Materialism and Theology
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2007 · 1:17:35 · 10,826 words
religion-theologyideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsecology-climatescience-physicsconsciousness-mindphilosophy-generalcapitalism
Žižek argues that both vulgar New Atheism (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens) and religious fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin, and proposes a 'materialist theology' grounded in Lacan's logic of the non-all. He reads the Book of Job as a founding materialist text, uses Chesterton to argue that Christianity saves reason through its constitutive exception, and extends this into a critique of ecology as the new 'opium of the masses' that secretly reproduces religious ideology of finitude and fall. The talk concludes with reflections on open ontology (Badiou's pure multiplicities, quantum indeterminacy), synthetic/artificial life, the hard problem of consciousness, and the need to abandon any notion of a balanced Nature to which humanity might return.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “pre-modern teleological reason”
Žižek's characterization of the Pope's actual concept of reason: a vision of the universe as a harmonious whole in which everything serves a higher purpose, in contrast to the contingency-accepting rationality of modern science.
The Duns Scotus / Descartes idea that God is not bound by eternal rational truths; Žižek argues this (not teleological reason) was the actual theological precondition of modern science.
Reading derived from Chesterton's commentary on Job: God himself, confronting the miracle of his own creation, temporarily becomes 'a blasphemer' and 'an atheist,' affirming wonder over rational explanation.
Lacanian masculine side: a universal law grounded in a constitutive exception; Žižek associates this with Chesterton's theology and Derrida's deconstructive gesture of totalization-through-exception.
Lacan's feminine side of sexuation in which there is no exception but also no universal totality; Žižek deploys it to characterize modern science: there is nothing outside natural causality, yet the rational order is in itself inconsistent and incomplete.
as “open ontology”
An ontology in which reality is in itself incomplete and inconsistent, without a fully constituted ground; Žižek draws on quantum indeterminacy and Badiou to argue that this incompleteness is not epistemological but ontological.
as “ontological incompleteness of reality”
The thesis that reality is not merely epistemically inaccessible but is in itself unfinished and inconsistent, as suggested by quantum indeterminacy; the condition of possibility of freedom.
as “pure multiplicity”
Badiou's ontological category: reality is multiplicities against the background of the void, with no atomic constituents reducible to ones; zero and multiplicities are the same thing.
Used in two senses: (1) the symbolic guarantee of meaning that Job and Christ both refuse; (2) the 'zero' that Americans skip in hotel elevator numbering, the missing symbolic ground.
as “negative judgment vs. infinite judgment”
Kantian distinction Žižek uses to separate idealism ('reality is not all there is') from genuine materialism ('reality is non-all'): negating a predicate vs. affirming a non-predicate (e.g., 'undead' rather than 'not dead').
as “the undead”
Example of the infinite judgment (you are undead ≠ you are not dead): used to illustrate the difference between idealist negation and the materialist affirmation of a non-predicate ('reality is non-all').
as “ecology as opium of the masses”
Žižek's claim (crediting Badiou) that contemporary ecology has taken over religion's ideological function of imposing unquestionable limits and a narrative of finitude and fall, thus becoming the predominant ideology of global capitalism.
as “fetishist split”
The structure 'I know very well, but nonetheless I don't believe it,' illustrated by the ecological case: people intellectually accept climate catastrophe but remain affectively captured by the life-world's apparent solidity.
Žižek's label for the three friends in the Book of Job who insist catastrophe has a deeper meaning; he identifies this as the zero level of ideology and parallels it with Freud's dream of Irma's injection.
Žižek's project of reading theological figures (Job, Christ, Chesterton) in a materialist register that rejects transcendent meaning, Big Others, and compensatory narratives, and affirms the non-all.
Not explicitly named but the logic is present in the discussion of how accepting artificial life retroactively denaturalizes all natural life, changing the status of the prior 'natural' baseline.
as “denaturalization of nature”
The retroactive effect of the possibility of synthetic/artificial life: once artificial life is possible, natural life itself is recast as merely one confused, imperfect species of synthetic life, losing its normative status.
Žižek's counter-proposal to standard hard-problem framings: consciousness is not perfection or complexity but originally arises when something goes wrong, as a registration of malfunction rather than successful operation.
as “surplus (divine jouissance)”
Mentioned playfully in the context of God 'spending' divine enjoyment on constructing the microscopic structure of the universe; jouissance as the expenditure or excess of creation.
Stories he reaches for 2
Hotels with more than thirteen floors label floor 13 as 14 to avoid the unlucky number. Žižek asks: whom are you cheating? God knows. This illustrates subjectivist idealism's futility and the American cultural refusal of the zero/void.
“But wait a minute, whom are you cheating? God knows that your fourteen is really thirteen.”
'You are undead' is categorically different from 'you are not dead': the first affirms a non-predicate (infinite judgment) rather than negating a predicate. Used to illustrate the difference between idealism and genuine materialism.
“You don't say 'you aren't dead,' but you say 'you are undead.' Every reader of Stephen King knows it's something totally different.”
Works invoked 14
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book; mentioned in Q&A as containing a long chapter on the hard problem of consciousness and all possible variations.
The Book of Job other
Described as 'the founding text of materialism maybe'; God sides with Job's refusal of transcendent meaning against the three ideologist-comforters; read as a proto-materialist text and structurally paralleled to Freud's Irma dream.
Adorno and Horkheimer's text cited as an example of the totalization gesture: 'from Plato to NATO' it's all a straight line of administered reason.
Logic of Sense book
Deleuze's other early solo work; likewise praised as pre-Guattari and genuinely materialist in its treatment of the event.
Being and Event book
Badiou's major ontological work; Žižek draws on its notion of pure multiplicities and the void, and jokes that the Polish hotel's floor numbering reads as if the porter had read it.
Chesterton's novel in which God and the Devil turn out to be the same figure; Žižek endorses a naive reading: God must be an atheist, God is fighting himself; finds it embarrassingly ignored by critics.
Orthodoxy book
Chesterton's book; Žižek extensively quotes and endorses its argument that reason is saved through its constitutive exception (the mystical); recommended as the 'theological counterpoint' to The Man Who Was Thursday.
Deleuze's early solo work; praised as one of his 'best books,' before the 'Guattari corruption'; cited as showing that only materialists can explain immateriality of the event.
The End of Faith book
Sam Harris's book: Žižek finds it symptomatic that aggressive atheism is paired with rehabilitation of Buddhist meditation and a detailed argument for torture; he jokes he favors the death penalty 'because Sam Harris is alive.'
Freud's foundational text; the dream of Irma's injection (opening) is structurally paralleled to the Book of Job as the zero level of ideology.
Gospel of John other
Briefly invoked (logos, 'in the beginning was the word') as the scriptural basis the Pope uses for his logos-theology.
Implicitly referenced through Habermas's co-publication with Ratzinger and his opposition to biogenetics; Žižek sees this as a symptom of Habermas's insufficiently radical Enlightenment position.
Described by Žižek as Chesterton's 'best text'; shows why God rebukes Job's comforters and stands on the side of the irreducible miracle of creation against mechanical optimism.
Truth and Tolerance book
Pope Ratzinger's book, quoted to show that he equates necessity with irrationality and frames modern science as irrational if not grounded in logos.
People invoked 43
Quoted from his Introduction to Philosophy on the idea of God constructing the world only with the parts inhabitants need to know about, illustrating ontological incompleteness.
Charles Darwin positive
Darwin's theory of contingent evolution is defended against both the Pope's intelligent design and ecology's misappropriation; the true lesson of Darwinism is contingency and catastrophe, not harmonious design.
Listed among thinkers (Kierkegaard to Marx, Nietzsche to Heidegger, Levinas to Lévi-Strauss) that Derrida's gesture levels as remaining within metaphysics of presence.
Jacques Derrida negative
Classified under the masculine logic of universality and exception: his gesture of equating all philosophy as 'metaphysics of presence' to define his own exceptional position is identified as itself the most elementary gesture of metaphysics.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek approvingly invokes Lenin's observation that idealists always turn out to be vulgar materialists, applied to Chalmers's theory of consciousness.
Mentioned alongside Horkheimer as another exemplar of the same totalizing gesture: their 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' levels all Western thought from Plato to NATO.
Listed in Derrida's catalogue of thinkers subsumed under the metaphysics of presence.
Thomas Müntzer positive
Briefly invoked by Žižek in the Q&A as his 'German hero,' in the context of claiming that all good political terror had a religious background.
Jacques Lacan positive
Lacan's logic of the non-all (masculine/feminine sexuation) provides the central formal framework for distinguishing Chesterton's theology from modern science's logic; also invoked via 'La femme n'existe pas' as a model for 'Nature doesn't exist.'
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Repeatedly invoked for the lesson of utter contingency of existence: nature tinkers and improvises with catastrophes, contradicting the ecological notion of a balanced optimum.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek's 'beloved theologian': extensively quoted on reason/exception, mysticism, detective stories, the Book of Job, and the theological insight that irrationalism is the consequence of attacking religion. Žižek endorses his analysis while noting a limitation he thinks Chesterton himself overcame.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Contrasted favorably with Derrida: Deleuze's gaze on philosophy finds miracles everywhere without leveling all tradition as 'metaphysics.' His early works ('Difference and Repetition,' 'Logic of Sense') are praised; the Guattari collaboration is described as a 'corruption.'
Duns Scotus positive
Cited alongside Descartes as elaborating the voluntarist theology that paved the way for modern science.
Daniel Dennett negative
Grouped with other New Atheists as proponents of vulgar reductionist materialism; also mentioned in the Q&A for partially engaging the hard problem of consciousness without solving it.
Benedict XVI negative
Central polemical target: Žižek dismantles Benedict's Regensburg lecture arguing his concept of 'reason' is pre-modern teleological, not compatible with modern science, and that his firing of Father Coyne exposes the contradiction.
Sam Harris negative
Žižek jokes he favors the death penalty because Harris is alive; criticizes him for combining aggressive atheism with rehabilitation of Buddhist meditation and a detailed argument for torture in 'The End of Faith.'
Alain Badiou positive
Credited with inspiring the ecology-as-opium thesis (via private conversation) and providing the ontological framework of pure multiplicity and void; his notion of event as 'curvature of being' is endorsed as genuinely materialist.
Giorgio Agamben negative
Žižek (noting Agamben is absent) criticizes his narrative that a single line from Western philosophy culminates in Homo sacer and concentration camp logic as another instance of violent equalization, the same gesture as Heidegger and Derrida.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad positive
Used as an example to invert the Pope's thesis: Ahmadinejad's Time Magazine appeal to logic and rationality demonstrates that from an Islamic perspective it is Christianity that is irrational.
Félix Guattari negative
Mentioned as the source of 'corruption' of Deleuze's work in the later collaborative phase; Žižek prefers Deleuze's early solo work.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Mentioned as an example of a thinker in whom Deleuze finds a miracle/exception rather than leveling him into 'metaphysics.'
David Chalmers negative
Mentioned as a direct idealist who posits awareness as an elementary natural force like gravity; Žižek (via Lenin) sees this as idealism that ends up as vulgar materialism by naturalizing consciousness.
Referenced as the author whose readers know the concept of 'undead', used to illustrate the infinite judgment.
Werner Heisenberg positive
Cited alongside Bohr for the ontological (not merely epistemological) interpretation of quantum indeterminacy.
Richard Dawkins negative
Listed as one of the 'big stars' of vulgar reductionist materialism attacking religion; Žižek groups him with Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens as two sides of the same coin as fundamentalism.
Martin Heidegger negative
Cited as another exemplar of the masculine exception-logic: he totalizes all philosophy (Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Sartre) as caught within 'forgetting of being,' defining his own position as the exception.
Christopher Hitchens negative
Grouped with Dawkins, Dennett, Harris as a 'big star' of vulgar reductionist atheism.
Edmund Husserl negative
The Husserlian phenomenological concept of the life-world is criticized: reliance on it as the 'ultimately given universe' is precisely what prevents confronting ecological catastrophe.
Mentioned as one of the thinkers Derrida's gesture levels as 'still within metaphysics of presence.'
Niels Bohr positive
Cited (with Heisenberg) for interpreting quantum indeterminacy as pointing to an incompleteness of reality itself, not merely our knowledge, the open ontology Žižek endorses.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Criticized for relying on a transcendental logic insufficient for confronting biogenetics; symptomatically co-authored a book with Ratzinger despite claiming to be the 'last advocate of Enlightenment.'
Mentioned by a questioner (not Žižek initially); Žižek engages with his concept 'we are the artificial by nature' (künstliche von Natur), finding it compatible with his thesis on biogenetics.
Co-author with Adorno of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, cited as exemplar of the totalization-through-exception gesture.
Mentioned as a thinker Deleuze finds exceptions in even though he might appear to be Deleuze's enemy; also in the 'from Plato to NATO' quip.
Mentioned as one of the thinkers Heidegger subsumes under 'technological nihilism'; also referenced for his awareness (against vulgar Marxism) that surplus/play precedes utility in the history of technology.
René Descartes positive
Cited as a founding figure of modern science for making even mathematical truths dependent on arbitrary divine will (voluntarism), thereby enabling the contingency axiom of modern science.
Sigmund Freud positive
The dream of Irma's injection (opening of the Traumdeutung) is structurally paralleled with the Book of Job as the founding text of ideology: catastrophe followed by three comforting ideologist-figures.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Referenced implicitly through dialectical method and the term Aufhebung; also grouped with Nietzsche and Kant in the anthropological tradition of 'man as sick nature.'
Immanuel Kant positive
The distinction between negative and infinite judgment is Žižek's key formal tool in this talk; Kant is also mentioned as part of the anthropological tradition that wrongly sees man as 'sick nature.'
Mentioned as part of the tradition of irrationalism that Chesterton saw as the consequence of Enlightenment attacks on religion; also noted that Nietzsche should be read 'naively' not ironically.
Listed in Heidegger's catalogue of thinkers subsumed under technological nihilism.
Albert Einstein negative
Cited as the foil to Bohr/Heisenberg: Einstein's view that quantum indeterminacy shows only that quantum physics is incomplete (missing variables) is the position Žižek rejects.
John Paul II negative
Cited as endorsing evolutionism with the exception of the divine impartation of the immortal soul, a classic example of the masculine logic of universality plus exception.
