On Apocalyptic Times
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-11-24 · 1:22:49 · 11,339 words
technology-ai-cyberspacehegel-dialecticsideologyreligion-theologypsychoanalysisfascism-populismliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismecology-climategeopolitics-warsubjectivityconsciousness-mindphilosophy-general
Žižek surveys three forms of contemporary apocalyptism, techno-digital, New Age, and Christian fundamentalist, and argues that the last is paradoxically closest to a genuine emancipatory logic. He examines synthetic biology (Craig Venter), brain-computer interfaces, gestural computing (Pranav Mistry's 'Sixth Sense'), and transhumanism (Nick Bostrom), critiquing each for failing to grasp how biogenetic enhancement dissolves the autonomous subject it presupposes. The talk then turns to Hegel to argue that Jung's 'compensation' model is pseudo-Hegelian: true dialectics reveals asymmetric, determining oppositions (liberalism generates fundamentalism as its symptom) rather than symmetrical reconciliations. Žižek concludes that the post-human nightmare, like fundamentalism, is a symptom of what we currently take to be human, and that the authentic left, not a synthesis, is the only real alternative.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 25
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “Christian fundamentalist apocalyptism”
The strictly biblical version that searches current events for signs of the final battle between Christ and Antichrist; Žižek argues it is the most dangerous yet paradoxically closest to a genuine millenarian emancipatory logic.
The strand of apocalyptism, typified by Ray Kurzweil, that remains within scientific naturalism and identifies in evolutionary terms the contours of humanity's transmutation into post-humans.
The spiritualist variant of apocalyptism that reinterprets post-human transmutation as a shift from mechanistic dualism to holistic cosmic awareness.
The structure Žižek identifies in Christian fundamentalist apocalyptism that, despite its absurd content, contains a genuine anticipation of radical rupture, more so than techno-digital or New Age variants.
as “third spirit of capitalism”
Žižek's label for postmodern humanitarian capitalism: non-hierarchical, anti-institutional, creativity-driven, with ethical-humanitarian concerns, exemplified by Craig Venter.
as “trillion-dollar organisms”
Venter's phrase, taken up critically by Žižek, for patented synthetic microbes designed to produce biofuels and industrial chemicals, emblematic of the capitalist colonization of synthetic biology.
Following Derrida, our humanity was always-already supplemented by artificial prostheses; the danger of invisibly miniaturised implants is that those who control the prosthesis control us at the heart of self-experience.
A person who does not yet have a disease but carries a genetic predisposition to it; Žižek invokes the buzzword to illustrate the anxiety produced by advanced biogenetic knowledge.
as “private use of reason / public use of reason”
Kant's distinction invoked by Žižek to criticise China's biogenetic programme: state and capital (private uses of reason) have joined hands at the expense of free democratic debate (public use of reason).
The claim that between every face-to-face encounter there is now an interface; Žižek suggests the near future will reverse this, with computers communicating directly and presenting humans only with the results.
Marx's formula, relations between things (computers) replacing relations between persons, applied by Žižek to describe digital network self-organisation.
as “big Other”
The thick symbolic texture of knowledge, expectations, and prejudices that continuously fills in the gaps in our perception; here illustrated by how Sixth Sense externalises and makes visible what the big Other already does.
Sixth Sense imitates and materialises the ideological mechanism of misrecognition that already overdetermines everyday perception, thereby staging ideology rather than transcending it.
The process by which ideological projections (prejudices, expectations) are perceived as immediate properties of objects; Žižek uses Sixth Sense as its material illustration.
Žižek's self-deprecating formulation: 'I hate all racism', used to illustrate that ideological projections are only resistible when made visible rather than felt as immediate perception.
Žižek's formulation for the contemporary structure of pleasure: even real sexual encounter has the structure of masturbation, in which the other is merely a virtual supplement rather than a genuine other.
as “subject of enunciation / subject of the enunciated”
The Lacanian distinction between the speaking subject and the subject spoken about; Žižek uses it to expose how transhumanists presuppose a persistent autonomous subject (enunciation) even as they propose to manipulate the biological object (enunciated).
The point at which techno-digital apocalyptism passes over into New Age spiritualism, claiming that neurological implants will allow direct mind-over-matter interaction with reality.
as “the western exception”
The historical rupture of secular modernity, the shift from organic whole to abstract universality, which Žižek argues must be affirmed rather than lamented as a loss.
as “compensation theory of the unconscious”
Jung's idea that the unconscious accumulates what the ego excludes, generating neurotic symptoms as attempts at re-balance; Žižek treats it as a pseudo-Hegelian model that mistakes symmetrical reconciliation for true dialectics.
as “pseudo-Hegelian”
Žižek's label for Jungian compensation theory, which mimics Hegelian reconciliation but smuggles in a symmetrical polarity and a transcendent synthesis that genuine Hegel never endorses.
In any dialectical opposition, the one pole that generates its opposite as its own shadow; for Žižek, liberalism is the determining element that produces fundamentalism.
as “symptom (of liberalism)”
Fundamentalism, for Žižek, is the symptomatic return of what global capitalist liberalism excludes and disavows, the social antagonism that liberalism cannot resolve.
as “Aufhebung / sublation”
Hegel's move of preserving-cancelling-elevating; Žižek invokes it to argue that saving what is worth saving in liberalism requires going beyond liberalism.
as “failed revolution thesis”
Walter Benjamin's claim, endorsed by Žižek, that every fascism is the sign of a failed revolution; applied to islamofascism, meaning the authentic left's failure created the space for it.
Stories he reaches for 4
Žižek recalls that 30-40 years ago Afghanistan was the most secular and tolerant Muslim country in the region, with a strong local communist party. Its fundamentalism is the direct result of Soviet intervention, US support for the opposition, and its forced incorporation into global capitalist politics.
“the fundamentalization of afghanistan is the result of the very process by means of which afghanistan was caught into global capitalist politics”
Kansas, once the most radical anti-slavery and populist-left US state (home of John Brown), is now the Bible Belt fundamentalist heartland. Žižek uses this transformation as evidence that American religious fundamentalism is produced by the disintegration of left alternatives under liberal capitalism.
“what happened then in 30, 40 years, the very bedrock of progressive leftist populism turned into...”
Žižek cites Hegel's reading of Antigone, Antigone neglects the state (Creon's domain), Creon neglects private divinities, each should recognise in the other their own oppressed truth, as an example of the 'young Hegel' model of reconciliation that mature Hegelian dialectics actually transcends.
“antigone neglects the public aspect, the state, creon neglects this private divinities... each should recognize in the other the oppressed truth”
Žižek invokes Benjamin's thesis to argue that all contemporary fundamentalisms, including islamofascism, exist because the radical left failed to occupy the space; they are not autonomous phenomena but symptoms of left defeat.
“every fascism is the sign and indication of a failed revolution... they are there because we were not there”
Works invoked 10
Implicitly drawn on throughout for Hegel's dialectics; the Jena fragments on love and reconciliation are cited as expressing the young-Hegel model.
Antigone play
Sophocles' play via Hegel's reading used to illustrate the young-Hegel model of mutual recognition between opposing one-sided positions.
The Da Vinci Code book
Dan Brown novel; in the film version (with Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer) the couple do not consummate the relationship, part of Žižek's analysis of de-eroticisation.
Angels and Demons book
Earlier Dan Brown novel where the couple still briefly consummated the relationship; cited to trace the progressive de-eroticisation across the Brown series.
Implied reference: co-authored book with John Milbank where Žižek called Milbank's communitarianism 'soft fascism'.
The Lost Symbol book
Dan Brown novel dismissed as badly written ('the worst novel of all times') but treated as an ideological symptom of New Age mystification of brain science, techgnosis, and the desire for thought to directly influence reality.
Thomas Frank's book on Kansas cited to support the claim that American religious fundamentalism is produced by the erosion of left alternatives under liberal capitalism.
Blade Runner film
Used as a cultural reference point for dystopian scenarios of slave subclasses; Venter dismisses it, but Žižek implies the social demand (revealed by letters Venter receives) validates its concerns.
Eagle Eye film
2008 film by DJ Caruso used to explore the idea of a rational autonomous AI (ARIIA) that protects the people against their own government; Žižek finds it ideologically inconsistent for suddenly villainising the computer.
Pranav Mistry's wearable gestural interface used as the central technological case study for ideology-at-work-in-technology and the materialisation of the big Other's projections.
People invoked 29
Thomas Frank positive
Author of the book on Kansas (What's the Matter with Kansas?); cited to support Žižek's argument that American fundamentalism is produced by the disintegration of left alternatives.
Co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association; mentioned alongside Bostrom without detailed analysis.
Parmenides positive
Identified (following Badiou) as the point of passage from mythos to logos, still one foot in myth (addressing the goddess) while inaugurating conceptual thinking.
Jacques Derrida positive
Invoked for the motif that our humanity was always-already supplemented by artificial prostheses; Žižek uses this to set up the danger of invisible implants that control self-experience.
Antigone positive
Hegel's reading of Antigone is cited as a classic expression of the young-Hegel model of mutual recognition, each side should recognise in the other their own oppressed truth, which mature dialectics transcends.
Žižek explicitly rejects supporting Saddam as 'anti-US hero' but concedes his regime was relatively secular, making the post-invasion Islamisation of Iraq even more damning for US policy.
Arnold Schoenberg positive
Cited for the observation that Nazi racism is a miserable imitation of Jewish chosen-ness, used to set up the radical asymmetry argument against Jungian mirroring.
Mentioned in passing: new brain-scan wheelchairs make even Hawking's finger-interface redundant, thought alone suffices.
John Brown positive
Cited as evidence that Kansas was once the most radical anti-slavery state in the US, bolstering Žižek's claim that American fundamentalism is a produced reversal, not a primordial condition.
Inventor of the Sixth Sense wearable gestural interface at MIT Media Lab; his own emphasis on the 'physical' dimension of the interface is used as the entry point for Žižek's ideological analysis.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Main representative of techno-digital apocalyptism; Žižek uses him as illustration of a worldview that stays within scientific naturalism while naively imagining humans and cyborgs will be 'all mixed up' without political consequence.
Craig Venter negative
Paradigm case of the 'third spirit of capitalism', postmodern humanitarian capitalist; his trillion-dollar organism dream is used to illustrate capital colonising the building blocks of life outside democratic control.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for identifying Parmenides as the point of passage from mythos to logos in the history of Greek philosophy.
John Milbank negative
Žižek's co-author; described as a personal friend ('my friend') but his communitarian personalism is labelled 'soft fascism', the dream of a proper synthesis between individual and community that Žižek rejects.
Used as the beneficiary of US foreign policy blunders in Iraq, the main result of the invasion was to deliver Iraq's Shia south to Iranian influence.
Bruno Latour negative
Cited as representing the anti-modernist position that 'we were never really modern'; Žižek argues against this and insists on fidelity to the universalist secular project.
David Chalmers negative
His view that psychic awareness is a fifth elementary natural force is labelled 'vulgar materialism' and linked to Dan Brown's spiritualist mystification in The Lost Symbol.
Carl Jung negative
His compensation theory is labelled pseudo-Hegelian; his brief support of the Nazis is cited as practical evidence of the theory's political failure.
Nick Bostrom negative
Co-founder of World Transhumanist Association; Žižek critiques him for presupposing the persistence of an autonomous choosing subject even as he proposes to alter human nature.
Darian Leader positive
Described as 'my friend'; his observation about the de-eroticization of Dan Brown's couples is paraphrased approvingly.
Mentioned as the other paradigm of the third spirit of capitalism, contrasted with Craig Venter.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Quoted ('the true gold they should never have found elsewhere') to ironically illustrate that applying Jung's logic symmetrically to the Nazi-Jew relation would be obscene.
Walter Benjamin positive
His thesis that every fascism signals a failed revolution is endorsed by Žižek and applied to islamofascism.
Dan Brown negative
Žižek reads his novels (The Lost Symbol especially) as ideological symptoms, of New Age mystification of science, of the progressive disappearance of genuine sexual encounter, and of the US desire to manufacture historical depth.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Paradoxically, by preferring modernity to remain 'unfinished', Habermas himself abstains from fully accomplishing modernity's project, used to illustrate contradictions within liberal modernity.
Plato positive
Cited as asserting abstract notional thinking against thought embedded in a concrete life-world, part of Žižek's narrative of the progressive ruptures constituting western modernity.
Sigmund Freud positive
Praised as a true Hegelian materialist in contrast to Jung: for Freud, reality is contingent and meaning is opportunistic/parasitic upon it rather than spiritually steered.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The main theoretical resource for the second part of the talk; Žižek mobilises Hegel against Jung's pseudo-synthesis and against New Age holism, arguing that genuine Hegelian dialectics requires identifying the asymmetric determining element.
Immanuel Kant positive
His distinction between private and public uses of reason is invoked to critique China's biogenetic programme as state + capital (private) crowding out democratic debate (public).
What it argues
three forms of contemporary apocalyptismsynthetic biology and the creation of artificial lifebrain-computer interfaces and mind controlthe dissolution of the autonomous subject by biogenetic enhancementJungian pseudo-Hegelian compensation theory vs. true dialecticsliberalism as the determining factor that generates fundamentalism as its symptomthe emancipatory left as the genuine third term beyond liberalism vs. fundamentalism
Dialectical moves 9
“The true miracle is not thought rejoining reality — the true miracle is the gap itself: how we can acquire distance from reality and think.”
Žižek inverts the New Age lament over lost organic unity: the rupture between thought and world is not a loss but the very condition of freedom and critical thought.
“Sixth Sense does not break with everyday experience — it rather openly stages what was always already the case.”
The technology does not introduce ideology into perception; it externalises and makes visible the ideological overdetermination that was already operative.
“The jungian dialectic of recognition holds for only one side — it would be obscene to apply the same operation in the reverse direction.”
True Hegelian dialectics is asymmetric: we can say the Nazis should recognise in the Jew their own disavowed antagonism, but we cannot symmetrically say the Jew should see the Nazi as his own excluded truth.
“Fundamentalism is the symptom of liberalism, not vice versa — the determining factor is liberalism.”
Far from being an external, pre-modern threat, fundamentalism is produced by the global capitalist liberal order itself as its own pathological supplement.
“In order to save what is worth saving in liberalism, we will have to go a step further, beyond liberalism.”
Aufhebung requires negating liberalism in order to preserve its genuine achievements, mere defence of liberal values reproduces the conditions that generate their opposite.
“Congo is a nightmare not because it is excluded from globalization — it is the very mode of its inclusion.”
