Hegel with Neuralink
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2019-04-16 · 1:29:20 · 10,972 words
technology-ai-cyberspacehegel-dialecticspsychoanalysissubjectivityideologyconsciousness-mindreligion-theologyphilosophy-general
Žižek examines the philosophical implications of brain-computer interface technology (Neuralink/singularity), arguing that the prospect of direct brain-to-brain communication does not deliver the reconciliation of subject and object promised by German idealism but instead produces a radical new form of self-division. He invokes Hegel's reading of the Fall to argue that obstacles (language, finitude, sexuality) constitute rather than impede higher meaning, and concludes that if singularity is achieved, the unconscious, as a purely virtual negative dimension, will be the one thing that escapes collective mind-sharing, preserving an uncanny divided subjectivity. The talk also ranges across Freudian sexuality, surveillance capitalism, identity politics, inner experience vs. outer action, and the dangers of ideological storytelling.
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The ideas in it 14
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek uses Musk/Kurzweil's term for the merger of human minds via direct brain-computer interface, treating it as the latest candidate for Hegelian reconciliation between subject and object, but ultimately diagnosing it as producing radical self-division rather than unity.
Žižek acknowledges surveillance capitalism as a significant development but argues it is not the true game-changer; the prospect of direct brain-machine interface represents a qualitatively greater potential for domination.
Applied to the assumption that linguistic expression merely distorts a pre-existing wealth of meaning: Žižek argues the surplus of deeper meaning is not already there but is generated by the very reduction to simple linguistic formulas.
Žižek argues Freudian sexuality, courtly love, perversion, indefinite deferral of climax, constitutes the radical break that makes us human, and that singularity threatens to undo this constitutive antagonism.
Freud's concept invoked to mark the denaturalization of human sexuality: biologically a nonsense, it withdraws sexuality from reproductive instinct into the domain of fantasy.
Illustrated via the Lubitsch 'coffee without cream/milk' joke: the absence is not generic but specifically determined, so 'coffee without milk' differs symbolically from 'coffee without cream' even though the material content is identical.
as “virtual negative dimension”
Žižek's characterization of the Freudian unconscious as an 'absential' layer, the difference between 'coffee without cream' and 'coffee without milk', that accompanies conscious content but cannot be read by a brain-scanning machine.
as “apocalypse without kingdom”
Borrowed from Günther Anders: a catastrophe that produces no higher redemptive outcome; Žižek uses it to ask whether the advent of singularity will be a catastrophe that opens a new dimension or simply an absolute end.
Invoked in the context of identity politics and victimhood: Žižek asks what surplus pleasure the self-humiliating subject gains by playing the victim or assuming collective guilt.
as “pure Cartesian subject”
What Žižek predicts we will become under singularity: an empty point of self-reference deprived of all positive experiential content, which is shared with the collective mind, leaving only the hollow 'I'.
Žižek invokes Hegel's notion against abstract identity politics: true universality is not each group keeping its particular identity but each being allowed to formulate its own universality and participate in a shared universal.
Invoked when Žižek notes that Hegel's idea is one of mediation and sublation, the body is not abolished but sublated, contrasting this with singularity theorists who claim to literally and empirically transcend finitude.
Referenced in the account of Bosnian rape survivors: what kept them alive was the hope of a 'big Other' ideal witness to whom they could report their suffering; the collapse of this hope led to suicide.
as “no ethnic cleansing without good poets”
Žižek's formula for the necessary role of aesthetic/poetic narrative in sustaining the ideological legitimation of ethnic violence, drawn from the Yugoslav experience.
Stories he reaches for 8
In a café a man orders coffee without cream; told there is no cream, only milk, the waiter says he can only bring coffee without milk. The same absent substance has different determinate identities depending on what it is deprived of.
“Coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream in our symbolic universe of course.”
Brian Victoria's book documents how the Japanese Zen Buddhist community actively used Zen theory to legitimize Japanese militarist atrocities; Žižek uses this to argue that spiritual inner experience can be the most dangerous form of ideological cover.
“Don't trust the inner experience. Inner experience is a lie in some sense.”
Žižek was told that in Hawking's final months his wheelchair was controlled by a machine reading basic brain commands (forward, left, right) without even requiring his one movable finger, illustrating that elementary brain-machine interface is already operational.
“He thought strongly forward, the machine moved forward and so on.”
Aquinas in the Summa Theologica argues the blessed in Paradise can observe the suffering of the damned, since omniscience cannot be curtailed; his solution, they enjoy divine justice not suffering directly, is shown by Žižek to be a sophistic evasion of sadistic enjoyment.
“We will not find pleasure directly in seeing the suffering, we will find pleasure and awe in the greatness of divine justice.”
A rich rabbi and rich merchant each prostrate themselves before God as 'nothing'; a poor ordinary Jew does the same and the rich men whisper 'But who does this guy think he is to say he is also a nothing?' Illustrates how self-abasement can be a form of claiming special status.
“Who does this guy think that he is that he can simply say that he is also a nothing?”
At a round table, Rushdie replied to a critic that his deepest influences were Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, because Austen's lower-middle-class marriage intrigues are Mumbai today, and Dickens's poverty is Indian poverty.
“If as an Indian person you read Jane Austen, all this... This is the lower middle class, middle class in Bombay... Poverty in India, it's Dickens.”
Žižek recounts speaking with rape survivors from the Yugoslav wars whose will to survive depended on the hope of a 'big Other' witness before whom they could testify; when that witness failed them (family silence), suicides followed.
“What kept you alive... was this... hope that there will be some big other ideal witness to whom you will report it.”
Hitler offered 1920s Germany a coherent story attributing all social chaos to the Jews; Žižek exploits the English ambiguity of 'plot' (novel plot / Jewish plot) to show that Hitler's story was itself a conspiratorial plot that gave everything meaning.
“Jewish plot is Hitler's plot. The story he told in a very successful way he said 'It's all the responsibility of the Jews,' and wonderful story, everything made meaning.”
Works invoked 12
Ninotchka film
Lubitsch film supplying the 'coffee without cream/milk' joke that Žižek uses to illustrate determinate negation and the virtual negative unconscious.
Hegel's work cited for the dictum 'evil is the gaze itself which perceives evil everywhere'; used in the discussion of the Fall and the gaze that excludes itself from the social whole.
Young Lukács's 'masterpiece'; cited as the exemplary Hegelian Marxist argument that only proletarian revolution achieves the Hegelian reconciliation of subject and object.
Zen at War book
Brian Victoria's documentation of Zen Buddhism's complicity in Japanese militarism; Žižek calls it 'like my Bible' and uses it to argue inner spiritual experience can be the most dangerous form of ideological cover.
The Idiot (novel) book
Dostoevsky's novel; Žižek uses its Kurosawa adaptation to illustrate artistic universality through transposition, even though he expresses personal reservations about Dostoevsky.
T.S. Eliot's essay, cited for the claim that every radical break in art retroactively changes the entire past; supports Žižek's point about retroactive modification of virtual dimensions.
Summa Theologica book
Aquinas's treatment of whether the blessed can observe Hell's suffering is cited as a sophistic evasion of the theological problem of sadistic enjoyment in Paradise.
Gillian Rose's book on Hegel; cited approvingly as one of the great Hegel books written by women.
Hakuchi (The Idiot) film
Kurosawa's Japanese adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, cited as the 'absolutely best film version of Dostoevsky' and paradigm of artistic universality through transposition.
Hegel's lectures quoted for the claim that cognition is the principle of spirituality and simultaneously the principle by which the injury of separation is healed.
Todd's new book, quoted at the end of the talk on Hegel's definition of progress as movement toward more intractable contradictions; warmly recommended despite the joking insult of the author.
How the Mind Works book
Steven Pinker's book, which Žižek says he 'didn't like'; its evolutionary/adaptive explanation of why humans cannot solve metaphysical questions is rejected as unable to account for humanity's obsession with impossible problems.
People invoked 30
Gillian Rose positive
Author of Hegel Contra Sociology; listed among the great women Hegel scholars.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as 'the best theorist of catastrophes I know'; his work on the possibility of retroactively changing the virtual dimension of past events is used to support Žižek's account of the unconscious as absential.
Todd McGowan positive
The host/interlocutor, author of 'Emancipation After Hegel'; Žižek jokes he is a 'complete idiot' while warmly endorsing his book and quoting it at the end of the talk.
Radovan Karadžić negative
Cited as an example of the poet who legitimized ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, illustrating the formula 'no ethnic cleansing without good poets.'
Rebecca Comay positive
Listed among the great Hegel scholars (women) of recent decades.
Georg Lukács positive
Cited as the author of History and Class Consciousness, exemplifying the Hegelian Marxist move of postponing genuine reconciliation to proletarian revolution.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the concept of the virtual 'another scene' (unconscious), the big Other, and Lacanian jargon applied to trauma testimony; Žižek uses Lacan to frame what brain-machine interface cannot access.
Used as an example of elementary brain-machine interface: in his final months the machine could read basic motor commands from his brain without requiring physical input.
Brian Victoria positive
Author of 'Zen at War,' described as 'like my Bible'; the book documents Zen's legitimation of Japanese militarism and is used to argue inner experience is ideologically dangerous.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Cited as another variant of 'Hegel came too early': for Fukuyama, only liberal democracy finally achieves the Hegelian reconciliation.
Steven Pinker negative
Žižek says he didn't like Pinker's book on how the mind works; Pinker's evolutionary/adaptive explanation of why metaphysical questions go unanswered is rejected because it fails to explain why humans are peculiarly obsessed with impossible problems.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Described as 'bad as a theorist' and the 'big popularizer of singularity'; his vision of individuals retaining their personalities while floating in a collective mind is criticized as naive.
Elon Musk negative
Žižek uses Musk's own quotes about Neuralink to expose the ideological assumptions behind singularity, simplification, technological utopianism, and naive assumptions about the relationship between brain states and subjective experience.
T. S. Eliot positive
His claim in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' that every radical break in art retroactively changes the entire past is cited approvingly as support for the idea that the past can be changed.
Heinrich Himmler negative
Cited for his statement that a true Nazi hero is one willing to do horrible things for the nation, illustrating how ideology presents atrocity as the highest ethical achievement.
Catherine Malabou positive
Listed among the 'really great books on Hegel in the last decades written by women,' cited with approval.
Salman Rushdie positive
Žižek says he doesn't like Rushdie much ('way too liberal now'), but cites his remark about Jane Austen and Dickens as an instance of transcultural universality he finds 'wonderful.'
Béatrice Longuenesse positive
French author of Hegel and the Critique of Metaphysics; listed first among the great women Hegel scholars.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Director of Ninotchka; the 'coffee without cream' joke from the film is Žižek's key illustration of determinate negation and the virtual negative dimension.
Mentioned only as the first wife of Günther Anders, establishing his biographical context.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Referenced via Michael Zimmerman's quote as the source of the phrase 'petrified / frozen intelligence' for nature in German idealism.
Günther Anders positive
His essay 'Apocalypse Without Kingdom' (written in response to nuclear catastrophe) is invoked approvingly to frame the question of what kind of apocalypse singularity represents.
Jordan Peterson negative
His idea that we need consistent big stories to give meaning to our lives is rejected as dangerous; his 'lobsters' reference is used dismissively. Žižek is also about to debate him and expresses deep skepticism about the framing.
William Shakespeare positive
Cited as the paradigm of true artistic universality: a genuine classic survives decontextualization and can be reinvented by each epoch (romantic Hamlet, etc.).
Akira Kurosawa positive
His film Hakuchi (The Idiot, transposed to post-WWII Japan) is cited as the 'absolutely best film version of Dostoevsky' and paradigm of concrete universality.
Paul the Apostle positive
Cited via Hegel: God gave law to make humans conscious of sin and thus aware of their need for salvation; Hegel's reading of Paul frames the discussion of the Fall.
Sigmund Freud positive
The Freudian unconscious as virtual negative dimension and infantile sexuality as the denaturalization of human being are central to Žižek's argument about what singularity threatens.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central theoretical reference throughout: the Fall/redemption identity, reconciliation through constitutive obstacles, determinate negation, and Geist's self-actualization are all deployed approvingly, though Žižek notes Hegel is 'afraid to go to the end' on the question of divine evil.
Thomas Aquinas negative
His argument in Summa Theologica that the blessed can observe Hell's suffering (enjoying divine justice, not suffering per se) is shown by Žižek to be a sophistic dodge that cannot escape the implication of sadistic enjoyment.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
Žižek says he doesn't like Dostoevsky much but uses Kurosawa's Japanese adaptation of The Idiot as the paradigm of literary universality.
What it argues
brain-computer interface and the fate of subjectivitylanguage as constitutive of thought rather than its mediumHegelian reconciliation vs. singularity's pseudo-reconciliationthe Fall as identical with redemptionthe Freudian unconscious as virtual negative dimension escaping singularitysurveillance and new forms of dominationdangers of ideological narrative and inner experience
Dialectical moves 9
“The surplus of deeper meaning left unsaid is not already there waiting to be discovered; it is generated by the very reduction of our thoughts to simple linguistic formulas.”
Language does not impoverish pre-existing rich thought but produces the very richness it appears to truncate, inverting the assumption behind Neuralink's promise of unmediated communication.
“It is not that the Fall is followed by redemption; the Fall is identical to redemption—it is in itself already redemption.”
The biblical/Hegelian Fall is not a catastrophe later redeemed but the redemptive event itself, collapsing the temporal sequence of sin and salvation into a single act.
“The true evil is not the fallen part but the good part itself which caused the separation—and ultimately God himself.”
Žižek pushes Hegel's point that separation is never simply good vs. bad: the evil is the very good that posits the division, making God (not man) the primordial source of separation.
“Technology has so far enhanced our individuality precisely because it introduced more alienation, additional layers—so what happens when that distance disappears?”
The apparent progress toward greater connection (less mediation) is inverted: individuality was produced by mediation, so its removal threatens rather than fulfills individuality.
“Far from being some deep substantial instinctual irrationality, the Freudian unconscious is a purely virtual negative dimension—the 'coffee without cream' versus 'coffee without milk.'”