What it argues
materialism and theology as non-opposedthe non-all as the logic of modern scienceecology as secular religion / new opium of the massesthe Book of Job as founding materialist textontological incompleteness of realityartificial life and the denaturalization of natureChristianity's constitutive exception vs. Islam's rational totality
Dialectical moves 14
“Vulgar atheism and religious fundamentalism are not opposites but two sides of the same coin.”
The apparent antagonism between Dawkins-style reductionism and religious fundamentalism conceals their shared structural position; neither represents a genuine alternative.
“The reason of which the Pope speaks is precisely not the reason of modern science — it is its opposite, pre-modern teleological reason.”
Benedict's appeal to logos/reason against Islam's irrationality in fact invokes an Aristotelian teleological worldview incompatible with modern contingency-based science.
“What paved the way for modern science was precisely the voluntarist idea that God is NOT bound by rational truths — the very opposite of the Pope's thesis.”
The theological foundation of modern science is irrationalist voluntarism (Duns Scotus, Descartes), not the rationalist logos the Pope celebrates.
“From the perspective of Islam, it is Christianity — the religion of love — which is not rational enough.”
Inverting the Pope's argument: Islam's wholly transcendent God is the true God of reason, while Christianity's interventionist God of passionate love introduces irrational partiality.
“The morbid logician makes everything mysterious; the mystic allows one thing to be mysterious and everything else becomes lucid.”
(Chesterton, endorsed by Žižek) Reason is saved not by eliminating mystery but by concentrating it in a single constitutive exception.
“If you do not believe in God, you will soon be ready to believe anything, including the most superstitious nonsense about miracles.”
(Chesterton, endorsed) The elimination of religion does not produce rationalism but the opposite: credulity and irrationalism without the organizing exception.
“God himself, in his reply to Job, becomes for an instant an atheist — a pure immanentist who insists on the positive, palpable unreason of things.”
The transcendent guarantor of meaning must himself renounce that role; the true God is not the exception sustaining rational order but one overwhelmed by the miracle of creation.
“We should not say 'material reality isn't all there is' (idealism) but 'material reality is non-all' — there is nothing outside it, it is simply incomplete in itself.”
The Kantian infinite judgment applied to materialism: the genuine materialist move is not to posit something beyond matter but to affirm matter's internal incompleteness.
“Ecology today functions as 'there is a deeper meaning, we transgressed some prohibition' — the same zero level of ideology as Job's comforters.”
Ecological ideology recapitulates the structure of the three theologians in Job: insisting on transcendent meaning and a sacred order violated by human hubris.
“The very possibility of artificial life retroactively denaturalizes natural life itself — it is no longer that you have natural life AND artificial life.”
Once synthetic life exists as a possibility, natural life loses its normative baseline status and becomes a confused species of the synthetic.
“The moment you can change psychological attitude through chemistry, this means that your attitude prior to intervention must already be dependent on chemistry — just on another chemistry.”
Biogenetic possibility retroactively reveals that the apparently 'free' prior state was always chemically constituted; there is no pre-biogenetic freedom to protect.
“Consciousness is not a mark of perfection but originally a consciousness of failure: you become conscious when something goes wrong.”
Inverts the standard assumption that consciousness indexes peak cognitive performance; it is a registration of malfunction, not success.
“The better brain science explains mental processes as automatic neuronal activity, the more superfluous — and mysteriously inexplicable — consciousness becomes.”
Explanatory success in reductive neuroscience paradoxically deepens the hard problem rather than dissolving it.
“Habermas, the last great advocate of the Enlightenment, ends up speaking the same language as conservative Pope Ratzinger on biogenetics.”
The supposedly progressive-Enlightenment position on biotechnology converges with religious conservatism, revealing its hidden theological structure.
Claims 20
reframes
Vulgar New Atheism and religious fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin; we do not have to choose between them.the religion vs. atheism debate
rejects
The Pope's concept of 'reason' is in fact pre-modern teleological reason incompatible with modern science, not the rationality he claims to defend.Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg lecture
asserts
It was voluntarist theology (Duns Scotus, Descartes), not teleological reason, that paved the way for modern science by making facts contingent on arbitrary divine will.the theological origins of modern science
reframes
Islam's God is more rational than Christianity's in the sense of a supreme all-encompassing rational order with no need for partial, passionate intervention.the Pope's claim that Islam is irrational
asserts
The logic of modern science is 'feminine' in Lacan's sense: materialist (nothing escapes natural causality) yet non-all (the totality is inconsistent in itself).the ontological structure of modern science
asserts
Ecology has become the new opium of the masses, performing religion's ideological function of imposing unquestionable limits and a narrative of finitude and fall.contemporary environmentalism
rejects
The ultimate lesson of Darwinism is the utter contingency of existence and nature's history of tinkering with catastrophes, not the harmonious optimum that ecologists invoke.ecological appeals to Darwin
asserts
Nature does not exist as a balanced self-reproducing universe; there is no prior state of equilibrium to which we could return.the concept of Nature in ecological ideology
asserts
In confronting ecological catastrophe we should become Cartesian subjects and abandon reliance on the life-world, because only science (not sensory experience) can register phenomena like the ozone hole.phenomenology vs. science in ecological politics
asserts
The Book of Job is a founding text of materialism: God sides with Job (who refuses to accept a deeper meaning) against the three theological comforters (ideologists who insist on transcendent meaning).the Book of Job
asserts
Ontological incompleteness of reality is not epistemological but real: reality is in itself inconsistent and unfinished, as suggested by quantum indeterminacy.the ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics
asserts
What dies on the cross is not Christ as earthly representative of a transcendent God, but the very idea of God as transcendent master and ultimate guarantee of meaning.the materialist reading of the Crucifixion
asserts
Freedom is only possible in an ontologically unfinished reality; a complete, fully constituted reality leaves no space for genuine freedom.the ontological conditions of freedom
asserts
Once biogenetic manipulation of human psychology is possible, the prior 'natural' psychological state is retroactively revealed to be merely another chemistry, not a free baseline.biogenetics and human freedom (against Habermas)
rejects
Habermas's opposition to biogenetics relies on a transcendental logic that is not radical enough: it mistakes different ontological spheres without confronting the real problem of how freedom is ontologically grounded.Habermas's bioethics
rejects
Derrida belongs to the masculine (exception-based) logic of universality: his gesture of leveling all philosophy as 'metaphysics of presence' to formulate his own exceptional position is itself the most elementary gesture of metaphysics.Derrida's deconstructive method
asserts
Deleuze's gaze on philosophical tradition mirrors God's reply to Job: there is no norm leveling the field, miracles are everywhere, every thinker (even Plato, Kant) is an exception.Deleuze's relation to philosophical tradition
asserts
Consciousness is originally a consciousness of failure, not perfection: the better vulgar brain science explains mental processes as automatic neuronal activity, the more superfluous and mysterious consciousness becomes.the hard problem of consciousness
asserts
Only materialist theories (Badiou, Deleuze) can genuinely account for consciousness; idealist explanations inevitably substantialize it and secretly reintroduce a vulgar materialism.consciousness and materialism
asserts
The possibility of artificial synthetic life retroactively denaturalizes all natural life, making natural life a confused, imperfect species of synthetic life.synthetic biology and the concept of nature
Quotes 15
“The moment you start to count, the zero itself becomes one.”Slavoj Žižek · Badiouian ontology: zero and multiplicity
“The true challenge today is to think this kind of materialism of multiplicities against the background of void.”Slavoj Žižek · materialist ontology / Badiou
“We should not say 'material reality isn't all there is' — we should say 'material reality is non-all.' There is nothing outside, it's just incomplete in itself.”Slavoj Žižek · non-all materialism vs. idealism
“Nature doesn't exist. Like Lacan said, 'La femme n'existe pas.'”Slavoj Žižek · ecology / non-all / nature as ideological construct
“Ecology is effectively a new opium of the masses, replacing religion.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology as ideology
“There is no evolution; catastrophes, broken equilibriums are part of natural history.”Slavoj Žižek · Gould / contingency of nature
“God trusts us. All that can be done is we should do it.”Slavoj Žižek · materialist theology / death of the Big Other
“There is freedom only in an ontologically unfinished reality.”Slavoj Žižek · open ontology and freedom
“What dies on the cross with Christ is precisely God as this transcendent master of the universe — the idea of God as the ultimate guarantee of meaning.”Slavoj Žižek · materialist Christology
“The better they succeed in this vulgar direct brain sciences approach, the more the problem becomes mystical. The better you explain it, the more superfluous consciousness becomes.”Slavoj Žižek · hard problem of consciousness / paradox of neuroscience
“Consciousness is originally a consciousness of failure. You become conscious when something goes wrong.”Slavoj Žižek · consciousness as failure / non-perfection
“It's not 'trust God' — no, God trusts us.”Slavoj Žižek · materialist theology / inversion of theodicy
“To worry about something is the ultimate way to avoid the problem. To focus on the problem is the way to avoid the problem.”Slavoj Žižek · fetishist split / moralism as avoidance
“The moment you can change your psychological attitude through chemistry, this means that your psychological attitude prior to this intervention must already be dependent on chemistry — just on another chemistry.”Slavoj Žižek · biogenetics / retroactive denaturalization / Habermas critique
“Deprived of this exception, reason degenerates into a blind self-destructive skepticism — in short, into total irrationalism.”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton / reason saved by exception
Transcript 37 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Do you need this? Ah, so it's not just like when you have a heart operation, you know, all those machines making beep-beep sounds which mean nothing, it's just to create the atmosphere. Okay. What do you think, do you dare to say what did you think I will be doing with it? Okay. Okay, so I would like to talk today about a slightly more serious matter, not only jokes, about materialism, theology, where do we stand today? Because I think we live in strange times. On the one hand, we have this so-called rise of fundamentalism and so on and so on, but something very interesting started to happen in the last years. Did you notice how a certain very vulgar direct materialism attacking religion as stupidity, immoral laws, is gaining also at the same time extreme popularity? The three big stars, even four, of course, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and now also Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. It's a kind of extremely vulgar reductionist materialism claiming religion is basically stupid, ethically hurtful and so on. I think more and more that these are in a way two sides of the same coin. That it's—we don't have to choose between these two. So what do we have to do? Okay, let me go directly into the debate. Less than a year ago, in September the Pope, the new one, Benedict, caused uproar, you all remember this, in Muslim circles when he quoted the infamous lines of a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." So what was Ratzinger's, Pope's idea? He tried to delineate what he saw as a fundamental difference between Christianity's view, according to him, that God is intrinsically linked to reason—you know, the beginning of Gospel of John, at the beginning it was the word, logos, blah, blah—and what Pope thinks is Islam's view that God is absolutely transcendent. Islam, according to Ratzinger, teaches that God's will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. And the risk the Pope sees implicit in this concept of the divine is that the irrationality of violence might thereby appear to be justified to someone who believes it is God's will. So for the Pope, the essential question is: is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature always and intrinsically true? His idea, of course, being for us Christians it is always true, God cannot enjoin us, compel us to act unreasonably, for Muslims it is not always true. There is a problem with this statement. The problem is that in the same move, as part of the same argumentation, the Pope also condemned what he called the Western godless secularism, in which the divine gift of reason has been warped into an absolutist doctrine. So the conclusion of the Pope is clear: reason and faith must come together in a new way. We should discover their shared ground in the divine logos. And I quote the Pope: "It is to this great logos, to this breath of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures." It sounds nice, but where do I see the problem? The problem—problems explode immediately when one analyzes a little bit more close what does the Pope understand with reason. Let's remember that just a week before this statement which provoked so much uproar, the Pope also made some remarks on the irrationality of Darwinism. Do you know that Benedict has removed Father George Coyne, a priest whose position was the director of the Vatican Observatory, after this American Jesuit priest repeatedly contradicted the Pope's endorsement of intelligent design theory, which essentially backs the Adam and Eve idea of creation? The Pope favors intelligent design, which says that God directs the process of evolution. He favors this intelligent design over Charles Darwin's theory which holds, as we all know, that species evolve through the random, unplanned process of genetic mutation. Father Coyne was an outspoken supporter of Darwin's theory, arguing that it is compatible with Christianity. But the Pope wrote in his book Truth and Tolerance, I quote Ratzinger: "The question is whether reality originated on the basis of chance and necessity and thus from what is irrational"—you got the point, necessity is for Pope irrational—"that is, whether reason, being a chance by-product of irrationality and floating in an ocean of irrationality, is ultimately just as meaningless, just as meaningless, or whether the principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian faith and of its philosophy remains true: in principio erat verbum. At the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason. Now as then, Christian faith represents the choice in favor of the priority of reason and of rationality." So this then is the first qualification that one must add. The reason of which the Pope speaks is a reason for which Darwin's theory of evolution—and let's be clear here, ultimately modern science itself, for which the assertion of the contingency of the universe, the break with the Aristotelian teleology is a constitutive axiom—so for which Darwin and modern science are irrational. The reason of which the Pope speaks is the pre-modern teleological reason, the view of the universe as a harmonious whole in which everything serves some higher purpose. Which is why, incidentally—that's the nice paradox here—the Pope's remarks obfuscate the key role of the Christian theology in the birth of modern science. I think this is true, that Christian theology played a crucial part. But which theology? What paved the way for modern science was precisely the voluntarist idea elaborated, among others, by Duns Scotus and René Descartes, that God is not bound by any eternal rational truths. That is to say, while the illusory perception of the scientific discourse is that it is a discourse of pure description of facts, the paradox resides, the paradox of modern science, in the coincidence of bare facticity, facts, and radical voluntarism. Facts can be sustained as meaningless, as something that just is the way it is, only if it is secretly sustained by an arbitrary divine will. This is why Descartes is the founding figure, one of the founding figures of modern science, precisely when he made even the most elementary mathematical facts, like two and two is four, dependent on the arbitrary divine will. Two and two is four because God willed it so, with no hidden obscure chain of reasons. Even in mathematics, this unconditional voluntarism is discernible in its axiomatic character. One begins by arbitrarily positing a series of axioms out of which everything else is supposed to follow. So again, that's the first paradox. When Pope speaks about rationality, he means this pre-modern teleological harmonious vision of the universe, not at all what we mean as the rationality of modern sciences. The second qualification, even much more interesting. Is Islam really so irrational? Does it really celebrate a totally transcendent irrational God above reason? In an issue of the Time Magazine around a year ago, there was an interesting interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, who advocated exactly the same unity of reason, logic, and spirituality as Pope does, as the Pope does. That is to say, to the question what he would ask President Bush in the public debate between the two that he, Ahmadinejad, proposed—no, they asked him, okay, what would you talk with Bush about? Ahmadinejad replied, that's a quote: "I would ask him, Bush, are rationalism, spirituality, and humanitarianism and logic, are they bad things for human beings? Why more conflict? Why should we go for hostilities? Why should we develop weapons of mass destruction? Everybody can love one another. I have said that we can run the world through logic. Problems cannot be solved through bombs. Bombs are of little use today. We need logic." This is the despised Muslim fundamentalist and so on. And effectively, I claim that he was right. From the perspective of Islam, it is Christianity as the religion of love which is not rational enough. Its focus on love makes God all too human, biased in the figure of Christ who intervenes into creation as an engaged, combative figure, allowing his, Christ's, passion to overrun the logic of the creator and master of the universe. The Muslim God, on the contrary, is the true God of reason. He is wholly transcendent, not in the sense of frivolous irrationality, as the Pope thinks, but in the sense of the supreme creator who knows and directs everything and has thus no need to get involved into earthly accidents with partial passion. You know, the God already is total rational master of the universe, no need to intervene with some stupid self-sacrifices or whatever. No wonder then that—and that's an interesting fact—that Islam finds it much easier to accept the for our common sense paradoxical results of modern quantum physics, which run against our common sense. The notion of an all-encompassing rational order which runs against our common sense, that's the idea of quantum physics. The underlying logic of Islam is that of a rationality which can be weird but which allows no exception. The universe is totally rational. While the underlying logic of Christianity is that of an irrational exception, unfathomable divine mystery which sustains our rationality. Or as my beloved theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton put it, the Christian doctrine not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. It is only the exceptions which allow us to perceive the miracle of the universal rule. And for Chesterton, the same goes for our rational understanding of the universe. A quote from Chesterton's "Orthodoxy": "The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious and everything else becomes lucid. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility." End of quote. Chesterton's aim is thus to save reason through sticking to its founding exception. Deprived of reason, deprived of this exception, reason degenerates into a blind self-destructive skepticism, in short into total irrationalism. Or as Chesterton liked to repeat, "If you do not believe in God, you will soon be ready to believe anything, including the most superstitious nonsense about miracles." Which is why incidentally, and Chesterton was here consequent, as you probably know, he is even best known today as the writer of detective stories, Father Brown. No, what's the point of detective stories, as Chesterton put it? That you have something which appears enigmatic, mysterious, like I don't know, locked-room mystery, how somebody was shot in a locked room. And precisely the whole point of detective story is to avoid—like if the solution at the end would have been oh, a divine an agent intervened or what, you are cheating. The explanation must be totally rational. And that's the nicety of Chesterton. His claim is that Christianity is the only way to save reason through the exception. This was Chesterton's basic insight, that the irrationalism of the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche, Lebensphilosophie and so on, was the necessary consequence of the Enlightenment rationalist attack on religion. Another problematic nice quote: "The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions of the pre-modern medieval universe were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They"—and he means here precisely again witch-hunts and so on—"they were organized for the difficult defense of reason. Men, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of Popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify, these were all only dark defenses erected around one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all: the authority of a man to think freely." I love this. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. It's a consequent position. The position again of universal rule and exception. Now here, however, I think we encounter Chesterton's limitation, but a limitation which I think he himself overcame when, in his—this is I think his best text—wonderful text on the Book of Job, he shows why God had to rebuke his own defenders, this as Chesterton put it "the mechanical and supercilious comforters of Job." You know the situation, no, Job got screwed up, family, all the property, everything lost, and then the three friends come, three or four I don't remember, and they try to comfort him by the message that it can be explained there is a deeper reason why you were so screwed up, no. The first says I don't know it was because even if you don't know it you must have done something wrong, God is just. The other said but maybe you are just tested, whatever. They want to read meaning into it. And we have to be here very precise, I will return to this at the end. What Job does, Job's point is not "no, I didn't," Job's point is not "no, I mean innocent, God is wrong." He just does not accept that there is a deeper meaning. And what the three or four theologian friends who come to comfort him insist on is precisely "no, your catastrophe has a deeper meaning." The nice thing of course, as you know, which is why I think the Book of Job is the founding text of materialism maybe, is that God himself without any ambiguity takes the side of Job. He says every word that Job said is right, every word that these three defenders of mine took is wrong. Quote, the last one a little bit longer from Chesterton: "The mechanical optimist endeavors to justify the universe avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that the fine thing about the world is that it can all be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which God in return"—God when he comes back at the end to Job—"is explicit to the point of violence. God says in effect that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything. He goes even further and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things." A quote from the Book of Job: "Hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no man," and so on. "To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer. One might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass"—incidentally I don't know what this is, it sounds crazy—"the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody on the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has himself made." End of quote. So you got it, God is here no longer the miraculous exception which guarantees the normality of the universe. The unexplainable X who enables us to explain everything else. He is on the contrary himself overwhelmed by the miracle of his own creation. Upon a closer look, there is nothing normal in our universe. Everything, even every small thing, is a miraculous exception. Viewed from a proper perspective, every normal thing is a monstrosity. Say why should we take horses as normal and the unicorn as a miraculous exception? Even a horse, the most ordinary thing in the world, is a shattering miracle. And I think that this blasphemous God is the God of modern science. Since modern science is sustained precisely by such an attitude of wondering at the most obvious. In short, modern science is on the side of believing in anything. Is one of the lessons of theory of relativity or quantum physics not that modern science undermines our most elementary natural attitude and compels us to believe, accept the most nonsensical things? To clarify this confusion, I think that Jacques Lacan's logic of the so-called non-all can be of some help here. Lacan distinguishes the so-called masculine side, universality (all), universal law grounded in exception, and non-all, where there is no exception but because of this no universality. Chesterton obviously relies on the masculine side of universality and its constitutive exception. Everything obeys natural causality with the exception of God, the central mystery. The logic of modern science is on the contrary feminine. First, it is materialist, accepting the axiom that nothing escapes natural causality. There is nothing which cannot be accounted for by rational explanation. However, the other side of this materialist axiom is that not all is rational. Not in the sense that there is something irrational, something that escapes rational causality, but in the sense that it is the totality of rational causal order which is in itself inconsistent and in this formal sense, of course, irrational non-all. Only this non-all guarantees the proper opening of the scientific discourse to surprises, to the emergencies of the unthinkable. Who in the nineteenth century could have imagined things like relativity theory or quantum physics? So perhaps the incompatibility between Derrida—I want to give you now an example of this difference—between Derrida and Deleuze, I think can also be accounted in these terms. What makes Derrida masculine in the sense of the logic of universality and its exception is the persistence throughout his, Derrida's, work of totalization through exception. The search for a post-metaphysical way of thinking, for the breakout of the metaphysical closure, presupposes the violent gesture of universalization, of leveling, equalization, unification of all the field of intra-metaphysical struggles. You know the story of all attempts to break out of metaphysics, from Kierkegaard to Marx, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, from Levinas to Claude Lévi-Strauss, ultimately remain within the horizon of the metaphysics of presence. This same gesture is clearly discernible also in Heidegger, for whom all reversals of metaphysics, from Marx to Nietzsche, from Husserl to Sartre, remain within the horizon of the forgetting of being, ultimately caught in the technological nihilism as the accomplishment of metaphysics. As well as incidentally for Adorno and Horkheimer, for whom the entire Western thought is totalized as the gradual deployment of the dialectics of Enlightenment which culminates in today's administered world. As some people used to say, from Plato to NATO—from Plato to NATO, it's a straight line. And incidentally, it is this aspect that I also find problematic in our good friend Giorgio Agamben. I can say something critical about him because he's not here, and I'm a human, warm person, I don't want to offend people face to face, so I'm saying this when he is not here. No, seriously, doesn't he do the same thing? Like, what narrative is he telling us? That from the very beginning of the West, Western philosophy, there is a certain line which culminates in a kind of a negative eschatology in today's Homo sacer, concentration camp logic. That's the truth of the entire development and all attempts to break out get caught into it. So we just have to wait for the reversal. I'm tempted to claim that perhaps it is this very gesture of violent equalization of the entire field, against which you then formulate your own position of exception, which is the most elementary gesture of metaphysics. This is for me what we should maybe drop. This idea of everything is part of metaphysics of presence, forgetfulness of being, except your own position from which you totalize it. In clear contrast to Derrida, this gesture of violent equalization is, as far as I can see, totally absent in Gilles Deleuze's work. Deleuze's gaze upon the tradition of philosophy is somehow like the gaze of God upon creation in God's reply to Job. There is no norm which would allow us to level the field. Miracles are everywhere. Every phenomenon perceived properly from a position which estranges it from its standard context is an exception. This is what I like again in Deleuze. He is far from the idea all hitherto is metaphysics. No, he says let's look at even Plato who appears to be his enemy, even Kant, Spinoza, everywhere you see an exception, everywhere you see a miracle. Catholic church on the contrary was as a rule always on the side of the common sense realism and universal natural explanation. From Chesterton to Pope John Paul II, who endorsed both evolutionism with the exception of the unique moment when God imparts to humans the immortal soul. It's always the same logic of—do you know that John Paul was for evolutionism? He said perfect, it explains everything except that moment when Adam and Eve blah, blah, no. Or even contemporary cosmology, John Paul II said it's wonderful, but don't mess with Big Bang, that's the exception that God intervened there. No wonder that many neo-Thomists noted a weird similarity between their own ontology and the ontology of the Stalinist dialectical materialism, because both were defending a version of naive realism: objects the way we perceive them exist really outside our perception independently of it and so on. This is why both Catholic philosophy and dialectical materialism had such problems with the so-called open ontology of quantum mechanics. That is to say, how are we to interpret the so-called principle of uncertainty in quantum physics which prohibits us from attaining full knowledge of particles at the quantum level? We cannot measure velocity and position of a particle, as we all know, at the same time. For Einstein, this principle of uncertainty simply demonstrates that quantum physics does not provide a full description of reality, that there must be some unknown feature missing, sorry, missed by its conceptual apparatus. As we all know, Heisenberg, Bohr and others on the contrary insisted that this incompleteness of our knowledge of quantum reality points towards a strange incompleteness of reality itself. A claim which leads to a breathtaking weird ontology. What kind of weird ontology? Let me give you a well-known example. When we want to simulate reality within an artificial digital medium, we do not have to go to the end. We just have to reproduce features which make the image realistic for the spectator's point of view. Say when you are playing a digital PC game. If there is a house in the background, the programmer does not have to construct the house's entire interior, since we expect that the participant, the player, will not want to enter the house. Or the construction of a virtual person in this space can be limited to his exterior. You know when you interact with the person there it's not in the program bones and so on, it's not part of the rules of the game. We just need maybe to install a program which will promptly fill in this gap if the participant's activity will necessitate it. It is like, you know, when you scroll down a long text on a computer screen. Earlier and later pages do not pre-exist our viewing them. In the same way, when we simulate a virtual universe, the microscopic structure of objects can be left blank. And if stars on the horizon, when you see the sky in a digital PC-CD-ROM whatever game, when—if the stars appear hazy, blurred, we need not bother to construct the way they would appear to a closer look, since there is no closer look within the game. Nobody will go up there to take such a look at them. Now you get it what's my point. The interesting idea here is that the quantum indeterminacy which we encounter when we inquire into the tiniest components of our universe can be read in exactly the same way: as a feature of the limited resolution of our simulated world. That is to say, as the sign of the ontological incompleteness of what we experience as a reality itself. That is to say, let us imagine a God who is creating the world for us, its human inhabitants, for us to dwell in. His task—I quote here Nicholas Fearn, Introduction to Philosophy—his task could be made easier, God's task, by furnishing the world only with those parts that each inhabitant need to know about. For example, the microscopic structure of the earth's interior could be left blank, at least at least until someone decides to dig down deep enough, in which case the details could be hastily filled in as required. If the most distant stars are hazy, no one is ever going to get close enough to them to notice that something is amiss. I love this theory because you got it why. The idea is that when God created the world he underestimated us. He was too lazy. He thought that the limit of our knowledge is atoms. He thought that we will not go beyond the atom into dividing it. So why spend precious time of divine jouissance or what into constructing things there? So he simply left it open, you know. Who cares about the place of a particle, velocity? Let's leave it open. We were a little bit too intelligent for God. We approached the end, we approached the limit. Now, of course, your counter-question would have been but what has this to do with materialism? Isn't this entire vision precisely based on the theological view there must be a creator? My answer is no. That is to say, it's not necessary to read this ontological, as it were, incompleteness of reality as a sign that we live in a simulated universe, but we can simply read it as a sign of the ontological incompleteness of reality itself. And this, I think, is the difficult thing to accept. That is to say, that reality is in itself incomplete because our common sense tells—tells us if reality is incomplete it will collapse into itself, you know. You can play the game, but at some ultimate level, things—in order for things to exist they must, how to put it, by definition fully ontologically exist. If reality really exists out there, it has to be complete all the way down, otherwise we are dealing with a fiction which just hangs in the air, like appearances which are not appearances of a substantial something. But here precisely, I think again, quantum physics offers a model of how to think such open ontology. And I claim, ruthlessly manipulating him, that Alain Badiou formulated the same idea in his notion of pure multiplicity as the ultimate ontological category. Reality is the multiplicity of multiplicities which cannot be generated or constituted from or reduced to some form of ones as its elementary atomic constituents. The difficult thing is to think multiplicity as original, you get my