From Pleasure-in-Pain To Surplus-Enjoyment
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-04-18 · 2:20:14 · 17,313 words
psychoanalysiscapitalismideologyhegel-dialecticscommunism-socialismphilosophy-generalsexuality-genderscience-physicsgeopolitics-warliberalism-political-correctness
Žižek delivers a two-session lecture introducing the triad of surplus-value, surplus-enjoyment, and surplus-knowledge as parallel structural logics in capitalism, psychoanalysis, and modern science. He critically engages Althusser's late philosophy of materialism, Samo Tomšič's 'The Capitalist Unconscious,' and Lacan's account of modern science, arguing that the foreclosure of subject and truth in science is structurally homologous to the capitalist dynamic of endless self-expansion. He also addresses sexuality, gender identity, sign-value and consumerism, the Shylock figure as a metaphor for colonial law-breaking, and the paradoxes of envy and desire as obstacles to imagining communism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “surplus-enjoyment”
The excess pleasure generated not by satisfaction of a need but by the form of the obstacle or complication itself, the Lustgewinn produced by the detour, not the goal.
as “surplus-value”
Marx's category of the excess extracted from labour beyond what is needed to reproduce the worker, invoked here as one term of a structural triad alongside surplus-enjoyment and surplus-knowledge.
as “surplus-knowledge”
The third term in Žižek's triad: modern scientific knowledge is constitutively surplus, endlessly self-expanding rather than finite and complete, homologous to capitalist surplus-value.
Spinoza's concept (used by Lordon) that social identities are grounded in shared affects, Žižek rejects Lordon's proposal that the left should embrace this logic as a strategy.
Hegelian sublation, cited in the context of Althusser's claim that philosophy performs a negation of negation, sublating scientific abstraction back into a universe of cosmic meaning.
The Lacanian split between what is said and the subject-position from which it is said, Žižek deploys this to expose Althusser's self-contradiction: his content preaches materialist modesty while his enunciative position is dogmatically arrogant.
Althusser's mechanism by which ideology hails subjects into their social positions, invoked as the frame for Žižek's critique of Althusser's late philosophy.
Žižek (following Tomšič and Lacan) proposes that early modern science enacts a 'primitive accumulation of knowledge' parallel to capital's primitive accumulation, seizing artisanal know-how and integrating it into scientific abstraction.
Lacan's term for science's exclusion of subjective truth (in the sense of slips, symptoms, desire) as a causal factor, the objective flow of knowledge is not to be disturbed by the speaking subject's unconscious.
as “foreclosure of the subject”
Lacan's term for science's structural exclusion of the enunciating subject, scientific truths are enunciated from an anonymous, desubjectivized position indifferent to who states them.
Lacan's notion that subjective truth operates as a cause, manifest in slips, symptoms, and parapraxes, which is structurally excluded from (foreclosed by) the impersonal discourse of modern science.
Freud's term for the surplus-pleasure or fore-pleasure yielded by the form of a process, Žižek uses it to explain how desire generates enjoyment through obstacles rather than their removal.
Freud's term for forepleasure or preliminary pleasure, Žižek uses it to describe the current two-day seminar as a Vorlust for a longer July seminar, keeping it as a structural analogy.
as “sexual difference versus gender identity”
Žižek distinguishes Lacan's 'sexual difference' (a constitutive antagonism that resists all fixed roles) from 'gender identities' (attempts to stabilize that antagonism into stable positions), arguing both Boko Haram and transgender politics are opposite strategies to erase the same underlying trauma.
Lacan's formula that there is no sexual relationship, for Žižek this means sexual difference is an irreducible antagonism, never a complementary duality, which all gender identities fail to overcome.
as “general gender”
Žižek's satirical-but-serious proposal for a third toilet category ('General Gender') parallel to the 'General Waste' bin, which would embody negativity rather than eliminate the antagonism of sexual difference.
Lacan's term (related to what others call sign-value) for the aura of social meaning attached to a commodity irreducible to use or exchange value.
The paradox whereby the growing gap between sign-value and use-value in consumerism makes genuine enjoyment harder to achieve, driving compulsive purchasing as a compensatory but self-defeating response.
The paradoxical superego command in consumer capitalism that enjoins enjoyment of a commodity's use-value even when no genuine need is felt, the inversion of traditional duty.
Stories he reaches for 2
Lenin maintained an intense relationship with Inessa Armand alongside his partnership with Krupskaya without crude jealousy, because the communist cause functioned as the third term that held and mediated both relationships, Žižek cites this as a model of desire with obstacle but without Oedipal prohibition.
“true communist love means: 'I'm with the woman who is everything to me, but if revolution demands I will kill her.'”
Austria's Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst (bearded drag performer) provoked horror in Russia, Putin cited the Bible on two sexes, while a Russian ideologist called her a symbol of decadent Europe, used to illustrate the political-ideological function of fears about sexual difference.
“Putin says: 'What's happening? In the Bible it says...we have two sexes. What do we have now, third one?'”
Works invoked 9
Don Giovanni opera
Used via Dupuy's reading: Don Juan is not a triumphant libertine but an impotent jealous man who cannot bear seeing Zerlina and Masetto happy together, illustrating jealousy as the primordial structure of desire.
Trouble in Paradise book
Žižek's own previous book; mentioned regarding the censored original title ('Communism After the End of History'), used as an example of soft censorship in publishing.
New Left Review journal
Mentioned as the publication carrying Alberto Toscano's critical review of Lordon.
Althusser's 1978 manuscript; companion text to the above, part of the same critique.
Samo Tomšič's Verso book; Žižek recommends it warmly as a 'wonderful book' but identifies substantive disagreements about alienation, disalienation, and the definition of communism as extension of scientific logic.
Diacritics journal
Carries Toscano's essay 'Detour of Abstraction' on Althusser's account of Plato, which Žižek quotes approvingly.
Article by Thomas Preiskorn Thygesen and Ole Bjerg; Žižek quotes it at length to ground his analysis of sign-value, the superego injunction to enjoy, and the falling rate of enjoyment in consumerism.
Althusser's 1976 manuscript outlining his late theory of philosophy; Žižek engages it as a key source of Althusser's self-contradictory materialist modesty.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy's recent book in French; praised for its precise distinction between envy and jealousy and its reading of Don Juan as a jealous rather than merely libidinous figure.
People invoked 34
Alberto Toscano positive
Authored a critical review of Lordon in New Left Review and an essay ('Detour of Abstraction') on Althusser in Diacritics; Žižek quotes his characterization of Plato's philosophy as 'reactive invention' with approval.
Barbara Cassin positive
French philosopher in dialogue with Badiou; Žižek uses her thesis that Plato's real antagonist was the Sophists (not early materialists) to refine and correct Althusser's account of philosophy's origin.
Udi Aloni positive
Israeli-American filmmaker; mentioned as director of the film in which Tamer Nafar plays the main role.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
French rational-choice theorist and Hegelian; Žižek quotes his recent book 'La Jalousie: Géométrie du désir' for a precise distinction between envy and jealousy, and praises his reading of Don Juan as a structure of jealousy.
Mohammed Assaf negative
Palestinian pop star praised as a beautiful voice but criticized for saying he would prohibit his sister from singing publicly, used as a foil to show internal Palestinian debate on gender.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited via the triangle with Krupskaya and Inessa Armand as a model of revolutionary love structured by a third (political cause) rather than by Oedipal prohibition or destructive jealousy.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical resource throughout: Žižek deploys Lacan's accounts of modern science (foreclosure of subject and truth), surplus-enjoyment, cult-value, sexual difference (il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel), and the structure of enunciation.
Madeleine Albright negative
Her 'special place in hell for women who don't help women' remark (attacking anti-Hillary women) is criticized; Žižek notes she also said 500,000 dead Iraqi children were 'worth the price' and suggests she deserves a special place in hell for that.
Mentioned by the Swedish authors Thygesen and Bjerg as a reference for the idea that the gap between sign-value and use-value is growing in consumer capitalism.
Louis Althusser negative
Žižek engages Althusser's late manuscripts on philosophy at length, arguing Althusser's materialist modesty is self-contradictory: his content preaches humility while his procedure enacts arrogant dogmatism; also criticises his Eurocentric account of science and his flat dismissal of digitalization.
Frédéric Lordon negative
French Spinozean social theorist reviewed by Alberto Toscano in New Left Review; Žižek accepts his critique of cosmopolitan rootlessness but rejects his proposal that the left should embrace Spinozean imitatio affecti and reclaim national/ethnic belonging.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak positive
Cited approvingly for her earlier critique of abstract celebration of nomadic existence as obscene when compared to genuine forced displacement (dieting rich American vs. starving Ethiopian woman).
Patricia Churchland negative
Cited with Paul Churchland as advocates of eliminative materialism who propose eliminating folk-psychological concepts (free will, responsibility) from lived experience; Žižek argues their very procedure of argumentation refutes their thesis.
Mentioned as a target of Lordon's critique of abstract, rootless European intellectuals.
Alain Badiou positive
Mentioned as the Platonist interlocutor in the dialogue with Cassin, Žižek invokes this dialectic with approval to map the Plato/Sophist divide onto contemporary philosophy of mathematics.
Mentioned in the context of an imagined embrace with Farage, used to illustrate the paradoxical coalition between left and right on the Brexit/roots question.
Nigel Farage negative
Cited as example of the strange coalition between right-wing anti-immigration politics (Pegida) and segments of the radical left over Brexit and 'roots,' illustrating the dangerous trend of left reclaiming nativist themes.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited twice: for the thesis that 'modernization' is code for 'capitalism,' and for the observation that communism will not dissolve envy and resentment but will see them explode.
Benedictus de Spinoza negative
Althusser places Spinoza in his materialist tradition; Žižek objects that Spinoza is far from modest, he begins with maximally strong metaphysical claims about substance, and thus undermines Althusser's account.
Benjamin Netanyahu negative
Cited for inviting French Jews to emigrate to Israel after minor antisemitic attacks; Žižek notes that French antisemites enthusiastically supported this, demonstrating the perverse alliance between Zionism and European antisemitism.
Cited as an extreme case of the paradox where anti-Western antisemitism coexists with support for Israel: Breivik called Israel the last fortress against Islamization while being antisemitic toward Europe.
Anecdote: dining with Jameson in LA, Anderson was dismissively elitist about which vintage of Bordeaux a student failed to identify, used to illustrate the concealed class elitism of cosmopolitan intellectuals.
Samo Tomšič negative
Member of Žižek's 'Slovene gang,' author of 'The Capitalist Unconscious: Lacan and Marx' (Verso); Žižek praises the book while identifying critical gaps, especially Tomšič's Althusserian rejection of disalienation and his underspecified claim that communism would extend scientific logic to politics.
Thomas Metzinger positive
German neuroscientist and Buddhist philosopher; Žižek endorses his view that the only genuine convergence between neuroscience and lived experience is the Buddhist dissolution of the self ('thoughts without a thinker').
Paul Churchland negative
Co-cited with Patricia Churchland as eliminativist neuroscientists; same critique applies.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Cited as the paradigm neo-Kantian who tries to limit the scope of natural science by reserving intersubjectivity and discursive ethics as a domain science cannot ground, repeating the same gesture as Kant.
Georg Cantor positive
Georg Cantor's discovery of multiple infinities is read as a materialist revolution that reclaimed infinity from theology; his private despair about sinning is used to illustrate Althusserian science-vs-ideology conflict.
Tamer Nafar positive
Palestinian rapper and actor (in Udi Aloni's film); Žižek's friend, cited as an example of authentic internal Palestinian political critique (his open letter to Mohammed Assaf) and as a man of Žižek's own irreverent spirit.
Ulrich Beck negative
Cited alongside Habermas as a proponent of abstract, rootless cosmopolitanism that Lordon targets; Žižek accepts this part of Lordon's critique.
Neuroscientist cited for experiments suggesting the brain decides before conscious awareness of a 'free' choice, used as evidence in the free-will debate.
Plato negative
Discussed as the origin of idealist philosophy whose function is to contain the Sophistic and mathematical threats; Žižek notes Plato repeatedly fails to draw the line between sophistry and philosophy without returning to myth.
Cited as a pivotal moment: his res extensa/res cogitans split is the philosophical containment of mechanistic science; Lacan identifies the Cartesian cogito as the implicit subject of modern science.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek defends Hegel as genuinely modest (the absolute is the complete path through errors), identifies him as a sophisticated Sophist who accepts the immanent procedure of dialectics, and opposes him to Althusser's hidden arrogance.
Immanuel Kant negative
Cited as paradigmatic of the philosophical move to limit science to make room for faith and morality; Žižek argues the Kantian-Habermasian solution fails to achieve a genuinely modern ethico-political framework.
What it argues
surplus-value, surplus-enjoyment, and surplus-knowledge as a structural triadAlthusser's materialism versus Hegelian modestyLacan's account of modern science and its foreclosuressign-value and the falling rate of enjoyment in consumer capitalismsexual difference versus gender identityShylock as figure of colonial law and Palestinian resistanceenvy, jealousy, and the impossibility of harmonious communism
Dialectical moves 9
“Philosophy is not the opposite of mythology but its negation of negation — science negates religion, philosophy negates that negation, reasserting cosmic meaning within rational argumentation.”
Althusser's account casts philosophy as a reactive sublation that reintroduces religious meaning under the guise of reason, making idealism the true heir of mythology.
“Althusser, who preaches modesty, is the arrogant one; Hegel, who appears arrogant with 'absolute knowledge,' is in fact the more modest philosopher.”
The apparent reversal exposes that Althusser's self-proclaimed materialist humility is belied by his dogmatic universal pronouncements, while Hegel's 'absolute' is merely the complete traversal of errors.
“The compulsive buyer is not a pathological exception to normal consumption — the compulsion is present from the very beginning.”
Compulsive buying reveals the inherent logic of sign-value already operative in all consumption, so the pathology is the truth of the norm rather than its deviation.
“We never have a pure use-value without a sign-value — even the most primitive stone axes were already shaped by their sign-value.”
The ideological dimension of commodities is not a modern addition but constitutive of objects from the very start of human tool-use.
“Today's capitalism does not function as Shylock (pure contract) but as perverted grace — yet the truly subversive move is to BE Shylock, to demand strict enforcement of the law.”
The system that presents itself as law-governed in fact survives through systematic exceptions; demanding legal consistency (like Palestinians citing UN resolutions) exposes this.
“Boko Haram and transgender post-gender politics are the opposite yet achieve the same thing: both try to erase the trauma of sexual antagonism.”
Conservative hyper-inscription of sexual difference and progressive dissolution of gender both attempt to resolve the irreducible Lacanian antagonism rather than inhabit it.
“The superego injunction does not say 'restrain your pleasure for the sake of duty' but the opposite: 'enjoy! you must enjoy even if you feel no need.'”
Consumer capitalism's superego inverts the classical morality structure, the injunction is to enjoy, not to sacrifice, which produces guilt when enjoyment fails.
“Science, precisely because it is foreclosed from subjectivity, produces the Cartesian subject as its implicit agent — the most abstract objectivity presupposes the most abstract subject.”
Lacan's paradox: the anonymous 'anyone can verify this' structure of science secretly relies on the empty Cartesian cogito, making scientific objectivity and Cartesian subjectivity co-constitutive.
“To be a man means to doubt in a certain way that you are a man — normal sexual identity is already traversed by the very ambiguity transgender politics claims to uniquely suffer.”
Sexual difference is not a stable given that some people fail to attain; it is universally experienced as failure and anxiety, making the transgender complaint a radicalization of the norm rather than its exception.
