On the Desert of Post-Ideology
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012-10-02 · 1:59:31 · 15,777 words
ideologyreligion-theologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticscapitalismconsciousness-mindcinema-art-culturephilosophy-generalethicssubjectivityfascism-populismcommunism-socialismtechnology-ai-cyberspacedemocracy
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture on ideology, spirituality, and the limits of Buddhism as a response to global capitalism. Beginning with Gangnam Style and Kung Fu Panda as illustrations of how cynical ironic distance sustains ideology rather than undermining it, he moves through the relationship between authentic spiritual experience and political violence (Himmler, Heydrich, DT Suzuki, Pol Pot), critiques Western Buddhism as the ideal spiritual supplement to capitalist subjectivity, and examines the biogenetic revolution's challenge to the category of free human subjectivity. He concludes by calling for an ethics of full engagement and 'falling into the world' against Buddhist withdrawal, and addresses questions on master signifiers, the left's lack of positive vision, Wittgenstein, and cognitivism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 26
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Implied in the Gangnam Style analysis: the 'pleasurably disgusting' quality that makes one return to something one finds repellent, the excess enjoyment beyond mere pleasure.
as “cynicism”
Žižek's usage here: a mode where one 'makes fun of itself' while still functioning, ironic distance from ideology that paradoxically sustains it rather than undermining it.
as “no ethnic cleansing without poetry”
Žižek's formula: political mass violence requires a mythic-poetic-spiritual vision to make ordinary people capable of doing horrible things they would otherwise find unbearable.
as “act without being fully involved”
Žižek reads the Bhagavad Gita's lesson to Arjuna, act without full identification with the act, as the Eastern spiritual technique Himmler used to enable Holocaust perpetrators to kill without 'becoming beasts.'
A genuine spiritual or aesthetic experience that carries no immanent ethical guarantee, it is fully compatible with doing horrible things in the world.
as “performative ritual”
Butler's concept of how sexual identity is constituted through repeated symbolic acts, Žižek's critique: this describes the predominant capitalist ideology, not a subversive alternative to it.
as “enlightened Western Buddhism”
Žižek's term for the predominant capitalist ideology: a pseudo-Buddhist attitude of non-attachment, self-construction, and inner-distance that perfectly complements global capitalist dynamics.
Against Buddhist withdrawal, Žižek advocates an ethics of fully 'falling into' the world, losing the ego not through meditation but through radical engagement; a distinctly Western-Christian ethical move.
Operative in the discussion of how jokes and irony function as real social mechanisms, they produce real effects regardless of their perceived ironic distance.
Implicit in the paternal authority discussion: the symbolic authority that functions by not seeing everything, leaving open spaces of transgression.
as “paternal authority”
Lacanian concept: the traditional father who prohibits but deliberately leaves blind spots for transgression, enabling a livable space of enjoyment, superior to the postmodern permissive father who imposes enjoyment.
as “reasonable hedonism”
Today's permissive but disciplined attitude toward pleasure, 'do it but in a healthy way', which Žižek finds more terrifying than authentic consumerism because it forecloses genuine enjoyment.
The dimension of murderous divine violence (God of the Real) that Judaism and civilization try to keep at a distance, associated here with sacred orgy and collective transgressive violence.
as “God of the Real”
The murderous, overwhelming divine force that came 'alive' in Auschwitz, not the death of God but the eruption of the Real's excess violence, which Judaism tries to keep at a distance.
as “Taoist Ethics and the Spirit of Global Capitalism”
Žižek's proposed sequel/update to Weber's Protestant Ethic: the argument that Taoist/Buddhist inner distance fits global capitalism far better than Protestant work-ethic Christianity.
as “narrative analysis”
DARPA's program to identify brain regions involved in ideological belief formation, with the goal of changing beliefs through direct biogenetic intervention rather than argument.
as “freedom as the power to say no”
Drawing on Benjamin Libet's neuroscience: genuine human freedom is not positive choosing but the capacity to block/veto an already-neurally-decided action, a Hegelian reading of the experiment.
The death drive-like enjoyment that is irreducible even in suffering, used against Buddhism's axiom that all beings want to escape suffering; Žižek insists we want to suffer.
The Buddhist saint who postpones Nirvana to return and save all beings, Žižek sees this as where Buddhism's problems begin, introducing an external ethical mission that authentic Buddhism need not have.
Žižek's ironic label for the Buddhist notion that one can wage war or kill with compassion, exposing that Buddhist ethics carries no guarantee against violence.
Žižek's dismissive label for the ideology in Star Wars where Anakin Skywalker falls to the Dark Side through too much attachment/love, a misrepresentation of both love and Buddhism.
In the Q&A: not an ecstatic moment of revolutionary togetherness but the name for a new order, what the left lacks is a positive master signifier articulating what it actually wants.
A structure that works precisely through self-mocking ironic distance, exemplified by Gangnam Style and Kung Fu Panda, where self-parody renders the ideological content more viable, not less.
For Žižek, the Cartesian Cogito is not a substance (res cogitans) but a purely performative, non-substantial void, the legitimate core of modernity's anti-humanism.
The Hegelian-Cartesian anti-humanist core of subjectivity: beneath the wealth of personality is a void, not a substantial self, convergent with Buddhist An-Atman but arrived at differently.
Not named explicitly but operative in the femme fatale example from film noir: the object-cause of desire whose pursuit one would repeat even knowing it leads to ruin.
Stories he reaches for 13
Suzuki argued that a truly enlightened person stabbing another is not 'doing' anything: the knife moves as part of a cosmic dance and the victim's body 'hits' the knife, the enlightened self is merely a transparent observer.
“it is as he says a knife in my hand as part of a cosmic dance is moving in space and as part of the same dance, Matthew sorry you are, your body hits my knife and I'm for nothing in it.”
Himmler carried a leather-bound Bhagavad Gita in his pocket and used its lesson of 'acting without full identification' to enable SS officers to commit atrocities without 'becoming beasts' through enjoyment.
“Himmler always had in his pocket a special leather-bound version of Bhagavad Gita...don't worry, do all the killing and so on, what you can destroy is already in itself negligible.”
Reinhard Heydrich, organizer of the Wannsee Conference, played violin and held private string quartet evenings with his SS friends playing late Beethoven, an 'ontological scandal' showing that authentic aesthetic appreciation and absolute evil can coexist.
“I found this to be some kind of let me call it ontological scandal, you know, like how is this possible?”
The film simultaneously mobilizes Orientalist mythology and mocks it, yet the self-mocking makes the ideology more viable, making fun of itself is precisely what allows it to work.
“far from undermining all this Orientalist mythology, in a strange way making fun of it makes this ideology viable.”
Libet showed that neurons decide a fraction of a second before conscious awareness of a decision, apparently disproving free will, but Libet himself argues freedom is the capacity to veto/block neurally-decided actions, not to positively choose.
“His answer is that yes...our freedom is originally a freedom to say no. That our freedom is not to freely decide for something, but just for no reason at all to sabotage.”
Žižek's own father, on his return from high school, demanded to know if he had been with girls and even offered to give sexual advice, the permissive, enjoining father is experienced as an 'absolute nightmare.'
“father told me, 'Where are the girls? Are you a man? Did you do it?...is it that you cannot do it? Do you need my advice or what?' Absolute nightmare.”
Father Joseph, Richelieu's right hand who engineered Thirty Years' War policy and organized murders, simultaneously wrote mystical letters to a convent at the level of Saint Teresa or John of the Cross, authentic spirituality alongside absolute political evil.
“this is what bothers so much Aldous Huxley. How can a guy who is doing all this at the same time how can he write something that you cannot but say if you are honest, my God this is the pearl, the thing itself.”
In the Babylonian Talmud, two rabbis debating theology summon God to adjudicate; the winning rabbi shouts at God that He did his job poorly and should leave, and God says 'you are right' and runs away. Žižek reads this as Judaism's strategy to keep God at a distance.
“God's reaction is 'Oh my God you are right,' and God runs away.”
Chesterton notes that in all other religions men fall from God, but only in Christianity does God himself fall into the world through incarnation, Žižek uses this to ground the ethics of the fall.
“in all other religions you have a fall like men fall from God, only in Christianity God himself falls into the world, incarnation and so on.”
The classic noir scene where a man ruined by a femme fatale, when asked if he regrets it, says 'it was worth it, I would do it again', illustrating that the death drive means we want to suffer, against Buddhism's optimism.
“'No, it was worth. Even if I were to know that it will end in ruin, it was it was worth doing it.' This idea of it's a catastrophe but I'm ready to do it again.”
The K-pop mega-hit functions ideologically precisely because it mocks itself: audiences find it disgusting yet return compulsively, and its self-parody of Seoul upper-class culture makes the ideology viable rather than undermining it.
“it's not that you like it...when you first hear it you find it disgusting, but in a weird way pleasurably disgusting. You become haunted by it.”
Von Trier used quasi-documentary handheld camera style, out of sync with the melodramatic narrative, as a distancing filter to make the ridiculous romantic story palpable; the opposite of standard melodrama.
“this quasi-documentary style functions like some kind of a screen which softens and makes palpable so that you can take seriously the story.”
An inflight magazine celebrated sex as medically healthy, good for the heart, muscles, and keeping facial muscles from sagging, epitomizing the horror of today's 'reasonable hedonism' that drains pleasure of enjoyment.
“even kissing, deep French kissing, it's very good, it keeps the muscle strong so when you will be old the saliva will not be dropping for.”
Works invoked 22
Bhagavad Gita book
Used to illustrate the 'act without full identification' teaching that Himmler weaponized; Žižek uses it analytically without personal endorsement.
Star Wars film
Dismissed as 'Star Wars Buddhism', the ideology that too much love/attachment causes the fall to the Dark Side is a falsification of both love and Buddhist ethics.
Zen at War book
Brian Victoria's documentation of Japanese Zen's support for imperial warfare; recommended as 'widely debated in Zen and generally Buddhist circles.'
Mein Kampf book
'A horrible book, pretty boring, but worth reading': cited to show that Hitler's ideology was historicist relativism, not philosophical absolutism, refuting the Levinas thesis.
Kung Fu Panda film
Had the 'misfortune' of seeing it four or five times; considers it 'exemplary of ideology today' because its self-mocking of Orientalist mythology makes that mythology viable.
Empire book
Negri and Hardt's book; criticized because when it approaches the problem of political organization it dissolves into mystical imagery (Saint Francis).
Annie Hall film
The Marshall McLuhan scene used as a parallel to the Talmudic story of summoning God to adjudicate a theological debate.
Described as 'the greatest triumph of sadomaso gay orientation in Hollywood', dismissed as authentic religious cinema and used as a foil for Project X.
One of Butler's two best works according to Žižek; preferred over her 'big official stuff.'
Breaking the Waves film
Does not especially like the film but uses it to illustrate the logic of a distancing filter, documentary style making melodramatic content palpable.
Multitude book
Negri and Hardt's follow-up; same criticism as Empire, lacks real answers on global organization.
Project X film
A 'modest film' used to illustrate that authentic sacred experience (transgressive collective violence) is found more in Hollywood commercialism than in official religion.
Dennett's book; his explanation of the origin of religion there is 'stupid', he is 'stupid when he wants to do a big general image.'
Wild at Heart film
The Bobby Peru 'say fuck me' scene is called 'the absolutely supreme most painful scene', Lynch's unconscious genius at work, used to illustrate Lacanian desire and humiliation.
Being No One book
Thomas Metzinger's 'big fat book'; the most interesting cognitivist contribution to Žižek's theme, argues Buddhist enlightenment is the only subjective position compatible with scientific results.
Naming and Necessity book
Saul Kripke's book; called 'an extraordinary book' and used to support the claim that language goes beyond a mere plurality of games.
Weber's 'classical book'; invoked as the template that should be updated with Taoist/Buddhist ethics for global capitalism.
Subjects of Desire book
Butler's first book, on Hegel; Žižek's favorite of her works, 'a very good reading of Hegel', showing her as 'deep in her heart a Hegelian.'
Bacchae play
Euripides's tragedy cited as the ancient example of the sacred as murderous orgiastic violence, a prefiguration of the analysis of Project X.
Gangnam Style song
Finds it 'disgusting' personally but uses it as the opening paradigm case of how ideology functions through cynical enjoyment and self-mocking ironic distance.
The Gray Eminence book
Aldous Huxley's biography of Father Joseph; 'not a really great book' but useful for establishing the coexistence of authentic spirituality and absolute political evil.
Kripke's book on Wittgenstein; endorsed for identifying a void beyond the standard language-games reading of the Philosophical Investigations.
People invoked 36
Radovan Karadžić positive
Bosnian Serb leader and war criminal who was also a poet; key empirical illustration of 'no ethnic cleansing without poetry.'
Owen Flanagan negative
Cognitivist close to Buddhism; his 'normative exclusion clause' (pill-induced enlightenment doesn't count) is challenged by Žižek, if the inner state is identical, the exclusion is arbitrary.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Žižek rejects his thesis that philosophical totality grounds political totalitarianism; but agrees with his reading that the ultimate addressee of 'don't kill' in Judaism is God himself.
Paul Celan positive
Cited as an example of genuinely authentic poetry that undermines nationalist myth rather than enabling it, the exception that qualifies Žižek's thesis.
Cited alongside Eliot as a great modernist poet with fascist sympathies, illustrating the thesis about poetry and political violence.
Edmund Burke negative
Cited as the paradigm historicist conservative defending Ancien Régime through tradition against revolutionary absolutism, used to invert the Levinas-Adorno thesis.
Jacques Lacan positive
Repeatedly invoked as authority on paternal function, desire, the master-slave dialectic inversion, and the big Other. Quoted from Seminar XI on the father who turns a blind eye to desire.
Steven Weinberg positive
Quoted on the distinction of religion making good people do bad things; Žižek 'basically agrees' with this formulation while noting he is not fully aligned with the Harris/Hitchens materialism camp.
Brian Victoria positive
Zen at War is recommended as a key text documenting Japanese Zen's near-unanimous support for imperial war; the book is called 'not a big theoretical book' but praised for its documentary value.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my favorite Catholic theologian although I'm totally an atheist'; cited on the Christian distinction that God falls into the world, grounding Žižek's ethics of the fall.
David Lynch positive
Called 'some kind of unconscious genius who really doesn't know how he does it'; analyzed via Wild at Heart's Bobby Peru scene; personally distanced from Lynch's right-wing politics and advocacy of transcendental meditation.
Steven Pinker negative
'Plainly stupid', over-simplifies and 'says stupidities'; brief but sharp dismissal.
Partially praised: stupid when offering grand images (e.g. origin of religion in Consciousness Explained), but 'very intelligent' with specific examples; not to be dismissed as a naive mechanist.
Judith Butler negative
Personal friend whom Žižek respects; praises her early Hegel book and The Psychic Life of Power, but argues her performativity theory describes and reproduces dominant capitalist ideology rather than subverting it.
Saskia Sassen positive
Cited in a documentary alongside Tibetan Buddhists arguing that Buddhist ontology of non-substantial reality maps onto the fragility of today's capitalism.
Patricia Churchland negative
With Paul Churchland, cited for the utopian claim that we can reconstruct human self-perception to fully integrate scientific determinism, Žižek considers this impossible.
Saul Kripke positive
Naming and Necessity called 'an extraordinary book'; his Wittgenstein on Rules is praised for identifying a dimension beyond the plurality of language games toward something more radical.
Antonio Negri negative
With Hardt: criticized because Empire and Multitude end in a mystical vision (quoting Saint Francis) rather than addressing how global organization would work after capitalism.
Alexis Tsipras negative
Met the SYRIZA leader and found him unable to articulate what the party would actually do if it won; exemplifies the left's lack of positive vision.
Cited alongside Pound as examples of undoubtedly great modernist poets who were close to fascism, illustrating the link between poetic vision and political violence.
Pol Pot positive
Cited as the most extreme case of the coexistence of authentic Buddhist enlightenment (reportedly) and mass murder; 'a nightmare of a human person' who was 'an incredibly gentle soft person.'
Kojin Karatani positive
Called 'my friend'; cited for the claim that there is a Buddhist tradition where Nirvana means falling fully into the world rather than maintaining inner distance, aligned with Žižek's ethics of the fall.
Heinrich Himmler positive
Used as the key historical illustration that authentic spiritual experience (Bhagavad Gita) can coexist with organizing genocide; his articulation of the 'lose your soul for the country' ethic is quoted with analytical interest.
Michel Foucault negative
Briefly cited as seemingly claiming that the transcendental tradition of modern philosophy is humanist, Žižek rejects this, arguing that tradition is fundamentally anti-humanist.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Cited as evidence that Buddhism is a neutral technique: Suzuki supported Japanese imperial warfare and provided advice on making killing more efficient; also praised for honestly admitting the irreducible gap between inner practice and ethics.
Reinhard Heydrich positive
Organizer of the Wannsee Conference who played violin and performed late Beethoven string quartets, cited as the paradigm case of the 'ontological scandal' of authentic aesthetic experience coexisting with absolute evil.
Thomas Metzinger positive
Called 'the most interesting guy' among cognitivists; his Being No One is praised for showing that Buddhist enlightenment is the only subjective position compatible with scientific results about the self.
Paul Churchland negative
With Patricia Churchland, cited for the eliminativist claim that human freedom-experience can be overcome through scientific self-understanding, Žižek calls it utopia.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Cited for the transcendental argument that scientific proof of determinism presupposes free reasoning, which is interesting; but dismissed for his conservative solution to biogenetics (simply prohibiting intervention).
Aldous Huxley negative
Author of The Gray Eminence; Žižek credits him for noticing the problem of Father Joseph but criticizes him for not being able to admit that spirituality and evil can coexist, fleeing instead to Eastern mysticism.
Benjamin Libet positive
Neuroscientist whose free will experiment Žižek discusses with approval; cited for his own (minority) Hegelian-compatible interpretation that freedom is the veto power over neurally-decided actions.
Michael Hardt negative
With Negri: same criticism, their books lack a real answer to the problem of large-scale political organization, dissolving into mystical Franciscan imagery.
René Descartes positive
Defended as the father of modern anti-humanism (and incidentally feminism through his pupils); the Cogito as void, not res cogitans, is the legitimate core of modernity.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Repeatedly invoked as foundational reference; the master-slave dialectic is cited (only to be inverted via Lacan); Libet's veto-freedom called 'very Hegelian'; dialectical tradition grounds much of the argument.
Max Weber positive
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism invoked as the template; Žižek proposes the update would be 'Taoist Ethics and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein positive
Žižek argues the late Wittgenstein on certainty goes beyond the standard language-games picture and points toward a void that parallels the Cartesian subject; Kripke's reading is endorsed.
What it argues
Ironic distance as ideological mechanism rather than critiqueThe gap between authentic inner spiritual experience and moral behaviorBuddhism as the spirituality of global capitalismBiogenetic revolution and the dissolution of human subjectivityPoetry, myth, and the enabling of political violenceThe left's failure to articulate a positive master signifierEthics of full engagement versus Buddhist detachment
Dialectical moves 12
“It is not that you like Gangnam Style, but precisely because you find it disgusting it functions—ironic distance from ideology is itself ideology's mode of functioning.”
The reversal: ideology operates not despite but through the cynical distance one takes from it; the 'making fun of itself' is what makes it work.
“Far from being the proof that spiritual experience is corrupted by evil, Heydrich listening to Beethoven and Himmler reading Bhagavad Gita shows that authentic spiritual experience and atrocity can perfectly coexist.”
The reversal: authentic inner experience is not evidence of moral goodness; the gap between inner life and worldly action is irreducible.
“The only one who can enjoy is not the master but the servant—in the small islands outside the master's view.”
Lacan's inversion of Hegel's master-slave dialectic: enjoyment belongs not to the master who commands but to the servant who exploits the blind spots of authority.