The unconscious is not a reservoir of dark drives but a formal/virtual difference accompanying conscious content, invisible to any direct brain-reading machine.
“Under singularity, we will not become a hive mind; we will emerge as pure Cartesian subject—an empty point—deprived of all positive content while the unconscious escapes.”
The expected outcome (fusion, loss of individuality) is inverted: the 'I' survives but emptied of everything, while precisely the virtual-negative unconscious remains irreducibly mine.
“It is this reduction to colorless space that, by reducing sensuous wealth, enables children to articulate a higher spiritual dimension—Hegel's reading is exactly the opposite of the humanist complaint.”
Aesthetic impoverishment (grey pencil) is not oppressive but constitutive of a higher expressive capacity, exemplifying the general Hegelian logic that obstacles generate what they obstruct.
“Stories are here to lie—to cover from us the horrible things we are doing in reality; inner experience is a lie in some sense.”
Narrative meaning-making, typically valued as humanizing, is recast as the ideological mechanism that permits atrocity by covering it with noble self-understanding.
“To understand Elizabethan England, you need to read Shakespeare—not the other way around.”
The historical classic is not explained by its context but is the lens through which context becomes intelligible, inverting the historicist assumption.
Claims 16
asserts
Language does not merely distort pre-existing thoughts but generates the very surplus of meaning that it appears to reduce.the role of language in thought formation
asserts
Surveillance capitalism is not yet the true game-changer; direct brain-machine interface offers far greater potential for new forms of domination.technology and social control
asserts
The prospect of Neuralink/singularity is, at its most fundamental level, the overcoming of sexuality understood not as a particular sphere but as the constitutive ontological antagonism of human finitude.singularity and sexuality
asserts
Under Neuralink, individuals will not know they are being controlled; they will experience externally-directed behaviour as their own free will.mind control and subjective experience
reframes
The partisans of singularity merely repeat the Hegelian Marxist/Fukuyaman move: 'Hegel came too early; only now (with X) is true reconciliation possible.'singularity as ideology
asserts
The Fall is not followed by redemption but is identical to redemption: the explosion of freedom that constitutes the Fall is itself the redemptive event.Hegel's reading of the Fall
asserts
Hegelian reconciliation does not overcome obstacles but recognizes the obstacle as constitutive of what it is an obstacle to.Hegel's concept of reconciliation
asserts
Reducing sensory richness (e.g., grey pencil drawings vs. color, silent vs. sound film) enables a higher spiritual dimension rather than simply impoverishing expression.aesthetic reduction and spiritual gain
asserts
A computer reading brain signals cannot discern the virtual negative dimension—the unconscious 'coffee without cream vs. coffee without milk' difference—that accompanies conscious thought.limits of brain-computer interface for reading the unconscious
asserts
If singularity is realized, the unconscious—as purely virtual negative dimension—will escape the collective mind and become the site of radical self-division rather than hive-mind unity.singularity and the unconscious
asserts
Inner experience and stories we tell ourselves are fundamentally deceptive and serve to cover up the horrible things we are actually doing.ideology, inner experience, and self-deception
asserts
White liberal anti-racists who assume all collective guilt actually thereby reserve for themselves the universal position of moral judges, which is itself a form of supremacy.identity politics and false universality
reframes
True anti-racism is not 'each group allowed its particular identity' but 'each group allowed to formulate its own universality.'race and universality
rejects
Musk's claim that individuals will maintain a minimal distance from Neuralink and can simply 'will' their connection on or off ignores that the brain is wired objectively and we are unaware of our own neuronal processes.Musk's defense of individual autonomy under Neuralink
asserts
The digital space of social media introduces beneficial alienation (masks, self-presentation) that can be more truthful than direct inner access, unlike singularity which would read thoughts directly.digital alienation vs. singularity
rejects
Ideological narrative (Hitler's 'plot') is not a perversion of storytelling but its paradigmatic case; consistent stories that give meaning to life are inherently dangerous.Jordan Peterson's view of narrative as life-organizing
Quotes 13
“Language reduces the mess of our thoughts to simple words or sentences... However, this very condensation of the chaotic wealth creates complex meanings. It evokes the rich texture of what is left unsaid.”Slavoj Žižek · language as generative of meaning, not merely reductive
“It is not that the Fall is followed by redemption; the Fall is identical to redemption. It is in some sense in itself already redemption.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's identity of Fall and redemption
“The true evil is the good part itself which caused the separation. But it's implicitly in Hegel this much more radical idea that in the separation of God from man... the true evil is God himself.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's radical inversion: God as the source of evil
“Reconciliation means you acknowledge the obstacle as constitutive. This obstacle which prevents you from reaching some higher goal is what creates, what sustains this higher goal.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian reconciliation as recognizing the obstacle's constitutive role
“Don't worry my Lord, you of course you cannot understand it because you were not there.”Slavoj Žižek · the joke as a virtual dimension inaccessible to divine omniscience
“Stories are here to lie. Stories as inner experience are here to cover from us what we are doing in reality, the horrible things we are doing in reality.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological narrative as cover for atrocity
“No ethnic cleansing without good poets.”Slavoj Žižek · the necessary role of aesthetic narrative in sustaining ethnic violence
“The true end of racism is when blacks and others are allowed to formulate their own universality, to participate in their own way in our universality.”Slavoj Žižek · universality as the goal of anti-racism, not mere particular identity
“To understand Elizabethan England, you need to read Shakespeare. That's why an author... Dostoevsky... the absolutely best film version... is Akira Kurosawa's Japanese version.”Slavoj Žižek · artistic universality as transposability across contexts
“What will not be taken from us, because of the reasons I already indicated, is our unconscious, this purely virtual negative dimension. So this will be a nice paradox where precisely our unconscious will escape this collective machine of singularity.”Slavoj Žižek · the unconscious as what escapes the singularity's total transparency
“The greatest story, one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century was Adolf Hitler.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological narrative as inherently dangerous regardless of content
“Coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream in our symbolic universe of course.”Slavoj Žižek · determinate negation: identity depends on what specific thing is absent
“In psychoanalysis you do exactly that. You throw out the baby, the ego, and you keep the dirty water.”Slavoj Žižek · psychoanalysis inverts the proverb: the unconscious, not the ego, is the object
Transcript 10 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I am really glad to be here because we are in the north, it's cold, and I love this. Now, about you Todd, you will get it back now. You know, speaking about good books on Hegel, since many of you are probably his students here, nonetheless, I must report on something that I noticed how almost all the really great books on Hegel in the last decades are written by women. You know, for example, it began thirty, forty years ago, a French lady Béatrice Longuenesse, Hegel and the Critique of Metaphysics, something like that. Then it was, it was Gillian Rose, not Jacqueline Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology. Then it was Catherine Malabou. Then it was Rebecca Comay, and so on. So at least measured by all politically correct standards, women are not underrepresented here. But there is now, you told me it physically already exists, although it's not yet in the bookstores, your own Emancipation After Hegel, a new book. And at the end, if there will be time to make my final point, I will quote from it. But this doesn't change the fact that you are a complete idiot. It's just we, in Slovene, we have one of these stupidities called national proverbs, no? Even a blind hen can find the best grain. You know, like the translation would be like even a complete idiot can be lucky. So the quote fits that category. No, seriously, read the book because it's very clearly written and so on. So before I begin, I will begin in a minute, but I was duped, tricked by Todd, because he told me you can speak in a complex way as much as you want. This is a group educated in theory. It will not be quite like that, but it will be some parts on Hegel relatively complex. So again, no dirty jokes. I will keep the jokes for this Friday, remember, no dirty jokes and, but at the same time it will be very naive. I'm really intrigued by this problem, problem of the so-called popular term coined by Elon Musk, Neuralink, or Singularity or whatever. Let's, my premise is, although I have some empirical doubts, but I am too stupid to judge if this can happen or not. Let's say this can happen. Something like direct brain-computer and with through computer with other persons, direct exchange of experiences, thoughts. What will this mean for the status of subjectivity? So let me begin. As already said, I will deal with the prospect of so-called post-humanity opened up by a direct link between our brain and a digital machine. My premise is that one should resist here the temptation to proclaim the prospect of a wired brain an illusion, something that we are still far from and that cannot really be actualized. I think that in spite of all simplifications and exaggerations in the public media, something is going on in this domain. And I am not totally bluffing. My only sources are not Time magazine, New York Times, or whatever. I am in contact with some specialists. So I will limit myself to questioning the philosophical implications and consequences of such an event. Important as the rise of the so-called surveillance capitalism is, it is, I think, surveillance capitalism, not yet the true game changer. I see a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface. It is clear that all kind of secret agencies are working intensely on it. My friends who are in it told me that it's incredible how much all, your own, Chinese, Russian secret services invest in this. What we learn is just the public face of it. The best known project in this direction is Elon Musk's Neuralink. The idea of a direct communication pathway first between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device, and then between brains themselves. So first, when our brain is connected to digital machines, we can cause things to happen in reality just by thinking about them. My friends are telling me that at still a very modest level, this can already be done. For example, I was told that when Stephen Hawking was dying in the last month, I don't know, they only considered it or it was already done, that in his wheelchair, he no longer even had to use this famous one finger that he was still able to move a little bit. At an elementary level, the machine was able to crack the basic commands of his brain. So he thought strongly forward, the machine moved forward and so on. Okay, that's the first thing. But then, and so again, there are examples here which are already practice. I direct my thoughts on a coffee machine and the coffee gets made and so on and so on. Then, of course, a much more dangerous and interesting prospect, that of a direct connection to another brain so that my thoughts are directly shared by another individual. For example, because everybody's first association is this one, I daydream about an intense sexual experience and another individual can directly share this experience. So the first paradox here is that the gradual development of communication in the direction of adding, this gradual development went on so that additional layers of mediation were added: spoken word, writing, telegraph, phone, internet. This development is here cut short. We don't get one medium more, we get the prospect of a direct link bypassing these additional layers. The consequence of this direct brain-to-brain communication is not just greater speed, but also accuracy. When I think about something, I don't have to translate my thoughts into linguistic signs which brutally simplify meaning. My partner can directly perceive what I think. A quote from Elon Musk, not because he is a genius, but precisely because he simplifies things to the utmost, bringing out the ideology that underlies this project: "Say you're on a beautiful hike and you want to show your husband the view. No problem. Just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he is there." End of quote. And what is more logical than to extend the idea onto the domain of sexuality? Again, Elon Musk: "You could have, you could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy it again later, or if you are not too private a person, you could send it over to a friend to experience." End of quote. Now, nonetheless, a series of questions arise here. Even again, if we neglect the technical feasibility of this project. The first one concerns the role of language in the formation of our thoughts and of our inner life in general. Elon Musk simply assumes that our thoughts are present in our mind independently of their expression in language, so that if I connect my brain directly with another's brain, the other individual will experience my thoughts directly in all their wealth and finesse, not distorted by the clumsiness and simplifications of language. However, what if language in all its clumsiness and simplifications generates the wealth, the subtle wealth of our thoughts? So yes, language reduces the mess of our thoughts to simple words or sentences. Say, when I say to somebody "I love you," the wealth of my feelings is reduced to a simple formula pronounced thousands of times every day. However, this very condensation of the chaotic wealth creates complex meanings. It evokes the rich texture of what is left unsaid. We are here, I think, automatically victims of a fetishist illusion. The surplus of deeper meaning left unsaid is not already there and then just discovered or alluded to. It is generated by the reduction of our thoughts to simple linguistic formulas. The next question that arises is, will our individuality survive this passage into singularity? Again, a quote from Elon Musk: "Our concern, one concern that comes up when people hear about thought communication in particular is a potential loss of individuality. Would this make us one great hive mind with each individual's brain as just another bee? Almost across the board, the experts believe it would be the opposite. We could act as one in a collaboration when it serves us, but technology has thus far enhanced human individuality." End of quote. My counterpoint: true, technology has so far enhanced our individuality because it introduced more alienation, additional layers into our exchange with others. And it even, it even alienated us from ourselves. Our on-screen image when we interact on the web is not directly ourselves. So what happens when this distance disappears? Elon Musk's first line of defense is that the individual is not totally immersed into this collective space. It, he, the individual, or she, or it, maintains a minimal distance towards it, so that in order to allow the machine or through it another individual to register or share my thoughts and feelings, I have to actively consent to it. Again, a quote: "People won't be able to read your thoughts. You would have to will it. If you don't will it, it doesn't happen. Just like if you don't will your mouth to talk, it doesn't talk." End of quote. My very naive question: how does Musk know that the individual maintains this minimal distance? Remember that a wired brain works objectively. Our brain is wired, linked to a machine which, strictly speaking, doesn't read our thoughts, but the processes in our brain which are the neuronal correlate of our thoughts. Consequently, since we think, I am not aware of the neuronal processes in my brain. So how should I know if I am plugged in into this Neuralink or not? Is it not much more reasonable to surmise that when I am plugged into Neuralink, I will not even be aware when my inner life is transparent to others? In short, does Neuralink not offer itself as the ideal medium of political or social control of our inner lives? And things do progress at this level. I will now repeat an old story that I often repeat. Already in a friend who works in this domain told me that in a lab where he was working, they already succeeded in wiring a rat, rat's brain, to a computer so that the result was this one, and I have the video, they registered, taped the experiment. It's still very elementary. They somehow cracked the neuronal signals to simple gesture, like run forward, left, right, and so on. So you have there a rat freely strolling around, you press a button, the rat becomes like a remote controlled car. You can direct the rat left, right, run this way, run that way. And as my friend kind of hinted at me in an obscure way, of course the big question that bothered them is, let's do it on a human being. And as he didn't want to talk about it, but his hint was that of course secretly they are doing it, and the result is pretty sad. Namely, the big question is, let's say I am this type of controlled person. I walk around here freely, Todd, the evil guy, presses the button and he can control my strolling around. How will I experience it? Will it be, oh my god, some foreign power controls me? And the result, at least what my friend told me almost years