Objet Petit a and Digital Civilization
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2014 · 1:03:58 · 8,597 words
psychoanalysistechnology-ai-cyberspacehegel-dialecticsideologycapitalismphilosophy-generalcinema-art-culture
Žižek delivers a lecture centered on Lacan's concept of objet petit a, tracing it through Freud's 'prosthetic god' thesis, contemporary biotechnology and nanotechnology, and the digital blurring of virtual and real. He uses Kierkegaard's paradoxical classifications and Marx's examples from Capital to argue that every binary opposition requires a third, excessive element (the 'chimney sweep') that embodies difference-as-such, which is also what objet petit a names. The talk concludes by connecting this structural insight to politics: today's task is to identify the 'chimney sweep' position that escapes the false official antagonisms (e.g. fundamentalism vs. liberal capitalism), illustrated by deserter communes in the trenches of WWI.
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The ideas in it 16
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The object-cause of desire: the imperfect excess in a person or thing that generates desire, if removed, it does not produce perfection but destroys the very allure it seemed to disturb.
Freud's figure for the human being who augments finite body and mind with technological organs, approaching divine omnipotence yet remaining troubled and unhappy precisely when approaching the ideal.
Kant's term for the divine capacity to directly actualize what one thinks, invoked here to describe brain-wiring technology that closes the gap between mental intention and physical causation.
The constitutive distance between thought and causal intervention into reality that is the source of human creativity; its closure by direct brain-machine interfaces threatens the very condition of subjectivity.
The claim that virtual/digital sex does not corrupt an originally authentic sexuality but reveals that even real sex was always already structured by fantasy and never immediate.
Žižek (via Dupuy) argues that the goal of contemporary science and technology is not to master nature but to generate autonomous, surprising new forms of life that exceed the engineer's control.
Lacan's figure for an obscene, undead substance that reproduces itself asexually beyond life and death, used here to name the feared product of runaway artificial-life experiments.
Lacan's neologism for objects (gadgets, devices, artificial organs) that did not exist before scientific intervention into the real and that generate new forms of libidinal surplus enjoyment.
The libidinal excess produced by technological gadgets and lathouses, an 'unheard of enjoyment' beyond natural satisfaction, structurally parallel to the market surplus and the scientific surplus object.
Žižek's gloss on objet petit a: a flaw or excess in a person that creates the illusion of near-perfection and generates desire, removing the imperfection destroys the very attraction it appeared to compromise.
The necessary residual category in any waste-separation system where things that fit no specific bin go, used to illustrate that every classification requires such an excessive remainder.
The paradoxical third element in a classification that disturbs the binary opposition and thereby embodies difference-as-such; Žižek's shorthand for the object a in any social or political antagonism.
as “antagonism”
Used in the Marxist/psychoanalytic sense: never a simple binary opposition but always requiring a third, excessive element that embodies the difference the two poles cannot themselves articulate.
Pleasures such as smoking or drinking spirits that begin as disgust and require cultural initiation, illustrating that enjoyment is never natural but always ideologically coded.
The unofficial, transgressive underside of any ideological order that is not merely tolerated but secretly prescribed and necessary for that order's functioning.
as “difference as such”
The Hegelian thesis that in any genuine antagonism the third excessive element does not merely confuse the binary but positively incarnates difference itself, preceding the differentiated terms.
Stories he reaches for 6
New York and German researchers wired a rat via computer signals so it could be steered externally like a toy; crucially, if done on humans the subject would still experience the externally commanded actions as spontaneous.
“the horror is I would still thought that I am acting spontaneously—I wouldn't even experience it as being steered”
In the early 1980s, Žižek's student journal published results of Yugoslav elections as if they were genuinely in doubt; the furious party official could not state the regime's cynical secret without undoing it, over-identification as subversion.
“boys don't fuck with us… we just said but what did we do wrong you claim these are free elections—he said don't fuck with me you know very well what I mean”
A psychoanalytic friend's patient is told by her lover that three or four fewer kilos would make her body perfect; Žižek argues the opposite: removing the 'imperfection' would not yield perfection but an ordinary body, the excess IS the cause of desire.
“only with this little bit overweight the illusion is created that she is almost perfect but if you take it away she would probably be just an ordinary lady”
Kierkegaard cites a wit who divides mankind into officers (men), serving maids (women), and chimney sweeps, the third term disrupts the masculine/feminine binary and embodies the antagonism between them.
“a wit has said that one might divide mankind into officers serving maids and chimney sweeps”
When CERN attempted to recreate big-bang conditions, a paranoiac fear circulated that they might trigger a process disintegrating all of reality, Žižek enjoys this fear as an illustration of the uncanny power of scientific non-mastery.
“what if they will succeed too much and they will trigger a process where our entire reality will disintegrate”
Young men from Vancouver ritually drive to a nearby Native reservation, gang-rape and kill Indigenous women, and are never arrested; police treat each incident as an individual family dysfunction, suppressing the cultural-ritual pattern.
“what is systematically ignored is not the brutality of the crime but the obscene cultural dimension of the crime”
Works invoked 9
Capital book
Two passages, the Eden of rights with Bentham, and the general equivalent as 'the Animal', are cited to illustrate the symptomal logic of excess in classification.
Freud's text is the conceptual departure point; the prosthetic god passage is quoted at length and endorsed as fitting contemporary digital civilization even better than Freud's own era.
Fear and Trembling book
Kierkegaard's officers/maids/chimney-sweeps classification is called 'the most famous example of a crazy classification' and is the lecture's main structural example.
Hitchcock's film is mentioned for the windmill-turning-wrong-direction scene, which Žižek traces back to WWI Belgian-farmer myths from Fussell's book.
Paul Fussell's book is recommended and used for the WWI paranoiac myths (Belgian farmers, deserter communes) illustrating ideological projection and the 'chimney sweep' political position.
Title noted as the English translation of 'Stalin'; used to link superhero prosthetic-god mythology to Soviet iconography.
Farmer and Belin's popular science text is quoted to articulate the cultural fear of self-reproducing artificial organisms, used as backdrop for the Lacanian lamella.
Benjamin's essay title itself is praised ('I would be ready to sell my mother into slavery for me to invent this title') and used to illustrate the universal/particular dialectic within a single language.
The Waste Land other
T.S. Eliot's poem is cited as an example of how the shock of WWI was symbolized by resuscitating medieval mythology (Arthurian wasteland) in modernist literature.
People invoked 16
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Called 'a guy whom I really appreciate'; cited extensively for his argument that contemporary technology aims at non-mastery and generating autonomous surprising creations rather than domination of nature.
Paul Fussell positive
His book The Great War and Modern Memory is recommended as excellent; used for the paranoiac myths of WWI (Belgian farmers signaling, deserter communes) to illustrate ideological projection.
Co-author of 'Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution'; quoted to articulate the fear of self-reproducing artificial organisms as a cultural backdrop for the Lacanian lamella.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout: objet petit a, lamella, lathouse, and the formula 'god always already was dead' are all attributed to Lacan and endorsed.
Robert Pfaller positive
Described as 'my Austrian friend'; Žižek credits Pfaller's observation about learned pleasures (smoking, spirits) as the starting point for the analysis of ideology and prescribed transgression.
Antonio Negri negative
Cited as an example of the left's failed attempts to name a new antagonism ('multitude', precarious intellectual workers) without finding a convincing formulation.
Bruno Latour negative
Žižek says he 'greatly appreciates' Latour but directly opposes the thesis 'we were never modern,' countering with 'we were always already modern.'
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as 'my good friend' whose work on the paradoxes of classification and the symptomal excess Žižek explicitly follows in this lecture.
Used as a case study of the obscene supplement: the official ideology of the ascetic leader required the rumor of his virility, while his actual impotence was suppressed.
Walter Benjamin positive
His essay 'On Language in General and Human Language in Particular' is cited to illustrate the dialectical relation of universal and particular within a single domain.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Praised as 'our teacher here'; the officers/maids/chimney-sweeps classification from Fear and Trembling is the central illustrative example for the logic of the excessive third element.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Criticized for failing to account for the gap between universal language structure and particular language saturated with power relations, leading to a naive normative use of communicative rationality.
Karl Popper positive
Cited for the point that experiments let hypotheses die instead of us, used to illustrate the productive value of the gap between thought and causal intervention.
Karl Marx positive
Two examples from Capital (the Bentham addition to the Eden of rights; the 'Animal' as general equivalent) are used to illustrate the symptomal logic of classification.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invokes Freud's 'prosthetic god' thesis from Civilization and Its Discontents as the conceptual starting point; credits Freud's 'dialectical' point about the unhappiness of attaining ideals.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for 'intellectual intuition' (intellektuelle Anschauung) as the definition of divine infinite mind, and for insisting on human finitude as the condition of creativity.
What it argues
objet petit a as the object cause of desire in digital civilizationFreud's prosthetic god and the unhappiness of technological omnipotencethe closing of the gap between mind and reality via brain-wiring and nanotechnologythe paradox of classification: the third element (chimney sweep) that embodies difference as suchobscene supplement as the underside of official ideologylearned pleasures and the prescription of transgressionfinding a genuine political difference beyond false official antagonisms
Dialectical moves 9
“The only things worse than not getting what you want is to get what you want.”
The attainment of technological ideals (omnipotence, omniscience) produces unhappiness rather than satisfaction, desire is constitutively unsatisfied.
“God always already was dead—he just didn't know it.”
Atheism is not a modern discovery that kills god; god's death is retroactively revealed to have always been the case, a Lacanian-Hegelian retroactive causation.
“We were always already modern—we just didn't know it.”
Against Latour's 'we were never modern,' Žižek argues modernity discloses a condition that was always there, not an unprecedented rupture.
“The lesson of virtual sex is not that once there was authentic sex—it's that there never was authentic sex.”
Virtual sex does not corrupt an original immediacy; it reveals that even direct sex was always already structured by fantasy and projection.
“Difference precedes the terms which are differentiated.”
Antagonism is not a relation between two pre-given poles; the poles are constituted by the difference that splits them, which is why you need a third element to embody it.
