Environment, Identity and Multiculturalism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-06-19 · 1:14:47 · 10,042 words
ideologycapitalismhegel-dialecticsecology-climaterace-antisemitismrevolution-violencehistoryreligion-theologyphilosophy-generalcinema-art-cultureethics
Žižek delivers a sustained critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty's postcolonial account of Marxism and historicism, arguing that abstract labor and the logic of capital are not idealist fictions contaminated by particular life-worlds but the actual structure of existing social relations. He extends this to Chakrabarty's essay on climate change and the Anthropocene, accepting the collapse of the nature/history distinction while insisting that the ecological crisis can only be solved by resolving the particular deadlock of capitalism, not by appealing to a purely negative species-universality. The second half moves through the left's self-culpabilization, Marx's writings on British India, Fanon's refusal of guilt-politics, and a reading of the Sonderkommando rebellion in Auschwitz as the model for a revolutionary ethics in which the subject accepts that there is no return to normality.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “historicism”
Used in two senses: the naive evolutionary stagism Chakrabarty attacks in Marx, and the radical historical relativism Chakrabarty himself practices in cultural studies.
Žižek defends Marx's abstract labor not as a substantialist physiological entity but as a real social abstraction that is actual in the network of exchange relations, against Chakrabarty's reading of it as a mere performative fiction.
Chakrabarty's ironic characterization of the stagist Marxist view that Third World societies are not yet at the level of secular political modernity and must wait to arrive there.
The postcolonial notion that different cultures (India, Japan, China, Latin America) can combine modernity with their own particular traditions, generating multiple distinct paths rather than one universal modernity.
Chakrabarty's distinction between H1 (immanent abstract logic of capital) and H2 (concrete life-worlds that capital can never fully absorb), which Žižek accepts as a distinction but disputes in its implications.
The postmodern form of religious return in which traditions survive not as authentic ways of life but as freely chosen lifestyle practices fully compatible with global capitalism.
Capitalism functions as a dialectical totality in which particular life-worlds are not external contaminations but are gradually re-articulated as integral moments of the whole.
Stephen Jay Gould's biological term for co-optation of a feature for a new function, used by Žižek to describe how capitalism permanently re-articulates elements of pre-existing life-worlds as its own moments.
The abstraction of labor is real because it is enacted through exchange; the 'as if' of abstraction is the thing itself in the social field.
as “lifework (Lebenswelt)”
The concrete cultural horizon of a community's practices and meanings, which Chakrabarty treats as the ultimate social reality and Žižek contests as always already an antagonistic, internally divided mess.
The geological era in which human activity has become a force capable of destabilizing the basic parameters of life on Earth, making nature a socio-historical category in a literal, not idealist, sense.
as “species-being (Gattungswesen)”
Young Marx's concept that humans alone actively relate to themselves as a species and are universal for-themselves, contrasted with the Anthropocene scientists' use of 'species' as merely one natural category among others.
Žižek's ironic concept of a natural disaster (Berkeley fire) that selectively destroys wealthy areas and stops at the boundary of poorer neighborhoods, suggesting nature can enact class justice.
as “negative universality”
Chakrabarty's concept of a universality constituted only by shared threat (climate change endangers all), which Žižek criticizes as severing universality from concrete historical struggle.
The properly Hegelian universality that emerges not from the best of each culture but at points of rupture where people stripped of their particular life-world express a humanity that exceeds cultural limits.
as “superego logic of guilt”
The self-reinforcing structure in which Western left self-flagellation functions as an inverted form of superiority: the more one confesses guilt, the more culpable one becomes, reproducing the paternalism of the white man's burden in negative form.
as “white man's burden in negative form”
The replacement of colonial paternalism with Western guilt that still patronizes the Third World by making them objects of Western responsibility rather than autonomous agents.
A mature independence that no longer requires blaming the ex-colonial power; exemplified by the Chinese president acknowledging that British occupation awakened China.
as “emancipatory egalitarian collective”
Žižek's reading of Christ's call to hate family ties as pointing toward a community (the Holy Ghost) that transcends hierarchical social bonds, against the neo-Thomist harmonious totality of Milbank and Blond.
as “living dead”
The existential state of the Sonderkommando prisoner who, having compromised himself beyond recovery, is already dead in any normative sense and whose only meaningful act is suicidal rebellion.
Žižek's name for the ethical stance in which one goes so far in struggle that there is no return to normality, so the only proper act is to sell one's death as a contribution, exemplified by the Sonderkommando rebellion.
Stories he reaches for 2
Žižek uses his hatred of the film to argue it combines the worst of traditional obscurantist fate-ideology with the worst of Hollywood entertainment logic, undermining Chakrabarty's celebration of India as model of fruitful coexistence.
“If anything, it brings out the worst of both worlds. The most obscurantist, all this fate-destiny ideology with the most stupid Hollywood amusement logic.”
Žižek poses the choice between radical political commitment and one's family, arguing the truly heroic act is to sacrifice the family, thereby irrevocably condemning oneself with no return to normality.
“When you do this, you cannot say: okay, then after we win I will be able to explain to others, to myself, I had to do it. No, you irrevocably condemn yourself.”
Works invoked 12
Capital book
Volume I quoted precisely on the reduction of concrete private labors to abstract human labor through exchange; used to establish the real abstraction thesis.
Schindler's List film
Žižek says it should be publicly burned as implicitly one of the most anti-Semitic films for patronizing Jews.
Dostoevsky's novel cited for the 'each of us is guilty before everyone' line, which Žižek takes as the epitome of the pseudo-moralistic superego guilt logic he rejects.
Slumdog Millionaire film
Žižek really hates it; used as a counter-example to Chakrabarty's celebration of Indian alternate modernity, arguing it combines the worst of obscurantist fate-ideology with the worst of Hollywood entertainment.
Fanon's 1952 text; Žižek reads a long passage from the final pages and fully subscribes to Fanon's refusal to make himself a man of any racial past or to demand reparations.
British rule in India essay
Marx's 1853 text usually dismissed as Eurocentric; Žižek rehabilitates it, stressing that Marx acknowledged colonial brutality while arguing it opened space for emancipatory struggle.
Sloterdijk's untranslated book provides, for Žižek, the best answer to post-secular bullshit by arguing that the return of religion is its ultimate death; Žižek agrees with near-ecstasy.
Companion Marx essay to 'The British Rule in India'; jointly rehabilitated by Žižek against postcolonial dismissal.
Hegel and Haiti book
Susan Buck-Morss's book is cited for its argument that human universality emerges at rupture points rather than through cultural synthesis; used as corrective to Chakrabarty's negative universality.
The Climate of History essay
Chakrabarty's Critical Inquiry essay on ecology; Žižek praises its theoretical approach to global warming but criticizes its negative universality for severing species-threat from concrete class struggle.
The Grey Zone film
Tim Blake Nelson's TV film about Sonderkommando in Auschwitz; Žižek praises it as one of the best Holocaust films and uses the doctor/prisoner dialogue to develop his concept of revolutionary ethics of no-return.
Chakrabarty's book is engaged at length; Žižek respects its dialectical sophistication but argues it ultimately relies on a mistaken presupposition (life-worlds as ultimate social reality) and cannot account for the special status of History 1.
People invoked 24
Frantz Fanon positive
Cited with full agreement on the emancipatory power of violence and, crucially, on refusing to capitalize on the guilt of colonizers or dedicate oneself to reviving a 'black civilization.' Žižek reads a long passage from 'Black Skin, White Masks' and subscribes to it completely.
L. Ron Hubbard positive
Called 'that Scientology idiot' but described as a genius whose trajectory from bad science fiction to religion perfectly models postmodern de-substantialized religion; used to illustrate Sloterdijk's and Žižek's thesis.
Pascal Bruckner positive
Described as a 'bad French guy' and politically opposed, but Žižek grants that his critique of Western left self-culpabilization as inverted superiority is occasionally correct.
Georg Lukács negative
The early subjectivist Marxist sense that nature's content is always historically determined is dismissed as not radical enough compared to the Anthropocene's literal collapse of nature into socio-history.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
His term 'exaptation' is borrowed to describe how capitalism appropriates and re-functions elements of pre-existing life-worlds.
Mentioned only as a proxy for Berkeley's wealthy academic community, whose neighborhood was burned by the class-conscious fire.
Dipesh Chakrabarty negative
Žižek engages at length and respectfully with both 'Provincializing Europe' and the 'Climate of History' essay, admiring Chakrabarty's moves while arguing he misses the properly dialectical relationship between universal and particular and relies on the mistaken presupposition that life-worlds are ultimate social reality.
Phillip Blond negative
Described as 'disgusting' and predicted to be David Cameron's Anthony Giddens; joins Milbank in defending a harmonious hierarchical reading of Christianity that Žižek calls blasphemous paganism.
John Milbank negative
Žižek debates him on Christ's sword passage; accuses Milbank of giving a water-down liberal reading of Scripture, functioning as a pagan neo-Thomist who reinstates harmonious hierarchy against Christ's radical communal demand.
Susan Buck-Morss positive
Described as 'way too liberal' but 'an honest liberal'; her argument in 'Hegel and Haiti' that universality emerges at rupture points is cited as the positive corrective to Chakrabarty's negative universality.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Žižek jokes they exchange gulag threats and may co-write a book; praises Sloterdijk's 'Du musst dein Leben ändern' as the best refutation of post-secular bullshit, calling his analysis of Hubbard as model postmodern religious figure 'multiple-orgasmic' agreement.
Briefly noted as an implicit parallel to Chakrabarty's logic of hegemony where the universal can only exist as a placeholder usurped by a particular.
Mentioned as a thinker Chakrabarty often references who was aware that European modernity threatened authentic life-worlds; cited without endorsement or critique.
Invoked as the arch-conservative whose chief of staff was James Meredith, illustrating the limits of American liberalism.
The first Black student at a segregated Southern university who later became chief of staff to Jesse Helms, cited as an example of disenchantment with liberalism.
Tim Blake Nelson positive
Director of The Grey Zone, a film Žižek praises as one of the best Holocaust films for its uncompromising moral complexity.
Referenced to argue that the Japanese Unit 731 commander was incomparably worse, and that Mengele's fame reflects a distorted Western hierarchy of atrocity.
Briefly mentioned alongside Fanon as a thinker whose violent dimension is fashionably watered down to symbolic cut by academics.
Mentioned briefly in passing as an example of local cultural drink preferences (whisky) illustrating that capitalism works through particular life-worlds.
Steven Spielberg negative
Implicitly targeted as director of Schindler's List, which Žižek says should be publicly burned as implicitly anti-Semitic.
Karl Marx positive
Defended against Chakrabarty's critique; Žižek rehabilitates the 1853 India essays and the theory of real abstraction in Capital, presenting Marx as correctly identifying that abstraction is actual in exchange and that colonial brutality opened space for later emancipation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The Hegelian dialectical notion of totality and concrete universality is repeatedly invoked against Chakrabarty; the Anthropocene finding (universality reveals particularity) is called 'purely Hegelian'; Žižek laments not having time to go into 'pure conceptual Hegelian dialectics.'
Called 'my enemy'; cited for data on the percentage of Americans who believe literally in the devil, which Žižek uses to debunk the idea that religious coexistence with modernity is a uniquely non-Western phenomenon.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky negative
The Brothers Karamazov line 'each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I am more guilty than all the others' is cited as the epitome of the superego guilt logic Žižek rejects, with the aside that all pseudo-moralistic stupidities can be found somewhere in Dostoevsky.
What it argues
postcolonial critique of Marxist universalismabstract labor as real abstraction vs. culturalist relativismcapitalism as totality that appropriates particular life-worldsAnthropocene and the collapse of nature/history distinctionwhite guilt and the superego logic of self-culpabilizationuniversality emerging at rupture points (Haiti, Sonderkommando)revolutionary ethics of no-return and suicidal sacrifice
Dialectical moves 10
“The pure logic of capital is not an ideal contaminated by particular life-worlds; it is the very mode of appropriating those life-worlds. Purity exists as the very logic of appropriation.”
Where Chakrabarty sees a tension between universal capital logic and particular cultures, Žižek inverts: the universal is already actual as the mechanism of appropriation.
“The concrete cultural content is a fake; the truth is the abstraction. The Indian programmer's core truth is not his life-world but his inclusion in the global capitalist machine.”
Žižek reverses the usual priority: abstraction is more real than the concrete experience that masks it.
“In the relation between universal and particular antagonism, the key struggle is the particular one. One can solve the universal problem only by first resolving the particular deadlock.”
The whole (ecological survival of the species) is contained by its part (the capitalist mode of production), a reversal of standard holism.
“Precisely when you become universal, you discover yourself as particular—as one of the species. At the highest point of universality, particularity returns.”
The Anthropocene inversion: humanity's greatest power over nature reveals it as merely one natural species.
