Reality as Constricted Ideology
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-05-17 · 1:49:55 · 14,688 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticstechnology-ai-cyberspacecinema-art-culturecapitalismsubjectivitycommunism-socialismhistoryethicsdemocracyphilosophy-general
Delivered at a Critical Theory Summer School, this talk ranges across post-apocalyptic video games and films as disguised capitalist utopias, the Lacanian distinction between alienation and separation (the 'no Big Other'), digitalization as a threat not to free subjectivity but to the decentered Freudian subject, and a detailed reading of Denis Villeneuve's film 'Arrival' as an illustration of circular temporality, predestination, and the radical historical act of 'changing the past.' Žižek also addresses Corbyn and Varoufakis, defends Assange, critiques Orwell's dystopia as anachronistic, and engages questions on werewolves/monsters, Moonlight at the Oscars, embodied cognition, Paul Mason's post-capitalism, and his forthcoming ontology in 'Incontinence of the Void.'
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The mode of experience (illustrated by the aliens in Arrival) where past, present, and future form a simultaneous whole rather than a linear sequence, used to probe questions of freedom, determinism, and radical historical action.
Žižek's reading (drawing on Alfred Bown) that dystopian disaster narratives are really fantasies of restarting capitalist modernity in a purified form, not genuine alternatives to it.
The socially effective fiction by which formal symbolic structures (money, law, state) function as real even when everyone knows they are constructions.
as “alienation vs. separation”
Alienation is the position where my truth lies outside myself in the Big Other ('I am spoken, not speaking'); separation is the move beyond, where the subject grasps the lack/inconsistency in the Other itself and thereby achieves ethical responsibility and freedom.
Referenced implicitly through the analysis of Coke variants and desire-construction: what we enjoy exceeds the object itself and is shaped by the symbolic packaging of desire.
as “Big Other”
The symbolic order as an agency that structures desire and social reality, which for Lacan is never fully coherent, 'there is no Big Other', and whose inconsistency is precisely what opens a space for subjectivity and freedom.
Lacan's formula that desire is never immediate or self-generated but always mediated and constructed through the symbolic order and social mechanisms.
as “digital Big Other”
The new threat of digitalization: not that we are more determined from outside, but that the Big Other now appears to fully exist as a consistent external system (algorithms, programs), eliminating the constitutive inconsistency that opens space for subjectivity.
Lacan's wordplay where the abbreviation ICS reads simultaneously as 'unconscious' and 'inconsistency,' capturing that the unconscious is not a deep truth but the instability of the symbolic order itself.
Lacan's axiom 'there is no Big Other,' taken in its strongest sense: the symbolic order is constitutively inconsistent, not merely non-existent as object, and this inconsistency is the condition of freedom.
The medieval Jewish prayer annulling vows, read by Žižek as a deep insight that one is never totally bound by symbolic commitment, the Big Other does not constitute the last horizon of obligation.
as “castration (symbolic)”
For Lacan, castration primarily means the Big Other itself is castrated, there is no substantial symbolic order on which we can ultimately rely, rather than merely the subject being separated from full enjoyment.
The pre-oedipal, pre-castrated mode of subjectivity enacted in video games, cartoons, and Sadean fiction, where death is never final and one can always restart, a denial of the constitutive gap of subjectivity.
The object-cause of desire, invoked in connection with Hollywood disaster films where an apparently marginal love story is actually the libidinal core of the narrative.
A figure whose function is to enable a transition and who then disappears once that function is complete; used here of DiCaprio's character in Titanic, who restores the heroine's bourgeois vitality and then freezes.
as “fake Hollywood Marxism”
Films like Titanic that present a superficially progressive class critique while actually encoding conservative bourgeois myths beneath the surface.
as “power of abstraction / power of negativity”
Žižek's Hegelian counter to holism: genuine progress requires not seeing the whole but abstracting, cutting, and identifying the principal contradiction, one-sidedness as the condition of universality.
as “lack in the Other”
The constitutive inconsistency and incompleteness within the symbolic order itself, which is the very condition of possibility for the subject's emergence and freedom.
as “optimism in pessimism itself”
The formula that catastrophe and social chaos are also chances; genuine hope is found not by denying crisis but by discerning within it a window for structural change.
Not literally altering historical facts but retroactively transforming the symbolic constellation that constructs 'the past as we have inherited it,' as in T.S. Eliot's claim that great new art rewrites the entire tradition, the basis for a radical political act.
Stories he reaches for 10
Anne Applebaum's Gulag records that on Stalin's birthday, camp inmates were assembled and compelled to vote by acclamation to endorse a long congratulatory telegram. This compulsory performance of loyalty was utterly alien to Nazi practice.
“Can you imagine all the inmates of Auschwitz collected for Hitler's birthday and sending him best wishes?”
Chinese authorities passed a law prohibiting time travel and alternate reality narratives in public art, ostensibly to protect cultural traditions; Žižek reads this as political fear that someone might imagine 'what if China were not communist' or 'what if we could undo Mao.'
“They are afraid that somebody would say 'Well, what if China would not be communist, or what if we can return and get rid of Mao.'”
Classic cartoons like Tom and Jerry enact obscene immortality: the cat is run over, cut to pieces, but immediately reconstitutes and begins again, an undead circular universe predating video games, analogous to the Sadean victim in de Sade's Juliette.
“Tom is run over by a car, cut into pieces and so on, but in undeadness you begin again and again and again.”
At the fall of East Germany, Stasi chief Erich Mielke addressed a hostile parliament with 'But I love you all' (Aber ich liebe euch alle), used by Žižek to illustrate that love is not holistic ('I love you all') but partial and one-sided.
“Aber ich liebe euch alle. The greatness of love is precisely... 'I love you' and ultimately... no, this is God.”
In Terry Gilliam's Brazil, restaurant diners receive a grey indistinct lump on their plate but a dazzling color photo of the dish mounted above it; the waiter insists the hero make a free choice among identical lumps to sustain the appearance that the symbolic image matters.
“A free choice is needed to sustain the appearance that precisely appearance, what we see on the photo matters.”
In Deep Impact, the global catastrophe threat materializes the heroine's fury at her father; at the climax she reconciles with him and they are subsumed together in the tidal wave, the real libidinal content of the disaster film is the Oedipal father-daughter relation.
“She goes to her father, they embrace, she says 'Daddy,' and they disappear in a big wave.”
In Armageddon, the world-threatening comet materializes the fury of Bruce Willis's father-character toward Ben Affleck screwing his daughter; the film ends with the father's self-sacrifice and blessing of the couple, resolving the Oedipal conflict.
“The comet threatening to destroy Earth is basically the materialization of the father's fury.”
Two rabbis debate a Talmudic point; the losing one calls on God to adjudicate; God appears and tries to mediate; the winning rabbi shouts at God that he already did his job (creating the world, though poorly), should leave, and it is now for wise men to decide. God replies 'He is right' and departs.
“Listen, you old guy, you did your job, you created the world but you screwed it up pretty much so fuck off, now it's for us wise men to decide.”
Žižek argues the real evil figure in Hamlet is not Claudius but Hamlet's father, who died 'in the flower of his sins'; Updike's Gertrude and Claudius retells the story from Gertrude and Claudius's perspective showing they were sincere lovers defending themselves from a brutal king.
“It's absolutely clear that the true evil guy in the play is Hamlet's father. It's not Claudius.”
In the 1932 film White Zombie, Bela Lugosi plays a plantation owner whose factory workers are all zombies, living dead who work without trade union rights, illustrating the class dimension of horror monsters.
“It's wonderful, they just work, they have no trade union rights and so on.”
Works invoked 24
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book cited for its engagement with Francisco Varela's embodied cognition theory in its middle chapters.
Brazil film
Described as possibly the greatest British film of all time; the restaurant scene is used as a canonical illustration of Lacanian separation, the ideology of free choice, and the gap between the real and symbolic.
Žižek's forthcoming book, described as addressing the big ontological question of what Lacanian-Hegelian analysis means for objective reality: ontological openness, the objectivity of antagonism, and a realist position that locates the real in how we are inscribed into reality.
Titanic film
Read as exemplary 'fake Hollywood Marxism': apparently progressive class framing conceals a conservative bourgeois myth of a rich woman restoring vitality by exploiting and discarding a working-class man.
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek's own book, referenced when an audience member asks about the three principal antagonisms formulated at its end and whether retroactivity misleads into thinking in terms of substantial entities.
T.S. Eliot's essay claiming that every great new work of art changes the entire past; used as the model for Žižek's concept of radical historical action as 'changing the past.'
Hamlet play
Used for the undead/immortality theme (the Ghost appears because the father died 'in the flower of his sins') and to argue the true evil is Hamlet's father, not Claudius.
Žižek's book-in-progress at the time; mentioned as containing his discussion of Paul Mason and Jeremy Rifkin on post-capitalism.
Arrival film
Central case study; Žižek gives a sustained reading against its apparent New Age holism, arguing its true lesson is the Hegelian power of abstraction/negativity and the concept of radical historical action via 'changing the past.'
Armageddon film
Used to illustrate how Hollywood disaster films are really Oedipal narratives; the comet materializes the father's fury about the daughter's lover.
Deep Impact film
Another Hollywood disaster film read as Oedipal narrative; the tidal wave materializes the heroine's fury at her father, resolved when they embrace and are consumed together.
Liu Cixin's trilogy mentioned as the biggest hit of Chinese science fiction, cited in the context of China's emerging SF literature.
Kant avec Sade essay
Lacan's essay noted for observing that the Sadean victim (in Juliette) is like a cartoon character, indestructibly reconstituting through all abuse, illustrating obscene immortality.
Gulag book
Anne Applebaum's book cited for the detail about Gulag inmates being assembled to sign Stalin birthday telegrams, used to illustrate the unique role of symbolic appearances in Stalinist ideology.
Juliette book
De Sade's novel described as 'rather boring'; intellectually deployed to illustrate the pre-oedipal circular immortality of the Sadean victim, analogous to Tom and Jerry.
White Zombie film
The 1932 film featuring Bela Lugosi as a plantation owner with zombie workers; used as the key text demonstrating the class dimension of horror monsters.
Lincoln (Spielberg) film
Spielberg's official prestige film; Žižek prefers Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter as the 'left's answer' to it.
The Postman film
Described as a reactionary utopia and 'incredible' mega-flop; used as the prime example of post-apocalyptic narratives that reproduce rather than transcend capitalism.
Preferred over Spielberg's Lincoln as 'the left's answer', presumably because it stages the class/undead dimension of American history more honestly.
Moonlight film
Žižek has ideological sympathy but considers it cinematically unremarkable; argues it follows all standard Hollywood narrative formulas despite its subject matter.
Paul Mason's book; Žižek respects it but criticizes its optimism about the spontaneous emancipatory potential of digital commons.
Copenhagen play
Michael Frayn's play about Heisenberg and Bohr; Žižek says it is 'too soft' on Heisenberg and fails to reckon with the evidence that he genuinely tried to build the Nazi bomb.
John Updike's novel retelling Hamlet from Gertrude and Claudius's perspective; Žižek calls it his favorite re-reading of Hamlet and is 'convinced by it', it supports his reading of Hamlet's father as the true villain.
Groundhog Day film
Makes 'the right lesson': the hero's escape from immortal repetition into linear time is presented as theological progress, temporality is higher than immortality.
People invoked 38
Alfred Bown positive
Author of a forthcoming Polity Press book on video game ideology; Žižek endorses Bown's thesis about post-apocalyptic games as disguised utopias and his Lacanian reversal of Freud, but criticizes his 'blind spot', endorsing radical alienation of desire without pushing to separation.
Star of The Postman, the film used as the prime example of post-apocalyptic reactionary utopia.
Liu Cixin positive
Mentioned as the author of The Three-Body Problem trilogy, cited as evidence of China's emerging science fiction literature.
Paul Mason negative
Žižek respects Mason but criticizes his optimism about digital commons spontaneously generating post-capitalism, arguing Mason underestimates the need for political agency and the danger of new master figures.
John Updike positive
Žižek says he doesn't like Updike much overall, but praises his novel Gertrude and Claudius as his favorite re-reading of Hamlet.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as 'my friend' and a 'good futurologist'; cited for the insight that abolishing commodity alienation under early communism brought back direct personal domination with a vengeance.
Denis Villeneuve positive
Director of Arrival; Žižek notes he was 'aware but not quite clearly what he was doing' in the film's deeper philosophical implications.
Mentioned in the context of Assange's problematic claim that she lost due to male chauvinism, a claim Žižek finds 'a little bit too cynical.'
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited as the exemplar of 'optimism in pessimism': Lenin read World War One catastrophe as a unique revolutionary chance despite its brutality.
Wolfgang Schäuble negative
Described as a 'hard-liner' who wanted Grexit and had a plan to engineer humanitarian catastrophe in Greece as a lesson to others.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical reference throughout; Žižek deploys Lacan's axioms on the Big Other, desire, alienation/separation, castration, and 'il n'y a pas de grand Autre' as the main conceptual scaffolding of the talk.
Steve Jobs negative
Grouped with Zuckerberg as a dangerous tech-capitalist master figure embodying the reprivatization of commons.
Žižek says he 'moderately' supported Trump's victory in the hope it would create useful chaos and opportunity for structural change, a position he now suspects was wrong.
Anne Applebaum positive
Her book Gulag is cited for the detail about Stalin birthday telegrams being signed by camp inmates, used to illustrate the unique function of symbolic appearances in Stalinism.
Jeremy Corbyn positive
Žižek says he would unambiguously vote Corbyn if British, while expressing structural doubts about whether global capitalism would allow a Corbyn government to succeed.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek references Badiou's fondness for Armageddon as a joke, then disagrees with his distinction between noble immortality (the event) and mortal human animals, arguing Badiou ignores the obscene immortality dimension.
George Orwell negative
Žižek respects Orwell's honesty and essayistic writing but finds his dystopian model (1984) anachronistic: it imagines naked direct domination with factual manipulation while today's control works invisibly through desire-construction.
Kathryn Bigelow negative
Described together with Cameron as 'two sides of the same Hollywood establishment, neither progressive'; anecdote quoted about Cameron's stated reason for marrying her.
Julian Assange positive
Žižek defends Assange as facing a state crime and justified in revealing US surveillance; has reservations about Assange's comment attributing Marine Le Pen's loss to male chauvinism, but attributes it to his desperate personal situation.
Mark Zuckerberg negative
Cited as an example of dangerous new master figures emerging from the privatization of digital commons, 'much more dangerous even than Trump.'
Samuel Beckett positive
His phrase 'Incontinence of the Void' is the title of Žižek's forthcoming book on Lacanian-Hegelian ontology.
Thomas Hobbes negative
His theory of the state of nature is rejected via Marx's critique: capitalism is not the regulation of natural violence but its very model.
T. S. Eliot positive
Cited repeatedly for the claim in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' that every great new work of art changes the entire past, used as the basis for Žižek's concept of 'changing the past' as radical historical act.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Žižek defends Varoufakis's strategy of staying within the Euro while introducing chaos; describes him as 'the only hope' in the Greek crisis and notes he personally spoke with him about secret mediation for Assange in Ecuador.
Werner Heisenberg negative
Žižek argues Heisenberg actively tried to build the Nazi atom bomb but made a scientific miscalculation; his postwar claim of deliberate sabotage was dishonest self-exculpation, an exemplar of bad-faith conformism.
James Cameron negative
Criticized as the exemplar of 'fake Hollywood Marxism': Titanic appears progressive (lower classes dancing, rich corrupted) but encodes a conservative bourgeois myth.
Ted Chiang positive
Chinese-American science fiction author whose story is the basis for Arrival; cited for his description of the alien Heptapod mode of simultaneous awareness vs. human sequential awareness.
Jeremy Rifkin negative
Grouped with Mason as too optimistic about the transformative potential of digital/cooperative commons.
The East German Stasi chief whose 'I love you all' speech to the collapsing parliament is used to illustrate why love must be partial and one-sided, not holistic.
Mao Zedong positive
His formula 'there is disorder under heaven so the situation is excellent' is quoted approvingly as the model for finding opportunity in catastrophe.
Francisco Varela positive
Described as 'almost my ideal'; Žižek engages with his embodied cognition work (discussed in The Parallax View) but disagrees: the unconscious for Freud is precisely an abstract symbolic machine that disembodies us, not our deepest bodily instincts.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited for the observation that the German word 'Geist' encompasses both noble spirituality and ghosts/evil spirits, reflecting the ambiguity of the undead dimension.
Quentin Meillassoux positive
Referenced for his critique of the philosophy of finitude, which Žižek aligns with in arguing that immortality, not finitude, is the fundamental horizon.
Georg Cantor positive
Praised for introducing multiple infinities as a materialist revolution wresting the concept of infinity from religion.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked for his critique of Hobbes: the state of nature is not pre-social wildness but capitalism at its zero level.
Sigmund Freud positive
Used for the paradox that psychoanalysis makes subjects responsible for what they don't know; also for the dialectical reversal of his thesis on dreams in the context of video game theory.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked for the power of abstraction/negativity, the concept of Aufhebung, the idea that Holy Ghost exists only through concrete human activity, and as the interpretive key for reading Arrival against New Age holism.
John Locke negative
His primary/secondary quality distinction is mentioned but rejected; Žižek argues the real is not an in-itself accessible by purifying perceptions but rather where we find ourselves inscribed into reality.
What it argues
post-apocalyptic fantasy as capitalist utopia in disguisedigitalization and the fate of the Big Otheralienation vs. separation in Lacan: the space of freedomcircular temporality, predestination, and radical historical actsobscene immortality vs. finite temporalitythe power of abstraction and negativity against holismCorbyn, Varoufakis, Assange, and the limits of left politics within global capitalism
Dialectical moves 10
“It's not that our complex dreams cover up primitive infantile desires; it's the reverse—the apparent infantile desire is the false mask covering what is really the dream of the Other.”
Bown's reversal of Freud: in digital games, the 'infantile' desire to restart and transgress is not pre-social nature but itself a historically specific product of the social/symbolic order.
“Digitalization threatens not our free subjectivity but the decentered Freudian subject itself.”
The standard worry is that tech threatens free autonomous selfhood; Žižek inverts this: what is actually threatened is the constitutively split, non-self-identical Lacanian subject that depends on an inconsistent Other.
“The Big Other is castrated—not I am castrated, but the Other lacks.”
Lacan's deepest insight is not that the subject is separated from full enjoyment, but that the symbolic order itself is constitutively incomplete; this is the ground of freedom.
“Far from immortality being a fantasy we project onto an implicit background of mortality, we cannot escape immortality—mortality is the exception, obscene undead persistence is the rule.”