“Far from being the element which undermines binary logic, the chimney sweep IS difference as such.”
The excessive third term in a classification does not blur the opposition but positively incarnates the antagonism that the two official poles cannot articulate.
“The universality of a genus always includes itself as one of its own species.”
In Hegelian dialectics, the universal (e.g. Money as the general equivalent) also appears as a particular element within the set it supposedly subsumes, generating the paradoxes of self-inclusion.
“It is precisely this disturbing supplement—Bentham—which tells you what the big slogans freedom and equality really mean in a bourgeois society.”
The obscene, seemingly out-of-place element in an ideological formula (Bentham among freedom/equality/property) reveals the cynical truth the formula otherwise conceals.
“The most subversive procedure was not to attack ruling ideology but to take it more seriously in its explicit values than it took itself.”
Under socialist Yugoslavia, over-identification with the official rules was more destabilizing than overt dissidence, because it forced the regime to state its own cynical secret.
Claims 14
asserts
Freud's thesis about the prosthetic god fits contemporary digital civilization even better than Freud's own time: we are unhappy precisely when we approach technological omnipotence.technology and discontents of civilization
asserts
The psychologization of modern superheroes (Spider-Man, Batman)—their anxieties and traumas—is a cultural symptom of the beyond-the-pleasure-principle dimension of our relationship to technological prostheses.superhero cinema as symptom
asserts
Brain-wiring technology that allows direct mind-to-object causation does not feel like external control; the subject still experiences the externally steered action as spontaneous—this is the new apocalyptic zero point.brain-machine interface and subjectivity
asserts
Contemporary science and technology do not aim at mastery over nature but at generating new autonomous forms of life that will surprise their creators; the Cartesian dream of domination is obsolete.the goal of modern science and technology
reframes
Virtual and digital sex does not corrupt an originally authentic sexuality; it reveals that even 'real' sex was never immediate but always structured by fantasy.virtual sex and authenticity
rejects
We were always already modern—the formula 'we were never modern' (Bruno Latour) gets it backwards; modernity is not a break but an articulation of what was always the case.Bruno Latour's 'we were never modern'
asserts
Ideological transgression is never spontaneous; the very ways we are expected to violate norms are already prescribed and codified by the ideological order itself.ideology and transgression
asserts
The ritualized murders in Ciudad Juárez and the gang attacks on Native women near Vancouver are not outbreaks of primitive barbarism but are structured through culture—their cultural-ritual dimension is precisely what the police suppress.structural violence and its ideological disavowal
asserts
In any genuine antagonism, difference precedes the differentiated terms: you cannot formulate the left/right distinction from a neutral standpoint because every definition is already partisan.the structure of political antagonism
asserts
The role of the Jew in anti-Semitic mythology is to embody antagonistic difference as such—combining opposites so as to be the stand-in for difference itself rather than one pole of an opposition.fascism, anti-Semitism, and the logic of antagonism
asserts
The political task today is to identify a 'chimney sweep' position—a difference that really matters—rather than accepting the false official antagonism between liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalism.political strategy and false antagonisms
asserts
Global capitalism and religious fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin: capitalism generates fundamentalism, which is why Iran and the US can coordinate militarily against a common enemy.capitalism and fundamentalism as co-produced
rejects
The Habermasian idea that language-in-its-universality can function as a directly normative regulator is wrong because it ignores the gap between universal language structure and the particular language saturated with power relations and obscenities.Habermas's communicative rationality
asserts
The objet petit a is the symptomal point of any classification: the excess that does not fit any category but is the condition of the system's coherence.objet petit a and classification
Quotes 12
“The only things worse than not getting what you want is to get what you want.”Slavoj Žižek · desire's constitutive dissatisfaction
“God always already was dead—he just didn't know it.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive constitution of truth / Lacanian theology
“We were always already modern—we just didn't know it.”Slavoj Žižek · against Latour; modernity as always-already condition
“The lesson of virtual sex is not that once there was authentic sex—it's that there never was authentic sex.”Slavoj Žižek · denaturalization of sexuality; fantasy as constitutive
“The horror is I would still thought that I am acting spontaneously—I wouldn't even experience it as being steered.”Slavoj Žižek · brain-wiring and the loss of subjective autonomy
“Barbarism is structured through culture totally.”Slavoj Žižek · ritual violence as culturally coded, not spontaneous
“The measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him.”Slavoj Žižek · non-mastery as the new technological ideal (Dupuy)
“Only with this little bit overweight the illusion is created that she is almost perfect—if you take it away she would probably be just an ordinary lady.”Slavoj Žižek · objet petit a: the imperfection that creates desire
“Difference precedes the terms which are differentiated.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian antagonism: the third element embodies difference as such
“Look for the chimney sweep—or when you have a war look for the madmen in the middle who live beneath.”Slavoj Žižek · political strategy: find the third position that embodies real difference
“The most subversive political procedure was not to attack ruling ideology but to take it more seriously in its explicit values than it took itself.”Slavoj Žižek · over-identification as radical strategy
“Fantasy is not a substitute for desire—it provides the coordinates of my desire.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian fantasy as constitutive of desire, not its supplement
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I really was here over ten years ago and I have good memories before it was before you had these stupid buildings up here we had rooms in the basement of the hotel itself so it was possible to get up five minutes to ten and just in a pyjama took the sorry now you move there yeah that's true yeah okay okay so I hope it will not be too boring I want to introduce a well-known concept but I'm going to approach it in a different way Lacanian concept of objet petit a object small a as the object cause of desire and how this works in our digital civilization as a Freudian I would like to begin by Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur strangely translated as Civilization and Its Discontents where Freud deploys his vision of the human being as a prosthetic god a being manufacturing and using technological supplements to his finite and limited body to approach an ideal of omnipotence or omniscience as expected from Freud his point is dialectical it is not that man cannot approach these ideals troubles emerge precisely when humanity does seem to approach them like you know as they say in psychoanalysis the only things worse to not getting what you want is to get what you want here is a quote from Freud Unbehagen in der Kultur long ago man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods to these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes or that was forbidden to him one may say therefore that these gods were cultural ideals today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal he has almost become a god himself only it is true in the fashion in which ideals are usually attained according to the general judgment of humanity not completely in some respects not at all in others only halfway man has as it were become a kind of prosthetic god when he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great achievements in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to god still more but in the interests of our investigations we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his godlike character it's a very simple thought but I think it fits even better our situation today with all the gadgets and so on than Freud's time namely is the prosthetic god as a cultural ideal not embodied today in popular culture in a series of superheroes like Batman Spider-Man or Superman incidentally it's worth mentioning that the title of the last Superman film The Man of Steel is of course the English translation of Stalin you know Stalin means in Russian the man of steel Superman if we judge from the latest wave of cinema remakes all these superheroes are definitely not happy they are all haunted by anxieties and doubts I think this is a nice symptom did you notice how in contrast to the early superhero movies even in the 60s all these Superman Batman whatever were simply happily intervening now all of a sudden we get this psychologization they are all you know Spider-Man Batman they all have some traumas cannot decide and so on for us common mortals there is an unmistakable dimension of beyond the pleasure principle in our dealings with artificial organs and gadgets in the last decades due to biotechnological breakthroughs prothesis exploded and wiring our brain is around the corner it is even already done I read somewhere that in some countries it's already even mass produced like if you are heavily crippled you get the chair but you know you don't even need Stephen Hawking's proverbial thing some your brains are wired and you like just think strongly forward and somehow the signal is interpreted the machine moves and so on and so on something very weird happens here when with my mind I can directly cause objects to move so that the brain itself directly serves as a remote control machine when this happens then in the terms of German idealism we enter what Kant called intellectual intuition intellektuelle Anschauung the closing of the gap between mind and reality a mind process which in a causal way directly influences reality for Kant who insisted on human finitude only this is the definition of the divine infinite god we humans we live in a gap between inside and outside god thinks about something he can directly actualize it but the problem is that as we learned from Kant as well as from Freud this gap of finitude is at the same time the resource of our creativity the distance between mere thought and causal intervention into external reality enables us to test our hypotheses in our mind so as Karl Popper put it nicely the whole point of experiments is that we let hypotheses die instead of ourselves in experiments so this direct short-circuit between mind and reality implies the prospect of some radical closure you know like when your mind is directly wired to reality you think it happens the problem is that again we lose the very gap which defines us as humans our basic experience of human identity is I'm here reality is out there and okay it may appear wonderful you know I think about moving an object moves the problem is that as they say what goes out goes in that is to say you can also have a machine which steers your brains directly and I will not bore you with old stories which I used already here years ago just to mention one which really fascinated me some guys in New York and also in Germany I know them they sent me a video they did a wonderful experiment which brings pleasure to my totalitarian mind they wired a rat in the sense that through computer through steering it's very elementary but it works they wired a rat so that you can from outside import into the rat this simple signals run forward turn right left and then you have a live rat running around in a cage you press a button a rat turns into a remote control toy you can literally steer it it's very primitive but it works why do I find this fascinating when I met these guys we immediately all totalitarians understood each other they told me they don't care about rats what interests them is the following if you do this on humans which probably they did it they just don't want to publicize it how will we humans experience it and the result is pretty terrifying it's not because this would have been the easy way out that let's say you Wolfgang the master I think I walk around here you press a button and you steer me it's not what you think that I would all of a sudden feel some foreign power took me over no the horror is I would still thought that I am acting spontaneously I wouldn't even experience it as being as being steered this is the new let's call it point of apocalypse the apocalyptic process will reach its zero point when prothesis will no longer merely supplement the human body and brain but they will in a way supplant it leaving behind the notion of human being as a worker whose know-how enables him to use prosthetic instruments so the problem is that with such an increase the prosthesis is no longer experienced as such here nanotechnology enters you know it's easy with all these external wiring where at least you are aware of the machine outside and this is why for example even some friends of mine who have to do dialysis claim that you get used to it but at the beginning there is something terrifying in it like you see a machine out there and like your life depends on it but the problem is that even you know with nanotechnology more and more these implants will be invisible what is already happening and I sorry if I repeat myself a little bit I improvised about this in my class here already what fascinates me is that we are approaching we are not yet there but we really are