“Far from being the death of God, Auschwitz was God coming alive—the God of the Real erupted there.”
Reversal of the standard Holocaust theology: not the absence but the violent presence of divine excess explains the event's obscene sublimity.
“The very experience of 'something is so disgusting it fascinates you'—pleasurably disgusting—is what defines today's spiritual experience.”
The sacred is not elevated and morally ennobling but can be repellent and disgusting while still being authentic sacred experience.
“Buddhism begins with 'we don't want to suffer' but psychoanalysis proves precisely the opposite: we want to suffer, and it is irreducible.”
Psychoanalysis reverses Buddhism's founding axiom; the death drive means suffering is not an accident to be eliminated but a constitutive dimension of desire.
“What Butler is attacking—fluid self-construction against patriarchal essentialism—is not the enemy of capitalism but its dominant ideology.”
Reversal: Butler's supposedly subversive performativity describes the norm of late capitalism, not a resistance to it.
“The problem is not the moderately repressive father but the permissive father who imposes enjoyment—the second is far more terrifying.”
Inversion: repression is better than enforced permissiveness; prohibition creates livable space for desire, while injunction to enjoy forecloses it.
“Anti-humanism does not begin with postmodernism—it begins with Descartes. Renaissance is humanism; the lesson of modernity is that beneath personality is a void.”
Reversal: Descartes, usually seen as grounding humanist subjectivity, is the origin of anti-humanism once the Cogito is properly understood as a void.
“Defenders of the Ancien Régime were the historicists; the revolutionaries were the absolutists. Far from grounding totalitarianism, absolute values opened space for freedom.”
Historical inversion against the Levinas-Adorno thesis: it was not philosophical absolutism but Burkean relativism that defended the old order; natural rights enabled emancipation.
“The true greatness Himmler demanded was not to enjoy killing but to be ready to 'lose one's soul'—the ethical problem of feeling horror at killing was recast as a weakness to overcome.”
Ideological reversal exposed: totalitarian propaganda transforms normal moral repugnance at violence into an ethical temptation to be transcended by the 'true hero.'
“Bobby Peru paradoxically humiliates the woman more by not raping her after she says 'fuck me'—by treating it as a genuine offer politely declined.”
The threat fully enacted would be less humiliating than the refusal; the real power move is to demonstrate that her capitulation meant nothing.
Claims 22
asserts
Cynical ironic distance from ideology—knowing it's ridiculous while still participating—is itself the dominant mode of ideology today, not a critique of it.ideology / cynicism
asserts
Authentic inner spiritual experience carries no necessary moral or ethical content and is fully compatible with committing atrocities.spirituality / ethics
asserts
Mass political violence requires a mythic-poetic-spiritual vision to function; ordinary decency has to be overcome by an 'absolute' vision.political violence / ideology / poetry
rejects
The claim that philosophical totality or absolutism grounds political totalitarianism is false; actual totalitarianisms rely on historicist relativism.Levinas / Adorno critique of philosophical totality
asserts
Buddhism functions as the ideal spiritual supplement to global capitalism, providing the inner distance needed to survive market volatility without disengaging from it.Buddhism / capitalism / ideology
asserts
If Weber were alive today, he would write a book on 'Taoist Ethics and the Spirit of Global Capitalism' rather than the Protestant ethic.Weber / capitalism / spirituality
rejects
We want to suffer—the irreducibility of the death drive means Buddhism's founding axiom that all beings seek to escape suffering is wrong.Buddhism's axiom / desire / jouissance
asserts
Buddhism is a neutral technique of achieving inner states; it carries no immanent moral or political direction and can equally serve fascism or liberal democracy.Buddhism / ethics / neutrality
asserts
The biogenetic revolution will dissolve the traditional boundary between inner subjectivity and external manipulation, forcing a rethinking of freedom.biogenetics / subjectivity / freedom
asserts
Human freedom is originally the freedom to say no—a veto power over neurally-decided actions—not a positive capacity to freely choose.free will / Libet experiment / subjectivity
rejects
Auschwitz was not the death of God but the eruption of God—the God of the Real, murderous and sublime—and it would be obscene to attribute it only to human causality.Holocaust theology / death of God
asserts
The postmodern permissive father who imposes rather than prohibits enjoyment is far more terrifying and psychologically debilitating than a moderately repressive one.paternal authority / permissiveness / psychoanalysis
rejects
Butler's performative gender theory simply describes and reaffirms today's predominant capitalist ideology of fluid self-construction rather than opposing it.Judith Butler / performativity / ideology
asserts
What we need today is an ethics of full engagement—falling into the world—against the pseudo-Buddhist wisdom of inner distance and detachment.ethics / Buddhism / engagement
asserts
North Korea's dominant ideology is maternal rather than paternal: the party is figured as mother, not father, and maternal imagery pervades its official culture.North Korea / ideology / gender
asserts
The true function of paternal authority is not to oppose desire to the law but to unite them—the father creates blind spots that enable transgressive enjoyment.Lacan / paternal authority / desire
asserts
Feminist emancipation must be radically separated from any imagery of society-as-mother or maternal divinity, which historically serves only to oppress actual women.feminism / maternal ideology
asserts
The left's central problem is not tactical but the absence of a positive vision of what order it wants to build—SYRIZA exemplifies this lack.the left / master signifier / politics
rejects
The Habermasian solution to the biogenetic challenge—simply setting a limit and refusing to intervene—is fundamentally conservative and inadequate.Habermas / biogenetics / freedom
asserts
Modern Western philosophy from Descartes through Kant to Hegel is fundamentally anti-humanist: the subject is a void, not the fullness of human personality.Descartes / Cogito / subjectivity / anti-humanism
asserts
Intelligent cognitivists should not be dismissed by continental philosophers; they offer genuine insights into consciousness as causal circularity.cognitivism / continental philosophy
rejects
The idea of non-representative direct local democracy is the left's secret dream but cannot scale; we need efficient global organizations, not local communities alone.direct democracy / left political organization
Quotes 16
“The greatest spiritual loss of the fall of communism was the loss of good political jokes, they simply disappeared, they were absolutely sublime, intelligent, wonderful.”Slavoj Žižek · communist political jokes as authentic spiritual experience
“Without religion bad people would be doing bad things and good people good things, you need something like religion to make good people do bad things.”Slavoj Žižek · religion as enabler of atrocity / Steven Weinberg quote
“There is an irreducible gap: you can have your authentic inner experience, it absolutely doesn't guarantee that you will not be doing horrible things in reality.”Slavoj Žižek · gap between inner spiritual life and ethical behavior
“It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice which is the function of mercy.”Slavoj Žižek · Suzuki on killing without selfhood / enlightened violence
“If you take this game seriously you get crazy...the only way to survive it if you learn some kind of inner distance, inner peace and so on, telling yourself but I'm not really there.”Slavoj Žižek · Buddhism as survival technique for capitalist market dynamics
“If Weber were to be alive today, he would have written a book something like Taoist Ethics and the Spirit of Global Capitalism. It fits much better.”Slavoj Žižek · Taoism/Buddhism as the spiritual supplement of global capitalism
“I think that the point of psychoanalysis is that we want to suffer, and it's irreducible.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive against Buddhism's optimistic axiom
“Our freedom is originally a freedom to say no. That our freedom is not to freely decide for something, but just for no reason at all to sabotage.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom as veto / negation rather than positive choice
“God of the Real, this murderous absolutely destroying God, he came alive in Auschwitz.”Slavoj Žižek · Auschwitz as eruption of the Real / inversion of 'death of God'
“I'm not crazy, don't be afraid. I mean there are poets who really are poets, they are absolute...but not so many as people think.”Slavoj Žižek · qualifying the claim about poetry and violence
“I didn't want to admit that you can have it both together.”Slavoj Žižek · Huxley's failure to accept the gap between spirituality and evil
“Not wise distance, like engage yourself fully, step out of yourself, fall into it. I think this is for me the ethics that we need today.”Slavoj Žižek · ethics of full engagement / the fall against Buddhist detachment
“I'm tired of just repeating the old Lacanian points and so on, you know. I want really in very naive way to engage with all this.”Slavoj Žižek · self-description: work in progress, moving beyond standard Lacanian framework
“The true value of a revolution is not those ecstatic moments where there is one million people on the square. That's easy to do. What interests me is what happens the day after.”Slavoj Žižek · the left's problem: the day after revolution / master signifier
“Beyond the mother stands out the image of a father who would turn a blind eye to desires.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan on the father's function / enabling transgressive enjoyment
“Steven Pinker is plainly stupid I think. He simplifies it so much, says stupidities.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's dismissal of Pinker
Transcript 10 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I'd like to welcome Slavoj Žižek. Thanks very much, I'm honored to be here and I also prefer the situation today where there is at least a hope that we will do a chance that we will do more theory and so on, but I don't want to disappoint you too much because I was nonetheless told that, like, the public is not only philosophers, so what I will try to do is simply prolong the reflections of the last days on the end of the world and so on, which means our ideological constellation today. Where are we moving, what does this mean? Well, my first association when you say the end of the world, it is culturally for me is, does any of you know this quite terrifying song, but I think it's if there ever was a symptom of where we are today, this is it. This mega mega hit Gangnam Style which started in South Korea, then all around the world, I was told that already in the United States it's already on the second place and so on. What interests me here is how it functions. My small son who listened to it draw my attention to it that you know if you play it on YouTube you have how many hits and then you have positive negative opinions, that negative opinions are much larger, it's like as my son told me, your big guy, if you look at Justin Bieber you find the same like five to one. But nonetheless people remain stuck onto it, they listen to it. And so I even then found a text on this hit Gangnam Style where they say that's how it effectively functions, it's not that you like it, but practically everyone tells me the same: when you first hear it you find it disgusting, but in a weird way pleasurably disgusting. You become haunted by it. You know it's like when something is so disgusting that fascinates you and you say, uh, it's horrible, let's take a look again at it how horrible it is. And then slowly my son who is eleven now ends up listening at least fifty times per day to it. Second thing, although it is a quasi-religious experience like in Korea a friend sent me some video clips, this stupid song was performed at a stadium with over one hundred thousand people all in a trance and so on. What is so interesting is how critics, false I claim fake leftist critics, try to convince us that it's irony, it's satirical, you shouldn't take it seriously, no, it's really making fun of that for young upper-class kids part of Seoul, Gangnam, and all the irony there and so on. But I claim precisely this is what makes the song an example of ideology, how as I always repeat how cynicism functions today. I believe in it, it's all the time fun making fun of itself, but the magic is that it functions. You see my point, I'm not claiming there is just the stupid song with this rave dance repetitive almost military style, the crowd follows this quasi-religious rave experience. It's not just this that makes it ideology, it's precisely this more of making fun of yourself, ironic distance and so on and so on. It's the same as my old thesis, did we use it, Matthew, in some of the films, I'm not sure, of that stupid movie Kung Fu Panda, where I claim it's exemplary of ideology today. Why? Because I had the misfortune of seeing it four-five times with the same above-mentioned son, where for for like on the one hand the movie mobilizes all this Orientalist mythology, you know, Kung Fu, destiny, warrior, chosen, whatever, the one, and at the same time it makes fun of its own ideology all the time, in a kind of a common-sensical mocking of all the Buddhist or whatever Orientalist spiritual wisdoms. But again you shouldn't miss the point, which is that in spite of, or I would rather have said precisely because of all this self-mocking, it works, in the sense that far from undermining all this Orientalist mythology, in a strange way making fun of it makes this ideology viable. It is as if the procedure, since I am I hope here with people who like at least some movies, films, it's something that was done in an intelligent way, I claim, with in I don't like too much the film, but this aspect I like, Lars von Trier, I hope you saw it, Breaking the Waves. He, Lars von Trier himself, has a wonderful explanation where he says the story in itself, he says, is ridiculously melodramatic, and if the form of the film were to fit to be adequate to the ridiculous melodramatic style of the narrative, it would have been inedible, how do you call it, ridiculous. So he says that's why he opted, you may remember it if you saw the film, for this quasi-documentary handheld camera short cuts and so on, a style which is totally out of sync with the mega-romantic narrative. He said very nicely that this quasi-documentary style functions like some kind of a screen which softens and makes palpable so that you can take so that you can take seriously the story. The reason I like this is that what von Trier does there is the exact opposite of the standard melodramatic procedure, where the style is often more pathetic, emotional, than the content. I mean all good analysts know this how often even something that at least in classical melodramas that you cannot directly depict at a narrative level, you signal it through the over-pathetic character of the style. Here it's the exact opposite, it's the story which is ridiculously pathetic, you need this filter as it were, distancing filter, to make the story palpable. And I claim, again, the same goes for this Gangnam Style. First, and I think I'm not I mean it quite seriously when I say that this is the way, the mode of today's spiritual experience is, if you want. I'm not making fun of it, my claim is not it's a pseudo-spiritual experience, of course I find it disgusting, but my thesis, underlying thesis, is much more radical: it's that what if a spiritual experience itself can be disgusting even if it's authentic? I mean why do we automatically associate inner spiritual experience with something, I don't know, morally elevating and so on and so on? My idea was always, for example, when I read their horrible reading, of course, Nazi or other memoirs. What if there, why automatically if someone does something horrible in real life, organized murder, torture, and so on, why do we automatically assume that he must be somehow non-authentic, hypocritical, in his inner life? This is, I know, very sad news, pessimist news, but I'm more and more convinced of it. Now let me present you as part of this line of thought another experience which brought me a lot of hatred in my own country already. I developed this in some of my books where I propose the line of like no ethnic cleansing without poetry, literally. You know why I took this path? Because I got a little bit tired with this eternal motive which you find from Levinas to Adorno, all of them or even many general generally people of culture, of blaming us philosophers, you know, the idea is political totalitarianism, for example Emmanuel Levinas says this clearly, political totalitarianism is grounded in philosophical notion of totality. You think you have access to total, absolute knowledge, you know totality, and this justifies you then to brutally impose your vision on reality. I claim okay maybe, although I doubt it deeply, deeply. Because if you look closely, now at a naive empirical level even, if you look closely at most of, not even most of, actual so-called totalitarianisms, you will see that the spontaneous ideology of totalitarianists is always historicist relativism, you know. For example, if there was someone who was not philosophically totalitarian, it's Adolf Hitler. Read Mein Kampf, it's a horrible book, pretty boring, but it's worth reading because you see that his attitude was not man, master of universe, his attitude was man is just a tiny dust of nature, we are totally exposed to nature, we will perish, disappear, and so on, it's total historicist relativism and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is then why, uh, even I had some problems with even with theorist theorists of deconstruction who also claim this, kind of a metaphysics of identity, sticking to absolute values again in some way grounds totalitarianism and so on. No, look for example at the time of the French Revolution and you will see that the defenders of Ancien Régime were historicists, they claim we have, you know their line was the one of how is he called the great critic of French Revolution, Edmund Burke or who? Burke, yeah, yeah. You know the idea is we all live within a certain particular tradition which is ultimately contingent but the worst thing we can do is to just relativize this tradition which is contingent and impose some eternal values and so on. It was the revolutionaries who were much more metaphysical in the sense that no, there are natural rights of men, if anything, the conflict between Burke and partisans of French Revolution was a conflict between a historicist and kind of absolutist, no eternal values, natural rights and so on. Here I think it's a nice example of how precisely the reference to an absolute can open up the space of freedom. But let me go on with this idea ethnic cleansing and so on, let me be serious now, I'm not crazy, don't be afraid. I mean there are poets who really are poets, they are absolute, I mean, but not so many as people think, like I don't know in the 20th century if you mention I don't know Paul Celan or whatever. But did you notice nonetheless how many of undoubtedly great modernist poets were pretty close to fascism or whatever, Eliot, Pound. What is my trauma here? This one. If you it's very simple line of thought. If you we are basically half-decent people, as I already developed it I think the first evening there, and it's difficult for us to kill someone and so on. So you need some kind of absolute mythic poetic religious vision again to function as a as a screen, to make it possible. Here I agree partially, not totally, I'm not part of that today's materialism of of Harris and Hitchens and so on, but I basically agree with what Steven Weinberg I think said somewhere, that without religion bad people would be doing bad things and good people good things, you need something like religion to make good people do bad things. I can tell you that this is what happened in my own country, for example, you know the story, ex-Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing and so on. I think it's not an accident a chance that the leader of Bosnian Serbs is Radovan Karadžić, a poet. And I'm not blaming just the Serbs, if you look at other ex-Yugoslav republics, every nation had its own Karadžić. You need this type of a vision of a vision to enable you to do the horrors. What do I mean by this? It's interesting to read, I always quote it, what Heinrich Himmler, you know the SS boss, he confronted this problem. Like, uh, he knew very well, it's interesting to read him, he knew very well that SS officers and soldiers were obliged to do horrible things while doing organizing Holocaust, uh, uh, bringing together all the Jews, you had to beat children, women and so on and so on. And his problem was how to how to enable German soldiers or SS, the elite to soldiers to do this without, as he himself put it, Himmler, without becoming beasts like beasts in the sense of simply enjoying, getting involved in what they are doing. You maybe know what his solution was? Bhagavad Gita, Oriental wisdom. Himmler always had in his pocket a special leather-bound version of Bhagavad Gita. Of course his focus was, you must know Bhagavad Gita, that famous encounter between Arjuna, the warrior, and God Krishna, no? In just before the big battle, Arjuna is on the battlefield with tens of thousands of soldiers opposing army and has doubts: my God, do I have the right to order the attack, thousands will die and so on, all the suffering. And then God basically gives him a nice lesson of this famous act without being fully involved, no? And of this what we in the West identify, that's another point, does it really hold or not, as Oriental ontology. He says, but material reality are just appearances, it things grow, disintegrate, disappear. The true reality is the reality of the your eternal self, Atman, which is eternal. So the logical conclusion: don't worry, do all the killing and so on, what you can destroy is already in itself negligible, deserves to perish and so on and so on, and precisely again, don't get involved. And it's really shocking how if you look, for example, I made a test and looked also at Rwanda. Of course there is a poet there who for ten years was laying the ground, the foundation for for Tutsis killing the Hutus and so on and so on. I'm not far from condemning poetry, I think that precisely authentic poetry is the best medicine against this for undermining national myths and so on and so on. But again I think that precisely uh how should put it, I don't believe in cynicism in the sense of that people can be totally cynical. I claim that nobody can be totally cynical, each of us has his or her or their own small island of authenticity as it were, you know. And here again poetry poetry is needed. You know where poetry enters? Ideological poetry, of course. The most terrifying trick of this poetic justification of violence is a very specific one. Hitler, sorry, Himmler also knew it. It's they admit, for example, let's go back to that situation that I evoked the first evening here using you Matthew I think as the example. Let's say I am ordered to kill you. Okay, unfortunately I'm not perfect, I will have some problems, no? But then the the trick is a good totalitarian propaganda, not propaganda, mythology admits this trouble of mine. Of course we have, most of us at least, some basic decency, it's disgusting, difficult for us simply to approach another guy, pick out his eyes, cut off his testicles, whatever. But then you know what does it do, authentic totalitarian poetry? It uh it redefines your very problem with doing this as an as an ethical problem temptation, in the sense of as Himmler said: most of the people can do great things for their country, even sacrifice their lives. A true hero is the one who is ready to lose his soul for the country, to to do horrible things for his fatherland. So you know like if I have, sorry, don't take it personally, it's just history, if I have to torture and kill you, the trick would have been to say of course you feel horrible, but the true greatness is to is to elevate yourself above this temptation of ordinary humanity, precisely what you in your everyday awareness experience as ethically problematic is the weakness. A true hero, a true ethical greatness is when for a higher cause you are ready to act beyond good and evil and so on and so on. And here you need some poetic vision, I cannot call it otherwise, vision of I don't know national destiny, religion, call it whatever you want, to make them to make them do that. Okay, so again this would be my first pessimist lesson of how and at the end I will come to Buddhism again, which I already mentioned at the first evening precisely because I think that here and I spoke with many Buddhists and even mostly they agreed that here there is a problem in Buddhism, namely that the really difficult thing for us to admit is that there is a there is no necessary inner link between ordinary goodness towards others, doing kind things and so on, and let's call it naively authentic authentic spiritual experience. Maybe you know the story which I like to repeat, I'm sorry if you know it, I wrote about it long ago twenty years ago in a book, a book I mean I wrote about a book which I like very much by Aldous Huxley, maybe you know it, The Gray Eminence, L'éminence grise. It's a biography of Father Joseph, Père Joseph, who was a priest and the right hand of Cardinal Richelieu, the de facto ruler of France during the