligent Marxists are absolutely against this primitive evolutionary notions that we have class antagonism which is usually blurred by other classes blah blah blah but then in a revolutionary situation or in the objective tendency we will have a clear cut distinction it's the
Todd you have this thing you're both champions of universalist politics and so the difference is a real universalist politics is going to have to center the movement around a contradiction antagonism at the heart of society that all of us are struggling from you call it an antagonism or um uh contradiction Todd will call it a lack but both of you are are tapped into this thing where it's like no there's a there's a deadlock in society that everybody is struggling from and if you focus it on one identity or the other that universal dimension gets lost and if we're gonna change society on a universal scale we all have to get tapped into this fundamental antagonism or lack that we're all dealing with here again a very friendly I wouldn't say even distance but shift of accent from Todd okay Todd MacGowan with an a you know my Todd whom I appreciate very much you know my problem with using the term lack as synonymous or in the same line with with with antagonism and so on is that I the the basic lesson for me is that lack always appears in the form of excess surplus the two are two sides of the same point especially a propos of antagonism look this is one of my now things as you challenged me we'll go a little bit get a little bit more complex all intelligent Marxists are absolutely against this primitive evolutionary notions that we have class antagonism which is usually blurred by other classes blah blah blah but then in a revolutionary situation or in the objective tendency we will have a clear cut distinction it's the
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exploited and the other side we'll get the pure binary opposition no we never get that antagonism means that precisely the
exploited and the other side we'll get the pure binary opposition no we never get that antagonism means that precisely the
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difference is never a clear difference between two opposed poles and to Marx this was clear you don't have Marx used in an ambiguous way here he
difference is never a clear difference between two opposed poles and to Marx this was clear you don't have Marx used in an ambiguous way here he
Slavoj Žižek
can also be criticized the term of lumpenproletariat Marx was I think too dismissive towards them they lumpenproletarians were for him potential traitors those who in a crucial moment can serve as a popular base for those in power Marx's trauma was here of course the revolution and its aftermath when precisely the lumpenproletariat was the immediate material support of the coup d'etat of Napoleon the little Napoleon
can also be criticized the term of lumpenproletariat Marx was I think too dismissive towards them they lumpenproletarians were for him potential traitors those who in a crucial moment can serve as a popular base for those in power Marx's trauma was here of course the revolution and its aftermath when precisely the lumpenproletariat was the immediate material support of the coup d'etat of Napoleon the little Napoleon
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the third I think that here things are today getting more complex first element to add and my other friend Adrian Johnston even establishes here a link with Hegel who in his not simply conservative but very refined critique of the English British uh new election law in or when which expanded electoral base warns against uh uh what Adrian Johnston calls lumpenbourgeoisie you know that opposed to lumpenproletarians those discarded vulgar classes we are getting more and more a bourgeoisie which is not even a proper bourgeoisie look now I will say something horrible but does a person like Trump Donald even deserve the the title of great
the third I think that here things are today getting more complex first element to add and my other friend Adrian Johnston even establishes here a link with Hegel who in his not simply conservative but very refined critique of the English British uh new election law in or when which expanded electoral base warns against uh uh what Adrian Johnston calls lumpenbourgeoisie you know that opposed to lumpenproletarians those discarded vulgar classes we are getting more and more a bourgeoisie which is not even a proper bourgeoisie look now I will say something horrible but does a person like Trump Donald even deserve the the title of great
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bourgeoisie no sorry great bourgeoisie with all my opposition to them had a certain under quotation marks but nonetheless creative function of
bourgeoisie no sorry great bourgeoisie with all my opposition to them had a certain under quotation marks but nonetheless creative function of
Slavoj Žižek
large social organization
large social organization
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and so on no wonder that in the last years of his sanity not that then he became crazy but he then became too ill when Bolsheviks after Bolsheviks won civil war Lenin was extremely maybe even too much fascinated by big American corporate bosses who came to visit Soviet Union to make deal he saw that Bolsheviks need a socialist form of these large corporate managers so what I'm saying I didn't lose my thread is that today's new oligarchs are in a sense lumpenbourgeoisie because we should be honest with all the exploitation and so on at some point big corporate capitalists did incredible things large industrial organization even for their own profit some kind of a workers safety do you know that for example the big example from Germany the
and so on no wonder that in the last years of his sanity not that then he became crazy but he then became too ill when Bolsheviks after Bolsheviks won civil war Lenin was extremely maybe even too much fascinated by big American corporate bosses who came to visit Soviet Union to make deal he saw that Bolsheviks need a socialist form of these large corporate managers so what I'm saying I didn't lose my thread is that today's new oligarchs are in a sense lumpenbourgeoisie because we should be honest with all the exploitation and so on at some point big corporate capitalists did incredible things large industrial organization even for their own profit some kind of a workers safety do you know that for example the big example from Germany the
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the big conservative Otto von Bismarck was the first earlier than England to establish some kind of a healthcare retirement and so on and so on so the point is that and I then try to transfer this point also onto sexual difference that class struggle is not simply we against us it's a
the big conservative Otto von Bismarck was the first earlier than England to establish some kind of a healthcare retirement and so on and so on so the point is that and I then try to transfer this point also onto sexual difference that class struggle is not simply we against us it's a
Slavoj Žižek
struggle against all those who are somewhere in between for for example so-called middle classes or other struggles and so on and so on without this complex situation where there are never just two agents but always a third one or many more thirds we don't get
struggle against all those who are somewhere in between for for example so-called middle classes or other struggles and so on and so on without this complex situation where there are never just two agents but always a third one or many more thirds we don't get
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antagonism we get a simple hierarchic opposition and I think it's the
antagonism we get a simple hierarchic opposition and I think it's the
Slavoj Žižek
same with sexual difference trans people are for me precisely this third element element which embodies sexual antagonism as such and this is just to finish especially important for me today when when we talk about working class yes we should insist on working class for a couple of reasons the first being that I don't agree with theory of Ernesto Laclau Chantal Mouffe and others who simply put working class into the series of other antagonisms as equal working class racism working class struggle feminist struggle tolerance struggle and so on and so on no but nonetheless the and here my good friend I'm honored to met him Álvaro García Linera the ex-vice president on Bolivia developed it well how the key to the revolution or successful relatively transformation of Bolivia was they got it that today working class is not just workers in the old sense of wage workers I respect your stance here absolutely but for example I'm sorry if I repeat stuff known to many of you in my country Slovenia as your beloved president acts it's brutal irony Trump would have call it a small shithole of a country in Slovenia I a couple of times opposed strikes people are oh are you getting a right-winger no because in specific Slovene situation who can afford to strike only the already privileged state employees those who work in private companies they don't have a chance to strike if they organize a strike the capitalists said fuck off we disband your factory we move elsewhere whatsoever it's only the relatively privileged state employees policemen doctors judges and so on and so I think to put it in Lenin's terms that to be able to strike today not it's not a general point like for precarious workers those who work for Amazon blah blah blah trade unions and strike would be a mega important thing but there are situations when strikes tend to become strikes of what Lenin called workers' aristocracy because the only effect in Slovenia of some successful strikes was that the already overpaid upper level surgeons and other top paid doctors got even more so ordinary nurses got less there was less there were less new instruments bought and so on and so on so my point is not only working class which of course still exists very strongly not it exists in big Western countries it exists in Third World countries but what about all this gray zone of unpaid and non not transparent for the state wage labor which is even more exploitative like I don't know where you are but from I was told from my friends in California Mexican immigrants are crucial their illegal work in harvesting season there and so on or in personal life you hire them as gardeners taking care of your children blah blah and we have to somehow include mobilize all this here I'm sorry if I repeat an old point but if we are addressing a broader public it's crucial the crucial point and here the term working class becomes important are new forms like for example Uber what's so horrible about Uber is that it blurs in its very structure class tension Uber the company claims we are not capitalists we just organize a contact between those who offer a service those who own a car and those who need a ride yeah so on the one hand you usually own your own means of production a car a computer whatever and the ideology is then that we are all capitalists just I don't have it but I have a factory fuck you you have just a car or whatever but the idea is we are all small capitalists and so but this hold on because this is a good point because we're gonna this gets at something we want to ask you about so yeah wait so Dave like hold on let's uh because we got to these these two main questions we want to get to Dave ask the the your main one so my main question and we were gonna do this last but we decided you know it's so important we want to see if you'll actually just you know what you said before we started recording about how you kind of hold back from getting into the theoretical weeds but that's kind after just finishing a couple courses on your work that's where we want to go for a hot minute and so the question is a question of the ethics of psychoanalysis um when Mikey was doing his talk about Antigone so it connects when Mikey was doing his introduction to you what he left out that is in the article he wrote for Underground Theory where he talks about how useful your concept it's really understanding jouissance and drive and how if your drive gets hooked into certain things you get jouissance from those things that's not pleasure it's the opposite of pleasure in a sort of sense right and so understanding how jouissance functions in the workplace is so important Drive though if we understand correctly is the is almost the enemy of desire like drive gets off on undermining whatever it is that you're desiring and so in the ethics of psychoanalysis the idea is Lacan says you should never compromise on your desire and then the the controversial thing that you say according to Mikey at least is that there's an inversion of that that you say no don't compromise on drive and so for me my question then because I've been thinking about this for months um you know my drive is hooked into hold on could I do one thing just just for for somebody watching and Slavoj I know you don't you don't like us quoting your books but this is for everybody who's watching you have this great line from Looking Awry let me read it just for context you said with regard to this relation between drive and desire we could perhaps risk a small modification of the Lacanian maxim of the psychoanalytic ethic not to cede one's desire is not desire as such already a certain yielding a kind of compromise formation a metonymic displacement retreat a defense against intractable drive to desire means to give way on the drive insofar as we follow Antigone and do not give way on our desire do we not precisely step out of the domain of desire do we not shift from the modality of desire into the modality of pure drive Looking Awry page Dave I know so my my question then is based in look Mikey and I and a lot of the people at Theory Underground we didn't really think that we were going to live to to the age that we have we didn't really think that we were going to survive we've lost a lot of friends on the way to being where we are to overdose to uh other kinds of self-destructive behavior why is it not showing me come on what's going on here all right we've lost friends along the way who didn't cede ground relative to their drive and so but then for me and for Mikey part of what gets us through the work week part of what gets us like um I mean we our drive is hooked into philosophy it's hooked into theory it's hooked into for me organizing and so obviously well that's good I think that it's a lot better that it's that than say heroin or you know cocaine but you know people who haven't had the opportunity to develop that drive formation it's sex drugs rock and roll and if you just lean into that it ends in a short you know a destruction not just of self but of relationships of family and and just causes a lot of heartbreak and so I just feel like this is a delicate issue it's a complicated issue and I kind of just wanted to give you an opportunity to elaborate on your position about the ethics of psychoanalysis yeah like how how do you at this point after all these years of like you were talking about Antigone with Alenka and I mean you know Todd's idea is that an ethics of desire would be in- like almost a Heideggerian resolute in- you know stance on the fact we are always going to lack we're never going to not be lacking so it's a kind of embrace of our fundamental lack but you've you've gone back to the ethics of psychoanalysis so many times across your main works we just want to know where you're at with it and what you think the ethics of psychoanalysis actually is and how do we prevent it from just being a kind of affirmation of the worst forms of self-destruction it's a excellent question and I am I in advance I apologize if I will not fully answer it first let me return to the point which I already made I want to in what you said quoting Ted involves some kind of a primacy of lack this for me if you say just this comes just a little bit too close to what I often cynically call this poetry of lack you know you know this hysterical formula of whatever you give me it's not that it's never that you always miss the true object I this let's call it metonymy of object this poetry of lack at the end you have to accept the lack and so on and so on is I must emphasize this just one side of the story there is the opposite side of the story in Lacan himself where where lack means also getting rid of an excess the first appearance of antagonism even at the level of individual psychic development is an excess I refer here to Lacan but also to one who was not a pure Lacanian but I think he elaborated this point very well Jean Laplanche in his volume Essays on Otherness where he claims that the lack that we experience it's not primarily our lack in the sense of I don't know what I really want because when I get what I want it's never that the original lack is the lack of myself as subjectivity it's what I am for the other Laplanche's idea is to put it very simply already a small baby somehow guesses that others around him eventually brothers sisters uncles mother father have a certain libidinal investment in him her I prefer to say it but it's impenetrable to him what this investment is what do they see in me what do they want from me so the original form of lack is I don't know what I am as an object for others and that's the original enigma why this enigma appears precisely as an excess of the other's desire for me the other wants something from me but I never can guess identify what the other see in me and the you're combining lack and
same with sexual difference trans people are for me precisely this third element element which embodies sexual antagonism as such and this is just to finish especially important for me today when when we talk about working class yes we should insist on working class for a couple of reasons the first being that I don't agree with theory of Ernesto Laclau Chantal Mouffe and others who simply put working class into the series of other antagonisms as equal working class racism working class struggle feminist struggle tolerance struggle and so on and so on no but nonetheless the and here my good friend I'm honored to met him Álvaro García Linera the ex-vice president on Bolivia developed it well how the key to the revolution or successful relatively transformation of Bolivia was they got it that today working class is not just workers in the old sense of wage workers I respect your stance here absolutely but for example I'm sorry if I repeat stuff known to many of you in my country Slovenia as your beloved president acts it's brutal irony Trump would have call it a small shithole of a country in Slovenia I a couple of times opposed strikes people are oh are you getting a right-winger no because in specific Slovene situation who can afford to strike only the already privileged state employees those who work in private companies they don't have a chance to strike if they organize a strike the capitalists said fuck off we disband your factory we move elsewhere whatsoever it's only the relatively privileged state employees policemen doctors judges and so on and so I think to put it in Lenin's terms that to be able to strike today not it's not a general point like for precarious workers those who work for Amazon blah blah blah trade unions and strike would be a mega important thing but there are situations when strikes tend to become strikes of what Lenin called workers' aristocracy because the only effect in Slovenia of some successful strikes was that the already overpaid upper level surgeons and other top paid doctors got even more so ordinary nurses got less there was less there were less new instruments bought and so on and so on so my point is not only working class which of course still exists very strongly not it exists in big Western countries it exists in Third World countries but what about all this gray zone of unpaid and non not transparent for the state wage labor which is even more exploitative like I don't know where you are but from I was told from my friends in California Mexican immigrants are crucial their illegal work in harvesting season there and so on or in personal life you hire them as gardeners taking care of your children blah blah and we have to somehow include mobilize all this here I'm sorry if I repeat an old point but if we are addressing a broader public it's crucial the crucial point and here the term working class becomes important are new forms like for example Uber what's so horrible about Uber is that it blurs in its very structure class tension Uber the company claims we are not capitalists we just organize a contact between those who offer a service those who own a car and those who need a ride yeah so on the one hand you usually own your own means of production a car a computer whatever and the ideology is then that we are all capitalists just I don't have it but I have a factory fuck you you have just a car or whatever but the idea is we are all small capitalists and so but this hold on because this is a good point because we're gonna this gets at something we want to ask you about so yeah wait so Dave like hold on let's uh because we got to these these two main questions we want to get to Dave ask the the your main one so my main question and we were gonna do this last but we decided you know it's so important we want to see if you'll actually just you know what you said before we started recording about how you kind of hold back from getting into the theoretical weeds but that's kind after just finishing a couple courses on your work that's where we want to go for a hot minute and so the question is a question of the ethics of psychoanalysis um when Mikey was doing his talk about Antigone so it connects when Mikey was doing his introduction to you what he left out that is in the article he wrote for Underground Theory where he talks about how useful your concept it's really understanding jouissance and drive and how if your drive gets hooked into certain things you get jouissance from those things that's not pleasure it's the opposite of pleasure in a sort of sense right and so understanding how jouissance functions in the workplace is so important Drive though if we understand correctly is the is almost the enemy of desire like drive gets off on undermining whatever it is that you're desiring and so in the ethics of psychoanalysis the idea is Lacan says you should never compromise on your desire and then the the controversial thing that you say according to Mikey at least is that there's an inversion of that that you say no don't compromise on drive and so for me my question then because I've been thinking about this for months um you know my drive is hooked into hold on could I do one thing just just for for somebody watching and Slavoj I know you don't you don't like us quoting your books but this is for everybody who's watching you have this great line from Looking Awry let me read it just for context you said with regard to this relation between drive and desire we could perhaps risk a small modification of the Lacanian maxim of the psychoanalytic ethic not to cede one's desire is not desire as such already a certain yielding a kind of compromise formation a metonymic displacement retreat a defense against intractable drive to desire means to give way on the drive insofar as we follow Antigone and do not give way on our desire do we not precisely step out of the domain of desire do we not shift from the modality of desire into the modality of pure drive Looking Awry page Dave I know so my my question then is based in look Mikey and I and a lot of the people at Theory Underground we didn't really think that we were going to live to to the age that we have we didn't really think that we were going to survive we've lost a lot of friends on the way to being where we are to overdose to uh other kinds of self-destructive behavior why is it not showing me come on what's going on here all right we've lost friends along the way who didn't cede ground relative to their drive and so but then for me and for Mikey part of what gets us through the work week part of what gets us like um I mean we our drive is hooked into philosophy it's hooked into theory it's hooked into for me organizing and so obviously well that's good I think that it's a lot better that it's that than say heroin or you know cocaine but you know people who haven't had the opportunity to develop that drive formation it's sex drugs rock and roll and if you just lean into that it ends in a short you know a destruction not just of self but of relationships of family and and just causes a lot of heartbreak and so I just feel like this is a delicate issue it's a complicated issue and I kind of just wanted to give you an opportunity to elaborate on your position about the ethics of psychoanalysis yeah like how how do you at this point after all these years of like you were talking about Antigone with Alenka and I mean you know Todd's idea is that an ethics of desire would be in- like almost a Heideggerian resolute in- you know stance on the fact we are always going to lack we're never going to not be lacking so it's a kind of embrace of our fundamental lack but you've you've gone back to the ethics of psychoanalysis so many times across your main works we just want to know where you're at with it and what you think the ethics of psychoanalysis actually is and how do we prevent it from just being a kind of affirmation of the worst forms of self-destruction it's a excellent question and I am I in advance I apologize if I will not fully answer it first let me return to the point which I already made I want to in what you said quoting Ted involves some kind of a primacy of lack this for me if you say just this comes just a little bit too close to what I often cynically call this poetry of lack you know you know this hysterical formula of whatever you give me it's not that it's never that you always miss the true object I this let's call it metonymy of object this poetry of lack at the end you have to accept the lack and so on and so on is I must emphasize this just one side of the story there is the opposite side of the story in Lacan himself where where lack means also getting rid of an excess the first appearance of antagonism even at the level of individual psychic development is an excess I refer here to Lacan but also to one who was not a pure Lacanian but I think he elaborated this point very well Jean Laplanche in his volume Essays on Otherness where he claims that the lack that we experience it's not primarily our lack in the sense of I don't know what I really want because when I get what I want it's never that the original lack is the lack of myself as subjectivity it's what I am for the other Laplanche's idea is to put it very simply already a small baby somehow guesses that others around him eventually brothers sisters uncles mother father have a certain libidinal investment in him her I prefer to say it but it's impenetrable to him what this investment is what do they see in me what do they want from me so the original form of lack is I don't know what I am as an object for others and that's the original enigma why this enigma appears precisely as an excess of the other's desire for me the other wants something from me but I never can guess identify what the other see in me and the you're combining lack and
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sorry just this of the unconscious is that because and that's for Laplanche the primordial form of unconscious that the other also doesn't know what he she it wants that's the beginning
sorry just this of the unconscious is that because and that's for Laplanche the primordial form of unconscious that the other also doesn't know what he she it wants that's the beginning
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of being human when you see that the lack is not yours so that you have an impenetrable other no the lack is in the other itself so now this is very abstract but this would have been my basic formula of ethics of psychoanalysis not to betray not your own lack because this poetic proposition I always lack I never get it that's bullshit that's usual pessimist
of being human when you see that the lack is not yours so that you have an impenetrable other no the lack is in the other itself so now this is very abstract but this would have been my basic formula of ethics of psychoanalysis not to betray not your own lack because this poetic proposition I always lack I never get it that's bullshit that's usual pessimist
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wisdom the crucial point is to transpose this lack into the figure
wisdom the crucial point is to transpose this lack into the figure
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of the big other itself society God or whatever they the the lack is there so I here returning I didn't lose the thread to your question desire drive I oscillate here I admit it my first point here is now I will not just criticize trans ideologies but as I always refer here to Judith Butler say something good about them you know the problem with excess of jouissance it's not just that it's always missing whatever we get it's not that but also that that we never can get rid of it as Judith Butler points out nicely let's say you renounce try to renounce jouissance you have a certain idea which is unacceptable for you of perverted whatever sexual enjoyment you renounce it but then you begin to enjoy the very rituals measures of exclusion this is the standard that's surplus jouissance right yeah yeah so I go to the end here there is no enjoyment without this surplus enjoyment enjoyment
of the big other itself society God or whatever they the the lack is there so I here returning I didn't lose the thread to your question desire drive I oscillate here I admit it my first point here is now I will not just criticize trans ideologies but as I always refer here to Judith Butler say something good about them you know the problem with excess of jouissance it's not just that it's always missing whatever we get it's not that but also that that we never can get rid of it as Judith Butler points out nicely let's say you renounce try to renounce jouissance you have a certain idea which is unacceptable for you of perverted whatever sexual enjoyment you renounce it but then you begin to enjoy the very rituals measures of exclusion this is the standard that's surplus jouissance right yeah yeah so I go to the end here there is no enjoyment without this surplus enjoyment enjoyment
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as such is a as such is a surplus so to go a step further the meaning in which I said that desire is also an escape is that in the drive you get caught into this closed loop of jouissance now the desire is a reaction to the deadlock of this closed loop you see it's suffocating so you say let's move the object to a beyond we desire some X we never get it in the same way I also say that that drive is an escape from the deadlock of desire desire is this desire for the always missing object the answer of drive is but what if I really desire this lack itself what the if the lack is not simply a lack but I enjoy this lack itself and I like repeating this lack that's how Lacan reached Freud's famous example of Fort Da the child who plays he doesn't simply want to keep the object he enjoys in the full sense of the term the very disappearing and reappearing
as such is a as such is a surplus so to go a step further the meaning in which I said that desire is also an escape is that in the drive you get caught into this closed loop of jouissance now the desire is a reaction to the deadlock of this closed loop you see it's suffocating so you say let's move the object to a beyond we desire some X we never get it in the same way I also say that that drive is an escape from the deadlock of desire desire is this desire for the always missing object the answer of drive is but what if I really desire this lack itself what the if the lack is not simply a lack but I enjoy this lack itself and I like repeating this lack that's how Lacan reached Freud's famous example of Fort Da the child who plays he doesn't simply want to keep the object he enjoys in the full sense of the term the very disappearing and reappearing
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of the object and I think this logic of enjoying the lack and all that it's crucial to understand all the strange perversities here I use the term in a strict way going on in today's politics we find this in certain forms of cancel culture where the pleasure in discovering new and new transgressions to be cancelled is obvious not to mention the right-wing populism which is full of obscene desires and so on and so forth these are not just abstract theoretical points so but nonetheless to come back to your point my ultimate answer it will not satisfy you now would have been that there is a parallax between desire and drive drive is an excess desire is a lack and they are like two sides of the same coin they have an extimate relation right yeah yeah but two points to a certain I call it ontological gap gap which cannot be recaptured neither by desire nor by drive in this sense I agree with you that that we shouldn't there was a tendency a couple of years ago which is why when I will take power I will first send myself to Gulag or reeducation camp I was at some point years ago tempted by this idea of desire a compromise good
of the object and I think this logic of enjoying the lack and all that it's crucial to understand all the strange perversities here I use the term in a strict way going on in today's politics we find this in certain forms of cancel culture where the pleasure in discovering new and new transgressions to be cancelled is obvious not to mention the right-wing populism which is full of obscene desires and so on and so forth these are not just abstract theoretical points so but nonetheless to come back to your point my ultimate answer it will not satisfy you now would have been that there is a parallax between desire and drive drive is an excess desire is a lack and they are like two sides of the same coin they have an extimate relation right yeah yeah but two points to a certain I call it ontological gap gap which cannot be recaptured neither by desire nor by drive in this sense I agree with you that that we shouldn't there was a tendency a couple of years ago which is why when I will take power I will first send myself to Gulag or reeducation camp I was at some point years ago tempted by this idea of desire a compromise good
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drive no I agree with you totalitarianism at its purest has the structure of a drive of this stupid closed loop of satisfaction and it's precisely the way you described your friends who lost
drive no I agree with you totalitarianism at its purest has the structure of a drive of this stupid closed loop of satisfaction and it's precisely the way you described your friends who lost
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their way I think that only people who go to the end into whatever alcoholism drugs and so on they go to the end in assuming jouissance and it's self-destructive the problem that we have today I don't have time to go into it is that conservatives in some sense know this they are aware of this but they offer as the only solution a return to desire but desire in this old-fashioned Christian sense desire as grounded in a prohibition unfortunately even some Lacanians like Pierre Legendre the lawyer also Jacques-Alain Miller follow this path they say that if you fully abandon yourself to drive it's self-destruction so the
their way I think that only people who go to the end into whatever alcoholism drugs and so on they go to the end in assuming jouissance and it's self-destructive the problem that we have today I don't have time to go into it is that conservatives in some sense know this they are aware of this but they offer as the only solution a return to desire but desire in this old-fashioned Christian sense desire as grounded in a prohibition unfortunately even some Lacanians like Pierre Legendre the lawyer also Jacques-Alain Miller follow this path they say that if you fully abandon yourself to drive it's self-destruction so the
Slavoj Žižek
