Ecology Without Nature
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2013 · 0:51:05 · 6,183 words
ecology-climateideologycapitalismhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisreligion-theologycommunism-socialismdemocracyhistoryphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture in Athens on what he sees as the four fundamental antagonisms of global capitalism, ecology, intellectual property, biogenetics, and new forms of social apartheid, that cannot be resolved within the liberal democratic capitalist framework. He devotes the bulk of the talk to a critique of mainstream ecological ideology, arguing that 'ecology of fear' functions as a new opium of the masses by naturalizing conservative assumptions about balance and nature. He contends that the solution requires not a return to embeddedness in nature but a deeper alienation from it, and that 'nature' is itself a social-ideological category. The talk closes by adapting Rumsfeld's known/unknown matrix to expose ideology as 'unknown knowns', unconscious beliefs that shape our perception of ecological and other crises.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The gap between one's immediate stupid existence and the decentered symbolic identity with which one cannot immediately identify, evoked here in response to flattering introductions.
Fukuyama's thesis that liberal democratic capitalism is the finally found formula of the best possible society, which Žižek argues the majority of the left has tacitly accepted.
as “Fukuyamaists”
Žižek's ironic label for the majority of today's left, who in practice accept liberal democratic capitalism as the ultimate horizon even while opposing specific policies.
as “four antagonisms”
Žižek's own schema of four problem zones, ecology, intellectual property, biogenetics, and new social apartheid, where global capitalism faces structural limits it cannot resolve.
as “List der Vernunft (cunning of reason)”
Hegel's idea that history corrects individual errors through its own rational logic, a confidence Žižek argues ecological stakes now make impossible to sustain.
as “Commons”
The shared legacy of humanity, cultural/cognitive capital, external nature, and biogenetic inheritance, which Žižek (citing Hardt and Negri) argues is threatened by privatization.
Agamben's concept of the one excluded from civil order who can be killed with impunity, which Žižek finds operative in contemporary Europe's treatment of African migrants.
Žižek's claim that the fundamental social antagonism of the 21st century is no longer class struggle but the gap between those included in the civil-political order and those structurally excluded in slums and favelas.
as “socialized cognitive capital”
Language, communication, education, and cultural Commons as a shared cognitive inheritance threatened by intellectual-property privatization.
A condition in which genuine political and economic questions are depoliticized and translated into cultural battles (racism as tolerance problem, class struggle as multicultural issue), leaving technocratic administration.
Žižek's label for the dominant strand of ecological ideology, which mobilizes apocalyptic dread in the same way religion once installed unquestionable authority and conservative limits on change.
The dominant mode of post-political mobilization in which the only way to introduce passion into technocratic governance is through fear, of immigrants, terror, or ecological catastrophe.
as “the Big Other doesn't exist”
Lacan's formula, which Žižek extends to nature: just as the symbolic order has no ultimate guarantor, 'nature' as a maternal, balanced deity has no existence outside ideological projection.
as “ecology without nature”
Žižek's proposed corrective: a genuinely radical ecology that abandons the fantasy of a stable, balanced Nature to be restored, accepting instead the open, chaotic, denaturalized character of the natural world.
as “fetishist disavowal (Verleugnung)”
The psychoanalytic logic of 'je sais bien mais quand même', we know very well about the ecological threat but our embeddedness in nature prevents us from really believing it and acting on it.
as “nature is a social category”
Following Lukács, Žižek argues that what counts as 'nature' in any epoch is always a product of a particular social-symbolic constellation, not a pre-given neutral reality.
The fourth term missing from Rumsfeld's epistemological matrix: things we do not know that we know, ideology itself, the unconscious prejudices and assumptions that determine our acts.
Not named explicitly but implied via Lacanian framework Žižek invokes throughout.
Stories he reaches for 4
Job's friends (proto-ideologists) insist his catastrophes must have a meaning; Job insists they do not; God at the end vindicates Job. Žižek reads this as the founding Western text of resistance to the demand that suffering be meaningful, and as a precursor to Christ's death as divine abdication.
“The greatness of Job is not to protest God so much but to insist, no, these horrible things happened to me but I don't accept that they have any meaning.”
Rumsfeld distinguished known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns; Žižek adds the missing fourth term, 'unknown knowns,' things we do not know that we know, which he identifies as ideology itself.
“There is a fourth term missing: unknown knowns. Things we do not know that we know. This is what we call ideology.”
Žižek searched King's major speeches for the words 'tolerance' and 'intolerance' and found they barely exist, because King framed racism as a problem of political equality and economic justice, not of white people's attitudes, showing that the 'tolerance' frame is ideological.
“For him it would have been humiliating and ridiculous to say we blacks want more tolerance from the whites.”
Oil is organic remains of ancient living matter; the very existence of our oil reserves presupposes unimaginable prehistoric ecological catastrophe, proof that nature itself is not balanced but catastrophic.
“Can we even imagine what kind of unbelievable ecological catastrophe had to have happened so that we have our oil reserves? This is nature.”
Works invoked 2
The Book of Job other
Read as the founding Western text of resistance to the demand that suffering have meaning, and as a proto-Christian anticipation of divine abdication.
Empire book
Cited by Hardt and Negri for rehabilitating the concept of Commons, Žižek uses it to frame three of his four antagonisms.
People invoked 14
Mentioned only to say Žižek does not believe a new working class will emerge led by a Leninist party, used to distance himself from orthodox Marxism.
Georg Lukács positive
Cited for the thesis that 'nature is a social category', Žižek endorses this as a key Marxist insight.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked as co-thinker (Thomas is described as Žižek's good friend with shared Lacanian orientation); 'the Big Other doesn't exist' is extended from symbolic order to nature.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Named as exemplary of progressive Darwinism that correctly identifies nature's chaotic, catastrophic character against social-Darwinist misreadings.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited for the observation that there are not only wrong answers but also wrong questions, used to define the philosopher's proper task.
Donald Rumsfeld positive
Ironically called 'a well-known American philosopher'; his known/unknown matrix is taken seriously as a starting point but critiqued for omitting the fourth term (unknown knowns = ideology).
Francis Fukuyama negative
His 'end of history' thesis is the foil for the entire lecture; Žižek argues the left has unwittingly become Fukuyamaist.
Antonio Negri positive
Cited (with Hardt) for the concept of Commons in Empire.
Giorgio Agamben positive
His concept of Homo Sacer, the one excluded from civil order who can be killed with impunity, is deployed to analyze the Lampedusa fishermen case.
Christa Wolf positive
Described as a 'German half-dissident half-state writer from old GDR'; her anecdote about her daughter and the blank East German map is used to illustrate ideological blind spots and excluded zones.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Held up as evidence that racism should be framed as political equality and economic justice, not tolerance; the absence of 'tolerance' in his vocabulary is Žižek's key data point.
Hugo Chávez positive
Critically but positively assessed: does many crazy things and will not end well, but his politicization of the excluded is called his 'eternal achievement.'
Michael Hardt positive
Cited (with Negri) for the concept of Commons and its rehabilitation of old English terminology.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
List der Vernunft (cunning of reason) and 'social substance' are invoked to frame ecology's challenge to capitalism; Hegel's reading of the Crucifixion informs Žižek's theology.
What it argues
four antagonisms of global capitalismecology of fear as hegemonic ideologynature as social-ideological categoryunknown knowns and ideological disavowaltolerance as ideological mystification of racismthe excluded and new forms of social apartheidtheology of meaninglessness: Job, Christ, and the death of the Big Other
Dialectical moves 10
“Far from offering a solution, the reference to our immediate living experience embedded in nature is the very cause of the problems.”
The mainstream ecological cure, recovering our felt sense of belonging to nature, is precisely what disables our response by making ecological catastrophe feel impossible.
“Nature is not natural — nature itself is denaturalized.”
Darwinism's true lesson is that nature is chaotic and catastrophic, not balanced; the idea of a stable natural order is the real human hubris projected onto nature.
“We are omnipotent today, but we don't know how we are omnipotent — we cannot predict the consequences of our acts.”
Contemporary human agency has achieved a god-like capacity to alter global processes while remaining radically ignorant of consequences, inverting the usual picture of mastery.
“Underlying ecology's demand that we radically change our way of life is its opposite — a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress.”