approaching a closing the gap between virtual digital universe and reality today we still mostly live in this idea like with sex you know you either do it with a real person or you play games sexual games on the screen or whatever but a machine developed by some I always forget his name maybe it's my spontaneous racism or whatever an Indian guy at MIT guy developed a machine which is still very primitive like it's on a you have a camera you have a receiver cell phone a projector and all this is then you are connected to some supercomputer it works how when you look at something the camera also looks at it and the camera is programmed to recognize many objects then from the computer it gets feedback so you get immediate information like I walk along and I see a building let's say Empire State Building and I look at it and all you need is just some kind of a flat surface instead you where the projector immediately it's done in less than a second projects onto it basic information about that you know it was built in I don't know when blah blah whatever you want it works with books you show a book it's immediately projected onto it the reviews of the book or you show a plane ticket it immediately tells you this plane has a delay or whatever the catch is you see that it's no longer virtual reality is here real reality is there the real virtual dimension is directly projected onto real reality why does this sound so strange and you can imagine a nasty dirty guy that I am what was my first idea to have the sexual you know I look at a woman and it says she likes cunnilingus she doesn't like these movies and so on I get instantly projected all the stuff but seriously you know what is so interesting about this machine is not that it's something unheard of new doesn't it function in a way it just copies the way our reality already functions let's take a basic racist experience if I am a racist I see a black guy an Arab a Jew and how does racism work if you are truly a racist you don't see just that person you see embodied there all the prejudices and so on you literally project them onto onto the person so if anything you see here I am not technophobic I think the good thing about this machinery is that it makes us aware of something which we are already doing even in so called direct immediate authentic relations with the other an other a foreigner is never what he really is it's always the whole network of ideological prejudices and so on that you that you that you project onto it so this is the first thing we should remember when you hear all this stuff virtual sex will ruin immediate sex and so on yes but in a much more radical way than we think the lesson of virtual sex is not oh once there was an authentic sex no it's that there never was an authentic sex the lesson of virtual sex is that even in real sex it's never immediately you and your partner instead of all those projections it's simply your fantasies and so on you are attracted you know this is the basic I will not go into it we all know it psychoanalytic lesson fantasy is not sorry for being vulgar I want to sleep with that woman she is minimally rational and knows never with the guy like that so I don't have a chance so I fantasize no no fantasy is an answer why in the first place do I want to have contact with that woman it provides the coordinates of my desire so the lesson is rather a denaturalization of sex human sex it's never just me and the partner it's always in non-authentic sex I'm an old romantic I still believe in authentic love and so on but in a non-authentic sex very naive difference but let's I still maintain it let's not lose time for that it's like the structure is masturbatory in a way I use the other as a masturbatory prop to enact my fantasies and I'm here very old-fashioned I think there is something called authentic love where you can reach beyond that but let me go on so this is one way to fight technophobia no I think that the lesson is much more radical it's not once there was natural sexuality blah blah no we just became you know here I'm a little bit an opponent although I greatly appreciate him of Bruno Latour and his idea we were never really modern no my answer would have been we were always already modern we just didn't know it it's the same formula as Lacan's who claimed that it's not only that god is dead he has this beautiful paradox the lesson of psychoanalysis is that god always already was dead he just didn't know it no I had to remind him okay that's the first thing the second thing which is absolutely crucial about new technology is that you know this primitive idea technology today wants to play god we want to become all powerful totally dominate nature and so on it's how can I put it in naive empirical terms it's totally empirically wrong this is not the technological dream today it's something else today's science wants precisely to be surprised for example to create an artificial intelligence which will as it were start to act on its own and surprise us here a nice point was made by a guy whom I really appreciate Jean-Pierre Dupuy a French theorist of catastrophes who also teaches in Stanford and my friendly advice maybe you should try and get him here he really he is a Heideggerian basically but very good in modal logic catastrophes and so on and he says this quote from his one of his texts how are we to explain that science became such a risky activity that according to some top scientists it poses today the principal threat to the survival of humanity some philosophers reply to this question by saying that Descartes' dream to become master and possessor of nature has turned wrong and that we should urgently renounce this hubris be master of nature they understood nothing they don't see that the technology profiling itself at our horizon through convergence of all disciplines aims precisely at non-mastery the engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer's apprentice because of his negligence or ignorance but by choice he will give himself complex structures or organizations and he will try to learn what they are able of by way of exploring their functional properties he will be an explorer and experimenter at least as much as an executor the measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him this will be the measure of his success not just that they will be able to perform perform our tasks and so on end of quote so again science and technology today do not aim at do not aim at sorry do not aim at understanding and reproducing natural processes but at generating new forms of life that will surprise us the goal is no longer just to dominate nature the way it is but to generate something new like you know today the point is no longer to totally dominate animals or forms of life but to create life too a totally artificial life which will then gain its own its own autonomy and so on and so on and of course this provokes fear anxiety and so on and so on this fear we are afraid of this prospect is what the dream again that sustains the scientific technological endeavor is that is to trigger a process with no return a process that would exponentially reproduce itself and go on on its own one can even imagine what can be the unforeseen result of nanotechnology experiments new life forms reproducing themselves out of control in a cancer-like way and I like this fear you remember when they tried to recreate that big bang conditions in CERN here across the street as it were one paranoiac idea I loved it was that what if they will succeed too much and they will trigger a process where our entire reality will disintegrate and so on and so on here is one of the standard descriptions of this fear a quote from a popular text Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution by J. Doyne Farmer and Alletta Belin quote within to years a new class of organisms is likely to emerge these organisms will be artificial in the sense that they will originally be designed by humans however they will reproduce and evolve into something other than their original form they will be alive under any reasonable definition of the word the impact on humanity and the biosphere could be enormous larger than the Industrial Revolution nuclear weapons or environmental pollution end of quote now from a psychoanalytic standpoint it is clear that this fear is a fear of what Jacques Lacan called lamella what he means by this is some obscene undeadness a substance which beyond life and death blindly reproduces itself not sexually but through division you know so the idea is we have our normal normative sexual reproduction but then the result of our experiments can be some obscene asexual form of life that it just goes on and the more you cut it destroy it the more parts reproduce themselves and so on and so on and of course there is always this fear in creating all the gadgets that mobilizes and so on and so on and here Jacques Lacan proposed a neologism lathouse L-A-T-H-O-U-S-E lathouse it's a weird word there are many associations I don't know this is for him the name for things which did not exist prior to the scientific intervention into the real from mobile phones to remote controlled toys air conditioners artificial hearts whatever so Lacan's idea is that this is the true power of science Descartes got it wrong it's not just to master nature but to create new forms organisms this is why this is science at its most terrifying science is basically it's like I was always horrified once I went in Vienna I think to a museum of natural horrors and I'm a naive guy I couldn't sleep for weeks you know I was awake you get all those monsters you know a goat with two heads or whatever and so on this is science precisely this unheard of objects these excessive objects which all the gadgets which they have three features first they are what drives our capitalist explosion basically today all capitalist explosion today is based on producing these prosthetic gadgets which enhance our abilities and it's already done this move towards that machinery I read somewhere that Google is already putting so Google glasses no where again it's more immediate immersion of reality and the virtual dimension and so on so we have market economy a surplus there we have scientific real surplus object non-natural objects and we have the libidinal surplus a surplus enjoyment unheard of enjoyment like you know the problem of course is with all these prothesis who needs real sex and so on so this excess now this is the introductory part Lacan's name for this excess is what Lacan Jacques Lacan calls object small a l'objet petit a now let me make a little bit of a detour what Lacan means by this I will be very precise and give you a simple erotic example it's confidential but it comes from the other part of the world so it's not too bad basic definition of objet a would be the imperfection that works like you when this would be I think what Lacan calls objet petit a object small a at its purest in a person something that is a sign of imperfection but if you take it away you lose everything you know you don't get for let me give you the example it happened I will not tell you which country to my psychoanalytic friend there who told me that a voluptuous lady who was his patient told him how when her last lover first saw her fully naked he told her that with just three-four kilos less weight her body would have been perfect what's the catch here it's totally wrong to think okay let her go through a diet lose two-three kilos and she would be perfect no she wouldn't that's the catch only with this little bit overweight the illusion is created that she is almost perfect but if you take it away she would probably be just an ordinary lady you know it's the excess which disturbs perfection but creates precisely you know the paradox is that it's an excess of imperfection but if you take it away you lose the very perfection that it disturbs now I come to a little bit more of a theory I rely here on my good friend Mladen Dolar whom I follow here because I claim that this object a this disturbing excess has a precise function it's the weak point the symptomal point of classification and we all know that from Plato onwards the problem of classification is always where things get complicated you know Plato already has this problem if you classify things with the ideas but what do you do with vulgar objects like shit dirt and so on is there an idea of shit of dirt and so on and precisely I claim dirt and waste is a good example of the paradox that I try to describe because I don't know how it is in your country but the paradox I'm describing exists in United States in England and in my own shitty country Slovenia it's that you know with all this I always violate it I think it's just a pedagogical bullshit you know all these how do you call it with waste that you you have to separate different forms you know you have for example one bin for you have one bin for one basket for plastic objects paper organic waste but then there is always something that doesn't fit into it all so you have this this this and then you have and this is crucial one particular basket where it says general waste and that's the necessity in what sense let's do a little bit of a dialectic of classification okay our teacher here is the greatest Kierkegaard he proposed in his Fear and Trembling the most famous example of a crazy classification maybe you know it I quote a wit has said that one might divide mankind into officers serving maids and chimney sweeps and then he praises this classification you know so of course this is not just confusion the logic is very precise officer is man maid serving maid is woman in male chauvinist universe they would have been the ideal couple but then you have the object a the intruder you have the chimney sweep and you can imagine him doing all possible things with my extremely dirty imagination you can imagine what I how I imagined it that the first to make love they forget about contraception and then the chimney sweep I will not go I will not go into it no but so again what is the paradox of this classification where is the logic of it it's precisely a proof that in a proper