Against the phenomenological/Heideggerian tradition, Žižek holds that our libidinal economy is structured around immortality (undead persistence), not finitude.
“The first act of changing the future is changing the past.”
Radical historical action does not choose among future options within a given framework but retroactively transforms the symbolic inheritance that constructs the present situation.
“Infinity is ontologically lower than temporality; falling into time is progress, not fall.”
The hero of Groundhog Day progresses by escaping the immortal loop and re-entering finite temporality, contrary to common wisdom, temporality is the higher category.
“What these Heptapod aliens lack is precisely our limitation—one-sidedness, abstraction, partiality.”
The apparently superior holistic awareness of the aliens in Arrival is actually inferior; the Hegelian power of abstraction and negativity, not holistic totality, is what enables change.
“The state of nature (Hobbes) is not pre-social wildness that capitalism must contain—the state of nature itself is already capitalism at its zero level.”
Marx's critique of Hobbes: capitalist social relations are not a correction of natural violence but the model of which the 'state of nature' is already an ideological image.
“You are determined by the unconscious, but nonetheless you are fully guilty and responsible.”
Psychoanalysis does not excuse subjects by pointing to unconscious overdetermination; the absence of a reliable Big Other means you cannot offload responsibility onto it.
“Appearances are not merely secondary; even the most brutal regimes depend on them—don't underestimate appearances.”
Stalinist sensitivity to ceremonial appearances (rain-free parades, gulag birthday telegrams) shows that ideology operates through the maintenance of symbolic surface, not just direct force.
Claims 19
asserts
Post-apocalyptic video games and films are not radical critiques of capitalism but thinly disguised utopias that dream of restarting the same capitalist order in purified form.post-apocalyptic popular culture
asserts
Digitalization threatens not free autonomous subjectivity but the decentered Freudian/Lacanian subject, by making the Big Other appear fully consistent and existent.digitalization and subjectivity
asserts
The space of human freedom depends on the Big Other's constitutive inconsistency ('there is no Big Other'); a fully consistent digital Big Other would abolish the very gap in which the subject exists.freedom, the Big Other, digitalization
asserts
Immersion in digital games enacts a pre-oedipal 'obscene immortality' that is a denial of castration, not a liberation.video game culture and psychoanalysis
rejects
Finitude/mortality is not the unsurpassable horizon of existence; one cannot escape immortality—the obscene undead dimension is constitutive of how we function.philosophy of finitude (Heidegger et al.)
asserts
The film Arrival's deeper message is not New Age holism but the Hegelian insight that the power of humanity lies in abstraction, negativity, and one-sided partiality—not in holistic totality.film Arrival / holism vs. negativity
asserts
A truly radical historical act does not choose within a given situation but undermines and 'changes the past'—the entire symbolic constellation that constitutes the present.radical political action and retroactivity
asserts
The Titanic narrative encodes not a progressive love story but a conservative bourgeois myth in which a rich woman exploits a working-class man's vitality and discards him once restored.film Titanic / bourgeois ideology
asserts
James Cameron's apparent Hollywood Marxism (class sympathy in Titanic) conceals a very conservative underlying myth.James Cameron / fake Hollywood Marxism
asserts
Under Stalinism, the regime was uniquely sensitive to appearances—forcing prisoners to endorse birthday telegrams, preventing rain at May Day parades—in a way fundamentally different from Nazism, which shows appearances are never merely secondary.Stalinism and the function of appearance
asserts
Psychoanalysis is more demanding than Catholic confession: you must take responsibility not only for what you know but for what you do not know about yourself.psychoanalytic ethics / responsibility
asserts
The lesson of psychoanalysis is that the Big Other doesn't exist, and precisely this lack opens the space of freedom and full ethical responsibility.Lacanian ethics and freedom
asserts
Global capitalism functions as a system that would rather engineer crisis in a country than allow a left government (like Corbyn's) to succeed.global capitalism and left politics
rejects
Orwell's image of totalitarian dystopia is anachronistic and too naive—today's domination is more radical precisely because subjects don't know they are controlled.Orwell's 1984 / modern surveillance and control
rejects
Paul Mason's optimism about digital commons leading spontaneously to post-capitalism underestimates the need for an external political agency and the danger of new master figures (Zuckerberg, Jobs) emerging from cooperative structures.Paul Mason's post-capitalism thesis
asserts
Vampires and zombies carry a class dimension: vampires are upper-class figures living among us, zombies are a pseudo-working-class outside horde.horror monsters and class ideology
asserts
Moonlight follows all standard Hollywood narrative formulas and is not a cinematically great film, despite its politically correct subject matter.film Moonlight / political correctness in cinema
asserts
Werner Heisenberg's postwar claim of secret resistance was dishonest self-exculpation; his failure to build the bomb was a scientific miscalculation, not deliberate sabotage.Werner Heisenberg / complicity and bad faith
asserts
Cantor's introduction of multiple infinities was a major materialist revolution that wrested the concept of infinity away from religious/theological monopoly.Georg Cantor / mathematics and materialism
Quotes 16
“We get the ideal capitalism instead of corrupted capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · post-apocalyptic utopia as capitalist utopia
“A free choice is needed to sustain the appearance that precisely appearance, what we see on the photo matters. But isn't this our situation?”Slavoj Žižek · ideology of free choice / Brazil restaurant scene
“Today's digitalization poses a threat to autonomous human subjectivity, no. What digitalization threatens is precisely the decentered Freudian subject.”Slavoj Žižek · digitalization and Lacanian subjectivity
“There is no subject without an incomplete Big Other.”Slavoj Žižek · subjectivity depends on the lack in the Other
“In psychoanalysis you must confess and be responsible even for what you don't know about yourself.”Slavoj Žižek · psychoanalytic ethics / responsibility beyond consciousness
“The power of human spirit is not to bring together the opposite, but to tear apart what in nature belongs together.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian negativity / power of abstraction
“The first act of changing the future is changing the past.”Slavoj Žižek · radical historical act / retroactivity
“You cannot maybe change the future, it's predetermined, but we can change the past.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive transformation as radical politics
“Infinity is ethically ontologically less than immortality... it is a certain triumph maturity that we are able to fully awaken or to elevate ourselves to temporality.”Slavoj Žižek · temporality as higher than immortality
“Don't underestimate appearances. Even when reality is at its most brutal, it has appearances to rely on.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology / function of symbolic appearances
“The trick is to accept pessimism and then to look for a sign of hope in pessimism itself.”Slavoj Žižek · optimism in pessimism / courage of hopelessness
“There is disorder under heaven so the situation is excellent.”Slavoj Žižek · Maoist formula / catastrophe as opportunity
“You are never totally bound by a symbolic commitment. This is not the last horizon.”Slavoj Žižek · Kol Nidre logic / limits of symbolic obligation
“The Big Other is unconscious. Lacan plays with 'ICS' which can be read as inconscient and inconsistance.”Slavoj Žižek · Big Other as inconsistent / Lacanian wordplay
“He snatched away the topic of infinity from religion and proposed a materialist infinity.”Slavoj Žižek · Cantor's set theory as materialist revolution
“What appears as an infantile desire is a false mask. The dream is the dream of the other.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal of Freud on dreams / Bown on video games
Transcript 52 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Nonetheless, maybe two days ago I gave a wrong impression with all my ironic remarks, so let me nonetheless make it clear. If I were to be a British citizen, with all my distances I would nonetheless unambiguously voted for Corbyn. And the doubts I have do not concern Corbyn himself, but first globally, you know, I'm not a paranoiac, I'm not saying there is a secret capitalist central committee which pulls the strings but nonetheless, system acts in a certain way. And I'm afraid that if, let's be utopian, Corbyn were to win, this system, which means automatic market movements, politics, would rather risk a serious crisis in United Kingdom than to allow him, his government to succeed. You know, that's the price of global capitalism, that it's not this, it doesn't work like this in one country we take power and so on. That's why incidentally it got me into so much trouble, I was also against Brexit. Sorry, not Brexit, Grexit. Grexit. You know, of course I am opposed to the capitulation, but I think there was, maybe, I'm not sure, a third way. Neither capitulation nor Grexit. Because again, as I already told you but it's important to repeat, I met some people who were there in Brussels, some minor Slovenian diplomats during negotiations, and they told me Schäuble and Wolfgang, German finance minister and a hard-liner, they wanted Grexit. Because they already have a model plan. Greeks do Grexit and then all they have to do is to take care that soon there will be a big humanitarian tragedy, catastrophe in Greece to teach them a lesson. Not so much Greeks as all others. And I don't know to what extent his plan would have worked, but Varoufakis had a plan which, if it was feasible, I don't know, was the right one. To remain within and through some of those tricks, a kind of a supplementary Euro for Greece, whatever tricks, while staying in, introducing chaos, and chaos, okay, the good chaos, new rules. I think he was the only hope, which is why I hope you noticed this, that he had to step down already before and he was the only one threatened with a trial for national treason and so on. Varoufakis. So, okay, he may have some illusions and so on, but no, and the same goes with all my criticism for Assange. He is making now some moves which I find a little bit problematic, like did you notice that he said a week ago or when that in France Marine Le Pen lost because of male chauvinism, you know. That like she was, she was rejected because she is a woman and so on and so on. It's a little bit too cynical for me. But you know, don't forget that he is now simply fighting for his life literally. When, you remember two weeks ago or when, the boss of CIA says our priority, not one of the tasks now, of American intelligence establishment is to get Assange arrested. Well, these are no jokes. And I learned precisely from Varoufakis when I spoke him via phone the last time, that he was very discreetly in Ecuador a week or two ago trying to mediate a *modus vivendi* for Assange because even in this, with the victory of the left, they are still under tremendous pressure from United States. They want to keep their word but how to do it one doesn't know and so on and so on. So okay, this will be again quoted against me as my crazy obsession with violence and so on. And my God, I'm ready to say no, yes, no, I don't just abhor violence. There are cases where, for example, let me give you a concrete example, it's a modest one. Okay, they can arrest me, I will not say that I am for it. So I will put it in an ambiguous way. If Assange is extradited, arrested, extradited to United States, then, now listen carefully how I will put it. I wouldn't protest too much, I'm not saying I'm for it just I wouldn't protest too much if some organization were to start kidnapping American diplomats and call them as a in as extortion, you know. Give us Assange, we set them free and so on. I think that arresting Assange is a clear case of a state crime and it should be, if it were to happen and so on. So ah, yeah, did I tell you already this, I think years ago I will repeat it. I'm preparing for, for meeting myself in my true will, let's say. I will try to give you an extreme example, I wonder how would you react to it. Maybe I mention it here but years ago more. Can I imagine a situation when I would kill someone who didn't torture or kill any other person? Yes, I can imagine. When I was in Latin America, I think it was Argentina, somebody told me of a doctor he met and this is for me the ultimate obscenity. You know, the military dictatorship there, when they tortured prisoners, they had doctors who, let's say a neutral example, I want to torture you now but I don't do it directly. First a doctor examines you and gives me precise indications. This guy, torture him in this way, what do you want? You want him healthy at the end, you don't mind if some eyes get lost or whatever, or you don't care if he dies. You tell him no, it can be some bones broken but he must remain alive and then he examines you and gives you precise, precise indications. And he can claim "wait a minute, I didn't do anything, I just". No. If, let me put it like this, if I were to find with this guy behind the same table drinking tea and somehow, don't ask me how, I would have some nice small cup of poison, I find this almost more disgusting than what direct torturers would have done. You know, this hypocrisy, "oh I just gave my opinion". I wouldn't, if I'm also a conformist, if it were be safe enough that I could see no way to blame me, I would have done it, I would have poisoned him. I would have done it. It's so absolutely disgusting. Precisely what makes it disgusting is not what he is doing but the way he thinks he kept his hands clear. You know, "oh I was just giving my opinion, what's wrong about it" and I always find this, for example, this is why I'm absolutely against, you know, the big German atom bomb scientist Werner Heisenberg. No, I read two books on him and they are horrible. You know why? This is the worst of conformism. Now it's absolutely proven. Even that play *Copenhagen* is too soft on him. He tried desperately to build the bomb. He just screwed it up scientifically. He made a miscalculation. And we even know today which miscalculation. He judged that much more of that heavy water from Norway will be needed. And so he thought we cannot do it. But they could have done it with much less water. And after the war, I find this so disgusting, in no way there are no indications that this is true, he tried to sell his scientific failure in calculating as a secret act of resistance, you know. "I was really trying to sabotage it" and so on and so on. But let's not lose time with this today, I hope you will not be too bored because I really want to move a little bit more into theory. First about as I promised you about this dystopian virtual worlds, our obsessions with games and movies which take place after some apocalyptic catastrophe. How does it work? From here I will enter the topic of circular temporality, immortality, and hopefully I will have time to approach that movie which is a modest one but I find quite interesting, I mentioned it to you two days ago, *Arrival*. Okay, so let me begin. I refer here to a man, how do you pronounce it? Is it Bown or Bowen? B-O-W-N. Bowen. Bowen. X-O. Okay, I don't want to [unintelligible]. Alfred Bown will soon publish, he asked me for a blurb, that's how I got hold of his short manuscript. It will be a book by Polity Press, I think, about the underlying ideology of video games. And he, Bown, proposed a nice formula of the attraction of post-apocalyptic video games, all that, you know, we are just after the end of the world catastrophe, as thinly disguised utopias. Here is a quote from his manuscript. "Dystopian disasters are really just a fresh chance, an opportunity to simplify our existence and leave everything behind. The problem faced with is not so much a lack of utopia that we are facing today because this is really what dystopic dreams are: the enjoyment of a chance to restart in a more simplified world, thinly veiled by the apparent horror of dystopic collapse. In other words, it is utopia repackaged. The chance to envisage changes to capitalist modernity is eradicated, leaving only dreams of tempering its destructiveness and of starting afresh after the apocalyptic fallout." End of quote. An early apocalyptic mega-flop, one of those proverbial movies which lost incredible amounts of money, from Kevin Costner's *The Postman*, does this. It's an incredible movie, this reactionary utopia at its purest. Set in but written fifteen years ago. It takes place a decade or two after an unspecified apocalyptic event which left a huge impact on human civilization and erased most technologies. So that, you know, people live in small dispersed communities, usually in very brutal poverty and relations of new domination. So it follows the story of an unnamed nomadic drifter, played by Kevin Costner, who stumbles across the uniform of an old United States Postal Service mail carrier. So what he does, it's very interesting. He starts to act as if he really is a postman. Between dispersed communities he begins to distribute, scattered villages, he begins to distribute post, pretending to act on behalf of the restored United States of America. Then others begin to imitate him and gradually the basic institutional network of the United States emerges again. The utopia that arises after the zero point of apocalyptic destruction is, and that's crucial, we get as a happy ending precisely the United States that we have now. Now it is easy to see how, although they may appear to be an exemplary case of the Hollywood left critically depicting the self-destructive potential of the capitalist civilization, such post-apocalyptic fantasies actually imply that there is no way out. Not only does the post-apocalyptic restoration end up in a utopia of the same society that preceded the apocalypse, just with some minor superficial embellishments, the very story of a new beginning after the apocalypse as it were clears the slate and repeats a basic bourgeois myth. I think the secret promise of these post-apocalyptic stories is: through an apocalypse may appear a catastrophe but what we will get is not a new society, but the same old society, just in which all the bad phenomena will be somehow erased. We get the ideal capitalism instead of corrupted capitalism. Bown, this guy, ingeniously here turns around Freud's standard thesis about dream as a disguised fulfillment of a repressed infantile wish. Another last quote from Bown: "While Freud might argue that dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a repressed infantile wish, in the context of this discussion of video games, the diagnosis can be reformulated in the following way: dreams are disguised as the fulfillment of a repressed infantile wish while the dream is the dream of the other," he means of the social other, "it is disguised as the fulfillment of the subject's internal instinctive desire." So it's a very nice idea, you know, it's very simple reversal, you got it. It's not that our apparently complex symbolically structured dreams are just a cover-up for some primitive infantile desire, it's the other way around. What appears as an infantile desire is a false mask. One should recall here Marx's classic critique of Thomas Hobbes. Capitalist civilization is not just an attempt to regulate and contain the wildness of the state of nature through social contract. This state of nature itself is already capitalism at its zero level. And I claim the same holds for the zero level state in apocalyptic games and movies. It stands for capitalism, for this specific capitalist constellation disguised as a wild state of nature. However, ah, now comes the theoretical point. Where does the claim, repeated by Bown, the claim that every formation of our desires is a historically specific product of social struggles, and in this sense political, where does all this bring us? Bown gives to this claim a Lacanian spin, pointing out how the Lacanian theory of desire provides the best conceptual apparatus to understand how the digital universe, our Big Other, especially that of video games, determines our desires. Like you think there that you are almost, you know, when you, and for some time then I got bored, I was doing this together with my young son, you know, for example, we spent hours playing that stupid game Taxi, Taxi Driver. But we totally twisted the rules. My our point was not to drive customers from one place to another, but to drive customers and to kill as many people and you would have said "No, it was just that we were regressed to our instinctual nature," No, precisely, we read the game correctly. Apparently, and my son again has a tremendous talent, at least for this. I remember, how is it called, that game where you build your house, your family... Sims? Yes, yes. And my son, you know, I suggested him to play that game for pedagogic reasons so that you will be able to build house, do a work, blah blah blah, people go around and you have a family. You know, and he went to play the game with an obvious goal and real, he used literally less than quarter of an hour to introduce murder, torture and so on. You know how you do it, an advice: you get quickly married, it's part of the game, and then you have a child. And then you don't feed the child. The child gets all red, then social services somehow are informed, they come, you start shooting them and there you are. You know, to the middle of the family game. But what I am saying is that this is precisely not a distortion of it. That's that's what is beneath it. So again, how then does this universe work? I didn't want to show it to you already this many times you so I will just mention again the well-known scene from what is for me one of the biggest, maybe the biggest British movie of all times, Terry Gilliam's *Brazil*. In the scene, minutes into the movie, it takes place in a high-class restaurant, I often debated already in my books this scene, all the customers, it doesn't matter what the customers okay, guests behind the table, they get as menu dazzling photos nicely of dishes and that, and then when they order of this dish and that, I think it's unique, it's one of the best examples of what Lacan calls separation as opposed to alienation. When they get the meal, they get a plate, and on it is just some some grey indistinct half-fluid, half-shit whatever like dogs, and but above it there is a dazzling photo in colors, nice steak or whatever all that. So you get the real, that disgusting lump, and you get what you are really eating, the symbolic image. But the two are nicely separated. It's wonderful how reality, the real and fantasy are separated. But there is another, which I neglected in my previous analysis, wonderful detail of this scene. When the waiter presents to the customers around the table the menu, and the hero, played by Jonathan Pryce, refuses to choose. He just shouts at the waiter back "Bring me whatever, I don't care". The waiter gets more and more angry, aggressive and insists that the hero should make a choice. Like, "You must choose, choose, choose!" And then at