formula proposed by Miller is for me a horrible one so even if social prohibitions the paternal law and so on are not true in the sense that they have no true foundation we have to accept them as necessary we have to act as if they are true I find this formula horrible because I think this was already in my surplus enjoyment book or I forgot where I noticed that you know that Miller unknowingly quotes here Kafka when at the end of The Trial Josef K asks the priest but this means that the law is a fake a lie the priest answer answer is no what matters with the law is not that it's true of course it's not true but that it's necessary this is for me the contemporary form of cynicism you know it's not true but you are afraid that if you abandon this appearance you get lost everything disintegrates so let's stick to it and I think that I don't have yet a clear answer I admit always my limitations where I don't think I found the final form that the great task of Lacan is precisely to avoid this choice which is crucial in today's globalized so-called falsely so-called permissive avoid avoid the choice of drive or desire avoid the choice of the ethics of drive whatever it costs go to the end which is a suicidal loop think about it but if we let somebody just a poetry of prohibition like the only enjoyment is you have a prohibition and you transgress it a little bit and so on and so on I think just to finish that Lacan's answer to this is that in the opposition between sacrifice and desire they are for Lacan not opposed I will now very briefly then I let you speak quote an example which I quoted four or five times from that Neil Gaiman you know when he says what catastrophe is to fall in love all your daily life is ruined you're obsessed but which means that love as unconditional desire beyond the pleasure principle is in itself a sacrifice sacrifice of your ordinary daily life and so on and so on you ruin your daily life but this type of sacrifice for a cause is how I read fidelity the fidelity to a drive not sorry to desire not to compromise your desire so it's not that desire must be controlled by some higher authority now you will say but still what if my desire is sorry for the vulgarity a desire to kill the Jews or to kill the Palestinians or whatever my answer here is to return to what I already said the big other the ethics of desire means do not rely on any figure of the big other to guarantee it and this figure can have many forms not just the obvious ideological form God divine order it can be a naturalist form natural laws blah blah blah it can be it can be sorry or any conservative form there are many forms of inventing of relying on the big other even the Marxist for example the idea of historical progress inscribed into history this is the permanent metaphorics not yet of Lenin but of traditional Stalinist Marxism we are just instruments of the historical will or whatever and so on and so on so again the ethics of psychoanalysis imposes fidelity to your desire but a desire which is not sustained by any coherent figure of the big other which somehow serves as the ultimate reference it is to and revolution I think that's why I like to quote I always forget it it is Robespierre no I think it's Saint-Just who says no revolution is not a process where you follow a higher necessity you remember that wonderful metaphor I quote it often where Saint-Just says revolutionaries are like passengers or captains of a ship in the middle of wide stormy sea without any compass where you have to find your way make risks and so on and so on that's our situation today that's the position the ethics of desire right there is the not rely on a compass yes precisely you don't have to accept to accept that the compass itself is lacking right that's the can't guarantee you anything yeah absolutely but now this doesn't mean any kind of stupid pure contingency like it doesn't matter blah blah because what about a what about a serial killer like a serial killer who says this is my this is what I desire I don't care about the big other I don't care about morality this is what I desire so I'm gonna act on it like what do you say to somebody who makes the serial killer counterpoint to you on the ethics of desire I would say that if you analyze first a serial killer that all serial killers that I've studied and I did some follow the logic of perversion perversion means you assume the position of the instrument of another's desire this desire can even be the desire of the victim itself you never a serial killer acts as an instrument even if this is an instrument of his usually there are very few feminine or trans not that I know yeah let's take a man he experiences himself as obsessed by a kind of deeper urge in himself I unconditionally had to do it this is not what I mean by not relying on it other on the big other because for me the lack of big other means that and here I'm still a Hegelian Kantian but in a way acceptable totally for Marx you know radical ethics allows for no excuse you cannot say what a serial killer would have been compelled to say sooner or later which is that okay I know I'm breaking all the moral rules blah blah but I feel this urge in me sorry no you are radically responsible for what you are this is and this Freud said this Freud for Freud unconscious is not oh my god there is something in me more than myself I cannot do it Lacan himself says already in the early 50s that that for psychoanalysis psychoanalysts even a psychotic is free in the formal sense of responsible for what he is doing now you will say but nonetheless how can you then be in love blah blah ah that's the beauty the last key for me to this ethics of desire for psychoanalysis and here the link to what you mentioned Kant Schelling and so on is obvious the most radical freedom is the freedom that we experience as an inner necessity like sorry my old example you I'm sure know it some of our listeners I hope don't know it when you fall passionately in love you never make the choice to fall in love all of a sudden you experience yourself as being in love and this always comes after the fact it's never oh my god now I want to fall in love the moment you do this but nonetheless although you experience this as a deeper necessity your fate you are fully responsible for it Kant and Schelling made wonderfully this point that the highest form of freedom is experienced as an inner necessity and I think this even holds for political ethical freedom when pathetic example your political cause country but I don't like to mention country because I'm not a cheap patriot but let's say country should be defended because it's brutally attacked it's not that you make a choice symmetric choice you simply feel that sorry for this cheap pathetics you cannot look yourself into a mirror in the morning without getting engaged and that's the true freedom you want to say something you got something please yeah so really quick here that's for I think that's a we'll be thinking about that one for the next year here and then maybe we'll follow up don't think too much fuck you don't think too much no you know but we do want to get to a couple other questions Slavoj we've got a couple left you know what I almost with my evil side wanted to reply to you and you will exclude me don't think about it freely do it or just do it just do it just do it bullshit you please we we should not read you we should just read Eckhart Tolle we'll just be in the in the present in the now all of our problems will go away okay but the I wanted to highlight for you that we got a camera working before we started recording this we were having trouble showing the in person audience here in Boise but this tour is we're going through the United States every part of it will be most parts of this tour are going to be hybrid and so I wanted to point out the Boise audience I don't know if you can see it there everyone go ahead and wave Nance you gotta go actually get in the I I see some of you yeah yeah yeah I even see a guy from Austin called Lukács I hope he is not a grandson of the Lukács I see Castellucci Marilyn Lawrence in my dirty mind I immediately combine this Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Lawrence or who is the famous one there sorry I can easily see but yes I see many of you not all of you who is the serious do you see this do you see this one do you see the people I just pinned it everyone go ahead and wave this is the people here in Boise Dave is on only the sign of Theory Underground ah that's me yeah but that's it says Boise audience ah so you are the immediate you Dave if I got it you are the immediate embodiment of the big other then yeah yes yes and I have this virtual background behind me but it I am in the same space as the Boise audience here in Boise I love you because my background unfortunately is the same one as as Marx and the big Signorelli we pretend to be intellectuals and want to impress you through some books in the background you know we call these in Liverpool art in the pub yeah it's the only room in yes are they real books or are you doing this what some of my professors that are new do they buy pocket books and then break just break the back so that the books look as if they are read you know yes yes all this blah blah that you can yes okay so now the question I wanted the I told you in the email beforehand there's two questions that Mikey has that the internet is dying to hear and so the first of those let them die fuck them death drive let them die okay go for it one of those one of those questions is not going to go up and be public on YouTube it will not be it's actually only for the people who are here he said we can clip it he doesn't care okay Mikey take it away you get to ask both questions go for it okay yeah Slavoj yeah we got two questions here about other thinkers so the first one because none of us have ever heard you mention this guy we want to know what do you know who Nick Land is no I am so sorry Nick like N-I-C-K Land like Land Land of Glory blah blah yeah so Nick Land is a British philosopher um and at this point he's one of the most famous philosophers on the internet like I know you're a meme in some way like there's certain philosophers that catch on with people online you're one of them Nick Land is another one Nick Land's a British philosopher um he's a Deleuzo-Guattarian and he has the most I don't even know how to describe the his concept of capitalism real quick is this he takes Deleuze and Guattari he doesn't think he he doesn't factor in reterritorialization that much he thinks capitalism is basically synonymous with deterritorialization so he thinks capitalism is just going to decode and deterritorialize everything up until the point that it produces artificial intelligence he thinks that this is going to be a superintelligence and basically like a god-like entity and it's going to bring about the extinction of the human race because he's a Bataillean he thinks somehow our death is a good thing and so his theory of capitalism he he basically in the 90s he was around leftists and he was he was at Warwick University and he was embraced as a kind of leftist back then nowadays he'd say he never was but he he's basically the most faithful champion of capitalism I've ever seen even maybe more so than Ayn Rand or anything but precisely because he thinks it's going to bring about the end of humanity and he he he he basically got into amphetamines he had an overdose or or he had a psychotic break he moved to China and now he's like the biggest proponent spokesman for Shanghai because he thinks actually Shanghai or the mega city of Shanghai is going to give rise to artificial intelligence and that's where the singularity's going to emerge and so he's all for China he's all for capitalism he ends up becoming one of the founding figures in the neo-reaction movement with Mencius Moldbug Curtis Yarvin um so he now has this really strong following online with people on the neo-reactionary right and they all love him because they think he loves capitalism so much and he does but what they don't get is he loves it because he thinks it's going to produce a god entity that destroys all of us and and so because he's so influential though um and here's the thing I mean he hates Lacan he hates Hegel he's all about Deleuze and Guattari and so it's one of those things everybody's always been curious though about what you think of him because he ha- he had such an impact on the neo-reaction movement he's also considered the father of accelerationism I know you're not a fan of accelerationism but here's the thing for him acceleration means accelerating capital turning itself into a god entity that's going to annihilate all of us and so with all that being said what do you think of what you just heard I think it's it may sound shocking I don't want to lose too much time but I think it's a way too optimist theory really you know optimism can for me optimism is not simply everything will turn out good well and so on and so on optimism is precisely this stance of seeing a clear line of development and then there is some point which appear to most of us catastrophic but for him it's a desired goal and so on and so on for theoretical reasons I think that I think that singularity in this precise sense I've elaborated this in my book Hegel in a Wired Brain singularity in the sense of all of us single individuals becoming like collectively flowing in some kind of a god-like mind that it simply is immanently impossible that again here again we have a wonderful example of what I was talking about before the big other singularity in the sense of god-like artificial intelligence is the latest figure of the big other and it's interesting that I forgot who I quoted in one of my books that some
formula proposed by Miller is for me a horrible one so even if social prohibitions the paternal law and so on are not true in the sense that they have no true foundation we have to accept them as necessary we have to act as if they are true I find this formula horrible because I think this was already in my surplus enjoyment book or I forgot where I noticed that you know that Miller unknowingly quotes here Kafka when at the end of The Trial Josef K asks the priest but this means that the law is a fake a lie the priest answer answer is no what matters with the law is not that it's true of course it's not true but that it's necessary this is for me the contemporary form of cynicism you know it's not true but you are afraid that if you abandon this appearance you get lost everything disintegrates so let's stick to it and I think that I don't have yet a clear answer I admit always my limitations where I don't think I found the final form that the great task of Lacan is precisely to avoid this choice which is crucial in today's globalized so-called falsely so-called permissive avoid avoid the choice of drive or desire avoid the choice of the ethics of drive whatever it costs go to the end which is a suicidal loop think about it but if we let somebody just a poetry of prohibition like the only enjoyment is you have a prohibition and you transgress it a little bit and so on and so on I think just to finish that Lacan's answer to this is that in the opposition between sacrifice and desire they are for Lacan not opposed I will now very briefly then I let you speak quote an example which I quoted four or five times from that Neil Gaiman you know when he says what catastrophe is to fall in love all your daily life is ruined you're obsessed but which means that love as unconditional desire beyond the pleasure principle is in itself a sacrifice sacrifice of your ordinary daily life and so on and so on you ruin your daily life but this type of sacrifice for a cause is how I read fidelity the fidelity to a drive not sorry to desire not to compromise your desire so it's not that desire must be controlled by some higher authority now you will say but still what if my desire is sorry for the vulgarity a desire to kill the Jews or to kill the Palestinians or whatever my answer here is to return to what I already said the big other the ethics of desire means do not rely on any figure of the big other to guarantee it and this figure can have many forms not just the obvious ideological form God divine order it can be a naturalist form natural laws blah blah blah it can be it can be sorry or any conservative form there are many forms of inventing of relying on the big other even the Marxist for example the idea of historical progress inscribed into history this is the permanent metaphorics not yet of Lenin but of traditional Stalinist Marxism we are just instruments of the historical will or whatever and so on and so on so again the ethics of psychoanalysis imposes fidelity to your desire but a desire which is not sustained by any coherent figure of the big other which somehow serves as the ultimate reference it is to and revolution I think that's why I like to quote I always forget it it is Robespierre no I think it's Saint-Just who says no revolution is not a process where you follow a higher necessity you remember that wonderful metaphor I quote it often where Saint-Just says revolutionaries are like passengers or captains of a ship in the middle of wide stormy sea without any compass where you have to find your way make risks and so on and so on that's our situation today that's the position the ethics of desire right there is the not rely on a compass yes precisely you don't have to accept to accept that the compass itself is lacking right that's the can't guarantee you anything yeah absolutely but now this doesn't mean any kind of stupid pure contingency like it doesn't matter blah blah because what about a what about a serial killer like a serial killer who says this is my this is what I desire I don't care about the big other I don't care about morality this is what I desire so I'm gonna act on it like what do you say to somebody who makes the serial killer counterpoint to you on the ethics of desire I would say that if you analyze first a serial killer that all serial killers that I've studied and I did some follow the logic of perversion perversion means you assume the position of the instrument of another's desire this desire can even be the desire of the victim itself you never a serial killer acts as an instrument even if this is an instrument of his usually there are very few feminine or trans not that I know yeah let's take a man he experiences himself as obsessed by a kind of deeper urge in himself I unconditionally had to do it this is not what I mean by not relying on it other on the big other because for me the lack of big other means that and here I'm still a Hegelian Kantian but in a way acceptable totally for Marx you know radical ethics allows for no excuse you cannot say what a serial killer would have been compelled to say sooner or later which is that okay I know I'm breaking all the moral rules blah blah but I feel this urge in me sorry no you are radically responsible for what you are this is and this Freud said this Freud for Freud unconscious is not oh my god there is something in me more than myself I cannot do it Lacan himself says already in the early 50s that that for psychoanalysis psychoanalysts even a psychotic is free in the formal sense of responsible for what he is doing now you will say but nonetheless how can you then be in love blah blah ah that's the beauty the last key for me to this ethics of desire for psychoanalysis and here the link to what you mentioned Kant Schelling and so on is obvious the most radical freedom is the freedom that we experience as an inner necessity like sorry my old example you I'm sure know it some of our listeners I hope don't know it when you fall passionately in love you never make the choice to fall in love all of a sudden you experience yourself as being in love and this always comes after the fact it's never oh my god now I want to fall in love the moment you do this but nonetheless although you experience this as a deeper necessity your fate you are fully responsible for it Kant and Schelling made wonderfully this point that the highest form of freedom is experienced as an inner necessity and I think this even holds for political ethical freedom when pathetic example your political cause country but I don't like to mention country because I'm not a cheap patriot but let's say country should be defended because it's brutally attacked it's not that you make a choice symmetric choice you simply feel that sorry for this cheap pathetics you cannot look yourself into a mirror in the morning without getting engaged and that's the true freedom you want to say something you got something please yeah so really quick here that's for I think that's a we'll be thinking about that one for the next year here and then maybe we'll follow up don't think too much fuck you don't think too much no you know but we do want to get to a couple other questions Slavoj we've got a couple left you know what I almost with my evil side wanted to reply to you and you will exclude me don't think about it freely do it or just do it just do it just do it bullshit you please we we should not read you we should just read Eckhart Tolle we'll just be in the in the present in the now all of our problems will go away okay but the I wanted to highlight for you that we got a camera working before we started recording this we were having trouble showing the in person audience here in Boise but this tour is we're going through the United States every part of it will be most parts of this tour are going to be hybrid and so I wanted to point out the Boise audience I don't know if you can see it there everyone go ahead and wave Nance you gotta go actually get in the I I see some of you yeah yeah yeah I even see a guy from Austin called Lukács I hope he is not a grandson of the Lukács I see Castellucci Marilyn Lawrence in my dirty mind I immediately combine this Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Lawrence or who is the famous one there sorry I can easily see but yes I see many of you not all of you who is the serious do you see this do you see this one do you see the people I just pinned it everyone go ahead and wave this is the people here in Boise Dave is on only the sign of Theory Underground ah that's me yeah but that's it says Boise audience ah so you are the immediate you Dave if I got it you are the immediate embodiment of the big other then yeah yes yes and I have this virtual background behind me but it I am in the same space as the Boise audience here in Boise I love you because my background unfortunately is the same one as as Marx and the big Signorelli we pretend to be intellectuals and want to impress you through some books in the background you know we call these in Liverpool art in the pub yeah it's the only room in yes are they real books or are you doing this what some of my professors that are new do they buy pocket books and then break just break the back so that the books look as if they are read you know yes yes all this blah blah that you can yes okay so now the question I wanted the I told you in the email beforehand there's two questions that Mikey has that the internet is dying to hear and so the first of those let them die fuck them death drive let them die okay go for it one of those one of those questions is not going to go up and be public on YouTube it will not be it's actually only for the people who are here he said we can clip it he doesn't care okay Mikey take it away you get to ask both questions go for it okay yeah Slavoj yeah we got two questions here about other thinkers so the first one because none of us have ever heard you mention this guy we want to know what do you know who Nick Land is no I am so sorry Nick like N-I-C-K Land like Land Land of Glory blah blah yeah so Nick Land is a British philosopher um and at this point he's one of the most famous philosophers on the internet like I know you're a meme in some way like there's certain philosophers that catch on with people online you're one of them Nick Land is another one Nick Land's a British philosopher um he's a Deleuzo-Guattarian and he has the most I don't even know how to describe the his concept of capitalism real quick is this he takes Deleuze and Guattari he doesn't think he he doesn't factor in reterritorialization that much he thinks capitalism is basically synonymous with deterritorialization so he thinks capitalism is just going to decode and deterritorialize everything up until the point that it produces artificial intelligence he thinks that this is going to be a superintelligence and basically like a god-like entity and it's going to bring about the extinction of the human race because he's a Bataillean he thinks somehow our death is a good thing and so his theory of capitalism he he basically in the 90s he was around leftists and he was he was at Warwick University and he was embraced as a kind of leftist back then nowadays he'd say he never was but he he's basically the most faithful champion of capitalism I've ever seen even maybe more so than Ayn Rand or anything but precisely because he thinks it's going to bring about the end of humanity and he he he he basically got into amphetamines he had an overdose or or he had a psychotic break he moved to China and now he's like the biggest proponent spokesman for Shanghai because he thinks actually Shanghai or the mega city of Shanghai is going to give rise to artificial intelligence and that's where the singularity's going to emerge and so he's all for China he's all for capitalism he ends up becoming one of the founding figures in the neo-reaction movement with Mencius Moldbug Curtis Yarvin um so he now has this really strong following online with people on the neo-reactionary right and they all love him because they think he loves capitalism so much and he does but what they don't get is he loves it because he thinks it's going to produce a god entity that destroys all of us and and so because he's so influential though um and here's the thing I mean he hates Lacan he hates Hegel he's all about Deleuze and Guattari and so it's one of those things everybody's always been curious though about what you think of him because he ha- he had such an impact on the neo-reaction movement he's also considered the father of accelerationism I know you're not a fan of accelerationism but here's the thing for him acceleration means accelerating capital turning itself into a god entity that's going to annihilate all of us and so with all that being said what do you think of what you just heard I think it's it may sound shocking I don't want to lose too much time but I think it's a way too optimist theory really you know optimism can for me optimism is not simply everything will turn out good well and so on and so on optimism is precisely this stance of seeing a clear line of development and then there is some point which appear to most of us catastrophic but for him it's a desired goal and so on and so on for theoretical reasons I think that I think that singularity in this precise sense I've elaborated this in my book Hegel in a Wired Brain singularity in the sense of all of us single individuals becoming like collectively flowing in some kind of a god-like mind that it simply is immanently impossible that again here again we have a wonderful example of what I was talking about before the big other singularity in the sense of god-like artificial intelligence is the latest figure of the big other and it's interesting that I forgot who I quoted in one of my books that some
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there are even some
there are even some
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Hegelian thinkers of singularity who claim that you know I count them among what I ironically call not yet Hegelians those readers of Hegel who think
Hegelian thinkers of singularity who claim that you know I count them among what I ironically call not yet Hegelians those readers of Hegel who think
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Hegel
Hegel
Slavoj Žižek
was in some sense right but he jumped to his conclusion too early what Hegel aimed total reconciliation of subject and substance of men and God needs some more time so even Marx was this
was in some sense right but he jumped to his conclusion too early what Hegel aimed total reconciliation of subject and substance of men and God needs some more time so even Marx was this
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in a sense at least in the reading of Young Lukács History and Class Consciousness Marx's idea was that not in the spiritual domain but in the social domain subject and substance which means work and capital will be reconciled only through communist revolution so Hegel was too early then you have of course Fukuyama who thought Hegel was too early it's only with today's liberal democracy global capital that we are there and then you had again artificial intelligence Hegelians who said what Hegel prophesied as the synt- as the reconciliation of subject and substance will happen only with singularity where individual subjectivity will be drowned
in a sense at least in the reading of Young Lukács History and Class Consciousness Marx's idea was that not in the spiritual domain but in the social domain subject and substance which means work and capital will be reconciled only through communist revolution so Hegel was too early then you have of course Fukuyama who thought Hegel was too early it's only with today's liberal democracy global capital that we are there and then you had again artificial intelligence Hegelians who said what Hegel prophesied as the synt- as the reconciliation of subject and substance will happen only with singularity where individual subjectivity will be drowned
Slavoj Žižek
in and in this sense totally reconciled with substance my first point here is that already at the limited level of artificial intelligence that we know today why do we presuppose and I'm just one detour I follow here even some intelligent I don't agree with them but they are not idiots quantum physicists and quantum cosmologists like the German lady Sabine Hossenfelder who who who claims that why do we always imagine artificial intelligence in this transhuman sense as some consistent god-like totality what if it will be a breathtaking total inconsistent mess it will not be anything divine the but a more important point for me is this one that I would strictly prohibit here the use of the term God because here I follow another person whom you mentioned in your last letter to me Heidegger the thing to learn from Heidegger is that what we imagine as the divine immortal dimension is always rooted in our finitude which I read in a more materialist way in our concrete social constellation there is no God in itself what we experience as divine is a moment of our concrete historical texture which means that the moment we become infinite in the sense of directly participating in god-like entity we not only lose our humanity but we lose the divine dimension itself also we step out into a but the only thing I'll add is for him I don't know if divine for Land he thinks this deity or entity as he calls it is more Lovecraftian it's a pure nightmare we can't even begin to process it it's not like a anything divine in in the way that we would think of Christ or Allah as divine it's it's a complete Lovecraftian nightmare that we can't begin to process I still think that he the way he describes it it's too risky because if there is a but think about it he does think that it's just going to refine its intelligence and just it's almost like surplus intelligence just more and more it's just going to get better and better more consistent it's going to refine its own algorithms okay what I am puzzled here is what does he mean by intelligence because my basic point in my uh Hegel and the Wired Brain book is that if there is a and I asked this question many many many theorists with whom I'm in regular contact you know I have my strange connections with quantum physicists with artificial intelligence theorists and my big question one of the big questions to them is uh is uh precisely this one how that obviously his representation of artificial intelligence is Deleuzian it is yeah absolutely based it on desiring production and machinic unconscious yeah which but I think that again here my Freudian approach enters unconscious is simply a meaningless term without subjectivity because for Freud unconscious is not some basic flux without subject and so on what Freud calls unconscious is unconscious formations fantasies and so on are answers replies to a certain deadlock deadlock which characterizes the rise of the subject so all these descriptions infinite flux no border no longer human blah blah for me still remain fantasies fantasies in the sense of avoiding a certain
in and in this sense totally reconciled with substance my first point here is that already at the limited level of artificial intelligence that we know today why do we presuppose and I'm just one detour I follow here even some intelligent I don't agree with them but they are not idiots quantum physicists and quantum cosmologists like the German lady Sabine Hossenfelder who who who claims that why do we always imagine artificial intelligence in this transhuman sense as some consistent god-like totality what if it will be a breathtaking total inconsistent mess it will not be anything divine the but a more important point for me is this one that I would strictly prohibit here the use of the term God because here I follow another person whom you mentioned in your last letter to me Heidegger the thing to learn from Heidegger is that what we imagine as the divine immortal dimension is always rooted in our finitude which I read in a more materialist way in our concrete social constellation there is no God in itself what we experience as divine is a moment of our concrete historical texture which means that the moment we become infinite in the sense of directly participating in god-like entity we not only lose our humanity but we lose the divine dimension itself also we step out into a but the only thing I'll add is for him I don't know if divine for Land he thinks this deity or entity as he calls it is more Lovecraftian it's a pure nightmare we can't even begin to process it it's not like a anything divine in in the way that we would think of Christ or Allah as divine it's it's a complete Lovecraftian nightmare that we can't begin to process I still think that he the way he describes it it's too risky because if there is a but think about it he does think that it's just going to refine its intelligence and just it's almost like surplus intelligence just more and more it's just going to get better and better more consistent it's going to refine its own algorithms okay what I am puzzled here is what does he mean by intelligence because my basic point in my uh Hegel and the Wired Brain book is that if there is a and I asked this question many many many theorists with whom I'm in regular contact you know I have my strange connections with quantum physicists with artificial intelligence theorists and my big question one of the big questions to them is uh is uh precisely this one how that obviously his representation of artificial intelligence is Deleuzian it is yeah absolutely based it on desiring production and machinic unconscious yeah which but I think that again here my Freudian approach enters unconscious is simply a meaningless term without subjectivity because for Freud unconscious is not some basic flux without subject and so on what Freud calls unconscious is unconscious formations fantasies and so on are answers replies to a certain deadlock deadlock which characterizes the rise of the subject so all these descriptions infinite flux no border no longer human blah blah for me still remain fantasies fantasies in the sense of avoiding a certain
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break my counter-answer would have been we don't know if this will happen I don't think it will happen why doesn't he draw the conclusion that we are already there well I'll
break my counter-answer would have been we don't know if this will happen I don't think it will happen why doesn't he draw the conclusion that we are already there well I'll
Slavoj Žižek
tell you why because he has a teleological concept of time he thinks the future's more real than
tell you why because he has a teleological concept of time he thinks the future's more real than
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the present moment is and
the present moment is and
Slavoj Žižek
that the future's actually in I mean you're the you're the one of the great thinkers of retroactivity but he takes it not as a quilting point we change the past because
that the future's actually in I mean you're the you're the one of the great thinkers of retroactivity but he takes it not as a quilting point we change the past because
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we resymbolize it there's something in him he's taken like a literal physical retrocausality like this thing exists out in the future and it's time traveling or sending influential like retro causes back in time to I know I know I my now we are coming I like this very much to even more fundamental let's call them naively I don't like this term metaphysical questions I remain here a Hegelian materialist let me explain this crazy notion you know when Hegel says I quoted it at least times when Hegel says how philosophy can only grasp a certain Lebensgestalt figure of life social order when it enters its decline that and I think that I agree with Land yes the representation of human being that is now endangered with artificial intelligence is something disintegrating today but what
we resymbolize it there's something in him he's taken like a literal physical retrocausality like this thing exists out in the future and it's time traveling or sending influential like retro causes back in time to I know I know I my now we are coming I like this very much to even more fundamental let's call them naively I don't like this term metaphysical questions I remain here a Hegelian materialist let me explain this crazy notion you know when Hegel says I quoted it at least times when Hegel says how philosophy can only grasp a certain Lebensgestalt figure of life social order when it enters its decline that and I think that I agree with Land yes the representation of human being that is now endangered with artificial intelligence is something disintegrating today but what
Slavoj Žižek
he projects into the future as this okay let's not use God but this infinite abyss maybe even the entity with a capital E the entity yeah yeah I think that this is this is a strict again projection fantasy formation on the gap in our situation here which is already here I see would you say that Deleuze and Guattari even do this at the end of Anti-Oedipus with their their image of the new earth which it's like oh we have a form of desire that's not neurotic it's not based on the signifier law it's not caught up with any of that exactly exactly I think that I this is why we don't have time to enter it but this is
he projects into the future as this okay let's not use God but this infinite abyss maybe even the entity with a capital E the entity yeah yeah I think that this is this is a strict again projection fantasy formation on the gap in our situation here which is already here I see would you say that Deleuze and Guattari even do this at the end of Anti-Oedipus with their their image of the new earth which it's like oh we have a form of desire that's not neurotic it's not based on the signifier law it's not caught up with any of that exactly exactly I think that I this is why we don't have time to enter it but this is
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why I think that Anti-Oedipus is arguably the worst book that they wrote I much prefer Difference and Repetition
why I think that Anti-Oedipus is arguably the worst book that they wrote I much prefer Difference and Repetition
Slavoj Žižek
Logic of Sense then maybe their last book is a little bit better Introduction to Philosophy or what but some