Hegelian dialectical sense an antagonism is precisely never a binary opposition the point is that what in psychoanalysis social sciences we call antagonism it's never we have just two we have two but for the two to be antagonistic you need a third element to confuse it like even in class struggle a true orthodox Marxism does not say there are only two classes no there is always either what Marx call or Hegel called Pöbel rebel or Lumpenproletariat or for the fascists the Jew you know some element which and it is this element which stands for what the failure of classification now in Marx here I follow Mladen Dolar he introduced even two types of this paradoxical classification the first one is when in Capital he talks about market exchange between worker and capitalist as I quote Capital the very Eden of innate rights of man there alone rule freedom equality property and Bentham you know what's the joke of Marx he takes the great the chimney sweep is Bentham here no that is to say he takes the great formulas of the French Revolution and adds a disturbing element Bentham Bentham you know the philosopher of egotism utilitarianism of course what Marx wants to say here is pretty simple and clear it's that it's precisely this disturbing supplement Bentham which tells you what the big slogans freedom equality really mean in a bourgeois society freedom means freedom to trade to sell equality means legal equality which covers up actual inequality and so on and so on so this is the first paradox of mentioned by Marx that you have a classification where one element sticks out it's kind of a dirty intruder you don't expect it there all freedom equality whatever and Bentham what is this dirty guy doing here well he tells you the truth about how the big slogans function then Marx has another example in Capital when he talks about money the general equivalent he says I quote it is as if alongside and external to lions tigers rabbits and other animals which form together the various kind species and so on of the animal kingdom there existed in addition the animal the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom this is of course the Marxist theory of money that the generality it is as if the universality exists among its own species as one of its elements so that and we get here into all the dialectical paradoxes of how the universality always includes itself as its own species and the problem I will not go into it today it's too much it's precisely how to read these two classifications together because in one case the additional element is dirt worthless like chimney sweep whatever Bentham the vulgar in the other case it's the most noble like you have one element which immediately gives body to universality so what we get here and this is crucial now I come to a slightly more difficult theoretical part it is that the paradox is that in the again that's the fundamental dialectical paradox in the division between universal and particular is always mirrored within the particular when you have a genus and different species one of the species always embodies the genus as such how does this function here I think I can take an example it's a wonderful one I envy him for this title Walter Benjamin wrote an early essay where the title I would be ready to sell my mother into slavery for me to invent this title is On Language in General and Human Language in Particular now you have to read very carefully here Benjamin he doesn't mean some New Age stupidity you know that there are different languages you know what some of those eco guys are saying you know like we have a madman mountain climber I was happy when he dropped dead on a mountain in Slovenia who claimed before I climb a mountain I talk with a mountain I ask the mountain for permission and well the mountain obviously got the point and finished him off no you know so that we have I don't know DNA biological language animals talk even trees talk I mean if you are British you know that Prince Charles is specialized in talking to trees and so on you know and then humans and maybe divine language no the genius of Benjamin is that there is only one language but in this language itself you have to differentiate between universal and particular universal is the abstract structure of language as such particular is all the pathology of power relations obscenities and so on which makes a particular living language and again the universality is not the universality which combines different languages there is only one language let's say okay German is a bad example because what they speak here in Switzerland no normal decent German understands it's the same I think for East Germany isn't there that the Saxon dialect is so strong that in West Germany they told me this anti-Ossi joke what's the difference between a Turk who lives in Germany and the Saxon guy that the Turk speaks much better German you know and so on but what I want to say take a country where there is only one united country one language you still have to distinguish language as such in its universality and the particular language where all the pathology of power struggle obscenities and so on is included into it and I don't have time to develop it but it would be nice to develop it how even here I think Habermas is wrong he doesn't take into account this gap and he thinks that language as such in its universality can function in a directly normative way regulating our actual but that's another topic what I want to elaborate now is this gap between universal language as such and all the pathology this is absolutely crucial and it brings us back to objet petit a which is the excess of this language in particularity I want to make the starting point my starting point a simple observation which I took from my Austrian friend Robert Pfaller philosopher remember your most intense forms of enjoyment like smoking and drinking hard liquors remember if you are honest how you learned it it was at the beginning and that's crucial it was not pleasure you know how it usually happened you had when you were seven eight years old a friend maybe a little bit older who told you you look did you see the adults are smoking this would you like to try it you did it and the first reaction was disgusting it's the same with hard liquor drinking and so on these are all learned pleasures if you want just pleasure you drink some stupid fruit juice or milk or whatever you know all much more intense pleasure are sublimated or whatever displeasure the lesson from this for me it's a very important one is that an ideology language as a totality of ideology not in the superficial sense of explicit ideology but all the symbolic attitudes and so on is never just the official normative structure precisely the ways we are expected to violate the existing normative structure are already prescribed by language the very transgressions are prescribed which is why and I can tell you from my own very modest half-dissident I'm not claiming to be a hero experience for example in socialism socialist communist regimes in my country where socialist communism was relatively soft we were able to play these games like maybe the most subversive political procedure was not to attack ruling ideology but to dismiss all these obscene transgressive rules to take it more seriously in its explicit values than it took itself like I'm sorry if I repeat an old story somewhere in early 80s or even earlier there was a student journal I was part of it which was like a little bit dissident and there were elections in ex-Yugoslavia elections were not as bad as in the Soviet Union the party didn't get of the vote they had enough like you know but it was clear they will get it so we wanted to do some provocation so some of us said let's risk it everything let's publish a special issue claiming these elections were a fraud they were not really free elections and we protested we said fuck it I mean everyone knows this are we telling people and then one of us not me I admit it came to a wonderful idea communists claim these are free elections what if we just treat them like that so we published a special issue of our journal on the evening of elections claiming latest result it looks as if communists will still remain in power you know as if this was a question the reaction was furious we were immediately called to central committee shouted at us and I had great sympathies for the small apparatchik who terrorized us we were not really frightened nothing else happened he told us boys don't fuck with us don't do that and then we just said but what did we do wrong you claim these are free elections and we just treat he said don't fuck with me you know very well what I mean and we ask him but what do you mean it was a tragedy you know he would have to explicitly state the obscene secret he wasn't able to do it another ritual like this I have I claim that when and I do it all the time as my students may have noticed when you talk dirty swear and so on it's psychologically absolutely not done in such a way that how could I put it that you know you talk in a polite way then when you get crazy your spontaneity explodes you swear no at least with me I think precisely when you apparently spontaneously exploit you follow formulas it's the most formulaic part and I have a wonderful ritual with my friend I love it to get rid of this obscene urge to be nasty when we meet we first go through minutes ritual of dirty talk I will dig out your mother out of her grave and screw her into her ass all dirty and then after minutes of this we said to ourselves okay now we did our duty towards obscenities we are rid of it now we can talk in a normal kind way you know I like this reversal how the very obscene excess we experience as the most automatic learned part we have to get rid of that that we can be spontaneous kind people and so on and so on so what I want to say here is that and now I want to give you two tragic examples much more serious of this of how precisely the transgression is the most codified way maybe already know the story but it's really tragic I double checked it two cities in North American continent first it is Ciudad Juárez you know just south of El Paso it's a one of the world capitals of this fast collecting they get raw materials or elements from some Chinese Gulags I don't know where and then they just put together the products ship them on the American market so they need a lot of unskilled labor so you have there thousands of young single women working there this of course is an affront to male chauvinists so you get there something which is really terrifying you get a couple of dozen cases every year ritualized brutal murders you get a girl is kidnapped and I mean even I with all my tasteless jokes I reach a limit here to tell you she is first gang raped by some guys then she is slowly killed first with scissors they cut off her breasts it's really disgusting but you know what's crucial here and that's the tragedy police is always ready to emphasize the brutality what police tries police which is corrupted there what it tries to obliterate is precisely as it were the cultural dimension that this is not a spontaneous orgy it's a precisely ritualized procedure what and what the police you know what's so tragic is that the only person punished no perpetrators were punished although everybody knows who they are the only person punished was one mother of a girl who inquired into it too much but police tries to dismiss each case as oh probably it was a dysfunctional family father raped her alcoholic and so on so this is what I find you see it's not we are on the surface civilized and then some barbarism explodes no barbarism is structured through culture totally now you will tell me okay I am a white racist you know haha making fun of poor Mexicans ah-ha let's go to the other side Canada Vancouver the most civilized city you know how Canadians like to boast to boast we are like United States dynamic but with European civilization and so on friends told me there that near Vancouver you have a big reservation of natives and it's a regular sport of young guys from Vancouver to drive there kidnap a Native American Indian whatever you call it I prefer Indian for precise reasons girl again gang raped killed and just dropped there not one of them was arrested because although it's a ritual police systematically treats it as individual family oh probably the her her family they were drunk addict drug addicts whatever again what I find interesting is that what is systematically ignored is not the brutality of the crime but the obscene of course cultural dimension of the crime and incidentally if you want to be a real leftist many things can be said here about Canada the nice because you know Canadians also like to boast how for example towards Indians they were much more human than Americans fuck it I learned that even today to from almost half of the Native American families children are taken and put into boarding schools like the blah blah blah they don't have proper education in the family family is dysfunctional and now what I'm giving you is not some crazy lunatic leftist data these are official data of an inquiry from Canadian parliament you know in these boarding schools and we are talking about boys and girls from to years you know what is sexual exploitation rate how many of them are raped percent and we are talking about today you know it's nice to talk oh this was somewhere in the dark 40s 50s no today and I think that this is the first task of a radical criticism to see how all this particular you know our culture is not only the official Christian whatever values all these obscene phenomena are part of our culture in the same way that pedophilia is part of Catholic identity and so on and here I will give you the last example then I do some concluding remarks on theory in Turkey it's a nice example of how this obscene supplement is part of no you know that the big hero of Turkey although now his glory is undermined is Kemal Pasha Atatürk you know the founder of modern Turkey okay his official image was ascetic like Stalin you know ascetic leader works hours per day for his country and