Digital Technologies and the Human Mind
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2019-04-18 · 1:45:49 · 13,721 words
technology-ai-cyberspacehegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisconsciousness-mindideologycapitalismsubjectivitysexuality-genderreligion-theologyphilosophy-generalcommunism-socialismliberalism-political-correctness
Žižek delivers a lecture at the University of Winnipeg on the philosophical implications of brain-machine interfaces (Neuralink/singularity), using Hegel's dialectics to argue that mediation, language, and failure are constitutive of thought, sexuality, and subjectivity rather than mere obstacles to overcome. He warns that direct neural connectivity threatens not obvious loss of freedom but an undetected form of mind control, and that it would destroy the Freudian unconscious as a domain of 'determinate absence.' The Q&A covers post-humanism vs. humanism, Jordan Peterson and the right-populist revival, the left's failure to articulate an alternative to capitalism, automation and basic income, and Žižek's universalism contra identity politics.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's shorthand for the Neuralink-style direct brain-digital interface; the central object of critique in the lecture as a threat to thought, individuality, and the unconscious.
The prospect of full brain-machine and brain-brain interconnection that partisans like Kurzweil celebrate as the self-actualization of collective spirit; Žižek treats it as a dangerous fantasy that dissolves the gap constitutive of subjectivity.
Implicit in the discussion of how prohibition turns into enjoyment of the prohibition itself; the excess generated by the detour is the very motor of desire.
The incestuous object that is simultaneously impossible to reach and impossible to fully abandon, structuring human sexuality through permanent detour.
as “Aufhebung / reconciliation”
Hegel's reconciliation is not the abolition of finitude and the fall but the recognition that the fall itself is the positive condition of the spiritual dimension it appears to negate.
Term borrowed from Terrence Deacon for the virtual domain of what is absent; Žižek identifies this with the Freudian unconscious, which he argues a brain-machine interface cannot capture.
Hegelian concept illustrated by the 'coffee without cream vs. coffee without milk' joke: the same empirical object takes on different symbolic identities depending on what specific absence defines it.
as “Apocalypse Without Kingdom”
Borrowed from Günther Anders: an apocalypse that yields no higher redemptive truth, just catastrophe; Žižek uses it to contrast pessimist and optimist visions of singularity.
as “pure subject / punctual Cartesian Cogito”
What Žižek speculates will remain after singularity strips away all inner-life content, a minimal, pure point of subjective distance sustained only by the virtual unconscious.
Hegelian/mystical figure for the pure subject as radical self-destructive negativity and darkness, which Žižek opposes to humanist metaphors of reason-as-light.
Žižek reads Freud's death drive not as a wish to die but as the name for a paradoxical immortality, the persistence of something 'neither alive nor dead,' the living-dead excess of subjectivity.
as “the plus as identity”
Žižek's Hegelian reading of the LGBTQ+ 'plus': one can exist directly as the plus, at a constitutive distance from any fixed identity, rather than adding to a list of named identities.
Lacan's discourse of established knowledge; mentioned briefly in contrast to the hysteric's discourse as the site of inventions.
as “hysteria as ideology critique”
For Žižek (via Lacan) hysteria is the most elementary form of ideology critique: the hysterical question 'why am I what you say I am?' refuses the identity imposed by the master.
as “capitalism as enacted universality”
The world market resolves the multicultural problem of incommensurable meanings because its exchanges function regardless of cultural understanding, it is the actual existing universality.
as “demise of symbolic efficiency”
Žižek's term (cited by a student questioner) for the postmodern crisis of collective meaning that creates a void filled by figures like Jordan Peterson.
Implicit in the discussion of symbolic order and language as the medium through which we always-already communicate; the structure whose efficiency is in crisis with new populist figures.
Peterson's polemical label for political correctness and identity politics, which Žižek calls an obvious nonsense: Trump, not the left, is the true postmodern figure.
as “moderate reasonable alienation”
Žižek's counter-formula to both hyper-communitarian and neoliberal visions: an anonymous, efficient state machine that frees individuals from having to negotiate everything, preserving their private distance.
as “happiness as conformist category”
Happiness is the state of wanting something while taking care not to really get it; it is a fundamentally conservative, self-contradictory ideal Žižek contrasts with Lacanian desire.
Stories he reaches for 9
A customer asks for coffee without cream; the waiter replies they have no cream, only milk, so he can only offer coffee without milk. Same coffee materially, but symbolically distinct negations.
“sorry sir, we don't have cream we only have milk, so I cannot give you a coffee without cream I can also only give you coffee without milk”
Lab researchers wired a rat's brain to control its movements; when applied to humans, the terrifying finding is that the controlled subject still believes it is moving freely.
“You press the button and to be very brutal the rat turns into a remote-controlled car... the human controlled in this way... you don't even know that you are controlled.”
A patient invites a woman to dinner with the plan of going to bed afterwards; in the restaurant he says 'a bed for two' instead of 'a table for two.' Lacanian reading: the slip was not crude directness but fear of enjoying the detour so much he would forget to go to bed.
“This guy was afraid that he will enjoy the detour so much that he will say okay, we had nice dinner I'm tired let's go home”
Žižek saw the film Billy Bathgate (based on Doctorow's novel), felt a mirage of a perfect story behind the bad film, then read the novel and found it worse. The perfection existed only in the gap between two failures.
“you have two failures, bad novel made into a bad movie, but in between, retroactively, this mirage of perfection arises. It exists nowhere”
French farmers let cheese rot and wine over-ferment, then rebranded these accidents as artisan products (French cheese, champagne). All great French food is failure elevated into triumph.
“the mystery of French cuisine are failures elevated into triumphs... the wine fermented too much and they said okay, let's call it champagne”
Žižek argues Soviet tanks preserved the dream of democratic socialism; without the intervention, the movement would have either collapsed into Western capitalism or hardened into Yugoslav-style soft communism, destroying the utopian ideal.
“They saved your dream. They saved the memory of Prague Spring.”
Friends who supported Corbyn were visibly relieved when Labour nearly won but didn't form the government, illustrating happiness as desire preserved from fulfillment.
“They were happy. We almost got there but not quite and so on.”
Hitler resolved the ideological confusion of 1920s Germany with a simple coherent story: it's all a Jewish plot. The example shows that storytelling alone is ideology, contra Peterson's celebration of myth.
“Hitler was one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century... it's all the Jewish plot. And all of a sudden ordinary Germans lived in a meaningful universe.”
Two Jews in paradise joke about their absurd deaths at Auschwitz; God passes by and says he doesn't understand how they can laugh. One embraces him and says: 'Don't worry, of course you cannot understand, you were not there.' What God cannot grasp is not suffering but the freedom of making jokes about it.
“don't worry our Lord, of course you cannot understand it because you were not there”
Works invoked 10
Ninotchka film
Ernst Lubitsch film; source of the 'coffee without cream' joke used to illustrate determinate negation and the virtual dimension of absence.
Lukács's Hegelian Marxist classic; cited for the thesis that true subject-object reconciliation requires proletarian revolution, as a version of 'Hegel came too early.'
Žižek's own forthcoming book from which the lecture is drawn; provisional title.
Violence book
Žižek's own book; cited for the line 'an enemy is just somebody whose story you didn't hear' (which he quotes only to criticize it as liberal ideology).
Billy Bathgate film
Described as 'a bad movie' with Dustin Hoffman and Nicole Kidman; nonetheless used to illustrate the positive role of mediated failure in generating a mirage of perfection.
Goldfinger film
Old James Bond film; mentioned for the red-button car scene as a joke about controlling Žižek.
Described as 'a disgusting movie, I hate it'; nonetheless Hugh Grant's clumsy love declaration is a 'classical scene' illustrating authenticity through failure.
Oedipus at Colonus play
Called 'the ultimate Greek tragedy' and Žižek's hero, superior to Antigone or Oedipus Rex; Oedipus is read as a Lacanian figure who has seen it all and refuses to compromise his desire, remaining extreme and demanding even in blindness.
Žižek's own book cited by a student questioner regarding the left's inability to exploit capitalist crises; Žižek accepts the framing.
Günther Anders's text on nuclear apocalypse as catastrophe with no redemptive kingdom following; concept applied to contrast pessimist and optimist visions of singularity.
People invoked 28
Matthew Flisfeder positive
Described as a Žižek scholar, called Žižek's 'super-ego' and 'PR person' during the event; played the role of moderator and timekeeper.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
French theorist of catastrophe (Paris/Stanford), described as a good friend; Žižek credits him with speculations on changing the virtual past using the coffee-without-cream example.
Philippe Van Parijs negative
Belgian philosopher credited as father of basic income idea; cited as explicitly NOT anti-capitalist, his basic income is meant to make capitalism more stable and efficient.
Georg Lukács positive
The young Lukács's History and Class Consciousness is cited as a Hegelian Marxist attempt to argue that true subject-object reconciliation comes only with proletarian revolution.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited on the unconscious as fragile virtual entity, on hysterical subjectivity as the fundamental form of ideology critique, on the ethics of desire ('do not compromise your desire'), and on subjective expression as always failed.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Described as 'my favorite Catholic theologian'; cited for the observation that on the cross God becomes atheist for a moment.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Cited as the liberal-capitalist version of 'Hegel came too early': Fukuyama locates the end of history in liberal democratic capitalism; a lazy centrist response to the left's failures.
Judith Butler negative
Described as having good personal relations but disagreement theoretically; criticized as 'way too much a traditional liberal', her worry is always who is excluded, her vision is expanding inclusion rather than rethinking universality.
Donald Trump negative
Described as 'an obscene postmodern abomination'; Žižek warns against left-liberal fascination/hatred with Trump as a substitute for self-criticism.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Partisans of singularity like Kurzweil are criticized for presupposing that post-singularity individuals will remain the same selves floating in collective spirit; he fails to locate the real danger.
Graham Harman negative
Object-oriented ontologist with whom Žižek has had public debates; criticized for reducing the subject to 'just one among objects, maybe more powerful but nonetheless', failing to see subjectivity as vanishing negativity.
Elon Musk negative
Treated as a simplifier and popularizer of singularity/Neuralink, not a theorist; his claim that users must 'will' thoughts for them to be shared is called 'totally problematic.'
E. L. Doctorow negative
Author of Billy Bathgate; Žižek's assessment is that the novel is worse than the film; Doctorow cut off contact with Žižek after learning this.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn negative
Grouped with Dostoevsky as part of a conservative tradition admired by Peterson; Žižek objects to Peterson taking this line seriously.
Bernie Sanders positive
Praised as an 'old-fashioned moralist' whose concrete program, labeled radical in America, was standard European social democracy half a century ago; contrasted favorably with Trump.
Malcolm X positive
Described as one of Žižek's 'authentic heroes'; his X is read not as a search for lost African roots but as radical openness to new universality enabled by deprivation of particular identity.
Darian Leader positive
Described as 'my English friend a Lacanian analyst'; his patient's 'bed for two' slip and its Lacanian reading is cited as a perfect illustration of the jouissance of detour.
Mentioned only as Günther Anders's former wife, in a parenthetical about gender asymmetry in how people are named.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited for the insight that 'true evil is more spiritual than goodness', Žižek uses it to distinguish evil-as-resentment from mere egotism.
Günther Anders positive
First husband of Hannah Arendt; his concept 'Apocalypse Without Kingdom' (nuclear catastrophe with no redemptive aftermath) is applied to singularity.
Jordan Peterson negative
Treated as a right-wing figure whose concept 'postmodern neo-Marxism' is nonsense; his clinical work is briefly acknowledged; his embrace of myth/narrative and Dostoevsky is criticized.
Terrence Deacon positive
Described as 'my favorite' contemporary evolutionary biologist; his concept of 'absentia' provides the technical vocabulary for Žižek's account of the unconscious as virtual absence.
Cited sympathetically as having desperately experimented with multiple economic forms (worker control, nationalization); none worked, but the failure illustrates the left's real programmatic difficulty.
Karl Marx positive
Credited with seeing clearly how capitalism thrives on surplus and exploitation; but criticized for dreaming of 'capitalism without capitalism', imagining pure expansion without the obstacle of surplus value.
Sigmund Freud positive
Central source for the account of human sexuality as constitutively metaphysical, death drive, and the unconscious; Žižek notes Freud was 'confused' on death drive but reads him productively.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central philosophical authority throughout the lecture; the talk is drawn from Žižek's forthcoming book 'Hegel in a Wired Brain'; Hegel's dialectics of obstacles and fall/redemption are the main analytical tool.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited as the definition of modernity: you cannot directly appeal to transcendent values; you must reason and ground them yourself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky negative
Specifically his line 'if there is no God then everything is permitted'; Žižek calls this 'total bullshit' refuted by modern fundamentalism.
What it argues
brain-machine interfaces and the prospect of singularitythe dialectical role of obstacles, failure, and mediationthe Freudian unconscious as determinate absencesubjectivity as 'night of the world' against humanism and object-oriented ontologyleft's inability to articulate a positive program beyond capitalismuniversalism vs. identity politics and multiculturalismsexuality as irreducibly structured by detour and prohibition
Dialectical moves 12
“What appears as an obstacle to perfection is really what gives rise to the perfection—the obstacle is not external to the ideal but its very condition.”
The central Hegelian thesis of the talk: mediation, failure, and lack are constitutive of the very value they seem to impede.
“Fall and redemption are the same thing: through the fall the very dimension from which you fell emerges.”
Hegel's reading of the Christian Fall: finitude and sin are not obstacles to goodness but its positive precondition.
“Thinking as such is formally evil—and it is only against this basic experience of evil that the good emerges.”
Hegel's radical inversion: thought is not the light against darkness but is itself the originary alienation from which the good is possible.
“The danger of Neuralink is not that you lose your individuality—it is that you will still think you are a free individual.”
The true threat of mind control is invisible: freedom is maintained as a subjective illusion while the subject is remotely directed.
“A prohibition of enjoyment always turns into the enjoyment of the prohibition itself.”
The Freudian-Hegelian reversal at the core of human sexuality: what blocks desire becomes the very motor of desire.
“If there is a God for you in the fundamentalist way, then everything is permitted—the exact opposite of Dostoevsky's claim.”
The reversal of Dostoevsky/Peterson: theological certainty, not atheism, licenses atrocity when the believer sees himself as God's instrument.
“God himself becomes atheist for a brief moment on the cross—there God doesn't believe in himself.”
The gap separating the believer from God is internalized as God's own self-division; abandonment by God IS God's self-abandonment.
“The fact that blacks were brutally deprived of their particular roots is at the same time the greatest chance of them—a space to create new universality.”
Malcolm X's X as radical negativity rather than identity claim: the loss of particularity is the very opening for universality.
“Soviet intervention saved the dream of Prague Spring: without it, the dream would have died in reality.”
Happiness requires non-fulfillment: the obstacle (Soviet tanks) is what sustains the positive utopian content of the movement.
“Trump is the ultimate postmodern president—not the left; postmodernism belongs to those Peterson attacks, not those he defends.”
Peterson's category of 'postmodern neo-Marxism' inverts the real distribution: cynical relativism describes Trump, not the moralist Sanders.
“You can exist directly as a plus—the plus IS the identity of human subjectivity at its most radical: existence at a distance from any fixed identity.”
The LGBTQ+ 'plus' is not a placeholder for unlisted identities but names the constitutive non-identity of the subject as such.
“Freud's death drive is paradoxically his name for immortality: something that persists beyond life and death.”
The death drive is not a wish to die but the figure of undead persistence, the living dead excess that exceeds both life and death.
