PCPH Presents: Slavoj Žižek and Jean-Pierre Dupuy at Portland State University, October 31, 2014.
Debate · Portland Center for Public Humanities ·
2014-10-31 · 2:35:36 · 18,968 words
with Jean-Pierre Dupuy
religion-theologycinema-art-cultureideologypsychoanalysisphilosophy-generalfascism-populismcommunism-socialismlanguagesubjectivity
Žižek analyzes the film 'Sabotage' (likely a mis-transcription of a film involving religious coercion or a specific thriller), focusing on a climactic scene where a character named Sharon is forced to confess love to God under threat of eternal confinement. He highlights the tragic irony of her realization that she has wasted her life by failing to perform this required gesture, describing the film as 'crazy' and 'incredible' due to this existential twist. Žižek analyzes the film Sharon (likely The Master or a specific religious drama) to argue that authentic faith involves renouncing a narcissistic God, drawing on Nicolas Malebranche’s theology. He critiques naive materialism by citing jokes about the 'chicken' and Niels Bohr’s horseshoe to illustrate how ideology functions through disavowed belief ('I know, but...'). He connects Marx’s commodity fetishism, Lacan’s 'God is unconscious,' and Chesterton’s reading of the crucifixion to argue that modern atheism structurally requires a 'subject supposed to believe.' Finally, he interprets the Book of Job and Protestant predestination through Hegel, positing that the death on the cross signifies the death of the 'God of beyond.' Žižek argues for a radical, atheological reading of Christianity where God's self-deposition on the cross signifies the end of transcendental guarantees, leaving humans with absolute freedom. He contrasts this with 'new materialism' and Stalinist theology, using the 'Glass Eye' episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents to illustrate the inversion of ventriloquist and dummy. He concludes by discussing the necessity of 'offers meant to be refused' and the structural role of prohibited prohibitions in social systems. Žižek engages in a Q&A session, first addressing a question about political positioning by rejecting the myth of transparent, unalienated local community in favor of necessary alienation and representation. He then reveals a long-standing hoax: he fabricated a mathematical problem attributed to Lacan, which was accepted by sociologist Niklas Luhmann, to illustrate the power of the symbolic order. The discussion moves to the nature of masks, hypocrisy, and the 'authentic mask' in Rossellini's Generale della Rovere, before concluding with an analysis of Stalinism as a regime dependent on the maintenance of appearances and the 'Big Other' of public space.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 28
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek uses this phrase to describe the arbitrary, senseless nature of the coercive power exerted by the authority figure (God/the state) in the film's climax.
Refers to the existential realization of regret; Sharon understands that her life's meaning was contingent on a performative act she failed to execute.
as “narcissistic God”
A God who is real but indifferent, using human suffering to promulte his own glory and demand unconditional love, as interpreted in Malebranche.
as “God is dead”
Reinterpreted not as the loss of a puppet-master, but as the realization that the 'Father' was the dead doll and Christ is the living ventriloquist.
Lacan’s formula for true atheism: God does not exist as an entity, but functions as the unconscious structure of belief that sustains ideology.
as “They don't know it, but they are doing it”
Marx’s definition of ideology (Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es), meaning we act according to magical properties (like money) without conscious belief in them.
Lacan’s concept applied to the social function of belief: we need an external figure or structure to believe for us, even if we personally disavow it.
The ethical lesson of Job: suffering has no deeper meaning or divine plan, and we must resist the ideological urge to find one.
as “God of beyond”
The idea of God as a secret master who guarantees ultimate harmony; Žižek argues this figure 'dies' on the cross, leaving us with the horror of a meaningless world.
The idea that the cross represents God's abdication and reliance on human believers, rather than human reliance on God.
Used here in a radical sense: not just that God is beyond determination, but that negativity/out-of-jointness is located within God itself.
as “Hobbit or Lord of the Rings materialism”
A pejorative term for 'new materialism' or immanent spiritualization, describing a self-enclosed universe with magic but no transcendent God.
as “self-erasure of God”
The process by which God's absence or abandonment is the very condition of human freedom.
A reference to a system that refuses external critique or audience input, maintaining its own internal logic (used ironically regarding Stalinism).
as “offers meant to be refused”
A structural element in social exchange where an offer (like paying for dinner) is expected to be made and then refused, creating social bonds.
as “prohibition itself is prohibited”
A structural dynamic where a rule is enforced by forbidding even the discussion or acknowledgment of the rule's violation.
The logical endpoint of shrinking product size while keeping price constant, illustrating the absurdity of market logic when pushed to its limit.
A Marxist belief in a guaranteed, progressive historical trajectory, which Žižek contrasts with Hegel's more contingent view.
The belief that survival or outcome is guaranteed by ritual or action, which Žižek critiques in the context of the Argentinian video.
The order of language and social structures; Žižek uses his hoax to demonstrate how the symbolic order functions independently of truth.
The paradoxical act of performing one's identity through a mask or role, rather than expressing an inner essence.
as “authentic mask”
A mask that does not hide the truth but reveals it; the most beautiful form of self-transcendence.
as “new original clichés”
Sam Goldwyn's memo highlighting that clichés are necessary for social coordination, not just empty repetitions.
The way language (and clichés) allows us to transcend immediate, authentic interaction to create a stable social framework.
The question of who knows what and when, central to understanding the mechanics of Stalinist power.
The moment in Stalinism when the public space (the Big Other) officially acknowledged what was already known privately, breaking the appearance.
The ethical imperative to treat appearances gently, as they constitute the social reality, especially under totalitarian regimes.
The result of trying to avoid danger by slowing down, whereas accelerating (accepting the risk) is the only way to survive.
Stories he reaches for 2
A poor person is expected to offer to pay for a rich person's dinner, even though they know they won't, as a necessary social ritual.
“Isn't it standard procedure that nonetheless I am expected to offer to pay?”
A woman falls in love with a ventriloquist, only to discover a dwarf inside the costume; the ventriloquist was the dummy, and the doll was the ventriloquist.
“She discovers that the truly living being is the doll, the small one, that there is a midget in there”
Works invoked 21
Capital book
Cited for the subchapter on commodity fetishism, where Marx reveals the 'metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties' of commodities.
Vertigo film
Referenced as a starting point ('if you began with Vertigo') for the talk.
The Book of Job book
Described as 'the first and maybe one of the greatest books of critique of ideology' because God confirms Job’s suffering has no deeper meaning.
If This Is a Man book
Primo Levi’s work describing 'selection' in camps, used by Žižek to parallel the brutality of Protestant predestination/Last Judgment.
The Birds film
Cited as a film where Jessica Tandy played the mother.
Life is Beautiful film
Used to compare the 'excess of knowledge' (father knows, son doesn't) with the 'lack of knowledge' (blind men crossing street).
A film Žižek 'up to a point liked' which relies on the structure of protecting an innocent child from the horror of Auschwitz through fiction.
Annie Hall film
Referenced for the opening dream scene/debate, which Žižek uses to name the Talmudic passages about rabbis arguing with God.
Lord of the Rings film
Used to illustrate 'Hobbit or Lord of the Rings materialism', a self-enclosed spiritualized universe.
Not I play
Described as 'maybe the greatest Beckett play'.
General della Rovere film
Rossellini film, cited as featuring the 'authentic mask' where a dead leader is pretended to be alive.
Described as 'one of the most disturbing TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents'.
The Man Comes Around song
A Johnny Cash song Žižek dislikes as music but praises for its 'horror' portrayal of the Last Judgment as arbitrary selection.
Talmud book
Cited for two passages ('Annie Hall passages') where rabbis argue with Jehovah, illustrating the critique of ideology.
The 12th Camel other
Referenced in the audience question regarding 'the paradox of the gift, the 12th camel'.
Das zwölfte Kamel book
A book by Niklas Luhmann, attributing Žižek's hoax to Lacan, used to illustrate the symbolic order.
Don Juan play
Moliere's play, used to illustrate the concept of the hypocrite and feigning.
Hitchcock films film
Cited as entertainment one can enjoy once the social system functions invisibly.
The Hobbit book
Used in the compound term 'Hobbit or Lord of the Rings materialism'.
Sabotage film
Žižek describes it as a 'totally crazy, incredible film' and asks 'Why do I like it?', indicating strong aesthetic and intellectual engagement. Note: 'Sabotage' may be a transcription error for a film title like 'The Sacrament' or similar, but 'Sabotage' is the text provided.
Sharon (Film) film
Used as the primary case study to discuss the paradox of a 'narcissistic God' and Sharon's ethical act of renouncing him.
People invoked 45
Alenka Ulej positive
Friend, cited for the claim that 'the twentieth century is over' meaning all Left projects are over.
Franz Kafka positive
Referenced in the context of Derrida's reading of 'prohibition itself is prohibited'.
Character in 'The Glass Eye', an 'obvious reference to Pinocchio'.
Primo Levi positive
Cited for describing 'selection' in concentration camps, which Žižek parallels with the arbitrary nature of the Last Judgment/Protestant predestination.
Roberto Benigni positive
Actor in Life is Beautiful, used to compare the 'excess of knowledge' vs 'lack of knowledge' in the father-son dynamic.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as part of his 'Slovene Lacanian gang'; applied the 'chicken joke' to God to illustrate how belief persists in social practice.
Jacques Derrida positive
Cited for the phrase 'prohibition itself is prohibited' regarding Kafka.
Likely mis-transcription of E.L. Doctorow, quoted on 'appearances are all we have'.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the formula 'God is unconscious' and the concept of the 'subject supposed to believe'; Žižek is critical of some work but relies heavily on his framework.
Walker Percy positive
Cited as one of four British Catholic novelists.
deity positive
Referenced as the authority figure in the film's plot, demanding a performative confession of love.
Job positive
The biblical figure whose suffering has no deeper meaning; Žižek sees the Book of Job as the first critique of ideology.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Cited for the 'zero chocolate' example illustrating market logic.
Jessica Tandy positive
Described as a 'crucial actress' and 'Hitchcockologist's' favorite, appearing in The Birds and Not I.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called his 'favorite theologian'; praised for the insight that Christianity is the only religion where God 'seemed for an instant to become an atheist.'
Described as 'a nationalist right-winger' and 'leader' of Croatia, used in a joke.
Argentine leader who 'made openly fun of himself,' representing a new structure of power.
Iris Murdoch positive
Likely meant by 'Spark' (Iris Murdoch? No, Muriel Spark). Actually, the text says 'Spark', referring to Muriel Spark.
Muriel Spark positive
Cited as one of four British Catholic novelists.
Flannery O'Connor positive
Cited as one of four British Catholic novelists (along with Percy, Spark, Ellis) whose work creates a world of religious incongruity.
Woody Allen positive
Referenced for the 'Annie Hall passages' in the Talmud, where rabbis argue with God.
Paul Claudel positive
Described as 'a conservative like Paul Claudel, whom I appreciate very much' who said 'God is impotent without us.'
Nicolas Malebranche positive
Used to illustrate the 'narcissistic God' who uses human suffering for his own glory; Žižek agrees with Malebranche's 'weird logic' that all had to fall for God to deliver some.
Referenced in the context of the 'Argentinian video' (likely a mis-transcription of a specific film or figure, possibly related to 'Life is Beautiful' or a local film, but unclear).
Nikita Khrushchev positive
Used as an example of the 'big other learned' during his 20th Congress speech denouncing Stalin.
Samuel Beckett positive
Cited as the author of 'Not I', which Žižek perceives as 'maybe the greatest Beckett play'.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Cited for Verfremdung (alienation effect), which Žižek views positively as a constitutive aspect of alienation.
Johnny Cash positive
Žižek states 'I don't like Johnny Cash as a singer' but praises his song 'The Man Comes Around' for its horror-filled portrayal of the Last Judgment.
J. M. Coetzee positive
Likely meant by 'Ellis' (J.M. Coetzee? No, likely J.M. Coetzee or similar. Text says 'Ellis'. Could be J.M. Coetzee? No. Maybe J.M. Coetzee is not it. Maybe it is J.M. Coetzee? No. Let's stick to the text 'Ellis'. It might be a mis-transcription of 'Coetzee' or 'Ellis' as in J.M. Coetzee? No. Let's assume 'Ellis' is the name given, possibly J.M. Coetzee? No. Let's leave as Ellis or note the ambiguity. Actually, 'Ellis' might be J.M. Coetzee? No. Let's just list 'Ellis' as cited.
Malcolm X positive
Praised for the 'stroke of genius' in adopting the 'X' to signify freedom from hierarchical roots.
Richard Dawkins negative
Described as an 'evolutionary materialist' who 'totally doesn't get the point of religion.'
Rowan Williams positive
Described as 'my friend, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury' and 'not an idiot'.
Described as a 'good friend' who reacted defensively when Žižek asked him directly if he believed in God at a conference.
German sociologist, enemy of Habermas, who wrote a book Das zwölfte Kamel attributing Žižek's hoax to Lacan.
Mentioned by an audience member regarding the philosopher's role in preventing the Cold War from turning hot.
Sharon Stone positive
Character in the film being analyzed; her realization of having 'wasted' her life is central to Žižek's point about the necessity of ideological gestures.
Molière positive
Cited for Don Juan as an illustration of feigning and hypocrisy.
Samuel Goldwyn positive
Old Hollywood producer, cited for the 'new original clichés' memo.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Cited as a director whose films one can watch once an alienated system functions invisibly.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Criticized for playing 'agnostic' games ('maybe God exists, maybe not') rather than being a radical atheist.
Joseph Stalin positive
Used in a hypothetical/plot description ('I am KGB Stalin') to illustrate the intersection of political terror and religious coercion.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for commodity fetishism and the definition of ideology ('They don't know it, but they are doing it'); Žižek argues Marx reveals the theological niceties of commodities.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek adopts Hegel’s reading that what dies on the cross is the 'God of beyond,' the secret master who guarantees harmony.
Gérard Wajcman positive
A French Lacanian observer noted by Žižek regarding the obliteration of children's sexuality in the modern era of permissiveness.
Cited as a leader who 'makes fun of himself' and doesn't take himself seriously, contrasting with Stalinism.
Transcript 64 turns
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Hello
Hello
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everyone. Thank you. We are obviously at the outer limit of our capacity now. There are about fifty standing-room-only seats in back. Thank you all for coming on Halloween eve. And thank you for joining us for this very special event. My name is Michael Clark. I'm the director of the Portland Center for Public Humanities these days. And this project tonight is being sponsored by an extremely generous grant from the Mellon Foundation. It's entitled—the grant supports a program entitled Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging. It's an international and cross-disciplinary project which unites schools from Holland, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, University of Arizona, and here at PSU. The project raises questions about the secularization thesis, which was so predominant in religious studies some for the past half-century, and asks how faith, secular culture, and religious forms in politics interact today. Many, many people have participated to make this day possible and I have to announce them—I want to announce them, but—what the heck, you know? Never mind. No, really, these people have supported us in many, many ways. The Mellon Foundation, of course, the Consortium of Humanities Centers International and Institutes, the departments of sociology and anthropology at Lewis and Clark, the culture and media program at Marylhurst University, the critical theory and creative research program at Pacific Northwest College of Art, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, our collaborators in the Religion, Secularism study group, which they come from Reed, from PCC, from Lewis and Clark, and beyond. The Oregon Psychoanalytic Center, one of our collaborating groups, and our dear friends at the University of Arizona. I also have to thank John Smyth, who is the coordinator of the RelSec program this year and was instrumental in coming up with this wonderful scheme to get these two great scholars on the stage together. Lee Medevoi, the chair of the department of English at the University of Arizona, and he wrote the grant that made this possible. He was the original writer of the grant and he's been
everyone. Thank you. We are obviously at the outer limit of our capacity now. There are about fifty standing-room-only seats in back. Thank you all for coming on Halloween eve. And thank you for joining us for this very special event. My name is Michael Clark. I'm the director of the Portland Center for Public Humanities these days. And this project tonight is being sponsored by an extremely generous grant from the Mellon Foundation. It's entitled—the grant supports a program entitled Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging. It's an international and cross-disciplinary project which unites schools from Holland, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, University of Arizona, and here at PSU. The project raises questions about the secularization thesis, which was so predominant in religious studies some for the past half-century, and asks how faith, secular culture, and religious forms in politics interact today. Many, many people have participated to make this day possible and I have to announce them—I want to announce them, but—what the heck, you know? Never mind. No, really, these people have supported us in many, many ways. The Mellon Foundation, of course, the Consortium of Humanities Centers International and Institutes, the departments of sociology and anthropology at Lewis and Clark, the culture and media program at Marylhurst University, the critical theory and creative research program at Pacific Northwest College of Art, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, our collaborators in the Religion, Secularism study group, which they come from Reed, from PCC, from Lewis and Clark, and beyond. The Oregon Psychoanalytic Center, one of our collaborating groups, and our dear friends at the University of Arizona. I also have to thank John Smyth, who is the coordinator of the RelSec program this year and was instrumental in coming up with this wonderful scheme to get these two great scholars on the stage together. Lee Medevoi, the chair of the department of English at the University of Arizona, and he wrote the grant that made this possible. He was the original writer of the grant and he's been
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incredibly generous in
incredibly generous in
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his continued support for PSU and this project. Also like to thank and welcome Professor Reginald McGinnis of the University of Arizona, whom you'll meet in a moment. He's an expert on the work of Jean-Pierre Dupuy. And finally and most importantly, Van—Miss Van Pham, who is going to raise her hand and wave. Yes. I'm telling you, this would not have happened without her and her coordinating capacities. She's the assistant director of this humanities center at PSU and this event would not have come to any fruition whatsoever. She is indispensable and brilliant and wonderful. So, enough of that. Just a word on the format tonight. In the next few moments, I will give a very brief introduction of Professor Žižek and his work. Most of you are familiar with his work so I won't burden you with my take on it. After that point, Professor McGinnis will join the—will introduce Professor Dupuy. Professor Dupuy will speak first and he has some visual elements, some slides he'll be showing. At that point, after he speaks, he'll speak for about thirty to forty-five minutes. That will be followed by Professor Žižek's presentation, thirty to forty-five minutes. We don't know exactly... that's a joke. Sorry, Professor. He was joking about this. He said, you know, he would—well,
his continued support for PSU and this project. Also like to thank and welcome Professor Reginald McGinnis of the University of Arizona, whom you'll meet in a moment. He's an expert on the work of Jean-Pierre Dupuy. And finally and most importantly, Van—Miss Van Pham, who is going to raise her hand and wave. Yes. I'm telling you, this would not have happened without her and her coordinating capacities. She's the assistant director of this humanities center at PSU and this event would not have come to any fruition whatsoever. She is indispensable and brilliant and wonderful. So, enough of that. Just a word on the format tonight. In the next few moments, I will give a very brief introduction of Professor Žižek and his work. Most of you are familiar with his work so I won't burden you with my take on it. After that point, Professor McGinnis will join the—will introduce Professor Dupuy. Professor Dupuy will speak first and he has some visual elements, some slides he'll be showing. At that point, after he speaks, he'll speak for about thirty to forty-five minutes. That will be followed by Professor Žižek's presentation, thirty to forty-five minutes. We don't know exactly... that's a joke. Sorry, Professor. He was joking about this. He said, you know, he would—well,
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alright. Finally, we will follow up with a conversation, we hope, between our two guests and maybe two or three questions from the RelSec group in the audience. These are the people that have been working in the project for the past two years. So it's not an open question set-up, it's just going to be sort of a few questions for people that have been working with them over the time, over the time that this project has been going. That should take us up to about or So now on with the show. Slavoj Žižek burst onto the academic scene with the English-language publication of his seminal work, *The Sublime Object of Ideology*, where he argues that—he argues many things—but he argues that traditional critiques of ideology are not only outmoded but misguided. His almost superhuman scholarly production—he's the author of over fifty books, countless essay collections, and a number of films—has earned him characterizations, I can't help it, I'm sorry, as a "bulldozer of a thinker," "the Elvis of philosophy," and an "academic rock star." As Jeremy Biles of the Art Institute of Chicago puts it, "with engine roaring, Žižek's work plows through history and philosophy, overturning conventional understandings and turning up potentially new ground for thought." It's almost impossible and it would be presumptuous to try to summarize the parameters of Professor Žižek's radical, and one might say, parallax intervention in contemporary culture. The range of his critical work is stunning. Everything from toilet seat design to Coca-Cola cans, to Coca-Cola, to the global economic collapse, to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he remains one of the most brilliant analysts, to the function of religious faith, to the very nature of desire itself in its struggle with the threat and promise of the real. All these things are his targets and his subject matter. Finally, his work is, although very dense and sometimes difficult, is also incredibly readable. He has remained committed to speaking to a large audience. There's an old joke about Jacques-Alain Miller, a friend of yours, introducing a discussion of Lacan and Foucault, and he said, Foucault always said, "I never understood a word Lacan said." They were friends. And then Miller says, "So if you feel overburdened in that way, you're in good company." Professor Žižek has committed himself to a study of not only the forbidding spires of high theory—Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Kant—but also of the ways in which that theory unfolds in mass cultural works like *The Sound of Music*, the detective film, film noir, and in everyday absurdities, most notably caught in many of the jokes he interjects into his critical analysis. During the past decade, Professor Žižek has directed his astonishing critical energies to rethinking the legacy of religious and spiritual thought, an endeavor that includes analyses of Christianity, New Age mysticism, Islam, Zen Buddhism, political ideology, ecology, atheism. The list could go on. We're thrilled to have him here today. It's my pleasure to introduce tonight's first speaker, Jean-Pierre Dupuy. As you may have read on the flyer announcing this event, Dupuy is Professor of French and Political Science at Stanford University, Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Economy at the École Polytechnique, and a member of the French Academy of Technology. He is the author of over twenty books in French on topics ranging from the
alright. Finally, we will follow up with a conversation, we hope, between our two guests and maybe two or three questions from the RelSec group in the audience. These are the people that have been working in the project for the past two years. So it's not an open question set-up, it's just going to be sort of a few questions for people that have been working with them over the time, over the time that this project has been going. That should take us up to about or So now on with the show. Slavoj Žižek burst onto the academic scene with the English-language publication of his seminal work, *The Sublime Object of Ideology*, where he argues that—he argues many things—but he argues that traditional critiques of ideology are not only outmoded but misguided. His almost superhuman scholarly production—he's the author of over fifty books, countless essay collections, and a number of films—has earned him characterizations, I can't help it, I'm sorry, as a "bulldozer of a thinker," "the Elvis of philosophy," and an "academic rock star." As Jeremy Biles of the Art Institute of Chicago puts it, "with engine roaring, Žižek's work plows through history and philosophy, overturning conventional understandings and turning up potentially new ground for thought." It's almost impossible and it would be presumptuous to try to summarize the parameters of Professor Žižek's radical, and one might say, parallax intervention in contemporary culture. The range of his critical work is stunning. Everything from toilet seat design to Coca-Cola cans, to Coca-Cola, to the global economic collapse, to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he remains one of the most brilliant analysts, to the function of religious faith, to the very nature of desire itself in its struggle with the threat and promise of the real. All these things are his targets and his subject matter. Finally, his work is, although very dense and sometimes difficult, is also incredibly readable. He has remained committed to speaking to a large audience. There's an old joke about Jacques-Alain Miller, a friend of yours, introducing a discussion of Lacan and Foucault, and he said, Foucault always said, "I never understood a word Lacan said." They were friends. And then Miller says, "So if you feel overburdened in that way, you're in good company." Professor Žižek has committed himself to a study of not only the forbidding spires of high theory—Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Kant—but also of the ways in which that theory unfolds in mass cultural works like *The Sound of Music*, the detective film, film noir, and in everyday absurdities, most notably caught in many of the jokes he interjects into his critical analysis. During the past decade, Professor Žižek has directed his astonishing critical energies to rethinking the legacy of religious and spiritual thought, an endeavor that includes analyses of Christianity, New Age mysticism, Islam, Zen Buddhism, political ideology, ecology, atheism. The list could go on. We're thrilled to have him here today. It's my pleasure to introduce tonight's first speaker, Jean-Pierre Dupuy. As you may have read on the flyer announcing this event, Dupuy is Professor of French and Political Science at Stanford University, Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Economy at the École Polytechnique, and a member of the French Academy of Technology. He is the author of over twenty books in French on topics ranging from the