“The return of religion is the ultimate death of religion. Religion is coming back, but as a totally de-substantialized lifestyle practice.”
The revival of the religious is not its resurrection but its final dissolution into consumer choice.
“Human universality is visible not where we celebrate the best of each culture, but in the discontinuities of history, where people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point express a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits.”
Universality appears not at the peak of cultural achievement but at its destruction, rupture, not synthesis.
“The positive form of the white man's burden is replaced by its negative form: the burden of white man's guilt. The West can no longer be the benevolent master, so it becomes the privileged source of evil.”
Self-culpabilization is the inverted continuation of colonial paternalism, still centering the West.
“The doctor who merely analyzes bodies gives killing a purpose, making him ethically more problematical than the prisoner who actually handles corpses.”
Complicity through providing meaning for atrocity is worse than direct dirty work, a reversal of intuitive moral distance.
“Nature becomes a socio-historical category not in the sense that its content is historically determined, but in the sense that our activity affects its basic geological parameters.”
The human/nature distinction collapses not ideally but materially: socio-economic activity now sets natural conditions.
“Ron Hubbard started with fiction and then decided to sell it as religion—the reverse of the usual story where authentic religion decays into aesthetic fiction.”
Scientology as the perfect model of postmodern religion: originating as deliberate fiction, it reveals that all contemporary religion is already de-substantialized performance.
Claims 16
rejects
Chakrabarty's critique of Marxist universalism rests on the mistaken presupposition that the ultimate social reality is a concrete life-world, whereas life-worlds are always antagonistic and internally divided.Chakrabarty's postcolonial critique of Marxism
asserts
Abstract labor is not a fictional idealization of concrete labor but the actual structure of social relations enacted through exchange, making the 'as if' of abstraction the thing itself.the ontological status of abstract labor
asserts
The pure logic of capital does not need to be free from particular life-worlds; it just is the mode by which those life-worlds are appropriated—capitalism functions as a totality that exapts particular cultures.the relation between universal capital logic and particular life-worlds
asserts
The ecological crisis cannot be solved at the level of species-universality independent of economic systems; its root is the particular deadlock of capitalism, and solving the universal problem requires resolving the particular one first.the political implications of climate change
rejects
Chakrabarty's negative universality of species threatened by climate change severs universality from concrete political struggle and thus remains politically inert.Chakrabarty's species-universality as response to climate change
asserts
True concrete universality emerges not from a synthesis of the best of all cultures but at rupture points where people dispossessed of their life-world express a humanity that exceeds cultural limits.the nature of universality
rejects
Western left self-culpabilization is an inverted form of superiority that reproduces colonial paternalism in negative form, depriving the Third World of its own responsibility.politically correct Western left self-flagellation
asserts
Marx's 1853 essays on British India, usually dismissed as Eurocentric, are more relevant today than ever and should be rehabilitated against the grain of postcolonial orthodoxy.Marx's writings on British colonialism in India
rejects
Fanon's insistence on literal emancipatory violence is routinely watered down by politically correct academic readings, just as his refusal of guilt-politics is suppressed.academic domestication of Fanon
asserts
The Sonderkommando suicidal rebellion in Auschwitz is the model of an ethical act: those who compromised themselves beyond recovery organized their own deaths as a blow against the enemy.revolutionary ethics and the model of ethical action
asserts
A truly radical political act sometimes requires going so far that there is no return to normality; the only proper response is to sell one's own destruction as a contribution.the ethics of radical political commitment
asserts
The return of religion in postmodernity is precisely the death of authentic religion: traditions survive as de-substantialized lifestyle practices compatible with global capitalism.the post-secular religious revival
asserts
Postmodernity is not the overcoming of modernity but its fulfillment: pre-modern leftovers are no longer obstacles but freely chosen lifestyles incorporated into multicultural global capitalism.the relation between postmodernity and modernity
asserts
The Indian programmer's participation in traditional rituals is already mediated and incorporated into global capitalism, rendering the sense of authentic life-world a mask for the reign of abstraction.the ideological function of traditional life-world practices under capitalism
asserts
Radical dialectics means not putting every particular in a global context but isolating the particular antagonism on which the whole hinges—the opposite of standard holism.the nature of dialectical thinking
asserts
Schindler's List is implicitly one of the most anti-Semitic films ever made, patronizing Jews.Schindler's List
Quotes 16
“The concrete cultural content is ultimately an ideological fake, a mask obfuscating the reign of abstraction.”Slavoj Žižek · abstraction as more real than concrete life-world
“In the social field, as if is the thing itself. Abstraction is actual in the life of exchange.”Slavoj Žižek · real abstraction / performativity is actuality
“The whole is contained by its part. The fate of the whole life on Earth hinges on what goes on in what is formally one of its parts: socio-economic mode of production of one species.”Slavoj Žižek · particular antagonism determines universal outcome
“The positive form of the white man's burden is thus replaced by its negative form: the burden of white man's guilt.”Slavoj Žižek · Western self-culpabilization as inverted colonialism
“The more the West confesses its crime, the more it is made to feel culpable.”Slavoj Žižek · superego logic of guilt
“The return of religion is the ultimate death of religion. Religion is coming back, but as a totally de-substantialized lifestyle practice.”Slavoj Žižek · postmodern religion as its own negation
“Species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change.”Dipesh Chakrabarty · species as placeholder for negative universality
“Human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits.”Susan Buck-Morss · universality at rupture, not cultural synthesis
“My black skin is not a repository for specific values. [...] There is no black mission, there is no white burden.”Frantz Fanon · Fanon's refusal of racial guilt-politics
“I do not wish to be alive when all this is over.”Slavoj Žižek · revolutionary ethics of no-return
“If there is a model of an ethical act, this is it.”Slavoj Žižek · Sonderkommando rebellion as ethical act
“The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms to the colonies where it goes naked.”Karl Marx · Marx on colonial hypocrisy
“Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences.”Susan Buck-Morss · universality against cultural relativism
“Nature becomes a socio-historical category in a much more radical and literal sense. Nature becomes something which is not just a stable background of human activity but is affected by human activity in its very basic components.”Slavoj Žižek · Anthropocene as collapse of nature/history distinction
“You give killing a purpose.”Slavoj Žižek · complicity through providing meaning for atrocity
“We are always more universal than a particular lifework. I don't agree with this entire perspective that we have concrete life worlds and then it's always ambiguous as to how we will connect with others.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of cultural identity logic
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Okay, let me simply start. I hope you will not be too bored because today I will do exactly what I said that I will do. Just go through this cultural problem and a little bit of ecology and so on. Okay. So, my problem. Does the ongoing passage to a multicentric world in which Western culture is no longer privileged, does it compel us to renounce every project of a single universal history, no matter how critical it is? I want, as already announced, to focus on, I want to focus on what I think maybe is the most articulate postcolonial criticism of the Marxist notion of history: Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, a book published in by Princeton University Press. Chakrabarty understands historicism in a rather narrow sense of a theory which posits linear historical development or progress. The idea is that in spite of all cultural differences, there is the same underlying matrix from primitive societies to and so on up to secular modernity. He ignores the predominant use of this term, historicism, in today's cultural studies—a use which, paradoxically, he himself practices: radical historical relativizing of each culture and each lifework. So, again, although I think he is a historicist, but since he understands historicism as this naive evolutionary progressive and universal, always the same logic, he, Chakrabarty, criticizes Marx for unproblematically endorsing the universality of the logic of capital and its constitutive moments, abstract labor and so on. According to Chakrabarty, Marx ignores how in each of its actually existing forms, this universality of capitalism is always colored by a historically specific lifework and thus cannot be directly applied to other culture. Every such extension should involve a long and patient work of translation. According to Chakrabarty, once we accept this stagist notion—different stages—of evolution, our very critique of colonialism and support of anti-colonial struggle surreptitiously relies on colonialist notions. For a Eurocentric progressive Marxist, when Third World peasants, for example, rebel against colonial rule, they do this in the guise of religious, traditional, pre-political forms of protest. That is to say, they are not yet at the level of modern political secular movement. Ultimately, they remain in the waiting room of history. They need time to shed off archaic practices, to get properly educated into modernity. The Third World countries, even if affected by European modernization, are thus for traditional evolutionary Marxism not yet fully there in socio-political modernity. And all refinements and complications of the Marxist theory—you know notions like uneven development and so on—still rely on this model of successive stages. A model which, again, according to Chakrabarty, should be abandoned. There is no universal standard of historical stages. There is nothing incomplete in coexistence of modern forms of political life with traditional practices. If Indian modernity places the bourgeois in juxtaposition with that which seems pre-bourgeois, if the non-secular supernatural exists in proximity to the secular, and if both are to be found in the sphere of the political, it is not because capitalism or political modernity in India has remained incomplete. Consequently, when India was integrated into global capitalist network, the pre-modern life practices which persisted should in no way be dismissed as a mere survival of an antecedent pre-capitalist culture. This was capitalism indeed, but without bourgeois relations that attain a position of unchallenged hegemony. It was a capitalist dominance without a hegemonic bourgeois culture. Chakrabarty refers here to India's much-celebrated effortless combination of traditional spirituality with all the diversity of everyday life practices and rituals, and digital modernity. This combination effectively makes India a model, demonstrating how a worldless global capitalism can effortlessly coexist with the plurality of particular life worlds. Although to be a little bit cynical, judging from my experience seeing the movie Slumdog Millionaire—I really hate that movie. I mean, if anything, it brings out the worst of both worlds. The most obscurantist, all this fate-destiny ideology with the most stupid Hollywood amusement logic. One can even discern here echoes of the notion of alternate modernity where India can be replaced with other cultures: Latino-American combination of modernity with populist traditions, Japanese and Chinese combination of modernity with Asian values, and so on and so on. Now let me be more specific here. Chakrabarty is far from a simplistic dismissal of the Marxist universalism. In a much more refined dialectical way, he admits that it is both indispensable but also at the same time inadequate in helping us—that Marxism is both indispensable and inadequate—in helping us to think through the various life practices of social and political developments in Third World countries. Furthermore, for Chakrabarty, this combination of modern and pre-modern elements is a necessary constituent of every really existing capitalism, Western included. That is to say, one should read the expression not yet as when you say, for example, Indians because of their sticking to pre-modern sacred practices are not yet fully in modernity; for Chakrabarty, one should read the expression not yet deconstructively, as referring to a process of deferral internal to the very being of capital, to the very logic of capital. It is as though the not yet is what keeps capital going. Why? Chakrabarty introduces here the distinction between what he calls H1—H as a letter, like Hitler, history—History the just a neutral example, sorry, the name so you can understand it—the immanent history of the capital which posits its own presupposition, this circle of capitalist reproduction, and what he calls H2, History all the elements and processes of life worlds which cannot be reduced simply to the moments of capital's self-reproduction. History is abstract universal, it articulates the decontextualized logic of enlightenment, while History refers to concrete life worlds. The point, of course, is that since History the universal abstract history, is always contaminated by History then—no historical form of capital, however global its reach, can ever be a universal. No global or even local, for that matter, capital can ever represent the universal logic of capital. For any historically available form of capital is a provisional compromise made up of History modified by somebody’s History 2—of universal capital logic modified, colored by a particular lifework. The universal in that case can only exist—this sounds like Ernesto Laclau, probably is an implicit reference to the logic of hegemony—this universal can only exist as a placeholder. Its own place always usurped by a historically particular seeking to present itself as the universal. However, here for me, problems arise. The very fact that one has to distinguish History from History indicates a special status of History How then do we account for this distinction? Can we ultimately reduce History 1—the notion of universal abstract history of the capital—to an effect of History of a particular cultural lifework? In other words, can the event of European secularization be conceived as fully grounded in the European lifework? Chakrabarty indicates a positive answer: the phenomenon of political modernity, namely the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise, is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe. So, the next logical step is to reject the assumption that the gods and spirits are in the end social facts, that the social somehow exists prior to them. In other words, the radical conclusion Chakrabarty draws—with which of course I violently disagree—is that secular universalism is ultimately just another mode of particular religion, religious practice. One empirically knows of no society in which humans have existed without gods and