Thirty Years' War in the early 17th century. And you know what is so crazy about this guy? If there ever was an evil politician, it's Father Joseph. To cut a long story short, if we engage in some mythical genealogy and try to guess what's the origin of Hitler, of World War II, it's Father Joseph. You know why? This was the battle between Catholics Protestants for Europe. But Cardinal Richelieu had no illusions, he knew it's not really about that, it is about guaranteeing central about establishing central role of France in European politics, and the way to do it is to prevent German unification. And so Father Joseph who executed this plan did something totally unprincipled. He, although this was officially a war of Catholics against Protestants, he made a pact with Swedish Protestants against Austrian Catholics just to keep Germany divided, and this is the logic I was referring to. Because Germany was divided, because Germany constituted itself as a nation-state too late, everybody knows that this delay caused First World War and then it's the ultimate cause and then of Second World War. But what I'm trying to say is okay, here we have a guy who was at this level really really evil, organizing murders, extortions, torture, name it. Now comes the horrible thing. At the same time this guy wrote was in a permanent communication exchanging letters with some nunnery, women's convent, how do you call it, and and he wrote them the most authentic beautiful mystical reflections at the top level name it like who are the big hits, Saint Teresa or John of the Cross, it's at that level, it's absolutely authentic spirituality. And that's what, it's not a really great book, but this is the nice point, this is what bothers so much Aldous Huxley. How can a guy who is doing all this at the same time how can he write something that you cannot but say if you are honest, my God this is the pearl, the thing itself, this is it. And we can go on here like Heinrich Heydrich, you know we are back to Himmler, his second man who organized the Wannsee Conference, Holocaust. I read I was quite traumatized, I read in a biography of, no biography sorry, history of SS that Heydrich was of course German elite, relatively educated, privately he played very well violin and in the evenings he used to gather with his SS friends and they have some kind of amateur constituted string quartet and they like to play what is, my God, unfortunately I must tell you is generally admitted one of the top achievements of Western music, late Beethoven's string quartets. Now I found this to be some kind of let me call it ontological scandal, you know, like how is this possible? This is not just that the not even scum, totally evil man like Heydrich, you know again, the one who organized planned Holocaust can maybe authentically enjoy, appreciate such beautiful music. Because here I want to resist the temptation which Huxley was not able to resist. His solution is this only can mean that Christian or Catholic spirituality is not authentic. He didn't want to admit that you can have it both together. So this is why as you maybe know he moved towards the Far East, no, meditation, Buddhism and so on, thinking that his idea was this one that Christianity is too much focused on suffering, of following the path of Christ, identifying with suffering, that this makes it potentially pathological. While this more peaceful, withdrawn, Oriental spiritual attitude can do the job better. Here I have another bad news for you. I always like to mention this book, I hope some of you know it, Brian Victoria, who is himself a Zen Buddhist monk, you really should read this book. It's called Zen at War. It's a you can find it, I think it's reprinted all the time, it's widely debated in Zen and generally Buddhist circles. It's not a big theoretical book, it does something very modest: it looks in detail on how the Japanese Zen community, they were relatively strong I think around ten million more, related to Japanese imperial war conquest, first war with China, then World War II in the 1930s and 40s. And the result is pretty depressing. Not only they tolerated it, but apart from literally five or ten dissidents, they unanimously supported the war. Not even this, but even provided tools like advices to make war more efficient. For example now I will be really evil, I'm sorry if you already know the story. Do you remember if you are old enough, some of you are, most happy for you not, in the old hippie times, he was very popular, who is he, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, DT Suzuki, you know, the great Zen popularizer. What people tend to forget, but he was honest enough to admit this, he never denied it, that in the 1930s and 40s, early 40s, he was totally supporting Japanese military imperial politics, and not only this but even gave active advices about how to render it more efficient. For example I quote this, I forgot which one in two-three of my books, this wonderful passage from Suzuki where he says again it's the same problem as I mentioned before: like imagine yourself in battle. You confront your enemy, you see him and of course you cannot avoid a minimum of, let's call it personalization, like you are, sorry Matthew it's always you whom I think when I think let's kill a person, I think about you don't ask me why, but like you know you're a human being, you have a child, all these problems. Eh, Suzuki has an answer here, it's pretty horrifying. He says these problems remain as long as we remain stuck into this what Buddhism describes as this Samsara, the wheel of desire, false identity, when we perceive falsely ourselves as agent with a substantial self, you know, when we don't fully assume this logic of, in Indian, An-Atman, there is no self, just void and so on. He says that let's say I have a knife I want to stab you. If I'm still caught in the world of illusion, I will find it problematic, like my God I am stabbing you, what right do I have to do it? But, Suzuki says, imagine that I go through Buddhist enlightenment, then I really assume that I have no self, I'm just a kind of totally impassive transparent observer, and the world also, reality loses its its substantial weight and becomes just a dance of phenomena popping up here, disappearing there. And then he says if you really assume this existential experience then it becomes much easier. He, Suzuki provides a wonderful description: he says it's no longer me deciding to stab you, it is as he says a knife in my hand as part of a cosmic dance is moving in space and as part of the same dance, Matthew sorry you are, your body hits my knife and I'm for nothing in it, you know, I'm just this totally enlightened observer and so on and so on. Now let's avoid a misunderstanding here. I am not saying I have immense respect for Buddhism, I'm not saying hoo-hoo Buddhism theory of Japanese militarism or whatever, Zen. I'm saying, and Suzuki after the war was heroic enough to admit it, what I'm saying is that is that it doesn't matter, it's neutral. Suzuki says this wonderfully in a people just ignored this when they bought this bullshit you know Buddhism holistic organic you are gentle with nature. No he says Buddhism is a technique of meditation. You can be a fascist, a torturer, a democrat, a liberal, whatever, communist, it doesn't matter. He, I found this really radical and great, this is a very traumatic thing to do. He admitted, accepted this irreducible gap: you can have your inner authentic inner experience, it absolutely doesn't guarantee that you will not be doing horrible things in reality. In some conditions as Suzuki admits it, it may even make it easier because again the moment you don't perceive yourself as agent you are no longer fully fully identified with it and so on and so on. So here I have a more general problem about where we are today. Here I have a problem with my personal friend, but we have some theoretical conflicts, Judith Butler. I don't know if I mention this, I appreciate her very much but not the usual books which are more her, for example the books that I like by her is her first book, Subjects of Desire, which is I think a very good reading of Hegel, that's what I appreciate in her, she is really deep in her heart a Hegelian. And once she told me, "Slavoj, you must really hate me." I said no, you may be evil but you like Hegel, somebody who wrote such a book on Hegel cannot be totally evil. I told her then we embraced, yeah, yeah, we were friends, no. And the other book, The Psychic Life of Power. These are I think her best works, not the big official stuff. My problem with her is this one. Her general space, and I don't care here if she really meant it like that, I'm speaking about how she is perceived, is that the enemy, quote marks, the opponent is this patriarchal identity, whatever, and then what she is fighting for is to undermine patriarchal identity, essentialism, whatever you want, and to assert that even our most intimate sexual identity is just a result of you know the story of this symbolic performative rituals which also allow then a space of maneuver when you ironically repeat rituals in a displaced way, you gain a distance, you can undermine them a little bit. My problem here is what: it's not that I'm defending patriarchy identity or what, it's okay nice, but what is she describing? I claim she is simply describing the predominant ideology today. I don't think our societies today still require this standard patriarchal identity attitude, you know like each of us has an eternal essential nature or whatever and so on, what she is attacking all the time. I think that precisely what is predominant ideology telling us? It's what I like to call this enlightened Western Buddhism, you know. Society is no longer telling us sacrifice yourself for a higher cause or what, society is telling us something like be truly yourself, be authentic, experiment, create yourself, don't get stuck in one identity. Experiment, restruct, reconstruct yourself all the time. And again all this is spiced with some kind of spontaneous pseudo-Buddhism where the idea is don't get too attached to it, you know. Don't assume fully any identity, always play, dance, then you get all this new age bullshit: remember things are not really serious, it's a cosmic dance or whatever you want and so on and so on. So again let me go now back, this is the reason I began with Gangnam Style. Because I think that this type of cynical working where you do something but you think it redeems you if you do it with irony, with distance. I don't accept this, I claim that again as I already said that precisely ironic distance helps you to swallow it. I mean this is also part of my personal experience where I remember when I was young living in a socialist country, you know there was one wonderful rumor which is of course wrong for theoretical reasons but there is a moment of truth in it. All the time there was a rumor and then I heard from friends that there was the same rumor in Soviet Union and so on, that you know we lived for political jokes, this was the big thing there. And I think if you ask me seriously I mean it that the greatest spiritual loss of the fall of communism was the loss of good political jokes, they simply disappeared, they were absolutely sublime, intelligent, wonderful, even this I will not bore them with those jokes even this what Freud claims Freud claims that is a specificity of Central Europe, this wonderful two-level jokes, you know a joke is told, you think that's it, but then there is another twist. So the rumor was that there is somewhere in the secret police or Central Committee of the party a special secret department where they produce jokes against themselves to keep people satisfied. The idea was if you provide these, you know jokes making people this, you know, it doesn't cost anything, you give people this false relaxation, freedom, and so on and so on. I don't think this works for a very simple theoretical reason, because you know how jokes function. Jokes are by definition they're a very mysterious thing, they never have an author, like you know how do you tell a joke? You tell it always by: "Oh do you know that joke, I heard that joke." Some something in the functioning of a joke prohibits, prevents you to say, "Now an idea came to me, I just invented a joke." It should be some anonymous other, anonymous, you are always just you are always just telling jokes. So again, I think this is wrong, but again, even if it's spontaneous, I think jokes definitely played this role, this role of making it viable, tolerable for you to live in such a society. I am so attached to this because you know in the last years under communism, well, communists were able to read the writing on the wall that their time is over. To enhance their popularity, some communist politicians, it was madness, wonderful, started themselves to tell jokes about themselves. I mean even Reagan, Reagan, Ronald Reagan came close to it but didn't go to the end in this I think. I remember a Croat politician visited, it was late 70s, visited Rome and then come back and when people expected this kind of official report on "ooh friendship between Yugoslav and Italian people, whatever," he started to tell jokes against himself, you know, which were not very funny but pretty nice, like he made fun of himself as stupid and non-educated, you know. The idea was for example it plays on, you know this in Europe at least, ambiguity of the word chapel. Chapel can mean the church, chapel, and also we call it in Italian cappella, you know the small band which plays in cafeterias, in restaurants, no? And the guy said, you know I got lost in Rome, I was told that I should go and see, you know Michelangelo, Vatican, Sistine Chapel, and I look in all cafeterias and nowhere was Sistine Chapel playing. And then it goes on like I was then told to go to see Marriage of Figaro, I look checked all the churches, nowhere was the Marriage of Figaro announced. And then it goes on, you know that German city Baden-Baden, no? This is a standard communist joke that our politician travels on a train through Germany and says, "Oh what city is this?" and the guy tells him "Baden-Baden," and he says "I'm not an idiot, you don't have to tell me two times or whatever" and so on. But again, this is my link with Kung Fu Panda, how you shouldn't be deluded here, this very distance makes it makes it viable. So okay, back to Gangnam Style, this stupid rhythm and at the same time with this stupid written nonetheless something like let's call it religious experience, religious experience kept at a distance but precisely sustained through this distance. If we pursue this line of thought, I would like to propose when people ask me can you think about an authentic religious film of Hollywood, I have an answer, it's not Mel Gibson Passion, which is I think as everyone know the greatest triumph of sadomaso gay orientation in Hollywood, you know you have male naked body tortured for two hours, what more do you want. It's, did you see it, I really think it's again I mean it seriously but precisely critically towards spiritual experience. Did you see Project X? It was half a year ago, a year ago, a modest film about in a small American town a group of three three nerds, non-popular guys, who decide to organize a party because father and mother are going somewhere for the weekend. And father gives to the son specific instructions: don't touch the car, don't enter that room, only five friends, and so on. What happened is that rumors starts to circulate and at the end a couple of thousands of people gather, the house is burned down, the car is ruined, everything and so on and so on. And it obviously at a certain point, I didn't want to bore it today, but I think you can even exactly locate it where you enter the sacred dimension, it becomes a sacred event. So what I'm simply claiming is that with all Hollywood commercialism and so on, there is more of an authentic sacred dimension in this film than in most of the official religion. That's what I'm claiming. We absolutely have no right to dismiss it as just manipulation or whatever you want, consumerist manipulation and so on and so on. There is another wonderful detail about this film if you saw it. At the very end, father returns home, is of course shocked and says to his son, "Okay, I you will have to work for it to pay for it, but I must admit something, I didn't expect you are strong enough to do something like this and so on and so on." And this is crucial, this is how Lacan explains the role of the father. Precisely of the traditional patriarchal father. He says, I quote, I think it's from somewhere in Seminar XI: "Beyond the mother stands out the image of a father who would turn a blind eye to desires." This marks the true function of the father which is fundamentally to unite and not to oppose a desire to the law. You know where I got the same idea although it's a feminine figure, I read in a book on Catherine the Great that one of her elder, the Russian Empress, one of her elder servants told her, "Do you know that your other servants are behind your back stealing expensive wines and expensive food from your reserves?" and he said, "I know this, but this is how I keep them satisfied by," you know. This is Lacan's idea that the function you know how you relate to a traditional paternal authority? It's always a minimally naive authority, father up there prohibits things but then you find the blind spots where you are as it were not on father's father's radar or whatever and you can there transgress things and so on. But for Lacan this precisely is the function of paternal authority to precisely it's never a total authority, it precisely doesn't see everything and allows for these islands of transgression where you can enjoy and so on and so on. In this sense, if some of you are philosophers, Lacan had a good critical point about Hegel, you know the famous Hegelian dialectics of master and servant where Hegel's idea is the master enjoys, the servant works for the master's enjoyment. Lacan's point is not the opposite one. The only one who can who can enjoy a little bit is the servant with this small islands where he is out of the father's view. And of course okay we can go on here because Lacan's point is precisely that when father no longer plays this role of an authority which prohibits but nonetheless you know leaves you open space for small transgressions and so on, then you get something much more horrible: you get the postmodern permissive father who no longer prohibits enjoyment but it's actually imposing it on you, you know, the style of "sex is healthy, did you do it, blah blah blah," which is I think something much more terrifying. It's the way to render you impotent, literally, this is clinically true, psychoanalytic friends are telling me. The problem is not the father who is moderately oppressive, that's wonderful. A moderately oppressive father gives you the space to resist, it is the problem is, and my God I will now do something obscene, I will admit that I had this experience with my father. The problem when I returned from high school home, father told me, "Where are the girls? Are you a man? Did you do it? Do you and then he said my father the most horrible thing: is it that you cannot do it? Do you need my advice or what?" Absolute nightmare or whatever. Okay, this incidentally is also why I'm horrified by today's attitude towards sex and other pleasures, which is more and more not what I'm tempted to call an authentic consumerism, which would be smoke, take drugs, orgy to the end, but this kind of a reasonable hedonism, you know, do it but in a proper way, in a healthy way, don't go too far and so on and so on. Like when I flew two months ago across the Atlantic, I found in Hemispheres, the journal of United Airlines, one of the most depressing texts that I can imagine. It was celebrating sex, but you know in what way? Like sex is healthy, they claimed if you make love often, love, it's good for your heart, for blood circulation, it's good for your muscles. Then even it becomes so obscene at the end where the text says: even kissing, deep French kissing, it's very good, it keeps the muscle strong so when you will be old the saliva will not be dropping for. It's nightmare, it's nightmare this type of stuff. So okay let me go on here. What I am saying here, and here I locate myself into the judeo-Christian tradition now, no. What I am saying is that this is now referring to this sacred experiences of like a Project X, of this collective transgressive orgiastic violence, whatever. The deepest insight already in Jewish tradition is that is that this is what Lacan would have put it, the living God, the God of the real, which is extremely this experience of sacred as this kind of a pagan total violence, sacred orgy. This is what the Jewish tradition tries to keep at a certain distance, no? Which is why Jewish God in a way is a is a dead God. Here I agree, although otherwise I'm very opposed to him, with Emmanuel Levinas who says somewhere something pretty surprising and shocking. He says that the ultimate addressee of the biblical commandment don't kill is God himself. You know, in other words the whole of Judaism should be read as a temptation to not to come too close to God, or not to allow God to come too close for us because then it's murderous violence. Levinas provides because then it's murderous violence. For example, you know in it's from Exodus to the scene which grounds circumcision. You remember how brutally violent Moses is in a tent with his wife and simply God as an anonymous dark stranger enters and wants to kill Moses. And then the wife of Moses quickly cuts the skin of the son to protect her, but this idea that when God comes too close it's it's brutality. Which is why I think, in what sense do I mean this: one of the commonplaces with which I totally disagree is that Auschwitz means the dead the death of God. Like you know the usual logic: how could God have allowed something like this to happen? But I claim here I agree with Habermas who says somewhere that it's much more ambiguous. When you have a truly terrifying event like Auschwitz, and we can give other examples of course from Congo to Gulag or whatever, there is something obscene in claiming "Oh this is just human evil, human causality." The evil is so terrifying that we cannot but call it divine, and divine here means simply the excessive sublime strength of it. So in other words I don't agree with a famous book, I forgot the author, on Holocaust where the title of the book is God died in Auschwitz. No, I claim God, but God of the real, this murderous absolutely destroying God, he came alive in Auschwitz. And the problem is how to keep how to keep this God at a distance. Here Judaism has a wonderful solution. I quoted it a couple of times, I hope you know it, there are in Babylonian Talmud and in some other parts there is a story which is repeated a couple of times which is I think an absolutely wonderful theological story. It will sound as a joke, but I checked with my Jewish friends, this is Talmud sacred text. It's basically referring to one of your compatriots, Marshall McLuhan, it's the Marshall McLuhan moment in Annie Hall. You remember, two guys Woody Allen and another fighting about McLuhan's theory and then what all of us dream happened, McLuhan comes and says to Woody Allen, "You are right, that guy is total idiot, whatever." It's literally the same scene. Two distinguished, this is the story from Talmud, two distinguished rabbis debate a theological point and the one who is losing the debate says, "Wait a minute, let's call Jehovah, God, to come and decide." And Jehovah comes, old man, comes there, and then the other, the winning in the debate, rabbi starts to shout and God basically he tells God, "You did your job, you didn't do a very good job, the universe is not perfect, but you did your job, now your time is out, leave us intelligent people to debate what you did, you don't have anything to say here," and that's the beauty that God's reaction is "Oh my God you are right," and God runs away. I mean it's, I know this story is often used in a not proper way signaling that Jews are by natural democratic by nature democratic that this is the origin of democracy or whatever, no? But it's nonetheless a wonderful story where again the point is how to keep God at a how to keep God at a distance. Let me now so this would be one dimension which I claim will be and is returning more and more violently in our violently in our experience. This obscene domain of the sacred which we don't want to acknowledge it. But I think it's crucial to acknowledge it. If you look from for the experience of sacred today, you find it in Project X more than in religions and so on. But again it doesn't mean that I like Project X, it means that I don't think that there is something automatically ethically noble in the experience of of the sacred as already in antiquity they knew it, you know like let me mention the best-known example Euripides, Bacchae, or what you know that game where you have also an explosion of murderous violence of women. Now I think this theory is not necessarily anti-feminist. I was always very suspicious of the attempts to ground feminism in any kind of feminine divinity, Great Mother or whatever. I think if anything it's the opposite, that usually the price for this elevation of Mother Earth or whatever goddess is usually paid by paid by real women. Like I remember years ago I read the description of some, I think New Guinea I'm not sure where, tribe which was apparently very feminist in the sense that the goddess the supreme God was a goddess and even to be primitive the way their village was structured: the central temple had a kind of a vague vagina form and around were the houses. There was only one problem of course, actual women of their tribe were prohibited to enter that vagina, only men could enter it and so on. So what I want to say I want to give you here another example of today's ideology. It's really a