Ecology – A New Opium for the Masses
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2007-11-28 · 1:49:02 · 15,517 words
capitalismcommunism-socialismideologyecology-climatepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsphilosophy-generalconsciousness-mindtechnology-ai-cyberspacedemocracygeopolitics-warsubjectivityethicsliberalism-political-correctness
Žižek delivers a lecture hosted by Lacanian Ink in which he argues that global capitalism faces four irresolvable antagonisms: ecological crisis, the incompatibility of intellectual property with digital commons, the socio-ethical stakes of biogenetics, and the exclusion of slum-dwellers from political life. He revives the communist hypothesis as a framework for defending the commons (of culture, external nature, and internal/biogenetic nature), while arguing that this project must be anchored in the perspective of the excluded. The talk then turns to ecology as ideology, deploying the Rumsfeld 'known/unknown' matrix and Malabou's concept of the post-traumatic subject to diagnose our inability to take ecological catastrophe seriously, before concluding with reflections on Platonic appearance, Lacanian 'essence as appearance,' and the role of the death drive in post-traumatic subjectivity. A Q&A covers technology, Heidegger, consciousness, neuroscience, and Nietzsche.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 24
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “objet a”
Introduced in the framing by Josefina Ayerza as the object of jouissance captured in the fantasy and unveiled naked in perversion; Žižek refers to it briefly as the vampire that casts no reflection, or conversely the invisible object we cannot see when looking directly at it.
as “surplus jouissance”
Mentioned in the introductory framing as the element unveiled in perversion where the subject's relation to objet a is laid bare.
Žižek's term for the de facto acceptance of liberal-democratic capitalism as the final formula of the best possible society, a position he claims even the left holds covertly despite mocking Fukuyama.
as “superego game”
Žižek's label for the politics of radical moralism (as practised by Critchley's politics of resistance): comfortable bombardment of those in power with impossible demands, from a position that expects and even desires non-compliance.
Hegel's concept invoked by Žižek to characterise the market's invisible-hand logic: individual egotisms, through their competition, are said to serve the common good, a mechanism Žižek argues breaks down under ecological and temporal pressure.
Following Hardt and Negri, Žižek identifies three domains of shared social substance whose privatisation must be resisted: the commons of culture (language, communication), the commons of external nature (environment, oil), and the commons of internal nature (biogenetic inheritance).
as “the communist hypothesis”
Badiou's formulation, quoted and endorsed by Žižek, that communism remains the only political horizon worth thinking, though its 20th-century form centred on state and property must be abandoned in favour of a new mode of existence.
as “private use of reason”
Kant's counterintuitive concept: reason is private when its horizon is predetermined by a social institution (state, church, law faculty), because it cannot question its presuppositions; paradoxically, state-administrative reason is private.
Badiou's concept invoked by Žižek: to achieve the universality required for genuine public use of reason one must subtract oneself from particular social identities rather than abstracting differences.
as “singular universality”
Badiou's term adopted by Žižek for the subject-position required for genuine public use of reason: withdrawing from particular social identity and acting directly as a universal singular, as the excluded class does.
as “the part of no part”
Rancière's phrase for those who have no proper place in the social order, invoked to designate the excluded whose universality collapses with the universality of reason in the Marxian move.
as “the chicken that does not know”
Žižek's emblematic figure for ideological disavowal: the ideological subject knows (like the man who knows he is not a grain) but requires the chicken to remain unknowing so that the disavowal can function.
as “subject supposed not to know”
Žižek's counter-formula to Lacan's 'subject supposed to know': ideology requires a figure, a child, a chicken, an innocent bystander, who is kept naive so that others can act as if they too do not know.
The fourth term Žižek adds to Rumsfeld's matrix, what we do not know that we already know, which he identifies with the Freudian unconscious: the prejudices and automatisms that shape us without our awareness.
as “death drive embodied”
Žižek and Malabou's characterisation of the post-traumatic blank subject: not destructive death drive but survival beyond death, a life deprived of all erotic engagement, death drive as a mode of living.
Drawing on Malabou, a new form of subjectivity produced when external shocks (terror, Alzheimer's, torture) are so catastrophic that they destroy identity without any libidinal resonance, a subject who has survived its own death, emotionally blank and disengaged.
as “Muselmann”
Agamben's term, deployed by Žižek via Malabou, for the concentration-camp figure of living death, the emblematic precursor of the post-traumatic subject whose devastation cannot be explained by Freudian libidinal mechanics.
Žižek uses it here specifically as the fantasy of stable nature, the rhythm of seasons, sunrise, the most elementary symbolic guarantee of consistency; ecology collapses this figure.
Žižek borrows Lynn Margulis's corrective phrase against mystifying Gaia as good mother Earth, using it to argue for a radical ecology without any big Other nature, accepting ontological inconsistency.
Heidegger's concept of technological enframing, invoked in the Q&A; Žižek argues it under-estimates capitalism by treating it as merely one ontic arrangement of a deeper ontological technological disclosure, whereas capitalism has autonomous ontological dignity.
as “ontological dignity of capitalism”
Žižek's claim that capitalism is not merely an ontic economic arrangement but has a transcendental, ontological status, it is the root phenomenon of which technological enframing is a part, not vice versa.
as “appearance as essence”
Žižek's Hegelian wager that essence does not hide behind appearances but must appear as essence within appearances, so essence is only real where appearances are inconsistent, a crack signalling depth.
Žižek insists that for Lacan the real is not a deep hidden substance behind appearances but is itself appearance, the surface, the inconsistency in appearances, against both naïve realism and postmodern simulacra.
Alenka Zupančič's Nietzschean concept endorsed by Žižek: the purely formal gap between appearances where truth resides, not a deep hidden essence but the inconsistency of the surface itself.
Stories he reaches for 5
Žižek describes experiments where neurons controlling a rat's movement were connected to a computer, allowing the rat to be steered like a remote-controlled toy while appearing to run freely. He extrapolates: if done to humans, they would not even know. This is more terrifying than Alzheimer's, radical change without any awareness.
“The truly horrible thing: would I experience this at all? Or would I still think that I am freely running around, not even being aware?”
Žižek cites Rumsfeld's March 2003 press conference distinguishing known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns (used to justify the Iraq invasion), then adds the fourth forgotten term: unknown knowns, what we do not know we already know, the Freudian unconscious, and applies this matrix to our disavowal of ecological crisis.
“Rumsfeld forgot the fourth term... unknown knowns. You don't know what you know. This is called in psychoanalysis unconscious.”
A man is released from a psychiatric institution having been cured of thinking he is a grain of seed. Outside the gates he meets a chicken; terrified, he runs back. The doctor reminds him he knows he is not a grain. He replies: 'But does the chicken know it?' Žižek identifies the ideological subject as the chicken, ideology functions through the figure who does not know.
“The best definition of ideology is the chicken... you know but you act as if you don't know because the chicken doesn't know.”
In 'Gonzo' pornography actors openly acknowledge the camera mid-act, breaking the minimal narrative illusion. Žižek reads this not as liberation but as the most radical censorship: the elimination of pure dangerous appearance by over-identification and self-reflexive distance.
“Gonzo means that they openly include the fact into their behavior that they are filmed... I claim this is an incredible form of censorship. What they are afraid of is pure appearance.”
The massive UK demonstrations against the Iraq war paradoxically satisfied both protesters ('we showed Blair and Bush the majority doesn't want war') and those in power (Bush: 'this is why we're going to Iraq, so Iraqis can demonstrate freely'). Everyone was satisfied because everyone knew the demonstrations would have no actual effect.
“Most of the people who demonstrated did it... not in spite of the fact that they knew it would not have influence, they did it because they knew it.”
Works invoked 21
Psycho film
Hitchcock's film; the corrupt clerk's phrase 'buying off non-happiness' is quoted and applied to Yugoslavia's nomenklatura delaying economic catastrophe to protect Tito.
Žižek's own forthcoming book (announced in the talk); the Heidegger chapter title, 'Why Heidegger Did the Right Step in 1933' with footnote 'in the wrong direction', is mentioned.
Žižek's own earlier film with Sophie Fiennes; mentioned as the model for the planned sequel The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which faced censorship of the word 'ideology.'
Being and Time book
Heidegger's main work; Žižek notes its project could not be concluded in its original form, leading to Heidegger's productive intermediate struggle.
New Left Review journal
Žižek mentions reading 'an interesting new text' in it arguing that today's China resembles 18th-century Europe, wild capitalism sustained by strong authoritarian rule.
The Shock Doctrine book
Naomi Klein's book; Žižek defends its fundamental message, that market economy requires extra-market violence to sustain itself, despite dismissing Klein as not a 'big theoretician.'
Citizen Kane film
Orson Welles's film; the liberal-charity formula is attributed to it: liberals want to care for the poor because their real fear is that the poor will organise themselves.
Kolyma Tales book
Varlam Shalamov's Gulag stories, praised as 'really good' (not 'sentimental shit like Solzhenitsyn'); used to correct Agamben's claim that Muselmann-like figures only existed in Nazi camps.
What is Enlightenment? essay
Kant's essay ('wonderful text on Enlightenment') from which the public/private use of reason distinction is drawn; central to Žižek's argument about the state's limitations.
Infinitely Demanding book
Simon Critchley's book; Žižek wrote a long negative review. Its politics of resistance and impossible demands is critiqued as a comfortable superego position that suits those in power.
The Shortest Shadow book
Alenka Zupančič's book on Nietzsche; her concept of the 'moment of shortest shadow' as a purely formal gap (the inconsistency of appearances) is endorsed as clarifying the Lacanian real.
Lacanian Ink journal
The journal hosting the event (18th year, issue on objet a being launched); Žižek's contribution on the vampire and the mirror is mentioned by the editor.
Les Nouveaux Blessés book
Catherine Malabou's book (published a month before the talk); praised for identifying the post-traumatic blank subject as a new form exceeding Freudian libidinal economy.
Alexander Luria's case study of a man with near-perfect memory; deployed to argue that consciousness's power is to forget and simplify, not to remember everything.
Heidegger's Ereignis book; cited as more ambiguous and productive than the late Gelassenheit writings, still using 'will to Ereignis' as a positive category.
The Cattle Truck book
Jorge Semprún's short story; the clasped-hands scene of two children dying together at Buchenwald is the talk's key literary illustration of Platonic eternity as pure appearance.
Badiou's book on Sarkozy from which Žižek quotes the communist hypothesis passage at length, deliberately to 'embarrass' Badiou by pinning him to a strong communist commitment.
Malabou's earlier book, called 'the best book on Hegel I know in the last years'; Derrida's introduction concedes he was wrong to dismiss Hegel.
Nietzsche's text; cited via Zupančič for its contradictory ethics of heroic truth versus priority of appearance, which Nietzsche could not synthesise.
Ornicar? journal
Lacanian journal mentioned in the introductory framing by Josefina Ayerza as having published Laurence Bataille's story on sado-masochistic fantasy.
Thelma and Louise film
Ridley Scott's film; Žižek argues the final freeze-frame is aesthetically wrong, the image should freeze while the soundtrack plays the crash, to render the Platonic duality of empirical chaos and eternal ethical idea.
People invoked 42
Lynn Margulis positive
Her corrective to Gaia mysticism ('Gaia is a dirty bitch') is cited approvingly to underpin Žižek's radical ecology without a good-mother big Other.
Cited as producing 'fictionalized documentaries' rather than true novels about the concentration camp experience, contrasted with Semprún's artistic form.
Rupert Murdoch negative
Cited ironically as having had an 'inner enlightenment' about ecology, ordering offices to use recycled paper, the emblem of how the most reactionary capitalism absorbs environmental branding.
Co-producer of The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and its sequel; mentioned as helping Žižek navigate Channel 4's resistance to the word 'ideology.'
The Soviet submarine officer who refused to authorise a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis, cited as the individual whose refusal literally saved the world.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Member of Žižek's 'inner party circle,' author of The Shortest Shadow; her Nietzschean reading of the 'moment of shortest shadow' as the gap between appearances is endorsed as clarifying the Lacanian real.
Jacques Derrida positive
Mentioned as having written a 'long beautiful introduction' to Malabou's book on Hegel in which he concedes he was wrong to dismiss Hegel.
Jorge Semprún positive
The Cattle Truck story is praised as one of the best literary treatments of concentration camp experience; the clasped hands scene is the talk's key aesthetic and ethical illustration of Platonic eternity as pure appearance.
Jacques Lacan positive
The subject supposed to know / not to know, nature as big Other, the real as appearance, all Lacanian concepts deployed throughout; Žižek also distances himself from Lacan's Ethics seminar as caught in an outmoded model of truth.
Donald Rumsfeld negative
His known/unknown matrix is cited as philosophically incomplete (missing the fourth term, unknown knowns) and as emblematic of the lack of ideological self-reflection in American politics.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek's starting point is ironically defending Fukuyama's relevance: despite being mocked ('that idiot who thought history is over'), his liberal-capitalist endgame is what almost everyone, including the left, tacitly accepts.
Richard Rorty negative
His liberal reading of public/private (public = legal order guaranteeing private idiosyncrasies) is contrasted unfavourably with Kant's counterintuitive inversion.
Daniel Dennett negative
Cited sceptically as an example of cognitive scientists who fail to adequately account for why consciousness exists if it can be explained as blind neural process.
Judith Butler negative
Described as a 'theoretical enemy, practical friend'; Žižek argues her universe of expanding inclusion for marginalised voices fits perfectly within liberal capitalism rather than challenging it.
Varlam Shalamov positive
Cited favourably over Solzhenitsyn as 'really good' Gulag literature (Kolyma Tales) documenting the 'duraki', the living dead analogous to the Muselmann.
Naomi Klein positive
Not a 'big theoretician' by her own admission, but Žižek agrees with the fundamental message of Shock Doctrine: market economy requires extra-market violence to sustain its conditions.
Mentioned as having been influenced by Luria; context is the discussion of the mnemonist and the nature of consciousness.
Mentioned as one of the stars who offered to appear in The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which Channel 4 still refused.
Antonio Negri positive
Co-cited with Hardt; Žižek accepts their framework of commons while noting he agrees with them 'not otherwise', suggesting selective agreement.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek's 'best friend' though not without disagreement; quotes Badiou's communist hypothesis approvingly and endorses his subtraction concept, while criticising Badiou's recent retreat from anti-capitalism toward fighting only 'concrete' enemies (capitalism as background murmur).
Giorgio Agamben positive
Cited for his focus on the Muselmann figure; Žižek gently corrects Agamben's claim that Muselmann-like figures only appeared in Nazi camps, noting they also existed in the Gulag.
Walter Lippmann positive
Cited as an early analyst (1920s) of the secret pact underlying functioning democracy: people don't really want to decide but want to be told what to choose.
Cited as a 'fanatic Kantian' whose doctoral thesis was on Kant and quantum physics, darkly illustrating how radical politics can emerge from philosophical universalism.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn negative
Dismissed as 'sentimental shit' in comparison to Shalamov's unsentimental documentation of Gulag living death.
Alexander Luria positive
Called his 'favourite brain scientist' (as an 'old Stalinist'); his The Mind of a Mnemonist illustrates that consciousness's power is to forget and simplify, not to remember everything.
Catherine Malabou positive
Her Les Nouveaux Blessés is praised for identifying the post-traumatic subject, a new form of blank subjectivity exceeding Freudian libidinal economy; Žižek also notes Lacan may be equally limited here.
Jacques Rancière positive
The 'part of no part' concept, those without a proper place who directly stand for universality, is cited approvingly as the social anchor of public use of reason.
Martin Heidegger positive
Praised for the Gestell concept and for the productive intermediate period after Being and Time, but criticised for not following his insights to their conclusion and for the late retreat into Gelassenheit (passive releasement).
Immanuel Wallerstein positive
Cited approvingly for predicting a low-level civil war in Europe between new immigrants and 'aboriginal Europeans' as a consequence of the new apartheid.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
His readings of Lacan's seminar From One Other to the Other frame the opening discussion of objet a and the fantasme.
Bill Gates negative
Used as an example of how intellectual property distorts market logic (becoming richest man in years is a 'market heart attack') and as the emblem of the humanitarian capitalism that displaces systemic critique.
Hugo Chávez positive
Despite 'clownish gestures,' Žižek sees Chávez's significance in being the first to fully politically integrate excluded slum-dwellers rather than managing them through charity or religion.
Editor of Lacanian Ink who introduces the event and provides the framing on objet a and the fantasme from Jacques-Alain Miller's seminars.
The 'eternal Chomsky motive' of manipulating consent is mentioned but Žižek claims Lippmann goes deeper: not just manipulation but a structural desire not to decide.
Karl Marx positive
The young Marx's idea of a privileged relationship between philosophy and the proletariat, the two universalities collapsing, is invoked as the model to be repeated in a new form today.
Michael Hardt positive
Žižek endorses Hardt and Negri's concept of 'commons' (shared social substance), though with reservations about their wider project ('here I agree with them not otherwise').
Sigmund Freud positive
Freud's theory of trauma (external shock resonating in pre-existing libidinal reality) is both used and critically reframed via Malabou; the Freudian century of libido is contrasted with the coming post-traumatic century.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The cunning of reason, the concept of essence appearing as appearance, and the dialectical logic underpin multiple sections; Žižek endorses Hegel's reading of essence in appearances against vulgar interpretations.
Simon Critchley negative
Žižek wrote a long negative review of Infinitely Demanding ('one friend less, one enemy more'); Critchley's politics of resistance and impossible demands is attacked as a comfortable superego position that never threatens power.
Immanuel Kant positive
The public/private use of reason distinction is central to Žižek's argument about the state's limitations; Kant is used to justify a communist politics that bypasses state ownership.
Žižek's 'feelings are very mixed'; he notes Nietzsche proposes two contradictory ethics (heroic truth vs. priority of appearance) without resolving them into a third position that Lacan can provide.
Hubert Dreyfus negative
Cited as a 'bad Heideggerian' who draws from Heidegger only the retreat to peaceful everyday existence (evenings with friends, drink, music) rather than confronting technology's challenge.
What it argues
the four antagonisms capitalism cannot resolvethe communist hypothesis and the commonsecology as ideology: the chicken that does not knowthe post-traumatic subject and death drive embodiedessence as appearance: the Platonic surfaceexcluded slum-dwellers as the universal classKant's public versus private use of reason applied to communism
Dialectical moves 9
“What is private is in fact public, and what presents itself as public is in fact private: for Kant the state and its administrative apparatuses are private use of reason, while a group of private intellectuals debating freely exercises public use of reason.”
Žižek inverts the intuitive public/private distinction to argue that genuine universality is not institutional but requires withdrawal from pre-given social constraints.
“The true radicality is not to step out of technology but to become even more alienated from it—we are not alienated enough.”
Against both Heideggerian retreat to life-world and techno-optimism, genuine confrontation with technology requires deeper, not less, abstraction from our embedded existence.
“Far from being the greatest humanitarian, Bill Gates could become the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty while the system that produces poverty remains untouched—that is the danger.”
The dialectic of corporate charity: humanitarian branding is the ideological supplement that neutralises systemic critique rather than the beginning of emancipation.
“Essence must appear as essence within appearances—essence is only where appearances are inconsistent.”
Žižek's Hegelian inversion: essence is not hidden behind appearances but only exists where the surface itself cracks and signals depth; the crack IS the essence.
“The truly traumatic real is the surface—the abyss of pleasures a naked body promises—while imagining the interior (blood, organs) is precisely the escape from the real.”