spirits accompanying them. Although the gods of monotheism may have taken a few knocks, if not actually died, in the 19th-century European story of the disenchantment of the world, the gods and other agents inhabiting practices of so-called superstition have never died anywhere. I take gods and spirits to be coexisting, co-substantial with the humans, and I think from the assumption—and think from the assumption that the question of being human involves the question of being with gods and spirits. Chakrabarty mentions here the well-known figure of the Indian software programmer who each morning before going to work offers gifts to his local divinity. For the Western stagist approach, this programmer lives simultaneously in universes which are centuries apart. But is the non-problematical simultaneity of such attitudes, the normalized coexistence of the universality of modernization and particular life worlds—that would be my answer to Chakrabarty—is this not one of the defining features of what we call postmodernity? As many observers noted, postmodernity is not the overcoming of modernity, but its fulfillment. In postmodern universe, the pre-modern leftovers are no longer experienced as obstacles to be overcome with the progress towards fully secularized modernization, but as something that can be unproblematically incorporated into the multicultural global universe. All traditions survive, but in a mediated, de-naturalized form. That is to say, no longer as authentic ways of life, but as freely chosen lifestyles. Here I want to draw your attention as another example of how we can learn from anti-communist liberals, even reactionaries—the last book not yet translated into English by Peter Sloterdijk. I'm really getting friendly with him now, we will maybe even write, co-write a book together, because you know when I meet him we always have the same conversation. I tell him, you know, when I take power you go to Gulag. He tells me when I take power you will disappear... reaction... the Auschwitz or what, no? But then we tell, okay, but till that moment arrive why don't we have a good time together, no? In his new book, Du musst dein Leben ändern, you must change your life. He, my God, why didn't—where were the progressives to help—he provided the best answer I know to this post-secular bullshit, you know: the enlightenment paradigm is exhausted, the religious is coming back. He claims that this return of religion is the ultimate death of religion. Religion is coming back, but as a totally de-substantialized lifestyle practice. And he gives for him the greatest theologian—and I cannot in a multiple orgasmic way agree but agree with him—his model, the key religious figure for him is Ron Hubbard, you know, that Scientology idiot. What fascinates him is also what fascinated me. My God, this guy is a genius. You know why? If you read his biography, you know how he proceeded. He first wrote a couple of science fiction novel, which were so stupid that they didn't sell well. And then—and you can prove this from letters, I mean, this is not just conjecture, he wrote about this—then once the idea came to him: maybe it will sell better if I sell this as religion. Like, you know, it's not as we usually say what was originally part of authentic religious experience is for us now just an aesthetic fiction, aesthetic phenomenon; with him, it was the opposite. It started as fiction, then he said: let's sell it as—as religion. So again, I think that this is the cunning of postmodernity. The Indian programmer can participate in his traditional rituals, believing that in this way he remains in touch with his authentic lifework. But the rituals are already mediated and incorporated into global capitalism, rendering possible its smooth functioning. Such coexistence holds not only for India but is present everywhere, inclusive of the most developed Western societies. I mean, why even—I found this always a little bit racist—why always when one wants to exemplify this coexistence of modern with pre-modern sacred and so on, why always this unfortunate India or what? Let's take United States. I learned this from my enemy Simon Critchley, who quotes this as a nice data, that my God, of Americans believe not only God but in literally in devil and all that stuff. So who needs India, my God, you know? This is the best adventure I had, my good friend Güven Güzeldere, a very good cognitive scientist. He is my source, of my spy there, he tells me what goes on. When I met him at Duke University, he told me that he—he is from Turkey—he wants to return to Turkey. Because he told me in Turkey he lived in Istanbul, nice secular elementary school. Then he had—he has a small daughter, he sent her to school—you know Duke is an island, you know all around is Jesse Helms country. It's—but there is something you should learn there. Sorry that I jump around to see the inconsistencies of—this is for me the most shattering indictment of the limits of American liberalism. You know who was the main secretary, chief of staff of Jesse Helms? James Meredith. If you are old enough you know he is this symbolic figure, the first black student in, I think late 50s early 60s, in American South. When he enrolled, he had to be protected by hundreds of policemen and so on and so on. This guy became so disenchanted with American liberals that he turned to—to Jesse Helms. Okay, but to go on—this Güven Güzeldere he told me a wonderful story. He told me that yes, when his daughter went to school there, she was asked in elementary school, second year or what: who is your—what is your religion? No, and she said: no, what God, there is no God, nothing. Then the schoolteacher made her stand in front of all of the class and told them: you see poor innocent girl, but because of the evil of her parents she will go to hell, she will burn and all that stuff. And then this Güven Güzeldere told me that like, you know, he has enough of this fundamentalist America, he wants to return to good secular Turkey. That is today much more secular. So again, such coexistence holds not only for India but is present everywhere. It is here that one should apply the dialectical notion of totality. Capitalism functions as a totality. That is to say, elements of pre-existing life worlds and economies are gradually re-articulated as its own moments. They are, again to use that Stephen Jay Gould term, exapted: appropriated, adapted with a different function. What this means is that the line that separates History and History is by definition always blurred. Parts of History which are found by capitalism as external to it are permanently re-articulated as its integral elements. What Marx is describing as the logic of capital is not, as Chakrabarty implies, an ideal which cannot ever be fully realized because you never get pure logic of capital, it is always contaminated by a particular lifework, but it's simply the very notional structure of the existing capitalism. There is no need—how to put it—it's wrong to say there is never a pure logic of capital which then is compromised by being colored by a particular—there is no need for purity. Purity exists as the very logic of appropriating particular life worlds. Chakrabarty sees a tension where there is none. Capitalism works as—you know, Chakrabarty still implies as if if we want to have pure capital somehow, to put it in the terms of a very primitive metaphor, somehow we would all have to eat hamburgers or some whatever. No, pure capitalism—you eat—you drink tequila or as Chavez would have put it, you drink whisky or whatever all around. But all these traditions become moments, they—they change—they change in their very substance. So again, the point is that where Chakrabarty sees a tension in the sense of oh there is never a pure logic of capital, but the pure logic of capital is the very mode how all these History concrete life worlds are appropriated. This is how it functions. It—it's not—it's not a—it's not a limitation. Chakrabarty confronts this problem when he proposes a critical reading of Marx's analysis of abstract labor. Chakrabarty is right to reject the predominant substantialist reading, according to which abstract labor designates a real or ideal property of labor. Abstract labor should rather be understood—I quote Chakrabarty again—as a performative practical category. To organize life under the sign of capital is to act as if labor could indeed be abstracted from all social tissues in which it is always embedded and which make any particular labor, even the labor of abstracting, concrete. Notice Marx's expression: the abstraction becomes true in practice. Marx could not have written a clearer statement, indicating that abstract labor is not a substantive entity, physiological labor. It's not also a calculable sum of muscular and nervous energy. It refers to a practice, an activity, a concrete performance of the work of abstraction, similar to what one does in the analytical strategies of economics when one speaks of an abstract category of labor. End of quote. But I think again that Chakrabarty here misses the point. The opposition he points is either we have real abstract labor or it's just a fiction. You know like that although labor is always a concrete labor part of a certain tradition, we—we fix—we act as if. What he doesn't get I claim is that—it is—of course one should criticize those who misread Marx as substantialist. It's almost as if Marx is a neo-Thomist like Aquinas, as if there really is in our labor some substance, abstract universal substance. Labor of course is a social category in this sense performative. But as such it has an actuality of its own. It is the structure of the actual network of social relations. There is no need for translation here, since in the social field as if is the thing itself. Abstraction is actual in the life of exchange. Here is a precise quote from Volume of Capital: the reduction of different concrete private labors to this abstractum of the same human labor is accomplished only through exchange, which effectively posits the products of different labors as equal to each other. End of quote. So, the performative status of abstract labor is in no way less real than some substantial reality. When an—this is the point I want to make, again through a metaphor or example rather—when an Indian capitalist trades with European companies or when an Indian worker sells his labor force, these acts are of course differently perceived in different life worlds. When I deal with an Indian, of course you can always show how for him the act of exchange is part of his lifework, is perceived in a different way than—than it is for me. But I claim the truth is in the very abstraction, not in the concrete cultural content. In other words, the truth—you know what I mean—Chakrabarty is saying like abstract labor is a fiction, in reality it's always part of a concrete lifework. I claim no, this concrete experience is a fake, the truth is the abstraction. Because the truth is in the social act of exchange where, whatever you think, in whichever way culturally over-determined you perceive it, abstraction is real. In other words, the concrete cultural content is ultimately an ideological fake, a mask obfuscating the reign of abstraction. The Indian programmer thinks that in the core of his being he remains faithful to his traditional lifework, but—but his truth is his inclusion in the global capitalist machine. With modernity, lifework loses its immediacy. Heidegger, to whom Chakrabarty often refers, was well aware of this, which is why Heidegger perceived European modernity as the danger of a worldless universe, a threat to authentic life worlds. So, again you see my point. What I miss in Chakrabarty is nonetheless—how should I put it—he cannot—the only way for him to explain the rise of universal notion of capital is to see it as a fake universalization of a particular lifework experience. I claim no—I'm here hopefully more radical—I claim here that—that the—the mistake is his methodological implicit presupposition, which is that the ultimate social reality is a concrete lifework. I don't think it is. I think what we so pathetically call concrete lifework is always an antagonistic mess. We are always more universal than a particular lifework. I don't agree with this entire perspective that, you know, as if we have concrete life worlds and then it's always ambiguous as to how we will connect with others, do we misunderstand each other or not. I think we always misunderstand ourselves. In the sense of—it's not that we—this is for me the limit of identity logic in the sense of cultural identity. It's not that we are naturally part of a certain lifework and then it's always problematical to expand it, it's cultural imperialism if I use the same term and so on. No, I think the very establishment of every particular lifework identity is an extremely violent process, where many things are oppressed, repressed and so on. Let me take precisely the case of India. The traditional lifework experience includes not only what—what Chakrabarty puts so nobly as this lifework spirit. Yeah, yeah, but these spirits tell you many things. These spirits tell you that there are castes and so on and all that stuff, no? I mean, you know what I mean? I'm only saying that the same goes for Europe. So I think we should—the point is not to opt for some naive universalism. The point is to see how a particular life experience is simply the mode of existence of universal capitalism. Capitalism is already actual in the interaction of this multiplicity of life worlds. Now let me go a step further, I hope this will interest you maybe a little bit more. Chakrabarty did something for which I nonetheless admire him. In the—one of the last issues, winter of Critical Inquiry, he extended his analysis to ecology. He published there a very nice essay on The Climate of History. So he wants to approach in a very nice way as a theoretical philosophical problem the consequences of global warming. The main thesis, as the main consequence, the collapse of the distinction between human and natural histories. Please be a little bit patient because I think that here he does a very nice job, okay, as always I try to be the wiser guy who will show then when where he doesn't see all and so on. First quote: for it is no longer a question simply of man having an interactive relation with nature. This humans have always had. Now it is being claimed that humans are a force of nature in the geological sense. End of quote. That is to say, the—the fact that—quote from Chakrabarty—humans, thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel and other related activities, have become a geological agent on the planet. This fact means that humans are able to affect, influence the very balance of life on Earth. End of quote. So that in itself, first with the Industrial Revolution of for itself consciously now with global warming, a new geological era began, which some scientists call Anthropocene. The way humankind is forced to perceive itself in these new conditions is as a species, as one of the species of life on Earth. You know that already the young Marx designated humanity as a species-being, Gattungswesen. But he meant something quite different. What Marx meant is that in contrast to animal species, only humans are a species-being. That is to say, a being which actively relates to itself as a species and is thus universal not only in itself but also for itself. I know myself as universal. This universality first appears in its alienated perverted form with capitalism, which connects, unites all of humanity within the same world market, then also with modern social and scientific development where we are no longer just a mere species among others. For the first time in the entire human history, we humans collectively constitute ourselves and are aware of it, so that we are responsible for ourselves. The mode of our survival depends on the maturity of our collective reasons. However, scientists who talk about the Anthropocene are—I quote Chakrabarty—are saying something quite the contrary. They argue that because humans constitute a particular kind of species, they can in the process of dominating other species acquire the status of a geological force. Humans, in other words, have become