Psychoanalysis and Philosophy
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2013-09-24 · 0:46:18 · 5,553 words
capitalismideologypsychoanalysisdemocracytechnology-ai-cyberspacecinema-art-culturereligion-theologygeopolitics-warphilosophy-generaleveryday-life
Delivered in Seoul (likely 2012-2013), Žižek opens by reflecting on Korean historical trauma and the contrast between forgiveness and forgetting, then moves through a wide-ranging lecture on the 'worldlessness' of global capitalism, the return of the sacred in pop culture (Gangnam Style, rock concerts), the ideological function of 'Western Buddhism,' and the moral vacuum capitalism produces. He uses the Indonesian documentary 'Act of Killing' to illustrate capitalism's ethical consequences, examines the collapse of public space under digital surveillance, and concludes with a defence of whistleblowers (Snowden, Manning, Assange) as guardians of Kantian public reason.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 13
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's term for capitalism's unique feature: unlike previous ideological orders it imposes no global worldview, accommodating all civilizations and thus hollowing out any totalizing meaning.
as “worldlessness”
Žižek (following Badiou) uses this to describe how global capitalism deprives people of any coherent cognitive mapping or horizon of meaning, leaving social space experienced as a meaningless void.
Žižek uses this (Jameson-inflected) term to describe the capacity of an ideological order to give subjects a meaningful orientation in the social totality, something capitalism uniquely fails to provide.
as “superego divinity”
Žižek describes religious fundamentalism's God as an obscene superego figure who demands sacrifice, mirroring the sacrificial logic of permissive consumer culture.
as “the sacred as collective trance”
Žižek argues that collective enthusiastic trance in mass pop-cultural events (rock concerts, Gangnam Style) is a genuine return of the sacred, not a pale imitation of religious ritual.
Žižek's ironic label for the pop-cultural phenomenon of inner detachment and mindfulness that, far from opposing capitalism, serves as its most efficient lubricant by enabling subjects to participate in frantic market competition with false equanimity.
as “imaginary identification”
Žižek argues that perpetrators of atrocity (e.g. Anwar Congo's gang) require a fictional role, here American film noir heroes, to sustain their acts; evil demands a fantasmatic screen to function.
Following Walter Benjamin, Žižek argues that capitalism functions as a religion of sacrifice: the true capitalist sacrifices his pleasures in fanatical dedication to the circulation of capital.
as “egotism as ideology”
Žižek inverts the common assumption: self-interested egotism is not the brute fact of capitalist society but its ideology, the spiritual totality that produces egotists, not a natural baseline.
Žižek invokes Hegel's phrase from the Phenomenology to describe the ideological fiction of the capitalist market: the more individuals pursue naked self-interest, the more they are said to serve the common good.
as “perverse fanatical dedication”
Žižek's reframing of capitalism's drive: it is not brutal hedonism but a wrong kind of perverse, self-destructive devotion to the pure circulation of capital, beyond any rational self-interest.
as “public space proper”
The shared symbolic space in which citizens communicate and expose themselves to an anonymous other, Žižek argues this is disappearing faster than private life under digitalization.
as “public vs private use of reason”
Drawing on Kant's 'What is Enlightenment?', Žižek distinguishes genuinely public reason (unconstrained philosophical/scientific debate) from the 'private' reasoning of state bureaucracies and expert problem-solvers who serve particular interests.
Stories he reaches for 2
Two rabbis debate theology; the losing one invokes God to adjudicate, but the winning rabbi shouts God down ('you old idiot, you did your job, now leave us to debate'), and God meekly agrees and leaves.
“listen, you old idiot, you did your job, you created the world, you did it pretty badly, so now… run away, go away and leave us intelligent theologians to debate things seriously.”
Žižek uses the global viral success of Gangnam Style, a song that ironizes its own vacuity but entraps listeners in its rhythm, to illustrate that ironic distance does not escape ideological enjoyment but constitutes it.
“Gangnam Style I claim is ideology not in spite of the ironic distance towards what it is doing, but it's ideology because of this. Disgustingly attractive.”
Works invoked 5
Hegel's text from which Žižek draws the concept of 'das geistige Tierreich' (the spiritual kingdom of animals) to analyse capitalist ideology.
The Act of Killing film
Žižek calls it one of the most depressive documentaries he has seen; he finds it extraordinarily important as a portrait of moral vacuum under global capitalism and uses it extensively to illustrate his argument.
Citizen Kane film
Mentioned only in passing as the Orson Welles film modelled on William Randolph Hearst.
What is Enlightenment? essay
Kant's essay underpins Žižek's distinction between public and private use of reason and his argument that whistleblowers defend public reason.
Gangnam Style song
Žižek finds it 'disgustingly attractive' and vulgar but deploys it as his central exhibit for how ideology operates through ironic enjoyment and the collective trance of the sacred.
People invoked 16
Anwar Congo positive
The Indonesian death-squad leader and subject of 'Act of Killing'; Žižek uses Congo's public boasting about torture as the key exhibit in his argument about capitalism's moral vacuum and the role of imaginary identification in evil.
Anwar Congo's gang identified with Bogart's film noir persona while committing atrocities, used to illustrate the role of imaginary identification in enabling evil.
Edward Snowden positive
Žižek argues Snowden should be 'unconditionally defended' not for embarrassing the US but for defending public reason and exposing the privatization of the public sphere; acknowledges Snowden's flight to Russia was a forced choice.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek deploys Lacan's inversion of Dostoevsky ('if there is no God everything is prohibited') as a key theoretical move; also name-dropped as the subject of intellectual conversation at the São Paulo brothel.
Franco Berardi positive
Žižek quotes Berardi's essay on Seoul at length as an authoritative diagnosis of Korea as 'ground zero' of capitalist worldlessness.
Mentioned only as the director whose Citizen Kane was modelled on Hearst.
Director of 'Act of Killing'; Žižek praises the film as an extraordinary portrait of moral vacuum and finds it one of the most depressive documentaries he has seen.
Appears in an anecdote about his newspaper editor; Žižek notes Hearst was the model for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.
Chelsea Manning positive
Grouped with Snowden and Assange as a whistleblower who compelled public confrontation with state surveillance and should be celebrated as a defender of Kantian public reason.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited for the concept of 'worldlessness', the experience of social space as progressively devoid of meaning, which Žižek adopts as a central diagnostic.
Julian Assange positive
Listed alongside Snowden and Manning; Žižek warns against cheaply instrumentalizing their revelations for anti-Americanism, the lesson is global.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Žižek cites Suzuki's biography to argue that Zen business courses organized by Suzuki in post-WWII Tokyo show that 'Western Buddhism' is an ideological supplement to capitalism, not a genuine alternative.
Walter Benjamin positive
Invoked for his thesis on capitalism as a form of religion, used to explain the ascetic-sacrificial structure of the true capitalist.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for 'das geistige Tierreich' (the spiritual kingdom of animals) from the Phenomenology of Spirit, used to expose the ideological fiction of the invisible hand of the market.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for 'What is Enlightenment?' and the distinction between public and private use of reason; Kant's framework underlies Žižek's defence of whistleblowers as guardians of public reason.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Referenced as source of the 'Nietzschean inversion' of the forgiveness formula; invoked approvingly to frame the Korean attitude toward Japanese atrocities.
What it argues
worldlessness of global capitalism and the erosion of symbolic meaningthe sacred as collective trance — from North Korean rallies to Gangnam StyleWestern Buddhism as capitalist ideological supplementcollapse of public space versus privacy under digital surveillancewhistleblowers as defenders of Kantian public reasonmoral vacuum and the need for fictional identification to commit eviltrue conservatism as a position only the radical left can occupy today
Dialectical moves 8
“If there is no God, then everything is prohibited — not permitted. And if there is God, then everything is permitted.”