Reversing the pseudo-Lacanian reading that the 'deep' biological interior is more real than the surface, Žižek argues that appearance is the real and depth is the flight from it.
“Chinese communists defend the sacred tradition of Lama reincarnation against the 'secularist' Dalai Lama—the atheist state becomes the defender of sacred tradition.”
The reversal of expected ideological positions illustrates how the logic of the big Other can be appropriated by any power, revealing the contingency of ideological alignments.
“Rupert Murdoch as the greatest environmentalist—the most virulent opponent of progressive politics absorbs its programme through branding, which cancels any real threat.”
When ideology is total, its most obvious enemies can absorb the opposite position; only the reference to the excluded cuts through this neutralisation.
“What Freud cannot envisage is that the victim survives its own death—the post-traumatic subject is not a destroyed psyche but a new subject that has simply replaced the old.”
The reversal of the Freudian economy of trauma: it is not that external shock triggers internal libidinal truth but that sometimes the external shock simply replaces the subject with a stranger.
“Making fun of Fukuyama is itself the supreme Fukuyamaist gesture: practically all the leftists who mock him basically accept liberal capitalism.”
The critique of Fukuyama has become the alibi for accepting the very horizon he described; the mockery is the disavowal.
Claims 24
asserts
Liberal-democratic capitalism is de facto accepted even by the left as the final formula of the best possible society, making almost everyone a covert Fukuyamaist.Fukuyamaism / naturalization of capitalism
asserts
Capitalism faces four antagonisms it cannot resolve in the long run: ecological crisis, intellectual/digital property, biogenetic commons, and the excluded slum-dwellers.limits of capitalism
asserts
Without anchoring the first three antagonisms (ecology, intellectual property, biogenetics) to the perspective of the excluded, they lose their subversive edge and become mere private concerns.the commons and the excluded
asserts
The notion of communism is justified by—and should be understood as—the struggle to prevent the privatisation of the three commons (culture, external nature, internal nature).communist hypothesis
asserts
The state itself is private in the Kantian sense: its reason is always already constrained by pre-existing social institutions, so the solution to capitalism cannot be state ownership.state versus commons
asserts
Capitalism and democracy do not naturally coexist; their apparently natural partnership in the 20th century was a historical exception, and we are returning to an era where they diverge.capitalism and democracy
asserts
Market mechanisms cannot cope with the extreme conditions of ecological crisis because market logic requires time for iterative trial and error that we no longer have.market and ecology
asserts
The ideology of ecology functions through the structure of 'the chicken that does not know': we collectively know about the crisis but require a figure of ignorance to sustain disavowal.ecology as ideology
asserts
Rumsfeld's epistemological matrix lacks a fourth term—unknown knowns (the Freudian unconscious)—which is the real obstacle to confronting ecological crisis.epistemology of ecological denial
reframes
Malabou is right that Freud cannot think the post-traumatic subject produced by purely external, meaningless destruction, but Lacan is also limited since for him such blank subjectivity is not just an accident but constitutive of subjectivity as such.Malabou's critique of Freud and Lacan
asserts
The truly radical ecological lesson is that there is no nature as big Other: we must accept the ontological inconsistency of nature rather than hoping for some self-regulating Gaia.radical ecology and the big Other
asserts
After the loss of the big Other, eternal ideas survive only as pure appearance—not as substantial depth but as the miracle of surface—illustrated by the frozen image of clasped hands in Semprún's story.appearance, eternity, and the Platonic
rejects
Critchley's politics of infinite demands against power is a comfortable superego position that plays into the hands of those in power rather than genuinely threatening them.Simon Critchley's politics of resistance
asserts
The anti-Iraq-war demonstrations satisfied both protesters and those in power because everyone knew the protests would have no effect; participants demonstrated not in spite of but because of this knowledge.the limits of protest politics
asserts
Real democracy as it de facto functions is closer to Switzerland's advisory referenda than to popular self-determination: people want to choose who decides, not to decide themselves.democracy
asserts
Intellectual property in the digital domain is structurally communist in its very principle—the form of private property resists it and causes irresolvable market distortions.intellectual property and capitalism
asserts
Hugo Chávez, whatever his faults, was the only leader who genuinely politically integrated the excluded slum-dwellers rather than managing them through charity or religion.Chávez and the excluded
rejects
Far from being merely an ontic arrangement, capitalism has ontological dignity and is the root phenomenon of which technological enframing is a part—not vice versa.Heidegger's Gestell as more fundamental than capitalism
reframes
The real obstacle is not that we are too alienated from technology but that we are not alienated enough—we always behave as if we remain embedded in our life-world.technology and alienation
asserts
For Lacan, the real is not a deep hidden truth behind appearances but the inconsistency of appearances themselves—the gap between appearances is the only truth.Lacanian real and appearance
asserts
Pornography's shift to 'Gonzo'—openly including the camera within the scene—is not liberation but a stronger censorship that eliminates the dangerous power of pure appearance.pornography and appearance
reframes
Consciousness's function is not to enable greater cognitive complexity but to simplify and selectively forget—the true power is the ability not to remember everything.consciousness and neuroscience
asserts
Today's China demonstrates that capitalism does not naturally lead to democracy; in fact authoritarian rule may be the necessary condition for capitalist explosion at this scale.capitalism and authoritarianism in China
asserts
The liberties we now take to be the core liberal inheritance—universal suffrage, free press, freedom of speech—were not originally part of liberal dogma but were won through long socialist and progressive struggle.liberalism and its historical origins
Quotes 20
“The only true question for me today is: do we endorse this naturalization of capitalism?”Slavoj Žižek · the central political question
“There is something as it were in so-called intellectual property which makes it, if I may use this term, communist in its very principle. The form of private property resists to it.”Slavoj Žižek · intellectual property as structurally communist
“Without the antagonism between the included and the excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates will be the greatest humanitarian fighting against poverty and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist.”Slavoj Žižek · the neutralisation of critique without the excluded
“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this communist hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action.”Slavoj Žižek · communist hypothesis (Badiou, endorsed by Žižek)
“The domain of state itself is also in its own way private. Private in the precise Kantian sense of what Kant calls the private use of reason.”Slavoj Žižek · the state as private in the Kantian sense
“If a couple of intellectuals meet in their kitchen... and debate philosophy, it's public use of reason. If you do something for the state, it's private.”Slavoj Žižek · Kant's public/private reason inverted
“The only way to properly confront ecological catastrophe is to get even more denaturalized.”Slavoj Žižek · radical ecology requires more not less abstraction
“Rumsfeld forgot the fourth term: unknown knowns. You don't know what you know. This is called in psychoanalysis unconscious.”Slavoj Žižek · unknown knowns as the unconscious
“Nature is the ultimate big Other. Not nature as nature, but nature as this fantasy of nature, nature as the rhythm of seasons, stars.”Slavoj Žižek · nature as big Other
“Lynn Margulis warned against mystifying Gaia as good mother Earth. She said Gaia is a dirty bitch. I like this.”Slavoj Žižek · Gaia without mystification
“Eternity should be saved but as appearance of eternity.”Slavoj Žižek · appearance as the only form of eternity
“The truly traumatic real is the surface, this abyss of pleasures that a naked body maybe promises. The idea of imagining all the dirt is precisely the very form of the escape from the real.”Slavoj Žižek · surface/appearance as the real, depth as escape
“Hegel means something much more radical: that literally essence has to appear as essence within appearances. Essence is only here when you look at appearances and some crack in the appearances signals that there is an essence behind.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian essence as appearance
“The power of consciousness is not to remember everything... but precisely to reduce. So this poor guy had to employ complicated techniques not to remember as we do but to forget.”Slavoj Žižek · consciousness as selective forgetting
“What they are afraid of is not that the poor will die but that the poor will start taking care of themselves—of course, that's the true horror.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal fear of the self-organising excluded
“Capitalism is for me the root, as it were. I think capitalism has a transcendental value.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's ontological primacy over technology
“The truth of democracy for me is Switzerland today where... you get when you go to vote, the paper to vote and an attached paper, an advice how to vote. And everybody accepts it.”Slavoj Žižek · democracy as managed choice
“Act for me is precisely a gesture which, as it were, makes palpable what otherwise is an invisible background.”Slavoj Žižek · the act as making the invisible background visible
“In the 21st century will be the century of post-traumatic disengaged subjects whose first emblematic figure was that of the Muselmann in concentration camps.”Slavoj Žižek · the post-traumatic century replacing the Freudian century of libido
“Together they dropped their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity. I claim this is not a metaphor, that this eternity is fully Platonic here.”Slavoj Žižek · Platonic eternity as pure ethical appearance
Transcript 14 turns
unknown
This is a verbatim transcription of the provided audio recording, featuring a talk by Josefina Ayerza followed by a lecture and Q&A session with Slavoj Žižek. Okay, so we start? Of course. I'm Josefina Ayerza, the editor of Lacanian Ink. Let me thank you all for coming. A special thanks to Jack Tilton for hosting this event. And many thanks to Janine Cirincione for her help with putting it together. So this is Lacanian Ink's 18th year of existence. We are launching issue The general subject is objet a. If we are following Jacques-Alain Miller throughout his readings of Jacques Lacan, Seminar: From One Other to the Other in this issue, objet a is not unseizable. Objet a is captured in the fantasme and it's denuded in perversion precisely where surplus-jouir is unveiled in a naked form. In terms of structure then, the place to find this little object is for certain the fantasme, especially to the extent that the subject is not represented in it. Operating outside any sort of awareness, the phantom image emerges when you're not expecting it and it vanishes after having produced its effect. The paradigmatic fantasme in Freud is of course a child is being beaten. In family romances he foresees a situation where daydreams are used by the child to avoid the Oedipal conflict by imagining himself to be adopted, to be really the child of a king and queen. A child is being beaten deals with the theoretical problem of how pleasure and suffering become linked. The childhood beating fantasy is often accompanied by sexual arousal. Always a question with the other sex since there isn't reciprocity because the other sex as such for both is the feminine sex for men and for women in the sense that this is the first object when the child, when the baby, the object of desire. Lacan pursues the concept and this is how he comes up with his famous line there isn't sexual relationship. Now the hysterical loans her body to another woman. If the classical masculine fantasme is to fantasize with another woman while making love, also women fantasize with another man, just that as we mentioned here a few days ago, they can go as far as to have this other man make love to another woman. That is to say that she offers her body as the body of somebody else. And this we saw is a very hidden thing. Her man, her husband doesn't know that each night he makes love to another woman. So there is a shame dimension to the fantasme. It often takes a while before patients talk of their fantasmes in analysis. But they do because once they did it, they love it. Now to this patient in question that we were talking about, in so telling it she has, she had hidden it for years in previous analysis. So when she decided to just stop with using this image that was the same one and appeared every time, the result was she was having problems with having an orgasm. So this is a process which needs to... I don't know, needs to reach some place for a while. Anyway, this is the hysterical pantomime that Lacan makes reference to. Now as for the sado-masochistic pantomime, Laurence Bataille, Lacan's stepdaughter and half-sister to Judith Lacan, who for a while was called also Judith Bataille, writes a story which early enough got published in Ornicar? I'll tell you that story. This is like a classical fantasme. Scott is saying that when he abandons himself to what he calls his recurrent daydream, he sees himself bowing in front of this woman who happens to hold a whip in her left hand. The whip's long lashes whistling in the air. He does not resist. He doesn't
This is a verbatim transcription of the provided audio recording, featuring a talk by Josefina Ayerza followed by a lecture and Q&A session with Slavoj Žižek. Okay, so we start? Of course. I'm Josefina Ayerza, the editor of Lacanian Ink. Let me thank you all for coming. A special thanks to Jack Tilton for hosting this event. And many thanks to Janine Cirincione for her help with putting it together. So this is Lacanian Ink's 18th year of existence. We are launching issue The general subject is objet a. If we are following Jacques-Alain Miller throughout his readings of Jacques Lacan, Seminar: From One Other to the Other in this issue, objet a is not unseizable. Objet a is captured in the fantasme and it's denuded in perversion precisely where surplus-jouir is unveiled in a naked form. In terms of structure then, the place to find this little object is for certain the fantasme, especially to the extent that the subject is not represented in it. Operating outside any sort of awareness, the phantom image emerges when you're not expecting it and it vanishes after having produced its effect. The paradigmatic fantasme in Freud is of course a child is being beaten. In family romances he foresees a situation where daydreams are used by the child to avoid the Oedipal conflict by imagining himself to be adopted, to be really the child of a king and queen. A child is being beaten deals with the theoretical problem of how pleasure and suffering become linked. The childhood beating fantasy is often accompanied by sexual arousal. Always a question with the other sex since there isn't reciprocity because the other sex as such for both is the feminine sex for men and for women in the sense that this is the first object when the child, when the baby, the object of desire. Lacan pursues the concept and this is how he comes up with his famous line there isn't sexual relationship. Now the hysterical loans her body to another woman. If the classical masculine fantasme is to fantasize with another woman while making love, also women fantasize with another man, just that as we mentioned here a few days ago, they can go as far as to have this other man make love to another woman. That is to say that she offers her body as the body of somebody else. And this we saw is a very hidden thing. Her man, her husband doesn't know that each night he makes love to another woman. So there is a shame dimension to the fantasme. It often takes a while before patients talk of their fantasmes in analysis. But they do because once they did it, they love it. Now to this patient in question that we were talking about, in so telling it she has, she had hidden it for years in previous analysis. So when she decided to just stop with using this image that was the same one and appeared every time, the result was she was having problems with having an orgasm. So this is a process which needs to... I don't know, needs to reach some place for a while. Anyway, this is the hysterical pantomime that Lacan makes reference to. Now as for the sado-masochistic pantomime, Laurence Bataille, Lacan's stepdaughter and half-sister to Judith Lacan, who for a while was called also Judith Bataille, writes a story which early enough got published in Ornicar? I'll tell you that story. This is like a classical fantasme. Scott is saying that when he abandons himself to what he calls his recurrent daydream, he sees himself bowing in front of this woman who happens to hold a whip in her left hand. The whip's long lashes whistling in the air. He does not resist. He doesn't
unknown
know where the striking goes and he doesn't feel pain. At this point, there is a certain number of strokes left, he will round up his back like a cat. The woman beating him, not herself anymore, is another woman placed beside her. This other one doesn't have a face. Now he's sexually aroused. This faceless woman is also aroused. The spaces between strokes seem like eternity. So to this story she adds that the whip is a waste of jouissance. The pursuit of jouissance functions as the lost object and suggests the idea of masochism because of the impossibility of regaining the object. The formula of the fantasme displays the subject relating to the object of jouissance, objet a. And this subject is a subject of a signifier. Divided by jouissance, it finds the object fusing, melting with it in a surface divisible with a cut, which is the fantasme itself. The action of the signifying cut as much as objet a is representing the subject, Scott is at once the beaten man, the one beating the man and the jouissance of the one doing this. At the same time the subject identifies with the signifier, with the act of whipping itself. The function of the objet a in the fantasme takes place in the real. The subject unconsciously perceiving the object becomes it. This sort of jouissance pertains to be. The fantasme will not ameliorate the emptiness of the subject, moreover it will reintroduce the interval between the division. So this is the interval between the signifier knots where Scott finds the desire of the other. In this interval separating the signifiers is metonymy. Through them, running, escaping is what we call desire. The desire of the other is apprehended by the subject in the lacks of the other's discourse. Objet a between S and S, in alienation the original repletion of S makes for a barred subject. Separation instead makes objet a appear. Now we have of Lacanian Ink. We have also that this object as stand-in is the same as appears in the work of art, which is the same objet a. Of course, what is different is the empty when we look into the work of art. And again, the empty gets specially different when we look for the work, at the work of art of some artist. So with Simon Critchley we have that the truth of art according to Wilde is romantic aesthetics. With Richard Kostelanetz, he says war is unnecessary. We are entering the Vietnam... we entered the Vietnam war, it was a mistake. So has been the invasion of Iraq. And he is a grenade. Jean-Luc Nancy, nudity is not truth. For him nudity is not truth, it is inquietude, anticipation. Cathy Lebowitz and me, we talk of Kohei Yoshiyuki's voyeur in the park and this is not Lacan's voyeur that wants to be screamed at, caught by the police. This voyeur is participator of the love scene. With Slavoj Žižek, objet a could be the vampire, an empirical object that does not bring out its image in a mirror. However, the exact opposite could also provide an image of objet a. When we look at the thing directly in reality we don't see it. Yes, with you Slavoj Žižek. Okay, thank you. Okay, I... well the usual thanks and so on. I... I would like directly to go to the point because I hope you will not be disappointed. What I decided to do today is a very boring systematic talk with almost no jokes dealing really with the problem which is indicated in the title. So let me begin. It is easy to make fun of Fukuyama's notion of the end of history. But the majority today is Fukuyamaian, how should I put it. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society. All one can do is to render it more just, more tolerant and so on and so on. So my starting point is a simple observation that this making fun of
know where the striking goes and he doesn't feel pain. At this point, there is a certain number of strokes left, he will round up his back like a cat. The woman beating him, not herself anymore, is another woman placed beside her. This other one doesn't have a face. Now he's sexually aroused. This faceless woman is also aroused. The spaces between strokes seem like eternity. So to this story she adds that the whip is a waste of jouissance. The pursuit of jouissance functions as the lost object and suggests the idea of masochism because of the impossibility of regaining the object. The formula of the fantasme displays the subject relating to the object of jouissance, objet a. And this subject is a subject of a signifier. Divided by jouissance, it finds the object fusing, melting with it in a surface divisible with a cut, which is the fantasme itself. The action of the signifying cut as much as objet a is representing the subject, Scott is at once the beaten man, the one beating the man and the jouissance of the one doing this. At the same time the subject identifies with the signifier, with the act of whipping itself. The function of the objet a in the fantasme takes place in the real. The subject unconsciously perceiving the object becomes it. This sort of jouissance pertains to be. The fantasme will not ameliorate the emptiness of the subject, moreover it will reintroduce the interval between the division. So this is the interval between the signifier knots where Scott finds the desire of the other. In this interval separating the signifiers is metonymy. Through them, running, escaping is what we call desire. The desire of the other is apprehended by the subject in the lacks of the other's discourse. Objet a between S and S, in alienation the original repletion of S makes for a barred subject. Separation instead makes objet a appear. Now we have of Lacanian Ink. We have also that this object as stand-in is the same as appears in the work of art, which is the same objet a. Of course, what is different is the empty when we look into the work of art. And again, the empty gets specially different when we look for the work, at the work of art of some artist. So with Simon Critchley we have that the truth of art according to Wilde is romantic aesthetics. With Richard Kostelanetz, he says war is unnecessary. We are entering the Vietnam... we entered the Vietnam war, it was a mistake. So has been the invasion of Iraq. And he is a grenade. Jean-Luc Nancy, nudity is not truth. For him nudity is not truth, it is inquietude, anticipation. Cathy Lebowitz and me, we talk of Kohei Yoshiyuki's voyeur in the park and this is not Lacan's voyeur that wants to be screamed at, caught by the police. This voyeur is participator of the love scene. With Slavoj Žižek, objet a could be the vampire, an empirical object that does not bring out its image in a mirror. However, the exact opposite could also provide an image of objet a. When we look at the thing directly in reality we don't see it. Yes, with you Slavoj Žižek. Okay, thank you. Okay, I... well the usual thanks and so on. I... I would like directly to go to the point because I hope you will not be disappointed. What I decided to do today is a very boring systematic talk with almost no jokes dealing really with the problem which is indicated in the title. So let me begin. It is easy to make fun of Fukuyama's notion of the end of history. But the majority today is Fukuyamaian, how should I put it. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society. All one can do is to render it more just, more tolerant and so on and so on. So my starting point is a simple observation that this making fun of
unknown
Fukuyama, 'Oh that idiot who thought history is over,' is suspicious. Practically all the leftists even that I know basically accept it. Nobody questions today state capitalism and so on. Even the word is disappearing, 'capitalism,' because it's so universal. Like I heard again and again, this is how censorship works today, the same anecdote from journalists here in the United States, in Germany, in Italy. How there is pressure from editors, apparently purely stylistic pressures, to drop the word. For example, an Italian friend for a big left-of-center daily newspaper, *La Repubblica*, told me how he wrote a text, totally neutral, just a report, where he used the word 'capitalism.' And the editor said 'stylistically it doesn't function, couldn't you replace capitalism with economy or something like that like.' And it's so... it's incredible how words are disappearing. Let me tell you another strange anecdote. You remember, maybe some of you even saw it, I didn't, I'm too horrified of myself, that *Pervert's Guide to Cinema*. Now we are trying to do part two, *Pervert's Guide to Ideology*. It's incredible. There are incredible obstacles even if we are doing with people there who run Channel in England, who boast of being leftists and so on and so on. And with all the strings that I tried to pull through Sophie Fiennes, we got Ralph Fiennes, some of big stars claiming 'just give the money, we will even appear there.' No, there was a