terrifying one, North Korea. We don't trust the media. No, no, don't be afraid, I'm not saying it's really a great democratic regime or what, no. I'm saying it's that there was a book recently published, a little bit naive is the book, but it's interesting because it does nonetheless it's a correct report I think on of the state of things, something that you know the usual thing we read about North Korea is that that the regime can survive because of this old Confucian ethics, paternal authority, obedience and so on and so on. No, this book I think conclusively demonstrates that this is totally false. The idea is this guy did something interesting. He really how he succeeded years ago he was allowed to stay there, now of course he cannot enter the North Korea anymore, he looked at not international North Korean propaganda, but at what or rather how Korean propaganda works at a local level for their own people. What's the message there? And he discovered some very weird things. That first the central metaphor for the party and the leader is mother not father. He claims that it's simple mistranslation where it's translated like Kim Il Sung or whatever the father of the nation and so on. No, the term used in Korean so the book claims it's it's the head of the family but usually in everyday language it means mother. And then this book has some wonderful obscene details about how this works. For example it's really a wonderful proof. This book takes the latest edition of North Korean dictionary, Dictionary of North Korean Language, and looks at two entries: mother, father. The entry of for mother is over one page. It begins with mother first meaning: the biological mother who gives birth to a child. Then mother as the family who takes care of the children, object of love, blah blah, then of course the third meaning: mother in the sense of a social force which takes care of all the people like the example here is Korean Workers' Party is the mother like mother to Korean people and all that. It's over one page. Then you look at the entry father. It's one sentence: "Father is the partner of the mother." And then he goes on and looks at official songs of party songs and claims that the most popular official party song, it's extremely obscene if you read it, is a song celebrating the party as mother and all the time openly mentioning mother's breasts like: "Oh Communist oh Korean Workers' Party our mother, we suck all that we need, food, love, from your breasts, we will never abandon your breasts, we will always cling to your breasts." It's pure obscenity and so on. Then this goes even further. Did you notice if you saw some of these official photos of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il? How the official photos don't try to, you know that Stalinist were specialists in how do you call it retouch changing the photo to make leader look younger? That first they all have a stomach and clear feminine features. Kim Jong Kim Il Sung the father and the crazy son. Now it's interesting what is now happening. This is a very strange move that all of a sudden the leader is publicly married, the third one now, you know they show because Kim Jong Il they even claim it's a wonderful reading: how how you remember maybe you saw it sometimes in newspaper the photo of Kim Jong Il, the second leader, how his hair is like waving and he has some kind of a plastic jacket, which and he proves with other photos that he consciously imitates the image of ordinary Korean mother who has this cheap jacket has to stand in line, take care of the family and so on and so on. Don't misunderstand me here. I'm not playing any type of defense of patriarchal authority in the sense of a-ah you overthrow patriarchy you get even worse, you know, like as if give power to feminist and you end up in North Korea. No, men are still absolutely in power there. My point is precisely that we must radically separate feminist issues, feminine emancipation from all this bullshit of society as a mother and so on and so on. This is why I did something that some people took for a little bit crazy. I claim that maybe the time is to more emphasize what already Freud did at some point: the distinction woman-mother. That psychoanalysis doesn't absolutely doesn't claim what it's usually attributed to it, you know that mother is a that woman doesn't have penis so she gets a child who functions as a symbolic substitute, all that bullshit. No, that precisely authentic feminine subjectivity means Medea, to cut a long story short, no? I was always fascinated by Medea. I think far from being the horrible destructive woman, whatever, Medea is my heroine. I think maybe the time has come to pass from from Antigone to Medea. I'm a little bit tired of that celebration of Antigone, whatever, no. Okay, but let me go on. So again, you know we what I'm trying to tell you is this. Of course a certain traditional patriarchal ideology is disintegrated. But what we are getting is not authentic emancipation, but we are getting one totalitarian version would have been North Korea, society as mother embodied. The other version would have been this new say sense of sacredness and so on and so on. And I claim that here the predominant version today, this is my prediction that the future lies with Buddhism, but I'm critical about it. It's not so much authentic Buddhism as a kind of a popular Western Buddhism. Now I will just slowly recapitulate what I already said two days ago, but I will move further: namely, I I think that there are two reasons at least why Buddhism fits, by Buddhism I will not go into this is it authentic or not, of course authentic Buddhism is something great, incredibly radical and so on. What I mean sorry yeah have time what I mean is something else. What I mean is that we should ask this simple question: we are entering a new era global capitalism and so on, and it's a very traditional Marxist question: what type of spirituality, self-experience, ideological self-understanding fits perfectly today's capitalism? I think that Buddhism can do the job much better than Christianity. First, because let's put it very simply, on the one hand what defines today's universe is the crazy global capitalist dynamics. And as many people pointed out, it is much, you know I was always fascinated when you read this propaganda leaflets, whatever, which try to convince you to take a course in transcendental meditation whatever. How the message is always a double message. The first message is: we live in a crazy world, we crave for material goods and so on, this is a false world, we are losing our true self, so don't you need time to simply stepped out of this crazy dance of hyperactivity to find simple inner truth, inner peace and so on and so on. But always, always then you find a second paragraph which is much more cynical and which tells you something like: in this way with a proper inner peace and distance you will function even better on the market, you know. Always. You know who began this? It's not even us in the West, I read somewhere that after the end of the World War II, Japanese defeat, Suzuki established the same Suzuki the first business the first Zen course for businessmen in Tokyo in '47. This idea that if you are minimally enlightened like, to be vulgar, aware that the reality we confront is not the substantial real reality, that the ultimate truth is the void, you arrive at this through this meditative distance and so on and so on. That precisely by not the idea is the following one: if you take crazy this game of imagine being a stockbroker whatever, speculating with futures and hedge funds, whatever. I mean if you take this game seriously you get crazy, it's so dynamic, you know like a rumor starts can ruin the whole industry whatever. And the idea is that the only way to survive it if you learn some kind of inner distance, inner peace and so on, telling yourself but I'm not really there. I quite, as I put it in one of my books, I think that we all know Max Weber's classical book, no, the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I think that if Weber were to be alive today, he would have written a book something like Taoist Ethics and the Spirit of Global Capitalism. It fits much better. Do you know that I quoted at the very end, I'm not sure, I think it's of my ticklish subject, but I'm not sure. A wonderful documentary where you have some sociologists like Saskia Sassen and some Tibetan Buddhists and they claim that the only way to account ontologically for the crazy experience of reality which is proper to today's capitalism, this total fragility, like remember the, you know you think you live in a stable world, all of a sudden you know this fragility, all of a sudden reality as we know it can dissolve and so on, is to accept some kind of Buddhist ontology of: there is no substantial reality, just phenomena dancing and so on and so on. So this is I think the first reason why why Buddhism can function much better than Western Christian traditions in enabling us to survive at everyday level, survive through a distance, the this crazy dynamic logic of global capitalism. The second thing I think is precisely the great revolution that we are approaching, the biogenetic revolution. I already also mentioned this two days ago. What fascinates me is that I really think that maybe even the very definition of being human will change. Because what does it mean now for us to be human? Minimally, it means I'm a thinking being, among other things, no. It means I'm in here, reality is out there, I can think whatever I want and so on. And as we all know the latest result of brain sciences, but also practices and so on, is that slowly, slowly, we are not yet there, but this fundamental divide between me, my inside and outside is breaking down in both directions. You know how from time to time you get all these stories about how they can wire your brain so that you can move objects directly. You for example you have wheelchairs for crippled people where you don't even need that Stephen Hawking's finger, you know, you just think strongly forward, because the chair moves because again it's very simple. They already can decode your very elementary orders to your muscles and they simply read them and directly transmit them to the machine. The problem is rather for me that it goes also the other way round, from outside inside. That is to say I was quite shocked and I spoke with some people connected with it and they told me it's not a joke, namely that it's quite serious. You can check it on, sorry on on on on the net, namely what: did you hear about did you hear about DARPA project? DARPA means Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's in United States a big huge military agency supporting neuroscientific research, and among other things, it's not a joke, they are now doing something they call narrative analysis. And I read their program, it's it's pretty, pretty terrifying. They are not yet there, but the very project is strange. The idea is this one: first it reads like some kind of structural analysis, they claim how to prevent terrorist attacks? We have to see how the mind of terrorist works. So at the first level it's simply let's analyze all the discursive rhetorical strategies, how do you make how does ideology create a terrorist, what shortcuts short circuits rather in their reasoning does it and so on. Then comes the real thing. They try to identify parts of the brain which are active in these processes when you assume a fanatical belief and so on. And the idea, they say it openly, is that we will be able to influence someone to change his or her beliefs not by arguing with him, either even brainwashing him, but through direct biogenetic intervention. I mean okay, again, it's still not yet developed but things are developing here fast. So what I'm saying is that how how to accept this, that namely that this fundamental divide between subject-object, my inner life outer life, you know that all even all cognitivists admit that at least from our experience there is a gap here. On the one hand you look at the brain, stupid piece of meat and so on. How you make a jump from there to your inner experience? They're trying to do it. At some elementary level they already can do it. So again the problem is how do we react to this? The problem is if we accept this, that science and technology will succeed relatively soon in this radical self-objectivization, that our thinking processes, emotional reactions and so on will become something which we will be able to identify as neuronal processes in your brain and then to influence it directly like that. There are, as I already said two days ago, there are the way I see three-four main reactions to this. One is that we in our immediate self-experience are condemned eternally to live in this illusion that we are free agents and so on, you know that that we are wired biologically evolutionary to experience ourselves as free responsible agents. So in other words there is an irreducible cognitive gap between scientific truth, which tells us that there is no free will and so on. By the way I am not saying this is true, I don't agree with this. And it's very interesting, do you know the guy, you should read him, interesting, called Benjamin Libet. It's a neuroscientist from Berkeley I think who he already some years or years ago proposed and did the experiment which is usually referred to as the ultimate experiment demonstrating that there is no free will. But interestingly enough he himself disagrees with this reading. He claims no, no, the experiment is the famous one, you know, to simplify to the utmost: you are asked to do some elementary gesture, like pick up this pen and move it here or there, whatever, just to do it immediately. You decide, you do it. He then of course wires puts sensors on you blah blah, and what he did prove is that a split of a second before you decide, your neurons already know it. In other words this allegedly proves that when you do something freely in the sense of you just on the spot decide it, you don't really decide, you just become aware of a process which objectively is already going on before. And they are even further developing this today. For example they have proven, absolutely conclusively I like this, that when you go to a store to buy a car and are nervous sweating what to buy and so on, they can tell you minutes before even that you've already decided, to minutes before and so on. So okay, what's so interesting is that Benjamin Libet rejects this reading. He claims that yes, it's a very Hegelian argument, I like it. His answer is that yes, this happens with our positive decisions, but that in that split of a second when my neurons decide and I don't yet know it, I can block it. That our freedom is originally a freedom to say no. That our freedom is not to freely decide for something, but just for no reason at all to sabotage. Okay, this is a complicated debate. What I wanted to say is that if we accept it, which I don't, this idea that we are just wired mechanisms, our free will is an illusion, the first attitude, this is the majority standard opinion, is to accept the gap. To say okay, we are forever condemned to live in illusion because we are wired to it, we experience ourselves as free. Okay, then we can give a more philosophical twist to this, I will not go into it, the Habermasian answer they have a great debate in Germany. Habermas tries to play more of a let's call it transcendental game here. He claims that even if the result of our scientific research is we are not free, we are neuronal mechanisms. How did we reach this result? Through scientific analysis, scientific reasoning, arguing, which precisely presupposes that we are free thinking beings. So the idea is that even when you prove that you are not free, the space for this very proof is sustained by the space of reasoning. And that you cannot close the circle here, that's another point. Okay. Then we have another tendency for example Patricia and Paul Churchland, who claim, but it's utopia I don't think it works, who claim that no there is nothing really eternal biological in our spontaneous self-perception as free agents. They claim no, it is possible to change our in the same way as for example, I don't know, when something strikes today we no longer experience it as divine intervention and so on. That we can imagine a society where people fully integrate, assume scientific results: we are not free beings and so on. And it would be they claim they try to pass to give it a positive twist, that it would be a much more tolerant society, less moralistic, less severe punishment and so on, simply to take this into account. But then my hero here, okay not hero but the most interesting guy I claim is the German guy Thomas Metzinger in his wonderful big fat book Being No One, where he tries to, first he accepts this gap. He says that if you look at cognitivist theories which totally naturalize our mind, he says that we can know it rationally, but we cannot really believe in it, we cannot really accept it. There is a gap here. But he provides an exception, again Buddhism. He claims that you see the parallel, that if you go to the end in Buddhist enlightenment and if you reach enlightenment, Nirvana, where you get the point that you have no free that you are not a free agent, you are not a substantial self and so on all that, there it's the only point where you do reach a subjective position which is compatible with the latest scientific results. It's a very beautiful reading. But as always I like to bring bad news, as always I claim there are problems here. So let me conclude just a little bit with where do I see problems here. First, Buddhism is concerned with solving the problem of suffering, so the first axiom is always: we don't want to suffer. Where here already I have problems. I think if there is a point of psychoanalysis, it's that we want to suffer, and it's irreducible. And I think that I my first association here is, you know a typical since we are here cinema lovers film noir scene, you know the typical scene is like a kind of I don't know who Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart guy falls for a evil femme fatale and at the end he loses everything, he's totally ruined and then somebody asks him, "Now you know it, it was ruin. So sad that you didn't know this before to avoid it." And his answer, the hero's answer is always is always, "No, it was worth. Even if I were to know that it will end in ruin, it was it was worth doing it." This idea of it's a catastrophe but I'm ready to do it again. So what I want to say is that my first point is that Buddhism is here way too optimistic in a way in this belief you know that all living beings want to get rid of suffering and so on. I doubt it. Second point, I think one of the mystifications of our Western perception of Buddhism is that we identify too much with meditation. In a very good book on reality of Buddhism I read it's very interesting that in countries like Thailand blah blah Burma Myanmar now where Buddhism is really a way of life, only a tiny minority meditates. It's not so much meditation is more an ideal, it's like to remind you that it is possible to reach but for a large majority of people being a Buddhist simply means don't cause too much suffering and so on all that stuff all that stuff. Okay, but let's go on now where I see a problem with where I see a problem with Buddhism. Again it's what I already mentioned, Buddhism begins with suffering, so then you slowly train yourself ethically and so on, at the end you step out of this wheel of desire, you are no longer controlled by karma, your acts no longer leave traces, you don't hurt other people and so on and so on. Here I have a couple of problems and okay I don't have time to go now in detail in them but I had big debates with Buddhists who at least maybe they pretend that this I don't know conceded to me that there is a problem here, namely did you notice this radical ambiguity in Buddhism, how when they talk about reaching enlightenment? They oscillate between two extremes. On the one hand the idea is enlightenment is simply a radical shift in your self-experience. Enlightenment doesn't mean anything changes in the world. It means just you radically shift your attitude, you no longer believe that you are a substantial agent, free will and so on, you know just this, you accept the void. On the other hand, you have a much more radical tendency that living as such is suffering and that basically that's the idea of Bodhisattva, the Buddhist saint who refuses to enter Nirvana, but although he entered Nirvana, he comes back to our illusory reality, he postpones his own salvation till all living sentient beings will be saved and so on and so on. I think if you ask me, the origin of all the problems with Buddhism is Bodhisattva, this very noble apparently idea of I could be there, could have been there in Nirvana but I have such loving sympathy for the suffering of all living beings that I came back so that only we all together should join it. The problem here is I think here already the battle is lost because you know authentic Buddhism for me means that in Nirvana you don't go somewhere else, you stay fully here. And you can even be active as such. For an authentic radical Buddhist you can when you are in Nirvana you should forget this is already I think a falsification, this idea that in Nirvana you are somewhere there in a trance, no you are here with all the people, just with a different attitude, but you can be fully active here. Now the problem of course is if you accept this position, what does it mean ethically? Again I claim there is no guarantee that horrible thing cannot happen. Like this was a big shock of me, I read two-three books on if there is a nightmare of a human person this is Pol Pot, you remember the leader of Khmer Rouge in Kampuchea, Cambodia. Well all descriptions agree that there was even a myth within the Khmer Rouge that he reached the highest enlightenment. He was an incredibly gentle soft person, always inner peace and so on and so on. So what I'm trying to say here again what I'm trying to say is that there is nothing which prevents you from reaching inner enlightenment and go on doing horrible things. Now you will say compassion, but is not the basic Buddhist attitude that of compassion? Compassion with all suffering beings and so on and so on. But let me assure you this problem was solved long ago with the wonderful notion of compassionate war, you know like you can also do you can do all the killing but with compassion and so on and so on. Then you have another problem here which I think makes it even more problematic: many Buddhists admit that you can reach something like Nirvana also through biogenetic means, with simple chemical intervention. You don't need to go through all the meditation blah blah blah. So the problem is doesn't this ruin then the undermine the ethical status of meditation? That is to say, is there a distinction between, let's say, real enlightenment where you meditated worked hardly to reach it and simply taking a pill and finding yourself in a blessed state? Owen Flanagan, cognitivist who is also close to Buddhism, proposed what he calls here a normative exclusion clause. I quote him: "Cases where happiness (happiness in the sense of Buddhist enlightenment) is gained by magic pills or is due to false belief do not count because the allegedly happy person must be involved in cultivating her own virtue and happiness. Happy states born of delusion are undeserved." My point is: why? Why, if as he admits it, it's exactly the same inner state? Okay then the next sorry so again because of all this my the only ah yes here is the quote from Suzuki if you don't believe me: "It is really not he the killer but the sword itself that does the killing. He the killer had no desire to to do harm to anybody but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice which is the function of mercy." Wonderful description of killing and so on and so on. So you know what I'm trying to say here now really to conclude, I was too long and I improvised because this is part of the work in progress. Two things. First don't misunderstand me: I am not dismissing Buddhism in any way, it's an absolutely authentic experience. I just claim it doesn't have a necessary immanent let's call it moral or whatever content. Let's not cheat here. It's as Suzuki said, a technique of achieving inner peace, you can do all the torturing you want. I don't and it's quite interesting to read, for example I have a book on Tibetan ethics, sorry Tibetan legal system, where it describes in what wonderful way, wonderful in a terrifying sense, in what wonderful way although they did not do the killing, they nonetheless did it. For example in traditional Tibetan justice of course you don't do the killing life is sacred, but they whipped a criminal and chained him in winter to a tree outside so he froze and so on and so on. You can do it. So what I want to say is that my lesson would be just double. First let's accept the gap: inner Buddhist peace meditation is a great thing but it's not the answer. I think we should again maintain a minimal gap between inner authenticity and let's call it ethics of acting together with other people and so on and so on. My second conclusion here would have been that I am that to locate what really, I'm sorry I'm talking in mega generalities now, what really divides East from West if I may use these terms probably in a wrong way but nonetheless. Is that what nonetheless I find attractive in Western tradition, it's terribly politically incorrect what I'm saying now, is that in contrast to this idea don't get involved remain maintain an inner distance, isn't the entire Western ethics starting with Plato precisely ethic an ethics of falling into opening yourself to an encounter like falling in love? Our Western love is not this peaceful Buddha's smile, it's out there something and you fall fully into it. You know this idea of fall, GK Chesterton, my favorite