the end the waiter, then I think Jonathan Pryce says "OK, OK, this one", "Yes, you've chosen!" and violently he closes the menu. The irony of this detail cannot but strike the eye. The waiter insists on the choice precisely because what each of the customers will get is what looks like the same excremental lump, just with a different colorful photo above it. A free choice is needed to sustain the appearance that precisely appearance, what we see on the photo matters. That there is a substantial difference between the choice of excremental lumps. But isn't this our situation? I claim like now it's not only two, you have three now. Classic Coke, Diet Coke, Zero Coke. I feel exactly like this. They are almost the same although did I already tell you this, I know from my evil son whom I mentioned, he did part of his high school, now he is old enough, research, they call it research, it was just a little bit of plagiarizing from the web, about what's the difference between Diet Coke and Zero Coke. I think already mentioned this here, it's very interesting. It's a sexual difference. The research of Coke Company showed them that light Coke, light diet is is perceived as too soft, too feminine. Men avoided it. And the result, the result so Zero, sorry, yeah, okay, I'm old I don't know but now you see secretly I'm transgender, I'm open to the feminine side in me or whatever, yeah. No, but so literally it was planned: Zero Coke is supposed to be black, dark, harsh, it is light for men. And now comes this, really as in the scene from *Brazil*, point. Then some researchers, not part of Coca-Cola of course, first they discovered that there is some percent correspondence, that a large majority of men, if they want to drink light, drink Zero, a large majority of women drink light. Okay, there is a slight difference what poison you get there in, but they made a simple experiment. They repackaged it, like they put some Zero into Light, into Diet and vice versa, and a large majority of men who claimed "No, I only drink Zero, I can immediately identify it", of course didn't identify the difference. Now let's be serious here, I'm not making fun of men and so on and so on, I'm just claiming that, or of women in this case, I'm just claiming to what extent the way things are designed, packaged and so on determines our desires. But is this enough to say what? This? This how our desires are not immediate for an object, they are always historically constructed and so on and so on. And here I find, although I respect his work deeply, kind of a blind spot of this wonderful short book of Alfred Bown. He simply insists that an emancipated subject should fully accept this radical alienation of his/her desire. The fact that his/her desire is never his/her own but regulated through external social symbolic mechanisms. His claim is that either we have this false sense of the self, "I really want this," but all you can do is to discover how what you experience as your self is really just an overdetermined result of symbolic texture, ideologies and so on and so on. So again, Bown focuses on how the Big Other in the guise of digital programs functions as the external site that determines and regulates our desires. With the obvious reference to Lacan. He quotes repeatedly Lacan's formula "Desire is the desire of the Other." It's not mine, it's constructed through social mediation and so on and so on. And of course this can easily be shown how even negative desires, desires to transgress to violate the norms, the space for them is opened through norms. But if our desires always already were decentered, because of course Bown consequently should not be claiming that once we really had our desires, now they are manipulated in our digital age, they always were decentered. What is new here in digitalization? What was desire not always like this? Is the digital Big Other, all those computer programs that manipulate us when we play a digital game or in many other cases, just a new case of the symbolic Big Other? A case which enables us to become aware of how we are decentered and regulated. Spoken and not speaking as Lacan put it. Lacan's answer is a resolute "No." What is threatened in the digitalization of our daily lives is not our free subjectivity but the Big Other itself, the agency of the symbolic order in its, let's call it naively standard, functioning. Another of Lacan's axioms above "desire is the desire of the Other" is "There is no Big Other." And we should take this statement in its strongest sense, as opposed to a mere "The Big Other doesn't exist." Lacan has here a precise distinction. If he says that something doesn't exist, *n'existe pas*, this means just that it doesn't exist in reality, but it still has it still can exist as a virtual symbolic fiction which structures our activity. For example, if you are a naive discursive materialist, and even Hegel is here... Hegel would have said, of course Hegel is here enough of a materialist, of course God or State or Party Communism, it doesn't exist an an object as an object in our world. It only exists through our concrete activity. There is Communism insofar as there are concrete individuals fighting for it or fighting against it and so on and so on. That's Hegel's idea of the Big Other. And Hegel, he is not quite correct here, also reads Christianity, Holy Ghost like this. Holy Ghost is not God of beyond, it's something that only exists through the activity of concrete material human beings. But this is *n'existe pas*. This is to say the Big Other doesn't exist. Like, to be vulgar, if you kill all Communists then also Communism no longer exists, because there is no one to practice it. But when Lacan says "*Il n'y a pas de grand Autre*," there is no... he has in mind a much stronger meaning. "There is no Big Other" implies that the Big Other cannot even persist as a coherent symbolic fiction since it is always thwarted, destabilized through immanent antagonisms and inconsistencies. This is why for Lacan the Big Other is unconscious. And Lacan plays nicely with this *inconscient*. You know, he uses the shortened formula "ICS" which can be read at the same time as *inconscient* and *inconsistance*. And this brings us to the crux of the matter. For Lacan, there is a space for subjectivity only insofar as the Big Other, there is no Big Other. The space for subjectivity is precisely in this: lacks, gaps, inconsistencies and so on of of the Big Other. And okay, I repeated this endlessly in my books, I will not lose time now. This is why for Lacan what does it practically mean, there is no Big Other? It means paradoxically the space of freedom. It means what Lacan calls separation in contrast to alienation. Because no matter how much you repeat "Oh I have no free will, I am overdetermined by symbolic mechanisms," all those stupid formulas which are not the ultimate truth of Lacan, "I am not speaking, I am spoken," "Subject is just an effect of the signifier" and so on and so on. This is the position of alienation. My truth is out of myself, out there. But for Lacan, if this were the ultimate truth, then there would only maybe exist imaginary selves, selves with their will of course. [unintelligible] But not, not subjects. A subject emerges, a subject in the strict Lacanian sense, which means people neglect this, as an ethical subject. They exist only insofar as there is a gap in the Other. Which is why subject is strictly correlative to what Lacan calls the lack in the Other. For example, you can see this nicely with intelligent theologians, when they claim that an impenetrable God, a God even more radically who is a mystery for himself also, is strictly correlative to to human freedom. And just a brief because because I think the detour, I think that here Protestantism returns to something that was, as far as I can say, I'm not a big specialist here but I think I'm at least on the right path, something that you find in the most radical Judaism. I quoted, I cannot resist repeating it in two of my books already I think, the most you must know here more than me, there is a wonderful story from Talmud I think, and I even have it in two versions. And this is the greatness of Judaism, that they say it openly. You know, that's why precisely things which in Old Testament and Talmud which are quoted as it were usually against the Jews, you see they are not serious, they are corrupt, are the greatest thing for me. In what sense? For example, the story of David and Bathsheba, yeah. People usually say you see how dirty they were, he sent a his own soldier to death just to be able to screw in peace that lady and so on. But isn't it wonderful, I claim our answer should be "But all kings were like that," and the greatness is that they say it there, you know. You find so much simple evil in Old Testament and so on, I find this wonderful. And the same with that with that wonderful story from Talmud, again look at my books I quote it in detail, how how two great wise guys, rabbis, were debating a point. And the one who was losing said, the one who was losing said "Look, we cannot decide, let's call Jehovah himself to come and decide who of us have right." Then then comes an incredible turn. Jehovah comes. And tries to mediate. And then the guy who was winning starts to shout at Jehovah. Literally almost in these terms: "Listen, you old guy, you did your job, you created the world but you screwed it up pretty much so fuck off, now it's for us wise men to decide, to debate." And you know what Jehovah said? "Oh my god, he is right," and runs away. That's true theology for me. That's and it's a deep lesson which I will not, I will try to [unintelligible] too much. [Laughter] No, but I will put it like this. You know, if I were to be allowed to be myself... [Host: "Since the chair has defeated me."] Yeah, yeah. But you know like how should I put it, if I were to put it in these terms I would understood it, but these primitive people here would not. So I have to humiliate myself to be understood. Especially I know the elder guy did not say, did not say to Jehovah "fuck off," no, not quite in these terms, you know. No, but you see my point it's also in my *Antigone* play, which strangely how it was a total flop. Even the book does, obviously I thought it would do better, you know my new version of *Antigone*. And I discovered all around by reactions that I touched something that I shouldn't have touched, Antigone it's too much, too mythic. You know my version of how three versions blah blah blah. But what I am especially proud is that in the second version I quote Kol Nidre, no? And I know it was from 15th century or 16th even I think, no. [Audience: "It's older."] Is it, but not but it's not the Old Testament. No no, it's medieval. But it is medieval, that's what I mean. But nonetheless, it's not simply all antisemites like to quote it like "You see, Jews are lying" and so on. No, it's a much deeper insight, if I put it in my Lacanian terms, precisely in the same sense in which Big Other doesn't exist. You are never totally bound by a symbolic commitment. This is not this is not the last this is not the last horizon. So, so let me go on. The deepest insight here is that we should move, we can move beyond alienation. Now psychoanalysis may appear to be the ultimate poetry of alienation. You know, you think you are the free self but the Big Other, your unconscious determines you, you are overdetermined and so on and so on. But that's the beauty of psychoanalysis. The first, you know it's this properly dialectical reversal. The first gesture is "Yes, we are predetermined by the unconscious, we don't have a free self." But then in a step further, you are even deprived of this last assurance, you know. Because in what sense? Freud makes it clear, and that's the big paradox, properly theological of psychoanalysis, it's "Yes, we are determined, unconscious, but nonetheless we are guilty, responsible." You, that is to say, you absolutely don't have the right to say "Okay, I killed the child," sorry for this pathetic example, "but what can you do? It wasn't me, it was the Big Other who was acting through me." No. You are you are this is why Freud says, I forgot where, somewhere that the lesson of psychoanalysis is much worse than the lesson of confession. In a Catholic confession you confess your sins, what you know. In psychoanalysis you must confess and be responsible even for what you don't know about yourself. But you see that for Lacan this is the space of freedom. The fact that *il n'y a pas de grand Autre*, there is no Big Other, there is no external symbolic site to which you can rely as to the ultimate ethical ontological agency so that you can say "It's not me but that's it, that's the true master." This master might be secret, over out there, they are controlling me, but nonetheless there is a place where things are really decided. The deepest lesson of psychoanalysis for Lacan is that that Big Other doesn't exist. And precisely this lack in the Other itself opens up the space for our freedom. Because if I cannot even rely on the Big Other then in some fundamental sense I am free, free and fully responsible. I have to I have to I have to I have to do it. So now, I didn't lose my thread. [Laughter] because let me now will come my paradoxical conclusion. Let me return to digitalization. I think that the change with digitalization and the danger, why digitalization is a threat for human subjectivity, it's not simply because we are determined out there by the Big Other, but that the Big Other is no longer this properly symbolic Big Other with inconsistency and so on and so on. It is as if the Big Other really exists out there in digital programs and so on and so on. So what because again I will just briefly return to what Lacan means by "There is no Big Other." It means and this is absolutely crucial, for Lacan castration doesn't mean "I am castrated, I never fully have what I want, I'm separated." No, the Big Other is castrated. That's absolutely Lacan's fundamental insight. There is no substantial Big Other, community, whatever, on which I can rely. There is antagonism, inconsistency in the Big Other itself. And I claim this inconsistency is obfuscated, blocked by this digital dream of "we will be totally controlled" and so on and so on. So paradoxically the way to approach the problem of "Is digitalization the threat to our identity?" is not to indulge in this paradoxical dreams or "will be totally controlled" and so on and so on, but what's the fate of the Big Other? There is no subject without an incomplete Big Other. Now, again to recapitulate, today's digitalization poses a threat to autonomous human subjectivity, no. What digitalization threatens is precisely the decentered Freudian subject. Now, but nonetheless something weird is happening in digitalization, another effect which is much more interesting. The digital machinery that sustains video games not only directs and regulates our desires, it also constitutes, constructs us or puts us into a specific mode of subjectivity. I think that's the key element that is than in digital games. How do we function there? We enter a, I'm sorry to use these bombastic terms, a pre-oedipal, not yet castrated subjectivity that floats in a kind of obscene immortality. When I'm immersed into a game, I dwell in a universe of undeadness where no annihilation is definitive since after every destruction I can return to the beginning and start the game again. It's this kind of obscene immortality. And of course, I will just repeat my old stuff here when I say that this obscene immortality was the stuff of fantasy long before cartoons. Because apart from video games we already had it in cartoons, that's why I love them. You remember the good ones, the late ones are bad, like Tom and Jerry from the 50s. What I always like and I just try to imagine the most obscene movie with real actors would have been just try to enact with real actors a simple Tom and Jerry story. You know, Tom is run over by a car, cut into pieces and so on, but in undeadness you begin again and again and again. [Laughter] So it's clearly that what happened in digital games, when you can start again and again, return to the same point and so on, is something that obviously is part of a much more fundamental fantasy that you find not only in cartoons but already, we know where it all it all of it is clearly formulated, in Marquis de Sade. As Lacan noted in his *Kant avec Sade*, what you find in the Sadean victim, if you read those rather boring book I never could have read it, *Juliette* for example. Isn't *Juliette* very similar to Tom or Jerry? She is tortured in this way, cut, but magically she remains beautiful, she remains the same all the time. It's this type of circular universe. But it's an interesting universe. Why? Because it runs against the philosophy of finitude. Here I rely a little bit on Quentin Meillassoux who criticized it of course. According to the philosophy of finitude, finitude or mortality is the unsurpassable horizon of our existence. We cannot escape it. And you have nice phenomenological analysis demonstrating how the very dreams of immortality, infinity, are only meaningful against the implicit background of our mortality. But Lacan's axiom is that, no matter how much you try, you cannot escape immortality. So of course really we die, but the way we function, we are always sustained by this by immortality. And you incidentally, this of course phantasmic obscene immortality, here I in a very friendly way disagree a little bit with Badiou who likes to elevate immortality as this noble eventual category against mortality of us as, as he puts it, human animals. My point against him is yes, we have this, let's call it very naively, noble immortality: you sacrifice yourself for a cause, for an idea. But we also have the obscene immortality. The immortality not only of cartoons, of Sadean victims, but also the immortality, I mentioned this here twenty times probably I will not go into it again just mention it again, the immortality of the living dead, of ghosts and so on. Already Schelling, German idealist, put it nicely when he said that this ambiguity of the term *spirit*, *Geist* is crucial. It can mean spirituality in the noble sense, but it can also mean ghosts, and ghosts are usually evil. You know, they are a sign of that we didn't do our duty or whatever. Like, why does Hamlet's ghost, Hamlet's father's ghost appear? Not because he was a great guy, but because, as they put it in *Hamlet*, people neglect this, that he died "in the flower of his sins" or whatever. I it's clear, it's absolutely clear, that's my god the ABC of reading *Hamlet*, that the true evil guy in the play is Hamlet's father. It's not a Claudius. Read a book, if you want to be amused I'm sorry if I repeat myself, John Updike, otherwise I don't like him too much, *Gertrude and Claudius*. My favorite re-reading of *Hamlet*. It takes place just before *Hamlet*, and it tells the story from Gertrude and Claudius' side. They were sincere lovers, the father, Hamlet's father, the king was an extremely brutal evil guy, threatening them both. So, more in a self-defense they kill him. Then Claudius is a good king, and you have almost a happy ending, like and everything was well in the Kingdom of Denmark, and then just one sentence: "Just till the stupid arrogant Prince returned from I don't know where and ruined everything again and so on." I'm convinced by that if you ask me. Okay. So, so let's so let's go on. I think that what Cantor, Georg, that one mathematician, did for infinity, you know, introducing a multiplicity of infinities. Because till Cantor infinity was usually linked to one. Infinity is the One, Divine, against the plurality. Cantor's revolution was introducing multiplicity of infinities, which is why he was quite right, you know that he was a devout Catholic who felt extremely guilty for this and even wrote, I read somewhere a letter to Pope. And he was right to feel guilty from a Catholic standpoint because he did maybe one of the greatest moves in materialist revolution: he snatched away the topic of infinity from religion and proposed a materialist a materialist infinity. So again, to conclude this part, I would say that what I'm describing here now you will say "Okay, but it's just a fantasy, no? A fantasy of this repeated immortality. We cannot do it in real life, so it doesn't matter." Of course we cannot do it literally. If you screw it up you cannot run back and so on. But nonetheless I claim that with the digitalization of our lives, our real lives even, and how this affects our real life existence, we can enact, live this kind of, how should I call it, this kind of fake infinity or immortality. For example, I can act in my love life as if I'm experimenting with ever new partners, and if the relationship doesn't work I can erase it and start again. I know despicable friends of mine, they are no longer friends of mine, who acted in this way. You know, they said "What is love? It's like cartoons, you do it, you fail, you erase it, you start again and so on and so on." So we do have a real-life existential stance which somehow enacts this evil infinity. So instead of celebrating such an immersion into the gaming dream world as a liberating stance of our of playful repetitions, we should precisely discern in it what in psychoanalysis we would have called the denial of castration, of the gap constitutive of subjectivity. Okay, I will not go on too much here just to tell you, you know which movie, although it's not as great as some people claim, makes nonetheless here the right lesson. Did you see *Groundhog Day*? It has a wonderful implicit theological premise which is that to cut it short, infinity, immortality is ontologically lower, less than temporality. You know what's the story, the guy awakens each day and can start again blah blah blah, and when true love wins, he falls into time again. You remember at the end he awakens the next day. But this is precisely progress. And I think this is the deepest lesson for me. Forget about theology, even of Christianity as intelligent theologians know. The embodiment of Christ is not fall, it's a progress. Infinity is ethically ontologically less than immortality. We not fall into infinity, once we play all these virtual games like the hero in the *Groundhog Day* and it's a certain triumph maturity that we are able to fully awaken or to elevate ourselves to temporality. And now, just a minute because I promised democracy. Oh, I still can have half an hour, okay. Now, to illustrate this point, I would like just to mention briefly a movie, I asked you to to copy. So you have already two things to to denounce me now. First I I condoned terror against United States, and now even worse in the capitalist universe I would advise you to use Pirate Bay to... [Laughter] You know I told you the last time *Arrival*, Denis Villeneuve, that a film precisely about this type of temporal paradoxes, circular time and so on. Incidentally it's from the story of Ted Chiang. Ted Chiang is a very interesting science fiction author, a Chinese living in United States, and it's interesting how it looks that now China is emerging also as a country with very good science fiction literature. I think I already mentioned it here, their biggest hit is Liu Cixin, I'm not sure I pronounce it correctly, *The Three-Body Problem*, which is a whole trilogy. And then and it's even controlled, did I tell you already this, maybe some months ago, you know that some two years ago I think, Chinese authorities passed a law prohibiting in any public art media, in cartoons, in movies, TV series and in literature, two topics: of time travel and of alternate realities. It's clear why. They are afraid that somebody would say "Well, what if China would not be communist, or what if we can return and get rid of Mao" or whatever. They, but