Fukuyama, 'Oh that idiot who thought history is over,' is suspicious. Practically all the leftists even that I know basically accept it. Nobody questions today state capitalism and so on. Even the word is disappearing, 'capitalism,' because it's so universal. Like I heard again and again, this is how censorship works today, the same anecdote from journalists here in the United States, in Germany, in Italy. How there is pressure from editors, apparently purely stylistic pressures, to drop the word. For example, an Italian friend for a big left-of-center daily newspaper, *La Repubblica*, told me how he wrote a text, totally neutral, just a report, where he used the word 'capitalism.' And the editor said 'stylistically it doesn't function, couldn't you replace capitalism with economy or something like that like.' And it's so... it's incredible how words are disappearing. Let me tell you another strange anecdote. You remember, maybe some of you even saw it, I didn't, I'm too horrified of myself, that *Pervert's Guide to Cinema*. Now we are trying to do part two, *Pervert's Guide to Ideology*. It's incredible. There are incredible obstacles even if we are doing with people there who run Channel in England, who boast of being leftists and so on and so on. And with all the strings that I tried to pull through Sophie Fiennes, we got Ralph Fiennes, some of big stars claiming 'just give the money, we will even appear there.' No, there was a
Slavoj Žižek
resistance. Then finally we met and they said 'You see this word ideology, but it's... couldn't you make it like Pervert's Guide to Spiritual Tendencies Today or what? It's no more longer actual.' You know words are disappearing. So again, we are Fukuyamaists, I claim even like let's take somebody like my good theoretical friend, no, sorry, theoretical enemy, practical friend, Judith Butler. I mean, her universe for me fits perfectly liberal capitalism. All she wants is, you know, like all the excluded voices, those on the margin who are not heard should be... their word should be heard and so on and so on. It's just let's expand more and more liberal democracy. Let's open up the space, let's include the marginalized and so on and so on. This for me fits the existing order. So the only true question for me today is: do we endorse this naturalization of capitalism which... I don't have time to go into it here, but my best friend and not theoretical enemy... even with him I have problems, the guy who was here I think a little bit ago, Badiou. My God, recently he started to talk about... he used a terrible metaphor, I don't know what's happening with him. Maybe he was visiting United States too much. At a talk recently he said something like 'one cannot fight capitalism, capitalism is like a murmur, a background sound, where it's just there, you should ignore it, you fight concrete politics, you fight United States government, you fight Israel government, you fight that... you know what I mean, you don't fight capitalism as such, it's the background of fight.' Well I claim, if the notion of event the way he uses it or, I would say in more Lacanian vein, act, has any meaning, act for me is precisely a gesture which, as it were, makes palpable what otherwise is an invisible background. So again, even there in Badiou you almost don't find capitalism. So again, the only serious question for me is: do we have to endorse this and the other guy whom you mentioned, Simon Critchley, that's his entire point. You cannot beat the system, the system is here to stay, the state is to stay, basically everything is to stay. So all we can do is what? My reproach to Critchley, if you read his book *Infinitely Demanding*, I wrote a long review of it which means one friend less, one enemy more. I will get... no because my... you know what's his idea? Capitalism, I mean, the state is here to stay, withdraw, resist, don't try to imitate power and so on. But the first surprise I have with this, it's very fashionable today, this politics of to withdraw into politics of resistance like 'let's not get caught into the struggle for power, let's just withdraw, resist and so on.' Is Critchley in his book *Infinitely Demanding* literally has these formulas that the moment you also aim for power, want to take over power, you start... you get caught into imitating power, you become like them and so on and so on. But here I think, especially for Critchley who is British, a certain dose of best British naive empiricism and common sense would come handy. Like what does he mean you don't resist? Surely he doesn't mean you don't resist Hitler for example. Probably he wouldn't say 'no let's not resist Hitler with arms, it means you got caught into his game.' No, there probably he would agree. Or I would like to ask him a similar naive question. For example, you have here the unfortunate great president. What would he say to the left here? 'No, don't beat him democratic Hillary Clinton, why don't you withdraw into the interstices of power and so on and so on.' His formula is we should just make the those in power... we should just put from outside the pressure onto those in power to make power more responsible and so on and so on. Okay, an honest position and I'm even ready to admit that mostly that's all almost one can do today. But isn't it then that if you function in this way I have two problems. The first problem is how to avoid nonetheless playing the game of power in this way. I mean I'm not a leftist paranoiac who claims every resistance is co-opted, far from this, but let me take when I asked him, Critchley, when we had a debate, 'Okay, give me one example of politics of resistance.' He told me for example the big movement all around Europe, hundreds of thousands demonstrated against the Iraq war. I doubt it. I remember when in England, when I was there, these big demonstrations, okay hundreds of thousands of people, the greatest demonstrations in British history after World War II. But what surprised me how in a strange way everyone was satisfied with the result. Those who organized the demonstrations were satisfied: 'Oh my God, you see, we showed Blair and Bush the majority doesn't want the war.' The more strange thing is that those in power were also very satisfied. I mean, Bush gave here a wonderful answer, which you may laugh that it's hypocritical, but I think there was a moment of truth in it. I remember I was in London when Bush was asked about, you know, hundreds of thousands of people protesting against you. His answer was: 'You see, this is why I love the demonstration because you see this is why we are going to Iraq, so that the thing that is happening here could happen also in Iraq, people freely demonstrating and so on.' I think even if it personally from Bush's side was a rather stupid cynicism, there is a moment of truth in it. Everybody was satisfied because it was clear, absolutely to everyone, that these demonstrations will have no... no effects whatsoever. I... I even suspect that... now this is something very nasty to say, that most of the people who demonstrated did it and they did not do it in spite of the fact that they knew that probably this will not have any influence on actual state politics, they did it because they knew it, that it will not have any influence. They like this game: they are there, we are here, we make our moral stand and so on and so on, so at the end everybody is satisfied. In other words, when Simon Critchley has this formula 'resist, bombard those in power with impossible demands,' he's simply playing the superego game. I mean, the superego game, I mean, it's a very comfortable position of radical morality, we bombard those in power, but what then would you answer if... and I know politicians whose reaction to this position is: 'Wonderful to have people like Simon Critchley, because they, we, who deal with real politics, we have to solve problems. But it's nice to have somebody to remind you that we all secretly dream of higher ideals and so on and so on.' You know every brutal politician likes to have another one who is kind of ideal... idealist who wants the impossible, unfortunately we cannot have it. It's a very comfortable... it's a very comfortable position. It's the same as with democracy. It took me some time to get the formula. You know who was already aware of it? Didn't your great commentator blah-blah Walter Lippmann, he wrote a book already in the 20s, I forgot the title, where he proposed a wonderful formula which is very deep one. I think that it's not only this eternal Chomsky motive, manipulating consent and so on. It's that what if every functioning democracy is sustained silently by a kind of a secret unwritten pact? I claim people don't really want to decide. The majority of the people really knows like, what do I really know about economics, about this, about that and so on and so on. They want between the lines to be told what they should choose and then they just want to go through the appearance of choosing. I claim that... so I claim that de facto situation is more mysterious. In a functioning democracy, people would be... the truth of democracy for me is Switzerland today where I was told whenever they have a referendum, you get, a friend of mine showed it to me, you get when you go to vote, the paper to vote and an attached paper, an advice how to vote. And everybody accepts it. That's democracy, I claim. I claim that's democracy. It's... that's how it de facto functions. And I'm not making fun of it, I'm not saying it's not important, I'm not playing the old Marxist card 'you see it's only a formal democracy' and so on and so on. I'm just saying that if you look really closely at it, this is how it effectively functions. We don't want to decide, we want to choose those who will decide, make decisions for us and so on and so on. So again, do we have to endorse this naturalization of capitalist democracy or does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which will prevent its indefinite reproduction? And here I will try to address very naively today this big question that people ask me: 'Okay, you claim to be a Marxist and so on, but cut the crap, what do you really mean by it?' Like people often reproach me, 'Okay, it's easy to write a book on Lenin, but wait a minute, what does this mean today here?' And I will very naively, I hope you will not be too bored, try to approach this question. I see four antagonisms which I claim in the long term capitalism will not be able to cope with. First, that's the title, the topic of main topic, I will come in the second part of the talk to it: Ecology. I am the first to admit the infinite adaptability of capitalism. I'm well aware that if there were to be a big ecological catastrophe, capitalism would immediately turn it into a new domain of market investment and so on and so on. I was even told that it's already happening, that there are already capitalists who take into account the possibility of of this higher level of sea and global warming, and they are already selling beaches in Hudson Bay, in northern Canada and so on, I mean, it's already happening even. But what's the problem? Capitalism at a certain level it works, more or less, more or less. Because you know what surprised me? I don't... the violent reaction to Naomi Klein's new book on shock capitalism. I mean, I don't think she is really a big theoretician. But let's be honest, she doesn't even pretend to be. But I agree with the fundamental message of her book, which is that market economy it's not just a mechanism which you apply and it works. First you need quite a lot of extra-market violence to sustain conditions in which market economy works. And I think the big triumphant proof of this is today's China. Incidentally, if some of you have read, about two months ago, I think *New York Times* was kind enough to publish that short text, crazy of me about this Chinese regulating... reg... I love that topic, it turned me into pro-Chinese, regulating reincarnation, you know how you have to... and a friend from China, it's wonderful. I mean, how can...literally you have a form printed if you want to reincarnate, Lama. And it says 'I here want like that.' I can imagine with my dirty mind obscenities how you know then a top bureaucrat answers you: 'Sorry, you want to reincarnate as a as a I don't know, as a as a Buddhist Lama. Sorry, these places are if you want to reincarnate in South Tibet only some insects and dogs are free for reincarnation. Sorry, it doesn't go.' And then... but you know that the game goes on. Now something unbelievable happened. Did you read Dalai Lama announced that he will not reincarnate, but that he wanted his successor to be elected by some kind of a more democratic procedure like, okay not really democratic, like Vatican conclave, to gather all the big Tibetan Buddhist figures to elect the successor. And now comes the irony. You know what was the Chinese official answer? 'You see secularists betraying Tibetan traditions. No, we... we...' now Chinese communists stand as defending the true traditions of of incarnation against this secularized politician Dalai Lama and so on. But the basic lesson holds, I think, that's the difficult lesson to get from what we learn of today's China is that, and people are aware of it, in Europe this debate is beginning. Till now we secretly hoped that even if we were cynical about capitalism, but nonetheless even many left-liberals believed that nonetheless sooner or later, after some periods of authoritarian rule, capitalism brings democracy. It can be for a decade or two you need a little bit of authoritarian rule to create conditions but then it takes off. Like they like to point out how all the big success stories of capitalist explosion, from Chile to South Korea, were opened up through a limited authoritarian rule which created the conditions. And it's typical, although some even people close to Bush already are honest enough to include into this series China. So it's absolutely hypocritical, I claim. Here I even agree with Chinese communists, although they are corrupt and so on, where they claim only... that's the ultimate paradox... only the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party can guarantee ideal conditions of capitalism. It's not that as some Western liberals think 'Oh if capitalism can thrive so nicely today in China in spite of the party rule, how much more it would be triumphant with liberal democracy.' Not more, less I think. It would explode with unrest, probably the unity of China falling apart and so on and so on. But not to get lost. I think that the sad lesson is that the sad lesson of this is that we are, I think, approaching a new era, in a way even here in the United States, where it becomes more and more clear that capitalism and democracy do not go together naturally, how should I put it. And I think we should reread history in this way. We tend to forget that this idea of natural coexistence of capitalism and democracy is not natural at all. If you look at the history of 19th century, you had have first liberal capitalism, but definitely without democracy. Rather, as I read in some interesting new text in *New Left Review*, I forgot even the author, the author tries to prove how what happens today in China is much closer to 18th century Europe, where wild capitalism was sustained by a very strong authoritarian rule. Now so let's not forget that throughout 19th century things which today liberal boasts but they are our inheritance. No, they were not at all perceived as part of liberal tradition. What we today understand as universal vote, universal education, freedom of the press, freedom of speech and so on. Sorry, but this was the result of the long years of socialist-progressive struggle, that this was... this was not originally part of part of liberal dogma. We tend to forget this and I think we should remember this today because again I claim we are slowly returning, and that's the lesson of Naomi Klein's book, a sad one, that we are returning to a state where capitalism and democracy no longer, how should I put it, go naturally together. So again, but my point is more fundamental one. Capitalism only works in precise social conditions. It implies the trust into the objective mechanism of market's invisible hand which, in the guise of what Hegel called cunning of reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, I claim, we are today in the midst of a radical change. We are in a situation where, unique in the history of humanity, where a subjective act, collective or even individual, like some crazy collective project, like this big dam on the Yellow River that the Chinese are building, on some super-terrorist attack, whatever, we don't know what, can catastrophically disturb our lives and cause global catastrophe. So you see my point. My point is that market works where you have time for test and trials. We have a problem, I try, you try, I fail, you fail, finally we find the solution. You need a breeding space, as it were. I claim that when you have this extreme situation we are approaching today, where you have to make now a decision and you cannot then repeat it and compete and so on and so on, you can no longer count on on market mechanisms. You cannot say 'okay global warming is a problem, let's leave this, that approach, market and so on and so on. At the end we will find the most efficient mechanism.' Maybe, but we may be all dead before we find it. The symbol of this is a nice detail which I read in a report on Cuban missile crisis. We learned that we were much closer to nuclear war than we thought. What happened on October 27th, is interesting. There was a small skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing that the submarine had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. So Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told later that the submarine was authorized in such conditions when directly attacked to fire this nuclear torpedo if three officers agreed. And then the three commanding officers began a fierce shouting debate. Two of them said yes, one, we even know his name, family name Arkhipov, said no. And you can almost say, as some historian said at this conference in Havana later about the Cuban crisis, a guy named Arkhipov saved the world. I mean, can you imagine what would have happened if this guy were to say yes? Russians would start with atomic attack and so on and so on. So you see my point. In such conditions you cannot, I claim, play the market game. The second problem I see is the obvious inappropriateness of private property for the so-called intellectual labor. The key antagonism of the so-called new digital industries is how to maintain the form of private property within which only the logic of profit can be maintained. And I think legal complications in biogenetics point in the same direction. Phenomena are emerging which bring the notion of property to weird paradoxes. So again I'm claiming that in the long term this will cause crazy oscillations, it doesn't work. I recently spoke, I forgot his name, at some conference in Germany with a conservative economist, German, who says a guy like Bill Gates is an anomaly in the sense that when you have a guy who in years becomes the richest guy in the world, it means that market no longer, even in a strongly distorted way, reflects some kind of social productivity and so... he said it's as if the normal market oscillation is the normal heartbeat and it's as if today market is like a heavy heart attack, how should I put it. Market is reacting too... too irrationally with intellectual property. If you let market to itself, you would we would be in a situation where like imagine just United States government not intervening against Microsoft, you would literally have an individual or a couple of individuals privately owning our entire communicational infrastructure. And in this way market would even self-cancel itself. So again, I'm not saying this opens up any bright revolutionary prospect or what. I'm simply saying that this is a limit of market mechanisms. That there is something as it were in so-called intellectual property which makes it, if I may use this term, communist in its very principle. The form of private property resists to it. Then third feature, the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, biogenetics and so on and so on. I think that something also is changing here. The moment you introduce the notion of private property in biogenetics, something extremely problematic is happening, which can lead to improbable consequences. And finally, what I repeat all the time in my texts, slums and other new forms of apartheid. New walls are arising, we are moving slowly towards a new apartheid society. And signs are everywhere, even in Europe, which which praises itself as more civilized welfare state against vulgar United States and so on. But I totally agree with Immanuel Wallerstein when he predicts as one of the options a kind of a low-level civil war in Europe between the new immigrants and the old aboriginal Europeans. We have in France, in United Kingdom signs of it, so-called religious minorities organizing themselves and so on and so on. So not to lose time, I think that this is the crucial geopolitical fact for me. How we usually characterize today's society, this is very fashionable to say, as the society of total digitalized control and so on, control, we are all controlled. We know the story how every time you take a walk on New York at least cameras tape your movement so that basically if those in power want, they can practically reconstruct the movement of already more or less of everyone of us. But I think that there is the opposite movement also occurring, how the state, the more it is total in this sense of controlling population, the more it is simply withdrawing itself from parts of its own territory. As if white spots in the map of a state are emerging, slums, places of the excluded where the state simply withdraws. And I think the big question maybe of our 21st century is what will happen with this growing number of the excluded. Here I see, in spite of his clownish gestures and so on, the big significance of Hugo Chávez. Because whatever you think about him, and I'm far from simply supporting him, but let's be frank, he was the first and till now, okay, in Bolivia the situation is more complex, we are not dealing with slums there but with aborigines more. Wasn't he the only one basically who fully integrated those excluded in favelas into a political process? The way it was done in all other cases in Brazil and so on is either religion or charity, humanitarian, like 'oh every liberal likes to worry.' You know this is for me the liberal formula today. Are we aware how we live here, rich, totally secured but, you know all this, there are people there who need just five dollars to make the operation that would save their lives and so on. Liberals like this. They what they like to do is, this is the old formula wonderful that Orson Welles used in *Citizen Kane*, every liberal likes to take care of, you know this Angelina Jolie stuff and so on, to take care of of the poor because what they are afraid of is not that the poor will die but that the poor will start taking care of themselves, of course, now that's the true horror, no? So again, I think that we are literally heading towards a possible civil war with unpredictable consequences here. So how do these four antagonisms relate to each other? There is a big difference, a gap, which separates the last antagonism, new favelas, slum, excluded, included, from the three other antagonisms. The first three antagonisms designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri, here I agree with them not otherwise, call commons. Commons in the sense of the shared substance of our social being whose privatization, enclosure and so on should be resisted. First, the commons of culture, the so-called cognitive capital, everything, language, means of communication, but also shared infrastructure, electricity and so on and so on. We have commons here, things which should remain within the public control because it concerns us all. And here again I partially at least support somebody like Chávez because at least with natural resources, I think, that that should be, how should I put it, that that should be kept under... I wouldn't say state but some kind of public control. Because I even read economic analysis, again pro-capitalist economists who are the first to concede that with especially small items for private consumption and so on, of course, capitalism works much better than public ownership or whatever. But one can argue does it really work better when you are dealing with these commons? For example, I think it was more or less accepted even by economists that when they had lacks of electricity, you remember a couple of years in California, they had electricity blackouts and so on. I loved it because I was there at that point and at a roundtable they asked me in this typical patronizing arrogant attitude: 'Oh, you come from a communist country, tell us please because we cannot imagine how it was to live in a communist terror and so on, no?' I told them well if I want to explain to my small son how it was, I bring him to California because, you know, we had electricity blackouts, now we don't have them, now you must come to California now to see them, no? So again, we have the commons of culture. Then we have the commons of external nature, our environment, oil, forests, our natural habitat. And then we have: what is the biogenetic inheritance of humanity if not the commons of internal nature? So I think clearly that three... three domains are emerging. Again, the commons of culture, the commons of external nature, the commons of internal nature, where some kind of public, I wouldn't say ownership but control, should be established. And it is this reference to commons which I think justifies the resuscitation of the notion of communism. Or to quote Alain Badiou, he likes to play a soft guy here, I want to embarrass him, would he do this here, I'm quoting now from his last book on Sarkozy, a nice quote to embarrass him. 