Claims 20
asserts
Surplus-value, surplus-enjoyment, and surplus-knowledge form a structural triad — the same logic of self-expanding excess operates in capitalism, psychoanalysis, and modern science.structural homology of capitalism, psychoanalysis, and science
rejects
Althusser's late materialist philosophy is self-contradictory: he preaches modesty and listening but his own philosophical procedure is dogmatically arrogant.Althusser's philosophy of encounter and materialism
asserts
The function of philosophy since Plato has been to contain the subversive abstraction of science by reinscribing it within a universe of cosmic meaning.Althusser's thesis on philosophy as reaction to science
reframes
Althusser's true antagonist for Plato was the Sophists, not early materialists; philosophy tries to contain the radical freedom of sophistic speech, not primarily scientific abstraction.Althusser's account of the origin of philosophy
reframes
Hegel is more modest than Althusser despite appearing arrogant: Hegel does not claim to know absolute truth but systematically demonstrates that all claimants to absolute truth are wrong.Hegel versus Althusser on philosophical arrogance
asserts
Modern science is defined by two Lacanian foreclosures — of the subject and of truth as cause — which make it structurally homologous to the Cartesian cogito.Lacan's account of modern science
rejects
Tomšič's thesis that communism would extend scientific logic to politics is attractive but insufficiently developed — he never specifies what such an extension would look like.Samo Tomšič's 'The Capitalist Unconscious'
asserts
Commodities require a third category of value — sign-value (or cult-value) — irreducible to use-value and exchange-value.commodity value and consumerism
asserts
Sexual difference in the Lacanian sense (an irreducible antagonism) must be strictly distinguished from gender identities (attempts to stabilize or eliminate that antagonism).sexual difference, gender identity, transgender politics
asserts
Both Boko Haram's enforcement of fixed sexual roles and the most radical transgender politics are opposite strategies aimed at the same goal: erasing the trauma of sexual antagonism.sexual politics across conservative and progressive movements
asserts
Today's capitalism increasingly operates not through strict legal exchange but through perverted grace and mercy, with colonial history being a history of broken treaties rather than imposed markets.capitalism, law, and colonialism
asserts
The Shylock figure — demanding strict adherence to the law — is today subversive because it exposes that the capitalist-colonial system must systematically violate its own rules.Shylock, law, Palestinians, colonialism
asserts
Communism will not be a harmonious society; envy and jealousy are constitutive of desire and will explode rather than disappear under communism.communism and human desire
rejects
Marx's formula 'to each according to his needs' is itself explosive because needs are always mediated by and measured against others' needs, making envy unavoidable.communist distribution and egalitarianism
rejects
Big capital's enthusiastic support for desegregating toilets is a sign that this struggle serves ideological rather than genuinely emancipatory purposes.liberal identity politics and capital
rejects
The left should not adopt Lordon's Spinozean strategy of reclaiming roots and national identity, as this risks a slide toward 'Socialist Nationalism'.Lordon's Spinozean left-populism
asserts
Western science is currently subject to a gigantic attempt at respiritualization — popular quantum physics interpretations are ideological attempts to reinject cosmic meaning into scientific results.ideology and science (quantum mysticism)
asserts
Cantor's discovery of multiple infinities was a materialist revolution against the theological infinite, which is why Cantor himself felt he was doing something sinful.mathematics, infinity, and ideology
rejects
The Churchlands' eliminativist neuroscience project is self-refuting because the very act of writing and arguing for it presupposes the free rational agency it claims to eliminate.Patricia and Paul Churchland's eliminative materialism
asserts
Palestine's political stance as demanding adherence to existing UN resolutions and treaties — playing the role of Shylock — is more genuinely anti-colonial than appeals to victimhood or charity.Palestinian politics and anti-colonialism
Quotes 14
“Philosophy is not the opposite of mythology but its negation of negation: science is a negation of religion, philosophy is a negation of negation. It reasserts religious meaning within the space of rational argumentation.”Slavoj Žižek · philosophy as reactive sublation of science
“Althusser claims for a modest approach... But again when he provides his definitions of philosophy, Althusser himself is definitely not modest.”Slavoj Žižek · Althusser's self-contradiction between content and enunciation
“Hegel doesn't say I know the absolute truth. Hegel just says all those who claim that they know absolute truth are wrong. And the absolute is just the complete path through the series of errors.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's modesty: the absolute as traversal of errors
“A scientific truth should in no way be affected by its place of enunciation. No, the moment you say 'but you have to feel it, you have to experience it,' it's no longer science.”Slavoj Žižek · foreclosure of subject in modern science
“Surplus is precisely the surplus that you get from apparent obstacles and so on, from the form always... you introduce some obstacles... the very complication surplus is — the surplus generated by the obstacle itself.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus-enjoyment as product of obstacle not satisfaction
“I claim that to be a man means to doubt in a certain way that you are a man. To be a woman, it's always a much more complex identification.”Slavoj Žižek · sexual identity is constitutively uncertain — not a stable datum
“We never have a pure use-value without a sign-value. And that again to account for the problem of consumerism, it's not enough just use-value, exchange-value, you have to add this third element, the sign-value.”Slavoj Žižek · sign-value as irreducible third term in commodity analysis
“The figure of Shylock is today so subversive. It undermines the rule of law by way of sticking to it without exception.”Slavoj Žižek · Shylock as subversive figure demanding law's own consistency
“Communism is not this harmonious society where we will all be solidary, you will get that beautiful woman, I will be glad for you. Fuck it, I will not be glad for you, I want her.”Slavoj Žižek · communism will not dissolve envy and desire
“The only point at which our personal self-experience really fits the results of cognitive sciences is this Buddhist overcoming the feeling of the self — where we have thoughts without a thinker.”Slavoj Žižek · Thomas Metzinger's Buddhist neuroscience as genuine fit between science and subjectivity
“True communist love means: 'I'm with the woman who is everything to me, but if revolution demands I will kill her.' So it's absolutely — it's not I sacrifice everything for you. No, but nonetheless she remains the absolute for me.”Slavoj Žižek · communist love: absolute personal bond subordinated to political cause
“Marx was against egalitarianism. This is not popular to remind people that Marx said repeatedly: 'egalitarianism is a bourgeois notion,' communism is not this.”Slavoj Žižek · communism is not egalitarianism
“The injunction does not enjoin me to follow my duty against the temptation of pleasure... On the contrary, the commodity's sign-value enjoins me to enjoy its use-value even if I do not really feel any need for it.”Slavoj Žižek · superego injunction to enjoy in consumer capitalism
“maybe they should make a special place in hell for women and men who say something like that — that half a million of children is worth the price.”Slavoj Žižek · rebuttal of Madeleine Albright's 'special place in hell' remark
Transcript 8 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. I’m very grateful for this introduction by the author of one of my favorite books. You did that book on Hollywood cartoons, you know. I always liked cartoons and my special imagination—I wonder if somebody already did it: imagine a simple Tom and Jerry cartoon, what the cat and the mouse do to each other, you know, like, I don’t know, steamroller over the one, cutting it into pieces and so on, to shoot this with real actors, you know, just the same story as the cartoon. That would have been something. Okay. Maybe I will disappoint you, but I do feel a little bit tired of improvising on politics, on jokes, and so on. So, I hope this will not be—I know I say this every time when I begin—that this time it will be less jokes, more serious. But unfortunately, and I can say because I have it here, it will be. Today more the explanation of some introductory notions, tomorrow more about these three surpluses: surplus-value, surplus-enjoyment, and the third term, which I think is a very interesting one, surplus-knowledge—how it functions in traditional wisdom universe and then in modern science and what does this mean for capitalism. Usually, the books that I give or texts as reference are bullshit, I just list something. This time, maybe it’s good for you if you have time to look at that book which was recently, recently, half a year I think, published by Verso of one of my Slovene gang, one of younger members, Samo Tomšič, a book on "The Capitalist Unconscious: Lacan and Marx." I of course like that book, but I have some creative differences, and maybe if there will be time I will go into this later. But all of this that will happen here in, unfortunately, just these two days—I must warn you—is just a beginning, a kind of a Vorlust, to speak with Freud, forepleasure or preliminary work for the July seminar, or rather class whatever, mentioned by Esther, where I will go into this problem much more in detail. Should we take this link seriously, especially—I mean the link between Lacanian surplus-enjoyment and Marx's surplus-value? And especially, although it’s a wonderful book, you should really read it, that "Capitalist Unconscious" by Samo Tomšič, I have one problem with it. Samo Tomšič in a traditional French structuralist or Lacanian way wants to break this link between Marx’s critique of political economy and what he perceives as the Hegelian humanist logic of disalienation: that as a result of socialist revolution, alienation is overcome. He repeats the standard Lacanian point that alienation is irreducible to human being as such, and that communist revolution, overcoming of capitalism, should not be conceptualized in these terms as overcoming alienation. My reaction is: okay, but how then should it be conceptualized? And that’s where I would like to get, maybe if some of you have time at least to read diagonally this book of a friend of mine, a counter-attack because, well frankly, I don’t need, I don’t see any—you know, it’s easy to say we shouldn’t have humanist illusions, communist revolution is not disalienation, alienation is irreducible—okay, but then what does it mean then, communist revolution? And here I think Tomšič is very ambiguous because on the one hand, he proposes sometimes, he moves in the direction of a solution which I think is totally wrong: this simple transcendental solution of distinguishing the bad—the good, good, okay—a priori universal alienation, you know, to put it in Lacanian bullshit terminology (by bullshit I mean it’s already a cliché): whenever we speak, we are spoken, we are not agents of our speech, so alienation that pertains to symbolic order as such, from the specific capitalist alienation, appropriation of surplus-value. I’m always deeply suspicious when you are in this type of a problem of simply distinguishing some neutral universality from its, as it were, bad, truly alienated particular example. So I have problems here that I will try to address a little bit tomorrow. So let me begin. I’m sorry it will be boring but I try to do a kind of an old-fashioned lesson. Just one thing I want to react not against Esther but to clarify things. You were kind to mention where I already was appearing regularly in public, you know. I want to repeat this not in order to present myself as some kind of the victim but so that you really see how censorship works. Yeah, yeah, Guardian, Guardian, but did you notice that for I think now it's about two years I didn't appear in Guardian? And I must say it, and I will, I will raise this unpleasant question tomorrow there. You know, because they invited me to that stupid public debate talk, and not that I care, but precisely so that I can justify my claim. Whenever I have a short text, I send it to them. And it's ridiculous how first, two years ago, for the first half of a year, they got me an excuse for rejecting it, which was always a little bit of ridiculous. You know, I know these tricks because I am the editor of book series and I know how to get rid of the authors, you know, up-front. You know: "Oh, you are just a little bit too late," "No, you are too early, not yet time for that," or once they even tried to that on me, that favorite excuse of mine. Once I said to an author: "Your book is so important, so it's but it's ahead of its time," you know, "It's not yet the time to..." Okay, but it's not so nice when you are in a position to. And, and the same is when people ask me with, with London Review of Books why I didn't appear there for about a year and a half, I think. I—usually they were soliciting texts to me. Now I don't know what is happening there. I even don't care, I have now other connections. But I have spies, I'm an old Stalinist communist, KGB must work. And from my KGB informations it's very interesting, informants, it's a perverse link between right-wing and left-wing. Right-wingers claim I'm too crazy leftist communism, let's not do that. Left-wingers claim that now I became an open racist, that I want to kill, throw refugees out of Europe, whatever, so... so it's, and it's not a new phenomenon. You noticed how with Brexit topic, you know, you have exactly the same weird coalition of like—I will now be very—how is the Pegida jerk who is the boss called? Nigel Farage. Yes, like, you know, I can imagine Nigel Farage embracing Tariq Ali, "Oh we are nonetheless old friends," you know. And I'm—the only political hint that I will give it today: this is happening recently in France, in Greece, up to a point here. The idea is this one: radical left is losing because it left to the anti-immigrant right the topic of roots, national identity, and so on. So since global capitalism is anonymous, rootless, and so on, the only chance for the left is to regain that topic. And it's very funny how—I will not name him, but one of the advocates from Greece of this line even used the term, just since he didn't say National Socialism, he said Socialist Nationalism, you know. I find this a very risky, a very risky trend. Okay, that's another, that's another topic. More of this tomorrow if they will—I hate it so much. I thought that at that Guardian event that I will at least have my usual narcissistic time to speak for fifty minutes. No, they told me they want an active, active exchange of opinions. If there is a thing that I really hate is this. I like to talk and others listen, you know. And then maybe there can be some questions, you know, but questions in the sense of "how can you be so funny and at the same time so profound, so brilliant," you know like this type—sorry. Now enough of jokes, now comes the theory. I would like to begin with confronting Louis Althusser, because there is now a new wave of Althusserianism, very interesting phenomenon in France. What is so interesting, and you can check it up if in the latest issue of New Left Review, I'm not sure if it's still the latest, where Alberto Toscano has a very critical good review of the work of Frédéric—I think it's Frédéric, not François—Lordon, a French social theorist who, I like this hermeneutics, you know, now the kid—sorry, this is not meant ironically but literally, you know—the kid will say "da da" and then we can go into deep hermeneutics: what's the meaning of this and so on. Okay, but it's a nice kid because it's still very small, you know. I claim that kids between four and five are what Kant meant by diabolical evil. Before they are simple egotists and later, but kids between four and five are pure evil for the sake of evil. My son had an old grandmother who was barely walking, and when he was four, he pushed her down on steps. She almost died. And we asked him why, did he have any grudge on her head? He said no, it just—he felt the impulse, he liked the aesthetic vision of an old crippled lady. Okay, let's go on seriously now. No, sorry for making this narcissistic detour, but it's just good to remind you that, you know, usually the line is in East European countries, ex-communist, there is no freedom of opinion, but at least when you publish a problematic text everyone reads it, it gets a great echo. While in our countries you can say whatever you want then it's just ignored. Well no, you cannot say whatever you want. Because as I already mentioned here, I think, to give you another example, my book previous one with "Trouble in Paradise," I told you what happened, no? The original title was, was "Communism After the End of History." And I was openly told, sorry, communism cannot be used in the title of a book in a positive way. Okay, I—maybe it was too much of a compromise—then I changed it, still with a subversive edge, I think it was something like "The End of Capitalism After the End of History" or something like that. But no, communism was prohibited. And this is happening to me all the time again and again. Like, I have whole stories to tell about my German experiences, where for example in my—it's rather stupid one, I want to disown it—the "Jokes" book, no? Three, four jokes were censored there. In my previous book, what I say about Zionism as a form of anti-semitism, which I think it's a crucial political insight. It's not some extravagant postmodern joke. If you want to understand the dynamics of what goes on, the key symptomatic point are figures like some American religious fundamentalists and some crazy men like Breivik, you know, the Norwegian hero and so on. It's as already said here, it's very interesting to read Breivik, because he is at the same time absolutely anti-semitic with regard to the West. He says openly there are too many Jews, he says in Europe the situation is better because Hitler took care of that, but United Kingdom and America they have a problem with this. But paradoxically in Middle East he totally supports Israel. He claims we should support Israel, it's the last fortress bastion against Islamization. And I noticed then that the American fundamentalist support for Israel—all these Pat Robertson and so on—they have the same logic. In United States they are anti-semitic, out there they support Zionism. So my answer to Netanyahu, who after the last bombings—small, not serious, not these big terrorist attacks of Jews, I don't know where it happened, Marseille or where—he invited the Jews to go to Israel. Well wonderful, do you know that my French told me that all French anti-semites said "Oh perfect," supported him fully. And I think this is what is false from the very beginning in this love of Israel by Europeans. The idea is yes, we did something horrible to Jews, but let the other pay the price for it, you know, go there. And this is I think, are we aware, the very dangerous alliance? Are we aware what is happening now in the Middle East? I don't know, I'm too stupid, what the consequences will be, but if you follow the news you can see that a totally new axis is forming. The three, maybe four main members are Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia more or less openly collaborating. Now they bribed Egypt will join it and so on. I mean forget about this eternal Arab-Israeli conflict, the whole scene is changing. But enough of that. Finally I will begin and from now please don't be too bored. I would like to begin with Althusser. The only justification is with the big hope that Lordon, who advocates this as it were return to roots, it's interesting his theoretical background: it's Spinozist, Spinozean. He claims that modern European left, and his target are here people like Balibar in France but especially, who is the big guy my god, Habermas in Germany and also Ulrich Beck, that they are these abstract rootless European intellectuals, you know, no particular links. Whenever you identify with your particular identity you are a proto-fascist already and so on. This rejection of every sense of ethnic belonging as dangerous, celebrating rootlessness. At this point I agree with Lordon, how fake this rootlessness is. Because did you notice how these very people who celebrate their not-belonging, their nomadic nature, are as a rule, have as a rule an extremely strong sense of belonging to their own intellectual elite, which is usually of course not ethnically identified? But I haven't seen people who are—I mean I've met especially in the United States so many ultra-leftists, but when by mistake some ordinary guy comes and doesn't behave properly at a table, you know, poor guy. Like, okay, I will tell two names. Why are friends so that you can talk against them behind their back, you know. I was once sitting in LA with Fred Jameson and Perry Anderson. And then there was a student there to help them, and after the student left, my god, I was so sad that I didn't have a recording machine, you know, to record the conversation between Perry Anderson and Fred Jameson. "That idiot, he doesn't even know which year of Bordeaux is the best. He thought it's '82 but not it's '81" and so on, you know. It was ultra, ultra-elitism. And my point is this one: how all this myth of a new proletariat is emerging, nomadic proletariat, they don’t have a home, they wander around. But isn’t there something so obscene in this, to even dare to compare their nomadic position, which is an extremely over-privileged nomadic position of people who don’t even move from one part of the world to the another part of the world if it’s not business class at least, no, dare to compare this with pure refugees who, my god, they are not enjoying their nomadic existence, they are desperately seeking for, searching for a new home, for a new belonging and so on. So, you know, it’s the same as Gayatri Spivak used this years ago, when she said that this abstract celebration of nomadic existence is the same as claiming that a rich fat American lady who is dieting trying to lose some weight and a poor, I don’t know, woman starving in Ethiopia or Somalia, basically are doing the same thing, no? Yeah, in some sense they are, but my god, it’s an obscenity to put them into the same category. So again, while he has some point to make, I nonetheless think that this Lordon’s idea that we should accept that this Spinozean point of imitatio affecti, identification through affects, that all social identities are based on some shared affects, values and so on, and that the left should accept this logic—for theoretical reasons I will not go into them today, I don't accept this. So again, Althusser also as a Spinozean follows this way, so let me begin with Althusser. Now serious theory. Two books, two manuscripts from his last years: "Initiation to the Philosophy for Non-Philosophers" from '76 and "Being a Marxist in Philosophy" from '78. There Althusser outlines a specific theory of philosophy which—that's what makes it so interesting—for a couple of years he advocated a notion of philosophy which overlaps neither with his early, let's call it theoreticist concept of philosophy (you know in "Pour Marx" and "For Marx" and "Reading Capital," his idea is that philosophy is a theory of theoretical practice establishing the conditions epistemological and so on of science), nor with his later notion of philosophy as class struggle in theory. It's a kind of a mediator between the two. So what does Althusser claim? It's an interesting theory. Althusser's starting point is the omnipresence of ideology, of ideological abstractions which always structure our approach to everyday life. This omnipresent ideology, the air we breathe, has two levels: the spontaneous everyday texture of implicit meanings, and the organized religion or mythology, it's a systematic structure of these meanings. That's a universal structure. We all live in this type of ideology. Then according to Althusser, in ancient Greece, something new and unexpected happens. I will leave here aside the fact that Althusser is here absolutely brutally opening and in an open way Eurocentrist. Even much more than I'm usually accused of being. For Althusser, the rise of science in the guise of mathematics. That's the Greek miracle. Now he is not an idiot, he knows all the stories about Indians inventing zero and all that stuff. But according to Althusser, mathematics as science deals with pure abstract numbers, deprived of all mythic reference. Mathematics is a game of axioms and rules in which no cosmic meaning resonates. There are no sacred, lucky or damned numbers. And I don't know enough about history, maybe this is up to a point true, that in traditional mathematics no matter how developed it was, you always have this mythic background of cosmic meanings resonating in it. One is male, two is female or whatever, then you have sacred numbers like ten which is one, two and three and four and all that. But precisely as such for Althusser, because you just have numbers, the mythic background, cosmic background is suspended. Mathematics is subversive. It threatens the universe of cosmic meaning, its homogeneity and stability. I found something attractive in this thesis. You know why? Because as a Hegelian, I always like it when someone praises abstraction or subtraction as subversive. You know, abstraction, like you say we I limit myself to this, I erase all the background, can be maybe the greatest revolutionary act. So the true break, according to Althusser, happens here. Between not between mythic ideology, premodern, and philosophy, but between the mythic universe and science. So science, again early Greek mathematics as the first example of science, we just deal with numbers and none of that bullshit: one, two, male-female, whatever then you get on, just meaningless pure numbers. This is a threat to ideology. Ideology in this most basic sense of the universe of meaning, of cosmic meaning in which we dwell. And a very nice thesis: the function of philosophy is precisely to contain this threat. How? Formally philosophy also breaks with the mythic universe. It obeys the rules of science. From the very beginning, philosophy does not refer to what a goddess tells you or poetic narrative but it’s rational argumentation, thinking in abstract conceptual terms. But the function of reasoning in philosophy is to reinscribe scientific procedure into the religious universe of cosmic meaning. To put it in pseudo-Hegelian terms, if science is a negation of religion, philosophy is a negation of negation. It reasserts religious meaning within the space of rational argumentation. Alberto Toscano, in "Detour of Abstraction," a nice essay on Althusser in one of the last issues of Diacritics, describes this very nicely propos Plato. So here is a quote from Toscano: "All of Plato (the theory of ideas, the opposition of knowledge and opinion and so on) is based on the break that the first science represents, mathematics. In a sense this is because all of Plato is an attempt to control and in a way to sublate (in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung) this break. In a profoundly inventive but also profoundly reactive dialectic, philosophy in its idealist-Platonist matrix is a reactive invention, the displacement of the ideological function of religion onto the plane of pure abstract rationality. It draws from science its form, the abstraction of its categories and demonstrative reasoning as a pure reasoning directly carried out on abstract objects. But its function is an ideological one, a mandate and a service delegated explicitly or otherwise by the dominant class." Here is of course the link to Althusser's later definition of philosophy as class struggle in theory. His idea, Althusser's, is that pure science, precisely in its abstraction, which again annihilates this cosmic universe of meaning, is revolutionary, objectively on the side of those oppressed and so on, and that from the very beginning, the function of philosophy is to reoccupy this terrain. So to reassert the all-encompassing religious worldview. And again, this is done in order to guarantee the hegemony of the ruling class ideology. There is some truth in this. All great philosophers after Plato repeat this gesture of containment. From Descartes who is the great thinker of natural mechanistic sciences, but at the same time through his theory of res extensa/res cogitans, he limits this mechanical rational reasoning to nature and reserves a space for God or for the spiritual domain. Kant does the same. On the one hand, as Lacan and others have long ago noted, Kant’s problem is to elaborate a philosophy at the level of Newtonian