Inverting Dostoevsky's formula via Lacan: divine authority licenses transgression while its absence imposes an even more crushing superego prohibition.
“Gangnam Style is ideology not in spite of the ironic distance towards what it is doing, but it's ideology because of this.”
The reversal shows that self-aware irony does not escape ideological capture but is itself the mechanism of enjoyment that sustains ideological participation.
“Today only a radical leftist can be a true conservative.”
Today's nominal conservatives fully endorse capitalist self-revolutionizing; only the radical left is genuinely attentive to what is lost in progress, making it the true heir to conservatism.
“Self-interested egotism is not the brutal fact of our society, but its ideology.”
What appears as a natural human baseline is revealed as a produced ideological effect of the spiritual totality of capitalism.
“The threat today is not the disappearance of privacy but the disappearance of public space proper.”
The standard digital-age fear is inverted: the deeper threat is the erosion of shared public reason, not the monitoring of private individuals.
“The point is not that they know too much, but that by knowing too much they know nothing.”
Mass data collection paradoxically produces ignorance: the sheer volume makes interpretation arbitrary, making the surveilled more vulnerable, not less.
“The more you are egotist on the market, the more society profits — that's capitalist ideology.”
Žižek (via Hegel's 'spiritual kingdom of animals') exposes the ideological fiction by which private vice is transmuted into public virtue, inverting the critical edge back onto the system.
“We will forget [Japanese atrocities], but we will never forgive you.”
Korea's inversion of the standard 'forgive but not forget' formula is presented as more honest: it refuses the manipulative moral leverage that forgiveness-with-memory grants the wronged party.
Claims 15
rejects
The formula 'I forgive you but will never forget' is deeply hypocritical and manipulative, serving as a permanent reminder of guilt rather than genuine reconciliation.forgiveness and memory (Korean-Japanese historical context)
asserts
Global capitalism is the first social order that actively 'detotalizes' meaning — it has no global worldview and can accommodate every civilization, leaving a worldless ideological constellation.capitalism and ideology
asserts
Religious fundamentalism arises as a panicked defensive reaction by societies subjected to rapid, unmediated modernization without the temporal cushion that allowed Western societies to adapt.fundamentalism and modernization
asserts
If there is no God then everything is prohibited — not permitted; and if there is a God, everything is permitted, because the believer acts as a direct instrument of divine will beyond ordinary morality.religion, permissiveness, and the superego (inverting Dostoevsky via Lacan)
asserts
Mass pop-cultural trance (rock concerts, Gangnam Style) is a genuine return of the sacred, not fundamentally different from traditional religious collective ritual.the sacred and popular culture
asserts
Gangnam Style is ideology not despite its self-ironic distance but precisely because of it — the irony does not undermine but sustains participation in the collective trance.ideology, irony, and enjoyment
asserts
Western Buddhism and oriental spirituality, far from resisting capitalism, serve as its most efficient ideological supplement, enabling subjects to participate fully in market competition with inner detachment.ideology and Eastern spirituality
asserts
Today only a radical leftist can be a true conservative, because only the left fully admits capitalism's antagonisms and is attentive to what is being lost in progress.left politics and conservatism
asserts
Self-interested egotism is not the brutal fact of capitalist society but its ideology — the spiritual totality of capitalism produces egotists rather than egotism being a natural human baseline.capitalism, egotism, and ideology
rejects
Capitalism should be attacked not as brutal hedonism but as a wrong kind of perverse, fanatical dedication to capital circulation that overrides even rational self-interest.standard critique of capitalism as hedonism
reframes
The primary threat of digital media is not the disappearance of privacy but the disappearance of public space proper — the genuine common space of communicating citizens.digital surveillance and public/private distinction
reframes
The danger of mass digital surveillance is not that authorities know too much, but that by knowing too much they effectively know nothing — and this unpredictability is more threatening to individuals.digital surveillance and state power
asserts
Whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning should be celebrated not merely for embarrassing states but for defending Kantian public reason and exposing the privatization of the public sphere.whistleblowing, public reason, and digital politics
asserts
The moral vacuum exposed by 'Act of Killing' — where perpetrators boast publicly of atrocities — is an effect of global capitalism, not Indonesian backwardness or Hollywood influence.capitalism, ethics, and the Indonesian killings
asserts
Perpetrators of extreme violence always require a fictional-imaginary identification (e.g. film noir heroes) to sustain their acts; it is very difficult to be 'directly evil' without such a screen.evil, fantasy, and imaginary identification
Quotes 12
“If there is no God, then everything is prohibited. Or if there is God, then everything is permitted.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian inversion of Dostoevsky on God and moral law
“Gangnam Style I claim is ideology not in spite of the ironic distance towards what it is doing, but it's ideology because of this. Disgustingly attractive.”Slavoj Žižek · ironic distance as ideological mechanism
“Today only a radical leftist can be a true conservative.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectical reversal of left and conservative
“Self-interested egotism is not the brutal fact of our society, but its ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · egotism as ideological product not natural baseline
“What is disappearing today is not privacy I think, but public space.”Slavoj Žižek · digital age threat: collapse of public space not loss of privacy
“The point is not that they know too much, but that by knowing too much they know nothing.”Slavoj Žižek · paradox of mass surveillance: excess data produces ignorance
“We should attack capitalism not as brutal hedonism, but as the wrong kind of perverse fanatical dedication.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism as fanatical asceticism not hedonism
“Experts are people who are solving problems defined by others. But I think this is not true intellectual work.”Slavoj Žižek · distinction between expertise and genuine intellectual work
“Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden should be today unconditionally defended. They don't defend our privacy, they defend the public space.”Slavoj Žižek · whistleblowers as defenders of public reason not private life
“Korea is the ground zero of the world, a blueprint for the future of the planet.”Slavoj Žižek · South Korea as paradigm case of capitalist worldlessness
“It's very difficult to be directly evil. You always need this kind of imaginary identification.”Slavoj Žižek · evil requires fictional-imaginary scaffolding
“My paradoxical conclusion is that today only a radical leftist can be a true conservative.”Slavoj Žižek · left as the only genuine conservatism
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I'm very glad and proud to be here. Let me already begin with a serious topic: the suffering of the Korean people in the 20th century, which undoubtedly was immense. No wonder that, so I was told, the Koreans do everything to forget that time, especially, I mean, the time of Japanese occupation, and go on with their lives. And again, I was told that the attitude of Korean people involves a profoundly Nietzschean, referring to Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzschean inversion of the standard formula: I will forgive you, but I will never forget it. With regard to Japanese atrocities, I was told that you say: we will forget them, we try to forget them, but we will never forgive you. I think you are right. There is something deeply hypocritical in the formula forgive but not forget. It sounds noble, this formula, but it is deeply manipulative since, you know, the underlying logic is: I forgive you for what you did, but I will never forget it, that is to say all the time I will remind you how guilty you are. Fortunately, I was told that your society is more and more penetrated by this postmodern attitude of feeling wounded and trying to get better, healing the wound. This, I think, has nothing to do with this authentic suffering that you experienced. I really oppose this pseudo-psychoanalytic culture of everything that we experience is some kind of a wound, a trauma that we have to heal. I think that wounds are really liberating at the same time. If we are not... I mean, if there is a country which really try to protect their people from being wounded, it’s North Korea. Total isolation so that the external world will not wound them. I would like to begin with Franco Berardi’s his report on his journey to Seoul. A long quote now. By the end of the 20th century, after decades of war, humiliation, starvation and horrific bombings, both the physical and the anthropological landscape of this country, Korea, had been reduced to a sort of devastated abstraction. At that point, human life and the city gave themselves with docility to the transforming hand of the highest form of contemporary nihilism. Korea is the ground zero