point? Multiplicity comes before one. No matter how far we progress in our analysis of multiplicities, we never reach the zero level of simple constituents. The only—you can go endlessly on—the only background of multiplicities is just zero, the void. Therein resides, I think, Badiou's ontological breakthrough. The primordial opposition is not that of one and zero, but that of zero and multiplicities, and the one emerges later. To put it even more radically, since only ones in plural fully really exist, multiplicities and zero are the same thing. Zero is multiplicities without ones which would guarantee their ontological consistencies. So when Badiou speaks about multiplicities and the void, his point is not this vulgar Democritean one. You know, you immediately think yes, multiplicities are small atoms running all around and the void is the space. No, imagine rather multiplicities, but then the more you divide them it's always more open space. The zero is the substance of multiplicities. And now comes okay, nonetheless, it's in my nature to tell a joke, not a dirty one. The ideal Badiouian ontologist who confirmed this, I found it, believe me or not, I found it, I encountered him in Poland. It's not a joke, it's a wonderful example. Namely, let's do a little bit of cultural theory. I was always interested in this, let's call it, differences in shared ideology, Lebenswelt ideology, which is betrayed by tiny details. For example, for me the difference between Europe and United States is that when you enter elevator in a hotel you notice it: we in Europe start with zero, the ground level is zero and then one, two. Americans start with one, our ground level is there one. It's clear: we know that you have to have a zero, a substantial background, Americans think you can start with one, you don't need the zero, the Big Other. Which is confirmed by another—by another—another strange thing. It always surprises me in American hotels—and as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, in Europe you don't find this—that in hotels which have more than thirteen floors, the thirteenth floor doesn't—it's twelve and fourteen. This is for me part of the same phenomenon. Why? Because—my, whenever I encounter this I ask my American friends: but wait a minute, whom are you cheating? God knows that your fourteen is really thirteen, no? I mean it's kind of a subjectivist idealism, it doesn't work. So okay, which of these solutions is then the right one? None of them. I got an answer in Poland, where I was staying in hotel and I noticed there something very strange. It's really like they read Badiou's Being and Event. They do—they start as Europeans: zero, but they go directly to two. Zero, two, three. And then there was this spontaneous philosopher, I asked, surprised, an old gentleman, the porter operator: but why, where is the one? You know what he told me? I was shocked unbelievably: Well, the moment you start to count, the zero itself becomes one. Zero, in order to count, zero has to be counted as one. Oh my God, no wonder they had Solidarity and all those, because Solidarity is maybe zero counted as one or whatever, no? But you see my point? I think so again, contrary to this idea that materialism means full reality out there ontologically constituted. I think the true challenge today is to think this kind of a materialism of multiplicities against the background of void. Again, what we should do here, a little bit of excursus into Kant. You know, it's an old distinction that I'm referring to all the time: wonderful Kantian distinction between negative and infinite judgment. You know, the negative judgment you negate a predicate, infinite judgment you don't negate a predicate, but you affirm a non-predicate. And it's totally different. Let's take a simple example which will make it immediately clear, my favorite from horror literature and so on. How can you negate the statement "you are dead"? You can do the negative judgment, you negate the predicate: "you aren't dead." What this means? It means simply you are alive, no problem. But what if you, instead of negating the predicate, you affirm a non-predicate? You don't say "you aren't dead," but you say "you are undead." Every reader of Stephen King knows it's something totally different. It's the infinity of the undead, vampires etc., the living dead and so on. And I think we should do the same here. If we take the axiom "material reality is all there is," if we negate it in the mode of negative judgment, then you say "material reality isn't all there is." This is idealism: haha, there is something else. What we should say is not "material reality isn't all there is," we should say "material reality is non-all." There is nothing outside, it's just incomplete in itself. And that's difficult to accept. If I return back to the beginning, both for those vulgar materialists and so on as for the New Age idealists. And a little bit of just concluding some concluding remarks on ecology. I think that the true side of the struggle for materialism today is ecology. How? Again let me I'm here developing an idea that Badiou gave me in a conversation, namely that ecology has all the chances of developing today into the predominant form of ideology of our global capitalism. I'm more and more convinced that even multiculturalism doesn't look so well, liberalism, if you dig to the end it's ecology. Ecology is effectively, as Badiou put it to me in a private conversation, a new opium of the masses, for the masses, replacing religion. Why? It takes over the old religion's fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude. We are not Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a biosphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our Earth with respect as something ultimately sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, something that should forever remain a mystery, a power we should trust, not just exploit and dominate. While we cannot gain full mastery over our biosphere, unfortunately it is in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance and so on and so on. This is why, although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite: a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress. Every radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe. This distrust was given a new impetus by today's biogenetics, which is on the verge of a crucial breakthrough. Namely, till now geneticists were confined to tinkering, tweaking what nature has already produced. You took a gene from a bacterium and inserted it into a chromosome of a pig or whatever. Whatever, but now the prospect is to produce life that will be wholly new, not in any way a genetic descendant of already existing biological organisms. The initial members of each newly created breed will have no ancestor at all. So the genome itself of this organism will be artificially put together. First individual biological building blocks will be fabricated, then they will be combined into an entirely new synthetic self-replicating organism. And as we know, scientists designate this new life as "Life as opposed to our natural life which becomes "Life like Microsoft and so on and so on. This is effectively a kind of end of nature. Synthetic life is not just supplementing natural life, it turns natural life itself into a confused, imperfect species of synthetic life. So there effectively are some breathtaking prospects here. And my idea is that those who opposed most ferociously this prospect are precisely religious leaders and environmentalists. For both there is something of a transgression, of entering a prohibited domain in this idea of creating a new form of life from the scratch. And this brings us back to the notion of ecology as the new opium for the masses. The underlying message is again a deeply conservative one: any change can only be the change for the worse. Here is from a newspaper report I read, a passage which describes this typical ecological attitude: "Behind much of the resistance to the notion of synthetic life is the intuition that nature or God created the best of possible worlds. Charles Darwin believed that the myriad designs of nature's creations are perfectly honed to do whatever they are meant to do, be it animals that see, hear, sing, or plants that feed on the sun's rays," and so on and so on. End of quote. So, I—but I claim that this reference to Darwin is totally misleading. The ultimate lesson of Darwinism is exact opposite: namely, that nature tinkers and improvises with great losses and catastrophes accompanying every limited success. Is the fact that of the human genome is junk DNA with no clear function not the ultimate proof of it? Consequently, the first lesson to be drawn is the one repeatedly made by Stephen Jay Gould: the utter contingency of our existence. There is no evolution; catastrophes, broken equilibriums are part of natural history. At numerous points in the past life could have turned into an entirely different direction. The main source of our energy, oil, is the result of a past catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions. And again, this is, I think—this I think is what we should accept. The first premise of materialist ecology is nature doesn't exist. Like Lacan said, "La femme n'existe pas." If we mean by nature this kind of a mythic balanced self-reproducing universe which is then derailed by human hubris and then we should somehow return—I quite agree with those who claim that there is in the predominant form of ecology a kind of a secularized version of this religious idea of the fall. And this is the truly different, the truly difficult materialist thing. To, of course, we have to do something, I'm totally pro-ecologist, but we have to drop this idea that there is an ultimate point of reference, nature, like Mother Nature, balanced universe which we disturbed and to the balance of which we should somehow return. Nature—I think we should even go a step further and reject a certain anthropology which we find not only in almost entire modern philosophy, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, but even Lacan, at least the early Lacan, this idea that man is a sick unto death, sick nature, derailed nature. Nature is already in itself sick, confused. Again, there is no nature. What does this mean practically? There is no previous standard to which—this would be the practical advice for ecological politics—to which we can return. My favorite ecological book is the one—an American scientist, I forgot his name, who demonstrated that nature itself on our Earth is already to such an extent integrated into our pollution that if our pollution were to diminish too fast, it would have probably meant a total catastrophe for animal life and so on. No, I'm—my message is not haha, then we can do whatever we want, but that the situation is much more terrifying. Of course I totally believe there can be catastrophes and so on, but there is nothing but catastrophes. We don't have a ground, we have nowhere to return to. Which is why I think that—but that's another story, I will not repeat it here, I think I already referred to it last time precisely here—which is why, which is why I think that this idea that another idea we should drop it totally, that the ultimate source of our ecological problems is alienated predomination of scientific universe, science manipulating, and then they say we should not forget that prior, this phenomenological Husserlian description, prior to every scientific objectivization there is the life-world and we are irreducibly immersed into the life-world. This is for me precisely the catastrophe. Why? Let's ask ourselves a simple question. You read about global warming, blah, blah, blah, ozone hole. Well look up as much as you want you will not see ozone hole. I mean we totally have to rely on science. And on the other hand, when a scientist—why, where does this mysterious fact come that although the possibility of catastrophe is convincingly demonstrated by scientists we strangely we humanity do not do take some serious measures, react to it? I think it's this fetishist split: we know very well that it's true, but nonetheless we don't believe it. Why? Precisely the what happens: you read about catastrophe, then what do you do? Then you go out, what a nice star, the stupid eyes there, glay—oh my god, like you really cannot believe that this natural life-world can be destroyed. So I think that precisely in order to confront properly ecology we should all become Cartesian subjects. We should renounce this reliance on the life-world as the ultimately given universe and so on and so on. So now really, look, just the concluding remark. This materialist lesson, to return to conclude briefly, is for me the lesson of the Book of Job. Because read it, every year I repeat this, I know. What really happens there? Job, three ideologists as I already said, and did you notice the strange parallel between the structure of the Book of Job and the structure of Freud's most famous dream with with which he opens "Traumdeutung," interpretation of dreams, of Irma's injection? The structure there is the same: first it's a catastrophe, the patient, the dreamer—Freud was dreaming it—looks into Irma's throat, horror, the real, Irma's throat, catastrophe, then all of a sudden the shift into three stupid doctors who produce some reasons inconsistencies why Freud is not guilty, no. There was no injection, the injection was already, Irma was already infected before, whatever. Doesn't exactly the same thing happen in the structure of the Book of Job? First the catastrophe, he loses everything from from animals to women and so on. It's interesting how when you have this description that Job loses cows, pigs, wives, daughters and so on, no. This reminds me of, you know, when the Bible prohibits the Ten Commandments "don't steal or covet your neighbor's wife," then it goes on, neither his cow, his pigs or whatever, one should put things in context. Okay, but what I'm saying that there also exactly as in Freud, the three ideologists what comes them are the three precisely the three ideologists. This is I think the zero level of ideology. The three theologians which come to Job with the message "there is a deeper meaning to your misfortunes." That's what we should resist. This is how ecology today predominantly functions, as "there is a deeper meaning, we transgressed some prohibition" and so on. And this is why God is the only true materialist there who comes and says there is no—there is no transcendent meaning, everything is a miracle. God as remember Chesterton says God is for a moment an atheist there, pure immanentist, there is no transcendent master, which is why I think we have to read Christ as repetition of Job. What dies on the cross with Christ, as God knew what dies is not an earthly representative of a transcendent, what dies is precisely God as this transcendent master of the universe. What dies on the cross for me is this idea who's the idea of God as the ultimate guarantee of meaning. You know this vulgar metaphor that I hate, that our creation is like a painting. When we see a catastrophe it is as if when you look at a picture and you look too close and you see only the stain, but from a proper distance you see that what appeared as a stain contributes to the harmony. Okay, I think that the lesson of Christianity, the materialist, this is for me the lesson of Christ: that we cannot afford this withdrawal. When we are confronting horrible things, I don't know, Holocaust, concentration camps or other similar catastrophes, it's a little bit vulgar to say "yeah, this only appears to you as a catastrophe because of your limited perspective, withdraw back and you will see how it contributes to harmony or whatever," no. There is no Big Other. This is why I think this would be a kind of a more materialist reading why Christ truly sacrificed himself. The message is no, all we can do is here, there is no Father up there who takes care of it, that—so in in a way I think that it's the opposite: it's not "trust God," no, God trusts us. All that can be done is we should do it. In this sense, with this incomplete notion of reality, it's also that we can, how to put it, it opens up in this sense the space for freedom. There is freedom only in an ontologically unfinished reality. So I it was exactly one hour, that's what I wanted. Thank you very much. Welcome to artificial life, Slavoj. It took you long because you have so many other avenues to take. But I know that you cannot be educated, so I will not do it tonight. But maybe one day you will see. We really love each other, you got it, no? But I see that you add another group of people to your enemies, the ecologists, you know, that's good, so you're bad-mouthing them too, not just Derrida and all the others who also do something. But that is what we expect from you, so what else can we do? It's just funny, I wonder—I knew something will appear. Have you been—I thought you were raised as a communist, no? I am a communist. Yes, not raised. I mean raised, where suddenly you embrace religion and then you speak about religion like a like a Dominican or things, "oh, there are these story"—how come, where did you—But where do you see a problem? All good political terror had a religious background. My German hero is Thomas Müntzer and so on. Yes, at least like Goebbels, raised in the, you know. You are—you are a late-comer to the game, no? So you're—what's that they call, yeah right, that's what they call it in America—newborn or what? Born-again! Born-again, thank you. Okay. No, but I think it's always, you're always a bit of a fundamentalist, and she's also a born-again atheist now. But all this comes out there, and I always wonder why that for me I have a little trouble here. I was raised too, but I was raised in many religions, so I'm screwed up from the beginning. My problem is always still why is it like kicking a dead dog, you know, that is—what is the big deal? And the—you mean in religion or what? Yeah, I mean or in atheism, huh? I mean it's—it's the same thing, also show me the phenomenon first, let me meet God. But unfortunately looking at you, no, that's best I can do is meet the devil, it's not—Yeah, but what's the difference? That's the first properly Christian answer. God is devil, it's just the point of perspective. Okay, but as long as he does not introduce himself to me, he does not exist for me. It's the only thing—why should I talk about something which I have no phenomenon for? It's nothing. Wait a minute, I'm an atheist. Yeah, but atheism is the same thing. Why do you have to renounce something which does not is a phenomenon? You say "no," there is nothing. Sure, there is nothing, but what's the point of talking about that? There are nothings and nothings. I know there are nothings. Yeah, yeah, there is a wrong—okay. Okay, there is a history, I agree with you, there's history and power, and there's the Pope, and there's also a big entertainment industry called religion and so on, no? And it turns into, sometimes into a cult and it has a lot of victims and so on etc. Also there I see a lot of political argumentation. I still don't see the philosophical part of it. I mean, and I agree, what you do is you take out these old stories, you know, as literature. Which Job and so on. Yeah, the Job story is literature, metaphor, and you can draw some insights, make it—it's another form of you joking, you know, you joking with serious material, huh? So to speak. I understand that. Still, is it worth your brainpower? That is—not is there not—ecology, yes, that's worth your brainpower. Go after them, but leave the religion there. Just a—just an advice, you do what you want. Okay. No, okay, I will not lose my—It's my commentary. Yeah, no, I mean if you are asking questions I just comment. Telling the truth. My god. If following Badiou's logic you say that truth happens in being... Sorry, truth—be precise. That the word of truth is what happens in creation? Yeah. What would be the truth being at that level? No, I'm not—no, here I would agree with what probably, I don't want to speak too much for him, Badiou would have said. I I don't think there is a truth dimension in this. I don't I don't I don't I don't think. What interests me is only this is not a truth event in this strict sense but—how to put it—what really changes with artificial life. Let me be very precise here, I passed over this very fast, is that once we accept artificial life, it's no longer that you have natural life and artificial life. This, the possibility, the very possibility of artificial life retroactively denaturalizes natural life itself. The moment you have natural life becomes how should I put it, you know? It's the same as with—for example, this is my big disagreement with Habermas, who opposes too much of biogenetic playing with human genome and so on, that this will threaten our freedom. No, I think that the the moment it is possible to do it, for example the moment we discover, if it's true, it's more complex, but the moment you put it in these terms, "will we insist on education, autonomous conscious work, or on simply changing our psychological attitudes through drugs?" The moment you say this, you lose, there is no choice. Because if you can do it through chemicals or genetic manipulations, this means that even if you don't do it, it depends just on another constellation of chemicals in your body. So, you know what I mean, the choice is not between freedom or chemical biogenetic manipulation. The choice is between conscious biogenetic manipulation and stupid natural chance or whatever. You you know what I mean, if I can change my psychological attitude through chemistry, this means that my psychological attitude prior to this intervention must already be dependent on chemistry, just on another chemistry. So the question here is more radical. No wonder that Habermas, as you probably maybe know, a couple of years ago even published a book with Ratzinger. This is for me the big symptom how Habermas, who publicizes himself as the great, the last advocate of Enlightenment, all of a sudden speaks the same language as this conservative Protestant. Basically he is repeating this same story which is which is "some things it's
Do you need this? Ah, so it's not just like when you have a heart operation, you know, all those machines making beep-beep sounds which mean nothing, it's just to create the atmosphere. Okay. What do you think, do you dare to say what did you think I will be doing with it? Okay. Okay, so I would like to talk today about a slightly more serious matter, not only jokes, about materialism, theology, where do we stand today? Because I think we live in strange times. On the one hand, we have this so-called rise of fundamentalism and so on and so on, but something very interesting started to happen in the last years. Did you notice how a certain very vulgar direct materialism attacking religion as stupidity, immoral laws, is gaining also at the same time extreme popularity? The three big stars, even four, of course, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and now also Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. It's a kind of extremely vulgar reductionist materialism claiming religion is basically stupid, ethically hurtful and so on. I think more and more that these are in a way two sides of the same coin. That it's—we don't have to choose between these two. So what do we have to do? Okay, let me go directly into the debate. Less than a year ago, in September the Pope, the new one, Benedict, caused uproar, you all remember this, in Muslim circles when he quoted the infamous lines of a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." So what was Ratzinger's, Pope's idea? He tried to delineate what he saw as a fundamental difference between Christianity's view, according to him, that God is intrinsically linked to reason—you know, the beginning of Gospel of John, at the beginning it was the word, logos, blah, blah—and what Pope thinks is Islam's view that God is absolutely transcendent. Islam, according to Ratzinger, teaches that God's will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. And the risk the Pope sees implicit in this concept of the divine is that the irrationality of violence might thereby appear to be justified to someone who believes it is God's will. So for the Pope, the essential question is: is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature always and intrinsically true? His idea, of course, being for us Christians it is always true, God cannot enjoin us, compel us to act unreasonably, for Muslims it is not always true. There is a problem with this statement. The problem is that in the same move, as part of the same argumentation, the Pope also condemned what he called the Western godless secularism, in which the divine gift of reason has been warped into an absolutist doctrine. So the conclusion of the Pope is clear: reason and faith must come together in a new way. We should discover their shared ground in the divine logos. And I quote the Pope: "It is to this great logos, to this breath of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures." It sounds nice, but where do I see the problem? The problem—problems explode immediately when one analyzes a little bit more close what does the Pope understand with reason. Let's remember that just a week before this statement which provoked so much uproar, the Pope also made some remarks on the irrationality of Darwinism. Do you know that Benedict has removed Father George Coyne, a priest whose position was the director of the Vatican Observatory, after this American Jesuit priest repeatedly contradicted the Pope's endorsement of intelligent design theory, which essentially backs the Adam and Eve idea of creation? The Pope favors intelligent design, which says that God directs the process of evolution. He favors this intelligent design over Charles Darwin's theory which holds, as we all know, that species evolve through the random, unplanned process of genetic mutation. Father Coyne was an outspoken supporter of Darwin's theory, arguing that it is compatible with Christianity. But the Pope wrote in his book Truth and Tolerance, I quote Ratzinger: "The question is whether reality originated on the basis of chance and necessity and thus from what is irrational"—you got the point, necessity is for Pope irrational—"that is, whether reason, being a chance by-product of irrationality and floating in an ocean of irrationality, is ultimately just as meaningless, just as meaningless, or whether the principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian faith and of its philosophy remains true: in principio erat verbum. At the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason. Now as then, Christian faith represents the choice in favor of the priority of reason and of rationality." So this then is the first qualification that one must add. The reason of which the Pope speaks is a reason for which Darwin's theory of evolution—and let's be clear here, ultimately modern science itself, for which the assertion of the contingency of the universe, the break with the Aristotelian teleology is a constitutive axiom—so for which Darwin and modern science are irrational. The reason of which the Pope speaks is the pre-modern teleological reason, the view of the universe as a harmonious whole in which everything serves some higher purpose. Which is why, incidentally—that's the nice paradox here—the Pope's remarks obfuscate the key role of the Christian theology in the birth of modern science. I think this is true, that Christian theology played a crucial part. But which theology? What paved the way for modern science was precisely the voluntarist idea elaborated, among others, by Duns Scotus and René Descartes, that God is not bound by any eternal rational truths. That is to say, while the illusory perception of the scientific discourse is that it is a discourse of pure description of facts, the paradox resides, the paradox of modern science, in the coincidence of bare facticity, facts, and radical voluntarism. Facts can be sustained as meaningless, as something that just is the way it is, only if it is secretly sustained by an arbitrary divine will. This is why Descartes is the founding figure, one of the founding figures of modern science, precisely when he made even the most elementary mathematical facts, like two and two is four, dependent on the arbitrary divine will. Two and two is four because God willed it so, with no hidden obscure chain of reasons. Even in mathematics, this unconditional voluntarism is discernible in its axiomatic character. One begins by arbitrarily positing a series of axioms out of which everything else is supposed to follow. So again, that's the first paradox. When Pope speaks about rationality, he means this pre-modern teleological harmonious vision of the universe, not at all what we mean as the rationality of modern sciences. The second qualification, even much more interesting. Is Islam really so irrational? Does it really celebrate a totally transcendent irrational God above reason? In an issue of the Time Magazine around a year ago, there was an interesting interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, who advocated exactly the same unity of reason, logic, and spirituality as Pope does, as the Pope does. That is to say, to the question what he would ask President Bush in the public debate between the two that he, Ahmadinejad, proposed—no, they asked him, okay, what would you talk with Bush about? Ahmadinejad replied, that's a quote: "I would ask him, Bush, are rationalism, spirituality, and humanitarianism and logic, are they bad things for human beings? Why more conflict? Why should we go for hostilities? Why should we develop weapons of mass destruction? Everybody can love one another. I have said that we can run the world through logic. Problems cannot be solved through bombs. Bombs are of little use today. We need logic." This is the despised Muslim fundamentalist and so on. And effectively, I claim that he was right. From the perspective of Islam, it is Christianity as the religion of love which is not rational enough. Its focus on love makes God all too human, biased in the figure of Christ who intervenes into creation as an engaged, combative figure, allowing his, Christ's, passion to overrun the logic of the creator and master of the universe. The Muslim God, on the contrary, is the true God of reason. He is wholly transcendent, not in the sense of frivolous irrationality, as the Pope thinks, but in the sense of the supreme creator who knows and directs everything and has thus no need to get involved into earthly accidents with partial passion. You know, the God already is total rational master of the universe, no need to intervene with some stupid self-sacrifices or whatever. No wonder then that—and that's an interesting fact—that Islam finds it much easier to accept the for our common sense paradoxical results of modern quantum physics, which run against our common sense. The notion of an all-encompassing rational order which runs against our common sense, that's the idea of quantum physics. The underlying logic of Islam is that of a rationality which can be weird but which allows no exception. The universe is totally rational. While the underlying logic of Christianity is that of an irrational exception, unfathomable divine mystery which sustains our rationality. Or as my beloved theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton put it, the Christian doctrine not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. It is only the exceptions which allow us to perceive the miracle of the universal rule. And for Chesterton, the same goes for our rational understanding of the universe. A quote from Chesterton's "Orthodoxy": "The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious and everything else becomes lucid. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility." End of quote. Chesterton's aim is thus to save reason through sticking to its founding exception. Deprived of reason, deprived of this exception, reason degenerates into a blind self-destructive skepticism, in short into total irrationalism. Or as Chesterton liked to repeat, "If you do not believe in God, you will soon be ready to believe anything, including the most superstitious nonsense about miracles." Which is why incidentally, and Chesterton was here consequent, as you probably know, he is even best known today as the writer of detective stories, Father Brown. No, what's the point of detective stories, as Chesterton put it? That you have something which appears enigmatic, mysterious, like I don't know, locked-room mystery, how somebody was shot in a locked room. And precisely the whole point of detective story is to avoid—like if the solution at the end would have been oh, a divine an agent intervened or what, you are cheating. The explanation must be totally rational. And that's the nicety of Chesterton. His claim is that Christianity is the only way to save reason through the exception. This was Chesterton's basic insight, that the irrationalism of the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche, Lebensphilosophie and so on, was the necessary consequence of the Enlightenment rationalist attack on religion. Another problematic nice quote: "The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions of the pre-modern medieval universe were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They"—and he means here precisely again witch-hunts and so on—"they were organized for the difficult defense of reason. Men, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of Popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify, these were all only dark defenses erected around one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all: the authority of a man to think freely." I love this. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. It's a consequent position. The position again of universal rule and exception. Now here, however, I think we encounter Chesterton's limitation, but a limitation which I think he himself overcame when, in his—this is I think his best text—wonderful text on the Book of Job, he shows why God had to rebuke his own defenders, this as Chesterton put it "the mechanical and supercilious comforters of Job." You know the situation, no, Job got screwed up, family, all the property, everything lost, and then the three friends come, three or four I don't remember, and they try to comfort him by the message that it can be explained there is a deeper reason why you were so screwed up, no. The first says I don't know it was because even if you don't know it you must have done something wrong, God is just. The other said but maybe you are just tested, whatever. They want to read meaning into it. And we have to be here very precise, I will return to this at the end. What Job does, Job's point is not "no, I didn't," Job's point is not "no, I mean innocent, God is wrong." He just does not accept that there is a deeper meaning. And what the three or four theologian friends who come to comfort him insist on is precisely "no, your catastrophe has a deeper meaning." The nice thing of course, as you know, which is why I think the Book of Job is the founding text of materialism maybe, is that God himself without any ambiguity takes the side of Job. He says every word that Job said is right, every word that these three defenders of mine took is wrong. Quote, the last one a little bit longer from Chesterton: "The mechanical optimist endeavors to justify the universe avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern. He points out that the fine thing about the world is that it can all be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which God in return"—God when he comes back at the end to Job—"is explicit to the point of violence. God says in effect that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything. He goes even further and insists on the positive and palpable unreason of things." A quote from the Book of Job: "Hast thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no man," and so on. "To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer. One might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass"—incidentally I don't know what this is, it sounds crazy—"the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody on the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has himself made." End of quote. So you got it, God is here no longer the miraculous exception which guarantees the normality of the universe. The unexplainable X who enables us to explain everything else. He is on the contrary himself overwhelmed by the miracle of his own creation. Upon a closer look, there is nothing normal in our universe. Everything, even every small thing, is a miraculous exception. Viewed from a proper perspective, every normal thing is a monstrosity. Say why should we take horses as normal and the unicorn as a miraculous exception? Even a horse, the most ordinary thing in the world, is a shattering miracle. And I think that this blasphemous God is the God of modern science. Since modern science is sustained precisely by such an attitude of wondering at the most obvious. In short, modern science is on the side of believing in