Logic of Sense then maybe their last book is a little bit better Introduction to Philosophy or what but some
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other what about A Thousand
other what about A Thousand
Slavoj Žižek
Plateaus what do you think of A Thousand Plateaus where do you put that a little bit better it's already a little bit better than that lower point of of
Plateaus what do you think of A Thousand Plateaus where do you put that a little bit better it's already a little bit better than that lower point of of
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of Anti-Oedipus you know how I would read Deleuze and Guattari especially Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus
of Anti-Oedipus you know how I would read Deleuze and Guattari especially Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus
Slavoj Žižek
Oedipus is defined as the agent of reterritorialization retotalizing whatever but read his own Logic of Sense where towards the end Oedipus is introduced precisely as an unlocatable outcast he so Deleuze is for me a wonderful example of something that holds for many great thinkers their big moment is not at the end it can be at the beginning in the middle or where for example as I repeatedly tried to show with Schelling so what I would say again but let's not lose time with Nick Land well there's one more
Oedipus is defined as the agent of reterritorialization retotalizing whatever but read his own Logic of Sense where towards the end Oedipus is introduced precisely as an unlocatable outcast he so Deleuze is for me a wonderful example of something that holds for many great thinkers their big moment is not at the end it can be at the beginning in the middle or where for example as I repeatedly tried to show with Schelling so what I would say again but let's not lose time with Nick Land well there's one more
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point I just want to ask you about okay one more thing so you and Land even though I don't think you know you disagreed with each other on this particular event
point I just want to ask you about okay one more thing so you and Land even though I don't think you know you disagreed with each other on this particular event
Slavoj Žižek
you both take different positions and I just wanted to ask you
you both take different positions and I just wanted to ask you
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about this real quick back in when the Chinese government banned all fiction depicting time travel science fiction
about this real quick back in when the Chinese government banned all fiction depicting time travel science fiction
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narratives etc. um you in Less Than Nothing talk about how you view it as what China was
narratives etc. um you in Less Than Nothing talk about how you view it as what China was
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doing the Chinese government was doing is
doing the Chinese government was doing is
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trying to ban its people of thinking of alternate futures like it's a kind of ban on the future Land though as a supporter of China he saw it as banning the past it didn't what the Chinese
trying to ban its people of thinking of alternate futures like it's a kind of ban on the future Land though as a supporter of China he saw it as banning the past it didn't what the Chinese
Slavoj Žižek
government didn't want is people fetishizing their feudal past thinking about the past because
government didn't want is people fetishizing their feudal past thinking about the past because
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China's actually the driving agent of the future and so for him the ban is on the past for you the ban is on the future and I'm just curious about what you would say thinking about him saying
China's actually the driving agent of the future and so for him the ban is on the past for you the ban is on the future and I'm just curious about what you would say thinking about him saying
Slavoj Žižek
the ban is on the past okay I'll put it like this of course Chinese
the ban is on the past okay I'll put it like this of course Chinese
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the Chinese state bureaucracy their top ideologists like Wang Huning are not idiots I respect them very much I never dismiss Xi the present leader as some kind of a crazy old communist no he is based on a quite accurate insight accurate insight into modern capitalism his problem is how to retain American productivity capitalist productivity without the effect of social decay unfortunately their solution is but I don't mean this term in a bad sense a neo-fascist one the typical neo-fascist solution is if you put you want modernity without ideological modernization you want the modern dynamic you want conservative modernity their idea is modernity but with Confucianism I think it will not function but what I would say controlling the past and so on is that uh I see here no big contradiction my only point is the Hegelian one there is no future every image of future that we I'm more of a pessimist even here we don't know what will happen I'm not I have many scenarios what I just don't believe is there will be this one large let's drop the name God but artificial intelligence general flow and so on and so on if this happens then we will not be able to use these terms which we project into it from today's experience but my basic point would have been that would have been that the couple of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is not the ultimate point that again we are maybe even rejoining the couple of desire and drive desire is in its nature at least apparently deterritorializing no it moves always beyond drive is territorializing you move in a closed loop and so on and so on and I think that again in order for all this space to happen you have to
the Chinese state bureaucracy their top ideologists like Wang Huning are not idiots I respect them very much I never dismiss Xi the present leader as some kind of a crazy old communist no he is based on a quite accurate insight accurate insight into modern capitalism his problem is how to retain American productivity capitalist productivity without the effect of social decay unfortunately their solution is but I don't mean this term in a bad sense a neo-fascist one the typical neo-fascist solution is if you put you want modernity without ideological modernization you want the modern dynamic you want conservative modernity their idea is modernity but with Confucianism I think it will not function but what I would say controlling the past and so on is that uh I see here no big contradiction my only point is the Hegelian one there is no future every image of future that we I'm more of a pessimist even here we don't know what will happen I'm not I have many scenarios what I just don't believe is there will be this one large let's drop the name God but artificial intelligence general flow and so on and so on if this happens then we will not be able to use these terms which we project into it from today's experience but my basic point would have been that would have been that the couple of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is not the ultimate point that again we are maybe even rejoining the couple of desire and drive desire is in its nature at least apparently deterritorializing no it moves always beyond drive is territorializing you move in a closed loop and so on and so on and I think that again in order for all this space to happen you have to
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have a certain radical ontological gap and that's why I'm looking also into this all this topic of quantum physics void and so on reality in some sense doesn't objectively exist there is a multiplicity of inconsistencies and so on there is a mess a gap a mega the you know even in my new book I would like if you don't put it on your web or the web but keep it in your inner party circle I would love to send you the manuscript of my new book Not Freedom which will appear in in April called Christian Atheism it's a provocative title it's totally materialist don't be afraid I didn't begin to discover God or what where my point is I try to sharpen my debate with Buddhists you know my point is that Buddhists had this opposition Nirvana this it's not the same as what Land dreams about but this kind of a eternal it's not the proper term it's not peace but whatever flow of annihilation right yeah yeah yeah and Samsara my point is that the true choice is not between these two my point is always a Hegelian one not can we rise from our finite world of desire to the void of Nirvana but the other way around how what went wrong
have a certain radical ontological gap and that's why I'm looking also into this all this topic of quantum physics void and so on reality in some sense doesn't objectively exist there is a multiplicity of inconsistencies and so on there is a mess a gap a mega the you know even in my new book I would like if you don't put it on your web or the web but keep it in your inner party circle I would love to send you the manuscript of my new book Not Freedom which will appear in in April called Christian Atheism it's a provocative title it's totally materialist don't be afraid I didn't begin to discover God or what where my point is I try to sharpen my debate with Buddhists you know my point is that Buddhists had this opposition Nirvana this it's not the same as what Land dreams about but this kind of a eternal it's not the proper term it's not peace but whatever flow of annihilation right yeah yeah yeah and Samsara my point is that the true choice is not between these two my point is always a Hegelian one not can we rise from our finite world of desire to the void of Nirvana but the other way around how what went wrong
Slavoj Žižek
with Nirvana that we fall into finite world and for me the gap this is the origin the origin is a gap and Nirvana is always already a retroactive projection out of this gap so the same thing would be I don't have time to go into it my ultimate answer to to Nick Land is that it's not we live today as humans and then we will blah blah already as humans today we are not fully human that's why I remain faithful to the old structuralist notion of antihumanism which means that in in the heart of being human there is a constitutive madness and this madness which is not just human madness which echoes some fundamental ontological disorder depicted for example by quantum physics of reality itself that's the ultimate truth so uh I would say that that's probably that's I think that's a perfect I I think we probably need we probably need to let you go here in a sec but Mikey you've got the one that you want to ask kind of off the record just go for it really quick here alright one last question Slavoj so when Dave and I I don't know if you remember this yeah one last question tell me the story of your life in two hours you know isn't this so liberating politically correct the only way for me to be friendly with somebody is to presuppose that in some sense they are evil you know you project evil this is for me the only form of true trust and friendliness it's not oh I know you are good no sorry nobody is good you know sorry go on okay so when Dave and I met you the first time we were at the international Žižek conference in Athens Georgia Athens Georgia oh my god I have sorry that you didn't approach me but this no we did we did you we did you we did you have wonderful memories of that one but uh okay so here's the thing though when I- no I- the thing I mentioned to you um was I had plans like I wanted to get what you thought about Baudrillard and so I told you that I had an idea for a book on you and Baudrillard well the last five years have been me doing constant research and the book's going to be out next year I it's it's happening next year but what I just wanted to kind of refresh my memory real quick didn't you say to me that Baudrillard actually like he- he had read Sublime Object and sent word to you that he appreciated your work is that- do I remember that correctly that there was some contact yeah but this is what they what they call in detective novels second-hand circumstantial evidence somebody told me this and it wasn't even that he read Sublime Object the one who read Sublime Object and didn't like it was Lyotard oh okay but Baudrillard it was just at the end before he died with this new confusions and contradictions ecological crisis and so on there I got a message immediately before his death I think even from his wife that he that he liked me and so on but you know where is nonetheless maybe a difference between him and me in a very naive way and you may feel it already what I was telling now recently I think we have to step out of this deconstructive mode it's very naive what I will say now of philosophy means reading readings of how other people read books and then you know in this sense deconstructing I think we should begin to risk big ontological projects how to do this without regressing to some traditional metaphysics that's the big problem I'm struggling in my last works so Baudrillard is for me here a little bit too deconstructionist still and that's what I like about Deleuze Deleuze is you to the end not afraid to simply posit as in Logic of Sense strong ontological theses propositions I think this is what we should do today you know and even in the last books Baudrillard wrote though like Lucid- Pack he seemed to return to metaphysics a little bit where he he's kind of taking this distinction between sign and symbol or you know the code and um symbolic exchange and basically seeing them as almost like metaphysical tendencies and so I almost see it like a return later on in him where he he- he warms up to it a bit I have nothing I must now make a confession I bluff enough I don't want to bluff too much that I I there is a lot of Lyotard
with Nirvana that we fall into finite world and for me the gap this is the origin the origin is a gap and Nirvana is always already a retroactive projection out of this gap so the same thing would be I don't have time to go into it my ultimate answer to to Nick Land is that it's not we live today as humans and then we will blah blah already as humans today we are not fully human that's why I remain faithful to the old structuralist notion of antihumanism which means that in in the heart of being human there is a constitutive madness and this madness which is not just human madness which echoes some fundamental ontological disorder depicted for example by quantum physics of reality itself that's the ultimate truth so uh I would say that that's probably that's I think that's a perfect I I think we probably need we probably need to let you go here in a sec but Mikey you've got the one that you want to ask kind of off the record just go for it really quick here alright one last question Slavoj so when Dave and I I don't know if you remember this yeah one last question tell me the story of your life in two hours you know isn't this so liberating politically correct the only way for me to be friendly with somebody is to presuppose that in some sense they are evil you know you project evil this is for me the only form of true trust and friendliness it's not oh I know you are good no sorry nobody is good you know sorry go on okay so when Dave and I met you the first time we were at the international Žižek conference in Athens Georgia Athens Georgia oh my god I have sorry that you didn't approach me but this no we did we did you we did you we did you have wonderful memories of that one but uh okay so here's the thing though when I- no I- the thing I mentioned to you um was I had plans like I wanted to get what you thought about Baudrillard and so I told you that I had an idea for a book on you and Baudrillard well the last five years have been me doing constant research and the book's going to be out next year I it's it's happening next year but what I just wanted to kind of refresh my memory real quick didn't you say to me that Baudrillard actually like he- he had read Sublime Object and sent word to you that he appreciated your work is that- do I remember that correctly that there was some contact yeah but this is what they what they call in detective novels second-hand circumstantial evidence somebody told me this and it wasn't even that he read Sublime Object the one who read Sublime Object and didn't like it was Lyotard oh okay but Baudrillard it was just at the end before he died with this new confusions and contradictions ecological crisis and so on there I got a message immediately before his death I think even from his wife that he that he liked me and so on but you know where is nonetheless maybe a difference between him and me in a very naive way and you may feel it already what I was telling now recently I think we have to step out of this deconstructive mode it's very naive what I will say now of philosophy means reading readings of how other people read books and then you know in this sense deconstructing I think we should begin to risk big ontological projects how to do this without regressing to some traditional metaphysics that's the big problem I'm struggling in my last works so Baudrillard is for me here a little bit too deconstructionist still and that's what I like about Deleuze Deleuze is you to the end not afraid to simply posit as in Logic of Sense strong ontological theses propositions I think this is what we should do today you know and even in the last books Baudrillard wrote though like Lucid- Pack he seemed to return to metaphysics a little bit where he he's kind of taking this distinction between sign and symbol or you know the code and um symbolic exchange and basically seeing them as almost like metaphysical tendencies and so I almost see it like a return later on in him where he he- he warms up to it a bit I have nothing I must now make a confession I bluff enough I don't want to bluff too much that I I there is a lot of Lyotard
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that I simply didn't read so I'm not qualified to make statements here but do you have like a- a Baudrillard work that you really appreciated did you like Simulacra and Simulation or The Mirror of Production see with The Mirror of Production I feel like okay I'm sorry please finish no I was just saying like at one point like with Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production I feel like he's really tapped in to a lot of the stuff that you're always trying to explain to
that I simply didn't read so I'm not qualified to make statements here but do you have like a- a Baudrillard work that you really appreciated did you like Simulacra and Simulation or The Mirror of Production see with The Mirror of Production I feel like okay I'm sorry please finish no I was just saying like at one point like with Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production I feel like he's really tapped in to a lot of the stuff that you're always trying to explain to
Slavoj Žižek
Marxists like in your book on the Communist Manifesto which is both you and Baudrillard seem to have realized that just ap- like copying and pasting old
Marxists like in your book on the Communist Manifesto which is both you and Baudrillard seem to have realized that just ap- like copying and pasting old
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Marxist categories that Marx used in his time onto our situation don't work you can't just take proletariat as Marx understood it and it just perfectly makes sense of the working class now
Marxist categories that Marx used in his time onto our situation don't work you can't just take proletariat as Marx understood it and it just perfectly makes sense of the working class now
Slavoj Žižek
you can't just take wages the way Marx understood them and say oh yes that's how wages work now or the strike that's how strikes work now both you and Baudrillard seem to convey a skepticism saying these concepts just don't work exactly the same way that they did no but my my agreement that one I did read The Mirror of Production and my agreement with Baudrillard is even deeper here in the sense that if I remember correctly Baudrillard's point is that Marx but not only Marx it's not so much Hegel it's more maybe uh Fichte and some others established this logic of we live in an imaginary world of mirrors exchange and so on and the real productive ground is then some process of production I think
you can't just take wages the way Marx understood them and say oh yes that's how wages work now or the strike that's how strikes work now both you and Baudrillard seem to convey a skepticism saying these concepts just don't work exactly the same way that they did no but my my agreement that one I did read The Mirror of Production and my agreement with Baudrillard is even deeper here in the sense that if I remember correctly Baudrillard's point is that Marx but not only Marx it's not so much Hegel it's more maybe uh Fichte and some others established this logic of we live in an imaginary world of mirrors exchange and so on and the real productive ground is then some process of production I think
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but I first would be here a little bit more merciful towards Marx this is a naive reading of Marx and there are big debates in Marxism about this do you know who
but I first would be here a little bit more merciful towards Marx this is a naive reading of Marx and there are big debates in Marxism about this do you know who
Slavoj Žižek
made this term critical of Marx do you read Kojin Karatani yeah yeah I forgot the title of his book no longer the last one when he tries to supplement in very Baudrillardian view I think the notion of modes of production with the notion of modes of exchange okay so that again what orthodox productivist Marxists would dismiss as mirror is the thing itself and I think that even if we re-read Marx in this way you see that things are not as simple as that for me the worst text of Marx is that Introduction to the or forward to the Critique of Political Economy where he has these evolutionary stupidities you know production develops and then when it develops up to a certain degree it no longer fits the old mode of production and so on no Marx in his own work doesn't follow this for example in Capital he distinguishes between formal subsumption under capital and then real subsumption he said
made this term critical of Marx do you read Kojin Karatani yeah yeah I forgot the title of his book no longer the last one when he tries to supplement in very Baudrillardian view I think the notion of modes of production with the notion of modes of exchange okay so that again what orthodox productivist Marxists would dismiss as mirror is the thing itself and I think that even if we re-read Marx in this way you see that things are not as simple as that for me the worst text of Marx is that Introduction to the or forward to the Critique of Political Economy where he has these evolutionary stupidities you know production develops and then when it develops up to a certain degree it no longer fits the old mode of production and so on no Marx in his own work doesn't follow this for example in Capital he distinguishes between formal subsumption under capital and then real subsumption he said
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that with early artisans weavers and so on the the form material of production weaving machine remained the same they weren't privately owned capitalist was just the one who immediately bought the products and so on that first it's a formal subsumption at the level of logic of exchange then the the the machines the concrete material mode of production itself changed so it gets a- it gets a much more concrete here I at this level I I agree with Baudrillard also I admire very much it really affected me uh was it Baudrillard on I'm
that with early artisans weavers and so on the the form material of production weaving machine remained the same they weren't privately owned capitalist was just the one who immediately bought the products and so on that first it's a formal subsumption at the level of logic of exchange then the the the machines the concrete material mode of production itself changed so it gets a- it gets a much more concrete here I at this level I I agree with Baudrillard also I admire very much it really affected me uh was it Baudrillard on I'm
Slavoj Žižek
sorry old senile guy am I confusing him with somebody else didn't he visit it was Korea South not North I think and then portraying Korea as this kind of a land of the future where people are at the same time I'm not sure if that's him or not honestly yeah but it- it reminds me of his maybe too pathetic but nonetheless wonderful it's a fantasy but a nice fantasy description of landing in LA Los Angeles and landing in hell and all that these are fantasies but I think they are in some sense fantasies immanent to reality itself yeah in that like because you always emphasize that like with an ideology ideological formation there's always an unconscious fantasy uh holding it together and so would you say that maybe when Baudrillard's doing his travelogues like he was doing America going over there he's actually tapped into the phantasmatic structure of America and that's what
sorry old senile guy am I confusing him with somebody else didn't he visit it was Korea South not North I think and then portraying Korea as this kind of a land of the future where people are at the same time I'm not sure if that's him or not honestly yeah but it- it reminds me of his maybe too pathetic but nonetheless wonderful it's a fantasy but a nice fantasy description of landing in LA Los Angeles and landing in hell and all that these are fantasies but I think they are in some sense fantasies immanent to reality itself yeah in that like because you always emphasize that like with an ideology ideological formation there's always an unconscious fantasy uh holding it together and so would you say that maybe when Baudrillard's doing his travelogues like he was doing America going over there he's actually tapped into the phantasmatic structure of America and that's what
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he's describing yes and that's very important because now comes my final point I think that he was able to do it precisely he was not himself an American I'm-
he's describing yes and that's very important because now comes my final point I think that he was able to do it precisely he was not himself an American I'm-
Slavoj Žižek
I was never this fake historicist in the sense of you have to be there to really see it how it is no I believe that we can understand Shakespeare today much better than people in Shakespeare's
I was never this fake historicist in the sense of you have to be there to really see it how it is no I believe that we can understand Shakespeare today much better than people in Shakespeare's
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time and so on and so on and that again to understand what is happening in America we it's better not to be too American where are you in Chicago where are you I live right at in a in a small suburb Raytown Missouri but I'm right outside of Kansas
time and so on and so on and that again to understand what is happening in America we it's better not to be too American where are you in Chicago where are you I live right at in a in a small suburb Raytown Missouri but I'm right outside of Kansas
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City Missouri oh you are you are there my god yeah
City Missouri oh you are you are there my god yeah
Slavoj Žižek
yeah Midwest no no because uh do you know was it no it wasn't Kansas City which is the big gate to the west city with the gateway St. Louis sorry St. Louis do you know about the strangest phenomenon in American philosophy the so-called St. Louis Hegelians no some German high school teachers who around established the first Hegelian school there it was pretty influential even the great pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce originated from this Hegelian sources but their idea
yeah Midwest no no because uh do you know was it no it wasn't Kansas City which is the big gate to the west city with the gateway St. Louis sorry St. Louis do you know about the strangest phenomenon in American philosophy the so-called St. Louis Hegelians no some German high school teachers who around established the first Hegelian school there it was pretty influential even the great pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce originated from this Hegelian sources but their idea
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was this one Hegel came to his conclusion too quickly
was this one Hegel came to his conclusion too quickly
Slavoj Žižek
it's not the West that in the 20th century or already late 19th century the spirit moved from Western Europe to America and then even then they moved further first it was East Coast now it's moving to St. Louis and they thought this is it and I like this fantasy first they were proved immediately empirically wrong because Chicago won over St. Louis soon but then you know you had their followers who claimed no they didn't go far enough it's West Coast we had this dream LA Seattle that's it and now you have I love this some not only Japanese guys but even Chinese guys who claim the only way to be truly Hegelian maybe Nick Land would agree with this is China you know for Hegel China Africa is before China is the beginning of history well it should also end there it comes full circle around you know so I mean these are fantasies oh I so I know I it's getting late for you and we got
it's not the West that in the 20th century or already late 19th century the spirit moved from Western Europe to America and then even then they moved further first it was East Coast now it's moving to St. Louis and they thought this is it and I like this fantasy first they were proved immediately empirically wrong because Chicago won over St. Louis soon but then you know you had their followers who claimed no they didn't go far enough it's West Coast we had this dream LA Seattle that's it and now you have I love this some not only Japanese guys but even Chinese guys who claim the only way to be truly Hegelian maybe Nick Land would agree with this is China you know for Hegel China Africa is before China is the beginning of history well it should also end there it comes full circle around you know so I mean these are fantasies oh I so I know I it's getting late for you and we got
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we're about to let the other two speakers here go up but right before we do that um I had my final question as well and I thought you know since you're I'm just gonna ask it because I think the whole internet is dying to know uh about your relation to Compact because you are on the board of editors I or I you can explain that in a second but uh I just wanted to say that we've caughten a lot of heat uh from people who don't know us and don't read us but they see that we're affiliated with you they see that we're affiliated or that Nina Power is in the volume um they see that you two are affiliated with uh Compact and so there's like this this uh critique that we've received that this is uh a red-brown operation that this is a reactionary operation that this is uh blah blah blah you know the thing um and so I kind of just wanted to give you a moment to uh as we close out say why it is that that project over there at Compact magazine um why it matters to you what value is it that you see in that can I give you a surprising brutal answer I don't regularly
we're about to let the other two speakers here go up but right before we do that um I had my final question as well and I thought you know since you're I'm just gonna ask it because I think the whole internet is dying to know uh about your relation to Compact because you are on the board of editors I or I you can explain that in a second but uh I just wanted to say that we've caughten a lot of heat uh from people who don't know us and don't read us but they see that we're affiliated with you they see that we're affiliated or that Nina Power is in the volume um they see that you two are affiliated with uh Compact and so there's like this this uh critique that we've received that this is uh a red-brown operation that this is a reactionary operation that this is uh blah blah blah you know the thing um and so I kind of just wanted to give you a moment to uh as we close out say why it is that that project over there at Compact magazine um why it matters to you what value is it that you see in that can I give you a surprising brutal answer I don't regularly
Slavoj Žižek
follow Compact just I am not even sure where do they really stand are they some kind of a anti-woke left are they more in the middle blah blah what matters to me and that's the desperate situation we are in today that for example did I publish with them that text uh some radioactive reflections and so on no I published that one with Philosophical Salon it doesn't matter there are many texts where the only two options for me to publish are Compact or my friend Michael Marder's Philosophical Salon the censorship is so strong for example my last text it's now published in that project syndicate website with a strange title National Disorder I don't know what it's critical but very respectfully not anti-Semitic the final hero is a Jew but it's critical of some extreme phenomena on in Israel today absolutely it was impossible to publish it anywhere in Germany in United States and so on are people aware how strict the censorship is in these days so it's not that I it's not that I looked around and said okay let's choose Compact they invited me I sent them a text which nobody no one else wanted they said yes that's it for me and it's a very tragic situation you know it's from all sides from of course right-wing side but also from the woke leftist side and so on the censorship is getting so incredible that and with this I will finish immediately that do you know that some people asked me they were stupid enough I warned them I will not name them for a letter of recommendation I did it but I warned them I may appear well-known but this may cause you trouble and afterwards they told me you were right we didn't get the job not in spite of your recommendation but because of it they all thought oh they got their spies within that committee and they learned that precisely somebody said no no no let's not give the job to this guy he has a letter of support from Slavoj Žižek that's bad so you know don't underestimate in what a desperate situation I am in the sense of how difficult it is to reach the public and in that sense uh then I see why you jumped at the opportunity to submit something to us because depending on how that goes maybe we can publish some more things and you know I also like you just one point that you will like Theory Underground you know I read this with you know the famous quote from from Virgil's Aeneid Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo move the underground insofar as the underground is the all the unconscious fantasies things that we know but we don't know that we know it that's the crucial thing to do today we cannot do direct revolution but the only way to lay the foundation for it is to do what you are doing to move the underground it's a theoretically correct title thank you Slavoj it's been an- it's been a complete honor to have you and uh don't don't screw me with this type of bullshit you know you should say something fuck off Slavoj it was it wasn't fuck off Slavoj we don't give a shit it doesn't matter no you should say it wasn't totally bad but you should put a lot of work into it to make it somewhat better that's the only thing that I accept okay have a nice time better talk in you yeah okay thanks very much bye-bye appreciate you thanks Slavoj bye-bye thank you take care yeah yeah take care of what? of my shit yeah i'm gonna do a quick little point of order here for you folks because i understand a lot of people probably are ready to go eat lunch for the people who are actually here in boise just so you know at any point stand up go over get some refreshments there are some there's also like water and other things like down the hall holly's got sparkling water um but let's see so what we want to do really quick is just let you all know what the agenda is so uh mountain time it's Mikey that means it's where you're at was getting pretty late for Žižek so it's awesome that he stayed as long as he did he actually stayed longer than we had agreed which is it was okay it was okay it was okay um the order of operations here though the Theory Underground tour crew is going to say some things and then the uh the two local presenters here in boise Elton LK of the working-class intelligentsia as well as the Dead Pirates Philosophical Society as well as um hold on let me change this back to speaker view what's going on here you people all fuck you oh everyone turned their cameras off they just wanted to be seen with Žižek they don't care about this they're like fuck it we're out well why why is it stuck on why is it stuck on Mikey when he turned his camera off Mikey okay fuck
