Plea for Ethical Violence
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2004 · 0:57:41 · 8,009 words
ethicspsychoanalysisreligion-theologyideologyphilosophy-generalhegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnesshistory
Žižek delivers a lecture framed as a 'plea for ethical violence against Levinas,' arguing that contemporary power operates not through repression but through permissiveness and the injunction to enjoy, making pitiless self-censorship a prerequisite for emancipatory politics. He systematically critiques Levinas's grounding of ethics in the encounter with the other's face, arguing via Lacan, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Kant that justice requires abstracting away from the face toward the faceless 'third,' and that the inhuman, exemplified by the Muselmann figure, is missing from Levinas's account. The talk also diagnoses the contemporary ideological function of religion and Habermasian neo-Kantianism as strategies for containing the consequences of scientific progress, and concludes that psychoanalysis is the only discourse that permits one 'not to enjoy.'
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 24
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “ethical violence”
The externally imposed, traumatic, non-organic character of genuine ethical injunctions (e.g. the Mosaic Law), which Žižek defends against those who denounce all ethical pressure as disguised power.
The emancipatory political imperative to suppress spontaneous self-expression and the desire for meaning, opposed to the permissive injunction to enjoy.
True art requires the artist's radical self-objectivization, a dying in and for oneself, making art more asubjective than science, which still allows the scientist a personal pathological stance.
Althusserian concept Žižek applies to the Sinaitic pronouncement of the Decalogue as the ultimate scene of religious ideological interpellation, external, violent, non-organic.
as “the face as ultimate fetish”
Žižek's reframing of Levinas's 'face' as a fetish object that fills in and obfuscates the big Other's inconsistency, providing a false ultimate foundation for the symbolic order.
The self-referential symbolic order whose circularity Levinas's 'face' is meant to anchor but which, for Žižek following Lacan, remains irreducibly inconsistent and groundless.
as “the phantasmatic kernel”
The innermost inadmissible fantasies that constitute the subject's being but can never be fully assumed without triggering aphanisis.
as “aphanisis of the subject”
Lacanian term for the fading or disintegration of the subject when it approaches its phantasmatic core too closely; Žižek links it to losing one's face in the Levinasian sense.
The absent others who are excluded from any privileged face-to-face ethical relation; Žižek argues the primordial ethical obligation is to this third rather than to the one whose face we encounter.
Žižek's ironic reformulation of the colonialist 'white man's burden' to name the dialectical reversal in Levinas whereby Jewish universal ethical responsibility secretly becomes a claim to privileged moral centrality.
Spinoza's concept of an entity's tendency toward self-preservation, which Žižek mobilizes against Levinas: Spinoza's self is not egotistically opposed to others but immanently part of the network of reality.
Žižek's counter to Levinas: the subject threatens the order of being not by positively existing within it but by being a void, nothing striving to become everything (citing Schelling).
Lacan's logical schema Žižek applies to love and hatred: 'I do not love you all' (universal non-love with exception) grounds true love, while 'I love you all' (universal love) necessarily generates hatred of exceptions.
as “the inhuman as indefinite judgment”
Drawing on Kant's distinction between negative and indefinite judgment, Žižek argues 'inhuman' is not 'not-human' (external negation) but an excess immanent to humanity itself, a monstrous excess like 'undead.'
as “undead”
Used as the template for the Kantian indefinite judgment: 'undead' is neither alive nor dead but marks a monstrous third domain; analogously 'inhuman' marks an excess immanent to humanity.
as “the night of the world”
Hegel's metaphor for the core of subjectivity as night rather than light of reason; Žižek invokes it to mark the shift with German Idealism where madness becomes the explosion of subjectivity's innermost core.
as “the Muselmann”
The concentration-camp figure of living death, simultaneously zero-level reduction to bare life and pure excess, whose facelessness exposes the limit of Levinasian face-ethics.
as “teleological suspension of the ethical”
Kierkegaard's concept invoked to argue that the highest ethical acts (like Abraham's or a Stalinist Antigone's) require suspending ordinary ethical norms; Žižek uses it to push beyond Levinas.
as “destructive agalma”
The secret treasure/knowledge (adapting Lacan's agalma) that Kierkegaard's modern Antigone must keep hidden, her father Oedipus's guilt, which destroys her by its unshareability.
as “Staatsphilosophie”
State philosophy structurally defined as the double game of allowing scientific/technological progress while blocking its epistemological and ethical consequences; Žižek diagnoses Habermasian neo-Kantianism as its current form.
as “pousse-à-jouir”
The ideological push toward enjoyment; Žižek identifies it as the fundamental contemporary injunction that psychoanalysis is uniquely positioned to resist.
Enjoyment as the operative ideological category today; Žižek argues that meaning has become so identified with jouissance that religion and New Age spirituality sell enjoyment as enlightenment.
Implicit background concept to the injunction-to-enjoy analysis; contemporary ideology channels jouissance as its binding mechanism.
Background concept implicit in the analysis of how 'universal human rights' function today, abstract universality that in practice becomes the right of powerful states to intervene.
Stories he reaches for 4
Žižek invokes the image of Reinhard Heydrich (chief architect of the Holocaust) playing Beethoven in the evening to illustrate why justice must ignore 'inner truth' and 'face': the capacity to understand anyone from within is precisely what ethical law prohibits.
“I'm sure one can understand Heydrich. He would say, but you don't understand anything about my deep inner experience of playing in the evening Beethoven string quartets.”
In the last days of the GDR, Stasi chief Erich Mielke defended himself before the People's Chamber with the declaration 'but I love you all', Žižek argues this was not irony but the literal universal-love proposition that grounded his systematic hatred of socialism's enemies.
“But I love you all. I think this was not irony, it has to be taken literal. I love you all is the universal proposition which grounded his hatred of the enemies of socialism.”
The horror-genre distinction between 'he is not dead' (external negation) and 'he is undead' (indefinite judgment) illustrates Kant's logical distinction and provides the template for 'inhuman': not the external negation of humanity but a monstrous excess immanent to it.
“He is not dead and he is undead. The indefinite judgment, he is undead, opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction.”
Žižek extends Kierkegaard's thought-experiment of a modern Antigone (who cannot share her destructive secret about Oedipus) into a postmodern-Stalinist Antigone who publicly denounces her father out of unconditional love, an act no one would understand as love, leaving her utterly alone.
“No one with the exception of Oedipus himself, if he were still to be alive, would understand that her act of betrayal is the supreme act of love.”
Works invoked 9
Capital book
The three forms of value in Chapter 1 are homologically mapped onto Levinas's stages of ethical responsibility to reveal the built-in structural reversal.
Kant's distinction between negative and indefinite judgment is the logical basis for Žižek's argument about the inhuman as a third domain immanent to humanity.
Levinas's main work; quoted for the epiphany of the face guaranteeing itself and grounding language's authenticity, Žižek uses these passages as the primary target of his critique.
Either/Or book
Kierkegaard's chapter on the ancient tragic motive (the modern Antigone) provides the template Žižek extends into a postmodern-Stalinist Antigone.
Agamben's 'wonderful book' on the Muselmann; used to ground Žižek's argument that the figure of the Muselmann is the limit-case that exposes Levinas's framework.
Butler's book (then published only in German), mentioned as an instance of the critique of ethical violence that Žižek's lecture is arguing against.
Difficult Freedom book
Quoted extensively (the tree as usurper passage, the chosen people passage, the uprooted letter/spirit passage), Žižek sees it as simultaneously Levinas at his best and worst, revealing the dialectical reversal into Jewish ethical privilege.
Brecht's short story collection; the Herr Keuner anecdote about God is quoted as the best formulation of true atheism as making the question itself irrelevant.
Graham Greene's novel; a passage ('Hate is just a failure of imagination') is cited and deliberately inverted: Žižek uses it to argue that justice requires suspending the imagination that always generates pity.
People invoked 26
Primo Levi positive
Invoked for repeatedly describing the Muselmann as 'faceless,' which Žižek uses to show that actual Holocaust experience contradicts Levinas's framework.
Graham Greene positive
Quoted from The Power and the Glory: 'Hate is just a failure of imagination', Žižek inverts the intended meaning: justice requires suspending imagination precisely because imagining the other fully always generates pity.
Antigone positive
Both Sophocles's acting Antigone and Kierkegaard's suffering modern Antigone are discussed; Žižek extends the thought-experiment to a postmodern Stalinist Antigone who denounces her father out of love.
Vladimir Mayakovsky positive
Quoted for 'I had to step on the throat of my muse', Žižek says he does not admire Mayakovsky excessively but treats this gesture as the constitutive act of a true poet and paradigm of emancipatory self-censorship.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for his ambiguity about the inhuman: Adorno sees the inhuman as depository of alienated humanity (barbarism to fight) but fails to thematize the positive dimension of inhumanity that Žižek locates in the Kantian tradition.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
The main polemical target of the lecture; Žižek critiques his grounding of ethics in the other's face as a fetish that obfuscates symbolic inconsistency, his dialectical reversal into Jewish privileged responsibility, his inability to account for the inhuman (Muselmann), and his inapplicability to actual Holocaust experience.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the circular self-referential structure of the symbolic order, aphanisis of the subject, and the formulas of sexuation; used to provide the psychoanalytic framework that consistently undermines Levinas.
Tenzin Gyatso negative
Cited as a structural example of contemporary religion sustaining rather than limiting enjoyment, his bestselling books package Tibetan Buddhist ethics as compatible with egotistic self-fulfillment, making him a vehicle of the injunction to enjoy.
Judith Butler negative
Cited as the author of a book titled Critique of Ethical Violence (then published only in German), which Žižek aligns with the position he is arguing against.
Alain Badiou positive
Quoted twice: first for his thesis that Empire no longer censors but controls via permissiveness, requiring pitiless self-censorship; second for an unpublished work on the gap between truth and meaning that Žižek uses to analyze contemporary religion's function.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Cited for Remnants of Auschwitz and his treatment of the Muselmann's paradoxical ethical status as simultaneously zero-level of life and pure excess.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Mobilized against Levinas: Spinoza's ontology of full immanence (conatus as participation in reality's network, not egotistic self-assertion) is offered as the more adequate account of the subject's relation to existence.
Bertolt Brecht positive
The Herr Keuner story about God is quoted in full as the best statement of true atheism: rendering the God-question irrelevant rather than heroically rejecting God.
Jacques Rancière positive
Despite disagreeing with him politically, Žižek cites Rancière's point about human rights being the rights of those who cannot exercise them, using it to develop the reflexive reversal argument about humanitarian intervention.
The Stasi chief's declaration 'I love you all' before the GDR People's Chamber is used as the paradigm case of universal love grounding hatred of exceptions, taken as literally true, not ironic.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited, despite political disagreement, for her observation that universal human rights became actual precisely when a class of stateless refugees emerged who had no political rights, a starting point for Žižek's critique of humanitarian intervention ideology.