ago already, I don't even want to think what they know now is, no, I will not even be aware of what is happening. I will still think that I'm just freely strolling, freely strolling around. Most of those who reflect on Neuralink focus on the individuality of my experience. Will I lose it or not when I immerse into singularity? I think that we should also pursue the opposite option. What if I retain my individuality and I even don't know that I'm controlled and steered? Next point: from the psychoanalytic standpoint, what the shift to the post-human dimension amounts to is, at its most fundamental level, the overcoming, leaving behind, of the domain of sexuality in its most radical ontological dimension. Not just sexuality as a specific sphere of human existence, but the sexual as an antagonism, a bar of impossibility constitutive of being human in our finitude. And the issue carefully avoided, carefully avoided by the partisans of singularity is: to what extent are many features usually identified with being human, not just sexuality but art, creativity, consciousness, and so on, precisely dependent on the antagonism that constitutes the sexual? That's Freud's basic premise. You must be very careful here. I hope you Todd trained them enough. For Freud, sexuality is not the instinctual basis of being human. It's precisely the site of the most radical break. The denaturalization of a human being begins with sexuality. Sexuality in its human form means the biological rhythm is perturbed. Apes or, I don't want to be evil, but those famous Jordan Peterson's lobsters and so on, they have their mating seasons, no? They do it when instinctually they feel the need for it and so on and so on. But look what happens with humans. First, we have this mysterious intrusion of infantile sexuality, which is biologically a nonsense. This biological, I know what's the origin, because of our belated maturity to feel it and so on, and so on. But already there, sexuality enters a domain of fantasies. It's kind of exempted from its biological function of reproduction. And then you get all the paradoxes of human sexuality. Like, what happens in courtly love and at other levels of perversion, that you infinitely prolong or defer, postpone the climax? You just play with it without ever getting at the thing. Or enjoying in pain or whatever, all this stuff. That's constitutive of human sexuality. And it can be claimed that that's in some sense what makes us human. Years ago, I remember reading a book that I didn't like on how our mind works of Steven Pinker, where he tries to explain why we humans cannot solve this enigma of metaphysical questions, how our mind works and so on. And he said it's simple. It's the same reason that rabbits cannot do high mathematics and so on, because in their biological adaptation and so on, they don't need it. Our intellectual tools serve certain purposes, for example, seduction, labor, work and so on. That's what is needed for our biological reproduction. And the same goes for rabbits. So of course the big metaphysical questions, that's why they cannot be answered because simply our mind because of evolutionary reasons of adaptation didn't develop in that direction. With humans, a problem emerges here. Why then, as far as I know, in contrast to rabbits, we are precisely obsessed by impossible problems, these problems which in principle cannot be solved. And not only this, why you can even say, you can even go a step further, why all useful knowledge usually comes as an offspring, an unintended result of solving, of dealing with metaphysical questions and so on and so on. Perhaps the saddest aspect of this vision of Neuralink is the cynical opportunistic calculus that sustain it. The idea is we humans will give birth to a higher form of intelligence. So if with this higher form, if we left it to itself to deploy its powers, will reduce us to gorillas in a zoo. So the logic is, we are doomed to develop a monster that will swallow us, so the only solution is join the winner. Let's immerse ourselves into this monster. Of course, from the perspective of so-called partisans of singularity, they try to put, as it were, a positive spin on it. Their idea is that this immersion into a new collective mind of singularity finally, here I come to your topic of Hegel and so on, finally realizes the program of German idealism, the full reconciliation unity of mind and matter. If you permit me a quote from a guy who formulated a good resume of this, Michael Zimmerman, a longer quote: "Only through humankind can divine self-consciousness occur. After positing an other to itself in the form of nature, which is Geist, spirit, extended in space, Geist subsequently manifests itself as conscious humankind, which then sets about to know and thus to assimilate otherness constituted by extended nature. Material things are petrified intelligence extended in space, whereas consciousness is liquefied intelligence unfolding through temporal history. Estranged from the idea, nature is only the corpse of the understanding. Nature is, however, only implicitly the idea. And Schelling, the German idealist philosopher to whom he refers, therefore called her a petrified intelligence, others even a frozen intelligence. But God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and raise themselves to spirit." End of quote. So the Hegelian, or more broadly, German idealist references are here clearly spelled out, as well as the gap that separates the idea of singularity from the space of German idealism. In nature, natural reality gets gradually spiritualized through the process of actualizing its spiritual potentials. The first peak of this process is human intelligence, in which Spirit becomes aware of itself, returns to itself back from nature. But at this stage, Spirit remains, is still opposed to reality. It becomes aware of itself as individual consciousness opposed to material reality. In order to fully actualize itself, Spirit has to overcome this opposition and become aware of itself as the spiritual dimension, the spiritual inner life of entire material reality. At this level, my self-consciousness overlaps with the self-consciousness of entire reality, or in theological terms, my awareness of God is simultaneously the self-awareness of God himself. That's the idea that, you know, if we are immersed into the collective space of so-called singularity, this transhuman intelligence, then it's no longer us as subject opposed to reality. This collective awareness is self-awareness of material reality itself. It's a total reconciliation between matter and Spirit. But the difference that separates German idealism from the theories of singularity is that for German idealists, this full unity of Spirit and reality is already achieved in the philosophical speculation, or in a more mystical version, in theosophical experience. For theorists of singularity, on the contrary, we finite humans cannot actualize the full unity of Spirit and reality. Our separate individual awareness is a too strong obstacle. Reconciliation of reality with Spirit is achieved only when we renounce our separate individuality and become one with the Spirit which permeates reality itself. Now, what we get here is another third version of "Hegel came too early." You know, all big or influential interpretations of Hegel shared this goal of Hegel, yes, reconciliation between subject and object, Spirit and reality. But the idea is, Hegel came too early. For example, already for so-called Hegelian Marxism, in an exemplary way, the masterpiece of young Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, only proletarian revolution with reconciliation between subject and object, individual, collectivity, can really do what Hegel aimed at, aimed at with his notion of reconciliation. Then for Fukuyama, in a more narrow political, at a more narrow political level, it's only with liberal democracy, with today's developed western capitalism, that we are there, that we got at the final best imaginable form of social order. And I think that partisans of singularity simply made the next step here. No, sorry, only with the science of a shared brain experience and so on will the true reconciliation occur. So the prospect of Neuralink is thus the prospect of actual empirical overcoming of our finite sexual being. Entering the dimension of singularity becomes a simple positive fact, not a matter of sublime inner experience. And we should clearly identify here the theological dimension. Insofar as Fall, in the biblical sense, designates the wound of separation, the constitutive loss that defines us as humans, proponents of Neuralink want to heal the wound literally. They claim, and it's even a nice, crazy, radical thought, they claim "No, no, we are not playing these speculative games in some higher knowledge or mystical experience you can overcome your finitude. No, science can do it. We can literally, empirically, develop a collective brain where it happens." This version of the healing of the wound, the wound of the Fall, is totally incompatible, I think, with Hegel's interpretation of the Fall. Hegel begins with Saint Paul. God gave law to man in order to make them conscious of their sin, even to make them sin all the more, and thus to make them aware of their need for salvation, which can occur only through divine grace. However, does this reading not involve a strange perverse notion of God? The only way to avoid such a perverse reading, and intelligent theologians are aware of it, the reading is that in order to redeem us, God first pushed us down, as it were. I claim this is an obscene misreading of the Bible. But if you want to get rid of this paradox, then you have to accept a radical consequence or implication, namely you have to assert the absolute identity of the two gestures. God does not first push us into sin in order to create the need for salvation and then offer himself as the redeemer from the trouble into which he got us in the first place. It is not that the Fall is followed by redemption; the Fall is identical to redemption. It is in some sense in itself already redemption. That is to say, think a little bit. What is redemption? The explosion of freedom, the breaking out of the natural enchantment. And this precisely is what happens in the Fall. One should bear in mind here the central tension of the Christian notion of the Fall: the Fall, regression to the natural state, enslavement to passions, is strictly identical with the dimension from which we fall. It is as if the very movement of the Fall creates, opens up, what is lost in it. And this brings me to Genesis, the beginning of the Bible, of the New Testament. Does the story of the Fall not say exactly the same thing? The serpent promises Adam and Eve that by eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they will become like God. And as Hegel cynically notices, the serpent didn't lie. After he sees them, after they ate from the tree of knowledge, God says, "Behold, Adam has become like one of us." Okay, I will now drop the mysteries of "one of us," you know, you have, especially in the Old Testament, always this plural existence of God. This is a big problem, in what precise sense is Judaism monotheistic? So then Hegel rejects the claim that what God says is meant with irony. Now I quote Hegel, the crucial passage from his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: "Cognition is the principle of spirituality, and this is also the principle by which the injury of the separation is healed. It is in this principle of cognition that the principle of divinity is also posited." End of quote. So subjective knowledge is not just the possibility to choose evil or good. Another quote from Hegel: "It is the consideration or the cognition that makes people evil, so that consideration and cognition themselves are what is evil, and therefore such cognition is what ought not to exist because it is the source of evil." End of quote. This is how one should understand Hegel's dictum from his Phenomenology of Spirit that evil is the gaze itself which perceives evil everywhere. The gaze which sees evil excludes itself from the social whole it criticizes, and this exclusion is the formal characteristic of evil. And Hegel's point is that the good emerges as a possibility and duty only through this primordial choice of evil. We experience the good when after choosing evil, we become aware of the utter inadequacy of our situation. Now, I think here, but if there are some Hegel specialists here they will know it better than me, that Hegel, as is often the case with him, is at a certain crucial point afraid to go to the end here. Because Hegel always emphasizes that when you have the Fall, division, separation, it's never simply the good part, Spirit, and then the bad part. The true evil is the good part itself which caused the separation. But it's implicitly in Hegel this much more radical idea that in the separation of God from man, to put it very brutally, you find some hints in Hegel, the true evil is God himself. That's why, as Hegel emphasizes, what happens on the cross is that God admits that his separation from man is also the separation of God from himself. You know, the Christian formula is not "we finite mortal humans are separated from God, so if you work hard, purifying yourself, means you somehow rejoin God." No, Christianity has a totally different formula of reconciliation. Reconciliation means that you experience how your separation from God is at the same time the separation of God from himself. That's what happens on the cross, of course with the famous *Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani*, "Father, why have you abandoned me?" You have there a moment of separation transposed into God himself. So again, I go here, my god I talk too much, very quickly to refer to your book again where you emphasize how the Hegelian reconciliation is not the reconciliation which overcomes the obstacles. Reconciliation means you acknowledge the obstacle as constitutive. You have an obstacle to something, but you get reconciled when you see, realize that this obstacle which prevents you from reaching some higher goal is what creates, what sustains this higher goal. So for Hegel, we humans reach immortality and infinity not by way of undoing the Fall, by way of somehow getting rid of the obstacle of our finite bodily existence, but by way of reconciling ourselves with what appeared to us as the obstacle and accepting that this obstacle plays the positive role of sustaining the space of what it appears as an obstacle to. Even, now, a comical very brief comical interlude, even from your love life, are you aware that if your partner, how do you fall in love? I claim it's what makes you, a person can be to your standards beautiful, attractive, but for love you always have to have some imperfection. And then you say to yourself "In spite of this imperfection I love him, her, it," and so on. But this "in spite of" is deceiving here. This "in spite of" really means a positive condition of it. So again, the basis of Hegel is that obstacles create what they are an obstacle to. And to illustrate this point, Hegel evokes a wonderful example from the sphere of education. He notices how small children prefer to draw images in color, while later they prefer to do them in gray, with the colorless pencil. Now humanist theories of education see this as the oppressive result of educational violence. Children's creativity thwarted, they are forced to express themselves within the straitjacket of colorlessness and so on. Hegel's reading is exactly the opposite one. It is this reduction to colorless space that by way of reducing the sensuous wealth enables the children to articulate the higher spiritual dimension. This is why when our medium gets enhanced by more realist, for example, reading of reality, something is always lost. This is why when color movies were introduced, or even already with sound, many high artists were in a panic. They saw that color movies do not mean simply we see more, it, we lose something, the spiritual wealth is lost. This brings me now, I will try to complicate things a little bit more, to the topic of the Freudian unconscious. The unconscious for Freud is not some deeper irrational dimension, but it's what Lacan would have called a virtual another scene which accompanies my conscious content. Let me take an example of a joke that I use all the time in the last decade, probably I used it here the last time, now I am the stupid hen or whatever, not just stupid, yeah. You know I always, the famous jokes from Lubitsch, Ernst Lubitsch's "Ninotchka," you know when a guy in a cafeteria says "Waiter, bring me a cup of coffee without cream please," and the waiter replies "I'm sorry sir, we have no cream, only milk, so I can only bring you a coffee without milk." That's what Hegel means with determinate negation. Although material is the same coffee, but coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream in our symbolic universe of course. And things get here so complex, my good friend, not as good as you but, a good friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy, D-U-P-U-Y, who teaches in Paris but also at Stanford, the best theorist of catastrophes that I know, locates at this dimension the possibility to change the past. He is not a science fiction magician. Of course, something happens, we cannot change it. But what we are doing, also I drank a coffee, we cannot change this, it happened in the past. But what I can do retroactively is to change the fact that I drank coffee without cream into a fact that I changed coffee without milk. I mean this, let's call it absential or virtual dimension of the past that we can change. And my point is that far from being some deep substantial instinctual irrationality, the Freudian unconscious moves strictly at this level. Unconscious is like the *anal* of unconscious is this potential negative virtuality. It's, let's say, drinking your stupid coffee without milk is your consciousness and unconscious decides are you drinking coffee without milk or coffee, or coffee without cream. Now the very naive question that I, that has to be raised here is, and maybe you can help me, this is not I am not boasting patronizing you, this is not a rhetorical question, it's a very naive question. Can the computer even if we imagine this perfect singularity which reads your mind and let's say it reads your mind "I want a cup of coffee," can it discern this virtual negative dimension accompanying it? Did you mean coffee without milk or coffee without, or coffee without cream? There are signs, my computer specialist friends who know more than me that no, this is still an obstacle, this virtual negative dimension remains outside. And so this brings me to the, to the conclusion. I think it's against this background that we should approach the question, will the eventual rise of singularity be an apocalypse? Already decades ago, Günther Anders, if you're interested, the first husband of Hannah Arendt, wrote after World War II an interesting essay, seminal essay, "Apocalypse Without Kingdom." Where he says usually we imagine apocalypse, even if it's a catastrophe, as apocalypse with kingdom. It's a catastrophe but through this catastrophe at the end some higher level kingdom emerges. And for Günther Anders, he was of course reacting to the prospect of nuclear catastrophe, the problem is that that catastrophe would have been precisely an apocalypse without kingdom. There is no higher insight only, maybe okay if you are some crazy religious fundamentalist and you think it doesn't matter what happens, we will all be dead but we will be risen in God and so on and so on. If you don't accept this, the apocalypse is simply absolute. Now the question is, since clearly our emerging into a singularity, floating in a collective brain, happens, what type of apocalypse will it be? Will it be the way the partisans of singularity paint it, with apocalypse with kingdom? We will become divine, floating in a divine collective mind, and so on and so on. But not to lose time, give me another five ten minutes just, I like to complicate things here. You know, even with intelligent theologians, this idea of floating in paradise, it gets complicated. I'm now repeating a joke of I forgot which one, one of my last books. For example, you learn so much from intelligent theologians. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica approaches this very simple problem: in Paradise, we were supposed to become a little bit God-like in the sense of a perfect, almost complete knowledge. So will we be able or not in Paradise to observe the suffering of those in Hell? And his solution is yes, because not being able to do it would have meant that our knowledge is curtailed, limited and so on and so on. But he, he was not an idiot Thomas Aquinas, he immediately sees the problem, which is since what we will be doing in Paradise will bring us constant pleasure, isn't it sadistic, ominous? How can we could find immense pleasure in observing terrible suffering of others in Hell? His answer is a typical sophistic theological tricky one, is to distinguish two types of pleasure. We will not find pleasure directly in seeing the suffering, we will find pleasure and awe in the greatness of divine justice. My God, you see how God did punish and so on and so on. But even this part, of course, I think it doesn't work. I think that many really intelligent theologians are aware of it, that things are much darker here. In the sense not in the sense that we are simply sadists and so on, but what if living in Paradise is boring? What if the only thing, place where in our imagination things really happen is Hell? So the scene I like to imagine, it's my crazy idea, is that you get bored in Heaven and then once a week they tell you "Okay, are you bored here? Let me just give you an idea and it will renew your will to be here, what is happening down there." So for minutes you are allowed to see the suffering down there and then the angel organizing this tells you "Now you see, it's nonetheless better here." But then I go to the end and tell myself look at it from the standpoint of Hell. It's permanent fire which means you are there, you are there roasting fresh meat, you are dancing, getting drunk and so on. And then Devil's advocate like once a week tell you "Guys, this only works if we pretend, if we cover it up, that we don't have such a nice life. In the next half an hour we are observed, please play that we are suffering. Oh, no!" and then this guy, Devil's advocate says "Okay, it's over, back to the party," and so on and so on. Now you will think I'm crazy, I will not quote it to you now, there are theologians who went as far as this. But, so now I will give you another example of this dimension which escapes, eludes divinity if you read the notion of divinity in a too flat dimension as you have put it outside contradiction, this eternal bliss, complete wisdom and so on and so on. A joke, at least here, I didn't use it here, it's nowhere so this joke I can tell it to you with clear consciousness. Jewish friend told me it to me. You know that the Jews have something, I don't think it will last for a long time, it's so politically incorrect, Auschwitz jokes. It's a whole subgenre. And to understand the joke that I will tell you now, you just have to be aware that, of this, how theology dealt with, dealt with, with, with Auschwitz. You know the popular motive is "God was not there" or "God died there." The idea is it's simply too horrible to happen for God to condone it. So there's even, I think, a book written on it with the title "God Died at Auschwitz" or "God Was Not There" and so on and so on. Okay, you are not obliged to laugh, it's a very simple joke but it has a deep insight in it. The joke is that the, there are a couple of Jews in Paradise who died at Auschwitz, and it's a nice afternoon in Paradise, a nice stream, meadow, near forest. They sit on a bench and tell them jokes, funny stories about how they died at Auschwitz. And one of them tells the other "You remember Jacob how you died there? You were even not touched by gas because when they dragged you towards gas chamber, you slipped on a, on a piece of soap and you fell and cracked your skull. Oh it was so funny," and Jacob laughs, "Oh it was so funny." Then God, taking a break from his hard work, comes walking by, looks at them and said "Guys, my god, how can you make fun of this? I don't understand it. You suffered so much, how can you make fun of it?" You know what one of the Jews does? Goes to God, puts a shoulder around his arms and says "Don't worry my Lord, you of course you cannot understand it because you were not there." And I find this so brilliant here. It's not the suffering that God cannot understand, it's the joke of it. This dimension is the dimension of "without coffee" or whatever, that, that virtual dimension. In the end, but I already speak too much, there is another joke which it would be possible to include her to make your point when the last time we met you were advocating universality. And if you okay, if you allow me this slight detour, it's the same with, that's my problem with identity politics. When somebody plays the victim, humiliating himself, always ask in Lacanian terms what is the surplus pleasure, surplus enjoyment, what does he gain by it? Another joke, I already used it but now I will give a different anti-political correctness twist to it. Probably you know the joke, it's again a Jewish joke, Saturday in a synagogue they are conversing, Jewish believers, and first a rich Rabbi said "Oh God, I'm nothing, I'm not worth of your attention," and so on and so on, you must know the joke. Then another rich Jewish merchant says "Oh God, I'm also nothing, I'm not worthy of your attention, blah blah blah." And then a poor ordinary Jew stands up and says "Oh God, but I'm also nothing," and one of the rich Jews kicks the other and says "But who does this guy think that he is that he can simply say that he is also a nothing?" That's what I literally experienced already over ten years ago at a round table where all white male people engaged in this exaggerated self-humiliation. Everything that happens in the third world it's responsibility of Eurocentrism, of European civilization, we are guilty of everything, blah blah blah. And then I learned this story from a black friend of mine who is really intelligent. He told me that he raised his hand and said "But wait a minute, we blacks are not so innocent you know, we also have our own mass fundamentalism and so on and so on, we are also guilty." And he told me the look of these big white critics was devastating. Basically, they were reproaching him "But *we* are the guilty ones! What right do you have to proclaim in this sense that you are also nothing?" and so on and so on. Why? You have to ask yourself what do white liberals, left liberals, anti-racists profit from this assuming all the guilt? They profit, they gain their universality. They all the time advocate "No, blacks or other cultures should be allowed their particular identity," blah blah blah. "But not universality." I always notice this how they precisely by proclaiming themselves nothing, they reserve for themselves this position of judges of what is politically correct and so on and so on and so on. So no, the true end of racism for me is not "we are all allowed our particular identity," no. The, the true end of racism is when blacks and others are allowed to formulate their own universality, to participate in their own way in our universality. So sorry for this detour, back to my main line. What then does all this have to do with singularity? What will it be? It will not be this free floating in some collective space. It will also not be, I think, that we will become simply inhuman, just cogs in the global machine of a global mind, simply losing our individuality and so on and so on. Here I think many partisans of singularity read, I really think he is bad as a theorist, the big popularizer of singularity Ray Kurzweil. Read him. He, you know, he describes this wonderful space, shared experiences and so on and so on. But the way he talks is as if we somehow remain the same individuals talking, reasoning and so on. It remains there. So what will happen? I think neither a collective bliss nor Hell, but something much more paradoxical. That's why I mentioned this, the joke of "without milk" and so on and so on. Now that we experience ourselves as subjects, somehow our individuality is automatically assumed to be the same as our inner life, self-experience and so on and so on. Here I think the way if it will happen, singularity, sharing a collective mind experiences will happen, is that we individuals participating in it will emerge as pure Cartesian subject, empty point. We will be deprived of all our positive content. Yes, all my experiences can be shared and so on and so on, all my conscious experiences. But I as pure "I", this pure point of self-reference, I will not be that. We will experience, I claim, singularity as a radical cut, radical division. Even our experiences, subjective experiences, will be taken from us. But I claim, and here comes the complication, what will not be taken from us, because of the reasons I already indicated, is our unconscious, this purely virtual negative dimension. So this will be a nice paradox where precisely our unconscious will escape this collective machine of singularity and so on and so on. So again, will the universe of meaning still be there when we will, if we will dwell in singularity, or will we enter simply a meaningless automatic universe? I think it will be there, but as absent. The loss will remain, precisely because we will survive as, as empty subject. So the division will not, no longer be the division between subject and object, I am alienated from the social totality. It will be a radical cut in my own self-experience. I am not what I am, my inner life and so on and so on. And here I come to the stupid hen and his thought from his new book, where he says referring to Hegel: "The point of political contestation is to move in the direction of an increasingly resistant contradiction, and philosophy plays a vital role in this movement. This is Hegel's definition of progress: the movement from more easily resolved social contradictions to more intractable ones." And that's again my final thought for, for, for what will happen if this will happen technologically, singularity. It will be no longer be this simple contradiction, I and you, what do I know what is in your mind and so on, or me and impenetrable society. The, the contradiction in the sense of radical inconsistency gap will be brought into the very heart of my identity. So maybe there is a new hope in it, but as many intelligent critics of singularity have proven, it can also mean an incredible new forms of pain. Are we aware, I'm sure some secret agencies are already practicing it. For example, you know this idea of getting rid of sexuality in the sense of our fantasies and so on and doing it directly, just soliciting our whatever biological basis is of orgasm and so on. But are you aware that once you do this, you can apply the same at pain, and you can imagine through Neuralink incredible new forms of torture and so on and so on. We are in an extremely dangerous domain. But I don't think that we can step back. We are already in it. So it's an extremely dangerous situation. New, what we were till now speculating, "Oh we are divided subject, not identical with ourselves" and so on, if singularity happens then it will no longer be just a philosophical speculation or something that you can discern through deep psychoanalysis, it will be an everyday matter of human experience, this radical self-division. I think that's all that we can say today, that under the mask of this unity of singularity, "Oh we share experiences" and so on and so on, it will be, it will be an incredible radical division. Thank you very much. Did I hear you correctly? Yeah. What did you? You said two minutes. A few minutes, yeah. Go ahead. Um, so talking about singularity, you talk about the apocalypse and us being in one singular space. Have you ever thought of the idea of if we are in this individual sense and our brains in a sense become code through this technological singularity, how would terrorist attacks or situations of hacking play into it? Because if our brain is technical code in that sense, couldn't that be manipulated to change memories and wouldn't that create some sort of downfall like all of a sudden you wake up, don't remember anything or something like that, or would it affect our understanding of how different diseases work, like Alzheimer's and such? That could be distorted as well in that sense because you're just forgetting stuff out of nowhere but it's your brain is technically being hacked because it is now code. So wouldn't that be a? Yes, it's a very nice question. I wanted to, I consciously avoided all these details, but I totally agree with you. What my friends are telling me, friends who know friends who have some dark connections in the military establishment, is precisely along those lines they are thinking. Like how you can manipulate the past and so on and so forth, how you can do all this. And again, I don't think this is a, a magic, no. You know, past is something that is alive here with us. In this sense, we can change the past. My god, my eternal quote here is, I always quote him so forgive me for repeating myself, T.S. Eliot, who said, you know, in his "Tradition and the Individual Talent," a classical statement of modernism, who said that with every new radical break in art, the entire past is changed in some sense. And I think there is nowhere that this is seen in a nicer way than for example, I'm sorry for repeating myself with William Shakespeare. I think what defines a true classic is not that you need the context to understand him, no, that you survive decontextualization. What I find nonetheless very traditional but I do admire Shakespeare because precisely it's incredible how his great plays can be reinvented for every new epoch. You can get, just imagine, you can get romantic Hamlet and so on and so on, each epoch has its own Hamlet. This is for me the true artistic universality. And again, if you allow me to repeat another, I think I used it in one of my books, one of my books, another wonderful moment here which nicely refers to your Todd thesis on universality and so on, transcultural links. I don't like too much Salman Rushdie, he's way too liberal now, but once I was at a round table with him where he gave a wonderful answer to a critical question from the podium where somebody told him "Why did you betray your own culture and move to England and so on and so on, more impressed by England and so on?" and he gave a wonderful answer. He said "No it's not true, the deepest influence in my work as a writer are two great English writers, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens." And he said "If as an Indian person you read Jane Austen, all this, you know, impoverished rich people, intrigues, how to marry your daughters," he said "This is the lower middle class, middle class in Bombay" or, no, how do you say today, Mumbai? No, Mumbai is prohibited. Mumbai? Mumbai, yes. This is in Mumbai today. Then he said "Poverty in India, it's Dickens, Oliver Twist and so on and so on." And this is the moments which are for me truly fascinating. How I don't think I never believed in this "No, to understand Shakespeare you have to know all the details of Elizabethan England." If anything, I claim the opposite is true. To understand Elizabethan England, you need to read Shakespeare. That's why, for example, an author that I don't like very much for reasons I will not go into today, Dostoevsky. It's so nice to see, go to Pirate Bay, is it dangerous here, can you be fined? Or I don't know, but you can get it there, the absolutely best film version of Dostoevsky is the title is "Hakuchi," I don't know, it's Akira Kurosawa's Japanese version. Which is transposed into Japan after World War II. Myshkin, the idiot of his "Idiot," doesn't come from Europe but he comes from the front and so on and so on. That's, that's the living universality. Precisely how it's not what Hegel calls concrete universality. It's not abstract, it's precisely this total adaptability. You are thankful to Shakespeare more if you, or to Dostoevsky, more if you transpose him in contemporary Japan then to try to search for what did he really mean and so on and so on. Hi, I was just wondering, um, with the possibility of singularity, uh, you know, materializing, do you see it as, as sort of like, as sort of uh opening up, uh, for example like the idea of the divided subject to falsificationism and therefore could you see it as a sort of threat to the whole theory or is there is it still too abstract and is there a way to sort of sidestep? Sorry, I didn't get precisely the point of your question. I, the possibility of literalizing the divided subject, um, does that open it up to falsification and therefore threaten the theory of Hegelian psychoanalysis, Lacanian? Yeah, yeah. In some sense yes, I'm not afraid to say I would accept this challenge. Because it's very abstract what I said but I really mean it as a, maybe I will be proven false, as a concrete prediction. I'm talking precisely about how if our individuality sometimes survives, how it will experience itself. Again, it will be neither this bliss of floating in some communal space nor simple disappearance of subjectivity. It will be precisely this radical division. And I'm even tempted to say, it's totally crazy, if it doesn't happen then we will know retroactively that Hegel was totally wrong. No, you know because I think that precisely because here something happened for me as a Hegelian which I find so paradoxical, something happened that was in some sense totally unthinkable for Hegel. Hegel was all in this idea of mediation, *Aufhebung*, you don't get rid of the body, you just mediate your body becomes a, you know, this idea of totally immanent transcendence. And here are guys who come "No, fuck your speculation, we can literally do it." through the means of empirical technology we can put you into this divine state and so on and so on. And it's crucial that, it's crucial again, yes, I'm ready to accept that challenge. Um, so I was just wondering um why do you think that these um these technological advances that promise to bring us closer together like in the in the age of social media that sort of promise us like more shared ideas and bringing us closer is actually making us more lonely and miserable and divided? Um, there seems to be sort of a common thread there