so on and so on then there was a myth of him that in reality he is a super macho seducer that he screwed the wives of all his ministers and so on but now okay maybe I'll be arrested when I go next time to Turkey but my friends from Turkey told me this that all historians know that this is not true that in reality at least from mid 1920s Atatürk was totally impotent and that the most he was able to do was play some soft games of masturbation with small boys and so on so there was then that's what I like an extremely obscene thing that happened still in Atatürk's time after his death but when Atatürk was still totally sacred at some point an official Kemalist politician addressed a crowd claiming don't listen to those rumors that our father Atatürk is screwing women around he works night and day for the country and so on and then a member of the opposition said yeah yeah we believe you it's absolutely not true that he is seducing women and so on he disappeared the next day you know why because again you know the official image was not only Atatürk works night and day but was precisely this rumor of his seductive powers and this rumor was clearly part of same ideology it didn't fit and in most countries it's like this like I remember in ex-Yugoslavia you have President Tito blah blah and then there were all these rumors that you know because Tito liked to invite movie stars Elizabeth Taylor Sophia Loren to Brijuni island no the rumor was did he fuck Elizabeth Taylor while Richard Burton was shooting a movie in Bosnia and so on but this was all part of official ideology this dark underside okay but let me stop with this and go back to my now concluding part just the problem I want to focus how does this third element chimney sweep function remember we have the official binary opposition officer maid in this case masculine feminine and then the third element but this third element this is the crucial point is not something that undermines binary logic in the sense of it cannot be fixed it's beyond no I claim he is precisely difference as such and that's the most radical dialectical thesis you have two differentiated terms and then you have difference as such the paradox is very nice here it's that in a way difference precedes the terms which are differentiated now you will think this is a speculative obscurity let me give you a simple example you know if you are old enough you may remember times when there still was something like left and right in politics you know but are you aware of the paradox of it there is no neutral conceptual field from which you can divide you can say leftists claim this every theory about where is the difference between left and right is already a leftist or a rightist theory you know because if you ask a right-winger what is the difference between left and right you will get a totally different answer than if you ask a left-winger a left-winger would have said probably something like this there is a radical antagonism in a society and the right-wingers proposing their proto-fascist organic image are trying to obfuscate the antagonism the right-winger would have said like a fascist right-winger society is an organic whole and we have on the margin Jews foreigners whoever who disturb it you know but you see the paradox so we have a difference a strong antagonistic opposition but each of the two poles of opposition already mystifies the difference as such you cannot formulate difference in a neutral way and this is antagonism this is why you need an additional element it's so clear for example in fascism where the additional element is a Jew a Jew may appear to obliterate difference because in anti-semitic I'm talking of course not now of real Jews but of the role of a Jew in anti-semitic mythology a Jew already if you analyze the prejudices what's the anti-semitic image of the Jew it's precisely the combination of opposites no Jews are at the same time dirty you know they don't wash they fornicate too much and too intellectual like even some of my American friends I didn't know they are secretly anti-semites how can you compete with these Jews we go out have a beer they study all the time and so on it's wonderful how the Jews bring you know on the one hand they are too intellectual they study all the time financially speculate work too hard on the other hand they don't wash they are dirty they seduce our women and so on the Jew is as it's clear in fascism the dream of fascism is pure binary opposition organic community of the leader and his followers and then the Jew from outside introduces antagonism but you see what this means Jew is difference antagonistic difference as such and the problem is precisely today more than ever what is this antagonism how to define it it's clear that all designations all left from somewhere 60s tries to formulate a new antagonism and I don't think they find a way you know you have like Toni Negri attempt multitude or precarious intellectual workers and so on and so on so what's the problem here I will just to conclude because yes exactly one hour I will give you my last example from a book that I really advise you to read it's a historical book Paul fuck it I don't know how to pronounce it F-U-S-S-E-L-L Fussell or how Fussell okay he wrote this guy a book called The Great War and Modern Memory it's an excellent book about the ideological impact of the First World War of how it was such a shock that the only way to symbolize it was to resuscitate all even medieval mythology like this is where T.S. Eliot's Waste Land comes the way the the battlefield all those waste area between the front trenches and so on was in England systematically equated to knights of the round table search for grail wasteland and so on and so on and what I like in this is the myth paranoiac myth that this war gave birth to for example one of my favorite myths is a guy remember his name called Reginald Grant he wrote a book SOS he was a kind of a pro-British Stalinist his idea was why because you know the northern part of the front in Belgium was was held by British army no against the Germans and British didn't do too well especially German artillery was very accurate in hitting British positions as a good Stalinist he said it's impossible Germans couldn't be better so there must be traitors here and they immediately located traitors these were Belgian farmers who were pro-German but now comes it's wonderful he Reginald this guy in his book which was a big best seller gives three procedures alleged of course it's fantasy of how Belgians just farmers just behind the front line and the front lines it was really a crazy war the front lines were so fixed you know that during World War I most of the years when British publishers printed maps of Europe they simply introduced into the map the front line without worrying that it would move you know okay the idea was this one that Belgian farmers do it in three ways one is crazier than the others the one is that when women hang their laundry it's all codified you know two white shirts one black shirt means two two degrees to the right there is an English artillery whatever the second one is it's even better that if you look at church towers clock the what do you call it watch hands are are are are showing wrong time which gives a codified message you know like if it's five past noon but it says ten past noon it means five is difference five kilometers to the right there is an English battery and my favorite third one if you know Hitchcock Foreign Correspondent the most famous scene is the guy pursuing a Nazi traitor comes to a countryside and then everything is idyllic windmills and then a guy says do you see something strange that windmill is turning in the wrong direction and this Hitchcock took it from here this was one myth that Belgian farmers signal with the wrong direction but these are jokes but then there is one great I am tempted to say almost communist-Leninist legend which probably it wasn't true but it's a beautiful legend and it happened on both sides of the front it was an absolute myth you know it was like this you had trenches second third and in between there was usually I don't know from meters to two miles crazy totally destroyed land with old trenches old shafts underground caves and so on the myth was that down there people live deserters from all sides half-crazy deserters who live in brotherhood they sing crazy songs they only come out after a battle to steal food and clothes from dead soldiers and it was such an emancipatory dream that like and the idea was then that in the night they shout like crazy you can hear them there is absolutely no proof that this existed but it's a beautiful emancipatory dream I claim because they were the true Leninists screw war it's not our conflict brotherhood and so on this is how you fight ideology what I want to say is that something like this we need today they were if you want the chimney sweeps you know the idiots were fighting the official duality they were the chimney sweeps and they stand for the true difference they were the one who really made difference and that's what we need today with all the struggles that we are confronted with that media tells us like for example fundamentalists versus western liberals where things are getting crazy I think the first ABC of political analysis today is that of course I'm against fundamentalists but the whole point is the way global capitalism generates fundamentalism these are two sides of the same coin which is why such strange things are happening like now you know like the arch enemy of United States is supposed to be Iran did you read newspapers what is happening these days Iran and United States are coordinating military acts to fight the Sunni insurgency in Iraq so what I'm saying is that the big problem today is to define a difference which really matters you know to find the chimney sweeps who embody the real difference otherwise if we accept the official media struggle of permissivity multiculturalism versus fundamentalism and so on and so on we are lost and this is here that the two aspects antagonism difference classification and object a come together this excessive look don't the big battle is between whatever male-female or classes or whatever no look for the chimney sweep or when you have a war look for the madmen in the middle who live beneath well fuck it I'm finished thanks very much
I really was here over ten years ago and I have good memories before it was before you had these stupid buildings up here we had rooms in the basement of the hotel itself so it was possible to get up five minutes to ten and just in a pyjama took the sorry now you move there yeah that's true yeah okay okay so I hope it will not be too boring I want to introduce a well-known concept but I'm going to approach it in a different way Lacanian concept of objet petit a object small a as the object cause of desire and how this works in our digital civilization as a Freudian I would like to begin by Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur strangely translated as Civilization and Its Discontents where Freud deploys his vision of the human being as a prosthetic god a being manufacturing and using technological supplements to his finite and limited body to approach an ideal of omnipotence or omniscience as expected from Freud his point is dialectical it is not that man cannot approach these ideals troubles emerge precisely when humanity does seem to approach them like you know as they say in psychoanalysis the only things worse to not getting what you want is to get what you want here is a quote from Freud Unbehagen in der Kultur long ago man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods to these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes or that was forbidden to him one may say therefore that these gods were cultural ideals today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal he has almost become a god himself only it is true in the fashion in which ideals are usually attained according to the general judgment of humanity not completely in some respects not at all in others only halfway man has as it were become a kind of prosthetic god when he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great achievements in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to god still more but in the interests of our investigations we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his godlike character it's a very simple thought but I think it fits even better our situation today with all the gadgets and so on than Freud's time namely is the prosthetic god as a cultural ideal not embodied today in popular culture in a series of superheroes like Batman Spider-Man or Superman incidentally it's worth mentioning that the title of the last Superman film The Man of Steel is of course the English translation of Stalin you know Stalin means in Russian the man of steel Superman if we judge from the latest wave of cinema remakes all these superheroes are definitely not happy they are all haunted by anxieties and doubts I think this is a nice symptom did you notice how in contrast to the early superhero movies even in the 60s all these Superman Batman whatever were simply happily intervening now all of a sudden we get this psychologization they are all you know Spider-Man Batman they all have some traumas cannot decide and so on for us common mortals there is an unmistakable dimension of beyond the pleasure principle in our dealings with artificial organs and gadgets in the last decades due to biotechnological breakthroughs prothesis exploded and wiring our brain is around the corner it is even already done I read somewhere that in some countries it's already even mass produced like if you are heavily crippled you get the chair but you know you don't even need Stephen Hawking's proverbial thing some your brains are wired and you like just think strongly forward and somehow the signal is interpreted the machine moves and so on and so on something very weird happens here when with my mind I can directly cause objects to move so that the brain itself directly serves as a remote control machine when this happens then in the