they put it in more bombastic terms, that this opens up this topic of alternate realities and time travel open up a disrespectful, a space for a disrespectful attitude towards Chinese cultural traditions or something like this. Okay. But so what happens in this movie? You will have now to suffer a little bit, I'm sorry to tell you the story. I'm sorry, and then I will give a reading. So *Arrival* subverts the standard Hollywood formula of the production of a couple as the frame of a catastrophic encounter. You know, I've written extensively about it, and that's what I like about Hollywood catastrophe movies. If you notice, it's always, I underline it, always that the big catastrophe, the end of the world, comet hitting the earth, is always a pretext for a story which is either Oedipal story or story of the production of a couple. For example, did you see the one which even Badiou liked, I like to spread because he is my friend these rumors of him, you know that one of great films for Badiou was *Armageddon*. You remember Bruce Willis, the father, he doesn't like it that Ben Affleck is screwing Liv Tyler, which means young guy being the lover of his beautiful daughter. So then it's so clear that the comet threatening to destroy Earth is basically the materialization of the father's fury. And the film ends that the father sacrifices himself, hits the asteroid in this way, exploding it, but his last words are to his daughter "I wish you all the best, now you can be with the guy." He accepts it. It's and all others, like my big example I mentioned it here two three times, did you see *Deep Impact*? It's similar, it's Téa Leoni, a girl who is furious at her father. And again you have the catastrophe threat to the earth which is clearly just the materialization of her fury and so on and so on. And at the end, it's really an extra-Oedipal ending, when the big wave destroying all of the East Coast is approaching, she goes to her father, they embrace, she says "Daddy," up they disappear in a big wave. It's a you know what's so interesting? Here you can see what Lacan means by Object A and so on. Something that appears just an accidental side story is really what the movie libidinally is about. And I will not repeat because I already did times how along these lines I tried to read also *Titanic*, you know. That it's not even a love story, beneath the progressive aspect of *Titanic*, you really find the nastiest bourgeois myth. Because who is the actor my god, DiCaprio, he is not really it's not just they are transgressing the rules by making love... you know I'm sorry if I repeat myself, check it up if you don't believe me. Look at that crucial moment where Leonardo DiCaprio is dying, freezing. At the very moment of his death, she, Kate Winslet, shouts "I will never let you go, I will never let you go!" But look at her hands. She is pushing him away. So it's clear that what's the movie really about, is the story of a it's *Captain Courageous* another version, story of a rich spoiled lady, impotent, caught in her decadent life. And you know this is an old bourgeois myth. Sometimes rich people live in their own way, and to regain vitality, they have to suck the blood, exploit, get the energy from ordinary people. And that's why her main function is not to screw her, whatever, it's just to restore her ego, her will to self if I may put it. Get the guy, kill the guy again. Keep going. Yeah, yeah, because you remember already when they are first time when he sees her naked, they don't make love, he he paints her drawing, you know. It's all about restoring herself. And do another thing. Go to DVD look, or Pirate Bay [Laughter] look at the that final scene just before he pushes him she pushes him away. His last words to her when he is dying, are not the words of a lover, but the words of some kind of a consultant: "Be honest, be true to yourself" and so on. I mean it's such a clear emotional exploitation. She she is the vanishing mediator. His function is over so he can freeze. It's really a melodrama about a young bourgeois girl restoring her vitality. But this is of course parallel the institution which organized this very story is also rejuvenating itself. Yes, I agree. That happened at the BFI at that very moment. Ah, no no no, yes, I agree. Yeah. To analyze exactly the the trajectory of the British Film Institute up to that moment, and then from that moment onwards, it is amazing that means they rejuvenate and stabilize themselves with your help and you... Okay, my help let's see. Yeah yeah. You must never be an actor, always be the director. You learn to make films in a minute. Just one thing you need to know: synchronicity between image and sound. That's all you need to know. No, no, you know in what sense I don't fully agree with you, because we don't have time to go into it but, because really intelligent directors, and I admire them, introduce small cuts, break into this synchronicity, and these are usually the most interesting notion. How for example, typical, it's not even you have don't have to be a great director, it's standard procedure, when one scene is ending, you hear a sound which you misinterpret as part of this scene but it's really already from the next scene. Now if you just do this mechanically is shit, but if you do it intelligent. But you know where I agree with you, I I think that Kathryn Bigelow and what's his name my god the director, James Cameron are just two sides of the same Hollywood establishment. Neither of them is progressive. I think that Cameron is a typical example of what I call fake Hollywood Marxism. It appears sometimes to be progressive even ridiculously, like in *Titanic*, you remember like all the lower you go the better are the people, lower classes dancing merrily, up there corrupted rich men. What I wanted to show with my reading is that precisely beneath this is a very conservative different myth. No, the only now since you provoked me, I will tell you the obscenity, my only sympathy to James Cameron, not David, James Cameron is I read years ago, in our politically correct times it would no longer be possible to say this, but I'm not obscene I'm just quoting him. He was asked how did he fell in love, why did he marry Kathryn Bigelow, who was more or less beautiful but very cold type of beauty when she was young. You know what he said publicly? That from the very first moment he was intrigued her cold face, how does it change when she is in intense sex, you know, and that he wanted to see this, so if there is no other way, marry her. [Laughter] I find this if you ask me an excellent reason to marry, no? Much more than all spiritual bullshit or whatever. Okay. because we don't have... yeah, yeah, *Arrival*. [Host: "In the context of advice for the chair?"] Yeah yeah. No no the chair is is the chair but I always look who is the real master behind the chair but let's not. Okay. The film yeah. Okay look listen. You know what I really want to give you, I lose too much time time for debate, so I will somehow condense it. At the beginning you see a lady, at the beginning of the film just a couple of minutes, lady, the heroine, alone and her daughter, who is already in her early teens, dying of cancer or whatever. Then you get a obviously a flashback. This lady is some linguistic researcher, whatever, and at eight places on our earth at the same time, aliens land. And it's again this Lacanian situation, what do they want? Nobody knows. So she the lady is mobilized with another scientist to establish contact with aliens and, okay, of course she falls in love also, they fall in love the two, but I'm simplifying the story very much. What is crucial is that they gradually establish that the aliens are here to help us, to force humanity to be one, and that they even learn to read their language. They are really octopuses, squeezed, squid, it is not the same but you know what I mean like ink. Their their writing is a language where they just like an octopus pushing out her its ink, they just push it on the wall, on the on the glass wall, where they are confronted with these two representation of humanity, and gradually they learn to read it, but it's a different type of language. It's a kind of a circular language where future and past are the same, they see the future, they they no longer live in linear time. And okay, at the films, I will skip all the complications, at the film's end they leave, the aliens, because they brought humanity together, the real their real message is constructed from partial messages on the eight ships or and, which landed in different parts of the worlds. They claim that they came here to the earth to help us because they know the future, for them future the past and present are in the same circular contemporaneous synchronous space, that in years into the future they will need humanity's help. And then what happens is that at the end of the film the heroine and her scientific partner, the hero, fall in love and decide to be together and to have a child, this is briefly hinted at, but then it becomes clear to you what really happened. She gets it that her visions, like the beginning of the film and you have some other apparitions, are not some primordial memories but visions from the future. So, this is the wisdom imparted on her by aliens. They enabled her to see her own past and also future. So her situation is "I love this guy, should we be together or not?" She knows that he will drop her out of despair because they will soon discover that the child, a girl that they will have, has whatever cancer, leukemia and will die in a couple of years. She knows everything and the painful death of her daughter but she nonetheless decides, with clear knowledge what is coming, she decides to do it. Now, so again the ideology of the film is here is what Chiang, the writer, wrote about the story on which the film is based, just to make it clear: "Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness like one after the other, temporality or thought, while Heptapods," these are these gigantic squids aliens with seven legs whatever, "have developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experience events in an order and we perceive their relationship as cause and effect. They," aliens, "experience all events at once and perceive a purpose underlying them all." End of quote. So living in such a circular time radically transforms the notion of acting, not actor but acting in the sense of intervening. Our common idea of the opposition between free choice and determinism is left behind. Another quote from the writer: "The Heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand these concepts. They don't act according to their will nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes them, their mode of awareness, is not just that their actions coincide with
Nonetheless, maybe two days ago I gave a wrong impression with all my ironic remarks, so let me nonetheless make it clear. If I were to be a British citizen, with all my distances I would nonetheless unambiguously voted for Corbyn. And the doubts I have do not concern Corbyn himself, but first globally, you know, I'm not a paranoiac, I'm not saying there is a secret capitalist central committee which pulls the strings but nonetheless, system acts in a certain way. And I'm afraid that if, let's be utopian, Corbyn were to win, this system, which means automatic market movements, politics, would rather risk a serious crisis in United Kingdom than to allow him, his government to succeed. You know, that's the price of global capitalism, that it's not this, it doesn't work like this in one country we take power and so on. That's why incidentally it got me into so much trouble, I was also against Brexit. Sorry, not Brexit, Grexit. Grexit. You know, of course I am opposed to the capitulation, but I think there was, maybe, I'm not sure, a third way. Neither capitulation nor Grexit. Because again, as I already told you but it's important to repeat, I met some people who were there in Brussels, some minor Slovenian diplomats during negotiations, and they told me Schäuble and Wolfgang, German finance minister and a hard-liner, they wanted Grexit. Because they already have a model plan. Greeks do Grexit and then all they have to do is to take care that soon there will be a big humanitarian tragedy, catastrophe in Greece to teach them a lesson. Not so much Greeks as all others. And I don't know to what extent his plan would have worked, but Varoufakis had a plan which, if it was feasible, I don't know, was the right one. To remain within and through some of those tricks, a kind of a supplementary Euro for Greece, whatever tricks, while staying in, introducing chaos, and chaos, okay, the good chaos, new rules. I think he was the only hope, which is why I hope you noticed this, that he had to step down already before and he was the only one threatened with a trial for national treason and so on. Varoufakis. So, okay, he may have some illusions and so on, but no, and the same goes with all my criticism for Assange. He is making now some moves which I find a little bit problematic, like did you notice that he said a week ago or when that in France Marine Le Pen lost because of male chauvinism, you know. That like she was, she was rejected because she is a woman and so on and so on. It's a little bit too cynical for me. But you know, don't forget that he is now simply fighting for his life literally. When, you remember two weeks ago or when, the boss of CIA says our priority, not one of the tasks now, of American intelligence establishment is to get Assange arrested. Well, these are no jokes. And I learned precisely from Varoufakis when I spoke him via phone the last time, that he was very discreetly in Ecuador a week or two ago trying to mediate a *modus vivendi* for Assange because even in this, with the victory of the left, they are still under tremendous pressure from United States. They want to keep their word but how to do it one doesn't know and so on and so on. So okay, this will be again quoted against me as my crazy obsession with violence and so on. And my God, I'm ready to say no, yes, no, I don't just abhor violence. There are cases where, for example, let me give you a concrete example, it's a modest one. Okay, they can arrest me, I will not say that I am for it. So I will put it in an ambiguous way. If Assange is extradited, arrested, extradited to United States, then, now listen carefully how I will put it. I wouldn't protest too much, I'm not saying I'm for it just I wouldn't protest too much if some organization were to start kidnapping American diplomats and call them as a in as extortion, you know. Give us Assange, we set them free and so on. I think that arresting Assange is a clear case of a state crime and it should be, if it were to happen and so on. So ah, yeah, did I tell you already this, I think years ago I will repeat it. I'm preparing for, for meeting myself in my true will, let's say. I will try to give you an extreme example, I wonder how would you react to it. Maybe I mention it here but years ago more. Can I imagine a situation when I would kill someone who didn't torture or kill any other person? Yes, I can imagine. When I was in Latin America, I think it was Argentina, somebody told me of a doctor he met and this is for me the ultimate obscenity. You know, the military dictatorship there, when they tortured prisoners, they had doctors who, let's say a neutral example, I want to torture you now but I don't do it directly. First a doctor examines you and gives me precise indications. This guy, torture him in this way, what do you want? You want him healthy at the end, you don't mind if some eyes get lost or whatever, or you don't care if he dies. You tell him no, it can be some bones broken but he must remain alive and then he examines you and gives you precise, precise indications. And he can claim "wait a minute, I didn't do anything, I just". No. If, let me put it like this, if I were to find with this guy behind the same table drinking tea and somehow, don't ask me how, I would have some nice small cup of poison, I find this almost more disgusting than what direct torturers would have done. You know, this hypocrisy, "oh I just gave my opinion". I wouldn't, if I'm also a conformist, if it were be safe enough that I could see no way to blame me, I would have done it, I would have poisoned him. I would have done it. It's so absolutely disgusting. Precisely what makes it disgusting is not what he is doing but the way he thinks he kept his hands clear. You know, "oh I was just giving my opinion, what's wrong about it" and I always find this, for example, this is why I'm absolutely against, you know, the big German atom bomb scientist Werner Heisenberg. No, I read two books on him and they are horrible. You know why? This is the worst of conformism. Now it's absolutely proven. Even that play *Copenhagen* is too soft on him. He tried desperately to build the bomb. He just screwed it up scientifically. He made a miscalculation. And we even know today which miscalculation. He judged that much more of that heavy water from Norway will be needed. And so he thought we cannot do it. But they could have done it with much less water. And after the war, I find this so disgusting, in no way there are no indications that this is true, he tried to sell his scientific failure in calculating as a secret act of resistance, you know. "I was really trying to sabotage it" and so on and so on. But let's not lose time with this today, I hope you will not be too bored because I really want to move a little bit more into theory. First about as I promised you about this dystopian virtual worlds, our obsessions with games and movies which take place after some apocalyptic catastrophe. How does it work? From here I will enter the topic of circular temporality, immortality, and hopefully I will have time to approach that movie which is a modest one but I find quite interesting, I mentioned it to you two days ago, *Arrival*. Okay, so let me begin. I refer here to a man, how do you pronounce it? Is it Bown or Bowen? B-O-W-N. Bowen. Bowen. X-O. Okay, I don't want to [unintelligible]. Alfred Bown will soon publish, he asked me for a blurb, that's how I got hold of his short manuscript. It will be a book by Polity Press, I think, about the underlying ideology of video games. And he, Bown, proposed a nice formula of the attraction of post-apocalyptic video games, all that, you know, we are just after the end of the world catastrophe, as thinly disguised utopias. Here is a quote from his manuscript. "Dystopian disasters are really just a fresh chance, an opportunity to simplify our existence and leave everything behind. The problem faced with is not so much a lack of utopia that we are facing today because this is really what dystopic dreams are: the enjoyment of a chance to restart in a more simplified world, thinly veiled by the apparent horror of dystopic collapse. In other words, it is utopia repackaged. The chance to envisage changes to capitalist modernity is eradicated, leaving only dreams of tempering its destructiveness and of starting afresh after the apocalyptic fallout." End of quote. An early apocalyptic mega-flop, one of those proverbial movies which lost incredible amounts of money, from Kevin Costner's *The Postman*, does this. It's an incredible movie, this reactionary utopia at its purest. Set in but written fifteen years ago. It takes place a decade or two after an unspecified apocalyptic event which left a huge impact on human civilization and erased most technologies. So that, you know, people live in small dispersed communities, usually in very brutal poverty and relations of new domination. So it follows the story of an unnamed nomadic drifter, played by Kevin Costner, who stumbles across the uniform of an old United States Postal Service mail carrier. So what he does, it's very interesting. He starts to act as if he really is a postman. Between dispersed communities he begins to distribute, scattered villages, he begins to distribute post, pretending to act on behalf of the restored United States of America. Then others begin to imitate him and gradually the basic institutional network of the United States emerges again. The utopia that arises after the zero point of apocalyptic destruction is, and that's crucial, we get as a happy ending precisely the United States that we have now. Now it is easy to see how, although they may appear to be an exemplary case of the Hollywood left critically depicting the self-destructive potential of the capitalist civilization, such post-apocalyptic fantasies actually imply that there is no way out. Not only does the post-apocalyptic restoration end up in a utopia of the same society that preceded the apocalypse, just with some minor superficial embellishments, the very story of a new beginning after the apocalypse as it were clears the slate and repeats a basic bourgeois myth. I think the secret promise of these post-apocalyptic stories is: through an apocalypse may appear a catastrophe but what we will get is not a new society, but the same old society, just in which all the bad phenomena will be somehow erased. We get the ideal capitalism instead of corrupted capitalism. Bown, this guy, ingeniously here turns around Freud's standard thesis about dream as a disguised fulfillment of a repressed infantile wish. Another last quote from Bown: "While Freud might argue that dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a repressed infantile wish, in the context of this discussion of video games, the diagnosis can be reformulated in the following way: dreams are disguised as the fulfillment of a repressed infantile wish while the dream is the dream of the other," he means of the social other, "it is disguised as the fulfillment of the subject's internal instinctive desire." So it's a very nice idea, you know, it's very simple reversal, you got it. It's not that our apparently complex symbolically structured dreams are just a cover-up for some primitive infantile desire, it's the other way around. What appears as an infantile desire is a false mask. One should recall here Marx's classic critique of Thomas Hobbes. Capitalist civilization is not just an attempt to regulate and contain the wildness of the state of nature through social contract. This state of nature itself is already capitalism at its zero level. And I claim the same holds for the zero level state in apocalyptic games and movies. It stands for capitalism, for this specific capitalist constellation disguised as a wild state of nature. However, ah, now comes the theoretical point. Where does the claim, repeated by Bown, the claim that every formation of our desires is a historically specific product of social struggles, and in this sense political, where does all this bring us? Bown gives to this claim a Lacanian spin, pointing out how the Lacanian theory of desire provides the best conceptual apparatus to understand how the digital universe, our Big Other, especially that of video games, determines our desires. Like you think there that you are almost, you know, when you, and for some time then I got bored, I was doing this together with my young son, you know, for example, we spent hours playing that stupid game Taxi, Taxi Driver. But we totally twisted the rules. My our point was not to drive customers from one place to another, but to drive customers and to kill as many people and you would have said "No, it was just that we were regressed to our instinctual nature," No, precisely, we read the game correctly. Apparently, and my son again has a tremendous talent, at least for this. I remember, how is it called, that game where you build your house, your family... Sims? Yes, yes. And my son, you know, I suggested him to play that game for pedagogic reasons so that you will be able to build house, do a