of the world, a blueprint for the future of the planet. After colonization and wars, after dictatorship and starvation, the South Korean mind, liberated by the burden of the natural body, smoothly entered the digital sphere with a lower degree of cultural resistance than virtually any other population in the world. This, in my opinion, is the main source of the incredible economic performance that this country has staged in the years of the electronic revolution. In the emptied cultural space, the Korean experience is marked by an extreme degree of individualization and simultaneously it is headed towards the ultimate cabling of the collective mind. These lonely monads walk in the urban space in tender continuous interaction with the pictures, tweets, games coming out of their small screens, perfectly insulated and perfectly wired into the smooth interface of the flow. Here probably lies the explanation of the extraordinary propensity of Koreans, both young and middle-aged, to commit suicide. In the space of two generations, their condition has certainly improved by the point of view of revenue, nutrition, freedom and possibility of traveling abroad. But the price of this improvement has been the desertification of daily life, the hyper-acceleration of rhythms, the extreme individualization of biographies, and work precariousness which also means unbridled competition. Koreans look back to the condition of their grandparents and they cannot question the present alienation. But the present alienation is a different sort of hell. The intensification of the rhythm of work, the desertification of the landscape, and the virtualization of the emotional life are converging to create a level of loneliness and despair that is difficult to consciously refuse and oppose. End of quote. Berardi’s portrait of South Korea... what they provide is the image of a place deprived of its history, a worldless place. Alain Badiou has reflected that we live in a social space which is progressively experienced as worldless. Even the fascist anti-Semitism opened up a world: it described its critical situation by positing an enemy, Jewish conspiracy, it named a goal and the means of achieving this goal. Fascism disclosed reality in a way which allowed its subjects to acquire some kind of global cognitive mapping. Dangers of capitalism, the entire world, it sustains a worldless ideological constellation. It deprives the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. Capitalism is the first social and economic order which detotalizes meaning. It is not global at the level of meaning. There is no global capitalist worldview. The fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Since in Europe modernization was spread over centuries, we in Europe had the time to accommodate ourselves to it, to soften the shattering impact of modernization, to soften it through the formation of new social narratives and myths. While some other societies, exemplarily the Muslim societies, were exposed to this impact directly without a protective screen or a temporal delay. So that their symbolic universe was perturbed much more brutally. These countries lost their symbolic ground with no time left to establish a new symbolic balance. No wonder then that the only way for some of these societies to avoid total breakdown was to erect in panic the shield of fundamentalism. This psychotic, delirious, incestuous reassertion of religion as a direct insight into the divine real, with all the terrifying consequences that such an assertion entails, up to the return with a vengeance of the obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices. And I think that this rise of superego is another feature that postmodern liberal permissiveness shares with new religious fundamentalisms. Either sacrifice in permissiveness or sacrifice on account of the divine fundamentalism. If there is no God, then everything is permitted. Jacques Lacan, as probably many of you know, turned this wisdom around. For him, it is exactly the opposite: if there is no God, then everything is prohibited. Or if there is God, then everything is permitted. And I think it’s clear what Lacan meant. On the one hand, imagine a religious fundamentalist. Isn’t it that for him, precisely because he perceives himself as a direct instrument of divine will, he stands above normal moral concerns? I can do whatever I want because God is acting through me, so I don’t have to... I can explode bombs, kill people and so on, I am not constrained by any ordinary moral considerations. A wonderful passage from Talmud, you know. Two rabbis, rabbis, Jewish priests, debate a theological point. And the one who is losing the argumentation calls God. He says: listen, let’s call Jehovah, God, so that he will come and decide. But before he even starts to talk, the other rabbi, the one who was winning the argumentation, starts to shout at God: listen, you old idiot, you did your job, you created the world, you did it pretty badly, so now you did your job, run away, go away and leave us intelligent theologians to debate things seriously. And you know what’s the beauty? You know what Jehovah answers? Oh my God, you are right! And he runs away. That’s how we should relate to God if you ask me. Where do we so again, I think that this explosions of collective enjoyment like in rock, emphatic rock concerts and so on, pop music, this is quite seriously for me the return of the sacred. And I don’t buy the naive answer: no, no, this is not authentic. I don’t think there is a fundamental difference here. When you have this collective enthusiastic trance, it is the sacred which is here. And so my conclusion is that the sacred is not only a noble, nice thing. The sacred can also be a very terrifying thing. And you should know it, because you probably already guessed why I am saying this. It’s that in the summer of the sacred did come also to your country in the form of Gangnam Style. As a curiosity, it is worth noting that the Gangnam Style video clip, did you know this, surpassed Justin Bieber’s clip on YouTube, thus becoming the most watched YouTube clip of all times. It went over one billion. The song is again I claim not only wildly popular. It also mobilizes people into a collective trance with tens of thousands shouting and performing a dance that imitates horse riding, all in the same rhythm with an intensity unseen from the times of early Beatles. What makes it interesting is the way it combines collective trance with self-irony. Words of the song and the staging of the video clip obviously make fun at the meaninglessness and vacuity of Gangnam style, this time not the song’s but literally the Gangnam life, and I know what it is, I’m staying there now. Some claim that they do this even in a subtly subversive way. But we are nonetheless entranced, caught in the stupid marching rhythm, participating in this pure mimesis, imitating it. Gangnam Style I claim is ideology not in spite of the ironic distance towards what it is doing, but it’s ideology because of this. Disgustingly attractive. They love to hate it. You know, it’s like you hear a certain melody and you are shocked how vulgar it is. But then you end up repeating it, it plays in your mind all the time, so the more you hate it, the more you finish up repeating it all the time. So now I will say something really evil, but I take it very seriously. You know, it’s easy to laugh at North Koreans for their mass staged rallies up there where they applaud the leader, cry and so on. Where well, they have their sacred rituals, you have yours. These are for me two sides of the same coin: Gangnam Style on a stadium spectacle and and Kim Jong-il spectacle or whatever. It may... this brings me to my central point. It may seem that in Korea, as well as elsewhere, numerous forms of traditional wisdom survive to serve as a protective cushion against the shock of modernization. However, I claim it is easy to see how these remainders of old ideology are already transformed into ideological tools destined to facilitate rapid modernization, like the so-called oriental spirituality with its more gentle, balanced, holistic, ecological approach. It is not only that what I ironically call Western Buddhism, this pop cultural phenomenon preaching inner distance and indifference towards the frantic pace of market competition, is the most efficient way I think to fully participate in the capitalist dynamics. I think that one even cannot really say that this is just a Western vulgar falsification. I learned that you know, the first course for business course the first courses, educational courses, for businessmen in Zen Buddhism were organized, I read in a biography of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, immediately after World War II in Tokyo, where his idea was again: to succeed in business competition with the crazy rhythm and so on, you should not take things too seriously, you should do it with an inner distance, you should be aware that this is only game of appearances and so on, and so on. Now I come to my next shocking point. Such an analysis of our Western crazy frantic rhythm of consumerism and so on, the resistance of a world threatened by rapid modernization. World stands here for a specific horizon of meaning, for an entire civilization, or rather culture, with its daily rituals and manners which are threatened by the post-historical commodification. Is this resistance conservative? Many modern capitalists are saying oh workers' resistance is just an example of old 19th-century attitudes persisting. Maybe. Why not? But I claim that it is today’s mainstream self-declared political and cultural conservatives who are not really conservative. Fully endorsing capitalist continuous self-revolutionizing, today’s conservatives just want to make it more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions, you know, like those teachers of oriental spirituality who claim go through a Buddhism course and you will be even more efficient on the market. A true conservative today is the one who fully admits the antagonisms of global capitalism, the one who rejects simple progressivism, the one who is attentive to the dark obverse of progress. In this sense, if by conservative we mean the one who is not just celebrating rapid development but who is also fully aware of what dimension of the past, which is a precious one, we are losing with progress, then my paradoxical conclusion is that today only a radical leftist can be a true conservative. So what should today’s leftist conservative fight for? Let me conclude with two brutal examples. First, one of the most depressive documentary films that I’ve ever seen: a Dutch documentary, 'Act of Killing', made by Joshua Oppenheimer in This film, shot in Medan, Indonesia, reports on a case of obscenity which reaches the extreme. It tells the story of a group of old anti-communist soldiers, led by Anwar Congo, who are these ex-soldiers now respected politicians, but you remember in the communist attempt to take over and then Suharto strike back and their armed gang did a massive killing of almost two million and a half, mostly Chinese communist sympathizers. This guy led one of the gang. 