Claims 21
asserts
The prospect of direct brain-machine interfaces, not surveillance capitalism, is the true game-changer for new forms of domination.Neuralink / brain-machine interface
asserts
Thoughts exist only in and through language; the idea that we could share raw thoughts directly without linguistic mediation is simply false.language and thought
asserts
What appears as an obstacle to perfection is often the very thing that generates the experience or perception of perfection.Hegelian dialectics of obstacles
asserts
The danger of Neuralink is not that one loses one's individuality but that one is controlled while still believing oneself to be freely acting.mind control and Neuralink
asserts
Human sexuality is not a civilized natural instinct but an irreducibly metaphysical experience structured by detour, prohibition, and impossibility.sexuality
asserts
A prohibition of enjoyment always turns into enjoying the prohibition itself.sexuality and jouissance
asserts
The Freudian unconscious is not a biological-instinctual substance but a virtual 'absentia'—the domain of determinate absence—which a brain-machine cannot detect.unconscious and Neuralink
asserts
For Hegel, fall and redemption are the same thing: the fall into finitude is itself the condition of goodness and freedom, not their negation.Hegel's reading of the Fall
asserts
Thinking as such is formally evil in Hegel's sense, because it enacts alienation and opposition between subject and reality.Hegel on thinking and evil
asserts
Singularity will be neither Kurzweil's blissful collective spirituality nor a dehumanized nightmare, but a radical intra-subjective division in which a pure minimal subject survives sustained by the virtual unconscious.singularity and subjectivity
rejects
He does not inscribe himself in the humanist tradition; the Hegelian-Lacanian subject is not the light-of-reason humanist subject but the 'night of the world.'humanism
rejects
Object-oriented ontology (Harman) represents a massive return to old realist ontology and fails to account for the subject as a vanishing entity distinct from all objects.object-oriented ontology
rejects
Jordan Peterson's label 'postmodern neo-Marxism' is nonsense: Trump, not the left, is the ultimate postmodern figure.Jordan Peterson's critique of postmodern neo-Marxism
rejects
If there is a God in the fundamentalist sense—so you see yourself as the instrument of God's will—then everything is permitted, inverting Dostoevsky's claim.Dostoevsky's 'if there is no God everything is permitted'
asserts
The left today is in crisis because it has no clear positive program beyond moral condemnation of capitalism.the contemporary left
rejects
Basic income alone is not an anti-capitalist solution but a more efficient version of capitalism that enables tougher market competition.basic income as leftist solution
asserts
Every universality is exclusive and that is what is good about it; the multicultural-liberal goal of an all-inclusive universality is a pseudo-problem.universalism and multiculturalism
asserts
Malcolm X's greatness lies not in seeking a new black identity but in recognizing that deprivation of particular roots is a chance to create a new universality.Malcolm X and universalism
asserts
Happiness is a deeply conformist category: it is the state of desiring something while carefully preventing oneself from actually getting it.happiness
reframes
Robotization and automation should be good news in a rationally organized society; they are experienced as horror only because our social framework is irrational.automation and work
rejects
Marx's dream of getting rid of surplus value to reach pure expansion was still 'capitalism without capitalism'—we need the obstacle.Marx on abolishing surplus value
Quotes 16
“What appears as an obstacle is really what gives rise to the perfection. Fall and redemption are the same thing.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectics of obstacle and perfection
“The danger is not just I will lose my individuality, the danger is that you will still think that you are a free individual.”Slavoj Žižek · invisible mind control under Neuralink
“The prohibition of enjoyment always turns into enjoying the prohibition itself.”Slavoj Žižek · jouissance of prohibition / human sexuality
“There on the cross God himself becomes atheist for a brief moment. God doesn't believe in himself.”Slavoj Žižek · Christian kenosis / Hegelian self-division of God
“Thinking as such in some sense is evil. Thinking is formally evil because in so far as evil is alienation, opposition: I'm here reality is there.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel on thinking as originary evil
“Paradise is not good, paradise is animal life.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel on paradise and the Fall
“If there is a God for you in the fundamentalist way so that you perceive yourself as the willing instrument, executor of God's will, then everything is permitted to you.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal of Dostoevsky: God permits everything
“True evil is more spiritual than goodness. Evil is not egotism... I hate you so much that I'm ready to suffer only if I know that you will suffer more.”Slavoj Žižek · evil as spiritual resentment
“An enemy is just somebody whose story you didn't hear—but would you say that Hitler was your enemy because you were not ready to listen to his story?”Slavoj Žižek · critique of liberal empathy as ideology
“My formula is moderate reasonable alienation. I want some efficient anonymous machine which takes care of it so that I can enjoy my isolated life.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's anti-communitarian political formula
“Happiness is for me this state of a compromise where you want something but you take good care of not really getting it.”Slavoj Žižek · happiness as conformist non-fulfillment
“The lesson of Jacques Lacan: do not compromise your desire. If you desire something, think about it, go to the end in it.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian ethics of desire
“Moralism is for me always the politics of those who don't know what to do. It's an escape.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of left moralism
“The fact that blacks were brutally deprived of their particular roots is at the same time the greatest chance of them. It's a space to create new universality, new freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · Malcolm X / universalism via negation of particularity
“Donald Trump is an obscene postmodern abomination. Compare as characters Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders: Bernie Sanders is an old-fashioned moralist.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump as true postmodern figure
“You can be directly a plus. Plus—the identity of human subjectivity at its most radical is that of a plus: existing at a distance from identity, doubting your identity.”Slavoj Žižek · plus as subject's constitutive non-identity
Transcript 49 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I am really glad to be here if for no other reasons because we are far north. My idea of hell is to be roasted on a Mediterranean beach. Further to the north that we are, all the better. So again, proud to be here and let's go directly to the topic. I hope you will not be too disappointed because my point of pride is always to give a title and then do something totally different. You know like here today I will betray myself. I will really talk about what the topic says. It's part of an ongoing project because next year will be a quarter of a millennium, years of the birth of Hegel, the German idealist. So this is from the first draft of my book on... the provisional title is Hegel in a Wired Brain. What does this prospect of wired brain mean? So not to lose time, let me begin. I will deal here with the prospect of so-called post-humanity opened up by a direct link between our brain and a digital machine, what is popularly called by some people like Elon Musk, Neuralink. My premise is that one should resist the temptation to proclaim the prospect of a wired brain an illusion, something that we are still far from and that cannot really be actualized. I think that in spite of all simplifications and exaggerations in the public media, something is going on in this domain and I will limit myself to questioning the philosophical implications and consequences of this prospect. Important as the rise of the so-called surveillance capitalism is, it is I think not yet the true game changer. I see a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface. It is clear that all kinds of secret agencies are already working intensely on it. What we learn is just the public face of it. So, the idea of a direct communicational pathway is usually presented as implying two steps. First, a link between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device and then a direct link between brains themselves. So first our brain is connected to digital machines. So what this practically means, and it may sound utopian but my friends who work on this are telling me that we are almost already there, namely this idea that your brain is somehow connected with a computer and the computer can already discern some basic, at least basic raw but nonetheless data of what you are thinking about. For example, I was told that when Stephen Hawking was dying in the last month of his life, he was already considering even practicing this type of communication in the sense of, so I was told, he no longer was using his proverbial one finger that he was able to move a little bit for moving his wheelchair. It was enough for him to just think forwards and the computer to which his brain was wired was able to discern this sign and things happened in reality. Then the next step is that the digital machine is just a mediator so that I can, that's the dream, so that I can share directly my experiences with others. I think about something, others can directly participate in my experience. Here, a quote from Elon Musk who is of course not a theorist but a popularizer: say you're on a beautiful hike and you want to show your husband the view. No problem, just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he's there, end of quote. And of course, what is more logical than to extend this idea onto the domain of sexuality? Again, a quote from Elon Musk: you could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy again later on and if you're not too private a person you could send it over to a friend to experience it and so on and so on. What's the problem I see here? A whole series of problems or just open questions. First, is the implication, not only of a simplifier like Elon Musk but of many other, let's call them theorists of whatever you call it, wired brain or singularity as this new form of collective spiritual experience, that somehow our thoughts will be directly socialized without the mediation of language. And here as a philosopher I already explode, because the presupposition is that somehow our thoughts exist prior to language. Because first, this is not true even at an empirical level. Maybe we have some sense perceptions which are non-linguistic, even that I doubt, but the moment you think in conceptual terms, you think in words. Words are never just an obstacle. This pseudo-Platonic perspective that words are just a material obstacle, that ideally we should target thoughts directly, is simply false. And this is a nice example, I will talk a lot about this tonight, of this basic Hegelian insight. If all Hegelian dialectics can be condensed, resumed in something, it is precisely this idea that be careful when something appears to you as an obstacle to a perfection. Quite often this obstacle, what appears as an obstacle, is really what gives rise to the perception, to the perfection. Let me improvise even if I'm eating my own time and I wait for you, Matthew, as my super-ego to interrupt me then. I had a nice personal experience at this level. Did you see the movie, which is a bad movie based on Doctorow's novel, I think Billy Bathgate? When I saw the movie with Dustin Hoffman and I don't know Nicole Kidman I think and so on, my impression was this is a bad movie but you can still feel that there is a much better failed novel behind it. Like you know you can somehow, I felt the greatness of the novel behind it. Then I did something which costed me my friendship with Doctorow because through some lady who was his secretary I know that he learned my experience and didn't want to have any contact with me. Because what I then did is the obvious thing: okay, let's then read the novel directly. Sorry, but my result, maybe I'm wrong, was that it's even worse than the movie. So you see the paradox: you have two failures, bad novel made into a bad movie, but in between, retroactively, this mirage of perfection arises. It exists nowhere, you don't get this perfect story, but you need it's in the space between the two failures. I have another experience of this which is my favorite, but I apologize in advance if it will appear a little bit sexist. Well, my only excuse is that it is sexist. I long ago at some, I will not say where it would be too indiscreet, an elder lady, very nice one was flirting with me quite openly and she told me that her last lover who saw her naked told her that her body is perfect just for two-three pounds too much, too heavy. You know what was my instant reaction? Don't try to lose the two-three pounds because this mirage of a perfect body was emerged precisely, you know, as the reaction to this obstacle: if only you lose two-three pounds you would be perfect. Then you lose two-three pounds, you don't get perfection, you get an ordinary body. And this is what dialectics teaches us: see the positive generating aspect of imperfection. See how and even to reach to the top of the tops, even Marx himself was here too narrow I think. He saw clearly how capitalism thrives but on these imperfections: exploitation, surplus profit and so on and so on. So his dream was to get rid of this surplus which for Marx more and more serves as an obstacle. But I think Marx's dream was in some sense still capitalism without capitalism. He thought if we get rid of the obstacle, surplus value, capital exploitation, we will get pure expansion. No we will not. I don't know what we will get but not that. We need the obstacle. That's my first point. My next question, so again, don't language, of course it's a clumsy mediator. Like just think about when you love somebody, you say I love you. It's a bland statement that millions of people probably say daily, but it echoes, it can echo an incredible wealth of your experience. But don't never think that you can get rid of these words and just get directly at the experience. Next question is about individuality. I think that our experience with the symbolic order demonstrates again how progress meant till now more alienation, sorry, thanks very much. Alienation in the sense that new layers get in between. We never communicate directly. First it's language, then it's writing, then it's internet, whatever whatever. And what happens if, that's the prospect of Neuralink, if these intermediate layers disappear and if we get direct communications? Will we, you know what is lost? Now I will, the dimension I'm aiming at is this one. There is a disgusting movie, I hate it, but it has one classical scene. Did you see, I'm sorry to mention it here, Four Weddings and a Funeral? You remember when the guy, I don't know he's a well-known actor, just his name slipped out, Hugh Grant. Yeah, when he declares his love to Andie MacDowell, he plays this typical English game of getting interrupted, clumsiness all the time and so on. But of course the obvious vulgar melodramatic lesson is that it is only through this clumsiness and so on that you can somehow transmit authentic love. If you can say a perfect love declaration, something has to be wrong with your love. It's the same even if we go at the opposite traumatic end. Here of course I totally disagree with those who when a woman denounces to the police that she was raped, and then you know one of the nasty tricks of the police at least till now is to look for contradictions in her report and claim oh but you are not consistent, you said this five minutes before, blah blah. Well, I think, and already this is too anti-feminist but nonetheless I think I'm making a correct point, that precisely I wouldn't trust a woman who would have been able to give a perfect objective report and so on. The very failures in her report, the very inconsistencies, confusions can signal authenticity. You know this is a beautiful paradox, Jacques Lacan mentioned it somewhere, that our subjective expression is always a failed one. In the sense that you want to say something, you fail in it, and only through this failure you do it. That's progress. Progress is like, if you allow me a very vulgar theory of French cuisine, as an excuse not to offend French people I will say that a French guy told this to me, that the mystery of French cuisine are failures elevated into triumphs. French farmers were making cheese, they were lazy, the cheese got rotten and so on, and they said oh my god, let's sell this as something special and you get the French cheese. Or they were making wine and something went wrong, the wine fermented too much and they said okay, let's call it champagne, let's, you know. All the great moments of French food are this failure turned into triumph. So again, what happens if you can do it directly successfully? If this danger of failure disappears? Here we can see of course, he's not a philosopher, the big fiasco of Elon Musk. When he is asked this question, his answer is, I quote, people won't be able to read your thoughts, you would have to will it. If you don't will it, it doesn't happen. Just like if you don't will your mouth to talk, it doesn't talk. I find this statement totally problematic, because the idea of Neuralink is that precisely the machine doesn't interact with your psyche directly but with the neuronal or whatever material existence of your psychic life. So for me the interesting question if anything is exactly the opposite one. It's rather, the point is not if my thoughts are shared in some common space of the machine, are they still my own thoughts? That would even be a good result. I see the opposite danger, that your thoughts are shared but you are not even aware of it. That you are, so the danger is not just I will lose my individuality, the danger is that you will still think that you are, that you are a free individual. And this is already half concerned, half sorry confirmed with research. My friends who are deeply involved, I have strange friends I admit it, into this told me that, you know it's an old story of mine, they already can do it for decades with rats. I have a video which is a pretty terrifying video, a friend of mine who works in a lab doing this cognitive research has told me where they already deciphered very elementary orders that neuronal path of how a rat gives orders to its legs to move and so on, to walk what direction. And then the result is pretty terrifying when they wired, in an very elementary way still, this rat's brain. You have a box, you press the button and to be very brutal the rat turns into a remote-controlled car. You see a rat running around in a box, you press the button and you can direct the movements. Now comes the mysterious part my friends didn't want to talk about, but they told me their question was immediately: how would it have been with men? And if you do it on humans, and it's pretty elementary, I'm talking just about these basic orders, move forward, left and so on, how will a human being controlled in this way, how will it experience this predicament? Will it be that something like oh my god, now I'm no longer my own master, a foreign power is directing my movements? All the indications I was told go in the opposite direction. You don't even know that you are controlled. You think that you are still freely, like I would advise you to do this: I walk here around, you press your button, you direct me and I still think that I'm freely, that I'm freely walking around. So I think that at this level the prospects of breathtaking mind control opens up. We cannot even imagine what is going on, what is already going on. Next point, a psychoanalytic one. It's easy for Elon Musk to evoke this sharing sexual experiences and so on and so on. And I ask a very naive question: but what remains then of our sexuality? My premise is here openly a psychoanalytic one. Be very, be very careful here. Psychoanalysis does not conceive sexuality as a natural instinctual base simply. We have certain biological drives and so on and then with the development of our culture we just civilized these drives. Like instead of in the male chauvinist universe, instead of raping a woman I write poems to her, invite her out, whatever and so on and so on. No it's not like this. The basic premise of Freud is that sexuality, our human sexuality is our most elementary metaphysical experience. That's why Freud privileges sexuality, because for him sexual passion is precisely where we are no longer animals. With animals you have instinctual life, rhythm of mating and so on and so on. With humans you have two opposite distortions. On the one hand sexuality can become a deadly passion, something which obsesses you, I'm talking about passionate love, sexual love, and disturbs your daily rhythm. And I agree with some writers who wrote about it and I deeply agree with them also from personal experience who say love is the greatest catastrophe you can imagine in this sense. Imagine you have a normal life, you know like maybe one night stand here and there, going out in the evening with friends drinking beer, blah blah, and then you fall passionately in love. It's a nightmare. All your daily rhythm is disturbed, everything focuses on that, your peace is lost and so on and so on. At the same time, and it's the other side of the same story, our sex life is always marked by an, it's basically perverted, in the sense of marked by a series of detours and impossibilities. For example, only with humans you can have this logic that it attracts you only if it is prohibited. This fundamental role of prohibition that if you can get directly your partner it's simple animal mating. If you have to go through, pass through the obstacles, the obstacles eroticize it. For example, you have this medieval practice of courtly love where the sexual fulfillment, full act is indefinitely postponed. You never do it, you never go to the end and this very obstacle eroticizes the situation even more, is a source of pleasure. As Freud puts it somewhere in a very Hegelian moment, the trick of human psyche is that a prohibition of enjoyment, something is prohibited to you by the social order you are not allowed to do it, always turns into the prohibition of enjoyment always turns into enjoying the prohibition itself. You know that's the fundamental paradox of human sexuality, is not that our full enjoyment is at the same time impossible, you never get it the incestuous object, but also you cannot ever avoid it, get lost of it, because the very ways you avoid it get eroticized. That's the basic mechanism for example of, and believe me I know it because I'm one of them, of obsessional neurotics. Something is prohibited and to protect you from this desire you get involved in rituals, compulsive rituals, and they get eroticized themselves. So I'm just asking what happens with all this when you can get your pleasure directly? Since again human eroticism resides in the detour itself. And that's often the problem, is that what many people are afraid of is precisely to get lost in the detour. My English friend a Lacanian analyst Darian Leader told me a wonderful example