'The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this communist hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs and let us drop... stop talking about it. In this case, the red man, the usual scum, is right, as is by the way the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the idea of communism does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and state. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the communist hypothesis to deploy itself.' And I simply agree with it. That is to say, the first step to admit is that the solution is not to limit the market and private property by direct interventions of state and state ownership. That attempt failed miserably, I'm the first to admit. Why? I think we should learn here from Kant something, Immanuel Kant. We should... the lesson is that the domain of state itself is also in its own way private. Private in the precise Kantian sense of what Kant calls in his wonderful text on Enlightenment the private use of reason. You know that Kant distinguishes private and public use of reason. And you know what's the paradox here? No wonder that many radical leftists like Kant, like really radical, who are even too radical for me. Like do you know that Abimael Guzmán, Presidente Gonzalo, Sendero Luminoso, you know that he was a fanatic Kantian? You know that the doctoral thesis of Guzmán was Kant's theory of space and quantum physics? You start with this you end up with, you know what. But what is Kant... what is what is attractive to a communist in Kant? I claim the key is his opposition between private and public use of reason. For Kant, again, it's the opposite of the usual liberal way to understand this opposition, which is the way Rorty does. Publicly... what's Rorty's point? It's very simple one. It's that his liberal ideal is to guarantee a minimal public space of rules which allow each of us to complain about his pains or her, tell the story and so on and so on. So public for him remains the public order, law, state, legal order which guarantees our private idiosyncrasies, prisons and so on. For Kant it's almost the opposite. For Kant private use of reason means precisely state administrative-ideological apparatuses and so on. It means the use of reason which is limited whose goal, horizon is pre-determined by a pre-existing social constitution. For example, for Kant a theological faculty, law faculty and so on. This all is private use of reason. Because they are not free to question their presuppositions. They have to serve public order, state and so on and so on. This makes it private. But for Kant, if a couple of... we here, we would have been public use of reason. Why? Because although we are private in the sense of not part of any public institution, we are, or at least act as if, pretend to be, public... public in the sense of unconstrained by any a priori predetermined space. We are free to debate. So that's the nice paradox of Kant that if a couple of intellectuals meet in their kitchen, in a kitchen of one of them, and debate philosophy, it's public use of reason. If you do... if you do something for the state and so on, it's private. The next step we should... this is incidentally the the difference, here Badiou's notion of subtraction comes handy. For the universal... for the public use of reason we have to adopt the position of singular universality. We should withdraw from the particular social order and act directly as singular universals. The thing to do here, to go a step further, is I think we should repeat this today, what already Marx did in his idea, the young Marx already of a privileged relationship between philosophy and working class proletariat. Of course we should do it in a different way today, to redetermine again what counts as proletariat today. But the idea is the following one: that it's not enough as Kant says this public use of reason. I'm the first to admit in a Marxist way how many prejudices and so on can be masked as public use of reason. How do we guarantee that the public use of reason is really public? By linking it to a social group, class, however you call it, which on account of its specific position, being those out of joint excluded, stand for universality. The idea is that the two... this is basic insight of Marx. The two universalities should collapse: the universality of reason and the universality of those who because they do not fit the existing social order. You know that's the old idea by Marx, taken over by Rancière, by Badiou and so on that universality is not simply all-encompassing universality. Universality doesn't mean I'm particular, you're particular, you're particular but we try to abstract our differences and see what we have in common. No, that's private still use of reason. Universality means that one of us, precisely the one who is at the bottom, who does not have, as Rancière put it, the part of no part, those without proper place, those directly stand for universality. And the catch is to bring the two together. That is to say, that's my thesis. All the first three antagonisms that I enumerated, ecology, biogenetic and and this symbolic social substance, intellectual property and so on, if we do not link them to this position of the excluded, they remain private. There is nothing more private than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep the excluded at a proper distance. You know all these problems: how many immigrants can we afford, will we still survive our community or all this. I think that when people attack globalization, we should radically abandon... we play the capitalist game if we approach the problem as 'but will we all become like Americans eating hamburg...' you know this my this my favorite right-wing motto, which turns around the old one 'better dead than red.' This is the European motto now anti-American: better red than eating hamburgers, how should I put it, no? So how will we keep our private particular way of life and so on and so on. No, that's my thesis. Without this reference to the social split between included and excluded, all other antagonisms lose their subversive edge. Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development. Intellectual property into a complex legal challenge. Biogenetic into an ethical issue and so on. One can seriously fight for ecology, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes and so on while not questioning the antagonism between the included and the excluded. Even more, one can even formulate some of these struggles in the terms of the included threatened by the polluting excluded. For example, you have ecologists who precisely combine ecology with anti... like all the foreigners coming and causing pollution and so on. In this way we get no true universality, only private concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. Corporations like Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor among some liberals even though they engage in anti-union activities. The trick is that they sell products that contain the claim of being politically progressive acts by themselves. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that, or so they claim, provide good benefits for their customers and so on and so on. I claim that, that's my conclusion here, without the antagonism between the included and the excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates will be the greatest humanitarian fighting against poverty and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist. Which he is, you know that Rupert Murdoch now had a an inner enlightenment, discovered ecology is the threat and now you know all the the usual stuff. Ordered all in all his offices to use recycled paper and so on, all all the the things. So again, it's crucial one... we have the fight for commons, all these commons: ecology, our shared social substance... the problem is how to keep these commons, how to prevent these commons from being privatized. We need the reference to the as it were to the fourth level. So my problem here is, now I come to ecology, how to prevent this kind of, let's call it, privatization of ecology. Ecology, I claim, is today one of the predominant fields of ideological... of the 'chicken not knowing.' You know my old joke about the guy who thought he is not a grain of seed, he says 'I know it, but does the chicken know it that I'm...' I think this... this is how ideology functions. It's... there is another aspect of this joke which I forgot to mention when I previously was reading it. I mean, in ideology ideology... the best definition of ideology is the chicken. That is to say, you know but you act as if you don't know because the chicken doesn't know. And let me give you a naive example of this chicken. A whole country can go, can disappear, so that the chicken doesn't know. This was my ex-country, ex-Yugoslavia. How? I read in recent memoirs of some politicians that already in the early 70s the nomenklatura, the circle around the ex-president Tito, they knew the economic situation is catastrophic, something will have to be done which will radically lower the living standard blah-blah. But their problem was Tito was old and dying and they wanted, okay, the chicken not to know. They wanted Tito to die happy. So for six, seven years till when Tito finally died, they the Yugoslavia got incredibly into debt like some billions of dollars and so on. They were, you know, the famous phrase in Hitchcock's *Psycho* at the beginning, that corrupt guy who tempts Marion. He says he... she told him 'are you buying happiness?' he says 'no I'm just buying... I'm not buying happiness I'm just buying... buying off non-happiness whatever.' Something like this they were doing. They were they were trying to buy off, to buy time, and they succeeded but then when the crisis strike, it struck much stronger. So again, it was an incredible example of the chicken shouldn't know, how should I put it, no? And but even at a deeper level, I think, this is how our culture functions. For example, imagine a civilized family. Mother and father are struggling, fighting and so on but in a civilized marriage they would say 'okay listen, we fight but let's make a pact, our children, our small child should not know it.' And they pretend that they are still happy in the eyes of the child. Of course, the game goes on. The child usually does know it but pretends not to know it, to not to make his parents even more unhappy and so on. But this... this need for... here we should supplement Lacan, subject supposed to know, the formula of transference. The fundamental figure of of ideology is subject supposed not to know. We need another who remains naive, who doesn't know. And this, I think, is our problem with ecology. We know it but the chicken doesn't know it. The problem is thus that we cannot rely on our common sense. That's my first crazy conclusion. We need to get in the only way to properly confront ecological catastrophe is to get even more denaturalized. In only in this way can we really accept the chance that what really is ecological threat, that my god our whole life-world the way we know it can disappear. Please believe me. I will give a new twist to it. Old joke, you know the I repeated it here at least two times already, Donald Rumsfeld, you know, the known unknowns all that. For you know when Rumsfeld deal... when Donald Rumsfeld in March explained why United States have to invade Iraq, he engaged in a little bit of philosophical debate. Here is the quote of Rumsfeld. 'There are known knowns, there are things we know that we know.' He meant like I am here and I know I'm here and blah-blah. 'Okay, then there are known unknowns. There are things that we know we don't know.' It's common what he meant, like I know there are cars outside this building and I don't know how many cars are there, but I know what I don't know. Then he says, 'but there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.' This was his justification. What if Saddam has some mega-weapons that it's not simply that we don't know does he have weapons of mass destruction, but we even don't know what we don't know. It's a total... okay. My old joke is that Rumsfeld, you know, the the problem of American politics is that they lack ideological reflection. Sorry they lacked yeah... because... because Rumsfeld forgot you noticed the fourth term. Which is not not known unknowns, you know what you don't know, but unknown knowns. You don't know what you know. This is called in psychoanalysis unconscious. All the prejudices and so on that determine you without you even knowing it. This is why things went wrong in Iraq and so on. But I think, and I think that our problem with ecology is that what is the real obstacle towards our taking it seriously? It's a combination of unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. On the one hand there are things we don't even know that we know. These automatical prejudices which prevent us from taking ecological crisis seriously. And then there are unknown unknowns in the sense of some total surprises, we don't even know how nature works when you think you master a certain organism, there can always be a surprise and so on and so on. And this is the true epistemological problem maybe. The Freudian, if the Freudian name for the unknown knowns is unconscious, the unconscious, the Freudian name for the unknown unknowns is trauma, the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected. Something the subject was absolutely not ready for. Something the subject cannot integrate in any way. And here I want to refer briefly to a wonderful new book by Catherine Malabou, who wrote the best book on Hegel that I know in the last years, published by Princeton University Press I think, *L'Avenir de Hegel: The Future of Hegel*, with long beautiful introduction by Derrida, where Derrida basically she converted Derrida. Derrida basically concedes there that he was wrong in his dismissal of Hegel. It's a totally pro-Hegelian book, her book. Okay, her new book published literally a month ago it's *Les Nouveaux Blessés*, 'The New Wounded.' The starting point of this book is the delicate echoing between internal and external real in psychoanalysis. For Freud and Lacan, external shocks, brutal unexpected encounters or intrusions, due their properly traumatic impact to the way they touch a pre-existing traumatic psychic reality. The idea of Freud is that when you undergo a shock, even if the shock is radical like a bomb explodes or what, the truly traumatic impact it's not due to this shock as such, but to the way the shock arouses, disturbs and so on some already trauma, pre-existing trauma deep in you. This is how Malabou rereads in a very interesting way that famous Freudian dream 'Father, can't you see that I'm burning?' where the external shock, the burning of the cloth covering the dead child, this is the external shock, fire, arouses the internal trauma. And that's the true trauma. So even the most violent intrusions of the external real owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in perverse mechanism, death drive, unconscious guilt feeling or whatever. That's the point for her of Freud. External real, real brutal trauma doesn't count ultimately. It can simply destroy you but doesn't count as trauma. It must have it must found an echo in your what Freud calls psychic reality, the real of your inner traumas. Today however, that's Malabou's thesis, our socio-political reality imposes multiple versions of external intrusions, traumas, which are just that: meaningless brutal interruptions that destroy the symbolic texture of subject's identity. First there is the brutal external physical violence, terror attacks like September 11th, the US 'shock and awe' bombing of Iraq, street violence, rapes and so on but also natural catastrophes, earthquakes, tsunamis and so on. Then there is the so-called irrational in the sense of meaningless destruction of the material base of our inner reality, brain tumors, Alzheimer's, organic lesions of our brain and so on which can utterly change, destroy even the victim's personality. And finally there are the destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence, social exclusion, family violence and so on. Basically Malabou's reproach is that Freud succumbs here to the temptation of meaning. He is not ready to accept the direct destructive efficiency of external shocks. They destroy the psyche of the victim without resonating in any inner traumatic truth. For example, it would be obviously obscene to link say the psychic devastation of a Muselmann, you know Muselmann the living dead in the concentration camp, to his masochism, death drive or guilt feeling. That is her big example. It's obscene to play there these Freudian games, you know Muselmann death drive. No, it's simply he he is the victim, he is not devastated by his unconscious anxieties, he is directly brutalized by a meaningless external shock which can in no way be hermeneutically appropriated. For Freud, if external violence gets too strong, we simply exit the psychic domain proper. For Freud the choice is either the shock is reintegrated into a pre-existing libidinal frame or the shock destroys psyche and nothing is left. This is how when Freud was engaged with violence, you know in his texts during World War I, his point was always to show that even when you deal with a physical violence at its purest like soldiers who were brutally wounded by a by a gun grenade or whatever, that in order to get from here to a psychological psychic traumatic effect you must go through sexuality, through their sexual traumas, masochism, whatever, you it's not the causality is not direct. So what Freud cannot envisage is that the victim as it were survives its own death. All different forms of traumatic encounters, independent of their specific nature, social, natural, biological, symbolic, lead to the same result. A new subject is emerging today which survived its own death, the erasure of its symbolic identity. There is no continuity between this new post-traumatic subject, for example, the victim of Alzheimer's disease or some other cerebral lesions of the brain. After the shock literally a new subject emerges. The features of this subject are well known from descriptions: lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference, detachment and so on and so on. It is a subject who is no longer in the world in the Heideggerian sense of engaged existence. This subject lives death as a form of life. His life is death drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagement. So in the if the 20th century was the Freudian century, the century of libido, so that even the worst nightmares were read as sado-masochist vicissitudes of the libido, the 21st century will be the century of post-traumatic disengaged subjects whose first emblematic figure was that of the Muselmann in concentration camps. The feature again which runs through all these figures is that the cause of the catastrophe remains libidinally meaningless, resisting any interpretation. Again, I hope I made it clear. Let's take Alzheimer's. You know that when somebody is victim of Alzheimer's, you cannot even say it's the same person just somehow reduced. It's literally a new person, you are talking to a stranger. You can... that's her thesis of Malabou that psychoanalysis remains at the level of repetition, every traumatic present serves as a trigger to to revitalize resuscitate old traumas and so on. But in cases like Alzheimer's and so on, Alzheimer's, survivors of terrorist attacks, whatever, we are dealing with something different. We are dealing with a radically new subject. We have still a psyche, the subject sometimes can even talk, survived, but his entire past is erased and he he or she is emotionally blank and so on. This for her is death drive embodied. And so that it's not only death drive as destruction, but you survive your death. And this kind of blank existence for her is something that Freud and she thinks even Lacan was not able... was not able to think. Okay, now I'm still working on this. I think, I will not go into it now, how I think things are a little bit more complex here that for Lacan a similar trauma where you as it were lose... what she thinks happens as an accident after external encounter, I think that for Lacan it's constitutive of subject, as subjects we are in a way living death and so on, but that's another topic. What I do like in her work is this basic insight which is a very common-sensical one but I think there is a truth in it. Where again where you are dealing with victims of I don't know serial rape, extreme torture or also things like a simple Alzheimer's or whatever, where the shock is so strong, external, that it literally destroys your personality but you survive. What happens there? You cannot deal with it the way Freud was dealing with traumas, playing these libidinal games and so on. Literally a post-libidinal subject survives. And this is the mystery already of Muselmann of this Agamben focuses on them. Incidentally in a strange way he he claims that we find them only in Nazi concentration camps not in Gulag. Which is a strange thing to claim because with all my sympathies for Stalinism I can tell you it's not true. They even had a many words for them if you read Gulag literature, not sentimental shit like Solzhenitsyn but really good one like for example Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales and so on. They had the term, one of the terms was 'duraki' which is the Russian for idiots and so on. You had the living death there. What I and I think but I agree with her that this strange weird subjectivity of a living death where also we have very nicely Malabou points out that we have here also a problem of a problem of transference, the way they are disengaged you cannot play the game of transference there. You cannot get them into into transference. So the whole the clinic, this would be the challenge. Is there a clinic of Muselmann, how should I put it, no? How do you how do you not Muselmann-Muselmann, but you know but what is the wonderful irony of history is that these Muselmann were mostly Jews of course, no? They were called Muselmann because, you know the story, in old normal racist Europe, the image of Muselmann was those who are totally resigned to their fate and just do this automatical gesture total passivity. This was the ideological racist image of the Muselmann. So when you are totally destroyed in the camp, you behaved in this way, you just uh-uh made this gesture that total passivity, which is why they were called... they were called Muselmann. So, okay, let me go to my main line and to conclude relatively fast. So the main lesson here is the Lacanian one, which we should yes, sorry. No, my first conclusion would have been that something like this a total devastation would already have happened, I claim, in a true ecological catastrophe. We shouldn't underestimate it. There were signs already in Chernobyl and so on that how a human being reacts when you are as it were deprived of your life world. Because let's not forget that Lacan points out this out this very nicely in his early seminars, nature is the ultimate big Other. Not nature as nature, but nature as this fantasy of nature, nature as the rhythm of seasons, stars. This is the basic reference of stability. The big Other at its most elementary is when you say, 'Oh we humans can play with our follies but there will be winter and summer, the sun will rise and so on,' you know in the sense of there is some basic big other. I mean, not bit, big Other. It's bit... I bit to sleep in the sense of that Lynn Margulis or what who claims that, you know, the hypothesis of Gaia, the Earth, no, that the Earth is an self-regulating organism. But Lynn Margulis, I hope I pronounce it pronounced it right, sorry, the big biologist who developed this idea, she warned against mystifying Gaia as good mother Earth. She said Gaia is a dirty bitch. I like this, yes. It's nice. Yeah, yeah, it's nice. Okay. So what I'm saying is that so this would be radic... truly radical ecology for me. Not just there is no big Other in the sense of symbolic system where accounts are settled, but there is no nature. To accept this utter inconsis... ontological inconsistency of nature. And again, how to survive this loss of our substance. Now just if you allow me a very short conclusion to add not a more optimistic note, but to go into ethical consequences here and aesthetic. Does this mean that I'm preaching some kind of nihilism, in the sense of 'Oh everything is totally chaotic ultimately and so on and so on.' No, I think that what survive after the big Other... I'm here for Badiou... eternal ideas, the Platonic domain survive but not as substantial big other, as a pure appearance. What do I mean by this? I want to give you a little bit of a hope. Precisely returning to concentration camps, there is a wonderful short story by Jorge Semprún, you know who wrote I think what is maybe the best novel about concentration camps because frankly what people like Levi and so on are doing, these are not exactly novels, these are fictionalized documentaries and so on, but Jorge Semprún seriously approached the problem of how can you find an artistic form that wouldn't betray the traumatic experience like that of a concentration camp. So in his short story *The Cattle Truck*, Semprún reports how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews at Buchenwald camp. The Jews were stacked into the freight train almost to a car, traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter. On arrival, all in the carriage had frozen to death except for children kept warm by the others in the center of the bundle of bodies. You know, they were simply for days in, adults were ethical enough to say 'we stay outside and with our warmth we enable the children to survive.' So when the children were emptied from the car, the Nazis let their dogs loose on them. They killed all children except two small boys, four, five years, one a little bit bigger than other, who started to run away in panic. Then this happened, quote: 'The little one of these two children began to fall behind. The SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too. The smell of blood was driving the dogs mad. And then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller. Together they covered a few more yards till the blows of the clubs felled them and together they dropped their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity.' I claim this is not a metaphor, that this eternity is fully Platonic here. In what sense? Imagine how you got the point: this miracle of the two surviving child running away, when one fell down the other one, even if total panic, stepped back, hold his hand and then they died together. One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed. While the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality, that's how I would film this scene, that the image would be frozen at the moment of clasped hands, but the soundtrack would go on. The children dying and so on. The sound renders temporary reality, the image renders the eternal real of the ethical idea. I think we should read this scene the way I imagine it against the final shot of *Thelma and Louise*. You remember when the car... I think that there, unfortunately, you don't have a soundtrack which is why it's missed, it's too vulgar. If I were to shoot... I think the more correct procedure, Ridley Scott I think was the director, would have been to have the image frozen but the sounds of crash and so on and so on. This is, in this way, you can render the Platonic duality of the chaos of empirical reality and the eternal idea, which is not any kind of a deep substantial idea, it's this miracle of surface. What do I mean by this? Recall the old Catholic strategy how to guard men against the temptation of the flesh. They tell you, this is the old Catholic, I read it in some books even when I was young, a religious uncle gave it to me, that when you are tempted by a beautiful woman, the thing to do is to imagine how this woman will look in a couple of decades: the dried skin, sagging breasts and so on and so on. Or, this friend told me, even better, imagine how already now she looks inside: like you see a beautiful breast but imagine all the blood, the stomach, the shit in and so on and so on. What's my point here? It's that far from enacting now that old-fashioned Lacanian, pseudo-Lacanian, would have said 'this is return to the real, the beautiful woman is image imaginary but you go to the real which is the vulgar real of bodily...' I claim exactly the opposite. The truly traumatic real is the surface, this abyss of pleasures that a naked body maybe promises and so on. And this idea of imagining all the dirt there is precisely the very form of the escape from the real. The same thing I think happens in pornography. Often people laugh at me that I repeat in my usual theory about pornography this fact how pornography has this fear of over-identification emotional, no? Which is why in traditional pornography, when you see it all, the story is usually extremely stupid. The story which introduces the even... you know like I'm not kidding, the last one I saw is years ago is one where it was something like... no, no, no, I will tell you what I saw more recently, I'm not, is like, you know, a plumber comes home fixes the hole and then the wife says, 'But but I have another hole to be fixed, can you fix it?' You are embarrassed. And I claim they are not so stupid. This is there is a deep censorship here as if to have both at the same time, that is to say the emotionally engaging story and you see it all, it's somehow prohibited. But what goes on now I claim is an even stronger censorship. I was told, and all I know is then I checked on some of the free websites, and you can imagine the price I'm paying now once you tested them, they know to your address. So every time I open email I get 'guaranteed in two weeks three inches longer' and so on, you know like that's life, that's life, no? Okay. So it's so-called, you know this so-called they call it Gonzo, Gonzo pornography, which means what? That not only is the story stupid but they consciously destroy even the minimal illusion that you are observing a narrative. Gonzo means that they openly they include the fact into their behavior that they are filmed. Like they make love but the woman makes a gesture, they address the camera, they make jokes about themselves and so on. I claim this is, you see, this is censorship. It's an incredible form of censorship. The appearance... what they are afraid of is pure appearance. Precisely what is dangerous is appearance. And again, for Lacan, real is not that deep real when you tear it off the ultimate truth. The real is appearance. And so this in this sense, in this sense I claim... when Lacan says there is no big Other in the sense of substantial reference and so on, it in no way it doesn't mean a kind of pseudo-Oriental wisdom existential cynicism, 'you know everything returns to dust, remember...' no, no, no, no, no, no. No, eternity should be saved but as appearance of eternity. I'm sorry if I was too long but that's life, what can you do, nothing. Thank you. So we have, if it's okay with you Jack, we have still some minutes whatever of time to pretend that we are in democracy, no? If you... so please. Ah, are you? But help me because I'm myopic and then I may not see your hand and then I'm usually accused of racism, sexism. I mean, these accusations are true, I am all that, but nonetheless I want... please. (Questioner A couple years ago when we just had this report, the UN report about... about global warming... there was very interesting response in the media. I remember one newspaper in Sweden was saying 'well the doomsday is almost here, it will be substantially, radically diminished.' But then they had two answers, you know this hope. The first one was 'well we don't have to sort of decrease our GDP very much.' And I think, you know, your talk has sort of dealt with that issue very much. But the other thing was that we almost have the technique, we almost have the technology in order to cope with this. And the point here that I'm trying to make is that you also have this kind of technology almost acting as this symbolic real as capitalism in the same way, you know you have the coming back of inevitable backdrop you can't get rid of. The same thing with technology to a certain extent, you know this kind of Heideggerian Gestell and the Jacques Ellul argument that technology becomes absolutely autonomous. Now I'm thinking first of all why you tend to sort of ignore that issue of technology, how technology renders itself as inevitable as capitalism. And secondly how you think perhaps these may work together in which communism and technology seems that global warming seems to be the symptom both of capitalism and of technology and so you can only deal with global warming within the modality of either capitalism or within the modality of technology.) Yeah, okay. No, first I agree, I mean, first limits of technology, our knowledge, sorry, and also even science, even more than technology... I said technology are obvious. For example, here we have unknown unknowns. No, you're too young to remember how years ago the big fashion more in Europe than here was what the Germans called *Waldsterben*, the dying of forests. Now we learn, let's be honest, that this was a total miscalculation, that forests are thriving more than ever. There are more forests now on the Earth than there were at any point in the last years, I think. So this was simply... so no, this is for me not an argument to avoid it, that that ecological crisis is not to be taken seriously. On the contrary, that it has to be taken much more seriously because you know we can miscalculate in this direction, in that direction. It's... we are really dealing with, to quote your respected philosopher again, Rumsfeld, with unknown unknowns. Here, you know. But you know what's for me the problem when you say technology? I'm more tempted to say that already with Heidegger there are problems here, because sometimes, and then bad Heideggerians for me like Richard Dreyfus take this over, sometimes Heidegger sounds as if for him the solution is to step out of this technological obsession, to discover the pleasures of peaceful everyday existence, as Dreyfus put it somewhere, 'forget about this frantic activity, spend evenings free, sit at a table with your friends, drink, listen to music and so on.' But that's not the Heideggerian way. Heidegger is well aware that all this... already he says this when he's at his best, when he says that for example a lone farmer who inspects his forest, he doesn't know it, but he is already part of the technological exploitation of forests and so on and so on. So again, I consciously avoided the topic of technology because it would have been too complex. But I think that the true challenge, and even with Heidegger it's clear, that the true challenge is to, how should I put it... it's stupid to say 'reinvent' but a shift in the very meaning of technology. It's not that we should move from technology to I don't know what, more meditation or passivity or whatever. The battle has to be won. Technology itself, to put it in Heidegger, had to be inverted through a new disclosure of being or whatever. You know what like... I think again that what I would insist on is that there is no way out in the sense of rediscovering our life world or of whatever, stepping in this sense stepping out of technology. If anything, I think we should become in a way more alienated. For me the problem with technology is precisely, this will sound crazy, that in it we are not alienated enough. We appear to be alienated, but we are never really just abstract subjects exploiting nature. We always behave as if nonetheless we are part of our existing life world and so on and so on. So the problem is much more serious here. And I think again that that Heidegger himself was afraid to confront this. This again is not a cheap criticism of Heidegger, I'm again writing a long text on Heidegger. I think especially today when it's very fashionable again in Europe to attack Heidegger in a cheap way as pro-Nazi or whatever, this should be rejected. I'm even tempted to say that the most interesting period of Heidegger is the period of the 30s when he struggled with... which is why in my new book *In Defense of Lost Causes*, which will be out in a month and so on, the title of the Heidegger chapter is 'Why Heidegger Did the Right Step in 1933.' Okay, then there is a footnote and then it says 'A right step but in the wrong direction,' no? So I'm not crazy, no? But but what I'm saying is that Heidegger absolutely, I agree here with you, deserves to be reread. But precisely, you know, I don't believe in this... I don't think that the late Heidegger of *Gelassenheit* is I think is the most productive one, to put it in these vulgar terms. I think that it's so interesting this big struggle of Heidegger in between. In between, that is to say, after *Sein und Zeit* (*Being and Time*) when he... it became clear to him that that project cannot be concluded in that form, and after that but before he found his late formula as it were somewhere in with his Nietzsche book. Even his book on *Vom Ereignis* (*Beiträge zur Philosophie*), on 'enownment' I don't know this, is much more ambiguous. For example, Heidegger there used still uses a term which would be unthinkable later: he speaks about 'the will to Ereignis.' Will... willing is still a positive category there. And I'm sorry but no I talk too much I'm sorry. (Questioner You still didn't really speak about the relation between capitalism, the way in which you conceptualized capitalism, and technology as it has been conceptualized by for example Heidegger and all. And how for example that... only you need a technological society in order to have capitalism functioning.) Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay, all I can do now is to give you just the formula. My formula is: I think that Heidegger and those who see capitalism just as one of the forms of let's call it instrumental technological reason
resistance. Then finally we met and they said 'You see this word ideology, but it's... couldn't you make it like Pervert's Guide to Spiritual Tendencies Today or what? It's no more longer actual.' You know words are disappearing. So again, we are Fukuyamaists, I claim even like let's take somebody like my good theoretical friend, no, sorry, theoretical enemy, practical friend, Judith Butler. I mean, her universe for me fits perfectly liberal capitalism. All she wants is, you know, like all the excluded voices, those on the margin who are not heard should be... their word should be heard and so on and so on. It's just let's expand more and more liberal democracy. Let's open up the space, let's include the marginalized and so on and so on. This for me fits the existing order. So the only true question for me today is: do we endorse this naturalization of capitalism which... I don't have time to go into it here, but my best friend and not theoretical enemy... even with him I have problems, the guy who was here I think a little bit ago, Badiou. My God, recently he started to talk about... he used a terrible metaphor, I don't know what's happening with him. Maybe he was visiting United States too much. At a talk recently he said something like 'one cannot fight capitalism, capitalism is like a murmur, a background sound, where it's just there, you should ignore it, you fight concrete politics, you fight United States government, you fight Israel government, you fight that... you know what I mean, you don't fight capitalism as such, it's the background of fight.' Well I claim, if the notion of event the way he uses it or, I would say in more Lacanian vein, act, has any meaning, act for me is precisely a gesture which, as it were, makes palpable what otherwise is an invisible background. So again, even there in Badiou you almost don't find capitalism. So again, the only serious question for me is: do we have to endorse this and the other guy whom you mentioned, Simon Critchley, that's his entire point. You cannot beat the system, the system is here to stay, the state is to stay, basically everything is to stay. So all we can do is what? My reproach to Critchley, if you read his book *Infinitely Demanding*, I wrote a long review of it which means one friend less, one enemy more. I will get... no because my... you know what's his idea? Capitalism, I mean, the state is here to stay, withdraw, resist, don't try to imitate power and so on. But the first surprise I have with this, it's very fashionable today, this politics of to withdraw into politics of resistance like 'let's not get caught into the struggle for power, let's just withdraw, resist and so on.' Is Critchley in his book *Infinitely Demanding* literally has these formulas that the moment you also aim for power, want to take over power, you start... you get caught into imitating power, you become like them and so on and so on. But here I think, especially for Critchley who is British, a certain dose of best British naive empiricism and common sense would come handy. Like what does he mean you don't resist? Surely he doesn't mean you don't resist Hitler for example. Probably he wouldn't say 'no let's not resist Hitler with arms, it means you got caught into his game.' No, there probably he would agree. Or I would like to ask him a similar naive question. For example, you have here the unfortunate great president. What would he say to the left here? 'No, don't beat him democratic Hillary Clinton, why don't you withdraw into the interstices of power and so on and so on.' His formula is we should just make the those in power... we should just put from outside the pressure onto those in power to make power more responsible and so on and so on. Okay, an honest position and I'm even ready to admit that mostly that's all almost one can do today. But isn't it then that if you function in this way I have two problems. The first problem is how to avoid nonetheless playing the game of power in this way. I mean I'm not a leftist paranoiac who claims every resistance is co-opted, far from this, but let me take when I asked him, Critchley, when we had a debate, 'Okay, give me one example of politics of resistance.' He told me for example the big movement all around Europe, hundreds of thousands demonstrated against the Iraq war. I doubt it. I remember when in England, when I was there, these big demonstrations, okay hundreds of thousands of people, the greatest demonstrations in British history after World War II. But what surprised me how in a strange way everyone was satisfied with the result. Those who organized the demonstrations were satisfied: 'Oh my God, you see, we showed Blair and Bush the majority doesn't want the war.' The more strange thing is that those in power were also very satisfied. I mean, Bush gave here a wonderful answer, which you may laugh that it's hypocritical, but I think there was a moment of truth in it. I remember I was in London when Bush was asked about, you know, hundreds of thousands of people protesting against you. His answer was: 'You see, this is why I love the demonstration because you see this is why we are going to Iraq, so that the thing that is happening here could happen also in Iraq, people freely demonstrating and so on.' I think even if it personally from Bush's side was a rather stupid cynicism, there is a moment of truth in it. Everybody was satisfied because it was clear, absolutely to everyone, that these demonstrations will have no... no effects whatsoever. I... I even suspect that... now this is something very nasty to say, that most of the people who demonstrated did it and they did not do it in spite of the fact that they knew that probably this will not have any influence on actual state politics, they did it because they knew it, that it will not have any influence. They like this game: they are there, we are here, we make our moral stand and so on and so on, so at the end everybody is satisfied. In other words, when Simon Critchley has this formula 'resist, bombard those in power with impossible demands,' he's simply playing the superego game. I mean, the superego game, I mean, it's a very comfortable position of radical morality, we bombard those in power, but what then would you answer if... and I know politicians whose reaction to this position is: 'Wonderful to have people like Simon Critchley, because they, we, who deal with real politics, we have to solve problems. But it's nice to have somebody to remind you that we all secretly dream of higher ideals and so on and so on.' You know every brutal politician likes to have another one who is kind of ideal... idealist who wants the impossible, unfortunately we cannot have it. It's a very comfortable... it's a very comfortable position. It's the same as with democracy. It took me some time to get the formula. You know who was already aware of it? Didn't your great commentator blah-blah Walter Lippmann, he wrote a book already in the 20s, I forgot the title, where he proposed a wonderful formula which is very deep one. I think that it's not only this eternal Chomsky motive, manipulating consent and so on. It's that what if every functioning democracy is sustained silently by a kind of a secret unwritten pact? I claim people don't really want to decide. The majority of the people really knows like, what do I really know about economics, about this, about that and so on and so on. They want between the lines to be told what they should choose and then they just want to go through the appearance of choosing. I claim that... so I claim that de facto situation is more mysterious. In a functioning democracy, people would be... the truth of democracy for me is Switzerland today where I was told whenever they have a referendum, you get, a friend of mine showed it to me, you get when you go to vote, the paper to vote and an attached paper, an advice how to vote. And everybody accepts it. That's democracy, I claim. I claim that's democracy. It's... that's how it de facto functions. And I'm not making fun of it, I'm not saying it's not important, I'm not playing the old Marxist card 'you see it's only a formal democracy' and so on and so on. I'm just saying that if you look really closely at it, this is how it effectively functions. We don't want to decide, we want to choose those who will decide, make decisions for us and so on and so on. So again, do we have to endorse this naturalization of capitalist democracy or does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which will prevent its indefinite reproduction? And here I will try to address very naively today this big question that people ask me: 'Okay, you claim to be a Marxist and so on, but cut the crap, what do you really mean by it?' Like people often reproach me, 'Okay, it's easy to write a book on Lenin, but wait a minute, what does this mean today here?' And I will very naively, I hope you will not be too bored, try to approach this question. I see four antagonisms which I claim in the long term capitalism will not be able to cope with. First, that's the title, the topic of main topic, I will come in the second part of the talk to it: Ecology. I am the first to admit the infinite adaptability of capitalism. I'm well aware that if there were to be a big ecological catastrophe, capitalism would immediately turn it into a new domain of market investment and so on and so on. I was even told that it's already happening, that there are already capitalists who take into account the possibility of of this higher level of sea and global warming, and they are already selling beaches in Hudson Bay, in northern Canada and so on, I mean, it's already happening even. But what's the problem? Capitalism at a certain level it works, more or less, more or less. Because you know what surprised me? I don't... the violent reaction to Naomi Klein's new book on shock capitalism. I mean, I don't think she is really a big theoretician. But let's be honest, she doesn't even pretend to be. But I agree with the fundamental message of her book, which is that market economy it's not just a mechanism which you apply and it works. First you need quite a lot of extra-market violence to sustain conditions in which market economy works. And I think the big triumphant proof of this is today's China. Incidentally, if some of you have read, about two months ago, I think *New York Times* was kind enough to publish that short text, crazy of me about this Chinese regulating... reg... I love that topic, it turned me into pro-Chinese, regulating reincarnation, you know how you have to... and a friend from China, it's wonderful. I mean, how can...literally you have a form printed if you want to reincarnate, Lama. And it says 'I here want like that.' I can imagine with my dirty mind obscenities how you know then a top bureaucrat answers you: 'Sorry, you want to reincarnate as a as a I don't know, as a as a Buddhist Lama. Sorry, these places are if you want to reincarnate in South Tibet only some insects and dogs are free for reincarnation. Sorry, it doesn't go.' And then... but you know that the game goes on. Now something unbelievable happened. Did you read Dalai Lama announced that he will not reincarnate, but that he wanted his successor to be elected by some kind of a more democratic procedure like, okay not really democratic, like Vatican conclave, to gather all the big Tibetan Buddhist figures to elect the successor. And now comes the irony. You know what was the Chinese official answer? 