work, blah blah blah, people go around and you have a family. You know, and he went to play the game with an obvious goal and real, he used literally less than quarter of an hour to introduce murder, torture and so on. You know how you do it, an advice: you get quickly married, it's part of the game, and then you have a child. And then you don't feed the child. The child gets all red, then social services somehow are informed, they come, you start shooting them and there you are. You know, to the middle of the family game. But what I am saying is that this is precisely not a distortion of it. That's that's what is beneath it. So again, how then does this universe work? I didn't want to show it to you already this many times you so I will just mention again the well-known scene from what is for me one of the biggest, maybe the biggest British movie of all times, Terry Gilliam's *Brazil*. In the scene, minutes into the movie, it takes place in a high-class restaurant, I often debated already in my books this scene, all the customers, it doesn't matter what the customers okay, guests behind the table, they get as menu dazzling photos nicely of dishes and that, and then when they order of this dish and that, I think it's unique, it's one of the best examples of what Lacan calls separation as opposed to alienation. When they get the meal, they get a plate, and on it is just some some grey indistinct half-fluid, half-shit whatever like dogs, and but above it there is a dazzling photo in colors, nice steak or whatever all that. So you get the real, that disgusting lump, and you get what you are really eating, the symbolic image. But the two are nicely separated. It's wonderful how reality, the real and fantasy are separated. But there is another, which I neglected in my previous analysis, wonderful detail of this scene. When the waiter presents to the customers around the table the menu, and the hero, played by Jonathan Pryce, refuses to choose. He just shouts at the waiter back "Bring me whatever, I don't care". The waiter gets more and more angry, aggressive and insists that the hero should make a choice. Like, "You must choose, choose, choose!" And then at the end the waiter, then I think Jonathan Pryce says "OK, OK, this one", "Yes, you've chosen!" and violently he closes the menu. The irony of this detail cannot but strike the eye. The waiter insists on the choice precisely because what each of the customers will get is what looks like the same excremental lump, just with a different colorful photo above it. A free choice is needed to sustain the appearance that precisely appearance, what we see on the photo matters. That there is a substantial difference between the choice of excremental lumps. But isn't this our situation? I claim like now it's not only two, you have three now. Classic Coke, Diet Coke, Zero Coke. I feel exactly like this. They are almost the same although did I already tell you this, I know from my evil son whom I mentioned, he did part of his high school, now he is old enough, research, they call it research, it was just a little bit of plagiarizing from the web, about what's the difference between Diet Coke and Zero Coke. I think already mentioned this here, it's very interesting. It's a sexual difference. The research of Coke Company showed them that light Coke, light diet is is perceived as too soft, too feminine. Men avoided it. And the result, the result so Zero, sorry, yeah, okay, I'm old I don't know but now you see secretly I'm transgender, I'm open to the feminine side in me or whatever, yeah. No, but so literally it was planned: Zero Coke is supposed to be black, dark, harsh, it is light for men. And now comes this, really as in the scene from *Brazil*, point. Then some researchers, not part of Coca-Cola of course, first they discovered that there is some percent correspondence, that a large majority of men, if they want to drink light, drink Zero, a large majority of women drink light. Okay, there is a slight difference what poison you get there in, but they made a simple experiment. They repackaged it, like they put some Zero into Light, into Diet and vice versa, and a large majority of men who claimed "No, I only drink Zero, I can immediately identify it", of course didn't identify the difference. Now let's be serious here, I'm not making fun of men and so on and so on, I'm just claiming that, or of women in this case, I'm just claiming to what extent the way things are designed, packaged and so on determines our desires. But is this enough to say what? This? This how our desires are not immediate for an object, they are always historically constructed and so on and so on. And here I find, although I respect his work deeply, kind of a blind spot of this wonderful short book of Alfred Bown. He simply insists that an emancipated subject should fully accept this radical alienation of his/her desire. The fact that his/her desire is never his/her own but regulated through external social symbolic mechanisms. His claim is that either we have this false sense of the self, "I really want this," but all you can do is to discover how what you experience as your self is really just an overdetermined result of symbolic texture, ideologies and so on and so on. So again, Bown focuses on how the Big Other in the guise of digital programs functions as the external site that determines and regulates our desires. With the obvious reference to Lacan. He quotes repeatedly Lacan's formula "Desire is the desire of the Other." It's not mine, it's constructed through social mediation and so on and so on. And of course this can easily be shown how even negative desires, desires to transgress to violate the norms, the space for them is opened through norms. But if our desires always already were decentered, because of course Bown consequently should not be claiming that once we really had our desires, now they are manipulated in our digital age, they always were decentered. What is new here in digitalization? What was desire not always like this? Is the digital Big Other, all those computer programs that manipulate us when we play a digital game or in many other cases, just a new case of the symbolic Big Other? A case which enables us to become aware of how we are decentered and regulated. Spoken and not speaking as Lacan put it. Lacan's answer is a resolute "No." What is threatened in the digitalization of our daily lives is not our free subjectivity but the Big Other itself, the agency of the symbolic order in its, let's call it naively standard, functioning. Another of Lacan's axioms above "desire is the desire of the Other" is "There is no Big Other." And we should take this statement in its strongest sense, as opposed to a mere "The Big Other doesn't exist." Lacan has here a precise distinction. If he says that something doesn't exist, *n'existe pas*, this means just that it doesn't exist in reality, but it still has it still can exist as a virtual symbolic fiction which structures our activity. For example, if you are a naive discursive materialist, and even Hegel is here... Hegel would have said, of course Hegel is here enough of a materialist, of course God or State or Party Communism, it doesn't exist an an object as an object in our world. It only exists through our concrete activity. There is Communism insofar as there are concrete individuals fighting for it or fighting against it and so on and so on. That's Hegel's idea of the Big Other. And Hegel, he is not quite correct here, also reads Christianity, Holy Ghost like this. Holy Ghost is not God of beyond, it's something that only exists through the activity of concrete material human beings. But this is *n'existe pas*. This is to say the Big Other doesn't exist. Like, to be vulgar, if you kill all Communists then also Communism no longer exists, because there is no one to practice it. But when Lacan says "*Il n'y a pas de grand Autre*," there is no... he has in mind a much stronger meaning. "There is no Big Other" implies that the Big Other cannot even persist as a coherent symbolic fiction since it is always thwarted, destabilized through immanent antagonisms and inconsistencies. This is why for Lacan the Big Other is unconscious. And Lacan plays nicely with this *inconscient*. You know, he uses the shortened formula "ICS" which can be read at the same time as *inconscient* and *inconsistance*. And this brings us to the crux of the matter. For Lacan, there is a space for subjectivity only insofar as the Big Other, there is no Big Other. The space for subjectivity is precisely in this: lacks, gaps, inconsistencies and so on of of the Big Other. And okay, I repeated this endlessly in my books, I will not lose time now. This is why for Lacan what does it practically mean, there is no Big Other? It means paradoxically the space of freedom. It means what Lacan calls separation in contrast to alienation. Because no matter how much you repeat "Oh I have no free will, I am overdetermined by symbolic mechanisms," all those stupid formulas which are not the ultimate truth of Lacan, "I am not speaking, I am spoken," "Subject is just an effect of the signifier" and so on and so on. This is the position of alienation. My truth is out of myself, out there. But for Lacan, if this were the ultimate truth, then there would only maybe exist imaginary selves, selves with their will of course. [unintelligible] But not, not subjects. A subject emerges, a subject in the strict Lacanian sense, which means people neglect this, as an ethical subject. They exist only insofar as there is a gap in the Other. Which is why subject is strictly correlative to what Lacan calls the lack in the Other. For example, you can see this nicely with intelligent theologians, when they claim that an impenetrable God, a God even more radically who is a mystery for himself also, is strictly correlative to to human freedom. And just a brief because because I think the detour, I think that here Protestantism returns to something that was, as far as I can say, I'm not a big specialist here but I think I'm at least on the right path, something that you find in the most radical Judaism. I quoted, I cannot resist repeating it in two of my books already I think, the most you must know here more than me, there is a wonderful story from Talmud I think, and I even have it in two versions. And this is the greatness of Judaism, that they say it openly. You know, that's why precisely things which in Old Testament and Talmud which are quoted as it were usually against the Jews, you see they are not serious, they are corrupt, are the greatest thing for me. In what sense? For example, the story of David and Bathsheba, yeah. People usually say you see how dirty they were, he sent a his own soldier to death just to be able to screw in peace that lady and so on. But isn't it wonderful, I claim our answer should be "But all kings were like that," and the greatness is that they say it there, you know. You find so much simple evil in Old Testament and so on, I find this wonderful. And the same with that with that wonderful story from Talmud, again look at my books I quote it in detail, how how two great wise guys, rabbis, were debating a point. And the one who was losing said, the one who was losing said "Look, we cannot decide, let's call Jehovah himself to come and decide who of us have right." Then then comes an incredible turn. Jehovah comes. And tries to mediate. And then the guy who was winning starts to shout at Jehovah. Literally almost in these terms: "Listen, you old guy, you did your job, you created the world but you screwed it up pretty much so fuck off, now it's for us wise men to decide, to debate." And you know what Jehovah said? "Oh my god, he is right," and runs away. That's true theology for me. That's and it's a deep lesson which I will not, I will try to [unintelligible] too much. [Laughter] No, but I will put it like this. You know, if I were to be allowed to be myself... [Host: "Since the chair has defeated me."] Yeah, yeah. But you know like how should I put it, if I were to put it in these terms I would understood it, but these primitive people here would not. So I have to humiliate myself to be understood. Especially I know the elder guy did not say, did not say to Jehovah "fuck off," no, not quite in these terms, you know. No, but you see my point it's also in my *Antigone* play, which strangely how it was a total flop. Even the book does, obviously I thought it would do better, you know my new version of *Antigone*. And I discovered all around by reactions that I touched something that I shouldn't have touched, Antigone it's too much, too mythic. You know my version of how three versions blah blah blah. But what I am especially proud is that in the second version I quote Kol Nidre, no? And I know it was from 15th century or 16th even I think, no. [Audience: "It's older."] Is it, but not but it's not the Old Testament. No no, it's medieval. But it is medieval, that's what I mean. But nonetheless, it's not simply all antisemites like to quote it like "You see, Jews are lying" and so on. No, it's a much deeper insight, if I put it in my Lacanian terms, precisely in the same sense in which Big Other doesn't exist. You are never totally bound by a symbolic commitment. This is not this is not the last this is not the last horizon. So, so let me go on. The deepest insight here is that we should move, we can move beyond alienation. Now psychoanalysis may appear to be the ultimate poetry of alienation. You know, you think you are the free self but the Big Other, your unconscious determines you, you are overdetermined and so on and so on. But that's the beauty of psychoanalysis. The first, you know it's this properly dialectical reversal. The first gesture is "Yes, we are predetermined by the unconscious, we don't have a free self." But then in a step further, you are even deprived of this last assurance, you know. Because in what sense? Freud makes it clear, and that's the big paradox, properly theological of psychoanalysis, it's "Yes, we are determined, unconscious, but nonetheless we are guilty, responsible." You, that is to say, you absolutely don't have the right to say "Okay, I killed the child," sorry for this pathetic example, "but what can you do? It wasn't me, it was the Big Other who was acting through me." No. You are you are this is why Freud says, I forgot where, somewhere that the lesson of psychoanalysis is much worse than the lesson of confession. In a Catholic confession you confess your sins, what you know. In psychoanalysis you must confess and be responsible even for what you don't know about yourself. But you see that for Lacan this is the space of freedom. The fact that *il n'y a pas de grand Autre*, there is no Big Other, there is no external symbolic site to which you can rely as to the ultimate ethical ontological agency so that you can say "It's not me but that's it, that's the true master." This master might be secret, over out there, they are controlling me, but nonetheless there is a place where things are really decided. The deepest lesson of psychoanalysis for Lacan is that that Big Other doesn't exist. And precisely this lack in the Other itself opens up the space for our freedom. Because if I cannot even rely on the Big Other then in some fundamental sense I am free, free and fully responsible. I have to I have to I have to I have to do it. So now, I didn't lose my thread. [Laughter] because let me now will come my paradoxical conclusion. Let me return to digitalization. I think that the change with digitalization and the danger, why digitalization is a threat for human subjectivity, it's not simply because we are determined out there by the Big Other, but that the Big Other is no longer this properly symbolic Big Other with inconsistency and so on and so on. It is as if the Big Other really exists out there in digital programs and so on and so on. So what because again I will just briefly return to what Lacan means by "There is no Big Other." It means and this is absolutely crucial, for Lacan castration doesn't mean "I am castrated, I never fully have what I want, I'm separated." No, the Big Other is castrated. That's absolutely Lacan's fundamental insight. There is no substantial Big Other, community, whatever, on which I can rely. There is antagonism, inconsistency in the Big Other itself. And I claim this inconsistency is obfuscated, blocked by this digital dream of "we will be totally controlled" and so on and so on. So paradoxically the way to approach the problem of "Is digitalization the threat to our identity?" is not to indulge in this paradoxical dreams or "will be totally controlled" and so on and so on, but what's the fate of the Big Other? There is no subject without an incomplete Big Other. Now, again to recapitulate, today's digitalization poses a threat to autonomous human subjectivity, no. What digitalization threatens is precisely the decentered Freudian subject. Now, but nonetheless something weird is happening in digitalization, another effect which is much more interesting. The digital machinery that sustains video games not only directs and regulates our desires, it also constitutes, constructs us or puts us into a specific mode of subjectivity. I think that's the key element that is than in digital games. How do we function there? We enter a, I'm sorry to use these bombastic terms, a pre-oedipal, not yet castrated subjectivity that floats in a kind of obscene immortality. When I'm immersed into a game, I dwell in a universe of undeadness where no annihilation is definitive since after every destruction I can return to the beginning and start the game again. It's this kind of obscene immortality. And of course, I will just repeat my old stuff here when I say that this obscene immortality was the stuff of fantasy long before cartoons. Because apart from video games we already had it in cartoons, that's why I love them. You remember the good ones, the late ones are bad, like Tom and Jerry from the 50s. What I always like and I just try to imagine the most obscene movie with real actors would have been just try to enact with real actors a simple Tom and Jerry story. You know, Tom is run over by a car, cut into pieces and so on, but in undeadness you begin again and again and again. [Laughter] So it's clearly that what happened in digital games, when you can start again and again, return to the same point and so on, is something that obviously is part of a much more fundamental fantasy that you find not only in cartoons but already, we know where it all it all of it is clearly formulated, in Marquis de Sade. As Lacan noted in his *Kant avec Sade*, what you find in the Sadean victim, if you read those rather boring book I never could have read it, *Juliette* for example. Isn't *Juliette* very similar to Tom or Jerry? She is tortured in this way, cut, but magically she remains beautiful, she remains the same all the time. It's this type of circular universe. But it's an interesting universe. Why? Because it runs against the philosophy of finitude. Here I rely a little bit on Quentin Meillassoux who criticized it of course. According to the philosophy of finitude, finitude or mortality is the unsurpassable horizon of our existence. We cannot escape it. And you have nice phenomenological analysis demonstrating how the very dreams of immortality, infinity, are only meaningful against the implicit background of our mortality. But Lacan's axiom is that, no matter how much you try, you cannot escape immortality. So of course really we die, but the way we function, we are always sustained by this by immortality. And you incidentally, this of course phantasmic obscene immortality, here I in a very friendly way disagree a little bit with Badiou who likes to elevate immortality as this noble eventual category against mortality of us as, as he puts it, human animals. My point against him is yes, we have this, let's call it very naively, noble immortality: you sacrifice yourself for a cause, for an idea. But we also have the obscene immortality. The immortality not only of cartoons, of Sadean victims, but also the immortality, I mentioned this here twenty times probably I will not go into it again just mention it again, the immortality of the living dead, of ghosts and so on. Already Schelling, German idealist, put it nicely when he said that this ambiguity of the term *spirit*, *Geist* is crucial. It can mean spirituality in the noble sense, but it can also mean ghosts, and ghosts are usually evil. You know, they are a sign of that we didn't do our duty or whatever. Like, why does Hamlet's ghost, Hamlet's father's ghost appear? Not because he was a great guy, but because, as they put it in *Hamlet*, people neglect this, that he died "in the flower of his sins" or whatever. I it's clear, it's absolutely clear, that's my god the ABC of reading *Hamlet*, that the true evil guy in the play is Hamlet's father. It's not a Claudius. Read a book, if you want to be amused I'm sorry if I repeat myself, John Updike, otherwise I don't like him too much, *Gertrude and Claudius*. My favorite re-reading of *Hamlet*. It takes place just before *Hamlet*, and it tells the story from Gertrude and Claudius' side. They were sincere lovers, the father, Hamlet's father, the king was an extremely brutal evil guy, threatening them both. So, more in a self-defense they kill him. Then Claudius is a good king, and you have almost a happy ending, like and everything was well in the Kingdom of Denmark, and then just one sentence: "Just till the stupid arrogant Prince returned from I don't know where and ruined everything again and so on." I'm convinced by that if you ask me. Okay. So, so let's so let's go on. I think that what Cantor, Georg, that one mathematician, did for infinity, you know, introducing a multiplicity of infinities. Because till Cantor infinity was usually linked to one. Infinity is the One, Divine, against the plurality. Cantor's revolution was introducing multiplicity of infinities, which is why he was quite right, you know that he was a devout Catholic who felt extremely guilty for this and even wrote, I read somewhere a letter to Pope. And he was right to feel guilty from a Catholic standpoint because he did maybe one of the greatest moves in materialist revolution: he snatched away the topic of infinity from religion and proposed a materialist a materialist infinity. So again, to conclude this part, I would say that what I'm describing here now you will say "Okay, but it's just a fantasy, no? A fantasy of this repeated immortality. We cannot do it in real life, so it doesn't matter." Of course we cannot do it literally. If you screw it up you cannot run back and so on. But nonetheless I claim that with the digitalization of our lives, our real lives even, and how this affects our real life existence, we can enact, live this kind of, how should I call it, this kind of fake infinity or immortality. For example, I can act in my love life as if I'm experimenting with ever new partners, and if the relationship doesn't work I can erase it and start again. I know despicable friends of mine, they are no longer friends of mine, who acted in this way. You know, they said "What is love? It's like cartoons, you do it, you fail, you erase it, you start again and so on and so on." So we do have a real-life existential stance which somehow enacts this evil infinity. So instead of celebrating such an immersion into the gaming dream world as a liberating stance of our of playful repetitions, we should precisely discern in it what in psychoanalysis we would have called the denial of castration, of the gap constitutive of subjectivity. Okay, I will not go on too much here just to tell you, you know which movie, although it's not as great as some people claim, makes nonetheless here the right lesson. Did you see *Groundhog Day*? It has a wonderful implicit theological premise which is that to cut