Ecological urgency paradoxically encodes a profoundly conservative message: any change can only be change for the worse.
“It is precisely because we feel embedded in nature that we cannot take the ecological threat seriously — the solution is to alienate ourselves even more.”
Our intuitive sense of belonging to nature is a cognitive obstacle, not a resource; greater alienation, not less, is what makes the crisis thinkable.
“The obverse of today's humanitarianism: we do humanitarian help so that the other stays there where he was, so that the distances are maintained.”
Humanitarianism is not the opposite of exclusion but its functional complement, it preserves the very distances it claims to bridge.
“The Big Other doesn't exist — and we should extend this to nature: nature doesn't exist.”
Lacan's formula about the symbolic order's lack of ultimate guarantor is extended: 'Nature' as a stable, maternal totality is equally a fiction.
“God is dead — and God is desperate and has to trust us; we are the only hope.”
Christ's death is not resurrection into transcendence but divine abdication, leaving humanity as the sole remaining agent of redemption, secularizing theology into collective political responsibility.
“What appears as a stain in a picture — Holocaust, Gulag — would from a proper distance contribute to divine harmony. But this God, the Big Other who guarantees meaning, is dead.”
The theodicy of suffering-as-meaningful-stain-in-larger-harmony is precisely the ideological move that must be rejected in the wake of 20th-century catastrophe.
“Ideology is not crazy abstract ideas which obfuscate real problems — ideology deals with very real problems but gives them a mystifying spin.”
Ideology works by acknowledging genuine problems (racism, ecology) while re-framing them in ways (tolerance, fear) that neutralize structural critique.
Claims 17
asserts
The majority of today's left are de facto Fukuyamaists who accept liberal democratic capitalism as the final formula and only seek marginal improvements.the contemporary left
asserts
The four antagonisms of ecology, intellectual property, biogenetics, and new social apartheid cannot be solved in the long term within the global capitalist framework.limits of capitalism
asserts
The market mechanism only functions when individual acts are absorbed within a larger social substance; ecological stakes break that precondition by making single acts potentially catastrophic and irreversible.capitalism and ecology
asserts
Dominant ecological ideology ('ecology of fear') is a new opium of the masses that installs conservative distrust of change under the guise of environmental urgency.ecological ideology
asserts
Reformulating racism as a 'problem of tolerance' rather than political equality and economic justice is an ideological mystification, as Martin Luther King's own vocabulary shows.tolerance ideology and racism
reframes
Our embeddedness in nature is precisely the reason we cannot take the ecological threat seriously; alienation from nature, not return to it, is the precondition for facing the crisis.the solution to ecological disavowal
asserts
Nature is not a stable, balanced organism disturbed by human hubris but is itself chaotic, catastrophic, and improvisational — 'nature is not natural.'the concept of nature
asserts
Nature is a social category: what counts as natural is always a product of a particular social-symbolic constellation, not a pre-ideological given.nature as ideology
asserts
Ideology is best defined as 'unknown knowns' — the unconscious prejudices and assumptions we do not know that we know, yet which determine our actions.definition of ideology
asserts
The principal emancipatory task of the 21st century is to politicize, organize, and discipline the structurally excluded masses living in slums and favelas.emancipatory politics
asserts
Hugo Chávez's lasting achievement, despite his many faults, is being the first to genuinely politicize the excluded rather than treating them as humanitarian objects.Hugo Chávez
asserts
Contemporary humanitarianism is designed to maintain distances — we help the other so they stay where they are — and is thus the obverse of exclusionary violence, not its correction.humanitarianism
rejects
The notion that ecological catastrophe results from Cartesian alienation and can be solved by returning to embeddedness in nature is itself the ideological cause of ecological passivity.mainstream ecological remedy of re-embedding in nature
asserts
The ozone hole and similar ecological crises are fundamentally scientific constructs invisible to immediate experience, which is why phenomenological embeddedness in nature cannot motivate adequate response.ecological knowledge and experience
asserts
The philosopher's task is not to provide answers but to correct wrong questions — to show how the way we approach a problem is itself part of the problem.the role of philosophy
asserts
The Book of Job should be read as resistance to the demand that suffering have meaning, and as a precursor to Christ's death as the abdication of the God who guarantees meaning.theology of meaninglessness
asserts
The Holy Spirit after Christ's death is not a return to God but the community itself — 'the communist party' — and God's desperate trust in us as the only remaining hope.Christian theology and collective emancipation
Quotes 14
“Most of us do accept liberal democratic capitalism as the finally found formula of the best possible society. This for me is almost the only true question today.”Slavoj Žižek · Fukuyamaism of the left
“Capitalism is very efficient but it works in precise social conditions. The paradox is that we are omnipotent today — but we don't know how we are omnipotent.”Slavoj Žižek · omnipotence without knowledge
“Ecology of fear has all the chances of developing into our predominant ideology. A new opium for and of the masses.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology as ideology
“The underlying message of this predominant ecological ideology is the deeply conservative one: any change can only be the change for the worse.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology's hidden conservatism
“The Big Other doesn't exist. We should extend this to nature. The first premise of a truly radical ecology should be: nature doesn't exist.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology without nature
“Nature as it were already includes our pollution into its reproduction. So what we need is ecology without nature.”Slavoj Žižek · nature incorporates human pollution
“Far from offering a solution, this kind of reference to our immediate living experience is the cause of the problems.”Slavoj Žižek · embeddedness in nature causes ecological passivity
“Nature is a social category. What counts as natural is always a product of a certain social symbolic constellation. Each epoch has its own nature.”Slavoj Žižek · nature as social category
“Unknown knowns: things we do not know that we know. Prejudices, unconscious ideas which control us, which determine our acts. This is what we call ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as unknown knowns
“When we do humanitarian help, we do it so that the other stays there where he was so that the distances are maintained.”Slavoj Žižek · humanitarianism as maintenance of distance
“There are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions.”Slavoj Žižek · philosophy corrects questions
“God is desperate and trust us, has to trust us. We are the only hope.”Slavoj Žižek · divine abdication and collective responsibility
“Thanks very much for a castrating experience. That's what one gets from friends.”Slavoj Žižek · symbolic castration as ironic opening
“It can simply be that we do something wrong and simply everything goes. I think this poses a limit to long-term capitalist solutions.”Slavoj Žižek · ecological stakes exceed capitalism's trial-and-error logic
Transcript 2 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much for this very kind reception. I’m very glad to be here in Athens again. My only embarrassment is that when I hear such kind words about me, flattering me too much, I find it difficult to recognize myself in them. I have the clue back like who is that guy, serious philosopher, you were talking about? Now as you Thomas know very well, in psychoanalysis we call this gap between your or in this case my stupid immediate existence and the symbolic identity which is always decentered, with which you cannot immediately identify, we call this symbolic castration. So thanks very much for a castrating experience. That’s what one gets from friends. So since as usual I talk too much and have many things to say, let me begin. It is easy, it is fashionable to make fun of Francis Fukuyama’s notion developed in the early 90s of the end of history. But are we aware that the majority of us, including most of today's left, we are, I don't know what would be the predicate, Fukuyamaists. That is to say, most of us do accept liberal democratic capitalism as the finally found formula of the best possible society. Even a large majority of today's left, what it is proposing is just to make it a little bit better, more social care for the underprivileged, more tolerance, and so on and so on, but almost nobody today questions the very fundamentals. Is political democracy the ultimate form? Do we need a state? Will capitalism survive? All the questions which were raised somewhere in 1970s and then disappeared. This for me is almost the only true question today. Do we accept this naturalization of capitalism or does today's global capitalism contain, still contain some strong enough antagonisms which will prevent its indefinite reproduction? The reason I remain some kind of a Marxist is not that I believe that a new working class will emerge led by the Leninist party. No, I am only more of a pessimist. I see in today's global constellation four antagonisms, four at least problematic regions where I think that the tension, the problem cannot be solved ultimately in the long term within the liberal democratic capitalist frame. Which are these antagonisms? First of course it is what I will talk about today, ecology. Now I’m well aware first that if anything the state socialist ways of dealing with ecological problematic were even much more catastrophic. I’m also well aware of the infinite adaptability of capitalism. Imagine a new ecological global ecological catastrophe. It’s clear that capitalism will use it just to open a new incredibly dynamic field of investments. Let’s even accept the hypothesis of global warming in the sense that the areas around the equator will become uninhabitable and we will have slowly to move up, up. I can cynically ironically imagine new real estate agencies offering nice locations to build your villa in Southern Antarctic or whatever Arctic. I don't so I don’t have any illusions here. What I nonetheless think is that the nature of the risks involved in ecology fundamentally preclude a market solution. Why? Capitalism is very efficient