Catholic theologian although I'm totally an atheist of course, puts this nicely when he says that in all other religions you have a fall like men fall from God, only in Christianity God himself falls into the world, incarnation and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that what I what I am tempted to do here, but even here I'm not sure if maybe some Buddhisms can do it, it's a very tricky point. It's you know at least I'm totally opposed to Star Wars Buddhism, I will stop immediately, to Star Wars Buddhism, you know which is you know how how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader by getting too identified, too much love. No, I mean my friend Kōjin Karatani, a Japanese leftist, told me that there is nonetheless a Buddhist tradition which says no, Nirvana does not mean maintain inner distance, Nirvana means fall fully into the world. In the sense of fall without reserve. You lose your ego not by some inner meditation, but precisely you lose your ego by falling true falling radically into the world, accepting fully the world. And even okay I should maybe have stopped here but my basic message again would have been that that maybe here there is an irreducible ethical line of division of how I am tempted to claim that what we need precisely today when a kind of a false Buddhism is becoming generally accepted ontology is precisely to to to advocate the fall. Not wise distance, like engage yourself fully, step out of yourself, fall into it. I think this is for me the ethics that we need today. I am very sorry if I was too long and I improvised because this is part of the work in progress, but I am very grateful for your incredible patience. Thank you very much. You said the left needs new master signifiers. So just going back to what you were talking about with poetry and how poetry sort of animates totalitarianism, is that really what the left needs? So I'm maybe thinking about like what would an example be, like Phil Ochs, you know, during the 60s and 70s he thought we needed someone who was both Che Guevara and Elvis Presley. Is this something that you're kind of thinking that, you know, how poetry kind of leads to animating master signifiers? No, I see your point. Yeah, yeah. No, first let me be clear: not every poetry. I mean I'm definitely not saying that, I don't know, Paul Celan leads to totalitarianism or what. All I'm saying is this that what I mean by master signifier is again, I don't like this ecstatic left where, you know, we are all out there together in ecstatic moments of freedom. What I'm obsessed with and this I mean with master signifier is, but what happens the day after? Are we strong enough to impose a new order? Like what will the new order be? I mean for me the true value of a revolution is not those ecstatic moments where there is one million people on the square. That's easy to do. What interests me is what happens the day after. Because you know at some point things, as we put it, return to normal functioning and how will the changes be felt there? And this is all I mean with a master signifier. Master signifier is here simply the name for a new for a new order if you want it like this, you know like and here again I I see a big problem. It's as if even like it's the problem for me it's of course people always tell me, but you ask too much, we cannot now give a detailed blueprint of what new society we want. But I'm not talking about this, I'm even I'm talking much more fundamentally about the basic blueprint of what are we striving for. And I find already here a lack of elementary like what do we want? Do we still want capitalism but just, you know, with a more human face, kind of Keynesian welfare state capitalism? Do we want, I don't know, a stronger state, do we want just local communities to it's it's pretty frustrating this. And this is not just an abstract problem. For example, it was a clear problem in Greece when SYRIZA the radical left party almost won the election. I was I was incredibly I was asking them I met the guy Tsipras, the leader, "Okay, if you win, what will you do?" Apart from this negative gestures like reject austerity measures and so on. What will you do? Will you like nationalize, not nationalize and it's it's pretty frustrating at this level. And I don't think because the again the answer I get is "I want too much, we cannot talk about this now." Okay, but I think we should, because exactly in Greece and in some other countries, you know, we cannot say, "Oh there is time, we will see when we come there." No, we have to think now about possible alternatives and so on. And I'm here even a pretty tough guy: like I think that the thing that we should abandon, this is very evil what I will say now, is this the true secret dream of the 20th century left: neither Stalinist communism nor social democracy but this idea of non-representative direct democracy in local communities where you know transparent non-representative. This works at a local level, but in order for this to works to work at a local level, you have to have a very efficient global organization. How will you do that and so on and so on. Here I find such a lack of even imagination like take the big hit Negri-Hardt at the end when they approach this problem of both first two big books, that is to say Empire and Multitude, all of a sudden Saint Francis is quoted and you get some kind of a mystical vision, you know. The way I see it is that the question I don't like this all this Deleuzian micro-local metaphorics where the enemy is the big molar whatever organization and this local networks and so on. No, I think we will have to reinvent precisely large global organizations how to do that and so on and so on. I'm not a total pessimist here. I think that one reason to act is you know when people tell us, but you cannot really change it. My answer is clear, my answer is, but things are already changing. Are we aware how quickly we are leaving behind this even standard bourgeois progressive capitalism? If we allow things to go on the way they are going on now, I think in about years, maximum we will live in some kind of new authoritarian world which we will not even recognize and so on. Even going towards the so the new idea of the human, the old idea of human of human subjectivity is disintegrating going towards. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my point here, yes that my point is not to paint some dark picture we will be neuronal automata and so on, but it's an open field of a camp we have to confront the problem. What I don't agree is for example the Habermasian solution which is basically a very conservative solution. No wonder that Habermas co-wrote a book not really co-wrote they just published together texts with whom, my God, with Ratzinger, today's Pope. And the his Habermas's solution is a negative gesture. It's saying since it's dangerous to play with our brain, since it uh limits our freedom, we should set up a limit and we should not do it. And here it may interest you, like I had a big debate with some bishops even in in Munich or Vienna I forgot years ago and I asked them: you remember now I'm referring to this standard Catholic argument: we shouldn't mess with our brain I mean do this all this biogenetic psycho effects because in this way we lose our responsibility and freedom, man is not just a machine, man has an eternal soul. But I also always have here an absolutely naive counter-question: if you not you you but if you are Catholic whatever Christian you believe that you have an eternal soul, isn't it that then the logical answer would have been: "I don't care, do whatever you want with my brain, you cannot touch my eternal soul"? If they believe that we have an eternal soul why then are they so afraid of me if I'm an evil scientist messing with your brain? Do you know incidentally that there is one the only good Christian answer that I got here? It's a wonderful one, it's the radio apparatus answer. They claim it's a nice way out: that think about our brain as a radio receiver. We do have an eternal soul but our brain is tuned like tuned to the good radio station to receive message from the soul. If we play through biogenetics with our brain, we will mess it up, it will no longer be able to. I don't think it works, but you see my point, I think we have to accept the challenge here. I mean I'm just otherwise it will be horrible, we will have new and new revolts like we have them now, you know here in Greece, Europe whatever, but then the result will be nothing just more and more frustration. So you've already killed me off about four or five times this weekend, this the reason why... Yeah I know what you are longing for, when you are already dead down you know in typical Hollywood fight when the bad guy wins when the guy is already down you kick him the last time into the head you know. So I have to do that we have another question over here. Hi, um, tying last night's screening into today's talk. Uh, I was just wondering if you were aware of uh you talk about David Lynch a lot I was wondering if you were aware of his whole engagement with transcendental meditation. Unfortunately I am, yes, the same Howard Stern also practices it in... I didn't know but Howard Stern, but I know about I know what the man his idea is that if you I think if you get a certain it's almost like what Stalinists called the jump from quantity to quality, that if you get a great a large number
I'd like to welcome Slavoj Žižek. Thanks very much, I'm honored to be here and I also prefer the situation today where there is at least a hope that we will do a chance that we will do more theory and so on, but I don't want to disappoint you too much because I was nonetheless told that, like, the public is not only philosophers, so what I will try to do is simply prolong the reflections of the last days on the end of the world and so on, which means our ideological constellation today. Where are we moving, what does this mean? Well, my first association when you say the end of the world, it is culturally for me is, does any of you know this quite terrifying song, but I think it's if there ever was a symptom of where we are today, this is it. This mega mega hit Gangnam Style which started in South Korea, then all around the world, I was told that already in the United States it's already on the second place and so on. What interests me here is how it functions. My small son who listened to it draw my attention to it that you know if you play it on YouTube you have how many hits and then you have positive negative opinions, that negative opinions are much larger, it's like as my son told me, your big guy, if you look at Justin Bieber you find the same like five to one. But nonetheless people remain stuck onto it, they listen to it. And so I even then found a text on this hit Gangnam Style where they say that's how it effectively functions, it's not that you like it, but practically everyone tells me the same: when you first hear it you find it disgusting, but in a weird way pleasurably disgusting. You become haunted by it. You know it's like when something is so disgusting that fascinates you and you say, uh, it's horrible, let's take a look again at it how horrible it is. And then slowly my son who is eleven now ends up listening at least fifty times per day to it. Second thing, although it is a quasi-religious experience like in Korea a friend sent me some video clips, this stupid song was performed at a stadium with over one hundred thousand people all in a trance and so on. What is so interesting is how critics, false I claim fake leftist critics, try to convince us that it's irony, it's satirical, you shouldn't take it seriously, no, it's really making fun of that for young upper-class kids part of Seoul, Gangnam, and all the irony there and so on. But I claim precisely this is what makes the song an example of ideology, how as I always repeat how cynicism functions today. I believe in it, it's all the time fun making fun of itself, but the magic is that it functions. You see my point, I'm not claiming there is just the stupid song with this rave dance repetitive almost military style, the crowd follows this quasi-religious rave experience. It's not just this that makes it ideology, it's precisely this more of making fun of yourself, ironic distance and so on and so on. It's the same as my old thesis, did we use it, Matthew, in some of the films, I'm not sure, of that stupid movie Kung Fu Panda, where I claim it's exemplary of ideology today. Why? Because I had the misfortune of seeing it four-five times with the same above-mentioned son, where for for like on the one hand the movie mobilizes all this Orientalist mythology, you know, Kung Fu, destiny, warrior, chosen, whatever, the one, and at the same time it makes fun of its own ideology all the time, in a kind of a common-sensical mocking of all the Buddhist or whatever Orientalist spiritual wisdoms. But again you shouldn't miss the point, which is that in spite of, or I would rather have said precisely because of all this self-mocking, it works, in the sense that far from undermining all this Orientalist mythology, in a strange way making fun of it makes this ideology viable. It is as if the procedure, since I am I hope here with people who like at least some movies, films, it's something that was done in an intelligent way, I claim, with in I don't like too much the film, but this aspect I like, Lars von Trier, I hope you saw it, Breaking the Waves. He, Lars von Trier himself, has a wonderful explanation where he says the story in itself, he says, is ridiculously melodramatic, and if the form of the film were to fit to be adequate to the ridiculous melodramatic style of the narrative, it would have been inedible, how do you call it, ridiculous. So he says that's why he opted, you may remember it if you saw the film, for this quasi-documentary handheld camera short cuts and so on, a style which is totally out of sync with the mega-romantic narrative. He said very nicely that this quasi-documentary style functions like some kind of a screen which softens and makes palpable so that you can take so that you can take seriously the story. The reason I like this is that what von Trier does there is the exact opposite of the standard melodramatic procedure, where the style is often more pathetic, emotional, than the content. I mean all good analysts know this how often even something that at least in classical melodramas that you cannot directly depict at a narrative level, you signal it through the over-pathetic character of the style. Here it's the exact opposite, it's the story which is ridiculously pathetic, you need this filter as it were, distancing filter, to make the story palpable. And I claim, again, the same goes for this Gangnam Style. First, and I think I'm not I mean it quite seriously when I say that this is the way, the mode of today's spiritual experience is, if you want. I'm not making fun of it, my claim is not it's a pseudo-spiritual experience, of course I find it disgusting, but my thesis, underlying thesis, is much more radical: it's that what if a spiritual experience itself can be disgusting even if it's authentic? I mean why do we automatically associate inner spiritual experience with something, I don't know, morally elevating and so on and so on? My idea was always, for example, when I read their horrible reading, of course, Nazi or other memoirs. What if there, why automatically if someone does something horrible in real life, organized murder, torture, and so on, why do we automatically assume that he must be somehow non-authentic, hypocritical, in his inner life? This is, I know, very sad news, pessimist news, but I'm more and more convinced of it. Now let me present you as part of this line of thought another experience which brought me a lot of hatred in my own country already. I developed this in some of my books where I propose the line of like no ethnic cleansing without poetry, literally. You know why I took this path? Because I got a little bit tired with this eternal motive which you find from Levinas to Adorno, all of them or even many general generally people of culture, of blaming us philosophers, you know, the idea is political totalitarianism, for example Emmanuel Levinas says this clearly, political totalitarianism is grounded in philosophical notion of totality. You think you have access to total, absolute knowledge, you know totality, and this justifies you then to brutally impose your vision on reality. I claim okay maybe, although I doubt it deeply, deeply. Because if you look closely, now at a naive empirical level even, if you look closely at most of, not even most of, actual so-called totalitarianisms, you will see that the spontaneous ideology of totalitarianists is always historicist relativism, you know. For example, if there was someone who was not philosophically totalitarian, it's Adolf Hitler. Read Mein Kampf, it's a horrible book, pretty boring, but it's worth reading because you see that his attitude was not man, master of universe, his attitude was man is just a tiny dust of nature, we are totally exposed to nature, we will perish, disappear, and so on, it's total historicist relativism and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is then why, uh, even I had some problems with even with theorist theorists of deconstruction who also claim this, kind of a metaphysics of identity, sticking to absolute values again in some way grounds totalitarianism and so on. No, look for example at the time of the French Revolution and you will see that the defenders of Ancien Régime were historicists, they claim we have, you know their line was the one of how is he called the great critic of French Revolution, Edmund Burke or who? Burke, yeah, yeah. You know the idea is we all live within a certain particular tradition which is ultimately contingent but the worst thing we can do is to just relativize this tradition which is contingent and impose some eternal values and so on. It was the revolutionaries who were much more metaphysical in the sense that no, there are natural rights of men, if anything, the conflict between Burke and partisans of French Revolution was a conflict between a historicist and kind of absolutist, no eternal values, natural rights and so on. Here I think it's a nice example of how precisely the reference to an absolute can open up the space of freedom. But let me go on with this idea ethnic cleansing and so on, let me be serious now, I'm not crazy, don't be afraid. I mean there are poets who really are poets, they are absolute, I mean, but not so many as people think, like I don't know in the 20th century if you mention I don't know Paul Celan or whatever. But did you notice nonetheless how many of undoubtedly great modernist poets were pretty close to fascism or whatever, Eliot, Pound. What is my trauma here? This one. If you it's very simple line of thought. If you we are basically half-decent people, as I already developed it I think the first evening there, and it's difficult for us to kill someone and so on. So you need some kind of absolute mythic poetic religious vision again to function as a as a screen, to make it possible. Here I agree partially, not totally, I'm not part of that today's materialism of of Harris and Hitchens and so on, but I basically agree with what Steven Weinberg I think said somewhere, that without religion bad people would be doing bad things and good people good things, you need something like religion to make good people do bad things. I can tell you that this is what happened in my own country, for example, you know the story, ex-Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing and so on. I think it's not an accident a chance that the leader of Bosnian Serbs is Radovan Karadžić, a poet. And I'm not blaming just the Serbs, if you look at other ex-Yugoslav republics, every nation had its own Karadžić. You need this type of a vision of a vision to enable you to do the horrors. What do I mean by this? It's interesting to read, I always quote it, what Heinrich Himmler, you know the SS boss, he confronted this problem. Like, uh, he knew very well, it's interesting to read him, he knew very well that SS officers and soldiers were obliged to do horrible things while doing organizing Holocaust, uh, uh, bringing together all the Jews, you had to beat children, women and so on and so on. And his problem was how to how to enable German soldiers or SS, the elite to soldiers to do this without, as he himself put it, Himmler, without becoming beasts like beasts in the sense of simply enjoying, getting involved in what they are doing. You maybe know what his solution was? Bhagavad Gita, Oriental wisdom. Himmler always had in his pocket a special leather-bound version of Bhagavad Gita. Of course his focus was, you must know Bhagavad Gita, that famous encounter between Arjuna, the warrior, and God Krishna, no? In just before the big battle, Arjuna is on the battlefield with tens of thousands of soldiers opposing army and has doubts: my God, do I have the right to order the attack, thousands will die and so on, all the suffering. And then God basically gives him a nice lesson of this famous act without being fully involved, no? And of this what we in the West identify, that's another point, does it really hold or not, as Oriental ontology. He says, but material reality are just appearances, it things grow, disintegrate, disappear. The true reality is the reality of the your eternal self, Atman, which is eternal. So the logical conclusion: don't worry, do all the killing and so on, what you can destroy is already in itself negligible, deserves to perish and so on and so on, and precisely again, don't get involved. And it's really shocking how if you look, for example, I made a test and looked also at Rwanda. Of course there is a poet there who for ten years was laying the ground, the foundation for for Tutsis killing the Hutus and so on and so on. I'm not far from condemning poetry, I think that precisely authentic poetry is the best medicine against this for undermining national myths and so on and so on. But again I think that precisely uh how should put it, I don't believe in cynicism in the sense of that people can be totally cynical. I claim that nobody can be totally cynical, each of us has his or her or their own small island of authenticity as it were, you know. And here again poetry poetry is needed. You know where poetry enters? Ideological poetry, of course. The most terrifying trick of this poetic justification of violence is a very specific one. Hitler, sorry, Himmler also knew it. It's they admit, for example, let's go back to that situation that I evoked the first evening here using you Matthew I think as the example. Let's say I am ordered to kill you. Okay, unfortunately I'm not perfect, I will have some problems, no? But then the the trick is a good totalitarian propaganda, not propaganda, mythology admits this trouble of mine. Of course we have, most of us at least, some basic decency, it's disgusting, difficult for us simply to approach another guy, pick out his eyes, cut off his testicles, whatever. But then you know what does it do, authentic totalitarian poetry? It uh it redefines your very problem with doing this as an as an ethical problem temptation, in the sense of as Himmler said: most of the people can do great things for their country, even sacrifice their lives. A true hero is the one who is ready to lose his soul for the country, to to do horrible things for his fatherland. So you know like if I have, sorry, don't take it personally, it's just history, if I have to torture and kill you, the trick would have been to say of course you feel horrible, but the true greatness is to is to elevate yourself above this temptation of ordinary humanity, precisely what you in your everyday awareness experience as ethically problematic is the weakness. A true hero, a true ethical greatness is when for a higher cause you are ready to act beyond good and evil and so on and so on. And here you need some poetic vision, I cannot call it otherwise, vision of I don't know national destiny, religion, call it whatever you want, to make them to make them do that. Okay, so again this would be my first pessimist lesson of how and at the end I will come to Buddhism again, which I already mentioned at the first evening precisely because I think that here and I spoke with many Buddhists and even mostly they agreed that here there is a problem in Buddhism, namely that the really difficult thing for us to admit is that there is a there is no necessary inner link between ordinary goodness towards others, doing kind things and so on, and let's call it naively authentic authentic spiritual experience. Maybe you know the story which I like to repeat, I'm sorry if you know it, I wrote about it long ago twenty years ago in a book, a book I mean I wrote about a book which I like very much by Aldous Huxley, maybe you know it, The Gray Eminence, L'éminence grise. It's a biography of Father Joseph, Père Joseph, who was a priest and the right hand of Cardinal Richelieu, the de facto ruler of France during the Thirty Years' War in the early 17th century. And you know what is so crazy about this guy? If there ever was an evil politician, it's Father Joseph. To cut a long story short, if we engage in some mythical genealogy and try to guess what's the origin of Hitler, of World War II, it's Father Joseph. You know why? This was the battle between Catholics Protestants for Europe. But Cardinal Richelieu had no illusions, he knew it's not really about that, it is about guaranteeing central about establishing central role of France in European politics, and the way to do it is to prevent German unification. And so Father Joseph who executed this plan did something totally unprincipled. He, although this was officially a war of Catholics against Protestants, he made a pact with Swedish Protestants against Austrian Catholics just to keep Germany divided, and this is the logic I was referring to. Because Germany was divided, because Germany