Invoked as a limiting case: one could understand Heydrich's 'inner truth' (his love of Beethoven) from within, which is precisely why justice must prohibit such understanding and remain blind to inner life.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited for his definition of the subject as 'the endless striving of the nothing to become everything,' supporting Žižek's argument that the subject is a void rather than a positive entity.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Used extensively: his modern Antigone (internalized conflict, unshared secret) and teleological suspension of the ethical serve as launching pads for Žižek's postmodern-Stalinist Antigone and the idea that the ethical itself can be a temptation.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Diagnosed as performing the structural role of Staatsphilosophie: his neo-Kantian Enlightenment position runs the same double game as religion, allowing technological progress while blocking its epistemological/ethical consequences; compared unfavorably to New Age strategy.
Karl Marx positive
The three forms of value in Capital Chapter 1 are mapped onto Levinas's stages of ethical responsibility to show the built-in reversal from self-denigration to self-privileging.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the 'night of the world' as metaphor for subjectivity's core, the Hegelian suspicion that self-denigration secretly asserts its contrary, and the dialectical structure underlying Levinas's ethical reversal.
Immanuel Kant positive
His distinction between negative and indefinite judgment (Critique of Pure Reason) is central to Žižek's argument that 'inhuman' is not the negation of human but a monstrous third domain immanent to humanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche negative
Mentioned as a misguided link sometimes made to the critique of ethical violence, Žižek argues Nietzsche's 'last man' critique of moral sensitivity cannot ground the anti-Levinasian position he is building.
Léon Brunschvicg positive
Quoted via Levinas: 'The preoccupation with our salvation is a remnant of self-love, a trace of natural egocentrism from which we must be torn by the religious life', Žižek agrees but then goes further to atheism.
Cited via Levinas quoting him: 'We are all responsible for everything and guilty in front of everyone, but I am that more than all others', used by Levinas to illustrate asymmetrical ethical responsibility.
What it argues
ethical violence vs. permissive powercritique of Levinasian face-ethicsjustice and the faceless thirdthe inhuman as constitutive of ethicspsychoanalysis and the permission not to enjoyreligion and Habermas as state philosophyJewish ethical universalism and its dialectical reversal
Dialectical moves 13
“Non-alienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization — they all serve the system. Which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics.”
The 1960s emancipatory mottos of spontaneity and self-expression have been co-opted by power, so their opposite, self-censorship, is now the truly emancipatory gesture.
“The face is the ultimate fetish, the object which fills in, obfuscates the big Other's inconsistency, the abyss of its circularity.”
What Levinas presents as the ethical foundation (the other's face) is precisely a fetish that papers over the groundlessness of the symbolic order rather than grounding it.
“Is the psychoanalytic treatment not the experience of rendering public to the analyst one's most intimate fantasies and thus the experience of losing one's face in precisely the most radical Levinasian sense of the term?”
Psychoanalysis, far from defending the dignity of the face, systematically destroys it, inverting its apparent relation to Levinasian ethics.
“Self-questioning is always by definition the obverse, the other side of self-privileging. There is always something false about respect for others which is based on questioning one's own right to exist.”
Levinas's asymmetrical self-denigration ('I have no right to be') dialectically reverses into its opposite, the claim to be the universal privileged site of ethical responsibility.
“I love you all is the universal proposition which grounded his hatred of the enemies of socialism — universal love necessarily relies on: I really hate some of you.”
Universal love (Mielke's 'I love you all') is not a sentimental opposite of hatred but its very foundation: the universal proposition generates hatred of the constitutive exception.
“Love emerges out of universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love.”
The asymmetry between love and hatred: genuine love requires a background of indifference (not universal love) to single out the beloved; universal love breeds hatred of exceptions.
“The true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of this face, the choice against the face for the third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary.”
Against Levinas, the genuinely ethical move is not responsiveness to the face but its suspension in favor of the faceless absent third, coldness is the condition of justice.
“He is not human is not the same as he is inhuman… he is inhuman means he is neither human nor inhuman, marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent as an innermost possibility of being human.”
The inhuman is not the external negation of humanity but its indefinite judgment, an excess constitutively immanent to being human, not something outside it.
“With Kant and German Idealism, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being — no longer animal passion or divine madness taking over, but the innermost excess of subjectivity itself.”
Kant reverses the pre-Kantian topology: excess is no longer external to the subject (animal or divine) but the subject's very innermost core, symbolized by 'the night of the world.'
“What universal human rights means effectively is our right to make humanitarian intervention where we want. We export them so that via this detour they return to us.”
Human rights, nominally the rights of the rightless, undergo a Hegelian reflexive reversal and become the right of powerful states to intervene, universality returns as particular power.
“A true atheist does not choose atheism, for him the question itself is irrelevant — the choice as such is located within the field of belief.”
Heroic atheism (choosing not to believe) is still a position within the field of theism; true atheism bypasses the choice entirely by rendering the question meaningless.
“The subject is not a positive living being threatening others by existing; rather, as a hole in the order of being, as nothing, it appropriates everything. Only a nothing can desire to become everything.”
Inverting Levinas's critique of Spinoza: the subject threatens others not by positively occupying space but by being a void, negation is more threatening than presence.
“Such a prohibition to assert the particular identity of white men, although it presents itself as admission of guilt, nonetheless confers on them a central position — it makes them the universal neutral medium.”
The political-correctness prohibition on white male identity-assertion dialectically produces white men as the universal standard from which others' identities are recognized.
Claims 19
asserts
Contemporary power reproduces itself not through repression but through unconstrained permissiveness and the injunction to enjoy, making pitiless self-censorship a sine qua non of emancipatory politics.ideology and contemporary power
asserts
True art is more asubjective than science because the artist must undergo radical self-objectivization and die in and for himself, while the scientist retains personal pathological features.the nature of authentic art
rejects
The critique of ethical violence, including Butler's and implicitly Nietzsche-inflected versions, fails to perceive how contemporary power operates through permissiveness rather than prohibition.critique of ethical violence (Butler, Nietzsche-inflected)
asserts
The Jewish commandment prohibiting images of God is not about mystical transcendence but is the obverse of the claim that the divine is present only in how we relate to our neighbors — an anti-Gnostic, anti-self-realization ethics.Jewish iconoclasm and ethics
asserts
Levinas's 'face' functions as the ultimate fetish that obfuscates the big Other's inconsistency and circularity rather than providing a genuine ethical foundation.Levinas's face-ethics
asserts
The psychoanalytic treatment is itself the experience of losing one's face in the most radical Levinasian sense, demonstrating how far psychoanalysis is from defending the dignity of the face.psychoanalysis vs. Levinasian face-ethics
asserts
Levinas's asymmetrical universal responsibility dialectically reverses into a claim to privileged moral status for Jews — a 'Jewish man's burden' — confirming the Hegelian suspicion that every self-denigration secretly asserts its contrary.Levinas's notion of chosenness and ethical asymmetry
asserts
The true ethical step is beyond the face of the other: justice requires suspending the hold of the face and choosing the faceless third, which is the only move that genuinely uproots justice from contingent particularity.the priority of justice over face-to-face ethics
rejects
The limitation of Levinas is not Eurocentrism but the exclusion of the inhuman — as an indefinite Kantian judgment immanent to humanity — exemplified by the Muselmann, who is precisely faceless.Levinas's account of the scope of ethical humanity
asserts
Levinas's ethics is characteristic of those who felt guilty for observing the Shoah from a safe distance rather than of actual survivors, as the experience of the Muselmann contradicts his framework.Levinas and the Shoah
asserts
Universal love (I love you all) necessarily generates hatred of exceptions, while true love can only emerge out of a background of universal indifference — love and hatred are asymmetrical, not symmetric.the logic of love and hatred
asserts
What appears today as Habermasian Enlightenment neo-Kantianism structurally functions as a Staatsphilosophie — the same double game as religion and New Age thought — blocking the epistemological consequences of scientific progress.Habermas and contemporary state philosophy
asserts
Today religion is evoked not to restrain enjoyment but to sustain it — and the Dalai Lama's popularity is explained by his selling Tibetan Buddhist ethics as compatible with egotistic self-fulfillment.contemporary religion and the injunction to enjoy
asserts
Psychoanalysis is today the only discourse whose message is 'you are allowed not to enjoy' — not 'you should not enjoy' (which would be an inverted superego call) but that enjoyment is not the fundamental category of existence.the distinctive ethical position of psychoanalysis
asserts
Universal human rights today function in practice as the right of powerful developed states to make humanitarian interventions wherever they want, via a Hegelian reflexive reversal.the ideology of universal human rights
asserts
True atheism is not a heroic decision not to believe in God but making the question itself irrelevant — a true atheist does not choose atheism because the choice is already located within the field of belief.the nature of genuine atheism
asserts
The Spinozian subject is not an egotistic center threatening others but a hole in the order of being — a nothing striving to become everything — which is more threatening than a positive, rooted entity.Spinoza vs. Levinas on the subject's relation to existence
asserts
One should renounce the striving for one's own spiritual salvation, and the radical conclusion of this path is atheism — not defiance of God but insight into the irrelevance of the divine.ethics and atheism
asserts
Politically correct prohibition on white men asserting their particular identity paradoxically confers on them the position of universal neutral medium — self-questioning is always the other side of self-privileging.political correctness and identity politics
Quotes 14
“Non-alienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all serve the system. Which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics.”Slavoj Žižek · permissive power and the necessity of self-censorship
“If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene when a close friend opens your heart to you, spilling out all the dirt of his so-called inner life.”Slavoj Žižek · asubjective art vs. emotional exhibitionism
“True art is in a way more asubjective than science. In science, I remain a person with my pathological features. While in true art, the artist has to undergo a kind of radical self-objectivization. He has to die in and for himself.”Slavoj Žižek · art requires radical self-objectivization
“No images of God does not point towards some Gnostic experience of the divine beyond our reality. On the contrary, it designates a kind of ethical hic Rhodus, hic salta.”Slavoj Žižek · Jewish iconoclasm as ethical injunction
“The face is thus the ultimate fetish, the object which fills in, obfuscates the big Other's inconsistency, the abyss of its circularity.”Slavoj Žižek · Levinas's face as ideological fetish
“Self-questioning is always by definition the obverse, the other side of self-privileging. There is always something false about respect for others which is based on questioning one's own right to exist.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectical reversal of moral self-denigration
“The true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of this face, the choice against the face for the third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary.”Slavoj Žižek · justice requires coldness toward the face
“Justice has to ignore the so-called inner truth. Recall the famous passage from Graham Greene: when you visualize a man carefully, you could always begin to feel pity. Hate is just a failure of imagination.”Slavoj Žižek · justice requires suspending imagination and empathy
“He is not human is not the same as he is inhuman… he is inhuman means he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by terrifying excess which is inherent as an innermost possibility of being human.”Slavoj Žižek · the inhuman as indefinite Kantian judgment
“Psychoanalysis is today the only discourse whose message is you are allowed not to enjoy. Not you should not enjoy — but you are allowed not to enjoy.”Slavoj Žižek · psychoanalysis and the permission not to enjoy
“A true atheist does not choose atheism, for him the question itself is irrelevant. The choice as such is located within the field of belief.”Slavoj Žižek · true atheism as making the God-question meaningless
“What universal human rights means, it effectively means our right to make humanitarian intervention where we want. Universality is our universality.”Slavoj Žižek · human rights ideology as cover for intervention
“Only a nothing can desire to become everything. It was already Schelling who defined subject as the endless striving of the nothing to become everything.”Slavoj Žižek · the subject as void striving for totality
“In order to practice justice, one has to suspend one's power of imagination.”Slavoj Žižek · justice requires suspension of empathetic imagination