terms of German idealism we enter what Kant called intellectual intuition intellektuelle Anschauung the closing of the gap between mind and reality a mind process which in a causal way directly influences reality for Kant who insisted on human finitude only this is the definition of the divine infinite god we humans we live in a gap between inside and outside god thinks about something he can directly actualize it but the problem is that as we learned from Kant as well as from Freud this gap of finitude is at the same time the resource of our creativity the distance between mere thought and causal intervention into external reality enables us to test our hypotheses in our mind so as Karl Popper put it nicely the whole point of experiments is that we let hypotheses die instead of ourselves in experiments so this direct short-circuit between mind and reality implies the prospect of some radical closure you know like when your mind is directly wired to reality you think it happens the problem is that again we lose the very gap which defines us as humans our basic experience of human identity is I'm here reality is out there and okay it may appear wonderful you know I think about moving an object moves the problem is that as they say what goes out goes in that is to say you can also have a machine which steers your brains directly and I will not bore you with old stories which I used already here years ago just to mention one which really fascinated me some guys in New York and also in Germany I know them they sent me a video they did a wonderful experiment which brings pleasure to my totalitarian mind they wired a rat in the sense that through computer through steering it's very elementary but it works they wired a rat so that you can from outside import into the rat this simple signals run forward turn right left and then you have a live rat running around in a cage you press a button a rat turns into a remote control toy you can literally steer it it's very primitive but it works why do I find this fascinating when I met these guys we immediately all totalitarians understood each other they told me they don't care about rats what interests them is the following if you do this on humans which probably they did it they just don't want to publicize it how will we humans experience it and the result is pretty terrifying it's not because this would have been the easy way out that let's say you Wolfgang the master I think I walk around here you press a button and you steer me it's not what you think that I would all of a sudden feel some foreign power took me over no the horror is I would still thought that I am acting spontaneously I wouldn't even experience it as being as being steered this is the new let's call it point of apocalypse the apocalyptic process will reach its zero point when prothesis will no longer merely supplement the human body and brain but they will in a way supplant it leaving behind the notion of human being as a worker whose know-how enables him to use prosthetic instruments so the problem is that with such an increase the prosthesis is no longer experienced as such here nanotechnology enters you know it's easy with all these external wiring where at least you are aware of the machine outside and this is why for example even some friends of mine who have to do dialysis claim that you get used to it but at the beginning there is something terrifying in it like you see a machine out there and like your life depends on it but the problem is that even you know with nanotechnology more and more these implants will be invisible what is already happening and I sorry if I repeat myself a little bit I improvised about this in my class here already what fascinates me is that we are approaching we are not yet there but we really are approaching a closing the gap between virtual digital universe and reality today we still mostly live in this idea like with sex you know you either do it with a real person or you play games sexual games on the screen or whatever but a machine developed by some I always forget his name maybe it's my spontaneous racism or whatever an Indian guy at MIT guy developed a machine which is still very primitive like it's on a you have a camera you have a receiver cell phone a projector and all this is then you are connected to some supercomputer it works how when you look at something the camera also looks at it and the camera is programmed to recognize many objects then from the computer it gets feedback so you get immediate information like I walk along and I see a building let's say Empire State Building and I look at it and all you need is just some kind of a flat surface instead you where the projector immediately it's done in less than a second projects onto it basic information about that you know it was built in I don't know when blah blah whatever you want it works with books you show a book it's immediately projected onto it the reviews of the book or you show a plane ticket it immediately tells you this plane has a delay or whatever the catch is you see that it's no longer virtual reality is here real reality is there the real virtual dimension is directly projected onto real reality why does this sound so strange and you can imagine a nasty dirty guy that I am what was my first idea to have the sexual you know I look at a woman and it says she likes cunnilingus she doesn't like these movies and so on I get instantly projected all the stuff but seriously you know what is so interesting about this machine is not that it's something unheard of new doesn't it function in a way it just copies the way our reality already functions let's take a basic racist experience if I am a racist I see a black guy an Arab a Jew and how does racism work if you are truly a racist you don't see just that person you see embodied there all the prejudices and so on you literally project them onto onto the person so if anything you see here I am not technophobic I think the good thing about this machinery is that it makes us aware of something which we are already doing even in so called direct immediate authentic relations with the other an other a foreigner is never what he really is it's always the whole network of ideological prejudices and so on that you that you that you project onto it so this is the first thing we should remember when you hear all this stuff virtual sex will ruin immediate sex and so on yes but in a much more radical way than we think the lesson of virtual sex is not oh once there was an authentic sex no it's that there never was an authentic sex the lesson of virtual sex is that even in real sex it's never immediately you and your partner instead of all those projections it's simply your fantasies and so on you are attracted you know this is the basic I will not go into it we all know it psychoanalytic lesson fantasy is not sorry for being vulgar I want to sleep with that woman she is minimally rational and knows never with the guy like that so I don't have a chance so I fantasize no no fantasy is an answer why in the first place do I want to have contact with that woman it provides the coordinates of my desire so the lesson is rather a denaturalization of sex human sex it's never just me and the partner it's always in non-authentic sex I'm an old romantic I still believe in authentic love and so on but in a non-authentic sex very naive difference but let's I still maintain it let's not lose time for that it's like the structure is masturbatory in a way I use the other as a masturbatory prop to enact my fantasies and I'm here very old-fashioned I think there is something called authentic love where you can reach beyond that but let me go on so this is one way to fight technophobia no I think that the lesson is much more radical it's not once there was natural sexuality blah blah no we just became you know here I'm a little bit an opponent although I greatly appreciate him of Bruno Latour and his idea we were never really modern no my answer would have been we were always already modern we just didn't know it it's the same formula as Lacan's who claimed that it's not only that god is dead he has this beautiful paradox the lesson of psychoanalysis is that god always already was dead he just didn't know it no I had to remind him okay that's the first thing the second thing which is absolutely crucial about new technology is that you know this primitive idea technology today wants to play god we want to become all powerful totally dominate nature and so on it's how can I put it in naive empirical terms it's totally empirically wrong this is not the technological dream today it's something else today's science wants precisely to be surprised for example to create an artificial intelligence which will as it were start to act on its own and surprise us here a nice point was made by a guy whom I really appreciate Jean-Pierre Dupuy a French theorist of catastrophes who also teaches in Stanford and my friendly advice maybe you should try and get him here he really he is a Heideggerian basically but very good in modal logic catastrophes and so on and he says this quote from his one of his texts how are we to explain that science became such a risky activity that according to some top scientists it poses today the principal threat to the survival of humanity some philosophers reply to this question by saying that Descartes' dream to become master and possessor of nature has turned wrong and that we should urgently renounce this hubris be master of nature they understood nothing they don't see that the technology profiling itself at our horizon through convergence of all disciplines aims precisely at non-mastery the engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer's apprentice because of his negligence or ignorance but by choice he will give himself complex structures or organizations and he will try to learn what they are able of by way of exploring their functional properties he will be an explorer and experimenter at least as much as an executor the measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him this will be the measure of his success not just that they will be able to perform perform our tasks and so on end of quote so again science and technology today do not aim at do not aim at sorry do not aim at understanding and reproducing natural processes but at generating new forms of life that will surprise us the goal is no longer just to dominate nature the way it is but to generate something new like you know today the point is no longer to totally dominate animals or forms of life but to create life too a totally artificial life which will then gain its own its own autonomy and so on and so on and of course this provokes fear anxiety and so on and so on this fear we are afraid of this prospect is what the dream again that sustains the scientific technological endeavor is that is to trigger a process with no return a process that would exponentially reproduce itself and go on on its own one can even imagine what can be the unforeseen result of nanotechnology experiments new life forms reproducing themselves out of control in a cancer-like way and I like this fear you remember when they tried to recreate that big bang conditions in CERN here across the street as it were one paranoiac idea I loved it was that what if they will succeed too much and they will trigger a process where our entire reality will disintegrate and so on and so on here is one of the standard descriptions of this fear a quote from a popular text Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution by J. Doyne Farmer and Alletta Belin quote within to years a new class of organisms is likely to emerge these organisms will be artificial in the sense that they will originally be designed by humans however they will reproduce and evolve into something other than their original form they will be alive under any reasonable definition of the word the impact on humanity and the biosphere could be enormous larger than the Industrial Revolution nuclear weapons or environmental pollution end of quote now from a psychoanalytic standpoint it is clear that this fear is a fear of what Jacques Lacan called lamella what he means by this is some obscene undeadness a substance which beyond life and death blindly reproduces itself not sexually but through division you know so the idea is we have our normal normative sexual reproduction but then the result of our experiments can be some obscene asexual form of life that it just goes on and the more you cut it destroy it the more parts reproduce themselves and so on and so on and of course there is always this fear in creating all the gadgets that mobilizes and so on and so on and here Jacques Lacan proposed a neologism lathouse L-A-T-H-O-U-S-E lathouse it's a weird word there are many associations I don't know this is for him the name for things which did not exist prior to the scientific intervention into the real from mobile phones to remote controlled toys air conditioners artificial hearts whatever so Lacan's idea is that this is the true power of science Descartes got it wrong it's not just to master nature but to create new forms organisms this is why this is science at its most terrifying science is basically it's like I was always horrified once I went in Vienna I think to a museum of natural horrors and I'm a naive guy I couldn't sleep for weeks you know I was awake you get all those monsters you know a goat with two heads or whatever and so on this is science precisely this unheard of objects these excessive objects which all the gadgets which they have three features first they are what drives our capitalist explosion basically today all capitalist explosion today is based on producing these prosthetic gadgets which enhance our abilities and it's already done this move towards that machinery I read somewhere that Google is already putting so Google glasses no where again it's more immediate immersion of reality and the virtual dimension and so on so we have market economy a surplus there we have scientific real surplus object non-natural objects and we have the libidinal surplus a surplus enjoyment unheard of enjoyment like you know the problem of