constituted itself as a nation-state too late, everybody knows that this delay caused First World War and then it's the ultimate cause and then of Second World War. But what I'm trying to say is okay, here we have a guy who was at this level really really evil, organizing murders, extortions, torture, name it. Now comes the horrible thing. At the same time this guy wrote was in a permanent communication exchanging letters with some nunnery, women's convent, how do you call it, and and he wrote them the most authentic beautiful mystical reflections at the top level name it like who are the big hits, Saint Teresa or John of the Cross, it's at that level, it's absolutely authentic spirituality. And that's what, it's not a really great book, but this is the nice point, this is what bothers so much Aldous Huxley. How can a guy who is doing all this at the same time how can he write something that you cannot but say if you are honest, my God this is the pearl, the thing itself, this is it. And we can go on here like Heinrich Heydrich, you know we are back to Himmler, his second man who organized the Wannsee Conference, Holocaust. I read I was quite traumatized, I read in a biography of, no biography sorry, history of SS that Heydrich was of course German elite, relatively educated, privately he played very well violin and in the evenings he used to gather with his SS friends and they have some kind of amateur constituted string quartet and they like to play what is, my God, unfortunately I must tell you is generally admitted one of the top achievements of Western music, late Beethoven's string quartets. Now I found this to be some kind of let me call it ontological scandal, you know, like how is this possible? This is not just that the not even scum, totally evil man like Heydrich, you know again, the one who organized planned Holocaust can maybe authentically enjoy, appreciate such beautiful music. Because here I want to resist the temptation which Huxley was not able to resist. His solution is this only can mean that Christian or Catholic spirituality is not authentic. He didn't want to admit that you can have it both together. So this is why as you maybe know he moved towards the Far East, no, meditation, Buddhism and so on, thinking that his idea was this one that Christianity is too much focused on suffering, of following the path of Christ, identifying with suffering, that this makes it potentially pathological. While this more peaceful, withdrawn, Oriental spiritual attitude can do the job better. Here I have another bad news for you. I always like to mention this book, I hope some of you know it, Brian Victoria, who is himself a Zen Buddhist monk, you really should read this book. It's called Zen at War. It's a you can find it, I think it's reprinted all the time, it's widely debated in Zen and generally Buddhist circles. It's not a big theoretical book, it does something very modest: it looks in detail on how the Japanese Zen community, they were relatively strong I think around ten million more, related to Japanese imperial war conquest, first war with China, then World War II in the 1930s and 40s. And the result is pretty depressing. Not only they tolerated it, but apart from literally five or ten dissidents, they unanimously supported the war. Not even this, but even provided tools like advices to make war more efficient. For example now I will be really evil, I'm sorry if you already know the story. Do you remember if you are old enough, some of you are, most happy for you not, in the old hippie times, he was very popular, who is he, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, DT Suzuki, you know, the great Zen popularizer. What people tend to forget, but he was honest enough to admit this, he never denied it, that in the 1930s and 40s, early 40s, he was totally supporting Japanese military imperial politics, and not only this but even gave active advices about how to render it more efficient. For example I quote this, I forgot which one in two-three of my books, this wonderful passage from Suzuki where he says again it's the same problem as I mentioned before: like imagine yourself in battle. You confront your enemy, you see him and of course you cannot avoid a minimum of, let's call it personalization, like you are, sorry Matthew it's always you whom I think when I think let's kill a person, I think about you don't ask me why, but like you know you're a human being, you have a child, all these problems. Eh, Suzuki has an answer here, it's pretty horrifying. He says these problems remain as long as we remain stuck into this what Buddhism describes as this Samsara, the wheel of desire, false identity, when we perceive falsely ourselves as agent with a substantial self, you know, when we don't fully assume this logic of, in Indian, An-Atman, there is no self, just void and so on. He says that let's say I have a knife I want to stab you. If I'm still caught in the world of illusion, I will find it problematic, like my God I am stabbing you, what right do I have to do it? But, Suzuki says, imagine that I go through Buddhist enlightenment, then I really assume that I have no self, I'm just a kind of totally impassive transparent observer, and the world also, reality loses its its substantial weight and becomes just a dance of phenomena popping up here, disappearing there. And then he says if you really assume this existential experience then it becomes much easier. He, Suzuki provides a wonderful description: he says it's no longer me deciding to stab you, it is as he says a knife in my hand as part of a cosmic dance is moving in space and as part of the same dance, Matthew sorry you are, your body hits my knife and I'm for nothing in it, you know, I'm just this totally enlightened observer and so on and so on. Now let's avoid a misunderstanding here. I am not saying I have immense respect for Buddhism, I'm not saying hoo-hoo Buddhism theory of Japanese militarism or whatever, Zen. I'm saying, and Suzuki after the war was heroic enough to admit it, what I'm saying is that is that it doesn't matter, it's neutral. Suzuki says this wonderfully in a people just ignored this when they bought this bullshit you know Buddhism holistic organic you are gentle with nature. No he says Buddhism is a technique of meditation. You can be a fascist, a torturer, a democrat, a liberal, whatever, communist, it doesn't matter. He, I found this really radical and great, this is a very traumatic thing to do. He admitted, accepted this irreducible gap: you can have your inner authentic inner experience, it absolutely doesn't guarantee that you will not be doing horrible things in reality. In some conditions as Suzuki admits it, it may even make it easier because again the moment you don't perceive yourself as agent you are no longer fully fully identified with it and so on and so on. So here I have a more general problem about where we are today. Here I have a problem with my personal friend, but we have some theoretical conflicts, Judith Butler. I don't know if I mention this, I appreciate her very much but not the usual books which are more her, for example the books that I like by her is her first book, Subjects of Desire, which is I think a very good reading of Hegel, that's what I appreciate in her, she is really deep in her heart a Hegelian. And once she told me, "Slavoj, you must really hate me." I said no, you may be evil but you like Hegel, somebody who wrote such a book on Hegel cannot be totally evil. I told her then we embraced, yeah, yeah, we were friends, no. And the other book, The Psychic Life of Power. These are I think her best works, not the big official stuff. My problem with her is this one. Her general space, and I don't care here if she really meant it like that, I'm speaking about how she is perceived, is that the enemy, quote marks, the opponent is this patriarchal identity, whatever, and then what she is fighting for is to undermine patriarchal identity, essentialism, whatever you want, and to assert that even our most intimate sexual identity is just a result of you know the story of this symbolic performative rituals which also allow then a space of maneuver when you ironically repeat rituals in a displaced way, you gain a distance, you can undermine them a little bit. My problem here is what: it's not that I'm defending patriarchy identity or what, it's okay nice, but what is she describing? I claim she is simply describing the predominant ideology today. I don't think our societies today still require this standard patriarchal identity attitude, you know like each of us has an eternal essential nature or whatever and so on, what she is attacking all the time. I think that precisely what is predominant ideology telling us? It's what I like to call this enlightened Western Buddhism, you know. Society is no longer telling us sacrifice yourself for a higher cause or what, society is telling us something like be truly yourself, be authentic, experiment, create yourself, don't get stuck in one identity. Experiment, restruct, reconstruct yourself all the time. And again all this is spiced with some kind of spontaneous pseudo-Buddhism where the idea is don't get too attached to it, you know. Don't assume fully any identity, always play, dance, then you get all this new age bullshit: remember things are not really serious, it's a cosmic dance or whatever you want and so on and so on. So again let me go now back, this is the reason I began with Gangnam Style. Because I think that this type of cynical working where you do something but you think it redeems you if you do it with irony, with distance. I don't accept this, I claim that again as I already said that precisely ironic distance helps you to swallow it. I mean this is also part of my personal experience where I remember when I was young living in a socialist country, you know there was one wonderful rumor which is of course wrong for theoretical reasons but there is a moment of truth in it. All the time there was a rumor and then I heard from friends that there was the same rumor in Soviet Union and so on, that you know we lived for political jokes, this was the big thing there. And I think if you ask me seriously I mean it that the greatest spiritual loss of the fall of communism was the loss of good political jokes, they simply disappeared, they were absolutely sublime, intelligent, wonderful, even this I will not bore them with those jokes even this what Freud claims Freud claims that is a specificity of Central Europe, this wonderful two-level jokes, you know a joke is told, you think that's it, but then there is another twist. So the rumor was that there is somewhere in the secret police or Central Committee of the party a special secret department where they produce jokes against themselves to keep people satisfied. The idea was if you provide these, you know jokes making people this, you know, it doesn't cost anything, you give people this false relaxation, freedom, and so on and so on. I don't think this works for a very simple theoretical reason, because you know how jokes function. Jokes are by definition they're a very mysterious thing, they never have an author, like you know how do you tell a joke? You tell it always by: "Oh do you know that joke, I heard that joke." Some something in the functioning of a joke prohibits, prevents you to say, "Now an idea came to me, I just invented a joke." It should be some anonymous other, anonymous, you are always just you are always just telling jokes. So again, I think this is wrong, but again, even if it's spontaneous, I think jokes definitely played this role, this role of making it viable, tolerable for you to live in such a society. I am so attached to this because you know in the last years under communism, well, communists were able to read the writing on the wall that their time is over. To enhance their popularity, some communist politicians, it was madness, wonderful, started themselves to tell jokes about themselves. I mean even Reagan, Reagan, Ronald Reagan came close to it but didn't go to the end in this I think. I remember a Croat politician visited, it was late 70s, visited Rome and then come back and when people expected this kind of official report on "ooh friendship between Yugoslav and Italian people, whatever," he started to tell jokes against himself, you know, which were not very funny but pretty nice, like he made fun of himself as stupid and non-educated, you know. The idea was for example it plays on, you know this in Europe at least, ambiguity of the word chapel. Chapel can mean the church, chapel, and also we call it in Italian cappella, you know the small band which plays in cafeterias, in restaurants, no? And the guy said, you know I got lost in Rome, I was told that I should go and see, you know Michelangelo, Vatican, Sistine Chapel, and I look in all cafeterias and nowhere was Sistine Chapel playing. And then it goes on like I was then told to go to see Marriage of Figaro, I look checked all the churches, nowhere was the Marriage of Figaro announced. And then it goes on, you know that German city Baden-Baden, no? This is a standard communist joke that our politician travels on a train through Germany and says, "Oh what city is this?" and the guy tells him "Baden-Baden," and he says "I'm not an idiot, you don't have to tell me two times or whatever" and so on. But again, this is my link with Kung Fu Panda, how you shouldn't be deluded here, this very distance makes it makes it viable. So okay, back to Gangnam Style, this stupid rhythm and at the same time with this stupid written nonetheless something like let's call it religious experience, religious experience kept at a distance but precisely sustained through this distance. If we pursue this line of thought, I would like to propose when people ask me can you think about an authentic religious film of Hollywood, I have an answer, it's not Mel Gibson Passion, which is I think as everyone know the greatest triumph of sadomaso gay orientation in Hollywood, you know you have male naked body tortured for two hours, what more do you want. It's, did you see it, I really think it's again I mean it seriously but precisely critically towards spiritual experience. Did you see Project X? It was half a year ago, a year ago, a modest film about in a small American town a group of three three nerds, non-popular guys, who decide to organize a party because father and mother are going somewhere for the weekend. And father gives to the son specific instructions: don't touch the car, don't enter that room, only five friends, and so on. What happened is that rumors starts to circulate and at the end a couple of thousands of people gather, the house is burned down, the car is ruined, everything and so on and so on. And it obviously at a certain point, I didn't want to bore it today, but I think you can even exactly locate it where you enter the sacred dimension, it becomes a sacred event. So what I'm simply claiming is that with all Hollywood commercialism and so on, there is more of an authentic sacred dimension in this film than in most of the official religion. That's what I'm claiming. We absolutely have no right to dismiss it as just manipulation or whatever you want, consumerist manipulation and so on and so on. There is another wonderful detail about this film if you saw it. At the very end, father returns home, is of course shocked and says to his son, "Okay, I you will have to work for it to pay for it, but I must admit something, I didn't expect you are strong enough to do something like this and so on and so on." And this is crucial, this is how Lacan explains the role of the father. Precisely of the traditional patriarchal father. He says, I quote, I think it's from somewhere in Seminar XI: "Beyond the mother stands out the image of a father who would turn a blind eye to desires." This marks the true function of the father which is fundamentally to unite and not to oppose a desire to the law. You know where I got the same idea although it's a feminine figure, I read in a book on Catherine the Great that one of her elder, the Russian Empress, one of her elder servants told her, "Do you know that your other servants are behind your back stealing expensive wines and expensive food from your reserves?" and he said, "I know this, but this is how I keep them satisfied by," you know. This is Lacan's idea that the function you know how you relate to a traditional paternal authority? It's always a minimally naive authority, father up there prohibits things but then you find the blind spots where you are as it were not on father's father's radar or whatever and you can there transgress things and so on. But for Lacan this precisely is the function of paternal authority to precisely it's never a total authority, it precisely doesn't see everything and allows for these islands of transgression where you can enjoy and so on and so on. In this sense, if some of you are philosophers, Lacan had a good critical point about Hegel, you know the famous Hegelian dialectics of master and servant where Hegel's idea is the master enjoys, the servant works for the master's enjoyment. Lacan's point is not the opposite one. The only one who can who can enjoy a little bit is the servant with this small islands where he is out of the father's view. And of course okay we can go on here because Lacan's point is precisely that when father no longer plays this role of an authority which prohibits but nonetheless you know leaves you open space for small transgressions and so on, then you get something much more horrible: you get the postmodern permissive father who no longer prohibits enjoyment but it's actually imposing it on you, you know, the style of "sex is healthy, did you do it, blah blah blah," which is I think something much more terrifying. It's the way to render you impotent, literally, this is clinically true, psychoanalytic friends are telling me. The problem is not the father who is moderately oppressive, that's wonderful. A moderately oppressive father gives you the space to resist, it is the problem is, and my God I will now do something obscene, I will admit that I had this experience with my father. The problem when I returned from high school home, father told me, "Where are the girls? Are you a man? Did you do it? Do you and then he said my father the most horrible thing: is it that you cannot do it? Do you need my advice or what?" Absolute nightmare or whatever. Okay, this incidentally is also why I'm horrified by today's attitude towards sex and other pleasures, which is more and more not what I'm tempted to call an authentic consumerism, which would be smoke, take drugs, orgy to the end, but this kind of a reasonable hedonism, you know, do it but in a proper way, in a healthy way, don't go too far and so on and so on. Like when I flew two months ago across the Atlantic, I found in Hemispheres, the journal of United Airlines, one of the most depressing texts that I can imagine. It was celebrating sex, but you know in what way? Like sex is healthy, they claimed if you make love often, love, it's good for your heart, for blood circulation, it's good for your muscles. Then even it becomes so obscene at the end where the text says: even kissing, deep French kissing, it's very good, it keeps the muscle strong so when you will be old the saliva will not be dropping for. It's nightmare, it's nightmare this type of stuff. So okay let me go on here. What I am saying here, and here I locate myself into the judeo-Christian tradition now, no. What I am saying is that this is now referring to this sacred experiences of like a Project X, of this collective transgressive orgiastic violence, whatever. The deepest insight already in Jewish tradition is that is that this is what Lacan would have put it, the living God, the God of the real, which is extremely this experience of sacred as this kind of a pagan total violence, sacred orgy. This is what the Jewish tradition tries to keep at a certain distance, no? Which is why Jewish God in a way is a is a dead God. Here I agree, although otherwise I'm very opposed to him, with Emmanuel Levinas who says somewhere something pretty surprising and shocking. He says that the ultimate addressee of the biblical commandment don't kill is God himself. You know, in other words the whole of Judaism should be read as a temptation to not to come too close to God, or not to allow God to come too close for us because then it's murderous violence. Levinas provides because then it's murderous violence. For example, you know in it's from Exodus to the scene which grounds circumcision. You remember how brutally violent Moses is in a tent with his wife and simply God as an anonymous dark stranger enters and wants to kill Moses. And then the wife of Moses quickly cuts the skin of the son to protect her, but this idea that when God comes too close it's it's brutality. Which is why I think, in what sense do I mean this: one of the commonplaces with which I totally disagree is that Auschwitz means the dead the death of God. Like you know the usual logic: how could God have allowed something like this to happen? But I claim here I agree with Habermas who says somewhere that it's much more ambiguous. When you have a truly terrifying event like Auschwitz, and we can give other examples of course from Congo to Gulag or whatever, there is something obscene in claiming "Oh this is just human evil, human causality." The evil is so terrifying that we cannot but call it divine, and divine here means simply the excessive sublime strength of it. So in other words I don't agree with a famous book, I forgot the author, on Holocaust where the title of the book is God died in Auschwitz. No, I claim God, but God of the real, this murderous absolutely destroying God, he came alive in Auschwitz. And the problem is how to keep how to keep this God at a distance. Here Judaism has a wonderful solution. I quoted it a couple of times, I hope you know it, there are in Babylonian Talmud and in some other parts there is a story which is repeated a couple of times which is I think an absolutely wonderful theological story. It will sound as a joke, but I checked with my Jewish friends, this is Talmud sacred text. It's basically referring to one of your compatriots, Marshall McLuhan, it's the Marshall McLuhan moment in Annie Hall. You remember, two guys Woody Allen and another fighting about McLuhan's theory and then what all of us dream happened, McLuhan comes and says to Woody Allen, "You are right, that guy is total idiot, whatever." It's literally the same scene. Two distinguished, this is the story from Talmud, two distinguished rabbis debate a theological point and the one who is losing the debate says, "Wait a minute, let's call Jehovah, God, to come and decide." And Jehovah comes, old man, comes there, and then the other, the winning in the debate, rabbi starts to shout and God basically he tells God, "You did your job, you didn't do a very good job, the universe is not perfect, but you did your job, now your time is out, leave us intelligent people to debate what you did, you don't have anything to say here," and that's the beauty that God's reaction is "Oh my God you are right," and God runs away. I mean it's, I know this story is often used in a not proper way signaling that Jews are by natural democratic by nature democratic that this is the origin of democracy or whatever, no? But it's nonetheless a wonderful story where again the point is how to keep God at a how to keep God at a distance. Let me now so this would be one dimension which I claim will be and is returning more and more violently in our violently in our experience. This obscene domain of the sacred which we don't want to acknowledge it. But I think it's crucial to acknowledge it. If you look from for the experience of sacred today, you find it in Project X more than in religions and so on. But again it doesn't mean that I like Project X, it means that I don't think that there is something automatically ethically noble in the experience of of the sacred as already in antiquity they knew it, you know like let me mention the best-known example Euripides, Bacchae, or what you know that game where you have also an explosion of murderous violence of women. Now I think this theory is not necessarily anti-feminist. I was always very suspicious of the attempts to ground feminism in any kind of feminine divinity, Great Mother or whatever. I think if anything it's the opposite, that usually the price for this elevation of Mother Earth or whatever goddess is usually paid by paid by real women. Like I remember years ago I read the description of some, I think New Guinea I'm not sure where, tribe which was apparently very feminist in the sense that the goddess the supreme God was a goddess and even to be primitive the way their village was structured: the central temple had a kind of a vague vagina form and around were the houses. There was only one problem of course, actual women of their tribe were prohibited to enter that vagina, only men could enter it and so on. So what I want to say I want to give you here another example of today's ideology. It's really a terrifying one, North Korea. We don't trust the media. No, no, don't be afraid, I'm not saying it's really a great democratic regime or what, no. I'm saying it's that there was a book recently published, a little bit naive is the book, but it's interesting because it does nonetheless it's a correct report I think on of the state of things, something that you know the usual thing we read about North Korea is that that the regime can survive because of this old Confucian ethics, paternal authority, obedience and so on and so on. No, this book I think conclusively demonstrates that this is totally false. The idea is this guy did something interesting. He really how he succeeded years ago he was allowed to stay there, now of course he cannot enter the North Korea anymore, he looked at not international North Korean propaganda, but at what or rather how Korean propaganda works at a local level for their own people. What's the message there? And