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I hope not to be too bored. What came out when I tried to prepare it, it's a little bit more theoretical with less jokes, unfortunately for you, than usual. I noticed that there is one shift from previous years. In previous years, we had this mysterious courses without titles, no? I just give a course. Almost a Kantian noumenal thinking in itself, a course as such, no title. This year even the talks here are without a title. Okay, but if I were to give a title, the title would have been a plea for ethical violence against Levinas. Today, in our era of oversensitivity for harassment, every ethical pressure is experienced as a mask of some hidden violence of power. Such tolerant attitude of denouncing ethical violence, I think, fails to perceive how contemporary power no longer primarily relies on censorship, repression, and so on, but on unconstrained permissiveness. Let me quote here Alain Badiou's Thesis of his, at least in my version, some people claim there are theses on contemporary art. Quote, since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censors anything. All art and all thought is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate, and to enjoy. We should become pitiless censors of ourselves. End of quote. And effectively, today we seem to be at the opposite point of the ideology of the sixties. The mottos of spontaneity, creative self-expression, and so on, are taken over by those in power. That is to say, the old logic of the system reproducing itself through repressing and rigidly channeling the subject's spontaneous impetus is abandoned. Non-alienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all serve the system. Which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics. Especially I think in the domain of poetic art. This means that one should totally reject any attitude of self-expression, of displaying innermost emotional turmoils, desires, dreams, and so on. True art has nothing whatsoever to do with the disgusting emotional exhibitionism. Insofar as the standard notion of poetic spirit is the ability to display one's intimate turmoils, what the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom I otherwise do not admire excessively, what he said about himself with regard to his turn from personal poetry to political propaganda is, I think, nonetheless a constitutive gesture of a true poet. He said simply, I had to step on the throat of my muse. If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene when a close friend opens your heart to you, spilling out all the dirt of his so-called inner life. Consequently, one should totally reject the standard opposition of objective science focused on reality and subjective art focused on emotional reaction to reality or self-expression. If anything, I claim true art is in a way more asubjective than science. In science, I remain a person with my pathological features. I just refer to objectivity outside my subjective inner universe. While in true art, the artist has to undergo a kind of radical self-objectivization. He has to die in and for himself, turn himself into a kind of living dead. Now can one imagine a stronger contrast to today's all-pervasive complaints about ethical violence, to the tendency to submit to criticism ethical injunctions which terrorize us allegedly with the brutal imposition of their universality? The ultimate irony is that this critique of ethical violence, it is also incidentally the title of the last book by Judith Butler, but till now published only in German. This critique of ethical violence is sometimes, I think, in a totally misleading erroneous way even linked to Nietzsche's motive of moral norms as imposed by the weak on the strong, thwarting life assertiveness. We all know these topics of moral sensitivity, bad conscience, guilt feeling as internalised resistance to the heroic assertion of life. However, for Nietzsche, such moral sensitivity culminates precisely in the contemporary last man who fears excessive intensity of life as something that may disturb his search for happiness without stress and who for this very reason rejects cruel imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance. Now I claim that what gets lost in such a critique of ethical violence is precisely the most precious aspect of the Jewish legacy. Let us not forget that in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally violently imposed, something contingent and traumatic. What is arguably the ultimate scene of religious ideological interpellation, the pronouncement of the Decalogue on the or rather beneath the Mount Sinai, is the very opposite of something that emerges organically as an outcome on the path of self-knowledge or self-realization. It is the pronouncement, the pronouncement, sorry, of the Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest. And I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment. When the Old Testament enjoys you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable, but to the neighbor as traumatic thing. In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my neighbor to my mirror image or to the means in the path of my self-realization, like the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality, Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my neighbor. The neighbor remains an impenetrable enigmatic presence that fundamentally hysterizes me. Now it is against this background that one should approach the topic of iconoclasm. The Jewish commandment which prohibits images of God, I think, is the obverse of the statement that relating to one's neighbor is the only terrain of religious practice, the obverse not in the sense of the opposite, but in the sense of its other side. That is to say, it is the other side of the idea that the divine dimension is present in our lives only in the way we relate to our neighbors. No images of God does not point towards some Gnostic experience of the divine beyond our reality, a divine which is beyond any image. On the contrary, it designates a kind of ethical hic Rhodus, hic salta. You want to be religious? Okay, forget about God, prove it here in the works of love in the way you relate to your neighbors. Levinas was therefore right to emphasize how, quote from Levinas, how nothing is more opposed to a relation with the face than contact with the irrational and mystery. End of quote. Judaism is anti-gnosticism par excellence. And it is from here that one should approach the key Levinasian notion of encountering the other's face as the epiphany, as the event that precedes truth itself. Again, a quote from his Totality and Infinity, to seek truth, I have already established a relationship with a face which can guarantee itself, whose epiphany itself is somehow a work of honor. Every language as an exchange of verbal signs refers already to this primordial word of honor. Deceit and veracity already presuppose the absolute authenticity of the face. End of quote. Now, I think, that's my first step towards criticism, that one should read these lines against the background of what Jacques Lacan characterized as the circular self-referential structure of the symbolic order. You know how ultimately in language signs point to other signs, it's a kind of abyss of self-referentiality. So when Levinas claims that a face, you remember how he put it, can guarantee itself, this means that precisely it serves as the non-linguistic point of reference which enables us to break the vicious circularity of the symbolic order, providing it with the ultimate foundation, the absolute authenticity. The face is thus the ultimate fetish, the object which fills in, obfuscates the big other's inconsistency, the abyss of its, the abyss of its circularity. So what then, what is shame? This experience precisely of losing one's face. There is a gap which forever separates the phantasmatic kernel of our being, our innermost inadmissible dreams and so on, from the more superficial modes of our symbolic identifications. It is never possible for me to fully assume the phantasmatic core of my being. When I approach it too much, when I come too close to it, what occurs is what Lacan following Freud calls the aphanisis of the subject. The subject loses his or her symbolic consistency, he or she disintegrates. And perhaps the forced actualization in social reality of the phantasmatic kernel of my being is the forced, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence which undermines the very basis of my identity. Now we can clearly see how far psychoanalysis is from any defense of the dignity of the human face. Is the psychoanalytic treatment not the experience of rendering public to the analyst one's most intimate fantasies and thus the experience of losing one's face in I claim precisely the most radical Levinasian sense of the term? This is already the lesson of the very material dispositif of a psychoanalytic treatment. No face-to-face between the analysand, patient, and the analyst, but the subject lying and the analyst sitting behind him, both staring in the same void in front of them. There is no intersubjectivity here, only the two without face-to-face. How then do for Levinas, courts, judgments, institutions and so on enter the scene? As we all know, Levinas's answer is by way of the presence of the third. When face-to-face with the other, I am infinitely responsible to him. This is for Levinas, as it were, the original ethical constellation. However, there is always a third one, and from that moment new questions arise. How does my neighbor whom I face relate to this third? Is he the third's friend or his foe or even his victim? Who of the two is my true neighbor in the first place? All this, as Levinas puts it, compels me to compare the infinities that cannot be compared, to limit the absolute priority of the other, to start to calculate the incalculable. However, what is important for Levinas is that this kind of legal relationship, necessary as it is, remains grounded in the primordial ethical relationship to the other as the other's face. The responsibility for the other, the subject as the response to the infinite call embodied in the other's face, which is ultimately and simultaneously helpless, vulnerable, and issuing an unconditional injunction, this responsibility is for Levinas asymmetrical and non-reciprocal. I am responsible for the other without having any right to claim that the other should display the same responsibility for me. Levinas liked to quote Dostoevsky here. We are all responsible for everything and guilty in front of everyone, but I am that more than all others. End of quote. This ethical asymmetry between me and the other addressing me with the infinite call is the primordial fact and I should never lose my grounding in this irreducibly first-person relationship to the other. Along these lines in his Totality and Infinity, Levinas emphasizes how what appears as the most natural should become for us the most questionable. For example, this is I think his implicit criticism of Spinoza, the notion, of course, Spinoza's notion that every entity naturally strives in its conatus as Spinoza put it towards its self-preservation in and its immanent powers. Levinas counters this with a question, do I have the right to be? Is it not that by insisting in being I deprive others of their place, I ultimately kill them? What one should fully acknowledge is that this stance of Levinas is radically anti-biopolitical. Levinasian ethics is the absolute opposite of today's biopolitics with its emphasis on regulating life and deploying its potentials. For Levinas, ethics is not about life but about something more than life. It is at this level that Levinas locates the gap that separates Judaism and Christianity. Judaism's fundamental ethical task, neglected Levinas thinks in Christianity, is that of how to be without being a murderer. Here is a quote from Levinas making this point. What is an individual? A solitary individual, if not a tree that grows without regard for everything it suppresses and breaks? Grabbing all the nourishment, air and sun, a being that is fully justified in its nature and its being? What is an individual if not a usurper? What is signified by the advent of conscience and even the first spark of spirit if not the discovery of corpses beside me and my horror of existing by assassination? From Levinas's Difficult Freedom. Now, how, what's my comment to it? Of course, I am aware that the first standard humanist answer to Levinas would have been here that one can, you know this banality, you can truly love others only if you love yourself. If you don't love yourself, you cannot truly appreciate others. However, I claim that at a more radical level, there is something inherently false in such a link between the responsibility for and to the other and questioning my own right to exist. Although Levinas asserts this asymmetry as universal, everyone of us is in the position of primordial responsibility, does this asymmetry not effectively end up in privileging one particular group which assumes responsibility for all others, a group which embodies in a privileged way this responsibility, a group which as it were directly stands for this responsibility? In this case, of course, Jews. So that I'm ironically tempted to speak about, you know, the old colonialist term of white man's burden, of Jewish man's ethical burden. A quote again from Difficult Freedom, the idea of a chosen people must not be taken as a sign of pride. It does not involve being aware of exceptional rights, but of exceptional duties. It is the prerogative of a moral consciousness itself. It knows itself at the center of the world and for it the world is not homogeneous. For I am always alone in being able to answer the call. I am irreplaceable in my assumption of responsibility. End of quote again from Difficult Freedom. My commentary, do we not get here a homology I'm tempted to claim with the way Marx in the first chapter of Capital develops three forms of the expression of value of a commodity, a kind of passage from simple to developed form? First, only two of us, I am responsible for you, then what Marx calls developed form, I am responsible for all of you, and then the general equivalent and its reversal. I am the privileged site of responsibility for all of you, which is why you are all effectively responsible to me. Is this not the truth of such an ethical stance, thereby confirming the old Hegelian suspicion that every self-denigration secretly asserts its contrary? It is like the proverbial political correctness of the western white male who questions his own right to assert his cultural identity while celebrating the exotic identity of others, but thereby asserting his privileged status of the universal neutral medium of recognizing others' identities. Self-questioning is always by definition the obverse, the other side of self-privileging. There is always something false about respect for others which is made, based on questioning one's own right to exist. Let me now quote a longer passage again from Difficult Freedom, which is I think Levinas at its best and in its worst, and