from his practice. I'm sorry if you already know it, I used it in one of my books but it's a perfect example. Where one of his patients told him of a strange slip of tongue that he made. He invited a lady, I'm sorry it's with a male chauvinist twist, he invited a lady to a dinner in a nice hotel. His idea was a very vulgar one: first nice dinner then we go up to the room. And he made a strange slip of tongue: entering the restaurant instead of saying a table for two please he said a bed for two please. Now as a true Lacanian Darian Leader gave a wonderful reading of this. It's not that he was vulgar and he didn't really care about dinner, he wanted to go his desire was directly go to bed with her, sex. His reading is exactly the opposite one. This guy was afraid that he will enjoy the detour so much that he will say okay, we had nice dinner I'm tired let's go home or whatever. The role of this slip was to remind himself: keep the energy for later, don't enjoy too much this detour, because that's what perverts do. Okay, enough of this. My basic concluding point here is that of course as such as the prospect of this direct communication between brains, singularity or whatever we call it, has a certain implicit let's call it metaphysical dimension. The threat is obvious. Partisans of singularity like Ray Kurzweil often simplify things incredibly. When I read Ray Kurzweil's books I was struck by how he praises singularity, it's wonderful moving in the same spiritual space with others, but somehow he presupposes that we'll still will be the same individuals who are doing it. He doesn't even locate the danger. My point is this one: when you have this short circuit between your thinking and reality. Think about the example that I gave you of Stephen Hawking. You do something and, sorry, you think it and thinking immediately has consequences in real life. Like they already are experimenting I was told with some factories who are doing coffee machines that you look at it, you think coffee, machine starts to work and so on. This sounds nice, but at the same time think about what you lose here. You lose this distance, gap between yourself and reality. A gap which is the very basis of our thinking individuality. Our most elementary sense of freedom is the freedom of thought in the sense of okay, I'm in social life controlled by others but I am at least formally free in my thinking. I can play, experiment there, do mental experiments and so on and so on. Something tremendous happens when this distance is lost. The partisans of singularity try to give a positive spin to it. They claim that what will happen with our immersion into this collective shared space of collective shared experience is nothing else, I go very quickly here not to talk too long, nothing less than the redemption from the fall in religious sense. Fall is fall into finitude, mortality and so on. We will in a way become almost divine, share participate in an immortal collective spiritual experience. And they even talk about self-actualization of God in this process in the sense that only in singularity spirit and matter will be fully reconciled. Because when we will when our individual thinking will be immersed into singularity and in this sense become part of objective reality, we lose distance between our isolated subjectivity and objective reality. And in this sense they claim that not only we will become godlike but in some sense God itself will actualize itself will become fully God only fully God only in this way. What we get here is something pretty interesting I claim. It's, you know Hegel, the great German idealist claimed we are at the end of history with French Revolution and free bourgeois society, we reached the highest point of imaginable of human development, free political order. But then a series of theorists claimed Hegel came too early. He was not yet there. For example, some Marxists, so-called Hegelian Marxists like the young Georg Lukács in his classic History and Class Consciousness said no, Hegel's reconciliation was wrong, it's only with proletarian revolution that subject and object, individual and collective will be truly reconciled. Then we get Fukuyama for whom Hegel just was a little bit again too quick. It's not with Hegel's rational constitutional monarchy, it's only with modern liberal democratic capitalism that we reach the end point. And here with the prospect of singularity we have again the last version of this Hegel came too early. What Hegel and German idealists were aiming at, it will happen only now. Now it's easy to make fun of this, but it's more of this speculative theologians of singularity. But I think that there is a problem here. Of course in some sense if, and I'm not going into the technological stuff, is it feasible or not, but I'm just saying generally, if we imagine entering singularity, of course in some sense we overcome the fall. But not in the way that precisely not in the way that German idealists imagine it. For Hegel, and you should read these are maybe one of the most provocative pages in Hegel, for Hegel it's not that we fall and then maybe at the end through divine grace or whatever we are redeemed. For Hegel fall and redemption are the same thing. Fall means finitude, eating from the tree of knowledge and so on and so on, and redemption resides just in you seeing, it's the same joke that I used before when I said how you need the positive role of obstacle, that and Hegel says this clearly that fall itself is at the same time opens up the space for goodness and freedom. Through the fall you discover the dimension from which you fell as it were. Hegel puts it in his lectures on the philosophy of religion part of Christianity. He says openly that thinking as such in some sense is evil. Thinking is not just as Christians like to say the freedom to choose good and evil. No, thinking is formally evil because in so far as evil is alienation, opposition: I'm here reality is there, I isolate myself from the reality. Thinking as such is evil and only against this basic experience of evil, the good emerges. You know there is no good prior to evil. Hegel says it clearly. For him paradise is not good, paradise is animal life. Hegel says it openly. Through the fall, that's again the same dialectical paradox that I'm obsessed with, through the fall the dimension from which you fell emerges, the dimension of goodness and so on. So again, the that's why I don't have time you're already preparing your knife probably to go into it but I think Hegel's reading of Christianity is here extremely interesting. Because if you go to the end in this dimension of thinking as such is evil, it's a wonderful, a little bit theosophic speculation about God which I think because I define myself as an atheist Christian, which hits the mark of what is really new in Christianity. I simplify it to the utmost. In other, most of the other religions, when you fall from God, God is there alienated, I feel abandoned by God, you then are looking for ways through, I don't know discipline, spiritual practices, good works to come regain the proximity to God. My god, if you are minimally Christian you must know that in Christianity something totally different happened. The solution is not I will come back close to God. The solution through the death of Christ and so on is that you discover that the gap that separates you from God is a self-division of God himself. That's for Hegel also and for all intelligent Christians the key moment of Christianity when God, you know that famous statement Eli Eli lama sabachthani, Father why have you abandoned me? As Gilbert Keith Chesterton, my favorite Catholic theologian wrote, there on the cross God himself becomes atheist for a brief moment. God doesn't believe in himself. So that's the Hegelian reversal. And this is Hegel's reconciliation. Precisely when I feel abandoned by God, it's self-abandonment of God by itself. I am in God in that way. So again this means that reconciliation doesn't mean abandoning the fall finitude and so on. Reconciliation means for Hegel that you just realize how your finitude mortality fall from God, from transcendence, from higher spiritual realm is a positive condition of this spiritual realm itself. And Hegel is quite radical here. In one of his passages where he speaks about education, Hegel provides a wonderful example that I love, about how the example that in my youth stupid libertarian leftists were using as a proof of the oppressive character of our education. How Hegel knew this, how small children when they are drawing or making paintings whatever, they like to do it with colors. But when you get a little bit older you prefer just gray pencils. And again when I was young this was mentioned by progressive theorists of education as how oppressive our society it is, young children are still allowed to express their creativity, then we are normalized in a straight jacket of just one color. But Hegel says no, this reduction to a colorless world is what gives wealth to it. Because in this way a space of let's call it virtual depth which you cannot render directly emerges. That's why I agree for example with those cinema theorists who deplored they were not just simply reactionaries who were afraid of color cinema, colors and sound. Five minutes? I fight I'm radically opposed to the linear metaphysical notion of time. So yeah. No, sorry I will try to squeeze. So again, again you know when you get too much of it directly you lose the spiritual content. Now I am approaching slowly conclusion. Now this brings me now to the crucial topic, just concluding line of thought. The Freudian unconscious. My because my final point will be there is a hope for us, because I'm not a technological reactionary. I'm not saying oooh singularity will be a catastrophe, we will lose our freedom and so on and so on. And maybe, this is not a rhetorical question, some of you can even maybe you know more than me because all my friends who are dealing with all this I'm asking them with this problems of Neuralink wiring the brain and so on, I'm asking them one simple question. For Jacques Lacan unconscious is not some spiritual substance, deep instincts, it's a very fragile virtual entity. It is what some intelligent contemporary evolutionary biologists like my favorite, sorry, Terrence Deacon call absentia, you know. What do I mean by this? I'm sorry I will now repeat a joke which probably most of you know, I always quote it from Ernst Lubitsch's movie Ninotchka where you know a guy enters a restaurant, a cafeteria, and asks the waiter: can I get a coffee but without cream please? And you know what's the mega-classic very Hegelian answer of the waiter: sorry sir, we don't have cream we only have milk, so I cannot give you a coffee without cream I can also only give you coffee without milk. This is what Hegel means by determinate negation. Although it's the same coffee, straight coffee, plain coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream are the same coffee materially, but let's call it symbolically in the spiritual space they are not the same. And there are wonderful speculations to be done here, done by my good friend the French theorist of catastrophes Jean-Pierre Dupuy who works also apart from Paris in Stanford. He claims that at this level we can change the past. We are not in magic. If you drank coffee yesterday, you cannot undo that. But what you can do is change the fact that you drank coffee without milk into no, you really drank coffee without cream. You can change this virtual dimension. And my point is that what Hegel calls, sorry what Freud calls the unconscious, forget about all this false biological metaphors, it's not instinctual. You drink coffee, the status of unconscious is that absentia, it's that without. The unconscious notices it's coffee without what, without milk, without cream and so on and so on. And my point is simply that I doubt and my friends who work maybe you can tell me more here in this domain claim that probably I'm wrong, they are more careful, that can the computer into which your thoughts will be immersed can it detect this difference? Can it, you think about I will have coffee, can it detect the difference between coffee without milk and coffee without cream? Next point, so at some level now I'm really at five minutes, at some level singularity will be of course if it will happen apocalyptic in the original sense, like revealing the truth. But what kind of apocalypse will it be? The Günther Anders, the German philosopher who some of you may know was the first husband of Hannah Arendt. And I like this like that it's not only that women are known as oh she was the wife of that guy, here we have a nice opposite example no. He wrote a very good text Apocalypse Without Kingdom where he claims that he was of course obsessed after World War II by the prospect of nuclear apocalypse. And for him this was not apocalypse in the usual Christian sense where it's a catastrophe and so on but nonetheless a new higher dimension of truth emerges through it. It's just a catastrophe. He Günther Anders called it Apocalypse Without Kingdom. Now what will it be for entering singularity? For partisans of singularity like Ray Kurzweil it will be apocalypse with a kingdom. We are entering the new kingdom of materialized spirituality, reconciliation of spirit and matter and so on and so on. For the pessimists it's an apocalypse without kingdom. Simply as humans we will no longer exist. I think that precisely if we take into account this virtual dimension of absentia, like the unconscious as this virtual domain of it exists only as a virtual symbolic fact of what I am not and so on. Here this dimension I guess in my crazy optimism will survive. And even to conclude with a joke and then one [unintelligible] even some intelligent theologians are aware with it. Although I'm very sympathetic towards Palestinians, but I nonetheless admire don't underestimate the Jewish sense of religious catastrophic humor. Jokes. You know Jews are wonderful here they have a series of even it's horrible in our politically correct times of Auschwitz jokes. Making fun of it. And by a Jewish friend he told me and it was not his own joke, he learned it from his grandmother who had tattoos who was there in Auschwitz that, okay to understand this joke you just have to know that when theologians dealt with the problem of Auschwitz, how could God have allowed such a horror to happen? One of the versions was God wasn't there. God died in Auschwitz. God couldn't have condoned it and so on. God was not there. It's too horrible for God to endure it. That's the background. Okay the joke goes like this, it's a trigger warning as they say today. A couple of Jews who died at Auschwitz are there in paradise now sitting at the bench close to a river stream enjoying free afternoon and telling each other jokes about their death in Auschwitz. Like one of them tells to the other: hey Jacob, do you remember in what stupid way you died in Auschwitz? When they were dragging you towards gas chambers, you slipped on a piece of soap and you cracked your skull and you died even before the gas affected you. Hahaha they laugh. Then God comes by and says, on a stroll also on an afternoon stroll and tells them God himself: listen guys, I don't get it. How can you laugh at this? It was so tragic your death. One of the Jews goes to God, embraces him tenderly and says: don't worry our Lord, of course you cannot understand it because you were not there. I love this joke because what God cannot understand is not suffering, but how you can make joke of it. That's the dimension of our freedom, the virtual dimension and so on and so on. Now really to conclude because of now I prove it to you, look look it's I'm at the end yeah yeah. Because of this I claim that a certain dimension which will it's not simply that a subject will survive. No in singularity we will be deprived, I speculate here, of our wealth of inner life. If I think about something, sexual dreams whatever and they can be shared by the machine by the others, of course I'm in some sense deprived even of my inner life. But I remain as a pure subject, as a punctual Cartesian Cogito who is sustained by this, the unconscious other virtual dimension. So my claim is this one: what will happen, it's an speculation which it will be possible to empirically verify it if something like singularity will happen, that I think that singularity will be neither this Ray Kurzweil style blissful immersion floating freely in a collective spiritual space, nor will it be this dehumanized nightmare, but it will be something much more interesting with great potentials for new forms of pain and horror but nonetheless maybe offering a new hope. We will be radically divided, more than now. Now we experience our division as the division between our inner life, I have all my dreams and so on, and reality out there. Or even the reality of others, the opacity of others. What I think will occur there is that the gap, the most radical gap will be within me as a subject. I will everything will be taken from me even my dreams of which I am aware of, but I will not be that. I will maintain a minimal pure distance. And I think that here we shouldn't lose our nerves. This minimal distance will be at the same time maybe a resort of new creativity of new freedom. Thanks very much for your patience. Thank you. Thank you. We go there. Yeah yeah. I suspect you still want me up there with the hope that I will fall down, slip and fall down or what. Okay, thanks. No, it's okay, thank you. Yeah yeah, thank you very much. Oh my god, okay I'm really in an anxiety a little bit. Okay. Okay. Thank you very much Slavoj. Now he is my good friend, a better Stalinist than me. Because if you did you notice how he said pre-selected or how organized... Well no no, I'll explain better. No free debate, you know like I know when I was young member of a Communist Party in Slovenia we had this free youth communist meetings where the boss at the beginning, free debate, distributed the questions. Well that's why but you're giving it away too much. You're following it here I see. Well I was going to I was going to say that you were like my obstacle paradoxically so because on the one hand I got the most pleasure from being able to tell you no, get off the stage, get off the stage, so as long as you're there, but at the same time so far as you're there I don't have to come to the stage and speak so that was my... That was mine. Yes. Okay. So for the Q&A we have yes, this is our curated Q&A. So we have students who will be asking Slavoj questions and engage in dialogue. Our first question is from Fatima Shaer. Yes I'm listening I'm listening. Yes, Fatima please. I'm very sorry but do people hear you? Could you come either come here or my god, I am ready to bring this to you. No because I'm serious. Should I? Please I shout enough. Oh, oh, I got there. Please, yeah. Oh, okay. Hello. Ah now it's okay, thanks. Yeah. Thank you for being here Mr. Žižek. So my first question is this: given your critique of post-humanism and its relationship to capitalism, do you see your work as part of the humanistic tradition? Sorry do I see my... Part of the humanistic tradition? No. Ah no sorry, please finish your question I'm very sorry please. Okay. Is this it? I thought I interrupted you. Well I was going to say and if so, do you nevertheless have criticism of humanism and its legacies, particularly within the university? I'm done. That's the book. That was the question. Ah that's it. Okay okay, thanks. So how how do you see your work in light of the humanist tradition? Maybe I'm distorted by my youthful experience but the great news when I was young was this great wave of French thought, Lacan, Althusser, anti-humanism and so on and so on. So I think that and I connect this with the legacy of German idealism where also, you know what is so interesting? Till German idealism the metaphor for human spirit was light. We live in a universe where all around there are threats but we are the light of reason and even if we are threatened from within from within us, it's the dark side of us and so on all those misleading Freudian metaphors, you know that our ego is like a tip of the iceberg and all the unconscious beneath water. I think that I follow here the line from medieval mystics to German idealism and so on where on the contrary the metaphor for the pure subject is the mystical word is you must know the term night of the world. Or as Hegel would have put it this it's the night, it's the radical darkness of self-destructive negativity. And this I think cannot be captured with the term humanism. Humanism is at that's to go to a more general dimension and going back to sexuality. You know we of course codify sexuality through all forms, manners, rules. But what this codification, cultivation tries to control is not nature. It's already some unnatural break from disruption of nature. Even in literature we find this as for example think about the myth of Tristan and Isolde. It's this deadly absolute passion. And Freudian name for this is death drive. Which is very paradoxical again, Freud himself was confused here. Freudian death drive is not oh I want to die, I want to disappear. I claim that it can be shown in a precise way that Freud's death drive is paradoxically his name for immortality. What Freud means by death drive is basically the experience of being living a living death. Something that persists beyond life and death. Something that is neither death than alive. And I think subjectivity, modern Cartesian subjectivity at its most basic is this. Night it's we live in so far as we are human subject in the days of the living death, not and so on. So in this that's all I can do now but it was a very precise question thank you. These are just some of the reasons why I don't inscribe myself into the humanist tradition. So if I could just press you for that on that for a second. So I think some of us here are curious to know more about how you position yourself, in light of not characterizing yourself in the humanist tradition, how you see yourself in light of the more recent popularity of post-humanist theory, new materialisms, object-oriented ontology... Oh, this is a nice problem. Because I am of course, although I appreciate some of them they are not stupid by far not but I think that precisely and that's my big I had a couple of debates with the new star of this orientation Graham Harman and so on. They are for me way too in some sense even if they are against this centered on subjectivity humanism, but nonetheless I think this dimension that I was talking about, the dimension of this radical negativity, zero potential destruction death drive disappears there. Their world is a world of objects. So my when I had the debate with Graham Harman, and he claims subject is just one among objects, maybe more powerful but nonetheless and so on, I claim no, subject is not this. And it's not that I think subject is an all-powerful entity mega object, no. Subject is some almost nothing, a vanishing entity, pure appearance and so on, but it's not subject is not an object like others. And this is why also the Freudian unconscious is not an objective determination of my being. So but I've written a lot about it at this settling the accounts with with this new object-oriented ontology and so on and so on. You know because I think that I'm here I agree with them with object-oriented ontologists that we should somehow get over the standard Kantian transcendental horizon. But for me what they do is simply a massive return to old to old realist ontology. And for me this is way too arrogant. I'm not ready to do that step. Just want to press you just a little bit more in in that regard before we get to the next question. Yeah. But so even thinking not just with the new materialisms and object-oriented ontology but even thinking the work in post-humanism, so thinking about the category of the human today in light of the the historical understanding of those who are excluded from the position of human, so not just human post-human but non-human. So I'm thinking in terms of something like the post-colonial how to reclaim the category of the human in light of this type of historicity, even in the context of contemporary... Yeah. I will now I always when I'm approached this one way, I'm not saying you are at this level but usually when I'm getting this question the implication is but isn't for European humanists, isn't their notion of humanity secretly Eurocentric and so on, no? So but but this is my conflict with among others things with one with whom I have good relations personally but not theoretically, Judith Butler. I think she is way too much a traditional liberal for me. Her vision is nonetheless we should expand our scope to include others. Her worry is always but what about those who are excluded and so on and so on. And so and that's her problem with universalism, how to get a true universality which will not be exclusive. Okay my brutal answer, I don't have time to develop it now, is that every universality is exclusive and that's what's good about it. You know? And but but another point is that's why I always here like to mention one of my authentic heroes Malcolm X. You know for which universality I am? Not for this humanist all-inclusive, you know. Ah I will give you I think a good example here so that I don't get lost in another minutes. I might take you off soon. Yeah yeah yeah. Ah no, you know what I proposed him, the only way to control me. Did you see it's an old classic it's not even a very good movie, did you see James Bond Goldfinger? You remember that scene when Goldfinger has that car with the red button? You press the button