'Act of Killing', this documentary, is about killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built. After they won, the communist rebellion was crushed, the terrible acts of these murderers were not relegated to the status of dirty secrets. On the contrary, they boast openly about the details of their massacre. I mean, if you watch the film I warn you, it’s extremely offensive because it’s simply breathtaking. You have these people, now elder respected people, who simply openly talk about how it took us some time to discover what is the most practical way to rape a woman, then we discovered that if you put her on a low table and somebody is holding her by her throat on the other side is the most practical way to penetrate her, or what is the most efficient way to torture men, how you should squeeze their testicles and so on, and so on. And what makes the film so depressive is that again, this is openly, publicly admitted. They talk about it. For me the most obscene moment, you couldn’t believe it, it’s almost from some kind of science fiction dystopia, is when the film shows a real TV show on Indonesian state TV where Anwar Congo is asked about some technique of torture. And he explains how he invented a more practical, efficient way of torture, and then a nice young woman who is the moderator says something like: what an inventiveness you showed, a big round of applause for Mr. Anwar Congo, you know like it’s an amusement show and so on, and so on. I mean, then there is another very important point to this documentary. You know, it’s difficult for people to be really evil. To be evil you need some imaginary scenario, you have to provide a fictional identification for you. In this case, this identification is provided by American films, and I don’t blame American films for this. Anwar and his friends said that when they were doing these horrible things, beating people, raping women, torturing suspected communists, that they identified with American film noir heroes like Humphrey Bogart and so on, they imagined themselves as heroes of noir. I find this very interesting how you always need this kind of imaginary identification. It’s very difficult to be directly evil. What I find so terrifying in this film is that it provides maybe the most horrible, at least for my taste, portrait of our moral vacuum. You know, even the Nazis, when they did the Holocaust, they kept it secret, you know, like we will not boast about it in the public. Here you go to a TV show and you openly present how you tortured and so on, and so on, and no one seems to care. Now how can this happen? Let me make it clear here. I’m not blaming Hollywood like 'oh it’s the influence of Hollywood'. I’m not also not blaming Indonesian backwardness and so on, and so on. I think it’s simply the ethical impact of global capitalism. We should follow here the insight of Walter Benjamin about capitalism as a form of religion. Listen, if you ever met and I did, a true capitalist who can be as a businessman extremely ruthless, brutal, you will immediately see that he is not a hedonist. You know, a true capitalist works day and night to multiply his fortune and so on, and so on, he is usually ruined, gets a heart attack, whatever. And this is I think what Walter Benjamin meant. A capitalist sacrifices his pleasures even more than we who work for him. This is why I also disagree with those who fight for ecology claim we should learn to abandon to get over our egotism and develop a feeling of solidarity for higher values, self-sacrifice. No, I think that imagine a capitalist who is destroying environment. I mean, in the long term it will even hurt him. My reproach to him is that he is not enough of a rational egotist. He is so dedicated to his goal, which is the multiplication circulation of capital, that he is ready to ruin the entire world just that the capital circulates, just that it goes on. So again, we should attack capitalism not as brutal hedonism, but as the wrong kind of perverse fanatical dedication. If anything we need today more of simple egotist utilitarian concerns. Self-interested egotism is not the brutal fact of our society, but its ideology. The ideology which was already described by Hegel in his phenomenology of spirit where he uses a wonderful expression: *das geistige Tierreich*, the spiritual kingdom of animals. You know what’s so-called cunning of reason or the hidden invisible hand of the market. The idea is that the more we are, that’s capitalist ideology, the more you are egotist on the market, the more society profits. It’s this cynical view that the greatest catastrophes always happen when you try to do something good, then the result is catastrophe. But in capitalism the more you care only for yourself, the more you work for the common good. To oppose capitalist egotism to some kind of global sense of community and so on, and so on, no. The problem is not that people are egotists. The problem is the spiritual totality which makes them egotists. I was told by a friend from China, Michael Yuen, crazy thing that happened half a decade ago in Nanjing. An elderly woman fell from the bus when the bus stops, and a kind young guy stepped out when he saw that she fell down, she was old, he stepped out and helped her to get up, and then when he saw that she is hurt, he gave her some money to take taxi to the hospital and so on. Two weeks later, because they probably exchanged addresses whatever, this guy got a call from the court. The woman prosecuted him for pushing her down. And her reasoning was this one: why would an ordinary guy help me as much as this guy did? No normal person would help an older woman who falls down. It must have been the only rational explanation is that he felt guilty because he pushed me down. And the shock is that the court gave her right. The man had to pay a quite a lot of amount of money because the court says that, I quote: 'According to common sense, Peng Yu', this was the guy's name, 'helped the lady because he has previously knocked her over. A normal person would not be as kind as Peng Yu claimed he was.' Now I find this extraordinary how you are good but it’s considered not normal, surprising. What is going on here? Again I claim the this situation is much more complex than it appears. It’s not simply people are egotist, it’s even when you are good the social standards are already egotist. And my friend Michael Yuen wrote to me that we should read such incidents against the background of a general opinion poll that they made in China recently where people were asked: you walk along the street and young people between and were asked, and you see an old person there wounded, dying, would you stop or not? percent of young people said no, we would pass by. And to avoid a misunderstanding it was specified that that person is dying alone there. So it’s not that there is a criminal beating someone and you risk your life helping the wounded. No, it would be perfectly safe. But then interestingly when they specified the question: under what conditions you would help the wounded person? They said: I would first look around if there is a CCTV, whatever, camera, I would help it. I claim what happens here is this is a little bit more complex philosophical idea, a redefinition of public space. What is disappearing today is not privacy I think, but public space. We are more and more getting in a state where even what once we considered public spaces... what do I mean by this? Let me give you another example which may sound weird from hardcore pornography. A friend told me that recently there is in Europe, I don’t know what happens here, a new tendency which is so-called public sex in hardcore pornography. And it’s pretty depressing. A friend showed me some clips. This is strangely enough especially popular in Hungary and Poland. For example I saw one clip where a couple, man and woman, enters they enter a streetcar, public transport. The car is half empty and they sit down at a free chair and simply undress and start to have sex. It’s obviously a non-staged situation, they really did it. And what shocked me is how people how did ordinary people around react to it? Okay a little bit they look strangely and then after a couple of seconds they simply went on reading newspapers or whatever. You know what I mean? Even if they were out in the open they still considered it part of the private space. Which is why, I have to