he discovered some very weird things. That first the central metaphor for the party and the leader is mother not father. He claims that it's simple mistranslation where it's translated like Kim Il Sung or whatever the father of the nation and so on. No, the term used in Korean so the book claims it's it's the head of the family but usually in everyday language it means mother. And then this book has some wonderful obscene details about how this works. For example it's really a wonderful proof. This book takes the latest edition of North Korean dictionary, Dictionary of North Korean Language, and looks at two entries: mother, father. The entry of for mother is over one page. It begins with mother first meaning: the biological mother who gives birth to a child. Then mother as the family who takes care of the children, object of love, blah blah, then of course the third meaning: mother in the sense of a social force which takes care of all the people like the example here is Korean Workers' Party is the mother like mother to Korean people and all that. It's over one page. Then you look at the entry father. It's one sentence: "Father is the partner of the mother." And then he goes on and looks at official songs of party songs and claims that the most popular official party song, it's extremely obscene if you read it, is a song celebrating the party as mother and all the time openly mentioning mother's breasts like: "Oh Communist oh Korean Workers' Party our mother, we suck all that we need, food, love, from your breasts, we will never abandon your breasts, we will always cling to your breasts." It's pure obscenity and so on. Then this goes even further. Did you notice if you saw some of these official photos of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il? How the official photos don't try to, you know that Stalinist were specialists in how do you call it retouch changing the photo to make leader look younger? That first they all have a stomach and clear feminine features. Kim Jong Kim Il Sung the father and the crazy son. Now it's interesting what is now happening. This is a very strange move that all of a sudden the leader is publicly married, the third one now, you know they show because Kim Jong Il they even claim it's a wonderful reading: how how you remember maybe you saw it sometimes in newspaper the photo of Kim Jong Il, the second leader, how his hair is like waving and he has some kind of a plastic jacket, which and he proves with other photos that he consciously imitates the image of ordinary Korean mother who has this cheap jacket has to stand in line, take care of the family and so on and so on. Don't misunderstand me here. I'm not playing any type of defense of patriarchal authority in the sense of a-ah you overthrow patriarchy you get even worse, you know, like as if give power to feminist and you end up in North Korea. No, men are still absolutely in power there. My point is precisely that we must radically separate feminist issues, feminine emancipation from all this bullshit of society as a mother and so on and so on. This is why I did something that some people took for a little bit crazy. I claim that maybe the time is to more emphasize what already Freud did at some point: the distinction woman-mother. That psychoanalysis doesn't absolutely doesn't claim what it's usually attributed to it, you know that mother is a that woman doesn't have penis so she gets a child who functions as a symbolic substitute, all that bullshit. No, that precisely authentic feminine subjectivity means Medea, to cut a long story short, no? I was always fascinated by Medea. I think far from being the horrible destructive woman, whatever, Medea is my heroine. I think maybe the time has come to pass from from Antigone to Medea. I'm a little bit tired of that celebration of Antigone, whatever, no. Okay, but let me go on. So again, you know we what I'm trying to tell you is this. Of course a certain traditional patriarchal ideology is disintegrated. But what we are getting is not authentic emancipation, but we are getting one totalitarian version would have been North Korea, society as mother embodied. The other version would have been this new say sense of sacredness and so on and so on. And I claim that here the predominant version today, this is my prediction that the future lies with Buddhism, but I'm critical about it. It's not so much authentic Buddhism as a kind of a popular Western Buddhism. Now I will just slowly recapitulate what I already said two days ago, but I will move further: namely, I I think that there are two reasons at least why Buddhism fits, by Buddhism I will not go into this is it authentic or not, of course authentic Buddhism is something great, incredibly radical and so on. What I mean sorry yeah have time what I mean is something else. What I mean is that we should ask this simple question: we are entering a new era global capitalism and so on, and it's a very traditional Marxist question: what type of spirituality, self-experience, ideological self-understanding fits perfectly today's capitalism? I think that Buddhism can do the job much better than Christianity. First, because let's put it very simply, on the one hand what defines today's universe is the crazy global capitalist dynamics. And as many people pointed out, it is much, you know I was always fascinated when you read this propaganda leaflets, whatever, which try to convince you to take a course in transcendental meditation whatever. How the message is always a double message. The first message is: we live in a crazy world, we crave for material goods and so on, this is a false world, we are losing our true self, so don't you need time to simply stepped out of this crazy dance of hyperactivity to find simple inner truth, inner peace and so on and so on. But always, always then you find a second paragraph which is much more cynical and which tells you something like: in this way with a proper inner peace and distance you will function even better on the market, you know. Always. You know who began this? It's not even us in the West, I read somewhere that after the end of the World War II, Japanese defeat, Suzuki established the same Suzuki the first business the first Zen course for businessmen in Tokyo in '47. This idea that if you are minimally enlightened like, to be vulgar, aware that the reality we confront is not the substantial real reality, that the ultimate truth is the void, you arrive at this through this meditative distance and so on and so on. That precisely by not the idea is the following one: if you take crazy this game of imagine being a stockbroker whatever, speculating with futures and hedge funds, whatever. I mean if you take this game seriously you get crazy, it's so dynamic, you know like a rumor starts can ruin the whole industry whatever. And the idea is that the only way to survive it if you learn some kind of inner distance, inner peace and so on, telling yourself but I'm not really there. I quite, as I put it in one of my books, I think that we all know Max Weber's classical book, no, the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I think that if Weber were to be alive today, he would have written a book something like Taoist Ethics and the Spirit of Global Capitalism. It fits much better. Do you know that I quoted at the very end, I'm not sure, I think it's of my ticklish subject, but I'm not sure. A wonderful documentary where you have some sociologists like Saskia Sassen and some Tibetan Buddhists and they claim that the only way to account ontologically for the crazy experience of reality which is proper to today's capitalism, this total fragility, like remember the, you know you think you live in a stable world, all of a sudden you know this fragility, all of a sudden reality as we know it can dissolve and so on, is to accept some kind of Buddhist ontology of: there is no substantial reality, just phenomena dancing and so on and so on. So this is I think the first reason why why Buddhism can function much better than Western Christian traditions in enabling us to survive at everyday level, survive through a distance, the this crazy dynamic logic of global capitalism. The second thing I think is precisely the great revolution that we are approaching, the biogenetic revolution. I already also mentioned this two days ago. What fascinates me is that I really think that maybe even the very definition of being human will change. Because what does it mean now for us to be human? Minimally, it means I'm a thinking being, among other things, no. It means I'm in here, reality is out there, I can think whatever I want and so on. And as we all know the latest result of brain sciences, but also practices and so on, is that slowly, slowly, we are not yet there, but this fundamental divide between me, my inside and outside is breaking down in both directions. You know how from time to time you get all these stories about how they can wire your brain so that you can move objects directly. You for example you have wheelchairs for crippled people where you don't even need that Stephen Hawking's finger, you know, you just think strongly forward, because the chair moves because again it's very simple. They already can decode your very elementary orders to your muscles and they simply read them and directly transmit them to the machine. The problem is rather for me that it goes also the other way round, from outside inside. That is to say I was quite shocked and I spoke with some people connected with it and they told me it's not a joke, namely that it's quite serious. You can check it on, sorry on on on on the net, namely what: did you hear about did you hear about DARPA project? DARPA means Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's in United States a big huge military agency supporting neuroscientific research, and among other things, it's not a joke, they are now doing something they call narrative analysis. And I read their program, it's it's pretty, pretty terrifying. They are not yet there, but the very project is strange. The idea is this one: first it reads like some kind of structural analysis, they claim how to prevent terrorist attacks? We have to see how the mind of terrorist works. So at the first level it's simply let's analyze all the discursive rhetorical strategies, how do you make how does ideology create a terrorist, what shortcuts short circuits rather in their reasoning does it and so on. Then comes the real thing. They try to identify parts of the brain which are active in these processes when you assume a fanatical belief and so on. And the idea, they say it openly, is that we will be able to influence someone to change his or her beliefs not by arguing with him, either even brainwashing him, but through direct biogenetic intervention. I mean okay, again, it's still not yet developed but things are developing here fast. So what I'm saying is that how how to accept this, that namely that this fundamental divide between subject-object, my inner life outer life, you know that all even all cognitivists admit that at least from our experience there is a gap here. On the one hand you look at the brain, stupid piece of meat and so on. How you make a jump from there to your inner experience? They're trying to do it. At some elementary level they already can do it. So again the problem is how do we react to this? The problem is if we accept this, that science and technology will succeed relatively soon in this radical self-objectivization, that our thinking processes, emotional reactions and so on will become something which we will be able to identify as neuronal processes in your brain and then to influence it directly like that. There are, as I already said two days ago, there are the way I see three-four main reactions to this. One is that we in our immediate self-experience are condemned eternally to live in this illusion that we are free agents and so on, you know that that we are wired biologically evolutionary to experience ourselves as free responsible agents. So in other words there is an irreducible cognitive gap between scientific truth, which tells us that there is no free will and so on. By the way I am not saying this is true, I don't agree with this. And it's very interesting, do you know the guy, you should read him, interesting, called Benjamin Libet. It's a neuroscientist from Berkeley I think who he already some years or years ago proposed and did the experiment which is usually referred to as the ultimate experiment demonstrating that there is no free will. But interestingly enough he himself disagrees with this reading. He claims no, no, the experiment is the famous one, you know, to simplify to the utmost: you are asked to do some elementary gesture, like pick up this pen and move it here or there, whatever, just to do it immediately. You decide, you do it. He then of course wires puts sensors on you blah blah, and what he did prove is that a split of a second before you decide, your neurons already know it. In other words this allegedly proves that when you do something freely in the sense of you just on the spot decide it, you don't really decide, you just become aware of a process which objectively is already going on before. And they are even further developing this today. For example they have proven, absolutely conclusively I like this, that when you go to a store to buy a car and are nervous sweating what to buy and so on, they can tell you minutes before even that you've already decided, to minutes before and so on. So okay, what's so interesting is that Benjamin Libet rejects this reading. He claims that yes, it's a very Hegelian argument, I like it. His answer is that yes, this happens with our positive decisions, but that in that split of a second when my neurons decide and I don't yet know it, I can block it. That our freedom is originally a freedom to say no. That our freedom is not to freely decide for something, but just for no reason at all to sabotage. Okay, this is a complicated debate. What I wanted to say is that if we accept it, which I don't, this idea that we are just wired mechanisms, our free will is an illusion, the first attitude, this is the majority standard opinion, is to accept the gap. To say okay, we are forever condemned to live in illusion because we are wired to it, we experience ourselves as free. Okay, then we can give a more philosophical twist to this, I will not go into it, the Habermasian answer they have a great debate in Germany. Habermas tries to play more of a let's call it transcendental game here. He claims that even if the result of our scientific research is we are not free, we are neuronal mechanisms. How did we reach this result? Through scientific analysis, scientific reasoning, arguing, which precisely presupposes that we are free thinking beings. So the idea is that even when you prove that you are not free, the space for this very proof is sustained by the space of reasoning. And that you cannot close the circle here, that's another point. Okay. Then we have another tendency for example Patricia and Paul Churchland, who claim, but it's utopia I don't think it works, who claim that no there is nothing really eternal biological in our spontaneous self-perception as free agents. They claim no, it is possible to change our in the same way as for example, I don't know, when something strikes today we no longer experience it as divine intervention and so on. That we can imagine a society where people fully integrate, assume scientific results: we are not free beings and so on. And it would be they claim they try to pass to give it a positive twist, that it would be a much more tolerant society, less moralistic, less severe punishment and so on, simply to take this into account. But then my hero here, okay not hero but the most interesting guy I claim is the German guy Thomas Metzinger in his wonderful big fat book Being No One, where he tries to, first he accepts this gap. He says that if you look at cognitivist theories which totally naturalize our mind, he says that we can know it rationally, but we cannot really believe in it, we cannot really accept it. There is a gap here. But he provides an exception, again Buddhism. He claims that you see the parallel, that if you go to the end in Buddhist enlightenment and if you reach enlightenment, Nirvana, where you get the point that you have no free that you are not a free agent, you are not a substantial self and so on all that, there it's the only point where you do reach a subjective position which is compatible with the latest scientific results. It's a very beautiful reading. But as always I like to bring bad news, as always I claim there are problems here. So let me conclude just a little bit with where do I see problems here. First, Buddhism is concerned with solving the problem of suffering, so the first axiom is always: we don't want to suffer. Where here already I have problems. I think if there is a point of psychoanalysis, it's that we want to suffer, and it's irreducible. And I think that I my first association here is, you know a typical since we are here cinema lovers film noir scene, you know the typical scene is like a kind of I don't know who Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart guy falls for a evil femme fatale and at the end he loses everything, he's totally ruined and then somebody asks him, "Now you know it, it was ruin. So sad that you didn't know this before to avoid it." And his answer, the hero's answer is always is always, "No, it was worth. Even if I were to know that it will end in ruin, it was it was worth doing it." This idea of it's a catastrophe but I'm ready to do it again. So what I want to say is that my first point is that Buddhism is here way too optimistic in a way in this belief you know that all living beings want to get rid of suffering and so on. I doubt it. Second point, I think one of the mystifications of our Western perception of Buddhism is that we identify too much with meditation. In a very good book on reality of Buddhism I read it's very interesting that in countries like Thailand blah blah Burma Myanmar now where Buddhism is really a way of life, only a tiny minority meditates. It's not so much meditation is more an ideal, it's like to remind you that it is possible to reach but for a large majority of people being a Buddhist simply means don't cause too much suffering and so on all that stuff all that stuff. Okay, but let's go on now where I see a problem with where I see a problem with Buddhism. Again it's what I already mentioned, Buddhism begins with suffering, so then you slowly train yourself ethically and so on, at the end you step out of this wheel of desire, you are no longer controlled by karma, your acts no longer leave traces, you don't hurt other people and so on and so on. Here I have a couple of problems and okay I don't have time to go now in detail in them but I had big debates with Buddhists who at least maybe they pretend that this I don't know conceded to me that there is a problem here, namely did you notice this radical ambiguity in Buddhism, how when they talk about reaching enlightenment? They oscillate between two extremes. On the one hand the idea is enlightenment is simply a radical shift in your self-experience. Enlightenment doesn't mean anything changes in the world. It means just you radically shift your attitude, you no longer believe that you are a substantial agent, free will and so on, you know just this, you accept the void. On the other hand, you have a much more radical tendency that living as such is suffering and that basically that's the idea of Bodhisattva, the Buddhist saint who refuses to enter Nirvana, but although he entered Nirvana, he comes back to our illusory reality, he postpones his own salvation till all living sentient beings will be saved and so on and so on. I think if you ask me, the origin of all the problems with Buddhism is Bodhisattva, this very noble apparently idea of I could be there, could have been there in Nirvana but I have such loving sympathy for the suffering of all living beings that I came back so that only we all together should join it. The problem here is I think here already the battle is lost because you know authentic Buddhism for me means that in Nirvana you don't go somewhere else, you stay fully here. And you can even be active as such. For an authentic radical Buddhist you can when you are in Nirvana you should forget this is already I think a falsification, this idea that in Nirvana you are somewhere there in a trance, no you are here with all the people, just with a different attitude, but you can be fully active here. Now the problem of course is if you accept this position, what does it mean ethically? Again I claim there is no guarantee that horrible thing cannot happen. Like this was a big shock of me, I read two-three books on if there is a nightmare of a human person this is Pol Pot, you remember the leader of Khmer Rouge in Kampuchea, Cambodia. Well all descriptions agree that there was even a myth within the Khmer Rouge that he reached the highest enlightenment. He was an incredibly gentle soft person, always inner peace and so on and so on. So what I'm trying to say here again what I'm trying to say is that there is nothing which prevents you from reaching inner enlightenment and go on doing horrible things. Now you will say compassion, but is not the basic Buddhist attitude that of compassion? Compassion with all suffering beings and so on and so on. But let me assure you this problem was solved long ago with the wonderful notion of compassionate war, you know like you can also do you can do all the killing but with compassion and so on and so on. Then you have another problem here which I think makes it even more problematic: many Buddhists admit that you can reach something like Nirvana also through biogenetic means, with simple chemical intervention. You don't need to go through all the meditation blah blah blah. So the problem is doesn't this ruin then the undermine the ethical status of meditation? That is to say, is there a distinction between, let's say, real enlightenment where you meditated worked hardly to reach it and simply taking a pill and finding yourself in a blessed state? Owen Flanagan, cognitivist who is also close to Buddhism, proposed what he calls here a normative exclusion clause. I quote him: "Cases where happiness (happiness in the sense of Buddhist enlightenment) is gained by magic pills or is due to false belief do not count because the allegedly happy person must be involved in cultivating her own virtue and happiness. Happy states born of delusion are undeserved." My point is: why? Why, if as he admits it, it's exactly the same inner state? Okay then the next sorry so again because of all this my the only ah yes here is the quote from Suzuki if you don't believe me: "It is really not he the killer but the sword itself that does the killing. He the killer had no desire to to do harm to anybody but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice which is the function of mercy." Wonderful description of killing and so on and so on. So you know what I'm trying to say here now really to conclude, I was too long and I improvised because this is part of the work in progress. Two things. First don't misunderstand me: I am not dismissing Buddhism in any way, it's an absolutely authentic experience. I just claim it doesn't have a necessary immanent let's call it moral or whatever content. Let's not cheat here. It's as Suzuki said, a technique of achieving inner peace, you can do all the torturing you want. I don't and it's quite interesting to read, for example I have a book on Tibetan ethics, sorry Tibetan legal system, where it describes in what wonderful way, wonderful in a terrifying sense, in what wonderful way although they did not do the killing, they nonetheless did it. For example in traditional Tibetan justice of course you don't do the killing life is sacred, but they whipped a criminal and chained him in winter to a tree outside so he froze and so on and so on. You can do it. So what I want to say is that my lesson would be just double. First let's accept the gap: inner Buddhist peace meditation is a great thing but it's not the answer. I think we should again maintain a minimal gap between inner authenticity and let's call it ethics of acting together with other people and so on and so on. My second conclusion here would have been that I am that to locate what really, I'm sorry I'm talking in mega generalities now, what really divides East from West if I may use these terms probably in a wrong way but nonetheless. Is that what nonetheless I find attractive in Western tradition, it's terribly politically incorrect what I'm saying now, is that in contrast to this idea don't get involved remain maintain an inner distance, isn't the entire Western ethics starting with Plato precisely ethic an ethics of falling into opening yourself to an encounter like falling in love? Our Western love is not this peaceful Buddha's smile, it's out there something and you fall fully into it. You know this idea of fall, GK Chesterton, my favorite Catholic theologian although I'm totally an atheist of course, puts this nicely when he says that in all other religions you have a fall like men fall from God, only in Christianity God himself falls into the world, incarnation and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that what I what I am tempted to do here, but even here I'm not sure if maybe some Buddhisms can do it, it's a very tricky point. It's you know at least I'm totally opposed to Star Wars Buddhism, I will stop immediately, to Star Wars Buddhism, you know which is you know how how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader by getting too identified, too much love. No, I mean my friend Kōjin Karatani, a Japanese leftist, told me that there is nonetheless a Buddhist tradition which says no, Nirvana does not mean maintain inner distance, Nirvana means fall fully into the world. In the sense of fall without reserve. You lose your ego not by some