'You see secularists betraying Tibetan traditions. No, we... we...' now Chinese communists stand as defending the true traditions of of incarnation against this secularized politician Dalai Lama and so on. But the basic lesson holds, I think, that's the difficult lesson to get from what we learn of today's China is that, and people are aware of it, in Europe this debate is beginning. Till now we secretly hoped that even if we were cynical about capitalism, but nonetheless even many left-liberals believed that nonetheless sooner or later, after some periods of authoritarian rule, capitalism brings democracy. It can be for a decade or two you need a little bit of authoritarian rule to create conditions but then it takes off. Like they like to point out how all the big success stories of capitalist explosion, from Chile to South Korea, were opened up through a limited authoritarian rule which created the conditions. And it's typical, although some even people close to Bush already are honest enough to include into this series China. So it's absolutely hypocritical, I claim. Here I even agree with Chinese communists, although they are corrupt and so on, where they claim only... that's the ultimate paradox... only the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party can guarantee ideal conditions of capitalism. It's not that as some Western liberals think 'Oh if capitalism can thrive so nicely today in China in spite of the party rule, how much more it would be triumphant with liberal democracy.' Not more, less I think. It would explode with unrest, probably the unity of China falling apart and so on and so on. But not to get lost. I think that the sad lesson is that the sad lesson of this is that we are, I think, approaching a new era, in a way even here in the United States, where it becomes more and more clear that capitalism and democracy do not go together naturally, how should I put it. And I think we should reread history in this way. We tend to forget that this idea of natural coexistence of capitalism and democracy is not natural at all. If you look at the history of 19th century, you had have first liberal capitalism, but definitely without democracy. Rather, as I read in some interesting new text in *New Left Review*, I forgot even the author, the author tries to prove how what happens today in China is much closer to 18th century Europe, where wild capitalism was sustained by a very strong authoritarian rule. Now so let's not forget that throughout 19th century things which today liberal boasts but they are our inheritance. No, they were not at all perceived as part of liberal tradition. What we today understand as universal vote, universal education, freedom of the press, freedom of speech and so on. Sorry, but this was the result of the long years of socialist-progressive struggle, that this was... this was not originally part of part of liberal dogma. We tend to forget this and I think we should remember this today because again I claim we are slowly returning, and that's the lesson of Naomi Klein's book, a sad one, that we are returning to a state where capitalism and democracy no longer, how should I put it, go naturally together. So again, but my point is more fundamental one. Capitalism only works in precise social conditions. It implies the trust into the objective mechanism of market's invisible hand which, in the guise of what Hegel called cunning of reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, I claim, we are today in the midst of a radical change. We are in a situation where, unique in the history of humanity, where a subjective act, collective or even individual, like some crazy collective project, like this big dam on the Yellow River that the Chinese are building, on some super-terrorist attack, whatever, we don't know what, can catastrophically disturb our lives and cause global catastrophe. So you see my point. My point is that market works where you have time for test and trials. We have a problem, I try, you try, I fail, you fail, finally we find the solution. You need a breeding space, as it were. I claim that when you have this extreme situation we are approaching today, where you have to make now a decision and you cannot then repeat it and compete and so on and so on, you can no longer count on on market mechanisms. You cannot say 'okay global warming is a problem, let's leave this, that approach, market and so on and so on. At the end we will find the most efficient mechanism.' Maybe, but we may be all dead before we find it. The symbol of this is a nice detail which I read in a report on Cuban missile crisis. We learned that we were much closer to nuclear war than we thought. What happened on October 27th, is interesting. There was a small skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing that the submarine had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. So Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told later that the submarine was authorized in such conditions when directly attacked to fire this nuclear torpedo if three officers agreed. And then the three commanding officers began a fierce shouting debate. Two of them said yes, one, we even know his name, family name Arkhipov, said no. And you can almost say, as some historian said at this conference in Havana later about the Cuban crisis, a guy named Arkhipov saved the world. I mean, can you imagine what would have happened if this guy were to say yes? Russians would start with atomic attack and so on and so on. So you see my point. In such conditions you cannot, I claim, play the market game. The second problem I see is the obvious inappropriateness of private property for the so-called intellectual labor. The key antagonism of the so-called new digital industries is how to maintain the form of private property within which only the logic of profit can be maintained. And I think legal complications in biogenetics point in the same direction. Phenomena are emerging which bring the notion of property to weird paradoxes. So again I'm claiming that in the long term this will cause crazy oscillations, it doesn't work. I recently spoke, I forgot his name, at some conference in Germany with a conservative economist, German, who says a guy like Bill Gates is an anomaly in the sense that when you have a guy who in years becomes the richest guy in the world, it means that market no longer, even in a strongly distorted way, reflects some kind of social productivity and so... he said it's as if the normal market oscillation is the normal heartbeat and it's as if today market is like a heavy heart attack, how should I put it. Market is reacting too... too irrationally with intellectual property. If you let market to itself, you would we would be in a situation where like imagine just United States government not intervening against Microsoft, you would literally have an individual or a couple of individuals privately owning our entire communicational infrastructure. And in this way market would even self-cancel itself. So again, I'm not saying this opens up any bright revolutionary prospect or what. I'm simply saying that this is a limit of market mechanisms. That there is something as it were in so-called intellectual property which makes it, if I may use this term, communist in its very principle. The form of private property resists to it. Then third feature, the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, biogenetics and so on and so on. I think that something also is changing here. The moment you introduce the notion of private property in biogenetics, something extremely problematic is happening, which can lead to improbable consequences. And finally, what I repeat all the time in my texts, slums and other new forms of apartheid. New walls are arising, we are moving slowly towards a new apartheid society. And signs are everywhere, even in Europe, which which praises itself as more civilized welfare state against vulgar United States and so on. But I totally agree with Immanuel Wallerstein when he predicts as one of the options a kind of a low-level civil war in Europe between the new immigrants and the old aboriginal Europeans. We have in France, in United Kingdom signs of it, so-called religious minorities organizing themselves and so on and so on. So not to lose time, I think that this is the crucial geopolitical fact for me. How we usually characterize today's society, this is very fashionable to say, as the society of total digitalized control and so on, control, we are all controlled. We know the story how every time you take a walk on New York at least cameras tape your movement so that basically if those in power want, they can practically reconstruct the movement of already more or less of everyone of us. But I think that there is the opposite movement also occurring, how the state, the more it is total in this sense of controlling population, the more it is simply withdrawing itself from parts of its own territory. As if white spots in the map of a state are emerging, slums, places of the excluded where the state simply withdraws. And I think the big question maybe of our 21st century is what will happen with this growing number of the excluded. Here I see, in spite of his clownish gestures and so on, the big significance of Hugo Chávez. Because whatever you think about him, and I'm far from simply supporting him, but let's be frank, he was the first and till now, okay, in Bolivia the situation is more complex, we are not dealing with slums there but with aborigines more. Wasn't he the only one basically who fully integrated those excluded in favelas into a political process? The way it was done in all other cases in Brazil and so on is either religion or charity, humanitarian, like 'oh every liberal likes to worry.' You know this is for me the liberal formula today. Are we aware how we live here, rich, totally secured but, you know all this, there are people there who need just five dollars to make the operation that would save their lives and so on. Liberals like this. They what they like to do is, this is the old formula wonderful that Orson Welles used in *Citizen Kane*, every liberal likes to take care of, you know this Angelina Jolie stuff and so on, to take care of of the poor because what they are afraid of is not that the poor will die but that the poor will start taking care of themselves, of course, now that's the true horror, no? So again, I think that we are literally heading towards a possible civil war with unpredictable consequences here. So how do these four antagonisms relate to each other? There is a big difference, a gap, which separates the last antagonism, new favelas, slum, excluded, included, from the three other antagonisms. The first three antagonisms designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri, here I agree with them not otherwise, call commons. Commons in the sense of the shared substance of our social being whose privatization, enclosure and so on should be resisted. First, the commons of culture, the so-called cognitive capital, everything, language, means of communication, but also shared infrastructure, electricity and so on and so on. We have commons here, things which should remain within the public control because it concerns us all. And here again I partially at least support somebody like Chávez because at least with natural resources, I think, that that should be, how should I put it, that that should be kept under... I wouldn't say state but some kind of public control. Because I even read economic analysis, again pro-capitalist economists who are the first to concede that with especially small items for private consumption and so on, of course, capitalism works much better than public ownership or whatever. But one can argue does it really work better when you are dealing with these commons? For example, I think it was more or less accepted even by economists that when they had lacks of electricity, you remember a couple of years in California, they had electricity blackouts and so on. I loved it because I was there at that point and at a roundtable they asked me in this typical patronizing arrogant attitude: 'Oh, you come from a communist country, tell us please because we cannot imagine how it was to live in a communist terror and so on, no?' I told them well if I want to explain to my small son how it was, I bring him to California because, you know, we had electricity blackouts, now we don't have them, now you must come to California now to see them, no? So again, we have the commons of culture. Then we have the commons of external nature, our environment, oil, forests, our natural habitat. And then we have: what is the biogenetic inheritance of humanity if not the commons of internal nature? So I think clearly that three... three domains are emerging. Again, the commons of culture, the commons of external nature, the commons of internal nature, where some kind of public, I wouldn't say ownership but control, should be established. And it is this reference to commons which I think justifies the resuscitation of the notion of communism. Or to quote Alain Badiou, he likes to play a soft guy here, I want to embarrass him, would he do this here, I'm quoting now from his last book on Sarkozy, a nice quote to embarrass him. 'The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this communist hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs and let us drop... stop talking about it. In this case, the red man, the usual scum, is right, as is by the way the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the idea of communism does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and state. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the communist hypothesis to deploy itself.' And I simply agree with it. That is to say, the first step to admit is that the solution is not to limit the market and private property by direct interventions of state and state ownership. That attempt failed miserably, I'm the first to admit. Why? I think we should learn here from Kant something, Immanuel Kant. We should... the lesson is that the domain of state itself is also in its own way private. Private in the precise Kantian sense of what Kant calls in his wonderful text on Enlightenment the private use of reason. You know that Kant distinguishes private and public use of reason. And you know what's the paradox here? No wonder that many radical leftists like Kant, like really radical, who are even too radical for me. Like do you know that Abimael Guzmán, Presidente Gonzalo, Sendero Luminoso, you know that he was a fanatic Kantian? You know that the doctoral thesis of Guzmán was Kant's theory of space and quantum physics? You start with this you end up with, you know what. But what is Kant... what is what is attractive to a communist in Kant? I claim the key is his opposition between private and public use of reason. For Kant, again, it's the opposite of the usual liberal way to understand this opposition, which is the way Rorty does. Publicly... what's Rorty's point? It's very simple one. It's that his liberal ideal is to guarantee a minimal public space of rules which allow each of us to complain about his pains or her, tell the story and so on and so on. So public for him remains the public order, law, state, legal order which guarantees our private idiosyncrasies, prisons and so on. For Kant it's almost the opposite. For Kant private use of reason means precisely state administrative-ideological apparatuses and so on. It means the use of reason which is limited whose goal, horizon is pre-determined by a pre-existing social constitution. For example, for Kant a theological faculty, law faculty and so on. This all is private use of reason. Because they are not free to question their presuppositions. They have to serve public order, state and so on and so on. This makes it private. But for Kant, if a couple of... we here, we would have been public use of reason. Why? Because although we are private in the sense of not part of any public institution, we are, or at least act as if, pretend to be, public... public in the sense of unconstrained by any a priori predetermined space. We are free to debate. So that's the nice paradox of Kant that if a couple of intellectuals meet in their kitchen, in a kitchen of one of them, and debate philosophy, it's public use of reason. If you do... if you do something for the state and so on, it's private. The next step we should... this is incidentally the the difference, here Badiou's notion of subtraction comes handy. For the universal... for the public use of reason we have to adopt the position of singular universality. We should withdraw from the particular social order and act directly as singular universals. The thing to do here, to go a step further, is I think we should repeat this today, what already Marx did in his idea, the young Marx already of a privileged relationship between philosophy and working class proletariat. Of course we should do it in a different way today, to redetermine again what counts as proletariat today. But the idea is the following one: that it's not enough as Kant says this public use of reason. I'm the first to admit in a Marxist way how many prejudices and so on can be masked as public use of reason. How do we guarantee that the public use of reason is really public? By linking it to a social group, class, however you call it, which on account of its specific position, being those out of joint excluded, stand for universality. The idea is that the two... this is basic insight of Marx. The two universalities should collapse: the universality of reason and the universality of those who because they do not fit the existing social order. You know that's the old idea by Marx, taken over by Rancière, by Badiou and so on that universality is not simply all-encompassing universality. Universality doesn't mean I'm particular, you're particular, you're particular but we try to abstract our differences and see what we have in common. No, that's private still use of reason. Universality means that one of us, precisely the one who is at the bottom, who does not have, as Rancière put it, the part of no part, those without proper place, those directly stand for universality. And the catch is to bring the two together. That is to say, that's my thesis. All the first three antagonisms that I enumerated, ecology, biogenetic and and this symbolic social substance, intellectual property and so on, if we do not link them to this position of the excluded, they remain private. There is nothing more private than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep the excluded at a proper distance. You know all these problems: how many immigrants can we afford, will we still survive our community or all this. I think that when people attack globalization, we should radically abandon... we play the capitalist game if we approach the problem as 'but will we all become like Americans eating hamburg...' you know this my this my favorite right-wing motto, which turns around the old one 'better dead than red.' This is the European motto now anti-American: better red than eating hamburgers, how should I put it, no? So how will we keep our private particular way of life and so on and so on. No, that's my thesis. Without this reference to the social split between included and excluded, all other antagonisms lose their subversive edge. Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development. Intellectual property into a complex legal challenge. Biogenetic into an ethical issue and so on. One can seriously fight for ecology, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes and so on while not questioning the antagonism between the included and the excluded. Even more, one can even formulate some of these struggles in the terms of the included threatened by the polluting excluded. For example, you have ecologists who precisely combine ecology with anti... like all the foreigners coming and causing pollution and so on. In this way we get no true universality, only private concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. Corporations like Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor among some liberals even though they engage in anti-union activities. The trick is that they sell products that contain the claim of being politically progressive acts by themselves. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that, or so they claim, provide good benefits for their customers and so on and so on. I claim that, that's my conclusion here, without the antagonism between the included and the excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates will be the greatest humanitarian fighting against poverty and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist. Which he is, you know that Rupert Murdoch now had a an inner enlightenment, discovered ecology is the threat and now you know all the the usual stuff. Ordered all in all his offices to use recycled paper and so on, all all the the things. So again, it's crucial one... we have the fight for commons, all these commons: ecology, our shared social substance... the problem is how to keep these commons, how to prevent these commons from being privatized. We need the reference to the as it were to the fourth level. So my problem here is, now I come to ecology, how to prevent this kind of, let's call it, privatization of ecology. Ecology, I claim, is today one of the predominant fields of ideological... of the 'chicken not knowing.' You know my old joke about the guy who thought he is not a grain of seed, he says 'I know it, but does the chicken know it that I'm...' I think this... this is how ideology functions. It's... there is another aspect of this joke which I forgot to mention when I previously was reading it. I mean, in ideology ideology... the best definition of ideology is the chicken. That is to say, you know but you act as if you don't know because the chicken doesn't know. And let me give you a naive example of this chicken. A whole country can go, can disappear, so that the chicken doesn't know. This was my ex-country, ex-Yugoslavia. How? I read in recent memoirs of some politicians that already in the early 70s the nomenklatura, the circle around the ex-president Tito, they knew the economic situation is catastrophic, something will have to be done which will radically lower the living standard blah-blah. But their problem was Tito was old and dying and they wanted, okay, the chicken not to know. They wanted Tito to die happy. So for six, seven years till when Tito finally died, they the Yugoslavia got incredibly into debt like some billions of dollars and so on. They were, you know, the famous phrase in Hitchcock's *Psycho* at the beginning, that corrupt guy who tempts Marion. He says he... she told him 'are you buying happiness?' he says 'no I'm just buying... I'm not buying happiness I'm just buying... buying off non-happiness whatever.' Something like this they were doing. They were they were trying to buy off, to buy time, and they succeeded but then when the crisis strike, it struck much stronger. So again, it was an incredible example of the chicken shouldn't know, how should I put it, no? And but even at a deeper level, I think, this is how our culture functions. For example, imagine a civilized family. Mother and father are struggling, fighting and so on but in a civilized marriage they would say 'okay listen, we fight but let's make a pact, our children, our small child should not know it.' And they pretend that they are still happy in the eyes of the child. Of course, the game goes on. The child usually does know it but pretends not to know it, to not to make his parents even more unhappy and so on. But this... this need for... here we should supplement Lacan, subject supposed to know, the formula of transference. The fundamental figure of of ideology is subject supposed not to know. We need another who remains naive, who doesn't know. And this, I think, is our problem with ecology. We know it but the chicken doesn't know it. The problem is thus that we cannot rely on our common sense. That's my first crazy conclusion. We need to get in the only way to properly confront ecological catastrophe is to get even more denaturalized. In only in this way can we really accept the chance that what really is ecological threat, that my god our whole life-world the way we know it can disappear. Please believe me. I will give a new twist to it. Old joke, you know the I repeated it here at least two times already, Donald Rumsfeld, you know, the known unknowns all that. For you know when Rumsfeld deal... when Donald Rumsfeld in March explained why United States have to invade Iraq, he engaged in a little bit of philosophical debate. Here is the quote of Rumsfeld. 'There are known knowns, there are things we know that we know.' He meant like I am here and I know I'm here and blah-blah. 