I am really glad to be here if for no other reasons because we are far north. My idea of hell is to be roasted on a Mediterranean beach. Further to the north that we are, all the better. So again, proud to be here and let's go directly to the topic. I hope you will not be too disappointed because my point of pride is always to give a title and then do something totally different. You know like here today I will betray myself. I will really talk about what the topic says. It's part of an ongoing project because next year will be a quarter of a millennium, years of the birth of Hegel, the German idealist. So this is from the first draft of my book on... the provisional title is Hegel in a Wired Brain. What does this prospect of wired brain mean? So not to lose time, let me begin. I will deal here with the prospect of so-called post-humanity opened up by a direct link between our brain and a digital machine, what is popularly called by some people like Elon Musk, Neuralink. My premise is that one should resist the temptation to proclaim the prospect of a wired brain an illusion, something that we are still far from and that cannot really be actualized. I think that in spite of all simplifications and exaggerations in the public media, something is going on in this domain and I will limit myself to questioning the philosophical implications and consequences of this prospect. Important as the rise of the so-called surveillance capitalism is, it is I think not yet the true game changer. I see a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface. It is clear that all kinds of secret agencies are already working intensely on it. What we learn is just the public face of it. So, the idea of a direct communicational pathway is usually presented as implying two steps. First, a link between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device and then a direct link between brains themselves. So first our brain is connected to digital machines. So what this practically means, and it may sound utopian but my friends who work on this are telling me that we are almost already there, namely this idea that your brain is somehow connected with a computer and the computer can already discern some basic, at least basic raw but nonetheless data of what you are thinking about. For example, I was told that when Stephen Hawking was dying in the last month of his life, he was already considering even practicing this type of communication in the sense of, so I was told, he no longer was using his proverbial one finger that he was able to move a little bit for moving his wheelchair. It was enough for him to just think forwards and the computer to which his brain was wired was able to discern this sign and things happened in reality. Then the next step is that the digital machine is just a mediator so that I can, that's the dream, so that I can share directly my experiences with others. I think about something, others can directly participate in my experience. Here, a quote from Elon Musk who is of course not a theorist but a popularizer: say you're on a beautiful hike and you want to show your husband the view. No problem, just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he's there, end of quote. And of course, what is more logical than to extend this idea onto the domain of sexuality? Again, a quote from Elon Musk: you could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy again later on and if you're not too private a person you could send it over to a friend to experience it and so on and so on. What's the problem I see here? A whole series of problems or just open questions. First, is the implication, not only of a simplifier like Elon Musk but of many other, let's call them theorists of whatever you call it, wired brain or singularity as this new form of collective spiritual experience, that somehow our thoughts will be directly socialized without the mediation of language. And here as a philosopher I already explode, because the presupposition is that somehow our thoughts exist prior to language. Because first, this is not true even at an empirical level. Maybe we have some sense perceptions which are non-linguistic, even that I doubt, but the moment you think in conceptual terms, you think in words. Words are never just an obstacle. This pseudo-Platonic perspective that words are just a material obstacle, that ideally we should target thoughts directly, is simply false. And this is a nice example, I will talk a lot about this tonight, of this basic Hegelian insight. If all Hegelian dialectics can be condensed, resumed in something, it is precisely this idea that be careful when something appears to you as an obstacle to a perfection. Quite often this obstacle, what appears as an obstacle, is really what gives rise to the perception, to the perfection. Let me improvise even if I'm eating my own time and I wait for you, Matthew, as my super-ego to interrupt me then. I had a nice personal experience at this level. Did you see the movie, which is a bad movie based on Doctorow's novel, I think Billy Bathgate? When I saw the movie with Dustin Hoffman and I don't know Nicole Kidman I think and so on, my impression was this is a bad movie but you can still feel that there is a much better failed novel behind it. Like you know you can somehow, I felt the greatness of the novel behind it. Then I did something which costed me my friendship with Doctorow because through some lady who was his secretary I know that he learned my experience and didn't want to have any contact with me. Because what I then did is the obvious thing: okay, let's then read the novel directly. Sorry, but my result, maybe I'm wrong, was that it's even worse than the movie. So you see the paradox: you have two failures, bad novel made into a bad movie, but in between, retroactively, this mirage of perfection arises. It exists nowhere, you don't get this perfect story, but you need it's in the space between the two failures. I have another experience of this which is my favorite, but I apologize in advance if it will appear a little bit sexist. Well, my only excuse is that it is sexist. I long ago at some, I will not say where it would be too indiscreet, an elder lady, very nice one was flirting with me quite openly and she told me that her last lover who saw her naked told her that her body is perfect just for two-three pounds too much, too heavy. You know what was my instant reaction? Don't try to lose the two-three pounds because this mirage of a perfect body was emerged precisely, you know, as the reaction to this obstacle: if only you lose two-three pounds you would be perfect. Then you lose two-three pounds, you don't get perfection, you get an ordinary body. And this is what dialectics teaches us: see the positive generating aspect of imperfection. See how and even to reach to the top of the tops, even Marx himself was here too narrow I think. He saw clearly how capitalism thrives but on these imperfections: exploitation, surplus profit and so on and so on. So his dream was to get rid of this surplus which for Marx more and more serves as an obstacle. But I think Marx's dream was in some sense still capitalism without capitalism. He thought if we get rid of the obstacle, surplus value, capital exploitation, we will get pure expansion. No we will not. I don't know what we will get but not that. We need the obstacle. That's my first point. My next question, so again, don't language, of course it's a clumsy mediator. Like just think about when you love somebody, you say I love you. It's a bland statement that millions of people probably say daily, but it echoes, it can echo an incredible wealth of your experience. But don't never think that you can get rid of these words and just get directly at the experience. Next question is about individuality. I think that our experience with the symbolic order demonstrates again how progress meant till now more alienation, sorry, thanks very much. Alienation in the sense that new layers get in between. We never communicate directly. First it's language, then it's writing, then it's internet, whatever whatever. And what happens if, that's the prospect of Neuralink, if these intermediate layers disappear and if we get direct communications? Will we, you know what is lost? Now I will, the dimension I'm aiming at is this one. There is a disgusting movie, I hate it, but it has one classical scene. Did you see, I'm sorry to mention it here, Four Weddings and a Funeral? You remember when the guy, I don't know he's a well-known actor, just his name slipped out, Hugh Grant. Yeah, when he declares his love to Andie MacDowell, he plays this typical English game of getting interrupted, clumsiness all the time and so on. But of course the obvious vulgar melodramatic lesson is that it is only through this clumsiness and so on that you can somehow transmit authentic love. If you can say a perfect love declaration, something has to be wrong with your love. It's the same even if we go at the opposite traumatic end. Here of course I totally disagree with those who when a woman denounces to the police that she was raped, and then you know one of the nasty tricks of the police at least till now is to look for contradictions in her report and claim oh but you are not consistent, you said this five minutes before, blah blah. Well, I think, and already this is too anti-feminist but nonetheless I think I'm making a correct point, that precisely I wouldn't trust a woman who would have been able to give a perfect objective report and so on. The very failures in her report, the very inconsistencies, confusions can signal authenticity. You know this is a beautiful paradox, Jacques Lacan mentioned it somewhere, that our subjective expression is always a failed one. In the sense that you want to say something, you fail in it, and only through this failure you do it. That's progress. Progress is like, if you allow me a very vulgar theory of French cuisine, as an excuse not to offend French people I will say that a French guy told this to me, that the mystery of French cuisine are failures elevated into triumphs. French farmers were making cheese, they were lazy, the cheese got rotten and so on, and they said oh my god, let's sell this as something special and you get the French cheese. Or they were making wine and something went wrong, the wine fermented too much and they said okay, let's call it champagne, let's, you know. All the great moments of French food are this failure turned into triumph. So again, what happens if you can do it directly successfully? If this danger of failure disappears? Here we can see of course, he's not a philosopher, the big fiasco of Elon Musk. When he is asked this question, his answer is, I quote, people won't be able to read your thoughts, you would have to will it. If you don't will it, it doesn't happen. Just like if you don't will your mouth to talk, it doesn't talk. I find this statement totally problematic, because the idea of Neuralink is that precisely the machine doesn't interact with your psyche directly but with the neuronal or whatever material existence of your psychic life. So for me the interesting question if anything is exactly the opposite one. It's rather, the point is not if my thoughts are shared in some common space of the machine, are they still my own thoughts? That would even be a good result. I see the opposite danger, that your thoughts are shared but you are not even aware of it. That you are, so the danger is not just I will lose my individuality, the danger is that you will still think that you are, that you are a free individual. And this is already half concerned, half sorry confirmed with research. My friends who are deeply involved, I have strange friends I admit it, into this told me that, you know it's an old story of mine, they already can do it for decades with rats. I have a video which is a pretty terrifying video, a friend of mine who works in a lab doing this cognitive research has told me where they already deciphered very elementary orders that neuronal path of how a rat gives orders to its legs to move and so on, to walk what direction. And then the result is pretty terrifying when they wired, in an very elementary way still, this rat's brain. You have a box, you press the button and to be very brutal the rat turns into a remote-controlled car. You see a rat running around in a box, you press the button and you can direct the movements. Now comes the mysterious part my friends didn't want to talk about, but they told me their question was immediately: how would it have been with men? And if you do it on humans, and it's pretty elementary, I'm talking just about these basic orders, move forward, left and so on, how will a human being controlled in this way, how will it experience this predicament? Will it be that something like oh my god, now I'm no longer my own master, a foreign power is directing my movements? All the indications I was told go in the opposite direction. You don't even know that you are controlled. You think that you are still freely, like I would advise you to do this: I walk here around, you press your button, you direct me and I still think that I'm freely, that I'm freely walking around. So I think that at this level the prospects of breathtaking mind control opens up. We cannot even imagine what is going on, what is already going on. Next point, a psychoanalytic one. It's easy for Elon Musk to evoke this sharing sexual experiences and so on and so on. And I ask a very naive question: but what remains then of our sexuality? My premise is here openly a psychoanalytic one. Be very, be very careful here. Psychoanalysis does not conceive sexuality as a natural instinctual base simply. We have certain biological drives and so on and then with the development of our culture we just civilized these drives. Like instead of in the male chauvinist universe, instead of raping a woman I write poems to her, invite her out, whatever and so on and so on. No it's not like this. The basic premise of Freud is that sexuality, our human sexuality is our most elementary metaphysical experience. That's why Freud privileges sexuality, because for him sexual passion is precisely where we are no longer animals. With animals you have instinctual life, rhythm of mating and so on and so on. With humans you have two opposite distortions. On the one hand sexuality can become a deadly passion, something which obsesses you, I'm talking about passionate love, sexual love, and disturbs your daily rhythm. And I agree with some writers who wrote about it and I deeply agree with them also from personal experience who say love is the greatest catastrophe you can imagine in this sense. Imagine you have a normal life, you know like maybe one night stand here and there, going out in the evening with friends drinking beer, blah blah, and then you fall passionately in love. It's a nightmare. All your daily rhythm is disturbed, everything focuses on that, your peace is lost and so on and so on. At the same time, and it's the other side of the same story, our sex life is always marked by an, it's basically perverted, in the sense of marked by a series of detours and impossibilities. For example, only with humans you can have this logic that it attracts you only if it is prohibited. This fundamental role of prohibition that if you can get directly your partner it's simple animal mating. If you have to go through, pass through the obstacles, the obstacles eroticize it. For example, you have this medieval practice of courtly love where the sexual fulfillment, full act is indefinitely postponed. You never do it, you never go to the end and this very obstacle eroticizes the situation even more, is a source of pleasure. As Freud puts it somewhere in a very Hegelian moment, the trick of human psyche is that a prohibition of enjoyment, something is prohibited to you by the social order you are not allowed to do it, always turns into the prohibition of enjoyment always turns into enjoying the prohibition itself. You know that's the fundamental paradox of human sexuality, is not that our full enjoyment is at the same time impossible, you never get it the incestuous object, but also you cannot ever avoid it, get lost of it, because the very ways you avoid it get eroticized. That's the basic mechanism for example of, and believe me I know it because I'm one of them, of obsessional neurotics. Something is prohibited and to protect you from this desire you get involved in rituals, compulsive rituals, and they get eroticized themselves. So I'm just asking what happens with all this when you can get your pleasure directly? Since again human eroticism resides in the detour itself. And that's often the problem, is that what many people are afraid of is precisely to get lost in the detour. My English friend a Lacanian analyst Darian Leader told me a wonderful example from his practice. I'm sorry if you already know it, I used it in one of my books but it's a perfect example. Where one of his patients told him of a strange slip of tongue that he made. He invited a lady, I'm sorry it's with a male chauvinist twist, he invited a lady to a dinner in a nice hotel. His idea was a very vulgar one: first nice dinner then we go up to the room. And he made a strange slip of tongue: entering the restaurant instead of saying a table for two please he said a bed for two please. Now as a true Lacanian Darian Leader gave a wonderful reading of this. It's not that he was vulgar and he didn't really care about dinner, he wanted to go his desire was directly go to bed with her, sex. His reading is exactly the opposite one. This guy was afraid that he will enjoy the detour so much that he will say okay, we had nice dinner I'm tired let's go home or whatever. The role of this slip was to remind himself: keep the energy for later, don't enjoy too much this detour, because that's what perverts do. Okay, enough of this. My basic concluding point here is that of course as such as the prospect of this direct communication between brains, singularity or whatever we call it, has a certain implicit let's call it metaphysical dimension. The threat is obvious. Partisans of singularity like Ray Kurzweil often simplify things incredibly. When I read Ray Kurzweil's books I was struck by how he praises singularity, it's wonderful moving in the same spiritual space with others, but somehow he presupposes that we'll still will be the same individuals who are doing it. He doesn't even locate the danger. My point is this one: when you have this short circuit between your thinking and reality. Think about the example that I gave you of Stephen Hawking. You do something and, sorry, you think it and thinking immediately has consequences in real life. Like they already are experimenting I was told with some factories who are doing coffee machines that you look at it, you think coffee, machine starts to work and so on. This sounds nice, but at the same time think about what you lose here. You lose this distance, gap between yourself and reality. A gap which is the very basis of our thinking individuality. Our most elementary sense of freedom is the freedom of thought in the sense of okay, I'm in social life controlled by others but I am at least formally free in my thinking. I can play, experiment there, do mental experiments and so on and so on. Something tremendous happens when this distance is lost. The partisans of singularity try to give a positive spin to it. They claim that what will happen with our immersion into this collective shared space of collective shared experience is nothing else, I go very quickly here not to talk too long, nothing less than the redemption from the fall in religious sense. Fall is fall into finitude, mortality and so on. We will in a way become almost divine, share participate in an immortal collective spiritual experience. And they even talk about self-actualization of God in this process in the sense that only in singularity spirit and matter will be fully reconciled. Because when we will when our individual thinking will be immersed into singularity and in this sense become part of objective reality, we lose distance between our isolated subjectivity and objective reality. And in this sense they claim that not only we will become godlike but in some sense God itself will actualize itself will become fully God only fully God only in this way. What we get here is something pretty interesting I claim. It's, you know Hegel, the great German idealist claimed we are at the end of history with French Revolution and free bourgeois society, we reached the highest point of imaginable of human development, free political order. But then a series of theorists claimed Hegel came too early. He was not yet there. For example, some Marxists, so-called Hegelian Marxists like the young Georg Lukács in his classic History and Class Consciousness said no, Hegel's reconciliation was wrong, it's only with proletarian revolution that subject and object, individual and collective will be truly reconciled. Then we get Fukuyama for whom Hegel just was a little bit again too quick. It's not with Hegel's rational constitutional monarchy, it's only with modern liberal democratic capitalism that we reach the end point. And here with the prospect of singularity we have again the last version of this Hegel came too early. What Hegel and German idealists were aiming at, it will happen only now. Now it's easy to make fun of this, but it's more of this speculative theologians of singularity. But I think that there is a problem here. Of course in some sense if, and I'm not going into the technological stuff, is it feasible or not, but I'm just saying generally, if we imagine entering singularity, of course in some sense we overcome the fall. But not in the way that precisely not in the way that German idealists imagine it. For Hegel, and you should read these are maybe one of the most provocative pages in Hegel, for Hegel it's not that we fall and then maybe at the end through divine grace or whatever we are redeemed. For