follow Compact just I am not even sure where do they really stand are they some kind of a anti-woke left are they more in the middle blah blah what matters to me and that's the desperate situation we are in today that for example did I publish with them that text uh some radioactive reflections and so on no I published that one with Philosophical Salon it doesn't matter there are many texts where the only two options for me to publish are Compact or my friend Michael Marder's Philosophical Salon the censorship is so strong for example my last text it's now published in that project syndicate website with a strange title National Disorder I don't know what it's critical but very respectfully not anti-Semitic the final hero is a Jew but it's critical of some extreme phenomena on in Israel today absolutely it was impossible to publish it anywhere in Germany in United States and so on are people aware how strict the censorship is in these days so it's not that I it's not that I looked around and said okay let's choose Compact they invited me I sent them a text which nobody no one else wanted they said yes that's it for me and it's a very tragic situation you know it's from all sides from of course right-wing side but also from the woke leftist side and so on the censorship is getting so incredible that and with this I will finish immediately that do you know that some people asked me they were stupid enough I warned them I will not name them for a letter of recommendation I did it but I warned them I may appear well-known but this may cause you trouble and afterwards they told me you were right we didn't get the job not in spite of your recommendation but because of it they all thought oh they got their spies within that committee and they learned that precisely somebody said no no no let's not give the job to this guy he has a letter of support from Slavoj Žižek that's bad so you know don't underestimate in what a desperate situation I am in the sense of how difficult it is to reach the public and in that sense uh then I see why you jumped at the opportunity to submit something to us because depending on how that goes maybe we can publish some more things and you know I also like you just one point that you will like Theory Underground you know I read this with you know the famous quote from from Virgil's Aeneid Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo move the underground insofar as the underground is the all the unconscious fantasies things that we know but we don't know that we know it that's the crucial thing to do today we cannot do direct revolution but the only way to lay the foundation for it is to do what you are doing to move the underground it's a theoretically correct title thank you Slavoj it's been an- it's been a complete honor to have you and uh don't don't screw me with this type of bullshit you know you should say something fuck off Slavoj it was it wasn't fuck off Slavoj we don't give a shit it doesn't matter no you should say it wasn't totally bad but you should put a lot of work into it to make it somewhat better that's the only thing that I accept okay have a nice time better talk in you yeah okay thanks very much bye-bye appreciate you thanks Slavoj bye-bye thank you take care yeah yeah take care of what? of my shit yeah i'm gonna do a quick little point of order here for you folks because i understand a lot of people probably are ready to go eat lunch for the people who are actually here in boise just so you know at any point stand up go over get some refreshments there are some there's also like water and other things like down the hall holly's got sparkling water um but let's see so what we want to do really quick is just let you all know what the agenda is so uh mountain time it's Mikey that means it's where you're at was getting pretty late for Žižek so it's awesome that he stayed as long as he did he actually stayed longer than we had agreed which is it was okay it was okay it was okay um the order of operations here though the Theory Underground tour crew is going to say some things and then the uh the two local presenters here in boise Elton LK of the working-class intelligentsia as well as the Dead Pirates Philosophical Society as well as um hold on let me change this back to speaker view what's going on here you people all fuck you oh everyone turned their cameras off they just wanted to be seen with Žižek they don't care about this they're like fuck it we're out well why why is it stuck on why is it stuck on Mikey when he turned his camera off Mikey okay fuck
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it whatever I think it'll pick it up from the zoom side on the recording so it should be fine but uh what am I saying well basically uh the tour crew's gonna say a few words
it whatever I think it'll pick it up from the zoom side on the recording so it should be fine but uh what am I saying well basically uh the tour crew's gonna say a few words
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um and then so Nance is going to
um and then so Nance is going to
Slavoj Žižek
introduce Ann and myself to talk about the two books and then Elton LK working-class intelligentsia is going to give his presentation on how Mark Fisher's The Vampire Castle is actually the PMC but then he has a critique of how that term gets used and then uh we'll end out here on Brian Weeks and his submission to Underground Theory so um I guess as uh some introductory remark for uh as- by way of introduction for Nance here I'll just say that uh nobody has been as supportive of what's going on at Theory
introduce Ann and myself to talk about the two books and then Elton LK working-class intelligentsia is going to give his presentation on how Mark Fisher's The Vampire Castle is actually the PMC but then he has a critique of how that term gets used and then uh we'll end out here on Brian Weeks and his submission to Underground Theory so um I guess as uh some introductory remark for uh as- by way of introduction for Nance here I'll just say that uh nobody has been as supportive of what's going on at Theory
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Underground in terms of Time Energy that is to say Nance has put in the most to actually
Underground in terms of Time Energy that is to say Nance has put in the most to actually
Slavoj Žižek
show up and be there for every one of the courses and he's given and
show up and be there for every one of the courses and he's given and
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so uh the fact that he wanted to go on the tour with myself and Ann it's like it's so really exciting thing so everybody we're coming to a city near you um and uh Marilyn go ahead and text me in a second here I'll step away and look at the phone but everyone put your hands together for Nance what's happening everybody? what's happening internet? um thank you all for coming um this is kind of weird it's kind of it's kind of thrown together it kind of feels hectic a little madcap um a little manic and it is all those things but it is also um much more than those things um Theory Underground is very special to me um I've had times in my life really low
so uh the fact that he wanted to go on the tour with myself and Ann it's like it's so really exciting thing so everybody we're coming to a city near you um and uh Marilyn go ahead and text me in a second here I'll step away and look at the phone but everyone put your hands together for Nance what's happening everybody? what's happening internet? um thank you all for coming um this is kind of weird it's kind of it's kind of thrown together it kind of feels hectic a little madcap um a little manic and it is all those things but it is also um much more than those things um Theory Underground is very special to me um I've had times in my life really low
Slavoj Žižek
um and I've had substance abuse issues and shit and uh I got sober a fucking decade ago or whatever um but sobriety isn't just abstinence from substances it's it's filling in the void that you were just trying to cover over um and uh I tried to do that with philosophy and uh it's somewhat effective but uh something was always missing so the the combination of resolve um and energy and dedication um and obsessive focus um and the willingness to to i don't know put the put the team on your back Dave is remarkable and and I i see a lot of really cool shit um with his ability to just say yeah fuck it i'll do it it needs to get done um and now i'm lost i don't know what i'm talking about but uh yeah Theory Underground fills in that void that i was trying to cover over and uh it was really cool and i'm down for the cause uh so we're going on this tour and and these events are going to be interesting they're going to be hybrid events they're going to be internet facing they're going to be having a live audience a lot of this stuff is new a lot of this stuff resembles things that have been done for a long time but things that have been captured things that are just part of the spectacle things that that just happen so that they can continue to happen um and this is something new so we're going to fuck up we're going to fuck up publicly we're going to fuck up big but we're also um already succeeding just by virtue of being here doing this and being willing to go out on a limb
um and I've had substance abuse issues and shit and uh I got sober a fucking decade ago or whatever um but sobriety isn't just abstinence from substances it's it's filling in the void that you were just trying to cover over um and uh I tried to do that with philosophy and uh it's somewhat effective but uh something was always missing so the the combination of resolve um and energy and dedication um and obsessive focus um and the willingness to to i don't know put the put the team on your back Dave is remarkable and and I i see a lot of really cool shit um with his ability to just say yeah fuck it i'll do it it needs to get done um and now i'm lost i don't know what i'm talking about but uh yeah Theory Underground fills in that void that i was trying to cover over and uh it was really cool and i'm down for the cause uh so we're going on this tour and and these events are going to be interesting they're going to be hybrid events they're going to be internet facing they're going to be having a live audience a lot of this stuff is new a lot of this stuff resembles things that have been done for a long time but things that have been captured things that are just part of the spectacle things that that just happen so that they can continue to happen um and this is something new so we're going to fuck up we're going to fuck up publicly we're going to fuck up big but we're also um already succeeding just by virtue of being here doing this and being willing to go out on a limb
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um and put the team on your back so i'm really excited to be going through um all these cities and hopefully meeting up with people i know some of the people here i know some of the people here on the internet um i'm looking forward to spending time with more people doing really cool shit going to broadway shows um maybe causing a scene at Platypus in Chicago um going to DC hanging out with Mikey um going to Philly um really really looking forward to doing all the
um and put the team on your back so i'm really excited to be going through um all these cities and hopefully meeting up with people i know some of the people here i know some of the people here on the internet um i'm looking forward to spending time with more people doing really cool shit going to broadway shows um maybe causing a scene at Platypus in Chicago um going to DC hanging out with Mikey um going to Philly um really really looking forward to doing all the
Slavoj Žižek
things we're going to do and hopefully this hasn't been too abrasive for the people here for the people here on the internet um thank you all for coming thank you all for giving us your attention um Ann is going to come up and talk about Underground Theory the volume that is a collection of some very big names some very small names
things we're going to do and hopefully this hasn't been too abrasive for the people here for the people here on the internet um thank you all for coming thank you all for giving us your attention um Ann is going to come up and talk about Underground Theory the volume that is a collection of some very big names some very small names
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um and some actually unknown people and they all have something to say and it is worth
um and some actually unknown people and they all have something to say and it is worth
Slavoj Žižek
reading um and that's dope Dave's gonna come up after
reading um and that's dope Dave's gonna come up after
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that and talk about the Time Energy book that is really good and uh I'm very excited to have all that shit shared with the world um Ann's gonna talk now alright hello internet friends Mikey Nick Andrew all of you who i don't know yet hello Boise friends um first of all thank you all for being here and thank you all for the support normally you know when you have a book like a team of people who have been trained to edit and put together a book who know how to use the the programs like Word to make it come together they all do it together and it takes them like two or three years and Dave said Slavoj Žižek gave us a manuscript we're going to put out a big book with a bunch of people in it let's get it out this summer like in April and I'm like oh okay
that and talk about the Time Energy book that is really good and uh I'm very excited to have all that shit shared with the world um Ann's gonna talk now alright hello internet friends Mikey Nick Andrew all of you who i don't know yet hello Boise friends um first of all thank you all for being here and thank you all for the support normally you know when you have a book like a team of people who have been trained to edit and put together a book who know how to use the the programs like Word to make it come together they all do it together and it takes them like two or three years and Dave said Slavoj Žižek gave us a manuscript we're going to put out a big book with a bunch of people in it let's get it out this summer like in April and I'm like oh okay
Slavoj Žižek
and we we did it we did it a little bit later than we meant to but we did it and so thank you all the support has just been been great um so yes Underground Theory this is the draft version there's typos on the cover don't worry about it you know we put a lot of work into the book that is now available on Amazon but you should actually buy it on theory-underground.com/undergroundtheorybook uh something like that you should buy it on the website because it's cheaper it's at a discount theory-underground.com/store to buy the books um Underground Theory has uh authors or contributors to the volume like Nance said including some big names like Slavoj Žižek Todd McGowan and even you know a never before seen piece by Marshall McLuhan uh donated or gifted to us by the estate of Marshall McLuhan um the works range from very academic and very rigorous and very technical to more poetic and narrative and so you know reading this anthology i don't want to say it's going to be like reading something you've never read before but most of the time people aren't just putting out books with authors like from Žižek to people from middle-of- nowhere like Boise Idaho and so I think this book is this anthology is really special in the diversity that it offers you know in the the very rigorous writing to the humor and the narrative all throughout it and so I'm really excited for people to get their hands on it and to read this uh work um you'll see not in the dedication page of this uh draft that i have in my hands but in the dedication of the book it is uh to workers with earbuds or something along those lines because at the end of the day this book is for real working people who want to cultivate their minds who care about education and thought and knowledge for its own sake and I'm really proud of every single piece that is in this book and i kind of wanted to in my time up here give a little teaser to some of the works that are in here let everyone know what kind of some of the sections are um it'll be brief because obviously you can read it for yourself but get excited because as soon as this thing arrives like I want to read it again just for pleasure not just for editing we've got the first section Underground Theory and Alternative Education a lot of pieces that highlight on the idea of the university which was actually the very first course that was taught at Theory Underground co-taught by Brian Dave and me um I think it's really special that that we have so many pieces talking about the idea of the university because the idea of the university like i said was that first course at Theory Underground and it really highlights the values of Theory Underground and what we're trying to do not being a university but still trying to uphold those ideas of the university being a community of truth seekers the pursuit of knowledge and education for its own sake and having academic freedom and so this book really really captures that idea of the university it lives on in every piece in this book and so you'll see pieces about that in the you know alternative education and underground theory section we have a section on critical media
and we we did it we did it a little bit later than we meant to but we did it and so thank you all the support has just been been great um so yes Underground Theory this is the draft version there's typos on the cover don't worry about it you know we put a lot of work into the book that is now available on Amazon but you should actually buy it on theory-underground.com/undergroundtheorybook uh something like that you should buy it on the website because it's cheaper it's at a discount theory-underground.com/store to buy the books um Underground Theory has uh authors or contributors to the volume like Nance said including some big names like Slavoj Žižek Todd McGowan and even you know a never before seen piece by Marshall McLuhan uh donated or gifted to us by the estate of Marshall McLuhan um the works range from very academic and very rigorous and very technical to more poetic and narrative and so you know reading this anthology i don't want to say it's going to be like reading something you've never read before but most of the time people aren't just putting out books with authors like from Žižek to people from middle-of- nowhere like Boise Idaho and so I think this book is this anthology is really special in the diversity that it offers you know in the the very rigorous writing to the humor and the narrative all throughout it and so I'm really excited for people to get their hands on it and to read this uh work um you'll see not in the dedication page of this uh draft that i have in my hands but in the dedication of the book it is uh to workers with earbuds or something along those lines because at the end of the day this book is for real working people who want to cultivate their minds who care about education and thought and knowledge for its own sake and I'm really proud of every single piece that is in this book and i kind of wanted to in my time up here give a little teaser to some of the works that are in here let everyone know what kind of some of the sections are um it'll be brief because obviously you can read it for yourself but get excited because as soon as this thing arrives like I want to read it again just for pleasure not just for editing we've got the first section Underground Theory and Alternative Education a lot of pieces that highlight on the idea of the university which was actually the very first course that was taught at Theory Underground co-taught by Brian Dave and me um I think it's really special that that we have so many pieces talking about the idea of the university because the idea of the university like i said was that first course at Theory Underground and it really highlights the values of Theory Underground and what we're trying to do not being a university but still trying to uphold those ideas of the university being a community of truth seekers the pursuit of knowledge and education for its own sake and having academic freedom and so this book really really captures that idea of the university it lives on in every piece in this book and so you'll see pieces about that in the you know alternative education and underground theory section we have a section on critical media
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theory with a really unique uh very you know underground theory to its core contribution from Samuel Loncar up on the east coast that's where the Marshall McLuhan piece is we have ideology critique so a lot of some Lacanian psychoanalysis um reflections and analysis uh we've got a whole piece in
theory with a really unique uh very you know underground theory to its core contribution from Samuel Loncar up on the east coast that's where the Marshall McLuhan piece is we have ideology critique so a lot of some Lacanian psychoanalysis um reflections and analysis uh we've got a whole piece in
Slavoj Žižek
there about uh the concept of jump humping if you don't know what that is oh boy you're in for a treat um more you know underground theory about the development of an idea of future trauma by Sean Middelstadt i believe he's here in the group with us as well as a piece uh kindly gifted to us by Alenka Zupančič next we've got the left and its critique featuring a blurb or a piece from Norman Finkelstein's latest
there about uh the concept of jump humping if you don't know what that is oh boy you're in for a treat um more you know underground theory about the development of an idea of future trauma by Sean Middelstadt i believe he's here in the group with us as well as a piece uh kindly gifted to us by Alenka Zupančič next we've got the left and its critique featuring a blurb or a piece from Norman Finkelstein's latest
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book I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It we've got Slavoj Žižek's piece in there Nina Power and Daniel Tutt somewhat in dialogue with each other
book I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It we've got Slavoj Žižek's piece in there Nina Power and Daniel Tutt somewhat in dialogue with each other
Slavoj Žižek
with two very differing opinions but we wanted to highlight those and say hey this is a space for different opinions that not every author and contributor is going to agree with one another and they can be in dialogue with each other and that should exist in the academic spheres and in the underground we've got Elton's piece Vampire Castle is PMC which he's going to present on a little bit later today um a piece about how the lock- the lockdown how it helped how it helped capitalism and then Dave's left her than thou and finally um historical interpretation and the history of philosophy um some really unique pieces in there art and gentrification in London in the early 2000s and uh limiting us to freedom by Todd McGowan all excellent pieces each piece is unique and like Nance said each piece is well worth reading and engaging with and taking seriously um i'm so proud of Dave for organizing this i'm so proud of Nance and Elton and Brian for contributing to this book and being able to say hey i'm published in a book with like big names but also just writing like very quality pieces that really embody the- the ethic and the value of Theory Underground and so put a lot of work into this this baby our first baby outside of Ryan Gosling I suppose our little kitten who's been scampering around on the floor um thank you all for the support we're so excited for you to read it and Dave is now going to tell us a little bit about Time Energy and thank you Ann for all the
with two very differing opinions but we wanted to highlight those and say hey this is a space for different opinions that not every author and contributor is going to agree with one another and they can be in dialogue with each other and that should exist in the academic spheres and in the underground we've got Elton's piece Vampire Castle is PMC which he's going to present on a little bit later today um a piece about how the lock- the lockdown how it helped how it helped capitalism and then Dave's left her than thou and finally um historical interpretation and the history of philosophy um some really unique pieces in there art and gentrification in London in the early 2000s and uh limiting us to freedom by Todd McGowan all excellent pieces each piece is unique and like Nance said each piece is well worth reading and engaging with and taking seriously um i'm so proud of Dave for organizing this i'm so proud of Nance and Elton and Brian for contributing to this book and being able to say hey i'm published in a book with like big names but also just writing like very quality pieces that really embody the- the ethic and the value of Theory Underground and so put a lot of work into this this baby our first baby outside of Ryan Gosling I suppose our little kitten who's been scampering around on the floor um thank you all for the support we're so excited for you to read it and Dave is now going to tell us a little bit about Time Energy and thank you Ann for all the
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work you did yeah if you didn't hear that Ann Mikey just said thank you for all the work that you put into this also if you thank you to Marilyn thank you to Mikey and Nance um the all of you have done so much to read over that volume um Time Energy actually i mean Ann was even surprised she forgot like apparently I never communicate like some of the most important things that are actually going on in my head when I'm organizing it's- it's a big flaw but basically yeah a lot of people did not realize that Time Energy was coming out at the same time as Underground Theory and that's because in my mind it wasn't going to it was going to come out like two months ago but i kept pushing it off because i was too focused on the tour too focused on the app too focused on our wedding too focused on the honeymoon too focused on all these other things that were going on and then i was like no i can't let this fucking book sit there any longer because the whole point of it is just to get it out there so that people who are like well what's time energy why- why do you all keep saying it that- that way like what
work you did yeah if you didn't hear that Ann Mikey just said thank you for all the work that you put into this also if you thank you to Marilyn thank you to Mikey and Nance um the all of you have done so much to read over that volume um Time Energy actually i mean Ann was even surprised she forgot like apparently I never communicate like some of the most important things that are actually going on in my head when I'm organizing it's- it's a big flaw but basically yeah a lot of people did not realize that Time Energy was coming out at the same time as Underground Theory and that's because in my mind it wasn't going to it was going to come out like two months ago but i kept pushing it off because i was too focused on the tour too focused on the app too focused on our wedding too focused on the honeymoon too focused on all these other things that were going on and then i was like no i can't let this fucking book sit there any longer because the whole point of it is just to get it out there so that people who are like well what's time energy why- why do you all keep saying it that- that way like what
Slavoj Žižek
is this neologism are you just saying time and energy and mashing it together and it's- it is not that simple it is a little bit more technical but the- it is meant also to be intuitive to actually you kind of do get it in the sense that you don't have time and when you do have time you don't have energy if you do have energy the time that you have is garbage time in itself because it's not really repeatable reliable large windows or blocks of time and so this is basically an existential understanding of labor power right but also it's not just of labor power for Marx it's just labor power all the way down like turtles all the way down it's just labor power all the way down the thing is is I think it's useful to make a distinction uh between labor power and time energy because time energy is the precondition for what becomes labor power as a commodity within capitalism but that- that can also be just expropriated labor power not commodified for a feudal lord if you're a serf or for a slave um so civilizations throughout history have seen the general populace or some other that is enslaved as nothing more than a reservoir of labor power but that is the reduction of time energy to labor power and so for the last years the there has always been some elite that gets relative time energy and everybody else their labor power all of their time energy's reduced to labor power right um and so the- the simple definition of it is just large energy infused repeatable blocks of time throughout the week and I focus on the week because obviously it would also be repeatable throughout the year throughout the decades but the point is is uh to learn the violin you kind of have to actually go at it for hours on end until you're kind of over it or your fingers hurt too much and then you have to give yourself a break but you have to come back to it soon enough that you are actually building on what you already learned so that you are embodying the practices it's no different for philosophy and theory and so people say well why why don't people read more books oh it's just the phone's fault no the phone's are a great way of using garbage time when you don't actually have cool calm
is this neologism are you just saying time and energy and mashing it together and it's- it is not that simple it is a little bit more technical but the- it is meant also to be intuitive to actually you kind of do get it in the sense that you don't have time and when you do have time you don't have energy if you do have energy the time that you have is garbage time in itself because it's not really repeatable reliable large windows or blocks of time and so this is basically an existential understanding of labor power right but also it's not just of labor power for Marx it's just labor power all the way down like turtles all the way down it's just labor power all the way down the thing is is I think it's useful to make a distinction uh between labor power and time energy because time energy is the precondition for what becomes labor power as a commodity within capitalism but that- that can also be just expropriated labor power not commodified for a feudal lord if you're a serf or for a slave um so civilizations throughout history have seen the general populace or some other that is enslaved as nothing more than a reservoir of labor power but that is the reduction of time energy to labor power and so for the last years the there has always been some elite that gets relative time energy and everybody else their labor power all of their time energy's reduced to labor power right um and so the- the simple definition of it is just large energy infused repeatable blocks of time throughout the week and I focus on the week because obviously it would also be repeatable throughout the year throughout the decades but the point is is uh to learn the violin you kind of have to actually go at it for hours on end until you're kind of over it or your fingers hurt too much and then you have to give yourself a break but you have to come back to it soon enough that you are actually building on what you already learned so that you are embodying the practices it's no different for philosophy and theory and so people say well why why don't people read more books oh it's just the phone's fault no the phone's are a great way of using garbage time when you don't actually have cool calm
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and collected energy when all you have is restless energy and so the thing that we all
and collected energy when all you have is restless energy and so the thing that we all
Slavoj Žižek
lack is time energy and with time energy we are able to study philosophy we are able to write our thoughts out we're able to develop our human capacities our personhood and I think that that matters because at the end of the day I think yeah Nick Land is fascinating but um i'm on the side of humans versus capital and i do think that that's not necessarily something where it's like oh the solution's going to come through revolution or reform oh the solution's going to come from some kind of like collective solidarity moment um maybe i'm open to
lack is time energy and with time energy we are able to study philosophy we are able to write our thoughts out we're able to develop our human capacities our personhood and I think that that matters because at the end of the day I think yeah Nick Land is fascinating but um i'm on the side of humans versus capital and i do think that that's not necessarily something where it's like oh the solution's going to come through revolution or reform oh the solution's going to come from some kind of like collective solidarity moment um maybe i'm open to
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that i'm i genuinely am open to that i like that idea a lot but at the- at the base level though i don't care what the solutions are if the solutions do not free up our time energy they're not real
that i'm i genuinely am open to that i like that idea a lot but at the- at the base level though i don't care what the solutions are if the solutions do not free up our time energy they're not real
Slavoj Žižek
solutions right UBI without time energy that just means
solutions right UBI without time energy that just means
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more consumer working right we have to restructure society
more consumer working right we have to restructure society
Slavoj Žižek
in such a way as to free up time energy for everybody not just the children of Bloomberg or Bezos right they get it they get that relative time energy and of course a lot of rich kids don't get it a lot of a lot of rich kids middle class kids um they don't actually get it because their parents have to hustle so hard they don't actually get to
in such a way as to free up time energy for everybody not just the children of Bloomberg or Bezos right they get it they get that relative time energy and of course a lot of rich kids don't get it a lot of a lot of rich kids middle class kids um they don't actually get it because their parents have to hustle so hard they don't actually get to
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have relationships and so not only is time energy the precondition to what becomes labor power it's also the precondition to cooperation with other people over an extended period of time it's also the precondition for discovering your talents and developing them and so it's meant to be an intuitive way of talking about a critique of capital but i also
have relationships and so not only is time energy the precondition to what becomes labor power it's also the precondition to cooperation with other people over an extended period of time it's also the precondition for discovering your talents and developing them and so it's meant to be an intuitive way of talking about a critique of capital but i also
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kind of avoid putting up a lot of partisan red flags throughout this book i'm trying to develop a way of talking here that is speaking to people who get it but also speaking to people who are put off by politics in the United States and who associate a lot of the techno-mumbo-jumbo of post-Marxist you know leftoids at they associate that all as just a bunch of like oh whatever that's too political yeah i'm gonna just kind of bracket that out and we're just going to put front and center the one thing that everybody is very aware of which is that every time they want to do something every time they want to be there for something to be able to show up and follow through on something that they promised they would do for themselves or something that they promised they would do for another right because a friendship a relationship a marriage being a parent all of these things require showing up and following through and it requires a sort of sustained effort but the precondition for that happens to be the exact same resource that is the precondition for labor power and so Time Energy has a subtitle this uh is a draft this- this draft does not have the subtitle the new version of the book looks a lot better and the subtitle is why you have no time or energy because i wanted the book to when people read Time Energy they go what's that and then they go oh it's why i don't have time or energy oh that's interesting i should probably look at that and so that's what that's about um and uh it's kind of my baby and i love it very much but also Time Energy's not my it's not my concept the concept is a neologism but it's meant to signify something that is real something that is yours as well and it's ours collectively in a shared sense that is as a lack because it's the thing that none of us have regardless of class regardless of gender regardless of race it's the one thing we all share and that is a constituent lack and the lack is caused by a regime that sees us as nothing more than something that can be turned into profit that is our time and energy so thank you everybody um and now uh just let me use a second to say congratulations to you publicly on getting this book done people have no idea the amount of time and energy it's taken you to refine this to work on this book and we know that you've got other books on this topic planned okay but still you finished one you've got your first book truly devoted to time energy it's a
kind of avoid putting up a lot of partisan red flags throughout this book i'm trying to develop a way of talking here that is speaking to people who get it but also speaking to people who are put off by politics in the United States and who associate a lot of the techno-mumbo-jumbo of post-Marxist you know leftoids at they associate that all as just a bunch of like oh whatever that's too political yeah i'm gonna just kind of bracket that out and we're just going to put front and center the one thing that everybody is very aware of which is that every time they want to do something every time they want to be there for something to be able to show up and follow through on something that they promised they would do for themselves or something that they promised they would do for another right because a friendship a relationship a marriage being a parent all of these things require showing up and following through and it requires a sort of sustained effort but the precondition for that happens to be the exact same resource that is the precondition for labor power and so Time Energy has a subtitle this uh is a draft this- this draft does not have the subtitle the new version of the book looks a lot better and the subtitle is why you have no time or energy because i wanted the book to when people read Time Energy they go what's that and then they go oh it's why i don't have time or energy oh that's interesting i should probably look at that and so that's what that's about um and uh it's kind of my baby and i love it very much but also Time Energy's not my it's not my concept the concept is a neologism but it's meant to signify something that is real something that is yours as well and it's ours collectively in a shared sense that is as a lack because it's the thing that none of us have regardless of class regardless of gender regardless of race it's the one thing we all share and that is a constituent lack and the lack is caused by a regime that sees us as nothing more than something that can be turned into profit that is our time and energy so thank you everybody um and now uh just let me use a second to say congratulations to you publicly on getting this book done people have no idea the amount of time and energy it's taken you to refine this to work on this book and we know that you've got other books on this topic planned okay but still you finished one you've got your first book truly devoted to time energy it's a