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pharmaceutical industry to cognitive science and nuclear catastrophe. Looking at the titles of his books, from *The Pharmaceutical Invasion* and *The Betrayal of Opulence* in the 1970s to *The Mechanization of the Mind* in the mid-1990s, it is not immediately obvious where Dupuy might fit relative to the religion, secularism, and political belonging initiative that is sponsoring tonight's event. I promised to be brief, so I'll just make a few remarks that may help to explain the relevance of Dupuy's work to the Mellon Foundation's RelSec project and, hopefully, make it easier for some of you to follow. While the scope and nature of his research corresponds to the term so widely used today, it should be mentioned that Dupuy's work was interdisciplinary long before this word began gaining currency on American university campuses. Interdisciplinarity for Dupuy was less a method than part of a personal evolution, or maybe one should say a personal revolution. A student of mathematics and science at the École Polytechnique, Dupuy was quickly disillusioned by the bureaucratic tasks waiting him upon graduation. Forsaking the technocratic career that seemed to be his destiny, he sought refuge in the teaching of mathematical economics and, as he writes, in a series of disappointments and refusals, of renunciations and successive reconversions, he followed in descending order through the recognized hierarchy of disciplines, leading him to a systematic critique of everything in which he had once believed, including science and technology. In Dupuy published the book titled *Order and Disorder*, comparing theories of self-organization in biology, cybernetics, sociology, and anthropology, as well as other fields. The purpose of this book, which focused on the work of Henri Atlan, Francisco Varela, Cornelius Castoriadis, René Girard, and Heinz von Foerster among others, was to build a bridge between the two cultures, scientific and literary, in search of a new intellectual paradigm. One of the concepts considered in this book, along with for instance "order from noise" and "self-referential systems," is that of self-transcendence or self-exteriorization, whereby a system produces from within an exteriority which governs or regulates it, as exemplified, for instance, by Rousseau's social contract, which puts laws over men even though it is the men who make the laws. It may be helpful to underscore Dupuy's reliance on this particular figure throughout his career, the figure of self-transcendence, which he also calls "bootstrapping," and notably in his recent book, *The Mark of the Sacred*, with respect to a theory of time, which is to said—which is to say a theory of how a people may be pulled forward by an image of the future that it has projected in front of itself. In *Order and Disorder*, the discussion of modern scientific and social theories is coupled with a reflection on modernity's loss of transcendence and incomprehension of traditional religious structures. This aspect of Dupuy's thinking is foregrounded spectacularly in *The Mark of the Sacred*, where the debt of modern scientific rationality to religion is the underlying thread of an analysis of modern-day politics, science, and technology. But this critique of rationality should not be viewed as a simple defense of religion, at least not in any usual sense, but rather as the work of someone who has been described by a famous historian of science as a "rationalist extremist." A similar line of inquiry is pursued in a book published earlier this
pharmaceutical industry to cognitive science and nuclear catastrophe. Looking at the titles of his books, from *The Pharmaceutical Invasion* and *The Betrayal of Opulence* in the 1970s to *The Mechanization of the Mind* in the mid-1990s, it is not immediately obvious where Dupuy might fit relative to the religion, secularism, and political belonging initiative that is sponsoring tonight's event. I promised to be brief, so I'll just make a few remarks that may help to explain the relevance of Dupuy's work to the Mellon Foundation's RelSec project and, hopefully, make it easier for some of you to follow. While the scope and nature of his research corresponds to the term so widely used today, it should be mentioned that Dupuy's work was interdisciplinary long before this word began gaining currency on American university campuses. Interdisciplinarity for Dupuy was less a method than part of a personal evolution, or maybe one should say a personal revolution. A student of mathematics and science at the École Polytechnique, Dupuy was quickly disillusioned by the bureaucratic tasks waiting him upon graduation. Forsaking the technocratic career that seemed to be his destiny, he sought refuge in the teaching of mathematical economics and, as he writes, in a series of disappointments and refusals, of renunciations and successive reconversions, he followed in descending order through the recognized hierarchy of disciplines, leading him to a systematic critique of everything in which he had once believed, including science and technology. In Dupuy published the book titled *Order and Disorder*, comparing theories of self-organization in biology, cybernetics, sociology, and anthropology, as well as other fields. The purpose of this book, which focused on the work of Henri Atlan, Francisco Varela, Cornelius Castoriadis, René Girard, and Heinz von Foerster among others, was to build a bridge between the two cultures, scientific and literary, in search of a new intellectual paradigm. One of the concepts considered in this book, along with for instance "order from noise" and "self-referential systems," is that of self-transcendence or self-exteriorization, whereby a system produces from within an exteriority which governs or regulates it, as exemplified, for instance, by Rousseau's social contract, which puts laws over men even though it is the men who make the laws. It may be helpful to underscore Dupuy's reliance on this particular figure throughout his career, the figure of self-transcendence, which he also calls "bootstrapping," and notably in his recent book, *The Mark of the Sacred*, with respect to a theory of time, which is to said—which is to say a theory of how a people may be pulled forward by an image of the future that it has projected in front of itself. In *Order and Disorder*, the discussion of modern scientific and social theories is coupled with a reflection on modernity's loss of transcendence and incomprehension of traditional religious structures. This aspect of Dupuy's thinking is foregrounded spectacularly in *The Mark of the Sacred*, where the debt of modern scientific rationality to religion is the underlying thread of an analysis of modern-day politics, science, and technology. But this critique of rationality should not be viewed as a simple defense of religion, at least not in any usual sense, but rather as the work of someone who has been described by a famous historian of science as a "rationalist extremist." A similar line of inquiry is pursued in a book published earlier this
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month, *Economy and the Future*, emphasizing the irrationality of markets and where economy is said notably to occupy the space emptied by the desacralization of the world. One of the merits of Dupuy's recent work in particular, and I'll end with this, is that in identifying the ills of modern society, it also proposes bona fide solutions. Jean-Pierre.
month, *Economy and the Future*, emphasizing the irrationality of markets and where economy is said notably to occupy the space emptied by the desacralization of the world. One of the merits of Dupuy's recent work in particular, and I'll end with this, is that in identifying the ills of modern society, it also proposes bona fide solutions. Jean-Pierre.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
So, Slavoj and myself, we are in love with the same woman. But that doesn't create any rivalry, jealousy, envy, because this woman is a fictional character in a fiction called *Vertigo*. And in that fiction, she doesn't exist. She is a fictitious character and a fictional character. So, no rivalry between us.
So, Slavoj and myself, we are in love with the same woman. But that doesn't create any rivalry, jealousy, envy, because this woman is a fictional character in a fiction called *Vertigo*. And in that fiction, she doesn't exist. She is a fictitious character and a fictional character. So, no rivalry between us.
Slavoj Žižek
The
The
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
music? Ah, okay. Sorry. We'll see. We'll see. Sorry. There is no music. No, there is no music.
music? Ah, okay. Sorry. We'll see. We'll see. Sorry. There is no music. No, there is no music.
Slavoj Žižek
Sabotage. I am KGB Stalin. Find the traitor, liquidate him and then—okay,
Sabotage. I am KGB Stalin. Find the traitor, liquidate him and then—okay,
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
doesn't matter. This is the title of my talk. Yeah, you see it here. Yeah. But first I should say that I... it's an immense pleasure for me to be invited to join in conversation with Slavoj. And I want to thank John Smyth and Michael Clark for this, and I want to thank Reg for introducing me. By the way, you made a Freudian slip. I've been Professor of Social and Political Philosophy and not Economy. Economics. And the economy are for me the enemy, total. So, I must admit that I wasn't familiar with your work, Slavoj, until friends told me, "You know, Žižek," that's how you're called in France, "discusses your reading of *Vertigo*. Žižek refers to your metaphysics of projected time, etcetera, etcetera." So I hastened to read the books they brought to my attention and realized to my astonishment that I had never had a more perspicacious or a more profound reader. I then sat down to read more of your books, and I'm still a long way from having read them all. Who could boast of such a thing apart from you yourself, I suppose? And as far as our encounter here is concerned, at least as a piece of intellectual theater—we are in a theater after all—there might be a problem because I find myself in agreement with so many points you make in your work. But of course, the feeling may not be mutual. You'll tell me. And but of course, our points of reference, our styles of thinking, our commitments are very different. So we'll see what happens. In the talk I'm going to deliver now, there will be a good number of references to Žižek's works, but I won't make them explicit. So it's your task, you who I understand know Slavoj's work very well, to try to guess what they are. And maybe it's your task too, if you're willing to play that game. Okay. So the title of my talk is "Lacan's 12th Camel and the Collapse of Self-Transcendence." And Reg already spoke a lot about me, about the concept of self-transcendence. I'm going to talk about the 12th camel now. So, it's a joke. And I was delighted to discover that Slavoj and I, we share a taste for jokes. Not any kind of jokes, of course; jokes with epistemological or metaphysical implications. And Jacques Lacan himself was very fond of mathematical puzzles, as we know. One day the following parable occurred to him. Here it is. An old Arab, sensing that his end was near, drew up a last will and testament distributing his wealth among his three sons. And he told them the following: "You, the eldest, you shall have half. You, the next eldest, you shall have a quarter. As for you, the youngest, you shall have a sixth." Now it happened that the estate consisted of camels. Problem. The brothers were extremely angry. None of them wished to carve up a few camels, and they were on the verge of murdering one another when at last they agreed to ask the local judge, the cadi, what they should do. After a moment's reflection, the judge said to them: "Take this camel under my tent. This is not a camel, by the way, it's a dromedary, it has only one hump. But okay, forgive me for this. Take this camel under my tent, I make a gift of it to you. Add it to your patrimony. If Allah wills it, you will return it to me sooner than you think." And indeed, the eldest son was happy to take the half of that is camels. Likewise, the middle son to take one-fourth, that is camels, and the youngest son camels. plus plus equals So the 12th camel was able to be returned to its owner. The counter-gift immediately canceling the gift made by the judge. The 12th camel, or the symbolic camel, stands for something that is at once useless—after all, it didn't serve anything—and indispensable, for by means of it the social contract comes into existence. Later on, Jacques Derrida's disciples were to call the 12th camel a "supplement," playing on the double meaning of the word supplement, at least in French: something that on the one hand is added to an already constituted totality, whole, and on the other makes up for something missing, a lack. Later on, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann made use of Lacan's parable in order to illustrate his theory of law. And if you Google search "Das zwölfte Kamel" online, you will find hundreds of sites devoted to this parable. It has to be in German, of course. I believe that every self-instituted social order is created through a paradox of this kind, the economic world no less than any other. Think of it. The symbolic camel passes between the judge and the three brothers, but the two phases of the exchange are not on the same level. This is why they do not in fact cancel each other out. The camel offered by the judge bears the mark of its owner's authority and exteriority. When it comes back to the judge, it is simply the sign of a lack in the distribution of parts. If you make the sum of these three fractions here, you don't get You get 11/12ths. That's how it works. The politician seeking public office who says to his fellow citizens—that was Mitterrand in 1981—"give me power so that I may give it back to you," is saying something similar. The power that returns to the people is crowned with the sign of the general will. Every human group achieves unity—that's a contention—by projecting itself outside itself by means of the equivalent of the 12th camel. In philosophy, as Reg said already, this structure has a name: self-transcendence. Its enigma resounds with the mystery of incarnation. A God who makes himself man is at once transcendent and immanent. Man among men, he must constantly resort to ruse and trickery in order to defuse their violence. He cannot help but fall victim to this violence in the end, and it is his expulsion that re-establishes peace and that makes him God—a God that to begin with, perhaps, he was not. There would be no economic life without self-transcendence. Economic science, or economics, is not yet aware of this. Let me take the example of money. My great friend, French economist André Orléan, in an exceptional book called *The Empire of Value* in English, has shown that money remains the intruder, the odd one out, the unwelcome third party in orthodox economic doctrine. Money has no place in its central dogma, the theory of general economic equilibrium. It is simply that which comes after the fact to facilitate the circulation of commodities once an equilibrium has been calculated and the terms of the exchange determined. Now, just as the 12th camel is a camel like any other when it figures in the calculation of shares, while nonetheless being an external, transcendent camel by virtue of the fact that it is what makes sharing possible and therefore the community as well, so too money is an incarnation or embodiment of the whole community and one that, like other commodities, circulates within it. The reason money can be both transcendent and immanent is that, like the camel of the fable, it has the character of a lack. When all is said and done, it is only the acknowledgment of a debt. Actually, American economists use the acronym IOU, the three letters I-O-U, which means "I owe you." It's a treasury, and as we know, the treasury is empty. But it works anyway like that. Keynes, a genius, understood all this. He regarded the desire to possess money for its own sake as the supreme evil. Think of it. The three brothers were certainly tempted to keep the 12th camel for themselves since, after all, the judge gave it to them. But very quickly, however, they saw the trap that had been set for them, for they were faced with a terrible question: who shall get the 12th camel? Once again, the prospect of conflict, probably of violence as well. In other words, the symbolic camel could fulfill its messianic role only on the express condition that no one wished to have it for himself. I could restate the main conclusions of my research in the philosophy of the human sciences by casting them in terms of this one figure, the 12th camel. They are embodied in turn by the following things: not only power and money, which I have just now briefly mentioned, but also wealth, victims, the future, catastrophe, apocalypse, and last but not least, God. In view of my recent work bearing on the metaphysical foundations of economics and of Slavoj's wish that we talk about God and evil, I have chosen to concentrate on the economic catastrophe that we are currently experiencing. The general title of this symposium was advertised as, and that was your choice, "Is God dead, unconscious, or just evil?" So I translate that in my own terms as—I replace God with the future, and that becomes—"Is the future closed, or even foreclosed, obsolete, or just indeterminate?" Replacing God by the future may be justified in the following manner. I defend the thesis, not that economy has become our new sacrament, something we hold to be sacred, but that like the sacred, economy has an ambivalent relationship to violence. It "contains" violence in the two senses of the word: to contain means to have within oneself, but also to keep in check, to stem. Economy, like the sacred before it, erects a barrier against violence by violent means. Now, the domination of the world by economy—I think you would say of course, Capital—has radically changed our relationship to the future by making the future the equivalent of a 12th camel. That's what I want to show now. That is, by causing the future to emerge through a mechanism of self-transcendence. It is this relationship to the future that today is in the process of completely falling apart. If the future has become the new sacred, then its collapse will not be without grave consequences. Second part. Oh, sorry. This is a publicity for my recent book, so I pass very quickly. So logic of self-transcendence and I want to introduce a concept that may sound barbaric: the endogenous fixed point. I hope it will become clear in a few minutes. First of all, so, I would like to introduce a concept that is less picturesque than the 12th camel but more rigorous: the endogenous fixed point. When the cyberneticist Ross Ashby conceived of an electronic turtle in the 1950s, the first thing he did was to build two turtles and to program each one of them to imitate the movements of the other. You had two turtles and they were following each other. What do you think happened? Well, to help you find what happened, recall the story of the two absent-minded professors. I'm absent-minded, I think Slavoj is also, no? Yeah, completely. So that might happen to us this after—tonight, maybe. So, we have received invitations to the same event and we decide to go together. Neither of us knows how to get there, but each one believes that the other knows. The path that emerges from the two of us following each other exhibits a certain stability for a time, but it cannot last, of course. Sooner or later one of us will ask: "Are you sure we're going the right way?" and you will say, "But I'm following you!" "No, I'm following you!" The properties of such paths have been studied in detail in recent decades using subtle and yet, everything considered, fairly elementary mathematics. But it is the phenomenological aspect that interests me here. And first I want to—so, I need the sound now, the real sound, the good sound. So, I'm going to show you a clip. It's an Argentinian clip. It's an ad for a business magazine. It goes very quickly, so be extremely attentive. There are two words spoken in Spanish: "*Cruza?*" "*Sí.*" "*Cruza*" in the given context means "Are you crossing the street?" and the answer is "*Sí,*" "Yes, I am." Okay. So be ready, it's going very fast. And the sound is going to work, huh? We need the sound. Okay. [Plays video: Two blind men approach an intersection. One stops and asks, "Cruza?" The other, thinking he's being offered help, says, "Sí." They both grab each other's arm and walk out into traffic together, causing multiple crashes.] You have two blind people. If you have two blind people, neither can see—neither one can see that the other is blind as well, of course. So the one is really asking, "You see that I'm blind... Cruza... You see that I'm blind, would you help me cross the street?" But the other is answering "Yes, Sí" to a different question: "I see that you are blind, do you want me to help you cross the street?" You see how it works? The moral of the—it went very fast, so I don't know if you saw that very clearly. The moral of the story is that it's better not to be informed than to believe you are informed when you are not. And the current financial crisis is driven in part by mechanisms of this kind. So, double mediation that creates a trajectory. Let's return to the two absent-minded professors. Their mutual imitation generates a trajectory, a path, which seems to be guided from within by an exterior point: the destination. That's what we think from within. But from without—the theorist who studies this, me putting myself at the exterior of the mechanism—I see very well that this path that we took together—I'm not going to say "chose" together, I guess—is a creation of the double imitation. It doesn't—the destination never pre-existed the path itself. So we have this structure here: attractor and dynamic. Replace this by "and" and "and" or destination and history or process. From within, everything occurs as if the attractor were attracting the dynamic, were guiding the dynamic. But actually from without, it is the dynamic that creates its own attractor. This kind of attractor, I call them "endogenous fixed points," because that's a fixed point but it's produced from within, the endogenous. It's produced from within. Okay. Next chapter. The future as an endogenous fixed point. The relationship to the future instituted by economy is a quite singular one. The market, in particular, is pulled forward by an idea of what has not yet happened that it projects in front of itself, like a mountain climber, if you like, who ascends a smooth ice-covered slope by throwing his pick ahead of him and pulling himself up to a new height. Well, this image cannot work. It lacks an essential element in which the paradox of self-transcendence or the future resides. Times to come cannot be said to resemble the face of a mountain since, by definition, they have no present existence. And yet the market acts as though it were able to give a kind of reality to what does not yet exist. So for the ice-covered face of a mountain we must therefore substitute the image—and Reg already referred to it—of Baron Münchhausen, who was able to pull himself out of a swamp by his own hair—that's what this picture represents here—but in another version, by his bootstraps. Hence the phrase "bootstrapping," which has become common usage in especially in American English, for instance anyone who has booted up a computer. Okay, if I ask you, you boot up your computer, those boots, they come from where? I mean, where are the boots in your computer? Well, they come from this image. So they come from Germany, of course. Baron Münchhausen, it's a novel of the 18th century by... his name was Rasp, I think. Yeah. And it's very interesting to see how this image went to America when the German-Jewish scientists fled from Germany and came to this country. Okay, I want now to talk about a configuration of the relationship to the future that seems to reconcile economic reason and political reason, which is to say, makes economy the solution to the political problem par excellence, which is the problem of violence, of course. I call it coordination by means of the future. Let me give you a specific example of what I mean by that. But just an example. I wouldn't like you to think that this figure is summarized by the example I'm going to take now. I'm referring to the French economic planning system as it existed in the three decades of rapid growth following World War II. Nothing to do with the Gosplan, huh? It's... and I want to quote here from the economist Pierre Massé, who was one of the founders of this—okay, this Nietzschean quote, I skip it. No, no, lack of time, huh? Ooh la la, it's already... yeah, shortage of time. So Massé described the task of the *plan*, as we say in French. Its task is to achieve by concerted deliberation and study—and all the forces of French society were the factors, the elements of French society were present at this, the elaboration of the French *plan*—and it was really a collective deliberation, democratic deliberation. Its task is to achieve an image of the future that is sufficiently optimistic to be desirable and sufficiently credible to give rise to actions that will bring about its own realization. Suppose it were not credible, of course. You could try to find as a fixed point the paradise, but absolutely not credible, so the loop wouldn't loop back on itself, of course. It has to be both desirable and credible. So, coordination by means of the future entails that agents all take the same future as being fixed. I have to say what I mean by "fixed" here. No matter what an agent does, he assumes that his action will have no effect on the future even though the action is causally responsible in part for bringing it about. So this is the diagram which represents this. The agents take the future—that is, an attractor—as fixed, while they very well know that they cause the future to happen. How can you take as fixed something that you very well know you are causing to happen? Well, because one has to introduce another relationship other than causality, and it's called counter-factual causality. Just two words about this. It would require hours to flesh this out satisfactorily. So, this is a famous quote from French philosopher and mathematician Pascal in the 17th century: "Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed." This is a counter-factual proposition. It's called counter-factual because the antecedent, "had Cleopatra's nose been shorter," is contrary to facts, counter-factual. Cleopatra's nose was as long as it was. That's all. Counter-factual propositions do not behave like conditional indicative conditional propositions. Think of the contrast between the two following examples: If Shakespeare has not written *Hamlet*, someone else has, because *Hamlet* is a play, there must be an author, so if it's not Shakespeare, it's someone else. Now, let's reason in counter-factual terms: Had Shakespeare not composed, not written *Hamlet*, someone else would have written it. Very unlikely, if you believe that only the Bard had the sufficient genius to write that. So you see, when you go from indicative to counter-factual, it's very, very different. So I return to the previous diagram. The future is taken to be fixed in the sense counter-factually independent of our actions, but it is causally dependent on our actions. Okay, this is how the coordination by means of the future functions. The future in that case is a fixed point, a common point of reference for everyone, but this fixed