inner meditation, but precisely you lose your ego by falling true falling radically into the world, accepting fully the world. And even okay I should maybe have stopped here but my basic message again would have been that that maybe here there is an irreducible ethical line of division of how I am tempted to claim that what we need precisely today when a kind of a false Buddhism is becoming generally accepted ontology is precisely to to to advocate the fall. Not wise distance, like engage yourself fully, step out of yourself, fall into it. I think this is for me the ethics that we need today. I am very sorry if I was too long and I improvised because this is part of the work in progress, but I am very grateful for your incredible patience. Thank you very much. You said the left needs new master signifiers. So just going back to what you were talking about with poetry and how poetry sort of animates totalitarianism, is that really what the left needs? So I'm maybe thinking about like what would an example be, like Phil Ochs, you know, during the 60s and 70s he thought we needed someone who was both Che Guevara and Elvis Presley. Is this something that you're kind of thinking that, you know, how poetry kind of leads to animating master signifiers? No, I see your point. Yeah, yeah. No, first let me be clear: not every poetry. I mean I'm definitely not saying that, I don't know, Paul Celan leads to totalitarianism or what. All I'm saying is this that what I mean by master signifier is again, I don't like this ecstatic left where, you know, we are all out there together in ecstatic moments of freedom. What I'm obsessed with and this I mean with master signifier is, but what happens the day after? Are we strong enough to impose a new order? Like what will the new order be? I mean for me the true value of a revolution is not those ecstatic moments where there is one million people on the square. That's easy to do. What interests me is what happens the day after. Because you know at some point things, as we put it, return to normal functioning and how will the changes be felt there? And this is all I mean with a master signifier. Master signifier is here simply the name for a new for a new order if you want it like this, you know like and here again I I see a big problem. It's as if even like it's the problem for me it's of course people always tell me, but you ask too much, we cannot now give a detailed blueprint of what new society we want. But I'm not talking about this, I'm even I'm talking much more fundamentally about the basic blueprint of what are we striving for. And I find already here a lack of elementary like what do we want? Do we still want capitalism but just, you know, with a more human face, kind of Keynesian welfare state capitalism? Do we want, I don't know, a stronger state, do we want just local communities to it's it's pretty frustrating this. And this is not just an abstract problem. For example, it was a clear problem in Greece when SYRIZA the radical left party almost won the election. I was I was incredibly I was asking them I met the guy Tsipras, the leader, "Okay, if you win, what will you do?" Apart from this negative gestures like reject austerity measures and so on. What will you do? Will you like nationalize, not nationalize and it's it's pretty frustrating at this level. And I don't think because the again the answer I get is "I want too much, we cannot talk about this now." Okay, but I think we should, because exactly in Greece and in some other countries, you know, we cannot say, "Oh there is time, we will see when we come there." No, we have to think now about possible alternatives and so on. And I'm here even a pretty tough guy: like I think that the thing that we should abandon, this is very evil what I will say now, is this the true secret dream of the 20th century left: neither Stalinist communism nor social democracy but this idea of non-representative direct democracy in local communities where you know transparent non-representative. This works at a local level, but in order for this to works to work at a local level, you have to have a very efficient global organization. How will you do that and so on and so on. Here I find such a lack of even imagination like take the big hit Negri-Hardt at the end when they approach this problem of both first two big books, that is to say Empire and Multitude, all of a sudden Saint Francis is quoted and you get some kind of a mystical vision, you know. The way I see it is that the question I don't like this all this Deleuzian micro-local metaphorics where the enemy is the big molar whatever organization and this local networks and so on. No, I think we will have to reinvent precisely large global organizations how to do that and so on and so on. I'm not a total pessimist here. I think that one reason to act is you know when people tell us, but you cannot really change it. My answer is clear, my answer is, but things are already changing. Are we aware how quickly we are leaving behind this even standard bourgeois progressive capitalism? If we allow things to go on the way they are going on now, I think in about years, maximum we will live in some kind of new authoritarian world which we will not even recognize and so on. Even going towards the so the new idea of the human, the old idea of human of human subjectivity is disintegrating going towards. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's my point here, yes that my point is not to paint some dark picture we will be neuronal automata and so on, but it's an open field of a camp we have to confront the problem. What I don't agree is for example the Habermasian solution which is basically a very conservative solution. No wonder that Habermas co-wrote a book not really co-wrote they just published together texts with whom, my God, with Ratzinger, today's Pope. And the his Habermas's solution is a negative gesture. It's saying since it's dangerous to play with our brain, since it uh limits our freedom, we should set up a limit and we should not do it. And here it may interest you, like I had a big debate with some bishops even in in Munich or Vienna I forgot years ago and I asked them: you remember now I'm referring to this standard Catholic argument: we shouldn't mess with our brain I mean do this all this biogenetic psycho effects because in this way we lose our responsibility and freedom, man is not just a machine, man has an eternal soul. But I also always have here an absolutely naive counter-question: if you not you you but if you are Catholic whatever Christian you believe that you have an eternal soul, isn't it that then the logical answer would have been: "I don't care, do whatever you want with my brain, you cannot touch my eternal soul"? If they believe that we have an eternal soul why then are they so afraid of me if I'm an evil scientist messing with your brain? Do you know incidentally that there is one the only good Christian answer that I got here? It's a wonderful one, it's the radio apparatus answer. They claim it's a nice way out: that think about our brain as a radio receiver. We do have an eternal soul but our brain is tuned like tuned to the good radio station to receive message from the soul. If we play through biogenetics with our brain, we will mess it up, it will no longer be able to. I don't think it works, but you see my point, I think we have to accept the challenge here. I mean I'm just otherwise it will be horrible, we will have new and new revolts like we have them now, you know here in Greece, Europe whatever, but then the result will be nothing just more and more frustration. So you've already killed me off about four or five times this weekend, this the reason why... Yeah I know what you are longing for, when you are already dead down you know in typical Hollywood fight when the bad guy wins when the guy is already down you kick him the last time into the head you know. So I have to do that we have another question over here. Hi, um, tying last night's screening into today's talk. Uh, I was just wondering if you were aware of uh you talk about David Lynch a lot I was wondering if you were aware of his whole engagement with transcendental meditation. Unfortunately I am, yes, the same Howard Stern also practices it in... I didn't know but Howard Stern, but I know about I know what the man his idea is that if you I think if you get a certain it's almost like what Stalinists called the jump from quantity to quality, that if you get a great a large number
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of people meditating together, it must be at least then it will unleash some energy which and so on and so on you know. I know but eh like what surprised me at a different level is how often David Lynch David Lynch even he really must be some kind of unconscious genius who really doesn't know how he does it. For example what is for
of people meditating together, it must be at least then it will unleash some energy which and so on and so on you know. I know but eh like what surprised me at a different level is how often David Lynch David Lynch even he really must be some kind of unconscious genius who really doesn't know how he does it. For example what is for
Slavoj Žižek
me the absolutely supreme most painful scene from Wild at Heart? You remember that traumatic scene where Willem Dafoe who plays Bobby Peru the bad guy harasses Laura Dern. You know, not physically but just intrusive, like close to her and with that disgusting mouth whispering to her, "Say fuck me, say fuck me, say fuck me." You remember what then happens? Finally terrorized she says, "Fuck me," and you know it's such a vulgar thing, you know what he does then? He steps back and says, "Oh thanks for the offer but not today, I'm not in a mood, maybe another day thanks." The point is that precisely by treating it as precisely by not raping her paradoxically he humiliates her even more. And okay in a book 'Lynch on Lynch' he is asked how did you come to this scene and he gives a totally stupid like "Oh it seemed a good line to say, I don't know what it means." He really doesn't know what he is doing, I mean. So but this is often the case with artists. I'm not saying let me be very careful here: I am not saying we had a good Lynch doing movies and a bad Lynch involved in all their Buddhist stuff and so on. Maybe somehow, and we often have with great artists this paradox, that somehow in order to do a good product you need the most stupid or naive ideology. Things are very paradoxical here, often and this is what always interests me how illusions are sometimes necessary, even stupid illusions, no? But yes I I am aware of that, yes. But Lynch is here not my greatest although you know I know even much darker things about Lynch. I don't know if it's true but a friend from California told me that when he was a couple of years ago David Lynch asked about unemployed people, no? He said I would cut off all the unemployed, these are just lazy people who don't know like it's a I even prefer not to talk about his direct politics. So uh no democracy here I have the the final say. Uh, we have one last question uh on the side here. Please. Yeah, uh I was fascinated about what you were saying when you were connecting subjectivity to void in a certain sense. Which was it the classical Hegelian I'm not original? No, no I know. Uh, this is Hegelian stuff. Precisely. But what I wanted to ask you is how you engage with the critique that would come out of Wittgenstein about a kind of Cartesian position. And I wonder to ask you that precisely because some of these issues about biogenetics and the seeming disintegration of the category of the human, uh, some people could say that that sort of validates the critique of the Cartesian void if you like. I I just wanted to ask you how you engage with that position. Ah, it's a very nice question, I'm so set we don't have time. You know what okay I am bluffing but not totally bluffing. I know about Wittgenstein. My answer would have been this one: I'm always looking for potential allies where that. Uh, I don't think it's enough to distinguish two Wittgensteins. The early
me the absolutely supreme most painful scene from Wild at Heart? You remember that traumatic scene where Willem Dafoe who plays Bobby Peru the bad guy harasses Laura Dern. You know, not physically but just intrusive, like close to her and with that disgusting mouth whispering to her, "Say fuck me, say fuck me, say fuck me." You remember what then happens? Finally terrorized she says, "Fuck me," and you know it's such a vulgar thing, you know what he does then? He steps back and says, "Oh thanks for the offer but not today, I'm not in a mood, maybe another day thanks." The point is that precisely by treating it as precisely by not raping her paradoxically he humiliates her even more. And okay in a book 'Lynch on Lynch' he is asked how did you come to this scene and he gives a totally stupid like "Oh it seemed a good line to say, I don't know what it means." He really doesn't know what he is doing, I mean. So but this is often the case with artists. I'm not saying let me be very careful here: I am not saying we had a good Lynch doing movies and a bad Lynch involved in all their Buddhist stuff and so on. Maybe somehow, and we often have with great artists this paradox, that somehow in order to do a good product you need the most stupid or naive ideology. Things are very paradoxical here, often and this is what always interests me how illusions are sometimes necessary, even stupid illusions, no? But yes I I am aware of that, yes. But Lynch is here not my greatest although you know I know even much darker things about Lynch. I don't know if it's true but a friend from California told me that when he was a couple of years ago David Lynch asked about unemployed people, no? He said I would cut off all the unemployed, these are just lazy people who don't know like it's a I even prefer not to talk about his direct politics. So uh no democracy here I have the the final say. Uh, we have one last question uh on the side here. Please. Yeah, uh I was fascinated about what you were saying when you were connecting subjectivity to void in a certain sense. Which was it the classical Hegelian I'm not original? No, no I know. Uh, this is Hegelian stuff. Precisely. But what I wanted to ask you is how you engage with the critique that would come out of Wittgenstein about a kind of Cartesian position. And I wonder to ask you that precisely because some of these issues about biogenetics and the seeming disintegration of the category of the human, uh, some people could say that that sort of validates the critique of the Cartesian void if you like. I I just wanted to ask you how you engage with that position. Ah, it's a very nice question, I'm so set we don't have time. You know what okay I am bluffing but not totally bluffing. I know about Wittgenstein. My answer would have been this one: I'm always looking for potential allies where that. Uh, I don't think it's enough to distinguish two Wittgensteins. The early
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one, Tractatus, clear
one, Tractatus, clear
Slavoj Žižek
correspondence and this plurality of games, language games, the so-called Wittgenstein founder of so-called wrong terms or. I claim that when he approached the topic of certainty and so on, there is another dimension there. He became aware that as it were the this plurality of language games and so on doesn't cover the entire field. What he evokes with the topic of certainty is something much more radical and there is a philosopher who claims who came close to this, you know he I know he is personally half crazy blah blah blah but he was hailed when I was young as a genius, Saul Kripke. You know his book his claim to fame is naming and necessity. It's an extraordinary book. But then he did Wittgenstein on Rules where he goes precisely into this problem which is no longer just late Wittgenstein what I claim. Saw that again the philosophical investigations that standard Wittgenstein of family of different language games is not enough. I claim a void appears there. As to Cartesian problem, I'm always faithful Cartesian because I claim that we should distinguish first every feminist should like Descartes. You know that Descartes is the father of feminism, literally. The first modern philosopher who fully developed feminism was a pupil, I forgot his name, of Descartes, who claimed precisely Cogito means Cogito doesn't have sex and so on and so on. But you know what my answer would have been here, even a Buddhist answer if you want, pro-Buddhist answer, that the mistake is at the very beginning of Descartes when he makes this faithful step from Cogito ergo sum which is a purely performative eventual entity. Cogito
correspondence and this plurality of games, language games, the so-called Wittgenstein founder of so-called wrong terms or. I claim that when he approached the topic of certainty and so on, there is another dimension there. He became aware that as it were the this plurality of language games and so on doesn't cover the entire field. What he evokes with the topic of certainty is something much more radical and there is a philosopher who claims who came close to this, you know he I know he is personally half crazy blah blah blah but he was hailed when I was young as a genius, Saul Kripke. You know his book his claim to fame is naming and necessity. It's an extraordinary book. But then he did Wittgenstein on Rules where he goes precisely into this problem which is no longer just late Wittgenstein what I claim. Saw that again the philosophical investigations that standard Wittgenstein of family of different language games is not enough. I claim a void appears there. As to Cartesian problem, I'm always faithful Cartesian because I claim that we should distinguish first every feminist should like Descartes. You know that Descartes is the father of feminism, literally. The first modern philosopher who fully developed feminism was a pupil, I forgot his name, of Descartes, who claimed precisely Cogito means Cogito doesn't have sex and so on and so on. But you know what my answer would have been here, even a Buddhist answer if you want, pro-Buddhist answer, that the mistake is at the very beginning of Descartes when he makes this faithful step from Cogito ergo sum which is a purely performative eventual entity. Cogito
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is just a process of Cogito, totally non-substantial. The step from here to res cogitans to a thing which thinks thing which thinks is illegitimate. So that Descartes I'm ready to
is just a process of Cogito, totally non-substantial. The step from here to res cogitans to a thing which thinks thing which thinks is illegitimate. So that Descartes I'm ready to
Slavoj Žižek
criticize, but I think Descartes I'll put it in this way: I claim that anti-humanism begins with Descartes in the theoretical sense. Renaissance is humanism, is this celebrating the fullness of personality and so on. But the lesson of all radical modern philosophers, Descartes, Kant, Hegel is no, our the wealth of our personality is just a mask, there is a void there. And this void, okay it's a big problem how to combine this void with the Buddhist void, but at least here they are on the same side. So again I think that in contrary to what sometimes Michel Foucault seems to claim and so on, I think that this transcendental tradition of modern philosophy is absolutely anti-humanist. It's not human being, the wealth of human being is the mask of a void. And here again even cognitivists I think would have accepted this in the sense that I as a Cartesian I'm ready to sacrifice all content, my authentic emotions, whatever whatever, all this can be. What I don't give away is the void itself. And it would be interesting to I don't have time now, sorry I talked too much to you know all I'm far from thinking that all cognitivists are stupid, if I may put it in this way. There are many who are stupid, plainly stupid, like I'm sorry to tell you Steven Pinker is plainly stupid I think. He simplifies it so much, says stupidities. But already with Daniel Dennett often he especially you know Dennett is stupid when he wants to do a big general image, like in Consciousness Explained when he explains the origin of religion. But when Dennett uses specific
criticize, but I think Descartes I'll put it in this way: I claim that anti-humanism begins with Descartes in the theoretical sense. Renaissance is humanism, is this celebrating the fullness of personality and so on. But the lesson of all radical modern philosophers, Descartes, Kant, Hegel is no, our the wealth of our personality is just a mask, there is a void there. And this void, okay it's a big problem how to combine this void with the Buddhist void, but at least here they are on the same side. So again I think that in contrary to what sometimes Michel Foucault seems to claim and so on, I think that this transcendental tradition of modern philosophy is absolutely anti-humanist. It's not human being, the wealth of human being is the mask of a void. And here again even cognitivists I think would have accepted this in the sense that I as a Cartesian I'm ready to sacrifice all content, my authentic emotions, whatever whatever, all this can be. What I don't give away is the void itself. And it would be interesting to I don't have time now, sorry I talked too much to you know all I'm far from thinking that all cognitivists are stupid, if I may put it in this way. There are many who are stupid, plainly stupid, like I'm sorry to tell you Steven Pinker is plainly stupid I think. He simplifies it so much, says stupidities. But already with Daniel Dennett often he especially you know Dennett is stupid when he wants to do a big general image, like in Consciousness Explained when he explains the origin of religion. But when Dennett uses specific
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examples
examples
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makes points and so on, he can be very intelligent. So what I'm claiming is that intelligent cognitivists do things for example I read dozens of books first report on that is in my 'Parallax View' of how all intelligent cognitivists try to locate the moment of self-consciousness as a moment of sub-kind of a circular short circuit claiming that you
makes points and so on, he can be very intelligent. So what I'm claiming is that intelligent cognitivists do things for example I read dozens of books first report on that is in my 'Parallax View' of how all intelligent cognitivists try to locate the moment of self-consciousness as a moment of sub-kind of a circular short circuit claiming that you
Slavoj Žižek
have consciousness where you no longer have a simple line of causes and effects, but when a cause is as it were retroactively posited by its own effect. There must be some kind of a causal circularity. And they describe it with very nice metaphorics and so on. So again my answer to you would have been that neither Wittgenstein nor cognitivists, especially cognitivists, are not Wittgenstein also but I say especially cognitivists because often the critics of cognitivism treat them as some idiots who thought, you know, we have a clear neuronal mechanism, we can explain everything. No, no you can find true pearls there on theory. I'm far from playing this typically continental European game of dismissing cognitivism as naive and unable to confront the true transcendental subjectivity and so on and so on. I take brain sciences and cognitivism very seriously. So I'm afraid we're out of time at this point. I'm sorry, I talk too much, I'm sorry. But I want again I want to thank Slavoj for coming the entire weekend. It's been very wonderful having you here. I'm very honored to have you here and I thank everybody also for. No I'm grateful to you to be because you saw what I was doing today. I wasn't totally selling the old bullshit. I'm sorry if you were disappointed because I really tried to give you the first glimpse of work in progress what I'm struggling with now. I'm tired of just repeating the old Lacanian points and so on, you know. I want really in very naive way to engage with all this and well the work goes on. Thank you very much, I mean it sincerely, I'm not bluffing now. Thank you very much for your great patience here with me. Thank you very much.
have consciousness where you no longer have a simple line of causes and effects, but when a cause is as it were retroactively posited by its own effect. There must be some kind of a causal circularity. And they describe it with very nice metaphorics and so on. So again my answer to you would have been that neither Wittgenstein nor cognitivists, especially cognitivists, are not Wittgenstein also but I say especially cognitivists because often the critics of cognitivism treat them as some idiots who thought, you know, we have a clear neuronal mechanism, we can explain everything. No, no you can find true pearls there on theory. I'm far from playing this typically continental European game of dismissing cognitivism as naive and unable to confront the true transcendental subjectivity and so on and so on. I take brain sciences and cognitivism very seriously. So I'm afraid we're out of time at this point. I'm sorry, I talk too much, I'm sorry. But I want again I want to thank Slavoj for coming the entire weekend. It's been very wonderful having you here. I'm very honored to have you here and I thank everybody also for. No I'm grateful to you to be because you saw what I was doing today. I wasn't totally selling the old bullshit. I'm sorry if you were disappointed because I really tried to give you the first glimpse of work in progress what I'm struggling with now. I'm tired of just repeating the old Lacanian points and so on, you know. I want really in very naive way to engage with all this and well the work goes on. Thank you very much, I mean it sincerely, I'm not bluffing now. Thank you very much for your great patience here with me. Thank you very much.