The standard liberal diagnosis (failed states need more globalization) is inverted: underdevelopment and fragmentation are the form that global market inclusion takes in Congo.
“If we accept the term islamofascism, we should also say it holds: they are there because we were not there — because the left failed.”
Islamofascism is not a cause but an effect, the space evacuated by the failure of the radical left.
“Transhumanists effectively remain too humanist — with all their warning about the post-human, they still presuppose the autonomous individual will somehow survive the passage.”
The people most committed to radical post-human transformation cannot think the dissolution of the very subject (the autonomous chooser) that their project would bring about.
“Between every face-to-face there is now an interface — but maybe the time is approaching when we will have to turn around this standard complaint.”
Žižek inverses the standard lament about digital mediation: with computers communicating directly and humans receiving only results, the interface may supplant rather than merely mediate the face-to-face.
Claims 18
asserts
Of the three contemporary apocalyptisms (techno-digital, New Age, Christian fundamentalist), Christian fundamentalism is the most ridiculous and most dangerous in content but paradoxically closest to a genuine millenarian emancipatory logic.Christian fundamentalist apocalyptism
asserts
Artificial life will genuinely be created from scratch — not by grafting existing genomes but by synthesising entirely new life at the zero level — within the foreseeable future.synthetic biology / Craig Venter
asserts
When brain-computer interfaces go in both directions (mind controlling machines and machines controlling minds), the prospect of full psychic control by states and militaries becomes real.brain-computer interfaces and mind control
asserts
Sixth Sense does not represent a radical break with everyday experience but rather openly stages what was always already the case: the big Other fills in and projects ideological content onto perceived reality.Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense / ideology in technology
asserts
Transhumanists remain too humanist because they presuppose that an autonomous subject will still be present to decide how to alter its own nature, thereby ignoring that the very capacity for autonomous decision can itself be biogenetically manipulated.transhumanism / Nick Bostrom
rejects
The New Age desire to overcome the gap between thought and reality and to reunify with nature misidentifies as a tragic loss what is actually the very condition of human freedom and critical thinking.New Age holism / techgnosis
asserts
Emancipatory politics must remain faithful to the universalist secular project of modernity and must fearlessly celebrate what anti-modernists present as catastrophic loss.secular modernity / the western exception
rejects
Jung's compensation theory is pseudo-Hegelian: it mistakes symmetrical reconciliation and a transcendent synthesis for true Hegelian dialectics, which requires identifying the asymmetric determining element.Jungian compensation theory
asserts
In the opposition between Nazism and Jewishness, the Jungian move of 'recognise in the other your own excluded truth' holds only for the Nazis (who should recognise social antagonism in the figure of the Jew) but is obscene and inapplicable for the reverse direction.radical asymmetry in dialectical oppositions
asserts
In the opposition between liberal individualism and communitarian/religious fundamentalism, liberalism is the determining element that generates fundamentalism as its own symptom.liberalism and fundamentalism
asserts
Afghanistan's fundamentalism is not a primordial condition but the direct product of its incorporation into global capitalist politics (Soviet intervention, US backing of the Mujahideen).Afghanistan / globalization and fundamentalism
rejects
Congo's nightmare is not a result of insufficient globalization but is the very mode of its inclusion in the global market.Congo / globalization brings prosperity
asserts
Every fascism is the sign of a failed revolution; therefore islamofascism exists because the left failed, not because of some primordial religious irrationalism.islamofascism / the left's failure
reframes
The true alternative is not liberalism versus fundamentalism but the entirety of that field versus the authentic radical left.the political alternative to liberalism vs. fundamentalism
asserts
The post-human nightmare (will we be robots?) is to our current notion of humanity what fundamentalism is to liberalism: its symptomatic product.post-humanism / technology and the human
asserts
Habermas, despite being modernity's champion, in preferring modernity to remain an unfinished project actually sets a limit on the unfolding of modernity's own potentials.Jürgen Habermas / modernity
asserts
The major impact of the miniaturisation of prosthetic implants is that those who technologically control the prosthesis control us at the very heart of our self-experience.prosthetics / biogenetic control
asserts
The main practical effect of China's unrestricted biogenetic programme will be to give China's commercial and scientific facilities a decisive advantage over Western competitors hobbled by legal prohibitions.China / biogenetics and global competition
Quotes 15
“the true miracle is not thought rejoining reality. the true miracle is the gap itself. how we can acquire distance from reality and think. that's the most precious thing.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom as the gap between thought and reality
“even if you do something by misfortune with the real other, it has the structure of a masturbation with a real partner.”Slavoj Žižek · virtual sexuality / fear of the neighbour
“transhumanists effectively remain too humanist.”Slavoj Žižek · transhumanism's self-defeating humanism
“the determining factor is liberalism, which means the only way to enact the change is to change... it. today's fundamentalism is the symptom of liberalism, not vice versa.”Slavoj Žižek · liberalism generates fundamentalism
“the true alternative is not liberalism versus fundamentalism. the true alternative is this entire field versus the authentic left.”Slavoj Žižek · the radical third term beyond the liberal-fundamentalist binary
“they are there because we were not there. because the left failed.”Slavoj Žižek · islamofascism as symptom of left failure
“if it goes outside, it goes also inside.”Slavoj Žižek · brain-computer interface as two-way control
“sixth sense presents us with another case of ideology at work in technology. sixth sense imitates and materializes the ideological mechanism of misrecognition which overdetermines our everyday perceptions.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology materialised in Sixth Sense technology
“between every face to face there is an interface.”Slavoj Žižek · digital mediation of human relations
“to save what is worth saving in liberalism, we will have to go a step further, beyond liberalism.”Slavoj Žižek · Aufhebung of liberalism
“in order precisely to save what is worth saving in liberalism — this is the hegelian aufhebung — to save it, we will have to go beyond liberalism.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectical sublation of liberalism
“both branches of what kant called the private use of reason, state and capital, joined hands at the expense of the absent public use of reason.”Slavoj Žižek · China's biogenetics: state + capital vs. public reason
“is ariia not simply and truly a rational agent? is the computer not acting in the interest of the people of the united states?”Slavoj Žižek · rational agency of autonomous AI / Eagle Eye
“those who technologically control the prosthesis control us in the very heart of our self-experience.”Slavoj Žižek · prosthetic control and self-experience
“the problem is not, my god, we lost immediate contact with reality. the problem is that we experience this as a problem. we should celebrate it.”Slavoj Žižek · affirming the loss of organic unity
Transcript 7 turns
Slavoj Žižek
first, i really, really, this time it's not a formality, i don't want to disappoint you because i'm a little bit tired of this standard form of mixing some latest jokes against liberalism and so on. so what i will do, i will keep to the title, i just warn you. and i will do something... maybe even a little bit boring first i want to go in detail for the first two thirds through some. possible consequences and also at a more elementary level description almost journalistic on what goes on what are the prospects in all this techno digital new development and then i want to propose at the end some hegelian models which i think allow us at least to understand what is going on so it will almost read more like kind of a reader's digest or whatever report on it. there are, as far as i can say, three at least three different versions. of apocalyptism today. christian fundamentalist, new age and techno-digital so-called post-human apocalyptism, although they all share the basic notion that humanity is approaching a zero point of radical transmutation. their respective ontologies differ radically. the techno-digital apocalyptism, whose main representative is maybe ray kurzweil, remains within the confines of scientific naturalism and identifies at the level of the evolution of human species, the contours of its transmutation into post-humans. the new age apocalyptism gives to this transmutation a spiritualist twist, interpreting it as the shift from one to another mode of cosmic awareness, usually from the modern dualist, mechanistic stance to the stance of holistic immersion, whatever. and finally, christian ap in strict biblical terms. they search for and find in contemporary world signs that the final battle between christ and antichrist is near, that things are approaching a critical turn. although i claim this last version is considered and ich the most ridiculous and also the most dangerous as to its content, i think it's the one maybe closest to the millenarist radical emancipatory logic. so let me first take a look at the technigital apician. if there is even more than bill gates, a scientist-capital who perfectly exemplifies the so-called third spirit of capitalism, this postmodern humanitarian, whatever capitalism. with its non-hierarchic and anti-institutional creativity humanitarian ethical concerns and so on it is craig venter with his idea of dna-controlled production. venter's field is synthetic biology, a life which is forged not by darwinian evolution, but simply created directly by human intelligence. wenter's first breakthrough was to develop so-called shotgun sequencing, a method for analyzing the human genome faster and more cheaply than ever before. he published, as you probably know, his own genome the first time any individual person's dna had been sequenced. incidentally, it revealed that wenter is at risk of alzheimer's, diabetes and hereditary eye disease. then he announced his next great project, to build an entirely synthetic organism which could be used to save the world from global warming. in january 2008. wenter constructed the world's first completely synthetic genome of a living organism. using laboratory chemicals, he recreated an almost exact copy of the genetic material found inside a tiny bacterium. this largest man-made dna structure is 582,970 base pairs in length. it was pieced together from far smaller but still massive strands of dna by utilizing the transcription power of yeast and is modeled on the genome of a really existing bacterium known as mycoplasma genitalium. sounds pornographic but the lab-made genome has not so far resulted in a living microbe that functions or replicates but venter claims it is just a matter of time before they figure out how to boot it up by inserting this synthetic dna into the shell of another bacterium this success opens up the way for creating new types of microorganisms which could be used in numerous ways as green fuels to replace oil and coal digest toxic waste, or absorb green house gases and so on and so on. venter's dream is effectively to create the first what he calls trillion-dollar organisms. patented bugs that could excrete biofuels, generate clean energy in the form of hydrogen and even produce tailor-made foods. a quote from venter's selfotion. imagine the end of fossil fuels, a cessation of ecologically devastating drilling operations, deflation of the political and economic power of neo-conservative oil barons, and affordable low-emission transportation, heating and electricity. the impact of this technology is profound and it doesn't stop there. by discovering the details of biochemical and metabolic pathways, we can more closely mimic their elegance and efficiency to solve problems that plague industrial civilization. maybe we'll engineer a primitive self-sustaining bio-robot that feeds on coa and excretes o2. perhaps we could remove mercury from our water supplies. the limitations are not known but the possibilities are awe-inspiring of quote there are, as venter admits, also more sinister possibilities. it will also be possible to synthesize viruses like ebola or to build new pathogens. but the problem is deeper, i think. such extreme genetic engineering will bring about substantially different organisms. we will find ourselves in a new terrain full of unknowns. the problem is our limited understanding of how dna works. even if we can put together a sequence of synthetic dna, we cannot predict how this sequence will actually perform, how its components will interact. that is to say, dna communicates with the cell by prompting it to make proteins, and we are far from understanding the relationship between a given dna sequence, the proteins it generates and the final properties of an organism. these dangers are strengthened by the absence of any public control over what goes on in this domain. outside any democratic oversight profiteering industrialists are tinkering with the building blocks of life. venter tried to allay the fears of an emerging blade runner society quote again. the movie blade runner has an underlying assumption that i just don't relate to, that people want a slave class. as i imagine the potential of engineering the human genome, i think, wouldn't it be nice if we could have 10 times the cognitive capabilities we do have? but people ask me whether i could engineer a stupid person to work as a servant. i've gotten letters from guys in prison asking me to engineer women they could keep in their. cell i don't see us as a society doing that venter may not see it but the requests he is bombarded with certainly prove that there is a social demand for the creation of a new serving subclass. kurzweil offered a different rebuttal of these fears. quote, the scenario of humans hunting cyborgs doesn't wash because those entities won't be separate. today, we treat parkinson's with a pea-sized brain implant. increase that device's capability by a billion and decrease its size by 100,000 and you get some idea of what will be feasible in 25 years. it won't be, okay, cyborgs on the left, humans on the right, the two will be all mixed up. end. well this is in principle true. en w can here. very endlessly jacques derrida's motif on how our humanity always already was supplemented by artificial prothesesesis. the problem is that with the decrease by 100000, the prosthesis is no longer experienced as such, but becomes invisible, part of our immediate organic self-experience, so that those who technologically control the pro control us in the very heart of our self-experience. the paradox is that insofar as the recreation of artificial life is the accomplishment of one of the strengths of modernity, it is jürgen habermas himself who abstains from accomplishing the project of modernity. habermas, as you probably know, prefers modernity to remain an unfinished project, setting a limit to the unfolding of its potentials. there are even more radical questions to be raised here. questions which concern the very limit of our desire and readiness to know. what will prospective parents do when they will be informed that their child will have alzheimer's dreams. the recent new buzzword, previvor, a person who does not have cancer but possesses a genetic predisposition to develop the disease, pre-survivor renders perfectly the anxiety of advanced knowledge. and the game. although thisar. still. mostly dreams. the first results are here. chinese scientists at the beijing genomic institute have completed the fourth human genome to be sequenced worldwide. they plan to use their genome database two. look, this is a quote from their brochure, this ominous formulation, to solve problems related to chinese-specific genetic diseases, end of quote, as well as to improve diagnosis, prediction and therapy. such phenomena are just the tip of the iceberg of a process going on in china of which not much is heard in the media preoccupied by the tibet troubles and so on. the expansion of biogenetic revolution. while in the west we are bothered with endless debates on ethical legal limits of biogenetic experiments and procedures, stem cells, yes or no, how far should should we be allowed to intervene into a genome only to prevent diseases or also to enhance the desired physical or even psychic properties in order to create a newborn who fits our desires? the chinese are simply doing it without any restraints and in a model example of the smooth cooperation between their state agencies, say their academy of sciences and private capital. in short, both branches of what kant called the private use of reason, state and capital, joined hands at the expense of the absent public use of reason, a free intellectual debate in the independent civil society on what is going on. how does all this infringe on individuals' status as ethical autonomous agents, not to mention the possible political misuses? things are proceeding fast on both fronts. not only towards the dystopian vision of the state controlling and steering the biogenetic mass of its citizens, and incidentally, according to some new documents sent to me by friends from china, this is simply already progressing, at least the plans. chinese, to cut a long story short, already have a plan how to, in the long term, to put it very simply, control biogenetically the entire population. tout. up to the point of. making it sure as much as we can influence this to make it sure with preborn biogenetic manipulations that you have the desired properties, not too much rebellious, cooperative spirit, whatever you want. so they are doing this at the same time they developed commercial clinics which target rich western foreigners who due to legal prohibitions will not be able to get this kind of treatment in their own countries. the problem is that in such a global situation legal prohibitions are becoming meaningless the main effect will be the commercial and scientific advantage of the chinese facilities to repeat a cliche shanghai has all the chances of becoming a dystopian megalopolis like the anonymous city in blatant runner. so i claim the next point is that maybe the time is approaching when we will have to turn around the standard complaint of how our relations to other people are more and more mediatized by digital. machinery. so that between every face to face there is an interface. maybe the prospect of the near future is the explosive development of the direct links between computers and other media so that they will communicate, make decisions and so on, presenting us just with the final result of their interaction. say, when we withdraw money from a cash machine, the machine informs our bank, whose computer sends the information to our pc via email and so on. already today, there are more connections between computers themselves than between computers and their human users. one could apply marx's formula here and state that relations between computers, things are replacing relations between persons. what if out of this interaction a self-organization emerges which can impose its own agenda? show that. human users no longer control and dominate the digital network but are themselves used by it eagle eye, a techno-thriller from 2008, directed by dj caruso, deals with this prospect in all its ambiguity. here is a brief outline of its plot. the movie starts with a standard accident in the war on terror. the us army has elite on a suspected terrorist in the middle east but as the man is a recluse getting a positive id proves difficult and the computer system which processes all military data recommends that the mission of killing him be aborted. the secretary of defense agrees, but the president of the united states orders the mission to be carried out anyway. this turns out into a political backlash when all those killed turn out to be civilians and retaliatory bombing are carried out by the arab so-called terrorists in response. now, the two heroes of the film are introduced to ordinary us citizens. jerry and rachel, they are led to an electronics store where a mysterious woman voice introduces herself to them. she is the voice of a top secret. supercomputer called autonomous reconnaissance