in it you have the passage from the best to the worst. The best being the wonderful assertion of the Jewish law as precisely an uprooted law, and the worst you will see. Quote. Every word is an uprooting. The constitution of a real society is an uprooting, the end of an existence in which the being at home is absolute and everything comes from within. Paganism is putting down roots. The advent of the scriptures, Old Testament, is not the subordination of the spirit to a letter, but the substitution of the letter to the soul. The spirit is free within the letter and it is enslaved within the root. It is on the arid soil of the desert where nothing is fixed, of course, reference to Palestine and so on, that the true spirit descended into a text in order to be universally fulfilled. Paganism is the local spirit. Nationalism in terms of its cruelty and pitilessness. A humanity with roots that possesses God inwardly with the sap rising from the earth is the forest of or of pre-human humanity. A history in which the idea of a universal God must only be fulfilled requires a beginning, it requires an elite. It is not through pride that Israel feels it has been chosen. It has to be obtained, it has to obtain this through grace. Each time the people are judged, Israel is judged. It is because the universality of the divine exists only in the form in which it is fulfilled in the relation between men and because it must be fulfillment and expansion that the category of a privileged civilization exists in the economy of creation. This civilization is defined in terms not of prerogatives but of responsibilities. Every person as a person, that is to say, one conscious of his freedom is chosen. If being chosen takes on a national appearance, it is because only in this form can a civilization be constituted, be maintained, be transmitted and endure. End of quote. So again, all people participate in universality but Jews are more universal than others. Another quote from Difficult Freedom, the Jewish faith involves tolerance because from the beginning it bears the entire weight of all other men. And again, I think this is Jewish man's burden. Insofar as Jews are absolutely responsible, responsible for all of us, is it not that at a kind of a reflexive level we are all doubly responsible to the Jews? Or in an inverted way, if they are all responsible, if they are responsible for all of us, is it not that the way to get rid of our responsibility is to annihilate them, those who condense our responsibility? Just to avoid any misunderstanding, my point here is that in a strange way what Levinas develops is almost the opposite of the implicit antisemitic reasoning. Now, back to Spinoza. A Spinozian answer to Levinas would have been that our existence is not at the expense of others, but it is part of the network of reality. There is for Spinoza no Hobbesian self as extracted from and opposed to reality. Spinoza's ontology is an ontology of full immanence to the world. I am just the network of my relations with the world and within the world. I am totally externalized in these relations. My conatus, my tendency to assert myself is therefore not my assertion at the expense of the world, but my full acceptance of being part of the world, my assertion of the wider reality within which I can only thrive. Levinas therefore, I think, secretly imputes to Spinoza an egotistic subjectivist if you want notion of my existence. His anti-Spinozian questioning of my right to exist is inverted arrogance, as if I am the center whose existence threatens all others. So the answer should not be an assertion of my right to exist in harmony with and tolerance of others, but a more radical claim. Do I exist at all in the first place? Am I not rather a hole in the order of being? This brings us to the ultimate paradox on account of which I think Levinasian answer is not sufficient. I am effectively a threat to the entire order of being, not insofar as I positively exist as part of this order, but precisely insofar as I am a hole in the order of being. As such as nothing, I am striving to reach out and appropriate everything. Only a nothing can desire become to become everything. It was already Schelling who defined subject as the endless striving of the nothing to become everything. And on the contrary, a positive living being occupying a determinate space in reality, rooted in it, is by definition a moment of its circulation and reproduction. Again, recall the already mentioned politically correct landscape. People far from the western world are allowed to fully assert their particular ethnic identity in this politically correct vision without being proclaimed essentialist, racist, identitarians and so on. If you are far away, if you are Black, Native American, okay, all your sins like I don't know, deprivation of women and so on are forgotten. Now the closer you get to the notorious white heterosexual males, the more problematic your assertion becomes. Asians are still okay, Italians and Irish maybe, with Germans and Scandinavians it is still problematic. However, such a prohibition of asserting the particular identity of white men as the model of oppression of others, although it presents itself as the admission of their guilt, nonetheless confers on them a central position. This very prohibition to assert their particular identity makes them into the universal neutral medium, the place from which the truth about others' oppression is accessible. One should therefore assume the risk of countering Levinas's position with a more radical one. Others are primordially an ethically indifferent multitude. And love is a violent gesture of cutting into this multitude and privileging a one, someone, as two words, as the neighbor, thus introducing a radical imbalance into the whole. In contrast to love, justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the one. Justice and love are structurally incompatible. Justice, not love, has to be blind. It has to disregard the privileged one whom I really understand. What this means is that the third is not secondary, it is always already here and the primordial ethical obligation is towards this third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship, the one in shadow, the absent of a love couple. In order to properly grasp the triangle of love, hatred, and indifference, one has to rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception. The truth of the universal proposition man is mortal does not imply the existence of even one man, while the apparently less strong proposition there is at least one man who exists or some men exist implies their existence. Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from universal proposition which only defines the content of a notion to existence only through a proposition stating the existence of at least one which is an exception to the universality in question. What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition I love you all acquires the level of actual existence only if there is at least one whom I hate, the thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that the universal love for humanity always led to the brutal hatred of the actually existing exception of the enemies of humanity. This hatred of the exception is the truth of universal love. In contrast to true love, which can only emerge against the background not of universal hatred, relationship here asymmetrical, but of universal indifference. I am indifferent towards all, the totality of the universe and as such I actually love you, the unique individual who sticks out against the back, this indifferent background. Love and hatred are thus not symmetric. Love emerges out of the universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love. In short, we are dealing here with what Lacan called the formulas of sexuation. I do not love you all is the only foundation of there is somebody, there is nobody that I do not love. While I love you all, necessarily relies on I really hate some of you. But I love you all, as you probably know, defended himself Erich Mielke, the secret police boss of the German Democratic Republic. You remember in the last days of DDR when he was attacked by critical members of the party, he made this so-to-say gesture, but I love you all. I think this was not irony, it has to be taken literal. I love you all is the universal proposition which grounded his hatred of the enemies of socialism. This brings us to the radical anti-Levinasian conclusion. The true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of this face, the choice against the face for the third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary. Every privileging of the other in the guise of his face reneges the third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of you, to be open for its depth and so on, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the third which effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders her embedded in a particular situation. In other words, it is only such a shift onto the third that grounds justice in the dimension of its broader true universality. When Levinas endeavors to ground ethics in the other's face, is he not still clinging to the ultimate root of all ethical commitment? Is he not still afraid to accept the abyss of the rootless law as the only foundation of ethics? Justice as blind just means that precisely it cannot be grounded in the relationship to others' face. And this structure I think is irreducible. It is not that while in our empirical lives the third is irreducible, we should maintain as a kind of Kantian regulative idea the full grounding of ethics in the relationship to the other's face. Such a grounding is not only empirically impossible, it is a priori impossible since the limitation of our capacity to relate to others' faces is the mark of our very finitude. In other words, the limitation of our ethical relation of responsibility towards the other's face which necessitates the rise of the third, the domain of regulations, is a positive condition of ethics. If we deny this, if we stick to the postulate of a final translatability of the third into a relation to others' face, we remain caught in understanding. One can understand everything, even the most hideous crime has an inner truth and beauty when observed from within. Recall the refined spiritual meditation of Japanese warriors. And I'm sure for example one can understand Heydrich. He would say, but you don't understand anything about my deep inner experience of playing in the evening Beethoven string quartets and so on and so on. This is what the ethical law prohibits. Justice has to ignore the so-called inner truth. Recall the famous passage from Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, quote, when you visualize a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity. That was a quality God's image carried with us. When you saw the lines at the corner of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how their hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate is just a failure of imagination. I don't know how Graham Greene meant it, but my conclusion is, in order to practice justice, one has to suspend one's power of imagination. So back to Levinas. I think that the limitation of Levinas is not simply that of a Eurocentrist who relies on a too narrow definition of what is human, a definition that secretly excludes non-Europeans as not fully human. If anything I think I almost sympathize with Levinas when he openly acknowledged his Eurocentric bias. For example in a wonderful strange text he reports on how our time is marked by, quote, the arrival on the historical scene of those underdeveloped Afro-Asiatic masses that are strangers to the sacred history that forms the heart of the Judaic-Christian world and so on. So even in one text, very significant text from about the philosophical background of the Chinese-Soviet political strife, he even openly says that Chinese are not our neighbors, emphatically. It's a different attitude. For me that's not the problem. What Levinas fails to include into the scope of human is rather the inhuman itself, a dimension which eludes the face-to-face relationship of humans. Recall here at a different level Theodor Adorno's ambiguity with regard to the inhuman. While Adorno is well aware of the violence involved in the predominant definition of what counts as human, the implied exclusion of whole dimensions as non-human, he nonetheless basically conceives inhuman as the depository of alienated humanity. Ultimately for Adorno, inhuman is the power of barbarism we have to fight. Now what Adorno failed to render thematic I claim is as it were the positive dimension of the inhuman, which I think this positive dimension was first indicated, even conceptualized in the change of the status of the inhuman in Kantian transcendental term. Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and in his Critique of Pure Reason, negative and indefinite judgment. For example the positive judgment, the soul is mortal, can be negated in two ways: when a predicate is denied to the subject, the soul is not mortal, and when it's not the predicate which is denied but a non-predicate which is affirmed. Not the soul is not mortal, but the soul is non-mortal. The difference is precisely the same as the one known to every reader of Stephen King and other cheap horror writers between he is not dead and he is undead. The indefinite judgment, he is undead, opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction. He is non-dead means simply he is alive. He is undead means he is alive precisely insofar as he is dead. The undead are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous living dead. And I claim the same goes for inhuman. It's crucial to conceive of inhuman as a Kantian indefinite judgment. He is not human is not the same as he is inhuman. He is not human means simply he is external to humanity, animal, divine, whatever. While he is inhuman means something totally different, the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent as an innermost possibility of being human. And perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution. In the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excess of animal lusts or divine madness. While only with Kant and German Idealism the excess to be thought is absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself, which is why, as you probably know, with German Idealism the metaphor for the very core of subjectivity is no longer light, the light of reason, but night, what Hegel called the night of the world. So when in the pre-Kantian universe a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, that is to say animal passions or divine madness took over. While with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. And this dimension I think is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what is missing in Levinas with all his celebration of otherness is not some underlying sameness of all humans, but the radical inhuman dimension, the otherness to humanity itself. The otherness of a human of being reduced to inhumanity, the otherness exemplified