but it works in precise social conditions. It implies, its implication is that we trust into the market's mechanism, the market's invisible hand which guarantees that the competition of individual egoisms works for the common good. However, I claim that this mechanism works only when our individual acts are part of what in old Hegelian language we can call social substance. You know like whatever you do it can trigger a counter-reaction, even a catastrophe, but somehow life goes on. It’s counteracted by other forces and so on so that we are just elements in a larger objective social process. I think we are reaching the limits of this logic. Today, maybe for the first time in human history, the act of a single social or political agent can alter or even interrupt the entire global historical process. An atomic catastrophe or whatever, it can change things so much so that we cannot any longer play this game of trust in what Hegel called List der Vernunft, the cunning of reason. You do something wrong but history corrects it and so on. It can simply be that we do something wrong and simply everything goes. I think this poses a limit to long-term capitalist solutions because you know market works through error and trial. You try something, another person tries something and then through repetitive attempts a solution emerges. But we can well imagine ecological catastrophes or the threat of catastrophes where we simply cannot afford this kind of a slow process of trial and error. In other words, the paradox is that we are omnipotent today, omnipotent in the sense that an act of ours can maybe destroy the entire balance of our environment. But we don't know how we are omnipotent. We cannot predict the consequences of our acts. Again in such a constellation, I don’t think capitalism can do the job. The second feature that I see as a tension in today's capitalism is the obvious inappropriateness of private property for the so-called intellectual property. You know how the main problem of today's new digital industries is how to maintain the form of private property within which only the logic of profit can be maintained. Do the legal complications of biogenetics also not point in the same direction? This is why the key element of the new international trade agreements is the protection of intellectual property. So I think what happens here, if you follow it closely, is that if you let the logic of private property dominate the field then we find ourselves in a situation where potentially some big company will literally own what in old English and the term was now rehabilitated by Hardt and Negri in their Empire, what they call Commons, the shared legacy. And it’s very risky to allow the privatization of that. We will be, if you let market free, we will find ourselves in a situation where biogenetic companies will own our genes, where for example Microsoft without the intervention of the American state would literally own a private company, our very means of communication and so on and so on. The third complication I see in modern capitalism is the challenge of the new technological and scientific developments especially in biogenetics. Let me be very clear here. The main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is to put it very simply, I think the end of nature. That is to say, once we know the rules of the construction of a natural organism, how it reproduces itself through its genome and so on, once we know this, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is in this way de-substantialized. It’s deprived of its impenetrable density. In our spontaneous understanding, nature is not what is out there independently of us. Nature is the density of our life-world which by definition is unfathomable, impenetrable. This is what I think is disappearing today. Because you see what is the trick? The trick is that once, and that's the big prospect of today's biogenetics, it's not only to manipulate through biogenetic interventions existing living beings but to even, they use the term life number two, like work two and so on, to create a totally new form of artificial life. But even if this is utopia, the point is that once you do this then the natural life loses its natural character and becomes life number one. You no longer again see nature as this breathing, living entity. It becomes a transparent mechanism. How to deal with the ethical consequences of this is again something that I think cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism. Then last but not least, the crucial problem, the new forms of apartheid emerging today. New walls, people living excluded in slums. There were many theories about what does September of mean. I think that it's crucial to compare September with years earlier, the 9th of November when the Berlin Wall fell. Usually people say this was the end of utopias, finally we accepted reality, capitalist reality the way it is. But I think the 90s were the real utopia. The utopia precisely, the Fukuyama utopia, that we found the formula, liberal democratic capitalism and okay we can improve it here and there but that's it. And I think that the message or the historical meaning of September it's precisely the end of this utopia. History is back. Here new walls are emerging here and there. It is only I mean from Berlin Wall went down but now we have walls between Israel and West Bank, around European Union, on the US Mexico border and so on. The ethical consequences of this are staggering and we are not even aware of that. There was a small note in newspapers, I don't know how much you noticed it, about a strange trial which goes on now on the small island of Lampedusa in Southern Italy. Namely, only now, two weeks ago, even less, on September 20th, seven fishermen from Tunis went on trial for the crime of rescuing African migrants from certain death in the sea. They found them there half drowned, dying, among them women, pregnant women, small children and so on. They brought them to safety to the small island of Lampedusa, the nearest piece of land. And they were immediately, the Tunisian fishermen, arrested for aiding and abetting illegal immigrants and they should get between and years in jail. What is so crazy here? What this incident demonstrates is that Giorgio Agamben's notion of Homo Sacer, the excluded from the civil order, the one who can be killed with impunity is fully operative in today's Europe which praises itself as the ultimate bastion of human rights and humanitarian help. Are we aware that in the middle of this Europe of human rights, helping the starving in Africa and so on, what happened is that a group of people found themselves confronted with a clear situation? And I’m not a naive idealist here, I’m not the naive leftist to say let’s open our borders, let the millions come, these are real problems, I’m not this kind of naive left. All I’m saying is nonetheless this should give us to think. The situation was clear. People on their business job in the middle of the sea found a group of other people which were close to death. Among them again small children, pregnant women and so on. All they did is save them. For this they are put to trial. And the message is clear, as Italian judges hinted. Namely that there are documented cases of opposite examples where fishermen encounter refugees on the sea close to death and they simply kick them off, kill them. You don't get to trial for that. I think it is absolutely crucial not to oppose this as a kind of aberration to this new notion of liberal humanitarian help and so on and so on. This is the obverse of today's humanitarianism. When we do humanitarian help, we do it so that the other stays there where he was so that the distances are maintained. Which is why I think that more and more instead of the old class struggle, the new form of fundamental social division today is the gap between to put it very simply those who are inside and those who are outside, outside of control. And this is a very interesting paradoxical phenomenon. You know that one of the commonplaces is that today we live in a society of total control. Even if we do not get political terror as in Stalinism or fascism, we are observed all the time, controlled and so on and so on. But is it not all the more strange how in most of the countries, even in the developed ones like United States, slums, favelas and so on are growing, literally growing? Are you aware that today over billion people already live in slums, favelas and so on? And I’m not using this term in some Christian sentimental metaphorical way. I define slums, favelas as places where the power, state power withdraws its control. It just, okay, prevents excesses but basically they are out of the civil order. The story I like to evoke, I love it, is of the German half dissident half state writer from old German Democratic Republic, Christa Wolf, who reports how in the days of German Democratic Republic she brought her small daughter to that high TV tower in East Berlin and from there you can see the West. Now the East German map of West Berlin area was a unique thing which I love. It was the area, the map detail of the whole Berlin area, but the West Berlin island was white, blank, as if it's nothing there. And she, Christa Wolf, reports how when her small daughter looked from this tower into the West, look mommy it's not white there, there are people there and so on. This surprise. Maybe that's what we should do. We have more and more in our states these kind of blank areas. I even think that if the principal task of the emancipatory politics of the 19th century was to break the monopoly of bourgeois liberals by way of politicizing ordinary people, working classes. If the task of the 20th century was to politically awaken the immense rural populations of Asia, Africa, Latin America and so on, maybe the principal task of the 21st century is to politicize, organize, and discipline this excluded, this structured masses of slum dwellers. And this is why although I do not idealize Hugo Chavez, he’s doing many crazy things, I think it will not end well, but honestly one thing I think is his eternal achievement. For the first time he really politicized the excluded. Not in this humanitarian way, rich ladies going there, sympathizing how horrible, let’s in our rich society discard that. He mobilized them, included them into a political process. So to stop now, these I see as the four spheres of problems today where I don't think they can be in the long term solved within the global capitalist frames. Of course they are not of the same order. The first three concern again what Hardt and Negri call Commons, the shared substance of our social being. First we have the Commons of culture, what some people call socialized cognitive capital: language, communication, education, and so on. Then we have the Commons of external nature: our natural environment threatened by pollution, exploitation. And then the Commons of internal nature: the biogenetic inheritance of humanity. Now in the