intelligence integration analysis ariia which gathers intelligence from all over the world and can control virtually anything electronic. show. what the computer's message is that in light of the mistake made by the president at the beginning of the film, ordering to bomb that arab village, ariaya has decided that the because ariia is trained sorry programmed to protect the interests of the people of the united states. and the computer decides that the greatest threat at that point is the executive power. of the united states to the public good of american people true yeah that's my point so ariia wants to destroy the president's cabinet all of them leaving alive only the secretary of defense who then should become the next president because the secretary of defense you remember from the beginning was the only one would say no we cannot be sure will at the end everything turns out okay okay in the standard sense the heroes succeed in the last meaning in cutting off ariaya preventing the attentat the capitalist created rachel and jerry and so on and so on. but my problem is again the obvious one. we already stated it. is ariia not simply and truly a rational agent? is the computer not acting in the interest of the people of the united states? would it not effectively be the best for the united states if the computer's plan were to shakit. ariia is ready to sacrifice dozens of innocent bystanders in the capitol building. in the attentat it organizes. but so did the president when he okayed the killing of the dozens of arab civilians. and this is i think a nice sign of confusion and ideological inconsistency of the film. first it presents ariaya almost in a sympathetic way, you know, like the the president is obviously presented as the bad guy but then i thought they... would make something out of this line. but no, it turned then in a simple thriller where all of a sudden without even any ideological justification, the computer turns... into a bad, not even a bad guy, a bad woman even. even better. because it's incredible in what sense this standard mythical even scenario is revitalized, that you have decisive man warriors president confronting some kind of a gigantic squid-like primordial woman who controls all and so on and so on. where does all this lead? now i'm asking a very simple question. you got it. not yet any lachenian theory and so on. first, i claim something pretty serious is happening. i think we are not dealing here with science fiction. i asked some of my biologist friends and so on. they effectively think that, okay, maybe not in two years, but in ten years. on the other hand, many things happen faster than we think. effectively, and this is a true revolution i claim, artificial life will be created, but not in the sense of supercomputers who imitate life. also, not in the sense of grafting and using, that's the catch, building blocks from this kind of grafting, you take a piece of bacteria, take a piece of monkey, a piece of northern american and whatever, and create a monster, you know, some kind of a monkey. with american head and spider feet, whatever. no, you got my point. the point is to do not to cheat, not even to use the already existing genomes. it's's quite fantastic what it looks they will be able to do. to create really from the zero level new life. and again. the question is, how will this affect our everyday experience? uh. let me ask the question in more general terms because another thing happened. which i checked it on youtube and you can find it anywhere if you just go to youtube and put it sixth sense. and youtube whatever you will get it namely a guy called pranav mistry. member member of the fluid interface group at the mit media lab. presented to the public, the thing is known already for over half a year, but now it was made public. a wearable he calls it gestural interface. the hardware is minimal. a small web camera dangling from my neck, a pocket projector. also around my neck and a mirror all connected wirelessly to a smartphone in my pocket which is of course then connected with the. with internet. with the digital network. this forms a mobile wearable device. what does it do? it's quite fascinating the user starts the interaction by handling objects. or making gestures by his or her hand. the camera recognizes and tracks the user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer vision-based techniques. so again, let's say i have a bottle, this bottle of water, i just hold it, the computer, the camera identifies it, gives the data to the to the smartphone the smartphone of course transmits it to the web and then. so again the software program processes the video stream data, reading them as instructions this data and retrieves instantly the appropriate information, texts, images from the internet. and then... this data when they come back. are projected remember there was also a small projector. the information are projected on any physical surface available. you don't need a screen anymore and it's magically how it already works. it can be table, surface of a book, whatever. all surfaces, walls and physical objects around the subject can be used as interface. here are just to give you and this my god, it's quite fascinating if they didn't stage it all, i first thought. but then i called some friends who have friends and they told me, no, it's shocking, but it's real. here are some examples of how it already works. for example, in a bookstore, i pick up a book and hold it in front of me. immediately, i see projected onto the book's covers, reviews, ratings and so on and so on. it works immediately. you know, you just do it like this, a book and you get it. or if i want to check the time i only do this. like, you know. the. immediately. it's projected onto my left wrist. the projector displays a clock when i hold my fingers out at the arm's length. the system recognizes the gestures as framing a scene. for example, it's really this already again, it does. for example, nothing tasteless. don't be afraid. ivonne, you will get there. no, promise i will. i'm a good christian now. john milbank, my friend, that show nothing. let's say i do this. the camera recognizes this as framing i need a photo of you. and immediately i do this, it's my photo and then i just... utter a word and i can go around the city just doing this this in the evening i sit at home i don't even need a screen i made the shine all the photos appear i can enlarge them and so on and so on although i don't know what to do with your photos but that's another thing okay or even nicer for example, for example, on the way to the airport, i'm not sure how is the plane. this already works. you know, you just hold in front of you the boarding pass and immediately it's projected onto it. 20 minutes delay, no delay, flight cancelled, or whatever. or internet. there it's really magical. all you do is make this at shine. computer recognizes the sheet, you just approach any surface, immediately the screen is projected, you touch it, it is red as what about col? does it help in col? this is, of course, my first dirty association, how it works. you can imagine yes how it would have worked at that level because okay, so again, no it really, you should look at it because it's shocking how well it already works, even at this clumsy level. and the shock is that even at this experimental level, where there is no longer, sorry, it's not yet mass produced, blah blah, all this costs $350. i mean, okay, it's not nothing, but if you imagine that we are still at this level, no? so it can be generally accessible. why ich dich? machine show interesting. mistry, the guy, indian who invented it emphasizes the physical aspect of this interaction. till now, internet and computer were isolating me from physical reality around me. the archetypal internet user is a, geek sitting alone in front of a screen and immersed into it, oblivious of the reality around him or her. that's the idea we have, you know, cut off from. here, with sixth sense, i remain embedded in physical interaction with objects. the alternative, physical reality or the screen is replaced by a direct interpenetration of the two. real physical objects i interact with are thus augmented by projecting more information about them onto them. and since this information is projected directly onto things, the effect is magic and mystifying. things appear to continuously reveal or rather emanate their own interpretation. you know, like, for example, i don't know. i don't know. i look at this table and the way computer interprets it, i immediately get it projected. of this would bought a discount there, you want this table there. but you know what i mean? you don't perceive it as coming from all that machinery. for me, crucial is this magic effect as if things this basic ideological myst as if things emanate data about themselves. and yes, yes, but it's his guilt. he provoked me. which a i can imagine. so now comes you look at the woman, it's says easy to get, she prefers fellatio and you know everything. let's don't provoke me further into this direction. no okay. now, the first thing to note here is that sixth sense is not simply a radical break with our everyday experience. it rather openly stages what was always already the case. that is to say, is it not that in our everyday experience of reality, the big other, the thick symbolic texture of knowledge, expectations, prejudices and so on, continuously fills in the gaps in our perception. say, a western racist stumbles upon a poor arab on the street. is it not that he in a way projects onto the arab and then perceives? in the arab all his prejudices, fake knowledge and so on and so on. you get my point in a naive way this is happening when if i am western anti-arab racist if i see an arab i don't just see an arab i see all the prejudices and so on this is why i claim sixth sense presents us with another case of ideology at work in technology. sixth sense imitates and materializes the ideological mechanism of misrecognition which overetermines our everyday perceptions and interactions. the question is to what, and i cannot decide here, i concede my stupidity, to what extent does the open staging of this mechanism undermine its efficiency? you know you see my point? in a way, nothing new happens, just what was till now implicit is rendered direct. but i claim sometimes... nonetheless, mechanisms are efficient only insofar as they remain implicit. so i claim, i'm trying not to be a pessimist here, or i see the dangers. the dangers are that, you know, of course. where is the catch? the catch is that, of course, for example, what will i see in this case when i... she and... ar. of course, it will not be my prejudices, but, you know, who controls the big other, the digital network and so on, this opens, i think, tremendous possibilities for ideological control and so on. you know, so that at least in the case of the arabs anti-arab racism. the data that you project or the hermeneutic horizon, how you perceive an arab, we are your own prejudices in some sense, which means through ideological self-criticism, whatever, you can change them. while here, you know. you can't do basically anything and those who control the internet can control you much more effectively. on the other hand, up. precisely because the mechanism is transparent. maybe a new space for critical distance is opening because the problem with my everyday racism and i'm racist but my only, as i usually say, redemption is that i'm a universal racist. i hate all racism the only solution. what i... you know, the problem is that when i see an arab, if i'm an anti-arab racist, i don't i'm not even aware of the projection. i think it's an immediate perception. while the moment i see it as projected, even if it appears that it emanates from the thing itself, the moment i see it as that, in some way the mechanism becomes palpable, which opens up a distance towards it. this is one thing which i claim. will again incredibly change our perception our interactivity again why? because as again this guy mistry emphasized it's no longer this opposition between you know either as they like to put it from both sides the nature love like forget about pc go out experience the fresh reality a nice meadow grass whatever no you cannot escape it here you know you go to a nice grass and then you see projected onto it you know too many worms don't like down bugs they can bite you whatever you know like in a way, this interpenetration, which of course it can be put in fashionable new age terms, like you see the levels of meaning and physical reality are no longer separated. they fall together into a unique holistic experience. yes, but this holistic experience is not innocent. it is controlled by an invisible very complex mechanism. this is one line. again, i'm just opening up the problem. the next one on which i've already did a lot of work, but i think more should be done, is even more important. according to a cnn report, i'm sorry if i sound so journalistic, i'm sounding like the worst novel of all times. i mean it. i read it for ideology and it's so bad. the lost symbol, you know, the last dan brown. and it shocked me to what extent this novel, it really, as one of the critics said, it started a new genre. like, you know, if you had the misfortune of reading the novel, you probably saw that it's like it's an exchange of... one and you usually get for five pages some kind of stupid description of simply one person running from another or in some stupid tunnel beneath washington whatever and then five pages of the cheapest wikipedia information you know all of a sudden they stop and one guy freemason sw in 1600 something disappears i mean it's just breathtaking although there is a more if you youperately want to find not something redeeming, but something interesting. nonetheless, sham... some critics found an interesting feature. you know that the place of this novel is washington. what he did in some previous novels dan brown, is, you know, to penetrate literally the underground of the city of paris, rome and so on, and literally to bring out all the history buried there. now, we all know that united states are non-histor but the mystification is the through digging to all those miserable 200 years old tunnels beneath the of the novel is to elevate the pride of the united states. we are also like europe, a historical society. like dig and you will found mysteries from here and there and so on and so on. and there is, of course, i already mentioned this in my yesterday's talk, things are even much, as ica, things are even much worse with the lost symbol. namely,
first, i really, really, this time it's not a formality, i don't want to disappoint you because i'm a little bit tired of this standard form of mixing some latest jokes against liberalism and so on. so what i will do, i will keep to the title, i just warn you. and i will do something... maybe even a little bit boring first i want to go in detail for the first two thirds through some. possible consequences and also at a more elementary level description almost journalistic on what goes on what are the prospects in all this techno digital new development and then i want to propose at the end some hegelian models which i think allow us at least to understand what is going on so it will almost read more like kind of a reader's digest or whatever report on it. there are, as far as i can say, three at least three different versions. of apocalyptism today. christian fundamentalist, new age and techno-digital so-called post-human apocalyptism, although they all share the basic notion that humanity is approaching a zero point of radical transmutation. their respective ontologies differ radically. the techno-digital apocalyptism, whose main representative is maybe ray kurzweil, remains within the confines of scientific naturalism and identifies at the level of the evolution of human species, the contours of its transmutation into post-humans. the new age apocalyptism gives to this transmutation a spiritualist twist, interpreting it as the shift from one to another mode of cosmic awareness, usually from the modern dualist, mechanistic stance to the stance of holistic immersion, whatever. and finally, christian ap in strict biblical terms. they search for and find in contemporary world signs that the final battle between christ and antichrist is near, that things are approaching a critical turn. although i claim this last version is considered and ich the most ridiculous and also the most dangerous as to its content, i think it's the one maybe closest to the millenarist radical emancipatory logic. so let me first take a look at the technigital apician. if there is even more than bill gates, a scientist-capital who perfectly exemplifies the so-called third spirit of capitalism, this postmodern humanitarian, whatever capitalism. with its non-hierarchic and anti-institutional creativity humanitarian ethical concerns and so on it is craig venter with his idea of dna-controlled production. venter's field is synthetic biology, a life which is forged not by darwinian evolution, but simply created directly by human intelligence. wenter's first breakthrough was to develop so-called shotgun sequencing, a method for analyzing the human genome faster and more cheaply than ever before. he published, as you probably know, his own genome the first time any individual person's dna had been sequenced. incidentally, it revealed that wenter is at risk of alzheimer's, diabetes and hereditary eye disease. then he announced his next great project, to build an entirely synthetic organism which could be used to save the world from global warming. in january 2008. wenter constructed the world's first completely synthetic genome of a living organism. using laboratory chemicals, he recreated an almost exact copy of the genetic material found inside a tiny bacterium. this largest man-made dna structure is 582,970 base pairs in length. it was pieced together from far smaller but still massive strands of dna by utilizing the transcription power of yeast and is modeled on the genome of a really existing bacterium known as mycoplasma genitalium. sounds pornographic but the lab-made genome has not so far resulted in a living microbe that functions or replicates but venter claims it is just a matter of time before they figure out how to boot it up by inserting this synthetic dna into the shell of another bacterium this success opens up the way for creating new types of microorganisms which could be used in numerous ways as green fuels to replace oil and coal digest toxic waste, or absorb green house gases and so on and so on. venter's dream is effectively to create the first what he calls trillion-dollar organisms. patented bugs that could excrete biofuels, generate clean energy in the form of hydrogen and even produce tailor-made foods. a quote from venter's selfotion. imagine the end of fossil fuels, a cessation of ecologically devastating drilling operations, deflation of the political and economic power of neo-conservative oil barons, and affordable low-emission transportation, heating and electricity. the impact of this technology is profound and it doesn't stop there. by discovering the details of biochemical and metabolic pathways, we can more closely mimic their elegance and efficiency to solve problems that plague industrial civilization. maybe we'll engineer a primitive self-sustaining bio-robot that feeds on coa and excretes o2. perhaps we could remove mercury from our water supplies. the limitations are not known but the possibilities are awe-inspiring of quote there are, as venter admits, also more sinister possibilities. it will also be possible to synthesize viruses like ebola or to build new pathogens. but the problem is deeper, i think. such extreme genetic engineering will bring about substantially different organisms. we will find ourselves in a new terrain full of unknowns. the problem is our limited understanding of how dna works. even if we can put together a sequence of synthetic dna, we cannot predict how this sequence will actually perform, how its components will interact. that is to say, dna communicates with the cell by prompting it to make proteins, and we are far from understanding the relationship between a given dna sequence, the proteins it generates and the final properties of an organism. these dangers are strengthened by the absence of any public control over what goes on in this domain. outside any democratic oversight profiteering industrialists are tinkering with the building blocks of life. venter tried to allay the fears of an emerging blade runner society quote again. the movie blade runner has an underlying assumption that i just don't relate to, that people want a slave class. as i imagine the potential of engineering the human genome, i think, wouldn't it be nice if we could have 10 times the cognitive capabilities we do have? but people ask me whether i could engineer a stupid person to work as a servant. i've gotten letters from guys in prison asking me to engineer women they could keep in their. cell i don't see us as a society doing that venter may not see it but the requests he is bombarded with certainly