cut it short here, which is why again I don’t think that the threat today is the disappearance of privacy. You know in the sense of I don’t know with digital media and so on those in power can control us. No, what is even more threatening I think is the disappearance of public space proper, a common space of all of us where we communicate. You know where you can feel this difference? It may appear again a dirty one. I claim that there is a great difference, although it may appear similar, between the good old exhibitionist, you know that who does you know that legendary gesture of you open your coat and you show your organ to someone who is passing by, and to posting your naked photos on on the web. When you do it what the traditional exhibitionist does it, it’s still public space. You expose yourself to some public. But even if you are wired connected to millions, when you post your naked photos on the net, it somehow remains private and solipsistic even if millions watch you. It’s not public space proper. And allow me to conclude briefly: this is why I claim, now my last political point, whistleblowers like Edward Snowden should be today unconditionally defended. They don’t defend our privacy, as people claim often, they defend the public space. The first thing to say about Snowden, Assange, Manning and so on is that we should celebrate them not simply because their acts annoy and embarrass United States Secret Service and so on, but for a much more fundamental reason. What Snowden disclosed is something that not only United States but probably all other great and not so great powers from China to Russia, from Germany to Israel are doing. We we didn’t learn really anything new from Manning or Snowden. But they compelled us, they pushed us into a situation where we cannot ignore it. But you know what happens when you somebody gives you some shots, photos and you see really how it goes on, this changes everything. So again, the lesson of Snowden’s revelations I think is global. The lesson is how with the digitalization of our lives, how the public sphere gets privatized. Privatized in the in what sense? Not only in the sense of private companies control it, but my reference is here Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, who in his famous text 'What is Enlightenment?' opposed public and private use of reason. But in a very paradoxical way. For Kant, state reasoning, state machinery, state bureaucracy is not public but private because they stand for particular interests. Only pure thinking, philosophy, sciences, are public. Public means we engage in a debate which is not limited by any collective, even if collective, especially if collective private concerns. So again for Kant the example of private use of reason is precisely state administration and its reasoning. Now in Europe, where they are imposing a reform of higher education, as they are saying, we don’t need philosophers who are doing their useless job, we need sciences to deliver useful knowledge. And in a debate in France my opponent explained this to me. Like he said let’s say there are demonstrations in the suburb of Paris. We need psychologists to tell us how to pacify the crowd, we need sociologists and urbanists to tell us how to build roads so that demonstrations can be more easily controlled and so on, and so on. What’s the problem with this? This is the job of experts. Experts are people who are solving problems defined by others. But I think this is not true intellectual work. True intellectual work begins not when you solve problems formulated by others, but when you question the problems themselves like: why this problem? Is this the right way to approach the problem? and so on, and so on. It’s something much more radical. And this is disappearing. What I claim is that this is the big struggle of digital media today. Will Internet be the space of public reason or will it became the space where collectivized monads will play their private games? You know the danger of Internet is that it’s falsely transparent. The more we think we control it, the more the clouds where all the informations are gathered control us. So two dangers I see here. The first danger is how Internet relates to state secrets. If there is something to be learned from Snowden’s discoveries is that we don’t simply have a secret, but as a rule more and more what is a secret is a secret in itself. So that you it’s not only that there are prohibitions, but you don’t even know what really is prohibited and what not because this in itself is prohibited. This happened already years ago in People’s Republic on China, I remember. It was reported in the media that somebody was accused of doing something, deploying some circulating some information, and the when he asked: okay, but what exactly am I guilty of? He was told: we cannot tell you this because this is a state secret and so on. Like, you know, what is secret is in itself a secret. And again, I don’t blame China here, of course I do, but what I’m saying is there it just we saw it in open what is more and more getting universal. The second thing is people usually say isn’t it horrible that those in power through digital control and so on learn everything about us? No. I think the danger is somewhere else. You know the point is not that they know too much, but that by knowing too much they know nothing. Machines are stupid. The more they know, the more they, state agencies and so on, don’t know what to do with what they know. And this makes it more dangerous for us because you don’t know how they will interpret all the data collected on us. You may find yourself on a terrorist list without even doing anything and so on. Anecdote about from United States in 1930s when William Randolph Hearst, you know the model for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. He had editor-in-chief of one of his newspapers did such a good work that Hearst asked him: why don’t you take a vacation? And the editor answered him: well, I’m afraid to take a vacation. Why? He said first: I’m afraid that if I leave things would will fall apart, things will not function well. And Hearst answered him: listen, no problem, you organized things so well that if you go away everything will function smoothly as before. Then the editor said: that’s what I’m even more afraid of. You know that like nobody will even notice and you will discover that you don’t need me. And it’s something the same with informations, you know. It’s horrible to think that they know all about us, but if they cannot know all about us, it’s even more horrible because we can get caught into something that we don’t know about and so on. To really conclude now I want to say that whistleblowers play a crucial role in keeping what Kant called public reason alive. Why are they so important? Because usually whistleblowers were celebrated as people from corrupted private companies who inform the state and the public about criminal activities of that society. For example, you know in tobacco companies, whistleblowers made it public that tobacco companies are even adding addictives to cigarettes and so on, and so on. That’s easy. But now this new type of whistleblowers are not just denouncing private companies to public institutions, they are denouncing to broader public even public institutions themselves in the sense of state apparatuses and so on. Which is why I think that we should not use this Snowden scandal and Manning, Assange only for cheap anti-Americanism. I’m totally opposed to cheap anti-Americanism and so on. Problems are much more radical. That’s why I think people like Manning, Snowden and so on are important. And especially we shouldn’t limit this to 'oh now people are telling me but wait a minute, Snowden now sold to Putin, to the Russians'. Yes, because he didn’t have any other way to do it. Which is why my proposal was to build an international, my proposal was to construct an international network which would take care and it can be done of these people so that they whistleblowers will not be obliged just to play one state against the other. I’m not waiting for a big revolution. We can start with small things without any utopian hopes, but I mean something. So now really one minute to conclude: I will give you a funny idea which is totally small, ridiculous, but I liked it. Half a year ago I visited Sao Paulo, Brazil. They took me to a prostitution club. No, I didn’t, don’t be afraid, I didn’t use it. But it was worth visiting. Why? It’s an extremely interesting, it’s a bar, cafeteria which everyone knows it’s where you get prostitutes. Then the prostitutes, who usually there are because a university is close, educated young women, they choose you. They look at you and if some of the girls find you tolerably attractive, she comes to you and starts a conversation with you. And this conversation is usually pretty intellectual, they ask you one customer, he admitted to me met told me he was asked about Jacques Lacan even. And if they are satisfied with this, then they tell you: okay, that’s my price, if you want we go to my room. Okay, it’s ridiculous, insignificant. But my God, there is something I like in it. I am opposed to prostitution. But if we cannot get rid of it, isn’t it nice at least that the woman can make a choice, that the woman should appreciate you, not the other way around. So again, don’t usually people think that I wait for some big mystical violent revolution. No, small things can be done at all times and the point of social dynamics is precisely that you never know what small thing can trigger, you know it’s always this logic of avalanche. You do something small and you never know what will happen. We cannot plan these things. I am grateful for your patience that you suffered my neurotic ramblings. Thank you very much.