anything. Is one of the lessons of theory of relativity or quantum physics not that modern science undermines our most elementary natural attitude and compels us to believe, accept the most nonsensical things? To clarify this confusion, I think that Jacques Lacan's logic of the so-called non-all can be of some help here. Lacan distinguishes the so-called masculine side, universality (all), universal law grounded in exception, and non-all, where there is no exception but because of this no universality. Chesterton obviously relies on the masculine side of universality and its constitutive exception. Everything obeys natural causality with the exception of God, the central mystery. The logic of modern science is on the contrary feminine. First, it is materialist, accepting the axiom that nothing escapes natural causality. There is nothing which cannot be accounted for by rational explanation. However, the other side of this materialist axiom is that not all is rational. Not in the sense that there is something irrational, something that escapes rational causality, but in the sense that it is the totality of rational causal order which is in itself inconsistent and in this formal sense, of course, irrational non-all. Only this non-all guarantees the proper opening of the scientific discourse to surprises, to the emergencies of the unthinkable. Who in the nineteenth century could have imagined things like relativity theory or quantum physics? So perhaps the incompatibility between Derrida—I want to give you now an example of this difference—between Derrida and Deleuze, I think can also be accounted in these terms. What makes Derrida masculine in the sense of the logic of universality and its exception is the persistence throughout his, Derrida's, work of totalization through exception. The search for a post-metaphysical way of thinking, for the breakout of the metaphysical closure, presupposes the violent gesture of universalization, of leveling, equalization, unification of all the field of intra-metaphysical struggles. You know the story of all attempts to break out of metaphysics, from Kierkegaard to Marx, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, from Levinas to Claude Lévi-Strauss, ultimately remain within the horizon of the metaphysics of presence. This same gesture is clearly discernible also in Heidegger, for whom all reversals of metaphysics, from Marx to Nietzsche, from Husserl to Sartre, remain within the horizon of the forgetting of being, ultimately caught in the technological nihilism as the accomplishment of metaphysics. As well as incidentally for Adorno and Horkheimer, for whom the entire Western thought is totalized as the gradual deployment of the dialectics of Enlightenment which culminates in today's administered world. As some people used to say, from Plato to NATO—from Plato to NATO, it's a straight line. And incidentally, it is this aspect that I also find problematic in our good friend Giorgio Agamben. I can say something critical about him because he's not here, and I'm a human, warm person, I don't want to offend people face to face, so I'm saying this when he is not here. No, seriously, doesn't he do the same thing? Like, what narrative is he telling us? That from the very beginning of the West, Western philosophy, there is a certain line which culminates in a kind of a negative eschatology in today's Homo sacer, concentration camp logic. That's the truth of the entire development and all attempts to break out get caught into it. So we just have to wait for the reversal. I'm tempted to claim that perhaps it is this very gesture of violent equalization of the entire field, against which you then formulate your own position of exception, which is the most elementary gesture of metaphysics. This is for me what we should maybe drop. This idea of everything is part of metaphysics of presence, forgetfulness of being, except your own position from which you totalize it. In clear contrast to Derrida, this gesture of violent equalization is, as far as I can see, totally absent in Gilles Deleuze's work. Deleuze's gaze upon the tradition of philosophy is somehow like the gaze of God upon creation in God's reply to Job. There is no norm which would allow us to level the field. Miracles are everywhere. Every phenomenon perceived properly from a position which estranges it from its standard context is an exception. This is what I like again in Deleuze. He is far from the idea all hitherto is metaphysics. No, he says let's look at even Plato who appears to be his enemy, even Kant, Spinoza, everywhere you see an exception, everywhere you see a miracle. Catholic church on the contrary was as a rule always on the side of the common sense realism and universal natural explanation. From Chesterton to Pope John Paul II, who endorsed both evolutionism with the exception of the unique moment when God imparts to humans the immortal soul. It's always the same logic of—do you know that John Paul was for evolutionism? He said perfect, it explains everything except that moment when Adam and Eve blah, blah, no. Or even contemporary cosmology, John Paul II said it's wonderful, but don't mess with Big Bang, that's the exception that God intervened there. No wonder that many neo-Thomists noted a weird similarity between their own ontology and the ontology of the Stalinist dialectical materialism, because both were defending a version of naive realism: objects the way we perceive them exist really outside our perception independently of it and so on. This is why both Catholic philosophy and dialectical materialism had such problems with the so-called open ontology of quantum mechanics. That is to say, how are we to interpret the so-called principle of uncertainty in quantum physics which prohibits us from attaining full knowledge of particles at the quantum level? We cannot measure velocity and position of a particle, as we all know, at the same time. For Einstein, this principle of uncertainty simply demonstrates that quantum physics does not provide a full description of reality, that there must be some unknown feature missing, sorry, missed by its conceptual apparatus. As we all know, Heisenberg, Bohr and others on the contrary insisted that this incompleteness of our knowledge of quantum reality points towards a strange incompleteness of reality itself. A claim which leads to a breathtaking weird ontology. What kind of weird ontology? Let me give you a well-known example. When we want to simulate reality within an artificial digital medium, we do not have to go to the end. We just have to reproduce features which make the image realistic for the spectator's point of view. Say when you are playing a digital PC game. If there is a house in the background, the programmer does not have to construct the house's entire interior, since we expect that the participant, the player, will not want to enter the house. Or the construction of a virtual person in this space can be limited to his exterior. You know when you interact with the person there it's not in the program bones and so on, it's not part of the rules of the game. We just need maybe to install a program which will promptly fill in this gap if the participant's activity will necessitate it. It is like, you know, when you scroll down a long text on a computer screen. Earlier and later pages do not pre-exist our viewing them. In the same way, when we simulate a virtual universe, the microscopic structure of objects can be left blank. And if stars on the horizon, when you see the sky in a digital PC-CD-ROM whatever game, when—if the stars appear hazy, blurred, we need not bother to construct the way they would appear to a closer look, since there is no closer look within the game. Nobody will go up there to take such a look at them. Now you get it what's my point. The interesting idea here is that the quantum indeterminacy which we encounter when we inquire into the tiniest components of our universe can be read in exactly the same way: as a feature of the limited resolution of our simulated world. That is to say, as the sign of the ontological incompleteness of what we experience as a reality itself. That is to say, let us imagine a God who is creating the world for us, its human inhabitants, for us to dwell in. His task—I quote here Nicholas Fearn, Introduction to Philosophy—his task could be made easier, God's task, by furnishing the world only with those parts that each inhabitant need to know about. For example, the microscopic structure of the earth's interior could be left blank, at least at least until someone decides to dig down deep enough, in which case the details could be hastily filled in as required. If the most distant stars are hazy, no one is ever going to get close enough to them to notice that something is amiss. I love this theory because you got it why. The idea is that when God created the world he underestimated us. He was too lazy. He thought that the limit of our knowledge is atoms. He thought that we will not go beyond the atom into dividing it. So why spend precious time of divine jouissance or what into constructing things there? So he simply left it open, you know. Who cares about the place of a particle, velocity? Let's leave it open. We were a little bit too intelligent for God. We approached the end, we approached the limit. Now, of course, your counter-question would have been but what has this to do with materialism? Isn't this entire vision precisely based on the theological view there must be a creator? My answer is no. That is to say, it's not necessary to read this ontological, as it were, incompleteness of reality as a sign that we live in a simulated universe, but we can simply read it as a sign of the ontological incompleteness of reality itself. And this, I think, is the difficult thing to accept. That is to say, that reality is in itself incomplete because our common sense tells—tells us if reality is incomplete it will collapse into itself, you know. You can play the game, but at some ultimate level, things—in order for things to exist they must, how to put it, by definition fully ontologically exist. If reality really exists out there, it has to be complete all the way down, otherwise we are dealing with a fiction which just hangs in the air, like appearances which are not appearances of a substantial something. But here precisely, I think again, quantum physics offers a model of how to think such open ontology. And I claim, ruthlessly manipulating him, that Alain Badiou formulated the same idea in his notion of pure multiplicity as the ultimate ontological category. Reality is the multiplicity of multiplicities which cannot be generated or constituted from or reduced to some form of ones as its elementary atomic constituents. The difficult thing is to think multiplicity as original, you get my point? Multiplicity comes before one. No matter how far we progress in our analysis of multiplicities, we never reach the zero level of simple constituents. The only—you can go endlessly on—the only background of multiplicities is just zero, the void. Therein resides, I think, Badiou's ontological breakthrough. The primordial opposition is not that of one and zero, but that of zero and multiplicities, and the one emerges later. To put it even more radically, since only ones in plural fully really exist, multiplicities and zero are the same thing. Zero is multiplicities without ones which would guarantee their ontological consistencies. So when Badiou speaks about multiplicities and the void, his point is not this vulgar Democritean one. You know, you immediately think yes, multiplicities are small atoms running all around and the void is the space. No, imagine rather multiplicities, but then the more you divide them it's always more open space. The zero is the substance of multiplicities. And now comes okay, nonetheless, it's in my nature to tell a joke, not a dirty one. The ideal Badiouian ontologist who confirmed this, I found it, believe me or not, I found it, I encountered him in Poland. It's not a joke, it's a wonderful example. Namely, let's do a little bit of cultural theory. I was always interested in this, let's call it, differences in shared ideology, Lebenswelt ideology, which is betrayed by tiny details. For example, for me the difference between Europe and United States is that when you enter elevator in a hotel you notice it: we in Europe start with zero, the ground level is zero and then one, two. Americans start with one, our ground level is there one. It's clear: we know that you have to have a zero, a substantial background, Americans think you can start with one, you don't need the zero, the Big Other. Which is confirmed by another—by another—another strange thing. It always surprises me in American hotels—and as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, in Europe you don't find this—that in hotels which have more than thirteen floors, the thirteenth floor doesn't—it's twelve and fourteen. This is for me part of the same phenomenon. Why? Because—my, whenever I encounter this I ask my American friends: but wait a minute, whom are you cheating? God knows that your fourteen is really thirteen, no? I mean it's kind of a subjectivist idealism, it doesn't work. So okay, which of these solutions is then the right one? None of them. I got an answer in Poland, where I was staying in hotel and I noticed there something very strange. It's really like they read Badiou's Being and Event. They do—they start as Europeans: zero, but they go directly to two. Zero, two, three. And then there was this spontaneous philosopher, I asked, surprised, an old gentleman, the porter operator: but why, where is the one? You know what he told me? I was shocked unbelievably: Well, the moment you start to count, the zero itself becomes one. Zero, in order to count, zero has to be counted as one. Oh my God, no wonder they had Solidarity and all those, because Solidarity is maybe zero counted as one or whatever, no? But you see my point? I think so again, contrary to this idea that materialism means full reality out there ontologically constituted. I think the true challenge today is to think this kind of a materialism of multiplicities against the background of void. Again, what we should do here, a little bit of excursus into Kant. You know, it's an old distinction that I'm referring to all the time: wonderful Kantian distinction between negative and infinite judgment. You know, the negative judgment you negate a predicate, infinite judgment you don't negate a predicate, but you affirm a non-predicate. And it's totally different. Let's take a simple example which will make it immediately clear, my favorite from horror literature and so on. How can you negate the statement "you are dead"? You can do the negative judgment, you negate the predicate: "you aren't dead." What this means? It means simply you are alive, no problem. But what if you, instead of negating the predicate, you affirm a non-predicate? You don't say "you aren't dead," but you say "you are undead." Every reader of Stephen King knows it's something totally different. It's the infinity of the undead, vampires etc., the living dead and so on. And I think we should do the same here. If we take the axiom "material reality is all there is," if we negate it in the mode of negative judgment, then you say "material reality isn't all there is." This is idealism: haha, there is something else. What we should say is not "material reality isn't all there is," we should say "material reality is non-all." There is nothing outside, it's just incomplete in itself. And that's difficult to accept. If I return back to the beginning, both for those vulgar materialists and so on as for the New Age idealists. And a little bit of just concluding some concluding remarks on ecology. I think that the true side of the struggle for materialism today is ecology. How? Again let me I'm here developing an idea that Badiou gave me in a conversation, namely that ecology has all the chances of developing today into the predominant form of ideology of our global capitalism. I'm more and more convinced that even multiculturalism doesn't look so well, liberalism, if you dig to the end it's ecology. Ecology is effectively, as Badiou put it to me in a private conversation, a new opium of the masses, for the masses, replacing religion. Why? It takes over the old religion's fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude. We are not Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a biosphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our Earth with respect as something ultimately sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, something that should forever remain a mystery, a power we should trust, not just exploit and dominate. While we cannot gain full mastery over our biosphere, unfortunately it is in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance and so on and so on. This is why, although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite: a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress. Every radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe. This distrust was given a new impetus by today's biogenetics, which is on the verge of a crucial breakthrough. Namely, till now geneticists were confined to tinkering, tweaking what nature has already produced. You took a gene from a bacterium and inserted it into a chromosome of a pig or whatever. Whatever, but now the prospect is to produce life that will be wholly new, not in any way a genetic descendant of already existing biological organisms. The initial members of each newly created breed will have no ancestor at all. So the genome itself of this organism will be artificially put together. First individual biological building blocks will be fabricated, then they will be combined into an entirely new synthetic self-replicating organism. And as we know, scientists designate this new life as "Life as opposed to our natural life which becomes "Life like Microsoft and so on and so on. This is effectively a kind of end of nature. Synthetic life is not just supplementing natural life, it turns natural life itself into a confused, imperfect species of synthetic life. So there effectively are some breathtaking prospects here. And my idea is that those who opposed most ferociously this prospect are precisely religious leaders and environmentalists. For both there is something of a transgression, of entering a prohibited domain in this idea of creating a new form of life from the scratch. And this brings us back to the notion of ecology as the new opium for the masses. The underlying message is again a deeply conservative one: any change can only be the change for the