among others by the terrifying figure of Muselmann, the living dead in the concentration camps. I should only refer here to the wonderful book by Agamben, his Remnants of Auschwitz, where he writes in a wonderful way about the paradoxical ethical status of Muslims, Muselmann in the concentration camps. Which is why, although Levinas is often perceived as the thinker who endeavored to articulate the experience of Shoah, usually called Holocaust, one thing is self-evident, apropos his questioning of one's own right to be, apropos his emphasis on my unconditional asymmetrical responsibility. This is not how a survivor of the Shoah, how one effectively experiencing the ethical abyss of Shoah thinks and writes. This is how I claim those who feel guilty for observing the catastrophe from a minimal safe distance think. Is the paradox of the Muselmann in the concentration camp not that this figure is simultaneously a zero level total reduction to life, a zero level of life, and a name for the pure excess as such, excess deprived of its normal base? This is why the figure of the Muselmann signals the limitation of Levinas. When describing it Primo Levi repeatedly uses the predicate faceless. And this term should be given I think here its entire Levinasian weight. When confronted with a Muselmann, one precisely cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the other, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets is a kind of blind spot, a lack of depth. Maybe Muselmann is thus the zero level neighbor, the neighbor with whom no emphatic face-to-face relationship is possible. For this same reason Levinas is also unable to take the properly Christian path of ethical paradoxes of the so-called teleological suspension of the ethical, outlined by Kierkegaard. In the chapter of his Either/Or in the volume one called The Ancient Tragical Motive as Reflected in the Modern, Kierkegaard deployed his fantasy of what a modern Antigone would have been. The conflict, he claims, is now entirely internalised. There is no longer a need for Creon. While Antigone admires and loves her father Oedipus, the public hero and savior of Thebes, she knows the truth about him, murderer of the father, incestuous marriage and so on. Her deadlock is that she is prevented from sharing this accursed knowledge, like Abraham who also could not communicate to others the divine injunction to sacrifice his son. She cannot complain, she cannot share her pain and sorrow with others. In contrast to Sophocles' Antigone who acts, buries her brother and thus actively assumes her fate, Kierkegaard's Antigone is unable to act, condemned forever to impassive suffering. This unbearable burden of her secret, of her destructive agalma, finally drives her to death in which only she can find peace otherwise provided by symbolising, sharing with others one's pain and so on. And Kierkegaard's point is that this situation is no longer properly tragic. In a similar way that Abraham also for Kierkegaard is not a tragic figure. Now I'm tempted to go here a step further. Insofar as Kierkegaard's Antigone is a paradigmatically modernist modern figure, should one not go on with his mental experiment and imagine a postmodern Antigone with, of course I cannot escape my nature, a Stalinist twist? In contrast to the modern one, the postmodern one should find herself in a position in which to quote Kierkegaard himself, the ethical dimension, the ethical itself would be the temptation. One version, version, would undoubtedly be for Antigone to publicly renounce, denounce and accuse her father, or in a different version her brother Polynices, accuse him of his terrible sins out of her unconditional love for him. The Kierkegaardian catch is that such a public act would render Antigone even more isolated, absolutely alone. No one with the exception of Oedipus himself, if he were still to be alive, would understand that her act of betrayal is the supreme act of love. Antigone would thus be entirely deprived of her sublime of this shining fascinating sublime beauty. So again, what I'm trying to imagine, you got it, is the Stalinist trial against Oedipus and Antigone playing the role you know of the Stalinist wife who wife who have to accuse your own relatives of being traitors and so on and so on. And do not misunderstand me here, my point is not to play games through through horrors and so on and so on. I think that if we are to go to the end in what the ethical experience of 20th of what 20th century means within the horizon of our ethical experience, we should go through this zero level where we experience the gap between the absolute dimension Kierkegaard called this theological and ethical at its purest, where we experience how as Kierkegaard put it ethical itself is a temptation to be to be resisted. Now let me conclude just with two final points. The first one I think is that the radical conclusion to be drawn from all this is that precisely apropos of Antigone is that one should renounce the very striving for one's own spiritual salvation. Here I agree with Levinas who himself quotes a very nice passage from Léon Brunschvicg, the old French philosopher of the early 20th century, who claims that, quote from Brunschvicg, the preoccupation with our salvation is a remnant of self-love, a trace of natural egocentrism from which we must be torn by the religious life. But I claim that we have to make here a step further, I claim that what we find at the end of this road is atheism. Not the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of heroic defiance of God, but the insight into the irrelevance of the divine. I would like to finish with a quote from Brecht's Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner, his Kafkaesque figure in Brecht, where one concerns precisely the question of atheism. Here is Brecht's short five lines passage. Someone asked Herr Keuner, Mr. Keuner, if there is a God. Herr Keuner said, I advise you to think about how your behavior would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: you already decided, you need a God. So the true atheism is again to make the question itself meaningless. And I think Brecht is right here, again. We are never in a position to directly choose between theism and atheism since the choice as such is located within the field of belief. Atheism in the in the sense of heroically deciding not to believe in God is a miserable pathetic stance of those who long for God but cannot find him or who rebel against God and so on and so on. A true atheist does not choose atheism, for him the question itself is irrelevant. And the last remark with which I would like to return to my starting quote from Alain Badiou about this pitiless the need for us to become pitiless censors, that is to say how we should reject this injunction enjoy. I claim that we live in a very paradoxical time today where one of the characteristic of our times is that in contrast to previous times where at least there appeared to be some kind of a tension between religious moral beliefs and your right to enjoy, I claim that today religion itself is evoked to sustain our injunct our injunction or ability to enjoy. I think that I think that the situation is today again with regard to enjoyment extremely paradoxical. I would like here to refer to another unpublished writing by Badiou where he speaks about the cut how where he the how today meaning and truth can no longer overlap. That is to say, for example, modern science develops truths, different modalities of truth, with which with whom meaning meaningful experience cannot catch up. So what are we to do here? I think that this necessity to catch it up, that is to say to reinvent to to reject this gap to reject our acceptance of this gap and to reinvent some kind of a meaning which would still catch up with the with scientific or political truth today is I think what gives a new impetus to forms of religion today. That's what religion is basically doing today. My God, biogenetic experiments they render our life meaningless or whatever and the the function of religion here is to say no stop we must guarantee meaning. And paradox there are paradoxical things going on here. For example it's interesting to observe how even great enlightened people who present themselves as great philosophers of enlightenment like Habermas speak start to speak the same language. I think let me be very clear: today we are facing the emergence of a new form of Staatsphilosophie, state philosophy, which is precisely Habermasian neo-Kantianism. Why? Let me be very precise. What always was the function of proper state philosophy? Now I'm not speaking at the personal level that Habermas is paid or whatever, but I'm speaking about the structural function. On the one hand we have today tremendous explosion of new technologies, scientific breakthroughs and so on. A state philosophy should do this, on the one hand it should allow the space for these breakthroughs because otherwise you put in the danger permanent self-revolutionizing of capitalism and so on, but at the same time it should block its epistemological ethical consequences. That is to say the catch is how to divide the two spheres so that on the one hand, yes okay, do your biogenetic things, but stop, don't go too far so that you will threaten our sense of autonomy and so on and so on. Which is I think what makes it pretty tragic of how Habermasian position today it's a purely defensive position. It's the position how to play this double game of unfortunately we have this progress but we should stop. Again this is also I think exactly the same strategy as the religious strategy: how to how to retain this fragile balance. In other words Habermas the great enlightenment guy is here playing only a more sophisticated New Age strategy. Because as you know of course another strategy would be precisely the New Age strategy where you find through some obscure operations like quantum physics oscillation oh do we not find this in Buddhism and so on. It's the same idea of uniting them these two dimensions. And I think that if anything this today is our ethical duty. And this is for me how I understand this pitiless censor of ourselves. This means for me precisely what we have to censors is precisely this as would the French expression like "pousse-à-jouir", pousse-à pousse-à jouir or la signification, they're not the same, like this this spontaneous as it were ideological tendency towards meaning. And since today meaning is more and more identified with jouissance, I think this is why Dalai Lama is such a hit. I don't know if he is aware what he is doing, but the way his works function here. Why is Dalai Lama on the bestseller list of New York Times? Because what he effectively does, now I'm speaking as a Stalinist not subjectively but the objective social meaning of his book, is to sell us Tibetan Buddhist ethics as totally compatible with our egotistic striving for personal self-fulfillment and so on. His message is: you want self-fulfillment pleasurable life, don't fear Buddhism, you can you can get it through it. Which is why I think that the lesson of psychoanalysis today is crucial. Not because today again as Badiou indicated in that thesis we live in a society whose fundamental ideological injunction precisely is enjoy, far from having anything transgressive about it. Enjoyment is precisely the fundamental injunction. And psychoanalysis now starts to find its proper terrain, which is not as we thought till now that you know you are not able to enjoy, you have this famous internalized paternal prohibitions and then you cannot do it so you go to a psychoanalyst who enables you to overcome your internal obstacles and finally can do it. I think on the contrary the if there is one ethical attitude which psychoanalysis stands for, it is precisely all other discourses from sexual sex manuals to to Dalai Lama's writings. In all of them you have one big underlying message: enjoy, realize yourself, develop your potential, you should do it enjoy. Psychoanalysis on the contrary is today the only discourse whose message is you are allowed not to enjoy. I'm very precise here. Not you should not enjoy, because this is just a kind of obscene inverted super-ego call, but you are allowed not to enjoy. That is to say enjoyment is not the funda- contrary to what people think the message of psychoanalysis precisely no enjoyment is not the fundamental category of your existence. From this, I didn't don't have time to do it, one should read this inhuman dimension not only as that how should we put it limit of humanity as embodied in the figure of Muselmann but the very ethical that some inhuman dimension is in the very heart of every ethical act I claim. In this sense I don't have time to develop it now, just since I didn't yet use my minutes I still have five minutes. Apropos along these lines I think what what one should criticize and reinterpret the notion of universal human rights today as even somebody with whom I totally do not agree otherwise politically Hannah Arendt said and here I agree with her partially that the fundamental paradox is that the notion of human rights became so actual at the very point where a class of people emerged she was referring to years ago to that time when there was a class of people who were refugees, stateless and precisely had no human rights. So from the very beginning universal human rights were basically rights of those who have no guaranteed political rights and so on and so on. So you may say what's the problem with it? Isn't this nice we have some universal standard which especially target those who have no rights? Ah, today we get an obscene twist to this. In a recent writing published I think at least I found it only in English Rancière gave her although again otherwise I don't agree with him with Jacques Rancière but gave a nice hint here. His idea was that what does this mean that human rights are the rights of those who have or rather who are not able to exercise effectively any rights? Like refugees, starving people and so on and so on. This means something very precise. This means as Rancière put it in a wonderful ironic way, we in developed countries have nothing to do with human rights. We this is not our problem, no our problem is more this, more this, not basic human rights. So we do with them exactly what we do with old useless medicine and and food out of date and old clothes. We export them to third world countries. But there is one catch in this export business is that those for whose human rights we fight are not able themselves to fight them. So we have a kind of almost Hegelian reflexive turn: what universal human rights means, it effectively means our right to make humanitarian intervention where we want. We export them so that via this detour they return to us and I think this is what effectively universal human right means today. The right of us to intervene wherever we want as if in order to defend human rights. Universality is our universality, our universal right to intervene wherever we want as if in order to defend human rights. Along all these lines one would have to say many other things but as Indians say in this old Westerns, I've spoken.