remainder of my talk, I want to focus on ecology. Why? Not because it's the most important one, not necessarily, but because I think that it's maybe the crucial example of ideological struggle today. Why? My thesis will be very maybe radical. On the one hand the problem is absolutely a real one. My god we are talking about survival of humanity. On the other hand, ideology reigns in today's ecology. Namely, let me clarify two things. What is ideology? Ideology are not crazy abstract ideas which obfuscate real problems. The power of ideology is that it deals with very real problems but gives them a how should I call it mystifying twist or spin, in the sense we talk today about spin doctors and so on. So that's the seduction of ideology, no? When you attack an ideologist he will say but don't you see that these are problems. Let me give you before I go on to ecology, let me give you another example: tolerance. I am more and more tempted to reject the very notion of tolerance. Why? Of course on the one hand it designates a real problem. Namely when I attack tolerance people immediately attack me, are you crazy but don't you see intolerance, racism, sexism and so on, don't you see that this is a problem? Yes, but what I claim, let’s go to racism, what I claim is that it's not self-evident to reformulate, to perceive the problem of racism as a problem of tolerance. And here is ideology. Listen, if you don't believe me you can repeat my experiment. I went on the internet and downloaded all the main speeches by Martin Luther King, the great figure of the 20th century fight against racism. And I put the search: tolerance, intolerance. They were practically doesn't exist in his vocabulary. Why? For him American white racism against the blacks was not the problem of tolerance, it was the problem of political equality, economic justice and so on. For him it would have been humiliating and ridiculous to say we blacks want more tolerance from the whites. And if you are a feminist and I hope you are, a woman with a minimum of feminist pride, you would also find it ridiculous, humiliating to say the goal of feminism is that more tolerance from men. It’s a bad joke. So again the true question is, the true question is, of course what we perceive as intolerance, racist violence and so on is a problem. Why is this problem perceived as the problem of tolerance and not of legal equality, economic justice and so on? Here we see ideology at work: real problem mystified. The answer I think is that we live in more and more, we are approaching so-called post-political era where let’s call them naively the real problems: political power, economic regulations and so on are more and more depoliticized so that whenever battles are fought they are always translated into cultural battles, conflicts. For example in United States the only way that any reference to exploitation and class struggle survives is that you talk about the exploitation of Mexican immigrant workers or the blacks and so on, and then ideology enters, no? Instead of talking about economic exploitation you somehow, even if you don't say it, act as if the root of economic exploitation is our intolerance towards the others. All of a sudden the problem becomes tolerance. I think there is an ideological mystification at work here. And the same goes even more for ecology. In what sense? Today's ecology is predominantly the ecology of fear. And as such it fits perfectly today's politics which is a politics of fear, as you also learned I think in your last elections and so on. Today we have this anonymous expert technocratic post-political administration. If you want to move a step over it to introduce what once was called passion into politics, the only way which unfortunately even the left follows is to evoke some kind of a fear: fear of immigrants, fear of terror, fear of natural catastrophes, whatever you want, it's fear. You can gather and mobilize people through fear. This ecology of fear I think has all the chances of developing into our predominant ideology. A new, I’m ironically here using Marx's term for religion, a new opium for and of the masses. Namely, it takes over the old religion's fundamental function, that of putting on, of installing an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ideology, sorry this ecology of fear is constantly hammering is our finitude. We are not abstract Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a biosphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our earth with respect as something sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, a power we should trust not dominate. This is why although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress. Every radical change can generate unintended catastrophic consequences. It is I think this distrust which makes ecology the ideal candidate for hegemonic ideology since it echoes the anti-totalitarian distrust of large collective of large collective acts. The underlying message of this predominant ecological ideology is the deeply conservative one: any change can only be the change for the worse. So what is wrong here? What is wrong I think is the very starting presupposition. To put it simply, the presupposition that there is something like nature which we humans with our hubris, with our will to dominate, disturb, disturb its balance, its patterns of balance and which somehow should be restored, the natural balance. Here we should take seriously the lesson of Darwinism, which is it’s a very crazy lesson, I don't think we are ready to take it, which is why I think Darwinism still has something to tell us. The true core of Darwinism as all progressive Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould will tell you is not that right-wing rubbish life is struggle, the stronger wins. No, the lesson is that nature itself is not natural, is denaturalized. Nature tinkers, improvises with great losses and catastrophes accompanying every limited success. The logic nature is not a harmonious pattern of you know seasons change, balance, reproduction. Nature is one big chaos, catastrophe which is from time to time contained in a fragile balance but then it explodes again. Are we aware how true this is for us? What is our main source of energy today? Oil. But we know that oil is organic remainder, sometimes we can even recognize there traces of plants, animals and so on. Can we even imagine what kind of unbelievable ecological catastrophe had to have happened so that we have our oil reserves? This is nature. And so I think that my first conclusion, ideology at its purest is precisely this idea that we humans are maybe too active, intervening, disturbing some preexisting balance. As psychoanalysts of Lacanian orientation, me and my good friend Thomas, we know Jacques Lacan's motto: the Big Other doesn't exist. I think we should extend this to nature. The first premise of a truly radical ecology should be nature doesn't exist. Namely nature as this maternal deity, if you want, Gaia, substance which we humans disturbed and then the balance of which should be restored. If you read really intelligent biologists and geologists of the earth today, they will tell you many funny and at the same time terrifying stories. Like the main conclusion which I find breathtakingly fascinating is that the natural equilibrium of our earth is already to such an extent accommodated to human pollution that if let us imagine human pollution were radically to be stopped or to diminish, it would have caused a breathtaking imbalance, catastrophe of natural reproduction itself. Nature as it were already includes our pollution into its into its reproduction. So again what we need is ecology without nature, ecology which accepts this open imbalance, denaturalized if you want character of nature itself. Nature improvises, tinkers and so on, nature are not stable patterns. Precisely this notion of nature as stable patterns of life, imposing this onto nature is the ultimate human hubris, is the ultimate human violence. Next point that I want to make with regard to the prospects of an ecological catastrophe. I think, and this is my key message, it is I think all too short to attribute our disbelief in the catastrophe to the impregnation of our minds by scientific ideology. You know this standard thesis of the predominant ecology which says something like this: the ultimate cause of our ecological problems is modern technology, Cartesian subjectivity. We think we are abstract beings, somehow outside nature, who can manipulate nature, dominate nature. What we should rediscover is that nature is not out there an object of our manipulation, nature is our very background. We are wired as it were to nature, embedded in nature. You should go out, feel, breathe nature. You should accept that your abstract scientific reification, objectivization of nature to so-called natural mechanisms is just an augmenting effect of being embedded in a life-world. I think that far from offering a solution, this kind of reference to our immediate living experience is the cause of the problems. Why? I claim that it is precisely because of this continuing feeling of being embedded in a natural environment that we cannot take and do not take the ecological threat seriously enough. Look let me be frank. First, apart from catastrophic effects like your fires that we see from time to time, are we aware that the very notion of ecological crisis is a scientific one? Like ozone hole. I’m sorry to tell you but look up as much as you want you will see no hole up there. We had to rely on science. But my point, my main point is the following one. Why do we do so little although we know very well how dangerous the ecological situation is? Why do we not act? I think we are dealing with what in psychoanalysis we call fetishist verleugnung, disavowal. The logic is the famous "je sais bien mais quand même," I know very well but nonetheless I do not believe. We know very well, science is telling us of all the threats. But what then happens? After listening to a talk about ecology you go out, you see my god nice rain, sun is going down, even some stupid bird singing there maybe whatever. So can this really change? Look what I mean, we are precisely because we are embedded in nature, we cannot really accept that this can fall apart. And precisely because of this we cannot take the ecological threat seriously. So again my a little bit crazy maybe conclusion is that the solution is not let’s not alienate ourselves in technology and science, let’s rediscover the way we are part of the living organism of nature. No, we should cut off even that link precisely. We should in some way alienate ourselves even more, denaturalize ourselves. Only in that way can we really see the ecological threat. Otherwise we are ultimately acting the way some Ukrainian farmers close to Chernobyl are acting. I saw recently a wonderful documentary on them. Do you know that around farmers still live in that secluded evacuated area? And they were interviewed and