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major accomplishment and i'm proud of you and you deserve a huge congrats for accomplishing this can I just say I I haven't read the book yet but just the very concept and what you've put out there it sounds absolutely fantastic and- and I'm saying this because if you look at what's put out today in terms of you know online everywhere we have all these solutions for optimization of the self the idea that you know even at the level of spirituality if you wish it's all about optimization so how you can become a better person is about how um optimized you can be um and so the whole field of self-help is saturated with that what you've done is you've pierced something there you've gone in and made a
major accomplishment and i'm proud of you and you deserve a huge congrats for accomplishing this can I just say I I haven't read the book yet but just the very concept and what you've put out there it sounds absolutely fantastic and- and I'm saying this because if you look at what's put out today in terms of you know online everywhere we have all these solutions for optimization of the self the idea that you know even at the level of spirituality if you wish it's all about optimization so how you can become a better person is about how um optimized you can be um and so the whole field of self-help is saturated with that what you've done is you've pierced something there you've gone in and made a
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signifier that will appeal to people who know that there is a lack there's something wrong here but the solution you're giving isn't about you know some neoliberal individualistic process by you becoming a better person it's a collective one it's directly political and that for me is the genius in what you've just put- you just pushed there so yeah congratulations thank you thank you I'm I'm going to send you the book and then you can write out a blurb for me or maybe i'll just quote you saying what you just said um but okay that's enough about me I'll be talking about this all of tour there'll be lots of stuff on my channel there's a Time Energy seminar beginning January uh the beginning of January at Theory Underground it's a course i'll be teaching we'll be going through the entire history of philosophy drawing on everybody from Aristotle through Descartes into the sort of post-modern continental kind of people but no we'll- it'll be spanning everything all of our favorite thinkers and as well as a bunch of obscure ones that talk about this stuff in various ways um and so i hope that people uh who are interested in this will sign up for it it's not going to be too time demanding it will only be once a month uh that the seminar takes place um but with that I want to turn it over here to someone um are we setting up the other microphones for them yeah is that better oh okay yeah all right so yeah i i i have to go now but honestly thank you very much and stuff so it's uh glad to see you again hey Mark it was yeah it's great to have you and uh the rest of this will be in full available online hopefully tomorrow I can't make promises that i can't keep but i'm trying to get it up tomorrow so um but with that we are going to give it over here to Elton LK of the working-class intelligentsia somebody who's very important to me he is a big time underground theorist he's been educating people in theory and philosophy now for a very long time through the Dead Pirates Philosophical Society but also the two podcasts that he does related to class and so everyone put your hands together here for Elton oh hold on we're switching microphones here so you can just do
signifier that will appeal to people who know that there is a lack there's something wrong here but the solution you're giving isn't about you know some neoliberal individualistic process by you becoming a better person it's a collective one it's directly political and that for me is the genius in what you've just put- you just pushed there so yeah congratulations thank you thank you I'm I'm going to send you the book and then you can write out a blurb for me or maybe i'll just quote you saying what you just said um but okay that's enough about me I'll be talking about this all of tour there'll be lots of stuff on my channel there's a Time Energy seminar beginning January uh the beginning of January at Theory Underground it's a course i'll be teaching we'll be going through the entire history of philosophy drawing on everybody from Aristotle through Descartes into the sort of post-modern continental kind of people but no we'll- it'll be spanning everything all of our favorite thinkers and as well as a bunch of obscure ones that talk about this stuff in various ways um and so i hope that people uh who are interested in this will sign up for it it's not going to be too time demanding it will only be once a month uh that the seminar takes place um but with that I want to turn it over here to someone um are we setting up the other microphones for them yeah is that better oh okay yeah all right so yeah i i i have to go now but honestly thank you very much and stuff so it's uh glad to see you again hey Mark it was yeah it's great to have you and uh the rest of this will be in full available online hopefully tomorrow I can't make promises that i can't keep but i'm trying to get it up tomorrow so um but with that we are going to give it over here to Elton LK of the working-class intelligentsia somebody who's very important to me he is a big time underground theorist he's been educating people in theory and philosophy now for a very long time through the Dead Pirates Philosophical Society but also the two podcasts that he does related to class and so everyone put your hands together here for Elton oh hold on we're switching microphones here so you can just do
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it right here you you already set it up all down there yeah h5 sorry Elton uh it's it's not showing up yet it's not showing up yet we're switching microphones everybody it's uh somebody came here yesterday while we were setting up all of this technical stuff and was like oh yeah so it's like a podcast and we were like would be so much easier if it was it should be up now no no no you got no it's- it's not selected yet yeah there we go audio interface you gotta do this you gotta do that but come over here Elton come over here all right so this is Elton everybody and so i think um you can say some kind of preamble things before uh we're actually set up with the real microphone to go okay sounds good here let me give you this i'll go around behind you okay sounds good okay so preamble stuff this is exciting and um like I think it was Ann was saying um Theory Underground I think is um great it's a dialogue between you know different positions
it right here you you already set it up all down there yeah h5 sorry Elton uh it's it's not showing up yet it's not showing up yet we're switching microphones everybody it's uh somebody came here yesterday while we were setting up all of this technical stuff and was like oh yeah so it's like a podcast and we were like would be so much easier if it was it should be up now no no no you got no it's- it's not selected yet yeah there we go audio interface you gotta do this you gotta do that but come over here Elton come over here all right so this is Elton everybody and so i think um you can say some kind of preamble things before uh we're actually set up with the real microphone to go okay sounds good here let me give you this i'll go around behind you okay sounds good okay so preamble stuff this is exciting and um like I think it was Ann was saying um Theory Underground I think is um great it's a dialogue between you know different positions
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like uh i think Žižek was saying as well it's nice when people don't agree with you um obviously uh that's within within reason but um i'm i'm a bit of a funny person i think to be in this place because you know admittedly i'm a
like uh i think Žižek was saying as well it's nice when people don't agree with you um obviously uh that's within within reason but um i'm i'm a bit of a funny person i think to be in this place because you know admittedly i'm a
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white-collar
white-collar
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worker but i have the boldness to have a podcast called the working-class intelligentsia um i think Dave mentioned that um you know working class isn't an identity politics so it's not about being um you know some stereotype of of what that identity is uh okay are we good? yeah okay so um you know for starters i i am really interested in the PMC um partially because um i am well i'll get to that in a moment okay so PMC tends to just be a slur against um certain kinds of people uh we're sick and tired of them they should just shut up that kind of stuff um but the problem is is that uh we need actually understand what this term means and we're not going to be able to make the kinds of change that we want to see in the world until we have a better handle on this term um i think a lot of the people who dismiss the term PMC dismiss it because um because the people who use the term use it so dismissively and so then it's basically like um it's not given the academic rigor that it really deserves that i think um John and Barbara Ehrenreich gave to it in their essays from which i'll discuss more in a moment so I wrote an essay um The Vampire Castle is PMC um specifically Mark Fisher was uh writing uh i think it was so like years ago and he was writing about the Vampire Castle which i'll talk about eventually but uh the important point is that he um was referring to the Vampire Castle as petty bourgeois and he um you know says a lot of critical things about the Vampire Castle uh much of which i agree with um i think that it was a mistake for him to call the Vampire Castle petty bourgeois because it wasn't it was PMC um what uh i chose to write this essay because um not- not because I'm attacking or criticizing Mark Fisher in fact Mikey asked me at a- a couple days ago you know essentially um what i think of Mark Fisher and and I actually think that Mark Fisher would just agree with me I could be wrong but if he were here today and and could respond i think he would just say yeah yeah that's what i meant okay moving on and um i even actually went into this writing it with that intention but recognizing that um you know there's a lot of confusion especially among Marxists around this as well as um recognizing as I was writing and have had conversations and been paying more attention i recognize that there is so much defensiveness around this term PMC that people just don't even want to engage with it and and I don't know if it's like you know Marx said uh you know intellectuals are petty bourgeoisie so we don't need to talk about it um and if that's what's going on i just disagree with them and um i don't know what where they're coming from but all of that to say that's kind
worker but i have the boldness to have a podcast called the working-class intelligentsia um i think Dave mentioned that um you know working class isn't an identity politics so it's not about being um you know some stereotype of of what that identity is uh okay are we good? yeah okay so um you know for starters i i am really interested in the PMC um partially because um i am well i'll get to that in a moment okay so PMC tends to just be a slur against um certain kinds of people uh we're sick and tired of them they should just shut up that kind of stuff um but the problem is is that uh we need actually understand what this term means and we're not going to be able to make the kinds of change that we want to see in the world until we have a better handle on this term um i think a lot of the people who dismiss the term PMC dismiss it because um because the people who use the term use it so dismissively and so then it's basically like um it's not given the academic rigor that it really deserves that i think um John and Barbara Ehrenreich gave to it in their essays from which i'll discuss more in a moment so I wrote an essay um The Vampire Castle is PMC um specifically Mark Fisher was uh writing uh i think it was so like years ago and he was writing about the Vampire Castle which i'll talk about eventually but uh the important point is that he um was referring to the Vampire Castle as petty bourgeois and he um you know says a lot of critical things about the Vampire Castle uh much of which i agree with um i think that it was a mistake for him to call the Vampire Castle petty bourgeois because it wasn't it was PMC um what uh i chose to write this essay because um not- not because I'm attacking or criticizing Mark Fisher in fact Mikey asked me at a- a couple days ago you know essentially um what i think of Mark Fisher and and I actually think that Mark Fisher would just agree with me I could be wrong but if he were here today and and could respond i think he would just say yeah yeah that's what i meant okay moving on and um i even actually went into this writing it with that intention but recognizing that um you know there's a lot of confusion especially among Marxists around this as well as um recognizing as I was writing and have had conversations and been paying more attention i recognize that there is so much defensiveness around this term PMC that people just don't even want to engage with it and and I don't know if it's like you know Marx said uh you know intellectuals are petty bourgeoisie so we don't need to talk about it um and if that's what's going on i just disagree with them and um i don't know what where they're coming from but all of that to say that's kind
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of where i came from with writing um this essay all right so why this is important as i was saying i don't think we can get anything done until we understand what- what the PMC is and and incorporate that into our uh class analysis of- of the material conditions um the left especially since the 60s has been dominated by the PMC not the working class and um you know the Ehrenreichs recognized in their essays in that the left would remain marginalized as long as uh that was the case because the PMC really is um allow me to explain PMC real quick um you know the professionals and the managers okay moving on so um the- the professionals and the managers within society are really you know let's say it's uh percent of the population now but it's still not a vast majority and basically we're not going to have real change um until the vast majority are on- are on our side um so yeah so i think even the- the socialist movement is predominantly PMC today and um it must earn the trust of the working class before anything is going to change okay so the PMC um the Ehrenreichs came up with the concept of the PMC actually let me correct they didn't come up with the concept of the PMC it was ever- it was very prevalent um in intellectual circles James Burnham uh in the 40s recognized that he didn't come up with the idea um and that you know kind of like everybody would recognize like wait a minute Marx was talking you know uh years ago about um how um the- the bourgeoisie and the proletariat which is to say the capitalists and the workers were
of where i came from with writing um this essay all right so why this is important as i was saying i don't think we can get anything done until we understand what- what the PMC is and and incorporate that into our uh class analysis of- of the material conditions um the left especially since the 60s has been dominated by the PMC not the working class and um you know the Ehrenreichs recognized in their essays in that the left would remain marginalized as long as uh that was the case because the PMC really is um allow me to explain PMC real quick um you know the professionals and the managers okay moving on so um the- the professionals and the managers within society are really you know let's say it's uh percent of the population now but it's still not a vast majority and basically we're not going to have real change um until the vast majority are on- are on our side um so yeah so i think even the- the socialist movement is predominantly PMC today and um it must earn the trust of the working class before anything is going to change okay so the PMC um the Ehrenreichs came up with the concept of the PMC actually let me correct they didn't come up with the concept of the PMC it was ever- it was very prevalent um in intellectual circles James Burnham uh in the 40s recognized that he didn't come up with the idea um and that you know kind of like everybody would recognize like wait a minute Marx was talking you know uh years ago about um how um the- the bourgeoisie and the proletariat which is to say the capitalists and the workers were
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the primary
the primary
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conflict
conflict
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in society and there's these small business owners petty bourgeois who will um eventually just go away and basically become workers and so that you won't have um you won't have a middle class you'll just have these impoverished workers and these capitalists until the workers overthrow uh capitalism and um obviously that didn't happen um the 20th century proved kind of the opposite where the middle class just exploded and um it you know it was a real debate among Marxists and non-Marxists like um what's going on you know with monopoly capitalism uh radically changing the- the demographics of- of at least you know Western society so let's talk about class for a moment like what is class and why is it important? So class is a concept that um sociologists and all different kinds of people use in order to understand what's going on in society different people groups that are interacting with each other they you know evolved over time to uh become you know what- what we recognize and we you know we think of like blue collar as being a class and the middle class as being a class and then obviously there's the aristocracy and the big capitalists um but for Marx class was fundamentally about power and who has um control of uh essentially the- the economic system and the material that we need in order to survive um and he didn't base it on some cultural aspects so um for Marx it's fundamentally you know about economic relationships and class analysis is basically just looking um at society and and understanding how different people relate to each other based off of the material conditions which again is to say economics and it's understanding how
in society and there's these small business owners petty bourgeois who will um eventually just go away and basically become workers and so that you won't have um you won't have a middle class you'll just have these impoverished workers and these capitalists until the workers overthrow uh capitalism and um obviously that didn't happen um the 20th century proved kind of the opposite where the middle class just exploded and um it you know it was a real debate among Marxists and non-Marxists like um what's going on you know with monopoly capitalism uh radically changing the- the demographics of- of at least you know Western society so let's talk about class for a moment like what is class and why is it important? So class is a concept that um sociologists and all different kinds of people use in order to understand what's going on in society different people groups that are interacting with each other they you know evolved over time to uh become you know what- what we recognize and we you know we think of like blue collar as being a class and the middle class as being a class and then obviously there's the aristocracy and the big capitalists um but for Marx class was fundamentally about power and who has um control of uh essentially the- the economic system and the material that we need in order to survive um and he didn't base it on some cultural aspects so um for Marx it's fundamentally you know about economic relationships and class analysis is basically just looking um at society and and understanding how different people relate to each other based off of the material conditions which again is to say economics and it's understanding how
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people act and where their- their interests are, what their values are. Now I definitely think that there's more going on than just uh class dynamics um but that's a conversation for another day. Um with class and understanding society in terms of class you have to recognize that um in order for it to be useful you need to like have kind of like big blocks that accurately kind of recognize like this is a group of people and this other group of people uh is like this. The reality is is that um we're kind of forcing people into- into buckets and if you really want to get precise it's easy to like you know get into smaller and smaller buckets to get you know like these you know these are the goths and and these are the gutter punks and and uh and you know just look at society in those terms but that's not very useful when it comes to understanding power dynamics. Um so Marx basically based it off of like where's your source of income and even when he did that he recognized that um he didn't- he didn't really like try to resolve this problem he just recognized it was a problem is that like source of income you can get really specific on nuances of different kinds of sources of income. So um you know maybe someday we should talk about that but for now you know the reality is is like um some people have to sell their labor in order to- to pay the bills some people own a bunch of property and buildings and capital um and then you know some people um are- are the king. Um so those- and those are basically what he recognized and you know just like okay good enough moving on. Okay so um when he was alive he used- Marx used terms like middle class, petty bourgeoisie, peasants and sometimes he was a little loose with them but if we go back to talking about like what's the source of income then um you know you recognize that the reason why petty bourgeoisie and middle class are used interchangeably is because he's- he's basically talking about this um group of people that's between the aristocracy and the workers or the peasants so that's middle class and it was just the common vernacular at that time anyways. So where does the what does like this term petty bourgeoisie mean? and i think I think this is some of the more interesting stuff that i got to learn while writing this um and I've picked up pieces here and there and that's partially how i was able to pull it together um but uh you know it's kind of funny um because it was actually the word bourgeoisie or something bur- the- the root word actually means castle which we're talking about the Vampire Castle don't take too much from that but um but like literally uh you know the kings had castles um that was the berg and then um eventually you had um merchants and uh artisans that built up around those castles um which created some economic development and so then the- the bourgeoisie originally was actually just like the city folk um but that you know over hundreds of years re- transformed into being uh thought of as the- you know the capitalist the people who actually own stuff. They were they tended to be just like the small capitalist, the petty bourgeoisie um it took a long
people act and where their- their interests are, what their values are. Now I definitely think that there's more going on than just uh class dynamics um but that's a conversation for another day. Um with class and understanding society in terms of class you have to recognize that um in order for it to be useful you need to like have kind of like big blocks that accurately kind of recognize like this is a group of people and this other group of people uh is like this. The reality is is that um we're kind of forcing people into- into buckets and if you really want to get precise it's easy to like you know get into smaller and smaller buckets to get you know like these you know these are the goths and and these are the gutter punks and and uh and you know just look at society in those terms but that's not very useful when it comes to understanding power dynamics. Um so Marx basically based it off of like where's your source of income and even when he did that he recognized that um he didn't- he didn't really like try to resolve this problem he just recognized it was a problem is that like source of income you can get really specific on nuances of different kinds of sources of income. So um you know maybe someday we should talk about that but for now you know the reality is is like um some people have to sell their labor in order to- to pay the bills some people own a bunch of property and buildings and capital um and then you know some people um are- are the king. Um so those- and those are basically what he recognized and you know just like okay good enough moving on. Okay so um when he was alive he used- Marx used terms like middle class, petty bourgeoisie, peasants and sometimes he was a little loose with them but if we go back to talking about like what's the source of income then um you know you recognize that the reason why petty bourgeoisie and middle class are used interchangeably is because he's- he's basically talking about this um group of people that's between the aristocracy and the workers or the peasants so that's middle class and it was just the common vernacular at that time anyways. So where does the what does like this term petty bourgeoisie mean? and i think I think this is some of the more interesting stuff that i got to learn while writing this um and I've picked up pieces here and there and that's partially how i was able to pull it together um but uh you know it's kind of funny um because it was actually the word bourgeoisie or something bur- the- the root word actually means castle which we're talking about the Vampire Castle don't take too much from that but um but like literally uh you know the kings had castles um that was the berg and then um eventually you had um merchants and uh artisans that built up around those castles um which created some economic development and so then the- the bourgeoisie originally was actually just like the city folk um but that you know over hundreds of years re- transformed into being uh thought of as the- you know the capitalist the people who actually own stuff. They were they tended to be just like the small capitalist, the petty bourgeoisie um it took a long
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time before you actually had big capitalists um you know basically it took capitalism um to get to get there um and then you know just a side note of- of while we talk about like petty bourgeoisie um is that their politics or they actually often end up leaning um kind of reactionary and education is not of their highest concern i mean certainly there's all kinds but just speaking historically as- as a class they've not focused on education which you know when we get to talking about the Vampire Castle is significant because Mark Fisher's talking about cancel culture in the context of these educated elites who are um essentially um bullying um each other and people of from the working class. Okay so we talked about petty bourgeoisie let's talk about the PMC for a moment. So in is like the um progressive era so we're talking you know
time before you actually had big capitalists um you know basically it took capitalism um to get to get there um and then you know just a side note of- of while we talk about like petty bourgeoisie um is that their politics or they actually often end up leaning um kind of reactionary and education is not of their highest concern i mean certainly there's all kinds but just speaking historically as- as a class they've not focused on education which you know when we get to talking about the Vampire Castle is significant because Mark Fisher's talking about cancel culture in the context of these educated elites who are um essentially um bullying um each other and people of from the working class. Okay so we talked about petty bourgeoisie let's talk about the PMC for a moment. So in is like the um progressive era so we're talking you know
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more than a hundred years ago monopoly capitalism became a thing so before monopoly capitalism there was just capitalism and i'm sure that there are technical terms for what phase of capitalism that Marx was writing about but you know it's essentially the industrial age. But then capitalism developed to a certain point where you started having you know monopolies and uh the big you know the big um yeah the big guys that owned the
more than a hundred years ago monopoly capitalism became a thing so before monopoly capitalism there was just capitalism and i'm sure that there are technical terms for what phase of capitalism that Marx was writing about but you know it's essentially the industrial age. But then capitalism developed to a certain point where you started having you know monopolies and uh the big you know the big um yeah the big guys that owned the
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railways and oil and um and the big banks that kind of stuff. During that period you had more wealth on earth than there had ever been in human history and it was radically transforming society and it was creating a massive working class um there's a whole conversation about where that where those uh workers came from but they had to come from somewhere. Um they they worked in factories, they worked on big farms uh they eventually started getting pretty frustrated with the working conditions and they were more militant and organized than in they had ever been in human history. So um while capital was doing better than it had ever done um they also recognized that they were starting to have a problem uh you know this is of course Pinkerton times when um the- the bosses would send in the um private police in order to crush worker strikes and in anything going on as far as um worker activity. And um that's basically the perfect opportunity for a new class of people that we think of as the professional managerial class um
railways and oil and um and the big banks that kind of stuff. During that period you had more wealth on earth than there had ever been in human history and it was radically transforming society and it was creating a massive working class um there's a whole conversation about where that where those uh workers came from but they had to come from somewhere. Um they they worked in factories, they worked on big farms uh they eventually started getting pretty frustrated with the working conditions and they were more militant and organized than in they had ever been in human history. So um while capital was doing better than it had ever done um they also recognized that they were starting to have a problem uh you know this is of course Pinkerton times when um the- the bosses would send in the um private police in order to crush worker strikes and in anything going on as far as um worker activity. And um that's basically the perfect opportunity for a new class of people that we think of as the professional managerial class um
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because uh you have engineers, you have doctors, you have people who essentially um help other people and organize society and try to bring order and alleviate pain among the working class prior to monopoly capitalism but it isn't until monopoly capitalism that they um essen- that the capitalists essentially have enough money in order to fund their existence as a unique class and they in return offer to the capitalists uh some alleviation of the um agitation among the working class. So as the working class gets more and more militant and organized the PMC grows as a class in order to um address some of the needs of the workers. So they ex- explicitly and this is very important they explicitly uh according to the Ehrenreichs see themselves as helping the workers but they're also doing it in a way that's actually radically disruptive to the workers and explicitly taking their power. So when Marx talks about class warfare they're
because uh you have engineers, you have doctors, you have people who essentially um help other people and organize society and try to bring order and alleviate pain among the working class prior to monopoly capitalism but it isn't until monopoly capitalism that they um essen- that the capitalists essentially have enough money in order to fund their existence as a unique class and they in return offer to the capitalists uh some alleviation of the um agitation among the working class. So as the working class gets more and more militant and organized the PMC grows as a class in order to um address some of the needs of the workers. So they ex- explicitly and this is very important they explicitly uh according to the Ehrenreichs see themselves as helping the workers but they're also doing it in a way that's actually radically disruptive to the workers and explicitly taking their power. So when Marx talks about class warfare they're
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taking the power of the
taking the power of the
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workers in the workplace uh from the workers and then creating them to be a more submissive class. So when I say that they uh take power from the workers um significantly what that means is uh you have workers who have mastered their trade um they know you know basically how shit gets done and the capitalist is actually dependent upon the workers for their expertise in their trade or whatever. Well um the PMC not in its entirety but but as a major function of what they do is you start to have um what now we call like business process improvement um but essentially you get these engineers who start to look at the production and the assembly line um you know look at Ford and his factory uh and you start to see um essentially a new class of people that is taking um that expertise out of the hands of the workers building it into- into the PMC as a class and just into the processes and so then the workers become more plug and play and essentially you know if somebody gets out of line they can be fired and- and easily replaced and the
workers in the workplace uh from the workers and then creating them to be a more submissive class. So when I say that they uh take power from the workers um significantly what that means is uh you have workers who have mastered their trade um they know you know basically how shit gets done and the capitalist is actually dependent upon the workers for their expertise in their trade or whatever. Well um the PMC not in its entirety but but as a major function of what they do is you start to have um what now we call like business process improvement um but essentially you get these engineers who start to look at the production and the assembly line um you know look at Ford and his factory uh and you start to see um essentially a new class of people that is taking um that expertise out of the hands of the workers building it into- into the PMC as a class and just into the processes and so then the workers become more plug and play and essentially you know if somebody gets out of line they can be fired and- and easily replaced and the
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assembly
assembly
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line keeps operating. So um that's like the foundation i think of- of what we need to talk about. what's interesting in- in the PMC essays is that we they that part um is significant because they talk about kind of the material conditions of where the PMC comes from and who they to this day they still essentially play a similar function
line keeps operating. So um that's like the foundation i think of- of what we need to talk about. what's interesting in- in the PMC essays is that we they that part um is significant because they talk about kind of the material conditions of where the PMC comes from and who they to this day they still essentially play a similar function
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um but then the Ehrenreichs have a part two to their essay where they start talking about um the golden era of the PMC so if you look at like you know they give this example of there being like literally like engineers in society and then years later there's like i can't remember but um it was let's just say times as many engineers so just an explosion of uh of that just one industry but that's true of tons of in- industries. By the 50s you have um you know space program you know 60s we land on the moon um we have um yeah just a radically transformed society where the professionals have um taken over government on some level i mean they were always the government workers but government itself has dramatically grown in a way that you know years later it was not and this this of course today as- as has become