prove that there is a social demand for the creation of a new serving subclass. kurzweil offered a different rebuttal of these fears. quote, the scenario of humans hunting cyborgs doesn't wash because those entities won't be separate. today, we treat parkinson's with a pea-sized brain implant. increase that device's capability by a billion and decrease its size by 100,000 and you get some idea of what will be feasible in 25 years. it won't be, okay, cyborgs on the left, humans on the right, the two will be all mixed up. end. well this is in principle true. en w can here. very endlessly jacques derrida's motif on how our humanity always already was supplemented by artificial prothesesesis. the problem is that with the decrease by 100000, the prosthesis is no longer experienced as such, but becomes invisible, part of our immediate organic self-experience, so that those who technologically control the pro control us in the very heart of our self-experience. the paradox is that insofar as the recreation of artificial life is the accomplishment of one of the strengths of modernity, it is jürgen habermas himself who abstains from accomplishing the project of modernity. habermas, as you probably know, prefers modernity to remain an unfinished project, setting a limit to the unfolding of its potentials. there are even more radical questions to be raised here. questions which concern the very limit of our desire and readiness to know. what will prospective parents do when they will be informed that their child will have alzheimer's dreams. the recent new buzzword, previvor, a person who does not have cancer but possesses a genetic predisposition to develop the disease, pre-survivor renders perfectly the anxiety of advanced knowledge. and the game. although thisar. still. mostly dreams. the first results are here. chinese scientists at the beijing genomic institute have completed the fourth human genome to be sequenced worldwide. they plan to use their genome database two. look, this is a quote from their brochure, this ominous formulation, to solve problems related to chinese-specific genetic diseases, end of quote, as well as to improve diagnosis, prediction and therapy. such phenomena are just the tip of the iceberg of a process going on in china of which not much is heard in the media preoccupied by the tibet troubles and so on. the expansion of biogenetic revolution. while in the west we are bothered with endless debates on ethical legal limits of biogenetic experiments and procedures, stem cells, yes or no, how far should should we be allowed to intervene into a genome only to prevent diseases or also to enhance the desired physical or even psychic properties in order to create a newborn who fits our desires? the chinese are simply doing it without any restraints and in a model example of the smooth cooperation between their state agencies, say their academy of sciences and private capital. in short, both branches of what kant called the private use of reason, state and capital, joined hands at the expense of the absent public use of reason, a free intellectual debate in the independent civil society on what is going on. how does all this infringe on individuals' status as ethical autonomous agents, not to mention the possible political misuses? things are proceeding fast on both fronts. not only towards the dystopian vision of the state controlling and steering the biogenetic mass of its citizens, and incidentally, according to some new documents sent to me by friends from china, this is simply already progressing, at least the plans. chinese, to cut a long story short, already have a plan how to, in the long term, to put it very simply, control biogenetically the entire population. tout. up to the point of. making it sure as much as we can influence this to make it sure with preborn biogenetic manipulations that you have the desired properties, not too much rebellious, cooperative spirit, whatever you want. so they are doing this at the same time they developed commercial clinics which target rich western foreigners who due to legal prohibitions will not be able to get this kind of treatment in their own countries. the problem is that in such a global situation legal prohibitions are becoming meaningless the main effect will be the commercial and scientific advantage of the chinese facilities to repeat a cliche shanghai has all the chances of becoming a dystopian megalopolis like the anonymous city in blatant runner. so i claim the next point is that maybe the time is approaching when we will have to turn around the standard complaint of how our relations to other people are more and more mediatized by digital. machinery. so that between every face to face there is an interface. maybe the prospect of the near future is the explosive development of the direct links between computers and other media so that they will communicate, make decisions and so on, presenting us just with the final result of their interaction. say, when we withdraw money from a cash machine, the machine informs our bank, whose computer sends the information to our pc via email and so on. already today, there are more connections between computers themselves than between computers and their human users. one could apply marx's formula here and state that relations between computers, things are replacing relations between persons. what if out of this interaction a self-organization emerges which can impose its own agenda? show that. human users no longer control and dominate the digital network but are themselves used by it eagle eye, a techno-thriller from 2008, directed by dj caruso, deals with this prospect in all its ambiguity. here is a brief outline of its plot. the movie starts with a standard accident in the war on terror. the us army has elite on a suspected terrorist in the middle east but as the man is a recluse getting a positive id proves difficult and the computer system which processes all military data recommends that the mission of killing him be aborted. the secretary of defense agrees, but the president of the united states orders the mission to be carried out anyway. this turns out into a political backlash when all those killed turn out to be civilians and retaliatory bombing are carried out by the arab so-called terrorists in response. now, the two heroes of the film are introduced to ordinary us citizens. jerry and rachel, they are led to an electronics store where a mysterious woman voice introduces herself to them. she is the voice of a top secret. supercomputer called autonomous reconnaissance intelligence integration analysis ariia which gathers intelligence from all over the world and can control virtually anything electronic. show. what the computer's message is that in light of the mistake made by the president at the beginning of the film, ordering to bomb that arab village, ariaya has decided that the because ariia is trained sorry programmed to protect the interests of the people of the united states. and the computer decides that the greatest threat at that point is the executive power. of the united states to the public good of american people true yeah that's my point so ariia wants to destroy the president's cabinet all of them leaving alive only the secretary of defense who then should become the next president because the secretary of defense you remember from the beginning was the only one would say no we cannot be sure will at the end everything turns out okay okay in the standard sense the heroes succeed in the last meaning in cutting off ariaya preventing the attentat the capitalist created rachel and jerry and so on and so on. but my problem is again the obvious one. we already stated it. is ariia not simply and truly a rational agent? is the computer not acting in the interest of the people of the united states? would it not effectively be the best for the united states if the computer's plan were to shakit. ariia is ready to sacrifice dozens of innocent bystanders in the capitol building. in the attentat it organizes. but so did the president when he okayed the killing of the dozens of arab civilians. and this is i think a nice sign of confusion and ideological inconsistency of the film. first it presents ariaya almost in a sympathetic way, you know, like the the president is obviously presented as the bad guy but then i thought they... would make something out of this line. but no, it turned then in a simple thriller where all of a sudden without even any ideological justification, the computer turns... into a bad, not even a bad guy, a bad woman even. even better. because it's incredible in what sense this standard mythical even scenario is revitalized, that you have decisive man warriors president confronting some kind of a gigantic squid-like primordial woman who controls all and so on and so on. where does all this lead? now i'm asking a very simple question. you got it. not yet any lachenian theory and so on. first, i claim something pretty serious is happening. i think we are not dealing here with science fiction. i asked some of my biologist friends and so on. they effectively think that, okay, maybe not in two years, but in ten years. on the other hand, many things happen faster than we think. effectively, and this is a true revolution i claim, artificial life will be created, but not in the sense of supercomputers who imitate life. also, not in the sense of grafting and using, that's the catch, building blocks from this kind of grafting, you take a piece of bacteria, take a piece of monkey, a piece of northern american and whatever, and create a monster, you know, some kind of a monkey. with american head and spider feet, whatever. no, you got my point. the point is to do not to cheat, not even to use the already existing genomes. it's's quite fantastic what it looks they will be able to do. to create really from the zero level new life. and again. the question is, how will this affect our everyday experience? uh. let me ask the question in more general terms because another thing happened. which i checked it on youtube and you can find it anywhere if you just go to youtube and put it sixth sense. and youtube whatever you will get it namely a guy called pranav mistry. member member of the fluid interface group at the mit media lab. presented to the public, the thing is known already for over half a year, but now it was made public. a wearable he calls it gestural interface. the hardware is minimal. a small web camera dangling from my neck, a pocket projector. also around my neck and a mirror all connected wirelessly to a smartphone in my pocket which is of course then connected with the. with internet. with the digital network. this forms a mobile wearable device. what does it do? it's quite fascinating the user starts the interaction by handling objects. or making gestures by his or her hand. the camera recognizes and tracks the user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer vision-based techniques. so again, let's say i have a bottle, this bottle of water, i just hold it, the computer, the camera identifies it, gives the data to the to the smartphone the smartphone of course transmits it to the web and then. so again the software program processes the video stream data, reading them as instructions this data and retrieves instantly the appropriate information, texts, images from the internet. and then... this data when they come back. are projected remember there was also a small projector. the information are projected on any physical surface available. you don't need a screen anymore and it's magically how it already works. it can be table, surface of a book, whatever. all surfaces, walls and physical objects around the subject can be used as interface. here are just to give you and this my god, it's quite fascinating if they didn't stage it all, i first thought. but then i called some friends who have friends and they told me, no, it's shocking, but it's real. here are some examples of how it already works. for example, in a bookstore, i pick up a book and hold it in front of me. immediately, i see projected onto the book's covers, reviews, ratings and so on and so on. it works immediately. you know, you just do it like this, a book and you get it. or if i want to check the time i only do this. like, you know. the. immediately. it's projected onto my left wrist. the projector displays a clock when i hold my fingers out at the arm's length. the system recognizes the gestures as framing a scene. for example, it's really this already again, it does. for example, nothing tasteless. don't be afraid. ivonne, you will get there. no, promise i will. i'm a good christian now. john milbank, my friend, that show nothing. let's say i do this. the camera recognizes this as framing i need a photo of you. and immediately i do this, it's my photo and then i just... utter a word and i can go around the city just doing this this in the evening i sit at home i don't even need a screen i made the shine all the photos appear i can enlarge them and so on and so on although i don't know what to do with your photos but that's another thing okay or even nicer for example, for example, on the way to the airport, i'm not sure how is the plane. this already works. you know, you just hold in front of you the boarding pass and immediately it's projected onto it. 20 minutes delay, no delay, flight cancelled, or whatever. or internet. there it's really magical. all you do is make this at shine. computer recognizes the sheet, you just approach any surface, immediately the screen is projected, you touch it, it is red as what about col? does it help in col? this is, of course, my first dirty association, how it works. you can imagine yes how it would have worked at that level because okay, so again, no it really, you should look at it because it's shocking how well it already works, even at this clumsy level. and the shock is that even at this experimental level, where there is no longer, sorry, it's not yet mass produced, blah blah, all this costs $350. i mean, okay, it's not nothing, but if you imagine that we are still at this level, no? so it can be generally accessible. why ich dich? machine show interesting. mistry, the guy, indian who invented it emphasizes the physical aspect of this interaction. till now, internet and computer were isolating me from physical reality around me. the archetypal internet user is a, geek sitting alone in front of a screen and immersed into it, oblivious of the reality around him or her. that's the idea we have, you know, cut off from. here, with sixth sense, i remain embedded in physical interaction with objects. the alternative, physical reality or the screen is replaced by a direct interpenetration of the two. real physical objects i interact with are thus augmented by projecting more information about them onto them. and since this information is projected directly onto things, the effect is magic and mystifying. things appear to continuously reveal or rather emanate their own interpretation. you know, like, for example, i don't know. i don't know. i look at this table and the way computer interprets it, i immediately get it projected. of this would bought a discount there, you want this table there. but you know what i mean? you don't perceive it as coming from all that machinery. for me, crucial is this magic effect as if things this basic ideological myst as if things emanate data about themselves. and yes, yes, but it's his guilt. he provoked me. which a i can imagine. so now comes you look at the woman, it's says easy to get, she prefers fellatio and you know everything. let's don't provoke me further into this direction. no okay. now, the first thing to note here is that sixth sense is not simply a radical break with our everyday experience. it rather openly stages what was always already the case. that is to say, is it not that in our everyday experience of reality, the big other, the thick symbolic texture of knowledge, expectations, prejudices and so on, continuously fills in the gaps in our perception. say, a western racist stumbles upon a poor arab on the street. is it not that he in a way projects onto the arab and then perceives? in the arab all his prejudices, fake knowledge and so on and so on. you get my point in a naive way this is happening when if i am western anti-arab racist if i see an arab i don't just see an arab i see all the prejudices and so on this is why i claim sixth sense presents us with another case of ideology at work in technology. sixth sense imitates and materializes the ideological mechanism of misrecognition which overetermines our everyday perceptions and interactions. the question is to what, and i cannot decide here, i concede my stupidity, to what extent does the open staging of this mechanism undermine its efficiency? you know you see my point? in a way, nothing new happens, just what was till now implicit is rendered direct. but i claim sometimes... nonetheless, mechanisms are efficient only insofar as they remain implicit. so i claim, i'm trying not to be a pessimist here, or i see the dangers. the dangers are that, you know, of course. where is the catch? the catch is that, of course, for example, what will i see in this case when i... she and... ar. of course, it will not be my prejudices, but, you know, who controls the big other, the digital network and so on, this opens, i think, tremendous possibilities for ideological control and so on. you know, so that at least in the case of the arabs anti-arab racism. the data that you project or the hermeneutic horizon, how you perceive an arab, we are your own prejudices in some sense, which means through ideological self-criticism, whatever, you can change them. while here, you know. you can't do basically anything and those who control the internet can control you much more effectively. on the other hand, up. precisely because the mechanism is transparent. maybe a new space for critical distance is opening because the problem with my everyday racism and i'm racist but my only, as i usually say, redemption is that i'm a universal racist. i hate all racism the only solution. what i... you know, the problem is that when i see an arab, if i'm an anti-arab racist, i don't i'm not even aware of the projection. i think it's an immediate perception. while the moment i see it as projected, even if it appears that it emanates from the thing itself, the moment i see it as that, in some way the mechanism becomes palpable, which opens up a distance towards it. this is one thing which i claim. will again incredibly change our perception our interactivity again why? because as again this guy mistry emphasized it's no longer this opposition between you know either as they like to put it from both sides the nature love like forget about pc go out experience the fresh reality a nice meadow grass whatever no you cannot escape it here you know you go to a nice grass and then you see projected onto it you know too many worms don't like down bugs they can bite you whatever you know like in a way, this interpenetration, which of course it can be put in fashionable new age terms, like you see the levels of meaning and physical reality are no longer separated. they fall together into a unique holistic experience. yes, but this holistic experience is not innocent. it is controlled by an invisible very complex mechanism. this is one line. again, i'm just opening up the problem. the next one on which i've already did a lot of work, but i think more should be done, is even more important. according to a cnn report, i'm sorry if i sound so journalistic, i'm sounding like the worst novel of all times. i mean it. i read it for ideology and it's so bad. the lost symbol, you know, the last dan brown. and it shocked me to what extent this novel, it really, as one of the critics said, it started a new genre. like, you know, if you had the misfortune of reading the novel, you probably saw that it's like it's an exchange of... one and you usually get for five pages some kind of stupid description of simply one person running from another or in some stupid tunnel beneath washington whatever and then five pages of the cheapest wikipedia information you know all of a sudden they stop and one guy freemason sw in 1600 something disappears i mean it's just breathtaking although there is a more if you youperately want to find not something redeeming, but something interesting. nonetheless, sham... some critics found an interesting feature. you know that the place of this novel is washington. what he did in some previous novels dan brown, is, you know, to penetrate literally the underground of the city of paris, rome and so on, and literally to bring out all the history buried there. now, we all know that united states are non-histor but the mystification is the through digging to all those miserable 200 years old tunnels beneath the of the novel is to elevate the pride of the united states. we are also like europe, a historical society. like dig and you will found mysteries from here and there and so on and so on. and there is, of course, i already mentioned this in my yesterday's talk, things are even much, as ica, things are even much worse with the lost symbol. namely,
Audience Member
this new now.