I'm very glad and proud to be here. Let me already begin with a serious topic: the suffering of the Korean people in the 20th century, which undoubtedly was immense. No wonder that, so I was told, the Koreans do everything to forget that time, especially, I mean, the time of Japanese occupation, and go on with their lives. And again, I was told that the attitude of Korean people involves a profoundly Nietzschean, referring to Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzschean inversion of the standard formula: I will forgive you, but I will never forget it. With regard to Japanese atrocities, I was told that you say: we will forget them, we try to forget them, but we will never forgive you. I think you are right. There is something deeply hypocritical in the formula forgive but not forget. It sounds noble, this formula, but it is deeply manipulative since, you know, the underlying logic is: I forgive you for what you did, but I will never forget it, that is to say all the time I will remind you how guilty you are. Fortunately, I was told that your society is more and more penetrated by this postmodern attitude of feeling wounded and trying to get better, healing the wound. This, I think, has nothing to do with this authentic suffering that you experienced. I really oppose this pseudo-psychoanalytic culture of everything that we experience is some kind of a wound, a trauma that we have to heal. I think that wounds are really liberating at the same time. If we are not... I mean, if there is a country which really try to protect their people from being wounded, it’s North Korea. Total isolation so that the external world will not wound them. I would like to begin with Franco Berardi’s his report on his journey to Seoul. A long quote now. By the end of the 20th century, after decades of war, humiliation, starvation and horrific bombings, both the physical and the anthropological landscape of this country, Korea, had been reduced to a sort of devastated abstraction. At that point, human life and the city gave themselves with docility to the transforming hand of the highest form of contemporary nihilism. Korea is the ground zero of the world, a blueprint for the future of the planet. After colonization and wars, after dictatorship and starvation, the South Korean mind, liberated by the burden of the natural body, smoothly entered the digital sphere with a lower degree of cultural resistance than virtually any other population in the world. This, in my opinion, is the main source of the incredible economic performance that this country has staged in the years of the electronic revolution. In the emptied cultural space, the Korean experience is marked by an extreme degree of individualization and simultaneously it is headed towards the ultimate cabling of the collective mind. These lonely monads walk in the urban space in tender continuous interaction with the pictures, tweets, games coming out of their small screens, perfectly insulated and perfectly wired into the smooth interface of the flow. Here probably lies the explanation of the extraordinary propensity of Koreans, both young and middle-aged, to commit suicide. In the space of two generations, their condition has certainly improved by the point of view of revenue, nutrition, freedom and possibility of traveling abroad. But the price of this improvement has been the desertification of daily life, the hyper-acceleration of rhythms, the extreme individualization of biographies, and work precariousness which also means unbridled competition. Koreans look back to the condition of their grandparents and they cannot question the present alienation. But the present alienation is a different sort of hell. The intensification of the rhythm of work, the desertification of the landscape, and the virtualization of the emotional life are converging to create a level of loneliness and despair that is difficult to consciously refuse and oppose. End of quote. Berardi’s portrait of South Korea... what they provide is the image of a place deprived of its history, a worldless place. Alain Badiou has reflected that we live in a social space which is progressively experienced as worldless. Even the fascist anti-Semitism opened up a world: it described its critical situation by positing an enemy, Jewish conspiracy, it named a goal and the means of achieving this goal. Fascism disclosed reality in a way which allowed its subjects to acquire some kind of global cognitive mapping. Dangers of capitalism, the entire world, it sustains a worldless ideological constellation. It deprives the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. Capitalism is the first social and economic order which detotalizes meaning. It is not global at the level of meaning. There is no global capitalist worldview. The fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Since in Europe modernization was spread over centuries, we in Europe had the time to accommodate ourselves to it, to soften the shattering impact of modernization, to soften it through the formation of new social narratives and myths. While some other societies, exemplarily the Muslim societies, were exposed to this impact directly without a protective screen or a temporal delay. So that their symbolic universe was perturbed much more brutally. These countries lost their symbolic ground with no time left to establish a new symbolic balance. No wonder then that the only way for some of these societies to avoid total breakdown was to erect in panic the shield of fundamentalism. This psychotic, delirious, incestuous reassertion of religion as a direct insight into the divine real, with all the terrifying consequences that such an assertion entails, up to the return with a vengeance of the obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices. And I think that this rise of superego is another feature that postmodern liberal permissiveness shares with new religious fundamentalisms. Either sacrifice in permissiveness or sacrifice on account of the divine fundamentalism. If there is no God, then everything is permitted. Jacques Lacan, as probably many of you know, turned this wisdom around. For him, it is exactly the opposite: if there is no God, then everything is prohibited. Or if there is God, then everything is permitted. And I think it’s clear what Lacan meant. On the one hand, imagine a religious fundamentalist. Isn’t it that for him, precisely because he perceives himself as a direct instrument of divine will, he stands above normal moral concerns? I can do whatever I want because God is acting through me, so I don’t have to... I can explode bombs, kill people and so on, I am not constrained by any ordinary moral considerations. A wonderful passage from Talmud, you know. Two rabbis, rabbis, Jewish priests, debate a theological point. And the one who is losing the argumentation calls God. He says: listen, let’s call Jehovah, God, so that he will come and decide. But before he even starts to talk, the other rabbi, the one who was winning the argumentation, starts to shout at God: listen, you old idiot, you did your job, you created the world, you did it pretty badly, so now you did your job, run away, go away and leave us intelligent theologians to debate things seriously. And you know what’s the beauty? You know what Jehovah answers? Oh my God, you are right! And he runs away. That’s how we should relate to God if you ask me. Where do we so again, I think that this explosions of collective enjoyment like in rock, emphatic rock concerts and so on, pop music, this is quite seriously for me the return of the sacred. And I don’t buy the naive answer: no, no, this is not authentic. I don’t think there is a fundamental difference here. When you have this collective enthusiastic trance, it is the sacred which is here. And so my conclusion is that the sacred is not only a noble, nice thing. The sacred can also be a very terrifying thing. And you should know it, because you probably already guessed why I am saying this. It’s that in the summer of the sacred did come also to your country in the form of Gangnam Style. As a curiosity, it is worth noting that the Gangnam Style video clip, did you know this, surpassed Justin Bieber’s clip on YouTube, thus becoming the most watched YouTube clip of all times. It went over one billion. The song is again I claim not only wildly popular. It also mobilizes people into a collective trance with tens of thousands shouting and performing a dance that imitates horse riding, all in the same rhythm with an intensity unseen from the times of early Beatles. What makes it interesting is the way it combines collective trance with self-irony. Words of the song and the staging of the video clip obviously make fun at the meaninglessness and vacuity of Gangnam style, this time not the song’s but literally the Gangnam life, and I know what it is, I’m staying there now. Some claim that they do this even in a subtly subversive way. But we are nonetheless entranced, caught in the stupid marching rhythm, participating in this pure mimesis, imitating it. Gangnam Style I claim is ideology not in spite of the ironic distance towards what it is doing, but it’s ideology because of this. Disgustingly attractive. They love to hate it. You know, it’s like you hear a certain melody and you are shocked how vulgar it is. But then you end up repeating it, it plays in your mind all the time, so the more you hate it, the more you finish up repeating it all the time. So now I will say something really evil, but I take it very seriously. You know, it’s easy to laugh at North Koreans for their mass staged rallies up there where they applaud the leader, cry and so on. Where well, they have their sacred rituals, you have yours. These are for me two sides of the same coin: Gangnam Style on a stadium spectacle and and Kim Jong-il spectacle or whatever. It may... this brings me to my central point. It may seem that in Korea, as well as elsewhere, numerous forms of traditional wisdom survive to serve as a protective cushion against the shock of modernization. However, I claim it is easy to see how these remainders of old ideology are already transformed into ideological tools destined to facilitate rapid modernization, like the so-called oriental spirituality with its more gentle, balanced, holistic, ecological approach. It is not only that what I ironically call Western Buddhism, this pop cultural phenomenon preaching inner distance and indifference towards the frantic pace of market competition, is the most efficient way I