physics. But the whole problem of Kant is how to—and that’s the notion of Kant’s critique, not critique in the sense of rejection, but critique in the sense of determining the limited domain where science is valid and of course then guaranteeing a separate domain where faith, morality and so on have their own place. Kant at some point typically openly says that I had to limit the scope of knowledge to sustain the the space of faith. I think something similar are doing even today's neo-Kantian theorists of communication. The great fear of Habermas for example is how to limit the constraint of contemporary natural sciences. So the idea is yeah, these sciences are a great thing, they're doing wonder, biogenetics explaining everything, but there is a domain which is always already presupposed by these sciences and which they cannot account for. So you have this domain of discursive ethics which is always already here when you reason scientifically, so you cannot ground it in scientist. Now Althusser's point is that against this predominant idealist form of philosophy (for Althusser, these are Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel), Althusser asserts then this subterranean tradition of materialist counter-philosophy: from early Greek materialists and Epicureans who assert the material world of contingent encounters, through Spinoza, and even very interesting the late Althusser even puts in this same materialist space Heidegger as theory of event, event as contingent event of truth. Again, there is something in this. For example, isn't one of the great episodes in this struggle Cantor's profoundly materialist reconceptualization of the mathematical concept of infinite? Cantor's basic premise is the multiplicity of infinities, which cannot be totalized by or into an all-encompassing one. The great materialist breakthrough of Cantor concerns the status of infinite numbers. Prior to Cantor, the infinite was linked to one, the conceptual form of God in religion and metaphysics, while with Cantor the infinite enters the domain of the multiple. It implies the actual existence of infinite multiplicities as well as the infinite number of different infinities. So again, I think here in Althusserian way we can explain very nicely why—I don't know if you want this wonderful but significant not irrelevant personal anecdote—Cantor was a devout Catholic and he suspect that he is doing something deeply, deeply sinful by doing this. So he even I don't know what, wrote a letter to Pope, was not sure, was totally desperate. And he was right to be desperate because the what he does to infinity is, you know, till Cantor infinity was a vague metaphysical notion, mystical one God. With Cantor again, mathematics—sorry, science reappropriates infinity. Infinity is no longer an obscurantist mystical notion like "Oh my god I had that experience, it went beyond all limits, I was one with God," no, it becomes this type of notion. It sounds nice, this Althusser's notion. Now I want to—I hate this term but I will use it—deconstruct it. First, is Platonism really a reaction to the subversive abstraction of mathematical sciences? I think I tend to agree much more here to the theory proposed by Barbara Cassin, a contemporary French philosopher who is engaged in an internal friendly dialogue with Alain Badiou and claiming that—and it’s also clear from the text—that the true partner in dialogue for Plato, the other that he tries to contain, is are Sophists, Sophist philosophers, not so much early materialists as Sophists. Point two: the ideological recuperation of mathematics began already before Plato with Pythagoreans. I think Pythagoreans are the original idealists. Because what Pythagoreans did is they desperately tried to, how should I put it, respiritualize, re-theologize mathematics. You know, numbers become bearers of cosmic harmony, cosmic meaning and so on and so on. So the dialogue between Badiou and Barbara Cassin can be best characterized as the new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and Sophists: the Platonist Badiou against Cassin’s insistence on the irreducibility of the Sophistic rupture. Cassin’s theory is here a very precise one: what happens with sophism, Gorgias and so on, is that speech, argumentation loses its roots in reality. The ultimate dimension of speech is no longer some reference to how things really are, but the logic of rhetoric, argumentation, how to convince people and so on and so on and basically it’s playing games. There is no external truth, the way things really are, by means of which we can ultimately measure the truth of our statements. And the whole problem of Plato is precisely how to contain not so much mathematics, it's it's precisely how to contain this wild freedom of speech where you can just use it in a playful way, poetry or sophism, playing games and so on, how to root speech in truth or in external reality and so on. And Plato effectively uses all possible strategies here. For example, in his seminar, sorry seminar, in his dialogue Cratylus, you know, he even tries to to contain the arbitrariness of language by way of a totally artificial crazy etymology, where he tries to demonstrate how all words have a deeper literal meaning which tells what they really are, like he is I think the origin of this ale-theia, theia is theos, that truth is divine, it’s a wandering of gods and so on. And so again one can say that philosophy doesn't begin only with materialists, so-called Ionian materialists, but also with Sophists and that the problem of Plato is how to contain this Sophist threat. And what is so interesting in Plato (this gives some credence to Althusser's notion of philosophy as secularized, if you want, rationalized mythology) that Plato fails again and again. His most Sophist dialogue is Parmenides, where you have that famous place of place of hypothesis, it's pure Sophistic game, all possible argumentation, and then that's the zero point of Plato. In all his later dialogues, he tries to define in a precise unambiguous way—sorry, define, determine the line of distinction between empty Sophistic games and true philosophy. And it can be shown that not only he fails again and again, but that when he tries to formulate a decision, he always needs to return to pre-pre-philosophical mythology, some stupid story about gods or whatever. Like, he cannot, he cannot do it. So, and I think that the ultimate philosopher Hegel is in this sense a Sophist. Not in the usual sense of Bertrand Russell of those like Hegel is just bluffing playing games, but Hegel accepts the basic premise of Sophists that the truth of language, of what your statement, cannot be decided by external comparison with reality. That the only way to enact a progress in truth is an immanent way. You claim something—the way Hegel moves from one plane to another in a dialectical progress is not by looking at things and saying no, no, no, it's not like that, but it's comparing a statement as it were with itself to demonstrate that it's immanently inconsistent. So that's the first problem with Althusser. It's in his totally simplified résumé, résumé which is: mythic universe, then the first scientific revolution, mathematics, and then philosophical reaction, idealist. He doesn't mention the two big mega examples that complicate it and who should have known about them: Sophists and on the other hand so-called Ionian pre-Socratic materialists, which are a story on themselves. But now I wonder if you will agree with me here. I have another strong criticism of Althusser here. The way Althusser relates to philosophy I think it's a ridiculous example of the tension, in Lacanian terms, between enunciated content, what you are claiming, and the position of enunciation, in the sense of how you are claiming it. I claim that Althusser claims something in his great thesis on philosophy, but his very procedure of elaborating this claim is in a radical contradiction with what he is claiming. At the level of content what Althusser is claiming: he is all modesty. Althusser strongly opposes the idealist philosophical pretension to grasp the structure of the entire universe, to know it all, to render the absolute truth. Against this idealist pretension, Althusser, the later Althusser of the so-called philosophy of encounter, contingency and so on, he praises accepting limits, being open to contingent encounters and so on, which characterizes according to Althusser the materialist undercurrent: from Epicurus through Spinoza up to Heidegger. And although you know here I have a first problem: my god, Spinoza as a modest philosopher. Wait a minute. Can you imagine a philosopher who is at the level of how he proceeds a more in a naive sense arrogant philosopher? Spinoza begins with extremely strong claims about substance, structure of the absolute and so on and so on. So here is again no, sorry, this is Althusser at his worst, I claim. Here I will quote to you Althusser's fight against idealism. Quote: "Idealist philosophers speak for everyone and in everyone's stead. They think in fact that they are in possession of the truth about everything. Materialist philosophers are much less talkative. They know how to shut up and listen to people. They do not think that they are private to the truth about everything. They know that they can become philosophers only gradually, modestly, and that their philosophy will come to them from outside. So they shut up and listen." Why do I find this problematic? What Althusser effectively does when talking about philosophy, in what he says we can I think easily discern the exact opposite of what he characterizes as a materialist approach. Althusser's statements about philosophy, idealism wants to explain everything, they know it all and so on, are brutally simplified universal statements which pretend to define the universal key features of philosophy with no modest provisos. Philosophy as such is class struggle in theory. The eternal battle of the two lines: idealism and materialism. It functions as an empty repetition of the line of demarcation, idealism-materialism, which produces nothing new and so on and so on. In short, Althusser acts as a supreme judge imposing his measure onto the wealth of philosophies. No wonder then that Althusser is so adamantly anti-Hegelian. Althusser’s opposite is here Hegel who may appear, as to what he says, extremely arrogant: absolute knowledge and so on and so on. But I claim Hegel’s actual approach is much more modest. Hegel doesn’t say I know the absolute truth. Hegel just says all those who claim that they know absolute truth are wrong. And we will systematically go through all of them, demonstrating how they are wrong, very modestly measuring their thoughts with the implications, just the implications of these thoughts. And when at the end of Hegel’s philosophy you reach the absolute, the absolute is just the complete path through the series of errors. There is no absolute outside. The extreme case of this Althusser's arrogance is his treatment of digitalization, computerization of our lives. In the worst idealist manner, Althusser brutally reduces today's digitalization to technocratic idealism. His idea is that when bourgeoisie loses its ability to generate idealist philosophical systems, it begins to rely on the apparently non-ideological automatism of computers and technocrats. Sounds nice, but naive. I think you see, here we have precisely the idealist side of Althusser. Whatever you think about digitalization, computerization and so on, isn't it clear that digitalization/computerization are a big site of, let's call it naively, class struggle today: who will dominate it, the state, private companies, will it become... so the least you can say that it's that it cannot be reduced just to a new ideological trick by bourgeoisie, but it's the site, it's the site of the battle. I think that Althusser totally, I mean as we can say repeating Althusser's word, "shut up and listen" before making this flat universal statement, digitalization is just a tool of bourgeois ideology to retain its rule after it’s no longer—no longer able to generate a proper ideology. Wouldn't it be good for Althusser to shut up and listen here a little bit? You see what I'm aiming at? Althusser’s modesty, no materialists are modest, just particular statements, it's totally belied by his procedure, by how he acts. What he effectively does is a series of extremely dogmatic, arrogant statements. All of history is a struggle between idealism, material—I’m not saying that this is maybe not true, I’m just saying that the way he speaks totally contradicts the content of what he is claiming. He claims for a modest approach, we don't know it, only idealists are the idiots who think they know everything, we should be modest. But again when he provides his definitions of philosophy and so on, Althusser himself is definitely not, is definitely not modest. So again, I want now further to complicate things which will gradually bring us to capitalism. For Althusser, he still celebrates science as progressive somehow. Another of his dogmatic presuppositions—I'm not saying it's not true, I'm just saying that it's a dogmatic axiom—that science as such is on the side of the oppressed. And for science to be used in the service of, in the class struggle of those in power, it has to be mystified, respiritualized and so on. Now there is something in this thesis, of course. For example, I claim that—and I never thought there is something progressive in it—that if you look at today's popular interpretations of quantum physics, it's a gigantic attempt to respiritualize them, you know, all this Tao of quantum physics, you discover some oriental wisdom or whatever in it. It does work in that way. The problem is just this one: is it as simple as that as Althusser claims? That is to say, is it as simple as that that capitalism or class societies as such may use sciences in order to assert their predominance, but they always at the same time mystify sciences? So that one way to fight the class struggle is simply to fully follow the potential of sciences, to demystify these attempts to re-respiritualize sciences. Here now I am returning—no, returning, I never was there, okay—for the first time turning to that book published by Verso half a year ago, Samo Tomšič's "The Capitalist Unconscious," where (but this is a particular element of the book) where he claims, it's an interesting thesis, his thesis is that although capitalism in a way stands for modernity—and I agree here with him because basically Fredric Jameson is saying the same, that when people speak about modernization it's basically what they mean is capitalism, and that when third-world countries are searching for an alternate modernity it means let's do capitalism with another way, what is happening in China now it's clearly an alternate modernity which as we can see clearly in no way it really avoids us to, sorry, enables us to avoid the immanent antagonisms of capitalism. Okay. So here is a quote from this book by Tomšič: "Capitalism needs to be thought as the restoration of premodernity within modernity, a counter-revolution that neutralizes the emancipatory political potentials of scientific revolution." End of quote. On the one hand it's true, I agree, capitalism is intimately linked to the rise of modern science. Even, and I we will return later to this, referring to Lacan who had this but I'm thankful to Tomšič to focus attention on this, that what happens already with Descartes, it's a wonderful parallel, and with modern science is that the logic of of surplus-value or surplus-enjoyment is also operative in science. Modern science, the knowledge in modern science is by definition a surplus-knowledge caught in exactly the same dynamics as the capitalist dynamics. In the same way as in capitalism, the system in order to reproduce itself has to expand, revolutionize itself all the time. We have the same with modern science. Modern science by definition never finished. It's an unending process of self-revolutionizing. Okay, but the thesis of of Tomšič and already of some others to whom he is relying is that although capitalism is intimately linked to the rise of modern science—and there is a wonderful thesis here that he refers to Tomšič, namely that what happens with early modern science is something that I like this term, something like a primordial accumulation of knowledge in exact parallel to primordial accumulation of capital with the rise of modern science. But nonetheless the thesis is this one: that although capitalism relies on science—I mean the entire capitalist organization from the very beginning of production relies on mechanic sciences, always new sciences today digital sciences and so on—the ideological political and economic organization of capitalism (liberal egotist individuals pursuing their interests, their messy interaction which secretly is regulated by the big other of the market) signals a return to premodern universe. That's a nice thesis although I don't fully agree with it: that again on the one hand silence—sorry, capitalism is modern science, but modern science again reinscribed into ideological political and economic organization which remains premodern. This idea of invisible hand of market, secret harmony through individual agents and so on and so on, it's a return to premodern universe. So Tomšič proposes here, so it seems, a new version of Habermas's idea of modernity as an unfinished project. Communism—what his definition of communism, Tomšič's, is is that communism will emerge when the logic of modern science will be extended also to political domain. Quote: "Only then will politics be consistently in sync with modern science and inhabit the same universe." So again it's a thesis which I nonetheless find very problematic although it sounds nice: that again capitalism is a paradox of science, explosive development of science, but socially exactly in the same way as Plato pushed for mathematics but reinscribed it in a cosmic vision of cosmos as harmonious totality with the supreme good and so on, at a different secularized level of course something similar happens in capitalism. Now my first counterpoint is: was Kant's goal not to do exactly this? To elaborate an ethico-political edifice that would be at the level of modern science. It's clear that, you know, Kant's practical reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment are part of the same project as Critique of Pure Reason. It is: we have now a fundamental fact of modern lives, Newtonian physics, which means this medieval harmonious world where phenomena mirror in each other, where there is a cosmic meaning, the deeper harmony between microcosm, macrocosm—that's over. And Kant's problem is: what does this mean for ethics? Because we no longer can have the ethics of the supreme good referring to some top of highest point of reality and so on. The point is: did Kant effectively achieve this or is his philosophical edifice a compromise? As I already pointed out, Kant openly claims that his goal is to limit knowledge in order to make space for belief. And I claim the modern neo-Kantians, Habermasians, are doing the same when they exempt intersubjectivity from the domain of objective science. The great fear of Habermas for example is how to limit the constraint of contemporary natural sciences. So the idea is yeah, these sciences are a great thing, they're doing wonder, biogenetics explaining everything, but there is a domain which is always already presupposed by these sciences and which they cannot account for. So you have this domain of discursive ethics which is always already here when you reason scientifically, so you cannot ground it in scientist. So the problem for me is: which then would be the ethico-political social organization that would no longer be premodern, that would fully fit modern science? Kant, the Kantian or Habermasian version I claim (cannot prove it now) doesn't work. We have a radical attempt which maintains which wants to universal the results of positive science, which is the one that I often mention, the radical objectivism of brain scientist like Patricia and Paul Churchland. Why are they of such an interest? Because the predominant notion of modern cognitive scientist is a kind of early Althusserian one. Sciences are telling us one thing, but in our everyday life the way we are biologically structured, we have to—we cannot escape pre-scientific naive illusions. Like, to put it in very naive terms: although we know (if we know, that's another question, but let's accept it), even if we know what science is telling us, that there is no free will, we are neuronal automata, you know, all those proofs by Benjamin Libet although he doesn't interpret it this way, that when we make an arbitrary conscious decision, our brains know it already before even we become aware of it. In other words, our free choice is just—when we think we make an arbitrary free choice, our consciousness just registers something that was already decided at objective neuronal processes. The big problem here (I developed it already this years ago here, just to remind you), the big problem here is: is this irreducible? In the sense that we have that these illusions let no matter how much I know I'm just an automaton, but I experience my activity as a free agent. Now I decide to do this, if I do something wrong, I'm responsible and so on and so on. Is this gap irreducible? I almost admire philosophers of science, there are two main references here, who claim: no, we can make go further. Patricia and Paul Churchland claim that they can, it is possible to imagine a society which would not just, how should I put it, admit theoretically in scientifically that we are not free individuals, but that it would draw consequences for our daily life. That it would eliminate from our basic self-experience notions like freedom, personal responsibility and so on. And they try to prove (here things get for me a little bit more problematic) that for me, that the results will not would not have been ethically catastrophic, but much more human and modest. Like, we would not simply condemn people to death or castigate them, because we would be well aware that they were not responsible for it and so on and so on. I claim this position is false. But okay, I cannot give you the entire line, but my basic argument is that the way here I'm a Habermasian, the way they argue, they still argue, you know, they still argue as free partners in rational argumentation and so on. The way they write their books doesn't follow that. I'm much closer to the position of Thomas Metzinger, the German neuroscientist who is a Buddhist. His idea is that the only point at which our personal self-experience really fits the results of cognitive sciences is this Buddhist overcoming the feeling of the self. You know, where we have thoughts without a thinker and so on. That this extreme position makes it. But I, I this reading nonetheless, so here is for me again the problem of Tomšič. It's nice to say: "only in communism science will come to its own." But he at least (you can correct me if you find something) but at least I don't find it, namely, in what sense is science—what would have this meant? To expand the logic of science also to ethico-political life without seeking a support in in tradition. Now the—we have one way out of this, which is the traditional Heideggerian or not even Heideggerian hermeneutic way, which would mean to claim that there is no way out. We have to accept that a certain hermeneutic horizon of understanding, which cannot be scientifically grounded itself, is always already here so that science can never really account for the possibility of itself. In order to have this image of reality as regulated by biological, neuronal whatever laws, you already have to approach nature in a certain way: precisely as an objective natural process, not as a universe of meanings. Plus, you have to automatically accept the level of free argumentation which itself is already what is called deontic logic. When you argue, you argue who is right, who is wrong and so on, so you have a so-called deontic dimension, dimension of value, of truth in the ethical sense, like is this what you are doing right and so on, which again cannot be accounted for in objective processes. So what to do here? I claim that we should look closely—and this is where Tomšič I think neglects things a little bit—in what is for Lacan modern science. And we will see that Lacan's relationship to modern science is much more ambiguous. For Lacan, modern science is defined by two foreclosures which are connected: the foreclosure of subject and the foreclosure of truth as cause. It sounds artificial, complicated, but it's simple and can be explained easily. The foreclosure of subject means that a scientific text or argumentation is always enunciated from a desubjectivized empty location. It allows for no reference to its subject of enunciation. You know, you say you enunciate a scientific law. It's totally meaningless or even mystifying when you say "I claim that." Okay, you can claim this, but this is irrelevant. This is why incidentally I hate those popular introductions into science where, you know, they mix description of what went on (I hate that) with this personal touch. Like: "In Princeton it was early spring, Professor blah blah walked along the grass, he met some students," fuck yeah, I don't care, you know what I mean. So again, scientific truth must be something which can be repeatedly demonstrated. Anyone can easily see it and say it. A scientific truth should in no way be affected by its place of enunciation. No, the moment you say "but you have to feel it, you have to experience it," it's no longer science. Science means precisely what—ah, this accounts for the second paradoxical thesis of Lacan, that Cartesian subject is the subjects of modern science. Namely, imagine modern science. You just say "this is the law that" and Lacan’s thesis is that the one who enunciates this general scientific statement, it’s precisely the Cartesian cogito. Because it’s not a concrete subject part of a certain culture (although, okay, we can now play this historicist game: "yes, in reality it is"), but the ideal of objective sciences is that it’s an empty X. Anyone, an empty subject who is its agent. And this precisely again is the abstract Cartesian subject, cogito. A vanishing punctuality deprived of all its properties. And I claim this same feature also accounts for the foreclosure (not in the commercial sense but more like radical exclusion, rejection in the Freudian sense of Verwerfung) of truth as cause. What is for Lacan *la vérité* (truth as cause)? When I commit a slip of tongue and say something other than what I wanted to say, and this other message—message tells the truth about me that I'm usually not ready to recognize—then one can say that in my slips the truth itself spoke, subverting what I wanted to say. There is truth, the truth about my desire, in such slips even if they contain factual inexactitude. Say an extremely stupid simple example: when the moderator of a debate, instead of saying "I am thereby opening the session," when he or she says "I am thereby closing the session," he obviously indicates that he is bored and he considers the debate worthless. So the truth of my subjective position is the cause of such slips. When it operates, the subject is directly inscribed into its speech, disturbing the smooth flow of objective knowledge. You see the point: you are reporting on something objectively, truth as a cause intervenes and there you as subject are inscribed when something—not your subjective intentionality, but precisely let’s say your unconscious or subconscious, half-conscious intention—disturbs the flow of objective, of objective knowledge. You know where you can find a nice example of this? I—oh my god this is so embarrassing, but it's not me, it's a friend of mine, am I'm not lying, that happened to him. His wife was cheating him. And his wife told him this. And my friend got into total panic. And he was right. Because he said that if my wife is just cheating me, that's okay. But why is she telling me this? He was quite fully justified in focusing not of does she really cheat me or not, but why is she telling me? What is the what Freud called *Lustgewinn*, the the the surplus-pleasure? Or even more simply, aim, strategic aim. Like, okay, you are telling me this, it's painful, but what's really painful is that I don't know why are you telling me this. Is—what's the message? That you want to abandon—you know, when I tell you—it's the same as that old story that I like to use, you know, always. This is the gap that Lacan is insisting once I used it a couple of times in my book. In academia, I don't know if it's here the same but in United States where you have this stupid politically correct rules of politeness and so on, let's say I one of you I would approach me after this talk and stupid narcissist as I am I asked you "did you like my class?" and of course you think it's shit, but in American academia the coded way to say this is "it was interesting." "It was interesting" means a polite way to say it was stupid boring shit, you know. But you know what’s the catch? The catch is again: why are you saying this? Because I will have the full right to ask my friend: if you are really—if