this new now.
Slavoj Žižek
the new novel..
the new novel..
Audience Member
out.
out.
Slavoj Žižek
culture culture, no work.
culture culture, no work.
Audience Member
no, new in relation to ica last night.
no, new in relation to ica last night.
Slavoj Žižek
yes, no, no, no, just i want to draw your attention to one fact that it's the first novel without. without even any sexual tensions. you know what i mean? the couple is no longer created. like, you remember in angels and demons, the novel, there still was... they screwed to cut a long story short. then, did you notice that in the cinema version, tom hanks and that beautiful israeli actress ayelet zurer, they don't do it. totally non-erotic. then in the vinci code, also, they don't consummate it. and to paraphrase my friend darian leader, it is as if all the things happening out there like poor jesus had to screw mary to cover up the fact that here they don't do it. and then in the lost symbol it's even worse. i mean, absolutely no sexual attention and so on and so on. i don't think there is anything emancipatory in this. i think it's basically a shift. i think that... beneath the mask of permissibility and so on and so on the oppression! and fear of neighbor is getting so strong that the model of pleasure becomes more and more some kind of a masturbation sustained by the most you can get is a virtual other. so i claim even if you do something by misfortune with the real other, it has the structure of a masturbation with a real partner, how put it. it's as if if you engage yourself with a real other, it is as if it's too intrusive. it's too much of a harassment, as they put it in the united states. so okay. let me go on according to this cnn report in may two thousand eight monkeys with sensors implanted in their brains have learned to control a robot arm with their thoughts, using it to feed themselves with fruit and so on. in the experiment, a pair of monkeys were fitted with electrodes the width the width of a human hair that transmitted signals from the area of the brain linked to movements. scientists behind the experiment say it will lead to the creation of brain-controlled prosthetic lim for example, here. no it wasn't sorry here it was in university of south florida that the first prototype is already operative a wheelchair. mounted robotic arm controlling by thought alone is already created the device gives people with full body paralysis who have functional brains but no way to express their thoughts, the ability to perform simple day-to-day functions. a kind of a scanning machine. again, scans your brain and it's able to recognize this most elementary signals, basically forward, backward, left, right, and you see the point. you don't need even that famous stephen hawking finger. you just intensely think about it and the machine the machine... the machine... movie so, uh and... this again goes further. for example, uh... we more and more learn the uncanny fact that the us secret defense agencies are involved in a wide long-term project to develop means to control human emotions and attitudes from outside by way of attacking brains by precise electromagnetic waves. so you see my point. this is the other side. you will say, nice, wonderful, i can move things with the sheer power of my brain. the problem is that if it goes outside, it goes also inside. that is to say, i was told by some military specialists that everybody in the world is doing this like crazy. the chinese, americans, of course, russians. this idea of... of attacking directly your mind for example they can do it with anxiety and panic they isolated the waves. which your mind is secreting when you are in a panic they succeeded in reproducing. in a mechanical way, these waves. electromagnetic waves and if they bombard you with these waves you are simply in a panic. and i was told they already have it. like you can cover a certain area. you press the button, people are in a panic there. of course, the ideal that regulates this process is the full control of past and future at the psychic level. the strategy is always the same. an invention is first presented as a crucial remedy for some extreme illness. you know, they always start with helping the cripples, children with defects and so on and so on. but then it goes on. there are already researches into genetic and biochemical interventions which would selectively erase the subject's traumatic past. you know, this is how this mind control of memory. it. progressing. of course they put it first in the humanitarian way. think about a poor child being raped, wouldn't it be nice to... to erase that traumatic event from her brain but you know you start this it goes on no. the procedure is universalized. or rich prospective parents can already afford to have their unborn child's brain. scan for traces of possible future mental weaknesses, low iq, criminal tendencies and so on and so on. i think that one has to avoid here the double trap. the utopian dream of benevolent cleansing of the brain, of protecting it from illnesses, but also the false doomsday perspective which sees such interventions as the end of humanity. now i want to confront the more basic problem. there exists a thing called the world transhumanist association, founded i think even in london in . 198by nick bostrom and david pearce. it set itself the task to deal with these problems. it describes itself as, i quote, an international non-profit, of course, membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. end of quote. its premise is that human development in evolutionary terms has not reached anything like an endpoint. of of emerging technologies, neuropharmacology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies and so on, have the potential to enhance our abilities. as bostrom put it, quote, a few years ago, the discussions would typically revolve around the question, is this science fiction or are we dealing in realistic future possibilities? now the discussions tend to start from the position that, yes, it will be increasingly possible to modify human capacities. the issue now is whether we should do it, and if so, what are the ethical constraints? in contrast to nietzsche's notion of übermensch which aims at a moral and cultural transcendence. a selected few endowed with strong willpower and great refinement will throw off the shackles of traditional morality and so on. the transhumanist idea of a post-human aims at a society in which everybody will have access to enhancement technologies. again, a quote. transhumanists advocate increased funding for research to radically extend healthy lifespan and favor the development of medical and technological means to improve memory, concentration and other human capacities. transhumanists propose that everybody should have the option to use such means to enhance various dimensions of their cognitive, emotional and physical well-being. not only is this a natural extension of the traditional aims of medicine and technology, but it is also a great humanitarian opportunity to genuinely improve the human condition. end quote consequently, the main ethical concerns are those of accessibility and those of who is transforming whom. the last quote. it's one thing if we are talking about adult competent citizens deciding what to do with their own bodies. if, on the other hand, we are thinking about modifying children or selecting embryos, then there is another set of ethical questions that arise. there is a further set of ethical questions relating to access. if some of the technologies as they well might turn out to be very expensive, then what mechanisms should be in place to ensure fairness end of quote so to prevent state or private institutions deciding our fate, the choice whether to avail oneself to such enhancement options should generally reside with the individual. but again, is this enough? end of quote of course no. with all their warning about how we are on the brink of a post-human era and that would be my fundamental reproach to them. transhumanists effectively remain too humanist. again with all their warning about how new ir. exploding uh. when they describe the possibility of intervening into our biogenetic base and changing our very nature, they somehow presuppose that the autonomous subject freely deciding on his or acts will still be here, deciding on how to change his or her nature. they thus bring the split between the subject of the enunciated, what we call in lacachenian theory, the subject about which we talk, and the subject of the enunciation the speaking subject to its extreme. on the one hand, as an object of my interventions, i am a biological mechanism whose properties up to the mental ones can be manipulated. on the other hand, i act as if i am somehow exempted from this manipulation. an autonomous individual who, from a distance, can make the right choices. but what about the prospect of the loop getting closed so that my very power of autonomous decision is already meddled with? by biogenetic manipulation. this is why there is effectively something shallow, boring even in all transhumanist meditations. they basically ignore the problem. like the critic. and like their critics, they avoid the core of the question which they seem to be dealing. with all the time how will biogenetic and other interventions affect the very definition of humanity bostrom emphasizes that the choice whether to avail oneself of such enhancement options should generally reside with the individual. but will this individual still be here? both transhumanists and their critics thus unproblematically cling to the standard notion of a free, autonomous individual. the difference is that transhumanists simply accept that it will somehow survive the passage in the post-human era while their critics see post-humanity as a threat and therefore want to prevent. ich reich. brought to its extreme. this techno-digital apocalyptism assumes the form of the so-called techgnosis. openly passes over into the new age apocalyptism what looms at the horizon of the digital revolution is nothing else than the prospect that human beings will acquire this. capacity of directly interacting with material reality in the sense of my mind directly influencing reality, the example that i already mentioned and we can imagine how it will be developed that you think about it and it happens as it were, that you can directly move objects with with your mind. so on the one hand, it will be possible, through neurological implants, to switch from our common reality to another computer-generated reality, without all the clumsy machinery of today's virtual reality, the awkward glasses, gloves and so on, since the signals of the virtual reality will directly reach our brain, bypassing our censoring. sensory organs. again, dan brown's the lost symbol provides an exemplary case of the spiritual mystification of these ongoing scientific breakthroughs. the fact that brain sciences are slowly unraveling the neuronal processes which support thinking, that is to say, which things happen in our brain when we think is mystified into the new age notion of thinking itself. influencing material. processing furthermore, this spiritualist mystification is supplemented by a piece of vulgar materialism in the david chalmers style, you know, the guy who thinks that psychic awareness is should be recognized as the fifth simply another elementary natural force. the lost symbol, the novel, claims that thought itself possesses a separate material existence of its own. that's supposed to be the big mystery revealed at the end, that you can isolate some kind of a slimy shit, shitty stuff which is allegedly like the direct materialization of thought itself, of the soul. so the new age announced by the novel, the shattering transformation which will affect humanity is what? it's that the gap that separates thinking from reality will be overcome. humanity will reawaken its spiritual potentials. we will become like gods in the precise sense of deploying the ability to directly through thought alone, influence reality. magic and science, faith and knowledge will thus be reconciled with the ancient faith acquiring new experimental confirmation. against this ideology, i think, we should assert that symbol as such the symbolic order in which we humans dwell is the symbol of a loss. in other words, what the novel, the lost symbol, presents is a loss. you know, the novel again adopts this new age attitude that things went really bad with all this lost distance. first, in logos we lost contact with mythic reality, with modern rationalism we lost this gradual loss of contact with reality. but loch. we should consider it as the very gap which sustains our freedom of thinking. you know, they are looking, this would be my first answer to all this new age stuff, how our thought must rejoin reality. that's the miracle. for me, if your thought produces some shit there or whatever, this is not a miracle. the true miracle is the gap itself. here i'm even aarya. the true miracle is how we can acquire distance from reality and think. that's the most precious thing. i mean, i simply see, i mean, if you look behind all this mystery of we will be able to influence reality and so on. i claim what is behind this is just this vulgar fact that, of course, thoughts have a certain materiality because they are ultimately material and so on. and i think, again, we should turn things around and precisely celebrate what the new agers are presenting to us as the tragic loss. we lost organic unity with nature and so on. thanks god that we lost it. that's why we are free human beings. now i go a little bit, if you allow me, into more thinking. now the journalism is over. what underlines all this topic of rejoining the holistic reality of being one with nature is the status of the so-called western exception, which culminates in western modernity. the shift from organic whole to universality universality which introduces a rupture, a cut in two. holistic totality. a distance from particular spiritualized life world when we jump to global secular order and so on and so on. hegel conceives this shift as the passage from the ancient greek aesthetic whole of polys to the christian abstract universality. on a closer look, we can see how this shift repeats itself three times in western history. first, as the shift from mythos to logos. the break of the greek philosophy from the traditional mythic universe and here alain badiou is right when he pointed out how parmenides is the point of passage. you remember, you know, this better, in the first line, one of the few surviving fragments, he is nonetheless with one leg still in the mythic. because you remember, he addresses the goddess, no? the goddess truth, i think, i'm not sure, parmenides. so it's the first breakthrough toward conceptual thinking one, but as it were still in the mythic form then the story goes on. then the christian break with the pagan cosmos, which culminates in the so-called irrational rejection of the world, the withdrawal into the non-thought of the night of the world, what mi calls this. finally, the modern disenchantment of reality, the rise of the cartesian subject opposed to the mute and meaningless infinite universe. for today's anti-modernist, partisans of a new post-secular holistic paradigm, each time things went fatally wrong. plato asserted abstract notional thinking against the thought embedded in a concrete life world when christianity asserted the christian believer as an abstract individual not as a member of concrete organic, traditional. community when cartesian modernity broke with the pre-modern universe of mythic meaning. for them, the whole idea of secular modernism and universalism is a freakish idiosyncrasy in the history of the human species, the root of our ecological and other disasters. ultimately, secular modernism is an impossible position, an illusion and, as bruno latour put it, we were never really modern. i claim that against this temptation, it is absolutely crucial for the emancipatory politics to remain faithful to this universalist secular project of modernity. again, we should fearlessly celebrate what is presented to us as a problem. you know for example the problem is not, my god, we lost immediate contact with reality. the problem is that we experience this as a problem. we should celebrate it. what does this mean? now i come to hegel, how this works. oop. where can hegel help us? precisely if we drop the standard approach to the dialectical process, which is the so-called synthesis of the opposite model. the model which no wonder can be immediately accepted, endorsed by new agers and so on, jungians especially. in the opposition between freud and jung, freud was here a true hegelian in contrast to jung's pseudo-hegelian compensation theory. what do i mean by this? you know where is the difference really between freud and jung? it's not just... that i don't know. for jung there is one dissexualized libido, for freud eros,anatos and so on. no, the fundamental difference is somewhere else. freud was a materialist. you know in what sense? it. for freud, for example, when he describes symptoms and so on, he always emphasized that we are not talking about some kind of a direct spiritual causality. things happen in a natural way. for example you become ill and then your unconscious parasitizes upon it and used it as meaning and so on but the point is again that that it's not that beneath reality there is some unconscious in a mysterious way steering reality reality is there totally contingent and all meaning is as it were you know meaning is opportunistic parasitic upon it while if you read jung closely he does precisely the opposite for him there is a deeper spiritual reality which somehow steers the usual reality so what is then this jungian pseudo--hegelian so-called compensation theory. a quote from jung. whenever life proceeds one-sidedly in any given direction, the self-regulation of the organism produces in the unconscious an accumulation of all those factors which play too small a part in the individual's conscious existence for this reason i have put forward the compensation theory of the unconscious as a complement to the repression theory. end of now it is easy to perceive how this relates to neurotic symptoms and their therapy. that's jung's idea. when the ego gets too narrow and rigid, excluding from its scope the irrational tendencies which do not fit his or her its self image, these tendencies return in the guise of neurotic symptoms. say, when a man curtails, oppresses his feminine shadow, anima, cutting it off his identity, the anima returns to her him in