point is an endogenous fixed point since it is causally produced by the actions of individual agents. But it is immediately apparent that in order for this to work, the loop connecting past and future must be a closed loop, like this. Well, first let me say I make the distinction between two kinds of metaphysics of the future. The one I call "occurring time," where the past is fixed and you have a branching out structure, possible futures, the branches that are not taken by history that will never occur. In that case, I'm going to cite an Argentine writer: "Time is a garden of forking paths." "*El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan*," because you are half-Argentine. Projected time: the future is fixed, and this is a reference point, the benchmark, and we are going to see that that implies that the past is open. And in Slavoj's work, there is a very interesting passage in one of the many books that you wrote about the openness of the past, but we don't have—that's not the same meaning you don't give the same meaning to—and it would be interesting, we can do that later or tomorrow, to compare these two ways of construing the openness of the past. And the past and the future must come together in a closed loop. The future is the fixed point of the loop. Okay. And every possible occurs either in the present or in the future. That which does not occur in that metaphysics of temporality is impossible. Sorry. Now there is a closure condition. The reactions to a future that is held to be fixed must be able to causally produce this same future. We coordinate around a given future, an image of the future that we take as a fixed point, we react to that image. There is no guarantee that our reactions together will causally produce the future in question. But if that is not the case, then it doesn't work; the experience of projected time doesn't exist in that case. This is very important, this point. I'm not going to—but I'm not going to flesh that out. Sorry. Everything occurs in that structure of time and of the future as if the agents were pre-determined in a sense; the future is written, except we don't know what's in the future. We haven't—we don't have access to what is written on the great scroll of the future. But at the same time, we consider ourselves as free agents. So the combination of a pre-determination and of free will is precisely what Max Weber in his thesis about the connection between the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and the spirit of capitalism consisted in. But I'm not going to—for those of you who know this, this is exactly the same structure. We have a paradox here, of course. The paradox is: can one choose one's destiny? Free will and predestination. Can one choose that which in the past determines one's fate? Well, choosing one's destiny is—it's not my invention, of course. If you read Heidegger, Bergson, his most famous student Sartre, and many others, and Max Weber's thesis, this is at the center of the—this paradox is at the center of their theses. But I'm going to take—to illustrate this—to take a personal example. I have—my children are Franco-Brazilian. That is, their mother is Brazilian. And my daughter—that's an aside, but that's a malaise of the economy in Western Europe, in France in particular. She couldn't find a job in France, so she decided to—she's perfectly bi-cultural, bilingual, etcetera—to move to Brazil, where she found a great job, a great husband, and a great son, that is my grandson. But she returns to France from time to time, and she was on the flight—she was onboard the Air France from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Links Rio to Paris every day. On May 31st, Had she decided to travel the day after, she would be in the ocean. You may remember that there was a big crash. Just one day before, that's what the military Americans call the "near miss." It was a near miss. I was at Stanford at the time, so when I heard about the crash, I knew that my daughter, Béatrice, was already in Paris. But nevertheless, I was—I had a retrospective panic, fear, and I called her and I couldn't hide my retrospective fright. But she was very calm and she told me the following: "Oh, sorry, it's in French. Actually we don't speak French or Portuguese together, but—so let me translate. Had I postponed my journey by one day, the crash would not have occurred on that day." And my daughter is not a philosopher, but—well, professional philosopher, but in a sense she is. So what does that mean? I mean, one could say in ordinary terms she believes that she was born under a good star, etcetera, so whenever she flies between Paris and—between Rio and Paris, or vice versa, there will be no crash. But there's a better way to put it. She was not endowing herself with the causal power to act on a sequence—on the sequence of events that lead or not to a crash. No, she was endowing herself with a much weaker power, which is—okay, that's her name—a counter-factual power over the past. "If I had decided to travel the day after, in that other possible world, the crash that in our world occurred on June 1st would not have occurred on June 1st." Counter-factual power over the past. This notion—this must be my iPhone somewhere—this notion was put forward by, I think, one of the greatest living American philosophers. His name is Alvin Plantinga. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame—to use the French pronunciation, after all—University of Notre Dame, Indiana. And as his name indicates, he's a Dutch Calvinist who believes in predestination and free will, precisely. Counter-factual power of the past. I'm almost finished. Yeah. So, fourth and last chapter. Yeah, well, I'm not going to insist on this, but I had in order to do—for those of you who are philosophers—I had to return to the first serious metaphysical argument. Diodorus Cronus was a contemporary of Aristotle, and he incredibly—he axiomatized, *avant la lettre*, the free will in a deterministic world. So, to make it simple: the past is fixed. There's nothing I can do now such that if I were to do it, the past would have been different. The act of cowardice that I did fifty years ago would not have occurred. The impossible doesn't logically follow from the possible. Okay, that's very abstract. But there is a possible which neither is presently true nor will be so. That is, the future is open, branching out. All of this looks self-evident, except that Diodorus Cronus demonstrated that these three axioms are incompatible. And the French philosopher Jules Vuillemin wrote a beautiful book called *Contingency or Necessity*, re-reading the history of Western philosophy as many attempts at transcending this obstacle here. Okay, the economic crisis as my last chapter, as a crisis of the future. Economy is no longer capable of producing a future through self-transcendence. That's how I see the origin of the current crisis. And I see two main reasons for this impotence. First, capitalism cannot survive unless it believes it is immortal. This is why growth is held to be sacred. And yet, from now on, capitalism stands in the same relation to its own mortality as we do, we human beings. It knows that it will die, but not when, neither the day nor the hour. And if it's mortal precisely, I will try to show that this prevents the emergence of the self-transcendent mechanism. Secondly, economy has mystified political life, the very thing without which no self-transcendent future can be produced. Economy has conquered the whole of society, destroying the exteriority on which it depends. So it's a suicide. What becomes of the concept of endogenous fixed point under these circumstances? Can it still be the future if we don't want it? If we don't want our destiny? If we can choose our destiny, doesn't that mean that we can also refuse it? It was in posing these questions that I was led to devise the method I call "enlightened doomsdaying" in French, *catastrophisme éclairé*, enlightened catastrophe. Suppose we stand the formula of French economic planning I mentioned before on its head. So now the question is—I will say why I call this the "Jonah and the Jonas paradox," referring to two prophets: the German Hans Jonas, that's 20th century, and Jonah, the biblical prophet of the 8th century before our common era. You know, the guy who refused to predict the fall of Nineveh. And as you may know—that's just an aside in passing—but I mean, Nineveh today is called Mosul. And the so-called—how do you call it in English?—I mean, Islamic State destroyed Jonah's mausoleum in Mosul. Bravo. So, it's a matter of achieving by concerted deliberation and study an image of the future that is sufficiently pessimistic to be repulsive and sufficiently credible to give rise to actions that will prevent it from being realized. Suppose we invert the formula. It cannot work for one reason: it's not the future if you stop it. How can we organize ourselves around the future that we do not want? Because if we succeed, that won't be the future. It's not the future if you stop it. It's a quote. It's a quote from Spielberg's movie *Minority Report*, which is based on a beautiful short story by Philip K. Dick, which itself is based on Voltaire's great metaphysical novel meant to make fun of the Leibnizian system, called *Zadig*. Okay, that's the filiation. Voltaire, Philip K. Dick, Spielberg. D.K. going downward, downhill, downhill. So, you may remember there is this incredible dialogue: "Let's not kid ourselves, we are arresting individuals who have broken no law." "But they will!" The Pre-Crime Commission—this is in the movie, I'm not making it up—the Pre-Crime Commission itself is absolute metaphysics. The Precogs, those who predict the future, see the future, and they are never wrong. "But it's not the future if you stop it. Isn't that a fundamental paradox?" That's in the movie. And then comes Tom Cruise: "Yes, it is." Yeah, it's... okay, this is the paradox I have—we have to deal with. So, this is how I solve the—and here this is becoming very complex and I have minus five minutes to flesh this out. In order for the—the problem is that we have to organize ourselves around the future that we don't want to happen. So it's not the future. It cannot be a fixed point. So at the same time we want two opposite things. In order for the expected catastrophe to exert a deterrent effect on the present, it is necessary that the catastrophe be part of the future, written down, as it were, on the great scroll of history. But if this is the case, we are doomed. It is necessary then that both the occurrence of the catastrophe and its non-occurrence be part of the future at the same time. What does this "and" mean if it's not a contradiction? Well, the answer is to be found, that's my work at least, in the philosophy of quantum information. You may have heard of Schrödinger's cat. So long as the box containing the unfortunate cat remains unopened, we must say that the cat is both dead and alive. Or more precisely, that the living state and the dead state coexist in a relation of superposition. Opening the box puts an end not to what is too often called "uncertainty," but to what in German is called *Unbestimmtheit*, which would be translated not as uncertainty but as indeterminacy, *Unbestimmtheit*, indeterminacy. Let me illustrate this with a more mundane example. Once upon a time, I had an American girlfriend and she lived in Stanford and I lived in Paris. So it was not very convenient, of course. And I don't know why she insisted on the importance of sending, exchanging Valentine cards on Valentine's Day. It's supposed to be a French invention, Saint-Valentin, but I've never practiced that. Anyway, she—for her, it was a problem. So one day, one year, she sent me—you know, this typical—these typical American cards with two sheets and you have something written on the first side and then on the third side. That's a punchline, huh? So the card I received on Valentine's Day in Paris had the following structure: "This is, or this is not, a Valentine card, depending on whether when you receive it you will already have sent me or not a Valentine card." So this is exactly the notion of superposition. Until she knew that I had not sent actually a Valentine card, the state of this card was indeterminate. Not uncertain, but indeterminate. So it's exactly the same structure. So the endogenous fixed point in that case is the superposition of the catastrophe and the non-catastrophe. And that's what the 12th camel in this case is. One last word. Let me quote the most important French poet, Victor Hugo: "A man is an earthworm enamored with a star," in *Ruy Blas*. If man is an earthworm enamored with a star, economy should in principle be concerned with the earthworm, its finitude, its limited needs. But with the cult of growth, economy has become the star, which is our guide only because it recedes as we advance. In truth, growth has all the qualities of a panic. Today the star has burned out. Etymology helps us describe the resulting state. Well, in French we call that a *désastre*, but in English it's "disaster." Disaster means *aster*, *asteroid*, the disappearance of the star. That's what disaster means: the star is no longer there. Actually there is another word which has the same etymology. It's "desire." And that's—that's really interesting. Desire—say it in Latin—*desiderare*, *sidus*, *sidere*, that's a star. *De-sidus*. So desire is the absence of the star. That's why you desire something: you've lost your star. But here it's a disaster. Those who call for slower growth or even no growth, partial though I am to their arguments, seem to me not to sufficiently appreciate the dilemma facing us. One does not wean a drug addict from his drug overnight. One does not renounce one's faith without suffering. Deprived of the sacred, condemned to live in a world without growth, who or what will be able to satisfy the desire for the star, for the infinite that we harbor within us? Thank you very much. [Žižek takes the stage. Thunderous applause. He adjusts his notes and clears his throat.] Could you turn off the light? The lights are there. Okay, simply go on. I go on. The chiefs are there. Okay, perfect. I cannot emphasize enough how honored I am to be here. First, in the city of Portland. You can imagine what I did this morning: I went to the sacred place here, which is Powell's the bookstore, of course. You know, Hegel says something wonderful in his lectures on the philosophy of history, that wonderful idealist remark: that the Peloponnesian War, the real one, was fought so that Thucydides was able to write a book on it. This is the spiritual game. In the same sense, I agree with you, the city of San Francisco was constructed so that Hitchcock was able to shoot *Vertigo* in it. And Portland is here to have the bookstore Powell's. If you lose that one, you lose your endogenous fixed point and so on, you. And no play with superposition here, you. Okay. So, I'm proud to be here. Point two. Thanks to all of you, especially John and Michael for organizing this and I'm especially honored to be here with my friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Not only this, it's more than a friend. He is really one of those whom I consider my secret master. You know like, I read his books and then I behaved towards you—I didn't tell you this—in a totally opportunistic way in the sense of: I follow a certain line of thought, then I discover that you took a different line, so once I really acted learning that as a pure Stalinist. I quickly ran home and erased all those files which didn't fit with your... I tried to change my own past which didn't fit with yours. So I'm just glad to be here. I have so many points to... but let's leave this to further our later debate to go on. Let me just deliver my paper, which unfortunately will not have this logical consistency of yours, but it will make some points which I think that at a deeper level do echo some of your points. Let me begin with a very weird film. Probably not a lot of you saw it because it's half forgotten today. It's a religious Christian film called *The Rapture* from '91, written and directed by Michael Tolkin. A film in which Mimi Rogers plays Sharon, a young LA woman who works during the day as a phone operator endlessly repeating the same questions in a small cubicle, while in the evening she engages in orgies and so on. Bored and dissatisfied leading such an empty life, Sharon becomes member of a sect which preaches that the end of time and rapture are imminent. So turning into a passionate believer, she begins to practice a new pious lifestyle. She gets married with Randy, one of her previous swinging partners, and they have a daughter, Mary. Six years later, when Randy is shot to death by a madman, this totally meaningless catastrophe makes her, Sharon and her daughter, even more convinced that rapture is approaching. Sharon believes God told her that she should go with Mary to a nearby desert camping place and wait there until the two of them, she and her daughter, will be taken up to heaven to be reunited with Randy. Mary, the daughter, gets impatient and proposes her mother that they simply kill themselves so that they reach heaven quickly. After a couple of weeks, Sharon decides, totally desperate, tired of waiting, decides to do this. She shoots her daughter, but then stops, doesn't shoot herself, realizing that suiciders are not allowed into heaven. But the point is not that this is a simple opportunistic fear. No. She immediately goes to the police, confesses her act and is arrested and taken to a local jail. Now up to this point, it can be a simple, even atheist critical story about how religious fanaticism ends up in disaster. We can imagine the ending: how Sharon is alone, totally broken, aware of the horror she has committed, and so on and so on. But now the reason comes why I like the movie. At this point, totally weird things begin to happen. While she is desperate, alone in the prison cell, rapture happens. The real one. Literally, in all naivety, including bad special effects. First, deep in the night, Mary, her deceased daughter, appears to her with two angels and then a loud trumpet blast is heard all around and prison bars fall down. She escapes the prison, runs into the desert and sees the four horsemen running around—horsemen of the apocalypse. I like this first reversal, because it is as if we have a brutal, ironic God who does the opposite of what we half-believers, half-atheists would have expected. Our expectation is something like, "Oh, maybe Bible is not to be taken literally. Of course, all these are ridiculous, superstitious stories, but it's just that, you know, we should look at it metaphorically, symbolically. It simply means there is some deeper spiritual truth, whatever." No, here God's message to man is something like: "You read the Bible. What did you think? That I was kidding or what? No, screw your search for deeper meaning. I wrote what I planned and here you got it now." Now comes an even weirder reversal. That's not the end. Sharon is then raptured, transported to a purgatory-like landscape. We see paradise in far distance like some enlightened castle. Then, in a vision, Mary, her deceased daughter, approaches her and pleads with her to accept God. She said, in a very Pascalian way: "It doesn't matter, do you really believe or not? Just say, 'Jesus, I love you,' or whatever and look, we are here, me and Randy, your husband, my father, we are just gladly waiting for you." Then something incredible happens, and that's the end of the film already. Sharon simply refuses. Although again there is no doubt now,
doesn't matter. This is the title of my talk. Yeah, you see it here. Yeah. But first I should say that I... it's an immense pleasure for me to be invited to join in conversation with Slavoj. And I want to thank John Smyth and Michael Clark for this, and I want to thank Reg for introducing me. By the way, you made a Freudian slip. I've been Professor of Social and Political Philosophy and not Economy. Economics. And the economy are for me the enemy, total. So, I must admit that I wasn't familiar with your work, Slavoj, until friends told me, "You know, Žižek," that's how you're called in France, "discusses your reading of *Vertigo*. Žižek refers to your metaphysics of projected time, etcetera, etcetera." So I hastened to read the books they brought to my attention and realized to my astonishment that I had never had a more perspicacious or a more profound reader. I then sat down to read more of your books, and I'm still a long way from having read them all. Who could boast of such a thing apart from you yourself, I suppose? And as far as our encounter here is concerned, at least as a piece of intellectual theater—we are in a theater after all—there might be a problem because I find myself in agreement with so many points you make in your work. But of course, the feeling may not be mutual. You'll tell me. And but of course, our points of reference, our styles of thinking, our commitments are very different. So we'll see what happens. In the talk I'm going to deliver now, there will be a good number of references to Žižek's works, but I won't make them explicit. So it's your task, you who I understand know Slavoj's work very well, to try to guess what they are. And maybe it's your task too, if you're willing to play that game. Okay. So the title of my talk is "Lacan's 12th Camel and the Collapse of Self-Transcendence." And Reg already spoke a lot about me, about the concept of self-transcendence. I'm going to talk about the 12th camel now. So, it's a joke. And I was delighted to discover that Slavoj and I, we share a taste for jokes. Not any kind of jokes, of course; jokes with epistemological or metaphysical implications. And Jacques Lacan himself was very fond of mathematical puzzles, as we know. One day the following parable occurred to him. Here it is. An old Arab, sensing that his end was near, drew up a last will and testament distributing his wealth among his three sons. And he told them the following: "You, the eldest, you shall have half. You, the next eldest, you shall have a quarter. As for you, the youngest, you shall have a sixth." Now it happened that the estate consisted of camels. Problem. The brothers were extremely angry. None of them wished to carve up a few camels, and they were on the verge of murdering one another when at last they agreed to ask the local judge, the cadi, what they should do. After a moment's reflection, the judge said to them: "Take this camel under my tent. This is not a camel, by the way, it's a dromedary, it has only one hump. But okay, forgive me for this. Take this camel under my tent, I make a gift of it to you. Add it to your patrimony. If Allah wills it, you will return it to me sooner than you think." And indeed, the eldest son was happy to take the half of that is camels. Likewise, the middle son to take one-fourth, that is camels, and the youngest son camels. plus plus equals So the 12th camel was able to be returned to its owner. The counter-gift immediately canceling the gift made by the judge. The 12th camel, or the symbolic camel, stands for something that is at once useless—after all, it didn't serve anything—and indispensable, for by means of it the social contract comes into existence. Later on, Jacques Derrida's disciples were to call the 12th camel a "supplement," playing on the double meaning of the word supplement, at least in French: something that on the one hand is added to an already constituted totality, whole, and on the other makes up for something missing, a lack. Later on, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann made use of Lacan's parable in order to illustrate his theory of law. And if you Google search "Das zwölfte Kamel" online, you will find hundreds of sites devoted to this parable. It has to be in German, of course. I believe that every self-instituted social order is created through a paradox of this kind, the economic world no less than any other. Think of it. The symbolic camel passes between the judge and the three brothers, but the two phases of the exchange are not on the same level. This is why they do not in fact cancel each other out. The camel offered by the judge bears the mark of its owner's authority and exteriority. When it comes back to the judge, it is simply the sign of a lack in the distribution of parts. If you make the sum of these three fractions here, you don't get You get 11/12ths. That's how it works. The politician seeking public office who says to his fellow citizens—that was Mitterrand in 1981—"give me power so that I may give it back to you," is saying something similar. The power that returns to the people is crowned with the sign of the general will. Every human group achieves unity—that's a contention—by projecting itself outside itself by means of the equivalent of the 12th camel. In philosophy, as Reg said already, this structure has a name: self-transcendence. Its enigma resounds with the mystery of incarnation. A God who makes himself man is at once transcendent and immanent. Man among men, he must constantly resort to ruse and trickery in order to defuse their violence. He cannot help but fall victim to this violence in the end, and it is his expulsion that re-establishes peace and that makes him God—a God that to begin with, perhaps, he was not. There would be no economic life without self-transcendence. Economic science, or economics, is not yet aware of this. Let me take the example of money. My great friend, French economist André Orléan, in an exceptional book called *The Empire of Value* in English, has shown that money remains the intruder, the odd one out, the unwelcome third party in orthodox economic doctrine. Money has no place in its central dogma, the theory of general economic equilibrium. It is simply that which comes after the fact to facilitate the circulation of commodities once an equilibrium has been calculated and the terms of the exchange determined. Now, just as the 12th camel is a camel like any other when it figures in the calculation of shares, while nonetheless being an external, transcendent camel by virtue of the fact that it is what makes sharing possible and therefore the community as well, so too money is an incarnation or embodiment of the whole community and one that, like other commodities, circulates within it. The reason money can be both transcendent and immanent is that, like the camel of the fable, it has the character of a lack. When all is said and done, it is only the acknowledgment of a debt. Actually, American economists use the acronym IOU, the three letters I-O-U, which means "I owe you." It's a treasury, and as we know, the treasury is empty. But it works anyway like that. Keynes, a genius, understood all this. He regarded the desire to possess money for its own sake as the supreme evil. Think of it. The three brothers were certainly tempted to keep the 12th camel for themselves since, after all, the judge gave it to them. But very quickly, however, they saw the trap that had been set for them, for they were faced with a terrible question: who shall get the 12th camel? Once again, the prospect of conflict, probably of violence as well. In other words, the symbolic camel could fulfill its messianic role only on the express condition that no one wished to have it for himself. I could restate the main conclusions of my research in the philosophy of the human sciences by casting them in terms of this one figure, the 12th camel. They are embodied in turn by the following things: not only power and money, which I have just now briefly mentioned, but also wealth, victims, the future, catastrophe, apocalypse, and last but not least, God. In view of my recent work bearing on the metaphysical foundations of economics and of Slavoj's wish that we talk about God and evil, I have chosen to concentrate on the economic catastrophe that we are currently experiencing. The general title of this symposium was advertised as, and that was your choice, "Is God dead, unconscious, or just evil?" So I translate that in my own terms as—I replace God with the future, and that becomes—"Is the future closed, or even foreclosed, obsolete, or just indeterminate?" Replacing God by the future may be justified in the following manner. I defend the thesis, not that economy has become our new sacrament, something we hold to be sacred, but that like the sacred, economy has an ambivalent relationship to violence. It "contains" violence in the two senses of the word: to contain means to have within oneself, but also to keep in check, to stem. Economy, like the sacred before it, erects a barrier against violence by violent means. Now, the domination of the world by economy—I think you would say of course, Capital—has radically changed our relationship to the future by making the future the equivalent of a 12th camel. That's what I want to show now. That is, by causing the future to emerge through a mechanism of self-transcendence. It is this relationship to the future that today is in the process of completely falling apart. If the future has become the new sacred, then its collapse will not be without grave consequences. Second part. Oh, sorry. This is a publicity for my recent book, so I pass very quickly. So logic of self-transcendence and I want to introduce a concept that may sound barbaric: the endogenous fixed point. I hope it will become clear in a few minutes. First of all, so, I would like to introduce a concept that is less picturesque than the 12th camel but more rigorous: the endogenous fixed point. When the cyberneticist Ross Ashby conceived of an electronic turtle in the 1950s, the first thing he did was to build two turtles and to program each one of them to imitate the movements of the other. You had two turtles and they were following each other. What do you think happened? Well, to help you find what happened, recall the story of the two absent-minded professors. I'm absent-minded, I think Slavoj is also, no? Yeah, completely. So that might happen to us this after—tonight, maybe. So, we have received invitations to the same event and we decide to go together. Neither of us knows how to get there, but each one believes that the other knows. The path that emerges from the two of us following each other exhibits a certain stability for a time, but it cannot last, of course. Sooner or later one of us will ask: "Are you sure we're going the right way?" and you will say, "But I'm following you!" "No, I'm following you!" The properties of such paths have been studied in detail in recent decades using subtle and yet, everything considered, fairly elementary mathematics. But it is the phenomenological aspect that interests me here. And first I want to—so, I need the sound now, the real sound, the good sound. So, I'm going to show you a clip. It's an Argentinian clip. It's an ad for a business magazine. It goes very quickly, so be extremely attentive. There are two words spoken in Spanish: "*Cruza?