a natural condition, at least today. End of quote. The standard Marxist counter-argument is here that this shift from Pleistocene to Anthropocene is entirely due to the explosive development of capitalism and its global impact. And this confronts us now with the key question, where I respectfully disagree with Chakrabarty. How are we to think the link between the social history of the capital and the much larger geological changes of the conditions of life on Earth? Quote, a longer quote but I think it's nicely written: if the industrial—this is Chakrabarty—if the industrial way of life was what got us into this crisis, ecological crisis, then the question is: why think in terms of species, surely a category that belongs to a much longer history? Why could not the narrative of capitalism and thereby the critique of capitalism be sufficient as a framework for interrogating the history of climate change and understanding its consequences? It seems true that the crisis of climate change has been necessitated by the high energy-consuming model of society that capitalist industrialization has created and promoted. But the current crisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logic of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities. They are connected rather to the history of life on this planet, the way different life forms connect to one another and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another. In other words, whatever our socio-economic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions such as the temperature zone in which the planet exists that work like boundary parameters of human existence. These parameters are independent of capitalism or socialism. They have been stable for much longer than the histories of these institutions and have allowed human beings to become the dominant species on Earth. Unfortunately, we have now ourselves become a geological agent, disturbing these parametric conditions needed for our own existence. End of quote. So, in contrast to nuclear war, which would have been the result of a conscious decision of a particular agent, climate change is an unintended consequence of human action and shows only through scientific analysis the effects of our action as a species. This threat to the very existence of humanity creates a new sense of we—we, like all of us—which truly encompasses all of humanity. Quote, the last quote: climate change refracted through global capital will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital. Some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crisis of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged. Witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighborhoods of California. End of quote. Incidentally, here I agree with him. In Berkeley, there was a fire and I loved it, two years ago, which was really a kind of a politically correct class-conscious fire. It covered all those, you know if you are in Berkeley, that nice mountain behind the campus, all the rich professors, no, like the Judith Butler area to be concrete, no? But then it stopped when you approach Oakland, the poor area, no? Politically progressive. I think we should start to think about progressive and reactionary natural catastrophes. This was a progressive one. Okay, sorry, let me go on. So, for Chakrabarty, the most appropriate name for this emerging universal subject, like this we of—but my God, with global warming we are all threatened, under threat—is species. Quote: species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change. End of quote. The problem is that for Chakrabarty, this universal is not a Hegelian one which arises dialectically out of the movement of history and subsumes, mediates all particularities. It escapes our capacity to experience the world. It can only give rise to a negative universal history, not the Hegelian world history as the gradual immanent self-deployment of freedom. So with the idea of humans as species, the universality of humankind falls back into the particularity of an animal species. Phenomena like global warming make us aware that with all the universality of our theoretical and practical activity, we are at a certain basic level just another living species on the planet Earth. Our survival depends on certain natural parameters which we automatically take for granted. The lesson of the global warming—warming—is that the freedom of the humankind was possible only against the background of the stable natural parameters of the life on Earth: temperature, composition of the air, sufficient water, energy supply and so on. Humans can do what they want only insofar as they remain marginal enough so that they don't seriously disturb the parameters of life on Earth. The limitation of our freedom—this limitation which becomes palpable with global warming—is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power, of our growing ability to transform nature around us, to destabilize the very basic geological parameters of the life on Earth. Nature thereby literally becomes a socio-historical category. But not in the exalted early subjectivist Marxism of young Lukács sense, that the content of nature is always historically determined and so on and so on. Nature becomes a socio-historical category in a much more radical and literal sense. Nature becomes something which is not just a stable background of human activity but is affected by human activity in its very basic components. What is thereby undermined is the distinction between nature and human history, this idea that nature blindly follows its course—it just has to be explained, exploited and so on—while human history has to be understood. Even if—that's the idea—the global course of human history is out of control, it functions as a fate; this fate is the result of the complex interaction of many individuals. It is based upon certain understanding what our world is. But not so for nature. So you see in which sense Chakrabarty thinks, and it's very nice, that we are becoming a species, that the difference between nature—natural history and human history—is overcome. Again, it's not just this idea we constitute what is nature and so on, the idea is that of Anthropocene, that—that we have become so powerful that with our human activity we can—we can change the basic parameters of what is natural, of how nature functions on Earth. But okay, so I agree him here. This is for me incidentally also, although he thinks the opposite, purely Hegelian. Namely, this idea that—that paradoxically at the highest point, precisely when you become universal, you discover yourself as particular. That is to say, as one of the species. But what Chakrabarty misses here I think is the full scope of the properly dialectical relationship between the basic geological parameters of life on Earth and the socio-economic dynamics of human development. Of course the natural parameters of our environment are independent of capitalism or socialism. They are a threat to all of us independently of economic development, political system and so on. However, the fact that their stability was threatened by the dynamic of global capitalism nonetheless has a stronger implication than the one allowed for by Chakrabarty. In a way, we have to admit that the whole is contained by its part. That is to say, the fate of the whole life on Earth hinges on what goes on in what is formally one of its parts: socio-economic mode of production of one of the species on Earth. This is why we have to accept the paradox that in the relation between the universal antagonism—the threatened parameters of the conditions for life on Earth—and the particular antagonism—the deadlock of capitalism—the key struggle is the particular one. One can solve the universal problem of the survival of the human species only by first resolving the particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production. In other words, the common sense reasoning which tells us that independently of our class position or political orientation, we all will have to tackle the ecological crisis if we are to survive, is deeply misleading. The key of the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such. So again, I think he makes a mistake when he says this is a global problem. It is a global problem but the roots are particular. That's the nice—you—I'm so sad I don't have time to go here into pure conceptual Hegelian dialectics which underlies this difference here between me and Chakrabarty. Because usually we think dialectic means every particular element, process has to be put in a global context. But the truly radical dialectics is exactly the opposite one. It's to isolate a particular process on which the whole—hinges. So that you know the—the balance of the whole is dependent on—on a particularity. Why? Why this deviation, why this abstract notion of universality? Because I think it again has something to do with how I think Chakrabarty misses the proper dialectical tension between universal and particular. For him, the way I see it, the only way to universality is through particular cultural identity. For him, the ecological crisis doesn't form a new universality, but it's a purely negative universality as he puts it. It's just we as endangered by nature, totally disconnected from concrete particular lifework historical—historical processes and so on and so on. What we have to do here and what is I think missing in Chakrabarty is, and here I would like to quote, although he is—she is way too liberal for me but she is an honest liberal, Susan Buck-Morss, who—pointed out how universal humanity is visible where—where we can experience it. Not only when we are all threatened. You see, that's the problem with again to make the link clear. This is the link between where I see Chakrabarty going wrong in his ecological topic and in his critiquing of the notion of global capitalism, abstract capitalism topic. Precisely because for him every—every human society the ultimate horizon is a lifework, the only universality he can imagine is this negative universality versus nature, which then becomes independent of concrete struggles. As he says, it doesn't matter you are capitalist, socialist, fascist whatever, we are all threatened. But what is missing in him is how we in our struggles concretely understand universality. There is a way we understand ourselves as universals. And here comes this properly Hegelian-Marxist beautiful passage from Susan Buck-Morss from her book on Hegel and Haiti, where she claims human universality is visible at the edges. That is to say, universal humanity is not this let's take the best of each culture and oh my god what great cultural works and so on, whatever. No, it is rather—here is a wonderful quote from Susan Buck-Morss: rather than giving multiple distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities—that's Chakrabarty position—human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained—it is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person's non-identity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal moral sentiment, the source of today's enthusiasm and hope. End of quote. I think this is her example of course here is for example the Haiti, where precisely those blacks who found themselves in between, torn out of their African culture where they were of course torn out as slaves, and also not included in European culture, what emerged in their rebellion is universality. Buck-Morss provides here I think a nice argument against the postmodern poetry of diversity. Diversity masks the underlying sameness of the brutal violence enacted by the culturally diverse cultures and regimes. Another quote: can we rest satisfied with the call for acknowledging multiple modernities, with a politics of diversity or multiversality, when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same? So again, that would be my first corrective. Universality is not just negative universality. It's inherent to our human identity. I live in my lifework, you live in your lifework, okay, they are both the same shit. But what I'm saying is that let's say that I am thrown out of my lifework, oppressed, don't find an identity—through each of us experiencing our marginalization, not being able to find identity in each lifework, as such we can identify. It's a very nice idea of what Hegelian concrete universality means. Now I want to engage, just to conclude, in two lines of politically incorrect thinking about consequences of this. First, I think that one of the consequences of this is that leftist whites should drop the politically correct process of endless self-culpabilization. Although Pascal Bruckner's—the bad French guy—critique of today's left often approaches ridicule, I'm totally opposed to him politically. This doesn't prevent him from occasionally generating correct insights. For example, I think one cannot but agree with him when he detects in the European politically correct self-whipping flagellation the inverted clinging to one's superiority. Whenever the West is attacked, the first reaction of us in Western Europe is self-probing: what did we do to deserve it? We are ultimately to be blamed for the evils of the world. The Third World catastrophes and terrorist violence are only reactions to our crimes. The positive form of the white man's burden—responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians—is thus replaced by its negative form: the burden of white man's guilt. If we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving them of their responsibility for their fate. The West is thus caught in the typical superego predicament best rendered by Dostoevsky's famous phrase from his Karamazov Brothers—I think really that all stupid things pseudo-moralistic that was possible to invent, you find them somewhere in Dostoevsky—each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I am more guilty than all the others. So the more the West confesses its crime, the more it is made to feel culpable. I think that against this logic one should—now I will do something horrible—I will try to rehabilitate what is today practically prohibited to mention or to mention it just as Marxist limitation—the—Mark two short texts by Marx from on India: The British Rule in India, The Future Results of British Rule in India. These are usually dismissed by postcolonial studies as embarrassing cases of Marxist Eurocentrism. I think they are today more actual than ever. Marx admits without restraint the brutality, exploitative hypocrisy of the British colonization of India, which goes up to the systematic use of torture prohibited in the West but—but outsourced to Indians. It's really nothing new in the sun. You discover in Marx that what we are today discovering with American hypocrisy, you know: we don't torture but we give them to Syria, to Egypt; British were doing this in India. We don't torture, so you give to local Indian police to—to do it. As Marx put it, quote: the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms to the colonies where it goes naked. End of quote. But what Marx nonetheless insists is that—we know the—I will even not quote Marx—Marx's point is nonetheless that with—with that this brutal, brutal intervention into the traditional way of life in India, in China nonetheless opened up the space for later emancipatory struggle and so on and so on. And I think that we shouldn't be afraid to admit this. That it's a sign of strength. I think a true victory of anti-colonial struggle is when, for example, the Chinese president apropos some British visiting dignitaries said already in in China: the British occupation has awakened China from its age-old sleep. Far from signaling some continuous self-abasement in front of the ex-colonial powers, statements like this I think express true post-postcolonialism, a mature independence. I'm so strong that I can reject this culpabilization—I don't longer need—I no longer need to blame—to blame the other. If there is someone who cannot be accused of softness towards the colonizers, it is, I hope we all agree, Frantz Fanon. His thoughts on the emancipatory power of violence, which I fully subscribe, are an embarrassment for many politically correct postcolonial theories. Which is why it's so fashionable to—they do it basically