the guise of monstrous obscene feminine figures in which he is not able to recognize himself and the man experiences them as brutal foreign intrusions the goal of therapy is therefore not to fight these symptoms not to eliminate them but to integrate them into a wider shelf which transcends the narrow confines of ego. these symptoms stand for forces which are not in themselves evil and destructive. what makes them such is the false perspective of the ego. or as hegel would have it, evil resides in the very gaze which perceives evil everywhere around itself. so, according to jung, when ego is haunted by neurotic symptoms, the task of the therapist is to make the patient see how his ego is part of the problem, not the solution. the ego should shift its perspective and recognize in his symptom a distorted violent expression of the disavowed part of himself. the true illness is that of the ego and neurotic symptoms are desperate attempts at a cure attempts to re-establish the balance disturbed by the ego's narrow frame which excluded crucial parts of the content. another quote. from a neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego we do not cure it it cures us a man is ill but the illness is nature's attempt to heal him and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. end quote no wonder that some partisans of jung see in this compensation theory a hegelian background. here is a quote from a popular book on jung. it was hegel who argued that the only way a battle could cease between a thesis and an antithesis is through the construction of a synthesis that would include elements from both sides and transcend the opposition. although jung denied that hegel was as an influence on his thought, it is hard to imagine jungian thought without the hegelian model that sees conflict overcome through the creation of a transcendent third which is neither thesis nor antithesis but a new entity in which both are included i think that here nonetheless, jung was right. there effectively is no trace of hegel in jung's compensation theory. this dismissal my dismissal may appear too fast, since many formulations of jung effectively, for example, recall hegel's notion of reconciliation of the subject with its alienated substance. the idea of hegel is howau. you should recognize in the foreign power. that you fight the misrecognized part of your own substance. this dialectic of recognition effectively belongs to the young hegel. it found its definitive expression in the so-called jena period fragments on love and reconciliation and later, for example in hegel's reading of antigone, you know as the tragic confrontation of the two opposed positions, antigones and creons. it really looks as if hegel is there a young. you know, antigone neglects the public aspect, the state, creon neglects this private divinities, whatever. and again, each should recognize in the other the oppressed truth. off. himself. so hish. jung's most hegelian formulation, quote, the individual is faced with the necessity of recognizing and accepting what is different and strange as part of his own life. as's the kind of also i, like, but that's also me. all the nightmares which haunt me. now you will say, but what's bad about it? isn't this? isn't there something great in this model? where not to great. the first thing totally accidental contingent that should make you think is that. based on precisely this reasoning, jung for one year supported the nazis. his reading was that our western civilization was way too influenced by the jewish abstract rational side and so this is why barbarism emerged, but what we need is, as he put it, the revival of the wotan archetype of this nordic vitality and so on, to counteract the jewish abstract cunning, j work of reason and so on. so we need to... to re need to re-establish the balance but i claim there is a problem here and precisely. this is the reason why this idea is not hegelian, although it sounds hegelian. you know, this idea of reconciliation with an apparent enemy that what you exclude from yourself continues to haunt you and so on and so on. let's imagine precisely the example, for example, but the same goes for all forms of racism, the struggle between the nazis and the jews. again, in a first approach, the jungian notion of shadow as the mis-recognized alter ego seems fitting here. is there effectively not a strange echoing and redoubling between the nazi elevation of aryan germans and the jewish self-perception as the chosen nation. was it not already arnold schoenberg the composer, who dismissed nazi racism as a miserable imitation of the jewish identity as the chosen people? however, what breaks down here is precisely this mirroring relationship. now i want you to be very attentive to this point. i claim that this jungian dialectics of recognition to recognize in the horror that you combat your own truth. holds in a properly hegelian way, and this is the true hegelian dialectics of the opposite, holds only for one side. you can effectively say for theaki, that. that in the figure of the jew, they should recognize the oppressed, excluded part of themselves. that if you want to put it in this way, not the real jew, but the figure of the jew is the symptom in which what the nazis disavowed, ultimately, to put it in simplified marxist terms, social antagonism, class struggle, whatever, returns to haunt you as the terrible feature of the haunting jew and so on. and so on. but as we all know, it would be obscene even to claim it. we cannot make the same operation for the other thing. you know we can say that this holds for the nis but the same does not hold for the for the glue. can you really claim that nazi is the symptom of the jew? so that a jew should see how what h him as a nazi is really just the excluded part of his own identity so that the jew should, i quote here schelling, should recognize in the nazi the true gold they should never have found elsewhere. you see the radical asymmetry. and that's crucial. that's what is missing, i claim, in this model of dialectical unity. like both elements are one-sided and we need a third position. no, we don't need a third position. the polarity in hegel is never a symmetric polarity so that then you go into this stupid common sense, neither he is right nor he is right, but some higher synthesis and so on and so on. the first step of a hegelian analysis when you are dealing with a struggle a contradiction is to isolate the determining element, the one which generates its opposite s. its own shadow maybe a little bit in jungian way. for example, and this will be problematic for my liberal critics. i am the first to advocate that we should sometimes make a pact, of course, with liberals against racism and so on and so on. but when we are dealing today with the opposition of, let us say, liberal individualism and so-called communitarian totalitarianism. absolutely we should avoid like hell any jungian notions of, you know, one go too far in one direction, the others go too far in the other direction. so we should do like john milbank in the book that i co-wrote with him, what i then called softly his soft fascism and so on, you know, like the right way, you know, not too much individualism. this is the commarian dream, no? a kind of a also a dream of christian. personalism a kind of a proper measure. yes, individual freedoms but still grounded in a community and so on and so on. it doesn't work in this way. why? because eh. there is no higher element. the whole point is that in the opposition between liberal individualism and, let's call it, communitarian fundamentalism, the determining factor is liberal individualism, i claim. it this global capitalist liberal logic. and again, this doesn't mean we blame it. we should make pact with them in concrete struggle, but we should always insist on one crucial. point it is. it. today's fundamentalism, which is the symptom of liberalism, not vice versa. you know. determining factor is liberalism, which means the only way to enact the change is to change, not to destroy it with new totalitarianism, but just that as long as we have liberalism the way we have it, it will generate at its opposition fundamentalism. as it's for me, as i repeat, i think also in my trag de far's last book, clear for me, for example, i maybe, i'm sorry if i repeat myself, you already know this example. take afghanistan. if there was a fundamentalist country which we all know it as such is today's afghanistan. but wait a minute, some of us, at least i, am old enough to remember 30, 40 years ago, afghanistan was, you know this, the single most secular and tolerant of near middle east muslim countries. they had a kind of a pro-western enlightened monarch who tried to do some sh-like but iranian shah-like but much less radical. how do you call this modernization. they had a very strong local communist party which as you probably know, with the coup d'etat took power even without the soviet union. what happened then? then uh. they got weak to weak to survive, soviet union intervened, then united states supported the opposition and out of this, how call it, getting becoming global of afghanistan. afghanistan became fundamentalist. so you see my point. it's not globalization progresses and oh you have there some stupid primitive countries which need no. the fundamentalization of afghanistan. it's the result of the very process by means of which afghanistan was caught into global capitalist politics and so on and so on. that's the absolutely crucial thing always to ask when we are dealing with so-called fundamentalist it's the same in the united states. probably you know it. i'm sorry to repeat myself, but my big example, kansas. you know that popular book thomas frank? know how? no, the crucial thing to remember is that kansas, as you maybe know, is today the bible belt fundamentalist christian state. but till 30 years ago, it was the state with the greatest number of populist left, for example, already in the civil war, john brown is from kansas. they were the most radical anti-slavery state within the united states and so on. so again, what happened then in 30, 40 years, the very bedrock of progressive leftist populism turned into you see this process we should bear in mind which means again the solution is not synthesis. in this case, the solution to the opposition liberalism fundamentalism is not, yeah, yeah, a higher synthesis, a little bit of this. it is to accept that this opposition is a real opposition, but nonetheless as such, in a way, a false opposition. a false opposition, not i'm not claiming in a primitive way all liberals are really fundamentalists. racists. what i'm claiming that liberals do not take into account enough in what way the very civilization they stand for. generate what they fight. like take another example which i think i mentioned in my last book, it's typical and almost nobody again talks about it. congo. you know, congo, nightmare, primitive, 5 million diedke and so on. but congo is not such a nightmare because it is excluded from globalization it's the very mode of its inclusion. you know where you can get this? do you remember half a year ago, there was, i think, some rebellion against the congo central government in some eastern province and it was interesting and crucial to read what happened. what was the demand of those that rebellious group? it was that the central government should break, abandon the contract it made with china. okay, it's now another story. i think we should approach it if we're honest left. the story about chinese economic neocolonialism. like, are you aware that you remember in myanmar, burma, in myanmar, those big demonstrations, they were controlled through chinese help? myanmar is effectively a chinese economic colony now. but what i'm saying is that nonetheless chinese offered to congo something which is colonialism, neocolonialism, but maybe it would have worked. it's tremendously important what happened there. china made a deal with congo that they will invest like we are speaking about real sums of money, like comparable to those that we give now to the banks so that their bosses can again share profits and those special whatever. we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. basically china offered to rebuild the entire infrastructure to make congo a functioning state, which now it's not. you know to rebuild the entire rail network of rails, 20 30 hospitals, universities and so on, of course in exchange for the complete all natural resources. this was a threat to some people. what is now the reality of congo? it is that we have so-called warlords who control parts and all of them has each of them specific deals with some western companies, for example, how is it called the cheap tungsten or what that you put into computers and so on. all the stuff. so you see the point. the point is that congo is kept in this state of non-functioning as a state of being divided into different domains with this human human nightmares not because it's not globalized enough. this is the mode of the inclusion of congo into global market. that's my answer to those who claim global market brings prosperity and so on and so on. it brings, but it also keeps congo where it is. it produces afghanistan. take iraq. like the guy who criticized me, i heard recently in the review of my book, was it independence? norman, how do you pronounce. no, no, john gray is another one. i have the list of i have a black book. all the names are there. you know, i'm slowly composing. you know that the nazis, when they planned the invasion of england in 39, you can buy it somewhere they already printed a book with all the people to erre. and they made this stupid mistake, you know, 1940, freud was already dead. they still list, you know. freud up there to arrest. no, i'm composing a similar book when we take over. no, no, but what i want to say, norman in norman gas, he said that it's ridiculous of me to blame liberalism, for example, for what afghanis are doing. no, i don't blame them in the moralistic sense. of course, i believe in their sincerity and so on and so on. but wait a minute, if we were cruel and it was right that we were cruel against communist regimes claiming fuck off with your idea, let's see what you really produce. let's if we always emphasize how really existing socialism was a nightmare let's then also look at really existing liberalism, not the ideals and there you see that okay, i agree with gerash and others who claim but we a minute, whatever you reproach the west with, nonetheless they are going there to these countries, iraq, afghanistan, precisely to bring western enlightenment. maybe that's the reason why they are going. what they produced is exactly the opposite. look at iraq. the i am totally opposed to... i don't have any of this bullshit you know, anyone who fights united states is our friend, so saddam was our hero for resisting. but one thing you should admit to saddam, he did relatively secularize the country. the first five years of shaddam. the entire legitimization was much more secular patriotic, basically nationalist. so you see the paradox that now, of course, united states are in a panic. i understand that because they know that if they leave now iraq. probably the country will fall apart from my french in turkey i learned. kurds are practically already building their capital. i mean, i support them and so on. so the scenario is that shia in the south will take over. this means through shia basically iran. this means to cut a long story short, the main result of, i mean, i really think that ahmadinejad, he plays jupiter world, but he should really send big thanks to the united states. like, thank you for getting rid of our enemy saddam and on delivering iraq to us, to our influence. you know, these are the things that are really going on. friends from iran told me that the immense investments of iran in iraq recently, especially in the shia part and so on. but you see my point here. my point is that the answer is not liberalism versus fundamentalism, who is the good guy? of course, we should fight also these battles in the same way as, for example, if there is illness and you can clearly see a social causality of this illness because of some poison in the air, whatever. of course! the solution is not the stupid marxist one, pseudo-marxist where you say, oh, we must fight the true causes, let the people drop dead there, we will solve. no, you should also do the medical. help helped the people. in the same sense, of course, when there is sexism and all that, we should make strategic pacts with liberals and so on. but our lesson to them, to the liberals should be that that that ultimately they are themselves generating not they, but... the... the economic unity whatever the civilization of which they are part, they are generating what they are fighting so in order precisely to save. what is worth saving in liberalism? this be this is the hegelian aufhebungablation. to save what is worth saving in liberalism, we will have to go a step further, beyond liberalism. in other words, we should never forget that this opposition, where one side is the symptom of the other, is the pseudo. opposition and that you know like the true alternative is not liberalism versus fundamentalism the true alternative is this entire field versus the authentic left and here we must be self-critical the reason why we have all these fundamentalisms, it's becoming more and more clear how right walter benjamin was when he made this famous statement that every fascism is the sign and indication of a failed revolution. if we accept, i'm very doubtful about this term, but strategically for five minutes, three minutes, if we accept the term islamofascism, then we should say... it also holds for islamof fascismism this. they are there because we were not there. because the the left failed. so again, you see my idea. don't accept those terms of the debate, liberalism versus fundamentalism. the solution is a radical third term which breaks this cycle. and now you will say, but what has all this to do with what i was saying about apocalyptism and so on and so on? it's exactly the same. i think that all these nightmarish dreams of are we human? are we not human? will we be robots and so on? are because it's like fundamentalism to liberalism. it's a symptom of what we consider now to be human. the true problem is not will we be humans or robots. the true problem is not in a young way to find the right kind of synthesis as some naive people dream, which is precisely the fascist equivalent in like you know, we should have some pro and so on, but mostly we should somehow control the process this is the dream of the church. this is the capital of the well-known paedophilia organization called