'Okay, then there are known unknowns. There are things that we know we don't know.' It's common what he meant, like I know there are cars outside this building and I don't know how many cars are there, but I know what I don't know. Then he says, 'but there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.' This was his justification. What if Saddam has some mega-weapons that it's not simply that we don't know does he have weapons of mass destruction, but we even don't know what we don't know. It's a total... okay. My old joke is that Rumsfeld, you know, the the problem of American politics is that they lack ideological reflection. Sorry they lacked yeah... because... because Rumsfeld forgot you noticed the fourth term. Which is not not known unknowns, you know what you don't know, but unknown knowns. You don't know what you know. This is called in psychoanalysis unconscious. All the prejudices and so on that determine you without you even knowing it. This is why things went wrong in Iraq and so on. But I think, and I think that our problem with ecology is that what is the real obstacle towards our taking it seriously? It's a combination of unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. On the one hand there are things we don't even know that we know. These automatical prejudices which prevent us from taking ecological crisis seriously. And then there are unknown unknowns in the sense of some total surprises, we don't even know how nature works when you think you master a certain organism, there can always be a surprise and so on and so on. And this is the true epistemological problem maybe. The Freudian, if the Freudian name for the unknown knowns is unconscious, the unconscious, the Freudian name for the unknown unknowns is trauma, the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected. Something the subject was absolutely not ready for. Something the subject cannot integrate in any way. And here I want to refer briefly to a wonderful new book by Catherine Malabou, who wrote the best book on Hegel that I know in the last years, published by Princeton University Press I think, *L'Avenir de Hegel: The Future of Hegel*, with long beautiful introduction by Derrida, where Derrida basically she converted Derrida. Derrida basically concedes there that he was wrong in his dismissal of Hegel. It's a totally pro-Hegelian book, her book. Okay, her new book published literally a month ago it's *Les Nouveaux Blessés*, 'The New Wounded.' The starting point of this book is the delicate echoing between internal and external real in psychoanalysis. For Freud and Lacan, external shocks, brutal unexpected encounters or intrusions, due their properly traumatic impact to the way they touch a pre-existing traumatic psychic reality. The idea of Freud is that when you undergo a shock, even if the shock is radical like a bomb explodes or what, the truly traumatic impact it's not due to this shock as such, but to the way the shock arouses, disturbs and so on some already trauma, pre-existing trauma deep in you. This is how Malabou rereads in a very interesting way that famous Freudian dream 'Father, can't you see that I'm burning?' where the external shock, the burning of the cloth covering the dead child, this is the external shock, fire, arouses the internal trauma. And that's the true trauma. So even the most violent intrusions of the external real owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in perverse mechanism, death drive, unconscious guilt feeling or whatever. That's the point for her of Freud. External real, real brutal trauma doesn't count ultimately. It can simply destroy you but doesn't count as trauma. It must have it must found an echo in your what Freud calls psychic reality, the real of your inner traumas. Today however, that's Malabou's thesis, our socio-political reality imposes multiple versions of external intrusions, traumas, which are just that: meaningless brutal interruptions that destroy the symbolic texture of subject's identity. First there is the brutal external physical violence, terror attacks like September 11th, the US 'shock and awe' bombing of Iraq, street violence, rapes and so on but also natural catastrophes, earthquakes, tsunamis and so on. Then there is the so-called irrational in the sense of meaningless destruction of the material base of our inner reality, brain tumors, Alzheimer's, organic lesions of our brain and so on which can utterly change, destroy even the victim's personality. And finally there are the destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence, social exclusion, family violence and so on. Basically Malabou's reproach is that Freud succumbs here to the temptation of meaning. He is not ready to accept the direct destructive efficiency of external shocks. They destroy the psyche of the victim without resonating in any inner traumatic truth. For example, it would be obviously obscene to link say the psychic devastation of a Muselmann, you know Muselmann the living dead in the concentration camp, to his masochism, death drive or guilt feeling. That is her big example. It's obscene to play there these Freudian games, you know Muselmann death drive. No, it's simply he he is the victim, he is not devastated by his unconscious anxieties, he is directly brutalized by a meaningless external shock which can in no way be hermeneutically appropriated. For Freud, if external violence gets too strong, we simply exit the psychic domain proper. For Freud the choice is either the shock is reintegrated into a pre-existing libidinal frame or the shock destroys psyche and nothing is left. This is how when Freud was engaged with violence, you know in his texts during World War I, his point was always to show that even when you deal with a physical violence at its purest like soldiers who were brutally wounded by a by a gun grenade or whatever, that in order to get from here to a psychological psychic traumatic effect you must go through sexuality, through their sexual traumas, masochism, whatever, you it's not the causality is not direct. So what Freud cannot envisage is that the victim as it were survives its own death. All different forms of traumatic encounters, independent of their specific nature, social, natural, biological, symbolic, lead to the same result. A new subject is emerging today which survived its own death, the erasure of its symbolic identity. There is no continuity between this new post-traumatic subject, for example, the victim of Alzheimer's disease or some other cerebral lesions of the brain. After the shock literally a new subject emerges. The features of this subject are well known from descriptions: lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference, detachment and so on and so on. It is a subject who is no longer in the world in the Heideggerian sense of engaged existence. This subject lives death as a form of life. His life is death drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagement. So in the if the 20th century was the Freudian century, the century of libido, so that even the worst nightmares were read as sado-masochist vicissitudes of the libido, the 21st century will be the century of post-traumatic disengaged subjects whose first emblematic figure was that of the Muselmann in concentration camps. The feature again which runs through all these figures is that the cause of the catastrophe remains libidinally meaningless, resisting any interpretation. Again, I hope I made it clear. Let's take Alzheimer's. You know that when somebody is victim of Alzheimer's, you cannot even say it's the same person just somehow reduced. It's literally a new person, you are talking to a stranger. You can... that's her thesis of Malabou that psychoanalysis remains at the level of repetition, every traumatic present serves as a trigger to to revitalize resuscitate old traumas and so on. But in cases like Alzheimer's and so on, Alzheimer's, survivors of terrorist attacks, whatever, we are dealing with something different. We are dealing with a radically new subject. We have still a psyche, the subject sometimes can even talk, survived, but his entire past is erased and he he or she is emotionally blank and so on. This for her is death drive embodied. And so that it's not only death drive as destruction, but you survive your death. And this kind of blank existence for her is something that Freud and she thinks even Lacan was not able... was not able to think. Okay, now I'm still working on this. I think, I will not go into it now, how I think things are a little bit more complex here that for Lacan a similar trauma where you as it were lose... what she thinks happens as an accident after external encounter, I think that for Lacan it's constitutive of subject, as subjects we are in a way living death and so on, but that's another topic. What I do like in her work is this basic insight which is a very common-sensical one but I think there is a truth in it. Where again where you are dealing with victims of I don't know serial rape, extreme torture or also things like a simple Alzheimer's or whatever, where the shock is so strong, external, that it literally destroys your personality but you survive. What happens there? You cannot deal with it the way Freud was dealing with traumas, playing these libidinal games and so on. Literally a post-libidinal subject survives. And this is the mystery already of Muselmann of this Agamben focuses on them. Incidentally in a strange way he he claims that we find them only in Nazi concentration camps not in Gulag. Which is a strange thing to claim because with all my sympathies for Stalinism I can tell you it's not true. They even had a many words for them if you read Gulag literature, not sentimental shit like Solzhenitsyn but really good one like for example Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales and so on. They had the term, one of the terms was 'duraki' which is the Russian for idiots and so on. You had the living death there. What I and I think but I agree with her that this strange weird subjectivity of a living death where also we have very nicely Malabou points out that we have here also a problem of a problem of transference, the way they are disengaged you cannot play the game of transference there. You cannot get them into into transference. So the whole the clinic, this would be the challenge. Is there a clinic of Muselmann, how should I put it, no? How do you how do you not Muselmann-Muselmann, but you know but what is the wonderful irony of history is that these Muselmann were mostly Jews of course, no? They were called Muselmann because, you know the story, in old normal racist Europe, the image of Muselmann was those who are totally resigned to their fate and just do this automatical gesture total passivity. This was the ideological racist image of the Muselmann. So when you are totally destroyed in the camp, you behaved in this way, you just uh-uh made this gesture that total passivity, which is why they were called... they were called Muselmann. So, okay, let me go to my main line and to conclude relatively fast. So the main lesson here is the Lacanian one, which we should yes, sorry. No, my first conclusion would have been that something like this a total devastation would already have happened, I claim, in a true ecological catastrophe. We shouldn't underestimate it. There were signs already in Chernobyl and so on that how a human being reacts when you are as it were deprived of your life world. Because let's not forget that Lacan points out this out this very nicely in his early seminars, nature is the ultimate big Other. Not nature as nature, but nature as this fantasy of nature, nature as the rhythm of seasons, stars. This is the basic reference of stability. The big Other at its most elementary is when you say, 'Oh we humans can play with our follies but there will be winter and summer, the sun will rise and so on,' you know in the sense of there is some basic big other. I mean, not bit, big Other. It's bit... I bit to sleep in the sense of that Lynn Margulis or what who claims that, you know, the hypothesis of Gaia, the Earth, no, that the Earth is an self-regulating organism. But Lynn Margulis, I hope I pronounce it pronounced it right, sorry, the big biologist who developed this idea, she warned against mystifying Gaia as good mother Earth. She said Gaia is a dirty bitch. I like this, yes. It's nice. Yeah, yeah, it's nice. Okay. So what I'm saying is that so this would be radic... truly radical ecology for me. Not just there is no big Other in the sense of symbolic system where accounts are settled, but there is no nature. To accept this utter inconsis... ontological inconsistency of nature. And again, how to survive this loss of our substance. Now just if you allow me a very short conclusion to add not a more optimistic note, but to go into ethical consequences here and aesthetic. Does this mean that I'm preaching some kind of nihilism, in the sense of 'Oh everything is totally chaotic ultimately and so on and so on.' No, I think that what survive after the big Other... I'm here for Badiou... eternal ideas, the Platonic domain survive but not as substantial big other, as a pure appearance. What do I mean by this? I want to give you a little bit of a hope. Precisely returning to concentration camps, there is a wonderful short story by Jorge Semprún, you know who wrote I think what is maybe the best novel about concentration camps because frankly what people like Levi and so on are doing, these are not exactly novels, these are fictionalized documentaries and so on, but Jorge Semprún seriously approached the problem of how can you find an artistic form that wouldn't betray the traumatic experience like that of a concentration camp. So in his short story *The Cattle Truck*, Semprún reports how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews at Buchenwald camp. The Jews were stacked into the freight train almost to a car, traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter. On arrival, all in the carriage had frozen to death except for children kept warm by the others in the center of the bundle of bodies. You know, they were simply for days in, adults were ethical enough to say 'we stay outside and with our warmth we enable the children to survive.' So when the children were emptied from the car, the Nazis let their dogs loose on them. They killed all children except two small boys, four, five years, one a little bit bigger than other, who started to run away in panic. Then this happened, quote: 'The little one of these two children began to fall behind. The SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too. The smell of blood was driving the dogs mad. And then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller. Together they covered a few more yards till the blows of the clubs felled them and together they dropped their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity.' I claim this is not a metaphor, that this eternity is fully Platonic here. In what sense? Imagine how you got the point: this miracle of the two surviving child running away, when one fell down the other one, even if total panic, stepped back, hold his hand and then they died together. One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed. While the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality, that's how I would film this scene, that the image would be frozen at the moment of clasped hands, but the soundtrack would go on. The children dying and so on. The sound renders temporary reality, the image renders the eternal real of the ethical idea. I think we should read this scene the way I imagine it against the final shot of *Thelma and Louise*. You remember when the car... I think that there, unfortunately, you don't have a soundtrack which is why it's missed, it's too vulgar. If I were to shoot... I think the more correct procedure, Ridley Scott I think was the director, would have been to have the image frozen but the sounds of crash and so on and so on. This is, in this way, you can render the Platonic duality of the chaos of empirical reality and the eternal idea, which is not any kind of a deep substantial idea, it's this miracle of surface. What do I mean by this? Recall the old Catholic strategy how to guard men against the temptation of the flesh. They tell you, this is the old Catholic, I read it in some books even when I was young, a religious uncle gave it to me, that when you are tempted by a beautiful woman, the thing to do is to imagine how this woman will look in a couple of decades: the dried skin, sagging breasts and so on and so on. Or, this friend told me, even better, imagine how already now she looks inside: like you see a beautiful breast but imagine all the blood, the stomach, the shit in and so on and so on. What's my point here? It's that far from enacting now that old-fashioned Lacanian, pseudo-Lacanian, would have said 'this is return to the real, the beautiful woman is image imaginary but you go to the real which is the vulgar real of bodily...' I claim exactly the opposite. The truly traumatic real is the surface, this abyss of pleasures that a naked body maybe promises and so on. And this idea of imagining all the dirt there is precisely the very form of the escape from the real. The same thing I think happens in pornography. Often people laugh at me that I repeat in my usual theory about pornography this fact how pornography has this fear of over-identification emotional, no? Which is why in traditional pornography, when you see it all, the story is usually extremely stupid. The story which introduces the even... you know like I'm not kidding, the last one I saw is years ago is one where it was something like... no, no, no, I will tell you what I saw more recently, I'm not, is like, you know, a plumber comes home fixes the hole and then the wife says, 'But but I have another hole to be fixed, can you fix it?' You are embarrassed. And I claim they are not so stupid. This is there is a deep censorship here as if to have both at the same time, that is to say the emotionally engaging story and you see it all, it's somehow prohibited. But what goes on now I claim is an even stronger censorship. I was told, and all I know is then I checked on some of the free websites, and you can imagine the price I'm paying now once you tested them, they know to your address. So every time I open email I get 'guaranteed in two weeks three inches longer' and so on, you know like that's life, that's life, no? Okay. So it's so-called, you know this so-called they call it Gonzo, Gonzo pornography, which means what? That not only is the story stupid but they consciously destroy even the minimal illusion that you are observing a narrative. Gonzo means that they openly they include the fact into their behavior that they are filmed. Like they make love but the woman makes a gesture, they address the camera, they make jokes about themselves and so on. I claim this is, you see, this is censorship. It's an incredible form of censorship. The appearance... what they are afraid of is pure appearance. Precisely what is dangerous is appearance. And again, for Lacan, real is not that deep real when you tear it off the ultimate truth. The real is appearance. And so this in this sense, in this sense I claim... when Lacan says there is no big Other in the sense of substantial reference and so on, it in no way it doesn't mean a kind of pseudo-Oriental wisdom existential cynicism, 'you know everything returns to dust, remember...' no, no, no, no, no, no. No, eternity should be saved but as appearance of eternity. I'm sorry if I was too long but that's life, what can you do, nothing. Thank you. So we have, if it's okay with you Jack, we have still some minutes whatever of time to pretend that we are in democracy, no? If you... so please. Ah, are you? But help me because I'm myopic and then I may not see your hand and then I'm usually accused of racism, sexism. I mean, these accusations are true, I am all that, but nonetheless I want... please. (Questioner A couple years ago when we just had this report, the UN report about... about global warming... there was very interesting response in the media. I remember one newspaper in Sweden was saying 'well the doomsday is almost here, it will be substantially, radically diminished.' But then they had two answers, you know this hope. The first one was 'well we don't have to sort of decrease our GDP very much.' And I think, you know, your talk has sort of dealt with that issue very much. But the other thing was that we almost have the technique, we almost have the technology in order to cope with this. And the point here that I'm trying to make is that you also have this kind of technology almost acting as this symbolic real as capitalism in the same way, you know you have the coming back of inevitable backdrop you can't get rid of. The same thing with technology to a certain extent, you know this kind of Heideggerian Gestell and the Jacques Ellul argument that technology becomes absolutely autonomous. Now I'm thinking first of all why you tend to sort of ignore that issue of technology, how technology renders itself as inevitable as capitalism. And secondly how you think perhaps these may work together in which communism and technology seems that global warming seems to be the symptom both of capitalism and of technology and so you can only deal with global warming within the modality of either capitalism or within the modality of technology.) Yeah, okay. No, first I agree, I mean, first limits of technology, our knowledge, sorry, and also even science, even more than technology... I said technology are obvious. For example, here we have unknown unknowns. No, you're too young to remember how years ago the big fashion more in Europe than here was what the Germans called *Waldsterben*, the dying of forests. Now we learn, let's be honest, that this was a total miscalculation, that forests are thriving more than ever. There are more forests now on the Earth than there were at any point in the last years, I think. So this was simply... so no, this is for me not an argument to avoid it, that that ecological crisis is not to be taken seriously. On the contrary, that it has to be taken much more seriously because you know we can miscalculate in this direction, in that direction. It's... we are really dealing with, to quote your respected philosopher again, Rumsfeld, with unknown unknowns. Here, you know. But you know what's for me the problem when you say technology? I'm more tempted to say that already with Heidegger there are problems here, because sometimes, and then bad Heideggerians for me like Richard Dreyfus take this over, sometimes Heidegger sounds as if for him the solution is to step out of this technological obsession, to discover the pleasures of peaceful everyday existence, as Dreyfus put it somewhere, 'forget about this frantic activity, spend evenings free, sit at a table with your friends, drink, listen to music and so on.' But that's not the Heideggerian way. Heidegger is well aware that all this... already he says this when he's at his best, when he says that for example a lone farmer who inspects his forest, he doesn't know it, but he is already part of the technological exploitation of forests and so on and so on. So again, I consciously avoided the topic of technology because it would have been too complex. But I think that the true challenge, and even with Heidegger it's clear, that the true challenge is to, how should I put it... it's stupid to say 'reinvent' but a shift in the very meaning of technology. It's not that we should move from technology to I don't know what, more meditation or passivity or whatever. The battle has to be won. Technology itself, to put it in Heidegger, had to be inverted through a new disclosure of being or whatever. You know what like... I think again that what I would insist on is that there is no way out in the sense of rediscovering our life world or of whatever, stepping in this sense stepping out of technology. If anything, I think we should become in a way more alienated. For me the problem with technology is precisely, this will sound crazy, that in it we are not alienated enough. We appear to be alienated, but we are never really just abstract subjects exploiting nature. We always behave as if nonetheless we are part of our existing life world and so on and so on. So the problem is much more serious here. And I think again that that Heidegger himself was afraid to confront this. This again is not a cheap criticism of Heidegger, I'm again writing a long text on Heidegger. I think especially today when it's very fashionable again in Europe to attack Heidegger in a cheap way as pro-Nazi or whatever, this should be rejected. I'm even tempted to say that the most interesting period of Heidegger is the period of the 30s when he struggled with... which is why in my new book *In Defense of Lost Causes*, which will be out in a month and so on, the title of the Heidegger chapter is 'Why Heidegger Did the Right Step in 1933.' Okay, then there is a footnote and then it says 'A right step but in the wrong direction,' no? So I'm not crazy, no? But but what I'm saying is that Heidegger absolutely, I agree here with you, deserves to be reread. But precisely, you know, I don't believe in this... I don't think that the late Heidegger of *Gelassenheit* is I think is the most productive one, to put it in these vulgar terms. I think that it's so interesting this big struggle of Heidegger in between. In between, that is to say, after *Sein und Zeit* (*Being and Time*) when he... it became clear to him that that project cannot be concluded in that form, and after that but before he found his late formula as it were somewhere in with his Nietzsche book. Even his book on *Vom Ereignis* (*Beiträge zur Philosophie*), on 'enownment' I don't know this, is much more ambiguous. For example, Heidegger there used still uses a term which would be unthinkable later: he speaks about 'the will to Ereignis.' Will... willing is still a positive category there. And I'm sorry but no I talk too much I'm sorry. (Questioner You still didn't really speak about the relation between capitalism, the way in which you conceptualized capitalism, and technology as it has been conceptualized by for example Heidegger and all. And how for example that... only you need a technological society in order to have capitalism functioning.) Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay, all I can do now is to give you just the formula. My formula is: I think that Heidegger and those who see capitalism just as one of the forms of let's call it instrumental technological reason
unknown
or
or
Slavoj Žižek
of course Heidegger would say that's not strong enough, what Heidegger calls *Gestell* and so on, is that they underestimate capitalism. I think capitalism is a much stronger phenomenon in the sense that it has an ontological dignity. Capitalism is for me the root, as it were. I think capitalism has a
of course Heidegger would say that's not strong enough, what Heidegger calls *Gestell* and so on, is that they underestimate capitalism. I think capitalism is a much stronger phenomenon in the sense that it has an ontological dignity. Capitalism is for me the root, as it were. I think capitalism has a
unknown
transcendental value. The
transcendental value. The
Slavoj Žižek
capitalist
capitalist
unknown
logic of surplus value, profit and so on is something which it's really a worldview, not in this naive sense of *Weltanschauung* but a mode of the disclosure of the world. And what I would say is here I wouldn't agree with the standard Heideggerian point that communism, capitalism and so on they are just different articulations of a more fundamental ontological project however we call it, disclosure of being as *Gestell*, as technological enframing and so on. I would say no, that capitalism has to be more elevated and that this functioning of technology is part of its as it were capitalist... capitalist use or what. I mean, one shouldn't reduce capitalism just to an ontological, sorry, just to an ontic arrangement and so on. I think one should give again stronger weight as it were, ontological weight to capitalism. But okay, that would have been very briefly, very briefly my answer. (Questioner I have a question but it's not socio-political, it's just a question about a word you used: 'appearance'. And I wanted a clarification about how you were using it being that it factors into your conclusions so much, you know. And you said that it wasn't like you could pull away the screen and there was the thing behind it that was truth, but that it concluded on