they say what’s the problem, what radiation? Look we live here, life is fine, all the crops are flat, we can now grow our potatoes and so on. You know they simply denied the problem. That's where the natural attitude takes you. No, we have to cut off our link with nature which is always again an ideological notion. That's what we should always remember, that as old Marxists like György Lukács insisted and I think they are right, nature is a social category. Not in this subjective idealist sense that we construct nature, but in the sense that what counts as natural is always a product of a certain social symbolic constellation. Each epoch has its own nature. You know that for example in old medieval times nature was considered a natural pyramid of creation. With the explosion of capitalism and Darwinism nature was considered the space of competitive struggle. In our era nature is more some kind of autopoietic system and so on and so on. It’s you can closely analyze the notion of nature again. You will see how it’s precisely because it is the open space of radical otherness to us humans, it is always the open space for ideological investment. And the most difficult thing today is that’s the lesson of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not hermeneutics, it's not oh we discover big meanings. Psychoanalysis is the best instrument to avoid the temptation of meaning. That’s very difficult, especially when you are dealing with catastrophes. I fully understand the crazy phenomenon I was told about it in Jerusalem, that there is now a strong Orthodox Jewish sect led by a rabbi who claims that the Jews deserved the Holocaust, that it was payment for the sinful ways of European Jews. And I understand it, even if it sounds crazy, if you could blame on yourself it's better than to accept that such an absolutely terrifying act as Holocaust can just happen without any deep meaning. It's the same with is the same with AIDS. Do you remember how immediately meaning was projected onto it? Ah Holocaust the result of our sinful ways of life and so on. So many of my materialist Marxist friends are asking me why are you writing books on Christianity? I tell them no, don't be afraid, I am a materialist totally. But I think that the great lesson of Christianity, let me do a little bit in the five minutes that I have of theology to be a priest here, is precisely this resistance to meaningless to meaning. Which is why I think the greatest founding text of Western civilization in this sense at least in meaning is the Book of Job, you know in the Old Testament. Remember exactly what happens there. It's not that the guy obeys God's trusting in all possible ways, the guy says yes, yes, yes. No, first it's typical how we falsify the figure of Job. He protests all the time. He’s a nasty old man who says no but how does he protest? You remember what happens. Horrible things happen to Job and ironically I list them in that way, no? His wife, his goats, his cows, everything dies, no? And then what happens there? Then the three idiots come or four if you count all of them, which are I think proto-ideologists. You know his theological friends, what's their point? It's not you are guilty. Their message is your catastrophe must have a meaning. The first gives him a simple version: God is just, so if you suffer even if you don't know you must have done something. The second one says God is testing you or whatever. The message is it must have some meaning. And I think the greatness of Job is not to protest God so much but to insist, no, okay, these horrible things happened to me but I don't accept that they have any meaning. And the beauty of it is that when God appears at the end he says every word that Job said protesting, he was right, all that those theological advocates of me said was wrong. Which is why I think Job should be effectively read as a precursor of Jesus Christ. What dies on the cross? I think that exactly Hegel had the right answer when he says on the cross it is not the God of beyond, sorry it is not the terrestrial representative of God who dies, it is the very God of beyond. The way I read it is the following: again you know for me the most disgusting part of traditional religious ideology, this idea even if you suffer, don't worry too much, everything has a deeper meaning, God knows what it means. You know this disgusting metaphor of our experience of suffering as that of a stain in a picture. Like let’s take a beautiful I don't know here of Tintoretto, a beautiful picture. Of course if you look very closely you see a stain. If you withdraw to a proper distance you see that what appears as a stain is part of a larger harmony. But is it that with our 20th century experiences and not only of it, wouldn't it be a little bit simple to say, oh Holocaust or Stalinist Gulag they appear only to our limited view as a stain, while from a proper distance they contribute to divine harmony or whatever? I think that this God, the Big Other who guarantees meaning is dead. And the way I see the figure of Jesus Christ in a materialist way is precisely this divine abdication. I cannot do it for you, I fall into my own creation, I can only suffer with you. Because what you get then after the Christ death is not back to God, God is over. What you here I respectfully disagree with your Orthodox theology which claims you know this big question of filioque that that the Holy Spirit comes only from only from father not Western Christianity adds from father and son. No I claim it comes only from the son in the sense that when through son the father dies all that remains is the Holy Spirit which is which means us to cut a long story short the communist party, the same. The Holy Spirit is our organization. The message is not we trust God. No, God is desperate and trust us, has to trust us. We are the only hope. So back to my point and to conclude. I would like to conclude to articulate the space of theology, sorry of ecology back a little bit with a reference to a well-known American philosopher who developed some interesting thoughts about the relation between known and unknown. Okay you got the joke, Donald Rumsfeld. You remember how a couple of years ago at the beginning of the war, Rumsfeld made a very strange interview where he said we should distinguish to justify the fear of weapons of mass destruction, we should distinguish between known knowns, the things we know that we know, like I know that you are Thomas Hippovits and I know that I know it. Then he said there are there are known unknowns, like things that I don't know but I know that I don't know them. Like I don't know, I know that there is a certain number of cars on the street outside this house but I know that I don't know it but I know that I don't know it. Then he says, Rumsfeld, there are unknown unknowns, in the sense that things that we don't know but we even do not know that we do not know them. And that was his point, what if Saddam has some horrible ultra weapons that we even don't know that we don't know them, no? But as the Freudian I think we should criticize our distinct American colleague philosopher here. He forgot the fourth number, the fourth element. Did you notice the asymmetry in his argument? Known knowns, thing we know that we know. Known unknowns, things we know that we don't know like I don't know how old are you or you but maybe it's better that I don't know it for you. But I know that I don't know it. And unknown unknowns, unknown, things totally out. There is a fourth term missing which is not the known unknowns but the unknown knowns. Things we do not know that we know. This is what we call ideology. Prejudices, unconscious ideas which control us, which determine our acts but we even do not know that we know them. Unconscious knowledge which determines our acts and we are not even aware of it. This is why incidentally I think the Americans are in such a deep crisis in Iraq. Because precisely they are not aware of the whole set of ideological prejudices and so on which control which control their acts there. So I think to conclude and to come back to ecology, I think that it is precisely the two dimensions which are crucial for how we mishandle ecology. On the one hand, ecology is so threatening precisely because we are dealing with unknown unknowns. The field is open, we even don't know what we don't know. We can do something, a totally unexpected result pops up and so on. On the other hand, we are deeply determined by the unknown knowns. That is to say, we are not even aware to what extent the very the very way we perceive ecological problematic is determined by these spontaneous ideological notions of what we understand as nature and so on and so on, notions of which we are not even aware. So my result is then that there is no easy way out. I’m not proposing a simple solution to ecological crisis. And frankly I don't even think that this is a duty of me as a philosopher. To put it very naively, we live in difficult times but what can a philosopher like me tell you? I cannot give you answers, I don't know what we should do. But I can only make you see not what is the answer but how maybe the way we approach the problem, the way we ask the question is part of the problem. I can correct questions as Gilles Deleuze you know the French guy said very nicely, there are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions. Here we can say a lot today. Thank you very much for your