you really think that it was interesting, why are then telling me that it was interesting? You know. Or then let’s say that my friend tells me it was total shit. Then I also have the right to tell him: if you think just that it was boring and shit, why didn’t you simply tell me that it was interesting? And I would have gotten the point. It must—you know, when I tell you or you to me "it was shit" instead of "it was interesting," it means that I mean something more. Not just that it was shit, but that I hate you, you are whatever... it’s something more. So this excessive dimension of truth is where subjectivity is inscribed. And this dimension is is excluded from—is precluded, excluded from language. How then, back to Lacan, can Lacan—ah, another thing I wanted to explain to you propos of this—okay we will return to this later, namely this structure of surplus-knowledge, of excess of knowledge and how it functions is crucial. But later to this. Now I just, let's see where we are. Oh perfect, we have time. So let's go on. How can Lacan claim that the subject of psychoanalysis, the divided subject, the subject traversed by negativity, is the subject of modern science? You will nonetheless say, but didn't I just prove that they're precisely different? That the subject of modern science is a totally abstract empty subject, this empty point which announces anonymous statements like, I don't know, scientific laws. While in the subject of psychoanalysis, this subjective negativity, resistance or whatsoever, re-re-emerges. Ah, Lacan has a nice point here. Modern science—that’s crucial for Lacan as I already indicated with my reference to mathematics—modern science breaks with the traditional universe held together by a deeper meaning, like a harmony of cosmic principles and so on and so on. You know, the traditional universe, it’s a universe of some hierarchic ordered whole, multiplicity of hierarchically ordered spheres, a whole in which everything serves a higher purpose and so on and so on. It’s the Aristotelian universe. So when Aristotelians talk about reason, they mean this. In this sense Aristotelians and many modern Catholics are Aristotelian, are quite justified to claim that they are the defenders of reason and that modern science is irrational. It is irrational in the sense that modern—the necessity of modern science is a meaningless, which means contingent necessity. In a traditional universe, when you say I don't know what it is, how the apple falls down, the Newton's formula, it's not just that, it's not just "oh it's like that." As the French say, "c'est comme ça." It has to have some deeper meaning and so on in ultimate hierarchy and so on. While the whole point of modern science, Newtonian physics or even more later, Darwin's theory on of evolution and so on, is that it's an irrational universe. Irrational in the sense that there is no deeper reason, meaning in natural laws. They are contingent, they are just what they are. Here we can find (I don't have to develop this), here is the big difference between Freud and Jung. Jung with his archetypes and so on effectively does what Freud is often accused by his stupid critics: namely that psychoanalysis is really a return to premodern dream interpretation, deeper meanings and so on. Jung does this. You know, you have deeper spiritual processes, Yin-Yang, archetypes and so on. With Freud, you don't have this. The universe of the Freudian unconscious is totally—a totally contingent universe. What you find as totally—are totally contingent traumas. You know, when Jung interprets a pathology, it finds some mythic reference, "Oh that primordial archetype is reactivated here." Freudian universe is totally open and contingent. It's: okay, maybe you when you were young, you were traumatized, raped, you witnessed something horrid, then due to some totally contingent series of later experiences or symbolic process, some of these traumas were reactivated and so on. But there is no deeper meaning in it. It's all just one big one big contingent way. So let me go—sorry, I want to make two more crucial points here, yes. First: so what happens in modern science? Here is a nice quote from Lacan: "I would—I would call the state of knowledge before Descartes pre-accumulative. With Descartes, knowledge, scientific knowledge is constituted on the mode of production of knowledge, just as an essential stage of our structure that one calls social, but is in fact metaphysical and which is called capitalism is accumulation of capital. The relation of the Cartesian subject to this being, which is affirmed in it, is founded on the accumulation of knowledge. After Descartes, knowledge is what serves to make knowledge grow." End of quote. If then the moment of Descartes stands for the primordial accumulation of knowledge, one should immediately raise the question: accumulated from where? Not from ancient traditions, the new capitalist master rather appropriates knowledge from workers' artisanal savoir-faire and integrates it into science. Ancient wisdoms and teachings transferred to the initiated belong to masters and priests to whom operational expert knowledge appears as too low to care about. Better left to the subordinated, to their servants, slaves. While capitalists take expert knowledge from their servants or workers. To put it in another way: master’s wisdom is repetitive. It functions as a fidelity to established tradition. If a revolution occurs, it has to appear as a return to true origins, as in Protestantism. In contrast to it, modern science science is split into (in Lacanian terms) university and hysteria. You know, modern science is not just university knowledge that can be eternally reproduced. It has to pass through, again and again, through hystericization. In the sense of pushing towards a new knowledge and so on and so on. And it's interesting to (here I will not have time today because I want to make another important point), to make two maybe with this I will conclude the first part (oh we have time, perfect) to two further points. So the idea is the three moments of surplus and their parallel: the capitalist notion of surplus-value, the the psychoanalytic notion of surplus-enjoyment, and the scientific notion of surplus-knowledge. The first thing to develop here is to emphasize here is that in psychoanalysis, surplus-enjoyment is not what comes at the end as surplus excess, you know like "we just play, we have a little bit of pleasure," sorry for these obscenities, "I put the finger there, she squeezed it" or whatever, "but then the big orgasm surplus." No, no, no, no. Surplus is precisely the surplus that you get from apparent obstacles and so on, from the—you know, is the surplus of the form always. You do something to profit. That's the simple profit. What Freud calls *Lustgewinn* is done by the form of the approach itself. For example, sorry for being vulgar, but I will leave the elements—I will leave the elements anonymous here. For example, two persons want to have sex. If they simply lay down and do it, okay, it is just what it is, it's stupid. But you introduce some obstacles: "you have to write a poem to me if you want to," and then further... you know so that you complicate the path, this the very complication surplus is—or what Freud calls *Lustgewinn* is basically surplus generated by the obstacle itself. Like, you want something, but if you complicate the way to get that, you get a surplus. And this is—I wonder how this will function today. I want to talk if they will give me time maybe at [unintelligible]—no, sorry wrong name—at, you know that the last day on Wednesday I think, I appear at Libyan School of Economics, you know, LSE. I know that now two, three years have passed, but I think it's still Libyan School of Economics. And I want to develop this there as it’s a very intriguing phenomenon, I think it’s very interesting that it’s happening today ideologically. We really live in crazy times. On the one hand, what is happening with sexual difference today? On the one hand, sexual difference is—my god, we have a whole worldwide movement of reasserting sexual difference as the key to social stability. It’s not just Boko Haram. Boko Haram is the extreme. You know that idea, you know what Boko Haram means? If you translate it into descriptive terms: "no Western education for women." Just think about the paradox of it. The society is in crisis and the idea is that the key to resolve social crisis is to keep women at their proper place, to reassert fixed sexual difference. Now you will say if you are a racist (I'm not here at least), you will say: "Oh those stupid niggers there in the middle of Africa." Yeah, yeah, these niggers are everywhere. Another big nigger here is Putin, and yet a third nigger are American Christian fundamentalists, and fourth niggers are in my own country Slovenia. It's interesting how even in my shitty country now, the church is obsessed by the fact that—they have a wonderful theory, I almost like it—that in the first wave communists tried to take power (20th century). Then they discovered that morality as prescribed in the Bible is too strong. So they have to wait a little bit with economic power and they first have to destroy social fabric from within. And the main agent, poison, is gender theory. It's incredible. With conservatives in post-communist Eastern Europe, gender theory appears more and more as the main tool. It's all part of a communist plot, you know. And for those crazy right-wingers even refugees, it's all part of a communist plot to destroy Europe. But what’s so interesting in this—I mean a story I know I repeated here already. Do you remember a couple of years ago when that disgusting Austrian man dressed as a lady—as a—as a lady—a lady, I don’t like... Conchita Wurst, you know that. But you know the traumatic reaction to it in Russia, where even Putin says: "What’s happening? In the Bible it says," Putin said, "we have two sexes. What do we have now, third one?" Or another ideologist of Putin said: "Is this the symbol of Europe, a bearded lady? No, we don’t want to join this Europe," and so on. So again, this fear of fear of erasing, undermining the clear contours of sexual difference, this is perceived as the main threat of Western capitalism. That's the irony. Because—I'm sorry if I mentioned to you this, but I think it's crucial—because I read some text and even met one guy in London two years ago Boko Haram, who gave me a nice Marxist theory for Boko Haram. He said if you analyze the concrete situation of their North Nigeria, Africa, how do ordinary people there experience the impact—the destructive impact of global capitalism? It destroys traditional family structures. And then you have the ideology human rights and so on, so for us Boko Haram, no education for women, fixed sexual difference but sexual difference in the sense of hierarchic ordering of sexual roles, is our main weapon against neo-colonialist imperialism. At least it’s a consistent position. Okay, there is one side. Now comes the evil aspect of myself. I want to oppose to it the opposite aspect which I think it's the same shit in another version. This, I hope you will not lynch me now, this big struggle now in United States—it's even, it's not a marginal one, it's big news cover stories—struggle against what they call sexual segregation. You know, and it's so ironic because it's the struggle about toilets, and you know how dear the topic of toilets, the structure of toilets is to me. The idea is this one: that—it’s not a joke, check it up—the idea is that the when you as a person go to toilets and you are confronted with this division, ladies/gentlemen, men/women, that this is the last form of social segregation. So then it becomes a big task of progressives to eliminate this. And now they have a big conflict: conservatives for maintaining it and progressives like Bruce Springsteen threaten to cancel a concert in North Carolina because the the Congress there rejected this sorry, rejected the proposal to eliminate sexual segregation. But so why am I opposed to it? What's my problem? Oh my problem is this one, frankly. That first the first thing that made me suspicious is the crazy degree to which big capital joined this, you know. I do you know that I recently read big California bosses, all big names, from Zuckerberg to Tim Cook of Apple, I don't know who, all big capital absolutely supports this abolition of sexual segregation as a big American progress, we should do this and so on, and even threaten to boycott those poor Southern states which cling to it. Second thing, and I had to laugh at Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, who said: "Oh we are always on the side of progress." This is wonderful, you know, you can forget about Foxconn and do those Chinese slaves, you know. Who cares if millions are over-exploited there, but we are for desegregated toilets, we did our [unintelligible]. Now you will say I’m cynical here. No, I understand although it’s really a minority, the problem are not gays and lesbians, because they still recognize themselves as men and women. The problem are so-called transgender people, no? Those who, to put it in elementary way, when you are confronted with a division "am I man or woman," you cannot, you don’t recognize yourself in any of the two, and then of course this explodes into dozens of position: bigender, transgender, agender, whatever, then you have cross-dressing, man, biologically operated, doesn’t matter. So what’s wrong about it? My problem is this one: first, what I find so strange is that—and this is for me the first symptom of transgender people—they don’t see where the problem is. Listen, they have a wrong notion of how sexual segregation, if you call it like that, works. When I go—sorry to be personal, but don't be afraid, it's not disgusting this time—when I go to a toilet, believe me or not, when I have to enter the male toilet, I often have the same anxiety. Not in the sense "am I a woman," but "my god who am I? Am I really a man?" or whatever. You know, in other words, I think that first I don’t think that normal sexual difference—normal in the sense of the way it works with majority of us—works in this simple way "Oh I'm fully a man" and so on and so on. No, I'm tempted to say that if you really look closely at how sexual difference works, it works in this ambiguous way of: basically to be a man means to doubt in a certain way that you are a man. To be a woman, it’s always a much more complex identification. Second point: I find it so crazy how transgender people (and I debated with some of them) on the one hand they like to present themselves as trans-gender revolutionaries, you know, "we don't care about categorization, we are beyond." But then I told them: "Okay, if this is true, why don’t you simply say 'fuck off, I will enter whichever toilet I want'?" You know. It’s at the same time this aggressive position, but combined with this totally opposite ridiculous fear: "Oh my god I don't recognize myself here there, I want a place for my own where I would fully identify myself, where I don't have such a place in the toilet." So the problem for me is a different one. I think—now this may be problematic for some of you but I hope not, if you understand it correctly—I claim that the first thing to do is to strictly distinguish what Lacan calls sexual difference (in the sense of sexual antagonism) and gender identities. It’s not the same for Lacan and that’s his point of *il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel*. It’s precisely that sexual difference is a kind of a traumatic gap and we cannot—it can never be translated into fixed roles. Sexual difference doesn’t mean if you are a man you have to do this, this, this or act like this or dress... No, sexual difference in its antagonism dimension means precisely that all sexual identities fail. It's a trauma in this sense. So I claim that what Boko Haram is doing and what transgender people are doing are the opposite way to achieve exactly the same: to erase the trauma of sexual antagonism. Because it’s the same with transgender people, the most radical tendency of transgender people are of course those, how do they call it, post-gender people. They claim that with new with new results of science and so on, humanity is approaching a new stage where sexuality will no longer be necessary for reproduction. So we will have just one sex which will no longer even be sex. Okay, I say maybe, I don't know, but I'm not saying we are playing with fire here. I'm just saying that so much of our everyday life (and not just what is oppressive about everyday life like our notion of love and so on) implies sexual antagonism, that I just would like to know more: what does it mean to live in a like post-sexual, asexual society? I doubt for example if art can survive in it and so on and so on. My second point is that precisely if you don’t talk about gender identities but in this more radical sense sexual difference, that you can prove (but not in the sense that they are less) transgender people that—I went through all the categories, I will do this in my next book blah blah, of transgender identities and I claim in all of them the gap of sexual difference is present. With gay people it's clear, it's woman-woman and I claim as an absent mediator man is there, and it's the same I claim with gay people that—I mean Lacan's best definition is in a gay couple you don't have name of the father but mother intervenes as the third in a gay couple. This doesn't mean that they are somehow pathological. They just prove that there is no normality. They are not—I just claim that we have an antagonism, a two, which is resisting imposition. That's why you have all this wealth of identities and so on. So what would have been? And I claim that the aim of this trans-gender movement is ultimately precisely to get rid of the antagonism. So how to do it? I have a very practical proposal which is of course an extremely cynical one. But not cynical, I think it would realistically have worked. I think I even mentioned already this example here of toilets. No, toilets, sorry, waste. Another kind of shit that we want to get rid of. I’m always so nicely surprised—I don’t know you have it here, they have it in Germany, but ah no I’ve seen it also in London—you know now with this recy—no recycling, that you have to separate waste, you know, paper, glass. I have always this dream that they make this just to make us feel well, you know, but then at the end when the truck comes they just put all back into the same. Okay, maybe not. But what I'm saying is that did you notice how you have three, four of this: paper, organic, this, and then you always have one more which is called General Waste. Which is a very Hegelian category of the general has to exist as—my god, when people say I'm a crazy Hegelian with no relation to reality, fuck off, go there to trash bins and you will see: Hegel rules, no? Okay, what I simply propose is: ladies, gentlemen, and general gender, or whatever you call it. So you have a problem with identifying, go to the third one. And in this way antagonism is maintained. Because if you choose the third one, probably I would have chosen it, it doesn’t mean that you are less. It means that the third one is the truth, in the sense that by choosing general gender you admit that every gender identity fails and so on and so on. It’s negativity embodied, you know. So why not, why not this? You see, this is so sad in our society, how there is a beautiful society beautiful theoretical problem but it okay. Nonetheless so that we don’t—yeah, we still have it—I would like to make, there are so many things I want to say but we don’t have time, the last element before we go, don’t be afraid, next tomorrow, my god, next time is tomorrow, I will go much more precisely into this structure of surpluses. I just want to complicate the game in another way. Usually Marxists talk about use-value and exchange-value, no? Use-value, blah, we know what this is. I claim that Lacan is right when he claims that this couple doesn't cover the entire field. When we are dealing with a commodity or even an object of use, that another dimension of value is needed, called by Lacan *cult-value*. Some other social theorists today call it *sign-value*. Let me take a commodity like stone-washed jeans. It has a use-value, of course. You wear stone-washed jeans like trousers. It has an exchange-value, of course, expressed in its price. But I claim it also has a third value which cannot be reduced to the first two: a thick web of meanings that stick to a commodity as its aura. What way of life stone-washed jeans signal? What stance towards reality? What image of myself do I stage when I wear them and so on and so on. And here I want to refer to a very interesting article by two I think Swedish guys, Thomas Preiskorn Thygesen and Ole Bjerg. They wrote a crazy text, "The Falling Rate of Enjoyment: Consumer Capitalism and Compulsive Buying Disorder," where they talk about sign-value. Let me just quote you a couple of passages: "Enjoyment plays a crucial role when symbolic identity is created through consumption of commodities with certain sign values. In order for the consumer to redeem the commodity's sign value, she must be able to enjoy its use value." End of quote. It's a nice very simple theory of a compulsive buyer, no? You still feel the compulsion of buying although use-value is practically zero, because you have the pressure of sign-value. I claim the term enjoyment is to be opposed here to pleasure. Pleasure is experienced when, in consuming a commodity, its use-value satisfied a need of mine. Of course this need is always socially constructed, not natural. While enjoyment is generated by the effect on the consumer of this commodity’s sign-value. Say in the case of stone-washed jeans, it is pleasurable to wear them so that I can enjoy the way wearing them shapes and asserts my self-identity at a certain—as a certain person. But then another quote from these two guys, quote: "The structuring of desire in the symbolic order is also at the same time a construction of subject's social identity. By consuming different commodity objects of desire, the consumer positions herself in a symbolic system of signs, thereby attaining a particular identity. The sign value of the commodity signals a particular social meaning of the commodity and the consumer gets a share of this meaning through her consumption. In short, commodities shape the way we think and feel about ourselves." End of quote. Now we come to the theoretical catch. The catch is that it is not possible for a consumer to keep use-value and sign-value apart, since sign-value is experienced as an organic component of the commodity's use-value. I desire stone-washed jeans because when I use them I will experience myself the way I want to. Another quote: "The commodity’s use-value serves the ideological function as the material correlate to the subject’s true self." End of quote. Now this overlapping of use-value and sign-value is not immediate. It has to be enforced. And the active moment in this enforcing is sign-value, which exerts pressure on the consumer to convince himself that he really needs the commodity in question. The last quote: "If the sign-value of the commodity is to function as a marker and creator of identity, the buyer has to be able to master a need for the use-value of the commodity and has to be able to retain this need. The higher the sign-value, the greater the demand on the buyer to be able to expand her needs." This is the guys, not me. I noticed this ideological like when we are dealing with stupid consumers, all of a sudden it’s not "his," it’s "her," no, it’s women. "Needs and her capacity for consumption. In other words, she must be able to convince herself and the world that she needs this particular commodity." End of quote. Now what clearly enters here is the superego dimension in the guise of the injunction to enjoy a commodity in question. Again, we have here the inversion that characterizes superego. The injunction does not enjoin me to follow my duty against the temptation of succumbing to the pleasure provided by the use-value of a commodity. On the contrary, the commodity’s sign-value, the ideology associated to it, enjoins me to enjoy its use-value even if I do not really feel any need for it. The last quote: "The acquisition of a commodity must be followed by a sense of enjoyment that functions as evidence of the consumer's urgent need for the commodity. The compulsive buyer suffers from being unable to produce this kind of evidence. This does not mean that the compulsive buyer has no desire for the commodity, but her desire is only directed at the sign-value of the commodity." And then referring to Baudrillard, the two guys say that because this gap is getting stronger and stronger, more and more we are buying objects because of their sign-value precisely because then when we think it's really use-value. For example, you remember you buy a computer and then even I was at some point victim to it: you need special cable attachment, that special part and so on and so on, and you convince yourself: "my god I really need all of that." Well it's a sign-value. You don't. But the problem is this one: that the the stronger this gap is between use-value and sign-value, the more impossible for you is to enjoy something that you buy just for your sign-value, for its sign-value, so again you have the falling rate of enjoyment. And of course the result is that not that you buy less but that you buy even more, since the—again, the rate of enjoyment is falling, you must buy even more and so on and so on. So and then the final dialectical reversal: you the one way to get out of this deadlock is a Hegelian reversal that you don't even pretend to enjoy the use-value but you enjoy the act of buying itself. It becomes it becomes a self-goal. So the critical point to be made here of course is that the compulsive buyer with this pathological reversal is not just a pathological form of the normal consuming process, but it's a a possibility that it is in it from the very beginning. And I think the term "from the very beginning" should be taken should be taken literally. I read, I quoted it in one of my books, a nice analysis of an anthropologist of the most primitive those stone stone axes or whatever, no? Which appear very unpractical. And the reading, I find it very convincing (at least for me), is that it's not that they were the primitive man so clumsy is that from the very beginning, the function of that stone hammer or axe or whatever was not that it's more effective to kill the animal or whatever, but that it somehow displays your strength and so on that a sign-value is there. In other words, we never have a pure use-value a pure use-value without without a sign-value. And that again to account for the problem of consumerism, it's not enough just use-value, exchange-value, you have to add this third element, the sign-value. And just if you allow me two, three minutes to conclude, another difference between traditional and modern capitalism. Traditional capitalism is usually referred to as the capitalism of law. It's Protestant capitalism, cruel exchange, no longer mercy, generosity, grace, just this brutal process of exchange described by Marx. So it is as if the medieval society was the one of grace, mercy, you survive because your lord was merciful towards you. Capitalism is the capitalism of law. Of law in the sense of equivalent exchange. Even when there is exploitation, it's masked like this: I bought that, I owe that, it's exchange. So it's as if again capitalism functions as a sphere of exchange, mercy are mercy grace are philanthropic, they don't really they don't really matter. But I claim that if there is something happening in today's societies which is of great interest is how law and mercy are more and more connected. In the sense that more and more in our society the predominant form is not brutal exchange like on a market and then we would demand "oh more philanthropy, we need mercy, whatever, grace" and so on and so on. I more gift, generosity. I claim that—okay I want to make my example here—usually Shylock as a figure of the Jew from Shakespeare, but general figure of the Jew, is perceived as pure capitalist. Even Marx falls into this in his "On the Jewish Question." As if capitalism is Shylock. Contract, unconditionally I want to stick to it. But I claim that today's capitalism more and more functions based on the principle of grace, mercy (of course it’s a perverted mercy, perverted grace, which is just a cover for exploitation). So I claim that our rule of law more and more relies on exceptions. This is why I claim the figure of Shylock is today so subversive. It undermines the rule of law by way of sticking to it without exception. The the cruel irony of the history of relations between capitalist colonialist nations (whose basic principle was legal equivalent exchange) and the colonized (who were allegedly external to economy of exchange) is that the history of colonialism is not the history of generous people on which we Western colonizers imposed the form of market exchange and so on, but it's precisely a long history of broken laws, of broken treaties. From the US treatment of Native Americans to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Which