um but then the Ehrenreichs have a part two to their essay where they start talking about um the golden era of the PMC so if you look at like you know they give this example of there being like literally like engineers in society and then years later there's like i can't remember but um it was let's just say times as many engineers so just an explosion of uh of that just one industry but that's true of tons of in- industries. By the 50s you have um you know space program you know 60s we land on the moon um we have um yeah just a radically transformed society where the professionals have um taken over government on some level i mean they were always the government workers but government itself has dramatically grown in a way that you know years later it was not and this this of course today as- as has become
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like a major
like a major
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feature of um conservative politics about big government and stuff like that it's the PMC that they're specifically calling out and often they use terms like the liberal elite and that kind of stuff but um in the part two of the Ehrenreich essay um you know i just want to point out a few things that uh you start to see this civil rights movement um and then uh which you know is is a really important moment the children of the PMC in university start to support the civil rights movement they start to recognize Vietnam and the basically like the role of America in um in the world as essentially imperialist and causing all kinds of- of being the oppressor basically and so the children of the PMC in the 60s essentially um turn on their parents and the PMC as a- as a class almost but also turn on the working class so that the left is no longer the
feature of um conservative politics about big government and stuff like that it's the PMC that they're specifically calling out and often they use terms like the liberal elite and that kind of stuff but um in the part two of the Ehrenreich essay um you know i just want to point out a few things that uh you start to see this civil rights movement um and then uh which you know is is a really important moment the children of the PMC in university start to support the civil rights movement they start to recognize Vietnam and the basically like the role of America in um in the world as essentially imperialist and causing all kinds of- of being the oppressor basically and so the children of the PMC in the 60s essentially um turn on their parents and the PMC as a- as a class almost but also turn on the working class so that the left is no longer the
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working class like one and the same instead it becomes um you know something that is crit- specifically like they offer a specific example the Port Huron Statement which of course you can Google it and um read for yourself that it's both critical of capitalism so the PMC were remaining critical of capital and wanting their independence um and autonomy um but then also critical of the working class for being racist and stuff like that. So um the left then kind of at that moment became more marginalized it of course took decades before you know it transformed into what- what we think of the left today but that was a major um moment in- kind of like how we think of PMC politics today um and the Vampire Castle but it's also worth noting that there was a segment of the PMC that became anti-PMC and basically recognized like oh wait we're actually oppressing working class people and when i say that it's even part of the civil rights movement and especially the Black Power movement like we're talking about working class people when we're talking about the Black Power movement and they specifically were pushing for what was called community control so basically imagine like um poor communities they wanted to change the dynamic. In the past the PMC had gone into poor communities and tried to solve all of their problems for them. In community control the idea is that um the Black Power movement was basically saying the PMC is not allowed social workers are not allowed to come in here and solve problems um basically educated people who think that they know better. Instead what we want is um teach and empower um our people to be able to take care of themselves uh whether that's um health uh services or um learning you know how to i don't know i apologize off the top of my head i'm not coming up with good examples but um there's a is also something you can Google is community control and i mention this because um it kind of became like a of the foundation i think for what the Ehrenreichs saw as like a way out for the PMC to begin to repair their relationship um with the working class and then um as a side note you know I have this podcast The Working Class Intelligentsia that's in- inspired by Gramsci's test- texts and in dialogue. I think that you know one of the most frequently misunderstood concepts of Gramsci is the organic intellectual but when we talk about community control that's what we're talking about is empowering individuals to solve the problems of their class and so it's where like you know members of the community actually start to- to solve their own problems as opposed to um allowing yeah PMC people to- to do it which is to say education is good um but let's do it in a way that is actually empowering people. So um i will i'm going to talk very briefly about neoliberalism and then we'll get to the Vampire Castle. So neoliberalism let's just say starting with uh you know Ronald Reagan um is a moment where like capitalism fundamentally changed where um we're no longer in monopoly capitalism, we're no longer in the New Deal order. It's it's essentially a portion of the capitalist class turns their back on the PMC and
working class like one and the same instead it becomes um you know something that is crit- specifically like they offer a specific example the Port Huron Statement which of course you can Google it and um read for yourself that it's both critical of capitalism so the PMC were remaining critical of capital and wanting their independence um and autonomy um but then also critical of the working class for being racist and stuff like that. So um the left then kind of at that moment became more marginalized it of course took decades before you know it transformed into what- what we think of the left today but that was a major um moment in- kind of like how we think of PMC politics today um and the Vampire Castle but it's also worth noting that there was a segment of the PMC that became anti-PMC and basically recognized like oh wait we're actually oppressing working class people and when i say that it's even part of the civil rights movement and especially the Black Power movement like we're talking about working class people when we're talking about the Black Power movement and they specifically were pushing for what was called community control so basically imagine like um poor communities they wanted to change the dynamic. In the past the PMC had gone into poor communities and tried to solve all of their problems for them. In community control the idea is that um the Black Power movement was basically saying the PMC is not allowed social workers are not allowed to come in here and solve problems um basically educated people who think that they know better. Instead what we want is um teach and empower um our people to be able to take care of themselves uh whether that's um health uh services or um learning you know how to i don't know i apologize off the top of my head i'm not coming up with good examples but um there's a is also something you can Google is community control and i mention this because um it kind of became like a of the foundation i think for what the Ehrenreichs saw as like a way out for the PMC to begin to repair their relationship um with the working class and then um as a side note you know I have this podcast The Working Class Intelligentsia that's in- inspired by Gramsci's test- texts and in dialogue. I think that you know one of the most frequently misunderstood concepts of Gramsci is the organic intellectual but when we talk about community control that's what we're talking about is empowering individuals to solve the problems of their class and so it's where like you know members of the community actually start to- to solve their own problems as opposed to um allowing yeah PMC people to- to do it which is to say education is good um but let's do it in a way that is actually empowering people. So um i will i'm going to talk very briefly about neoliberalism and then we'll get to the Vampire Castle. So neoliberalism let's just say starting with uh you know Ronald Reagan um is a moment where like capitalism fundamentally changed where um we're no longer in monopoly capitalism, we're no longer in the New Deal order. It's it's essentially a portion of the capitalist class turns their back on the PMC and
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starts to attack them uh well I say attack the PMC that's a major feature I think that the working class actually you know receives a lot more harm under neoliberalism than the PMC but an important piece is that the PMC no longer has this privileged position and now um must begin to find new ways to justify their- their privilege and economic power and uh you know i'll- i'll argue that the Vampire Castle that Mark Fisher talks about is essentially the PMC turning in on itself and against working class which they'd already been doing but but specifically like um turning on each other looking for um whatever ethical superiority that they can in order to have some level of prestige because their you know university jobs are going away, their- their newspaper jobs you know journalist jobs are going away, all kinds of professional positions um are either getting shipped overseas or just essentially the capitalists are saying we don't need to do that anymore um yeah we don't need to continue to invest in that. One moment while I just make sure I wrap this up yeah okay so um in- in the essay I you know kind of enjoyed like dissecting Mark Fisher's text and finding out all of the um words that he uses to describe the Vampire Castle and i'll just say that like you'd be a moron to think that he's talking about the petty bourgeoisie um because you know the- the terms that he uses um if you were to like you know describe the petty bourgeoisie on one side uh and the PMC on the other they're like you know on the PMC side which is to say that you've got you know small business owners and you've got professionals on the other side and again I'm oversimplifying but um they're two distinct groups of people and they play very different roles in the economy and um it's clear that when Fisher's talking about the PMC and the problems he sees on- or sorry the Vampire Castle and the problems he sees on the left it's the PMC that he's talking about which i think means that um it gives us some insight into the kinds of things that need to change on the left. I mean we already knew that but um thinking in terms of PMC gives us a larger context in order to- to frame that and I recommend everybody just read the Barbara and John Ehrenreich essays um that are on the professional managerial class they at the end of part two especially they basically say you know the PMC the way out is not through basically just saying um the PMC should die and long live the working class instead saying those like that's not how reality works um actually saying that um the two are kind of inter- interlinked interconnected to each other. The PMC has caused a lot of harm to the working class and they must repent. That's significant of course again today with like DSA and- and you know many socialists and internet socialists that you know they're PMC, we're PMC and it's not about you know guilt and shame um instead it's about
starts to attack them uh well I say attack the PMC that's a major feature I think that the working class actually you know receives a lot more harm under neoliberalism than the PMC but an important piece is that the PMC no longer has this privileged position and now um must begin to find new ways to justify their- their privilege and economic power and uh you know i'll- i'll argue that the Vampire Castle that Mark Fisher talks about is essentially the PMC turning in on itself and against working class which they'd already been doing but but specifically like um turning on each other looking for um whatever ethical superiority that they can in order to have some level of prestige because their you know university jobs are going away, their- their newspaper jobs you know journalist jobs are going away, all kinds of professional positions um are either getting shipped overseas or just essentially the capitalists are saying we don't need to do that anymore um yeah we don't need to continue to invest in that. One moment while I just make sure I wrap this up yeah okay so um in- in the essay I you know kind of enjoyed like dissecting Mark Fisher's text and finding out all of the um words that he uses to describe the Vampire Castle and i'll just say that like you'd be a moron to think that he's talking about the petty bourgeoisie um because you know the- the terms that he uses um if you were to like you know describe the petty bourgeoisie on one side uh and the PMC on the other they're like you know on the PMC side which is to say that you've got you know small business owners and you've got professionals on the other side and again I'm oversimplifying but um they're two distinct groups of people and they play very different roles in the economy and um it's clear that when Fisher's talking about the PMC and the problems he sees on- or sorry the Vampire Castle and the problems he sees on the left it's the PMC that he's talking about which i think means that um it gives us some insight into the kinds of things that need to change on the left. I mean we already knew that but um thinking in terms of PMC gives us a larger context in order to- to frame that and I recommend everybody just read the Barbara and John Ehrenreich essays um that are on the professional managerial class they at the end of part two especially they basically say you know the PMC the way out is not through basically just saying um the PMC should die and long live the working class instead saying those like that's not how reality works um actually saying that um the two are kind of inter- interlinked interconnected to each other. The PMC has caused a lot of harm to the working class and they must repent. That's significant of course again today with like DSA and- and you know many socialists and internet socialists that you know they're PMC, we're PMC and it's not about you know guilt and shame um instead it's about
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essentially how do we create uh you know worker empowerment through labor movement and through community control that essentially is empowering people um to essentially live in- or to invest in their own communities and in their own democratic society and i think i've i think i've said everything i want to say so thanks a lot everybody. thank you so much Elton so while Brian gets himself set up here i'll just say a couple of things um i i think that it's been really inspirational to me to see the this concept this class category this working understanding developing um i say developing because i do not believe that until now there has been any understanding of this concept or of this class category um because the things that people say as a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the people who- who use it kind of as a slur just to write people off exposes their lack of understanding i do think Catherine Liu understands it but the point is is that understanding for it to really mean something has to be outside of your own head it has to be something between us it's something that we develop as a subject matter between us and of course we might understand it differently, we might have our disagreements but you don't understand a subject matter if you do not understand the constitutive disagreements in the field of that subject matter and that's why Elton and I taught the PMC course as the second course at Theory Underground it is available on demand um and we will probably do a continuation of that someday hopefully um Nance is one person who was involved in that course who started out by being like i just don't really get much from this and i actually basically disagree now you should ask him on tour what he thinks and how that's changed um but suffice it to say nance and i have also changed my mind on it too and really shown me a lot that i kind of blew off at first so i apologize for being somewhat dismissive because no this is worth doing, worth learning from. thank you yeah and Nance's piece in the Underground Theory is also on that topic basically Elton, Nance and myself all talk about it in our own ways. um there are people who think that the Underground Theory reader or anthology is nothing more than like a post-left reader which is silly because nobody in there identifies as post-left and nobody in there talks about the post-left except for me and i'm critiquing it by saying that it's a form of left-than-thou enjoyment that is the same as anti-leftism and leftism itself and that all three of those fall into the same form of enjoyment which is getting jouissance by telling somebody they're not really left, they're not the real McCoy right and so anyway so check it out uh but look Brian's back he's ready to go uh and then he's going to close this motherfucker out okay and then for the people here in Boise um some of us will be getting some Indian food in a few hours uh we'll
essentially how do we create uh you know worker empowerment through labor movement and through community control that essentially is empowering people um to essentially live in- or to invest in their own communities and in their own democratic society and i think i've i think i've said everything i want to say so thanks a lot everybody. thank you so much Elton so while Brian gets himself set up here i'll just say a couple of things um i i think that it's been really inspirational to me to see the this concept this class category this working understanding developing um i say developing because i do not believe that until now there has been any understanding of this concept or of this class category um because the things that people say as a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the people who- who use it kind of as a slur just to write people off exposes their lack of understanding i do think Catherine Liu understands it but the point is is that understanding for it to really mean something has to be outside of your own head it has to be something between us it's something that we develop as a subject matter between us and of course we might understand it differently, we might have our disagreements but you don't understand a subject matter if you do not understand the constitutive disagreements in the field of that subject matter and that's why Elton and I taught the PMC course as the second course at Theory Underground it is available on demand um and we will probably do a continuation of that someday hopefully um Nance is one person who was involved in that course who started out by being like i just don't really get much from this and i actually basically disagree now you should ask him on tour what he thinks and how that's changed um but suffice it to say nance and i have also changed my mind on it too and really shown me a lot that i kind of blew off at first so i apologize for being somewhat dismissive because no this is worth doing, worth learning from. thank you yeah and Nance's piece in the Underground Theory is also on that topic basically Elton, Nance and myself all talk about it in our own ways. um there are people who think that the Underground Theory reader or anthology is nothing more than like a post-left reader which is silly because nobody in there identifies as post-left and nobody in there talks about the post-left except for me and i'm critiquing it by saying that it's a form of left-than-thou enjoyment that is the same as anti-leftism and leftism itself and that all three of those fall into the same form of enjoyment which is getting jouissance by telling somebody they're not really left, they're not the real McCoy right and so anyway so check it out uh but look Brian's back he's ready to go uh and then he's going to close this motherfucker out okay and then for the people here in Boise um some of us will be getting some Indian food in a few hours uh we'll
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probably
probably
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all take a break for a
all take a break for a
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couple hours and then reconvene for the Indian food talk to Holly about it if you want to be there because she's going to be making sure the space and the- the food selections and everything are good for you and if you got a lot out of this and want to have conversations with us you're welcome so everyone here's welcome uh to the people on the internet you could just jump on a plane and fly over here probably in the next three hours you could- you could get Indian food too it's really good it would probably be worth it but anyway okay Brian um as by way of introduction um Brian when he was years old he ran away from home and did a bunch of substance abuse things with people on the west coast and was just kind of like Nance like a gutter punk kid getting in trouble hippie okay i- i i just think crusty but of course there is this distinction between gutter punk and hippie but they're both crusty but he you know something that saved his life as well as mine and a lot of the other people here was getting into ideas, getting into literature, creative writing um and so now he continues to do that uh not just for himself but for other people who are struggling to find any meaning much less place in this world and so he works with and has worked with for years um children who are not making it in this education system um there's a million reasons not to make it, i'm surprised when anyone does make it, whenever anyone is okay in this society the real question is what's wrong with them um but and i get into that in the Time Energy book you know this is the structural stultification of time energy i get into education and schooling and its role but that's kind of where he and i have always jibed our conversations always kind of come back to what is the good life, what is real education, what is meaningful work in education, um what can these institutions do better, to what degree can these things be reformed, um to what degree do we need actual alternatives um and we've collaborated in a million ways over the course of i don't even know how long at this point but it's been a while and some of my previous experiments were like basically projects with Brian and so we've read a lot of books together with other people and so um i watched him get into philosophy by jumping into the deepest end possible at the time he got into reading Being and Time uh which i'm currently teaching a course on at Theory Underground division two begins in January so people have a chance to catch up on division one um but you know it was reading that book and him the amount of time he spent being lost and confused that really showed me like he- he cares about education in that sense where it's like he doesn't mind being confused in fact he he he welcomes the opportunity to get lost in something and to struggle with it for its own sake and so um
couple hours and then reconvene for the Indian food talk to Holly about it if you want to be there because she's going to be making sure the space and the- the food selections and everything are good for you and if you got a lot out of this and want to have conversations with us you're welcome so everyone here's welcome uh to the people on the internet you could just jump on a plane and fly over here probably in the next three hours you could- you could get Indian food too it's really good it would probably be worth it but anyway okay Brian um as by way of introduction um Brian when he was years old he ran away from home and did a bunch of substance abuse things with people on the west coast and was just kind of like Nance like a gutter punk kid getting in trouble hippie okay i- i i just think crusty but of course there is this distinction between gutter punk and hippie but they're both crusty but he you know something that saved his life as well as mine and a lot of the other people here was getting into ideas, getting into literature, creative writing um and so now he continues to do that uh not just for himself but for other people who are struggling to find any meaning much less place in this world and so he works with and has worked with for years um children who are not making it in this education system um there's a million reasons not to make it, i'm surprised when anyone does make it, whenever anyone is okay in this society the real question is what's wrong with them um but and i get into that in the Time Energy book you know this is the structural stultification of time energy i get into education and schooling and its role but that's kind of where he and i have always jibed our conversations always kind of come back to what is the good life, what is real education, what is meaningful work in education, um what can these institutions do better, to what degree can these things be reformed, um to what degree do we need actual alternatives um and we've collaborated in a million ways over the course of i don't even know how long at this point but it's been a while and some of my previous experiments were like basically projects with Brian and so we've read a lot of books together with other people and so um i watched him get into philosophy by jumping into the deepest end possible at the time he got into reading Being and Time uh which i'm currently teaching a course on at Theory Underground division two begins in January so people have a chance to catch up on division one um but you know it was reading that book and him the amount of time he spent being lost and confused that really showed me like he- he cares about education in that sense where it's like he doesn't mind being confused in fact he he he welcomes the opportunity to get lost in something and to struggle with it for its own sake and so um
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that's
that's
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Brian, i love him and put
Brian, i love him and put
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your hands together to welcome him up here. thank you. sitting on the stool all right uh yeah uh i think the topic of today or of this bit of today is thinking is hard um i don't think it comes naturally to me i've struggled for many years um to feel like i have anything to say um and the piece i have in Underground Theory is kind of a result of uh many years of struggling with that exact idea um because i know like at a sort of intellectual level that like even if the thinking is unfinished there's still something worthwhile to be said or to be written, writing is a process in its own right um yet i was brought up in sort of the academic environment that- that to- to kind of believe or have internalized that everything you ever write needs to be finished and needs to be definitive uh as far as representing your thinking on a topic and the truth is is you know we taught this class on Carl Jaspers's the Idea of the University i have a master's degree in education i'm really interested in in what's right and wrong with the way we educate our people in the United States and the Western world and the world in general um i think there's a lot to say for it and a lot to say against it um but i have like a- a Google sheet with a bunch of titles of books that are going to take me at minimum the next five years to get through before i probably will be willing to say like i'm taking this stand. that said i don't want to do the simple thing it's like well we shouldn't take a stand at all and we should look at things from all sides um if you haven't taken the For They Know Not What They Do course Mikey has a great probably like hour long lecture in the first lecture talking about exactly why Žižek hates that point of view um from the introduction that really kind of was inspiring for me because i have spent many years kind of like without any sort of metaphysical ground like i don't always know exactly what i believe um but i don't necessarily just want to deconstruct everything to death um which is the tendency when you don't know exactly where you stand um but i wanted a- a way to write something that is actively trying like demonstrate the process of thinking through something so my piece for theory or Underground Theory is more of an art piece than a- a theoretical piece um it's me contemplating ideas that are interesting to me um and my background's in creative writing anyway so that's what made sense to me i think before i start it's worth noting um i'm going to be talking about Ray Bradbury, George Eliot, Tolkien, Dostoevsky and not always saying that's what i'm doing um so you might catch that and um there's some block quotes from Agamben sort of contextualizing this idea of inoperativity which is a- a
your hands together to welcome him up here. thank you. sitting on the stool all right uh yeah uh i think the topic of today or of this bit of today is thinking is hard um i don't think it comes naturally to me i've struggled for many years um to feel like i have anything to say um and the piece i have in Underground Theory is kind of a result of uh many years of struggling with that exact idea um because i know like at a sort of intellectual level that like even if the thinking is unfinished there's still something worthwhile to be said or to be written, writing is a process in its own right um yet i was brought up in sort of the academic environment that- that to- to kind of believe or have internalized that everything you ever write needs to be finished and needs to be definitive uh as far as representing your thinking on a topic and the truth is is you know we taught this class on Carl Jaspers's the Idea of the University i have a master's degree in education i'm really interested in in what's right and wrong with the way we educate our people in the United States and the Western world and the world in general um i think there's a lot to say for it and a lot to say against it um but i have like a- a Google sheet with a bunch of titles of books that are going to take me at minimum the next five years to get through before i probably will be willing to say like i'm taking this stand. that said i don't want to do the simple thing it's like well we shouldn't take a stand at all and we should look at things from all sides um if you haven't taken the For They Know Not What They Do course Mikey has a great probably like hour long lecture in the first lecture talking about exactly why Žižek hates that point of view um from the introduction that really kind of was inspiring for me because i have spent many years kind of like without any sort of metaphysical ground like i don't always know exactly what i believe um but i don't necessarily just want to deconstruct everything to death um which is the tendency when you don't know exactly where you stand um but i wanted a- a way to write something that is actively trying like demonstrate the process of thinking through something so my piece for theory or Underground Theory is more of an art piece than a- a theoretical piece um it's me contemplating ideas that are interesting to me um and my background's in creative writing anyway so that's what made sense to me i think before i start it's worth noting um i'm going to be talking about Ray Bradbury, George Eliot, Tolkien, Dostoevsky and not always saying that's what i'm doing um so you might catch that and um there's some block quotes from Agamben sort of contextualizing this idea of inoperativity which is a- a
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concept he spent over a thousand pages trying to figure out what it means but um for the sense of this i think it's worth knowing that uh an activity is operative basically when its goal is to result in some sort of completion or have an effect on the world and the inoperative is those things that we do that aren't intended to be complete um they're done for their own sake and uh and for Agamben contemplation or just thinking through things is- is an inoperative act and it is a political act and it's an artistic act um whether or not you agree with the rest of the things he does i think that is very valuable for me in thinking through um how to say something when you're not done how to talk about something when you're not done thinking about it um or how to write it and that's what this piece is trying to do is just to be inoperative um it's not done. um it's called Running in the Shadows, I'm just going to read the whole thing it's not- it's probably one of the shorter things in the volume. Running in the Shadows: Vignettes and Constellations. One. oh to see the moon rise behind the dark mountains the prismatic flare in the clouds why am i running? because i love being in this body why am i thinking? because i love being in this mind why differentiate the two? life is something that i solve each day when the moon crosses Orion's belt lingering there in the dark winter sky i forget will i remember when i wake? gentlemen, let the arrow pierce the body soul and mind as you already know we dwellers of the underground are always addressing you gentlemen, gentlemen i am not a philosopher do not call me that i master of nothing the credentials you gave me you can have back i won't be needing them Montag is all kerosene Clarisse McClellan knows that leaves in autumn smell of cinnamon and clove forgive me for speaking bluntly the trees are evacuating the universities and repopulating the forest Two. block quote from Agamben's Creation and Anarchy. we therefore understand the essential function that the tradition of western philosophy has ascribed the contemplative life and inoperativity. the properly human praxis is that which by rendering inoperative the specific works and functions of the living being makes them so to speak run on idle and in this way opens them to possibilities. contemplation and inoperativity are in this sense the metaphysical operators of anthropogenesis which by freeing the human creature from every biological or social destiny and from any predetermined task make him available for that particular absence of work we are accustomed to call politics and art. politics and art are neither tasks nor simply works they name rather the dimension in which linguistic and bodily material and immaterial biological and social operations are deactivated and contemplated as such. Three. there is a striking difference between Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Peter Jackson's film adaptation that takes place early on in the fellowship of the ring.
concept he spent over a thousand pages trying to figure out what it means but um for the sense of this i think it's worth knowing that uh an activity is operative basically when its goal is to result in some sort of completion or have an effect on the world and the inoperative is those things that we do that aren't intended to be complete um they're done for their own sake and uh and for Agamben contemplation or just thinking through things is- is an inoperative act and it is a political act and it's an artistic act um whether or not you agree with the rest of the things he does i think that is very valuable for me in thinking through um how to say something when you're not done how to talk about something when you're not done thinking about it um or how to write it and that's what this piece is trying to do is just to be inoperative um it's not done. um it's called Running in the Shadows, I'm just going to read the whole thing it's not- it's probably one of the shorter things in the volume. Running in the Shadows: Vignettes and Constellations. One. oh to see the moon rise behind the dark mountains the prismatic flare in the clouds why am i running? because i love being in this body why am i thinking? because i love being in this mind why differentiate the two? life is something that i solve each day when the moon crosses Orion's belt lingering there in the dark winter sky i forget will i remember when i wake? gentlemen, let the arrow pierce the body soul and mind as you already know we dwellers of the underground are always addressing you gentlemen, gentlemen i am not a philosopher do not call me that i master of nothing the credentials you gave me you can have back i won't be needing them Montag is all kerosene Clarisse McClellan knows that leaves in autumn smell of cinnamon and clove forgive me for speaking bluntly the trees are evacuating the universities and repopulating the forest Two. block quote from Agamben's Creation and Anarchy. we therefore understand the essential function that the tradition of western philosophy has ascribed the contemplative life and inoperativity. the properly human praxis is that which by rendering inoperative the specific works and functions of the living being makes them so to speak run on idle and in this way opens them to possibilities. contemplation and inoperativity are in this sense the metaphysical operators of anthropogenesis which by freeing the human creature from every biological or social destiny and from any predetermined task make him available for that particular absence of work we are accustomed to call politics and art. politics and art are neither tasks nor simply works they name rather the dimension in which linguistic and bodily material and immaterial biological and social operations are deactivated and contemplated as such. Three. there is a striking difference between Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Peter Jackson's film adaptation that takes place early on in the fellowship of the ring.