Thank you very much. I am really glad to be here because we are in the north, it's cold, and I love this. Now, about you Todd, you will get it back now. You know, speaking about good books on Hegel, since many of you are probably his students here, nonetheless, I must report on something that I noticed how almost all the really great books on Hegel in the last decades are written by women. You know, for example, it began thirty, forty years ago, a French lady Béatrice Longuenesse, Hegel and the Critique of Metaphysics, something like that. Then it was, it was Gillian Rose, not Jacqueline Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology. Then it was Catherine Malabou. Then it was Rebecca Comay, and so on. So at least measured by all politically correct standards, women are not underrepresented here. But there is now, you told me it physically already exists, although it's not yet in the bookstores, your own Emancipation After Hegel, a new book. And at the end, if there will be time to make my final point, I will quote from it. But this doesn't change the fact that you are a complete idiot. It's just we, in Slovene, we have one of these stupidities called national proverbs, no? Even a blind hen can find the best grain. You know, like the translation would be like even a complete idiot can be lucky. So the quote fits that category. No, seriously, read the book because it's very clearly written and so on. So before I begin, I will begin in a minute, but I was duped, tricked by Todd, because he told me you can speak in a complex way as much as you want. This is a group educated in theory. It will not be quite like that, but it will be some parts on Hegel relatively complex. So again, no dirty jokes. I will keep the jokes for this Friday, remember, no dirty jokes and, but at the same time it will be very naive. I'm really intrigued by this problem, problem of the so-called popular term coined by Elon Musk, Neuralink, or Singularity or whatever. Let's, my premise is, although I have some empirical doubts, but I am too stupid to judge if this can happen or not. Let's say this can happen. Something like direct brain-computer and with through computer with other persons, direct exchange of experiences, thoughts. What will this mean for the status of subjectivity? So let me begin. As already said, I will deal with the prospect of so-called post-humanity opened up by a direct link between our brain and a digital machine. My premise is that one should resist here the temptation to proclaim the prospect of a wired brain an illusion, something that we are still far from and that cannot really be actualized. I think that in spite of all simplifications and exaggerations in the public media, something is going on in this domain. And I am not totally bluffing. My only sources are not Time magazine, New York Times, or whatever. I am in contact with some specialists. So I will limit myself to questioning the philosophical implications and consequences of such an event. Important as the rise of the so-called surveillance capitalism is, it is, I think, surveillance capitalism, not yet the true game changer. I see a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface. It is clear that all kind of secret agencies are working intensely on it. My friends who are in it told me that it's incredible how much all, your own, Chinese, Russian secret services invest in this. What we learn is just the public face of it. The best known project in this direction is Elon Musk's Neuralink. The idea of a direct communication pathway first between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device, and then between brains themselves. So first, when our brain is connected to digital machines, we can cause things to happen in reality just by thinking about them. My friends are telling me that at still a very modest level, this can already be done. For example, I was told that when Stephen Hawking was dying in the last month, I don't know, they only considered it or it was already done, that in his wheelchair, he no longer even had to use this famous one finger that he was still able to move a little bit. At an elementary level, the machine was able to crack the basic commands of his brain. So he thought strongly forward, the machine moved forward and so on. Okay, that's the first thing. But then, and so again, there are examples here which are already practice. I direct my thoughts on a coffee machine and the coffee gets made and so on and so on. Then, of course, a much more dangerous and interesting prospect, that of a direct connection to another brain so that my thoughts are directly shared by another individual. For example, because everybody's first association is this one, I daydream about an intense sexual experience and another individual can directly share this experience. So the first paradox here is that the gradual development of communication in the direction of adding, this gradual development went on so that additional layers of mediation were added: spoken word, writing, telegraph, phone, internet. This development is here cut short. We don't get one medium more, we get the prospect of a direct link bypassing these additional layers. The consequence of this direct brain-to-brain communication is not just greater speed, but also accuracy. When I think about something, I don't have to translate my thoughts into linguistic signs which brutally simplify meaning. My partner can directly perceive what I think. A quote from Elon Musk, not because he is a genius, but precisely because he simplifies things to the utmost, bringing out the ideology that underlies this project: "Say you're on a beautiful hike and you want to show your husband the view. No problem. Just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he is there." End of quote. And what is more logical than to extend the idea onto the domain of sexuality? Again, Elon Musk: "You could have, you could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy it again later, or if you are not too private a person, you could send it over to a friend to experience." End of quote. Now, nonetheless, a series of questions arise here. Even again, if we neglect the technical feasibility of this project. The first one concerns the role of language in the formation of our thoughts and of our inner life in general. Elon Musk simply assumes that our thoughts are present in our mind independently of their expression in language, so that if I connect my brain directly with another's brain, the other individual will experience my thoughts directly in all their wealth and finesse, not distorted by the clumsiness and simplifications of language. However, what if language in all its clumsiness and simplifications generates the wealth, the subtle wealth of our thoughts? So yes, language reduces the mess of our thoughts to simple words or sentences. Say, when I say to somebody "I love you," the wealth of my feelings is reduced to a simple formula pronounced thousands of times every day. However, this very condensation of the chaotic wealth creates complex meanings. It evokes the rich texture of what is left unsaid. We are here, I think, automatically victims of a fetishist illusion. The surplus of deeper meaning left unsaid is not already there and then just discovered or alluded to. It is generated by the reduction of our thoughts to simple linguistic formulas. The next question that arises is, will our individuality survive this passage into singularity? Again, a quote from Elon Musk: "Our concern, one concern that comes up when people hear about thought communication in particular is a potential loss of individuality. Would this make us one great hive mind with each individual's brain as just another bee? Almost across the board, the experts believe it would be the opposite. We could act as one in a collaboration when it serves us, but technology has thus far enhanced human individuality." End of quote. My counterpoint: true, technology has so far enhanced our individuality because it introduced more alienation, additional layers into our exchange with others. And it even, it even alienated us from ourselves. Our on-screen image when we interact on the web is not directly ourselves. So what happens when this distance disappears? Elon Musk's first line of defense is that the individual is not totally immersed into this collective space. It, he, the individual, or she, or it, maintains a minimal distance towards it, so that in order to allow the machine or through it another individual to register or share my thoughts and feelings, I have to actively consent to it. Again, a quote: "People won't be able to read your thoughts. You would have to will it. If you don't will it, it doesn't happen. Just like if you don't will your mouth to talk, it doesn't talk." End of quote. My very naive question: how does Musk know that the individual maintains this minimal distance? Remember that a wired brain works objectively. Our brain is wired, linked to a machine which, strictly speaking, doesn't read our thoughts, but the processes in our brain which are the neuronal correlate of our thoughts. Consequently, since we think, I am not aware of the neuronal processes in my brain. So how should I know if I am plugged in into this Neuralink or not? Is it not much more reasonable to surmise that when I am plugged into Neuralink, I will not even be aware when my inner life is transparent to others? In short, does Neuralink not offer itself as the ideal medium of political or social control of our inner lives? And things do progress at this level. I will now repeat an old story that I often repeat. Already in a friend who works in this domain told me that in a lab where he was working, they already succeeded in wiring a rat, rat's brain, to a computer so that the result was this one, and I have the video, they registered, taped the experiment. It's still very elementary. They somehow cracked the neuronal signals to simple gesture, like run forward, left, right, and so on. So you have there a rat freely strolling around, you press a button, the rat becomes like a remote controlled car. You can direct the rat left, right, run this way, run that way. And as my friend kind of hinted at me in an obscure way, of course the big question that bothered them is, let's do it on a human being. And as he didn't want to talk about it, but his hint was that of course secretly they are doing it, and the result is pretty sad. Namely, the big question is, let's say I am this type of controlled person. I walk around here freely, Todd, the evil guy, presses the button and he can control my strolling around. How will I experience it? Will it be, oh my god, some foreign power controls me? And the result, at least what my friend told me almost years ago already, I don't even want to think what they know now is, no, I will not even be aware of what is happening. I will still think that I'm just freely strolling, freely strolling around. Most of those who reflect on Neuralink focus on the individuality of my experience. Will I lose it or not when I immerse into singularity? I think that we should also pursue the opposite option. What if I retain my individuality and I even don't know that I'm controlled and steered? Next point: from the psychoanalytic standpoint, what the shift to the post-human dimension amounts to is, at its most fundamental level, the overcoming, leaving behind, of the domain of sexuality in its most radical ontological dimension. Not just sexuality as a specific sphere of human existence, but the sexual as an antagonism, a bar of impossibility constitutive of being human in our finitude. And the issue carefully avoided, carefully avoided by the partisans of singularity is: to what extent are many features usually identified with being human, not just sexuality but art, creativity, consciousness, and so on, precisely dependent on the antagonism that constitutes the sexual? That's Freud's basic premise. You must be very careful here. I hope you Todd trained them enough. For Freud, sexuality is not the instinctual basis of being human. It's precisely the site of the most radical break. The denaturalization of a human being begins with sexuality. Sexuality in its human form means the biological rhythm is perturbed. Apes or, I don't want to be evil, but those famous Jordan Peterson's lobsters and so on, they have their mating seasons, no? They do it when instinctually they feel the need for it and so on and so on. But look what happens with humans. First, we have this mysterious intrusion of infantile sexuality, which is biologically a nonsense. This biological, I know what's the origin, because of our belated maturity to feel it and so on, and so on. But already there, sexuality enters a domain of fantasies. It's kind of exempted from its biological function of reproduction. And then you get all the paradoxes of human sexuality. Like, what happens in courtly love and at other levels of perversion, that you infinitely prolong or defer, postpone the climax? You just play with it without ever getting at the thing. Or enjoying in pain or whatever, all this stuff. That's constitutive of human sexuality. And it can be claimed that that's in some sense what makes us human. Years ago, I remember reading a book that I didn't like on how our mind works of Steven Pinker, where he tries to explain why we humans cannot solve this enigma of metaphysical questions, how our mind works and so on. And he said it's simple. It's the same reason that rabbits cannot do high mathematics and so on, because in their biological adaptation and so on, they don't need it. Our intellectual tools serve certain purposes, for example, seduction, labor, work and so on. That's what is needed for our biological reproduction. And the same goes for rabbits. So of course the big metaphysical questions, that's why they cannot be answered because simply our mind because of evolutionary reasons of adaptation didn't develop in that direction. With humans, a problem emerges here. Why then, as far as I know, in contrast to rabbits, we are precisely obsessed by impossible problems, these problems which in principle cannot be solved. And not only this, why you can even say, you can even go a step further, why all useful knowledge usually comes as an offspring, an unintended result of solving, of dealing with metaphysical questions and so on and so on. Perhaps the saddest aspect of this vision of Neuralink is the cynical opportunistic calculus that sustain it. The idea is we humans will give birth to a higher form of intelligence. So if with this higher form, if we left it to itself to deploy its powers, will reduce us to gorillas in a zoo. So the logic is, we are doomed to develop a monster that will swallow us, so the only solution is join the winner. Let's immerse ourselves into this monster. Of course, from the perspective of so-called partisans of singularity, they try to put, as it were, a positive spin on it. Their idea is that this immersion into a new collective mind of singularity finally, here I come to your topic of Hegel and so on, finally realizes the program of German idealism, the full reconciliation unity of mind and matter. If you permit me a quote from a guy who formulated a good resume of this, Michael Zimmerman, a longer quote: "Only through humankind can divine self-consciousness occur. After positing an other to itself in the form of nature, which is Geist, spirit, extended in space, Geist subsequently manifests itself as conscious humankind, which then sets about to know and thus to assimilate otherness constituted by extended nature. Material things are petrified intelligence extended in space, whereas consciousness is liquefied intelligence unfolding through temporal history. Estranged from the idea, nature is only the corpse of the understanding. Nature is, however, only implicitly the idea. And Schelling, the German idealist philosopher to whom he refers, therefore called her a petrified intelligence, others even a frozen intelligence. But God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and raise themselves to spirit." End of quote. So the Hegelian, or more broadly, German idealist references are here clearly spelled out, as well as the gap that separates the idea of singularity from the space of German idealism. In nature, natural reality gets gradually spiritualized through the process of actualizing its spiritual potentials. The first peak of this process is human intelligence, in which Spirit becomes aware of itself, returns to itself back from nature. But at this stage, Spirit remains, is still opposed to reality. It becomes aware of itself as individual consciousness opposed to material reality. In order to fully actualize itself, Spirit has to overcome this opposition and become aware of itself as the spiritual dimension, the spiritual inner life of entire material reality. At this level, my self-consciousness overlaps with the self-consciousness of entire reality, or in theological terms, my awareness of God is simultaneously the self-awareness of God himself. That's the idea that, you know, if we are