what they do with the Bible. I don't know if some of you were there, I found it quite funny, the same happened to me yesterday with John Milbank and that disgusting Tory guy who will be the next guru—who will be, how should I put it, David Cameron's Anthony Giddens—Phillip Blond, no? I did something very simple that I always did. I read those couple of my favorite Stalinist lines from the Bible, you know: I bring sword, fire, not peace. I will turn husband against wife, this against that and so on and so on. And ask them—if you don't hate your mother, father, you know—and I ask them okay, how do you read this? It's breathtaking. I should—I became a kind of a fundamentalist Christian, they should be burned, heretics. They all gave me, Milbank and Blond, this water-down liberal version, no? First they started to talk as a kind of cultural sociologists: you know you should understand Palestine at that time, Judea was a primitive country, Christ had to use this forceful expression. I said: My God, you talk like materialist historicists. For me this is the word of God. What do you think, that God was some—and no, but then the comedy was that then they told me: ah, it should be meant like this, that just we should understand that although we are always with our near people, husband, wife, children, neighbors, we can love them more than others. But you should nonetheless somehow remember that there is something larger and so on. So where Christ puts clear cut, you must hate, sword, they put in a typically pagan neo-Thomist way this nice hierarchy, you know? Like it's not cut, it's just: you love your neighbors but, yeah, there is something larger and so on and it's a kind of world as a—as a harmonious totality. Then Phillip Blond started more or less to shout at me, claiming: but do I want to abolish all this familial ties, distinctions? What—what is outside this? Like, am I aware that I'm a pure individualist—individualist liberal? Although I proclaim to be a Marxist. He attacked me like, like: if we erase all this family ties and so on, social ties, all that remains is pure voluntarism, pure ego. Then my God, I couldn't believe it. I told him—he told me basically: give me a name, what would be this collective? How can you imagine it outside all these ties? At that point, my God, I'm telling you I'm not kidding, I wanted to be an Inquisition guy and burn them all. How dare he say this? Holy Ghost is this community! That's the whole idea of Christ. That—that's his idea. It's not individual—is that—is that Christ is not saying hate your mother, father and masturbate alone with God in some mystical enrapture. What Christ is saying, and that's where we should take the lesson, is that there is a possibility of an emancipatory egalitarian collective outside this hierarchical up and down or whatever. And basically they are denying this. They are—sorry, but my conviction was that they are dangerous pagans. They literally re-inscribe this—then they told me: but you shouldn't understand—then the thing even became comical when they told me: but we should just say that it's kind of, you know, a hierarchy where you should guard proper you love—this—they basically defended this—this disgusting idea of, you know: God is jealous and God wants like, you know, love me more and I allow you to love your wife a little bit but be aware of proper hierarchies and so on and so on. So they told me it's just this, a harmonious universe. Where did you get all this hatred and sword? Fuck them, I got it from Christ, I told him. My God, were they aware that they were doing blasphemy? So that it was a wonderful, I love this comical situation where again, they were talking like some disgusting—now I'm speaking as an American fundamentalist—disgusting godless deconstructionist cultural analyst. I was saying: but wait a minute, this is the word of God, my God, no? No, it's really incredible how—I'm more and more convinced how, how should I put it, how deeply censored is for Christians themselves. I really, I'm more and more I think that—I'm getting back into this, you know, Protestant—that the Whore of Babylon is seated in Rome today and we should burn it or whatever, no? Sorry. So let me go on. Yeah. We were talking about violence. So Frantz Fanon. What I'm claiming is that he is treated a little bit like that, you know, that when he says violence, you know, it's wonderful how—the same as with Benjamin. It's fashionable now to water down that Fanon doesn't mean literal violence but some kind of symbolic cut—this what academics like, you know, ultra-violence where nobody really gets hurt and so on. So at least allow for—that I'm quoting back in '52, he provided I think one of the most beautiful expressions—articulations of this refusal to capitalize on the guilt of the colonizers. I hope you will excuse me for this wonderful quote. It's from the last pages of his—how is this—the other book, Black Skin, White Masks. I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible only for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. Haven't I got better things to do on this Earth than avenge the blacks of the 17th century? I, as a man of color, do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt towards the past of my race. I, as a man of color, do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission, there is no white burden. I do not want to be the victim of the ruse of a black world. I am going—am I going to ask today's white man to answer for the slave traders of the 17th century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt in their souls? I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors. It would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the 3rd century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of 8-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe. I find myself in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone, that of demanding human behavior from the other. End of quote. I subscribe this. Not on behalf of some softness towards the white. You should always bear in mind that this is not talking a white liberal—sorry, a black liberal telling to the whites let's forget it we are now on equal. He knew very well, he advocated very violent struggle and so on. But he knew the basis of this struggle should not be—you know this superego logic of the guilt and so on and so on. So if you allow me another five minutes, now comes the—pathetically identification with—with it, the maybe crucial communist question: what kind of subjectivity does this emancipatory communist struggle require? I will go to an extreme case but there is a moment of universal truth in it. Recently I saw a movie from directed by Tim Blake Nelson—it's a TV movie with Mira Sorvino, some other well-known names—called The Grey Zone. It's one of these but I think it's one of the best of these Holocaust movies about Auschwitz. Usually I hate them. I think that, for example, Schindler’s List should be publicly burned, it's implicitly one of the most anti-Semitic film patronizing Jews and so on. But this one is better. Why? The movie takes place in Auschwitz in the fall of '44, among a Sonderkommando—special unit—prisoners selected to do the dirty job of directing victims to gas chambers and then rob and dispose of the bodies. Prisoners who did the dirty job, then undress them, all that stuff. They knew that they will be liquidated after month in order to erase the traces of their work. But in between—that was the bribe—they got much better food, they were allowed to steal something if they found anything on the corpses and so on. So, in the middle of the film there is an intriguing dialogue between two of these privileged Jewish prisoners who were doing the job of—directing the prisoners to—to the gas chamber and so on—and a top surgeon who in the same camp did medical research on the corpses for the famous but not as guilty as people think Dr. Mengele. No, I'm not here playing any obscenity. I'm just—this really brings up my worst or best moral instincts. You know why this focus on Mengele? To avoid any misunderstanding. He was a nightmare. But as I already told you, there was a guy who was a professor then in the 50s in United States who was infinitely worse. I forgot his name, a Japanese doctor, you know in Harbin, I think in Manchuria. The Japanese were doing the same experiments, but on a much larger scale. They have there a great medical experimentation compound. There were only doctors there, with dozens of—and they were doing all the possible nasty experiment: taking eyes out, how long do you need to freeze—nightmarish experiments. The results were so precious that—you know what happened after the war? The—the chief, the commander of this camp, some stupid doctor, offered Americans a deal which they accepted. They—he got them all the documentation and they gave him a high-level professorship in the United States where he happily died in the 60s after long career. And this is a guy again—with—if you compare him to—Mengele to him, Mengele was like an innocent country doctor compared to a big city hospital, no? Incidentally, so that you will not say that I exaggerate, some Nazi doctors visited this camp and they were shocked and brought home—I mean, the Nazis were horrified when they visited this camp. Okay. So we have a talk between the two of them: this doctor who just does inquiry, no experiment, he wasn't involved in any dirty stuff, just bit then measure, cut the bodies whatever—and this guy who did with the bodies when they were burned. The doctor is a survivalist whose attitude is the one of I am just doing what I am ordered to do to survive. I am not killing anyone. He claims, I'm just analyzing bodies afterwards and so on. While the other prisoner is more aware of the moral deadlock. So the doctor says—that's the dialogue, I wrote it down. I never asked to be doing what I do. The other prisoner says: you volunteered, doctor. They wanted doctors for a hospital. The prisoner: you knew the sort of work you'll be doing and you continue doing it. Doctor: I don't kill. Prisoner: and we do? Doctor: I didn't say that. Prisoner: you give killing a purpose. Doctor: you're just trying to make it to the next day, that's all any of us is doing. Prisoner: you have no idea, do you? Doctor: I don't know what you are talking about. Now crucial, prisoner: I do not wish to be alive when all this is over. Doctor: I don't believe that. Prisoner: I know you don't. You know, first this position of a doctor. Of course this is totally different but, you know, when people ask me why are you for—I'm sorry if I repeat myself, maybe already used this story—why are you for death penalty? Did I already told you? I usually give them an example where—it's a—where I would be ready not only to be for death penalty but to kill someone and knowing fully that this guy didn't kill anyone else. And I hope—I hope at least you Oscar because it concerns your part of this shitty world would agree. I read—I'm sorry if I repeat myself—I read a book recently on all these torture chambers in Latin American military dictatorships and it's one of the most disgusting that I can imagine ethical—non-ethical figures that you encounter there. In each torture chamber, secret police, military, they had a doctor who didn't do anything dirty. He just examined the prisoner to be tortured and gave scientific advice, you know: torture him what do you want? Can he die? Okay, then torture him in this way so that he will suffer the longest. You want him tortured but not—you know, he gave exact advice and did nothing. In some way spontaneously this is for me to me almost more disgusting than doing the torture. I don't know how you are, if I were to sit at a table with this guy and—okay this is ridiculous but you will get the point—and if there were to be there a—a glass—a sorry, a little bit of arsenic or whatever and if I were to have a chance to—to put it in, to kill this guy. I don't know what you would do. I would without any problem do it. I mean, I don't think—if—maybe I wouldn't be able to do it. But in that case I would be ashamed of myself for not being able to kill this guy. So again, two times I claim in that dialogue the ordinary Sonderkommando, the guy who just put the bodies in the oven and so on, I think he made—makes the correct moral insight. First he points out that although his work is more dirty and comes closer to killing, the doctor's work is ethically much more problematical. The doctor gives killing a purpose, because you know the killing was done so that later Mengele could inspect stuff and so on and so on. Second, and that's what I found so fascinating, the ordinary Sonderkommando outlines the crucial sentence for me is I do not wish to be alive when all this is over. He outlines the extreme existential deadlock for which the doctor is blind. Namely this ordinary worker is aware that in order to survive he accepted to do something which compromises him so much that there is for him no way back to normality. He is aware that he is doing something so horrible for the Nazis, you know putting the bodies in, undressing the bodies afterwards and so on, that you cannot say: okay, this is a dark, dark chapter of my life afterwards if I survive I will—and so on. He knows that there is no return to normal. He is well aware, it's clear from other scenes in the film, that once you do things like this, you can survive only as long as this situation lasts. The moment the situation is normalized, if you are not a monster you have to kill yourself. And then he draws—the guy from this—the only correct conclusion. If he is already a living dead, the only thing to do is to die in a way that will make the enemy pay. And this movie is based on historical data. This was the only real rebellion in concentration camps. It was organized late '44 in Auschwitz where—and precisely these, the most contaminated corrupted as it were guy, those who were serving the—the—the gas chambers and so on—they organized a suicidal rebellion. They killed—it was very successful—some Nazis before they died. If there is a model of an ethical act, this is it. And I think this is the tragedy—the tragic position that sometimes we have to adopt in a radical political struggle. That you find yourself in a situation where you go so far that you know there is no way back to normal. You cannot say I fight now so that later I will live happily. You went so far that you can survive only in this emergency extraordinary crazy state. So you have all you have to do, all you can do properly is to organize your suicide. You know there is no way back to normality. The only way to win is to sell your death itself as a—as a contribution. I don't think this has anything to do with any masochism or whatever pseudo-psychoanalytic shit. I think that—this idea is the idea of a properly let's call it revolutionary—revolutionary ethics. And quite often we find ourselves in such a situation even in a much more innocent—not so ridiculous, you can—way. Let's say for example that you are in a situation which can happen that—you know this Sartrean dilemma—you have to choose between political struggle and your family. What if you have a family—sorry if I'm now a traditional—okay no I will be ironically politically correct—what if you are part of a same-sex marriage where you adopted a child whatever, so that you have some nearest to you and so on. But what if you know that you can contribute a lot to a more general political struggle, saving people, really making a difference, and you absolutely love your family or whomever your group. And what can you do? I think the truly heroic thing to do is to sacrifice the family. But in this way you do something which is—to dedicate yourself fully to the struggle. In this way you do something so radical that—you see my point? When you do this, you cannot say: okay, then after we win I will be able to explain to others, to myself, I had to do it. No, you irrevocably condemn yourself by sacrificing your family. There is no way out for you. But you accept that. That's the spirit. That's where we should take from—from the right-wingers, their spirit of sacrifice and so on, we should teach them. I'm sorry for this crazy conclusion but that's life. Thank you very much for your great patience today.