is why I claim the role of Shylock, who just demands what the law gives him, is played today by Palestinians. Because do you know what Palestinians are saying? This fascinating thing. It's not "oh Israel is a commercial society, we want some special grace or whatever," no Palestinians repeat again and again: "there were laws, United Nations' resolution and so on, we just want you to stick to your own laws and treaties and so on and so on." You know who is for me the a a wonderful a a wonderful example of Palestinian Shylock? This is one of my heroes my god. You remember the Israeli strategy of when one of the family is condemned as a terrorist or whatever, they ruin the house of the entire family? Yeah but now incidentally Israel is not even the worst here. I learned a horrible thing, I wonder if it's true if you know. A friend of mine from Jordan told me that in Jordan there are now it begins a little bit with ISIS practically no terrorist attacks. You know why? Ah they went a step further. If somebody whose family whose they can identify there in Jordan is condemned as a terrorist, they don't just ruin the house, they kill the entire family, you know, discreetly. So it works, less. Okay I'm not saying we should do this. But what I want to say: a wonderful things happened recently half a year ago in Israel. You remember two young Israeli boys, Israeli boys (and it's openly admitted even by Israelis, they were put to trial) burned down a Palestinian house where some people were died and so on. And you know what the father of those children who died said? Not "kill them" or whatever, but he said: "Fine, now we expect you to do the same. Will you burn that house already also?" And he was dismissed as a pervert and so on or whatever. They just they just wanted that. So what I'm saying is how this is a beautiful paradox how today's capitalism (not to mention it's really interesting you know from this standpoint to read the history of United States, the expansion to the West). It's not wild Indians and they were civilized. No, again and again there were contracts, treaties which were violated by the West. And then this violation was covered up by false mercy: "we put them in reservation where we give them some help" and so on and so on. So you see my point here: that this is for me the true anti-colonialism and so on. Not "we want help, we were victims," but "we just want you to stick to your own rules of exchange." Because the true message is that although we apparently live in a state of exchange, equal exchange, contracts are sacred and so on, no, the system has to violate this again and again. That's the problem. And recently, you know when even it was too much for Jacqueline Rose when I mentioned that Canadian example the last time here of that of course how do they call them now "First Nation" native American, Canadian whatever woman Eskimo Inuit whatever who was whose corpse was displayed there in the court. It's here you can see the reality. It's a tragedy. Just put Google and put there "Canada suicide first Americans" or what. I mean they now discovered an absolute horror. They are really how do they call them "First Americans," they are simply a totally broken nation. There is some fucking city in Northern Ontario with people. In the last couple of months, over of them made suicides. It's the whole society is falling apart. Connect this with the system of this forced schooling and so on with an incredible... you know with that incredible... so I think that while we should be cruel towards cruel, okay, just towards Arab, Muslim fundamentalism. And I will talk about this at maybe—no at at LSE yes on Wednesday. But we don't even report what beautiful things are happening here. Do some of you know—it's disgusting, I would have shot him because he's just beautiful kids boy—Mohammed Assaf, the mega star of Palestinian pop music. This beautiful mother's voice sings wonderful songs, total apolitical. But he said something. He said in a recent interview that he respects tradition, so if his sister would like to sing in public, he would prohibit her. And now a great thing happened: not Western liberals but Tamer Nafar who plays in Udi Aloni's film, he wrote a wonderful open letter to Assaf where he says: "so you want to end the the wall between Israel and Palestine, what about ending this destroying this wall" and so on? This is so precious because you see, why is this a wonderful example? Because it's proven that Palestinians do not need our fucking liberals to to teach them or whatever. They themselves have they themselves have a movement. And I can tell you to conclude because it's over with a wonderful totally obscene dirty... Tamer Nafar, I love him. He's my friend, that rap singer who plays the main role in Udi Aloni's movie. Because once I talk with him we were in Haifa. He introduced me we did in some theater a talk which was very nice, not because of me but because it was a miracle. The public was half and half Palestinian/Israeli and we have a perfect debate. And at the end I told him—I cannot resist this, this is my way of talking—I presented him my wife and I told him: "Look, you can have her, what's the price no?" And he immediately provided because he is kind of a sexual a beautiful boy, you know. You know what his answer was? "You mean of course how much you should pay me to satisfy her because you cannot" and so on. I mean that's my type of a guy. No, you know what I mean, you know what I mean? I mean the struggle is going on there. We don't have to we don't have to teach them. For example this is for me, now there is a tremendous debate in Palestinian and other Arab media about this. These are so important struggle, of course you will not read about this because you read either about primitive Palestinians or about those totally co-opted bribed by the West. I'm sorry if I was a little bit confused today, but tomorrow you will get more of a real theory. Thanks very much. I wish we had a wonderful today no? Yeah. Okay, take some questions? Okay. One question or two? My god you decide, I don't want to be the bad guy you decide. Ah but just don't ask me this half an hour questions where you have five quotes on Lacan and... [unintelligible] after after penetrating beneath the Oedipus complex of desire grounded in in prohibition how do we reintroduce a big limit and thus return to the domain of prohibition or law communication and meaning? This is a wonderful question, I'm not kidding but I'm writing the answer in my next book. Namely the problem is this one and it's a radical one. You know to what I refer this problem? I will just give you the path towards an answer. My reference here is a wonderful observation by Fredric Jameson that communism far from being a simple society of harmony that problem of envy, resentment will explode there. So in other words the problem is this one, because the problem of envy is the problem of mediator, prohibition, obstacle, and so what I will the problem I will face is precisely this one. If a desire cannot function, I put it in extremely simplified terms, if a desire cannot function without obstacle, competition, whatever, I think this twisted nature of desire is a priori. In the sense that I never desire an object, that competition, envy, jealousy is not secondary. It's not I desire something then I discover you want it so it's a problem. No it's I desire what you desire or... but here Jean-Pierre Dupuy whom I often quote, the French rational choice theorist but a good one theorist, he is a Hegelian and so... in a wonderful way in his new book "La Jalousie Géométrie du désir" which just appeared in French, elaborated in a wonderful precise way the distinction between envy and jealousy. For him jealousy has a different structure: it's not against a competition but it's this structure of inclusion. I see the—for him for example he provides a wonderful reading of Don Giovanni, Don Juan. That he is an impotent jealous guy. What disturbs him is that for example in Mozart opera he sees this there the poor peasant girl Zerlina and Masetto. And he says: "I cannot bear this, why are the two of them so happy? I have to ruin it," you know. The primordial scene of desire is jealousy and desire is a reaction to jealousy. So how to—how to—this is another way for me the true way to confront your question. Definitely we live in a society where less and less we have direct ethical prohibitions. But how to, as you said, a deadlock remains. How to deal with this deadlock? How not to ruin because if we don't find a way of this reintroducing not a prohibition but obstacle deadlock then we risk falling regressing into destructive destructive violence. And especially at the level of jealousy, it may surprise you but I don't will not have time to develop this tomorrow. My ideal would be another triangle, not the Girardian mimetic triangle: Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya and Inessa Armand. How the a communist revolutionary has a way to avoid the deadlock. You have an incredibly intense love relationship and the third element which is obstacle but at the same time what links you, connects the two lovers is the communist cause. And you know if you make a choice it's always true communist love means: "I'm with the woman who is everything to me, but if revolution demands I will kill her." So it's absolutely it's not I sacrifice everything for you. No, but nonetheless she remains the absolute for me. So it's pure act of mercy, maybe I'm lucky for some time that I can... and Lenin did something like this, I claim, with Inessa Armand. Because it's so incredible how maybe you know it better from all these new biographies what kind of a triangle were there. Because there was no stupid jealousy nothing, you know. Nadezhda and Lenin were the perfect communist couple but they simply ac—and they didn't make a great transgressive gesture, nobody talked about it, but it's clear now when they penetrated some archives and so on, you know. So I think it can be done. To reintroduce whatever you call it, obstacle limitation, but not in this old-fashioned Oedipal stupid way. This is how this is for me again an extremely important—because you know what's the problem of communism? If we cannot even imagine it. Distributive justice doesn't work. Egalitarian justice doesn't work. My god Marx was against egalitarianism. This is not popular to remind people that Marx said repeatedly: "egalitarianism is a bourgeois notice notion," communism is not this. Communism is also—I never agreed with that one—"everyone to everyone to his needs, everyone according to his..." The problem is: who decides what do you need, you or me? Immediately you have the problem of envy and so on. Let's say that somebody decides you need three cakes per week and I too. "Fuck you, I want three cakes." Not because I really need them but fuck you why would you have three and you know what I mean. There is no need which is not mediated by by other needs. So I think that all this which it can be proven (again it's in my next book) that you know that this formula "to everyone his according to his needs" and so on and so on, you know. No, these are I think explosive problems. And it's not just problems for some communist future, they explode here and now because again are we aware how strong these categories of envy, jealousy and so on are? You notice for me I use it in one of my books a mega problem. I remember some fifteen-ten years ago a group of refugees escaped from were allowed to escape from Cuba to I don't know where Florida. And they put them into a camp there and there was a fight among them, brutal with fists, some even died. Then they discovered you know what was the fight about. American authorities distributed to them how do they call these packages of orange juice. And through some pure administrative misunderstanding one group discovered that the other group got a fruit juice a little bit better quality. That is a tragedy. Conflicts are usually the really deadly conflicts are quite often (okay there are economic interest behind) but for totally superficial symbolic points. For example now why is there a tension of war between China and Japan or China and Vietnam? For some stupid small rocky islands of absolutely not even any strategic importance and so on and so on. I think we have a lot to learn about the let's call it in this sense irrationality of human of human conflicts and so on and so on. So my conclusion here is radical. For me communism is not this harmonious society if there will be where, you know, we will all be solidary, you will get that beautiful woman, I will be glad for you. Fuck it, I will not be glad for you, I want her. You know what I mean like it will explode. These are extremely serious extremely serious topics. They are not insolvable problems but I agree with you that I always was horrified by this simplistic pseudo-Freudian idea: problems emerge because of sexual inhibition so we drop the prohibitions and we will be all happy and so on. You know that’s the fundamental lesson of Freud: our unconscious is not the domain of freedom or what. You discover horrible things in your unconscious. Okay one
Thanks very much. I’m very grateful for this introduction by the author of one of my favorite books. You did that book on Hollywood cartoons, you know. I always liked cartoons and my special imagination—I wonder if somebody already did it: imagine a simple Tom and Jerry cartoon, what the cat and the mouse do to each other, you know, like, I don’t know, steamroller over the one, cutting it into pieces and so on, to shoot this with real actors, you know, just the same story as the cartoon. That would have been something. Okay. Maybe I will disappoint you, but I do feel a little bit tired of improvising on politics, on jokes, and so on. So, I hope this will not be—I know I say this every time when I begin—that this time it will be less jokes, more serious. But unfortunately, and I can say because I have it here, it will be. Today more the explanation of some introductory notions, tomorrow more about these three surpluses: surplus-value, surplus-enjoyment, and the third term, which I think is a very interesting one, surplus-knowledge—how it functions in traditional wisdom universe and then in modern science and what does this mean for capitalism. Usually, the books that I give or texts as reference are bullshit, I just list something. This time, maybe it’s good for you if you have time to look at that book which was recently, recently, half a year I think, published by Verso of one of my Slovene gang, one of younger members, Samo Tomšič, a book on "The Capitalist Unconscious: Lacan and Marx." I of course like that book, but I have some creative differences, and maybe if there will be time I will go into this later. But all of this that will happen here in, unfortunately, just these two days—I must warn you—is just a beginning, a kind of a Vorlust, to speak with Freud, forepleasure or preliminary work for the July seminar, or rather class whatever, mentioned by Esther, where I will go into this problem much more in detail. Should we take this link seriously, especially—I mean the link between Lacanian surplus-enjoyment and Marx's surplus-value? And especially, although it’s a wonderful book, you should really read it, that "Capitalist Unconscious" by Samo Tomšič, I have one problem with it. Samo Tomšič in a traditional French structuralist or Lacanian way wants to break this link between Marx’s critique of political economy and what he perceives as the Hegelian humanist logic of disalienation: that as a result of socialist revolution, alienation is overcome. He repeats the standard Lacanian point that alienation is irreducible to human being as such, and that communist revolution, overcoming of capitalism, should not be conceptualized in these terms as overcoming alienation. My reaction is: okay, but how then should it be conceptualized? And that’s where I would like to get, maybe if some of you have time at least to read diagonally this book of a friend of mine, a counter-attack because, well frankly, I don’t need, I don’t see any—you know, it’s easy to say we shouldn’t have humanist illusions, communist revolution is not disalienation, alienation is irreducible—okay, but then what does it mean then, communist revolution? And here I think Tomšič is very ambiguous because on the one hand, he proposes sometimes, he moves in the direction of a solution which I think is totally wrong: this simple transcendental solution of distinguishing the bad—the good, good, okay—a priori universal alienation, you know, to put it in Lacanian bullshit terminology (by bullshit I mean it’s already a cliché): whenever we speak, we are spoken, we are not agents of our speech, so alienation that pertains to symbolic order as such, from the specific capitalist alienation, appropriation of surplus-value. I’m always deeply suspicious when you are in this type of a problem of simply distinguishing some neutral universality from its, as it were, bad, truly alienated particular example. So I have problems here that I will try to address a little bit tomorrow. So let me begin. I’m sorry it will be boring but I try to do a kind of an old-fashioned lesson. Just one thing I want to react not against Esther but to clarify things. You were kind to mention where I already was appearing regularly in public, you know. I want to repeat this not in order to present myself as some kind of the victim but so that you really see how censorship works. Yeah, yeah, Guardian, Guardian, but did you notice that for I think now it's about two years I didn't appear in Guardian? And I must say it, and I will, I will raise this unpleasant question tomorrow there. You know, because they invited me to that stupid public debate talk, and not that I care, but precisely so that I can justify my claim. Whenever I have a short text, I send it to them. And it's ridiculous how first, two years ago, for the first half of a year, they got me an excuse for rejecting it, which was always a little bit of ridiculous. You know, I know these tricks because I am the editor of book series and I know how to get rid of the authors, you know, up-front. You know: "Oh, you are just a little bit too late," "No, you are too early, not yet time for that," or once they even tried to that on me, that favorite excuse of mine. Once I said to an author: "Your book is so important, so it's but it's ahead of its time," you know, "It's not yet the time to..." Okay, but it's not so nice when you are in a position to. And, and the same is when people ask me with, with London Review of Books why I didn't appear there for about a year and a half, I think. I—usually they were soliciting texts to me. Now I don't know what is happening there. I even don't care, I have now other connections. But I have spies, I'm an old Stalinist communist, KGB must work. And from my KGB informations it's very interesting, informants, it's a perverse link between right-wing and left-wing. Right-wingers claim I'm too crazy leftist communism, let's not do that. Left-wingers claim that now I became an open racist, that I want to kill, throw refugees out of Europe, whatever, so... so it's, and it's not a new phenomenon. You noticed how with Brexit topic, you know, you have exactly the same weird coalition of like—I will now be very—how is the Pegida jerk who is the boss called? Nigel Farage. Yes, like, you know, I can imagine Nigel Farage embracing Tariq Ali, "Oh we are nonetheless old friends," you know. And I'm—the only political hint that I will give it today: this is happening recently in France, in Greece, up to a point here. The idea is this one: radical left is losing because it left to the anti-immigrant right the topic of roots, national identity, and so on. So since global capitalism is anonymous, rootless, and so on, the only chance for the left is to regain that topic. And it's very funny how—I will not name him, but one of the advocates from Greece of this line even used the term, just since he didn't say National Socialism, he said Socialist Nationalism, you know. I find this a very risky, a very risky trend. Okay, that's another, that's another topic. More of this tomorrow if they will—I hate it so much. I thought that at that Guardian event that I will at least have my usual narcissistic time to speak for fifty minutes. No, they told me they want an active, active exchange of opinions. If there is a thing that I really hate is this. I like to talk and others listen, you know. And then maybe there can be some questions, you know, but questions in the sense of "how can you be so funny and at the same time so profound, so brilliant," you know like this type—sorry. Now enough of jokes, now comes the theory. I would like to begin with confronting Louis Althusser, because there is now a new wave of Althusserianism, very interesting phenomenon in France. What is so interesting, and you can check it up if in the latest issue of New Left Review, I'm not sure if it's still the latest, where Alberto Toscano has a very critical good review of the work of Frédéric—I think it's Frédéric, not François—Lordon, a French social theorist who, I like this hermeneutics, you know, now the kid—sorry, this is not meant ironically but literally, you know—the kid will say "da da" and then we can go into deep hermeneutics: what's the meaning of this and so on. Okay, but it's a nice kid because it's still very small, you know. I claim that kids between four and five are what Kant meant by diabolical evil. Before they are simple egotists and later, but kids between four and five are pure evil for the sake of evil. My son had an old grandmother who was barely walking, and when he was four, he pushed her down on steps. She almost died. And we asked him why, did he have any grudge on her head? He said no, it just—he felt the impulse, he liked the aesthetic vision of an old crippled lady. Okay, let's go on seriously now. No, sorry for making this narcissistic detour, but it's just good to remind you that, you know, usually the line is in East European countries, ex-communist, there is no freedom of opinion, but at least when you publish a problematic text everyone reads it, it gets a great echo. While in our countries you can say whatever you want then it's just ignored. Well no, you cannot say whatever you want. Because as I already mentioned here, I think, to give you another example, my book previous one with "Trouble in Paradise," I told you what happened, no? The original title was, was "Communism After the End of History." And I was openly told, sorry, communism cannot be used in the title of a book in a positive way. Okay, I—maybe it was too much of a compromise—then I changed it, still with a subversive edge, I think it was something like "The End of Capitalism After the End of History" or something like that. But no, communism was prohibited. And this is happening to me all the time again and again. Like, I have whole stories to tell about my German experiences, where for example in my—it's rather stupid one, I want to disown it—the "Jokes" book, no? Three, four jokes were censored there. In my previous book, what I say about Zionism as a form of anti-semitism, which I think it's a crucial political insight. It's not some extravagant postmodern joke. If you want to understand the dynamics of what goes on, the key symptomatic point are figures like some American religious fundamentalists and some crazy men like Breivik, you know, the Norwegian hero and so on. It's as already said here, it's very interesting to read Breivik, because he is at the same time absolutely anti-semitic with regard to the West. He says openly there are too many Jews, he says in Europe the situation is better because Hitler took care of that, but United Kingdom and America they have a problem with this. But paradoxically in Middle East he totally supports Israel. He claims we should support Israel, it's the last fortress bastion against Islamization. And I noticed then that the American fundamentalist support for Israel—all these Pat Robertson and so on—they have the same logic. In United States they are anti-semitic, out there they support Zionism. So my answer to Netanyahu, who after the last bombings—small, not serious, not these big terrorist attacks of Jews, I don't know where it happened, Marseille or where—he invited the Jews to go to Israel. Well wonderful, do you know that my French told me that all French anti-semites said "Oh perfect," supported him fully. And I think this is what is false from the very beginning in this love of Israel by Europeans. The idea is yes, we did something horrible to Jews, but let the other pay the price for it, you know, go there. And this is I think, are we aware, the very dangerous alliance? Are we aware what is happening now in the Middle East? I don't know, I'm too stupid, what the consequences will be, but if you follow the news you can see that a totally new axis is forming. The three, maybe four main members are Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia more or less openly collaborating. Now they bribed Egypt will join it and so on. I mean forget about this eternal Arab-Israeli conflict, the whole scene is changing. But enough of that. Finally I will begin and from now please don't be too bored. I would like to begin with Althusser. The only justification is with the big hope that Lordon, who advocates this as it were return to roots, it's interesting his theoretical background: it's Spinozist, Spinozean. He claims that modern European left, and his target are here people like Balibar in France but especially, who is the big guy my god, Habermas in Germany and also Ulrich Beck, that they are these abstract rootless European intellectuals, you know, no particular links. Whenever you identify with your particular identity you are a proto-fascist already and so on. This rejection of every sense of ethnic belonging as dangerous, celebrating rootlessness. At this point I agree with Lordon, how fake this rootlessness is. Because did you notice how these very people who celebrate their not-belonging, their nomadic nature, are as a rule, have as a rule an extremely strong sense of belonging to their own intellectual elite, which is usually of course not ethnically identified? But I haven't seen people who are—I mean I've met especially in the United States so many ultra-leftists, but when by mistake some ordinary guy comes and doesn't behave properly at a table, you know, poor guy. Like, okay, I will tell two names. Why are friends so that you can talk against them behind their back, you know. I was once sitting in LA with Fred Jameson and Perry Anderson. And then there was a student there to help them, and after the student left, my god, I was so sad that I didn't have a recording machine, you know, to record the conversation between Perry Anderson and Fred Jameson. "That idiot, he doesn't even know which year of Bordeaux is the best. He thought it's '82 but not it's '81" and so on, you know. It was ultra, ultra-elitism. And my point is this one: how all this myth of a new proletariat is emerging, nomadic proletariat, they don’t have a home, they wander around. But isn’t there something so obscene in this, to even dare to compare their nomadic position, which is an extremely over-privileged nomadic position of people who don’t even move from one part of the world to the another part of the world if it’s not business class at least, no, dare to compare this with pure refugees who, my god, they are not enjoying their nomadic existence, they are desperately seeking for, searching for a new home, for a new belonging and so on. So, you know, it’s the same as Gayatri Spivak used this years ago, when she said that this abstract celebration of nomadic existence is the same as claiming that a rich fat American lady who is dieting trying to lose some weight and a poor, I don’t know, woman starving in Ethiopia or Somalia, basically are doing the same thing, no? Yeah, in some sense they are, but my god, it’s an obscenity to put them into the same category. So again, while he has some point to make, I nonetheless think that this Lordon’s idea that we should accept that this Spinozean point of imitatio affecti, identification through affects, that all social identities are based on some shared affects, values and so on, and that the left should accept this logic—for theoretical reasons I will not go into them today, I don't accept this. So again, Althusser also as a Spinozean follows this way, so let me begin with Althusser. Now serious theory. Two books, two manuscripts from his last years: "Initiation to the Philosophy for Non-Philosophers" from '76 and "Being a Marxist in Philosophy" from '78. There Althusser outlines a specific theory of philosophy which—that's what makes it so interesting—for a couple of years he advocated a notion of philosophy which overlaps neither with his early, let's call it theoreticist concept of philosophy (you know in "Pour Marx" and "For Marx" and "Reading Capital," his idea is that philosophy is a theory of theoretical practice establishing the conditions epistemological and so on of science), nor with his later notion of philosophy as class struggle in theory. It's a kind of a mediator between the two. So what does Althusser claim? It's an interesting theory. Althusser's starting point is the omnipresence of ideology, of ideological abstractions