it short, infinity, immortality is ontologically lower, less than temporality. You know what's the story, the guy awakens each day and can start again blah blah blah, and when true love wins, he falls into time again. You remember at the end he awakens the next day. But this is precisely progress. And I think this is the deepest lesson for me. Forget about theology, even of Christianity as intelligent theologians know. The embodiment of Christ is not fall, it's a progress. Infinity is ethically ontologically less than immortality. We not fall into infinity, once we play all these virtual games like the hero in the *Groundhog Day* and it's a certain triumph maturity that we are able to fully awaken or to elevate ourselves to temporality. And now, just a minute because I promised democracy. Oh, I still can have half an hour, okay. Now, to illustrate this point, I would like just to mention briefly a movie, I asked you to to copy. So you have already two things to to denounce me now. First I I condoned terror against United States, and now even worse in the capitalist universe I would advise you to use Pirate Bay to... [Laughter] You know I told you the last time *Arrival*, Denis Villeneuve, that a film precisely about this type of temporal paradoxes, circular time and so on. Incidentally it's from the story of Ted Chiang. Ted Chiang is a very interesting science fiction author, a Chinese living in United States, and it's interesting how it looks that now China is emerging also as a country with very good science fiction literature. I think I already mentioned it here, their biggest hit is Liu Cixin, I'm not sure I pronounce it correctly, *The Three-Body Problem*, which is a whole trilogy. And then and it's even controlled, did I tell you already this, maybe some months ago, you know that some two years ago I think, Chinese authorities passed a law prohibiting in any public art media, in cartoons, in movies, TV series and in literature, two topics: of time travel and of alternate realities. It's clear why. They are afraid that somebody would say "Well, what if China would not be communist, or what if we can return and get rid of Mao" or whatever. They, but they put it in more bombastic terms, that this opens up this topic of alternate realities and time travel open up a disrespectful, a space for a disrespectful attitude towards Chinese cultural traditions or something like this. Okay. But so what happens in this movie? You will have now to suffer a little bit, I'm sorry to tell you the story. I'm sorry, and then I will give a reading. So *Arrival* subverts the standard Hollywood formula of the production of a couple as the frame of a catastrophic encounter. You know, I've written extensively about it, and that's what I like about Hollywood catastrophe movies. If you notice, it's always, I underline it, always that the big catastrophe, the end of the world, comet hitting the earth, is always a pretext for a story which is either Oedipal story or story of the production of a couple. For example, did you see the one which even Badiou liked, I like to spread because he is my friend these rumors of him, you know that one of great films for Badiou was *Armageddon*. You remember Bruce Willis, the father, he doesn't like it that Ben Affleck is screwing Liv Tyler, which means young guy being the lover of his beautiful daughter. So then it's so clear that the comet threatening to destroy Earth is basically the materialization of the father's fury. And the film ends that the father sacrifices himself, hits the asteroid in this way, exploding it, but his last words are to his daughter "I wish you all the best, now you can be with the guy." He accepts it. It's and all others, like my big example I mentioned it here two three times, did you see *Deep Impact*? It's similar, it's Téa Leoni, a girl who is furious at her father. And again you have the catastrophe threat to the earth which is clearly just the materialization of her fury and so on and so on. And at the end, it's really an extra-Oedipal ending, when the big wave destroying all of the East Coast is approaching, she goes to her father, they embrace, she says "Daddy," up they disappear in a big wave. It's a you know what's so interesting? Here you can see what Lacan means by Object A and so on. Something that appears just an accidental side story is really what the movie libidinally is about. And I will not repeat because I already did times how along these lines I tried to read also *Titanic*, you know. That it's not even a love story, beneath the progressive aspect of *Titanic*, you really find the nastiest bourgeois myth. Because who is the actor my god, DiCaprio, he is not really it's not just they are transgressing the rules by making love... you know I'm sorry if I repeat myself, check it up if you don't believe me. Look at that crucial moment where Leonardo DiCaprio is dying, freezing. At the very moment of his death, she, Kate Winslet, shouts "I will never let you go, I will never let you go!" But look at her hands. She is pushing him away. So it's clear that what's the movie really about, is the story of a it's *Captain Courageous* another version, story of a rich spoiled lady, impotent, caught in her decadent life. And you know this is an old bourgeois myth. Sometimes rich people live in their own way, and to regain vitality, they have to suck the blood, exploit, get the energy from ordinary people. And that's why her main function is not to screw her, whatever, it's just to restore her ego, her will to self if I may put it. Get the guy, kill the guy again. Keep going. Yeah, yeah, because you remember already when they are first time when he sees her naked, they don't make love, he he paints her drawing, you know. It's all about restoring herself. And do another thing. Go to DVD look, or Pirate Bay [Laughter] look at the that final scene just before he pushes him she pushes him away. His last words to her when he is dying, are not the words of a lover, but the words of some kind of a consultant: "Be honest, be true to yourself" and so on. I mean it's such a clear emotional exploitation. She she is the vanishing mediator. His function is over so he can freeze. It's really a melodrama about a young bourgeois girl restoring her vitality. But this is of course parallel the institution which organized this very story is also rejuvenating itself. Yes, I agree. That happened at the BFI at that very moment. Ah, no no no, yes, I agree. Yeah. To analyze exactly the the trajectory of the British Film Institute up to that moment, and then from that moment onwards, it is amazing that means they rejuvenate and stabilize themselves with your help and you... Okay, my help let's see. Yeah yeah. You must never be an actor, always be the director. You learn to make films in a minute. Just one thing you need to know: synchronicity between image and sound. That's all you need to know. No, no, you know in what sense I don't fully agree with you, because we don't have time to go into it but, because really intelligent directors, and I admire them, introduce small cuts, break into this synchronicity, and these are usually the most interesting notion. How for example, typical, it's not even you have don't have to be a great director, it's standard procedure, when one scene is ending, you hear a sound which you misinterpret as part of this scene but it's really already from the next scene. Now if you just do this mechanically is shit, but if you do it intelligent. But you know where I agree with you, I I think that Kathryn Bigelow and what's his name my god the director, James Cameron are just two sides of the same Hollywood establishment. Neither of them is progressive. I think that Cameron is a typical example of what I call fake Hollywood Marxism. It appears sometimes to be progressive even ridiculously, like in *Titanic*, you remember like all the lower you go the better are the people, lower classes dancing merrily, up there corrupted rich men. What I wanted to show with my reading is that precisely beneath this is a very conservative different myth. No, the only now since you provoked me, I will tell you the obscenity, my only sympathy to James Cameron, not David, James Cameron is I read years ago, in our politically correct times it would no longer be possible to say this, but I'm not obscene I'm just quoting him. He was asked how did he fell in love, why did he marry Kathryn Bigelow, who was more or less beautiful but very cold type of beauty when she was young. You know what he said publicly? That from the very first moment he was intrigued her cold face, how does it change when she is in intense sex, you know, and that he wanted to see this, so if there is no other way, marry her. [Laughter] I find this if you ask me an excellent reason to marry, no? Much more than all spiritual bullshit or whatever. Okay. because we don't have... yeah, yeah, *Arrival*. [Host: "In the context of advice for the chair?"] Yeah yeah. No no the chair is is the chair but I always look who is the real master behind the chair but let's not. Okay. The film yeah. Okay look listen. You know what I really want to give you, I lose too much time time for debate, so I will somehow condense it. At the beginning you see a lady, at the beginning of the film just a couple of minutes, lady, the heroine, alone and her daughter, who is already in her early teens, dying of cancer or whatever. Then you get a obviously a flashback. This lady is some linguistic researcher, whatever, and at eight places on our earth at the same time, aliens land. And it's again this Lacanian situation, what do they want? Nobody knows. So she the lady is mobilized with another scientist to establish contact with aliens and, okay, of course she falls in love also, they fall in love the two, but I'm simplifying the story very much. What is crucial is that they gradually establish that the aliens are here to help us, to force humanity to be one, and that they even learn to read their language. They are really octopuses, squeezed, squid, it is not the same but you know what I mean like ink. Their their writing is a language where they just like an octopus pushing out her its ink, they just push it on the wall, on the on the glass wall, where they are confronted with these two representation of humanity, and gradually they learn to read it, but it's a different type of language. It's a kind of a circular language where future and past are the same, they see the future, they they no longer live in linear time. And okay, at the films, I will skip all the complications, at the film's end they leave, the aliens, because they brought humanity together, the real their real message is constructed from partial messages on the eight ships or and, which landed in different parts of the worlds. They claim that they came here to the earth to help us because they know the future, for them future the past and present are in the same circular contemporaneous synchronous space, that in years into the future they will need humanity's help. And then what happens is that at the end of the film the heroine and her scientific partner, the hero, fall in love and decide to be together and to have a child, this is briefly hinted at, but then it becomes clear to you what really happened. She gets it that her visions, like the beginning of the film and you have some other apparitions, are not some primordial memories but visions from the future. So, this is the wisdom imparted on her by aliens. They enabled her to see her own past and also future. So her situation is "I love this guy, should we be together or not?" She knows that he will drop her out of despair because they will soon discover that the child, a girl that they will have, has whatever cancer, leukemia and will die in a couple of years. She knows everything and the painful death of her daughter but she nonetheless decides, with clear knowledge what is coming, she decides to do it. Now, so again the ideology of the film is here is what Chiang, the writer, wrote about the story on which the film is based, just to make it clear: "Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness like one after the other, temporality or thought, while Heptapods," these are these gigantic squids aliens with seven legs whatever, "have developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experience events in an order and we perceive their relationship as cause and effect. They," aliens, "experience all events at once and perceive a purpose underlying them all." End of quote. So living in such a circular time radically transforms the notion of acting, not actor but acting in the sense of intervening. Our common idea of the opposition between free choice and determinism is left behind. Another quote from the writer: "The Heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand these concepts. They don't act according to their will nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes them, their mode of awareness, is not just that their actions coincide with
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history's events, it is also that
history's events, it is also that
Slavoj Žižek
their motives coincide with history's purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology." Now if this were to be all, we would have the usual New Age kitsch. You know, there is a deeper contemporaneous circularity, like even again the language of these octopuds is kind of an imperfect, imperfect in the sense of a circular circle, and they see the future, past, part of the same totality and so on and so on. But problems immediately emerge here, and here I see the intelligence of the movie. Okay, it's easy to get... first, the first nice point of the movie is that although it may appear obvious, the difference between humans and aliens is not sexualized. It's not human man versus feminized aliens. No, aliens Heptapods are more presented as this like
their motives coincide with history's purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology." Now if this were to be all, we would have the usual New Age kitsch. You know, there is a deeper contemporaneous circularity, like even again the language of these octopuds is kind of an imperfect, imperfect in the sense of a circular circle, and they see the future, past, part of the same totality and so on and so on. But problems immediately emerge here, and here I see the intelligence of the movie. Okay, it's easy to get... first, the first nice point of the movie is that although it may appear obvious, the difference between humans and aliens is not sexualized. It's not human man versus feminized aliens. No, aliens Heptapods are more presented as this like
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Kraken almost, ultimate horror, this squid
Kraken almost, ultimate horror, this squid
Slavoj Žižek
with a great
with a great
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great mouth sucking us in or whatever. It's the object of animal horror. The interesting thing is that remember how I described it to you that the film's thesis is not just we know the future, we are caught into it. Remember the situation of the heroine at the end of the film. She is she sees the future, but she still has the freedom to choose it or not. And that's a nice point because and it's even a correct theoretical position, I would claim. It's again we are back at the deepest of Judaism and Protestantism. Which is predestination, fate and so on. Like, the fate of
great mouth sucking us in or whatever. It's the object of animal horror. The interesting thing is that remember how I described it to you that the film's thesis is not just we know the future, we are caught into it. Remember the situation of the heroine at the end of the film. She is she sees the future, but she still has the freedom to choose it or not. And that's a nice point because and it's even a correct theoretical position, I would claim. It's again we are back at the deepest of Judaism and Protestantism. Which is predestination, fate and so on. Like, the fate of
Slavoj Žižek
the furious, you saw that great work of art. [Laughter] You didn't see that stupid movie which now my god it earned over a billion, this means nothing to you, no wonder we are all poor academics you know. No seriously. What so he she sees the future but nonetheless she can change it. But the result is much more the underlying thesis of the film is not "even we see the future we cannot but enact it." It's a much deeper paradox of: you see the future, but this fate itself can be destroyed, historicized and so on. It's no it's similar to that boring paradox in all those *Back to the Future* movies where what happens when you travel into the past and kill your parents. If you do it, can you do it because if you do it then you cannot you will not be in the future, so you will not be in a position to move to the past, you will destroy erase your act itself. But if you destroy your act itself, would it not mean that your parents will nonetheless screw and produce you? You know like, I I think the correct reading is this one. A much deeper insight that every historical moment has its past and its future. In this sense we are predetermined. And I'm almost tempted to say in a very specific way, I don't have time to develop it here, that we cannot maybe change the future, it's predetermined, but we can change the past. And in this way... That is to say she knows the future. He she will get married to that guy, have a child with him, it will end tragically. So what happens if she acts against the future? She destroys it's a total catastrophe, future and the past. It's a totally new world. It's a kind of a radical death drive. You know, it's the vision of history is not just the vision of the usual common sense vision. I am here now, I have a determined past, but I have different options for the future. No, it is the future is predetermined in the sense of if I remain within my historical totality, ideology, it's a clear line past-future. From past to future and it's shit, as we know today. If we just go on today the way we did it's some kind of catastrophe for
the furious, you saw that great work of art. [Laughter] You didn't see that stupid movie which now my god it earned over a billion, this means nothing to you, no wonder we are all poor academics you know. No seriously. What so he she sees the future but nonetheless she can change it. But the result is much more the underlying thesis of the film is not "even we see the future we cannot but enact it." It's a much deeper paradox of: you see the future, but this fate itself can be destroyed, historicized and so on. It's no it's similar to that boring paradox in all those *Back to the Future* movies where what happens when you travel into the past and kill your parents. If you do it, can you do it because if you do it then you cannot you will not be in the future, so you will not be in a position to move to the past, you will destroy erase your act itself. But if you destroy your act itself, would it not mean that your parents will nonetheless screw and produce you? You know like, I I think the correct reading is this one. A much deeper insight that every historical moment has its past and its future. In this sense we are predetermined. And I'm almost tempted to say in a very specific way, I don't have time to develop it here, that we cannot maybe change the future, it's predetermined, but we can change the past. And in this way... That is to say she knows the future. He she will get married to that guy, have a child with him, it will end tragically. So what happens if she acts against the future? She destroys it's a total catastrophe, future and the past. It's a totally new world. It's a kind of a radical death drive. You know, it's the vision of history is not just the vision of the usual common sense vision. I am here now, I have a determined past, but I have different options for the future. No, it is the future is predetermined in the sense of if I remain within my historical totality, ideology, it's a clear line past-future. From past to future and it's shit, as we know today. If we just go on today the way we did it's some kind of catastrophe for
unknown
humanity, ecology, whatever. But we can
humanity, ecology, whatever. But we can
Slavoj Žižek
do a crazy act which in a way changes the past, not the real past, but how the past constructed that we inherited and so on. And this is for me a radical historical act. I'm not saying anything mystic here even. I always quoted at least seven eight times you know from T.S. Eliot's, what's his most famous as a literary English... *Tradition and the Individual Talent*? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You remember when he says that every great new work of art doesn't just break with the past, it changes the entire past. Of course not materially. But let's say past is present for us as the image of the past, symbolic and so on. We can change that. So again, the first act of changing the future is changing the past. Is this type of radical act which changes. And now I come to the philosophical conclusion. I want to be short here. This is why as I already emphasized here, the true choice is not this simple choice "do I do this or that," but a much radical choice, choice of changing the past itself. In other words, of undermining the entire context, historical totality part of which I am. So in some sense, that's my reading of the film, very moralistic. She, the girl, does a wrong choice. I don't know how you look at it, but it's too much of an egotistic choice. I think knowing that, I would have said "Okay, sorry," no I will be vulgar but not in any problematic way. "Okay let's have some sex with the guy if we like each other but no children if I know there will be" and so on. But something much more important we get here. Again, if you read the movie in the obvious way it would be New Age bullshit. We humans are limited, we have our abstract temporal sequential approach while these stupid organic holistic squids Heptapods they have a holistic approach, they see past, future, part of the same totality and so on and so on. All intelligent debates on the website I tried to get, most of them, focus correctly on one big topic. If they know everything already, they, aliens, Heptapods, what kind of help will they need from us years from now? What can we teach them? Totality it is there already, holistic totality and so on. We just bring limitation. And I have only one consequent Hegelian answer: that's what they are lacking. Breaking one-sidedness and so on and so on. The greatness of human symbolic universe it's precisely that it's not holistic. I think all, to put it naively, progress, change comes from non-holistic approach. From saying... Isn't also this love? Love is not holistic. Love is not "I love you all." No, the only guy who said "I love you all," you remember who it was, you are too young. Erich Mielke, the chief of Stasi, in his last appearance in East German Parliament where it was all falling down and people started to shout against him, and he did a wonderful gesture like this symbolic "But I love you all." *Aber ich liebe euch alle.