yes, no, no, no, just i want to draw your attention to one fact that it's the first novel without. without even any sexual tensions. you know what i mean? the couple is no longer created. like, you remember in angels and demons, the novel, there still was... they screwed to cut a long story short. then, did you notice that in the cinema version, tom hanks and that beautiful israeli actress ayelet zurer, they don't do it. totally non-erotic. then in the vinci code, also, they don't consummate it. and to paraphrase my friend darian leader, it is as if all the things happening out there like poor jesus had to screw mary to cover up the fact that here they don't do it. and then in the lost symbol it's even worse. i mean, absolutely no sexual attention and so on and so on. i don't think there is anything emancipatory in this. i think it's basically a shift. i think that... beneath the mask of permissibility and so on and so on the oppression! and fear of neighbor is getting so strong that the model of pleasure becomes more and more some kind of a masturbation sustained by the most you can get is a virtual other. so i claim even if you do something by misfortune with the real other, it has the structure of a masturbation with a real partner, how put it. it's as if if you engage yourself with a real other, it is as if it's too intrusive. it's too much of a harassment, as they put it in the united states. so okay. let me go on according to this cnn report in may two thousand eight monkeys with sensors implanted in their brains have learned to control a robot arm with their thoughts, using it to feed themselves with fruit and so on. in the experiment, a pair of monkeys were fitted with electrodes the width the width of a human hair that transmitted signals from the area of the brain linked to movements. scientists behind the experiment say it will lead to the creation of brain-controlled prosthetic lim for example, here. no it wasn't sorry here it was in university of south florida that the first prototype is already operative a wheelchair. mounted robotic arm controlling by thought alone is already created the device gives people with full body paralysis who have functional brains but no way to express their thoughts, the ability to perform simple day-to-day functions. a kind of a scanning machine. again, scans your brain and it's able to recognize this most elementary signals, basically forward, backward, left, right, and you see the point. you don't need even that famous stephen hawking finger. you just intensely think about it and the machine the machine... the machine... movie so, uh and... this again goes further. for example, uh... we more and more learn the uncanny fact that the us secret defense agencies are involved in a wide long-term project to develop means to control human emotions and attitudes from outside by way of attacking brains by precise electromagnetic waves. so you see my point. this is the other side. you will say, nice, wonderful, i can move things with the sheer power of my brain. the problem is that if it goes outside, it goes also inside. that is to say, i was told by some military specialists that everybody in the world is doing this like crazy. the chinese, americans, of course, russians. this idea of... of attacking directly your mind for example they can do it with anxiety and panic they isolated the waves. which your mind is secreting when you are in a panic they succeeded in reproducing. in a mechanical way, these waves. electromagnetic waves and if they bombard you with these waves you are simply in a panic. and i was told they already have it. like you can cover a certain area. you press the button, people are in a panic there. of course, the ideal that regulates this process is the full control of past and future at the psychic level. the strategy is always the same. an invention is first presented as a crucial remedy for some extreme illness. you know, they always start with helping the cripples, children with defects and so on and so on. but then it goes on. there are already researches into genetic and biochemical interventions which would selectively erase the subject's traumatic past. you know, this is how this mind control of memory. it. progressing. of course they put it first in the humanitarian way. think about a poor child being raped, wouldn't it be nice to... to erase that traumatic event from her brain but you know you start this it goes on no. the procedure is universalized. or rich prospective parents can already afford to have their unborn child's brain. scan for traces of possible future mental weaknesses, low iq, criminal tendencies and so on and so on. i think that one has to avoid here the double trap. the utopian dream of benevolent cleansing of the brain, of protecting it from illnesses, but also the false doomsday perspective which sees such interventions as the end of humanity. now i want to confront the more basic problem. there exists a thing called the world transhumanist association, founded i think even in london in . 198by nick bostrom and david pearce. it set itself the task to deal with these problems. it describes itself as, i quote, an international non-profit, of course, membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. end of quote. its premise is that human development in evolutionary terms has not reached anything like an endpoint. of of emerging technologies, neuropharmacology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies and so on, have the potential to enhance our abilities. as bostrom put it, quote, a few years ago, the discussions would typically revolve around the question, is this science fiction or are we dealing in realistic future possibilities? now the discussions tend to start from the position that, yes, it will be increasingly possible to modify human capacities. the issue now is whether we should do it, and if so, what are the ethical constraints? in contrast to nietzsche's notion of übermensch which aims at a moral and cultural transcendence. a selected few endowed with strong willpower and great refinement will throw off the shackles of traditional morality and so on. the transhumanist idea of a post-human aims at a society in which everybody will have access to enhancement technologies. again, a quote. transhumanists advocate increased funding for research to radically extend healthy lifespan and favor the development of medical and technological means to improve memory, concentration and other human capacities. transhumanists propose that everybody should have the option to use such means to enhance various dimensions of their cognitive, emotional and physical well-being. not only is this a natural extension of the traditional aims of medicine and technology, but it is also a great humanitarian opportunity to genuinely improve the human condition. end quote consequently, the main ethical concerns are those of accessibility and those of who is transforming whom. the last quote. it's one thing if we are talking about adult competent citizens deciding what to do with their own bodies. if, on the other hand, we are thinking about modifying children or selecting embryos, then there is another set of ethical questions that arise. there is a further set of ethical questions relating to access. if some of the technologies as they well might turn out to be very expensive, then what mechanisms should be in place to ensure fairness end of quote so to prevent state or private institutions deciding our fate, the choice whether to avail oneself to such enhancement options should generally reside with the individual. but again, is this enough? end of quote of course no. with all their warning about how we are on the brink of a post-human era and that would be my fundamental reproach to them. transhumanists effectively remain too humanist. again with all their warning about how new ir. exploding uh. when they describe the possibility of intervening into our biogenetic base and changing our very nature, they somehow presuppose that the autonomous subject freely deciding on his or acts will still be here, deciding on how to change his or her nature. they thus bring the split between the subject of the enunciated, what we call in lacachenian theory, the subject about which we talk, and the subject of the enunciation the speaking subject to its extreme. on the one hand, as an object of my interventions, i am a biological mechanism whose properties up to the mental ones can be manipulated. on the other hand, i act as if i am somehow exempted from this manipulation. an autonomous individual who, from a distance, can make the right choices. but what about the prospect of the loop getting closed so that my very power of autonomous decision is already meddled with? by biogenetic manipulation. this is why there is effectively something shallow, boring even in all transhumanist meditations. they basically ignore the problem. like the critic. and like their critics, they avoid the core of the question which they seem to be dealing. with all the time how will biogenetic and other interventions affect the very definition of humanity bostrom emphasizes that the choice whether to avail oneself of such enhancement options should generally reside with the individual. but will this individual still be here? both transhumanists and their critics thus unproblematically cling to the standard notion of a free, autonomous individual. the difference is that transhumanists simply accept that it will somehow survive the passage in the post-human era while their critics see post-humanity as a threat and therefore want to prevent. ich reich. brought to its extreme. this techno-digital apocalyptism assumes the form of the so-called techgnosis. openly passes over into the new age apocalyptism what looms at the horizon of the digital revolution is nothing else than the prospect that human beings will acquire this. capacity of directly interacting with material reality in the sense of my mind directly influencing reality, the example that i already mentioned and we can imagine how it will be developed that you think about it and it happens as it were, that you can directly move objects with with your mind. so on the one hand, it will be possible, through neurological implants, to switch from our common reality to another computer-generated reality, without all the clumsy machinery of today's virtual reality, the awkward glasses, gloves and so on, since the signals of the virtual reality will directly reach our brain, bypassing our censoring. sensory organs. again, dan brown's the lost symbol provides an exemplary case of the spiritual mystification of these ongoing scientific breakthroughs. the fact that brain sciences are slowly unraveling the neuronal processes which support thinking, that is to say, which things happen in our brain when we think is mystified into the new age notion of thinking itself. influencing material. processing furthermore, this spiritualist mystification is supplemented by a piece of vulgar materialism in the david chalmers style, you know, the guy who thinks that psychic awareness is should be recognized as the fifth simply another elementary natural force. the lost symbol, the novel, claims that thought itself possesses a separate material existence of its own. that's supposed to be the big mystery revealed at the end, that you can isolate some kind of a slimy shit, shitty stuff which is allegedly like the direct materialization of thought itself, of the soul. so the new age announced by the novel, the shattering transformation which will affect humanity is what? it's that the gap that separates thinking from reality will be overcome. humanity will reawaken its spiritual potentials. we will become like gods in the precise sense of deploying the ability to directly through thought alone, influence reality. magic and science, faith and knowledge will thus be reconciled with the ancient faith acquiring new experimental confirmation. against this ideology, i think, we should assert that symbol as such the symbolic order in which we humans dwell is the symbol of a loss. in other words, what the novel, the lost symbol, presents is a loss. you know, the novel again adopts this new age attitude that things went really bad with all this lost distance. first, in logos we lost contact with mythic reality, with modern rationalism we lost this gradual loss of contact with reality. but loch. we should consider it as the very gap which sustains our freedom of thinking. you know, they are looking, this would be my first answer to all this new age stuff, how our thought must rejoin reality. that's the miracle. for me, if your thought produces some shit there or whatever, this is not a miracle. the true miracle is the gap itself. here i'm even aarya. the true miracle is how we can acquire distance from reality and think. that's the most precious thing. i mean, i simply see, i mean, if you look behind all this mystery of we will be able to influence reality and so on. i claim what is behind this is just this vulgar fact that, of course, thoughts have a certain materiality because they are ultimately material and so on. and i think, again, we should turn things around and precisely celebrate what the new agers are presenting to us as the tragic loss. we lost organic unity with nature and so on. thanks god that we lost it. that's why we are free human beings. now i go a little bit, if you allow me, into more thinking. now the journalism is over. what underlines all this topic of rejoining the holistic reality of being one with nature is the status of the so-called western exception, which culminates in western modernity. the shift from organic whole to universality universality which introduces a rupture, a cut in two. holistic totality. a distance from particular spiritualized life world when we jump to global secular order and so on and so on. hegel conceives this shift as the passage from the ancient greek aesthetic whole of polys to the christian abstract universality. on a closer look, we can see how this shift repeats itself three times in western history. first, as the shift from mythos to logos. the break of the greek philosophy from the traditional mythic universe and here alain badiou is right when he pointed out how parmenides is the point of passage. you remember, you know, this better, in the first line, one of the few surviving fragments, he is nonetheless with one leg still in the mythic. because you remember, he addresses the goddess, no? the goddess truth, i think, i'm not sure, parmenides. so it's the first breakthrough toward conceptual thinking one, but as it were still in the mythic form then the story goes on. then the christian break with the pagan cosmos, which culminates in the so-called irrational rejection of the world, the withdrawal into the non-thought of the night of the world, what mi calls this. finally, the modern disenchantment of reality, the rise of the cartesian subject opposed to the mute and meaningless infinite universe. for today's anti-modernist, partisans of a new post-secular holistic paradigm, each time things went fatally wrong. plato asserted abstract notional thinking against the thought embedded in a concrete life world when christianity asserted the christian believer as an abstract individual not as a member of concrete organic, traditional. community when cartesian modernity broke with the pre-modern universe of mythic meaning. for them, the whole idea of secular modernism and universalism is a freakish idiosyncrasy in the history of the human species, the root of our ecological and other disasters. ultimately, secular modernism is an impossible position, an illusion and, as bruno latour put it, we were never really modern. i claim that against this temptation, it is absolutely crucial for the emancipatory politics to remain faithful to this universalist secular project of modernity. again, we should fearlessly celebrate what is presented to us as a problem. you know for example the problem is not, my god, we lost immediate contact with reality. the problem is that we experience this as a problem. we should celebrate it. what does this mean? now i come to hegel, how this works. oop. where can hegel help us? precisely if we drop the standard approach to the dialectical process, which is the so-called synthesis of the opposite model. the model which no wonder can be immediately accepted, endorsed by new agers and so on, jungians especially. in the opposition between freud and jung, freud was here a true hegelian in contrast to jung's pseudo-hegelian compensation theory. what do i mean by this? you know where is the difference really between freud and jung? it's not just... that i don't know. for jung there is one dissexualized libido, for freud eros,anatos and so on. no, the fundamental difference is somewhere else. freud was a materialist. you know in what sense? it. for freud, for example, when he describes symptoms and so on, he always emphasized that we are not talking about some kind of a direct spiritual causality. things happen in a natural way. for example you become ill and then your unconscious parasitizes upon it and used it as meaning and so on but the point is again that that it's not that beneath reality there is some unconscious in a mysterious way steering reality reality is there totally contingent and all meaning is as it were you know meaning is opportunistic parasitic upon it while if you read jung closely he does precisely the opposite for him there is a deeper spiritual reality which somehow steers the usual reality so what is then this jungian pseudo--hegelian so-called compensation theory. a quote from jung. whenever life proceeds one-sidedly in any given direction, the self-regulation of the organism produces in the unconscious an accumulation of all those factors which play too small a part in the individual's conscious existence for this reason i have put forward the compensation theory of the unconscious as a complement to the repression theory. end of now it is easy to perceive how this relates to neurotic symptoms and their therapy. that's jung's idea. when the ego gets too narrow and rigid, excluding from its scope the irrational tendencies which do not fit his or her its self image, these tendencies return in the guise of neurotic symptoms. say, when a man curtails, oppresses his feminine shadow, anima, cutting it off his identity, the anima returns to her him in the guise of monstrous obscene feminine figures in which he is not able to recognize himself and the man experiences them as brutal