Hegel fall and redemption are the same thing. Fall means finitude, eating from the tree of knowledge and so on and so on, and redemption resides just in you seeing, it's the same joke that I used before when I said how you need the positive role of obstacle, that and Hegel says this clearly that fall itself is at the same time opens up the space for goodness and freedom. Through the fall you discover the dimension from which you fell as it were. Hegel puts it in his lectures on the philosophy of religion part of Christianity. He says openly that thinking as such in some sense is evil. Thinking is not just as Christians like to say the freedom to choose good and evil. No, thinking is formally evil because in so far as evil is alienation, opposition: I'm here reality is there, I isolate myself from the reality. Thinking as such is evil and only against this basic experience of evil, the good emerges. You know there is no good prior to evil. Hegel says it clearly. For him paradise is not good, paradise is animal life. Hegel says it openly. Through the fall, that's again the same dialectical paradox that I'm obsessed with, through the fall the dimension from which you fell emerges, the dimension of goodness and so on. So again, the that's why I don't have time you're already preparing your knife probably to go into it but I think Hegel's reading of Christianity is here extremely interesting. Because if you go to the end in this dimension of thinking as such is evil, it's a wonderful, a little bit theosophic speculation about God which I think because I define myself as an atheist Christian, which hits the mark of what is really new in Christianity. I simplify it to the utmost. In other, most of the other religions, when you fall from God, God is there alienated, I feel abandoned by God, you then are looking for ways through, I don't know discipline, spiritual practices, good works to come regain the proximity to God. My god, if you are minimally Christian you must know that in Christianity something totally different happened. The solution is not I will come back close to God. The solution through the death of Christ and so on is that you discover that the gap that separates you from God is a self-division of God himself. That's for Hegel also and for all intelligent Christians the key moment of Christianity when God, you know that famous statement Eli Eli lama sabachthani, Father why have you abandoned me? As Gilbert Keith Chesterton, my favorite Catholic theologian wrote, there on the cross God himself becomes atheist for a brief moment. God doesn't believe in himself. So that's the Hegelian reversal. And this is Hegel's reconciliation. Precisely when I feel abandoned by God, it's self-abandonment of God by itself. I am in God in that way. So again this means that reconciliation doesn't mean abandoning the fall finitude and so on. Reconciliation means for Hegel that you just realize how your finitude mortality fall from God, from transcendence, from higher spiritual realm is a positive condition of this spiritual realm itself. And Hegel is quite radical here. In one of his passages where he speaks about education, Hegel provides a wonderful example that I love, about how the example that in my youth stupid libertarian leftists were using as a proof of the oppressive character of our education. How Hegel knew this, how small children when they are drawing or making paintings whatever, they like to do it with colors. But when you get a little bit older you prefer just gray pencils. And again when I was young this was mentioned by progressive theorists of education as how oppressive our society it is, young children are still allowed to express their creativity, then we are normalized in a straight jacket of just one color. But Hegel says no, this reduction to a colorless world is what gives wealth to it. Because in this way a space of let's call it virtual depth which you cannot render directly emerges. That's why I agree for example with those cinema theorists who deplored they were not just simply reactionaries who were afraid of color cinema, colors and sound. Five minutes? I fight I'm radically opposed to the linear metaphysical notion of time. So yeah. No, sorry I will try to squeeze. So again, again you know when you get too much of it directly you lose the spiritual content. Now I am approaching slowly conclusion. Now this brings me now to the crucial topic, just concluding line of thought. The Freudian unconscious. My because my final point will be there is a hope for us, because I'm not a technological reactionary. I'm not saying oooh singularity will be a catastrophe, we will lose our freedom and so on and so on. And maybe, this is not a rhetorical question, some of you can even maybe you know more than me because all my friends who are dealing with all this I'm asking them with this problems of Neuralink wiring the brain and so on, I'm asking them one simple question. For Jacques Lacan unconscious is not some spiritual substance, deep instincts, it's a very fragile virtual entity. It is what some intelligent contemporary evolutionary biologists like my favorite, sorry, Terrence Deacon call absentia, you know. What do I mean by this? I'm sorry I will now repeat a joke which probably most of you know, I always quote it from Ernst Lubitsch's movie Ninotchka where you know a guy enters a restaurant, a cafeteria, and asks the waiter: can I get a coffee but without cream please? And you know what's the mega-classic very Hegelian answer of the waiter: sorry sir, we don't have cream we only have milk, so I cannot give you a coffee without cream I can also only give you coffee without milk. This is what Hegel means by determinate negation. Although it's the same coffee, straight coffee, plain coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream are the same coffee materially, but let's call it symbolically in the spiritual space they are not the same. And there are wonderful speculations to be done here, done by my good friend the French theorist of catastrophes Jean-Pierre Dupuy who works also apart from Paris in Stanford. He claims that at this level we can change the past. We are not in magic. If you drank coffee yesterday, you cannot undo that. But what you can do is change the fact that you drank coffee without milk into no, you really drank coffee without cream. You can change this virtual dimension. And my point is that what Hegel calls, sorry what Freud calls the unconscious, forget about all this false biological metaphors, it's not instinctual. You drink coffee, the status of unconscious is that absentia, it's that without. The unconscious notices it's coffee without what, without milk, without cream and so on and so on. And my point is simply that I doubt and my friends who work maybe you can tell me more here in this domain claim that probably I'm wrong, they are more careful, that can the computer into which your thoughts will be immersed can it detect this difference? Can it, you think about I will have coffee, can it detect the difference between coffee without milk and coffee without cream? Next point, so at some level now I'm really at five minutes, at some level singularity will be of course if it will happen apocalyptic in the original sense, like revealing the truth. But what kind of apocalypse will it be? The Günther Anders, the German philosopher who some of you may know was the first husband of Hannah Arendt. And I like this like that it's not only that women are known as oh she was the wife of that guy, here we have a nice opposite example no. He wrote a very good text Apocalypse Without Kingdom where he claims that he was of course obsessed after World War II by the prospect of nuclear apocalypse. And for him this was not apocalypse in the usual Christian sense where it's a catastrophe and so on but nonetheless a new higher dimension of truth emerges through it. It's just a catastrophe. He Günther Anders called it Apocalypse Without Kingdom. Now what will it be for entering singularity? For partisans of singularity like Ray Kurzweil it will be apocalypse with a kingdom. We are entering the new kingdom of materialized spirituality, reconciliation of spirit and matter and so on and so on. For the pessimists it's an apocalypse without kingdom. Simply as humans we will no longer exist. I think that precisely if we take into account this virtual dimension of absentia, like the unconscious as this virtual domain of it exists only as a virtual symbolic fact of what I am not and so on. Here this dimension I guess in my crazy optimism will survive. And even to conclude with a joke and then one [unintelligible] even some intelligent theologians are aware with it. Although I'm very sympathetic towards Palestinians, but I nonetheless admire don't underestimate the Jewish sense of religious catastrophic humor. Jokes. You know Jews are wonderful here they have a series of even it's horrible in our politically correct times of Auschwitz jokes. Making fun of it. And by a Jewish friend he told me and it was not his own joke, he learned it from his grandmother who had tattoos who was there in Auschwitz that, okay to understand this joke you just have to know that when theologians dealt with the problem of Auschwitz, how could God have allowed such a horror to happen? One of the versions was God wasn't there. God died in Auschwitz. God couldn't have condoned it and so on. God was not there. It's too horrible for God to endure it. That's the background. Okay the joke goes like this, it's a trigger warning as they say today. A couple of Jews who died at Auschwitz are there in paradise now sitting at the bench close to a river stream enjoying free afternoon and telling each other jokes about their death in Auschwitz. Like one of them tells to the other: hey Jacob, do you remember in what stupid way you died in Auschwitz? When they were dragging you towards gas chambers, you slipped on a piece of soap and you cracked your skull and you died even before the gas affected you. Hahaha they laugh. Then God comes by and says, on a stroll also on an afternoon stroll and tells them God himself: listen guys, I don't get it. How can you laugh at this? It was so tragic your death. One of the Jews goes to God, embraces him tenderly and says: don't worry our Lord, of course you cannot understand it because you were not there. I love this joke because what God cannot understand is not suffering, but how you can make joke of it. That's the dimension of our freedom, the virtual dimension and so on and so on. Now really to conclude because of now I prove it to you, look look it's I'm at the end yeah yeah. Because of this I claim that a certain dimension which will it's not simply that a subject will survive. No in singularity we will be deprived, I speculate here, of our wealth of inner life. If I think about something, sexual dreams whatever and they can be shared by the machine by the others, of course I'm in some sense deprived even of my inner life. But I remain as a pure subject, as a punctual Cartesian Cogito who is sustained by this, the unconscious other virtual dimension. So my claim is this one: what will happen, it's an speculation which it will be possible to empirically verify it if something like singularity will happen, that I think that singularity will be neither this Ray Kurzweil style blissful immersion floating freely in a collective spiritual space, nor will it be this dehumanized nightmare, but it will be something much more interesting with great potentials for new forms of pain and horror but nonetheless maybe offering a new hope. We will be radically divided, more than now. Now we experience our division as the division between our inner life, I have all my dreams and so on, and reality out there. Or even the reality of others, the opacity of others. What I think will occur there is that the gap, the most radical gap will be within me as a subject. I will everything will be taken from me even my dreams of which I am aware of, but I will not be that. I will maintain a minimal pure distance. And I think that here we shouldn't lose our nerves. This minimal distance will be at the same time maybe a resort of new creativity of new freedom. Thanks very much for your patience. Thank you. Thank you. We go there. Yeah yeah. I suspect you still want me up there with the hope that I will fall down, slip and fall down or what. Okay, thanks. No, it's okay, thank you. Yeah yeah, thank you very much. Oh my god, okay I'm really in an anxiety a little bit. Okay. Okay. Thank you very much Slavoj. Now he is my good friend, a better Stalinist than me. Because if you did you notice how he said pre-selected or how organized... Well no no, I'll explain better. No free debate, you know like I know when I was young member of a Communist Party in Slovenia we had this free youth communist meetings where the boss at the beginning, free debate, distributed the questions. Well that's why but you're giving it away too much. You're following it here I see. Well I was going to I was going to say that you were like my obstacle paradoxically so because on the one hand I got the most pleasure from being able to tell you no, get off the stage, get off the stage, so as long as you're there, but at the same time so far as you're there I don't have to come to the stage and speak so that was my... That was mine. Yes. Okay. So for the Q&A we have yes, this is our curated Q&A. So we have students who will be asking Slavoj questions and engage in dialogue. Our first question is from Fatima Shaer. Yes I'm listening I'm listening. Yes, Fatima please. I'm very sorry but do people hear you? Could you come either come here or my god, I am ready to bring this to you. No because I'm serious. Should I? Please I shout enough. Oh, oh, I got there. Please, yeah. Oh, okay. Hello. Ah now it's okay, thanks. Yeah. Thank you for being here Mr. Žižek. So my first question is this: given your critique of post-humanism and its relationship to capitalism, do you see your work as part of the humanistic tradition? Sorry do I see my... Part of the humanistic tradition? No. Ah no sorry, please finish your question I'm very sorry please. Okay. Is this it? I thought I interrupted you. Well I was going to say and if so, do you nevertheless have criticism of humanism and its legacies, particularly within the university? I'm done. That's the book. That was the question. Ah that's it. Okay okay, thanks. So how how do you see your work in light of the humanist tradition? Maybe I'm distorted by my youthful experience but the great news when I was young was this great wave of French thought, Lacan, Althusser, anti-humanism and so on and so on. So I think that and I connect this with the legacy of German idealism where also, you know what is so interesting? Till German idealism the metaphor for human spirit was light. We live in a universe where all around there are threats but we are the light of reason and even if we are threatened from within from within us, it's the dark side of us and so on all those misleading Freudian metaphors, you know that our ego is like a tip of the iceberg and all the unconscious beneath water. I think that I follow here the line from medieval mystics to German idealism and so on where on the contrary the metaphor for the pure subject is the mystical word is you must know the term night of the world. Or as Hegel would have put it this it's the night, it's the radical darkness of self-destructive negativity. And this I think cannot be captured with the term humanism. Humanism is at that's to go to a more general dimension and going back to sexuality. You know we of course codify sexuality through all forms, manners, rules. But what this codification, cultivation tries to control is not nature. It's already some unnatural break from disruption of nature. Even in literature we find this as for example think about the myth of Tristan and Isolde. It's this deadly absolute passion. And Freudian name for this is death drive. Which is very paradoxical again, Freud himself was confused here. Freudian death drive is not oh I want to die, I want to disappear. I claim that it can be shown in a precise way that Freud's death drive is paradoxically his name for immortality. What Freud means by death drive is basically the experience of being living a living death. Something that persists beyond life and death. Something that is neither death than alive. And I think subjectivity, modern Cartesian subjectivity at its most basic is this. Night it's we live in so far as we are human subject in the days of the living death, not and so on. So in this that's all I can do now but it was a very precise question thank you. These are just some of the reasons why I don't inscribe myself into the humanist tradition. So if I could just press you for that on that for a second. So I think some of us here are curious to know more about how you position yourself, in light of not characterizing yourself in the humanist tradition, how you see yourself in light of the more recent popularity of post-humanist theory, new materialisms, object-oriented ontology... Oh, this is a nice problem. Because I am of course, although I appreciate some of them they are not stupid by far not but I think that precisely and that's my big I had a couple of debates with the new star of this orientation Graham Harman and so on. They are for me way too in some sense even if they are against this centered on subjectivity humanism, but nonetheless I think this dimension that I was talking about, the dimension of this radical negativity, zero potential destruction death drive disappears there. Their world is a world of objects. So my when I had the debate with Graham Harman, and he claims subject is just one among objects, maybe more powerful but nonetheless and so on, I claim no, subject is not this. And it's not that I think subject is an all-powerful entity mega object, no. Subject is some almost nothing, a vanishing entity, pure appearance and so on, but it's not subject is not an object like others. And this is why also the Freudian unconscious is not an objective determination of my being. So but I've written a lot about it at this settling the accounts with with this new object-oriented ontology and so on and so on. You know because I think that I'm here I agree with them with object-oriented ontologists that we should somehow get over the standard Kantian transcendental horizon. But for me what they do is simply a massive return to old to old realist ontology. And for me this is way too arrogant. I'm not ready to do that step. Just want to press you just a little bit more in in that regard before we get to the next question. Yeah. But so even thinking not just with the new materialisms and object-oriented ontology but even thinking the work in post-humanism, so thinking about the category of the human today in light of the the historical understanding of those who are excluded from the position of human, so not just human post-human but non-human. So I'm thinking in terms of something like the post-colonial how to reclaim the category of the human in light of this type of historicity, even in the context of contemporary... Yeah. I will now I always when I'm approached this one way, I'm not saying you are at this level but usually when I'm getting this question the implication is but isn't for European humanists, isn't their notion of humanity secretly Eurocentric and so on, no? So but but this is my conflict with among others things with one with whom I have good relations personally but not theoretically, Judith Butler. I think she is way too much a traditional liberal for me. Her vision is nonetheless we should expand our scope to include others. Her worry is always but what about those who are excluded and so on and so on. And so and that's her problem with universalism, how to get a true universality which will not be exclusive. Okay my brutal answer, I don't have time to develop it now, is that every universality is exclusive and that's what's good about it. You know? And but but another point is that's why I always here like to mention one of my authentic heroes Malcolm X. You know for which universality I am? Not for this humanist all-inclusive, you know. Ah I will give you I think a good example here so that I don't get lost in another minutes. I might take you off soon. Yeah yeah yeah. Ah no, you know what I proposed him, the only way to control me. Did you see it's an old classic it's not even a very good movie, did you see James Bond Goldfinger? You remember that scene when Goldfinger has that car with the red button? You press the button
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and maybe you need this when you direct talk with me. No. You
and maybe you need this when you direct talk with me. No. You
Slavoj Žižek
know LGBTQ+. I fully support them, the problems I have is when the movement makes in part of its ideology too much for what I considered identity political turn. Like you know so the very expression LGBTQ or whatever plus. It's crucial, I'm selling saying this as a Hegelian
know LGBTQ+. I fully support them, the problems I have is when the movement makes in part of its ideology too much for what I considered identity political turn. Like you know so the very expression LGBTQ or whatever plus. It's crucial, I'm selling saying this as a Hegelian
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now, no, to move with
now, no, to move with
Slavoj Žižek
this plus from the empirical to the more speculative level. The empirical level is the way this plus is usually conceptualized. The idea is this one: we should avoid just we should escape this binary logic: there are only two real sexes masculine feminine, we should admit that there is a plurality of gender or sex whatever identities and so on. And in the typical liberal way they worry then oh my god, we composed a list, you had list bigender, trigender, asexual, butch whatever and so on, but they worry what if another guy comes
this plus from the empirical to the more speculative level. The empirical level is the way this plus is usually conceptualized. The idea is this one: we should avoid just we should escape this binary logic: there are only two real sexes masculine feminine, we should admit that there is a plurality of gender or sex whatever identities and so on. And in the typical liberal way they worry then oh my god, we composed a list, you had list bigender, trigender, asexual, butch whatever and so on, but they worry what if another guy comes
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and says I don't recognize myself in any of those lists. So plus means and so on, let's keep the space open for all the others. My Hegelian you can imagine it's very simple solution is: no, you can be directly a plus. Plus and plus the identity of human subjectivity at its most radical is that of a plus. You can exist as a plus which means precisely at a distance from identity, doubting your identity. And in a further speculation, I don't have the time to go into it now, I would have said that this is why for Lacan the basic form or the basic form
and says I don't recognize myself in any of those lists. So plus means and so on, let's keep the space open for all the others. My Hegelian you can imagine it's very simple solution is: no, you can be directly a plus. Plus and plus the identity of human subjectivity at its most radical is that of a plus. You can exist as a plus which means precisely at a distance from identity, doubting your identity. And in a further speculation, I don't have the time to go into it now, I would have said that this is why for Lacan the basic form or the basic form
Slavoj Žižek
shape
shape
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of human subjectivity
of human subjectivity
Slavoj Žižek
is feminine and hysterical. For a true Freudians the term hysteria is something the highest you can say about a person.