* The greatness of love is precisely... no, sorry I don't want to be accused of harassing you, so I will just none of you. So "I love you" and ultimately... but no this is God. Okay. "I love you" and "I don't," you know this to accept this radical imbalance, one-sidedness. I don't want to see it. One-sidedness, partiality, choice. Hegel is not a holist in this sense. He always praises the power of abstraction, even what is our reason at its most creative? It's not "I see it all," that's only the first step. It's then to abstract, to say "I see it all, but," to put it in Maoist terms, "there is a principal contradiction." That is to say "but only this matters." So it's a wonderful deep insight that we cannot simply escape into any primordial holistic wisdom and so on. We need to make, to be one-sided, to make a radical choice. That this is the only way to build universality and so on and so on. That's for me again a very in a very nice subtle message of the film. And it's incredible how many interpreters, critics missed it because they read it as a simple New Age mysticism. While on the contrary, the point of the movie is not that everything is predestined, we stupid humans just don't know it. Yes, we cannot change fate, we cannot change the scope of our fate once we are within it. But in a much more radical we can change, ruin fate itself. And this precisely is our strength as abstract beings. The power of humanity is negativity is to abstract, to cut. As Hegel puts it, the power of human spirit is not to bring together the opposite, but to tear apart what in nature belongs together. So you see this is what I like to do, to take a movie which may appear saying the opposite, and to read it in a more subtle way. And I read some interviews with the director. He's so-so, he was aware, but not quite clearly what he is doing. Since I offered you some... [Host: "Yes, it allows me one point crucial for the way to connect to that. That means however the framework which organizes that discourse..."] Which discourse? [Host: "For instance your discourse in the moment or the discourse in which you support the film, has its own power of of adding holistic aspects even if you are negating it."] In what sense precisely? [Host: "Well, very concretely. If you then... because the discourse is in the heads of the of your audience always, not in your own output. And so therefore when you in the film, as I previously mentioned, come out of airplane doors, directly after previously we have seen Stalin coming out or Hitler. Yeah. So in a sense it transports you into a realm which no doubt you did not add your intention to that that ends would happen."] Yeah, but you don't hear me... no, because I think that at the same time, wait a minute, imagine it me standing at the side of Stalin. I doubt Stalin will survive this, you know what I mean. Am I not a scandal there, stepping out like Stalin and so on? I think we should do it in the right way, to transpose ourselves into that universe, but as the disturbing element. Because you know what's also interesting, but I don't have time to go into this now because I should leave some space also to other debates that you know you should never forget that practically all ideologies function in the way that they cannot openly admit their own presuppositions. Like like it would never have been especially Stalinism, one of the most brutal dictatorships. They had to pretend that they have some form of freedom. That's why like you were not allowed to say "Stalin is our master," sorry old joke I repeated it here at least ten times. In Stalinism you were not allowed to say publicly what everyone knew it was true: "We are not allowed to criticize Stalin, Stalin is a master, if we do it you will disappear." If you said this what everybody knew, you would be absolutely immediately arrested. So this is what always fascinated me with Stalinism: how at the same time it was the most brutal regime risking millions not a problem for them, but at the same time it was a regime incredibly sensitive to appearances. And I, sorry to repeat myself, I like one example that I read, at least I hope it's true. You know people wondered why in Soviet Union the 1st of May parades were never disturbed by rain or storm and so on. And they discovered that they spread all the air above Moscow with some very problematic half-poisonous gases just to guarantee there will not be rain, because they perceived it that if a storm, rain were to disturb parade, the appearance of all-powerfulness of the regime would be broken. The appearance had to be safe. It's incredible. This is the key to Stalinism for me, again. Or again, what I quote in my chapters in my old books on communism. This idea, totally absent in fascism, that I read not by some leftist, Anne Applebaum, *Gulag* in that book, how on Stalin's birthday citizens, okay inmates of Gulag were gathered and they all had to with acclamation accept a long telegram endorse it wishing Stalin all the best for his birthday, long years to live. Why this? Everybody knew this was appearance, but it was absolutely compulsive to do it. And it's totally meaningless to do it in Nazi Germany. It doesn't work there. Can you imagine all the inmates of Auschwitz collected for Hitler's birthday and sending him best wishes? You know this is where I like to complicate things. Even when reality is at its most brutal, it has appearances to rely on. Don't underestimate appearances. Okay. [Host: "Okay, I think we'll collect a few... some people have got in with apprentice strikes, but since you've just got the left up at the back, if you don't mind, since you've got the got the microphone there. This gentleman here."] You started and back, he supports backward thoughts. [Audience question: "Hello, we'll collect a few if you don't mind, yeah. If you say you've spoken about the living dead and zombies and vampires, but I was wondering if you could say something about werewolves and metamorphosis and if that has any interest for you in your system. Thanks."] [Host: "Aha. Okay. Werewolves. Okay. No, no, Slavoj has spoken for a long time now for questions, so I'm going to collect a few. Somebody at the back, way at the back there."] [Audience question: "Thank you. I just wanted to ask about the idea going back to *Arrival*. Problems of communications and diplomacy because to me it's also the similar idea of a Zero Coke sum game in the sense that we're looking at the self as humans but we're also looking at aliens and if we think of the root of the word Latin *alius* it means 'other'."] [Host: "Okay, yeah. Let's do the other side. So I'm afraid I point to the right, but it's his left that he is pointing to."] [Žižek: "Well this opportunistic [unintelligible] I don't mind either."] [Audience question: "I'd really love to hear your thoughts on what happened at the Oscars in February with *La La Land* and *Moonlight*. I feel like there's some good analysis to be done there."] [Žižek: "This is the quality of my memory. Let me quickly, I promise after three because okay... First, werewolves, then *Arrival* communication, then *Moonlight* Oscar. Very briefly. I cannot go on... the first one, I must admit I don't have a good theory of werewolves but all I can tell you is what I develop in some of my books like the basic distinction, I love it, between vampires and zombies. I think it clearly has a class dimension. Vampires are always upper-class gentlemen, they live among us. Zombies are outside, stupid pseudo-working class slowly... you know that the crucial movie is the one *White Zombie* like this. Crucial movie from '32, one year too later with Hays Code it would be prohibited, where the actor who is the ultra-vampire, Bela Lugosi, plays a plantation owner in the South and takes guests to his factory where you see all his workers there are zombies, living dead. And he said it's wonderful, they just work, they have no trade union rights and so on and so on. So I think that it's absolutely crucial to see this class dimension there so I cannot answer you concretely. What I would just have said is that it's crucial not to put all of them these monsters together and so on. Which is why in my craziest moment, against that official Spielberg movie *Lincoln*, I much preferred the other one, *Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter*. That's the left's answer to you know... Sorry. Ah, second one, *Arrival* communication. There I don't have time to develop it, but there I think a movie cheats a little bit. Because I think with strict structural and so on linguistics, it can be shown that that so-called circular language of of Heptapods and so on, it's really just a fantasy from within our language. If you don't implicitly presuppose the differential non-circular structure of our language, you cannot you cannot do it. In other words, all I would impute to Heptapods, aliens in the movie, is that maybe they have some direct mental communication or whatever. It's not language. It's not language. So that would have been my direct answer. The third one, Oscar, *Moonlight* or whatever, no? Listen. I have great sympathy for ideologically, theoretically for *Moonlight*. But am I permitted to say something for which I was looked upon as if I said the ultimate obscenity in these politically correct times recently in where was I in LA or where. I don't think it's a great film really. I know it's politically incorrect. How can you? It's
do a crazy act which in a way changes the past, not the real past, but how the past constructed that we inherited and so on. And this is for me a radical historical act. I'm not saying anything mystic here even. I always quoted at least seven eight times you know from T.S. Eliot's, what's his most famous as a literary English... *Tradition and the Individual Talent*? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You remember when he says that every great new work of art doesn't just break with the past, it changes the entire past. Of course not materially. But let's say past is present for us as the image of the past, symbolic and so on. We can change that. So again, the first act of changing the future is changing the past. Is this type of radical act which changes. And now I come to the philosophical conclusion. I want to be short here. This is why as I already emphasized here, the true choice is not this simple choice "do I do this or that," but a much radical choice, choice of changing the past itself. In other words, of undermining the entire context, historical totality part of which I am. So in some sense, that's my reading of the film, very moralistic. She, the girl, does a wrong choice. I don't know how you look at it, but it's too much of an egotistic choice. I think knowing that, I would have said "Okay, sorry," no I will be vulgar but not in any problematic way. "Okay let's have some sex with the guy if we like each other but no children if I know there will be" and so on. But something much more important we get here. Again, if you read the movie in the obvious way it would be New Age bullshit. We humans are limited, we have our abstract temporal sequential approach while these stupid organic holistic squids Heptapods they have a holistic approach, they see past, future, part of the same totality and so on and so on. All intelligent debates on the website I tried to get, most of them, focus correctly on one big topic. If they know everything already, they, aliens, Heptapods, what kind of help will they need from us years from now? What can we teach them? Totality it is there already, holistic totality and so on. We just bring limitation. And I have only one consequent Hegelian answer: that's what they are lacking. Breaking one-sidedness and so on and so on. The greatness of human symbolic universe it's precisely that it's not holistic. I think all, to put it naively, progress, change comes from non-holistic approach. From saying... Isn't also this love? Love is not holistic. Love is not "I love you all." No, the only guy who said "I love you all," you remember who it was, you are too young. Erich Mielke, the chief of Stasi, in his last appearance in East German Parliament where it was all falling down and people started to shout against him, and he did a wonderful gesture like this symbolic "But I love you all." *Aber ich liebe euch alle.* The greatness of love is precisely... no, sorry I don't want to be accused of harassing you, so I will just none of you. So "I love you" and ultimately... but no this is God. Okay. "I love you" and "I don't," you know this to accept this radical imbalance, one-sidedness. I don't want to see it. One-sidedness, partiality, choice. Hegel is not a holist in this sense. He always praises the power of abstraction, even what is our reason at its most creative? It's not "I see it all," that's only the first step. It's then to abstract, to say "I see it all, but," to put it in Maoist terms, "there is a principal contradiction." That is to say "but only this matters." So it's a wonderful deep insight that we cannot simply escape into any primordial holistic wisdom and so on. We need to make, to be one-sided, to make a radical choice. That this is the only way to build universality and so on and so on. That's for me again a very in a very nice subtle message of the film. And it's incredible how many interpreters, critics missed it because they read it as a simple New Age mysticism. While on the contrary, the point of the movie is not that everything is predestined, we stupid humans just don't know it. Yes, we cannot change fate, we cannot change the scope of our fate once we are within it. But in a much more radical we can change, ruin fate itself. And this precisely is our strength as abstract beings. The power of humanity is negativity is to abstract, to cut. As Hegel puts it, the power of human spirit is not to bring together the opposite, but to tear apart what in nature belongs together. So you see this is what I like to do, to take a movie which may appear saying the opposite, and to read it in a more subtle way. And I read some interviews with the director. He's so-so, he was aware, but not quite clearly what he is doing. Since I offered you some... [Host: "Yes, it allows me one point crucial for the way to connect to that. That means however the framework which organizes that discourse..."] Which discourse? [Host: "For instance your discourse in the moment or the discourse in which you support the film, has its own power of of adding holistic aspects even if you are negating it."] In what sense precisely? [Host: "Well, very concretely. If you then... because the discourse is in the heads of the of your audience always, not in your own output. And so therefore when you in the film, as I previously mentioned, come out of airplane doors, directly after previously we have seen Stalin coming out or Hitler. Yeah. So in a sense it transports you into a realm which no doubt you did not add your intention to that that ends would happen."] Yeah, but you don't hear me... no, because I think that at the same time, wait a minute, imagine it me standing at the side of Stalin. I doubt Stalin will survive this, you know what I mean. Am I not a scandal there, stepping out like Stalin and so on? I think we should do it in the right way, to transpose ourselves into that universe, but as the disturbing element. Because you know what's also interesting, but I don't have time to go into this now because I should leave some space also to other debates that you know you should never forget that practically all ideologies function in the way that they cannot openly admit their own presuppositions. Like like it would never have been especially Stalinism, one of the most brutal dictatorships. They had to pretend that they have some form of freedom. That's why like you were not allowed to say "Stalin is our master," sorry old joke I repeated it here at least ten times. In Stalinism you were not allowed to say publicly what everyone knew it was true: "We are not allowed to criticize Stalin, Stalin is a master, if we do it you will disappear." If you said this what everybody knew, you would be absolutely immediately arrested. So this is what always fascinated me with Stalinism: how at the same time it was the most brutal regime risking millions not a problem for them, but at the same time it was a regime incredibly sensitive to appearances. And I, sorry to repeat myself, I like one example that I read, at least I hope it's true. You know people wondered why in Soviet Union the 1st of May parades were never disturbed by rain or storm and so on. And they discovered that they spread all the air above Moscow with some very problematic half-poisonous gases just to guarantee there will not be rain, because they perceived it that if a storm, rain were to disturb parade, the appearance of all-powerfulness of the regime would be broken. The appearance had to be safe. It's incredible. This is the key to Stalinism for me, again. Or again, what I quote in my chapters in my old books on communism. This idea, totally absent in fascism, that I read not by some leftist, Anne Applebaum, *Gulag* in that book, how on Stalin's birthday citizens, okay inmates of Gulag were gathered and they all had to with acclamation accept a long telegram endorse it wishing Stalin all the best for his birthday, long years to live. Why this? Everybody knew this was appearance, but it was absolutely compulsive to do it. And it's totally meaningless to do it in Nazi Germany. It doesn't work there. Can you imagine all the inmates of Auschwitz collected for Hitler's birthday and sending him best wishes? You know this is where I like to complicate things. Even when reality is at its most brutal, it has appearances to rely on. Don't underestimate appearances. Okay. [Host: "Okay, I think we'll collect a few... some people have got in with apprentice strikes, but since you've just got the left up at the back, if you don't mind, since you've got the got the microphone there. This gentleman here."] You started and back, he supports backward thoughts. [Audience question: "Hello, we'll collect a few if you don't mind, yeah. If you say you've spoken about the living dead and zombies and vampires, but I was wondering if you could say something about werewolves and metamorphosis and if that has any interest for you in your system. Thanks."] [Host: "Aha. Okay. Werewolves. Okay. No, no, Slavoj has spoken for a long time now for questions, so I'm going to collect a few. Somebody at the back, way at the back there."] [Audience question: "Thank you. I just wanted to ask about the idea going back to *Arrival*. Problems of communications and diplomacy because to me it's also the similar idea of a Zero Coke sum game in the sense that we're looking at the self as humans but we're also looking at aliens and if we think of the root of the word Latin *alius* it means 'other'."] [Host: "Okay, yeah. Let's do the other side. So I'm afraid I point to the right, but it's his left that he is pointing to."] [Žižek: "Well this opportunistic [unintelligible] I don't mind either."] [Audience question: "I'd really love to hear your thoughts on what happened at the Oscars in February with *La La Land* and *Moonlight*. I feel like there's some good analysis to be done there."] [Žižek: "This is the quality of my memory. Let me quickly, I promise after three because okay... First, werewolves, then *Arrival* communication, then *Moonlight* Oscar. Very briefly. I cannot go on... the first one, I must admit I don't have a good theory of werewolves but all I can tell you is what I develop in some of my books like the basic distinction, I love it, between vampires and zombies. I think it clearly has a class dimension. Vampires are always upper-class gentlemen, they live among us. Zombies are outside, stupid pseudo-working class slowly... you know that the crucial movie is the one *White Zombie* like this. Crucial movie from '32, one year too later with Hays Code it would be prohibited, where the actor who is the ultra-vampire, Bela Lugosi, plays a plantation owner in the South and takes guests to his factory where you see all his workers there are zombies, living dead. And he said it's wonderful, they just work, they have no trade union rights and so on and so on. So I think that it's absolutely crucial to see this class dimension there so I cannot answer you concretely. What I would just have said is that it's crucial not to put all of them these monsters together and so on. Which is why in my craziest moment, against that official Spielberg movie *Lincoln*, I much preferred the other one, *Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter*. That's the left's answer to you know... Sorry. Ah, second one, *Arrival* communication. There I don't have time to develop it, but there I think a movie cheats a little bit. Because I think with strict structural and so on linguistics, it can be shown that that so-called circular language of of Heptapods and so on, it's really just a fantasy from within our language. If you don't implicitly presuppose the differential non-circular structure of our language, you cannot you cannot do it. In other words, all I would impute to Heptapods, aliens in the movie, is that maybe they have some direct mental communication or whatever. It's not language. It's not language. So that would have been my direct answer. The third one, Oscar, *Moonlight* or whatever, no? Listen. I have great sympathy for ideologically, theoretically for *Moonlight*. But am I permitted to say something for which I was looked upon as if I said the ultimate obscenity in these politically correct times recently in where was I in LA or where. I don't think it's a great film really. I know it's politically incorrect. How can you? It's
unknown
the movie about black gay people, so whatever you say you are immediately homophobic racist. No, it's not such a good film. I'm not saying that the other one *La La Land* is any better. But this precisely is... although it's a modest correct movie
the movie about black gay people, so whatever you say you are immediately homophobic racist. No, it's not such a good film. I'm not saying that the other one *La La Land* is any better. But this precisely is... although it's a modest correct movie
Slavoj Žižek
*Moonlight*, but if let's call it naively
*Moonlight*, but if let's call it naively
unknown
progressive cinema will move just in that direction it will be very sad. It's not..."] [Host: "What about the enactment of the Oscars though? You know the the muddle?"] [Žižek: "Oh, I don't know I am... I when I was there a couple of days after giving some talks, nothing to do with Oscars in Hollywood, and it's incredible how many paranoic theories were. The predominant paranoic theory in Hollywood itself was that they were
progressive cinema will move just in that direction it will be very sad. It's not..."] [Host: "What about the enactment of the Oscars though? You know the the muddle?"] [Žižek: "Oh, I don't know I am... I when I was there a couple of days after giving some talks, nothing to do with Oscars in Hollywood, and it's incredible how many paranoic theories were. The predominant paranoic theory in Hollywood itself was that they were
Slavoj Žižek
afraid because I think
afraid because I think
unknown
the how do you
the how do you
Slavoj Žižek
call it, how many million people were looking at it? It was rather a failure and the idea was that to so that people will talk more about it that they on purpose organized it and so on, you know. Then the other theory was of course but it's too primitive, that it was a typical white liberal flip secretly racist. No, I think if anything it helped the movie, everybody talked about it and so on and so on. So I'm not ready to read anything deep into it. No you know, sorry, one last. You know what's for me the problem with *Moonlight*? That if you all the narrative structure, the way love functions and so on, it follows all the standard Hollywood formulas.
call it, how many million people were looking at it? It was rather a failure and the idea was that to so that people will talk more about it that they on purpose organized it and so on, you know. Then the other theory was of course but it's too primitive, that it was a typical white liberal flip secretly racist. No, I think if anything it helped the movie, everybody talked about it and so on and so on. So I'm not ready to read anything deep into it. No you know, sorry, one last. You know what's for me the problem with *Moonlight*? That if you all the narrative structure, the way love functions and so on, it follows all the standard Hollywood formulas.