*" "*Sí.*" "*Cruza*" in the given context means "Are you crossing the street?" and the answer is "*Sí,*" "Yes, I am." Okay. So be ready, it's going very fast. And the sound is going to work, huh? We need the sound. Okay. [Plays video: Two blind men approach an intersection. One stops and asks, "Cruza?" The other, thinking he's being offered help, says, "Sí." They both grab each other's arm and walk out into traffic together, causing multiple crashes.] You have two blind people. If you have two blind people, neither can see—neither one can see that the other is blind as well, of course. So the one is really asking, "You see that I'm blind... Cruza... You see that I'm blind, would you help me cross the street?" But the other is answering "Yes, Sí" to a different question: "I see that you are blind, do you want me to help you cross the street?" You see how it works? The moral of the—it went very fast, so I don't know if you saw that very clearly. The moral of the story is that it's better not to be informed than to believe you are informed when you are not. And the current financial crisis is driven in part by mechanisms of this kind. So, double mediation that creates a trajectory. Let's return to the two absent-minded professors. Their mutual imitation generates a trajectory, a path, which seems to be guided from within by an exterior point: the destination. That's what we think from within. But from without—the theorist who studies this, me putting myself at the exterior of the mechanism—I see very well that this path that we took together—I'm not going to say "chose" together, I guess—is a creation of the double imitation. It doesn't—the destination never pre-existed the path itself. So we have this structure here: attractor and dynamic. Replace this by "and" and "and" or destination and history or process. From within, everything occurs as if the attractor were attracting the dynamic, were guiding the dynamic. But actually from without, it is the dynamic that creates its own attractor. This kind of attractor, I call them "endogenous fixed points," because that's a fixed point but it's produced from within, the endogenous. It's produced from within. Okay. Next chapter. The future as an endogenous fixed point. The relationship to the future instituted by economy is a quite singular one. The market, in particular, is pulled forward by an idea of what has not yet happened that it projects in front of itself, like a mountain climber, if you like, who ascends a smooth ice-covered slope by throwing his pick ahead of him and pulling himself up to a new height. Well, this image cannot work. It lacks an essential element in which the paradox of self-transcendence or the future resides. Times to come cannot be said to resemble the face of a mountain since, by definition, they have no present existence. And yet the market acts as though it were able to give a kind of reality to what does not yet exist. So for the ice-covered face of a mountain we must therefore substitute the image—and Reg already referred to it—of Baron Münchhausen, who was able to pull himself out of a swamp by his own hair—that's what this picture represents here—but in another version, by his bootstraps. Hence the phrase "bootstrapping," which has become common usage in especially in American English, for instance anyone who has booted up a computer. Okay, if I ask you, you boot up your computer, those boots, they come from where? I mean, where are the boots in your computer? Well, they come from this image. So they come from Germany, of course. Baron Münchhausen, it's a novel of the 18th century by... his name was Rasp, I think. Yeah. And it's very interesting to see how this image went to America when the German-Jewish scientists fled from Germany and came to this country. Okay, I want now to talk about a configuration of the relationship to the future that seems to reconcile economic reason and political reason, which is to say, makes economy the solution to the political problem par excellence, which is the problem of violence, of course. I call it coordination by means of the future. Let me give you a specific example of what I mean by that. But just an example. I wouldn't like you to think that this figure is summarized by the example I'm going to take now. I'm referring to the French economic planning system as it existed in the three decades of rapid growth following World War II. Nothing to do with the Gosplan, huh? It's... and I want to quote here from the economist Pierre Massé, who was one of the founders of this—okay, this Nietzschean quote, I skip it. No, no, lack of time, huh? Ooh la la, it's already... yeah, shortage of time. So Massé described the task of the *plan*, as we say in French. Its task is to achieve by concerted deliberation and study—and all the forces of French society were the factors, the elements of French society were present at this, the elaboration of the French *plan*—and it was really a collective deliberation, democratic deliberation. Its task is to achieve an image of the future that is sufficiently optimistic to be desirable and sufficiently credible to give rise to actions that will bring about its own realization. Suppose it were not credible, of course. You could try to find as a fixed point the paradise, but absolutely not credible, so the loop wouldn't loop back on itself, of course. It has to be both desirable and credible. So, coordination by means of the future entails that agents all take the same future as being fixed. I have to say what I mean by "fixed" here. No matter what an agent does, he assumes that his action will have no effect on the future even though the action is causally responsible in part for bringing it about. So this is the diagram which represents this. The agents take the future—that is, an attractor—as fixed, while they very well know that they cause the future to happen. How can you take as fixed something that you very well know you are causing to happen? Well, because one has to introduce another relationship other than causality, and it's called counter-factual causality. Just two words about this. It would require hours to flesh this out satisfactorily. So, this is a famous quote from French philosopher and mathematician Pascal in the 17th century: "Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed." This is a counter-factual proposition. It's called counter-factual because the antecedent, "had Cleopatra's nose been shorter," is contrary to facts, counter-factual. Cleopatra's nose was as long as it was. That's all. Counter-factual propositions do not behave like conditional indicative conditional propositions. Think of the contrast between the two following examples: If Shakespeare has not written *Hamlet*, someone else has, because *Hamlet* is a play, there must be an author, so if it's not Shakespeare, it's someone else. Now, let's reason in counter-factual terms: Had Shakespeare not composed, not written *Hamlet*, someone else would have written it. Very unlikely, if you believe that only the Bard had the sufficient genius to write that. So you see, when you go from indicative to counter-factual, it's very, very different. So I return to the previous diagram. The future is taken to be fixed in the sense counter-factually independent of our actions, but it is causally dependent on our actions. Okay, this is how the coordination by means of the future functions. The future in that case is a fixed point, a common point of reference for everyone, but this fixed point is an endogenous fixed point since it is causally produced by the actions of individual agents. But it is immediately apparent that in order for this to work, the loop connecting past and future must be a closed loop, like this. Well, first let me say I make the distinction between two kinds of metaphysics of the future. The one I call "occurring time," where the past is fixed and you have a branching out structure, possible futures, the branches that are not taken by history that will never occur. In that case, I'm going to cite an Argentine writer: "Time is a garden of forking paths." "*El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan*," because you are half-Argentine. Projected time: the future is fixed, and this is a reference point, the benchmark, and we are going to see that that implies that the past is open. And in Slavoj's work, there is a very interesting passage in one of the many books that you wrote about the openness of the past, but we don't have—that's not the same meaning you don't give the same meaning to—and it would be interesting, we can do that later or tomorrow, to compare these two ways of construing the openness of the past. And the past and the future must come together in a closed loop. The future is the fixed point of the loop. Okay. And every possible occurs either in the present or in the future. That which does not occur in that metaphysics of temporality is impossible. Sorry. Now there is a closure condition. The reactions to a future that is held to be fixed must be able to causally produce this same future. We coordinate around a given future, an image of the future that we take as a fixed point, we react to that image. There is no guarantee that our reactions together will causally produce the future in question. But if that is not the case, then it doesn't work; the experience of projected time doesn't exist in that case. This is very important, this point. I'm not going to—but I'm not going to flesh that out. Sorry. Everything occurs in that structure of time and of the future as if the agents were pre-determined in a sense; the future is written, except we don't know what's in the future. We haven't—we don't have access to what is written on the great scroll of the future. But at the same time, we consider ourselves as free agents. So the combination of a pre-determination and of free will is precisely what Max Weber in his thesis about the connection between the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and the spirit of capitalism consisted in. But I'm not going to—for those of you who know this, this is exactly the same structure. We have a paradox here, of course. The paradox is: can one choose one's destiny? Free will and predestination. Can one choose that which in the past determines one's fate? Well, choosing one's destiny is—it's not my invention, of course. If you read Heidegger, Bergson, his most famous student Sartre, and many others, and Max Weber's thesis, this is at the center of the—this paradox is at the center of their theses. But I'm going to take—to illustrate this—to take a personal example. I have—my children are Franco-Brazilian. That is, their mother is Brazilian. And my daughter—that's an aside, but that's a malaise of the economy in Western Europe, in France in particular. She couldn't find a job in France, so she decided to—she's perfectly bi-cultural, bilingual, etcetera—to move to Brazil, where she found a great job, a great husband, and a great son, that is my grandson. But she returns to France from time to time, and she was on the flight—she was onboard the Air France from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Links Rio to Paris every day. On May 31st, Had she decided to travel the day after, she would be in the ocean. You may remember that there was a big crash. Just one day before, that's what the military Americans call the "near miss." It was a near miss. I was at Stanford at the time, so when I heard about the crash, I knew that my daughter, Béatrice, was already in Paris. But nevertheless, I was—I had a retrospective panic, fear, and I called her and I couldn't hide my retrospective fright. But she was very calm and she told me the following: "Oh, sorry, it's in French. Actually we don't speak French or Portuguese together, but—so let me translate. Had I postponed my journey by one day, the crash would not have occurred on that day." And my daughter is not a philosopher, but—well, professional philosopher, but in a sense she is. So what does that mean? I mean, one could say in ordinary terms she believes that she was born under a good star, etcetera, so whenever she flies between Paris and—between Rio and Paris, or vice versa, there will be no crash. But there's a better way to put it. She was not endowing herself with the causal power to act on a sequence—on the sequence of events that lead or not to a crash. No, she was endowing herself with a much weaker power, which is—okay, that's her name—a counter-factual power over the past. "If I had decided to travel the day after, in that other possible world, the crash that in our world occurred on June 1st would not have occurred on June 1st." Counter-factual power over the past. This notion—this must be my iPhone somewhere—this notion was put forward by, I think, one of the greatest living American philosophers. His name is Alvin Plantinga. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame—to use the French pronunciation, after all—University of Notre Dame, Indiana. And as his name indicates, he's a Dutch Calvinist who believes in predestination and free will, precisely. Counter-factual power of the past. I'm almost finished. Yeah. So, fourth and last chapter. Yeah, well, I'm not going to insist on this, but I had in order to do—for those of you who are philosophers—I had to return to the first serious metaphysical argument. Diodorus Cronus was a contemporary of Aristotle, and he incredibly—he axiomatized, *avant la lettre*, the free will in a deterministic world. So, to make it simple: the past is fixed. There's nothing I can do now such that if I were to do it, the past would have been different. The act of cowardice that I did fifty years ago would not have occurred. The impossible doesn't logically follow from the possible. Okay, that's very abstract. But there is a possible which neither is presently true nor will be so. That is, the future is open, branching out. All of this looks self-evident, except that Diodorus Cronus demonstrated that these three axioms are incompatible. And the French philosopher Jules Vuillemin wrote a beautiful book called *Contingency or Necessity*, re-reading the history of Western philosophy as many attempts at transcending this obstacle here. Okay, the economic crisis as my last chapter, as a crisis of the future. Economy is no longer capable of producing a future through self-transcendence. That's how I see the origin of the current crisis. And I see two main reasons for this impotence. First, capitalism cannot survive unless it believes it is immortal. This is why growth is held to be sacred. And yet, from now on, capitalism stands in the same relation to its own mortality as we do, we human beings. It knows that it will die, but not when, neither the day nor the hour. And if it's mortal precisely, I will try to show that this prevents the emergence of the self-transcendent mechanism. Secondly, economy has mystified political life, the very thing without which no self-transcendent future can be produced. Economy has conquered the whole of society, destroying the exteriority on which it depends. So it's a suicide. What becomes of the concept of endogenous fixed point under these circumstances? Can it still be the future if we don't want it? If we don't want our destiny? If we can choose our destiny, doesn't that mean that we can also refuse it? It was in posing these questions that I was led to devise the method I call "enlightened doomsdaying" in French, *catastrophisme éclairé*, enlightened catastrophe. Suppose we stand the formula of French economic planning I mentioned before on its head. So now the question is—I will say why I call this the "Jonah and the Jonas paradox," referring to two prophets: the German Hans Jonas, that's 20th century, and Jonah, the biblical prophet of the 8th century before our common era. You know, the guy who refused to predict the fall of Nineveh. And as you may know—that's just an aside in passing—but I mean, Nineveh today is called Mosul. And the so-called—how do you call it in English?—I mean, Islamic State destroyed Jonah's mausoleum in Mosul. Bravo. So, it's a matter of achieving by concerted deliberation and study an image of the future that is sufficiently pessimistic to be repulsive and sufficiently credible to give rise to actions that will prevent it from being realized. Suppose we invert the formula. It cannot work for one reason: it's not the future if you stop it. How can we organize ourselves around the future that we do not want? Because if we succeed, that won't be the future. It's not the future if you stop it. It's a quote. It's a quote from Spielberg's movie *Minority Report*, which is based on a beautiful short story by Philip K. Dick, which itself is based on Voltaire's great metaphysical novel meant to make fun of the Leibnizian system, called *Zadig*. Okay, that's the filiation. Voltaire, Philip K. Dick, Spielberg. D.K. going downward, downhill, downhill. So, you may remember there is this incredible dialogue: "Let's not kid ourselves, we are arresting individuals who have broken no law." "But they will!" The Pre-Crime Commission—this is in the movie, I'm not making it up—the Pre-Crime Commission itself is absolute metaphysics. The Precogs, those who predict the future, see the future, and they are never wrong. "But it's not the future if you stop it. Isn't that a fundamental paradox?" That's in the movie. And then comes Tom Cruise: "Yes, it is." Yeah, it's... okay, this is the paradox I have—we have to deal with. So, this is how I solve the—and here this is becoming very complex and I have minus five minutes to flesh this out. In order for the—the problem is that we have to organize ourselves around the future that we don't want to happen. So it's not the future. It cannot be a fixed point. So at the same time we want two opposite things. In order for the expected catastrophe to exert a deterrent effect on the present, it is necessary that the catastrophe be part of the future, written down, as it were, on the great scroll of history. But if this is the case, we are doomed. It is necessary then that both the occurrence of the catastrophe and its non-occurrence be part of the future at the same time. What does this "and" mean if it's not a contradiction? Well, the answer is to be found, that's my work at least, in the philosophy of quantum information. You may have heard of Schrödinger's cat. So long as the box containing the unfortunate cat remains unopened, we must say that the cat is both dead and alive. Or more precisely, that the living state and the dead state coexist in a relation of superposition. Opening the box puts an end not to what is too often called "uncertainty," but to what in German is called *Unbestimmtheit*, which would be translated not as uncertainty but as indeterminacy, *Unbestimmtheit*, indeterminacy. Let me illustrate this with a more mundane example. Once upon a time, I had an American girlfriend and she lived in Stanford and I lived in Paris. So it was not very convenient, of course. And I don't know why she insisted on the importance of sending, exchanging Valentine cards on Valentine's Day. It's supposed to be a French invention, Saint-Valentin, but I've never practiced that. Anyway, she—for her, it was a problem. So one day, one year, she sent me—you know, this typical—these typical American cards with two sheets and you have something written on the first side and then on the third side. That's a punchline, huh? So the card I received on Valentine's Day in Paris had the following structure: "This is, or this is not, a Valentine card, depending on whether when you receive it you will already have sent me or not a Valentine card." So this is exactly the notion of superposition. Until she knew that I had not sent actually a Valentine card, the state of this card was indeterminate. Not uncertain, but indeterminate. So it's exactly the same structure. So the endogenous fixed point in that case is the superposition of the catastrophe and the non-catastrophe. And that's what the 12th camel in this case is. One last word. Let me quote the most important French poet, Victor Hugo: "A man is an earthworm enamored with a star," in *Ruy Blas*. If man is an earthworm enamored with a star, economy should in principle be concerned with the earthworm, its finitude, its limited needs. But with the cult of growth, economy has become the star, which is our guide only because it recedes as we advance. In truth, growth has all the qualities of a panic. Today the star has burned out. Etymology helps us describe the resulting state. Well, in French we call that a *désastre*, but in English it's "disaster." Disaster means *aster*, *asteroid*, the disappearance of the star. That's what disaster means: the star is no longer there. Actually there is another word which has the same etymology. It's "desire." And that's—that's really interesting. Desire—say it in Latin—*desiderare*, *sidus*, *sidere*, that's a star. *De-sidus*. So desire is the absence of the star. That's why you desire something: you've lost your star. But here it's a disaster. Those who call for slower growth or even no growth, partial though I am to their arguments, seem to me not to sufficiently appreciate the dilemma facing us. One does not wean a drug addict from his drug overnight. One does not renounce one's faith without suffering. Deprived of the sacred, condemned to live in a world without growth, who or what will be able to satisfy the desire for the star, for the infinite that we harbor within us? Thank you very much. [Žižek takes the stage. Thunderous applause. He adjusts his notes and clears his throat.] Could you turn off the light? The lights are there. Okay, simply go on. I go on. The chiefs are there. Okay, perfect. I cannot emphasize enough how honored I am to be here. First, in the city of Portland. You can imagine what I did this morning: I went to the sacred place here, which is Powell's the bookstore, of course. You know, Hegel says something wonderful in his lectures on the philosophy of history, that wonderful idealist remark: that the Peloponnesian War, the real one, was fought so that Thucydides was able to write a book on it. This is the spiritual game. In the same sense, I agree with you, the city of San Francisco was constructed so that Hitchcock was able to shoot *Vertigo* in it. And Portland is here to have the bookstore Powell's. If you lose that one, you lose your endogenous fixed point and so on, you. And no play with superposition here, you. Okay. So, I'm proud to be here. Point two. Thanks to all of you, especially John and Michael for organizing this and I'm especially honored to be here with my friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Not only this, it's more than a friend. He is really one of those whom I consider my secret master. You know like, I read his books and then I behaved towards you—I didn't tell you this—in a totally opportunistic way in the sense of: I follow a certain line of thought, then I discover that you took a different line, so once I really acted learning that as a pure Stalinist. I quickly ran home and erased all those files which didn't fit with your... I tried to change my own past which didn't fit with yours. So I'm just glad to be here. I have so many points to... but let's leave this to further our later debate to go on. Let me just deliver my paper, which unfortunately will not have this logical consistency of yours, but it will make some points which I think that at a deeper level do echo some of your points. Let me begin with a very weird film. Probably not a lot of you saw it because it's half forgotten today. It's a religious Christian film called *The Rapture* from '91, written and directed by Michael Tolkin. A film in which Mimi Rogers plays Sharon, a young LA woman who works during the day as a phone operator endlessly repeating the same questions in a small cubicle, while in the evening she engages in orgies and so on. Bored and dissatisfied leading such an empty life, Sharon becomes member of a sect which preaches that the end of time and rapture are imminent. So turning into a passionate believer, she begins to practice a new pious lifestyle. She gets married with Randy, one of her previous swinging partners, and they have a daughter, Mary. Six years later, when Randy is shot to death by a madman, this totally meaningless catastrophe makes her, Sharon and her daughter, even more convinced that rapture is approaching. Sharon believes God told her that she should go with Mary to a nearby desert camping place and wait there until the two of them, she and her daughter, will be taken up to heaven to be reunited with Randy. Mary, the daughter, gets impatient and proposes her mother that they simply kill themselves so that they reach heaven quickly. After a couple of weeks, Sharon decides, totally desperate, tired of waiting, decides to do this. She shoots her daughter, but then stops, doesn't shoot herself, realizing that suiciders are not allowed into heaven. But the point is not that this is a simple opportunistic fear. No. She immediately goes to the police, confesses her act and is arrested and taken to a local jail. Now up to this point, it can be a simple, even atheist critical story about how religious fanaticism ends up in disaster. We can imagine the ending: how Sharon is alone, totally broken, aware of the horror she has committed, and so on and so on. But now the reason comes why I like the movie. At this point, totally weird things begin to happen. While she is desperate, alone in the prison cell, rapture happens. The real one. Literally, in all naivety, including bad special effects. First, deep in the night, Mary, her deceased daughter, appears to her with two angels and then a loud trumpet blast is heard all around and prison bars fall down. She escapes the prison, runs into the desert and sees the four horsemen running around—horsemen of the apocalypse. I like this first reversal, because it is as if we have a brutal, ironic God who does the opposite of what we half-believers, half-atheists would have expected. Our expectation is something like, "Oh, maybe Bible is not to be taken literally. Of course, all these are ridiculous, superstitious stories, but it's just that, you know, we should look at it metaphorically, symbolically. It simply means there is some deeper spiritual truth, whatever." No, here God's message to man is something like: "You read the Bible. What did you think? That I was kidding or what? No, screw your search for deeper meaning. I wrote what I planned and here you got it now." Now comes an even weirder reversal. That's not the end. Sharon is then raptured, transported to a purgatory-like landscape. We see paradise in far distance like some enlightened castle. Then, in a vision, Mary, her deceased daughter, approaches her and pleads with her to accept God. She said, in a very Pascalian way: "It doesn't matter, do you really believe or not? Just say, 'Jesus, I love you,' or whatever and look, we are here, me and Randy, your husband, my father, we are just gladly waiting for you." Then something incredible happens, and that's the end of the film already. Sharon simply refuses. Although again there is no doubt now,
Slavoj Žižek
there is God and so on, rapture. She said that I
there is God and so on, rapture. She said that I
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