immersed into the collective space of so-called singularity, this transhuman intelligence, then it's no longer us as subject opposed to reality. This collective awareness is self-awareness of material reality itself. It's a total reconciliation between matter and Spirit. But the difference that separates German idealism from the theories of singularity is that for German idealists, this full unity of Spirit and reality is already achieved in the philosophical speculation, or in a more mystical version, in theosophical experience. For theorists of singularity, on the contrary, we finite humans cannot actualize the full unity of Spirit and reality. Our separate individual awareness is a too strong obstacle. Reconciliation of reality with Spirit is achieved only when we renounce our separate individuality and become one with the Spirit which permeates reality itself. Now, what we get here is another third version of "Hegel came too early." You know, all big or influential interpretations of Hegel shared this goal of Hegel, yes, reconciliation between subject and object, Spirit and reality. But the idea is, Hegel came too early. For example, already for so-called Hegelian Marxism, in an exemplary way, the masterpiece of young Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, only proletarian revolution with reconciliation between subject and object, individual, collectivity, can really do what Hegel aimed at, aimed at with his notion of reconciliation. Then for Fukuyama, in a more narrow political, at a more narrow political level, it's only with liberal democracy, with today's developed western capitalism, that we are there, that we got at the final best imaginable form of social order. And I think that partisans of singularity simply made the next step here. No, sorry, only with the science of a shared brain experience and so on will the true reconciliation occur. So the prospect of Neuralink is thus the prospect of actual empirical overcoming of our finite sexual being. Entering the dimension of singularity becomes a simple positive fact, not a matter of sublime inner experience. And we should clearly identify here the theological dimension. Insofar as Fall, in the biblical sense, designates the wound of separation, the constitutive loss that defines us as humans, proponents of Neuralink want to heal the wound literally. They claim, and it's even a nice, crazy, radical thought, they claim "No, no, we are not playing these speculative games in some higher knowledge or mystical experience you can overcome your finitude. No, science can do it. We can literally, empirically, develop a collective brain where it happens." This version of the healing of the wound, the wound of the Fall, is totally incompatible, I think, with Hegel's interpretation of the Fall. Hegel begins with Saint Paul. God gave law to man in order to make them conscious of their sin, even to make them sin all the more, and thus to make them aware of their need for salvation, which can occur only through divine grace. However, does this reading not involve a strange perverse notion of God? The only way to avoid such a perverse reading, and intelligent theologians are aware of it, the reading is that in order to redeem us, God first pushed us down, as it were. I claim this is an obscene misreading of the Bible. But if you want to get rid of this paradox, then you have to accept a radical consequence or implication, namely you have to assert the absolute identity of the two gestures. God does not first push us into sin in order to create the need for salvation and then offer himself as the redeemer from the trouble into which he got us in the first place. It is not that the Fall is followed by redemption; the Fall is identical to redemption. It is in some sense in itself already redemption. That is to say, think a little bit. What is redemption? The explosion of freedom, the breaking out of the natural enchantment. And this precisely is what happens in the Fall. One should bear in mind here the central tension of the Christian notion of the Fall: the Fall, regression to the natural state, enslavement to passions, is strictly identical with the dimension from which we fall. It is as if the very movement of the Fall creates, opens up, what is lost in it. And this brings me to Genesis, the beginning of the Bible, of the New Testament. Does the story of the Fall not say exactly the same thing? The serpent promises Adam and Eve that by eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they will become like God. And as Hegel cynically notices, the serpent didn't lie. After he sees them, after they ate from the tree of knowledge, God says, "Behold, Adam has become like one of us." Okay, I will now drop the mysteries of "one of us," you know, you have, especially in the Old Testament, always this plural existence of God. This is a big problem, in what precise sense is Judaism monotheistic? So then Hegel rejects the claim that what God says is meant with irony. Now I quote Hegel, the crucial passage from his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: "Cognition is the principle of spirituality, and this is also the principle by which the injury of the separation is healed. It is in this principle of cognition that the principle of divinity is also posited." End of quote. So subjective knowledge is not just the possibility to choose evil or good. Another quote from Hegel: "It is the consideration or the cognition that makes people evil, so that consideration and cognition themselves are what is evil, and therefore such cognition is what ought not to exist because it is the source of evil." End of quote. This is how one should understand Hegel's dictum from his Phenomenology of Spirit that evil is the gaze itself which perceives evil everywhere. The gaze which sees evil excludes itself from the social whole it criticizes, and this exclusion is the formal characteristic of evil. And Hegel's point is that the good emerges as a possibility and duty only through this primordial choice of evil. We experience the good when after choosing evil, we become aware of the utter inadequacy of our situation. Now, I think here, but if there are some Hegel specialists here they will know it better than me, that Hegel, as is often the case with him, is at a certain crucial point afraid to go to the end here. Because Hegel always emphasizes that when you have the Fall, division, separation, it's never simply the good part, Spirit, and then the bad part. The true evil is the good part itself which caused the separation. But it's implicitly in Hegel this much more radical idea that in the separation of God from man, to put it very brutally, you find some hints in Hegel, the true evil is God himself. That's why, as Hegel emphasizes, what happens on the cross is that God admits that his separation from man is also the separation of God from himself. You know, the Christian formula is not "we finite mortal humans are separated from God, so if you work hard, purifying yourself, means you somehow rejoin God." No, Christianity has a totally different formula of reconciliation. Reconciliation means that you experience how your separation from God is at the same time the separation of God from himself. That's what happens on the cross, of course with the famous *Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani*, "Father, why have you abandoned me?" You have there a moment of separation transposed into God himself. So again, I go here, my god I talk too much, very quickly to refer to your book again where you emphasize how the Hegelian reconciliation is not the reconciliation which overcomes the obstacles. Reconciliation means you acknowledge the obstacle as constitutive. You have an obstacle to something, but you get reconciled when you see, realize that this obstacle which prevents you from reaching some higher goal is what creates, what sustains this higher goal. So for Hegel, we humans reach immortality and infinity not by way of undoing the Fall, by way of somehow getting rid of the obstacle of our finite bodily existence, but by way of reconciling ourselves with what appeared to us as the obstacle and accepting that this obstacle plays the positive role of sustaining the space of what it appears as an obstacle to. Even, now, a comical very brief comical interlude, even from your love life, are you aware that if your partner, how do you fall in love? I claim it's what makes you, a person can be to your standards beautiful, attractive, but for love you always have to have some imperfection. And then you say to yourself "In spite of this imperfection I love him, her, it," and so on. But this "in spite of" is deceiving here. This "in spite of" really means a positive condition of it. So again, the basis of Hegel is that obstacles create what they are an obstacle to. And to illustrate this point, Hegel evokes a wonderful example from the sphere of education. He notices how small children prefer to draw images in color, while later they prefer to do them in gray, with the colorless pencil. Now humanist theories of education see this as the oppressive result of educational violence. Children's creativity thwarted, they are forced to express themselves within the straitjacket of colorlessness and so on. Hegel's reading is exactly the opposite one. It is this reduction to colorless space that by way of reducing the sensuous wealth enables the children to articulate the higher spiritual dimension. This is why when our medium gets enhanced by more realist, for example, reading of reality, something is always lost. This is why when color movies were introduced, or even already with sound, many high artists were in a panic. They saw that color movies do not mean simply we see more, it, we lose something, the spiritual wealth is lost. This brings me now, I will try to complicate things a little bit more, to the topic of the Freudian unconscious. The unconscious for Freud is not some deeper irrational dimension, but it's what Lacan would have called a virtual another scene which accompanies my conscious content. Let me take an example of a joke that I use all the time in the last decade, probably I used it here the last time, now I am the stupid hen or whatever, not just stupid, yeah. You know I always, the famous jokes from Lubitsch, Ernst Lubitsch's "Ninotchka," you know when a guy in a cafeteria says "Waiter, bring me a cup of coffee without cream please," and the waiter replies "I'm sorry sir, we have no cream, only milk, so I can only bring you a coffee without milk." That's what Hegel means with determinate negation. Although material is the same coffee, but coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream in our symbolic universe of course. And things get here so complex, my good friend, not as good as you but, a good friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy, D-U-P-U-Y, who teaches in Paris but also at Stanford, the best theorist of catastrophes that I know, locates at this dimension the possibility to change the past. He is not a science fiction magician. Of course, something happens, we cannot change it. But what we are doing, also I drank a coffee, we cannot change this, it happened in the past. But what I can do retroactively is to change the fact that I drank coffee without cream into a fact that I changed coffee without milk. I mean this, let's call it absential or virtual dimension of the past that we can change. And my point is that far from being some deep substantial instinctual irrationality, the Freudian unconscious moves strictly at this level. Unconscious is like the *anal* of unconscious is this potential negative virtuality. It's, let's say, drinking your stupid coffee without milk is your consciousness and unconscious decides are you drinking coffee without milk or coffee, or coffee without cream. Now the very naive question that I, that has to be raised here is, and maybe you can help me, this is not I am not boasting patronizing you, this is not a rhetorical question, it's a very naive question. Can the computer even if we imagine this perfect singularity which reads your mind and let's say it reads your mind "I want a cup of coffee," can it discern this virtual negative dimension accompanying it? Did you mean coffee without milk or coffee without, or coffee without cream? There are signs, my computer specialist friends who know more than me that no, this is still an obstacle, this virtual negative dimension remains outside. And so this brings me to the, to the conclusion. I think it's against this background that we should approach the question, will the eventual rise of singularity be an apocalypse? Already decades ago, Günther Anders, if you're interested, the first husband of Hannah Arendt, wrote after World War II an interesting essay, seminal essay, "Apocalypse Without Kingdom." Where he says usually we imagine apocalypse, even if it's a catastrophe, as apocalypse with kingdom. It's a catastrophe but through this catastrophe at the end some higher level kingdom emerges. And for Günther Anders, he was of course reacting to the prospect of nuclear catastrophe, the problem is that that catastrophe would have been precisely an apocalypse without kingdom. There is no higher insight only, maybe okay if you are some crazy religious fundamentalist and you think it doesn't matter what happens, we will all be dead but we will be risen in God and so on and so on. If you don't accept this, the apocalypse is simply absolute. Now the question is, since clearly our emerging into a singularity, floating in a collective brain, happens, what type of apocalypse will it be? Will it be the way the partisans of singularity paint it, with apocalypse with kingdom? We will become divine, floating in a divine collective mind, and so on and so on. But not to lose time, give me another five ten minutes just, I like to complicate things here. You know, even with intelligent theologians, this idea of floating in paradise, it gets complicated. I'm now repeating a joke of I forgot which one, one of my last books. For example, you learn so much from intelligent theologians. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica approaches this very simple problem: in Paradise, we were supposed to become a little bit God-like in the sense of a perfect, almost complete knowledge. So will we be able or not in Paradise to observe the suffering of those in Hell? And his solution is yes, because not being able to do it would have meant that our knowledge is curtailed, limited and so on and so on. But he, he was not an idiot Thomas Aquinas, he immediately sees the problem, which is since what we will be doing in Paradise will bring us constant pleasure, isn't it sadistic, ominous? How can we could find immense pleasure in observing terrible suffering of others in Hell? His answer is a typical sophistic theological tricky one, is to distinguish two types of pleasure. We will not find pleasure directly in seeing the suffering, we will find pleasure and awe in the greatness of divine justice. My God, you see how God did punish and so on and so on. But even this part, of course, I think it doesn't work. I think that many really intelligent theologians are aware of it, that things are much darker here. In the sense not in the sense that we are simply sadists and so on, but what if living in Paradise is boring? What if the only thing, place where in our imagination things really happen is Hell? So the scene I like to imagine, it's my crazy idea, is that you get bored in Heaven and then once a week they tell you "Okay, are you bored here? Let me just give you an idea and it will renew your will to be here, what is happening down there." So for minutes you are allowed to see the suffering down there and then the angel organizing this tells you "Now you see, it's nonetheless better here." But then I go to the end and tell myself look at it from the standpoint of Hell. It's permanent fire which means you are there, you are there roasting fresh meat, you are dancing, getting drunk and so on. And then Devil's advocate like once a week tell you "Guys, this only works if we pretend, if we cover it up, that we don't have such a nice life. In the next half an hour we are observed, please play that we are suffering. Oh, no!" and then this guy, Devil's advocate says "Okay, it's over, back to the party," and so on and so on. Now you will think I'm crazy, I will not quote it to you now, there are theologians who went as far as this. But, so now I will give you another example of this dimension which escapes, eludes divinity if you read the notion of divinity in a too flat dimension as you have put it outside contradiction, this eternal bliss, complete wisdom and so on and so on. A joke, at least here, I didn't use it here, it's nowhere so this joke I can tell it to you with clear consciousness. Jewish friend told me it to me. You know that the Jews have something, I don't think it will last for a long time, it's so politically incorrect, Auschwitz jokes. It's a whole subgenre. And to understand the joke that I will tell you now, you just have to be aware that, of this, how theology dealt with, dealt with, with, with Auschwitz. You know the popular motive is "God was not there" or "God died there." The idea is it's simply too horrible to happen for God to condone it. So there's even, I think, a book written on it with the title "God Died at Auschwitz" or "God Was Not There" and so on and so on. Okay, you are not obliged to laugh, it's a very simple joke but it has a deep insight in it. The joke is that the, there are a couple of Jews in Paradise who died at Auschwitz, and it's a nice afternoon in Paradise, a nice stream, meadow, near forest. They sit on a bench and tell them jokes, funny stories about how they died at Auschwitz. And one of them tells the other "You remember Jacob how you died there? You were even not touched by gas because when they dragged you towards gas chamber, you slipped on a, on a piece of soap and you fell and cracked your skull. Oh it was so funny," and Jacob laughs, "Oh it was so funny." Then God, taking a break from his hard work, comes walking by, looks at them and said "Guys, my god, how can you make fun of this? I don't understand it. You suffered so much, how can you make fun of it?" You know what one of the Jews does? Goes to God, puts a shoulder around his arms and says "Don't worry my Lord, you of course you cannot understand it because you were not there." And I find this so brilliant here. It's not the suffering that God cannot understand, it's the joke of it. This dimension is the dimension of "without coffee" or whatever, that, that virtual dimension. In the end, but