which always structure our approach to everyday life. This omnipresent ideology, the air we breathe, has two levels: the spontaneous everyday texture of implicit meanings, and the organized religion or mythology, it's a systematic structure of these meanings. That's a universal structure. We all live in this type of ideology. Then according to Althusser, in ancient Greece, something new and unexpected happens. I will leave here aside the fact that Althusser is here absolutely brutally opening and in an open way Eurocentrist. Even much more than I'm usually accused of being. For Althusser, the rise of science in the guise of mathematics. That's the Greek miracle. Now he is not an idiot, he knows all the stories about Indians inventing zero and all that stuff. But according to Althusser, mathematics as science deals with pure abstract numbers, deprived of all mythic reference. Mathematics is a game of axioms and rules in which no cosmic meaning resonates. There are no sacred, lucky or damned numbers. And I don't know enough about history, maybe this is up to a point true, that in traditional mathematics no matter how developed it was, you always have this mythic background of cosmic meanings resonating in it. One is male, two is female or whatever, then you have sacred numbers like ten which is one, two and three and four and all that. But precisely as such for Althusser, because you just have numbers, the mythic background, cosmic background is suspended. Mathematics is subversive. It threatens the universe of cosmic meaning, its homogeneity and stability. I found something attractive in this thesis. You know why? Because as a Hegelian, I always like it when someone praises abstraction or subtraction as subversive. You know, abstraction, like you say we I limit myself to this, I erase all the background, can be maybe the greatest revolutionary act. So the true break, according to Althusser, happens here. Between not between mythic ideology, premodern, and philosophy, but between the mythic universe and science. So science, again early Greek mathematics as the first example of science, we just deal with numbers and none of that bullshit: one, two, male-female, whatever then you get on, just meaningless pure numbers. This is a threat to ideology. Ideology in this most basic sense of the universe of meaning, of cosmic meaning in which we dwell. And a very nice thesis: the function of philosophy is precisely to contain this threat. How? Formally philosophy also breaks with the mythic universe. It obeys the rules of science. From the very beginning, philosophy does not refer to what a goddess tells you or poetic narrative but it’s rational argumentation, thinking in abstract conceptual terms. But the function of reasoning in philosophy is to reinscribe scientific procedure into the religious universe of cosmic meaning. To put it in pseudo-Hegelian terms, if science is a negation of religion, philosophy is a negation of negation. It reasserts religious meaning within the space of rational argumentation. Alberto Toscano, in "Detour of Abstraction," a nice essay on Althusser in one of the last issues of Diacritics, describes this very nicely propos Plato. So here is a quote from Toscano: "All of Plato (the theory of ideas, the opposition of knowledge and opinion and so on) is based on the break that the first science represents, mathematics. In a sense this is because all of Plato is an attempt to control and in a way to sublate (in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung) this break. In a profoundly inventive but also profoundly reactive dialectic, philosophy in its idealist-Platonist matrix is a reactive invention, the displacement of the ideological function of religion onto the plane of pure abstract rationality. It draws from science its form, the abstraction of its categories and demonstrative reasoning as a pure reasoning directly carried out on abstract objects. But its function is an ideological one, a mandate and a service delegated explicitly or otherwise by the dominant class." Here is of course the link to Althusser's later definition of philosophy as class struggle in theory. His idea, Althusser's, is that pure science, precisely in its abstraction, which again annihilates this cosmic universe of meaning, is revolutionary, objectively on the side of those oppressed and so on, and that from the very beginning, the function of philosophy is to reoccupy this terrain. So to reassert the all-encompassing religious worldview. And again, this is done in order to guarantee the hegemony of the ruling class ideology. There is some truth in this. All great philosophers after Plato repeat this gesture of containment. From Descartes who is the great thinker of natural mechanistic sciences, but at the same time through his theory of res extensa/res cogitans, he limits this mechanical rational reasoning to nature and reserves a space for God or for the spiritual domain. Kant does the same. On the one hand, as Lacan and others have long ago noted, Kant’s problem is to elaborate a philosophy at the level of Newtonian physics. But the whole problem of Kant is how to—and that’s the notion of Kant’s critique, not critique in the sense of rejection, but critique in the sense of determining the limited domain where science is valid and of course then guaranteeing a separate domain where faith, morality and so on have their own place. Kant at some point typically openly says that I had to limit the scope of knowledge to sustain the the space of faith. I think something similar are doing even today's neo-Kantian theorists of communication. The great fear of Habermas for example is how to limit the constraint of contemporary natural sciences. So the idea is yeah, these sciences are a great thing, they're doing wonder, biogenetics explaining everything, but there is a domain which is always already presupposed by these sciences and which they cannot account for. So you have this domain of discursive ethics which is always already here when you reason scientifically, so you cannot ground it in scientist. Now Althusser's point is that against this predominant idealist form of philosophy (for Althusser, these are Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel), Althusser asserts then this subterranean tradition of materialist counter-philosophy: from early Greek materialists and Epicureans who assert the material world of contingent encounters, through Spinoza, and even very interesting the late Althusser even puts in this same materialist space Heidegger as theory of event, event as contingent event of truth. Again, there is something in this. For example, isn't one of the great episodes in this struggle Cantor's profoundly materialist reconceptualization of the mathematical concept of infinite? Cantor's basic premise is the multiplicity of infinities, which cannot be totalized by or into an all-encompassing one. The great materialist breakthrough of Cantor concerns the status of infinite numbers. Prior to Cantor, the infinite was linked to one, the conceptual form of God in religion and metaphysics, while with Cantor the infinite enters the domain of the multiple. It implies the actual existence of infinite multiplicities as well as the infinite number of different infinities. So again, I think here in Althusserian way we can explain very nicely why—I don't know if you want this wonderful but significant not irrelevant personal anecdote—Cantor was a devout Catholic and he suspect that he is doing something deeply, deeply sinful by doing this. So he even I don't know what, wrote a letter to Pope, was not sure, was totally desperate. And he was right to be desperate because the what he does to infinity is, you know, till Cantor infinity was a vague metaphysical notion, mystical one God. With Cantor again, mathematics—sorry, science reappropriates infinity. Infinity is no longer an obscurantist mystical notion like "Oh my god I had that experience, it went beyond all limits, I was one with God," no, it becomes this type of notion. It sounds nice, this Althusser's notion. Now I want to—I hate this term but I will use it—deconstruct it. First, is Platonism really a reaction to the subversive abstraction of mathematical sciences? I think I tend to agree much more here to the theory proposed by Barbara Cassin, a contemporary French philosopher who is engaged in an internal friendly dialogue with Alain Badiou and claiming that—and it’s also clear from the text—that the true partner in dialogue for Plato, the other that he tries to contain, is are Sophists, Sophist philosophers, not so much early materialists as Sophists. Point two: the ideological recuperation of mathematics began already before Plato with Pythagoreans. I think Pythagoreans are the original idealists. Because what Pythagoreans did is they desperately tried to, how should I put it, respiritualize, re-theologize mathematics. You know, numbers become bearers of cosmic harmony, cosmic meaning and so on and so on. So the dialogue between Badiou and Barbara Cassin can be best characterized as the new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and Sophists: the Platonist Badiou against Cassin’s insistence on the irreducibility of the Sophistic rupture. Cassin’s theory is here a very precise one: what happens with sophism, Gorgias and so on, is that speech, argumentation loses its roots in reality. The ultimate dimension of speech is no longer some reference to how things really are, but the logic of rhetoric, argumentation, how to convince people and so on and so on and basically it’s playing games. There is no external truth, the way things really are, by means of which we can ultimately measure the truth of our statements. And the whole problem of Plato is precisely how to contain not so much mathematics, it's it's precisely how to contain this wild freedom of speech where you can just use it in a playful way, poetry or sophism, playing games and so on, how to root speech in truth or in external reality and so on. And Plato effectively uses all possible strategies here. For example, in his seminar, sorry seminar, in his dialogue Cratylus, you know, he even tries to to contain the arbitrariness of language by way of a totally artificial crazy etymology, where he tries to demonstrate how all words have a deeper literal meaning which tells what they really are, like he is I think the origin of this ale-theia, theia is theos, that truth is divine, it’s a wandering of gods and so on. And so again one can say that philosophy doesn't begin only with materialists, so-called Ionian materialists, but also with Sophists and that the problem of Plato is how to contain this Sophist threat. And what is so interesting in Plato (this gives some credence to Althusser's notion of philosophy as secularized, if you want, rationalized mythology) that Plato fails again and again. His most Sophist dialogue is Parmenides, where you have that famous place of place of hypothesis, it's pure Sophistic game, all possible argumentation, and then that's the zero point of Plato. In all his later dialogues, he tries to define in a precise unambiguous way—sorry, define, determine the line of distinction between empty Sophistic games and true philosophy. And it can be shown that not only he fails again and again, but that when he tries to formulate a decision, he always needs to return to pre-pre-philosophical mythology, some stupid story about gods or whatever. Like, he cannot, he cannot do it. So, and I think that the ultimate philosopher Hegel is in this sense a Sophist. Not in the usual sense of Bertrand Russell of those like Hegel is just bluffing playing games, but Hegel accepts the basic premise of Sophists that the truth of language, of what your statement, cannot be decided by external comparison with reality. That the only way to enact a progress in truth is an immanent way. You claim something—the way Hegel moves from one plane to another in a dialectical progress is not by looking at things and saying no, no, no, it's not like that, but it's comparing a statement as it were with itself to demonstrate that it's immanently inconsistent. So that's the first problem with Althusser. It's in his totally simplified résumé, résumé which is: mythic universe, then the first scientific revolution, mathematics, and then philosophical reaction, idealist. He doesn't mention the two big mega examples that complicate it and who should have known about them: Sophists and on the other hand so-called Ionian pre-Socratic materialists, which are a story on themselves. But now I wonder if you will agree with me here. I have another strong criticism of Althusser here. The way Althusser relates to philosophy I think it's a ridiculous example of the tension, in Lacanian terms, between enunciated content, what you are claiming, and the position of enunciation, in the sense of how you are claiming it. I claim that Althusser claims something in his great thesis on philosophy, but his very procedure of elaborating this claim is in a radical contradiction with what he is claiming. At the level of content what Althusser is claiming: he is all modesty. Althusser strongly opposes the idealist philosophical pretension to grasp the structure of the entire universe, to know it all, to render the absolute truth. Against this idealist pretension, Althusser, the later Althusser of the so-called philosophy of encounter, contingency and so on, he praises accepting limits, being open to contingent encounters and so on, which characterizes according to Althusser the materialist undercurrent: from Epicurus through Spinoza up to Heidegger. And although you know here I have a first problem: my god, Spinoza as a modest philosopher. Wait a minute. Can you imagine a philosopher who is at the level of how he proceeds a more in a naive sense arrogant philosopher? Spinoza begins with extremely strong claims about substance, structure of the absolute and so on and so on. So here is again no, sorry, this is Althusser at his worst, I claim. Here I will quote to you Althusser's fight against idealism. Quote: "Idealist philosophers speak for everyone and in everyone's stead. They think in fact that they are in possession of the truth about everything. Materialist philosophers are much less talkative. They know how to shut up and listen to people. They do not think that they are private to the truth about everything. They know that they can become philosophers only gradually, modestly, and that their philosophy will come to them from outside. So they shut up and listen." Why do I find this problematic? What Althusser effectively does when talking about philosophy, in what he says we can I think easily discern the exact opposite of what he characterizes as a materialist approach. Althusser's statements about philosophy, idealism wants to explain everything, they know it all and so on, are brutally simplified universal statements which pretend to define the universal key features of philosophy with no modest provisos. Philosophy as such is class struggle in theory. The eternal battle of the two lines: idealism and materialism. It functions as an empty repetition of the line of demarcation, idealism-materialism, which produces nothing new and so on and so on. In short, Althusser acts as a supreme judge imposing his measure onto the wealth of philosophies. No wonder then that Althusser is so adamantly anti-Hegelian. Althusser’s opposite is here Hegel who may appear, as to what he says, extremely arrogant: absolute knowledge and so on and so on. But I claim Hegel’s actual approach is much more modest. Hegel doesn’t say I know the absolute truth. Hegel just says all those who claim that they know absolute truth are wrong. And we will systematically go through all of them, demonstrating how they are wrong, very modestly measuring their thoughts with the implications, just the implications of these thoughts. And when at the end of Hegel’s philosophy you reach the absolute, the absolute is just the complete path through the series of errors. There is no absolute outside. The extreme case of this Althusser's arrogance is his treatment of digitalization, computerization of our lives. In the worst idealist manner, Althusser brutally reduces today's digitalization to technocratic idealism. His idea is that when bourgeoisie loses its ability to generate idealist philosophical systems, it begins to rely on the apparently non-ideological automatism of computers and technocrats. Sounds nice, but naive. I think you see, here we have precisely the idealist side of Althusser. Whatever you think about digitalization, computerization and so on, isn't it clear that digitalization/computerization are a big site of, let's call it naively, class struggle today: who will dominate it, the state, private companies, will it become... so the least you can say that it's that it cannot be reduced just to a new ideological trick by bourgeoisie, but it's the site, it's the site of the battle. I think that Althusser totally, I mean as we can say repeating Althusser's word, "shut up and listen" before making this flat universal statement, digitalization is just a tool of bourgeois ideology to retain its rule after it’s no longer—no longer able to generate a proper ideology. Wouldn't it be good for Althusser to shut up and listen here a little bit? You see what I'm aiming at? Althusser’s modesty, no materialists are modest, just particular statements, it's totally belied by his procedure, by how he acts. What he effectively does is a series of extremely dogmatic, arrogant statements. All of history is a struggle between idealism, material—I’m not saying that this is maybe not true, I’m just saying that the way he speaks totally contradicts the content of what he is claiming. He claims for a modest approach, we don't know it, only idealists are the idiots who think they know everything, we should be modest. But again when he provides his definitions of philosophy and so on, Althusser himself is definitely not, is definitely not modest. So again, I want now further to complicate things which will gradually bring us to capitalism. For Althusser, he still celebrates science as progressive somehow. Another of his dogmatic presuppositions—I'm not saying it's not true, I'm just saying that it's a dogmatic axiom—that science as such is on the side of the oppressed. And for science to be used in the service of, in the class struggle of those in power, it has to be mystified, respiritualized and so on. Now there is something in this thesis, of course. For example, I claim that—and I never thought there is something progressive in it—that if you look at today's popular interpretations of quantum physics, it's a gigantic attempt to respiritualize them, you know, all this Tao of quantum physics, you discover some oriental wisdom or whatever in it. It does work in that way. The problem is just this one: is it as simple as that as Althusser claims? That is to say, is it as simple as that that capitalism or class societies as such may use sciences in order to assert their predominance, but they always at the same time mystify sciences? So that one way to fight the class struggle is simply to fully follow the potential of sciences, to demystify these attempts to re-respiritualize sciences. Here now I am returning—no, returning, I never was there, okay—for the first time turning to that book published by Verso half a year ago, Samo Tomšič's "The Capitalist Unconscious," where (but this is a particular element of the book) where he claims, it's an interesting thesis, his thesis is that although capitalism in a way stands for modernity—and I agree here with him because basically Fredric Jameson is saying the same, that when people speak about modernization it's basically what they mean is capitalism, and that when third-world countries are searching for an alternate modernity it means let's do capitalism with another way, what is happening in China now it's clearly an alternate modernity which as we can see clearly in no way it really avoids us to, sorry, enables us to avoid the immanent antagonisms of capitalism. Okay. So here is a quote from this book by Tomšič: "Capitalism needs to be thought as the restoration of premodernity within modernity, a counter-revolution that neutralizes the emancipatory political potentials of scientific revolution." End of quote. On the one hand it's true, I agree, capitalism is intimately linked to the rise of modern science. Even, and I we will return later to this, referring to Lacan who had this but I'm thankful to Tomšič to focus attention on this, that what happens already with Descartes, it's a wonderful parallel, and with modern science is that the logic of of surplus-value or surplus-enjoyment is also operative in science. Modern science, the knowledge in modern science is by definition a surplus-knowledge caught in exactly the same dynamics as the capitalist dynamics. In the same way as in capitalism, the system in order to reproduce itself has to expand, revolutionize itself all the time. We have the same with modern science. Modern science by definition never finished. It's an unending process of self-revolutionizing. Okay, but the thesis of of Tomšič and already of some others to whom he is relying is that although capitalism is intimately linked to the rise of modern science—and there is a wonderful thesis here that he refers to Tomšič, namely that what happens with early modern science is something that I like this term, something like a primordial accumulation of knowledge in exact parallel to primordial accumulation of capital with the rise of modern science. But nonetheless the thesis is this one: that although capitalism relies on science—I mean the entire capitalist organization from the very beginning of production relies on mechanic sciences, always new sciences today digital sciences and so on—the ideological political and economic organization of capitalism (liberal egotist individuals pursuing their interests, their messy interaction which secretly is regulated by the big other of the market) signals a return to premodern universe. That's a nice thesis although I don't fully agree with it: that again on the one hand silence—sorry, capitalism is modern science, but modern science again reinscribed into ideological political and economic organization which remains premodern. This idea of invisible hand of market, secret harmony through individual agents and so on and so on, it's a return to premodern universe. So Tomšič proposes here, so it seems, a new version of Habermas's idea of modernity as an unfinished project. Communism—what his definition of communism, Tomšič's, is is that communism will emerge when the logic of modern science will be extended also to political domain. Quote: "Only then will politics be consistently in sync with modern science and inhabit the same universe." So again it's a thesis which I nonetheless find very problematic although it sounds nice: that again capitalism is a paradox of science, explosive development of science, but socially exactly in the same way as Plato pushed for mathematics but reinscribed it in a cosmic vision of cosmos as harmonious totality with the supreme good and so on, at a different secularized level of course something similar happens in capitalism. Now my first counterpoint is: was Kant's goal not to do exactly this? To elaborate an ethico-political edifice that would be at the level of modern science. It's clear that, you know, Kant's practical reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment are part of the same project as Critique of Pure Reason. It is: we have now a fundamental fact of modern lives, Newtonian physics, which means this medieval harmonious world where phenomena mirror in each other, where there is a cosmic meaning, the deeper harmony between microcosm, macrocosm—that's over. And Kant's problem is: what does this mean for ethics? Because we no longer can have the ethics of the supreme good referring to some top of highest point of reality and so on. The point is: did Kant effectively achieve this or is his philosophical edifice a compromise? As I already pointed out, Kant openly claims that his goal is to limit knowledge in order to make space for belief. And I claim the modern neo-Kantians, Habermasians, are doing the same when they exempt intersubjectivity from the domain of objective science. The great fear of Habermas for example is how to limit the constraint of contemporary natural sciences. So the idea is yeah, these sciences are a great thing, they're doing wonder, biogenetics explaining everything, but there is a domain which is always already presupposed by these sciences and which they cannot account for. So you have this domain of discursive ethics which is always already here when you reason scientifically, so you cannot ground it in scientist. So the problem for me is: which then would be the ethico-political social organization that would no longer be premodern, that would fully fit modern science? Kant, the Kantian or Habermasian version I claim (cannot prove it now) doesn't work. We have a radical attempt which maintains which wants to universal the results of positive science, which is the one that I often mention, the radical objectivism of brain scientist like Patricia and Paul Churchland. Why are they of such an interest? Because the predominant notion of modern cognitive scientist is a kind of early Althusserian one. Sciences are telling us one thing, but in our everyday life the way we are biologically structured, we have to—we cannot escape pre-scientific naive illusions. Like, to put it in very naive terms: although we know (if we know, that's another question, but let's accept it), even if we know what science is telling us, that there is no free will, we are neuronal automata, you know, all those proofs by Benjamin Libet although he doesn't interpret it this way, that when we make an arbitrary conscious decision, our brains know it already before even we become aware of it. In other words, our free choice is just—when we think we make an arbitrary free choice, our consciousness just registers something that was already decided at objective neuronal processes. The big problem here (I developed it already this years ago here, just to remind you), the big problem here is: is this irreducible? In the sense that we have that these illusions let no matter how much I know I'm just an automaton, but I experience my activity as a free agent. Now I decide to do this, if I do something wrong, I'm responsible and so on and so on. Is this gap irreducible? I almost admire philosophers of science, there are two main references here, who claim: no, we can make go further. Patricia and Paul Churchland claim that they can, it is possible to imagine a society which would not just, how should I put it, admit theoretically in scientifically that we are not free individuals, but that it would draw consequences for our daily life. That it would eliminate from our basic self-experience notions like freedom, personal responsibility and so on. And they try to prove (here things get for me a little bit more problematic) that for me, that the results will not would not have been ethically catastrophic, but much more human and modest. Like, we would not simply condemn people to death or castigate them, because we would be well aware that they were not responsible for it and so on and so on. I claim this position is false. But okay, I cannot give you the entire line, but my basic argument is that the way here I'm a Habermasian, the way they argue, they still argue, you know, they still argue as free partners in rational argumentation and so on. The way they write their books doesn't follow that. I'm much closer to the position of Thomas Metzinger, the German neuroscientist who is a Buddhist. His idea is that the only point at which our personal self-experience really fits the results of cognitive sciences is this Buddhist overcoming the feeling of the self. You know, where we have thoughts without a thinker and so on. That this extreme position makes it. But I, I this reading nonetheless, so here is for me again the problem of Tomšič. It's nice to say: "only in communism science will come to its own." But he at least (you can correct me if you find something) but at least I don't find it, namely, in what sense is science—what would have this meant? To expand the logic of science also to ethico-political life without seeking a support in in tradition. Now the—we have one way out of this, which is the traditional Heideggerian or not even Heideggerian hermeneutic way, which would mean to claim that there is no way out. We have to accept that a certain hermeneutic horizon of understanding, which cannot be scientifically grounded itself, is always already here so that science can never really account for the possibility of itself. In order to have this image of reality as regulated by biological, neuronal whatever laws, you already have to approach nature in a certain way: precisely as an objective natural process, not as a universe of meanings. Plus, you have to automatically accept the level of free argumentation which itself is already what is called deontic logic. When you argue, you argue who is right, who is wrong and so on, so you have a so-called deontic dimension, dimension of value, of truth in the ethical sense, like is this what you are doing right and so on, which again cannot be accounted for in objective