am not ready to declare my love for God who acted with such
am not ready to declare my love for God who acted with such
Slavoj Žižek
cruelty towards my family for no reason
cruelty towards my family for no reason
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
at all. When Mary asks her, her
at all. When Mary asks her, her
Slavoj Žižek
mother, "Do you know, mother, what this means? Do you know how long you will be confined to stay here if you refuse to say to God 'I love you'?" Sharon replies: "Yes, I know. Forever." The end of the film. I mean, it's a totally crazy, incredible film. Why do I like it? So Sharon realizes that she wasted
mother, "Do you know, mother, what this means? Do you know how long you will be confined to stay here if you refuse to say to God 'I love you'?" Sharon replies: "Yes, I know. Forever." The end of the film. I mean, it's a totally crazy, incredible film. Why do I like it? So Sharon realizes that she wasted
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
her life appeasing
her life appeasing
Slavoj Žižek
a God who is only toying with her feelings. And that's the paradox of the film: it would be very easy to accept all this if we were to discover that God doesn't exist, that Sharon was just caught into her religious imagination, delirious imagination. But the paradox is: she persists in renouncing a God who is real but a narcissist giving us life for the sole purpose of demanding unconditional love in return, no matter how much damage his demands have inflicted on human lives. Now this is not a joke. Such indifferent and narcissistic God is part of a certain at least Christian tradition. For Nicolas Malebranche, a pupil of Descartes, in the same way that the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction—Malebranche had no illusions here—in helping those in distress, God also ultimately loves only himself. He merely uses us, our human suffering, to promulgate his own glory. So Malebranche drew this incredible conclusion: it is not true that if Christ had not come to earth to deliver humanity, that if Christ had not come to earth to redeem us, everyone would have been lost. Quite on the contrary, nobody would have been lost. All of us had to fall so that it gave God the opportunity to come and deliver some of us. It's a very weird logic and you find similar absolute miracles in Malebranche. For example, he said that at no point was God more happy than when he observed his son dying in pain on the cross. Okay. Now back to the movie. Sharon's resistance to God, her refusal to declare her love for him, is I would claim an authentic ethical act. It would be totally wrong to say that she rejects the false God and that in an authentically Christian version of the film the true Christ should appear at the end, proclaim her a true believer precisely because she rejected to declare that she loves the false God and so on and so on. The true temptation to be resisted is to declare our love for a God who doesn't deserve it, even if he really is a God. Now I confront the obvious naive materialist question: all this cannot but appear as a pseudo-topic, a rather stupid mental experiment. Isn't this obvious? Why engage in these stupid games? Isn't it that simply for a consequent materialist we should simply renounce God, there is no God, and not play these stupid games? God is, but he is maybe evil, not good, whatever. But I think that there is something much subtler here at work. We should, in the consequent materialism, undermine as it were the fiction of God from within. Because if we don't do that, then this fiction can prolong its hold over us in the form of disavowal, which is almost, I'm tempted to say, the way a great majority of us continue to believe. I'm always making this experiment with all my relatives, friends. I ask them: "Okay, cut the crap. Do you believe in God or not?" And it's absolutely incredible what answers do I have. Like half a year ago we had in London a conference on the actuality of theologico-political. And there were some big theologians and so on, and literary theorists, others. And I did something which obviously broke all the rules of polite conversation. I asked them: "Listen, I'm sorry, but this is a conference on theology. Do you believe in God or not?" It was incredible. They reacted as if I asked them, like, in what position did you have sex last night or what. Absolutely, one of them, I will name him, he is my good friend Eric Santner. He said, "Well, I prefer not to engage in that direction because I speak here as a literary theorist. Don't mess me into that." There were theologians then, leftist theologians who said, "Listen, that's not the point. The point is how to mobilize progressive politics today" and so on and so on. So I think that far from being an exception, this is our belief today. It's even something like, "I know there is no God, but he is nonetheless a noble and uplifting illusion." My some of my Jewish friends who are Zionists even one of them openly told me another version of this paradox when we debated West Bank Palestine. He said, "I know God doesn't exist, but nonetheless he gave us West Bank Palestine." You know? Why? Now now I'm going into much more serious waters. You can imagine what I will try to prove, in a bloody very serious way. I'm not kidding. I consider myself an atheist. But only through Christianity can you really be an atheist. You have to go through Christian experience. If not, then you don't believe it, but the fiction persists, determines you. How? Let me do now something for which I really hate myself, but it's necessary here. Let me repeat an old joke which I used, I would say, at least a conservative estimate, some fifteen to twenty times in my work. So it's an old joke, you are not obliged to laugh, but its structure is wonderful. You know that classical joke about an idiot who believes he is a grain of seed and is finally cured in the lunatic asylum, is left out, then comes running back, and his psychiatrist asks him, "But why are you so frightened? Why do you come back?" The guy says, "Well, I met a chicken and I was afraid the chicken will eat me." And the psychiatrist says, "But wait a minute, we cured you. You know that you are not a grain of corn or whatever." And he says, "Yes, I know it now, but does the chicken know it?" This is how we believe today. Another story which I used only five times in my books so I can tell it to you, the one you mentioned, quantum physics. We all admire he was a true genius, much more than Heisenberg who got it wrong with that uncertainty principle, Niels Bohr. You know there is a wonderful anecdote about him. He had a small wooden house in some suburbs around Copenhagen and at the entrance of that house there was a horseshoe. In Europe this is a superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the house. And a scientist friend visiting him told him, "Wait a minute, you are a scientist. You shouldn't be superstitious. Why do you have that horseshoe there?" You cannot beat Niels Bohr. You know what was his answer? "I know I don't believe in it, I'm a scientist, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's how this is ideology today. In what sense? Now you will say I'm telling you joke. Oh, let's go further. First, I'm saying this is what Jacques Lacan means by the idea, in late Lacan he liked to repeat that the formula of true atheism is not "God is dead" but "God is unconscious." It means precisely that for example in psychoanalysis, today patients are cynical. You know that Freudian standard joke: "this is not my mother." When you ask a patient, "who is that woman in your dream?" and he answers, "I don't know who that woman is, I'm just sure that it's not my mother." Well, today we don't have patients like that. A patient today would probably immediately tell you almost the opposite: "I don't know who that woman is in my dream, but I trust you, probably it has something to do with my mother or whatever." So the point is not to... the true task of psychoanalysis is not to convince you about your unconscious desires whatever, but to convince the chicken, which is your unconscious. It's much more difficult. Who knew this, although I'm very critical towards a lot of his work, Marx. What Marx meant by commodity fetishism is something much more mysterious than it may appear. Look how Marx begins his famous subchapter to the—the subdivision four of the chapter one of *Capital* on commodity fetishism. I quote Marx: "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Are we aware what a strange thing Marx is saying here? It's the exact opposite of the naive materialist enlightened critique of religion which says, "Oh, you," I'm simplifying it, "you idiot, you live in your obscure religious fantasies. No, but in reality, in reality..." No, Marx is saying the opposite: "You think a commodity is just an ordinary object there. You think money is just an instrument for us exchanging commodities. But what has to be brought out is precisely the implicit metaphysical topics that you practice even if you do not believe in it." In other words, even if you are an atheist, your unconscious remains divine. Which is why when Marx provides his definition of ideology, "*Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es,*" "They don't know it, but they are doing it." It doesn't mean the vulgarity: "Oh, you think one thing but you are doing another." It means: you do not know the illusions that you follow, but you are doing them. Like, to put it in simple terms: in your self-consciousness, you are a vulgar materialist, like utilitarian, you think money is just an object, blah blah. But what you are not aware is that in your social practice, you act as if you believe in magical properties in money. And commodities are here chicken. Marx evokes this idea when he says, "If commodities could speak, they would say this and so on and so on." It's this weird fiction of commodities speaking to another. Now, so again, the point is of fetishism: Marx is not that we live in some superstitions and some naive enlightened procedure should enable us to get rid of it. No, Marx's point is precisely that especially in modern era where we appear to be enlightened utilitarians, we are not aware of the theological niceties etc. which continue to structure our life. And my friend Alenka Zupančič, one of the members of my Slovene Lacanian gang, applied also this chicken joke, or Marx's joke on commodities, to God. She said, instead of lunatic asylum, imagine a revolutionary materialist society where those who still believe in God are treated like madmen and they are ideologically brainwashed. So imagine one of them being finally cured: "Now you know there is no God and so on," and he is released, but he comes running back and says he is scared of being punished by God. Now the teacher there tells him, "Teachers materialism, but you know now that God doesn't exist." He said, "I know that God is dead, but does God know it? I'm afraid that God didn't learn this news and so on." Now why am I mentioning this? Now I turn to my favorite theologian, the old Catholic British Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who got this point. He said that all other religions, of course you find in them atheists, people who don't believe in God. But he says only in Christianity you find a God who, at least for a brief moment, doesn't believe in himself. Here is this wonderful quote: "When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross, the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionaries choose a creed from all the creeds, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and so on, they will not find another God who has himself been in revolt. Let the atheists themselves choose a God; they will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation, only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to become an atheist." And I don't have time to develop it, but this is why I claim today's era is perhaps less atheist than ever. We don't believe, but we always structurally need another naive gaze, what following Jacques Lacan maybe I could have called "the subject supposed to believe," who believes for us. Like, I'm old enough unfortunately, I never participated in them, but to remember late '60s, '70s sexual revolution, swinging orgies. I had some friends who were already in middle ages, which means family, they had children, and I noticed how all of them, they were participating in orgies blah blah, but everything turned on how their children or parents—there always was someone who shouldn't know about it. If they were to learn that that one learns about it, it would have meant the end of it all. That's why I think, this is total distraction, but you see how our era, which may appear, even in sexuality, the most permissive one and so on. As many intelligent observers like the French Lacanian Gérard Wajcman, they noticed how... you know, the usual dogma is: "who needs Freud today? We are open, we can admit all our desires." Yes, but did you notice how one—the price of this permissiveness today is that one basic insight of Freud is totally obliterated: children's sexuality. Children are again elevated into innocent beings and child molesting is returned as the worst you can imagine, the ultimate crime. There are some other crimes, I don't have time to go into them. I don't smoke, but my wife does, and she converted me not into smoking but into believing how—I think it's part of the same ideology, this obsession with how dangerous smoking is. It would be nice just to follow in Hollywood who still smokes today. Basically, serial killers and Arab terrorists before they explode bombs and so on. But okay. So my point is, we need another innocent one. And I'm sad to say that even a film which I up to a point liked—up to a point—Roberto Benigni's *La vita bella*. You know, relies on this structure: we know what Auschwitz is, but in order to save the innocent child, you have to construct for him the fiction that this is just a big game, we are free to leave at any point we want and so on. You know, let me make a mental counter-factual mental experiment. Don't you think that it would have been a much more desperate film if, you remember the last scene when they are taking Benigni to be shot at the very end, and he waves at his son? If at that point somehow his son were to let him know that he also knew it all the time that they are in a camp, but that for the same reason as his father, he just pretended to believe him to make it easier for his father? Because he knew that if his father were to know that the son... so, this is my category here, which is absolutely crucial: the category of a social belief which can function as a belief even if nobody believes, even if no empirical individual believes. Now let me go on. The reason I'm fully attached shamelessly to so-called—I hate the term—Judeo-Christian tradition is that I claim that this insight into the horror of God and so on, monstrosity of God, is the lesson of Judeo-Christian tradition. How? It all began with the book of, how do you pronounce it, the guy who got screwed up, Job? The Book of Job. I think this is the first and maybe one of the greatest books of critique of ideology. Why? Remember what happens in it. After Job is hit by all the calamities, what happens then? Three or four theological friends come and each of them gives him, Job, the same message: "Your... not so much is he innocent or not, but your suffering has a deeper meaning." The first one tells him basically even if you think you are innocent, look more deep into yourself; the other one tells him maybe God is testing you, just persist. The message is: "Your suffering has a deeper meaning." What... and now comes the first shock. You know when Jehovah, God comes, surprisingly he says what these theological friends were telling is bullshit, you Job were right. Your suffering has no meaning. I think that this is the first big lesson: this resistance to search for a deeper meaning when we encounter catastrophes. But then things go on, again I will refer to Chesterton. After getting this answer for God that he is right, Job nonetheless asks, "Okay, but tell me, but why then did all this happen to me?" Then comes God's answer, which I claim is usually totally misread: "Where were you when I created all those strange creatures, monsters?" Usually these lines are read as assertion of God's arrogance, in the sense of: "Who are you, tiny creepy mortal, to know it? We are simply on a different level." But Chesterton, in his short essay on the Book of Job, gives—and for me it's terribly convincing—gives a totally different reading. He says that God's answer is rather something like: "You think you are in trouble, but look at the world that I created. Everything is a mess in it. You are not an exception." And now you will say I'm dreaming here. Opp, my Jewish friends provided me in my last book blah blah, you find the proper quotes. Do you know that in Talmud there are two passages, which I call—you will immediately see why—'Annie Hall' passages. You know that dream scene at the beginning of *Annie Hall*, the movie, where Woody Allen character is debating with a guy about Marshall McLuhan theories, then Marshall McLuhan comes and says of course to Woody Allen, "You are totally right, that guy is an idiot, he doesn't..." In one of, and I'm not kidding, this is not a joke, this is the sacred text, Talmud. Two rabbis debate some theological point. The one who is losing the debate says to the other, "But listen, who are we to decide? Let's call Jehovah." It happens. Jehovah, an old guy, comes. But before he even starts to talk, the other rabbi starts to shout at God: "Listen, old man, you did your job, you did it pretty bad, but okay, you did it. Now beat it. We theologians have to debate some serious matter." And you know what Jehovah says? He answers, "Oh my God, you got me!" and runs away. It's absolutely breathtaking. Now I will probably—yes, it looks bad, so let me condense this part. What I wanted to develop also is the different problems and readings of the Book of Job. The way I understand it is that the secret of Protestantism is that... what predestination means. It is that you have a brutal, ignorant God who simply, without any criteria, makes his... in predestination, makes his decisions. So I even wanted to play it, I didn't want to. You know the last Johnny Cash hit, "The Man Comes Around"? This is for me the best of this Protestant God. What I... I don't like Johnny Cash as a singer. But what I like in this song is the horror of how the last judgment is portrayed, presented. It's not, "Oh my God, we the righteous will stand up." It's literally like we are all lined, a man like some police comes and you are in, you are out, you are in, you are out. I was shocked to establish the clear parallel between last judgment here and the way in *If This Is a Man*, Primo Levi describes what he calls "selection," *selezione*. You know, every two months in concentration camp all the inmates had to run naked in front of a SS doctor, and he just quickly took a look and quickly "yes", "no", means gas chamber or you continue to survive. Again, you will say "why this crazy vision of God, what has this to do?" I think to arrive at what Jesus Christ means, you have to go through this. I think that with what... because what happens, for me that's my reading, which is basically Hegel's reading, what happens on the cross. It's not that God sent us a messenger and okay, it failed, sorry, God says to Christ "come back to me, come back to your dad, I will try maybe in a thousand of years." No, as Hegel put it, what dies on the cross is the God of beyond itself. What dies on the cross is precisely this idea of God as a secret master up there who, no matter how bad things look down here on earth, he pulls the strings and guarantees that everything will end well. You know this, I find it ethically repulsive, this metaphor for God which was usually evoked by old theologians, which is that we ordinary mortals are like one who imagine a big classical beautiful painting. We, with our limited view, we look too close at it and you know like, if you look at Mona Lisa from one inch you see just a stain. But if you step back and see all of it, you see how what you misperceived as a stain contributes to the harmony of it all. This God dies there. And I think that the ethical reasons are clear. Like, let's say somebody complains about Holocaust or Gulag or other things. Are you really to say... are you really ready to say to this guy, "Listen, Holocaust may appear to you as something horrible, but can't you see how it contributes to the harmony of it all?" and so on and so on. The gesture of Christ is precisely a kind of a self-deposition of God. What happens on the cross is, I think, on the cross is God abdicates. God no longer believes even in himself. So what happens is Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit which is just our freedom, the community of believers. This is, I think, again, what it's the ultimate message of Christianity. It's not: you are safe because no matter how confused things are, God is up there taking care of it. No, it's God lost control, it's up to you. And even, not only Chesterton, some very intelligent Catholic intellectuals saw this. For example, a conservative like Paul Claudel, whom I appreciate very much. He said that the ultimate message of Christianity is "God is impotent without us." It's not we have to rely on God, it's that the message of the cross is God is just a witness who relies on us. And just now, a little bit of a conclusion. So what kind of theology can we bring out of this, if at the end we just get the suffering Christ, pure impassive compassion and basically telling us: no transcendental guarantee, no one is pulling the strings. I think that, incidentally, only with such a radical reading can you really give—I don't have time to go into this now, of course—a consistent interpretation of all those problematic passages in the Bible. You know, I... this is my long tradition. For example, in Vienna and Munich, I had a debate even with some bishops. And I asked them these totally simple questions. For example, when God says, "If you don't hate your mother, your father, you are not my follower," what does this mean? It's incredible what answers I got. If we were to be in medieval times, I would have burned them all. One of them, a bishop, told me, "God just meant don't be excessive in your earthly loves, reserve the true love for me." I find this disgusting and horrible, as if God is some jealous master who says, "Okay, love that woman a little bit, just I want to be sure that you love me more." I think it's totally exactly the opposite. In Christianity you don't have to love God. God is love. God is here when you passionately love someone and so on and so on. So if we are in this universe which is radically atheist—it's not only that you think there is no God, also you don't have this unconscious God as the appearance on which you rely—what remains of religion? Here, if you allow me just some good five minutes to conclude, I would like to quote a guy whom I'm honored to call my friend, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is not an idiot, at least not a total idiot. And I mean this sincerely, there are two types of people: total idiots and not total idiots, there is no third option. He, commenting on the work of four British Catholic novelists—O'Connor, Percy, Spark, and Ellis—Rowan Williams wrote, I quote: "All four [these four writers] create a world in which the secular majority account of what is going on is severely relativized. But there is no simple alternative that anyone can step into by a single decision, or even a series of decisions. The religious dimension of these fictions lies in the insistent sense of incongruity, unmistakable even if no one within the fiction can say what we should be congruent with." End of quote. So, the term "negative theology" is here meant in a much more radical sense than usual, where the idea is simply "God is so much beyond that all of our positive determinations fail." The idea is rather that we locate negativity into God itself. That it is as if God as a positive entity fills in a certain negative place which precedes divinity, which is precisely the place of that what in my Hegelianism I would have called negativity, this basic feeling of being out of joint and so on and so on, which I think precedes any positive transcendence. In this sense, I'm not playing cheap paradoxical game that I say that theology for me as an atheist can survive. Religion is no longer the opium of the people today because, if for no other reasons than, and I like this well-known saying, that today the opium of the people is more and more simply opium itself, the drug and so on, abstracted and so on. But this... and here I also think we should do two things. First, I think that we should reject not only evolutionary materialists like Richard Dawkins and so on and so on. I mean, maybe all that Dawkins is describing is at some stupid factual level true, but still he totally doesn't get the point of religion. It's simply not it, even if it's true. And this is my position of negativity here. Another thing. I think we should also reject all this—how should I call it?