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in the film version Gandalf who had been aware of Bilbo's ring catches a wicked glimpse in Bilbo's eye and immediately conjectures that it is the ring of power and urges Frodo in his quest that very night as Frodo begins his journey Gandalf is depicted on a journey of his own pouring through texts and getting caught up with Saruman before escaping on the back of an eagle and meeting Frodo and company in Rivendell just before a- just a short while after Frodo's departure from the shire. Tolkien on the other hand wrote this process completely differently after recognizing that something is off with the ring Gandalf disappears for years during which it's suggested later in the book he was completely engulfed in the task of trying to discover the truth about Bilbo's ring. Frodo meanwhile clueless of the danger he was in went about his life eating and wandering in the nearby hills beyond Bag End as if nothing had changed but the absence of Bilbo who had retired from the shire. while the Jackson version confirms to its audience the naive belief that certain individuals through keen observation can quickly ascertain some of the most complex moral and political truths, Tolkien implicitly recognizes the difficult all-consuming path required to make sense of the world around us. and today's university largely supports and encourages the former simplistic view that certain smart people can quickly learn and discern important truths and the rest of the population should follow their lead. a key characteristic i think of any underground intellectual movement ought to be the insistence on fostering an attitude toward thinking as singular devotion to life's most perplexing problems and truths without end. Four. thoughts on inoperativity. a problem for the university is that the inoperative is illegible and institutional function demands legibility. universities must remain legible or they lose funding the underground need not. Agamben considers the Franciscan doctrine of use as the prime example of the inoperative Francis owned nothing not even his clothes his habit was in his use but not his possession his life was beyond the reach of the church. here creation and contemplation take on a relation to potential. in the underground knowledge is in the use of the thinking mind not possessed use is in the mess born of the potential to know and potential to miss the mark. today's university assembles knowledge like the farmer their crop neat rows void of complexity predictable harvest crop is good until the soil is spent. Five. thoughts on dwelling. i wonder to what extent the problem of being in the world needs to be further worked out in consideration of settled and unsettled dwelling in societies. it seems like Dasein is perpetually unsettled existentially yet often desiring settlement. it also appears to be suggested through modern science that movement unpredictability and certain stressors have beneficial effects this though only speaks to our empirical bodily existence the mind does its own productive wandering. in what way are body and mind existentially united? what can we learn from the tension that arises in the mutual desire to settle and wander? how does this problem relate to a pervasive sense of homelessness, a nihilism? as Jaspers
in the film version Gandalf who had been aware of Bilbo's ring catches a wicked glimpse in Bilbo's eye and immediately conjectures that it is the ring of power and urges Frodo in his quest that very night as Frodo begins his journey Gandalf is depicted on a journey of his own pouring through texts and getting caught up with Saruman before escaping on the back of an eagle and meeting Frodo and company in Rivendell just before a- just a short while after Frodo's departure from the shire. Tolkien on the other hand wrote this process completely differently after recognizing that something is off with the ring Gandalf disappears for years during which it's suggested later in the book he was completely engulfed in the task of trying to discover the truth about Bilbo's ring. Frodo meanwhile clueless of the danger he was in went about his life eating and wandering in the nearby hills beyond Bag End as if nothing had changed but the absence of Bilbo who had retired from the shire. while the Jackson version confirms to its audience the naive belief that certain individuals through keen observation can quickly ascertain some of the most complex moral and political truths, Tolkien implicitly recognizes the difficult all-consuming path required to make sense of the world around us. and today's university largely supports and encourages the former simplistic view that certain smart people can quickly learn and discern important truths and the rest of the population should follow their lead. a key characteristic i think of any underground intellectual movement ought to be the insistence on fostering an attitude toward thinking as singular devotion to life's most perplexing problems and truths without end. Four. thoughts on inoperativity. a problem for the university is that the inoperative is illegible and institutional function demands legibility. universities must remain legible or they lose funding the underground need not. Agamben considers the Franciscan doctrine of use as the prime example of the inoperative Francis owned nothing not even his clothes his habit was in his use but not his possession his life was beyond the reach of the church. here creation and contemplation take on a relation to potential. in the underground knowledge is in the use of the thinking mind not possessed use is in the mess born of the potential to know and potential to miss the mark. today's university assembles knowledge like the farmer their crop neat rows void of complexity predictable harvest crop is good until the soil is spent. Five. thoughts on dwelling. i wonder to what extent the problem of being in the world needs to be further worked out in consideration of settled and unsettled dwelling in societies. it seems like Dasein is perpetually unsettled existentially yet often desiring settlement. it also appears to be suggested through modern science that movement unpredictability and certain stressors have beneficial effects this though only speaks to our empirical bodily existence the mind does its own productive wandering. in what way are body and mind existentially united? what can we learn from the tension that arises in the mutual desire to settle and wander? how does this problem relate to a pervasive sense of homelessness, a nihilism? as Jaspers
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rightly observed science keeps philosophy in check by demanding that philosophy recognize its revelation of certain kinds of truth as such it would be inappropriate for the existential and political philosopher to neglect clear evidence that sedentary lives have observable deleterious effects on individuals both physically and cognitively. science on the other hand is checked when we point out that this is all that science can tell us these are the facts of the matter. as soon as we start making value judgments about this fact we have begun philosophizing and this is serious business. we should not accept what seems obvious just because it seems so we should really put time and effort into thinking about what this truth can tell us about who and what humans are and how we should live and organize society as a result. Six. the books aren't important Montag it's what they contain Gandalf lived for thousands of years and had the luxury of time. we depend on those who came before to get us started thinking likewise those who come after depend on us. Clarisse demanded the thinking life and is nowhere to be found the path is perilous choose wisely. Seven. i've tried hard to be a linear thinker but Tom Bombadil's yellow boots are dancing through my mind i don't want to be readable anyway. Eight. it should be readily obvious that self-preservation is of utmost importance for the university truth on the other hand constantly disrupts the will to preserve. preservation requires legibility. this i think is a fundamental contradiction that universities as institutions act as if they have reconciled when in fact they haven't. natural science with its universally valid claims to a certain type of truth has situated itself at the center of the university in such a way as to mask a fundamental contradiction from plain sight. we need spaces outside the university beyond the influence of state and corporate power structures the state and the market demand a certain kind of organization are structured to fundamentally reward the conservators of institutions and suppress the critics who shine light on certain realities that undermine such structures. any fidelity to truth that a university proclaims is empty. this is not to say that those of us who go underground are prophets and wielders of greater truth than the rest of the population. what it means is that we are not beholden to behave in such a way as to preserve anything and thus open the potential, not actuality, of seeing the world with fresh eyes. Eleven. how shall we put it? intellectual outlaws, guerrilla academics, underground theorists, Homo Sacer booted from the tower. Silas Marner was expelled from the church and lived out his days spinning garments and hoarding gold before learning to love. the yarn we weave is thought and we have come to the conclusion that our thread is not enough, we can't weave alone. like Marner who could only love after every penny was stolen in the night in order to think freely we must go beyond possession and acquisitiveness. the hoarding of
rightly observed science keeps philosophy in check by demanding that philosophy recognize its revelation of certain kinds of truth as such it would be inappropriate for the existential and political philosopher to neglect clear evidence that sedentary lives have observable deleterious effects on individuals both physically and cognitively. science on the other hand is checked when we point out that this is all that science can tell us these are the facts of the matter. as soon as we start making value judgments about this fact we have begun philosophizing and this is serious business. we should not accept what seems obvious just because it seems so we should really put time and effort into thinking about what this truth can tell us about who and what humans are and how we should live and organize society as a result. Six. the books aren't important Montag it's what they contain Gandalf lived for thousands of years and had the luxury of time. we depend on those who came before to get us started thinking likewise those who come after depend on us. Clarisse demanded the thinking life and is nowhere to be found the path is perilous choose wisely. Seven. i've tried hard to be a linear thinker but Tom Bombadil's yellow boots are dancing through my mind i don't want to be readable anyway. Eight. it should be readily obvious that self-preservation is of utmost importance for the university truth on the other hand constantly disrupts the will to preserve. preservation requires legibility. this i think is a fundamental contradiction that universities as institutions act as if they have reconciled when in fact they haven't. natural science with its universally valid claims to a certain type of truth has situated itself at the center of the university in such a way as to mask a fundamental contradiction from plain sight. we need spaces outside the university beyond the influence of state and corporate power structures the state and the market demand a certain kind of organization are structured to fundamentally reward the conservators of institutions and suppress the critics who shine light on certain realities that undermine such structures. any fidelity to truth that a university proclaims is empty. this is not to say that those of us who go underground are prophets and wielders of greater truth than the rest of the population. what it means is that we are not beholden to behave in such a way as to preserve anything and thus open the potential, not actuality, of seeing the world with fresh eyes. Eleven. how shall we put it? intellectual outlaws, guerrilla academics, underground theorists, Homo Sacer booted from the tower. Silas Marner was expelled from the church and lived out his days spinning garments and hoarding gold before learning to love. the yarn we weave is thought and we have come to the conclusion that our thread is not enough, we can't weave alone. like Marner who could only love after every penny was stolen in the night in order to think freely we must go beyond possession and acquisitiveness. the hoarding of
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knowledge at the center of the university practice and recognize ourselves as those who use truth knowledge and wisdom to live but possess none of it it is a gift freely given and freely shared. Ten. these vignettes full of grandiosity and presumption speak using the royal we. obviously i speak for no one but myself and do not attempt to swim in the thoughts of others. who then is this we who speaks? well don't overthink these perfumes i contain multitudes. Eleven. at any moment what makes the whole person is unattainable the whole life is only experienced right now through the contemplation of past and future but never by
knowledge at the center of the university practice and recognize ourselves as those who use truth knowledge and wisdom to live but possess none of it it is a gift freely given and freely shared. Ten. these vignettes full of grandiosity and presumption speak using the royal we. obviously i speak for no one but myself and do not attempt to swim in the thoughts of others. who then is this we who speaks? well don't overthink these perfumes i contain multitudes. Eleven. at any moment what makes the whole person is unattainable the whole life is only experienced right now through the contemplation of past and future but never by
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experience. the whole truth is always limited to present understandings and vantage point. the world to which our being is inextricably linked is always beyond us. if scholarship is to treat the whole man it must be conducted in a way in setting in which these limitations are not experienced as limitations. truth seeking is never finished and this is the problem with any system of education and research which is structured with definitive beginnings and ends. research of the kind most valuable to humanity is inoperative we need universities but they cannot be all. we also need spaces and communities where people form any walk- people from any walk of life can come together as whole people in search of the illusory truths of life. who believed that the liberal- liberal arts were named that precisely because they strive for liberation personal and social. those who want to form their life around this principle need space and community in which to do so. universities are indeed that space for some and this is to the good but they by virtue of their social role and ties to the state cannot be for all or even most. Twelve. the trade-off for every new development in information technology which makes individuals and communities more legible is increased vulnerability to abusive states. simplification makes legible. philosophy and theory ought to resist simplification and make possible the maintenance of complexity. Thirteen. them teachers be feeding us mush grown in dead soil but we got us a whiff of cinnamon in the forest. Fourteen. Montag is on the run he has burned his house, his things, his books, his fellows, he has traded his clothes for those of another man, he is jumping in the river, he is leaving nothing behind not even his scent. what awaits a man like this? death, life, resurrection? how could he know? he is in orbit under a night sky full of potential. Fifteen. James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed showcases how throughout history a not insignificant number of people- people groups around the world in response to the terror inflicted by settled agrarian states and kingdoms banded together and turned to the hills where they were able to maintain autonomy. over the last to years this is
experience. the whole truth is always limited to present understandings and vantage point. the world to which our being is inextricably linked is always beyond us. if scholarship is to treat the whole man it must be conducted in a way in setting in which these limitations are not experienced as limitations. truth seeking is never finished and this is the problem with any system of education and research which is structured with definitive beginnings and ends. research of the kind most valuable to humanity is inoperative we need universities but they cannot be all. we also need spaces and communities where people form any walk- people from any walk of life can come together as whole people in search of the illusory truths of life. who believed that the liberal- liberal arts were named that precisely because they strive for liberation personal and social. those who want to form their life around this principle need space and community in which to do so. universities are indeed that space for some and this is to the good but they by virtue of their social role and ties to the state cannot be for all or even most. Twelve. the trade-off for every new development in information technology which makes individuals and communities more legible is increased vulnerability to abusive states. simplification makes legible. philosophy and theory ought to resist simplification and make possible the maintenance of complexity. Thirteen. them teachers be feeding us mush grown in dead soil but we got us a whiff of cinnamon in the forest. Fourteen. Montag is on the run he has burned his house, his things, his books, his fellows, he has traded his clothes for those of another man, he is jumping in the river, he is leaving nothing behind not even his scent. what awaits a man like this? death, life, resurrection? how could he know? he is in orbit under a night sky full of potential. Fifteen. James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed showcases how throughout history a not insignificant number of people- people groups around the world in response to the terror inflicted by settled agrarian states and kingdoms banded together and turned to the hills where they were able to maintain autonomy. over the last to years this is
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all but ceased due to advances in technology and infrastructure that are able to reach areas that were previously inaccessible without strenuous effort. as a movement it may be tempting for
all but ceased due to advances in technology and infrastructure that are able to reach areas that were previously inaccessible without strenuous effort. as a movement it may be tempting for
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some to idealize the anarchic rejection of the state through the formation of mountain-dwelling bands. but first that's not possible today and we have to work within a framework of the world we were thrown into. second considering the structure of the world as it is today even if one could make a space beyond the watchful eye of the state is this desirable? is this the lesson to take from the past? maybe today's outlaws ought to remain dwellers in a world of mega- mega-cities connected to everything by highways physical and virtual. maybe the lesson buried in all of Scott's work is the need to find a way to preserve intellectual autonomy in a highly curricularized data-driven legible world. Sixteen. from Agamben Highest Poverty. certainly thanks to the doctrine of use the Franciscan life could be affirmed unreservedly as that existence which is situated outside the law which must abdicate the law in order to exist and this is certainly the legacy that modernity has shown itself to be incapable of facing and that our time does not seem to be at all in a position to think. but what is a life outside the law if it is defined as that form of life which makes use of things without ever appropriating them? and what is use if one ceases to define it solely negatively with respect to ownership? Seventeen. in the final pages of Ray Ba- Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit Guy Montag who's on the run after turning against his occupation as a professional book burner and instead stealing away books here and there finds himself joining a group of wandering ex-professors and intellectuals who no longer have a place in society. after the leader Granger explains that these wanderers do not possess any books as that would be a safety risk but instead have developed a method for perfect recall and each member holds their own set of thinkers and writers in their mind, Granger lets Montag in on the most important truth the bond that holds them together. Eighteen. we do not reject the university outright we simply do not belong to it, it is not our master we seek to be pupils only of truth. Nineteen. in the face of annihilation we are everywhere and not one of us is important. thank you we lost most of the people obviously at this point because not everybody just has an entire free Saturday and that- that would be a lot of free time you know but people don't have that much free time and so uh but there are a handful of people who've actually been able to stay this whole time and uh i want to give people an opportunity to at least just say a thing you can ask a question you can say a thing that's on your mind you can even take the microphone and be like fuck you Dave i don't care i just want to give you your opportunity to say something and so Ann's got the
some to idealize the anarchic rejection of the state through the formation of mountain-dwelling bands. but first that's not possible today and we have to work within a framework of the world we were thrown into. second considering the structure of the world as it is today even if one could make a space beyond the watchful eye of the state is this desirable? is this the lesson to take from the past? maybe today's outlaws ought to remain dwellers in a world of mega- mega-cities connected to everything by highways physical and virtual. maybe the lesson buried in all of Scott's work is the need to find a way to preserve intellectual autonomy in a highly curricularized data-driven legible world. Sixteen. from Agamben Highest Poverty. certainly thanks to the doctrine of use the Franciscan life could be affirmed unreservedly as that existence which is situated outside the law which must abdicate the law in order to exist and this is certainly the legacy that modernity has shown itself to be incapable of facing and that our time does not seem to be at all in a position to think. but what is a life outside the law if it is defined as that form of life which makes use of things without ever appropriating them? and what is use if one ceases to define it solely negatively with respect to ownership? Seventeen. in the final pages of Ray Ba- Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit Guy Montag who's on the run after turning against his occupation as a professional book burner and instead stealing away books here and there finds himself joining a group of wandering ex-professors and intellectuals who no longer have a place in society. after the leader Granger explains that these wanderers do not possess any books as that would be a safety risk but instead have developed a method for perfect recall and each member holds their own set of thinkers and writers in their mind, Granger lets Montag in on the most important truth the bond that holds them together. Eighteen. we do not reject the university outright we simply do not belong to it, it is not our master we seek to be pupils only of truth. Nineteen. in the face of annihilation we are everywhere and not one of us is important. thank you we lost most of the people obviously at this point because not everybody just has an entire free Saturday and that- that would be a lot of free time you know but people don't have that much free time and so uh but there are a handful of people who've actually been able to stay this whole time and uh i want to give people an opportunity to at least just say a thing you can ask a question you can say a thing that's on your mind you can even take the microphone and be like fuck you Dave i don't care i just want to give you your opportunity to say something and so Ann's got the
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microphone um i'm going to see if i can how do i work this? okay here we go i'm going to make the local- um i'm
microphone um i'm going to see if i can how do i work this? okay here we go i'm going to make the local- um i'm
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going to make the rooms show so everyone can see you all some of you are off camera but maybe if you take the microphone just make sure you're in camera for that laptop over there um Sean Josh Marilyn anyone else who's here in the Zoom call you can also put your hand up if you want to say something in close but yeah we just want to give everyone else a moment to say something so fuck you Dave really? oh she can Ann can definitely get away with that um oh come on we don't have all day come on who wants to say something? I just did well I guess no one has to but no one- yeah nobody wants to you don't have to everyone's happy let's close this thing out once twice yeah and what's your name man? my name's Hunter um welcome yeah uh so obviously i'm like new to all of this i'm um and finding this was super super interesting i follow Žižek's work and a lot of others and want to learn more about Heidegger Being and Time all of that i have so many questions but one that i want to ask right now is how did you guys get together to form uh Theory Underground as like non- non-institutional of course but as a place of learning or whatever because it seems like obviously it sound- sounds great but it's just like uh it almost sounds too good to be true like very- like i'm very skeptical right? because it's just like oh yeah we're all going to just learn and it's just going to be great and it's like establish- establishing credibility and making sure there's just that academic quality like i how i don't know could you tell me more about that? or any of you? it's a really good question to ask on a video where a lot of people are probably finding out about it for the first time because of the Žižek interview so a lot of people will just watch it for that and then a handful of you all will watch it to the end and uh so it's good to call it on this point right um and it is- it is too good to be true because it is a failure in the making and so Theory Underground is meant to fail fast but that's education and that's learning itself right is discovering limitations by running into them um and so some previous failures or experiments that i've been involved in were with various clubs on and off campus uh at North Idaho College and then at Boise State University uh as well as things that i did with Elton's Dead Pirates
going to make the rooms show so everyone can see you all some of you are off camera but maybe if you take the microphone just make sure you're in camera for that laptop over there um Sean Josh Marilyn anyone else who's here in the Zoom call you can also put your hand up if you want to say something in close but yeah we just want to give everyone else a moment to say something so fuck you Dave really? oh she can Ann can definitely get away with that um oh come on we don't have all day come on who wants to say something? I just did well I guess no one has to but no one- yeah nobody wants to you don't have to everyone's happy let's close this thing out once twice yeah and what's your name man? my name's Hunter um welcome yeah uh so obviously i'm like new to all of this i'm um and finding this was super super interesting i follow Žižek's work and a lot of others and want to learn more about Heidegger Being and Time all of that i have so many questions but one that i want to ask right now is how did you guys get together to form uh Theory Underground as like non- non-institutional of course but as a place of learning or whatever because it seems like obviously it sound- sounds great but it's just like uh it almost sounds too good to be true like very- like i'm very skeptical right? because it's just like oh yeah we're all going to just learn and it's just going to be great and it's like establish- establishing credibility and making sure there's just that academic quality like i how i don't know could you tell me more about that? or any of you? it's a really good question to ask on a video where a lot of people are probably finding out about it for the first time because of the Žižek interview so a lot of people will just watch it for that and then a handful of you all will watch it to the end and uh so it's good to call it on this point right um and it is- it is too good to be true because it is a failure in the making and so Theory Underground is meant to fail fast but that's education and that's learning itself right is discovering limitations by running into them um and so some previous failures or experiments that i've been involved in were with various clubs on and off campus uh at North Idaho College and then at Boise State University uh as well as things that i did with Elton's Dead Pirates
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Philosophical Society Brian and i did Victory Farm Center for the Humanities for about a year and a half um and before that i had other things that i- i clubs that were kind of on and off campus and mixing intellectual things with like slacklining and hiking and stuff like Equilibrium or New Symbolization Project where we the one i used to bring uh Richard Wolff and other people to to Boise State um all of these experiments in organizing i think just has a lot to do with my drive in a very like- uh Žižekian sense it's like i desire to be an intellectual but i also have to organize and the organizing usually hijacks the intellectual work gets in the way of it even and i'm not even very good at it and so that's part of the problem in these previous organizations that i've been involved in um you know maybe sometimes i was like a vice president or a president or something but there's usually like a board or there's like a central committee or there's like whatever there's officers in the club and uh what i was finding was that i have like bursts of energy and i'll get- i can get a lot done but if i have to like wait on a lot of other people to also then do stuff or like we have to agree on things you know what i mean? like decentralization and actually all working together as a team um by the time we actually get to making it happen i've already lost the- the initial impulse i'm already over it I- I wanted to do that three months ago now I'm fucking over it man right? and that is a very much like a me problem and so I knew that i needed something that allows me to harness my bursts of energy into something that doesn't just fizzle out or go away and so that's the idea of like the self-contained platform that is just my own baby like Theory Underground is a platform with courses on it there can be other instructors involved but you know I- I basically invite them to do a course with me or to teach a course and once it's up after the fact it's still available on demand that part is very important to me i talk about it in the introduction to Underground Theory i say that I've been keeping an eye on leavers from academia people who are professors who decide to go online and teach instead to the maybe on YouTube or i use the example of Thaddeus Russell with his Renegade University podcast or Justin Murphy with his Other Life podcast and the newsletter that he does for that and i kind of say you know at first i was really like watching them being like oh this is new but then as i was watching it i was like well they are doing
Philosophical Society Brian and i did Victory Farm Center for the Humanities for about a year and a half um and before that i had other things that i- i clubs that were kind of on and off campus and mixing intellectual things with like slacklining and hiking and stuff like Equilibrium or New Symbolization Project where we the one i used to bring uh Richard Wolff and other people to to Boise State um all of these experiments in organizing i think just has a lot to do with my drive in a very like- uh Žižekian sense it's like i desire to be an intellectual but i also have to organize and the organizing usually hijacks the intellectual work gets in the way of it even and i'm not even very good at it and so that's part of the problem in these previous organizations that i've been involved in um you know maybe sometimes i was like a vice president or a president or something but there's usually like a board or there's like a central committee or there's like whatever there's officers in the club and uh what i was finding was that i have like bursts of energy and i'll get- i can get a lot done but if i have to like wait on a lot of other people to also then do stuff or like we have to agree on things you know what i mean? like decentralization and actually all working together as a team um by the time we actually get to making it happen i've already lost the- the initial impulse i'm already over it I- I wanted to do that three months ago now I'm fucking over it man right? and that is a very much like a me problem and so I knew that i needed something that allows me to harness my bursts of energy into something that doesn't just fizzle out or go away and so that's the idea of like the self-contained platform that is just my own baby like Theory Underground is a platform with courses on it there can be other instructors involved but you know I- I basically invite them to do a course with me or to teach a course and once it's up after the fact it's still available on demand that part is very important to me i talk about it in the introduction to Underground Theory i say that I've been keeping an eye on leavers from academia people who are professors who decide to go online and teach instead to the maybe on YouTube or i use the example of Thaddeus Russell with his Renegade University podcast or Justin Murphy with his Other Life podcast and the newsletter that he does for that and i kind of say you know at first i was really like watching them being like oh this is new but then as i was watching it i was like well they are doing
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some educational stuff but they lack that thing that i was also having a problem with which is that well once they burn out on it or once the course is over then it just goes away and they're not reminded of it they don't have to return on it to it they don't dwell on it and so part of the idea with Theory Underground is to make it so that any course that we do is then available after the fact on demand for people let's just say someone who's really getting into this stuff who comes later is able to binge all those courses for and that wouldn't- that's not currently possible with a lot of these other um alternative experiments um and if it is possible or for instance the New Center for Research and Practice I'm a friend of the Center and i love it um i think it's really important work that they do but a lot of it's discussion based and so a video on demand is not really worth much if you're not in the discussion and so if you go and you're watching a whole course on say Deleuze's Difference and Repetition Mikey and i did that course with Levi Bryant it was a great course we got a lot out of it but if you go back and watch it it's mostly like seminar style discussion group Theory Underground aims to be a lecture course site and we also have a social media aspect right? so the- the app is buggy as hell i don't think it's even working for Nance and I but it's working for Holly for some reason a lot of people aren't even getting the notifications to go out but the idea is to inspire so the reason it's- it's destined to failure is because my hands are so wrapped up in every single little part of it that once i become a father uh or- or get a life in some other capacity it's- it's good luck good luck keeping it going and it- and me to even train up the people to be able to run it and then make it a institution that could actually run without me doing everything um would require so much time that it's like i don't even know if it's possible but my goal is not a institution that will outlast me but an idea that will outlast me because i want to inspire educators everywhere to be able to turn their research programs that they need for their own sake into something that's useful for other people and to be able to see that there might be a world wherein they don't rely on the institutions and that's not to say the institutions need to go away