I already speak too much, there is another joke which it would be possible to include her to make your point when the last time we met you were advocating universality. And if you okay, if you allow me this slight detour, it's the same with, that's my problem with identity politics. When somebody plays the victim, humiliating himself, always ask in Lacanian terms what is the surplus pleasure, surplus enjoyment, what does he gain by it? Another joke, I already used it but now I will give a different anti-political correctness twist to it. Probably you know the joke, it's again a Jewish joke, Saturday in a synagogue they are conversing, Jewish believers, and first a rich Rabbi said "Oh God, I'm nothing, I'm not worth of your attention," and so on and so on, you must know the joke. Then another rich Jewish merchant says "Oh God, I'm also nothing, I'm not worthy of your attention, blah blah blah." And then a poor ordinary Jew stands up and says "Oh God, but I'm also nothing," and one of the rich Jews kicks the other and says "But who does this guy think that he is that he can simply say that he is also a nothing?" That's what I literally experienced already over ten years ago at a round table where all white male people engaged in this exaggerated self-humiliation. Everything that happens in the third world it's responsibility of Eurocentrism, of European civilization, we are guilty of everything, blah blah blah. And then I learned this story from a black friend of mine who is really intelligent. He told me that he raised his hand and said "But wait a minute, we blacks are not so innocent you know, we also have our own mass fundamentalism and so on and so on, we are also guilty." And he told me the look of these big white critics was devastating. Basically, they were reproaching him "But *we* are the guilty ones! What right do you have to proclaim in this sense that you are also nothing?" and so on and so on. Why? You have to ask yourself what do white liberals, left liberals, anti-racists profit from this assuming all the guilt? They profit, they gain their universality. They all the time advocate "No, blacks or other cultures should be allowed their particular identity," blah blah blah. "But not universality." I always notice this how they precisely by proclaiming themselves nothing, they reserve for themselves this position of judges of what is politically correct and so on and so on and so on. So no, the true end of racism for me is not "we are all allowed our particular identity," no. The, the true end of racism is when blacks and others are allowed to formulate their own universality, to participate in their own way in our universality. So sorry for this detour, back to my main line. What then does all this have to do with singularity? What will it be? It will not be this free floating in some collective space. It will also not be, I think, that we will become simply inhuman, just cogs in the global machine of a global mind, simply losing our individuality and so on and so on. Here I think many partisans of singularity read, I really think he is bad as a theorist, the big popularizer of singularity Ray Kurzweil. Read him. He, you know, he describes this wonderful space, shared experiences and so on and so on. But the way he talks is as if we somehow remain the same individuals talking, reasoning and so on. It remains there. So what will happen? I think neither a collective bliss nor Hell, but something much more paradoxical. That's why I mentioned this, the joke of "without milk" and so on and so on. Now that we experience ourselves as subjects, somehow our individuality is automatically assumed to be the same as our inner life, self-experience and so on and so on. Here I think the way if it will happen, singularity, sharing a collective mind experiences will happen, is that we individuals participating in it will emerge as pure Cartesian subject, empty point. We will be deprived of all our positive content. Yes, all my experiences can be shared and so on and so on, all my conscious experiences. But I as pure "I", this pure point of self-reference, I will not be that. We will experience, I claim, singularity as a radical cut, radical division. Even our experiences, subjective experiences, will be taken from us. But I claim, and here comes the complication, what will not be taken from us, because of the reasons I already indicated, is our unconscious, this purely virtual negative dimension. So this will be a nice paradox where precisely our unconscious will escape this collective machine of singularity and so on and so on. So again, will the universe of meaning still be there when we will, if we will dwell in singularity, or will we enter simply a meaningless automatic universe? I think it will be there, but as absent. The loss will remain, precisely because we will survive as, as empty subject. So the division will not, no longer be the division between subject and object, I am alienated from the social totality. It will be a radical cut in my own self-experience. I am not what I am, my inner life and so on and so on. And here I come to the stupid hen and his thought from his new book, where he says referring to Hegel: "The point of political contestation is to move in the direction of an increasingly resistant contradiction, and philosophy plays a vital role in this movement. This is Hegel's definition of progress: the movement from more easily resolved social contradictions to more intractable ones." And that's again my final thought for, for, for what will happen if this will happen technologically, singularity. It will be no longer be this simple contradiction, I and you, what do I know what is in your mind and so on, or me and impenetrable society. The, the contradiction in the sense of radical inconsistency gap will be brought into the very heart of my identity. So maybe there is a new hope in it, but as many intelligent critics of singularity have proven, it can also mean an incredible new forms of pain. Are we aware, I'm sure some secret agencies are already practicing it. For example, you know this idea of getting rid of sexuality in the sense of our fantasies and so on and doing it directly, just soliciting our whatever biological basis is of orgasm and so on. But are you aware that once you do this, you can apply the same at pain, and you can imagine through Neuralink incredible new forms of torture and so on and so on. We are in an extremely dangerous domain. But I don't think that we can step back. We are already in it. So it's an extremely dangerous situation. New, what we were till now speculating, "Oh we are divided subject, not identical with ourselves" and so on, if singularity happens then it will no longer be just a philosophical speculation or something that you can discern through deep psychoanalysis, it will be an everyday matter of human experience, this radical self-division. I think that's all that we can say today, that under the mask of this unity of singularity, "Oh we share experiences" and so on and so on, it will be, it will be an incredible radical division. Thank you very much. Did I hear you correctly? Yeah. What did you? You said two minutes. A few minutes, yeah. Go ahead. Um, so talking about singularity, you talk about the apocalypse and us being in one singular space. Have you ever thought of the idea of if we are in this individual sense and our brains in a sense become code through this technological singularity, how would terrorist attacks or situations of hacking play into it? Because if our brain is technical code in that sense, couldn't that be manipulated to change memories and wouldn't that create some sort of downfall like all of a sudden you wake up, don't remember anything or something like that, or would it affect our understanding of how different diseases work, like Alzheimer's and such? That could be distorted as well in that sense because you're just forgetting stuff out of nowhere but it's your brain is technically being hacked because it is now code. So wouldn't that be a? Yes, it's a very nice question. I wanted to, I consciously avoided all these details, but I totally agree with you. What my friends are telling me, friends who know friends who have some dark connections in the military establishment, is precisely along those lines they are thinking. Like how you can manipulate the past and so on and so forth, how you can do all this. And again, I don't think this is a, a magic, no. You know, past is something that is alive here with us. In this sense, we can change the past. My god, my eternal quote here is, I always quote him so forgive me for repeating myself, T.S. Eliot, who said, you know, in his "Tradition and the Individual Talent," a classical statement of modernism, who said that with every new radical break in art, the entire past is changed in some sense. And I think there is nowhere that this is seen in a nicer way than for example, I'm sorry for repeating myself with William Shakespeare. I think what defines a true classic is not that you need the context to understand him, no, that you survive decontextualization. What I find nonetheless very traditional but I do admire Shakespeare because precisely it's incredible how his great plays can be reinvented for every new epoch. You can get, just imagine, you can get romantic Hamlet and so on and so on, each epoch has its own Hamlet. This is for me the true artistic universality. And again, if you allow me to repeat another, I think I used it in one of my books, one of my books, another wonderful moment here which nicely refers to your Todd thesis on universality and so on, transcultural links. I don't like too much Salman Rushdie, he's way too liberal now, but once I was at a round table with him where he gave a wonderful answer to a critical question from the podium where somebody told him "Why did you betray your own culture and move to England and so on and so on, more impressed by England and so on?" and he gave a wonderful answer. He said "No it's not true, the deepest influence in my work as a writer are two great English writers, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens." And he said "If as an Indian person you read Jane Austen, all this, you know, impoverished rich people, intrigues, how to marry your daughters," he said "This is the lower middle class, middle class in Bombay" or, no, how do you say today, Mumbai? No, Mumbai is prohibited. Mumbai? Mumbai, yes. This is in Mumbai today. Then he said "Poverty in India, it's Dickens, Oliver Twist and so on and so on." And this is the moments which are for me truly fascinating. How I don't think I never believed in this "No, to understand Shakespeare you have to know all the details of Elizabethan England." If anything, I claim the opposite is true. To understand Elizabethan England, you need to read Shakespeare. That's why, for example, an author that I don't like very much for reasons I will not go into today, Dostoevsky. It's so nice to see, go to Pirate Bay, is it dangerous here, can you be fined? Or I don't know, but you can get it there, the absolutely best film version of Dostoevsky is the title is "Hakuchi," I don't know, it's Akira Kurosawa's Japanese version. Which is transposed into Japan after World War II. Myshkin, the idiot of his "Idiot," doesn't come from Europe but he comes from the front and so on and so on. That's, that's the living universality. Precisely how it's not what Hegel calls concrete universality. It's not abstract, it's precisely this total adaptability. You are thankful to Shakespeare more if you, or to Dostoevsky, more if you transpose him in contemporary Japan then to try to search for what did he really mean and so on and so on. Hi, I was just wondering, um, with the possibility of singularity, uh, you know, materializing, do you see it as, as sort of like, as sort of uh opening up, uh, for example like the idea of the divided subject to falsificationism and therefore could you see it as a sort of threat to the whole theory or is there is it still too abstract and is there a way to sort of sidestep? Sorry, I didn't get precisely the point of your question. I, the possibility of literalizing the divided subject, um, does that open it up to falsification and therefore threaten the theory of Hegelian psychoanalysis, Lacanian? Yeah, yeah. In some sense yes, I'm not afraid to say I would accept this challenge. Because it's very abstract what I said but I really mean it as a, maybe I will be proven false, as a concrete prediction. I'm talking precisely about how if our individuality sometimes survives, how it will experience itself. Again, it will be neither this bliss of floating in some communal space nor simple disappearance of subjectivity. It will be precisely this radical division. And I'm even tempted to say, it's totally crazy, if it doesn't happen then we will know retroactively that Hegel was totally wrong. No, you know because I think that precisely because here something happened for me as a Hegelian which I find so paradoxical, something happened that was in some sense totally unthinkable for Hegel. Hegel was all in this idea of mediation, *Aufhebung*, you don't get rid of the body, you just mediate your body becomes a, you know, this idea of totally immanent transcendence. And here are guys who come "No, fuck your speculation, we can literally do it." through the means of empirical technology we can put you into this divine state and so on and so on. And it's crucial that, it's crucial again, yes, I'm ready to accept that challenge. Um, so I was just wondering um why do you think that these um these technological advances that promise to bring us closer together like in the in the age of social media that sort of promise us like more shared ideas and bringing us closer is actually making us more lonely and miserable and divided? Um, there seems to be sort of a common thread there
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with the idea of increased separation in the promise of a unity of a singularity. So why do you think there's that reversal there of things that promise to bring us closer together actually dividing us more? Is it some malevolent agenda of keeping us dissatisfied as if a misunderstanding of how human consciousness works? Why do you think that is? Uh, no, here I would have to be more precise. I would never characterize what I described as simple loneliness. No, it's precisely an how shall I put it empty loneliness. At the level of content you will for me the way we usually, maybe I'm wrong, correct me, and I'm not patronizing you here, I really mean maybe I'm wrong. What we understand usually by loneliness is
with the idea of increased separation in the promise of a unity of a singularity. So why do you think there's that reversal there of things that promise to bring us closer together actually dividing us more? Is it some malevolent agenda of keeping us dissatisfied as if a misunderstanding of how human consciousness works? Why do you think that is? Uh, no, here I would have to be more precise. I would never characterize what I described as simple loneliness. No, it's precisely an how shall I put it empty loneliness. At the level of content you will for me the way we usually, maybe I'm wrong, correct me, and I'm not patronizing you here, I really mean maybe I'm wrong. What we understand usually by loneliness is
Slavoj Žižek
let's say I suffered a terrible loss. I'm traumatized. But I don't have anyone to share it with. And this, I'm not just speculating, I remember, I'm old enough to remember it, a quarter of a century ago the war in ex-Yugoslavia and all these cases of rape. And I've spoken with some rape victims and their common motive was if you as a woman survived the rape, what kept you, of course if you survived it, what kept you alive in the sense of sustaining your will to go on was this to put it in Lacanian jargon this readiness or will or hope that there will be some big other ideal witness to whom you will report it. And the most horrible disappointments were when this didn't happen. Then suicides took place, not immediately after the rape. For example, you survived, you turn home and you see what happened to you is too shocking, your family ignores you, or even if they pretend to be polite to you and so on and so on. This is the usual notion of loneliness. Here it's a mark what I see, maybe I'm wrong, is a loneliness with a, maybe we are a, no, it's still different because I didn't have time to go into it, this is a part that I cut short but I think we should strictly distinguish between so-called surveillance society where we know we already live in it. It's easy to make fun of the Chinese, you know. Did you notice how all the negative tendencies that we have today, the ideal target is China? And you know that they already have this there this how do they call that, patriotic ranking or whatever. Yeah, yeah, so it you get a certain score number. For example, you lose points if you are a dissident, if you are arrested or whatever. Then consequences are very concrete. It's now well known that in about or million of people were not allowed were on the black list not allowed to buy this fast tickets for flights or fast long-distance trains because their patriotic score whatever was too low. But okay, don't be too glad to put it on the Chinese. In some more subtle form we are already doing it. You know what's the problem? In the good old totalitarian days to have this type of total control was simply too complex, too much. You could, it would have meant I don't know one third of the people controlling the other two thirds but then who will control? But with today's super strong computers this is a realist option. In China probably with us, we don't know it also, they are already doing it. You can individualize it. Each person has its file and everything is recorded. Again, the capacity of computers is almost infinite. For example, somebody told me that this flat screen TVs now if you buy them, they have a camera in them which it's not just that they record which program, which channel did you watch how long, no, they even discern the basic expression on your face like did you watch it enthusiastically or in what way. If you buy modern sneakers they have a chip in them which informs, informs the company not only how many hours did you use them but with what intensity did you run and so on and so