is feminine and hysterical. For a true Freudians the term hysteria is something the highest you can say about a person.
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Lacan
Lacan
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is clear here: he says
is clear here: he says
Slavoj Žižek
university discourse it's established knowledge, inventions happen
university discourse it's established knowledge, inventions happen
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at the level of hysteria. Hysteria is for me elementary the most elementary form of the critique of ideology. Hysteria means what's the hysterical question? It is: you, figure of master, usually male master, you want to fixate
at the level of hysteria. Hysteria is for me elementary the most elementary form of the critique of ideology. Hysteria means what's the hysterical question? It is: you, figure of master, usually male master, you want to fixate
Slavoj Žižek
me onto some identity. You are my wife, a whore, a mother, whatever. The hysterical
me onto some identity. You are my wife, a whore, a mother, whatever. The hysterical
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question is:
question is:
Slavoj Žižek
why am I what you are claiming that I am? This questioning the ideology
why am I what you are claiming that I am? This questioning the ideology
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the identity imposed by imposed by ideology. And this brings me back to Malcolm X. That's how I think one should read his X. It's not this
the identity imposed by imposed by ideology. And this brings me back to Malcolm X. That's how I think one should read his X. It's not this
Slavoj Žižek
longing for lost roots oh let's go back to Africa and found our identity. No, I read him, he is at least at in his great moments
longing for lost roots oh let's go back to Africa and found our identity. No, I read him, he is at least at in his great moments
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Malcolm X is fully aware he is not a partisan of
Malcolm X is fully aware he is not a partisan of
Slavoj Žižek
new creative black identity. No, he is in search of a new universality. He says in an ingenious way that the fact that blacks were brutally deprived of their particular roots is at the same time the greatest chance of them. It's a space to create new universality, new freedom. His plan is not this typical liberal multiculturalist one, yeah we shouldn't oppress the blacks, they should also be allowed their particular identity. No thanks, they should be allowed also to participate in our universality. Because you know that's the trick with multiculturalists. They like to white liberal multiculturalists, they like to humiliate themselves. It's a permanent joke with them, you know like oh we are guilty of everything, we white male, we we everything that happens in the third world, for example I remember years ago or when the Rwanda genocide, all my left liberal friends said yes of course we it's a consequence of neo-colonialism. And a black friend of mine from there, he's a genius, he he exploded back he said how can you be so racist that you even allow us to be authentically evil? You really think that we are innocent children and only you can make us evil and so on. So I think that I believe in I'm a universalist. And I think this is a pseudo problem, you know this multicultural liberal problem, how we let's say you are, but you are not, you are a Chinese, I am a Latino American. When we talk, how do we know that we mean the same thing when we talk about art, state and so on and so on. The world market has solved this. It doesn't matter if we don't think in the same terms. Universality exists in the world market, an actual universality. When we make a deal, I mean it doesn't matter what you think what I think, it functions. Capitalism is enacted universality. But I'm getting lost, sorry yeah. No no, there's a few things that I'm going to press you on maybe afterwards but I do want to get to our next question. So our next question comes from Luke Mulessan. There's Luke there, okay. Hi. Um so first off I would like to thank you. Oh my god I can hear how you are behind your back sharpening your knife when you begin in this kind of way, you know as always but please go on. Um for your lecture today. Um so my question is one that I think rather timely given the big debate tomorrow. Um so it seems to me that the allure of figures like Jordan Peterson resides
new creative black identity. No, he is in search of a new universality. He says in an ingenious way that the fact that blacks were brutally deprived of their particular roots is at the same time the greatest chance of them. It's a space to create new universality, new freedom. His plan is not this typical liberal multiculturalist one, yeah we shouldn't oppress the blacks, they should also be allowed their particular identity. No thanks, they should be allowed also to participate in our universality. Because you know that's the trick with multiculturalists. They like to white liberal multiculturalists, they like to humiliate themselves. It's a permanent joke with them, you know like oh we are guilty of everything, we white male, we we everything that happens in the third world, for example I remember years ago or when the Rwanda genocide, all my left liberal friends said yes of course we it's a consequence of neo-colonialism. And a black friend of mine from there, he's a genius, he he exploded back he said how can you be so racist that you even allow us to be authentically evil? You really think that we are innocent children and only you can make us evil and so on. So I think that I believe in I'm a universalist. And I think this is a pseudo problem, you know this multicultural liberal problem, how we let's say you are, but you are not, you are a Chinese, I am a Latino American. When we talk, how do we know that we mean the same thing when we talk about art, state and so on and so on. The world market has solved this. It doesn't matter if we don't think in the same terms. Universality exists in the world market, an actual universality. When we make a deal, I mean it doesn't matter what you think what I think, it functions. Capitalism is enacted universality. But I'm getting lost, sorry yeah. No no, there's a few things that I'm going to press you on maybe afterwards but I do want to get to our next question. So our next question comes from Luke Mulessan. There's Luke there, okay. Hi. Um so first off I would like to thank you. Oh my god I can hear how you are behind your back sharpening your knife when you begin in this kind of way, you know as always but please go on. Um for your lecture today. Um so my question is one that I think rather timely given the big debate tomorrow. Um so it seems to me that the allure of figures like Jordan Peterson resides
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chiefly in their ability to occupy the void left by what you have termed uh the demise of symbolic efficiency, that is the crisis at the level of collective meaning that characterizes postmodernity. They do so by providing a set of coordinates within which individuals can make sense of as well as act upon the realities. Do you believe that the left can learn anything
chiefly in their ability to occupy the void left by what you have termed uh the demise of symbolic efficiency, that is the crisis at the level of collective meaning that characterizes postmodernity. They do so by providing a set of coordinates within which individuals can make sense of as well as act upon the realities. Do you believe that the left can learn anything
Slavoj Žižek
from the successes of such figures? Yes
from the successes of such figures? Yes
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it's of course
it's of course
Slavoj Žižek
Jordan Peterson is my opponent but I will not say maybe anything original if I say this. But you know it's the same as with Donald Trump. I'm deeply suspicious of this hatred but at the same time fascination with Donald Trump. You know all left liberals say let's now forget about old hatreds, we have a fascist enemy there. In some sense it's true, but at the same time my god we should begin with self-criticism. How what was wrong with our liberal consensus that it disintegrated and opened up the space for this new right-wing populism and so on and so on. Here maybe I have one respectful disagreement with Jordan Peterson in so far he's a right-winger, but listen, he attacks something that he calls postmodern neo-Marxism. I don't see, I know what he empirically means: all this politically correct, full of resentment, the but the term is for me such an obvious nonsense. If you mean by postmodernism uh this historicist relativism, no longer taking old values seriously, just cynically playing with it, then Donald Trump is the ultimate postmodern president. It's an insult. I mean compare as characters Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is an old-fashioned moralist and so on. Donald Trump is an is an obscene postmodern abomination and so on and so on. Also you know Jordan Peterson in some sense I appreciate his work. You know he is at least in contrast to many lazy leftists really, although I don't know how much he's really doing it, really uh working with people as a clinician. This is not to make
Jordan Peterson is my opponent but I will not say maybe anything original if I say this. But you know it's the same as with Donald Trump. I'm deeply suspicious of this hatred but at the same time fascination with Donald Trump. You know all left liberals say let's now forget about old hatreds, we have a fascist enemy there. In some sense it's true, but at the same time my god we should begin with self-criticism. How what was wrong with our liberal consensus that it disintegrated and opened up the space for this new right-wing populism and so on and so on. Here maybe I have one respectful disagreement with Jordan Peterson in so far he's a right-winger, but listen, he attacks something that he calls postmodern neo-Marxism. I don't see, I know what he empirically means: all this politically correct, full of resentment, the but the term is for me such an obvious nonsense. If you mean by postmodernism uh this historicist relativism, no longer taking old values seriously, just cynically playing with it, then Donald Trump is the ultimate postmodern president. It's an insult. I mean compare as characters Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is an old-fashioned moralist and so on. Donald Trump is an is an obscene postmodern abomination and so on and so on. Also you know Jordan Peterson in some sense I appreciate his work. You know he is at least in contrast to many lazy leftists really, although I don't know how much he's really doing it, really uh working with people as a clinician. This is not to make
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fun of. So again here I appreciate Jordan Peterson. But I wouldn't but he says two things. First he buys this into this topic of we need some transcendent values, higher cause. I would say yes, but we live in a modern era where first you cannot like the definition of modernity with Kant and so on is that you cannot directly refer to some transcendent value system. We are responsible for it. We you cannot say I follow this because it's tradition. That's the definition of modernity. You have to reason, you have to ground it. Second problem I have with him. When he emphasizes this
fun of. So again here I appreciate Jordan Peterson. But I wouldn't but he says two things. First he buys this into this topic of we need some transcendent values, higher cause. I would say yes, but we live in a modern era where first you cannot like the definition of modernity with Kant and so on is that you cannot directly refer to some transcendent value system. We are responsible for it. We you cannot say I follow this because it's tradition. That's the definition of modernity. You have to reason, you have to ground it. Second problem I have with him. When he emphasizes this
Slavoj Žižek
moment that against the hedonist civilization and so on we need myth, narratives, consistent stories. Yes but to say this is not enough for me. Stories are ideology. And uh okay speaking about stories just a brief point. Hitler was one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century. What did he do? Germany in the twenties 1920s total ideological confusion, people well at a loss, economic crisis, what they perceived as moral degradation, what's going on. Hitler provided a perfect simple story: it's all the Jewish plot. And all of a sudden ordinary Germans lived in a meaningful universe. Second problem for me with Peterson is is is uh is uh you know but that's I will just hint it not to talk too much. It's his admiration of Dostoevsky, you know the line Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn. How can he take seriously that total bullshit of Dostoevsky which is if there is no God then everything is permitted. If today's experience shows anything is that the exact opposite is true. If there is a God for you in the fundamentalist way so that you perceive yourself as the willing instrument, executor of God's will, then everything is permitted to you. I so again I just at this level I would I would I would complicate I would complicate things. Another difference with him is that I don't think that today the problem of our societies, even if you accept this conservative vision moral values are disintegrating, we live in a hedonist society, no we don't. We live in a society where all the inner tensions and of of hedonist ethics of happiness exploded. The reason I don't totally trust political correctness is that it often falls into the trap of resentment, which means that you know the logic of resentment is you know a truly I'll put it like this: we learned from already great German idealists from Freud and so on that Schelling puts it wonderfully where he says that true evil is more spiritual than goodness. Goodness always has a certain openness towards naivety, nature and so on. True evil is when destroying your opponent, hurting him makes means to you more than your own happiness. Evil is not egotism. Egotism is: I hate you let's take with my I hate you so much that I'm ready to suffer only if I know that you will suffer more. You know we Slovenians identify as misers and we have one beautiful anecdote. A divine almighty person approaches a Slovenian farmer and tells him: I will do to you whatever you want but be careful I will do twice the same to your neighbor. You know the Slovenian farmer answers immediately: fine, take one of my eyes. So you know and that that li this is the form of evil. It's important to know so again hedonism is not evil. What we live today is the era where again this inner tension of hedonism and this is why for me as a Freudian it's not difficult to explain all the paradoxes. Officially we live in a permissive hedonist society. But then at the same time we live in a society where okay the motto is enjoy, realize your potentials, but then it's so hyper-regulated with all politically correct rules and so on and so on. So no wonder that the more our society is permissive, more there is impotence and frigidity and so on and so on. So you see we just have to open ourselves to all these paradoxes and maybe it's much more complex. My difference from Peterson is rather that I think he appears to me again a little bit too naive conservative. I think that not it's not only that we cannot return to some old stable values is that if you do it you become a postmodern clown. So my reproach to today's fundamentalists it's not you are too fundamentalist. It's that if you look at the form how they act, it's a big postmodern ego trip. They are not really what they claim to be. I'm not measuring them by my open democratic standards, I'm measuring them by their own performance, how they act but maybe I should stop I talk too much. Well just on that note but do you think that so given... You always have to say something also. Well I have to, that's... I'm here to to react. No but given the the openness of permissiveness or the apparent openness of permissiveness and given the logic of the obstacle as the only possibility for enjoyment, is there something about the return of a figure like you know a very much a father type figure, you know clean your room or as the obstacle to permit that kind of enjoyment? Oh, that's also a big... Ah no no no no. This is a very good point I'm writing about it now. Because there is this tendency with some conservative Lacanians, not so much in United States as in France and so on, where they say the disintegration of Oedipus complex was the big catastrophe, the only way to return to moral stability of our life is bring back Oedipal authority and so on and so on. I don't think this can be done and I'm writing about this now. My formula is you know which one? The true read it please it's for me the ultimate Greek tragedy. Forget about Antigone, Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus. He is my hero. He is like beyond Oedipus, you know. He has seen it all and but he is not this this is the big surprise. Oedipus at Colonus after when he wanders around blind, he is not this figure of wisdom, resigned. He is like a spoiled child extremely demanding and so on. Full of revenge and
moment that against the hedonist civilization and so on we need myth, narratives, consistent stories. Yes but to say this is not enough for me. Stories are ideology. And uh okay speaking about stories just a brief point. Hitler was one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century. What did he do? Germany in the twenties 1920s total ideological confusion, people well at a loss, economic crisis, what they perceived as moral degradation, what's going on. Hitler provided a perfect simple story: it's all the Jewish plot. And all of a sudden ordinary Germans lived in a meaningful universe. Second problem for me with Peterson is is is uh is uh you know but that's I will just hint it not to talk too much. It's his admiration of Dostoevsky, you know the line Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn. How can he take seriously that total bullshit of Dostoevsky which is if there is no God then everything is permitted. If today's experience shows anything is that the exact opposite is true. If there is a God for you in the fundamentalist way so that you perceive yourself as the willing instrument, executor of God's will, then everything is permitted to you. I so again I just at this level I would I would I would complicate I would complicate things. Another difference with him is that I don't think that today the problem of our societies, even if you accept this conservative vision moral values are disintegrating, we live in a hedonist society, no we don't. We live in a society where all the inner tensions and of of hedonist ethics of happiness exploded. The reason I don't totally trust political correctness is that it often falls into the trap of resentment, which means that you know the logic of resentment is you know a truly I'll put it like this: we learned from already great German idealists from Freud and so on that Schelling puts it wonderfully where he says that true evil is more spiritual than goodness. Goodness always has a certain openness towards naivety, nature and so on. True evil is when destroying your opponent, hurting him makes means to you more than your own happiness. Evil is not egotism. Egotism is: I hate you let's take with my I hate you so much that I'm ready to suffer only if I know that you will suffer more. You know we Slovenians identify as misers and we have one beautiful anecdote. A divine almighty person approaches a Slovenian farmer and tells him: I will do to you whatever you want but be careful I will do twice the same to your neighbor. You know the Slovenian farmer answers immediately: fine, take one of my eyes. So you know and that that li this is the form of evil. It's important to know so again hedonism is not evil. What we live today is the era where again this inner tension of hedonism and this is why for me as a Freudian it's not difficult to explain all the paradoxes. Officially we live in a permissive hedonist society. But then at the same time we live in a society where okay the motto is enjoy, realize your potentials, but then it's so hyper-regulated with all politically correct rules and so on and so on. So no wonder that the more our society is permissive, more there is impotence and frigidity and so on and so on. So you see we just have to open ourselves to all these paradoxes and maybe it's much more complex. My difference from Peterson is rather that I think he appears to me again a little bit too naive conservative. I think that not it's not only that we cannot return to some old stable values is that if you do it you become a postmodern clown. So my reproach to today's fundamentalists it's not you are too fundamentalist. It's that if you look at the form how they act, it's a big postmodern ego trip. They are not really what they claim to be. I'm not measuring them by my open democratic standards, I'm measuring them by their own performance, how they act but maybe I should stop I talk too much. Well just on that note but do you think that so given... You always have to say something also. Well I have to, that's... I'm here to to react. No but given the the openness of permissiveness or the apparent openness of permissiveness and given the logic of the obstacle as the only possibility for enjoyment, is there something about the return of a figure like you know a very much a father type figure, you know clean your room or as the obstacle to permit that kind of enjoyment? Oh, that's also a big... Ah no no no no. This is a very good point I'm writing about it now. Because there is this tendency with some conservative Lacanians, not so much in United States as in France and so on, where they say the disintegration of Oedipus complex was the big catastrophe, the only way to return to moral stability of our life is bring back Oedipal authority and so on and so on. I don't think this can be done and I'm writing about this now. My formula is you know which one? The true read it please it's for me the ultimate Greek tragedy. Forget about Antigone, Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus. He is my hero. He is like beyond Oedipus, you know. He has seen it all and but he is not this this is the big surprise. Oedipus at Colonus after when he wanders around blind, he is not this figure of wisdom, resigned. He is like a spoiled child extremely demanding and so on. Full of revenge and