Okay, let me simply start. I hope you will not be too bored because today I will do exactly what I said that I will do. Just go through this cultural problem and a little bit of ecology and so on. Okay. So, my problem. Does the ongoing passage to a multicentric world in which Western culture is no longer privileged, does it compel us to renounce every project of a single universal history, no matter how critical it is? I want, as already announced, to focus on, I want to focus on what I think maybe is the most articulate postcolonial criticism of the Marxist notion of history: Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, a book published in by Princeton University Press. Chakrabarty understands historicism in a rather narrow sense of a theory which posits linear historical development or progress. The idea is that in spite of all cultural differences, there is the same underlying matrix from primitive societies to and so on up to secular modernity. He ignores the predominant use of this term, historicism, in today's cultural studies—a use which, paradoxically, he himself practices: radical historical relativizing of each culture and each lifework. So, again, although I think he is a historicist, but since he understands historicism as this naive evolutionary progressive and universal, always the same logic, he, Chakrabarty, criticizes Marx for unproblematically endorsing the universality of the logic of capital and its constitutive moments, abstract labor and so on. According to Chakrabarty, Marx ignores how in each of its actually existing forms, this universality of capitalism is always colored by a historically specific lifework and thus cannot be directly applied to other culture. Every such extension should involve a long and patient work of translation. According to Chakrabarty, once we accept this stagist notion—different stages—of evolution, our very critique of colonialism and support of anti-colonial struggle surreptitiously relies on colonialist notions. For a Eurocentric progressive Marxist, when Third World peasants, for example, rebel against colonial rule, they do this in the guise of religious, traditional, pre-political forms of protest. That is to say, they are not yet at the level of modern political secular movement. Ultimately, they remain in the waiting room of history. They need time to shed off archaic practices, to get properly educated into modernity. The Third World countries, even if affected by European modernization, are thus for traditional evolutionary Marxism not yet fully there in socio-political modernity. And all refinements and complications of the Marxist theory—you know notions like uneven development and so on—still rely on this model of successive stages. A model which, again, according to Chakrabarty, should be abandoned. There is no universal standard of historical stages. There is nothing incomplete in coexistence of modern forms of political life with traditional practices. If Indian modernity places the bourgeois in juxtaposition with that which seems pre-bourgeois, if the non-secular supernatural exists in proximity to the secular, and if both are to be found in the sphere of the political, it is not because capitalism or political modernity in India has remained incomplete. Consequently, when India was integrated into global capitalist network, the pre-modern life practices which persisted should in no way be dismissed as a mere survival of an antecedent pre-capitalist culture. This was capitalism indeed, but without bourgeois relations that attain a position of unchallenged hegemony. It was a capitalist dominance without a hegemonic bourgeois culture. Chakrabarty refers here to India's much-celebrated effortless combination of traditional spirituality with all the diversity of everyday life practices and rituals, and digital modernity. This combination effectively makes India a model, demonstrating how a worldless global capitalism can effortlessly coexist with the plurality of particular life worlds. Although to be a little bit cynical, judging from my experience seeing the movie Slumdog Millionaire—I really hate that movie. I mean, if anything, it brings out the worst of both worlds. The most obscurantist, all this fate-destiny ideology with the most stupid Hollywood amusement logic. One can even discern here echoes of the notion of alternate modernity where India can be replaced with other cultures: Latino-American combination of modernity with populist traditions, Japanese and Chinese combination of modernity with Asian values, and so on and so on. Now let me be more specific here. Chakrabarty is far from a simplistic dismissal of the Marxist universalism. In a much more refined dialectical way, he admits that it is both indispensable but also at the same time inadequate in helping us—that Marxism is both indispensable and inadequate—in helping us to think through the various life practices of social and political developments in Third World countries. Furthermore, for Chakrabarty, this combination of modern and pre-modern elements is a necessary constituent of every really existing capitalism, Western included. That is to say, one should read the expression not yet as when you say, for example, Indians because of their sticking to pre-modern sacred practices are not yet fully in modernity; for Chakrabarty, one should read the expression not yet deconstructively, as referring to a process of deferral internal to the very being of capital, to the very logic of capital. It is as though the not yet is what keeps capital going. Why? Chakrabarty introduces here the distinction between what he calls H1—H as a letter, like Hitler, history—History the just a neutral example, sorry, the name so you can understand it—the immanent history of the capital which posits its own presupposition, this circle of capitalist reproduction, and what he calls H2, History all the elements and processes of life worlds which cannot be reduced simply to the moments of capital's self-reproduction. History is abstract universal, it articulates the decontextualized logic of enlightenment, while History refers to concrete life worlds. The point, of course, is that since History the universal abstract history, is always contaminated by History then—no historical form of capital, however global its reach, can ever be a universal. No global or even local, for that matter, capital can ever represent the universal logic of capital. For any historically available form of capital is a provisional compromise made up of History modified by somebody’s History 2—of universal capital logic modified, colored by a particular lifework. The universal in that case can only exist—this sounds like Ernesto Laclau, probably is an implicit reference to the logic of hegemony—this universal can only exist as a placeholder. Its own place always usurped by a historically particular seeking to present itself as the universal. However, here for me, problems arise. The very fact that one has to distinguish History from History indicates a special status of History How then do we account for this distinction? Can we ultimately reduce History 1—the notion of universal abstract history of the capital—to an effect of History of a particular cultural lifework? In other words, can the event of European secularization be conceived as fully grounded in the European lifework? Chakrabarty indicates a positive answer: the phenomenon of political modernity, namely the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise, is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe. So, the next logical step is to reject the assumption that the gods and spirits are in the end social facts, that the social somehow exists prior to them. In other words, the radical conclusion Chakrabarty draws—with which of course I violently disagree—is that secular universalism is ultimately just another mode of particular religion, religious practice. One empirically knows of no society in which humans have existed without gods and spirits accompanying them. Although the gods of monotheism may have taken a few knocks, if not actually died, in the 19th-century European story of the disenchantment of the world, the gods and other agents inhabiting practices of so-called superstition have never died anywhere. I take gods and spirits to be coexisting, co-substantial with the humans, and I think from the assumption—and think from the assumption that the question of being human involves the question of being with gods and spirits. Chakrabarty mentions here the well-known figure of the Indian software programmer who each morning before going to work offers gifts to his local divinity. For the Western stagist approach, this programmer lives simultaneously in universes which are centuries apart. But is the non-problematical simultaneity of such attitudes, the normalized coexistence of the universality of modernization and particular life worlds—that would be my answer to Chakrabarty—is this not one of the defining features of what we call postmodernity? As many observers noted, postmodernity is not the overcoming of modernity, but its fulfillment. In postmodern universe, the pre-modern leftovers are no longer experienced as obstacles to be overcome with the progress towards fully secularized modernization, but as something that can be unproblematically incorporated into the multicultural global universe. All traditions survive, but in a mediated, de-naturalized form. That is to say, no longer as authentic ways of life, but as freely chosen lifestyles. Here I want to draw your attention as another example of how we can learn from anti-communist liberals, even reactionaries—the last book not yet translated into English by Peter Sloterdijk. I'm really getting friendly with him now, we will maybe even write, co-write a book together, because you know when I meet him we always have the same conversation. I tell him, you know, when I take power you go to Gulag. He tells me when I take power you will disappear... reaction... the Auschwitz or what, no? But then we tell, okay, but till that moment arrive why don't we have a good time together, no? In his new book, Du musst dein Leben ändern, you must change your life. He, my God, why didn't—where were the progressives to help—he provided the best answer I know to this post-secular bullshit, you know: the enlightenment paradigm is exhausted, the religious is coming back. He claims that this return of religion is the ultimate death of religion. Religion is coming back, but as a totally de-substantialized lifestyle practice. And he gives for him the greatest theologian—and I cannot in a multiple orgasmic way agree but agree with him—his model, the key religious figure for him is Ron Hubbard, you know, that Scientology idiot. What fascinates him is also what fascinated me. My God, this guy is a genius. You know why? If you read his biography, you know how he proceeded. He first wrote a couple of science fiction novel, which were so stupid that they didn't sell well. And then—and you can prove this from letters, I mean, this is not just conjecture, he wrote about this—then once the idea came to him: maybe it will sell better if I sell this as religion. Like, you know, it's not as we usually say what was originally part of authentic religious experience is for us now just an aesthetic fiction, aesthetic phenomenon; with him, it was the opposite. It started as fiction, then he said: let's sell it as—as religion. So again, I think that this is the cunning of postmodernity. The Indian programmer can participate in his traditional rituals, believing that in this way he remains in touch with his authentic lifework. But the rituals are already mediated and incorporated into global capitalism, rendering possible its smooth functioning. Such coexistence holds not only for India but is present everywhere, inclusive of the most developed Western societies. I mean, why even—I found this always a little bit racist—why always when one wants to exemplify this coexistence of modern with pre-modern sacred and so on, why always this unfortunate India or what? Let's take United States. I learned this from my enemy Simon Critchley, who quotes this as a nice data, that my God, of Americans believe not only God but in literally in devil and all that stuff. So who needs India, my God, you know? This is the best adventure I had, my good friend Güven Güzeldere, a very good cognitive scientist. He is my source, of my spy there, he tells me what goes on. When I met him at Duke University, he told me that he—he is from Turkey—he wants to return to Turkey. Because he told me in Turkey he lived in Istanbul, nice secular elementary school. Then he had—he has a small daughter, he sent her to school—you know Duke is an island, you know all around is Jesse Helms country. It's—but there is something you should learn there. Sorry that I jump around to see the inconsistencies of—this is for me the most shattering indictment of the limits of American liberalism. You know who was the main secretary, chief of staff of Jesse Helms? James Meredith. If you are old enough you know he is this symbolic figure, the first black student in, I think late 50s early 60s, in American South. When he enrolled, he had to be protected by hundreds of policemen and so on and so on. This guy became so disenchanted with American liberals that he turned to—to Jesse Helms. Okay, but to go on—this Güven Güzeldere he told me a wonderful story. He told me that yes, when his daughter went to school there, she was asked in elementary school, second year or what: who is your—what is your religion? No, and she said: no, what God, there is no God, nothing. Then the schoolteacher made her stand in front of all of the class and told them: you see poor innocent girl, but because of the evil of her parents she will go to hell, she will burn and all that stuff. And then this Güven Güzeldere told me that like, you know, he has enough of this fundamentalist America, he wants to return to good secular Turkey. That is today much more secular. So again, such coexistence holds not only for India but is present everywhere. It is here that one should apply the dialectical notion of totality. Capitalism functions as a totality. That is to say, elements of pre-existing life worlds and economies are gradually re-articulated as its own moments. They are, again to use that Stephen Jay Gould term, exapted: appropriated, adapted with a different function. What this means is that the line that separates History and History is by definition always blurred. Parts of History which are found by capitalism as external to it are permanently re-articulated as its integral elements. What Marx is describing as the logic of capital is not, as Chakrabarty implies, an ideal which cannot ever be fully realized because you never get pure logic of capital, it is always contaminated by a particular lifework, but it's simply the very notional structure of the existing capitalism. There is no need—how to put it—it's wrong to say there is never a pure logic of capital which then is compromised by being colored by a particular—there is no need for purity. Purity exists as the very logic of appropriating particular life worlds. Chakrabarty sees a tension where there is none. Capitalism works as—you know, Chakrabarty still implies as if if we want to have pure capital somehow, to put it in the terms of a very primitive metaphor, somehow we would all have to eat hamburgers or some whatever. No, pure capitalism—you eat—you drink tequila or as Chavez would have put it, you drink whisky or whatever all around. But all these traditions become moments, they—they change—they change in their very substance. So again, the point is that where Chakrabarty sees a tension in the sense of oh there is never a pure logic of capital, but the pure logic of capital is the very mode how all these History concrete life worlds are appropriated. This is how it functions. It—it's not—it's not a—it's not a limitation. Chakrabarty confronts this problem when he proposes a critical reading of Marx's analysis of abstract labor. Chakrabarty is right to reject the predominant substantialist reading, according to which abstract labor designates a real or ideal property of labor. Abstract labor should rather be understood—I quote Chakrabarty again—as a performative practical category. To organize life under the sign of capital is to act as if labor could indeed be abstracted from all social tissues in which it is always embedded and which make any particular labor, even the labor of abstracting, concrete. Notice Marx's expression: the abstraction becomes true in practice. Marx could not have written a clearer statement, indicating that abstract labor is not a substantive entity, physiological labor. It's not also a calculable sum of muscular and nervous energy. It refers to a practice, an activity, a concrete performance of the work of abstraction, similar to what one does in the analytical strategies of economics when one speaks of an abstract category of labor. End of quote. But I think again that Chakrabarty here misses the point. The opposition he points is either we have real abstract labor or it's just a fiction. You know like that although labor is always a concrete labor part of a certain tradition, we—we fix—we act as if. What he doesn't get I claim is that—it is—of course one should criticize those who misread Marx as substantialist. It's almost as if Marx is a neo-Thomist like Aquinas, as if there really is in our labor some substance, abstract universal substance. Labor of course is a social category in this sense performative. But as such it has an actuality of its own. It is the structure of the actual network of social relations. There is no need for translation here, since in the social field as if is the thing itself. Abstraction is actual in the life of exchange. Here is a precise quote from Volume of Capital: the reduction of different concrete private labors to this abstractum of the same human labor is accomplished only through exchange, which effectively posits the products of different labors as equal to each other. End of quote. So, the performative status of abstract labor is in no way less real than some substantial reality. When an—this is the point I want to make, again through a metaphor or example rather—when an Indian capitalist trades with European companies or when an Indian worker sells his labor force, these acts are of course differently perceived in different life worlds. When I deal with an Indian, of course you can always show how for him the act of exchange is part of his lifework, is perceived in a different way than—than it is for me. But I claim the truth is in the very abstraction, not in the concrete cultural content. In other words, the truth—you know what I mean—Chakrabarty is saying like abstract labor is a fiction, in reality it's always part of a concrete lifework. I claim no, this concrete experience is a fake, the truth is the abstraction. Because