course is with all these prothesis who needs real sex and so on so this excess now this is the introductory part Lacan's name for this excess is what Lacan Jacques Lacan calls object small a l'objet petit a now let me make a little bit of a detour what Lacan means by this I will be very precise and give you a simple erotic example it's confidential but it comes from the other part of the world so it's not too bad basic definition of objet a would be the imperfection that works like you when this would be I think what Lacan calls objet petit a object small a at its purest in a person something that is a sign of imperfection but if you take it away you lose everything you know you don't get for let me give you the example it happened I will not tell you which country to my psychoanalytic friend there who told me that a voluptuous lady who was his patient told him how when her last lover first saw her fully naked he told her that with just three-four kilos less weight her body would have been perfect what's the catch here it's totally wrong to think okay let her go through a diet lose two-three kilos and she would be perfect no she wouldn't that's the catch only with this little bit overweight the illusion is created that she is almost perfect but if you take it away she would probably be just an ordinary lady you know it's the excess which disturbs perfection but creates precisely you know the paradox is that it's an excess of imperfection but if you take it away you lose the very perfection that it disturbs now I come to a little bit more of a theory I rely here on my good friend Mladen Dolar whom I follow here because I claim that this object a this disturbing excess has a precise function it's the weak point the symptomal point of classification and we all know that from Plato onwards the problem of classification is always where things get complicated you know Plato already has this problem if you classify things with the ideas but what do you do with vulgar objects like shit dirt and so on is there an idea of shit of dirt and so on and precisely I claim dirt and waste is a good example of the paradox that I try to describe because I don't know how it is in your country but the paradox I'm describing exists in United States in England and in my own shitty country Slovenia it's that you know with all this I always violate it I think it's just a pedagogical bullshit you know all these how do you call it with waste that you you have to separate different forms you know you have for example one bin for you have one bin for one basket for plastic objects paper organic waste but then there is always something that doesn't fit into it all so you have this this this and then you have and this is crucial one particular basket where it says general waste and that's the necessity in what sense let's do a little bit of a dialectic of classification okay our teacher here is the greatest Kierkegaard he proposed in his Fear and Trembling the most famous example of a crazy classification maybe you know it I quote a wit has said that one might divide mankind into officers serving maids and chimney sweeps and then he praises this classification you know so of course this is not just confusion the logic is very precise officer is man maid serving maid is woman in male chauvinist universe they would have been the ideal couple but then you have the object a the intruder you have the chimney sweep and you can imagine him doing all possible things with my extremely dirty imagination you can imagine what I how I imagined it that the first to make love they forget about contraception and then the chimney sweep I will not go I will not go into it no but so again what is the paradox of this classification where is the logic of it it's precisely a proof that in a proper Hegelian dialectical sense an antagonism is precisely never a binary opposition the point is that what in psychoanalysis social sciences we call antagonism it's never we have just two we have two but for the two to be antagonistic you need a third element to confuse it like even in class struggle a true orthodox Marxism does not say there are only two classes no there is always either what Marx call or Hegel called Pöbel rebel or Lumpenproletariat or for the fascists the Jew you know some element which and it is this element which stands for what the failure of classification now in Marx here I follow Mladen Dolar he introduced even two types of this paradoxical classification the first one is when in Capital he talks about market exchange between worker and capitalist as I quote Capital the very Eden of innate rights of man there alone rule freedom equality property and Bentham you know what's the joke of Marx he takes the great the chimney sweep is Bentham here no that is to say he takes the great formulas of the French Revolution and adds a disturbing element Bentham Bentham you know the philosopher of egotism utilitarianism of course what Marx wants to say here is pretty simple and clear it's that it's precisely this disturbing supplement Bentham which tells you what the big slogans freedom equality really mean in a bourgeois society freedom means freedom to trade to sell equality means legal equality which covers up actual inequality and so on and so on so this is the first paradox of mentioned by Marx that you have a classification where one element sticks out it's kind of a dirty intruder you don't expect it there all freedom equality whatever and Bentham what is this dirty guy doing here well he tells you the truth about how the big slogans function then Marx has another example in Capital when he talks about money the general equivalent he says I quote it is as if alongside and external to lions tigers rabbits and other animals which form together the various kind species and so on of the animal kingdom there existed in addition the animal the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom this is of course the Marxist theory of money that the generality it is as if the universality exists among its own species as one of its elements so that and we get here into all the dialectical paradoxes of how the universality always includes itself as its own species and the problem I will not go into it today it's too much it's precisely how to read these two classifications together because in one case the additional element is dirt worthless like chimney sweep whatever Bentham the vulgar in the other case it's the most noble like you have one element which immediately gives body to universality so what we get here and this is crucial now I come to a slightly more difficult theoretical part it is that the paradox is that in the again that's the fundamental dialectical paradox in the division between universal and particular is always mirrored within the particular when you have a genus and different species one of the species always embodies the genus as such how does this function here I think I can take an example it's a wonderful one I envy him for this title Walter Benjamin wrote an early essay where the title I would be ready to sell my mother into slavery for me to invent this title is On Language in General and Human Language in Particular now you have to read very carefully here Benjamin he doesn't mean some New Age stupidity you know that there are different languages you know what some of those eco guys are saying you know like we have a madman mountain climber I was happy when he dropped dead on a mountain in Slovenia who claimed before I climb a mountain I talk with a mountain I ask the mountain for permission and well the mountain obviously got the point and finished him off no you know so that we have I don't know DNA biological language animals talk even trees talk I mean if you are British you know that Prince Charles is specialized in talking to trees and so on you know and then humans and maybe divine language no the genius of Benjamin is that there is only one language but in this language itself you have to differentiate between universal and particular universal is the abstract structure of language as such particular is all the pathology of power relations obscenities and so on which makes a particular living language and again the universality is not the universality which combines different languages there is only one language let's say okay German is a bad example because what they speak here in Switzerland no normal decent German understands it's the same I think for East Germany isn't there that the Saxon dialect is so strong that in West Germany they told me this anti-Ossi joke what's the difference between a Turk who lives in Germany and the Saxon guy that the Turk speaks much better German you know and so on but what I want to say take a country where there is only one united country one language you still have to distinguish language as such in its universality and the particular language where all the pathology of power struggle obscenities and so on is included into it and I don't have time to develop it but it would be nice to develop it how even here I think Habermas is wrong he doesn't take into account this gap and he thinks that language as such in its universality can function in a directly normative way regulating our actual but that's another topic what I want to elaborate now is this gap between universal language as such and all the pathology this is absolutely crucial and it brings us back to objet petit a which is the excess of this language in particularity I want to make the starting point my starting point a simple observation which I took from my Austrian friend Robert Pfaller philosopher remember your most intense forms of enjoyment like smoking and drinking hard liquors remember if you are honest how you learned it it was at the beginning and that's crucial it was not pleasure you know how it usually happened you had when you were seven eight years old a friend maybe a little bit older who told you you look did you see the adults are smoking this would you like to try it you did it and the first reaction was disgusting it's the same with hard liquor drinking and so on these are all learned pleasures if you want just pleasure you drink some stupid fruit juice or milk or whatever you know all much more intense pleasure are sublimated or whatever displeasure the lesson from this for me it's a very important one is that an ideology language as a totality of ideology not in the superficial sense of explicit ideology but all the symbolic attitudes and so on is never just the official normative structure precisely the ways we are expected to violate the existing normative structure are already prescribed by language the very transgressions are prescribed which is why and I can tell you from my own very modest half-dissident I'm not claiming to be a hero experience for example in socialism socialist communist regimes in my country where socialist communism was relatively soft we were able to play these games like maybe the most subversive political procedure was not to attack ruling ideology but to dismiss all these obscene transgressive rules to take it more seriously in its explicit values than it took itself like I'm sorry if I repeat an old story somewhere in early 80s or even earlier there was a student journal I was part of it which was like a little bit dissident and there were elections in ex-Yugoslavia elections were not as bad as in the Soviet Union the party didn't get of the vote they had enough like you know but it was clear they will get it so we wanted to do some provocation so some of us said let's risk it everything let's publish a special issue claiming these elections were a fraud they were not really free elections and we protested we said fuck it I mean everyone knows this are we telling people and then one of us not me I admit it came to a wonderful idea communists claim these are free elections what if we just treat them like that so we published a special issue of our journal on the evening of elections claiming latest result it looks as if communists will still remain in power you know as if this was a question the reaction was furious we were immediately called to central committee shouted at us and I had great sympathies for the small apparatchik who terrorized us we were not really frightened nothing else happened he told us boys don't fuck with us don't do that and then we just said but what did we do wrong you claim these are free elections and we just treat he said don't fuck with me you know very well what I mean and we ask him but what do you mean it was a tragedy you know he would have to explicitly state the obscene secret he wasn't able to do it another ritual like this I have I claim that when and I do it all the time as my students may have noticed when you talk dirty swear and so on it's psychologically absolutely not done in such a way that how could I put it that you know you talk in a polite way then when you get crazy your spontaneity explodes you swear no at least with me I think precisely when you apparently spontaneously exploit you follow formulas it's the most formulaic part and I have a wonderful ritual with my friend I love it to get rid of this obscene urge to be nasty when we meet we first go through minutes ritual of dirty talk I will dig out your mother out of her grave and screw her into her ass all dirty and then after minutes of this we said to ourselves okay now we did our duty towards obscenities we are rid of it now we can talk in a normal kind way you know I like this reversal how the very obscene excess we experience as the most automatic learned part we have to get rid of that that we can be spontaneous kind people and so on and so on so what I want to say here is that and now I want to give you two tragic examples much more serious of this of how precisely the transgression is the most codified way maybe already know the story but it's really tragic I double checked it two cities in North American continent first it is Ciudad Juárez you know just south of El Paso it's a one of the world capitals of this fast collecting they get raw materials or elements from some Chinese Gulags I don't know where and then they just put together the products ship them on the