think to fully participate in the capitalist dynamics. I think that one even cannot really say that this is just a Western vulgar falsification. I learned that you know, the first course for business course the first courses, educational courses, for businessmen in Zen Buddhism were organized, I read in a biography of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, immediately after World War II in Tokyo, where his idea was again: to succeed in business competition with the crazy rhythm and so on, you should not take things too seriously, you should do it with an inner distance, you should be aware that this is only game of appearances and so on, and so on. Now I come to my next shocking point. Such an analysis of our Western crazy frantic rhythm of consumerism and so on, the resistance of a world threatened by rapid modernization. World stands here for a specific horizon of meaning, for an entire civilization, or rather culture, with its daily rituals and manners which are threatened by the post-historical commodification. Is this resistance conservative? Many modern capitalists are saying oh workers' resistance is just an example of old 19th-century attitudes persisting. Maybe. Why not? But I claim that it is today’s mainstream self-declared political and cultural conservatives who are not really conservative. Fully endorsing capitalist continuous self-revolutionizing, today’s conservatives just want to make it more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions, you know, like those teachers of oriental spirituality who claim go through a Buddhism course and you will be even more efficient on the market. A true conservative today is the one who fully admits the antagonisms of global capitalism, the one who rejects simple progressivism, the one who is attentive to the dark obverse of progress. In this sense, if by conservative we mean the one who is not just celebrating rapid development but who is also fully aware of what dimension of the past, which is a precious one, we are losing with progress, then my paradoxical conclusion is that today only a radical leftist can be a true conservative. So what should today’s leftist conservative fight for? Let me conclude with two brutal examples. First, one of the most depressive documentary films that I’ve ever seen: a Dutch documentary, 'Act of Killing', made by Joshua Oppenheimer in This film, shot in Medan, Indonesia, reports on a case of obscenity which reaches the extreme. It tells the story of a group of old anti-communist soldiers, led by Anwar Congo, who are these ex-soldiers now respected politicians, but you remember in the communist attempt to take over and then Suharto strike back and their armed gang did a massive killing of almost two million and a half, mostly Chinese communist sympathizers. This guy led one of the gang. 'Act of Killing', this documentary, is about killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built. After they won, the communist rebellion was crushed, the terrible acts of these murderers were not relegated to the status of dirty secrets. On the contrary, they boast openly about the details of their massacre. I mean, if you watch the film I warn you, it’s extremely offensive because it’s simply breathtaking. You have these people, now elder respected people, who simply openly talk about how it took us some time to discover what is the most practical way to rape a woman, then we discovered that if you put her on a low table and somebody is holding her by her throat on the other side is the most practical way to penetrate her, or what is the most efficient way to torture men, how you should squeeze their testicles and so on, and so on. And what makes the film so depressive is that again, this is openly, publicly admitted. They talk about it. For me the most obscene moment, you couldn’t believe it, it’s almost from some kind of science fiction dystopia, is when the film shows a real TV show on Indonesian state TV where Anwar Congo is asked about some technique of torture. And he explains how he invented a more practical, efficient way of torture, and then a nice young woman who is the moderator says something like: what an inventiveness you showed, a big round of applause for Mr. Anwar Congo, you know like it’s an amusement show and so on, and so on. I mean, then there is another very important point to this documentary. You know, it’s difficult for people to be really evil. To be evil you need some imaginary scenario, you have to provide a fictional identification for you. In this case, this identification is provided by American films, and I don’t blame American films for this. Anwar and his friends said that when they were doing these horrible things, beating people, raping women, torturing suspected communists, that they identified with American film noir heroes like Humphrey Bogart and so on, they imagined themselves as heroes of noir. I find this very interesting how you always need this kind of imaginary identification. It’s very difficult to be directly evil. What I find so terrifying in this film is that it provides maybe the most horrible, at least for my taste, portrait of our moral vacuum. You know, even the Nazis, when they did the Holocaust, they kept it secret, you know, like we will not boast about it in the public. Here you go to a TV show and you openly present how you tortured and so on, and so on, and no one seems to care. Now how can this happen? Let me make it clear here. I’m not blaming Hollywood like 'oh it’s the influence of Hollywood'. I’m not also not blaming Indonesian backwardness and so on, and so on. I think it’s simply the ethical impact of global capitalism. We should follow here the insight of Walter Benjamin about capitalism as a form of religion. Listen, if you ever met and I did, a true capitalist who can be as a businessman extremely ruthless, brutal, you will immediately see that he is not a hedonist. You know, a true capitalist works day and night to multiply his fortune and so on, and so on, he is usually ruined, gets a heart attack, whatever. And this is I think what Walter Benjamin meant. A capitalist sacrifices his pleasures even more than we who work for him. This is why I also disagree with those who fight for ecology claim we should learn to abandon to get over our egotism and develop a feeling of solidarity for higher values, self-sacrifice. No, I think that imagine a capitalist who is destroying environment. I mean, in the long term it will even hurt him. My reproach to him is that he is not enough of a rational egotist. He is so dedicated to his goal, which is the multiplication circulation of capital, that he is ready to ruin the entire world just that the capital circulates, just that it goes on. So again, we should attack capitalism not as brutal hedonism, but as the wrong kind of perverse fanatical dedication. If anything we need today more of simple egotist utilitarian concerns. Self-interested egotism is not the brutal fact of our society, but its ideology. The ideology which was already described by Hegel in his phenomenology of spirit where he uses a wonderful expression: *das geistige Tierreich*, the spiritual kingdom of animals. You know what’s so-called cunning of reason or the hidden invisible hand of the market. The idea is that the more we are, that’s capitalist ideology, the more you are egotist on the market, the more society profits. It’s this cynical view that the greatest catastrophes always happen when you try to do something good, then the result is catastrophe. But in capitalism the more you care only for yourself, the more you work for the common good. To oppose capitalist egotism to some kind of global sense of community and so on, and so on, no. The problem is not that people are egotists. The problem is the spiritual totality which makes them egotists. I was told by a friend from China, Michael Yuen, crazy thing that happened half a decade ago in Nanjing. An elderly woman fell from the bus when the bus stops, and a kind young guy stepped out when he saw that she fell down, she was old, he stepped out and helped her to get up, and then when he saw that she is hurt, he gave her some money to take taxi to the hospital and so on. Two weeks later, because they probably exchanged addresses whatever, this guy got a call from the court. The woman prosecuted him for pushing her down. And her reasoning was this one: why would an ordinary guy help me as much as this guy did? No normal person would help an older woman who falls down. It must have been the only rational explanation is that he felt guilty because he pushed me down. And the shock is that the court gave her right. The man had to pay a quite a lot of amount of money because the court says that, I quote: 'According to common sense, Peng Yu', this was the guy's name, 'helped the lady because he has previously knocked her over. A normal person would not be as kind as Peng Yu claimed he was.' Now I find this extraordinary how you are good but it’s considered not normal, surprising. What is going on here? Again I claim the this situation is much more complex than it appears. It’s not simply people are egotist, it’s even when you are good the social standards are already egotist. And my friend Michael Yuen wrote to me that we should read such incidents against the background of a general opinion poll that they made in China recently where people were asked: you walk along the street and young people between and were asked, and you see an old person there wounded, dying, would you stop or not? percent of young people said no, we would pass by. And to avoid a misunderstanding it was specified that that person is dying alone there. So it’s not that there is a criminal beating someone and you risk your life helping the wounded. No, it would be perfectly safe. But then interestingly when they specified the question: under what conditions you would help the wounded person? They said: I would first look around if there is a CCTV, whatever, camera, I would help it. I claim what happens here is this is a little bit more complex philosophical idea, a redefinition of public space. What is disappearing today is not privacy I think, but public space. We are more and more getting in a state where even what once we considered public spaces... what do I mean by this? Let me give you another example which may sound weird from hardcore pornography. A friend told me that recently there is in Europe, I don’t know what happens here, a new tendency which is so-called public sex in hardcore pornography. And