the truth is in the social act of exchange where, whatever you think, in whichever way culturally over-determined you perceive it, abstraction is real. In other words, the concrete cultural content is ultimately an ideological fake, a mask obfuscating the reign of abstraction. The Indian programmer thinks that in the core of his being he remains faithful to his traditional lifework, but—but his truth is his inclusion in the global capitalist machine. With modernity, lifework loses its immediacy. Heidegger, to whom Chakrabarty often refers, was well aware of this, which is why Heidegger perceived European modernity as the danger of a worldless universe, a threat to authentic life worlds. So, again you see my point. What I miss in Chakrabarty is nonetheless—how should I put it—he cannot—the only way for him to explain the rise of universal notion of capital is to see it as a fake universalization of a particular lifework experience. I claim no—I'm here hopefully more radical—I claim here that—that the—the mistake is his methodological implicit presupposition, which is that the ultimate social reality is a concrete lifework. I don't think it is. I think what we so pathetically call concrete lifework is always an antagonistic mess. We are always more universal than a particular lifework. I don't agree with this entire perspective that, you know, as if we have concrete life worlds and then it's always ambiguous as to how we will connect with others, do we misunderstand each other or not. I think we always misunderstand ourselves. In the sense of—it's not that we—this is for me the limit of identity logic in the sense of cultural identity. It's not that we are naturally part of a certain lifework and then it's always problematical to expand it, it's cultural imperialism if I use the same term and so on. No, I think the very establishment of every particular lifework identity is an extremely violent process, where many things are oppressed, repressed and so on. Let me take precisely the case of India. The traditional lifework experience includes not only what—what Chakrabarty puts so nobly as this lifework spirit. Yeah, yeah, but these spirits tell you many things. These spirits tell you that there are castes and so on and all that stuff, no? I mean, you know what I mean? I'm only saying that the same goes for Europe. So I think we should—the point is not to opt for some naive universalism. The point is to see how a particular life experience is simply the mode of existence of universal capitalism. Capitalism is already actual in the interaction of this multiplicity of life worlds. Now let me go a step further, I hope this will interest you maybe a little bit more. Chakrabarty did something for which I nonetheless admire him. In the—one of the last issues, winter of Critical Inquiry, he extended his analysis to ecology. He published there a very nice essay on The Climate of History. So he wants to approach in a very nice way as a theoretical philosophical problem the consequences of global warming. The main thesis, as the main consequence, the collapse of the distinction between human and natural histories. Please be a little bit patient because I think that here he does a very nice job, okay, as always I try to be the wiser guy who will show then when where he doesn't see all and so on. First quote: for it is no longer a question simply of man having an interactive relation with nature. This humans have always had. Now it is being claimed that humans are a force of nature in the geological sense. End of quote. That is to say, the—the fact that—quote from Chakrabarty—humans, thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel and other related activities, have become a geological agent on the planet. This fact means that humans are able to affect, influence the very balance of life on Earth. End of quote. So that in itself, first with the Industrial Revolution of for itself consciously now with global warming, a new geological era began, which some scientists call Anthropocene. The way humankind is forced to perceive itself in these new conditions is as a species, as one of the species of life on Earth. You know that already the young Marx designated humanity as a species-being, Gattungswesen. But he meant something quite different. What Marx meant is that in contrast to animal species, only humans are a species-being. That is to say, a being which actively relates to itself as a species and is thus universal not only in itself but also for itself. I know myself as universal. This universality first appears in its alienated perverted form with capitalism, which connects, unites all of humanity within the same world market, then also with modern social and scientific development where we are no longer just a mere species among others. For the first time in the entire human history, we humans collectively constitute ourselves and are aware of it, so that we are responsible for ourselves. The mode of our survival depends on the maturity of our collective reasons. However, scientists who talk about the Anthropocene are—I quote Chakrabarty—are saying something quite the contrary. They argue that because humans constitute a particular kind of species, they can in the process of dominating other species acquire the status of a geological force. Humans, in other words, have become a natural condition, at least today. End of quote. The standard Marxist counter-argument is here that this shift from Pleistocene to Anthropocene is entirely due to the explosive development of capitalism and its global impact. And this confronts us now with the key question, where I respectfully disagree with Chakrabarty. How are we to think the link between the social history of the capital and the much larger geological changes of the conditions of life on Earth? Quote, a longer quote but I think it's nicely written: if the industrial—this is Chakrabarty—if the industrial way of life was what got us into this crisis, ecological crisis, then the question is: why think in terms of species, surely a category that belongs to a much longer history? Why could not the narrative of capitalism and thereby the critique of capitalism be sufficient as a framework for interrogating the history of climate change and understanding its consequences? It seems true that the crisis of climate change has been necessitated by the high energy-consuming model of society that capitalist industrialization has created and promoted. But the current crisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logic of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities. They are connected rather to the history of life on this planet, the way different life forms connect to one another and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another. In other words, whatever our socio-economic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions such as the temperature zone in which the planet exists that work like boundary parameters of human existence. These parameters are independent of capitalism or socialism. They have been stable for much longer than the histories of these institutions and have allowed human beings to become the dominant species on Earth. Unfortunately, we have now ourselves become a geological agent, disturbing these parametric conditions needed for our own existence. End of quote. So, in contrast to nuclear war, which would have been the result of a conscious decision of a particular agent, climate change is an unintended consequence of human action and shows only through scientific analysis the effects of our action as a species. This threat to the very existence of humanity creates a new sense of we—we, like all of us—which truly encompasses all of humanity. Quote, the last quote: climate change refracted through global capital will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital. Some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crisis of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged. Witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighborhoods of California. End of quote. Incidentally, here I agree with him. In Berkeley, there was a fire and I loved it, two years ago, which was really a kind of a politically correct class-conscious fire. It covered all those, you know if you are in Berkeley, that nice mountain behind the campus, all the rich professors, no, like the Judith Butler area to be concrete, no? But then it stopped when you approach Oakland, the poor area, no? Politically progressive. I think we should start to think about progressive and reactionary natural catastrophes. This was a progressive one. Okay, sorry, let me go on. So, for Chakrabarty, the most appropriate name for this emerging universal subject, like this we of—but my God, with global warming we are all threatened, under threat—is species. Quote: species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change. End of quote. The problem is that for Chakrabarty, this universal is not a Hegelian one which arises dialectically out of the movement of history and subsumes, mediates all particularities. It escapes our capacity to experience the world. It can only give rise to a negative universal history, not the Hegelian world history as the gradual immanent self-deployment of freedom. So with the idea of humans as species, the universality of humankind falls back into the particularity of an animal species. Phenomena like global warming make us aware that with all the universality of our theoretical and practical activity, we are at a certain basic level just another living species on the planet Earth. Our survival depends on certain natural parameters which we automatically take for granted. The lesson of the global warming—warming—is that the freedom of the humankind was possible only against the background of the stable natural parameters of the life on Earth: temperature, composition of the air, sufficient water, energy supply and so on. Humans can do what they want only insofar as they remain marginal enough so that they don't seriously disturb the parameters of life on Earth. The limitation of our freedom—this limitation which becomes palpable with global warming—is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power, of our growing ability to transform nature around us, to destabilize the very basic geological parameters of the life on Earth. Nature thereby literally becomes a socio-historical category. But not in the exalted early subjectivist Marxism of young Lukács sense, that the content of nature is always historically determined and so on and so on. Nature becomes a socio-historical category in a much more radical and literal sense. Nature becomes something which is not just a stable background of human activity but is affected by human activity in its very basic components. What is thereby undermined is the distinction between nature and human history, this idea that nature blindly follows its course—it just has to be explained, exploited and so on—while human history has to be understood. Even if—that's the idea—the global course of human history is out of control, it functions as a fate; this fate is the result of the complex interaction of many individuals. It is based upon certain understanding what our world is. But not so for nature. So you see in which sense Chakrabarty thinks, and it's very nice, that we are becoming a species, that the difference between nature—natural history and human history—is overcome. Again, it's not just this idea we constitute what is nature and so on, the idea is that of Anthropocene, that—that we have become so powerful that with our human activity we can—we can change the basic parameters of what is natural, of how nature functions on Earth. But okay, so I agree him here. This is for me incidentally also, although he thinks the opposite, purely Hegelian. Namely, this idea that—that paradoxically at the highest point, precisely when you become universal, you discover yourself as particular. That is to say, as one of the species. But what Chakrabarty misses here I think is the full scope of the properly dialectical relationship between the basic geological parameters of life on Earth and the socio-economic dynamics of human development. Of course the natural parameters of our environment are independent of capitalism or socialism. They are a threat to all of us independently of economic development, political system and so on. However, the fact that their stability was threatened by the dynamic of global capitalism nonetheless has a stronger implication than the one allowed for by Chakrabarty. In a way, we have to admit that the whole is contained by its part. That is to say, the fate of the whole life on Earth hinges on what goes on in what is formally one of its parts: socio-economic mode of production of one of the species on Earth. This is why we have to accept the paradox that in the relation between the universal antagonism—the threatened parameters of the conditions for life on Earth—and the particular antagonism—the deadlock of capitalism—the key struggle is the particular one. One can solve the universal problem of the survival of the human species only by first resolving the particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production. In other words, the common sense reasoning which tells us that independently of our class position or political orientation, we all will have to tackle the ecological crisis if we are to survive, is deeply misleading. The key of the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such. So again, I think he makes a mistake when he says this is a global problem. It is a global problem but the roots are particular. That's the nice—you—I'm so sad I don't have time to go here into pure conceptual Hegelian dialectics which underlies this difference here between me and Chakrabarty. Because usually we think dialectic means every particular element, process has to be put in a global context. But the truly radical dialectics is exactly the opposite one. It's to isolate a particular process on which the whole—hinges. So that you know the—the balance of the whole is dependent on—on a particularity. Why? Why this deviation, why this abstract notion of universality? Because I think it again has something to do with how I think Chakrabarty misses the proper dialectical tension between universal and particular. For him, the way I see it, the only way to universality is through particular cultural identity. For him, the ecological crisis doesn't form a new universality, but it's a purely negative universality as he puts it. It's just we as endangered by nature, totally disconnected from concrete particular lifework historical—historical processes and so on and so on. What we have to do here and what is I think missing in Chakrabarty is, and here I would like to quote, although he is—she is way too liberal for me but she is an honest liberal, Susan Buck-Morss, who—pointed out how universal humanity is visible where—where we can experience it. Not only when we are all threatened. You see, that's the problem with again to make the link clear. This is the link between where I see Chakrabarty going wrong in his ecological topic and in his critiquing of the notion of global capitalism, abstract capitalism topic. Precisely because for him every—every human society the ultimate horizon is a lifework, the only universality he can imagine is this negative universality versus nature, which then becomes independent of concrete struggles. As he says, it doesn't matter you are capitalist, socialist, fascist whatever, we are all threatened. But what is missing in him is how we in our struggles concretely understand universality. There is a way we understand ourselves as universals. And here comes this properly Hegelian-Marxist beautiful passage from Susan Buck-Morss from her book on Hegel and Haiti, where she claims human universality is visible at the edges. That is to say, universal humanity is not this let's take the best of each culture and oh my god what great cultural works and so on, whatever. No, it is rather—here is a wonderful quote from Susan Buck-Morss: rather than giving multiple distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities—that's Chakrabarty position—human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained—it is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person's non-identity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal moral sentiment, the source of today's enthusiasm and hope. End of quote. I think this is her example of course here is for example the Haiti, where precisely those blacks who found themselves in between, torn out of their African culture where they were of course torn out as slaves, and also not included in European culture, what emerged in their rebellion is universality. Buck-Morss provides here I think a nice argument against the postmodern poetry of diversity. Diversity masks the underlying sameness of the brutal violence enacted by the culturally diverse cultures and regimes. Another quote: can we rest satisfied with the call for acknowledging multiple modernities, with a politics of diversity or multiversality, when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same? So again, that would be my first corrective. Universality is not just negative universality. It's inherent to our human identity. I live in my lifework, you live in your lifework, okay, they are both the same shit. But what I'm saying is that let's say that I am thrown out of my lifework, oppressed, don't find an identity—through each of us experiencing our marginalization, not being able to find identity in each lifework, as such we can identify. It's a very nice idea of what Hegelian concrete universality means. Now I want to engage, just to conclude, in two lines of politically incorrect thinking about consequences of this. First, I think that one of the consequences of this is that leftist whites should drop the politically correct process of endless self-culpabilization. Although Pascal Bruckner's—the bad French guy—critique of today's left often approaches ridicule, I'm totally opposed to him politically. This doesn't prevent him from occasionally generating correct insights. For example, I think one cannot but agree with him when he detects in the European politically correct self-whipping flagellation the inverted clinging to one's superiority. Whenever the West is attacked, the first reaction of us in Western Europe is self-probing: what did we do to deserve it? We are ultimately to be blamed for the evils of the world. The Third World catastrophes and terrorist violence are only reactions to our crimes. The positive form of the white man's burden—responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians—is thus replaced by its negative form: the burden of white man's guilt. If we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving them of their responsibility for their fate. The West is thus caught in the typical superego