American market so they need a lot of unskilled labor so you have there thousands of young single women working there this of course is an affront to male chauvinists so you get there something which is really terrifying you get a couple of dozen cases every year ritualized brutal murders you get a girl is kidnapped and I mean even I with all my tasteless jokes I reach a limit here to tell you she is first gang raped by some guys then she is slowly killed first with scissors they cut off her breasts it's really disgusting but you know what's crucial here and that's the tragedy police is always ready to emphasize the brutality what police tries police which is corrupted there what it tries to obliterate is precisely as it were the cultural dimension that this is not a spontaneous orgy it's a precisely ritualized procedure what and what the police you know what's so tragic is that the only person punished no perpetrators were punished although everybody knows who they are the only person punished was one mother of a girl who inquired into it too much but police tries to dismiss each case as oh probably it was a dysfunctional family father raped her alcoholic and so on so this is what I find you see it's not we are on the surface civilized and then some barbarism explodes no barbarism is structured through culture totally now you will tell me okay I am a white racist you know haha making fun of poor Mexicans ah-ha let's go to the other side Canada Vancouver the most civilized city you know how Canadians like to boast to boast we are like United States dynamic but with European civilization and so on friends told me there that near Vancouver you have a big reservation of natives and it's a regular sport of young guys from Vancouver to drive there kidnap a Native American Indian whatever you call it I prefer Indian for precise reasons girl again gang raped killed and just dropped there not one of them was arrested because although it's a ritual police systematically treats it as individual family oh probably the her her family they were drunk addict drug addicts whatever again what I find interesting is that what is systematically ignored is not the brutality of the crime but the obscene of course cultural dimension of the crime and incidentally if you want to be a real leftist many things can be said here about Canada the nice because you know Canadians also like to boast how for example towards Indians they were much more human than Americans fuck it I learned that even today to from almost half of the Native American families children are taken and put into boarding schools like the blah blah blah they don't have proper education in the family family is dysfunctional and now what I'm giving you is not some crazy lunatic leftist data these are official data of an inquiry from Canadian parliament you know in these boarding schools and we are talking about boys and girls from to years you know what is sexual exploitation rate how many of them are raped percent and we are talking about today you know it's nice to talk oh this was somewhere in the dark 40s 50s no today and I think that this is the first task of a radical criticism to see how all this particular you know our culture is not only the official Christian whatever values all these obscene phenomena are part of our culture in the same way that pedophilia is part of Catholic identity and so on and here I will give you the last example then I do some concluding remarks on theory in Turkey it's a nice example of how this obscene supplement is part of no you know that the big hero of Turkey although now his glory is undermined is Kemal Pasha Atatürk you know the founder of modern Turkey okay his official image was ascetic like Stalin you know ascetic leader works hours per day for his country and so on and so on then there was a myth of him that in reality he is a super macho seducer that he screwed the wives of all his ministers and so on but now okay maybe I'll be arrested when I go next time to Turkey but my friends from Turkey told me this that all historians know that this is not true that in reality at least from mid 1920s Atatürk was totally impotent and that the most he was able to do was play some soft games of masturbation with small boys and so on so there was then that's what I like an extremely obscene thing that happened still in Atatürk's time after his death but when Atatürk was still totally sacred at some point an official Kemalist politician addressed a crowd claiming don't listen to those rumors that our father Atatürk is screwing women around he works night and day for the country and so on and then a member of the opposition said yeah yeah we believe you it's absolutely not true that he is seducing women and so on he disappeared the next day you know why because again you know the official image was not only Atatürk works night and day but was precisely this rumor of his seductive powers and this rumor was clearly part of same ideology it didn't fit and in most countries it's like this like I remember in ex-Yugoslavia you have President Tito blah blah and then there were all these rumors that you know because Tito liked to invite movie stars Elizabeth Taylor Sophia Loren to Brijuni island no the rumor was did he fuck Elizabeth Taylor while Richard Burton was shooting a movie in Bosnia and so on but this was all part of official ideology this dark underside okay but let me stop with this and go back to my now concluding part just the problem I want to focus how does this third element chimney sweep function remember we have the official binary opposition officer maid in this case masculine feminine and then the third element but this third element this is the crucial point is not something that undermines binary logic in the sense of it cannot be fixed it's beyond no I claim he is precisely difference as such and that's the most radical dialectical thesis you have two differentiated terms and then you have difference as such the paradox is very nice here it's that in a way difference precedes the terms which are differentiated now you will think this is a speculative obscurity let me give you a simple example you know if you are old enough you may remember times when there still was something like left and right in politics you know but are you aware of the paradox of it there is no neutral conceptual field from which you can divide you can say leftists claim this every theory about where is the difference between left and right is already a leftist or a rightist theory you know because if you ask a right-winger what is the difference between left and right you will get a totally different answer than if you ask a left-winger a left-winger would have said probably something like this there is a radical antagonism in a society and the right-wingers proposing their proto-fascist organic image are trying to obfuscate the antagonism the right-winger would have said like a fascist right-winger society is an organic whole and we have on the margin Jews foreigners whoever who disturb it you know but you see the paradox so we have a difference a strong antagonistic opposition but each of the two poles of opposition already mystifies the difference as such you cannot formulate difference in a neutral way and this is antagonism this is why you need an additional element it's so clear for example in fascism where the additional element is a Jew a Jew may appear to obliterate difference because in anti-semitic I'm talking of course not now of real Jews but of the role of a Jew in anti-semitic mythology a Jew already if you analyze the prejudices what's the anti-semitic image of the Jew it's precisely the combination of opposites no Jews are at the same time dirty you know they don't wash they fornicate too much and too intellectual like even some of my American friends I didn't know they are secretly anti-semites how can you compete with these Jews we go out have a beer they study all the time and so on it's wonderful how the Jews bring you know on the one hand they are too intellectual they study all the time financially speculate work too hard on the other hand they don't wash they are dirty they seduce our women and so on the Jew is as it's clear in fascism the dream of fascism is pure binary opposition organic community of the leader and his followers and then the Jew from outside introduces antagonism but you see what this means Jew is difference antagonistic difference as such and the problem is precisely today more than ever what is this antagonism how to define it it's clear that all designations all left from somewhere 60s tries to formulate a new antagonism and I don't think they find a way you know you have like Toni Negri attempt multitude or precarious intellectual workers and so on and so on so what's the problem here I will just to conclude because yes exactly one hour I will give you my last example from a book that I really advise you to read it's a historical book Paul fuck it I don't know how to pronounce it F-U-S-S-E-L-L Fussell or how Fussell okay he wrote this guy a book called The Great War and Modern Memory it's an excellent book about the ideological impact of the First World War of how it was such a shock that the only way to symbolize it was to resuscitate all even medieval mythology like this is where T.S. Eliot's Waste Land comes the way the the battlefield all those waste area between the front trenches and so on was in England systematically equated to knights of the round table search for grail wasteland and so on and so on and what I like in this is the myth paranoiac myth that this war gave birth to for example one of my favorite myths is a guy remember his name called Reginald Grant he wrote a book SOS he was a kind of a pro-British Stalinist his idea was why because you know the northern part of the front in Belgium was was held by British army no against the Germans and British didn't do too well especially German artillery was very accurate in hitting British positions as a good Stalinist he said it's impossible Germans couldn't be better so there must be traitors here and they immediately located traitors these were Belgian farmers who were pro-German but now comes it's wonderful he Reginald this guy in his book which was a big best seller gives three procedures alleged of course it's fantasy of how Belgians just farmers just behind the front line and the front lines it was really a crazy war the front lines were so fixed you know that during World War I most of the years when British publishers printed maps of Europe they simply introduced into the map the front line without worrying that it would move you know okay the idea was this one that Belgian farmers do it in three ways one is crazier than the others the one is that when women hang their laundry it's all codified you know two white shirts one black shirt means two two degrees to the right there is an English artillery whatever the second one is it's even better that if you look at church towers clock the what do you call it watch hands are are are are showing wrong time which gives a codified message you know like if it's five past noon but it says ten past noon it means five is difference five kilometers to the right there is an English battery and my favorite third one if you know Hitchcock Foreign Correspondent the most famous scene is the guy pursuing a Nazi traitor comes to a countryside and then everything is idyllic windmills and then a guy says do you see something strange that windmill is turning in the wrong direction and this Hitchcock took it from here this was one myth that Belgian farmers signal with the wrong direction but these are jokes but then there is one great I am tempted to say almost communist-Leninist legend which probably it wasn't true but it's a beautiful legend and it happened on both sides of the front it was an absolute myth you know it was like this you had trenches second third and in between there was usually I don't know from meters to two miles crazy totally destroyed land with old trenches old shafts underground caves and so on the myth was that down there people live deserters from all sides half-crazy deserters who live in brotherhood they sing crazy songs they only come out after a battle to steal food and clothes from dead soldiers and it was such an emancipatory dream that like and the idea was then that in the night they shout like crazy you can hear them there is absolutely no proof that this existed but it's a beautiful emancipatory dream I claim because they were the true Leninists screw war it's not our conflict brotherhood and so on this is how you fight ideology what I want to say is that something like this we need today they were if you want the chimney sweeps you know the idiots were fighting the official duality they were the chimney sweeps and they stand for the true difference they were the one who really made difference and that's what we need today with all the struggles that we are confronted with that media tells us like for example fundamentalists versus western liberals where things are getting crazy I think the first ABC of political analysis today is that of course I'm against fundamentalists but the whole point is the way global capitalism generates fundamentalism these are two sides of the same coin which is why such strange things are happening like now you know like the arch enemy of United States is supposed to be Iran did you read newspapers what is happening these days Iran and United States are coordinating military acts to fight the Sunni insurgency in Iraq so what I'm saying is that the big problem today is to define a difference which really matters you know to find the chimney sweeps who embody the real difference otherwise if we accept the official media struggle of permissivity multiculturalism versus fundamentalism and so on and so on we are lost and this is here that the two aspects antagonism difference classification and object a come together this excessive look don't the big battle is between whatever male-female or classes or whatever no look for the chimney sweep or when you have a war look for the madmen in the middle who live beneath well fuck it I'm finished thanks very much