let's say I suffered a terrible loss. I'm traumatized. But I don't have anyone to share it with. And this, I'm not just speculating, I remember, I'm old enough to remember it, a quarter of a century ago the war in ex-Yugoslavia and all these cases of rape. And I've spoken with some rape victims and their common motive was if you as a woman survived the rape, what kept you, of course if you survived it, what kept you alive in the sense of sustaining your will to go on was this to put it in Lacanian jargon this readiness or will or hope that there will be some big other ideal witness to whom you will report it. And the most horrible disappointments were when this didn't happen. Then suicides took place, not immediately after the rape. For example, you survived, you turn home and you see what happened to you is too shocking, your family ignores you, or even if they pretend to be polite to you and so on and so on. This is the usual notion of loneliness. Here it's a mark what I see, maybe I'm wrong, is a loneliness with a, maybe we are a, no, it's still different because I didn't have time to go into it, this is a part that I cut short but I think we should strictly distinguish between so-called surveillance society where we know we already live in it. It's easy to make fun of the Chinese, you know. Did you notice how all the negative tendencies that we have today, the ideal target is China? And you know that they already have this there this how do they call that, patriotic ranking or whatever. Yeah, yeah, so it you get a certain score number. For example, you lose points if you are a dissident, if you are arrested or whatever. Then consequences are very concrete. It's now well known that in about or million of people were not allowed were on the black list not allowed to buy this fast tickets for flights or fast long-distance trains because their patriotic score whatever was too low. But okay, don't be too glad to put it on the Chinese. In some more subtle form we are already doing it. You know what's the problem? In the good old totalitarian days to have this type of total control was simply too complex, too much. You could, it would have meant I don't know one third of the people controlling the other two thirds but then who will control? But with today's super strong computers this is a realist option. In China probably with us, we don't know it also, they are already doing it. You can individualize it. Each person has its file and everything is recorded. Again, the capacity of computers is almost infinite. For example, somebody told me that this flat screen TVs now if you buy them, they have a camera in them which it's not just that they record which program, which channel did you watch how long, no, they even discern the basic expression on your face like did you watch it enthusiastically or in what way. If you buy modern sneakers they have a chip in them which informs, informs the company not only how many hours did you use them but with what intensity did you run and so on and so
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forth. So but still I claim with singularity something different happens. It's even much worse than than than than floating in a
forth. So but still I claim with singularity something different happens. It's even much worse than than than than floating in a
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digital space because digital space is for me a strict space of alienation and I think this as a positive feature. You know, in the digital space
digital space because digital space is for me a strict space of alienation and I think this as a positive feature. You know, in the digital space
Slavoj Žižek
you play games, you wear masks, you present yourself in a certain
you play games, you wear masks, you present yourself in a certain
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way. The prospect of singularity is it really reads your thoughts, you cannot escape. Of course, the here things get interesting
way. The prospect of singularity is it really reads your thoughts, you cannot escape. Of course, the here things get interesting
Slavoj Žižek
but I what if in some sense the masks that you are wearing are more tell, are more truthful than what you think you are in the intimacy of yourself? You know this is the well-known case of how of how masks are not simply here to lie. Often, something that is too traumatic for you to admit it in real life, to act like that, you can actualize it, play with it if you know it's only a game and so on. That's why people like, some people, psychoanalysis because precisely it's a total foreigner. You don't have to play your game there and so on. Still, for me the best definition of psychoanalysis of free associations is the exact opposite of one of the most stupid proverbs which is which is when you are throwing out of the bathtub the dirty water be
but I what if in some sense the masks that you are wearing are more tell, are more truthful than what you think you are in the intimacy of yourself? You know this is the well-known case of how of how masks are not simply here to lie. Often, something that is too traumatic for you to admit it in real life, to act like that, you can actualize it, play with it if you know it's only a game and so on. That's why people like, some people, psychoanalysis because precisely it's a total foreigner. You don't have to play your game there and so on. Still, for me the best definition of psychoanalysis of free associations is the exact opposite of one of the most stupid proverbs which is which is when you are throwing out of the bathtub the dirty water be
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careful that you do not also throw out the baby. In psychoanalysis you do exactly that. You throw out the baby, the ego, and you keep the dirty water. You know? So again, this will be, I didn't want to go into it, another traumatic aspect that this will be maybe, I neglected it, I admit it, the greatest trauma of singularity: that your thoughts and so on will be out there, but not your unconscious. It's not you. So I think if I were to study you, control you, I would prefer this total external digital control
careful that you do not also throw out the baby. In psychoanalysis you do exactly that. You throw out the baby, the ego, and you keep the dirty water. You know? So again, this will be, I didn't want to go into it, another traumatic aspect that this will be maybe, I neglected it, I admit it, the greatest trauma of singularity: that your thoughts and so on will be out there, but not your unconscious. It's not you. So I think if I were to study you, control you, I would prefer this total external digital control
Slavoj Žižek
to to reading your brain. We lie all the time in what we think, in the flow of our thoughts and so on and so on. That's my problem also, but maybe he means it in a more complex way, you know, Jordan Peterson's big idea that we need consistent big stories to give meaning to our life. Yes, but what kind of stories? The greatest story, one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century was Adolf Hitler. He did in a model way exactly this. Remember Germany 1920s: great confusion and so on, people lacked a consistent story. Economic crisis, what they perceived as moral crisis, social chaos. Hitler in a play with words that I like because you have only in English, maybe I'm wrong I don't know, this wonderful ambiguity of the term plot. Which means plot in the sense of course the plot of that novel, and plot in the sense of Jewish plot. Jewish plot is Hitler's plot. The story he told in a very successful way he said "It's all the responsibility of the Jews," and wonderful story, everything made meaning. This is why the stories we are telling ourselves to ourselves are an extremely dangerous domain. Because I think that let's say like the Nazi criminals or also in Stalinism and so on, Gulag and so on. The problem there was of the bureaucrats, executors, a very simple one. You had to do what those in power wanted you to do: something horrible, treat people brutally and so on and so on. And like somebody, although I'm not sure with you, I would maybe love to do it. If somebody, I'm still lady, I'm not sure, half a decent guy. And if somebody would want me to take a knife and pick out your eye, I'm not so sure, but maybe I will have a problem. So what you need is a strong ideological story. And Nazis did it in wonderful way, and at a different level Stalinists. They told you "No, these are your individual prejudices, the true greatness is that for the higher cause of your nation, communism, you are also ready to do horrible things for it." You know that they present you violating these basic rules of decadence as your higher, highest ethical achievement. That's the true sacrifice. Himmler said it once, Heinrich Himmler, that every idiot can do good things for his nation, die for it. A true Nazi hero is the one who is ready to do horrible things for the, for the, for the nation. So we are here at the level of stories, at the level of stories, which again I find it extremely suspicious to see just the good side of stories. Stories are here to lie. Stories as inner experience, now I didn't lose my thread, are here to cover from us what we are doing in reality, the horrible things we are doing in reality. That's why it always intrigued me, this ultimate horror of how most noble religious experiences or spiritual experiences were manipulated in this way. Probably I did already mention the last time I was here this book, like my Bible here is a book written by a guy called Brian Victoria, "Zen at War." How Zen in Japan, Zen Buddhist community, large majority, used Zen Buddhist theory not only to support but to actively legitimize Japanese militaristic horrors and so on. I will not go into details now but what I'm saying is that don't trust the inner experience. Inner experience is a lie in some sense. Basically we lie ourselves. I don't think I never believe this bullshit like "I look deep into you and I will see some inner truth." That's why I also violently, as I developed in my book on violence, violently disagree with that multiculturalist proverb saying another stupidity masked as wisdom: "An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to listen to." Ah, really? So Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to his story so if we were to understand- no, no, there are real enemies and so on. But precisely to see this, you should not be duped, fascinated by the stories they are telling. And that's very sad thing that I recently discovered how, this is my formula: no ethnic cleansing without good poets. I learned this in my own ex-country, ex-Yugoslavia. Not only the Serbs in Bosnia, Radovan Karadžić, but also in other parts, you know. Always ethnic spirit of cleansing and so on was sustained by some great national poets who of course, if you tell them, they would deny, they would "No, no, we meant it in a much more noble way," and so on and so on. So again, I think that this is what we can nonetheless learn from all three Western religions, I mean monotheistic, even in Islam you find this. It's easy today to be, I am opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, absolutely. But when a friend of mine Muslim quoted me where it says somewhere in Quran, even I don't know where, that atheism is your private decision. If you believe in me or not, I cannot order this to you, just obey the rules. And you have the same line I claim although it may appear not to be the case even in Christianity, even in Judaism. For example, the Jewish iconoclasm, don't paint the image of God. It's not simply this mysticism, God is beyond form and so on. No, is because it doesn't matter what God is. God is here in how you interact with other people. That for me what Jewish iconoclasm means. I talk too much I'm sorry. Okay, can I ask you something? I feel so ridiculous, please don't watch it. By this they claim now it will be "intellectual duel of the century" or whatever. It's crazy! Who am I? The idea is I stand for liberal left against Peterson's conservatism or whatever. Wait a minute, if you ask any of today's great figures of liberal left, am I really there to represent them? They would have turned around in their grave even if they are still alive. It's, it's there is I just wonder what will happen because it's such a terrible misunderstanding. I think one of the keys is that not that I of course deeply against Peterson but maybe the idea is that we are all in some sense both marginalized by the establishment although he has so much greater public, public following and so on and so on. It's, it's very weird thing what happened there. So don't expect anything from me and so on. It's structurally necessary that nothing can happen. Thank you.
to to reading your brain. We lie all the time in what we think, in the flow of our thoughts and so on and so on. That's my problem also, but maybe he means it in a more complex way, you know, Jordan Peterson's big idea that we need consistent big stories to give meaning to our life. Yes, but what kind of stories? The greatest story, one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century was Adolf Hitler. He did in a model way exactly this. Remember Germany 1920s: great confusion and so on, people lacked a consistent story. Economic crisis, what they perceived as moral crisis, social chaos. Hitler in a play with words that I like because you have only in English, maybe I'm wrong I don't know, this wonderful ambiguity of the term plot. Which means plot in the sense of course the plot of that novel, and plot in the sense of Jewish plot. Jewish plot is Hitler's plot. The story he told in a very successful way he said "It's all the responsibility of the Jews," and wonderful story, everything made meaning. This is why the stories we are telling ourselves to ourselves are an extremely dangerous domain. Because I think that let's say like the Nazi criminals or also in Stalinism and so on, Gulag and so on. The problem there was of the bureaucrats, executors, a very simple one. You had to do what those in power wanted you to do: something horrible, treat people brutally and so on and so on. And like somebody, although I'm not sure with you, I would maybe love to do it. If somebody, I'm still lady, I'm not sure, half a decent guy. And if somebody would want me to take a knife and pick out your eye, I'm not so sure, but maybe I will have a problem. So what you need is a strong ideological story. And Nazis did it in wonderful way, and at a different level Stalinists. They told you "No, these are your individual prejudices, the true greatness is that for the higher cause of your nation, communism, you are also ready to do horrible things for it." You know that they present you violating these basic rules of decadence as your higher, highest ethical achievement. That's the true sacrifice. Himmler said it once, Heinrich Himmler, that every idiot can do good things for his nation, die for it. A true Nazi hero is the one who is ready to do horrible things for the, for the, for the nation. So we are here at the level of stories, at the level of stories, which again I find it extremely suspicious to see just the good side of stories. Stories are here to lie. Stories as inner experience, now I didn't lose my thread, are here to cover from us what we are doing in reality, the horrible things we are doing in reality. That's why it always intrigued me, this ultimate horror of how most noble religious experiences or spiritual experiences were manipulated in this way. Probably I did already mention the last time I was here this book, like my Bible here is a book written by a guy called Brian Victoria, "Zen at War." How Zen in Japan, Zen Buddhist community, large majority, used Zen Buddhist theory not only to support but to actively legitimize Japanese militaristic horrors and so on. I will not go into details now but what I'm saying is that don't trust the inner experience. Inner experience is a lie in some sense. Basically we lie ourselves. I don't think I never believe this bullshit like "I look deep into you and I will see some inner truth." That's why I also violently, as I developed in my book on violence, violently disagree with that multiculturalist proverb saying another stupidity masked as wisdom: "An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to listen to." Ah, really? So Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to his story so if we were to understand- no, no, there are real enemies and so on. But precisely to see this, you should not be duped, fascinated by the stories they are telling. And that's very sad thing that I recently discovered how, this is my formula: no ethnic cleansing without good poets. I learned this in my own ex-country, ex-Yugoslavia. Not only the Serbs in Bosnia, Radovan Karadžić, but also in other parts, you know. Always ethnic spirit of cleansing and so on was sustained by some great national poets who of course, if you tell them, they would deny, they would "No, no, we meant it in a much more noble way," and so on and so on. So again, I think that this is what we can nonetheless learn from all three Western religions, I mean monotheistic, even in Islam you find this. It's easy today to be, I am opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, absolutely. But when a friend of mine Muslim quoted me where it says somewhere in Quran, even I don't know where, that atheism is your private decision. If you believe in me or not, I cannot order this to you, just obey the rules. And you have the same line I claim although it may appear not to be the case even in Christianity, even in Judaism. For example, the Jewish iconoclasm, don't paint the image of God. It's not simply this mysticism, God is beyond form and so on. No, is because it doesn't matter what God is. God is here in how you interact with other people. That for me what Jewish iconoclasm means. I talk too much I'm sorry. Okay, can I ask you something? I feel so ridiculous, please don't watch it. By this they claim now it will be "intellectual duel of the century" or whatever. It's crazy! Who am I? The idea is I stand for liberal left against Peterson's conservatism or whatever. Wait a minute, if you ask any of today's great figures of liberal left, am I really there to represent them? They would have turned around in their grave even if they are still alive. It's, it's there is I just wonder what will happen because it's such a terrible misunderstanding. I think one of the keys is that not that I of course deeply against Peterson but maybe the idea is that we are all in some sense both marginalized by the establishment although he has so much greater public, public following and so on and so on. It's, it's very weird thing what happened there. So don't expect anything from me and so on. It's structurally necessary that nothing can happen. Thank you.