Thanks very much for this very kind reception. I’m very glad to be here in Athens again. My only embarrassment is that when I hear such kind words about me, flattering me too much, I find it difficult to recognize myself in them. I have the clue back like who is that guy, serious philosopher, you were talking about? Now as you Thomas know very well, in psychoanalysis we call this gap between your or in this case my stupid immediate existence and the symbolic identity which is always decentered, with which you cannot immediately identify, we call this symbolic castration. So thanks very much for a castrating experience. That’s what one gets from friends. So since as usual I talk too much and have many things to say, let me begin. It is easy, it is fashionable to make fun of Francis Fukuyama’s notion developed in the early 90s of the end of history. But are we aware that the majority of us, including most of today's left, we are, I don't know what would be the predicate, Fukuyamaists. That is to say, most of us do accept liberal democratic capitalism as the finally found formula of the best possible society. Even a large majority of today's left, what it is proposing is just to make it a little bit better, more social care for the underprivileged, more tolerance, and so on and so on, but almost nobody today questions the very fundamentals. Is political democracy the ultimate form? Do we need a state? Will capitalism survive? All the questions which were raised somewhere in 1970s and then disappeared. This for me is almost the only true question today. Do we accept this naturalization of capitalism or does today's global capitalism contain, still contain some strong enough antagonisms which will prevent its indefinite reproduction? The reason I remain some kind of a Marxist is not that I believe that a new working class will emerge led by the Leninist party. No, I am only more of a pessimist. I see in today's global constellation four antagonisms, four at least problematic regions where I think that the tension, the problem cannot be solved ultimately in the long term within the liberal democratic capitalist frame. Which are these antagonisms? First of course it is what I will talk about today, ecology. Now I’m well aware first that if anything the state socialist ways of dealing with ecological problematic were even much more catastrophic. I’m also well aware of the infinite adaptability of capitalism. Imagine a new ecological global ecological catastrophe. It’s clear that capitalism will use it just to open a new incredibly dynamic field of investments. Let’s even accept the hypothesis of global warming in the sense that the areas around the equator will become uninhabitable and we will have slowly to move up, up. I can cynically ironically imagine new real estate agencies offering nice locations to build your villa in Southern Antarctic or whatever Arctic. I don't so I don’t have any illusions here. What I nonetheless think is that the nature of the risks involved in ecology fundamentally preclude a market solution. Why? Capitalism is very efficient but it works in precise social conditions. It implies, its implication is that we trust into the market's mechanism, the market's invisible hand which guarantees that the competition of individual egoisms works for the common good. However, I claim that this mechanism works only when our individual acts are part of what in old Hegelian language we can call social substance. You know like whatever you do it can trigger a counter-reaction, even a catastrophe, but somehow life goes on. It’s counteracted by other forces and so on so that we are just elements in a larger objective social process. I think we are reaching the limits of this logic. Today, maybe for the first time in human history, the act of a single social or political agent can alter or even interrupt the entire global historical process. An atomic catastrophe or whatever, it can change things so much so that we cannot any longer play this game of trust in what Hegel called List der Vernunft, the cunning of reason. You do something wrong but history corrects it and so on. It can simply be that we do something wrong and simply everything goes. I think this poses a limit to long-term capitalist solutions because you know market works through error and trial. You try something, another person tries something and then through repetitive attempts a solution emerges. But we can well imagine ecological catastrophes or the threat of catastrophes where we simply cannot afford this kind of a slow process of trial and error. In other words, the paradox is that we are omnipotent today, omnipotent in the sense that an act of ours can maybe destroy the entire balance of our environment. But we don't know how we are omnipotent. We cannot predict the consequences of our acts. Again in such a constellation, I don’t think capitalism can do the job. The second feature that I see as a tension in today's capitalism is the obvious inappropriateness of private property for the so-called intellectual property. You know how the main problem of today's new digital industries is how to maintain the form of private property within which only the logic of profit can be maintained. Do the legal complications of biogenetics also not point in the same direction? This is why the key element of the new international trade agreements is the protection of intellectual property. So I think what happens here, if you follow it closely, is that if you let the logic of private property dominate the field then we find ourselves in a situation where potentially some big company will literally own what in old English and the term was now rehabilitated by Hardt and Negri in their Empire, what they call Commons, the shared legacy. And it’s very risky to allow the privatization of that. We will be, if you let market free, we will find ourselves in a situation where biogenetic companies will own our genes, where for example Microsoft without the intervention of the American state would literally own a private company, our very means of communication and so on and so on. The third complication I see in modern capitalism is the challenge of the new technological and scientific developments especially in biogenetics. Let me be very clear here. The main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is to put it very simply, I think the end of nature. That is to say, once we know the rules of the construction of a natural organism, how it reproduces itself through its genome and so on, once we know this, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is in this way de-substantialized. It’s deprived of its impenetrable density. In our spontaneous understanding, nature is not what is out there independently of us. Nature is the density of our life-world which by definition is unfathomable, impenetrable. This is what I think is disappearing today. Because you see what is the trick? The trick is that once, and that's the big prospect of today's biogenetics, it's not only to manipulate through biogenetic interventions existing living beings but to even, they use the term life number two, like work two and so on, to create a totally new form of artificial life. But even if this is utopia, the point is that once you do this then the natural life loses its natural character and becomes life number one. You no longer again see nature as this breathing, living entity. It becomes a transparent mechanism. How to deal with the ethical consequences of this is again something that I think cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism. Then last but not least, the crucial problem, the new forms of apartheid emerging today. New walls, people living excluded in slums. There were many theories about what does September of mean. I think that it's crucial to compare September with years earlier, the 9th of November when the Berlin Wall fell. Usually people say this was the end of utopias, finally we accepted reality, capitalist reality the way it is. But I think the 90s were the real utopia. The utopia precisely, the Fukuyama utopia, that we found the formula, liberal democratic capitalism and okay we can improve it here and there but that's it. And I think that the message or the historical meaning of September it's precisely the end of this utopia. History is back. Here new walls are emerging here and there. It is only I mean from Berlin Wall went down but now we have walls between Israel and West Bank, around European Union, on the US Mexico border and so on. The ethical consequences of this are staggering and we are not even aware of that. There was a small note in newspapers, I don't know how much you noticed it, about a strange trial which goes on now on the small island of Lampedusa in Southern Italy. Namely, only now, two weeks ago, even less, on September 20th, seven fishermen from Tunis went on trial for the crime of rescuing African migrants from certain death in the sea. They found them there half drowned, dying, among them women, pregnant women, small children and so on. They brought them to safety to the small island of Lampedusa, the nearest piece of land. And they were immediately, the Tunisian fishermen, arrested for aiding and abetting illegal immigrants and they should get between and years in jail. What is so crazy here? What this incident demonstrates is that Giorgio Agamben's notion of Homo Sacer, the excluded from the civil order, the one who can be killed with impunity is fully operative in today's Europe which praises itself as the ultimate bastion of human rights and humanitarian help. Are we aware that in the middle of this Europe of human rights, helping the starving in Africa and so on, what happened is that a group of people found themselves confronted with a clear situation? And I’m not a naive idealist here, I’m not the naive leftist to say let’s open our borders, let the millions come, these are real problems, I’m not this kind of naive left. All I’m saying is nonetheless this should give us to think. The situation was clear. People on their business job in the middle of the sea found a group of other people which were close to death. Among them again small children, pregnant women and so on. All they did is save them. For this they are put to trial. And the message is clear, as Italian judges hinted. Namely that there are documented cases of opposite examples where fishermen encounter refugees on the sea close to death and they simply kick them off, kill them. You don't get to trial for that. I think it is absolutely crucial not to oppose this as a kind of aberration to this new notion of liberal humanitarian help and so on and so on. This is the obverse of today's humanitarianism. When we do humanitarian help, we do it so that the other stays there where he was so that the distances are maintained. Which is why I think that more and more instead of the old class struggle, the new form of fundamental social division today is the gap between to put it very simply those who are inside and those who are outside, outside of control. And this is a very interesting paradoxical phenomenon. You know that one of the commonplaces is that today we live in a society of total control. Even if we do not get political terror as in Stalinism or fascism, we are observed all the time, controlled and so on and so on. But is it not all the more strange how in most of the countries, even in the developed ones like United States, slums, favelas and so on are growing, literally growing? Are you aware that today over billion people already live in slums, favelas and so on? And I’m not using this term in some Christian sentimental metaphorical way. I define slums, favelas as places where the power, state power withdraws its control. It just, okay, prevents excesses but basically they are out of the civil order. The story I like to evoke, I love it, is of the German half dissident half state writer from old German Democratic Republic, Christa Wolf, who reports how in the days of German Democratic Republic she brought her small daughter to that high TV tower in East Berlin and from there you can see the West. Now the East German map of West Berlin area was a unique thing which I love. It was the area, the map detail of the whole Berlin area, but the West Berlin island was white, blank, as if it's nothing there. And she, Christa Wolf, reports how when her small daughter looked from this tower into the West, look mommy it's not white there, there are people there and so on. This surprise. Maybe that's what we should do. We have more and more in our states these kind of blank