predicament best rendered by Dostoevsky's famous phrase from his Karamazov Brothers—I think really that all stupid things pseudo-moralistic that was possible to invent, you find them somewhere in Dostoevsky—each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I am more guilty than all the others. So the more the West confesses its crime, the more it is made to feel culpable. I think that against this logic one should—now I will do something horrible—I will try to rehabilitate what is today practically prohibited to mention or to mention it just as Marxist limitation—the—Mark two short texts by Marx from on India: The British Rule in India, The Future Results of British Rule in India. These are usually dismissed by postcolonial studies as embarrassing cases of Marxist Eurocentrism. I think they are today more actual than ever. Marx admits without restraint the brutality, exploitative hypocrisy of the British colonization of India, which goes up to the systematic use of torture prohibited in the West but—but outsourced to Indians. It's really nothing new in the sun. You discover in Marx that what we are today discovering with American hypocrisy, you know: we don't torture but we give them to Syria, to Egypt; British were doing this in India. We don't torture, so you give to local Indian police to—to do it. As Marx put it, quote: the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms to the colonies where it goes naked. End of quote. But what Marx nonetheless insists is that—we know the—I will even not quote Marx—Marx's point is nonetheless that with—with that this brutal, brutal intervention into the traditional way of life in India, in China nonetheless opened up the space for later emancipatory struggle and so on and so on. And I think that we shouldn't be afraid to admit this. That it's a sign of strength. I think a true victory of anti-colonial struggle is when, for example, the Chinese president apropos some British visiting dignitaries said already in in China: the British occupation has awakened China from its age-old sleep. Far from signaling some continuous self-abasement in front of the ex-colonial powers, statements like this I think express true post-postcolonialism, a mature independence. I'm so strong that I can reject this culpabilization—I don't longer need—I no longer need to blame—to blame the other. If there is someone who cannot be accused of softness towards the colonizers, it is, I hope we all agree, Frantz Fanon. His thoughts on the emancipatory power of violence, which I fully subscribe, are an embarrassment for many politically correct postcolonial theories. Which is why it's so fashionable to—they do it basically what they do with the Bible. I don't know if some of you were there, I found it quite funny, the same happened to me yesterday with John Milbank and that disgusting Tory guy who will be the next guru—who will be, how should I put it, David Cameron's Anthony Giddens—Phillip Blond, no? I did something very simple that I always did. I read those couple of my favorite Stalinist lines from the Bible, you know: I bring sword, fire, not peace. I will turn husband against wife, this against that and so on and so on. And ask them—if you don't hate your mother, father, you know—and I ask them okay, how do you read this? It's breathtaking. I should—I became a kind of a fundamentalist Christian, they should be burned, heretics. They all gave me, Milbank and Blond, this water-down liberal version, no? First they started to talk as a kind of cultural sociologists: you know you should understand Palestine at that time, Judea was a primitive country, Christ had to use this forceful expression. I said: My God, you talk like materialist historicists. For me this is the word of God. What do you think, that God was some—and no, but then the comedy was that then they told me: ah, it should be meant like this, that just we should understand that although we are always with our near people, husband, wife, children, neighbors, we can love them more than others. But you should nonetheless somehow remember that there is something larger and so on. So where Christ puts clear cut, you must hate, sword, they put in a typically pagan neo-Thomist way this nice hierarchy, you know? Like it's not cut, it's just: you love your neighbors but, yeah, there is something larger and so on and it's a kind of world as a—as a harmonious totality. Then Phillip Blond started more or less to shout at me, claiming: but do I want to abolish all this familial ties, distinctions? What—what is outside this? Like, am I aware that I'm a pure individualist—individualist liberal? Although I proclaim to be a Marxist. He attacked me like, like: if we erase all this family ties and so on, social ties, all that remains is pure voluntarism, pure ego. Then my God, I couldn't believe it. I told him—he told me basically: give me a name, what would be this collective? How can you imagine it outside all these ties? At that point, my God, I'm telling you I'm not kidding, I wanted to be an Inquisition guy and burn them all. How dare he say this? Holy Ghost is this community! That's the whole idea of Christ. That—that's his idea. It's not individual—is that—is that Christ is not saying hate your mother, father and masturbate alone with God in some mystical enrapture. What Christ is saying, and that's where we should take the lesson, is that there is a possibility of an emancipatory egalitarian collective outside this hierarchical up and down or whatever. And basically they are denying this. They are—sorry, but my conviction was that they are dangerous pagans. They literally re-inscribe this—then they told me: but you shouldn't understand—then the thing even became comical when they told me: but we should just say that it's kind of, you know, a hierarchy where you should guard proper you love—this—they basically defended this—this disgusting idea of, you know: God is jealous and God wants like, you know, love me more and I allow you to love your wife a little bit but be aware of proper hierarchies and so on and so on. So they told me it's just this, a harmonious universe. Where did you get all this hatred and sword? Fuck them, I got it from Christ, I told him. My God, were they aware that they were doing blasphemy? So that it was a wonderful, I love this comical situation where again, they were talking like some disgusting—now I'm speaking as an American fundamentalist—disgusting godless deconstructionist cultural analyst. I was saying: but wait a minute, this is the word of God, my God, no? No, it's really incredible how—I'm more and more convinced how, how should I put it, how deeply censored is for Christians themselves. I really, I'm more and more I think that—I'm getting back into this, you know, Protestant—that the Whore of Babylon is seated in Rome today and we should burn it or whatever, no? Sorry. So let me go on. Yeah. We were talking about violence. So Frantz Fanon. What I'm claiming is that he is treated a little bit like that, you know, that when he says violence, you know, it's wonderful how—the same as with Benjamin. It's fashionable now to water down that Fanon doesn't mean literal violence but some kind of symbolic cut—this what academics like, you know, ultra-violence where nobody really gets hurt and so on. So at least allow for—that I'm quoting back in '52, he provided I think one of the most beautiful expressions—articulations of this refusal to capitalize on the guilt of the colonizers. I hope you will excuse me for this wonderful quote. It's from the last pages of his—how is this—the other book, Black Skin, White Masks. I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible only for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. Haven't I got better things to do on this Earth than avenge the blacks of the 17th century? I, as a man of color, do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt towards the past of my race. I, as a man of color, do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission, there is no white burden. I do not want to be the victim of the ruse of a black world. I am going—am I going to ask today's white man to answer for the slave traders of the 17th century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt in their souls? I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors. It would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the 3rd century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of 8-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe. I find myself in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone, that of demanding human behavior from the other. End of quote. I subscribe this. Not on behalf of some softness towards the white. You should always bear in mind that this is not talking a white liberal—sorry, a black liberal telling to the whites let's forget it we are now on equal. He knew very well, he advocated very violent struggle and so on. But he knew the basis of this struggle should not be—you know this superego logic of the guilt and so on and so on. So if you allow me another five minutes, now comes the—pathetically identification with—with it, the maybe crucial communist question: what kind of subjectivity does this emancipatory communist struggle require? I will go to an extreme case but there is a moment of universal truth in it. Recently I saw a movie from directed by Tim Blake Nelson—it's a TV movie with Mira Sorvino, some other well-known names—called The Grey Zone. It's one of these but I think it's one of the best of these Holocaust movies about Auschwitz. Usually I hate them. I think that, for example, Schindler’s List should be publicly burned, it's implicitly one of the most anti-Semitic film patronizing Jews and so on. But this one is better. Why? The movie takes place in Auschwitz in the fall of '44, among a Sonderkommando—special unit—prisoners selected to do the dirty job of directing victims to gas chambers and then rob and dispose of the bodies. Prisoners who did the dirty job, then undress them, all that stuff. They knew that they will be liquidated after month in order to erase the traces of their work. But in between—that was the bribe—they got much better food, they were allowed to steal something if they found anything on the corpses and so on. So, in the middle of the film there is an intriguing dialogue between two of these privileged Jewish prisoners who were doing the job of—directing the prisoners to—to the gas chamber and so on—and a top surgeon who in the same camp did medical research on the corpses for the famous but not as guilty as people think Dr. Mengele. No, I'm not here playing any obscenity. I'm just—this really brings up my worst or best moral instincts. You know why this focus on Mengele? To avoid any misunderstanding. He was a nightmare. But as I already told you, there was a guy who was a professor then in the 50s in United States who was infinitely worse. I forgot his name, a Japanese doctor, you know in Harbin, I think in Manchuria. The Japanese were doing the same experiments, but on a much larger scale. They have there a great medical experimentation compound. There were only doctors there, with dozens of—and they were doing all the possible nasty experiment: taking eyes out, how long do you need to freeze—nightmarish experiments. The results were so precious that—you know what happened after the war? The—the chief, the commander of this camp, some stupid doctor, offered Americans a deal which they accepted. They—he got them all the documentation and they gave him a high-level professorship in the United States where he happily died in the 60s after long career. And this is a guy again—with—if you compare him to—Mengele to him, Mengele was like an innocent country doctor compared to a big city hospital, no? Incidentally, so that you will not say that I exaggerate, some Nazi doctors visited this camp and they were shocked and brought home—I mean, the Nazis were horrified when they visited this camp. Okay. So we have a talk between the two of them: this doctor who just does inquiry, no experiment, he wasn't involved in any dirty stuff, just bit then measure, cut the bodies whatever—and this guy who did with the bodies when they were burned. The doctor is a survivalist whose attitude is the one of I am just doing what I am ordered to do to survive. I am not killing anyone. He claims, I'm just analyzing bodies afterwards and so on. While the other prisoner is more aware of the moral deadlock. So the doctor says—that's the dialogue, I wrote it down. I never asked to be doing what I do. The other prisoner says: you volunteered, doctor. They wanted doctors for a hospital. The prisoner: you knew the sort of work you'll be doing and you continue doing it. Doctor: I don't kill. Prisoner: and we do? Doctor: I didn't say that. Prisoner: you give killing a purpose. Doctor: you're just trying to make it to the next day, that's all any of us is doing. Prisoner: you have no idea, do you? Doctor: I don't know what you are talking about. Now crucial, prisoner: I do not wish to be alive when all this is over. Doctor: I don't believe that. Prisoner: I know you don't. You know, first this position of a doctor. Of course this is totally different but, you know, when people ask me why are you for—I'm sorry if I repeat myself, maybe already used this story—why are you for death penalty? Did I already told you? I usually give them an example where—it's a—where I would be ready not only to be for death penalty but to kill someone and knowing fully that this guy didn't kill anyone else. And I hope—I hope at least you Oscar because it concerns your part of this shitty world would agree. I read—I'm sorry if I repeat myself—I read a book recently on all these torture chambers in Latin American military dictatorships and it's one of the most disgusting that I can imagine ethical—non-ethical figures that you encounter there. In each torture chamber, secret police, military, they had a doctor who didn't do anything dirty. He just examined the prisoner to be tortured and gave scientific advice, you know: torture him what do you want? Can he die? Okay, then torture him in this way so that he will suffer the longest. You want him tortured but not—you know, he gave exact advice and did nothing. In some way spontaneously this is for me to me almost more disgusting than doing the torture. I don't know how you are, if I were to sit at a table with this guy and—okay this is ridiculous but you will get the point—and if there were to be there a—a glass—a sorry, a little bit of arsenic or whatever and if I were to have a chance to—to put it in, to kill this guy. I don't know what you would do. I would without any problem do it. I mean, I don't think—if—maybe I wouldn't be able to do it. But in that case I would be ashamed of myself for not being able to kill this guy. So again, two times I claim in that dialogue the ordinary Sonderkommando, the guy who just put the bodies in the oven and so on, I think he made—makes the correct moral insight. First he points out that although his work is more dirty and comes closer to killing, the doctor's work is ethically much more problematical. The doctor gives killing a purpose, because you know the killing was done so that later Mengele could inspect stuff and so on and so on. Second, and that's what I found so fascinating, the ordinary Sonderkommando outlines the crucial sentence for me is I do not wish to be alive when all this is over. He outlines the extreme existential deadlock for which the doctor is blind. Namely this ordinary worker is aware that in order to survive he accepted to do something which compromises him so much that there is for him no way back to normality. He is aware that he is doing something so horrible for the Nazis, you know putting the bodies in, undressing the bodies afterwards and so on, that you cannot say: okay, this is a dark, dark chapter of my life afterwards if I survive I will—and so on. He knows that there is no return to normal. He is well aware, it's clear from other scenes in the film, that once you do things like this, you can survive only as long as this situation lasts. The moment the situation is normalized, if you are not a monster you have to kill yourself. And then he draws—the guy from this—the only correct conclusion. If he is already a living dead, the only thing to do is to die in a way that will make the enemy pay. And this movie is based on historical data. This was the only real rebellion in concentration camps. It was organized late '44 in Auschwitz where—and precisely these, the most contaminated corrupted as it were guy, those who were serving the—the—the gas chambers and so on—they organized a suicidal rebellion. They killed—it was very successful—some Nazis before they died. If there is a model of an ethical act, this is it. And I think this is the tragedy—the tragic position that sometimes we have to adopt in a radical political struggle. That you find yourself in a situation where you go so far that you know there is no way back to normal. You cannot say I fight now so that later I will live happily. You went so far that you can survive only in this emergency extraordinary crazy state. So you have all you have to do, all you can do properly is to organize your suicide. You know there is no way back to normality. The only way to win is to sell your death itself as a—as a contribution. I don't think this has anything to do with any masochism or whatever pseudo-psychoanalytic shit. I think that—this idea is the idea of a properly let's call it revolutionary—revolutionary ethics. And quite often we find ourselves in such a situation even in a much more innocent—not so ridiculous, you can—way. Let's say for example that you are in a situation which can happen that—you know this Sartrean dilemma—you have to choose between political struggle and your family. What if you have a family—sorry if I'm now a traditional—okay no I will be ironically politically correct—what if you are part of a same-sex marriage where you adopted a child whatever, so that you have some nearest to you and so on. But what if you know that you can contribute a lot to a more general political struggle, saving people, really making a difference, and you absolutely love your family or whomever your group. And what can you do? I think the truly heroic thing to do is to sacrifice the family. But in this way you do something which is—to dedicate yourself fully to the struggle. In this way you do something so radical that—you see my point? When you do this, you cannot say: okay, then after we win I will be able to explain to others, to myself, I had to do it. No, you irrevocably condemn yourself by sacrificing your family. There is no way out for you. But you accept that. That's the spirit. That's where we should take from—from the right-wingers, their spirit of sacrifice and so on, we should teach them. I'm sorry for this crazy conclusion but that's life. Thank you very much for your great patience today.