I hope not to be too bored. What came out when I tried to prepare it, it's a little bit more theoretical with less jokes, unfortunately for you, than usual. I noticed that there is one shift from previous years. In previous years, we had this mysterious courses without titles, no? I just give a course. Almost a Kantian noumenal thinking in itself, a course as such, no title. This year even the talks here are without a title. Okay, but if I were to give a title, the title would have been a plea for ethical violence against Levinas. Today, in our era of oversensitivity for harassment, every ethical pressure is experienced as a mask of some hidden violence of power. Such tolerant attitude of denouncing ethical violence, I think, fails to perceive how contemporary power no longer primarily relies on censorship, repression, and so on, but on unconstrained permissiveness. Let me quote here Alain Badiou's Thesis of his, at least in my version, some people claim there are theses on contemporary art. Quote, since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censors anything. All art and all thought is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate, and to enjoy. We should become pitiless censors of ourselves. End of quote. And effectively, today we seem to be at the opposite point of the ideology of the sixties. The mottos of spontaneity, creative self-expression, and so on, are taken over by those in power. That is to say, the old logic of the system reproducing itself through repressing and rigidly channeling the subject's spontaneous impetus is abandoned. Non-alienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all serve the system. Which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics. Especially I think in the domain of poetic art. This means that one should totally reject any attitude of self-expression, of displaying innermost emotional turmoils, desires, dreams, and so on. True art has nothing whatsoever to do with the disgusting emotional exhibitionism. Insofar as the standard notion of poetic spirit is the ability to display one's intimate turmoils, what the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom I otherwise do not admire excessively, what he said about himself with regard to his turn from personal poetry to political propaganda is, I think, nonetheless a constitutive gesture of a true poet. He said simply, I had to step on the throat of my muse. If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene when a close friend opens your heart to you, spilling out all the dirt of his so-called inner life. Consequently, one should totally reject the standard opposition of objective science focused on reality and subjective art focused on emotional reaction to reality or self-expression. If anything, I claim true art is in a way more asubjective than science. In science, I remain a person with my pathological features. I just refer to objectivity outside my subjective inner universe. While in true art, the artist has to undergo a kind of radical self-objectivization. He has to die in and for himself, turn himself into a kind of living dead. Now can one imagine a stronger contrast to today's all-pervasive complaints about ethical violence, to the tendency to submit to criticism ethical injunctions which terrorize us allegedly with the brutal imposition of their universality? The ultimate irony is that this critique of ethical violence, it is also incidentally the title of the last book by Judith Butler, but till now published only in German. This critique of ethical violence is sometimes, I think, in a totally misleading erroneous way even linked to Nietzsche's motive of moral norms as imposed by the weak on the strong, thwarting life assertiveness. We all know these topics of moral sensitivity, bad conscience, guilt feeling as internalised resistance to the heroic assertion of life. However, for Nietzsche, such moral sensitivity culminates precisely in the contemporary last man who fears excessive intensity of life as something that may disturb his search for happiness without stress and who for this very reason rejects cruel imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance. Now I claim that what gets lost in such a critique of ethical violence is precisely the most precious aspect of the Jewish legacy. Let us not forget that in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally violently imposed, something contingent and traumatic. What is arguably the ultimate scene of religious ideological interpellation, the pronouncement of the Decalogue on the or rather beneath the Mount Sinai, is the very opposite of something that emerges organically as an outcome on the path of self-knowledge or self-realization. It is the pronouncement, the pronouncement, sorry, of the Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest. And I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment. When the Old Testament enjoys you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable, but to the neighbor as traumatic thing. In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my neighbor to my mirror image or to the means in the path of my self-realization, like the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality, Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my neighbor. The neighbor remains an impenetrable enigmatic presence that fundamentally hysterizes me. Now it is against this background that one should approach the topic of iconoclasm. The Jewish commandment which prohibits images of God, I think, is the obverse of the statement that relating to one's neighbor is the only terrain of religious practice, the obverse not in the sense of the opposite, but in the sense of its other side. That is to say, it is the other side of the idea that the divine dimension is present in our lives only in the way we relate to our neighbors. No images of God does not point towards some Gnostic experience of the divine beyond our reality, a divine which is beyond any image. On the contrary, it designates a kind of ethical hic Rhodus, hic salta. You want to be religious? Okay, forget about God, prove it here in the works of love in the way you relate to your neighbors. Levinas was therefore right to emphasize how, quote from Levinas, how nothing is more opposed to a relation with the face than contact with the irrational and mystery. End of quote. Judaism is anti-gnosticism par excellence. And it is from here that one should approach the key Levinasian notion of encountering the other's face as the epiphany, as the event that precedes truth itself. Again, a quote from his Totality and Infinity, to seek truth, I have already established a relationship with a face which can guarantee itself, whose epiphany itself is somehow a work of honor. Every language as an exchange of verbal signs refers already to this primordial word of honor. Deceit and veracity already presuppose the absolute authenticity of the face. End of quote. Now, I think, that's my first step towards criticism, that one should read these lines against the background of what Jacques Lacan characterized as the circular self-referential structure of the symbolic order. You know how ultimately in language signs point to other signs, it's a kind of abyss of self-referentiality. So when Levinas claims that a face, you remember how he put it, can guarantee itself, this means that precisely it serves as the non-linguistic point of reference which enables us to break the vicious circularity of the symbolic order, providing it with the ultimate foundation, the absolute authenticity. The face is thus the ultimate fetish, the object which fills in, obfuscates the big other's inconsistency, the abyss of its, the abyss of its circularity. So what then, what is shame? This experience precisely of losing one's face. There is a gap which forever separates the phantasmatic kernel of our being, our innermost inadmissible dreams and so on, from the more superficial modes of our symbolic identifications. It is never possible for me to fully assume the phantasmatic core of my being. When I approach it too much, when I come too close to it, what occurs is what Lacan following Freud calls the aphanisis of the subject. The subject loses his or her symbolic consistency, he or she disintegrates. And perhaps the forced actualization in social reality of the phantasmatic kernel of my being is the forced, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence which undermines the very basis of my identity. Now we can clearly see how far psychoanalysis is from any defense of the dignity of the human face. Is the psychoanalytic treatment not the experience of rendering public to the analyst one's most intimate fantasies and thus the experience of losing one's face in I claim precisely the most radical Levinasian sense of the term? This is already the lesson of the very material dispositif of a psychoanalytic treatment. No face-to-face between the analysand, patient, and the analyst, but the subject lying and the analyst sitting behind him, both staring in the same void in front of them. There is no intersubjectivity here, only the two without face-to-face. How then do for Levinas, courts, judgments, institutions and so on enter the scene? As we all know, Levinas's answer is by way of the presence of the third. When face-to-face with the other, I am infinitely responsible to him. This is for Levinas, as it were, the original ethical constellation. However, there is always a third one, and from that moment new questions arise. How does my neighbor whom I face relate to this third? Is he the third's friend or his foe or even his victim? Who of the two is my true neighbor in the first place? All this, as Levinas puts it, compels me to compare the infinities that cannot be compared, to limit the absolute priority of the other, to start to calculate the incalculable. However, what is important for Levinas is that this kind of legal relationship, necessary as it is, remains grounded in the primordial ethical relationship to the other as the other's face. The responsibility for the other, the subject as the response to the infinite call embodied in the other's face, which is ultimately and simultaneously helpless, vulnerable, and issuing an unconditional injunction, this responsibility is for Levinas asymmetrical and non-reciprocal. I am responsible for the other without having any right to claim that the other should display the same responsibility for me. Levinas liked to quote Dostoevsky here. We are all responsible for everything and guilty in front of everyone, but I am that more than all others. End of quote. This ethical asymmetry between me and the other addressing me with the infinite call is the primordial fact and I should never lose my grounding in this irreducibly first-person relationship to the other. Along these lines in his Totality and Infinity, Levinas emphasizes how what appears as the most natural should become for us the most questionable. For example, this is I think his implicit criticism of Spinoza, the notion, of course, Spinoza's notion that every entity naturally strives in its conatus as Spinoza put it towards its self-preservation in and its immanent powers. Levinas counters this with a question, do I have the right to be? Is it not that by insisting in being I deprive others of their place, I ultimately kill them? What one should fully acknowledge is that this stance of Levinas is radically anti-biopolitical. Levinasian ethics is the absolute opposite of today's biopolitics with its emphasis on regulating life and deploying its potentials. For Levinas, ethics is not about life but about something more than life. It is at this level that Levinas locates the gap that separates Judaism and Christianity. Judaism's fundamental ethical task, neglected Levinas thinks in Christianity, is that of how to be without being a murderer. Here is a quote from Levinas making this point. What is an individual? A solitary individual, if not a tree that grows without regard for everything it suppresses and breaks? Grabbing all the nourishment, air and sun, a being that is fully justified in its nature and its being? What is an individual if not a usurper? What is signified by the advent of conscience and even the first spark of spirit if not the discovery of corpses beside me and my horror of existing by assassination? From Levinas's Difficult Freedom. Now, how, what's my comment to it? Of course, I am aware that the first standard humanist answer to Levinas would have been here that one can, you know this banality, you can truly love others only if you love yourself. If you don't love yourself, you cannot truly appreciate others. However, I claim that at a more radical level, there is something inherently false in such a link between the responsibility for and to the other and questioning my own right to exist. Although Levinas asserts this asymmetry as universal, everyone of us is in the position of primordial responsibility, does this asymmetry not effectively end up in privileging one particular group which assumes responsibility for all others, a group which embodies in a privileged way this responsibility, a group which as it were directly stands for this responsibility? In this case, of course, Jews. So that I'm ironically tempted to speak about, you know, the old colonialist term of white man's burden, of Jewish man's ethical burden. A quote again from Difficult Freedom, the idea of a chosen people must not be taken as a sign of pride. It does not involve being aware of exceptional rights, but of exceptional duties. It is the prerogative of a moral consciousness itself. It knows itself at the center of the world and for it the world is not homogeneous. For I am always alone in being able to answer the call. I am irreplaceable in my assumption of responsibility. End of quote again from Difficult Freedom. My commentary, do we not get here a homology I'm tempted to claim with the way Marx in the first chapter of Capital develops three forms of the expression of value of a commodity, a kind of passage from simple to developed form? First, only two of us, I am responsible for you, then what Marx calls developed form, I am responsible for all of you, and then the general equivalent and its reversal. I am the privileged site of responsibility for all of you, which is why you are all effectively responsible to me. Is this not the truth of such an ethical stance, thereby confirming the old Hegelian suspicion that every self-denigration secretly asserts its contrary? It is like the proverbial political correctness of the western white male who questions his own right to assert his cultural identity while celebrating the exotic identity of others, but thereby asserting his privileged status of the universal neutral medium of recognizing others' identities. Self-questioning is always by definition the obverse, the other side of self-privileging. There is always something false about respect for others which is made, based on questioning one's own right to exist. Let me now quote a longer passage again from Difficult Freedom, which is I think Levinas at its best and in its worst, and in it you have the passage from the best to