logic of surplus value, profit and so on is something which it's really a worldview, not in this naive sense of *Weltanschauung* but a mode of the disclosure of the world. And what I would say is here I wouldn't agree with the standard Heideggerian point that communism, capitalism and so on they are just different articulations of a more fundamental ontological project however we call it, disclosure of being as *Gestell*, as technological enframing and so on. I would say no, that capitalism has to be more elevated and that this functioning of technology is part of its as it were capitalist... capitalist use or what. I mean, one shouldn't reduce capitalism just to an ontological, sorry, just to an ontic arrangement and so on. I think one should give again stronger weight as it were, ontological weight to capitalism. But okay, that would have been very briefly, very briefly my answer. (Questioner I have a question but it's not socio-political, it's just a question about a word you used: 'appearance'. And I wanted a clarification about how you were using it being that it factors into your conclusions so much, you know. And you said that it wasn't like you could pull away the screen and there was the thing behind it that was truth, but that it concluded on
Slavoj Žižek
appearances. When you say appearance are you talking about it so let's say I have a sphere in my hand, is it a sphere that's solid to the center, the appearance I have that there is something behind it? Or is your use of the word appearance like an empty sphere where the idea of there being any kind of... you can use word material I think maybe as a materialist but something extending from the appearance? Or does that not factor in at all?) Ah, that's a very nice question. Because yes, I agree, I should have but again this was just a final remark that I made. I totally... because as already developed in I forgot which of my books, one should be I agree very precise here. For example, appearance is definitely not a simulacrum. One should distinguish, of course, appearance in a simple imaginary sense, things appear not the way they really are. Then we have this would be simulacrum, like in digital reality, when you immerse in a digital world it wants to imitate, to be like. But symbolic fiction is a totally different appearance. It's not an appearance to to deceive you, how should I put it. It's so what interests me is, of course, also then we have all the problem of appearance as phenomenon. We know from Kant that they are not at all the same. And this is the usual misunderstanding with Kant when he speaks about about about this phenomenal world, this is not appearance in this sense that there is a hidden essence behind or whatsoever. No, what the fundamental move that I wanted to make at this level, it's just that... okay it all began with my reading of Hegel. Everybody knows this big Hegelian phrase that every essence has to appear. It is usually read in a rather vulgar way that essence is not just an inner essence, essence had to disclose itself in the multitude of appearances. No, I think Hegel means something much more radical: that literally essence has to appear *as essence* within appearances. So that essence is only here when you look at appearances and some crack in the appearances signals that there is an essence behind. So that essence is only where appearances are inconsistent. That in this sense essence must appear. For example, when you say 'but there is a mystery behind,' this means that the mystery must appear. You must experience it that there is a mystery behind. If not, then it's simply totally other. Which is why, to return to these problems of Catherine Malabou and so on, this is one problem I have with her. She focuses too much on this horrible situation where because of totally contingent reality like your brain doesn't work, you the your personality changes, so you can see here how what you think is your autonomous personality is depending depending on some stupid biological totally meaningless, stupid not in the sense of simple, but in the sense of hermeneutically totally meaningless contingent natural processes. But something would have been for me much more terrifying. What if nothing changes and you don't even know it? What do I mean by this? For example, maybe I even used this story here years ago. They are making now some experiments like they did it already with rats a years ago where they succeeded in connecting the neurons which direct your bodily movements, the direction you walk, directly with a computer. And I saw this on TV, maybe you remember it, it was shown all around some two-three years ago, this terrifying idea that you see a rat freely running around. Then you connect it because these neurons are relatively simple. So they succeeded in connecting so that then you can literally play a living with a living rat as if a remote-controlled toy. It's something horrible that the rat runs around but a living but you can control it. Now, of course, what immediately interested me is let's do it with humans, no? It can be done because again this these neurons are not so complicated. It can be done. And now we come to the crucial problem which is the truly terrifying for me: not that you would be ruined, become another person, that the these
appearances. When you say appearance are you talking about it so let's say I have a sphere in my hand, is it a sphere that's solid to the center, the appearance I have that there is something behind it? Or is your use of the word appearance like an empty sphere where the idea of there being any kind of... you can use word material I think maybe as a materialist but something extending from the appearance? Or does that not factor in at all?) Ah, that's a very nice question. Because yes, I agree, I should have but again this was just a final remark that I made. I totally... because as already developed in I forgot which of my books, one should be I agree very precise here. For example, appearance is definitely not a simulacrum. One should distinguish, of course, appearance in a simple imaginary sense, things appear not the way they really are. Then we have this would be simulacrum, like in digital reality, when you immerse in a digital world it wants to imitate, to be like. But symbolic fiction is a totally different appearance. It's not an appearance to to deceive you, how should I put it. It's so what interests me is, of course, also then we have all the problem of appearance as phenomenon. We know from Kant that they are not at all the same. And this is the usual misunderstanding with Kant when he speaks about about about this phenomenal world, this is not appearance in this sense that there is a hidden essence behind or whatsoever. No, what the fundamental move that I wanted to make at this level, it's just that... okay it all began with my reading of Hegel. Everybody knows this big Hegelian phrase that every essence has to appear. It is usually read in a rather vulgar way that essence is not just an inner essence, essence had to disclose itself in the multitude of appearances. No, I think Hegel means something much more radical: that literally essence has to appear *as essence* within appearances. So that essence is only here when you look at appearances and some crack in the appearances signals that there is an essence behind. So that essence is only where appearances are inconsistent. That in this sense essence must appear. For example, when you say 'but there is a mystery behind,' this means that the mystery must appear. You must experience it that there is a mystery behind. If not, then it's simply totally other. Which is why, to return to these problems of Catherine Malabou and so on, this is one problem I have with her. She focuses too much on this horrible situation where because of totally contingent reality like your brain doesn't work, you the your personality changes, so you can see here how what you think is your autonomous personality is depending depending on some stupid biological totally meaningless, stupid not in the sense of simple, but in the sense of hermeneutically totally meaningless contingent natural processes. But something would have been for me much more terrifying. What if nothing changes and you don't even know it? What do I mean by this? For example, maybe I even used this story here years ago. They are making now some experiments like they did it already with rats a years ago where they succeeded in connecting the neurons which direct your bodily movements, the direction you walk, directly with a computer. And I saw this on TV, maybe you remember it, it was shown all around some two-three years ago, this terrifying idea that you see a rat freely running around. Then you connect it because these neurons are relatively simple. So they succeeded in connecting so that then you can literally play a living with a living rat as if a remote-controlled toy. It's something horrible that the rat runs around but a living but you can control it. Now, of course, what immediately interested me is let's do it with humans, no? It can be done because again this these neurons are not so complicated. It can be done. And now we come to the crucial problem which is the truly terrifying for me: not that you would be ruined, become another person, that the these
unknown
are the good news.
are the good news.
Slavoj Žižek
The truly horrible thing would have been the crucial question is let's say I would be that kind of a rat, no? Unknown to me, my those neurons which control my the direction of my movement are remote controlled. Okay, let's say I walk around freely then, not even knowing when, I am controlled and somebody directs me. The crucial question for me is the following one: how would I experience this? Would I experience it at all? Or would I still think that I am freely running around, not even being aware? And through some of my friends at Duke University or where I tried to contact the people who were doing these experiments and they told me that their hypothesis is a very terrible, terrifying one: that no, people would not be aware. No? This is for me much more horrible than that Alzheimer's. There you know you are in deep shit somehow, no? But isn't it even more horrible when there is a radical change but you don't even you don't even know it, no? Okay, so the problem is how to avoid here this paranoiac vision of total control and so on. Here appearance enters. You know this standard topic of books about brains where they say this 'user's illusion' and so on. We just think there is but when you look behind there is nothing behind, just stupid meat, brain and so
The truly horrible thing would have been the crucial question is let's say I would be that kind of a rat, no? Unknown to me, my those neurons which control my the direction of my movement are remote controlled. Okay, let's say I walk around freely then, not even knowing when, I am controlled and somebody directs me. The crucial question for me is the following one: how would I experience this? Would I experience it at all? Or would I still think that I am freely running around, not even being aware? And through some of my friends at Duke University or where I tried to contact the people who were doing these experiments and they told me that their hypothesis is a very terrible, terrifying one: that no, people would not be aware. No? This is for me much more horrible than that Alzheimer's. There you know you are in deep shit somehow, no? But isn't it even more horrible when there is a radical change but you don't even you don't even know it, no? Okay, so the problem is how to avoid here this paranoiac vision of total control and so on. Here appearance enters. You know this standard topic of books about brains where they say this 'user's illusion' and so on. We just think there is but when you look behind there is nothing behind, just stupid meat, brain and so
unknown
on. But I think it's totally wrong to draw from this a conclusion that we are really nothing, that our appearance of freedom is just an illusion. It's not an illusion, it's an appearance. And the whole point is that appearance can have the efficiency of its own. That's my ontological wager. It's not that appearance is not something which just appears but the process is, how should I put it, totally determined at the level of what really goes on. No, appearance
on. But I think it's totally wrong to draw from this a conclusion that we are really nothing, that our appearance of freedom is just an illusion. It's not an illusion, it's an appearance. And the whole point is that appearance can have the efficiency of its own. That's my ontological wager. It's not that appearance is not something which just appears but the process is, how should I put it, totally determined at the level of what really goes on. No, appearance
Slavoj Žižek
as such can have efficiency efficiency in the real. Which is why ironically those reductionist neurobiologist or cognitive scientist, brain scientists who try to reduce consciousness, the more they succeed the more they get caught into a mystery. Like they demonstrate how 'oh, this free thinking of yours, it's nothing, it's only this neural processes blah-blah.' But the problem is: the more you explain consciousness, the more the enigma emerges why then do we need consciousness? If you can explain consciousness as a blind process, why then doesn't it simply go on as a blind process, how should I put it? Why? Now this is... this is a big debate in cognitive scientist. And okay, I am not totally bluffing the way I appear now. I read quite a couple of books on it. And I think that those who are skeptical have a point here: that all the attempts, Dennett and so on try to make them of somehow accounting for evolutionary gains that you get by consciousness, no, it's not clear. For example, as to complexity, it's not clear. Often in your unconscious mind you can reason much more with much greater complexity and so on. That is to say this vulgar idea that by getting conscious... get that being conscious is a condition of performing more complex intellectual tasks and so on. Absolutely not true. If anything it's the other way around. I mean the the true mystery is that and Hegel knew it. Consciousness I think at its most elementary is not complexity it's simplifying. You know which is my favorite, okay as an old Stalinist I say this brain scientist, the big influence on Oliver Sacks, the Russian guy Alexander Luria, who wrote that wonderful book on *The Mind of a Mnemonist* or how, the guy who had in Russia in the 40s an almost perfect memory. And how this ruined his life. The power of consciousness is not to remember everything as he did, but precisely to reduce. So this poor guy had to employ complicated techniques not to remember as we do but to forget. I mean, the fact of not being able to forget almost totally incapacitated his the working of his of his mind and so on. Okay, I got confused I didn't answer your question I know, but that's life and so on. Sorry. We can maybe have one more so that we play the triad, the three, no? Like Hegel. Please. (Questioner I have a sort of comment and then a question. In both of your responses to the previous questions, it seems as though you've been giving a Nietzschean gloss. Oh yeah. In some respects... with respect to the first question you were talking about... the idea of... the term maybe we're looking for is transvaluation in technology... you were talking about the importance the value of appearances... and again I was wondering about the notion of transvaluation and so I was wondering why use this term transvaluation? You know I wouldn't use I'm my feelings are to put it in these very stupid terms are very mixed about Nietzsche. Although a colleague of mine, one of my inner party circle, Alenka Zupančič published that wonderful book *The Shortest Shadow* or what, she is a pro-Nietzschean in my inner circle. But she did convert me but not quite, how should I put it, no? But where I like her work is what's now if I rather connect Nietzsche to this final point about appearance and so on. You know where is the problem? She points very nicely how Nietzsche I think didn't go to the end here. She quotes I think from *Zur Genealogie der Moral* (*On the Genealogy of Morality*) of how in the space of a couple of pages Nietzsche proposes two opposite ethics and ontologists. At some point he has this heroic notion of how much truth we can endure. As if, you know, this heroic notion of truth is too strong for us human beings, we prefer appearances and this would be what Badiou called the the passion of the real, you know truth is this raw flesh which hurts, are we strong enough to confront the truth. But then a couple of pages later he goes around and say the true greatness of man is to give priority of appearances to reality the, you know to then he practically turns it around. And the catch is that I don't think that Nietzsche was able to formulate, not in political sense, the third way here: how to read the two together. And I think, I will not do it now not to bore you too much, that from Lacanian standpoint you you can do it. Namely the problem is: do we play, these are two sides of postmodernity. On the one hand, postmodernity is this celebration of appearances, there is no truth, one appearance, another appearance, there is no appearance beneath appearance. But then there is also this postmodernity of the negative thing, it can be Holocaust or whatever, you know there is some horrible core of the truth and we need symbolic fictions as a protection. And what I was opposing is precisely this misreading of Lacan along these lines, as if for Lacan this is why I more and more hate Lacan's Ethics seminar. I think it's caught into this model. Truth is something like Antigone does, you you penetrate this impossible traumatic domain, you see some horrible prohibited thing and oh my god you have to run back, you know and so on. That's not the Lacanian real, I think. The it's much more I would say the same thing that I said about appearances that the greatness of Lacan is that on the one hand he does not believe in substantial truth behind appearances. It's not that we have just symbolic fiction, there is some hard real too strong to confront. But on the other hand, if Lacan there is something Lacan is not, it's that he is not this kind of a postmodernist, oh there is only the game of appearances and so on. I would say that this is what Alenka in her book calls this moment of shortest shadow. The cut there is a truth but it's a purely formal gap. The truth is the gap between appearances, the truth is the inconsistency of appearances themselves as it were. It's a very nice ontological topic I think. Sorry, again I didn't answer but what the hell. What are you doing there? Will be no you were drawing something there, is this a portrait? No no, I was just afraid. Because at some point I was doing this at a conference and then somebody at the conference of psychoanalysts in Ann Arbor and somebody then grabbed my paper and said he will use it like how a complete psychotic works so somehow. So okay, thanks very much. If you want I will go on precisely into this maybe philosophically more interesting topic about appearance and so on when my next, okay appearance here in, I think it's the Friday the 7th I think of December at as it were at NYU downtown. Maybe they will allow more more people, more people in, no? Where? NYU I don't know where in NYU but you know what, you do something very simple. I have to do because I often forget where I'm supposed to appear. But here Google is a good thing, internet. You put my stupid name, December New York and you get it, how should I put it. Thanks very much.
as such can have efficiency efficiency in the real. Which is why ironically those reductionist neurobiologist or cognitive scientist, brain scientists who try to reduce consciousness, the more they succeed the more they get caught into a mystery. Like they demonstrate how 'oh, this free thinking of yours, it's nothing, it's only this neural processes blah-blah.' But the problem is: the more you explain consciousness, the more the enigma emerges why then do we need consciousness? If you can explain consciousness as a blind process, why then doesn't it simply go on as a blind process, how should I put it? Why? Now this is... this is a big debate in cognitive scientist. And okay, I am not totally bluffing the way I appear now. I read quite a couple of books on it. And I think that those who are skeptical have a point here: that all the attempts, Dennett and so on try to make them of somehow accounting for evolutionary gains that you get by consciousness, no, it's not clear. For example, as to complexity, it's not clear. Often in your unconscious mind you can reason much more with much greater complexity and so on. That is to say this vulgar idea that by getting conscious... get that being conscious is a condition of performing more complex intellectual tasks and so on. Absolutely not true. If anything it's the other way around. I mean the the true mystery is that and Hegel knew it. Consciousness I think at its most elementary is not complexity it's simplifying. You know which is my favorite, okay as an old Stalinist I say this brain scientist, the big influence on Oliver Sacks, the Russian guy Alexander Luria, who wrote that wonderful book on *The Mind of a Mnemonist* or how, the guy who had in Russia in the 40s an almost perfect memory. And how this ruined his life. The power of consciousness is not to remember everything as he did, but precisely to reduce. So this poor guy had to employ complicated techniques not to remember as we do but to forget. I mean, the fact of not being able to forget almost totally incapacitated his the working of his of his mind and so on. Okay, I got confused I didn't answer your question I know, but that's life and so on. Sorry. We can maybe have one more so that we play the triad, the three, no? Like Hegel. Please. (Questioner I have a sort of comment and then a question. In both of your responses to the previous questions, it seems as though you've been giving a Nietzschean gloss. Oh yeah. In some respects... with respect to the first question you were talking about... the idea of... the term maybe we're looking for is transvaluation in technology... you were talking about the importance the value of appearances... and again I was wondering about the notion of transvaluation and so I was wondering why use this term transvaluation? You know I wouldn't use I'm my feelings are to put it in these very stupid terms are very mixed about Nietzsche. Although a colleague of mine, one of my inner party circle, Alenka Zupančič published that wonderful book *The Shortest Shadow* or what, she is a pro-Nietzschean in my inner circle. But she did convert me but not quite, how should I put it, no? But where I like her work is what's now if I rather connect Nietzsche to this final point about appearance and so on. You know where is the problem? She points very nicely how Nietzsche I think didn't go to the end here. She quotes I think from *Zur Genealogie der Moral* (*On the Genealogy of Morality*) of how in the space of a couple of pages Nietzsche proposes two opposite ethics and ontologists. At some point he has this heroic notion of how much truth we can endure. As if, you know, this heroic notion of truth is too strong for us human beings, we prefer appearances and this would be what Badiou called the the passion of the real, you know truth is this raw flesh which hurts, are we strong enough to confront the truth. But then a couple of pages later he goes around and say the true greatness of man is to give priority of appearances to reality the, you know to then he practically turns it around. And the catch is that I don't think that Nietzsche was able to formulate, not in political sense, the third way here: how to read the two together. And I think, I will not do it now not to bore you too much, that from Lacanian standpoint you you can do it. Namely the problem is: do we play, these are two sides of postmodernity. On the one hand, postmodernity is this celebration of appearances, there is no truth, one appearance, another appearance, there is no appearance beneath appearance. But then there is also this postmodernity of the negative thing, it can be Holocaust or whatever, you know there is some horrible core of the truth and we need symbolic fictions as a protection. And what I was opposing is precisely this misreading of Lacan along these lines, as if for Lacan this is why I more and more hate Lacan's Ethics seminar. I think it's caught into this model. Truth is something like Antigone does, you you penetrate this impossible traumatic domain, you see some horrible prohibited thing and oh my god you have to run back, you know and so on. That's not the Lacanian real, I think. The it's much more I would say the same thing that I said about appearances that the greatness of Lacan is that on the one hand he does not believe in substantial truth behind appearances. It's not that we have just symbolic fiction, there is some hard real too strong to confront. But on the other hand, if Lacan there is something Lacan is not, it's that he is not this kind of a postmodernist, oh there is only the game of appearances and so on. I would say that this is what Alenka in her book calls this moment of shortest shadow. The cut there is a truth but it's a purely formal gap. The truth is the gap between appearances, the truth is the inconsistency of appearances themselves as it were. It's a very nice ontological topic I think. Sorry, again I didn't answer but what the hell. What are you doing there? Will be no you were drawing something there, is this a portrait? No no, I was just afraid. Because at some point I was doing this at a conference and then somebody at the conference of psychoanalysts in Ann Arbor and somebody then grabbed my paper and said he will use it like how a complete psychotic works so somehow. So okay, thanks very much. If you want I will go on precisely into this maybe philosophically more interesting topic about appearance and so on when my next, okay appearance here in, I think it's the Friday the 7th I think of December at as it were at NYU downtown. Maybe they will allow more more people, more people in, no? Where? NYU I don't know where in NYU but you know what, you do something very simple. I have to do because I often forget where I'm supposed to appear. But here Google is a good thing, internet. You put my stupid name, December New York and you get it, how should I put it. Thanks very much.