processes. So what to do here? I claim that we should look closely—and this is where Tomšič I think neglects things a little bit—in what is for Lacan modern science. And we will see that Lacan's relationship to modern science is much more ambiguous. For Lacan, modern science is defined by two foreclosures which are connected: the foreclosure of subject and the foreclosure of truth as cause. It sounds artificial, complicated, but it's simple and can be explained easily. The foreclosure of subject means that a scientific text or argumentation is always enunciated from a desubjectivized empty location. It allows for no reference to its subject of enunciation. You know, you say you enunciate a scientific law. It's totally meaningless or even mystifying when you say "I claim that." Okay, you can claim this, but this is irrelevant. This is why incidentally I hate those popular introductions into science where, you know, they mix description of what went on (I hate that) with this personal touch. Like: "In Princeton it was early spring, Professor blah blah walked along the grass, he met some students," fuck yeah, I don't care, you know what I mean. So again, scientific truth must be something which can be repeatedly demonstrated. Anyone can easily see it and say it. A scientific truth should in no way be affected by its place of enunciation. No, the moment you say "but you have to feel it, you have to experience it," it's no longer science. Science means precisely what—ah, this accounts for the second paradoxical thesis of Lacan, that Cartesian subject is the subjects of modern science. Namely, imagine modern science. You just say "this is the law that" and Lacan’s thesis is that the one who enunciates this general scientific statement, it’s precisely the Cartesian cogito. Because it’s not a concrete subject part of a certain culture (although, okay, we can now play this historicist game: "yes, in reality it is"), but the ideal of objective sciences is that it’s an empty X. Anyone, an empty subject who is its agent. And this precisely again is the abstract Cartesian subject, cogito. A vanishing punctuality deprived of all its properties. And I claim this same feature also accounts for the foreclosure (not in the commercial sense but more like radical exclusion, rejection in the Freudian sense of Verwerfung) of truth as cause. What is for Lacan *la vérité* (truth as cause)? When I commit a slip of tongue and say something other than what I wanted to say, and this other message—message tells the truth about me that I'm usually not ready to recognize—then one can say that in my slips the truth itself spoke, subverting what I wanted to say. There is truth, the truth about my desire, in such slips even if they contain factual inexactitude. Say an extremely stupid simple example: when the moderator of a debate, instead of saying "I am thereby opening the session," when he or she says "I am thereby closing the session," he obviously indicates that he is bored and he considers the debate worthless. So the truth of my subjective position is the cause of such slips. When it operates, the subject is directly inscribed into its speech, disturbing the smooth flow of objective knowledge. You see the point: you are reporting on something objectively, truth as a cause intervenes and there you as subject are inscribed when something—not your subjective intentionality, but precisely let’s say your unconscious or subconscious, half-conscious intention—disturbs the flow of objective, of objective knowledge. You know where you can find a nice example of this? I—oh my god this is so embarrassing, but it's not me, it's a friend of mine, am I'm not lying, that happened to him. His wife was cheating him. And his wife told him this. And my friend got into total panic. And he was right. Because he said that if my wife is just cheating me, that's okay. But why is she telling me this? He was quite fully justified in focusing not of does she really cheat me or not, but why is she telling me? What is the what Freud called *Lustgewinn*, the the the surplus-pleasure? Or even more simply, aim, strategic aim. Like, okay, you are telling me this, it's painful, but what's really painful is that I don't know why are you telling me this. Is—what's the message? That you want to abandon—you know, when I tell you—it's the same as that old story that I like to use, you know, always. This is the gap that Lacan is insisting once I used it a couple of times in my book. In academia, I don't know if it's here the same but in United States where you have this stupid politically correct rules of politeness and so on, let's say I one of you I would approach me after this talk and stupid narcissist as I am I asked you "did you like my class?" and of course you think it's shit, but in American academia the coded way to say this is "it was interesting." "It was interesting" means a polite way to say it was stupid boring shit, you know. But you know what’s the catch? The catch is again: why are you saying this? Because I will have the full right to ask my friend: if you are really—if you really think that it was interesting, why are then telling me that it was interesting? You know. Or then let’s say that my friend tells me it was total shit. Then I also have the right to tell him: if you think just that it was boring and shit, why didn’t you simply tell me that it was interesting? And I would have gotten the point. It must—you know, when I tell you or you to me "it was shit" instead of "it was interesting," it means that I mean something more. Not just that it was shit, but that I hate you, you are whatever... it’s something more. So this excessive dimension of truth is where subjectivity is inscribed. And this dimension is is excluded from—is precluded, excluded from language. How then, back to Lacan, can Lacan—ah, another thing I wanted to explain to you propos of this—okay we will return to this later, namely this structure of surplus-knowledge, of excess of knowledge and how it functions is crucial. But later to this. Now I just, let's see where we are. Oh perfect, we have time. So let's go on. How can Lacan claim that the subject of psychoanalysis, the divided subject, the subject traversed by negativity, is the subject of modern science? You will nonetheless say, but didn't I just prove that they're precisely different? That the subject of modern science is a totally abstract empty subject, this empty point which announces anonymous statements like, I don't know, scientific laws. While in the subject of psychoanalysis, this subjective negativity, resistance or whatsoever, re-re-emerges. Ah, Lacan has a nice point here. Modern science—that’s crucial for Lacan as I already indicated with my reference to mathematics—modern science breaks with the traditional universe held together by a deeper meaning, like a harmony of cosmic principles and so on and so on. You know, the traditional universe, it’s a universe of some hierarchic ordered whole, multiplicity of hierarchically ordered spheres, a whole in which everything serves a higher purpose and so on and so on. It’s the Aristotelian universe. So when Aristotelians talk about reason, they mean this. In this sense Aristotelians and many modern Catholics are Aristotelian, are quite justified to claim that they are the defenders of reason and that modern science is irrational. It is irrational in the sense that modern—the necessity of modern science is a meaningless, which means contingent necessity. In a traditional universe, when you say I don't know what it is, how the apple falls down, the Newton's formula, it's not just that, it's not just "oh it's like that." As the French say, "c'est comme ça." It has to have some deeper meaning and so on in ultimate hierarchy and so on. While the whole point of modern science, Newtonian physics or even more later, Darwin's theory on of evolution and so on, is that it's an irrational universe. Irrational in the sense that there is no deeper reason, meaning in natural laws. They are contingent, they are just what they are. Here we can find (I don't have to develop this), here is the big difference between Freud and Jung. Jung with his archetypes and so on effectively does what Freud is often accused by his stupid critics: namely that psychoanalysis is really a return to premodern dream interpretation, deeper meanings and so on. Jung does this. You know, you have deeper spiritual processes, Yin-Yang, archetypes and so on. With Freud, you don't have this. The universe of the Freudian unconscious is totally—a totally contingent universe. What you find as totally—are totally contingent traumas. You know, when Jung interprets a pathology, it finds some mythic reference, "Oh that primordial archetype is reactivated here." Freudian universe is totally open and contingent. It's: okay, maybe you when you were young, you were traumatized, raped, you witnessed something horrid, then due to some totally contingent series of later experiences or symbolic process, some of these traumas were reactivated and so on. But there is no deeper meaning in it. It's all just one big one big contingent way. So let me go—sorry, I want to make two more crucial points here, yes. First: so what happens in modern science? Here is a nice quote from Lacan: "I would—I would call the state of knowledge before Descartes pre-accumulative. With Descartes, knowledge, scientific knowledge is constituted on the mode of production of knowledge, just as an essential stage of our structure that one calls social, but is in fact metaphysical and which is called capitalism is accumulation of capital. The relation of the Cartesian subject to this being, which is affirmed in it, is founded on the accumulation of knowledge. After Descartes, knowledge is what serves to make knowledge grow." End of quote. If then the moment of Descartes stands for the primordial accumulation of knowledge, one should immediately raise the question: accumulated from where? Not from ancient traditions, the new capitalist master rather appropriates knowledge from workers' artisanal savoir-faire and integrates it into science. Ancient wisdoms and teachings transferred to the initiated belong to masters and priests to whom operational expert knowledge appears as too low to care about. Better left to the subordinated, to their servants, slaves. While capitalists take expert knowledge from their servants or workers. To put it in another way: master’s wisdom is repetitive. It functions as a fidelity to established tradition. If a revolution occurs, it has to appear as a return to true origins, as in Protestantism. In contrast to it, modern science science is split into (in Lacanian terms) university and hysteria. You know, modern science is not just university knowledge that can be eternally reproduced. It has to pass through, again and again, through hystericization. In the sense of pushing towards a new knowledge and so on and so on. And it's interesting to (here I will not have time today because I want to make another important point), to make two maybe with this I will conclude the first part (oh we have time, perfect) to two further points. So the idea is the three moments of surplus and their parallel: the capitalist notion of surplus-value, the the psychoanalytic notion of surplus-enjoyment, and the scientific notion of surplus-knowledge. The first thing to develop here is to emphasize here is that in psychoanalysis, surplus-enjoyment is not what comes at the end as surplus excess, you know like "we just play, we have a little bit of pleasure," sorry for these obscenities, "I put the finger there, she squeezed it" or whatever, "but then the big orgasm surplus." No, no, no, no. Surplus is precisely the surplus that you get from apparent obstacles and so on, from the—you know, is the surplus of the form always. You do something to profit. That's the simple profit. What Freud calls *Lustgewinn* is done by the form of the approach itself. For example, sorry for being vulgar, but I will leave the elements—I will leave the elements anonymous here. For example, two persons want to have sex. If they simply lay down and do it, okay, it is just what it is, it's stupid. But you introduce some obstacles: "you have to write a poem to me if you want to," and then further... you know so that you complicate the path, this the very complication surplus is—or what Freud calls *Lustgewinn* is basically surplus generated by the obstacle itself. Like, you want something, but if you complicate the way to get that, you get a surplus. And this is—I wonder how this will function today. I want to talk if they will give me time maybe at [unintelligible]—no, sorry wrong name—at, you know that the last day on Wednesday I think, I appear at Libyan School of Economics, you know, LSE. I know that now two, three years have passed, but I think it's still Libyan School of Economics. And I want to develop this there as it’s a very intriguing phenomenon, I think it’s very interesting that it’s happening today ideologically. We really live in crazy times. On the one hand, what is happening with sexual difference today? On the one hand, sexual difference is—my god, we have a whole worldwide movement of reasserting sexual difference as the key to social stability. It’s not just Boko Haram. Boko Haram is the extreme. You know that idea, you know what Boko Haram means? If you translate it into descriptive terms: "no Western education for women." Just think about the paradox of it. The society is in crisis and the idea is that the key to resolve social crisis is to keep women at their proper place, to reassert fixed sexual difference. Now you will say if you are a racist (I'm not here at least), you will say: "Oh those stupid niggers there in the middle of Africa." Yeah, yeah, these niggers are everywhere. Another big nigger here is Putin, and yet a third nigger are American Christian fundamentalists, and fourth niggers are in my own country Slovenia. It's interesting how even in my shitty country now, the church is obsessed by the fact that—they have a wonderful theory, I almost like it—that in the first wave communists tried to take power (20th century). Then they discovered that morality as prescribed in the Bible is too strong. So they have to wait a little bit with economic power and they first have to destroy social fabric from within. And the main agent, poison, is gender theory. It's incredible. With conservatives in post-communist Eastern Europe, gender theory appears more and more as the main tool. It's all part of a communist plot, you know. And for those crazy right-wingers even refugees, it's all part of a communist plot to destroy Europe. But what’s so interesting in this—I mean a story I know I repeated here already. Do you remember a couple of years ago when that disgusting Austrian man dressed as a lady—as a—as a lady—a lady, I don’t like... Conchita Wurst, you know that. But you know the traumatic reaction to it in Russia, where even Putin says: "What’s happening? In the Bible it says," Putin said, "we have two sexes. What do we have now, third one?" Or another ideologist of Putin said: "Is this the symbol of Europe, a bearded lady? No, we don’t want to join this Europe," and so on. So again, this fear of fear of erasing, undermining the clear contours of sexual difference, this is perceived as the main threat of Western capitalism. That's the irony. Because—I'm sorry if I mentioned to you this, but I think it's crucial—because I read some text and even met one guy in London two years ago Boko Haram, who gave me a nice Marxist theory for Boko Haram. He said if you analyze the concrete situation of their North Nigeria, Africa, how do ordinary people there experience the impact—the destructive impact of global capitalism? It destroys traditional family structures. And then you have the ideology human rights and so on, so for us Boko Haram, no education for women, fixed sexual difference but sexual difference in the sense of hierarchic ordering of sexual roles, is our main weapon against neo-colonialist imperialism. At least it’s a consistent position. Okay, there is one side. Now comes the evil aspect of myself. I want to oppose to it the opposite aspect which I think it's the same shit in another version. This, I hope you will not lynch me now, this big struggle now in United States—it's even, it's not a marginal one, it's big news cover stories—struggle against what they call sexual segregation. You know, and it's so ironic because it's the struggle about toilets, and you know how dear the topic of toilets, the structure of toilets is to me. The idea is this one: that—it’s not a joke, check it up—the idea is that the when you as a person go to toilets and you are confronted with this division, ladies/gentlemen, men/women, that this is the last form of social segregation. So then it becomes a big task of progressives to eliminate this. And now they have a big conflict: conservatives for maintaining it and progressives like Bruce Springsteen threaten to cancel a concert in North Carolina because the the Congress there rejected this sorry, rejected the proposal to eliminate sexual segregation. But so why am I opposed to it? What's my problem? Oh my problem is this one, frankly. That first the first thing that made me suspicious is the crazy degree to which big capital joined this, you know. I do you know that I recently read big California bosses, all big names, from Zuckerberg to Tim Cook of Apple, I don't know who, all big capital absolutely supports this abolition of sexual segregation as a big American progress, we should do this and so on, and even threaten to boycott those poor Southern states which cling to it. Second thing, and I had to laugh at Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, who said: "Oh we are always on the side of progress." This is wonderful, you know, you can forget about Foxconn and do those Chinese slaves, you know. Who cares if millions are over-exploited there, but we are for desegregated toilets, we did our [unintelligible]. Now you will say I’m cynical here. No, I understand although it’s really a minority, the problem are not gays and lesbians, because they still recognize themselves as men and women. The problem are so-called transgender people, no? Those who, to put it in elementary way, when you are confronted with a division "am I man or woman," you cannot, you don’t recognize yourself in any of the two, and then of course this explodes into dozens of position: bigender, transgender, agender, whatever, then you have cross-dressing, man, biologically operated, doesn’t matter. So what’s wrong about it? My problem is this one: first, what I find so strange is that—and this is for me the first symptom of transgender people—they don’t see where the problem is. Listen, they have a wrong notion of how sexual segregation, if you call it like that, works. When I go—sorry to be personal, but don't be afraid, it's not disgusting this time—when I go to a toilet, believe me or not, when I have to enter the male toilet, I often have the same anxiety. Not in the sense "am I a woman," but "my god who am I? Am I really a man?" or whatever. You know, in other words, I think that first I don’t think that normal sexual difference—normal in the sense of the way it works with majority of us—works in this simple way "Oh I'm fully a man" and so on and so on. No, I'm tempted to say that if you really look closely at how sexual difference works, it works in this ambiguous way of: basically to be a man means to doubt in a certain way that you are a man. To be a woman, it’s always a much more complex identification. Second point: I find it so crazy how transgender people (and I debated with some of them) on the one hand they like to present themselves as trans-gender revolutionaries, you know, "we don't care about categorization, we are beyond." But then I told them: "Okay, if this is true, why don’t you simply say 'fuck off, I will enter whichever toilet I want'?" You know. It’s at the same time this aggressive position, but combined with this totally opposite ridiculous fear: "Oh my god I don't recognize myself here there, I want a place for my own where I would fully identify myself, where I don't have such a place in the toilet." So the problem for me is a different one. I think—now this may be problematic for some of you but I hope not, if you understand it correctly—I claim that the first thing to do is to strictly distinguish what Lacan calls sexual difference (in the sense of sexual antagonism) and gender identities. It’s not the same for Lacan and that’s his point of *il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel*. It’s precisely that sexual difference is a kind of a traumatic gap and we cannot—it can never be translated into fixed roles. Sexual difference doesn’t mean if you are a man you have to do this, this, this or act like this or dress... No, sexual difference in its antagonism dimension means precisely that all sexual identities fail. It's a trauma in this sense. So I claim that what Boko Haram is doing and what transgender people are doing are the opposite way to achieve exactly the same: to erase the trauma of sexual antagonism. Because it’s the same with transgender people, the most radical tendency of transgender people are of course those, how do they call it, post-gender people. They claim that with new with new results of science and so on, humanity is approaching a new stage where sexuality will no longer be necessary for reproduction. So we will have just one sex which will no longer even be sex. Okay, I say maybe, I don't know, but I'm not saying we are playing with fire here. I'm just saying that so much of our everyday life (and not just what is oppressive about everyday life like our notion of love and so on) implies sexual antagonism, that I just would like to know more: what does it mean to live in a like post-sexual, asexual society? I doubt for example if art can survive in it and so on and so on. My second point is that precisely if you don’t talk about gender identities but in this more radical sense sexual difference, that you can prove (but not in the sense that they are less) transgender people that—I went through all the categories, I will do this in my next book blah blah, of transgender identities and I claim in all of them the gap of sexual difference is present. With gay people it's clear, it's woman-woman and I claim as an absent mediator man is there, and it's the same I claim with gay people that—I mean Lacan's best definition is in a gay couple you don't have name of the father but mother intervenes as the third in a gay couple. This doesn't mean that they are somehow pathological. They just prove that there is no normality. They are not—I just claim that we have an antagonism, a two, which is resisting imposition. That's why you have all this wealth of identities and so on. So what would have been? And I claim that the aim of this trans-gender movement is ultimately precisely to get rid of the antagonism. So how to do it? I have a very practical proposal which is of course an extremely cynical one. But not cynical, I think it would realistically have worked. I think I even mentioned already this example here of toilets. No, toilets, sorry, waste. Another kind of shit that we want to get rid of. I’m always so nicely surprised—I don’t know you have it here, they have it in Germany, but ah no I’ve seen it also in London—you know now with this recy—no recycling, that you have to separate waste, you know, paper, glass. I have always this dream that they make this just to make us feel well, you know, but then at the end when the truck comes they just put all back into the same. Okay, maybe not. But what I'm saying is that did you notice how you have three, four of this: paper, organic, this, and then you always have one more which is called General Waste. Which is a very Hegelian category of the general has to exist as—my god, when people say I'm a crazy Hegelian with no relation to reality, fuck off, go there to trash bins and you will see: Hegel rules, no? Okay, what I simply propose is: ladies, gentlemen, and general gender, or whatever you call it. So you have a problem with identifying, go to the third one. And in this way antagonism is maintained. Because if you choose the third one, probably I would have chosen it, it doesn’t mean that you are less. It means that the third one is the truth, in the sense that by choosing general gender you admit that every gender identity fails and so on and so on. It’s negativity embodied, you know. So why not, why not this? You see, this is so sad in our society, how there is a beautiful society beautiful theoretical problem but it okay. Nonetheless so that we don’t—yeah, we still have it—I would like to make, there are so many things I want to say but we don’t have time, the last element before we go, don’t be afraid, next tomorrow, my god, next time is tomorrow, I will go much more precisely into this structure of surpluses. I just want to complicate the game in another way. Usually Marxists talk about use-value and exchange-value, no? Use-value, blah, we know what this is. I claim that Lacan is right when he claims that this couple doesn't cover the entire field. When we are dealing with a commodity or even an object of use, that another dimension of value is needed, called by Lacan *cult-value*. Some other social theorists today call it *sign-value*. Let me take a commodity like stone-washed jeans. It has a use-value, of course. You wear stone-washed jeans like trousers. It has an exchange-value, of course, expressed in its price. But I claim it also has a third value which cannot be reduced to the first two: a thick web of meanings that stick to a commodity as its aura. What way of life stone-washed jeans signal? What stance towards reality? What image of myself do I stage when I wear them and so on and so on. And here I want to refer to a very interesting article by two I think Swedish guys, Thomas Preiskorn Thygesen and Ole Bjerg. They wrote a crazy text, "The Falling Rate of Enjoyment: Consumer Capitalism and Compulsive Buying Disorder," where they talk about sign-value. Let me just quote you a couple of passages: "Enjoyment plays a crucial role when symbolic identity is created through consumption of commodities with certain sign values. In order for the consumer to redeem the commodity's sign value, she must be able to enjoy its use value." End of quote. It's a nice very simple theory of a compulsive buyer, no? You still feel the compulsion of buying although use-value is practically zero, because you have the pressure of sign-value. I claim the term enjoyment is to be opposed here to pleasure. Pleasure is experienced when, in consuming a commodity, its use-value satisfied a need of mine. Of course this need is always socially constructed, not natural. While enjoyment is generated by the effect on the consumer of this commodity’s sign-value. Say in the case of stone-washed jeans, it is pleasurable to wear them so that I can enjoy the way wearing them shapes and asserts my self-identity at a certain—as a certain person. But then another quote from these two guys, quote: "The structuring of desire in the symbolic order is also at the same time a construction of subject's social identity. By consuming different commodity objects of desire, the consumer positions herself in a symbolic system of signs, thereby attaining a particular identity. The sign value of the commodity signals a particular social meaning of the commodity and the consumer gets a share of this meaning through her consumption. In short, commodities shape the way we think and feel about ourselves." End of quote. Now we come to the theoretical catch. The catch is that it is not possible for a consumer to keep use-value and sign-value apart, since sign-value is experienced as an organic component of the commodity's use-value. I desire stone-washed jeans because when I use them I will experience myself the way I want to. Another quote: "The commodity’s use-value serves the ideological function as the material correlate to the subject’s true self." End of quote. Now this overlapping of use-value and sign-value is not immediate. It has to be enforced. And the active moment in this enforcing is sign-value, which exerts pressure on the consumer to convince himself that he really needs the commodity in question. The last quote: "If the sign-value of the commodity is to function as a marker and creator of identity, the buyer has to be able to master a need for the use-value of the commodity and has to be able to retain this need. The higher the sign-value, the greater the demand on the buyer to be able to expand her needs." This is the guys, not me. I noticed this ideological like when we are dealing with stupid consumers, all of a sudden it’s not "his," it’s "her," no, it’s women. "Needs and her capacity for consumption. In other words, she must be able to convince herself and the world that she needs this particular commodity." End of quote. Now what clearly enters here is the superego dimension in the guise of the injunction to enjoy a commodity in question. Again, we have here the inversion that characterizes superego. The injunction does not enjoin me to follow my duty against the temptation of succumbing to the pleasure provided by the use-value of a commodity. On the contrary, the commodity’s sign-value, the ideology associated to it, enjoins me to enjoy its