the worst. The best being the wonderful assertion of the Jewish law as precisely an uprooted law, and the worst you will see. Quote. Every word is an uprooting. The constitution of a real society is an uprooting, the end of an existence in which the being at home is absolute and everything comes from within. Paganism is putting down roots. The advent of the scriptures, Old Testament, is not the subordination of the spirit to a letter, but the substitution of the letter to the soul. The spirit is free within the letter and it is enslaved within the root. It is on the arid soil of the desert where nothing is fixed, of course, reference to Palestine and so on, that the true spirit descended into a text in order to be universally fulfilled. Paganism is the local spirit. Nationalism in terms of its cruelty and pitilessness. A humanity with roots that possesses God inwardly with the sap rising from the earth is the forest of or of pre-human humanity. A history in which the idea of a universal God must only be fulfilled requires a beginning, it requires an elite. It is not through pride that Israel feels it has been chosen. It has to be obtained, it has to obtain this through grace. Each time the people are judged, Israel is judged. It is because the universality of the divine exists only in the form in which it is fulfilled in the relation between men and because it must be fulfillment and expansion that the category of a privileged civilization exists in the economy of creation. This civilization is defined in terms not of prerogatives but of responsibilities. Every person as a person, that is to say, one conscious of his freedom is chosen. If being chosen takes on a national appearance, it is because only in this form can a civilization be constituted, be maintained, be transmitted and endure. End of quote. So again, all people participate in universality but Jews are more universal than others. Another quote from Difficult Freedom, the Jewish faith involves tolerance because from the beginning it bears the entire weight of all other men. And again, I think this is Jewish man's burden. Insofar as Jews are absolutely responsible, responsible for all of us, is it not that at a kind of a reflexive level we are all doubly responsible to the Jews? Or in an inverted way, if they are all responsible, if they are responsible for all of us, is it not that the way to get rid of our responsibility is to annihilate them, those who condense our responsibility? Just to avoid any misunderstanding, my point here is that in a strange way what Levinas develops is almost the opposite of the implicit antisemitic reasoning. Now, back to Spinoza. A Spinozian answer to Levinas would have been that our existence is not at the expense of others, but it is part of the network of reality. There is for Spinoza no Hobbesian self as extracted from and opposed to reality. Spinoza's ontology is an ontology of full immanence to the world. I am just the network of my relations with the world and within the world. I am totally externalized in these relations. My conatus, my tendency to assert myself is therefore not my assertion at the expense of the world, but my full acceptance of being part of the world, my assertion of the wider reality within which I can only thrive. Levinas therefore, I think, secretly imputes to Spinoza an egotistic subjectivist if you want notion of my existence. His anti-Spinozian questioning of my right to exist is inverted arrogance, as if I am the center whose existence threatens all others. So the answer should not be an assertion of my right to exist in harmony with and tolerance of others, but a more radical claim. Do I exist at all in the first place? Am I not rather a hole in the order of being? This brings us to the ultimate paradox on account of which I think Levinasian answer is not sufficient. I am effectively a threat to the entire order of being, not insofar as I positively exist as part of this order, but precisely insofar as I am a hole in the order of being. As such as nothing, I am striving to reach out and appropriate everything. Only a nothing can desire become to become everything. It was already Schelling who defined subject as the endless striving of the nothing to become everything. And on the contrary, a positive living being occupying a determinate space in reality, rooted in it, is by definition a moment of its circulation and reproduction. Again, recall the already mentioned politically correct landscape. People far from the western world are allowed to fully assert their particular ethnic identity in this politically correct vision without being proclaimed essentialist, racist, identitarians and so on. If you are far away, if you are Black, Native American, okay, all your sins like I don't know, deprivation of women and so on are forgotten. Now the closer you get to the notorious white heterosexual males, the more problematic your assertion becomes. Asians are still okay, Italians and Irish maybe, with Germans and Scandinavians it is still problematic. However, such a prohibition of asserting the particular identity of white men as the model of oppression of others, although it presents itself as the admission of their guilt, nonetheless confers on them a central position. This very prohibition to assert their particular identity makes them into the universal neutral medium, the place from which the truth about others' oppression is accessible. One should therefore assume the risk of countering Levinas's position with a more radical one. Others are primordially an ethically indifferent multitude. And love is a violent gesture of cutting into this multitude and privileging a one, someone, as two words, as the neighbor, thus introducing a radical imbalance into the whole. In contrast to love, justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the one. Justice and love are structurally incompatible. Justice, not love, has to be blind. It has to disregard the privileged one whom I really understand. What this means is that the third is not secondary, it is always already here and the primordial ethical obligation is towards this third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship, the one in shadow, the absent of a love couple. In order to properly grasp the triangle of love, hatred, and indifference, one has to rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception. The truth of the universal proposition man is mortal does not imply the existence of even one man, while the apparently less strong proposition there is at least one man who exists or some men exist implies their existence. Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from universal proposition which only defines the content of a notion to existence only through a proposition stating the existence of at least one which is an exception to the universality in question. What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition I love you all acquires the level of actual existence only if there is at least one whom I hate, the thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that the universal love for humanity always led to the brutal hatred of the actually existing exception of the enemies of humanity. This hatred of the exception is the truth of universal love. In contrast to true love, which can only emerge against the background not of universal hatred, relationship here asymmetrical, but of universal indifference. I am indifferent towards all, the totality of the universe and as such I actually love you, the unique individual who sticks out against the back, this indifferent background. Love and hatred are thus not symmetric. Love emerges out of the universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love. In short, we are dealing here with what Lacan called the formulas of sexuation. I do not love you all is the only foundation of there is somebody, there is nobody that I do not love. While I love you all, necessarily relies on I really hate some of you. But I love you all, as you probably know, defended himself Erich Mielke, the secret police boss of the German Democratic Republic. You remember in the last days of DDR when he was attacked by critical members of the party, he made this so-to-say gesture, but I love you all. I think this was not irony, it has to be taken literal. I love you all is the universal proposition which grounded his hatred of the enemies of socialism. This brings us to the radical anti-Levinasian conclusion. The true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of this face, the choice against the face for the third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary. Every privileging of the other in the guise of his face reneges the third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of you, to be open for its depth and so on, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the third which effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders her embedded in a particular situation. In other words, it is only such a shift onto the third that grounds justice in the dimension of its broader true universality. When Levinas endeavors to ground ethics in the other's face, is he not still clinging to the ultimate root of all ethical commitment? Is he not still afraid to accept the abyss of the rootless law as the only foundation of ethics? Justice as blind just means that precisely it cannot be grounded in the relationship to others' face. And this structure I think is irreducible. It is not that while in our empirical lives the third is irreducible, we should maintain as a kind of Kantian regulative idea the full grounding of ethics in the relationship to the other's face. Such a grounding is not only empirically impossible, it is a priori impossible since the limitation of our capacity to relate to others' faces is the mark of our very finitude. In other words, the limitation of our ethical relation of responsibility towards the other's face which necessitates the rise of the third, the domain of regulations, is a positive condition of ethics. If we deny this, if we stick to the postulate of a final translatability of the third into a relation to others' face, we remain caught in understanding. One can understand everything, even the most hideous crime has an inner truth and beauty when observed from within. Recall the refined spiritual meditation of Japanese warriors. And I'm sure for example one can understand Heydrich. He would say, but you don't understand anything about my deep inner experience of playing in the evening Beethoven string quartets and so on and so on. This is what the ethical law prohibits. Justice has to ignore the so-called inner truth. Recall the famous passage from Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, quote, when you visualize a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity. That was a quality God's image carried with us. When you saw the lines at the corner of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how their hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate is just a failure of imagination. I don't know how Graham Greene meant it, but my conclusion is, in order to practice justice, one has to suspend one's power of imagination. So back to Levinas. I think that the limitation of Levinas is not simply that of a Eurocentrist who relies on a too narrow definition of what is human, a definition that secretly excludes non-Europeans as not fully human. If anything I think I almost sympathize with Levinas when he openly acknowledged his Eurocentric bias. For example in a wonderful strange text he reports on how our time is marked by, quote, the arrival on the historical scene of those underdeveloped Afro-Asiatic masses that are strangers to the sacred history that forms the heart of the Judaic-Christian world and so on. So even in one text, very significant text from about the philosophical background of the Chinese-Soviet political strife, he even openly says that Chinese are not our neighbors, emphatically. It's a different attitude. For me that's not the problem. What Levinas fails to include into the scope of human is rather the inhuman itself, a dimension which eludes the face-to-face relationship of humans. Recall here at a different level Theodor Adorno's ambiguity with regard to the inhuman. While Adorno is well aware of the violence involved in the predominant definition of what counts as human, the implied exclusion of whole dimensions as non-human, he nonetheless basically conceives inhuman as the depository of alienated humanity. Ultimately for Adorno, inhuman is the power of barbarism we have to fight. Now what Adorno failed to render thematic I claim is as it were the positive dimension of the inhuman, which I think this positive dimension was first indicated, even conceptualized in the change of the status of the inhuman in Kantian transcendental term. Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and in his Critique of Pure Reason, negative and indefinite judgment. For example the positive judgment, the soul is mortal, can be negated in two ways: when a predicate is denied to the subject, the soul is not mortal, and when it's not the predicate which is denied but a non-predicate which is affirmed. Not the soul is not mortal, but the soul is non-mortal. The difference is precisely the same as the one known to every reader of Stephen King and other cheap horror writers between he is not dead and he is undead. The indefinite judgment, he is undead, opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction. He is non-dead means simply he is alive. He is undead means he is alive precisely insofar as he is dead. The undead are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous living dead. And I claim the same goes for inhuman. It's crucial to conceive of inhuman as a Kantian indefinite judgment. He is not human is not the same as he is inhuman. He is not human means simply he is external to humanity, animal, divine, whatever. While he is inhuman means something totally different, the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent as an innermost possibility of being human. And perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution. In the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excess of animal lusts or divine madness. While only with Kant and German Idealism the excess to be thought is absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself, which is why, as you probably know, with German Idealism the metaphor for the very core of subjectivity is no longer light, the light of reason, but night, what Hegel called the night of the world. So when in the pre-Kantian universe a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, that is to say animal passions or divine madness took over. While with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. And this dimension I think is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what is missing in Levinas with all his celebration of otherness is not some underlying sameness of all humans, but the radical inhuman dimension, the otherness to humanity itself. The otherness of a human of being reduced to inhumanity, the otherness exemplified among others by the