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so on. His problem is that he knows the prediction that the place where he will die is a place the city where he will die will succeed, he will bring
so on. His problem is that he knows the prediction that the place where he will die is a place the city where he will die will succeed, he will bring
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great wealth, happiness, power to that city. So his whole
great wealth, happiness, power to that city. So his whole
Slavoj Žižek
point is how to hurt his own city Thebes, how to how in a spectacular way to sell his death. No that's so beautiful he his
point is how to hurt his own city Thebes, how to how in a spectacular way to sell his death. No that's so beautiful he his
unknown
point is precisely the Lacanian one. I no even if I'm blind and dying I don't compromise my desire. I insist. He is the example of the one who has seen it all beyond all obstacles and it's so typical how people mystify him. For example, you know that wisdom which is usually quoted as the wisdom of Oedipus at Colonus, that moaning you know like the greatest luck is not to have been born at all. It's not Oedipus who says it is the chorus and Oedipus mocks it then and so on. You know incidentally I proposed they didn't like it to an pro-abortion group in Slovenia to use this as
point is precisely the Lacanian one. I no even if I'm blind and dying I don't compromise my desire. I insist. He is the example of the one who has seen it all beyond all obstacles and it's so typical how people mystify him. For example, you know that wisdom which is usually quoted as the wisdom of Oedipus at Colonus, that moaning you know like the greatest luck is not to have been born at all. It's not Oedipus who says it is the chorus and Oedipus mocks it then and so on. You know incidentally I proposed they didn't like it to an pro-abortion group in Slovenia to use this as
Slavoj Žižek
the motto, you know like the greatest luck is not to be born and we can help your child to achieve this goal or whatever. Nobody liked it. Neither conservatives nor... To amuse you I had another just allow me this obscene detour, dirty story... You know we have also these anti-smoking campaigns. I proposed to a friend of mine who worked in Slovenia at the publicity agency they were hired to do some stuff against smoking, you know. Okay first trigger warning there is an obscenity. And then uh uh okay it works only in our language we don't use this term, you know with us smoking, like I'll smoke yours, it's also a gay and heterosexual term for fellatio. You know. So my idea was: do a propaganda like instead of all those you know livers with cancer and so on, put on the cigarette a picture of a guy or a lady passionately giving fellatio and then in the publicity you have a doctor explaining: look, by smoking a cigarette you get just this cancerous stuff. By smoking a prick you get all the vitamins and so on and so on. Nobody liked this. Nobody liked this I don't know in what world we live. All right, I don't know in what... I hate to kill a good time but uh we have next question. from Quinn McNeil. Sorry. Uh yeah sorry sorry. Good evening. Yeah. Um so as you said in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, when capitalism experiences a crisis today's radical left finds itself unable to take advantage. You have stated that the immediate effect of a crisis of confidence in the capitalist system and its leadership will not necessarily lead to emancipatory politics. When faced with a crisis you say the capitalist system's default response is to employ a back-to-basics approach and this strategy sees the ruling ideology and its leaders blame scapegoats for its crisis instead of assigning the blame where it rightly belongs, on the shoulders of capitalists. You stated in the book this approach leads to racist populism, greater class division and increasing poverty. You've also indicated that the basic insight of the radical left is that although crises are painful and dangerous, they are unavoidable and that they are the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won. So my question is, if the radical left is ever to be truly effective, how does it go about creating the necessary discursive space to ensure its message has a chance of becoming an acceptable sensible and viable alternative to the capitalist system? It's a very precise question I'm grateful for it and I'm too old and tired to just be bluffing and I admit it I don't see a clear answer. That's why the left is today so moralist. Like you know many people who are now in United States and I support them of course democratic socialists and so on. And when I talk with them I ask them okay, what do you want? What do you really want? How to move outside capitalism? Is it nationalization, state takes over? Is it some kind of communal regulation of economy? How it will be done? And I never get a clear answer. Usually they squeeze out by saying something like oh now we have to fight capitalism we'll see later when we will come to that point or some or they they cling to some vague local pre- non-representative democracy dream. You know small communities, villages where people debate decide everything. And here I explode. I think that that this is the description of a hell for me. Sorry, I wouldn't like to live in a small community where every afternoon I will have I would have to debate how we organize children kindergarten, how we distribute water. I think that our the formula of the left should be uh moderate reasonable alienation. I want some efficient anonymous machine which somehow in a reasonable way state machine whatever you want takes care of it so that I can enjoy my isolated life. Even at the level of multiculturalism. I hate this liberal pressure, you know, we have to understand each other. Why? There are many people whom I'm not interested in understanding them and so on, you know. For example I and furthermore how can we understand each other when we don't even understand ourselves and so on. I mean it doesn't I think that isn't a true overcoming of racism not this pressure understand understand each other but rather tolerate opacity, discretion. Like my ideal would have been to live in a big apartment block a small apartment there where perfect, one of my neighbors is Native American, another black, a Chinese, a an Arab, whatever you want. And we politely ignore each other. In a very respectful way, maybe miracles happen. I'm always open to them. With some of them I become really friendly and so on. But uh I'm deeply suspicious of this pressure of we have to understand each other especially when this pressure is linked to another supreme stupidity, which means politically correct wisdom, which goes something on something like this, I quote it in one of my books I think Violence, an enemy is just somebody whose story you didn't hear, we were not ready... I know what's the humanist point, we fetishize the enemy we are not ready to hear his side of the story. But this procedure clearly has a limit. Would you say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to his story? No, the more you listen to his story the more you see that he really is your enemy and so on. We have to accept this painful fact, there are enemies. And so again I'm here and yes back to your question. Another point, the situation if anything today I don't know how it is here with you, Trump talks a lot about it but didn't do it a lot, the tragedy in Europe is that some populist right-wingers where they are in power even go so far as to enact measures that no social democracy dares to do today. In Poland, this Justice and Law led by Kaczyński, the arch-conservative
the motto, you know like the greatest luck is not to be born and we can help your child to achieve this goal or whatever. Nobody liked it. Neither conservatives nor... To amuse you I had another just allow me this obscene detour, dirty story... You know we have also these anti-smoking campaigns. I proposed to a friend of mine who worked in Slovenia at the publicity agency they were hired to do some stuff against smoking, you know. Okay first trigger warning there is an obscenity. And then uh uh okay it works only in our language we don't use this term, you know with us smoking, like I'll smoke yours, it's also a gay and heterosexual term for fellatio. You know. So my idea was: do a propaganda like instead of all those you know livers with cancer and so on, put on the cigarette a picture of a guy or a lady passionately giving fellatio and then in the publicity you have a doctor explaining: look, by smoking a cigarette you get just this cancerous stuff. By smoking a prick you get all the vitamins and so on and so on. Nobody liked this. Nobody liked this I don't know in what world we live. All right, I don't know in what... I hate to kill a good time but uh we have next question. from Quinn McNeil. Sorry. Uh yeah sorry sorry. Good evening. Yeah. Um so as you said in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, when capitalism experiences a crisis today's radical left finds itself unable to take advantage. You have stated that the immediate effect of a crisis of confidence in the capitalist system and its leadership will not necessarily lead to emancipatory politics. When faced with a crisis you say the capitalist system's default response is to employ a back-to-basics approach and this strategy sees the ruling ideology and its leaders blame scapegoats for its crisis instead of assigning the blame where it rightly belongs, on the shoulders of capitalists. You stated in the book this approach leads to racist populism, greater class division and increasing poverty. You've also indicated that the basic insight of the radical left is that although crises are painful and dangerous, they are unavoidable and that they are the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won. So my question is, if the radical left is ever to be truly effective, how does it go about creating the necessary discursive space to ensure its message has a chance of becoming an acceptable sensible and viable alternative to the capitalist system? It's a very precise question I'm grateful for it and I'm too old and tired to just be bluffing and I admit it I don't see a clear answer. That's why the left is today so moralist. Like you know many people who are now in United States and I support them of course democratic socialists and so on. And when I talk with them I ask them okay, what do you want? What do you really want? How to move outside capitalism? Is it nationalization, state takes over? Is it some kind of communal regulation of economy? How it will be done? And I never get a clear answer. Usually they squeeze out by saying something like oh now we have to fight capitalism we'll see later when we will come to that point or some or they they cling to some vague local pre- non-representative democracy dream. You know small communities, villages where people debate decide everything. And here I explode. I think that that this is the description of a hell for me. Sorry, I wouldn't like to live in a small community where every afternoon I will have I would have to debate how we organize children kindergarten, how we distribute water. I think that our the formula of the left should be uh moderate reasonable alienation. I want some efficient anonymous machine which somehow in a reasonable way state machine whatever you want takes care of it so that I can enjoy my isolated life. Even at the level of multiculturalism. I hate this liberal pressure, you know, we have to understand each other. Why? There are many people whom I'm not interested in understanding them and so on, you know. For example I and furthermore how can we understand each other when we don't even understand ourselves and so on. I mean it doesn't I think that isn't a true overcoming of racism not this pressure understand understand each other but rather tolerate opacity, discretion. Like my ideal would have been to live in a big apartment block a small apartment there where perfect, one of my neighbors is Native American, another black, a Chinese, a an Arab, whatever you want. And we politely ignore each other. In a very respectful way, maybe miracles happen. I'm always open to them. With some of them I become really friendly and so on. But uh I'm deeply suspicious of this pressure of we have to understand each other especially when this pressure is linked to another supreme stupidity, which means politically correct wisdom, which goes something on something like this, I quote it in one of my books I think Violence, an enemy is just somebody whose story you didn't hear, we were not ready... I know what's the humanist point, we fetishize the enemy we are not ready to hear his side of the story. But this procedure clearly has a limit. Would you say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to his story? No, the more you listen to his story the more you see that he really is your enemy and so on. We have to accept this painful fact, there are enemies. And so again I'm here and yes back to your question. Another point, the situation if anything today I don't know how it is here with you, Trump talks a lot about it but didn't do it a lot, the tragedy in Europe is that some populist right-wingers where they are in power even go so far as to enact measures that no social democracy dares to do today. In Poland, this Justice and Law led by Kaczyński, the arch-conservative
unknown
Catholic party, they are the ruling party,
Catholic party, they are the ruling party,
Slavoj Žižek
what they did a year ago approximately is
what they did a year ago approximately is
unknown
they lowered the retirement age, they organized better better better how do you call it, foundations stipends for students and so on, better health care and so on. Even in Italy, this disgusting populist right-wing coalition which rules now, they were the first big state
they lowered the retirement age, they organized better better better how do you call it, foundations stipends for students and so on, better health care and so on. Even in Italy, this disgusting populist right-wing coalition which rules now, they were the first big state
Slavoj Žižek
which introduced some kind of very modest but some kind of basic income and so on. So this is the tragedy of the left which you can see in United States when Bernie Sanders is now is now depicted as the crazy madman. Trump called him I think crazy Bernie and so on. But look at his concrete program. Measured by the standards of Europe half a century ago, it's a very modest social democracy. What he is preaching as a radical measure was half a century ago and this worked very well in Europe. This was the golden era of social democratic welfare state. So I'm not uh I'm not uh I don't see an easy solution here. I really think that the left today, that's the tragedy, the on the one hand we need something like, just to provoke people I still call it communism, to confront economic crisis, to confront the threat of this digital control, to confront this wild migrations and so on. We clearly need some kind of transnational regulation which is beyond the control of market forces and so on and so on. But how how to do it? Any ideas and so on. We need it but there is no formula. You know for me the true tragedy of Venezuela, yes they screwed it up now Maduro and so on, but I'm following there the situation for decades. Already under Chávez, he desperately experimented with all possible forms, giving a factory to the workers to run it or not just nationalization, he played all possible games. It didn't work. I got this from my leftist friends who are doing something wonderful very evil. When there were big news in the newspapers that factory is given to the workers to be run by them, he just noticed it and then a year later he went to that factory you know and the story in great majority of cases is is is a failure. Now a liberal centrist would have told me: so what's the point, drop your dreams accept liberal capitalism as nonetheless Fukuyama position the best that we have. I think this will not work. I'm more an apocalyptic catastrophes here. I think ecologically and so on we are approaching a zero point. So to cut a long story short I'm not a Marxist determinist, I don't think a new working class authentic proletariat will emerge as a subject. Maybe, I'm pretty desperate, maybe we are simply approaching a catastrophe. Okay the catastrophe for you is your time is done for that one. Oh
which introduced some kind of very modest but some kind of basic income and so on. So this is the tragedy of the left which you can see in United States when Bernie Sanders is now is now depicted as the crazy madman. Trump called him I think crazy Bernie and so on. But look at his concrete program. Measured by the standards of Europe half a century ago, it's a very modest social democracy. What he is preaching as a radical measure was half a century ago and this worked very well in Europe. This was the golden era of social democratic welfare state. So I'm not uh I'm not uh I don't see an easy solution here. I really think that the left today, that's the tragedy, the on the one hand we need something like, just to provoke people I still call it communism, to confront economic crisis, to confront the threat of this digital control, to confront this wild migrations and so on. We clearly need some kind of transnational regulation which is beyond the control of market forces and so on and so on. But how how to do it? Any ideas and so on. We need it but there is no formula. You know for me the true tragedy of Venezuela, yes they screwed it up now Maduro and so on, but I'm following there the situation for decades. Already under Chávez, he desperately experimented with all possible forms, giving a factory to the workers to run it or not just nationalization, he played all possible games. It didn't work. I got this from my leftist friends who are doing something wonderful very evil. When there were big news in the newspapers that factory is given to the workers to be run by them, he just noticed it and then a year later he went to that factory you know and the story in great majority of cases is is is a failure. Now a liberal centrist would have told me: so what's the point, drop your dreams accept liberal capitalism as nonetheless Fukuyama position the best that we have. I think this will not work. I'm more an apocalyptic catastrophes here. I think ecologically and so on we are approaching a zero point. So to cut a long story short I'm not a Marxist determinist, I don't think a new working class authentic proletariat will emerge as a subject. Maybe, I'm pretty desperate, maybe we are simply approaching a catastrophe. Okay the catastrophe for you is your time is done for that one. Oh