use-value even if I do not really feel any need for it. The last quote: "The acquisition of a commodity must be followed by a sense of enjoyment that functions as evidence of the consumer's urgent need for the commodity. The compulsive buyer suffers from being unable to produce this kind of evidence. This does not mean that the compulsive buyer has no desire for the commodity, but her desire is only directed at the sign-value of the commodity." And then referring to Baudrillard, the two guys say that because this gap is getting stronger and stronger, more and more we are buying objects because of their sign-value precisely because then when we think it's really use-value. For example, you remember you buy a computer and then even I was at some point victim to it: you need special cable attachment, that special part and so on and so on, and you convince yourself: "my god I really need all of that." Well it's a sign-value. You don't. But the problem is this one: that the the stronger this gap is between use-value and sign-value, the more impossible for you is to enjoy something that you buy just for your sign-value, for its sign-value, so again you have the falling rate of enjoyment. And of course the result is that not that you buy less but that you buy even more, since the—again, the rate of enjoyment is falling, you must buy even more and so on and so on. So and then the final dialectical reversal: you the one way to get out of this deadlock is a Hegelian reversal that you don't even pretend to enjoy the use-value but you enjoy the act of buying itself. It becomes it becomes a self-goal. So the critical point to be made here of course is that the compulsive buyer with this pathological reversal is not just a pathological form of the normal consuming process, but it's a a possibility that it is in it from the very beginning. And I think the term "from the very beginning" should be taken should be taken literally. I read, I quoted it in one of my books, a nice analysis of an anthropologist of the most primitive those stone stone axes or whatever, no? Which appear very unpractical. And the reading, I find it very convincing (at least for me), is that it's not that they were the primitive man so clumsy is that from the very beginning, the function of that stone hammer or axe or whatever was not that it's more effective to kill the animal or whatever, but that it somehow displays your strength and so on that a sign-value is there. In other words, we never have a pure use-value a pure use-value without without a sign-value. And that again to account for the problem of consumerism, it's not enough just use-value, exchange-value, you have to add this third element, the sign-value. And just if you allow me two, three minutes to conclude, another difference between traditional and modern capitalism. Traditional capitalism is usually referred to as the capitalism of law. It's Protestant capitalism, cruel exchange, no longer mercy, generosity, grace, just this brutal process of exchange described by Marx. So it is as if the medieval society was the one of grace, mercy, you survive because your lord was merciful towards you. Capitalism is the capitalism of law. Of law in the sense of equivalent exchange. Even when there is exploitation, it's masked like this: I bought that, I owe that, it's exchange. So it's as if again capitalism functions as a sphere of exchange, mercy are mercy grace are philanthropic, they don't really they don't really matter. But I claim that if there is something happening in today's societies which is of great interest is how law and mercy are more and more connected. In the sense that more and more in our society the predominant form is not brutal exchange like on a market and then we would demand "oh more philanthropy, we need mercy, whatever, grace" and so on and so on. I more gift, generosity. I claim that—okay I want to make my example here—usually Shylock as a figure of the Jew from Shakespeare, but general figure of the Jew, is perceived as pure capitalist. Even Marx falls into this in his "On the Jewish Question." As if capitalism is Shylock. Contract, unconditionally I want to stick to it. But I claim that today's capitalism more and more functions based on the principle of grace, mercy (of course it’s a perverted mercy, perverted grace, which is just a cover for exploitation). So I claim that our rule of law more and more relies on exceptions. This is why I claim the figure of Shylock is today so subversive. It undermines the rule of law by way of sticking to it without exception. The the cruel irony of the history of relations between capitalist colonialist nations (whose basic principle was legal equivalent exchange) and the colonized (who were allegedly external to economy of exchange) is that the history of colonialism is not the history of generous people on which we Western colonizers imposed the form of market exchange and so on, but it's precisely a long history of broken laws, of broken treaties. From the US treatment of Native Americans to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Which is why I claim the role of Shylock, who just demands what the law gives him, is played today by Palestinians. Because do you know what Palestinians are saying? This fascinating thing. It's not "oh Israel is a commercial society, we want some special grace or whatever," no Palestinians repeat again and again: "there were laws, United Nations' resolution and so on, we just want you to stick to your own laws and treaties and so on and so on." You know who is for me the a a wonderful a a wonderful example of Palestinian Shylock? This is one of my heroes my god. You remember the Israeli strategy of when one of the family is condemned as a terrorist or whatever, they ruin the house of the entire family? Yeah but now incidentally Israel is not even the worst here. I learned a horrible thing, I wonder if it's true if you know. A friend of mine from Jordan told me that in Jordan there are now it begins a little bit with ISIS practically no terrorist attacks. You know why? Ah they went a step further. If somebody whose family whose they can identify there in Jordan is condemned as a terrorist, they don't just ruin the house, they kill the entire family, you know, discreetly. So it works, less. Okay I'm not saying we should do this. But what I want to say: a wonderful things happened recently half a year ago in Israel. You remember two young Israeli boys, Israeli boys (and it's openly admitted even by Israelis, they were put to trial) burned down a Palestinian house where some people were died and so on. And you know what the father of those children who died said? Not "kill them" or whatever, but he said: "Fine, now we expect you to do the same. Will you burn that house already also?" And he was dismissed as a pervert and so on or whatever. They just they just wanted that. So what I'm saying is how this is a beautiful paradox how today's capitalism (not to mention it's really interesting you know from this standpoint to read the history of United States, the expansion to the West). It's not wild Indians and they were civilized. No, again and again there were contracts, treaties which were violated by the West. And then this violation was covered up by false mercy: "we put them in reservation where we give them some help" and so on and so on. So you see my point here: that this is for me the true anti-colonialism and so on. Not "we want help, we were victims," but "we just want you to stick to your own rules of exchange." Because the true message is that although we apparently live in a state of exchange, equal exchange, contracts are sacred and so on, no, the system has to violate this again and again. That's the problem. And recently, you know when even it was too much for Jacqueline Rose when I mentioned that Canadian example the last time here of that of course how do they call them now "First Nation" native American, Canadian whatever woman Eskimo Inuit whatever who was whose corpse was displayed there in the court. It's here you can see the reality. It's a tragedy. Just put Google and put there "Canada suicide first Americans" or what. I mean they now discovered an absolute horror. They are really how do they call them "First Americans," they are simply a totally broken nation. There is some fucking city in Northern Ontario with people. In the last couple of months, over of them made suicides. It's the whole society is falling apart. Connect this with the system of this forced schooling and so on with an incredible... you know with that incredible... so I think that while we should be cruel towards cruel, okay, just towards Arab, Muslim fundamentalism. And I will talk about this at maybe—no at at LSE yes on Wednesday. But we don't even report what beautiful things are happening here. Do some of you know—it's disgusting, I would have shot him because he's just beautiful kids boy—Mohammed Assaf, the mega star of Palestinian pop music. This beautiful mother's voice sings wonderful songs, total apolitical. But he said something. He said in a recent interview that he respects tradition, so if his sister would like to sing in public, he would prohibit her. And now a great thing happened: not Western liberals but Tamer Nafar who plays in Udi Aloni's film, he wrote a wonderful open letter to Assaf where he says: "so you want to end the the wall between Israel and Palestine, what about ending this destroying this wall" and so on? This is so precious because you see, why is this a wonderful example? Because it's proven that Palestinians do not need our fucking liberals to to teach them or whatever. They themselves have they themselves have a movement. And I can tell you to conclude because it's over with a wonderful totally obscene dirty... Tamer Nafar, I love him. He's my friend, that rap singer who plays the main role in Udi Aloni's movie. Because once I talk with him we were in Haifa. He introduced me we did in some theater a talk which was very nice, not because of me but because it was a miracle. The public was half and half Palestinian/Israeli and we have a perfect debate. And at the end I told him—I cannot resist this, this is my way of talking—I presented him my wife and I told him: "Look, you can have her, what's the price no?" And he immediately provided because he is kind of a sexual a beautiful boy, you know. You know what his answer was? "You mean of course how much you should pay me to satisfy her because you cannot" and so on. I mean that's my type of a guy. No, you know what I mean, you know what I mean? I mean the struggle is going on there. We don't have to we don't have to teach them. For example this is for me, now there is a tremendous debate in Palestinian and other Arab media about this. These are so important struggle, of course you will not read about this because you read either about primitive Palestinians or about those totally co-opted bribed by the West. I'm sorry if I was a little bit confused today, but tomorrow you will get more of a real theory. Thanks very much. I wish we had a wonderful today no? Yeah. Okay, take some questions? Okay. One question or two? My god you decide, I don't want to be the bad guy you decide. Ah but just don't ask me this half an hour questions where you have five quotes on Lacan and... [unintelligible] after after penetrating beneath the Oedipus complex of desire grounded in in prohibition how do we reintroduce a big limit and thus return to the domain of prohibition or law communication and meaning? This is a wonderful question, I'm not kidding but I'm writing the answer in my next book. Namely the problem is this one and it's a radical one. You know to what I refer this problem? I will just give you the path towards an answer. My reference here is a wonderful observation by Fredric Jameson that communism far from being a simple society of harmony that problem of envy, resentment will explode there. So in other words the problem is this one, because the problem of envy is the problem of mediator, prohibition, obstacle, and so what I will the problem I will face is precisely this one. If a desire cannot function, I put it in extremely simplified terms, if a desire cannot function without obstacle, competition, whatever, I think this twisted nature of desire is a priori. In the sense that I never desire an object, that competition, envy, jealousy is not secondary. It's not I desire something then I discover you want it so it's a problem. No it's I desire what you desire or... but here Jean-Pierre Dupuy whom I often quote, the French rational choice theorist but a good one theorist, he is a Hegelian and so... in a wonderful way in his new book "La Jalousie Géométrie du désir" which just appeared in French, elaborated in a wonderful precise way the distinction between envy and jealousy. For him jealousy has a different structure: it's not against a competition but it's this structure of inclusion. I see the—for him for example he provides a wonderful reading of Don Giovanni, Don Juan. That he is an impotent jealous guy. What disturbs him is that for example in Mozart opera he sees this there the poor peasant girl Zerlina and Masetto. And he says: "I cannot bear this, why are the two of them so happy? I have to ruin it," you know. The primordial scene of desire is jealousy and desire is a reaction to jealousy. So how to—how to—this is another way for me the true way to confront your question. Definitely we live in a society where less and less we have direct ethical prohibitions. But how to, as you said, a deadlock remains. How to deal with this deadlock? How not to ruin because if we don't find a way of this reintroducing not a prohibition but obstacle deadlock then we risk falling regressing into destructive destructive violence. And especially at the level of jealousy, it may surprise you but I don't will not have time to develop this tomorrow. My ideal would be another triangle, not the Girardian mimetic triangle: Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya and Inessa Armand. How the a communist revolutionary has a way to avoid the deadlock. You have an incredibly intense love relationship and the third element which is obstacle but at the same time what links you, connects the two lovers is the communist cause. And you know if you make a choice it's always true communist love means: "I'm with the woman who is everything to me, but if revolution demands I will kill her." So it's absolutely it's not I sacrifice everything for you. No, but nonetheless she remains the absolute for me. So it's pure act of mercy, maybe I'm lucky for some time that I can... and Lenin did something like this, I claim, with Inessa Armand. Because it's so incredible how maybe you know it better from all these new biographies what kind of a triangle were there. Because there was no stupid jealousy nothing, you know. Nadezhda and Lenin were the perfect communist couple but they simply ac—and they didn't make a great transgressive gesture, nobody talked about it, but it's clear now when they penetrated some archives and so on, you know. So I think it can be done. To reintroduce whatever you call it, obstacle limitation, but not in this old-fashioned Oedipal stupid way. This is how this is for me again an extremely important—because you know what's the problem of communism? If we cannot even imagine it. Distributive justice doesn't work. Egalitarian justice doesn't work. My god Marx was against egalitarianism. This is not popular to remind people that Marx said repeatedly: "egalitarianism is a bourgeois notice notion," communism is not this. Communism is also—I never agreed with that one—"everyone to everyone to his needs, everyone according to his..." The problem is: who decides what do you need, you or me? Immediately you have the problem of envy and so on. Let's say that somebody decides you need three cakes per week and I too. "Fuck you, I want three cakes." Not because I really need them but fuck you why would you have three and you know what I mean. There is no need which is not mediated by by other needs. So I think that all this which it can be proven (again it's in my next book) that you know that this formula "to everyone his according to his needs" and so on and so on, you know. No, these are I think explosive problems. And it's not just problems for some communist future, they explode here and now because again are we aware how strong these categories of envy, jealousy and so on are? You notice for me I use it in one of my books a mega problem. I remember some fifteen-ten years ago a group of refugees escaped from were allowed to escape from Cuba to I don't know where Florida. And they put them into a camp there and there was a fight among them, brutal with fists, some even died. Then they discovered you know what was the fight about. American authorities distributed to them how do they call these packages of orange juice. And through some pure administrative misunderstanding one group discovered that the other group got a fruit juice a little bit better quality. That is a tragedy. Conflicts are usually the really deadly conflicts are quite often (okay there are economic interest behind) but for totally superficial symbolic points. For example now why is there a tension of war between China and Japan or China and Vietnam? For some stupid small rocky islands of absolutely not even any strategic importance and so on and so on. I think we have a lot to learn about the let's call it in this sense irrationality of human of human conflicts and so on and so on. So my conclusion here is radical. For me communism is not this harmonious society if there will be where, you know, we will all be solidary, you will get that beautiful woman, I will be glad for you. Fuck it, I will not be glad for you, I want her. You know what I mean like it will explode. These are extremely serious extremely serious topics. They are not insolvable problems but I agree with you that I always was horrified by this simplistic pseudo-Freudian idea: problems emerge because of sexual inhibition so we drop the prohibitions and we will be all happy and so on. You know that’s the fundamental lesson of Freud: our unconscious is not the domain of freedom or what. You discover horrible things in your unconscious. Okay one
unknown
more so that we pretend to be... But that yeah... Uh, you? Because you have a nice beard better than mine like I'm too lazy to cut it properly. Thank you. Uh very briefly, um, I was just interested interested to know what you really mean of the affective
more so that we pretend to be... But that yeah... Uh, you? Because you have a nice beard better than mine like I'm too lazy to cut it properly. Thank you. Uh very briefly, um, I was just interested interested to know what you really mean of the affective
Slavoj Žižek
and the body turn in the social sciences? What do you affective and and body turn in the social sciences? What do you mean by this? Give me some names. Well I mean basically the interest in um exploring how uh emotions and the bodies um are part of our understanding of reality not just accessing reality through a rational through a rational process. And the second question I want to ask you is um I I agree that um there is a there is an attempt to mystify science today and that’s part of a process I would say of the ruling the ruling class, the dominant class to mystify itself, particularly this idea that they created they created the wealth through sheer hard work, when in fact you know the Panama Papers for instance have shown us that you know there is much to to learn about how they created the wealth. So I was just wondering if you thought that resistance, you know, whether political resistance or cultural resistance should be precisely about debunking this myth that the ruling class try to create about itself to position itself in society. Yes I agree with you, but I would go even a step further. I claim that the sad lesson if you read all this Panama and so on papers, no? Is that it's not even like it's not only that those who are wealthy are didn't really work for it but were lucky. No, there are even elements of conspiracy theory. That is to say they really did horrible things, well-planned things and so on and so on, so it's not even that they were that they were just lucky. The only thing where I I wrote a text on it that I have some suspicion is, you know I'm of course against Putin, but the Russian reaction was interesting, where they pointed out I mean if I know it correctly isn't there a strange absence of American companies and people on Panama papers? Now there are different other explanations for it. One is that the laws are already so lax, confused in the United States, they already are a tax haven, they don't even they don't need a Panama, you know. But but that's okay that's the first problem for me. That's the first—the second problem is that I never understood what was how should I put it what was what's the big scandal about Panama papers? Didn't we all know it? Why do we even fake that we are surprised? That's how the only interesting question is to demonstrate in what sense this is not an exception, that it's in some sense I'm not saying all capitalisms are the same, you know like, okay, capitalism is capitalism but still I would prefer to live in Norway than in I don't know some horrible totally corrupted country. But nonetheless again the the false thing about Panama papers for me were the where was this faked surprise. And the second thing where I agree with right-wingers, but not really, is when they said: "isn't this normal when you have too high taxes, then people move to where there are lesser taxes?" The lesson to be drawn from this, I don't agree with them, is that you know people who did this through Panama, we should never forget, they were not some creepy criminals, they simply acted as rational capitalist subject. Fuck you, I have five millions, why would I allow the state to take two millions when Panama takes only I don't know I mean they acted as rational subjects. So I think that the only thing that can really save this is some type of I don't know maybe with digitalization it can be done. Some kind of global control of the flux of money. The moment money is no longer material, it's not that you have in your in your basement some a lot of some bags of money and if money is digitalized, can't you somehow treat it like some news, some sorry digital bit of information which is always accompanied by a digital registration of its genesis and path? You know, I think again that the taboo that will have to be fall is precisely this abstract movement of money, and I think precisely through digitalization it may be it will be possible to do it. But you know another example if we talk about these struggles I wanted to use these jokes before that horrifies me is my god she should be you know what what Madeleine Albright said, that disgusting anti-Bernie Sanders remark: that Pro-Hillary, that there must be a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. She meant who will not vote for
and the body turn in the social sciences? What do you affective and and body turn in the social sciences? What do you mean by this? Give me some names. Well I mean basically the interest in um exploring how uh emotions and the bodies um are part of our understanding of reality not just accessing reality through a rational through a rational process. And the second question I want to ask you is um I I agree that um there is a there is an attempt to mystify science today and that’s part of a process I would say of the ruling the ruling class, the dominant class to mystify itself, particularly this idea that they created they created the wealth through sheer hard work, when in fact you know the Panama Papers for instance have shown us that you know there is much to to learn about how they created the wealth. So I was just wondering if you thought that resistance, you know, whether political resistance or cultural resistance should be precisely about debunking this myth that the ruling class try to create about itself to position itself in society. Yes I agree with you, but I would go even a step further. I claim that the sad lesson if you read all this Panama and so on papers, no? Is that it's not even like it's not only that those who are wealthy are didn't really work for it but were lucky. No, there are even elements of conspiracy theory. That is to say they really did horrible things, well-planned things and so on and so on, so it's not even that they were that they were just lucky. The only thing where I I wrote a text on it that I have some suspicion is, you know I'm of course against Putin, but the Russian reaction was interesting, where they pointed out I mean if I know it correctly isn't there a strange absence of American companies and people on Panama papers? Now there are different other explanations for it. One is that the laws are already so lax, confused in the United States, they already are a tax haven, they don't even they don't need a Panama, you know. But but that's okay that's the first problem for me. That's the first—the second problem is that I never understood what was how should I put it what was what's the big scandal about Panama papers? Didn't we all know it? Why do we even fake that we are surprised? That's how the only interesting question is to demonstrate in what sense this is not an exception, that it's in some sense I'm not saying all capitalisms are the same, you know like, okay, capitalism is capitalism but still I would prefer to live in Norway than in I don't know some horrible totally corrupted country. But nonetheless again the the false thing about Panama papers for me were the where was this faked surprise. And the second thing where I agree with right-wingers, but not really, is when they said: "isn't this normal when you have too high taxes, then people move to where there are lesser taxes?" The lesson to be drawn from this, I don't agree with them, is that you know people who did this through Panama, we should never forget, they were not some creepy criminals, they simply acted as rational capitalist subject. Fuck you, I have five millions, why would I allow the state to take two millions when Panama takes only I don't know I mean they acted as rational subjects. So I think that the only thing that can really save this is some type of I don't know maybe with digitalization it can be done. Some kind of global control of the flux of money. The moment money is no longer material, it's not that you have in your in your basement some a lot of some bags of money and if money is digitalized, can't you somehow treat it like some news, some sorry digital bit of information which is always accompanied by a digital registration of its genesis and path? You know, I think again that the taboo that will have to be fall is precisely this abstract movement of money, and I think precisely through digitalization it may be it will be possible to do it. But you know another example if we talk about these struggles I wanted to use these jokes before that horrifies me is my god she should be you know what what Madeleine Albright said, that disgusting anti-Bernie Sanders remark: that Pro-Hillary, that there must be a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. She meant who will not vote for
unknown
Bernie, no? But maybe I even wanted to do
Bernie, no? But maybe I even wanted to do
unknown
some text, but
some text, but
Slavoj Žižek
nobody will want
nobody will want
unknown
to publish it now in the United States, of saying that you know she said something much more disgusting, Madeleine Albright. A couple of years ago she was asked: half a million children died in Iraq. Was it worth the price? And she thought and she said: "Yes, it was worth the price." I mean just
to publish it now in the United States, of saying that you know she said something much more disgusting, Madeleine Albright. A couple of years ago she was asked: half a million children died in Iraq. Was it worth the price? And she thought and she said: "Yes, it was worth the price." I mean just
Slavoj Žižek
maybe they should make a special place in hell for women and men who say something like that. That half a million of children is worth the price. Even if I'm a pragmatic and say free Iraq is worth of it, but we don't have free Iraq. We have free Iraq out of which (now I speak as pro-Western imperialist) from which almost all of Christians have fled, free Iraq from which in which now women's rights are infinitely lower than in the era of Saddam and so on, you know. So but again I don't have a good answer now, no, but I admit... fuck it, no? Okay maybe we should call it a day. Tomorrow same time, same place, no? Same time, same place. Okay. Thank you very much.
maybe they should make a special place in hell for women and men who say something like that. That half a million of children is worth the price. Even if I'm a pragmatic and say free Iraq is worth of it, but we don't have free Iraq. We have free Iraq out of which (now I speak as pro-Western imperialist) from which almost all of Christians have fled, free Iraq from which in which now women's rights are infinitely lower than in the era of Saddam and so on, you know. So but again I don't have a good answer now, no, but I admit... fuck it, no? Okay maybe we should call it a day. Tomorrow same time, same place, no? Same time, same place. Okay. Thank you very much.