—what is usually referred to today as a "new materialism," this re-enchantment of reality as immanently spiritualized. What I ironically like to call "the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings materialism." Because did you notice that in *Lord of the Rings* universe, there are no gods. All the magic is material magic. You have magical beings, this that, but there is no other dimension. It's a fully self-enclosed spiritualized universe. I think that we have to keep alive precisely this sense of radical out-of-jointness. To just now, the last two, three minutes, just to make this clear and in your spirit, I would like also—if you began with *Vertigo*—I would like much more modestly to end with one of the most disturbing TV episodes of *Alfred Hitchcock Presents*. The early ones, twenty-five minutes. They are now republishing them. It's the one called "The Glass Eye," the opening episode of the third year, where Jessica Tandy—incidentally, this is if you are like the two of us, Hitchcockologists, she's a crucial actress. On the one hand, she is the mother in *The Birds*, but at the same time, you know, for what I perceive as maybe the greatest Beckett play, *Not I*, which is really a partial object talking, the mouth. She was there, she was the original. Okay, she plays a lone woman who falls in love with a handsome ventriloquist, Max Collodi, the obvious reference to Pinocchio. So every evening he performs in a small cabaret, she is there in the first row observing him how he manipulates, you know, ventriloquism. Then comes... I was even shocked, I didn't expect this. Then the last evening, it's his last performance, she gathers the courage and approaches him while the people are leaving there on stage and touches him like "Aha! look at me!" No. And can you imagine what happens? She discovers the big guy collapses as a doll. She discovers that the truly living being is the doll, the small one, that there is a midget in there and that the truly manipulated one was the big one, you know? And then out of that costume steps out a dwarf, totally desperate, and starts to cry and runs away and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that again, the result is that the ventriloquist was in fact the dummy, while the hideous dummy is the actual ventriloquist. And what I claim is that "God is dead" means something similar. That we have to abandon the common notion of Christ as God who is the Father's puppet. No. The Christian reversal is something like this: forget about God the Father, he was just a dead, a big fat dead doll. All that is alive is Christ there, and love that, accept that. So again, my point is—I will develop this in my next book much more in detail—but my point is, and I hope we agree here, that I don't like to bluff here. I'm not playing those games that Jürgen Habermas is now playing: "Oh, I'm an agnostic, maybe God exists, maybe not." No, I am an atheist. But I think that without this radical—that my paradox would be this one: only by going through Christianity can you be in this sense a radical atheist. Without this authentic theological experience of out-of-joint, of this world we are in is not it, you even if you pretend to be a materialist you end up as some kind of cheap perverted spiritualist. This is why it's easy to prove, for example, how Stalinism is immanently but in a perverted way theological. Because, you know, the whole position of a Stalinist communist is a position of an instrument of some big other, historical necessity and so on. Like, I am not myself, I am an instrument of and so on and so on. This is why I claim here as a Hegelian that in what sense does God give us freedom? Let's say you find yourself in a position where you feel—experience yourself as abandoned by God. "Oh, God is out there, I am alone," and so on. All other religions offer you the path of reconciliation: "Eh, whip yourself a little bit more, more good deeds, suffer, and maybe you will be able to rejoin God." The answer of Christianity is a totally different one. It is precisely when you feel totally abandoned by God, you are in the position of Christ. That's to say, who on the cross is, you know, "Father, why have you abandoned me?" and so on. So in other words, the very gap that separates you from God is an inner self-separation of God himself. Your distance from God is part of divinity. Which is why I think that's the good news of New Testament. The good news are not "Oh, God Father is there, everything..." No, the good news are in a Hegelian way, if I might put it exactly the same as the bad news. The bad news is we are alone, no God will take care of us. And the good news is: wonderful, so we are free. This loneliness is precisely—which succeeds self-erasure of God—is precisely freedom. And that's the fundamental insight of Christianity which is, I wonder if you will agree here, which is extremely important even politically today. Which is why against political correctness, I'm totally opposed to this idea: bad global capitalism, secular, and then we can resuscitate some stupid local traditions, you know like Brazilian friends try to convince me that there are some tribes in Lower Amazon which has some primordial wisdom whatever, how we are just—my point is this one. I'm here on the side of Malcolm X. You know what's Malcolm X? I disagree with many things that he wrote, but one thing was a stroke of a genius: X. This is not a simple complaint, "Oh, bad white people deprived us Blacks of our authentic roots." No, what Malcolm X saw is that this X, which means we have no hierarchical roots in tradition, we cannot trace our roots, that this horror that white people did to us is at the same time a unique chance of freedom to be more universalist than white people themselves. He saw this. And this is so important today, I think. We cannot fight... I think global imperialism, whatever we call it, is inherently multicultural. You don't fight it by sticking to your local... this is typical global capitalist subject. It's not the one who eat hamburgers, but it's the one who works for a big company and then if you're a Buddhist, you do your meditation, if you're a Hindu, you do your sacrifices, whatever. All this fits perfectly global capitalism. The problem is to beat it with even stronger globalism. I'm very sorry if I used too much time, but that's it. Thank you very much. [The audience applauds for several minutes.] Do you want to open or—because I have not a lot, I have just some twenty questions, but do you want to... but what is the... the rule of the game? He's going to tell us, Michael. No, we should... haha! You want to have an endogenous fixed point, no? You don't want us to... now I got it, you know? Well, you're welcome to speak with each other if you have any questions to address to each other. I certainly do have, but it's important also to get questions from the audience, no? No, but questions... how much time do we have? We have half an hour. Half an hour? Yeah. No, no, wait a minute. I'm a Stalinist here. Listen, why give the word to them when we already know better than the people what they really want? You don't buy this? You don't buy this? No, seriously. Can I begin openly by asking you two, three questions? First, I love immensely that—the way you structure that paradox of the gift, the 12th camel and so on, because immediately I had two lines of associations. One is that—especially if you connect it with gift and so on—often in my books I describe a phenomenon which I love and I think in the same sense that you describe self-transcendence, it is an excess but it's not just a rhetorical excess. It's necessary for the very exchange that—what I call in my work, "offers meant to be refused." You know this classical... let's say we go to dinner. You are rich, I am poor, let's say. We all know you will pay. But isn't it, at least in my part of the world, isn't it standard procedure that nonetheless I am expected to offer to pay? A little bit to insist. And then I withdraw, but even if I know that it will be rejected, I have to make that offer. This is what always fascinated me: how every community needs this type of element. Or even at the level of rules and laws, how you do not simply get to become part of a certain community. It's not enough just to know what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do. It's for structural reasons which I would have linked with your self-transcendence, it's also a necessary inconsistency here. Every system regulated by rules, human community, has to have first some rules which are meant to be transcendent, like, you know, I tell you "don't do this" but you are an idiot if you don't do this, you just have to do it discreetly. Or even more interesting, a system allows you to do something and you are given the choice to do it on condition that you don't take the choice. But, and here I come to your self-transcendence, on condition that this redoubled prohibition must not be announced publicly. What do I mean by this? Just a brief... if we are on a stage here, imagine—this is a true dream—that it's a different stage, we are in in Moscow, I am Stalin, you are Central Committee. I give a speech, it's the applause, no. Then debate. One of you stands up and attacks me. Now this would be pretty stupid, no? Like next day everyone would be asking the question who saw that guy alive the last. But let's then say that another one of you would have stood up and started to shout at the first guy, "Are you crazy? Don't you know that here in Soviet Union we are not allowed to criticize Stalin?" My thesis is that this second guy would disappear even faster. As Derrida put it nicely, apropos of Kafka, prohibition itself is prohibited. Something is prohibited but it shouldn't be allowed as such. That's my first point. My second point: I love this mathematics, you know, of your solution was the to add which is purely... but there is another solution in a similar structure of jokes that I like, is that the subject throws itself into it to stop the subdivision. I quote in one of my books, in the '90s in Croatia, they have that leader Tuđman, who was a kind of a nationalist right-winger, and there was a wonderful joke about him. Of course, this is a joke which was already circulating before in other countries, it was just applied to him. It was that Tuđman is with his family on a plane above Croatia and he says, "What can I do for Croat people? Open that window a little bit, why don't I throw out a check for a million dollars and I will make one Croat happy?" Then his wife tells him, "But listen, Franjo," his name, "why don't you throw out two checks for half a million and make two Croats happy?" And so on and so on. And then his grandson, the voice of reason, you can imagine what he tells: "But Grandpa, why don't you throw yourself out and make all Croats happy?" you know. And there are so many jokes which have this... like there is a wonderful Stalinist joke which functions in the same way. Three people meet in Lubyanka, KGB headquarters, in mid-thirties, and you know immediately you talk about why are you here. The first one says, "I am here, I got five years for criticizing Popov," a top official. The second one says, "I got ten years for supporting Popov," because later Popov... no? You can imagine what the third one says: "I am here for life and I am Popov." You know? You know this how there is... okay, let me go on. Very briefly.
a God who is only toying with her feelings. And that's the paradox of the film: it would be very easy to accept all this if we were to discover that God doesn't exist, that Sharon was just caught into her religious imagination, delirious imagination. But the paradox is: she persists in renouncing a God who is real but a narcissist giving us life for the sole purpose of demanding unconditional love in return, no matter how much damage his demands have inflicted on human lives. Now this is not a joke. Such indifferent and narcissistic God is part of a certain at least Christian tradition. For Nicolas Malebranche, a pupil of Descartes, in the same way that the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction—Malebranche had no illusions here—in helping those in distress, God also ultimately loves only himself. He merely uses us, our human suffering, to promulgate his own glory. So Malebranche drew this incredible conclusion: it is not true that if Christ had not come to earth to deliver humanity, that if Christ had not come to earth to redeem us, everyone would have been lost. Quite on the contrary, nobody would have been lost. All of us had to fall so that it gave God the opportunity to come and deliver some of us. It's a very weird logic and you find similar absolute miracles in Malebranche. For example, he said that at no point was God more happy than when he observed his son dying in pain on the cross. Okay. Now back to the movie. Sharon's resistance to God, her refusal to declare her love for him, is I would claim an authentic ethical act. It would be totally wrong to say that she rejects the false God and that in an authentically Christian version of the film the true Christ should appear at the end, proclaim her a true believer precisely because she rejected to declare that she loves the false God and so on and so on. The true temptation to be resisted is to declare our love for a God who doesn't deserve it, even if he really is a God. Now I confront the obvious naive materialist question: all this cannot but appear as a pseudo-topic, a rather stupid mental experiment. Isn't this obvious? Why engage in these stupid games? Isn't it that simply for a consequent materialist we should simply renounce God, there is no God, and not play these stupid games? God is, but he is maybe evil, not good, whatever. But I think that there is something much subtler here at work. We should, in the consequent materialism, undermine as it were the fiction of God from within. Because if we don't do that, then this fiction can prolong its hold over us in the form of disavowal, which is almost, I'm tempted to say, the way a great majority of us continue to believe. I'm always making this experiment with all my relatives, friends. I ask them: "Okay, cut the crap. Do you believe in God or not?" And it's absolutely incredible what answers do I have. Like half a year ago we had in London a conference on the actuality of theologico-political. And there were some big theologians and so on, and literary theorists, others. And I did something which obviously broke all the rules of polite conversation. I asked them: "Listen, I'm sorry, but this is a conference on theology. Do you believe in God or not?" It was incredible. They reacted as if I asked them, like, in what position did you have sex last night or what. Absolutely, one of them, I will name him, he is my good friend Eric Santner. He said, "Well, I prefer not to engage in that direction because I speak here as a literary theorist. Don't mess me into that." There were theologians then, leftist theologians who said, "Listen, that's not the point. The point is how to mobilize progressive politics today" and so on and so on. So I think that far from being an exception, this is our belief today. It's even something like, "I know there is no God, but he is nonetheless a noble and uplifting illusion." My some of my Jewish friends who are Zionists even one of them openly told me another version of this paradox when we debated West Bank Palestine. He said, "I know God doesn't exist, but nonetheless he gave us West Bank Palestine." You know? Why? Now now I'm going into much more serious waters. You can imagine what I will try to prove, in a bloody very serious way. I'm not kidding. I consider myself an atheist. But only through Christianity can you really be an atheist. You have to go through Christian experience. If not, then you don't believe it, but the fiction persists, determines you. How? Let me do now something for which I really hate myself, but it's necessary here. Let me repeat an old joke which I used, I would say, at least a conservative estimate, some fifteen to twenty times in my work. So it's an old joke, you are not obliged to laugh, but its structure is wonderful. You know that classical joke about an idiot who believes he is a grain of seed and is finally cured in the lunatic asylum, is left out, then comes running back, and his psychiatrist asks him, "But why are you so frightened? Why do you come back?" The guy says, "Well, I met a chicken and I was afraid the chicken will eat me." And the psychiatrist says, "But wait a minute, we cured you. You know that you are not a grain of corn or whatever." And he says, "Yes, I know it now, but does the chicken know it?" This is how we believe today. Another story which I used only five times in my books so I can tell it to you, the one you mentioned, quantum physics. We all admire he was a true genius, much more than Heisenberg who got it wrong with that uncertainty principle, Niels Bohr. You know there is a wonderful anecdote about him. He had a small wooden house in some suburbs around Copenhagen and at the entrance of that house there was a horseshoe. In Europe this is a superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the house. And a scientist friend visiting him told him, "Wait a minute, you are a scientist. You shouldn't be superstitious. Why do you have that horseshoe there?" You cannot beat Niels Bohr. You know what was his answer? "I know I don't believe in it, I'm a scientist, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's how this is ideology today. In what sense? Now you will say I'm telling you joke. Oh, let's go further. First, I'm saying this is what Jacques Lacan means by the idea, in late Lacan he liked to repeat that the formula of true atheism is not "God is dead" but "God is unconscious." It means precisely that for example in psychoanalysis, today patients are cynical. You know that Freudian standard joke: "this is not my mother." When you ask a patient, "who is that woman in your dream?" and he answers, "I don't know who that woman is, I'm just sure that it's not my mother." Well, today we don't have patients like that. A patient today would probably immediately tell you almost the opposite: "I don't know who that woman is in my dream, but I trust you, probably it has something to do with my mother or whatever." So the point is not to... the true task of psychoanalysis is not to convince you about your unconscious desires whatever, but to convince the chicken, which is your unconscious. It's much more difficult. Who knew this, although I'm very critical towards a lot of his work, Marx. What Marx meant by commodity fetishism is something much more mysterious than it may appear. Look how Marx begins his famous subchapter to the—the subdivision four of the chapter one of *Capital* on commodity fetishism. I quote Marx: "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Are we aware what a strange thing Marx is saying here? It's the exact opposite of the naive materialist enlightened critique of religion which says, "Oh, you," I'm simplifying it, "you idiot, you live in your obscure religious fantasies. No, but in reality, in reality..." No, Marx is saying the opposite: "You think a commodity is just an ordinary object there. You think money is just an instrument for us exchanging commodities. But what has to be brought out is precisely the implicit metaphysical topics that you practice even if you do not believe in it." In other words, even if you are an atheist, your unconscious remains divine. Which is why when Marx provides his definition of ideology, "*Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es,*" "They don't know it, but they are doing it." It doesn't mean the vulgarity: "Oh, you think one thing but you are doing another." It means: you do not know the illusions that you follow, but you are doing them. Like, to put it in simple terms: in your self-consciousness, you are a vulgar materialist, like utilitarian, you think money is just an object, blah blah. But what you are not aware is that in your social practice, you act as if you believe in magical properties in money. And commodities are here chicken. Marx evokes this idea when he says, "If commodities could speak, they would say this and so on and so on." It's this weird fiction of commodities speaking to another. Now, so again, the point is of fetishism: Marx is not that we live in some superstitions and some naive enlightened procedure should enable us to get rid of it. No, Marx's point is precisely that especially in modern era where we appear to be enlightened utilitarians, we are not aware of the theological niceties etc. which continue to structure our life. And my friend Alenka Zupančič, one of the members of my Slovene Lacanian gang, applied also this chicken joke, or Marx's joke on commodities, to God. She said, instead of lunatic asylum, imagine a revolutionary materialist society where those who still believe in God are treated like madmen and they are ideologically brainwashed. So imagine one of them being finally cured: "Now you know there is no God and so on," and he is released, but he comes running back and says he is scared of being punished by God. Now the teacher there tells him, "Teachers materialism, but you know now that God doesn't exist." He said, "I know that God is dead, but does God know it? I'm afraid that God didn't learn this news and so on." Now why am I mentioning this? Now I turn to my favorite theologian, the old Catholic British Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who got this point. He said that all other religions, of course you find in them atheists, people who don't believe in God. But he says only in Christianity you find a God who, at least for a brief moment, doesn't believe in himself. Here is this wonderful quote: "When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross, the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionaries choose a creed from all the creeds, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and so on, they will not find another God who has himself been in revolt. Let the atheists themselves choose a God; they will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation, only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to become an atheist." And I don't have time to develop it, but this is why I claim today's era is perhaps less atheist than ever. We don't believe, but we always structurally need another naive gaze, what following Jacques Lacan maybe I could have called "the subject supposed to believe," who believes for us. Like, I'm old enough unfortunately, I never participated in them, but to remember late '60s, '70s sexual revolution, swinging orgies. I had some friends who were already in middle ages, which means family, they had children, and I noticed how all of them, they were participating in orgies blah blah, but everything turned on how their children or parents—there always was someone who shouldn't know about it. If they were to learn that that one learns about it, it would have meant the end of it all. That's why I think, this is total distraction, but you see how our era, which may appear, even in sexuality, the most permissive one and so on. As many intelligent observers like the French Lacanian Gérard Wajcman, they noticed how... you know, the usual dogma is: "who needs Freud today? We are open, we can admit all our desires." Yes, but did you notice how one—the price of this permissiveness today is that one basic insight of Freud is totally obliterated: children's sexuality. Children are again elevated into innocent beings and child molesting is returned as the worst you can imagine, the ultimate crime. There are some other crimes, I don't have time to go into them. I don't smoke, but my wife does, and she converted me not into smoking but into believing how—I think it's part of the same ideology, this obsession with how dangerous smoking is. It would be nice just to follow in Hollywood who still smokes today. Basically, serial killers and Arab terrorists before they explode bombs and so on. But okay. So my point is, we need another innocent one. And I'm sad to say that even a film which I up to a point liked—up to a point—Roberto Benigni's *La vita bella*. You know, relies on this structure: we know what Auschwitz is, but in order to save the innocent child, you have to construct for him the fiction that this is just a big game, we are free to leave at any point we want and so on. You know, let me make a mental counter-factual mental experiment. Don't you think that it would have been a much more desperate film if, you remember the last scene when they are taking Benigni to be shot at the very end, and he waves at his son? If at that point somehow his son were to let him know that he also knew it all the time that they are in a camp, but that for the same reason as his father, he just pretended to believe him to make it easier for his father? Because he knew that if his father were to know that the son... so, this is my category here, which is absolutely crucial: the category of a social belief which can function as a belief even if nobody believes, even if no empirical individual believes. Now let me go on. The reason I'm fully attached shamelessly to so-called—I hate the term—Judeo-Christian tradition is that I claim that this insight into the horror of God and so on, monstrosity of God, is the lesson of Judeo-Christian tradition. How? It all began with the book of, how do you pronounce it, the guy who got screwed up, Job? The Book of Job. I think this is the first and maybe one of the greatest books of critique of ideology. Why? Remember what happens in it. After Job is hit by all the calamities, what happens then? Three or four theological friends come and each of them gives him, Job, the same message: "Your... not so much is he innocent or not, but your suffering has a deeper meaning." The first one tells him basically even if you think you are innocent, look more deep into yourself; the other one tells him maybe God is testing you, just persist. The message is: "Your suffering has a deeper meaning." What... and now comes the first shock. You know when Jehovah, God comes, surprisingly he says what these theological friends were telling is bullshit, you Job were right. Your suffering has no meaning. I think that this is the first big lesson: this resistance to search for a deeper meaning when we encounter catastrophes. But then things go on, again I will refer to Chesterton. After getting this answer for God that he is right, Job nonetheless asks, "Okay, but tell me, but why then did all this happen to me?" Then comes God's answer, which I claim is usually totally misread: "Where were you when I created all those strange creatures, monsters?" Usually these lines are read as assertion of God's arrogance, in the sense of: "Who are you, tiny creepy mortal, to know it? We are simply on a different level." But Chesterton, in his short essay on the Book of Job, gives—and for me it's terribly convincing—gives a totally different reading. He says that God's answer is rather something like: "You think you are in trouble, but look at the world that I created. Everything is a mess in it. You are not an exception." And now you will say I'm dreaming here. Opp, my Jewish friends provided me in my last book blah blah, you find the proper quotes. Do you know that in Talmud there are two passages, which I call—you will immediately see why—'Annie Hall' passages. You know that dream scene at the beginning of *Annie Hall*, the movie, where Woody Allen character is debating with a guy about Marshall McLuhan theories, then Marshall McLuhan comes and says of course to Woody Allen, "You are totally right, that guy is an idiot, he doesn't..." In one of, and I'm not kidding, this is not a joke, this is the sacred text, Talmud. Two rabbis debate some theological point. The one who is losing the debate says to the other, "But listen, who are we to decide? Let's call Jehovah." It happens. Jehovah, an old guy, comes. But before he even starts to talk, the other rabbi starts to shout at God: "Listen, old man, you did your job, you did it pretty bad, but okay, you did it. Now beat it. We theologians have to debate some serious matter." And you know what Jehovah says? He answers, "Oh my God, you got me!" and runs away. It's absolutely breathtaking. Now I will probably—yes, it looks bad, so let me condense this part. What I wanted to develop also is the different problems and readings of the Book of Job. The way I understand it is that the secret of Protestantism is that... what predestination means. It is that you have a brutal, ignorant God who simply, without any criteria, makes his... in predestination, makes his decisions. So I even wanted to play it, I didn't want to. You know the last Johnny Cash hit, "The Man Comes Around"? This is for me the best of this Protestant God. What I... I don't like Johnny Cash as a singer. But what I like in this song is the horror of how the last judgment is portrayed, presented. It's not, "Oh my God, we the righteous will stand up." It's literally like we are all lined, a man like some police comes and you are in, you are out, you are in, you are out. I was shocked to establish the clear parallel between last judgment here and the way in *If This Is a Man*, Primo Levi describes what he calls "selection," *selezione*. You know, every two months in concentration camp all the inmates had to run naked in front of a SS doctor, and he just quickly took a look and quickly "yes", "no", means gas chamber or you continue to survive. Again, you will say "why this crazy vision of God, what has this to do?" I think to arrive at what Jesus Christ means, you have to go through this. I think that with what... because what happens, for me that's my reading, which is basically Hegel's reading, what happens on the cross. It's not that God sent us a messenger and okay, it failed, sorry, God says to Christ "come back to me, come back to your dad, I will try maybe in a thousand of years." No, as Hegel put it, what dies on the cross is the God of beyond itself. What dies on the cross is precisely this idea of God as a secret master up there who, no matter how bad things look down here on earth, he pulls the strings and guarantees that everything will end well. You know this, I find it ethically repulsive, this metaphor for God which was usually evoked by old theologians, which is that we ordinary mortals are like one who imagine a big classical beautiful painting. We, with our limited view, we look too close at it and you know like, if you look at Mona Lisa from one inch you see just a stain. But if you step back and see all of it, you see how what you misperceived as a stain contributes to the harmony of it all. This God dies there. And I think that the ethical reasons are clear. Like, let's say somebody complains about Holocaust or Gulag or other things. Are you really to say... are you really ready to say to this guy, "Listen, Holocaust may appear to you as something horrible, but can't you see how it contributes to the harmony of it all?" and so on and so on. The gesture of Christ is precisely a kind of a self-deposition of God. What happens on the cross is, I think, on the cross is God abdicates. God no longer believes even in himself. So what happens is Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit which is just our freedom, the community of believers. This is, I think, again, what it's the ultimate message of Christianity. It's not: you are safe because no matter how confused things are, God is up there taking care of it. No, it's God lost control, it's up to you. And even, not only Chesterton, some very intelligent Catholic intellectuals saw this. For example, a conservative like Paul Claudel, whom I appreciate very much. He said that the ultimate message of Christianity is "God is impotent without us." It's not we have to rely on God, it's that the message of the cross is God is just a witness who relies on us. And just now, a little bit of a conclusion. So what kind of theology can we bring out of this, if at the end we just get the suffering Christ, pure impassive compassion and basically telling us: no transcendental guarantee, no one is pulling the strings. I think that, incidentally, only with such a radical reading can you really give—I don't have time to go into this now, of course—a consistent interpretation of all those problematic passages in the Bible. You know, I... this is my long tradition. For example, in Vienna and Munich, I had a debate even with some bishops. And I asked them these totally simple questions. For example, when God says, "If you don't hate your mother, your father, you are not my follower," what does this mean? It's incredible what answers I got. If we were to be in medieval times, I would have burned them all. One of them, a bishop, told me, "God just meant don't be excessive in your earthly loves, reserve the true love for me." I find this disgusting and horrible, as if God is some jealous master who says, "Okay, love that woman a little bit, just I want to be sure that you love me more." I think it's totally exactly the opposite. In Christianity you don't have to love God. God is love. God is here when you passionately love someone and so on and so on. So if we are in this universe which is radically atheist—it's not only that you think there is no God, also you don't have this unconscious God as the appearance on which you rely—what remains of religion? Here, if you allow me just some good five minutes to conclude, I would like to quote a guy whom I'm honored to call my friend, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is not an idiot, at least not a total idiot. And I mean this sincerely, there are two types of people: total idiots and not total idiots, there is no third option. He, commenting on the work of four British Catholic novelists—O'Connor, Percy, Spark, and Ellis—Rowan Williams wrote, I quote: "All four [these four writers] create a world in which the secular majority account of what is going on is severely relativized. But there is no simple alternative that anyone can step into by a single decision, or even a series of decisions. The religious dimension of these fictions lies in the insistent sense of incongruity, unmistakable even if no one within the fiction can say what we should be congruent with." End of quote. So, the term "negative theology" is here meant in a much more radical sense than usual, where the idea is simply "God is so much beyond that all of our positive determinations fail." The idea is rather that we locate negativity into God itself. That it is as if God as a positive entity fills in a certain negative place which precedes divinity, which is precisely the place of that what in my Hegelianism I would have called negativity, this basic feeling of being out of joint and so on and so on, which I think precedes any positive transcendence. In this sense, I'm not playing cheap paradoxical game that I say that theology for me as an atheist can survive. Religion is no longer the opium of the people today because, if for no other reasons than, and I like this well-known saying, that today the opium of the people is more and more simply opium itself, the drug and so on, abstracted and so on. But this... and here I also think we should do two things. First, I think that we should reject not only evolutionary materialists like Richard Dawkins and so on and so on. I mean, maybe all that Dawkins is describing is at some stupid factual level true, but still he totally doesn't get the point of religion. It's simply not it, even if it's true. And this is my position of negativity here. Another thing. I think we should also reject all this—how should I call it?