unknown
that's the best news, you know this if
that's the best news, you know this if
unknown
you are my true friend I love to play this dirty game my true friends are ready to play like when I'm tired of you and don't want to debate I like you to say your time is over and then I can play a hypocritical game with you, I would love to talk with you for hours but look he is the bad guy so okay please. All right, last question, last question from Conrad Vandenberg. Please. Yeah. Hi. Um so actually you were just talking about basic income briefly there and my question kind of feeds right into that. Um so over the past few years I feel like people have been talking about automation in the economy a lot and in the workplace, it seems like a lot of different industries are facing this problem and politicians seem like they're talking about it now recently, we're seeing campaigns in the states to um fix the automation problem uh with a basic income as a solution to that. I'm wondering uh if you think that those are viable solutions to that issue or if it they miss something about the connection between the human subject and labor and uh technology, things like that. Ah,
you are my true friend I love to play this dirty game my true friends are ready to play like when I'm tired of you and don't want to debate I like you to say your time is over and then I can play a hypocritical game with you, I would love to talk with you for hours but look he is the bad guy so okay please. All right, last question, last question from Conrad Vandenberg. Please. Yeah. Hi. Um so actually you were just talking about basic income briefly there and my question kind of feeds right into that. Um so over the past few years I feel like people have been talking about automation in the economy a lot and in the workplace, it seems like a lot of different industries are facing this problem and politicians seem like they're talking about it now recently, we're seeing campaigns in the states to um fix the automation problem uh with a basic income as a solution to that. I'm wondering uh if you think that those are viable solutions to that issue or if it they miss something about the connection between the human subject and labor and uh technology, things like that. Ah,
Slavoj Žižek
it's very nice question but a concrete question and first I have to admit that to give I simply don't know enough to give you a precise answer. What just seems to me a strange fact, an elementary observation, is how in a what I naively cling to as a rationally organized society, robotization, automation should have been great news. Like fine we will work less and so on. While for us it's usually perceived as horror, we will not have enough work and so on and so on. So so uh I don't think that although in principle I support basic income, but I don't think it's the solution. Basic income is really maybe it's a more intelligent efficient version of capitalism where the idea is this one: that if you take care of those who don't work through basic income, you can have a much more pure and tough competition and efficient capitalism for the rest. And uh because even how is he called? A Belgian guy called Parijs, something like this. The father of the idea of basic income. That's his notion. I read a text by him where he says: No, I'm not anti-capitalist, my idea is just how to render capitalism more stable and even more efficient. On the other hand you ask a good question: is this the solution or how and so on and so on. Maybe I am old idealist here, but it will sound horrible, but I still think, here I'm almost a leftist conservative in some sense, that to do some work is part of our personal dignity. It's the same as with the army. I'm deeply suspicious of the idea of abolishing military service. It sounds nice, but it really means professional armies will control us and so on and so on. I'm I'm for universal as long as we need it, universal military service. I am for this idea that okay now that would be my very brutal, you will not like it nobody likes it solution: yes basic income, but then you have to be at your disposal for some public work whatever. Why should you get it for free? It's not great work, hard work, but you should do something whatever, cleaning parks or whatever I don't care. Why not? I mean I again I claim I'm here an old European idealist. I claim doing something for you has also a great function of disciplining you and so on. Why not? I don't I am not one of those people who claim laziness is a virtue and so on and so on or happiness is a virtue. No, the pursuit of happiness is one of the most stupid ideas that I can imagine. Because if you analyze closely the idea of happiness it's something very self-contradictory because if you do an elementary analysis you discover when we dream about how we want something, we are secretly always aware a little bit afraid like, you know the old joke, the worst nightmare is to really get what you dream about it. So happiness is for me this state of a compromise where you want something but you take good care of not really getting it. For example, an example of happiness. In England in the last elections I have some friends who supported Jeremy Corbyn and when it was an electoral success for Labour Party, but not full success, they didn't form the government, they were relieved, you know. Oh my god, it would have been hell and so on. They were happy. We almost got there but not quite and so on and so on. In this sense I don't believe in happiness. To provoke my friends in the Czech Republic, you know the great you are too young to remember it but maybe you read about it, '68 the Communist Party leadership tried to open the situation and then Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries intervened and stifled this Prague Spring. To provoke them I said they saved your dream. They saved the memory of Prague Spring. Why? Let's imagine that Soviet Union would not intervene. In that case one of the two things would have happened I claim. Either there was no genuine chance for a third way authentic socialism there, either they would have joined the West, or at a certain point they would have to regain control like comrades you had your fine enough, that's the limit. And they would have gotten something like we had in Yugoslavia, a little bit more liberal communism but still you know who is the boss no. So what I'm saying is that precisely Soviet intervention sustained the dream oh my god without Soviet intervention we would have a really new democratic socialism and so on and so on. That's happiness for me. Happiness you know happiness is a very deeply conformist category in this sense. You don't really want to get it, it allows you to live and I'm here more maybe sincerely maybe I'm bluffing don't ask me
it's very nice question but a concrete question and first I have to admit that to give I simply don't know enough to give you a precise answer. What just seems to me a strange fact, an elementary observation, is how in a what I naively cling to as a rationally organized society, robotization, automation should have been great news. Like fine we will work less and so on. While for us it's usually perceived as horror, we will not have enough work and so on and so on. So so uh I don't think that although in principle I support basic income, but I don't think it's the solution. Basic income is really maybe it's a more intelligent efficient version of capitalism where the idea is this one: that if you take care of those who don't work through basic income, you can have a much more pure and tough competition and efficient capitalism for the rest. And uh because even how is he called? A Belgian guy called Parijs, something like this. The father of the idea of basic income. That's his notion. I read a text by him where he says: No, I'm not anti-capitalist, my idea is just how to render capitalism more stable and even more efficient. On the other hand you ask a good question: is this the solution or how and so on and so on. Maybe I am old idealist here, but it will sound horrible, but I still think, here I'm almost a leftist conservative in some sense, that to do some work is part of our personal dignity. It's the same as with the army. I'm deeply suspicious of the idea of abolishing military service. It sounds nice, but it really means professional armies will control us and so on and so on. I'm I'm for universal as long as we need it, universal military service. I am for this idea that okay now that would be my very brutal, you will not like it nobody likes it solution: yes basic income, but then you have to be at your disposal for some public work whatever. Why should you get it for free? It's not great work, hard work, but you should do something whatever, cleaning parks or whatever I don't care. Why not? I mean I again I claim I'm here an old European idealist. I claim doing something for you has also a great function of disciplining you and so on. Why not? I don't I am not one of those people who claim laziness is a virtue and so on and so on or happiness is a virtue. No, the pursuit of happiness is one of the most stupid ideas that I can imagine. Because if you analyze closely the idea of happiness it's something very self-contradictory because if you do an elementary analysis you discover when we dream about how we want something, we are secretly always aware a little bit afraid like, you know the old joke, the worst nightmare is to really get what you dream about it. So happiness is for me this state of a compromise where you want something but you take good care of not really getting it. For example, an example of happiness. In England in the last elections I have some friends who supported Jeremy Corbyn and when it was an electoral success for Labour Party, but not full success, they didn't form the government, they were relieved, you know. Oh my god, it would have been hell and so on. They were happy. We almost got there but not quite and so on and so on. In this sense I don't believe in happiness. To provoke my friends in the Czech Republic, you know the great you are too young to remember it but maybe you read about it, '68 the Communist Party leadership tried to open the situation and then Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries intervened and stifled this Prague Spring. To provoke them I said they saved your dream. They saved the memory of Prague Spring. Why? Let's imagine that Soviet Union would not intervene. In that case one of the two things would have happened I claim. Either there was no genuine chance for a third way authentic socialism there, either they would have joined the West, or at a certain point they would have to regain control like comrades you had your fine enough, that's the limit. And they would have gotten something like we had in Yugoslavia, a little bit more liberal communism but still you know who is the boss no. So what I'm saying is that precisely Soviet intervention sustained the dream oh my god without Soviet intervention we would have a really new democratic socialism and so on and so on. That's happiness for me. Happiness you know happiness is a very deeply conformist category in this sense. You don't really want to get it, it allows you to live and I'm here more maybe sincerely maybe I'm bluffing don't ask me
unknown
but at least I think I am more
but at least I think I am more
Slavoj Žižek
compromised more radically oriented here. That's the lesson of psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan: do not compromise your desire. If you desire something, think about it, go to the end in it. Of course you should reason very well like what
compromised more radically oriented here. That's the lesson of psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan: do not compromise your desire. If you desire something, think about it, go to the end in it. Of course you should reason very well like what
unknown
are the consequences and so on. But
are the consequences and so on. But
unknown
I'm always disgusted by this allow me to dream about it but don't push me too far and so on and so on. And I wonder to what extent even here like so-called new in not here but down there in the United States so-called democratic socialists, what do they really want? I mean when there was the Occupy Wall
I'm always disgusted by this allow me to dream about it but don't push me too far and so on and so on. And I wonder to what extent even here like so-called new in not here but down there in the United States so-called democratic socialists, what do they really want? I mean when there was the Occupy Wall
unknown
Street movement I spent hours talking with them just with this
Street movement I spent hours talking with them just with this
Slavoj Žižek
stupid question, not Freud's question what does a woman want? but what do you want? And apart from some vague oh it's horrible what the banks are doing and so on and so on, they had they had really no idea, no idea, which is why in politics I'm always afraid of moralism. Not because I'm immoral, I hope not, but because moralism is for me always the politics of those who don't know what to do. It's an escape. Slavoj, I want to thank you for coming to speak and I want to thank our student questions. And I feel at home here, it's like in good old communist times, you know. A true democratic debate where you asked the guys, I wonder if you corrected and approved the questions and so on. I feel at home here, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. And now I'd like to invite Dr. Jane Barter who is going to come up for some closing remarks. I join the people we stay here oh. So I have the privilege right now of saying a few words of thanks on behalf of our president and vice-chancellor Dr. Annette Trimbee who unfortunately could not be with us tonight as she's attending the funeral of Dr. Marsha Hanen, one of our former presidents in Victoria. And so there are many people who ought to be thanked tonight, people who worked tirelessly to enable this wonderful event to take place and I wish to thank a few of them. I'd like to thank the Axworthy Lecture Committee, especially its chair Dr. Paul Lawrie and I'd also like to thank James Patterson for all of their work. To the University of Winnipeg Foundation staff and its donors who contribute so generously that we can have lectures of this caliber. I would like to thank Events, especially Susan Awanicka, I would like to thank Communications, Naniece Ibrahim, physical plant and security at the University of Winnipeg and Diversity Foods for keeping us nourished all day. I would like to thank Dr. Matthew Flisfeder, he's a Žižek scholar himself and now his PR person and super-ego I believe. And thank you so much for the work that you've done to bring Professor Žižek here. We know how much you've done for this event to take place and we really appreciate your labor. And so finally Professor Žižek for your own work. For several decades you have goaded us to challenge many of our commonplaces within contemporary capitalist society and you have inspired countless young minds, some of those you've heard tonight. And you've inspired us to think critically and as you have yourself inimitably put it, you have given us something of the courage of hopelessness. And tonight of course you did not disappoint, you have caused us to think about what it means to be a human in a so-called post-human age and you have awakened us once again to the dangers of ideologies that so captivate us and inure us to the sufferings of this world. So we live here and we work here in a very special place, Treaty a place where the resurgence of indigenous voices has also awakened us here, we hope, from our slumbers. And so on behalf of the University of Winnipeg, I would like to present you with a small token of our appreciation which I hope will remind you of this place and of the gifts and talents of the first peoples of this country. Uh, this, um to give it away, is an Inuit sculpture which depicts Sedna the goddess of the sea and so we hope you enjoy this. Thank you so much for being with us. Merci beaucoup. Miigwetch. Thanks very much. A brief critical remark on you. You forgot
stupid question, not Freud's question what does a woman want? but what do you want? And apart from some vague oh it's horrible what the banks are doing and so on and so on, they had they had really no idea, no idea, which is why in politics I'm always afraid of moralism. Not because I'm immoral, I hope not, but because moralism is for me always the politics of those who don't know what to do. It's an escape. Slavoj, I want to thank you for coming to speak and I want to thank our student questions. And I feel at home here, it's like in good old communist times, you know. A true democratic debate where you asked the guys, I wonder if you corrected and approved the questions and so on. I feel at home here, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. And now I'd like to invite Dr. Jane Barter who is going to come up for some closing remarks. I join the people we stay here oh. So I have the privilege right now of saying a few words of thanks on behalf of our president and vice-chancellor Dr. Annette Trimbee who unfortunately could not be with us tonight as she's attending the funeral of Dr. Marsha Hanen, one of our former presidents in Victoria. And so there are many people who ought to be thanked tonight, people who worked tirelessly to enable this wonderful event to take place and I wish to thank a few of them. I'd like to thank the Axworthy Lecture Committee, especially its chair Dr. Paul Lawrie and I'd also like to thank James Patterson for all of their work. To the University of Winnipeg Foundation staff and its donors who contribute so generously that we can have lectures of this caliber. I would like to thank Events, especially Susan Awanicka, I would like to thank Communications, Naniece Ibrahim, physical plant and security at the University of Winnipeg and Diversity Foods for keeping us nourished all day. I would like to thank Dr. Matthew Flisfeder, he's a Žižek scholar himself and now his PR person and super-ego I believe. And thank you so much for the work that you've done to bring Professor Žižek here. We know how much you've done for this event to take place and we really appreciate your labor. And so finally Professor Žižek for your own work. For several decades you have goaded us to challenge many of our commonplaces within contemporary capitalist society and you have inspired countless young minds, some of those you've heard tonight. And you've inspired us to think critically and as you have yourself inimitably put it, you have given us something of the courage of hopelessness. And tonight of course you did not disappoint, you have caused us to think about what it means to be a human in a so-called post-human age and you have awakened us once again to the dangers of ideologies that so captivate us and inure us to the sufferings of this world. So we live here and we work here in a very special place, Treaty a place where the resurgence of indigenous voices has also awakened us here, we hope, from our slumbers. And so on behalf of the University of Winnipeg, I would like to present you with a small token of our appreciation which I hope will remind you of this place and of the gifts and talents of the first peoples of this country. Uh, this, um to give it away, is an Inuit sculpture which depicts Sedna the goddess of the sea and so we hope you enjoy this. Thank you so much for being with us. Merci beaucoup. Miigwetch. Thanks very much. A brief critical remark on you. You forgot
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something, you
something, you
Slavoj Žižek
forgot to bring your
forgot to bring your
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speech. I am waiting for somebody who gives these thanks at the end to do it to what in Hegel scholarship we call self-relating. I expect you to thank yourself, you know, for all the thing you do. I would like, not I don't want to be the one who say although I will now say thank you. Wouldn't it be nice for you to say and finally I want to thank myself?
speech. I am waiting for somebody who gives these thanks at the end to do it to what in Hegel scholarship we call self-relating. I expect you to thank yourself, you know, for all the thing you do. I would like, not I don't want to be the one who say although I will now say thank you. Wouldn't it be nice for you to say and finally I want to thank myself?
Slavoj Žižek
I'm doing it for you. Thanks.
I'm doing it for you. Thanks.