areas. I even think that if the principal task of the emancipatory politics of the 19th century was to break the monopoly of bourgeois liberals by way of politicizing ordinary people, working classes. If the task of the 20th century was to politically awaken the immense rural populations of Asia, Africa, Latin America and so on, maybe the principal task of the 21st century is to politicize, organize, and discipline this excluded, this structured masses of slum dwellers. And this is why although I do not idealize Hugo Chavez, he’s doing many crazy things, I think it will not end well, but honestly one thing I think is his eternal achievement. For the first time he really politicized the excluded. Not in this humanitarian way, rich ladies going there, sympathizing how horrible, let’s in our rich society discard that. He mobilized them, included them into a political process. So to stop now, these I see as the four spheres of problems today where I don't think they can be in the long term solved within the global capitalist frames. Of course they are not of the same order. The first three concern again what Hardt and Negri call Commons, the shared substance of our social being. First we have the Commons of culture, what some people call socialized cognitive capital: language, communication, education, and so on. Then we have the Commons of external nature: our natural environment threatened by pollution, exploitation. And then the Commons of internal nature: the biogenetic inheritance of humanity. Now in the remainder of my talk, I want to focus on ecology. Why? Not because it's the most important one, not necessarily, but because I think that it's maybe the crucial example of ideological struggle today. Why? My thesis will be very maybe radical. On the one hand the problem is absolutely a real one. My god we are talking about survival of humanity. On the other hand, ideology reigns in today's ecology. Namely, let me clarify two things. What is ideology? Ideology are not crazy abstract ideas which obfuscate real problems. The power of ideology is that it deals with very real problems but gives them a how should I call it mystifying twist or spin, in the sense we talk today about spin doctors and so on. So that's the seduction of ideology, no? When you attack an ideologist he will say but don't you see that these are problems. Let me give you before I go on to ecology, let me give you another example: tolerance. I am more and more tempted to reject the very notion of tolerance. Why? Of course on the one hand it designates a real problem. Namely when I attack tolerance people immediately attack me, are you crazy but don't you see intolerance, racism, sexism and so on, don't you see that this is a problem? Yes, but what I claim, let’s go to racism, what I claim is that it's not self-evident to reformulate, to perceive the problem of racism as a problem of tolerance. And here is ideology. Listen, if you don't believe me you can repeat my experiment. I went on the internet and downloaded all the main speeches by Martin Luther King, the great figure of the 20th century fight against racism. And I put the search: tolerance, intolerance. They were practically doesn't exist in his vocabulary. Why? For him American white racism against the blacks was not the problem of tolerance, it was the problem of political equality, economic justice and so on. For him it would have been humiliating and ridiculous to say we blacks want more tolerance from the whites. And if you are a feminist and I hope you are, a woman with a minimum of feminist pride, you would also find it ridiculous, humiliating to say the goal of feminism is that more tolerance from men. It’s a bad joke. So again the true question is, the true question is, of course what we perceive as intolerance, racist violence and so on is a problem. Why is this problem perceived as the problem of tolerance and not of legal equality, economic justice and so on? Here we see ideology at work: real problem mystified. The answer I think is that we live in more and more, we are approaching so-called post-political era where let’s call them naively the real problems: political power, economic regulations and so on are more and more depoliticized so that whenever battles are fought they are always translated into cultural battles, conflicts. For example in United States the only way that any reference to exploitation and class struggle survives is that you talk about the exploitation of Mexican immigrant workers or the blacks and so on, and then ideology enters, no? Instead of talking about economic exploitation you somehow, even if you don't say it, act as if the root of economic exploitation is our intolerance towards the others. All of a sudden the problem becomes tolerance. I think there is an ideological mystification at work here. And the same goes even more for ecology. In what sense? Today's ecology is predominantly the ecology of fear. And as such it fits perfectly today's politics which is a politics of fear, as you also learned I think in your last elections and so on. Today we have this anonymous expert technocratic post-political administration. If you want to move a step over it to introduce what once was called passion into politics, the only way which unfortunately even the left follows is to evoke some kind of a fear: fear of immigrants, fear of terror, fear of natural catastrophes, whatever you want, it's fear. You can gather and mobilize people through fear. This ecology of fear I think has all the chances of developing into our predominant ideology. A new, I’m ironically here using Marx's term for religion, a new opium for and of the masses. Namely, it takes over the old religion's fundamental function, that of putting on, of installing an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ideology, sorry this ecology of fear is constantly hammering is our finitude. We are not abstract Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a biosphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our earth with respect as something sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, a power we should trust not dominate. This is why although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress. Every radical change can generate unintended catastrophic consequences. It is I think this distrust which makes ecology the ideal candidate for hegemonic ideology since it echoes the anti-totalitarian distrust of large collective of large collective acts. The underlying message of this predominant ecological ideology is the deeply conservative one: any change can only be the change for the worse. So what is wrong here? What is wrong I think is the very starting presupposition. To put it simply, the presupposition that there is something like nature which we humans with our hubris, with our will to dominate, disturb, disturb its balance, its patterns of balance and which somehow should be restored, the natural balance. Here we should take seriously the lesson of Darwinism, which is it’s a very crazy lesson, I don't think we are ready to take it, which is why I think Darwinism still has something to tell us. The true core of Darwinism as all progressive Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould will tell you is not that right-wing rubbish life is struggle, the stronger wins. No, the lesson is that nature itself is not natural, is denaturalized. Nature tinkers, improvises with great losses and catastrophes accompanying every limited success. The logic nature is not a harmonious pattern of you know seasons change, balance, reproduction. Nature is one big chaos, catastrophe which is from time to time contained in a fragile balance but then it explodes again. Are we aware how true this is for us? What is our main source of energy today? Oil. But we know that oil is organic remainder, sometimes we can even recognize there traces of plants, animals and so on. Can we even imagine what kind of unbelievable ecological catastrophe had to have happened so that we have our oil reserves? This is nature. And so I think that my first conclusion, ideology at its purest is precisely this idea that we humans are maybe too active, intervening, disturbing some preexisting balance. As psychoanalysts of Lacanian orientation, me and my good friend Thomas, we know Jacques Lacan's motto: the Big Other doesn't exist. I think we should extend this to nature. The first premise of a truly radical ecology should be nature doesn't exist. Namely nature as this maternal deity, if you want, Gaia, substance which we humans disturbed and then the balance of which should be restored. If you read really intelligent biologists and geologists of the earth today, they will tell you many funny and at the same time terrifying stories. Like the main conclusion which I find breathtakingly fascinating is that the natural equilibrium of our earth is already to such an extent accommodated to human pollution that if let us imagine human pollution were radically to be stopped or to diminish, it would have caused a breathtaking imbalance, catastrophe of natural reproduction itself. Nature as it were already includes our pollution into its into its reproduction. So again what we need is ecology without nature, ecology which accepts this open imbalance, denaturalized if you want character of nature itself. Nature improvises, tinkers and so on, nature are not stable patterns. Precisely this notion of nature as stable patterns of life, imposing this onto nature is the ultimate human hubris, is the ultimate human violence. Next point that I want to make with regard to the prospects of an ecological catastrophe. I think, and this is my key message, it is I think all too short to attribute our disbelief in the catastrophe to the impregnation of our minds by scientific ideology. You know this standard thesis of the predominant ecology which says something like this: the ultimate cause of our ecological problems is modern technology, Cartesian subjectivity. We think we are abstract beings, somehow outside nature, who can manipulate nature, dominate nature. What we should rediscover is that nature is not out there an object of our manipulation, nature is our very background. We are wired as it were to nature, embedded in nature. You should go out, feel, breathe nature. You should accept that your abstract scientific reification, objectivization of nature to so-called natural mechanisms is just an augmenting effect of being embedded in a life-world. I think that far from offering a solution, this kind of reference to our immediate living experience is the cause of the problems. Why? I claim that it is precisely because of this continuing feeling of being embedded in a natural environment that we cannot take and do not take the ecological threat seriously enough. Look let me be frank. First, apart from catastrophic effects like your fires that we see from time to time, are we aware that the very notion of ecological crisis is a scientific one? Like ozone hole. I’m sorry to tell you but look up as much