some educational stuff but they lack that thing that i was also having a problem with which is that well once they burn out on it or once the course is over then it just goes away and they're not reminded of it they don't have to return on it to it they don't dwell on it and so part of the idea with Theory Underground is to make it so that any course that we do is then available after the fact on demand for people let's just say someone who's really getting into this stuff who comes later is able to binge all those courses for and that wouldn't- that's not currently possible with a lot of these other um alternative experiments um and if it is possible or for instance the New Center for Research and Practice I'm a friend of the Center and i love it um i think it's really important work that they do but a lot of it's discussion based and so a video on demand is not really worth much if you're not in the discussion and so if you go and you're watching a whole course on say Deleuze's Difference and Repetition Mikey and i did that course with Levi Bryant it was a great course we got a lot out of it but if you go back and watch it it's mostly like seminar style discussion group Theory Underground aims to be a lecture course site and we also have a social media aspect right? so the- the app is buggy as hell i don't think it's even working for Nance and I but it's working for Holly for some reason a lot of people aren't even getting the notifications to go out but the idea is to inspire so the reason it's- it's destined to failure is because my hands are so wrapped up in every single little part of it that once i become a father uh or- or get a life in some other capacity it's- it's good luck good luck keeping it going and it- and me to even train up the people to be able to run it and then make it a institution that could actually run without me doing everything um would require so much time that it's like i don't even know if it's possible but my goal is not a institution that will outlast me but an idea that will outlast me because i want to inspire educators everywhere to be able to turn their research programs that they need for their own sake into something that's useful for other people and to be able to see that there might be a world wherein they don't rely on the institutions and that's not to say the institutions need to go away
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but i think the institutions would probably cut a lot of the bullshit if they had to compete against people like me if the- if the institutions actually got to a point where learning webs between singular isolated self-contained educators with their own projects if a learning web network became so fucking rich and exciting and people were learning so much the university's going to be like uh how is it we're spending such a so much of everybody's money and getting them what in return? right? a really expensive diploma that is what so you can get a job because the neoliberalization of the university as Anne talked about in her Underground Theory piece has turned it into just a really expensive thing you do for a job which has nothing to do with the idea of inoperativity which is Brian's idea right or it's Agamben's but he's drawing upon that. really schole the root the Greek root of school is about leisure time that doesn't have to do anything um but is just pursuing the fields of consciousness and or the fields of knowledge that's opened up to consciousness um by human collaboration and inquiry for their own sake because it's liberating. these things are liberating in and of themselves and so um yeah it's great if kids of the elite can pad out their CV with some courses or hanging out with some professors maybe cultivate their minds a little bit before they go off and join the institutions and and focus on their- their careers like i've got nothing against that but there's got to be a place for people who just want to do it for its own sake who don't want to have to get caught up in the to year precarious loop of chasing uh tenure which is increasingly less likely because the neoliberalization means you hire three adjuncts instead of one full-time professor and those adjuncts have no protections if they say anything that gets them in trouble they're gone forever um and so everyone's walking on eggshells and people are like oh well that's just Twitter or oh that's just the internet that's just activists or whatever today no the people who are the most afraid of this climate of fear and silencing are the ones who don't even have social media and in my experience the professors who don't have social media the reason they don't have it is because it is actually like this spectre that haunts them every waking day right like they are not terrified of some cosmic justice that's coming to get them no they're terrified of the fact that there's constantly moving goal posts in the discourse and that if they're not hip on keeping up with the Joneses of
but i think the institutions would probably cut a lot of the bullshit if they had to compete against people like me if the- if the institutions actually got to a point where learning webs between singular isolated self-contained educators with their own projects if a learning web network became so fucking rich and exciting and people were learning so much the university's going to be like uh how is it we're spending such a so much of everybody's money and getting them what in return? right? a really expensive diploma that is what so you can get a job because the neoliberalization of the university as Anne talked about in her Underground Theory piece has turned it into just a really expensive thing you do for a job which has nothing to do with the idea of inoperativity which is Brian's idea right or it's Agamben's but he's drawing upon that. really schole the root the Greek root of school is about leisure time that doesn't have to do anything um but is just pursuing the fields of consciousness and or the fields of knowledge that's opened up to consciousness um by human collaboration and inquiry for their own sake because it's liberating. these things are liberating in and of themselves and so um yeah it's great if kids of the elite can pad out their CV with some courses or hanging out with some professors maybe cultivate their minds a little bit before they go off and join the institutions and and focus on their- their careers like i've got nothing against that but there's got to be a place for people who just want to do it for its own sake who don't want to have to get caught up in the to year precarious loop of chasing uh tenure which is increasingly less likely because the neoliberalization means you hire three adjuncts instead of one full-time professor and those adjuncts have no protections if they say anything that gets them in trouble they're gone forever um and so everyone's walking on eggshells and people are like oh well that's just Twitter or oh that's just the internet that's just activists or whatever today no the people who are the most afraid of this climate of fear and silencing are the ones who don't even have social media and in my experience the professors who don't have social media the reason they don't have it is because it is actually like this spectre that haunts them every waking day right like they are not terrified of some cosmic justice that's coming to get them no they're terrified of the fact that there's constantly moving goal posts in the discourse and that if they're not hip on keeping up with the Joneses of
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what you're supposed to say and not say then it could come back to bite them in the ass and that has created a complete breakdown in um dialectics in discourse in inquiry um and so people are more afraid to um speak than ever before and i call that a genocide of voice in my piece in Underground Theory. and so you know it- the university is too good to be true. and- and it- and it is also a failure um and the idea of the university as like this thing that we all esteem which is a community of truth seekers coming at the fields of knowledge from different perspectives and then trying to bring their specialization back to some conception of the whole through dialogue with one another that idea of the university is itself impossible but we need impossible ideas to try to guide our efforts and the goal of Theory Underground is to be a new impossible ideal and that is at the point that you feel like you've sacrificed everything to just research and live in the life of the mind and educate other people at the point that you realize all of that sacrifice is amounting to nothing you don't actually get to do the research you want you don't actually get to teach the courses you want you don't actually get to have real conversations with other people and the students there have their earbuds in and are bullshitting their way through your course because ultimately they're more worried about the job and getting laid and drinking which is all great but you know what i mean? at the point that you realize all of your sacrifice is amounting to nothing more and more people leave the institutions but when they leave the institutions right now there's not a very serious
what you're supposed to say and not say then it could come back to bite them in the ass and that has created a complete breakdown in um dialectics in discourse in inquiry um and so people are more afraid to um speak than ever before and i call that a genocide of voice in my piece in Underground Theory. and so you know it- the university is too good to be true. and- and it- and it is also a failure um and the idea of the university as like this thing that we all esteem which is a community of truth seekers coming at the fields of knowledge from different perspectives and then trying to bring their specialization back to some conception of the whole through dialogue with one another that idea of the university is itself impossible but we need impossible ideas to try to guide our efforts and the goal of Theory Underground is to be a new impossible ideal and that is at the point that you feel like you've sacrificed everything to just research and live in the life of the mind and educate other people at the point that you realize all of that sacrifice is amounting to nothing you don't actually get to do the research you want you don't actually get to teach the courses you want you don't actually get to have real conversations with other people and the students there have their earbuds in and are bullshitting their way through your course because ultimately they're more worried about the job and getting laid and drinking which is all great but you know what i mean? at the point that you realize all of your sacrifice is amounting to nothing more and more people leave the institutions but when they leave the institutions right now there's not a very serious
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seriously plausible path towards being able to actually do what you want to do. automation AI and the sophisticated tools at our disposal through everything we have today um in terms of WordPress and its plugins um in terms of uh all these different functions that are now available that we are able to stack and integrate into new experiments didn't exist years ago, didn't exist years ago, didn't exist or a thousand years ago this is the first time that we have that any one ex-professor is able to do all of it on their own and I've officially proven that even though it's buggy as shit and it's spontaneous and like last minute and people can't keep up with it or get the newsletters or ever really plan their lives around it very well I'm still doing
seriously plausible path towards being able to actually do what you want to do. automation AI and the sophisticated tools at our disposal through everything we have today um in terms of WordPress and its plugins um in terms of uh all these different functions that are now available that we are able to stack and integrate into new experiments didn't exist years ago, didn't exist years ago, didn't exist or a thousand years ago this is the first time that we have that any one ex-professor is able to do all of it on their own and I've officially proven that even though it's buggy as shit and it's spontaneous and like last minute and people can't keep up with it or get the newsletters or ever really plan their lives around it very well I'm still doing
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it and just
it and just
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and
and
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yeah i'm not going to do it as great as i would want to but other people should be able to look at what i'm doing and go well i'm smarter than Dave if he can do it i can do it too and that's the goal is to be
yeah i'm not going to do it as great as i would want to but other people should be able to look at what i'm doing and go well i'm smarter than Dave if he can do it i can do it too and that's the goal is to be
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able
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to be like yes you can um and if you're not as bipolar and fucking frenetic with your energy like so you have it and then you
to be like yes you can um and if you're not as bipolar and fucking frenetic with your energy like so you have it and then you
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can do an amazing amount of things in a couple of days but then you can't do anything for like another week if if you're a bit more stable and like even-keeled and you have you actually have a house under your feet and you have an income um but you actually see a path forward where you can do it i think that there will be others who go way beyond whatever comes of Theory Underground but i honestly think it's probably going to be a decade until anything like it exists right now there's too many new things i
can do an amazing amount of things in a couple of days but then you can't do anything for like another week if if you're a bit more stable and like even-keeled and you have you actually have a house under your feet and you have an income um but you actually see a path forward where you can do it i think that there will be others who go way beyond whatever comes of Theory Underground but i honestly think it's probably going to be a decade until anything like it exists right now there's too many new things i
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can't really get into the functionality of the website too much right now but it's too many things it's it was it so many things all in one place and though I have all these threads and sometimes they slip out and I am not able to get people updated on something or there might be a spelling error on the book cover or whatever it is there I have my own app I do not rely on a university for that app it does have courses on it and the people involved are getting a lot out of it and having fun and so to me that's what matters is that we're doing what we love with people we love doing it with as Kadell says and so Kadell Last is doing similar stuff at Philosophy Portal he's another experimental educator who has a piece in the Underground Theory volume but um yeah that's- that's my short answer you'd- you'd hate to hear my long answer long answers are for hikes for sure but anyway Hunter it's really nice to meet you though yeah oh share the- share the mic so the people online can hear and then we'll go to Sean after Holly I'll give you details uh later but we have a group here that meets and we've had representation today yeah Aaron here and sorry for calling you out and Rebecca as well um and yeah we've been meeting for more than years and it's just a once a
can't really get into the functionality of the website too much right now but it's too many things it's it was it so many things all in one place and though I have all these threads and sometimes they slip out and I am not able to get people updated on something or there might be a spelling error on the book cover or whatever it is there I have my own app I do not rely on a university for that app it does have courses on it and the people involved are getting a lot out of it and having fun and so to me that's what matters is that we're doing what we love with people we love doing it with as Kadell says and so Kadell Last is doing similar stuff at Philosophy Portal he's another experimental educator who has a piece in the Underground Theory volume but um yeah that's- that's my short answer you'd- you'd hate to hear my long answer long answers are for hikes for sure but anyway Hunter it's really nice to meet you though yeah oh share the- share the mic so the people online can hear and then we'll go to Sean after Holly I'll give you details uh later but we have a group here that meets and we've had representation today yeah Aaron here and sorry for calling you out and Rebecca as well um and yeah we've been meeting for more than years and it's just a once a
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month um meeting where i try to come up with like you know pages that isn't too hard to read um it's okay if it's the first time you've encountered it and some yeah some times they're intelligible on their own sometimes they're unintelligible on their own um but it's you know it's that learning process um it's more dialogue based as opposed to lecture i try to not lecture so yeah yes my biggest critique of Elton is his refusal to lecture but it's also his strength is his ability- what he does is he sets up the- the space he- he kind of gives everybody the quick summary on the piece assuming that they didn't read it because they don't have the time energy which is always a good assumption and then you see where the conversation goes and those kind of conversations are very important also you'll want to talk to Brian he also does a lot of just reading group stuff that is like right now they're all reading Moby Dick you know um and so yeah uh we will come back here in a second to the IRL side but Sean uh you've been so patiently waiting i do want to give you your opportunity here so um let's make sure you come through on the speaker here yeah can you hear me? yes sir yeah my internet connection just got really weird so uh hopefully you can hear me but uh but yeah uh yeah i just wanted to say to like add to what Dave was saying like what i find valuable about Theory Underground is just that uh like i think we live in a world in which we really um are taught to think that if it's outside of the major institutions it's not legitimate um which i think is like just like the death of the mind in a lot of ways like i know i felt this really strongly i managed to go a couple years of university and uh don't do what i did for sure like is talk about inherent transgression don't write essays arguing that the prompt that your professor gave you is not legitimate um you want to talk about inherent transgression uh yeah don't sabotage yourself is what i would say but like uh yeah like but that said like what was motivating me to do that was just like this just rage that like we are not i can tell like we
month um meeting where i try to come up with like you know pages that isn't too hard to read um it's okay if it's the first time you've encountered it and some yeah some times they're intelligible on their own sometimes they're unintelligible on their own um but it's you know it's that learning process um it's more dialogue based as opposed to lecture i try to not lecture so yeah yes my biggest critique of Elton is his refusal to lecture but it's also his strength is his ability- what he does is he sets up the- the space he- he kind of gives everybody the quick summary on the piece assuming that they didn't read it because they don't have the time energy which is always a good assumption and then you see where the conversation goes and those kind of conversations are very important also you'll want to talk to Brian he also does a lot of just reading group stuff that is like right now they're all reading Moby Dick you know um and so yeah uh we will come back here in a second to the IRL side but Sean uh you've been so patiently waiting i do want to give you your opportunity here so um let's make sure you come through on the speaker here yeah can you hear me? yes sir yeah my internet connection just got really weird so uh hopefully you can hear me but uh but yeah uh yeah i just wanted to say to like add to what Dave was saying like what i find valuable about Theory Underground is just that uh like i think we live in a world in which we really um are taught to think that if it's outside of the major institutions it's not legitimate um which i think is like just like the death of the mind in a lot of ways like i know i felt this really strongly i managed to go a couple years of university and uh don't do what i did for sure like is talk about inherent transgression don't write essays arguing that the prompt that your professor gave you is not legitimate um you want to talk about inherent transgression uh yeah don't sabotage yourself is what i would say but like uh yeah like but that said like what was motivating me to do that was just like this just rage that like we are not i can tell like we
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are not here to talk about truth like that is just painfully obvious like and so like if i could go back in time what i would do is just like you know sort of bracket that to the side and like still get like good grades at college you know and we're going to put that away for a minute i'm going to keep that in mind but like you know um but like uh instead i like just had to externalize it like immediately and uh and but anyway like i just think that like it's a huge problem that we live in that world that like that everything has to be captured by the institution like uh Derek Varn if you guys know who that is like some of you i know do is that uh he says that like this is just an example like the MFA Master of Fine Arts is literally created to- to break up radical communities and take artists out of it and institutionalize them like that's literally like the explicit stated purpose of like why that exists this is according to him um so i don't have the like i can't cite that and like prove it right now but like this is what he says and he's he's a really smart dude um and usually he backs up everything he fucking everything he says so like uh but if you want to look into that maybe it's wrong maybe it's not i don't know but like uh but yeah anyway like we live in a world in which just everything is just increasingly captured by the institutions and we really it's i think it's really common common sense to think that like if you didn't do it inside of a capitalist institution a corporation or inside of like some other kind of bureaucratic institution it doesn't matter and i just think that like we need to do things for ourselves and this is what i see happening in Theory Underground is like that's not what life's about is serving an institution of any kind life's- what life's about is like just doing what you want because you fucking want to do it and that's it and that's all there is to it like at- at root we can talk so much it gets really
are not here to talk about truth like that is just painfully obvious like and so like if i could go back in time what i would do is just like you know sort of bracket that to the side and like still get like good grades at college you know and we're going to put that away for a minute i'm going to keep that in mind but like you know um but like uh instead i like just had to externalize it like immediately and uh and but anyway like i just think that like it's a huge problem that we live in that world that like that everything has to be captured by the institution like uh Derek Varn if you guys know who that is like some of you i know do is that uh he says that like this is just an example like the MFA Master of Fine Arts is literally created to- to break up radical communities and take artists out of it and institutionalize them like that's literally like the explicit stated purpose of like why that exists this is according to him um so i don't have the like i can't cite that and like prove it right now but like this is what he says and he's he's a really smart dude um and usually he backs up everything he fucking everything he says so like uh but if you want to look into that maybe it's wrong maybe it's not i don't know but like uh but yeah anyway like we live in a world in which just everything is just increasingly captured by the institutions and we really it's i think it's really common common sense to think that like if you didn't do it inside of a capitalist institution a corporation or inside of like some other kind of bureaucratic institution it doesn't matter and i just think that like we need to do things for ourselves and this is what i see happening in Theory Underground is like that's not what life's about is serving an institution of any kind life's- what life's about is like just doing what you want because you fucking want to do it and that's it and that's all there is to it like at- at root we can talk so much it gets really
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over-intellectualized but at the root of it oversimplified like that's what it's about you know is like and if we don't go back and seize that then i think like we're really giving up our souls in a- in a sense you know um to these institutions of many different kinds whether they're public or private uh so anyway yeah just don't- we're- we're not the appendage of an institution you're not you know you're an end in and of yourself you know so workers everywhere are so that- i just wanted to add thanks Sean yeah every every every meaningful movement in politics every movement in thought it comes from a robust intellectual milieu that exists between a bunch of people in the world who are doing things that they don't see existing institutions addressing and what you're talking about just doing what you want at the end of the day like and being able to pursue it obsessively and not stop just because the clock's- oh time's up time to think about the next thing or oh i just have to keep teaching the same course six times a day for for years at a time you know no the point of time energy is a- a more thoroughly fleshed out conception of freedom and being able to direct it for oneself is the definition of freedom and not being able to do that is the definition of slavery going back years being slavish there was two meanings to it one was not having control over yourself so you couldn't stop yourself from doing things that you found despicable or like oh i eat so much i just can't stop or i gamble so much i just can't stop okay well that's slavish that's like you don't have freedom because you aren't able to choose and to will what you actually want and then the other definition of slavery was obviously the more classical one which is uh you don't get to choose what you do someone else will choose what you do and we like to pride ourselves for having emancipated the slaves in this
over-intellectualized but at the root of it oversimplified like that's what it's about you know is like and if we don't go back and seize that then i think like we're really giving up our souls in a- in a sense you know um to these institutions of many different kinds whether they're public or private uh so anyway yeah just don't- we're- we're not the appendage of an institution you're not you know you're an end in and of yourself you know so workers everywhere are so that- i just wanted to add thanks Sean yeah every every every meaningful movement in politics every movement in thought it comes from a robust intellectual milieu that exists between a bunch of people in the world who are doing things that they don't see existing institutions addressing and what you're talking about just doing what you want at the end of the day like and being able to pursue it obsessively and not stop just because the clock's- oh time's up time to think about the next thing or oh i just have to keep teaching the same course six times a day for for years at a time you know no the point of time energy is a- a more thoroughly fleshed out conception of freedom and being able to direct it for oneself is the definition of freedom and not being able to do that is the definition of slavery going back years being slavish there was two meanings to it one was not having control over yourself so you couldn't stop yourself from doing things that you found despicable or like oh i eat so much i just can't stop or i gamble so much i just can't stop okay well that's slavish that's like you don't have freedom because you aren't able to choose and to will what you actually want and then the other definition of slavery was obviously the more classical one which is uh you don't get to choose what you do someone else will choose what you do and we like to pride ourselves for having emancipated the slaves in this
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um but as i talk about in Time Energy what we really did was we universalized slavery for everybody right it goes beyond the fact that there is actually existing slaves still making our iPhones and you know video gaming consoles it goes beyond that to the fact that whether you are rich or poor you don't have time
um but as i talk about in Time Energy what we really did was we universalized slavery for everybody right it goes beyond the fact that there is actually existing slaves still making our iPhones and you know video gaming consoles it goes beyond that to the fact that whether you are rich or poor you don't have time
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energy to do with it as you will instead you have to fight to survive or thrive but it requires constant fighting in ways and doing things that probably doesn't matter and so of course like our entire educational experience is usually like being told oh but you just have to find the thing that you're good at and then get paid for that that would be the dream and it's like what about the dream of being something beyond what you're paid for
energy to do with it as you will instead you have to fight to survive or thrive but it requires constant fighting in ways and doing things that probably doesn't matter and so of course like our entire educational experience is usually like being told oh but you just have to find the thing that you're good at and then get paid for that that would be the dream and it's like what about the dream of being something beyond what you're paid for
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right you can be a plumber, you can be a doctor, you can be a whatever but that's not your main thing in life and the things that you have over and above that aren't just hobbies that you do sometimes but instead it's like no you speak five languages and play multiple instruments and travel the world and get to know people and maintain friendships like that is not a vision of humanity that we are being sold because it's not something that's easy to sell and the thing is is Time Energy is not something that you can sell right capitalism cannot commodify it and all existing alternatives to capitalism also presuppose most people working most of the time so what we need is a new idea of freedom and that's basically it i think we should close out because we're basically at time our goal was to be finished here just about
right you can be a plumber, you can be a doctor, you can be a whatever but that's not your main thing in life and the things that you have over and above that aren't just hobbies that you do sometimes but instead it's like no you speak five languages and play multiple instruments and travel the world and get to know people and maintain friendships like that is not a vision of humanity that we are being sold because it's not something that's easy to sell and the thing is is Time Energy is not something that you can sell right capitalism cannot commodify it and all existing alternatives to capitalism also presuppose most people working most of the time so what we need is a new idea of freedom and that's basically it i think we should close out because we're basically at time our goal was to be finished here just about
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now um and so we actually have to get out of this venue space uh at a reasonable time and that requires packing things up and so uh for the people who are here uh you can all ask Elton or Nance or myself if if you can help but i think yeah we'll reconvene in Boise in a couple hours and Hunter i'd like to talk to you uh i have a gift for you um that i'd like to share after- after this is done recording Mikey you just turned on your camera you get the last word what do you want to say? yeah i just want to say thank you thank you Ann, Marilyn, Nance, Brian, Elton everybody was here um i mean this- the interview went better than i even expected it would um so super happy with with
now um and so we actually have to get out of this venue space uh at a reasonable time and that requires packing things up and so uh for the people who are here uh you can all ask Elton or Nance or myself if if you can help but i think yeah we'll reconvene in Boise in a couple hours and Hunter i'd like to talk to you uh i have a gift for you um that i'd like to share after- after this is done recording Mikey you just turned on your camera you get the last word what do you want to say? yeah i just want to say thank you thank you Ann, Marilyn, Nance, Brian, Elton everybody was here um i mean this- the interview went better than i even expected it would um so super happy with with
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that um i loved how he talked about the ethics of psychoanalysis getting him to talk about Land is you know that was pretty special um i think that'll be quite a clip um but yeah just a great day um proud of you can't believe that Underground Theory is out, Time Energy's out so just a great day yeah man and uh we'll see you we'll see you at the live event in Kansas City at Prospero's bookstore on Sunday the 10th of this month Mikey will be presenting on wage labor and jouissance why the left needs Žižek will do take care everybody stay safe
that um i loved how he talked about the ethics of psychoanalysis getting him to talk about Land is you know that was pretty special um i think that'll be quite a clip um but yeah just a great day um proud of you can't believe that Underground Theory is out, Time Energy's out so just a great day yeah man and uh we'll see you we'll see you at the live event in Kansas City at Prospero's bookstore on Sunday the 10th of this month Mikey will be presenting on wage labor and jouissance why the left needs Žižek will do take care everybody stay safe
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alright later
alright later