—what is usually referred to today as a "new materialism," this re-enchantment of reality as immanently spiritualized. What I ironically like to call "the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings materialism." Because did you notice that in *Lord of the Rings* universe, there are no gods. All the magic is material magic. You have magical beings, this that, but there is no other dimension. It's a fully self-enclosed spiritualized universe. I think that we have to keep alive precisely this sense of radical out-of-jointness. To just now, the last two, three minutes, just to make this clear and in your spirit, I would like also—if you began with *Vertigo*—I would like much more modestly to end with one of the most disturbing TV episodes of *Alfred Hitchcock Presents*. The early ones, twenty-five minutes. They are now republishing them. It's the one called "The Glass Eye," the opening episode of the third year, where Jessica Tandy—incidentally, this is if you are like the two of us, Hitchcockologists, she's a crucial actress. On the one hand, she is the mother in *The Birds*, but at the same time, you know, for what I perceive as maybe the greatest Beckett play, *Not I*, which is really a partial object talking, the mouth. She was there, she was the original. Okay, she plays a lone woman who falls in love with a handsome ventriloquist, Max Collodi, the obvious reference to Pinocchio. So every evening he performs in a small cabaret, she is there in the first row observing him how he manipulates, you know, ventriloquism. Then comes... I was even shocked, I didn't expect this. Then the last evening, it's his last performance, she gathers the courage and approaches him while the people are leaving there on stage and touches him like "Aha! look at me!" No. And can you imagine what happens? She discovers the big guy collapses as a doll. She discovers that the truly living being is the doll, the small one, that there is a midget in there and that the truly manipulated one was the big one, you know? And then out of that costume steps out a dwarf, totally desperate, and starts to cry and runs away and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that again, the result is that the ventriloquist was in fact the dummy, while the hideous dummy is the actual ventriloquist. And what I claim is that "God is dead" means something similar. That we have to abandon the common notion of Christ as God who is the Father's puppet. No. The Christian reversal is something like this: forget about God the Father, he was just a dead, a big fat dead doll. All that is alive is Christ there, and love that, accept that. So again, my point is—I will develop this in my next book much more in detail—but my point is, and I hope we agree here, that I don't like to bluff here. I'm not playing those games that Jürgen Habermas is now playing: "Oh, I'm an agnostic, maybe God exists, maybe not." No, I am an atheist. But I think that without this radical—that my paradox would be this one: only by going through Christianity can you be in this sense a radical atheist. Without this authentic theological experience of out-of-joint, of this world we are in is not it, you even if you pretend to be a materialist you end up as some kind of cheap perverted spiritualist. This is why it's easy to prove, for example, how Stalinism is immanently but in a perverted way theological. Because, you know, the whole position of a Stalinist communist is a position of an instrument of some big other, historical necessity and so on. Like, I am not myself, I am an instrument of and so on and so on. This is why I claim here as a Hegelian that in what sense does God give us freedom? Let's say you find yourself in a position where you feel—experience yourself as abandoned by God. "Oh, God is out there, I am alone," and so on. All other religions offer you the path of reconciliation: "Eh, whip yourself a little bit more, more good deeds, suffer, and maybe you will be able to rejoin God." The answer of Christianity is a totally different one. It is precisely when you feel totally abandoned by God, you are in the position of Christ. That's to say, who on the cross is, you know, "Father, why have you abandoned me?" and so on. So in other words, the very gap that separates you from God is an inner self-separation of God himself. Your distance from God is part of divinity. Which is why I think that's the good news of New Testament. The good news are not "Oh, God Father is there, everything..." No, the good news are in a Hegelian way, if I might put it exactly the same as the bad news. The bad news is we are alone, no God will take care of us. And the good news is: wonderful, so we are free. This loneliness is precisely—which succeeds self-erasure of God—is precisely freedom. And that's the fundamental insight of Christianity which is, I wonder if you will agree here, which is extremely important even politically today. Which is why against political correctness, I'm totally opposed to this idea: bad global capitalism, secular, and then we can resuscitate some stupid local traditions, you know like Brazilian friends try to convince me that there are some tribes in Lower Amazon which has some primordial wisdom whatever, how we are just—my point is this one. I'm here on the side of Malcolm X. You know what's Malcolm X? I disagree with many things that he wrote, but one thing was a stroke of a genius: X. This is not a simple complaint, "Oh, bad white people deprived us Blacks of our authentic roots." No, what Malcolm X saw is that this X, which means we have no hierarchical roots in tradition, we cannot trace our roots, that this horror that white people did to us is at the same time a unique chance of freedom to be more universalist than white people themselves. He saw this. And this is so important today, I think. We cannot fight... I think global imperialism, whatever we call it, is inherently multicultural. You don't fight it by sticking to your local... this is typical global capitalist subject. It's not the one who eat hamburgers, but it's the one who works for a big company and then if you're a Buddhist, you do your meditation, if you're a Hindu, you do your sacrifices, whatever. All this fits perfectly global capitalism. The problem is to beat it with even stronger globalism. I'm very sorry if I used too much time, but that's it. Thank you very much. [The audience applauds for several minutes.] Do you want to open or—because I have not a lot, I have just some twenty questions, but do you want to... but what is the... the rule of the game? He's going to tell us, Michael. No, we should... haha! You want to have an endogenous fixed point, no? You don't want us to... now I got it, you know? Well, you're welcome to speak with each other if you have any questions to address to each other. I certainly do have, but it's important also to get questions from the audience, no? No, but questions... how much time do we have? We have half an hour. Half an hour? Yeah. No, no, wait a minute. I'm a Stalinist here. Listen, why give the word to them when we already know better than the people what they really want? You don't buy this? You don't buy this? No, seriously. Can I begin openly by asking you two, three questions? First, I love immensely that—the way you structure that paradox of the gift, the 12th camel and so on, because immediately I had two lines of associations. One is that—especially if you connect it with gift and so on—often in my books I describe a phenomenon which I love and I think in the same sense that you describe self-transcendence, it is an excess but it's not just a rhetorical excess. It's necessary for the very exchange that—what I call in my work, "offers meant to be refused." You know this classical... let's say we go to dinner. You are rich, I am poor, let's say. We all know you will pay. But isn't it, at least in my part of the world, isn't it standard procedure that nonetheless I am expected to offer to pay? A little bit to insist. And then I withdraw, but even if I know that it will be rejected, I have to make that offer. This is what always fascinated me: how every community needs this type of element. Or even at the level of rules and laws, how you do not simply get to become part of a certain community. It's not enough just to know what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do. It's for structural reasons which I would have linked with your self-transcendence, it's also a necessary inconsistency here. Every system regulated by rules, human community, has to have first some rules which are meant to be transcendent, like, you know, I tell you "don't do this" but you are an idiot if you don't do this, you just have to do it discreetly. Or even more interesting, a system allows you to do something and you are given the choice to do it on condition that you don't take the choice. But, and here I come to your self-transcendence, on condition that this redoubled prohibition must not be announced publicly. What do I mean by this? Just a brief... if we are on a stage here, imagine—this is a true dream—that it's a different stage, we are in in Moscow, I am Stalin, you are Central Committee. I give a speech, it's the applause, no. Then debate. One of you stands up and attacks me. Now this would be pretty stupid, no? Like next day everyone would be asking the question who saw that guy alive the last. But let's then say that another one of you would have stood up and started to shout at the first guy, "Are you crazy? Don't you know that here in Soviet Union we are not allowed to criticize Stalin?" My thesis is that this second guy would disappear even faster. As Derrida put it nicely, apropos of Kafka, prohibition itself is prohibited. Something is prohibited but it shouldn't be allowed as such. That's my first point. My second point: I love this mathematics, you know, of your solution was the to add which is purely... but there is another solution in a similar structure of jokes that I like, is that the subject throws itself into it to stop the subdivision. I quote in one of my books, in the '90s in Croatia, they have that leader Tuđman, who was a kind of a nationalist right-winger, and there was a wonderful joke about him. Of course, this is a joke which was already circulating before in other countries, it was just applied to him. It was that Tuđman is with his family on a plane above Croatia and he says, "What can I do for Croat people? Open that window a little bit, why don't I throw out a check for a million dollars and I will make one Croat happy?" Then his wife tells him, "But listen, Franjo," his name, "why don't you throw out two checks for half a million and make two Croats happy?" And so on and so on. And then his grandson, the voice of reason, you can imagine what he tells: "But Grandpa, why don't you throw yourself out and make all Croats happy?" you know. And there are so many jokes which have this... like there is a wonderful Stalinist joke which functions in the same way. Three people meet in Lubyanka, KGB headquarters, in mid-thirties, and you know immediately you talk about why are you here. The first one says, "I am here, I got five years for criticizing Popov," a top official. The second one says, "I got ten years for supporting Popov," because later Popov... no? You can imagine what the third one says: "I am here for life and I am Popov." You know? You know this how there is... okay, let me go on. Very briefly.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
What you said about this endogenous fixed point. I like—he is an intelligent
What you said about this endogenous fixed point. I like—he is an intelligent
Slavoj Žižek
biologist, the one who unfortunately was deceased, Stephen Jay Gould. I think he has a perfect example of some fixed
biologist, the one who unfortunately was deceased, Stephen Jay Gould. I think he has a perfect example of some fixed
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
point which although it's a pure fiction, it cannot be actualized, but it's
point which although it's a pure fiction, it cannot be actualized, but it's
Slavoj Žižek
absolutely necessary for the—you know, he takes the example of Hershey chocolate bars. You know, how do you... first you had—you get a certain amount of chocolate for a certain price. Then the price was kept the same, but you get a little bit less chocolate. At a certain point the price went up, the quantity also, but it was nonetheless a little bit lower than the first one. And Stephen Gould says, "If you just bring this logic to the end, you can not only precisely construct the point at which you will get zero chocolate, but you can also say exactly how much this zero will cost." You know, it's a wonderful example. Okay. Now really to... to finish with what I liked about futurism. You see, you again and again convinced me: this is why I am for Hegel against Marx. Marx still believed like that minister of yours in this positive bootstrapping future. Hegel knew it, no way. Hegel precisely was much more contingent-open than Marx, he prohibited any plans about... any... this position which is Marx's position, that you can be a historical agent who, as it were, have a privileged insight into historical necessity and in this way legitimate your own acts. This is totally prohibited for Hegel. Which is why I think Hegel is much more—and just—I will not talk endlessly. Then the word to your... the last one. That Argentinian video. Shall I cross? Not, you know. I noticed nonetheless some magical thinking there, which is nonetheless basically—did I see it correctly?—they survive. Yeah, they did. Yeah. Well, yes. What I in my evil mind imagined is that one of them is hit and then blames the other, and then two blind people start to beat each other. That would be my much more pessimistic version. I'm sorry for asking so much, no. But are you asking anything? No, yeah, this is a really evil question. I plead guilty. No, but what I really want to ask you to seriously comment where do you stand politically? Yes. It's a very... no, no, not "do you believe in God," it's even more obscene question. Where do you... your vision of how we should do what we should do with capitalism and so on. It's a vulgar question, but it intrigues me. How would you translate it into, or can you translate it into any of existing political orientations or not or what? In my country, because I mean, you act... you act in a given country. If not, in a given nation-state. The question doesn't... Okay, but you are divided between United States and France, no? Yeah, and Brazil. Okay, yeah. And Brazil. There is no—but you know that as well as I do—no political offer that can satisfy any one of us. So, and when you are a citizen, why you are asked to vote, that's all you are asked to. And I don't even vote. In my country. I tend to agree with you, you know why? Because my God, you know what's the problem today? We have freedom, certain freedom, which is the freedom of choice at this individual level. But isn't it that the more we have this freedom, the more totally transparent the social network is for us? We never decide or are even asked to decide about the global framework within which we can make our free choices. So unfortunately, I tend to agree with you. I have a question to you, too. Are we now out of time? No. But first I have a confession to make. The whole story I told is a hoax. About the—the—the camels. Exactly. I suspected this because I know Lacan pretty well, but I didn't remember it. Bravo, bravo. I wanted to test you. But it's a hoax that I made in Long time ago. I—what I did was to take the mathematical problem, which is not extraordinarily difficult but which is not trivial either, and it seemed obvious to me to ascribe it to Lacan's notion of the symbolic. But—but what about those hundreds of examples if you put it on Google in German? Was this also a lie? No, but that at least my hoax worked. Okay, let me explain to you. So I said to myself, "This is a beautiful illustration of Lacan's the symbolic." So I wrote a paper not only to say, "This is an illustration of Lacan's symbolic," but ascribing it to Lacan himself. And it worked. It worked. And in particular, it worked with Niklas Luhmann, whom I knew at the time, German sociologist, the great enemy of Habermas. And Luhmann in a very German—I hope I'm not going to—there are Germans in here—in a very German philosophical way, wrote a and almost page book called *Das zwölfte Kamel* about the parable, attributing it to Lacan and just mentioning in a footnote that he knew that through me. But I mean, you know. And now—I mean, it worked. That was in the early eighties. And again, do the test: Google search "Das zwölfte Kamel." You'll see hundreds of sites describing it to Lacan through Luhmann. Yeah, okay. But you know where is the real symbolic power? Because it doesn't matter if you say this. It will still function as Lacan's. But—but exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So this is a kind of hoax which works, but—and I'm not making fun of anyone here. The interesting thing is that it worked. You see? Okay. Now, have you—you see, we were given these masks here representing ourselves. So this is a typically Žižekian topic, no? Feigning to be oneself. Feigning to be oneself. And that makes me think of many, many things. For instance, Moliere's *Don Juan*. At the end of the play, he pretends to be a hypocrite in order to better demystify the hypocrites. But a hypocrite is someone literally who wears a mask. "Hypocrite,"
absolutely necessary for the—you know, he takes the example of Hershey chocolate bars. You know, how do you... first you had—you get a certain amount of chocolate for a certain price. Then the price was kept the same, but you get a little bit less chocolate. At a certain point the price went up, the quantity also, but it was nonetheless a little bit lower than the first one. And Stephen Gould says, "If you just bring this logic to the end, you can not only precisely construct the point at which you will get zero chocolate, but you can also say exactly how much this zero will cost." You know, it's a wonderful example. Okay. Now really to... to finish with what I liked about futurism. You see, you again and again convinced me: this is why I am for Hegel against Marx. Marx still believed like that minister of yours in this positive bootstrapping future. Hegel knew it, no way. Hegel precisely was much more contingent-open than Marx, he prohibited any plans about... any... this position which is Marx's position, that you can be a historical agent who, as it were, have a privileged insight into historical necessity and in this way legitimate your own acts. This is totally prohibited for Hegel. Which is why I think Hegel is much more—and just—I will not talk endlessly. Then the word to your... the last one. That Argentinian video. Shall I cross? Not, you know. I noticed nonetheless some magical thinking there, which is nonetheless basically—did I see it correctly?—they survive. Yeah, they did. Yeah. Well, yes. What I in my evil mind imagined is that one of them is hit and then blames the other, and then two blind people start to beat each other. That would be my much more pessimistic version. I'm sorry for asking so much, no. But are you asking anything? No, yeah, this is a really evil question. I plead guilty. No, but what I really want to ask you to seriously comment where do you stand politically? Yes. It's a very... no, no, not "do you believe in God," it's even more obscene question. Where do you... your vision of how we should do what we should do with capitalism and so on. It's a vulgar question, but it intrigues me. How would you translate it into, or can you translate it into any of existing political orientations or not or what? In my country, because I mean, you act... you act in a given country. If not, in a given nation-state. The question doesn't... Okay, but you are divided between United States and France, no? Yeah, and Brazil. Okay, yeah. And Brazil. There is no—but you know that as well as I do—no political offer that can satisfy any one of us. So, and when you are a citizen, why you are asked to vote, that's all you are asked to. And I don't even vote. In my country. I tend to agree with you, you know why? Because my God, you know what's the problem today? We have freedom, certain freedom, which is the freedom of choice at this individual level. But isn't it that the more we have this freedom, the more totally transparent the social network is for us? We never decide or are even asked to decide about the global framework within which we can make our free choices. So unfortunately, I tend to agree with you. I have a question to you, too. Are we now out of time? No. But first I have a confession to make. The whole story I told is a hoax. About the—the—the camels. Exactly. I suspected this because I know Lacan pretty well, but I didn't remember it. Bravo, bravo. I wanted to test you. But it's a hoax that I made in Long time ago. I—what I did was to take the mathematical problem, which is not extraordinarily difficult but which is not trivial either, and it seemed obvious to me to ascribe it to Lacan's notion of the symbolic. But—but what about those hundreds of examples if you put it on Google in German? Was this also a lie? No, but that at least my hoax worked. Okay, let me explain to you. So I said to myself, "This is a beautiful illustration of Lacan's the symbolic." So I wrote a paper not only to say, "This is an illustration of Lacan's symbolic," but ascribing it to Lacan himself. And it worked. It worked. And in particular, it worked with Niklas Luhmann, whom I knew at the time, German sociologist, the great enemy of Habermas. And Luhmann in a very German—I hope I'm not going to—there are Germans in here—in a very German philosophical way, wrote a and almost page book called *Das zwölfte Kamel* about the parable, attributing it to Lacan and just mentioning in a footnote that he knew that through me. But I mean, you know. And now—I mean, it worked. That was in the early eighties. And again, do the test: Google search "Das zwölfte Kamel." You'll see hundreds of sites describing it to Lacan through Luhmann. Yeah, okay. But you know where is the real symbolic power? Because it doesn't matter if you say this. It will still function as Lacan's. But—but exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So this is a kind of hoax which works, but—and I'm not making fun of anyone here. The interesting thing is that it worked. You see? Okay. Now, have you—you see, we were given these masks here representing ourselves. So this is a typically Žižekian topic, no? Feigning to be oneself. Feigning to be oneself. And that makes me think of many, many things. For instance, Moliere's *Don Juan*. At the end of the play, he pretends to be a hypocrite in order to better demystify the hypocrites. But a hypocrite is someone literally who wears a mask. "Hypocrite,"
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
that's what it means in Greek. So Don Juan
that's what it means in Greek. So Don Juan
Slavoj Žižek
pretends to be someone who
pretends to be someone who
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
wears a mask, the mask
wears a mask, the mask
Slavoj Žižek
of hypocrisy, in order to better demystify hypocrisy. So I mean, so this is the kind
of hypocrisy, in order to better demystify hypocrisy. So I mean, so this is the kind
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
of
of
Slavoj Žižek
game you love. Another illustration of that is fake money. What is the difference between fake money and money that is legal tender? In a sense, there is a big one and at the same time there is none, because a fake money that works—that is, that rests on the gullibility of those who
game you love. Another illustration of that is fake money. What is the difference between fake money and money that is legal tender? In a sense, there is a big one and at the same time there is none, because a fake money that works—that is, that rests on the gullibility of those who
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
exchange that—is exactly like a real money. Yeah,
exchange that—is exactly like a real money. Yeah,
Slavoj Žižek
but here I deeply... sorry to
but here I deeply... sorry to
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
interrupt you, but now I want to make a... No, no, please, please. Here I—you know why you were a discovery for me? Because before reading you I had some vague idea of a point, but only
interrupt you, but now I want to make a... No, no, please, please. Here I—you know why you were a discovery for me? Because before reading you I had some vague idea of a point, but only
Slavoj Žižek
through reading you I made it clear: that we should ultimately reject this Marxist and phenomenological and so on idea of self-transcendence as bad alienation and so on, you know? No, self-transcendence is absolutely... it shouldn't be just dismissed as a bad... you know, like all this bullshit that we get, how in an authentic society we just interact, then in an alienated society it appears as if there is an external transcendent entity. But no, this is an absolute structural necessity in this. I—we should totally reject this idea of an immediate self-transparent society. We—and the same goes for masks. Do you know I mention it sometime and I
through reading you I made it clear: that we should ultimately reject this Marxist and phenomenological and so on idea of self-transcendence as bad alienation and so on, you know? No, self-transcendence is absolutely... it shouldn't be just dismissed as a bad... you know, like all this bullshit that we get, how in an authentic society we just interact, then in an alienated society it appears as if there is an external transcendent entity. But no, this is an absolute structural necessity in this. I—we should totally reject this idea of an immediate self-transparent society. We—and the same goes for masks. Do you know I mention it sometime and I
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
always think about that one: a beautiful film about the power of an
always think about that one: a beautiful film about the power of an
Slavoj Žižek
authentic mask? For me, the most beautiful Rossellini film, a relatively late one, *Generale della Rovere*. Isn't this a beautiful...
authentic mask? For me, the most beautiful Rossellini film, a relatively late one, *Generale della Rovere*. Isn't this a beautiful...