terrifying figure of Muselmann, the living dead in the concentration camps. I should only refer here to the wonderful book by Agamben, his Remnants of Auschwitz, where he writes in a wonderful way about the paradoxical ethical status of Muslims, Muselmann in the concentration camps. Which is why, although Levinas is often perceived as the thinker who endeavored to articulate the experience of Shoah, usually called Holocaust, one thing is self-evident, apropos his questioning of one's own right to be, apropos his emphasis on my unconditional asymmetrical responsibility. This is not how a survivor of the Shoah, how one effectively experiencing the ethical abyss of Shoah thinks and writes. This is how I claim those who feel guilty for observing the catastrophe from a minimal safe distance think. Is the paradox of the Muselmann in the concentration camp not that this figure is simultaneously a zero level total reduction to life, a zero level of life, and a name for the pure excess as such, excess deprived of its normal base? This is why the figure of the Muselmann signals the limitation of Levinas. When describing it Primo Levi repeatedly uses the predicate faceless. And this term should be given I think here its entire Levinasian weight. When confronted with a Muselmann, one precisely cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the other, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets is a kind of blind spot, a lack of depth. Maybe Muselmann is thus the zero level neighbor, the neighbor with whom no emphatic face-to-face relationship is possible. For this same reason Levinas is also unable to take the properly Christian path of ethical paradoxes of the so-called teleological suspension of the ethical, outlined by Kierkegaard. In the chapter of his Either/Or in the volume one called The Ancient Tragical Motive as Reflected in the Modern, Kierkegaard deployed his fantasy of what a modern Antigone would have been. The conflict, he claims, is now entirely internalised. There is no longer a need for Creon. While Antigone admires and loves her father Oedipus, the public hero and savior of Thebes, she knows the truth about him, murderer of the father, incestuous marriage and so on. Her deadlock is that she is prevented from sharing this accursed knowledge, like Abraham who also could not communicate to others the divine injunction to sacrifice his son. She cannot complain, she cannot share her pain and sorrow with others. In contrast to Sophocles' Antigone who acts, buries her brother and thus actively assumes her fate, Kierkegaard's Antigone is unable to act, condemned forever to impassive suffering. This unbearable burden of her secret, of her destructive agalma, finally drives her to death in which only she can find peace otherwise provided by symbolising, sharing with others one's pain and so on. And Kierkegaard's point is that this situation is no longer properly tragic. In a similar way that Abraham also for Kierkegaard is not a tragic figure. Now I'm tempted to go here a step further. Insofar as Kierkegaard's Antigone is a paradigmatically modernist modern figure, should one not go on with his mental experiment and imagine a postmodern Antigone with, of course I cannot escape my nature, a Stalinist twist? In contrast to the modern one, the postmodern one should find herself in a position in which to quote Kierkegaard himself, the ethical dimension, the ethical itself would be the temptation. One version, version, would undoubtedly be for Antigone to publicly renounce, denounce and accuse her father, or in a different version her brother Polynices, accuse him of his terrible sins out of her unconditional love for him. The Kierkegaardian catch is that such a public act would render Antigone even more isolated, absolutely alone. No one with the exception of Oedipus himself, if he were still to be alive, would understand that her act of betrayal is the supreme act of love. Antigone would thus be entirely deprived of her sublime of this shining fascinating sublime beauty. So again, what I'm trying to imagine, you got it, is the Stalinist trial against Oedipus and Antigone playing the role you know of the Stalinist wife who wife who have to accuse your own relatives of being traitors and so on and so on. And do not misunderstand me here, my point is not to play games through through horrors and so on and so on. I think that if we are to go to the end in what the ethical experience of 20th of what 20th century means within the horizon of our ethical experience, we should go through this zero level where we experience the gap between the absolute dimension Kierkegaard called this theological and ethical at its purest, where we experience how as Kierkegaard put it ethical itself is a temptation to be to be resisted. Now let me conclude just with two final points. The first one I think is that the radical conclusion to be drawn from all this is that precisely apropos of Antigone is that one should renounce the very striving for one's own spiritual salvation. Here I agree with Levinas who himself quotes a very nice passage from Léon Brunschvicg, the old French philosopher of the early 20th century, who claims that, quote from Brunschvicg, the preoccupation with our salvation is a remnant of self-love, a trace of natural egocentrism from which we must be torn by the religious life. But I claim that we have to make here a step further, I claim that what we find at the end of this road is atheism. Not the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of heroic defiance of God, but the insight into the irrelevance of the divine. I would like to finish with a quote from Brecht's Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner, his Kafkaesque figure in Brecht, where one concerns precisely the question of atheism. Here is Brecht's short five lines passage. Someone asked Herr Keuner, Mr. Keuner, if there is a God. Herr Keuner said, I advise you to think about how your behavior would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: you already decided, you need a God. So the true atheism is again to make the question itself meaningless. And I think Brecht is right here, again. We are never in a position to directly choose between theism and atheism since the choice as such is located within the field of belief. Atheism in the in the sense of heroically deciding not to believe in God is a miserable pathetic stance of those who long for God but cannot find him or who rebel against God and so on and so on. A true atheist does not choose atheism, for him the question itself is irrelevant. And the last remark with which I would like to return to my starting quote from Alain Badiou about this pitiless the need for us to become pitiless censors, that is to say how we should reject this injunction enjoy. I claim that we live in a very paradoxical time today where one of the characteristic of our times is that in contrast to previous times where at least there appeared to be some kind of a tension between religious moral beliefs and your right to enjoy, I claim that today religion itself is evoked to sustain our injunct our injunction or ability to enjoy. I think that I think that the situation is today again with regard to enjoyment extremely paradoxical. I would like here to refer to another unpublished writing by Badiou where he speaks about the cut how where he the how today meaning and truth can no longer overlap. That is to say, for example, modern science develops truths, different modalities of truth, with which with whom meaning meaningful experience cannot catch up. So what are we to do here? I think that this necessity to catch it up, that is to say to reinvent to to reject this gap to reject our acceptance of this gap and to reinvent some kind of a meaning which would still catch up with the with scientific or political truth today is I think what gives a new impetus to forms of religion today. That's what religion is basically doing today. My God, biogenetic experiments they render our life meaningless or whatever and the the function of religion here is to say no stop we must guarantee meaning. And paradox there are paradoxical things going on here. For example it's interesting to observe how even great enlightened people who present themselves as great philosophers of enlightenment like Habermas speak start to speak the same language. I think let me be very clear: today we are facing the emergence of a new form of Staatsphilosophie, state philosophy, which is precisely Habermasian neo-Kantianism. Why? Let me be very precise. What always was the function of proper state philosophy? Now I'm not speaking at the personal level that Habermas is paid or whatever, but I'm speaking about the structural function. On the one hand we have today tremendous explosion of new technologies, scientific breakthroughs and so on. A state philosophy should do this, on the one hand it should allow the space for these breakthroughs because otherwise you put in the danger permanent self-revolutionizing of capitalism and so on, but at the same time it should block its epistemological ethical consequences. That is to say the catch is how to divide the two spheres so that on the one hand, yes okay, do your biogenetic things, but stop, don't go too far so that you will threaten our sense of autonomy and so on and so on. Which is I think what makes it pretty tragic of how Habermasian position today it's a purely defensive position. It's the position how to play this double game of unfortunately we have this progress but we should stop. Again this is also I think exactly the same strategy as the religious strategy: how to how to retain this fragile balance. In other words Habermas the great enlightenment guy is here playing only a more sophisticated New Age strategy. Because as you know of course another strategy would be precisely the New Age strategy where you find through some obscure operations like quantum physics oscillation oh do we not find this in Buddhism and so on. It's the same idea of uniting them these two dimensions. And I think that if anything this today is our ethical duty. And this is for me how I understand this pitiless censor of ourselves. This means for me precisely what we have to censors is precisely this as would the French expression like "pousse-à-jouir", pousse-à pousse-à jouir or la signification, they're not the same, like this this spontaneous as it were ideological tendency towards meaning. And since today meaning is more and more identified with jouissance, I think this is why Dalai Lama is such a hit. I don't know if he is aware what he is doing, but the way his works function here. Why is Dalai Lama on the bestseller list of New York Times? Because what he effectively does, now I'm speaking as a Stalinist not subjectively but the objective social meaning of his book, is to sell us Tibetan Buddhist ethics as totally compatible with our egotistic striving for personal self-fulfillment and so on. His message is: you want self-fulfillment pleasurable life, don't fear Buddhism, you can you can get it through it. Which is why I think that the lesson of psychoanalysis today is crucial. Not because today again as Badiou indicated in that thesis we live in a society whose fundamental ideological injunction precisely is enjoy, far from having anything transgressive about it. Enjoyment is precisely the fundamental injunction. And psychoanalysis now starts to find its proper terrain, which is not as we thought till now that you know you are not able to enjoy, you have this famous internalized paternal prohibitions and then you cannot do it so you go to a psychoanalyst who enables you to overcome your internal obstacles and finally can do it. I think on the contrary the if there is one ethical attitude which psychoanalysis stands for, it is precisely all other discourses from sexual sex manuals to to Dalai Lama's writings. In all of them you have one big underlying message: enjoy, realize yourself, develop your potential, you should do it enjoy. Psychoanalysis on the contrary is today the only discourse whose message is you are allowed not to enjoy. I'm very precise here. Not you should not enjoy, because this is just a kind of obscene inverted super-ego call, but you are allowed not to enjoy. That is to say enjoyment is not the funda- contrary to what people think the message of psychoanalysis precisely no enjoyment is not the fundamental category of your existence. From this, I didn't don't have time to do it, one should read this inhuman dimension not only as that how should we put it limit of humanity as embodied in the figure of Muselmann but the very ethical that some inhuman dimension is in the very heart of every ethical act I claim. In this sense I don't have time to develop it now, just since I didn't yet use my minutes I still have five minutes. Apropos along these lines I think what what one should criticize and reinterpret the notion of universal human rights today as even somebody with whom I totally do not agree otherwise politically Hannah Arendt said and here I agree with her partially that the fundamental paradox is that the notion of human rights became so actual at the very point where a class of people emerged she was referring to years ago to that time when there was a class of people who were refugees, stateless and precisely had no human rights. So from the very beginning universal human rights were basically rights of those who have no guaranteed political rights and so on and so on. So you may say what's the problem with it? Isn't this nice we have some universal standard which especially target those who have no rights? Ah, today we get an obscene twist to this. In a recent writing published I think at least I found it only in English Rancière gave her although again otherwise I don't agree with him with Jacques Rancière but gave a nice hint here. His idea was that what does this mean that human rights are the rights of those who have or rather who are not able to exercise effectively any rights? Like refugees, starving people and so on and so on. This means something very precise. This means as Rancière put it in a wonderful ironic way, we in developed countries have nothing to do with human rights. We this is not our problem, no our problem is more this, more this, not basic human rights. So we do with them exactly what we do with old useless medicine and and food out of date and old clothes. We export them to third world countries. But there is one catch in this export business is that those for whose human rights we fight are not able themselves to fight them. So we have a kind of almost Hegelian reflexive turn: what universal human rights means, it effectively means our right to make humanitarian intervention where we want. We export them so that via this detour they return to us and I think this is what effectively universal human right means today. The right of us to intervene wherever we want as if in order to defend human rights. Universality is our universality, our universal right to intervene wherever we want as if in order to defend human rights. Along all these lines one would have to say many other things but as Indians say in this old Westerns, I've spoken.