foreign intrusions the goal of therapy is therefore not to fight these symptoms not to eliminate them but to integrate them into a wider shelf which transcends the narrow confines of ego. these symptoms stand for forces which are not in themselves evil and destructive. what makes them such is the false perspective of the ego. or as hegel would have it, evil resides in the very gaze which perceives evil everywhere around itself. so, according to jung, when ego is haunted by neurotic symptoms, the task of the therapist is to make the patient see how his ego is part of the problem, not the solution. the ego should shift its perspective and recognize in his symptom a distorted violent expression of the disavowed part of himself. the true illness is that of the ego and neurotic symptoms are desperate attempts at a cure attempts to re-establish the balance disturbed by the ego's narrow frame which excluded crucial parts of the content. another quote. from a neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego we do not cure it it cures us a man is ill but the illness is nature's attempt to heal him and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. end quote no wonder that some partisans of jung see in this compensation theory a hegelian background. here is a quote from a popular book on jung. it was hegel who argued that the only way a battle could cease between a thesis and an antithesis is through the construction of a synthesis that would include elements from both sides and transcend the opposition. although jung denied that hegel was as an influence on his thought, it is hard to imagine jungian thought without the hegelian model that sees conflict overcome through the creation of a transcendent third which is neither thesis nor antithesis but a new entity in which both are included i think that here nonetheless, jung was right. there effectively is no trace of hegel in jung's compensation theory. this dismissal my dismissal may appear too fast, since many formulations of jung effectively, for example, recall hegel's notion of reconciliation of the subject with its alienated substance. the idea of hegel is howau. you should recognize in the foreign power. that you fight the misrecognized part of your own substance. this dialectic of recognition effectively belongs to the young hegel. it found its definitive expression in the so-called jena period fragments on love and reconciliation and later, for example in hegel's reading of antigone, you know as the tragic confrontation of the two opposed positions, antigones and creons. it really looks as if hegel is there a young. you know, antigone neglects the public aspect, the state, creon neglects this private divinities, whatever. and again, each should recognize in the other the oppressed truth. off. himself. so hish. jung's most hegelian formulation, quote, the individual is faced with the necessity of recognizing and accepting what is different and strange as part of his own life. as's the kind of also i, like, but that's also me. all the nightmares which haunt me. now you will say, but what's bad about it? isn't this? isn't there something great in this model? where not to great. the first thing totally accidental contingent that should make you think is that. based on precisely this reasoning, jung for one year supported the nazis. his reading was that our western civilization was way too influenced by the jewish abstract rational side and so this is why barbarism emerged, but what we need is, as he put it, the revival of the wotan archetype of this nordic vitality and so on, to counteract the jewish abstract cunning, j work of reason and so on. so we need to... to re need to re-establish the balance but i claim there is a problem here and precisely. this is the reason why this idea is not hegelian, although it sounds hegelian. you know, this idea of reconciliation with an apparent enemy that what you exclude from yourself continues to haunt you and so on and so on. let's imagine precisely the example, for example, but the same goes for all forms of racism, the struggle between the nazis and the jews. again, in a first approach, the jungian notion of shadow as the mis-recognized alter ego seems fitting here. is there effectively not a strange echoing and redoubling between the nazi elevation of aryan germans and the jewish self-perception as the chosen nation. was it not already arnold schoenberg the composer, who dismissed nazi racism as a miserable imitation of the jewish identity as the chosen people? however, what breaks down here is precisely this mirroring relationship. now i want you to be very attentive to this point. i claim that this jungian dialectics of recognition to recognize in the horror that you combat your own truth. holds in a properly hegelian way, and this is the true hegelian dialectics of the opposite, holds only for one side. you can effectively say for theaki, that. that in the figure of the jew, they should recognize the oppressed, excluded part of themselves. that if you want to put it in this way, not the real jew, but the figure of the jew is the symptom in which what the nazis disavowed, ultimately, to put it in simplified marxist terms, social antagonism, class struggle, whatever, returns to haunt you as the terrible feature of the haunting jew and so on. and so on. but as we all know, it would be obscene even to claim it. we cannot make the same operation for the other thing. you know we can say that this holds for the nis but the same does not hold for the for the glue. can you really claim that nazi is the symptom of the jew? so that a jew should see how what h him as a nazi is really just the excluded part of his own identity so that the jew should, i quote here schelling, should recognize in the nazi the true gold they should never have found elsewhere. you see the radical asymmetry. and that's crucial. that's what is missing, i claim, in this model of dialectical unity. like both elements are one-sided and we need a third position. no, we don't need a third position. the polarity in hegel is never a symmetric polarity so that then you go into this stupid common sense, neither he is right nor he is right, but some higher synthesis and so on and so on. the first step of a hegelian analysis when you are dealing with a struggle a contradiction is to isolate the determining element, the one which generates its opposite s. its own shadow maybe a little bit in jungian way. for example, and this will be problematic for my liberal critics. i am the first to advocate that we should sometimes make a pact, of course, with liberals against racism and so on and so on. but when we are dealing today with the opposition of, let us say, liberal individualism and so-called communitarian totalitarianism. absolutely we should avoid like hell any jungian notions of, you know, one go too far in one direction, the others go too far in the other direction. so we should do like john milbank in the book that i co-wrote with him, what i then called softly his soft fascism and so on, you know, like the right way, you know, not too much individualism. this is the commarian dream, no? a kind of a also a dream of christian. personalism a kind of a proper measure. yes, individual freedoms but still grounded in a community and so on and so on. it doesn't work in this way. why? because eh. there is no higher element. the whole point is that in the opposition between liberal individualism and, let's call it, communitarian fundamentalism, the determining factor is liberal individualism, i claim. it this global capitalist liberal logic. and again, this doesn't mean we blame it. we should make pact with them in concrete struggle, but we should always insist on one crucial. point it is. it. today's fundamentalism, which is the symptom of liberalism, not vice versa. you know. determining factor is liberalism, which means the only way to enact the change is to change, not to destroy it with new totalitarianism, but just that as long as we have liberalism the way we have it, it will generate at its opposition fundamentalism. as it's for me, as i repeat, i think also in my trag de far's last book, clear for me, for example, i maybe, i'm sorry if i repeat myself, you already know this example. take afghanistan. if there was a fundamentalist country which we all know it as such is today's afghanistan. but wait a minute, some of us, at least i, am old enough to remember 30, 40 years ago, afghanistan was, you know this, the single most secular and tolerant of near middle east muslim countries. they had a kind of a pro-western enlightened monarch who tried to do some sh-like but iranian shah-like but much less radical. how do you call this modernization. they had a very strong local communist party which as you probably know, with the coup d'etat took power even without the soviet union. what happened then? then uh. they got weak to weak to survive, soviet union intervened, then united states supported the opposition and out of this, how call it, getting becoming global of afghanistan. afghanistan became fundamentalist. so you see my point. it's not globalization progresses and oh you have there some stupid primitive countries which need no. the fundamentalization of afghanistan. it's the result of the very process by means of which afghanistan was caught into global capitalist politics and so on and so on. that's the absolutely crucial thing always to ask when we are dealing with so-called fundamentalist it's the same in the united states. probably you know it. i'm sorry to repeat myself, but my big example, kansas. you know that popular book thomas frank? know how? no, the crucial thing to remember is that kansas, as you maybe know, is today the bible belt fundamentalist christian state. but till 30 years ago, it was the state with the greatest number of populist left, for example, already in the civil war, john brown is from kansas. they were the most radical anti-slavery state within the united states and so on. so again, what happened then in 30, 40 years, the very bedrock of progressive leftist populism turned into you see this process we should bear in mind which means again the solution is not synthesis. in this case, the solution to the opposition liberalism fundamentalism is not, yeah, yeah, a higher synthesis, a little bit of this. it is to accept that this opposition is a real opposition, but nonetheless as such, in a way, a false opposition. a false opposition, not i'm not claiming in a primitive way all liberals are really fundamentalists. racists. what i'm claiming that liberals do not take into account enough in what way the very civilization they stand for. generate what they fight. like take another example which i think i mentioned in my last book, it's typical and almost nobody again talks about it. congo. you know, congo, nightmare, primitive, 5 million diedke and so on. but congo is not such a nightmare because it is excluded from globalization it's the very mode of its inclusion. you know where you can get this? do you remember half a year ago, there was, i think, some rebellion against the congo central government in some eastern province and it was interesting and crucial to read what happened. what was the demand of those that rebellious group? it was that the central government should break, abandon the contract it made with china. okay, it's now another story. i think we should approach it if we're honest left. the story about chinese economic neocolonialism. like, are you aware that you remember in myanmar, burma, in myanmar, those big demonstrations, they were controlled through chinese help? myanmar is effectively a chinese economic colony now. but what i'm saying is that nonetheless chinese offered to congo something which is colonialism, neocolonialism, but maybe it would have worked. it's tremendously important what happened there. china made a deal with congo that they will invest like we are speaking about real sums of money, like comparable to those that we give now to the banks so that their bosses can again share profits and those special whatever. we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. basically china offered to rebuild the entire infrastructure to make congo a functioning state, which now it's not. you know to rebuild the entire rail network of rails, 20 30 hospitals, universities and so on, of course in exchange for the complete all natural resources. this was a threat to some people. what is now the reality of congo? it is that we have so-called warlords who control parts and all of them has each of them specific deals with some western companies, for example, how is it called the cheap tungsten or what that you put into computers and so on. all the stuff. so you see the point. the point is that congo is kept in this state of non-functioning as a state of being divided into different domains with this human human nightmares not because it's not globalized enough. this is the mode of the inclusion of congo into global market. that's my answer to those who claim global market brings prosperity and so on and so on. it brings, but it also keeps congo where it is. it produces afghanistan. take iraq. like the guy who criticized me, i heard recently in the review of my book, was it independence? norman, how do you pronounce. no, no, john gray is another one. i have the list of i have a black book. all the names are there. you know, i'm slowly composing. you know that the nazis, when they planned the invasion of england in 39, you can buy it somewhere they already printed a book with all the people to erre. and they made this stupid mistake, you know, 1940, freud was already dead. they still list, you know. freud up there to arrest. no, i'm composing a similar book when we take over. no, no, but what i want to say, norman in norman gas, he said that it's ridiculous of me to blame liberalism, for example, for what afghanis are doing. no, i don't blame them in the moralistic sense. of course, i believe in their sincerity and so on and so on. but wait a minute, if we were cruel and it was right that we were cruel against communist regimes claiming fuck off with your idea, let's see what you really produce. let's if we always emphasize how really existing socialism was a nightmare let's then also look at really existing liberalism, not the ideals and there you see that okay, i agree with gerash and others who claim but we a minute, whatever you reproach the west with, nonetheless they are going there to these countries, iraq, afghanistan, precisely to bring western enlightenment. maybe that's the reason why they are going. what they produced is exactly the opposite. look at iraq. the i am totally opposed to... i don't have any of this bullshit you know, anyone who fights united states is our friend, so saddam was our hero for resisting. but one thing you should admit to saddam, he did relatively secularize the country. the first five years of shaddam. the entire legitimization was much more secular patriotic, basically nationalist. so you see the paradox that now, of course, united states are in a panic. i understand that because they know that if they leave now iraq. probably the country will fall apart from my french in turkey i learned. kurds are practically already building their capital. i mean, i support them and so on. so the scenario is that shia in the south will take over. this means through shia basically iran. this means to cut a long story short, the main result of, i mean, i really think that ahmadinejad, he plays jupiter world, but he should really send big thanks to the united states. like, thank you for getting rid of our enemy saddam and on delivering iraq to us, to our influence. you know, these are the things that are really going on. friends from iran told me that the immense investments of iran in iraq recently, especially in the shia part and so on. but you see my point here. my point is that the answer is not liberalism versus fundamentalism, who is the good guy? of course, we should fight also these battles in the same way as, for example, if there is illness and you can clearly see a social causality of this illness because of some poison in the air, whatever. of course! the solution is not the stupid marxist one, pseudo-marxist where you say, oh, we must fight the true causes, let the people drop dead there, we will solve. no, you should also do the medical. help helped the people. in the same sense, of course, when there is sexism and all that, we should make strategic pacts with liberals and so on. but our lesson to them, to the liberals should be that that that ultimately they are themselves generating not they, but... the... the economic unity whatever the civilization of which they are part, they are generating what they are fighting so in order precisely to save. what is worth saving in liberalism? this be this is the hegelian aufhebungablation. to save what is worth saving in liberalism, we will have to go a step further, beyond liberalism. in other words, we should never forget that this opposition, where one side is the symptom of the other, is the pseudo. opposition and that you know like the true alternative is not liberalism versus fundamentalism the true alternative is this entire field versus the authentic left and here we must be self-critical the reason why we have all these fundamentalisms, it's becoming more and more clear how right walter benjamin was when he made this famous statement that every fascism is the sign and indication of a failed revolution. if we accept, i'm very doubtful about this term, but strategically for five minutes, three minutes, if we accept the term islamofascism, then we should say... it also holds for islamof fascismism this. they are there because we were not there. because the the left failed. so again, you see my idea. don't accept those terms of the debate, liberalism versus fundamentalism. the solution is a radical third term which breaks this cycle. and now you will say, but what has all this to do with what i was saying about apocalyptism and so on and so on? it's exactly the same. i think that all these nightmarish dreams of are we human? are we not human? will we be robots and so on? are because it's like fundamentalism to liberalism. it's a symptom of what we consider now to be human. the true problem is not will we be humans or robots. the true problem is not in a young way to find the right kind of synthesis as some naive people dream, which is precisely the fascist equivalent in like you know, we should have some pro and so on, but mostly we should somehow control the process this is the dream of the church. this is the capital of the well-known paedophilia organization called