worse. Here is from a newspaper report I read, a passage which describes this typical ecological attitude: "Behind much of the resistance to the notion of synthetic life is the intuition that nature or God created the best of possible worlds. Charles Darwin believed that the myriad designs of nature's creations are perfectly honed to do whatever they are meant to do, be it animals that see, hear, sing, or plants that feed on the sun's rays," and so on and so on. End of quote. So, I—but I claim that this reference to Darwin is totally misleading. The ultimate lesson of Darwinism is exact opposite: namely, that nature tinkers and improvises with great losses and catastrophes accompanying every limited success. Is the fact that of the human genome is junk DNA with no clear function not the ultimate proof of it? Consequently, the first lesson to be drawn is the one repeatedly made by Stephen Jay Gould: the utter contingency of our existence. There is no evolution; catastrophes, broken equilibriums are part of natural history. At numerous points in the past life could have turned into an entirely different direction. The main source of our energy, oil, is the result of a past catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions. And again, this is, I think—this I think is what we should accept. The first premise of materialist ecology is nature doesn't exist. Like Lacan said, "La femme n'existe pas." If we mean by nature this kind of a mythic balanced self-reproducing universe which is then derailed by human hubris and then we should somehow return—I quite agree with those who claim that there is in the predominant form of ecology a kind of a secularized version of this religious idea of the fall. And this is the truly different, the truly difficult materialist thing. To, of course, we have to do something, I'm totally pro-ecologist, but we have to drop this idea that there is an ultimate point of reference, nature, like Mother Nature, balanced universe which we disturbed and to the balance of which we should somehow return. Nature—I think we should even go a step further and reject a certain anthropology which we find not only in almost entire modern philosophy, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, but even Lacan, at least the early Lacan, this idea that man is a sick unto death, sick nature, derailed nature. Nature is already in itself sick, confused. Again, there is no nature. What does this mean practically? There is no previous standard to which—this would be the practical advice for ecological politics—to which we can return. My favorite ecological book is the one—an American scientist, I forgot his name, who demonstrated that nature itself on our Earth is already to such an extent integrated into our pollution that if our pollution were to diminish too fast, it would have probably meant a total catastrophe for animal life and so on. No, I'm—my message is not haha, then we can do whatever we want, but that the situation is much more terrifying. Of course I totally believe there can be catastrophes and so on, but there is nothing but catastrophes. We don't have a ground, we have nowhere to return to. Which is why I think that—but that's another story, I will not repeat it here, I think I already referred to it last time precisely here—which is why, which is why I think that this idea that another idea we should drop it totally, that the ultimate source of our ecological problems is alienated predomination of scientific universe, science manipulating, and then they say we should not forget that prior, this phenomenological Husserlian description, prior to every scientific objectivization there is the life-world and we are irreducibly immersed into the life-world. This is for me precisely the catastrophe. Why? Let's ask ourselves a simple question. You read about global warming, blah, blah, blah, ozone hole. Well look up as much as you want you will not see ozone hole. I mean we totally have to rely on science. And on the other hand, when a scientist—why, where does this mysterious fact come that although the possibility of catastrophe is convincingly demonstrated by scientists we strangely we humanity do not do take some serious measures, react to it? I think it's this fetishist split: we know very well that it's true, but nonetheless we don't believe it. Why? Precisely the what happens: you read about catastrophe, then what do you do? Then you go out, what a nice star, the stupid eyes there, glay—oh my god, like you really cannot believe that this natural life-world can be destroyed. So I think that precisely in order to confront properly ecology we should all become Cartesian subjects. We should renounce this reliance on the life-world as the ultimately given universe and so on and so on. So now really, look, just the concluding remark. This materialist lesson, to return to conclude briefly, is for me the lesson of the Book of Job. Because read it, every year I repeat this, I know. What really happens there? Job, three ideologists as I already said, and did you notice the strange parallel between the structure of the Book of Job and the structure of Freud's most famous dream with with which he opens "Traumdeutung," interpretation of dreams, of Irma's injection? The structure there is the same: first it's a catastrophe, the patient, the dreamer—Freud was dreaming it—looks into Irma's throat, horror, the real, Irma's throat, catastrophe, then all of a sudden the shift into three stupid doctors who produce some reasons inconsistencies why Freud is not guilty, no. There was no injection, the injection was already, Irma was already infected before, whatever. Doesn't exactly the same thing happen in the structure of the Book of Job? First the catastrophe, he loses everything from from animals to women and so on. It's interesting how when you have this description that Job loses cows, pigs, wives, daughters and so on, no. This reminds me of, you know, when the Bible prohibits the Ten Commandments "don't steal or covet your neighbor's wife," then it goes on, neither his cow, his pigs or whatever, one should put things in context. Okay, but what I'm saying that there also exactly as in Freud, the three ideologists what comes them are the three precisely the three ideologists. This is I think the zero level of ideology. The three theologians which come to Job with the message "there is a deeper meaning to your misfortunes." That's what we should resist. This is how ecology today predominantly functions, as "there is a deeper meaning, we transgressed some prohibition" and so on. And this is why God is the only true materialist there who comes and says there is no—there is no transcendent meaning, everything is a miracle. God as remember Chesterton says God is for a moment an atheist there, pure immanentist, there is no transcendent master, which is why I think we have to read Christ as repetition of Job. What dies on the cross with Christ, as God knew what dies is not an earthly representative of a transcendent, what dies is precisely God as this transcendent master of the universe. What dies on the cross for me is this idea who's the idea of God as the ultimate guarantee of meaning. You know this vulgar metaphor that I hate, that our creation is like a painting. When we see a catastrophe it is as if when you look at a picture and you look too close and you see only the stain, but from a proper distance you see that what appeared as a stain contributes to the harmony. Okay, I think that the lesson of Christianity, the materialist, this is for me the lesson of Christ: that we cannot afford this withdrawal. When we are confronting horrible things, I don't know, Holocaust, concentration camps or other similar catastrophes, it's a little bit vulgar to say "yeah, this only appears to you as a catastrophe because of your limited perspective, withdraw back and you will see how it contributes to harmony or whatever," no. There is no Big Other. This is why I think this would be a kind of a more materialist reading why Christ truly sacrificed himself. The message is no, all we can do is here, there is no Father up there who takes care of it, that—so in in a way I think that it's the opposite: it's not "trust God," no, God trusts us. All that can be done is we should do it. In this sense, with this incomplete notion of reality, it's also that we can, how to put it, it opens up in this sense the space for freedom. There is freedom only in an ontologically unfinished reality. So I it was exactly one hour, that's what I wanted. Thank you very much. Welcome to artificial life, Slavoj. It took you long because you have so many other avenues to take. But I know that you cannot be educated, so I will not do it tonight. But maybe one day you will see. We really love each other, you got it, no? But I see that you add another group of people to your enemies, the ecologists, you know, that's good, so you're bad-mouthing them too, not just Derrida and all the others who also do something. But that is what we expect from you, so what else can we do? It's just funny, I wonder—I knew something will appear. Have you been—I thought you were raised as a communist, no? I am a communist. Yes, not raised. I mean raised, where suddenly you embrace religion and then you speak about religion like a like a Dominican or things, "oh, there are these story"—how come, where did you—But where do you see a problem? All good political terror had a religious background. My German hero is Thomas Müntzer and so on. Yes, at least like Goebbels, raised in the, you know. You are—you are a late-comer to the game, no? So you're—what's that they call, yeah right, that's what they call it in America—newborn or what? Born-again! Born-again, thank you. Okay. No, but I think it's always, you're always a bit of a fundamentalist, and she's also a born-again atheist now. But all this comes out there, and I always wonder why that for me I have a little trouble here. I was raised too, but I was raised in many religions, so I'm screwed up from the beginning. My problem is always still why is it like kicking a dead dog, you know, that is—what is the big deal? And the—you mean in religion or what? Yeah, I mean or in atheism, huh? I mean it's—it's the same thing, also show me the phenomenon first, let me meet God. But unfortunately looking at you, no, that's best I can do is meet the devil, it's not—Yeah, but what's the difference? That's the first properly Christian answer. God is devil, it's just the point of perspective. Okay, but as long as he does not introduce himself to me, he does not exist for me. It's the only thing—why should I talk about something which I have no phenomenon for? It's nothing. Wait a minute, I'm an atheist. Yeah, but atheism is the same thing. Why do you have to renounce something which does not is a phenomenon? You say "no," there is nothing. Sure, there is nothing, but what's the point of talking about that? There are nothings and nothings. I know there are nothings. Yeah, yeah, there is a wrong—okay. Okay, there is a history, I agree with you, there's history and power, and there's the Pope, and there's also a big entertainment industry called religion and so on, no? And it turns into, sometimes into a cult and it has a lot of victims and so on etc. Also there I see a lot of political argumentation. I still don't see the philosophical part of it. I mean, and I agree, what you do is you take out these old stories, you know, as literature. Which Job and so on. Yeah, the Job story is literature, metaphor, and you can draw some insights, make it—it's another form of you joking, you know, you joking with serious material, huh? So to speak. I understand that. Still, is it worth your brainpower? That is—not is there not—ecology, yes, that's worth your brainpower. Go after them, but leave the religion there. Just a—just an advice, you do what you want. Okay. No, okay, I will not lose my—It's my commentary. Yeah, no, I mean if you are asking questions I just comment. Telling the truth. My god. If following Badiou's logic you say that truth happens in being... Sorry, truth—be precise. That the word of truth is what happens in creation? Yeah. What would be the truth being at that level? No, I'm not—no, here I would agree with what probably, I don't want to speak too much for him, Badiou would have said. I I don't think there is a truth dimension in this. I don't I don't I don't I don't think. What interests me is only this is not a truth event in this strict sense but—how to put it—what really changes with artificial life. Let me be very precise here, I passed over this very fast, is that once we accept artificial life, it's no longer that you have natural life and artificial life. This, the possibility, the very possibility of artificial life retroactively denaturalizes natural life itself. The moment you have natural life becomes how should I put it, you know? It's the same as with—for example, this is my big disagreement with Habermas, who opposes too much of biogenetic playing with human genome and so on, that this will threaten our freedom. No, I think that the the moment it is possible to do it, for example the moment we discover, if it's true, it's more complex, but the moment you put it in these terms, "will we insist on education, autonomous conscious work, or on simply changing our psychological attitudes through drugs?" The moment you say this, you lose, there is no choice. Because if you can do it through chemicals or genetic manipulations, this means that even if you don't do it, it depends just on another constellation of chemicals in your body. So, you know what I mean, the choice is not between freedom or chemical biogenetic manipulation. The choice is between conscious biogenetic manipulation and stupid natural chance or whatever. You you know what I mean, if I can change my psychological attitude through chemistry, this means that my psychological attitude prior to this intervention must already be dependent on chemistry, just on another chemistry. So the question here is more radical. No wonder that Habermas, as you probably maybe know, a couple of years ago even published a book with Ratzinger. This is for me the big symptom how Habermas, who publicizes himself as the great, the last advocate of Enlightenment, all of a sudden speaks the same language as this conservative Protestant. Basically he is repeating this same story which is which is "some things it's
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better not to know too much, to go too far at the level of knowledge." I think that in a more serious radical philosophical perspective we have to confront
better not to know too much, to go too far at the level of knowledge." I think that in a more serious radical philosophical perspective we have to confront
Slavoj Žižek
this problem. I mean, it's not the question of saving
this problem. I mean, it's not the question of saving
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freedom, it's the question of how is freedom ontologically grounded and so on and so on. For me Habermas is simply not radical enough here. He relies on some transcendental logic. I mean you know this classic transcendental answer which for me is totally insufficient, that natural
freedom, it's the question of how is freedom ontologically grounded and so on and so on. For me Habermas is simply not radical enough here. He relies on some transcendental logic. I mean you know this classic transcendental answer which for me is totally insufficient, that natural
Slavoj Žižek
sciences have their own ontological
sciences have their own ontological
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horizon, and that if you deduce from biological reasoning, observing
horizon, and that if you deduce from biological reasoning, observing
Slavoj Žižek
man as a neuronal being, that
man as a neuronal being, that
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there is no freedom, that you confuse different spheres. I think it's again it's too simple. Because my let—let's say I am lazy and you are not lazy. Let's say that we have to compete. You are not lazy and you are more intelligent than me.
there is no freedom, that you confuse different spheres. I think it's again it's too simple. Because my let—let's say I am lazy and you are not lazy. Let's say that we have to compete. You are not lazy and you are more intelligent than me.
Slavoj Žižek
But then I take a pill and I which pill, whatever, that's a metaphor for some biochemical intervention which makes me much more
But then I take a pill and I which pill, whatever, that's a metaphor for some biochemical intervention which makes me much more
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intelligent without a great effort. Now, you would say but this is un—maybe
intelligent without a great effort. Now, you would say but this is un—maybe
Slavoj Žižek
you would say, I
you would say, I
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don't know, but "this is unfair, I worked hard, you just did it." Then I would answer: but why is it unfair? If I was able to do it through chemistry, this means that your having you having to work much more was simply the result of not having enough chemistry like me. Take the pills! Of course this is not my ultimate answer, what I'm only saying is that there is a serious problem which precisely these people who worry so much "will modern science deprive us
don't know, but "this is unfair, I worked hard, you just did it." Then I would answer: but why is it unfair? If I was able to do it through chemistry, this means that your having you having to work much more was simply the result of not having enough chemistry like me. Take the pills! Of course this is not my ultimate answer, what I'm only saying is that there is a serious problem which precisely these people who worry so much "will modern science deprive us
Slavoj Žižek
of our humanity," they are avoiding the problem. There
of our humanity," they are avoiding the problem. There
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is—this is the ultimate irony of today's moralist—that to worry about something is the ultimate way to avoid the problem. To focus on the problem is the way to avoid the problem. So again, okay, I stop
is—this is the ultimate irony of today's moralist—that to worry about something is the ultimate way to avoid the problem. To focus on the problem is the way to avoid the problem. So again, okay, I stop
Slavoj Žižek
talking enough, yeah. Have you ever encountered Helmuth Plessner? Yes. The anthropologist? Philosophical anthropologist?
talking enough, yeah. Have you ever encountered Helmuth Plessner? Yes. The anthropologist? Philosophical anthropologist?