it’s pretty depressing. A friend showed me some clips. This is strangely enough especially popular in Hungary and Poland. For example I saw one clip where a couple, man and woman, enters they enter a streetcar, public transport. The car is half empty and they sit down at a free chair and simply undress and start to have sex. It’s obviously a non-staged situation, they really did it. And what shocked me is how people how did ordinary people around react to it? Okay a little bit they look strangely and then after a couple of seconds they simply went on reading newspapers or whatever. You know what I mean? Even if they were out in the open they still considered it part of the private space. Which is why, I have to cut it short here, which is why again I don’t think that the threat today is the disappearance of privacy. You know in the sense of I don’t know with digital media and so on those in power can control us. No, what is even more threatening I think is the disappearance of public space proper, a common space of all of us where we communicate. You know where you can feel this difference? It may appear again a dirty one. I claim that there is a great difference, although it may appear similar, between the good old exhibitionist, you know that who does you know that legendary gesture of you open your coat and you show your organ to someone who is passing by, and to posting your naked photos on on the web. When you do it what the traditional exhibitionist does it, it’s still public space. You expose yourself to some public. But even if you are wired connected to millions, when you post your naked photos on the net, it somehow remains private and solipsistic even if millions watch you. It’s not public space proper. And allow me to conclude briefly: this is why I claim, now my last political point, whistleblowers like Edward Snowden should be today unconditionally defended. They don’t defend our privacy, as people claim often, they defend the public space. The first thing to say about Snowden, Assange, Manning and so on is that we should celebrate them not simply because their acts annoy and embarrass United States Secret Service and so on, but for a much more fundamental reason. What Snowden disclosed is something that not only United States but probably all other great and not so great powers from China to Russia, from Germany to Israel are doing. We we didn’t learn really anything new from Manning or Snowden. But they compelled us, they pushed us into a situation where we cannot ignore it. But you know what happens when you somebody gives you some shots, photos and you see really how it goes on, this changes everything. So again, the lesson of Snowden’s revelations I think is global. The lesson is how with the digitalization of our lives, how the public sphere gets privatized. Privatized in the in what sense? Not only in the sense of private companies control it, but my reference is here Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, who in his famous text 'What is Enlightenment?' opposed public and private use of reason. But in a very paradoxical way. For Kant, state reasoning, state machinery, state bureaucracy is not public but private because they stand for particular interests. Only pure thinking, philosophy, sciences, are public. Public means we engage in a debate which is not limited by any collective, even if collective, especially if collective private concerns. So again for Kant the example of private use of reason is precisely state administration and its reasoning. Now in Europe, where they are imposing a reform of higher education, as they are saying, we don’t need philosophers who are doing their useless job, we need sciences to deliver useful knowledge. And in a debate in France my opponent explained this to me. Like he said let’s say there are demonstrations in the suburb of Paris. We need psychologists to tell us how to pacify the crowd, we need sociologists and urbanists to tell us how to build roads so that demonstrations can be more easily controlled and so on, and so on. What’s the problem with this? This is the job of experts. Experts are people who are solving problems defined by others. But I think this is not true intellectual work. True intellectual work begins not when you solve problems formulated by others, but when you question the problems themselves like: why this problem? Is this the right way to approach the problem? and so on, and so on. It’s something much more radical. And this is disappearing. What I claim is that this is the big struggle of digital media today. Will Internet be the space of public reason or will it became the space where collectivized monads will play their private games? You know the danger of Internet is that it’s falsely transparent. The more we think we control it, the more the clouds where all the informations are gathered control us. So two dangers I see here. The first danger is how Internet relates to state secrets. If there is something to be learned from Snowden’s discoveries is that we don’t simply have a secret, but as a rule more and more what is a secret is a secret in itself. So that you it’s not only that there are prohibitions, but you don’t even know what really is prohibited and what not because this in itself is prohibited. This happened already years ago in People’s Republic on China, I remember. It was reported in the media that somebody was accused of doing something, deploying some circulating some information, and the when he asked: okay, but what exactly am I guilty of? He was told: we cannot tell you this because this is a state secret and so on. Like, you know, what is secret is in itself a secret. And again, I don’t blame China here, of course I do, but what I’m saying is there it just we saw it in open what is more and more getting universal. The second thing is people usually say isn’t it horrible that those in power through digital control and so on learn everything about us? No. I think the danger is somewhere else. You know the point is not that they know too much, but that by knowing too much they know nothing. Machines are stupid. The more they know, the more they, state agencies and so on, don’t know what to do with what they know. And this makes it more dangerous for us because you don’t know how they will interpret all the data collected on us. You may find yourself on a terrorist list without even doing anything and so on. Anecdote about from United States in 1930s when William Randolph Hearst, you know the model for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. He had editor-in-chief of one of his newspapers did such a good work that Hearst asked him: why don’t you take a vacation? And the editor answered him: well, I’m afraid to take a vacation. Why? He said first: I’m afraid that if I leave things would will fall apart, things will not function well. And Hearst answered him: listen, no problem, you organized things so well that if you go away everything will function smoothly as before. Then the editor said: that’s what I’m even more afraid of. You know that like nobody will even notice and you will discover that you don’t need me. And it’s something the same with informations, you know. It’s horrible to think that they know all about us, but if they cannot know all about us, it’s even more horrible because we can get caught into something that we don’t know about and so on. To really conclude now I want to say that whistleblowers play a crucial role in keeping what Kant called public reason alive. Why are they so important? Because usually whistleblowers were celebrated as people from corrupted private companies who inform the state and the public about criminal activities of that society. For example, you know in tobacco companies, whistleblowers made it public that tobacco companies are even adding addictives to cigarettes and so on, and so on. That’s easy. But now this new type of whistleblowers are not just denouncing private companies to public institutions, they are denouncing to broader public even public institutions themselves in the sense of state apparatuses and so on. Which is why I think that we should not use this Snowden scandal and Manning, Assange only for cheap anti-Americanism. I’m totally opposed to cheap anti-Americanism and so on. Problems are much more radical. That’s why I think people like Manning, Snowden and so on are important. And especially we shouldn’t limit this to 'oh now people are telling me but wait a minute, Snowden now sold to Putin, to the Russians'. Yes, because he didn’t have any other way to do it. Which is why my proposal was to build an international, my proposal was to construct an international network which would take care and it can be done of these people so that they whistleblowers will not be obliged just to play one state against the other. I’m not waiting for a big revolution. We can start with small things without any utopian hopes, but I mean something. So now really one minute to conclude: I will give you a funny idea which is totally small, ridiculous, but I liked it. Half a year ago I visited Sao Paulo, Brazil. They took me to a prostitution club. No, I didn’t, don’t be afraid, I didn’t use it. But it was worth visiting. Why? It’s an extremely interesting, it’s a bar, cafeteria which everyone knows it’s where you get prostitutes. Then the prostitutes, who usually there are because a university is close, educated young women, they choose you. They look at you and if some of the girls find you tolerably attractive, she comes to you and starts a conversation with you. And this conversation is usually pretty intellectual, they ask you one customer, he admitted to me met told me he was asked about Jacques Lacan even. And if they are satisfied with this, then they tell you: okay, that’s my price, if you want we go to my room. Okay, it’s ridiculous, insignificant. But my God, there is something I like in it. I am opposed to prostitution. But if we cannot get rid of it, isn’t it nice at least that the woman can make a choice, that the woman should appreciate you, not the other way around. So again, don’t usually people think that I wait for some big mystical violent revolution. No, small things can be done at all times and the point of social dynamics is precisely that you never know what small thing can trigger, you know it’s always this logic of avalanche. You do something small and you never know what will happen. We cannot plan these things. I am grateful for your patience that you suffered my neurotic ramblings. Thank you very much.