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
you know, very briefly, he is a cheap swindler in '43, '44, Nazi-occupied Italy. Vittorio De Sica plays a guy who quite by chance resembles a big resistance leader. That
you know, very briefly, he is a cheap swindler in '43, '44, Nazi-occupied Italy. Vittorio De Sica plays a guy who quite by chance resembles a big resistance leader. That
Slavoj Žižek
leader is in reality dead, but resistance doesn't know it. So Germans make an offer
leader is in reality dead, but resistance doesn't know it. So Germans make an offer
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
to this poor Italian: "We leave you—let you live, we bribe you, if you just—we will arrest you, and there in front of other resistance that we have arrested, you pretend to be Generale della Rovere and of course, they will confide to you, tell you some..." And you can imagine what happens: the guy identifying with the role discovers his pride and takes his role so seriously that at the end he is shot as Generale della Rovere and so on and so on. No, I am here—I totally agree with you. I even take—did you see a movie which is vulgar but I kind of liked it? With Jim Carrey, *The Mask*. I like this idea how, you know, the Freudian drive—it's
to this poor Italian: "We leave you—let you live, we bribe you, if you just—we will arrest you, and there in front of other resistance that we have arrested, you pretend to be Generale della Rovere and of course, they will confide to you, tell you some..." And you can imagine what happens: the guy identifying with the role discovers his pride and takes his role so seriously that at the end he is shot as Generale della Rovere and so on and so on. No, I am here—I totally agree with you. I even take—did you see a movie which is vulgar but I kind of liked it? With Jim Carrey, *The Mask*. I like this idea how, you know, the Freudian drive—it's
Slavoj Žižek
not what is deep in you. I always like this
not what is deep in you. I always like this
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
metaphor of a mask which is stronger than you and kind of you are caught into a mask. So I always hate this idea of taking off the mask and, like, I don't want to see your real face or even less mine. Probably we are some filthy egotist, I don't know what shit you discover if you look too deep. I want nice polite masks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a beautiful article by Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher who's dead now, on the unfortunate translation in English—well, in French and English, but Spanish, Portuguese, whatever—of the two different German words and we translated both of them as "alienation." But one has a positive meaning: *Äußerung*, meaning self-exteriorization. And that's what I'm sensitive to and I want to say, "Yes, yes, yes." And *Entfremdung*, which means estrangement. Yes, that's a negative sense of— Yeah, but you know that there is the third one, which is sometimes also... no, but I
metaphor of a mask which is stronger than you and kind of you are caught into a mask. So I always hate this idea of taking off the mask and, like, I don't want to see your real face or even less mine. Probably we are some filthy egotist, I don't know what shit you discover if you look too deep. I want nice polite masks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a beautiful article by Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher who's dead now, on the unfortunate translation in English—well, in French and English, but Spanish, Portuguese, whatever—of the two different German words and we translated both of them as "alienation." But one has a positive meaning: *Äußerung*, meaning self-exteriorization. And that's what I'm sensitive to and I want to say, "Yes, yes, yes." And *Entfremdung*, which means estrangement. Yes, that's a negative sense of— Yeah, but you know that there is the third one, which is sometimes also... no, but I
Slavoj Žižek
think you translate it differently, the Brechtian one, which is not *Entfremdung*, which is *Verfremdung*. *Verfremdung* is the Brechtian extra... sometimes, how do you—how do you? Because that one is meant directly in a positive way. Yeah. So I don't know how to translate. Yes, but— No, no, but and I think that again, this is what I find in your work. You know we all know that the big Left project, here I agree with my friend Alenka but you at least here, when he says the twentieth century is over, it means all the twentieth century Left projects, from of course Stalinist communism—which is not simply over, but the irony is that Stalinist communists where they are still in power, they are now the most efficient managers of capitalism in China—Social Democratic welfare state, but there is another leftist myth that I'm deeply skeptical about. This myth of local communitarian pre-representative directly engaged without alien—like, you know, communities in a transparent way take... like we are all engaged, no—no alienation, representation. I'm totally opposed to this. First for the simple elementary reason: can you imagine living in this type of society where you would have to be engaged all the time with some stupid problems: "How do we get food?" No, I want a good alienated system which functions invisibly and then we can watch Hitchcock and write our books and so on. I also—what I learned from you is this, let's call it absolutely positive constitutive aspect of alienation. Even at the most elementary level in language. I like language because from the ve—you know, for example, let's say we meet on a street. Not you—I would really like to meet you—but another one, and then you know, of course we met and I say the usual bullshit, "How are you? Nice to meet you." Okay, we all know that my
think you translate it differently, the Brechtian one, which is not *Entfremdung*, which is *Verfremdung*. *Verfremdung* is the Brechtian extra... sometimes, how do you—how do you? Because that one is meant directly in a positive way. Yeah. So I don't know how to translate. Yes, but— No, no, but and I think that again, this is what I find in your work. You know we all know that the big Left project, here I agree with my friend Alenka but you at least here, when he says the twentieth century is over, it means all the twentieth century Left projects, from of course Stalinist communism—which is not simply over, but the irony is that Stalinist communists where they are still in power, they are now the most efficient managers of capitalism in China—Social Democratic welfare state, but there is another leftist myth that I'm deeply skeptical about. This myth of local communitarian pre-representative directly engaged without alien—like, you know, communities in a transparent way take... like we are all engaged, no—no alienation, representation. I'm totally opposed to this. First for the simple elementary reason: can you imagine living in this type of society where you would have to be engaged all the time with some stupid problems: "How do we get food?" No, I want a good alienated system which functions invisibly and then we can watch Hitchcock and write our books and so on. I also—what I learned from you is this, let's call it absolutely positive constitutive aspect of alienation. Even at the most elementary level in language. I like language because from the ve—you know, for example, let's say we meet on a street. Not you—I would really like to meet you—but another one, and then you know, of course we met and I say the usual bullshit, "How are you? Nice to meet you." Okay, we all know that my
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
first thought was "My God, why didn't I notice him five seconds earlier so that I would be able to cross..." But, but you know what's the miracle of politeness? Even if we all know this, nonetheless it's wrong in a phenomenological way to claim that this is just hypocritical. It's a kind of a sincere lie. And I claim it's wrong in a phenomenological
first thought was "My God, why didn't I notice him five seconds earlier so that I would be able to cross..." But, but you know what's the miracle of politeness? Even if we all know this, nonetheless it's wrong in a phenomenological way to claim that this is just hypocritical. It's a kind of a sincere lie. And I claim it's wrong in a phenomenological
Slavoj Žižek
way to claim that this is just a formalization, a fixation of some primordial authentic moment when people really meant it: "Glad to see you." No, I claim the gap is here from the very beginning. This is why my salute goes to the great old Hollywood producer, Sam Goldwyn. You know his wonderful Goldwynism: when some newspapers attacked his films as containing too many old clichés, you know what memo he wrote to his scenario department? "We urgently need some new original clichés." And he was absolutely right. Cliché is a self-transcendence of language in this sense. Yes. Can I interrupt you for a second, very quickly? We've finished your point, but I wanted to see if we wanted to have one or two questions from the audience? Oh sure, sure. Yeah, but should he
way to claim that this is just a formalization, a fixation of some primordial authentic moment when people really meant it: "Glad to see you." No, I claim the gap is here from the very beginning. This is why my salute goes to the great old Hollywood producer, Sam Goldwyn. You know his wonderful Goldwynism: when some newspapers attacked his films as containing too many old clichés, you know what memo he wrote to his scenario department? "We urgently need some new original clichés." And he was absolutely right. Cliché is a self-transcendence of language in this sense. Yes. Can I interrupt you for a second, very quickly? We've finished your point, but I wanted to see if we wanted to have one or two questions from the audience? Oh sure, sure. Yeah, but should he
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
reply me? Just take my
reply me? Just take my
Slavoj Žižek
word for me. Don't you deserve nonetheless to... No, but I mean the... I think it's important to get feedback from people present. Please continue, but I'll see if there's any interest in some questions at the same time as you're speaking. Superposition of questions. Are you bourgeois democrat or did you distribute the questions in the Stalinist way so that— I have a question for both of you. I'm curious how you would relate the program turtles that are programmed to do nothing other than mimic one another's movement, or the absent-minded professors, the blind—the two blind men crossing the street, each each of which is—is operating with a complete absence of any kind of plan, assuming that the other one has that. I'm curious about the comparison with that with the example you gave of *Life is Beautiful*. If both the father and the son know what's going on in the camp, but each pretends that the other one doesn't know in order to keep the game going. That would seem in some way to amount to the same thing, but one comes from an excess of knowledge whereas the other comes from a lack of
word for me. Don't you deserve nonetheless to... No, but I mean the... I think it's important to get feedback from people present. Please continue, but I'll see if there's any interest in some questions at the same time as you're speaking. Superposition of questions. Are you bourgeois democrat or did you distribute the questions in the Stalinist way so that— I have a question for both of you. I'm curious how you would relate the program turtles that are programmed to do nothing other than mimic one another's movement, or the absent-minded professors, the blind—the two blind men crossing the street, each each of which is—is operating with a complete absence of any kind of plan, assuming that the other one has that. I'm curious about the comparison with that with the example you gave of *Life is Beautiful*. If both the father and the son know what's going on in the camp, but each pretends that the other one doesn't know in order to keep the game going. That would seem in some way to amount to the same thing, but one comes from an excess of knowledge whereas the other comes from a lack of
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
knowledge.
knowledge.
Slavoj Žižek
I'm curious how those two moments relate to one another. It's your—it's not really a lack of knowledge in my
I'm curious how those two moments relate to one another. It's your—it's not really a lack of knowledge in my
unknown
case. Actually, behind this, it's—it's a chapter of John Maynard Keynes', *The General Theory of Money, Employment and Interest*. It's if—it's a general precept of rationality. If I don't know, for instance, on the market where there is a lot of uncertainties, if I don't know how things work and how they are going to work, it is rational to imitate the others because there is a chance that they do know. If they do know... well, I will lose nothing in a sense, but if they know, I will
case. Actually, behind this, it's—it's a chapter of John Maynard Keynes', *The General Theory of Money, Employment and Interest*. It's if—it's a general precept of rationality. If I don't know, for instance, on the market where there is a lot of uncertainties, if I don't know how things work and how they are going to work, it is rational to imitate the others because there is a chance that they do know. If they do know... well, I will lose nothing in a sense, but if they know, I will
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
profit from their knowledge by imitating them. And I do—I have no way for me to know whether they know or whether they do not know. So the rational on a market like a financial market, the rational behavior is to imitate the others. But so everyone imitates everyone else, and that can produce a catastrophe or, if a few—if a few members of the crowd know—know the truth, the truth being the real value of this asset, for instance, of this action or bond, the whole crowd will benefit from the knowledge of some. But there is no guarantee that all of us we won't go into the big hole. So there is—no, it's—it's more complex than the lack of—the absence of knowledge. It's—if there is uncertainty and a fortiori there is indeterminacy about the future, then imitating the others may be the rational thing to do. But in that case, of course, in the case of the two blind men, it—it didn't work. Although, as Slavoj said, they survived in this particular ad. But it's an ad for a business magazine, so it would be... yeah, if they didn't survive, it would be a problem. Can
profit from their knowledge by imitating them. And I do—I have no way for me to know whether they know or whether they do not know. So the rational on a market like a financial market, the rational behavior is to imitate the others. But so everyone imitates everyone else, and that can produce a catastrophe or, if a few—if a few members of the crowd know—know the truth, the truth being the real value of this asset, for instance, of this action or bond, the whole crowd will benefit from the knowledge of some. But there is no guarantee that all of us we won't go into the big hole. So there is—no, it's—it's more complex than the lack of—the absence of knowledge. It's—if there is uncertainty and a fortiori there is indeterminacy about the future, then imitating the others may be the rational thing to do. But in that case, of course, in the case of the two blind men, it—it didn't work. Although, as Slavoj said, they survived in this particular ad. But it's an ad for a business magazine, so it would be... yeah, if they didn't survive, it would be a problem. Can
Slavoj Žižek
I just ask you, and you go on—didn't—didn't the philosopher, not the old German idealist Schelling, but this—but the
I just ask you, and you go on—didn't—didn't the philosopher, not the old German idealist Schelling, but this—but the
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
other Schelling, Thomas Schelling, did he develop something similar? Focal points. Focal points. Exactly. So you also implicitly refer to Schelling. Oh, yes, absolutely so. Yes. But you know, we had minutes so we couldn't... of course, yeah. No, but absolutely so. Thomas Schelling, yes. What was the title? *The Strategy of Conflict*, His book about that. The idea is that it's even crucial that it even played some real
other Schelling, Thomas Schelling, did he develop something similar? Focal points. Focal points. Exactly. So you also implicitly refer to Schelling. Oh, yes, absolutely so. Yes. But you know, we had minutes so we couldn't... of course, yeah. No, but absolutely so. Thomas Schelling, yes. What was the title? *The Strategy of Conflict*, His book about that. The idea is that it's even crucial that it even played some real
Slavoj Žižek
role in preventing cold war turning hot
role in preventing cold war turning hot
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
and so on. Catastrophe.
and so on. Catastrophe.
Slavoj Žižek
Exactly. But you the question was for you too, no? I—the only thing I can say is that for me the big enigma is the status of knowledge—who knows what, and so on and so on—and a situation similar with that of Benigni, you know? Here the chicken is the big other, the public space. Look, this is for me the paradox of Stalinism. Usually people said that Western democracies are—manipulated, while Stalinism relies on brutal force. It's not as simple as that. Stalinism—the other—Stalinism was of course an extremely brutal regime killing millions
Exactly. But you the question was for you too, no? I—the only thing I can say is that for me the big enigma is the status of knowledge—who knows what, and so on and so on—and a situation similar with that of Benigni, you know? Here the chicken is the big other, the public space. Look, this is for me the paradox of Stalinism. Usually people said that Western democracies are—manipulated, while Stalinism relies on brutal force. It's not as simple as that. Stalinism—the other—Stalinism was of course an extremely brutal regime killing millions
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
without problem. But at the
without problem. But at the
Slavoj Žižek
same time, that's the enigma of Stalinism: it was a regime which was incredibly depending on appearances being kept. Like something that can happen now. Now we have different types of leaders. Even in United States, starting with Reagan, or in Argentina, Menem was maybe the first. He made openly fun of himself and so on. You know, this structure of power which makes fun of itself, don't take itself seriously but nonetheless it functions and so on. While the Stalinist regime—it behaved as if something which everyone knew it's true but it shouldn't be said publicly. As if the whole system would collapse if anyone were to say this publicly. And this here you have, you know, we all know the chicken shouldn't know. It's a very—here you have the mystery. Here you have, for example, I'll give you another example. You know Khrushchev's speech, 20th Congress, when he blah blah. You know that the situation was so tense that—it would be nice for us to have such an effect—that you know that four, five people, while Khrushchev was delivering his big speech denouncing Stalinist crimes, there were ambulance units with stretchers waiting there, five people died during the speech of heart attack. But wait a minute: they didn't learn anything new. My God, everyone knew about Stalinist gulags and so on. It's just that the big other learned. The appearance was broken. You know? So as, I think was it Doctorow or which American contemporary writer who said something like, "The appearances are all we have, so let's treat them gently." You know? This is why I was always—that's why I hate Actor's Studio, incidentally. You know, this idea of "be heroic, tear
same time, that's the enigma of Stalinism: it was a regime which was incredibly depending on appearances being kept. Like something that can happen now. Now we have different types of leaders. Even in United States, starting with Reagan, or in Argentina, Menem was maybe the first. He made openly fun of himself and so on. You know, this structure of power which makes fun of itself, don't take itself seriously but nonetheless it functions and so on. While the Stalinist regime—it behaved as if something which everyone knew it's true but it shouldn't be said publicly. As if the whole system would collapse if anyone were to say this publicly. And this here you have, you know, we all know the chicken shouldn't know. It's a very—here you have the mystery. Here you have, for example, I'll give you another example. You know Khrushchev's speech, 20th Congress, when he blah blah. You know that the situation was so tense that—it would be nice for us to have such an effect—that you know that four, five people, while Khrushchev was delivering his big speech denouncing Stalinist crimes, there were ambulance units with stretchers waiting there, five people died during the speech of heart attack. But wait a minute: they didn't learn anything new. My God, everyone knew about Stalinist gulags and so on. It's just that the big other learned. The appearance was broken. You know? So as, I think was it Doctorow or which American contemporary writer who said something like, "The appearances are all we have, so let's treat them gently." You know? This is why I was always—that's why I hate Actor's Studio, incidentally. You know, this idea of "be heroic, tear
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
off the appearance, go deep into your..." I'm not interested in anyone's true face. That makes me think of—I have a chicken story that dovetails nicely with yours. It's a true story actually. Reg when he introduced me mentioned the influence that a certain Heinz von Foerster had on me. That's one of the founding fathers of cybernetics. Heinz von Foerster was a Viennese Jew, but protected by his aristocratic name, "von Foerster." So actually he spent the war as an electrical engineer before coming to this country and founding cybernetics. And he was
off the appearance, go deep into your..." I'm not interested in anyone's true face. That makes me think of—I have a chicken story that dovetails nicely with yours. It's a true story actually. Reg when he introduced me mentioned the influence that a certain Heinz von Foerster had on me. That's one of the founding fathers of cybernetics. Heinz von Foerster was a Viennese Jew, but protected by his aristocratic name, "von Foerster." So actually he spent the war as an electrical engineer before coming to this country and founding cybernetics. And he was
unknown
working near Danzig. Danzig in
working near Danzig. Danzig in
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Poland. Danzig, yeah.
Poland. Danzig, yeah.
unknown
Every day he would ride his bike to go from his home to his work. And he noticed that it was easy to notice that when he was riding his bike and crossing a farm, for instance, the chickens that were there would end up under his wheels. And every other day he killed a chicken, had to pay for it, and well, he—he was fed up with eating
Every day he would ride his bike to go from his home to his work. And he noticed that it was easy to notice that when he was riding his bike and crossing a farm, for instance, the chickens that were there would end up under his wheels. And every other day he killed a chicken, had to pay for it, and well, he—he was fed up with eating
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
chickens and paying for them, so he decided to study the mathematics of this. And he understood the following
chickens and paying for them, so he decided to study the mathematics of this. And he understood the following
unknown
thing: a chicken is
thing: a chicken is
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
not a stupid animal and is afraid, it is not stupid and it is—it feels fear. And for the chicken it's fundamental to see the danger, to keep the danger in his visual field. And it turns out that chickens see sideways, like this. So it's a very beautiful mathematical problem: imagine the trajectory of the chicken such that, at a given speed, such that the—constantly the chicken sees sideways the wheel of the bicycle. And that it's a very complicated curve, but for a given
not a stupid animal and is afraid, it is not stupid and it is—it feels fear. And for the chicken it's fundamental to see the danger, to keep the danger in his visual field. And it turns out that chickens see sideways, like this. So it's a very beautiful mathematical problem: imagine the trajectory of the chicken such that, at a given speed, such that the—constantly the chicken sees sideways the wheel of the bicycle. And that it's a very complicated curve, but for a given
Slavoj Žižek
ratio of the two speeds, the speed of the chicken and the speed of the bicycle, ends up with the chicken below the wheel. And—and there is something counter-productive here. It's what Heinz did was to slow down. And when he knew all these things, he understood that it was exactly the opposite. He had to accelerate and save the lives of the chickens. So the chicken was very smart. The chicken just wanted to see the danger coming to him. You see? Okay, that's the chicken story. [The audience applauds as the event wraps up.] In case anyone wanted to, we have some of the books available for sale at the door and Van will help you with that. And I just want to thank both of our speakers again, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much, what a way to spend Halloween. [Final applause as speakers shake hands.]
ratio of the two speeds, the speed of the chicken and the speed of the bicycle, ends up with the chicken below the wheel. And—and there is something counter-productive here. It's what Heinz did was to slow down. And when he knew all these things, he understood that it was exactly the opposite. He had to accelerate and save the lives of the chickens. So the chicken was very smart. The chicken just wanted to see the danger coming to him. You see? Okay, that's the chicken story. [The audience applauds as the event wraps up.] In case anyone wanted to, we have some of the books available for sale at the door and Van will help you with that. And I just want to thank both of our speakers again, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much, what a way to spend Halloween. [Final applause as speakers shake hands.]