as you want you will see no hole up there. We had to rely on science. But my point, my main point is the following one. Why do we do so little although we know very well how dangerous the ecological situation is? Why do we not act? I think we are dealing with what in psychoanalysis we call fetishist verleugnung, disavowal. The logic is the famous "je sais bien mais quand même," I know very well but nonetheless I do not believe. We know very well, science is telling us of all the threats. But what then happens? After listening to a talk about ecology you go out, you see my god nice rain, sun is going down, even some stupid bird singing there maybe whatever. So can this really change? Look what I mean, we are precisely because we are embedded in nature, we cannot really accept that this can fall apart. And precisely because of this we cannot take the ecological threat seriously. So again my a little bit crazy maybe conclusion is that the solution is not let’s not alienate ourselves in technology and science, let’s rediscover the way we are part of the living organism of nature. No, we should cut off even that link precisely. We should in some way alienate ourselves even more, denaturalize ourselves. Only in that way can we really see the ecological threat. Otherwise we are ultimately acting the way some Ukrainian farmers close to Chernobyl are acting. I saw recently a wonderful documentary on them. Do you know that around farmers still live in that secluded evacuated area? And they were interviewed and they say what’s the problem, what radiation? Look we live here, life is fine, all the crops are flat, we can now grow our potatoes and so on. You know they simply denied the problem. That's where the natural attitude takes you. No, we have to cut off our link with nature which is always again an ideological notion. That's what we should always remember, that as old Marxists like György Lukács insisted and I think they are right, nature is a social category. Not in this subjective idealist sense that we construct nature, but in the sense that what counts as natural is always a product of a certain social symbolic constellation. Each epoch has its own nature. You know that for example in old medieval times nature was considered a natural pyramid of creation. With the explosion of capitalism and Darwinism nature was considered the space of competitive struggle. In our era nature is more some kind of autopoietic system and so on and so on. It’s you can closely analyze the notion of nature again. You will see how it’s precisely because it is the open space of radical otherness to us humans, it is always the open space for ideological investment. And the most difficult thing today is that’s the lesson of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not hermeneutics, it's not oh we discover big meanings. Psychoanalysis is the best instrument to avoid the temptation of meaning. That’s very difficult, especially when you are dealing with catastrophes. I fully understand the crazy phenomenon I was told about it in Jerusalem, that there is now a strong Orthodox Jewish sect led by a rabbi who claims that the Jews deserved the Holocaust, that it was payment for the sinful ways of European Jews. And I understand it, even if it sounds crazy, if you could blame on yourself it's better than to accept that such an absolutely terrifying act as Holocaust can just happen without any deep meaning. It's the same with is the same with AIDS. Do you remember how immediately meaning was projected onto it? Ah Holocaust the result of our sinful ways of life and so on. So many of my materialist Marxist friends are asking me why are you writing books on Christianity? I tell them no, don't be afraid, I am a materialist totally. But I think that the great lesson of Christianity, let me do a little bit in the five minutes that I have of theology to be a priest here, is precisely this resistance to meaningless to meaning. Which is why I think the greatest founding text of Western civilization in this sense at least in meaning is the Book of Job, you know in the Old Testament. Remember exactly what happens there. It's not that the guy obeys God's trusting in all possible ways, the guy says yes, yes, yes. No, first it's typical how we falsify the figure of Job. He protests all the time. He’s a nasty old man who says no but how does he protest? You remember what happens. Horrible things happen to Job and ironically I list them in that way, no? His wife, his goats, his cows, everything dies, no? And then what happens there? Then the three idiots come or four if you count all of them, which are I think proto-ideologists. You know his theological friends, what's their point? It's not you are guilty. Their message is your catastrophe must have a meaning. The first gives him a simple version: God is just, so if you suffer even if you don't know you must have done something. The second one says God is testing you or whatever. The message is it must have some meaning. And I think the greatness of Job is not to protest God so much but to insist, no, okay, these horrible things happened to me but I don't accept that they have any meaning. And the beauty of it is that when God appears at the end he says every word that Job said protesting, he was right, all that those theological advocates of me said was wrong. Which is why I think Job should be effectively read as a precursor of Jesus Christ. What dies on the cross? I think that exactly Hegel had the right answer when he says on the cross it is not the God of beyond, sorry it is not the terrestrial representative of God who dies, it is the very God of beyond. The way I read it is the following: again you know for me the most disgusting part of traditional religious ideology, this idea even if you suffer, don't worry too much, everything has a deeper meaning, God knows what it means. You know this disgusting metaphor of our experience of suffering as that of a stain in a picture. Like let’s take a beautiful I don't know here of Tintoretto, a beautiful picture. Of course if you look very closely you see a stain. If you withdraw to a proper distance you see that what appears as a stain is part of a larger harmony. But is it that with our 20th century experiences and not only of it, wouldn't it be a little bit simple to say, oh Holocaust or Stalinist Gulag they appear only to our limited view as a stain, while from a proper distance they contribute to divine harmony or whatever? I think that this God, the Big Other who guarantees meaning is dead. And the way I see the figure of Jesus Christ in a materialist way is precisely this divine abdication. I cannot do it for you, I fall into my own creation, I can only suffer with you. Because what you get then after the Christ death is not back to God, God is over. What you here I respectfully disagree with your Orthodox theology which claims you know this big question of filioque that that the Holy Spirit comes only from only from father not Western Christianity adds from father and son. No I claim it comes only from the son in the sense that when through son the father dies all that remains is the Holy Spirit which is which means us to cut a long story short the communist party, the same. The Holy Spirit is our organization. The message is not we trust God. No, God is desperate and trust us, has to trust us. We are the only hope. So back to my point and to conclude. I would like to conclude to articulate the space of theology, sorry of ecology back a little bit with a reference to a well-known American philosopher who developed some interesting thoughts about the relation between known and unknown. Okay you got the joke, Donald Rumsfeld. You remember how a couple of years ago at the beginning of the war, Rumsfeld made a very strange interview where he said we should distinguish to justify the fear of weapons of mass destruction, we should distinguish between known knowns, the things we know that we know, like I know that you are Thomas Hippovits and I know that I know it. Then he said there are there are known unknowns, like things that I don't know but I know that I don't know them. Like I don't know, I know that there is a certain number of cars on the street outside this house but I know that I don't know it but I know that I don't know it. Then he says, Rumsfeld, there are unknown unknowns, in the sense that things that we don't know but we even do not know that we do not know them. And that was his point, what if Saddam has some horrible ultra weapons that we even don't know that we don't know them, no? But as the Freudian I think we should criticize our distinct American colleague philosopher here. He forgot the fourth number, the fourth element. Did you notice the asymmetry in his argument? Known knowns, thing we know that we know. Known unknowns, things we know that we don't know like I don't know how old are you or you but maybe it's better that I don't know it for you. But I know that I don't know it. And unknown unknowns, unknown, things totally out. There is a fourth term missing which is not the known unknowns but the unknown knowns. Things we do not know that we know. This is what we call ideology. Prejudices, unconscious ideas which control us, which determine our acts but we even do not know that we know them. Unconscious knowledge which determines our acts and we are not even aware of it. This is why incidentally I think the Americans are in such a deep crisis in Iraq. Because precisely they are not aware of the whole set of ideological prejudices and so on which control which control their acts there. So I think to conclude and to come back to ecology, I think that it is precisely the two dimensions which are crucial for how we mishandle ecology. On the one hand, ecology is so threatening precisely because we are dealing with unknown unknowns. The field is open, we even don't know what we don't know. We can do something, a totally unexpected result pops up and so on. On the other hand, we are deeply determined by the unknown knowns. That is to say, we are not even aware to what extent the very the very way we perceive ecological problematic is determined by these spontaneous ideological notions of what we understand as nature and so on and so on, notions of which we are not even aware. So my result is then that there is no easy way out. I’m not proposing a simple solution to ecological crisis. And frankly I don't even think that this is a duty of me as a philosopher. To put it very naively, we live in difficult times but what can a philosopher like me tell you? I cannot give you answers, I don't know what we should do. But I can only make you see not what is the answer but how maybe the way we approach the problem, the way we ask the question is part of the problem. I can correct questions as Gilles Deleuze you know the French guy said very nicely, there are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions. Here we can say a lot today. Thank you very much for your
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