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Right-winger, no? Right-winger, no? Are you sure? In my black book—In your black book, yeah. In your black book! Because this is—one of
Right-winger, no? Right-winger, no? Are you sure? In my black book—In your black book, yeah. In your black book! Because this is—one of
Slavoj Žižek
his key notions, Begriffe, was
his key notions, Begriffe, was
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we are the artificial by nature. We are the künstliche von Natur. Ah, that's—okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. And but there's also—is it's not about knowing what is nature as such, sondern our
we are the artificial by nature. We are the künstliche von Natur. Ah, that's—okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. And but there's also—is it's not about knowing what is nature as such, sondern our
Slavoj Žižek
our way of existing is more than a
our way of existing is more than a
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perspective, it's our way of existing, we are existing artificially, we we create and generate our own way to to live, and totally right, this is not something which is in this way or that way, sondern it's for all our enterprises, nicht? It's not just music or etc., sondern also the biotechnology, the moment we can do it, nicht, there is no way out. We cannot say "I refuse it and I don't do it,"
perspective, it's our way of existing, we are existing artificially, we we create and generate our own way to to live, and totally right, this is not something which is in this way or that way, sondern it's for all our enterprises, nicht? It's not just music or etc., sondern also the biotechnology, the moment we can do it, nicht, there is no way out. We cannot say "I refuse it and I don't do it,"
Slavoj Žižek
but okay you are—you can do it, and so you
but okay you are—you can do it, and so you
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will do it one day. So it's—it's not so that the things are not known, but there is this resistance of the traditional forces, left and right, nicht, saying "no, no, that cannot be, there must be some security, some standard or things like that." But the standard is what we generate, that's all there is. There were two, three of them, so that—Okay, and let me go from from the glass to—Slavoj please because I have a
will do it one day. So it's—it's not so that the things are not known, but there is this resistance of the traditional forces, left and right, nicht, saying "no, no, that cannot be, there must be some security, some standard or things like that." But the standard is what we generate, that's all there is. There were two, three of them, so that—Okay, and let me go from from the glass to—Slavoj please because I have a
Slavoj Žižek
standard claim,
standard claim,
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I don't know if you've heard about Sam Harris, he's working
I don't know if you've heard about Sam Harris, he's working
Slavoj Žižek
on this brain imaging study where he—To repeat my joke from my
on this brain imaging study where he—To repeat my joke from my
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afternoon talk which you were there—of course I
afternoon talk which you were there—of course I
Slavoj Žižek
know about it, my thesis is you know when people ask me "why are you for death penalty?" Well, because Sam Harris is alive, how should I put it, no? I really hate that book. No, of course. No, but Harris and his team are working on this project where they're doing imaging of people that are different about like an atheist brain versus a fundamentalist Christian brain, so it seems like there's a central or—Ah, really? Ah, that's—oh, that's more interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think I even did did the last year here, namely I draw your attention that in his first book, now he has another bestseller, "The End of Faith" or belief what's—it's "The End of Faith" I think, you know, it's for me deeply symptomatic that in this very book where he advocates an aggressive atheism, with immediately my Stalinist gaze notices one exception: Buddhist meditation, no? Which is rehabilitated, but in this very book he advocates torture. He has a detailed argumentation for torture. For for whom? In what way? Some people would say your lessons are torture. No! Some people would say your comments at the end! So it's—the Man Who Was Thursday. Torture. You know the basic plot of the novel: a group, a secret top policeman hires people to chase some secret terrorist organization, at the end you learn that this secret top policeman whom you don't see the face, it's precisely it's the same as the criminal gang chief and they're both God. God is fighting himself and so on. I think that one has to read it in a very—you know, often we intellectuals make a mistake, especially with Nietzsche, people make this mistake, to put too much irony, joke into it. I think the key is to read Nietzsche as a totally in Schiller's term, not sentimental but naive. And I think it's the same with this Chesterton. I I I only think that at the end you get something more. The problem is not only "God is devil" and so on, but then where is the in this imagine theology the role of Christ suffering and so on? But I think yes, that it's an extremely interesting novel. The proof of it is that I checked on the internet in the bookstores, I didn't buy them, in books, texts on Chesterton, and I was shocked how people try to squeeze out, like nobody wants to take it seriously and simply to draw the conclusions from it. Which are very clear: God and devil are the same, God is fighting himself, God himself in order to be the Christian God had to be an atheist and all that stuff and so on. Again, no wonder that it's an it's an embarrassing—but again, if you like that novel, I would really advise you to look a little bit around: first the theological counterpoint to that novel which is "Orthodoxy," the book, and then some of the wonderful short texts like his reading of on the Book of Job and so on and so on. It's a first—I mean it's not just your experience. You know, this the so-called hard problem of consciousness about which you maybe you probably know it even better than me. There is a—I even in—okay, maybe you know, in my "Parallax" book I have a whole long chapter on it, no? All possible variations. Like you have direct idealists, like Chalmers, David Chalmers, who advocate that the only way to account for awareness is to to to posit awareness as together with together with gravity, all elementary forces, as another elementary natural force, like gravity, electromagnetism and so on. That you absolutely cannot reduce it to others. My problem with this is that I almost feel vindicated in my vulgar
know about it, my thesis is you know when people ask me "why are you for death penalty?" Well, because Sam Harris is alive, how should I put it, no? I really hate that book. No, of course. No, but Harris and his team are working on this project where they're doing imaging of people that are different about like an atheist brain versus a fundamentalist Christian brain, so it seems like there's a central or—Ah, really? Ah, that's—oh, that's more interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think I even did did the last year here, namely I draw your attention that in his first book, now he has another bestseller, "The End of Faith" or belief what's—it's "The End of Faith" I think, you know, it's for me deeply symptomatic that in this very book where he advocates an aggressive atheism, with immediately my Stalinist gaze notices one exception: Buddhist meditation, no? Which is rehabilitated, but in this very book he advocates torture. He has a detailed argumentation for torture. For for whom? In what way? Some people would say your lessons are torture. No! Some people would say your comments at the end! So it's—the Man Who Was Thursday. Torture. You know the basic plot of the novel: a group, a secret top policeman hires people to chase some secret terrorist organization, at the end you learn that this secret top policeman whom you don't see the face, it's precisely it's the same as the criminal gang chief and they're both God. God is fighting himself and so on. I think that one has to read it in a very—you know, often we intellectuals make a mistake, especially with Nietzsche, people make this mistake, to put too much irony, joke into it. I think the key is to read Nietzsche as a totally in Schiller's term, not sentimental but naive. And I think it's the same with this Chesterton. I I I only think that at the end you get something more. The problem is not only "God is devil" and so on, but then where is the in this imagine theology the role of Christ suffering and so on? But I think yes, that it's an extremely interesting novel. The proof of it is that I checked on the internet in the bookstores, I didn't buy them, in books, texts on Chesterton, and I was shocked how people try to squeeze out, like nobody wants to take it seriously and simply to draw the conclusions from it. Which are very clear: God and devil are the same, God is fighting himself, God himself in order to be the Christian God had to be an atheist and all that stuff and so on. Again, no wonder that it's an it's an embarrassing—but again, if you like that novel, I would really advise you to look a little bit around: first the theological counterpoint to that novel which is "Orthodoxy," the book, and then some of the wonderful short texts like his reading of on the Book of Job and so on and so on. It's a first—I mean it's not just your experience. You know, this the so-called hard problem of consciousness about which you maybe you probably know it even better than me. There is a—I even in—okay, maybe you know, in my "Parallax" book I have a whole long chapter on it, no? All possible variations. Like you have direct idealists, like Chalmers, David Chalmers, who advocate that the only way to account for awareness is to to to posit awareness as together with together with gravity, all elementary forces, as another elementary natural force, like gravity, electromagnetism and so on. That you absolutely cannot reduce it to others. My problem with this is that I almost feel vindicated in my vulgar
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Leninism when Lenin says
Leninism when Lenin says
Slavoj Žižek
how idealists always turn out to be vulgar materialists, no? He wants to save
how idealists always turn out to be vulgar materialists, no? He wants to save
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consciousness, he ends up naturalizing it into just another just another natural force. Then you have one position, then you have you probably know the the McGinn position, no? Which is that it's a—it's structurally cannot be explained. Then you have again the way others are dealing with it. But so yes, of course this—how should I put it—Of course this is a key question, but I think—I cannot go now into a detail—that precisely through this open ontology where you always count with the void, with nothing, where nothing can have an existence and so on, that in this way maybe—I don't know, I mean if you look at the question as a empirical scientific question, what can I say
consciousness, he ends up naturalizing it into just another just another natural force. Then you have one position, then you have you probably know the the McGinn position, no? Which is that it's a—it's structurally cannot be explained. Then you have again the way others are dealing with it. But so yes, of course this—how should I put it—Of course this is a key question, but I think—I cannot go now into a detail—that precisely through this open ontology where you always count with the void, with nothing, where nothing can have an existence and so on, that in this way maybe—I don't know, I mean if you look at the question as a empirical scientific question, what can I say
Slavoj Žižek
as a philosopher? Nothing. It would be the worst old-fashioned ontology, even in the Stalinist way where you as a philosopher are supposed to be a kind of a general controller giving advice to scientists. I cannot say anything. All I am saying that
as a philosopher? Nothing. It would be the worst old-fashioned ontology, even in the Stalinist way where you as a philosopher are supposed to be a kind of a general controller giving advice to scientists. I cannot say anything. All I am saying that
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philosophically
philosophically
Slavoj Žižek
I can see how one can open up the space for a possible explanation of consciousness, because I think that look at the work of two philosophers which are otherwise opposed, Badiou and Deleuze. Although they are both materialists and there are differences between them, they both are doing something which is for me very interesting. What is the problem of Deleuze is precisely how to account for the immateriality of what he calls event and so on. And his thesis in his best books, which are for me the early ones, "Difference and Repetition" and "Logic
I can see how one can open up the space for a possible explanation of consciousness, because I think that look at the work of two philosophers which are otherwise opposed, Badiou and Deleuze. Although they are both materialists and there are differences between them, they both are doing something which is for me very interesting. What is the problem of Deleuze is precisely how to account for the immateriality of what he calls event and so on. And his thesis in his best books, which are for me the early ones, "Difference and Repetition" and "Logic
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of Sense"
of Sense"
Slavoj Žižek
before the Guattari corruption, is that is
before the Guattari corruption, is that is
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that
that
Slavoj Žižek
not only we materialists can also explain it, but that only materialists can explain it. That every idealist explanation of consciousness sooner or later substantializes it, secretly reintroduces some kind of a vulgar vulgar materialism. Simply consciousness becomes just another substance fully existing. So with Badiou it's the same, the whole problem of event is precisely event—it's not, as stupid people accuse Badiou, miracle from—event is, as he puts it somewhere, just a curvature, a twisting of in the order of being ultimately. So he's not saying out there event. Ultimately there is nothing but being. And I found this deeply significant and optimistic that the theories which the the theories which those theories who for me are even at a naive intuitive level the most convincing, closest to convincing, at least about how where did thought come from and so on, are materialist theories. Of course not that vulgar naturalizing materialism. Of course you cannot explain consciousness if you ask the question in this reductionist terms "what happens in my brain when I am conscious?" In this way of course you will always find only something that happens in your brain. And then this awareness idiot will always come and say "but wait a minute, even if that happens in my—" you know, it's the same it's the same paradox which is a crucial nice paradox of determinists. You know what's the big problem in—Chalmers has some nice descriptions in the problem theory of consciousness is that the better they succeed in this vulgar direct brain sciences approach, the more the problem becomes mystical. Because even Dennett approaches this problem but I don't think he solves it. You explain certain phenomenon which we do consciously like complex thinking as a certain automatic neuronal process. Okay, but then the question emerges: if it's all happening there as a blind process, why does it have to be conscious? You know, the better you explain it, the more superfluous consciousness becomes. So my view would have been, and there are some people who are not idiots, even Dennett in his best moment and so on, who move in this direction, that it's totally wrong to approach consciousness as perfection in the sense of my God something so complex you can do it only if you are conscious. It's the opposite: consciousness is originally a consciousness of failure. You become conscious when when something goes wrong. How should I put it, that consciousness is not this when it's too perfect. It's it's even empirically true, you know that like what if there is a thing which phenomenologically distinguishes us humans from the more or less we can say naively thinking animals like apes or whatever, it's not the it's not the complexity as such. It's precisely that in a way we even more fell into, are prone to some illusions. Like what I liked is a friend from Duke University, Turkish guy, wonderful brain scientist, told me that he is was doing some of these boring experiments with apes and so on. And he told me that the first strange thing is that apes are, contrary to what you would expect, much more plastic, adaptable than humans. Like, if you show to an ape a beautiful female partner and a bad one but put obstacles that he cannot reach the beautiful one, he will try, the ape, for some time then he will say f— off, no? and let's accept the second place, no? But with humans, we we are attached, you don't drop it, no? If anything humans are more fixated. It's not that we humans are more plastic and so on. Okay, but I'm getting lost here. So apes know how to settle? Sorry? Apes know how to settle for a—? Sorry? Apes learn how to settle. Yeah! Yeah, they they are this kind of a rational choice apes and so on. We humans are crazy, we are stubborn, and I think this goes even for the history of science. Isn't it that it's not like some vulgar materialist thing that first inventions were for real-life production then they were used for amusement? We know that the first phase of modern machinery, the court of of of Louis Quatorze where they were building all these automats and so on. First comes the surplus, then you say maybe why don't we use it also for—then Marxists come who say but where is the development of productive forces and so on, no? And even Marx was aware of this, but let's not get lost in it.
not only we materialists can also explain it, but that only materialists can explain it. That every idealist explanation of consciousness sooner or later substantializes it, secretly reintroduces some kind of a vulgar vulgar materialism. Simply consciousness becomes just another substance fully existing. So with Badiou it's the same, the whole problem of event is precisely event—it's not, as stupid people accuse Badiou, miracle from—event is, as he puts it somewhere, just a curvature, a twisting of in the order of being ultimately. So he's not saying out there event. Ultimately there is nothing but being. And I found this deeply significant and optimistic that the theories which the the theories which those theories who for me are even at a naive intuitive level the most convincing, closest to convincing, at least about how where did thought come from and so on, are materialist theories. Of course not that vulgar naturalizing materialism. Of course you cannot explain consciousness if you ask the question in this reductionist terms "what happens in my brain when I am conscious?" In this way of course you will always find only something that happens in your brain. And then this awareness idiot will always come and say "but wait a minute, even if that happens in my—" you know, it's the same it's the same paradox which is a crucial nice paradox of determinists. You know what's the big problem in—Chalmers has some nice descriptions in the problem theory of consciousness is that the better they succeed in this vulgar direct brain sciences approach, the more the problem becomes mystical. Because even Dennett approaches this problem but I don't think he solves it. You explain certain phenomenon which we do consciously like complex thinking as a certain automatic neuronal process. Okay, but then the question emerges: if it's all happening there as a blind process, why does it have to be conscious? You know, the better you explain it, the more superfluous consciousness becomes. So my view would have been, and there are some people who are not idiots, even Dennett in his best moment and so on, who move in this direction, that it's totally wrong to approach consciousness as perfection in the sense of my God something so complex you can do it only if you are conscious. It's the opposite: consciousness is originally a consciousness of failure. You become conscious when when something goes wrong. How should I put it, that consciousness is not this when it's too perfect. It's it's even empirically true, you know that like what if there is a thing which phenomenologically distinguishes us humans from the more or less we can say naively thinking animals like apes or whatever, it's not the it's not the complexity as such. It's precisely that in a way we even more fell into, are prone to some illusions. Like what I liked is a friend from Duke University, Turkish guy, wonderful brain scientist, told me that he is was doing some of these boring experiments with apes and so on. And he told me that the first strange thing is that apes are, contrary to what you would expect, much more plastic, adaptable than humans. Like, if you show to an ape a beautiful female partner and a bad one but put obstacles that he cannot reach the beautiful one, he will try, the ape, for some time then he will say f— off, no? and let's accept the second place, no? But with humans, we we are attached, you don't drop it, no? If anything humans are more fixated. It's not that we humans are more plastic and so on. Okay, but I'm getting lost here. So apes know how to settle? Sorry? Apes know how to settle for a—? Sorry? Apes learn how to settle. Yeah! Yeah, they they are this kind of a rational choice apes and so on. We humans are crazy, we are stubborn, and I think this goes even for the history of science. Isn't it that it's not like some vulgar materialist thing that first inventions were for real-life production then they were used for amusement? We know that the first phase of modern machinery, the court of of of Louis Quatorze where they were building all these automats and so on. First comes the surplus, then you say maybe why don't we use it also for—then Marxists come who say but where is the development of productive forces and so on, no? And even Marx was aware of this, but let's not get lost in it.