unknown
It's really a movie
It's really a movie
Slavoj Žižek
which is a very traditional movie in some sense. Okay."] [Host: "Okay, so really quick. So just next to the person next to you and then the guy from Monday. Briefly, yeah."] [Audience question: "Are you are you aware of any of the recent work around embodied cognition? [Žižek: "You mean Varela and his followers?"] Yeah. And how you think that will affect on the like sort of ethics and embodied ethics and perhaps relate that to *Arrival* the Heptapod experience."] [Žižek: "No, I know that Varela was was he tried to combine..."] [Host: "Let's hold on to this. One more. Three questions. Yes, really brief if you don't mind. I know there's lots to say."] [Audience question: "You mentioned U.T. you said about the light at the end of the tunnel and how the courage of hopelessness... I was wondering whether our perception of the present situation could be influenced by optimism or pessimism, so that it could be a train coming at us or it could be a kind of new horizon or a new Eden? So I'm saying is our choice of optimism or pessimism an influence on the future?"] [Host: "Thank you. One more from a woman. Here. Here. Let's have this one."] [Žižek: "Now I will be evil. Like, don't you know there are no women, there are only lesbians, mothers and so on. Feminine male chauvinist abstraction."] [Host: "That is a situation in which only men can speak. Women."] [Audience question: "It's very brief. Part of our homework on Monday was to watch *The Discovery*, so if you could..."] [Žižek: "I'm so sorry, I... Okay I can... Yeah, but there you know what I will do? I hope you will agree. You either now that I'm running out, you give me your email, not that you will get an obscene proposal with three penises or whatever, or even if Madison here, I can send it to Madison because I didn't want to spend too much time and much better than now to improvise,
which is a very traditional movie in some sense. Okay."] [Host: "Okay, so really quick. So just next to the person next to you and then the guy from Monday. Briefly, yeah."] [Audience question: "Are you are you aware of any of the recent work around embodied cognition? [Žižek: "You mean Varela and his followers?"] Yeah. And how you think that will affect on the like sort of ethics and embodied ethics and perhaps relate that to *Arrival* the Heptapod experience."] [Žižek: "No, I know that Varela was was he tried to combine..."] [Host: "Let's hold on to this. One more. Three questions. Yes, really brief if you don't mind. I know there's lots to say."] [Audience question: "You mentioned U.T. you said about the light at the end of the tunnel and how the courage of hopelessness... I was wondering whether our perception of the present situation could be influenced by optimism or pessimism, so that it could be a train coming at us or it could be a kind of new horizon or a new Eden? So I'm saying is our choice of optimism or pessimism an influence on the future?"] [Host: "Thank you. One more from a woman. Here. Here. Let's have this one."] [Žižek: "Now I will be evil. Like, don't you know there are no women, there are only lesbians, mothers and so on. Feminine male chauvinist abstraction."] [Host: "That is a situation in which only men can speak. Women."] [Audience question: "It's very brief. Part of our homework on Monday was to watch *The Discovery*, so if you could..."] [Žižek: "I'm so sorry, I... Okay I can... Yeah, but there you know what I will do? I hope you will agree. You either now that I'm running out, you give me your email, not that you will get an obscene proposal with three penises or whatever, or even if Madison here, I can send it to Madison because I didn't want to spend too much time and much better than now to improvise,
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I'm ready to send you my text where all these readings are."] [Host: "Okay, well if you could send it to Madison, I mean people can access..."] [Žižek: "Yeah, okay, Madison, is she here?"] [Host: "But there was there was the question about yes, optimistic horizon
I'm ready to send you my text where all these readings are."] [Host: "Okay, well if you could send it to Madison, I mean people can access..."] [Žižek: "Yeah, okay, Madison, is she here?"] [Host: "But there was there was the question about yes, optimistic horizon
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and and I forgot."] [Žižek: "No, no there are two others, immediately I will do it. First, cognitive embodiment and so on and so on. I greatly appreciate his work, he is almost my ideal, Varela. But there and all I can say is, I forgot in which of my books I may be wrong, but I
and and I forgot."] [Žižek: "No, no there are two others, immediately I will do it. First, cognitive embodiment and so on and so on. I greatly appreciate his work, he is almost my ideal, Varela. But there and all I can say is, I forgot in which of my books I may be wrong, but I
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think in *Parallax View* the middle two chapters. I have a couple of pages of him where you know what would be my idea here? Basically where I disagree is that the lesson of psychoanalysis is "No, we are not fully embodied." Unconscious is precisely... like this full embodiment means, you know it's a nice theory like we are not
think in *Parallax View* the middle two chapters. I have a couple of pages of him where you know what would be my idea here? Basically where I disagree is that the lesson of psychoanalysis is "No, we are not fully embodied." Unconscious is precisely... like this full embodiment means, you know it's a nice theory like we are not
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abstract Cartesian Cogitos, we
abstract Cartesian Cogitos, we
Slavoj Žižek
are
are
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engaged in a life-world and so on and so on. But what Freud called unconscious is precisely some more universal abstract symbolic machine which all the time in a way disembodied us. I think what Freud called unconscious is not our
engaged in a life-world and so on and so on. But what Freud called unconscious is precisely some more universal abstract symbolic machine which all the time in a way disembodied us. I think what Freud called unconscious is not our
Slavoj Žižek
deepest bodily instincts,
deepest bodily instincts,
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it's something that
it's something that
Slavoj Žižek
precisely disturbs the relationship of body and soul whatever and so on and so on. I don't have time to go into it now very briefly. And it was optimism, pessimism, train and so on. Well I can only give you a formula which may appear empty but I believe in it. That the trick is to accept pessimism and then to look for a sign of hope in pessimism itself, that is to say I'm not just bluffing, when things go wrong there's usually also a chance opens up to do something to change the entire situation and so on and so on. That was the reason for example, I now suspect that I was wrong, why I, no I'm not crazy, supported Donald Trump, but say maybe his victory can do what? Can bring new chaos, confusion where maybe we can catch or discern an opportunity to do it. Basically I mean to change the whole situation. Basically my solution would be here that old, I repeated it times, Mao's formula: there is disorder under heaven so the situation is excellent whatever. We should never forget that catastrophes, social chaos are also chances, an opening to do something. And that's my position like, you know, in this sense only: optimism in pessimism itself. In the sense of see a new chance in a desperate situation. If there ever was a guy who did this and it may appear problematic because he was very brutal in doing this, was Lenin, that was the entire Lenin's view of World War One: it's a catastrophe, millions will die, but isn't there a unique chance?"] [Host: "Okay, just this one. Okay, sorry. And then we'll move here out."] [Host: "Thank you very much. Um... do you agree with the view that maybe Orwell in showed in a dystopian way what you have proposed as changing the future is only possible when changing the past?"] [Žižek: "Thank you. Thank you."] [Audience question: "In the end of *Absolute Recoil* you formulate your ontology as being structured around three principal antagonisms, but you only do it in the end of the book which seems to me that it can only be thought as the end of a dialectical process as its truth which cannot be alienated anymore. Is it possible to take that as a starting point in a philosophical or your style ontological analysis or does retroactivity then, let's say mislead us into thinking in terms of substantial entities
precisely disturbs the relationship of body and soul whatever and so on and so on. I don't have time to go into it now very briefly. And it was optimism, pessimism, train and so on. Well I can only give you a formula which may appear empty but I believe in it. That the trick is to accept pessimism and then to look for a sign of hope in pessimism itself, that is to say I'm not just bluffing, when things go wrong there's usually also a chance opens up to do something to change the entire situation and so on and so on. That was the reason for example, I now suspect that I was wrong, why I, no I'm not crazy, supported Donald Trump, but say maybe his victory can do what? Can bring new chaos, confusion where maybe we can catch or discern an opportunity to do it. Basically I mean to change the whole situation. Basically my solution would be here that old, I repeated it times, Mao's formula: there is disorder under heaven so the situation is excellent whatever. We should never forget that catastrophes, social chaos are also chances, an opening to do something. And that's my position like, you know, in this sense only: optimism in pessimism itself. In the sense of see a new chance in a desperate situation. If there ever was a guy who did this and it may appear problematic because he was very brutal in doing this, was Lenin, that was the entire Lenin's view of World War One: it's a catastrophe, millions will die, but isn't there a unique chance?"] [Host: "Okay, just this one. Okay, sorry. And then we'll move here out."] [Host: "Thank you very much. Um... do you agree with the view that maybe Orwell in showed in a dystopian way what you have proposed as changing the future is only possible when changing the past?"] [Žižek: "Thank you. Thank you."] [Audience question: "In the end of *Absolute Recoil* you formulate your ontology as being structured around three principal antagonisms, but you only do it in the end of the book which seems to me that it can only be thought as the end of a dialectical process as its truth which cannot be alienated anymore. Is it possible to take that as a starting point in a philosophical or your style ontological analysis or does retroactivity then, let's say mislead us into thinking in terms of substantial entities
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again?"] [Žižek: "Well, my... one more. Sorry, sorry."]
again?"] [Žižek: "Well, my... one more. Sorry, sorry."]
Slavoj Žižek
[Audience question: "Hi. I was interested in the process of digitization that you talked about in relation to the
[Audience question: "Hi. I was interested in the process of digitization that you talked about in relation to the
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networked individual which Paul Mason talks about in
networked individual which Paul Mason talks about in
Slavoj Žižek
*PostCapitalism* and so..."] [Žižek: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."] [Host: "Okay."] [Žižek: "Okay I will begin at the end very briefly. In it's even in this book about *The Courage of Hopelessness* that I have a couple of pages on Paul Mason and so on and Jeremy Rifkin and all them. You know, where I agree with them and with others is that effectively with this digitalization and other processes something fundamental is happening with capitalism. Capitalism as we know it cannot go on. But I'm a little bit more pessimistic than they. It's typical although I greatly appreciate him, when Paul Mason speaks he does have to mention how precisely this Internet of Things and so on is getting reprivatized, reappropriated by state
*PostCapitalism* and so..."] [Žižek: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."] [Host: "Okay."] [Žižek: "Okay I will begin at the end very briefly. In it's even in this book about *The Courage of Hopelessness* that I have a couple of pages on Paul Mason and so on and Jeremy Rifkin and all them. You know, where I agree with them and with others is that effectively with this digitalization and other processes something fundamental is happening with capitalism. Capitalism as we know it cannot go on. But I'm a little bit more pessimistic than they. It's typical although I greatly appreciate him, when Paul Mason speaks he does have to mention how precisely this Internet of Things and so on is getting reprivatized, reappropriated by state
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agencies,
agencies,
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by all those big companies. Now we have Internet of Things it means whatever Mark Zuckerberg
by all those big companies. Now we have Internet of Things it means whatever Mark Zuckerberg
Slavoj Žižek
and so on, all those big humanitarians. And his idea is this is just an intermediary phenomenon. Like, now we have first sign of post-capitalist
and so on, all those big humanitarians. And his idea is this is just an intermediary phenomenon. Like, now we have first sign of post-capitalist
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order but it's not yet fully developed so now
order but it's not yet fully developed so now
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capitalism can still reappropriate it through these big companies which privatize our commons, that's the formula. I'm more of a pessimist. I don't think that Internet of Things or however we call it, cooperative commons, can work all the way. I think some external, let's call it political agency is needed to the end because I think that for example one great danger that I see is the following one
capitalism can still reappropriate it through these big companies which privatize our commons, that's the formula. I'm more of a pessimist. I don't think that Internet of Things or however we call it, cooperative commons, can work all the way. I think some external, let's call it political agency is needed to the end because I think that for example one great danger that I see is the following one
Slavoj Žižek
and some other intelligent analysts got it. Okay with capitalism we no longer need personal authority because the authority is money,
and some other intelligent analysts got it. Okay with capitalism we no longer need personal authority because the authority is money,
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so we can
so we can
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pretend
pretend
Slavoj Žižek
we are all
we are all
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equal. But what if Internet of Things, digitalization and this
equal. But what if Internet of Things, digitalization and this
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cooperative
cooperative
Slavoj Žižek
commons will open up a new space for new master figures for new authorities? They are already emerging. Are we aware what how strange are figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and so on and so on? They are for me much more dangerous even than Trump and so on. Because they embody the big threat today the reprivatization of of commons. And as my friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the good futurologist and
commons will open up a new space for new master figures for new authorities? They are already emerging. Are we aware what how strange are figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and so on and so on? They are for me much more dangerous even than Trump and so on. Because they embody the big threat today the reprivatization of of commons. And as my friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the good futurologist and
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many
many
Slavoj Žižek
others
others
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pointed out, the big problem already of
pointed out, the big problem already of
Slavoj Žižek
early communism, Soviet Union was: okay you abolish alienation in the commodity sense, you know, money things ruling over us, but direct domination returns with a vengeance. And I'm not so sure that cooperative commons automatically imply some kind of genuinely cooperative democratic multiplicity, whatever. I think that the problem of power and domination remains. Even some economists, I'm now reading their stuff, are going in this direction it's extremely interesting trend, claiming that with new digital capitalism, virtual, financial, what is happening now, the tendency is not towards more abstraction in the Marxist sense that now virtual money will rule over us, totally disembodied, abstract, but that next step will be a return of personal power and domination. So I see, it's very confused answer but that's what I wanted to say. I see very many problems here. Yes, I see what you mean. But again, my God, this is another good question which means give me two hours to to formulate it answer. I was always a little bit distrustful about Orwell. I don't think his image of future was was correct. It's almost too utopian. You know, it doesn't function like this, you know, that how many fingers do you see, no it's not four it's five or whatever, that simple cheating with facts and then sexual love as transgression and so on and so on. No, the threat today is more that we are controlled, dominated, that would be the digital threat for me. But we don't even know how unfree we are, how controlled we are. That's why I moderately, he is doing crazy things, defend Assange when he is reproached with "Why do you attack only publish documents from United States, why not China, Russia?" Well my answer is every idiot knows what China and Russia are. It's easy. Nobody thinks they are really free there. But in United
early communism, Soviet Union was: okay you abolish alienation in the commodity sense, you know, money things ruling over us, but direct domination returns with a vengeance. And I'm not so sure that cooperative commons automatically imply some kind of genuinely cooperative democratic multiplicity, whatever. I think that the problem of power and domination remains. Even some economists, I'm now reading their stuff, are going in this direction it's extremely interesting trend, claiming that with new digital capitalism, virtual, financial, what is happening now, the tendency is not towards more abstraction in the Marxist sense that now virtual money will rule over us, totally disembodied, abstract, but that next step will be a return of personal power and domination. So I see, it's very confused answer but that's what I wanted to say. I see very many problems here. Yes, I see what you mean. But again, my God, this is another good question which means give me two hours to to formulate it answer. I was always a little bit distrustful about Orwell. I don't think his image of future was was correct. It's almost too utopian. You know, it doesn't function like this, you know, that how many fingers do you see, no it's not four it's five or whatever, that simple cheating with facts and then sexual love as transgression and so on and so on. No, the threat today is more that we are controlled, dominated, that would be the digital threat for me. But we don't even know how unfree we are, how controlled we are. That's why I moderately, he is doing crazy things, defend Assange when he is reproached with "Why do you attack only publish documents from United States, why not China, Russia?" Well my answer is every idiot knows what China and Russia are. It's easy. Nobody thinks they are really free there. But in United
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States majority still thinks even if they had Trump "We are free." The true danger is that you don't even
States majority still thinks even if they had Trump "We are free." The true danger is that you don't even
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know that you are controlled, but your choices, your desires are controlled. So in this sense, there is I always read Orwell as an as some kind of anachronistic nostalgic image of a dystopia. A beautiful old dystopia, you know? There's in this direct domination, you know, there is always something naively attractive in it. That's the that although he was a nice guy and so on and so on, but if you ask me, I much
know that you are controlled, but your choices, your desires are controlled. So in this sense, there is I always read Orwell as an as some kind of anachronistic nostalgic image of a dystopia. A beautiful old dystopia, you know? There's in this direct domination, you know, there is always something naively attractive in it. That's the that although he was a nice guy and so on and so on, but if you ask me, I much
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prefer
prefer
Slavoj Žižek
his essayistic writings and so on, they are much better than his big... although he was honest. You know that when it was directly mobilized by Cold War activists, he was honest enough to write an open letter to Americans claiming that "Wait a minute, I am fully supporting the Attlee Labour government, I am not a right-winger" and so on and so on. He resisted absolutely. But you know like again the problem with Orwell is that he relies too much on this let's call it for me at least common sense idea, you know: Ministry of Truth. His idea of changing the past is all too naive. It's that you literally have to change the data and so on and so on. Even in Stalinism this holds only up to a point. Today you no longer need to change the data. And nonetheless mystification can be even more radical. And that's what always fascinates me with intelligent new authority figures. They admit everything. You know, "No, we don't do any retroactive changes out erasing out and so on and so on." You just change radically the entire frame of interpretation. So, I there is one I will try to answer it quickly, this retroactivity, dialectics... one minute. Retroactive dialectics and so on and so on. My God there is another mega question. Okay I will do something very cheap but sincere. This exactly is the focus of my next book, *Incontinence of the Void*. It's not obscene, it's a quote from Samuel Beckett. Where I try precisely to do what you indicated and I agree this is crucial for me, not to get involved just in this social analysis but I try very naively to address the big ontological question: what does all this Lacanian Hegelian bullshit of mine mean for what what is objective reality? In what sense do we have access to it and so on and so on. So there, it's not so much retroactivity as precisely this idea, messages from the future, ontological openness, the objectivity of antagonism. I am for realism in the sense that things are not out there as some in-itself to which we don't have access. But I think we should change all this naive realist perspective "There is reality out there and if we purify our false perceptions somehow we will get at it." You know, already John Locke did this with his otherwise beautiful distinction, no? between primary and secondary qualities. For Locke, those qualities that we perceive with only one of our senses, like color, they are subjective. But those like shape, which a shape I can see it and I can touch it, so I can confirm the shape of an object with more than one sense, which means it's an objective property. I don't buy this. I think the true paradox, my solution is as always Hegelian, is that the true point of the real is how we are inscribed into reality. Every reality can be dismissed as subjectively constructed. But how we fit it, there you touch the real. It's too much now, I cannot... I'd like to really thank Slavoj, he's he's back again at the second week of the Critical Theory Summer School and on an open panel, open to everybody on Friday afternoon, I think it's the 7th of July, the first Friday in July. But can I tell you something? And he's got he's got a big deal this evening so he needs to be helped along his way. Thank you. Can I tell you something evil but isn't the truth of it? It's open to everybody who will pay the price, no? No no, it's free on the Friday afternoon. On the Friday afternoon it's free. Ah, yeah. Friday afternoon is free because it's just the stupid debate, no? That's right. Yeah, but the previous the big seminar, no? [Laughter
his essayistic writings and so on, they are much better than his big... although he was honest. You know that when it was directly mobilized by Cold War activists, he was honest enough to write an open letter to Americans claiming that "Wait a minute, I am fully supporting the Attlee Labour government, I am not a right-winger" and so on and so on. He resisted absolutely. But you know like again the problem with Orwell is that he relies too much on this let's call it for me at least common sense idea, you know: Ministry of Truth. His idea of changing the past is all too naive. It's that you literally have to change the data and so on and so on. Even in Stalinism this holds only up to a point. Today you no longer need to change the data. And nonetheless mystification can be even more radical. And that's what always fascinates me with intelligent new authority figures. They admit everything. You know, "No, we don't do any retroactive changes out erasing out and so on and so on." You just change radically the entire frame of interpretation. So, I there is one I will try to answer it quickly, this retroactivity, dialectics... one minute. Retroactive dialectics and so on and so on. My God there is another mega question. Okay I will do something very cheap but sincere. This exactly is the focus of my next book, *Incontinence of the Void*. It's not obscene, it's a quote from Samuel Beckett. Where I try precisely to do what you indicated and I agree this is crucial for me, not to get involved just in this social analysis but I try very naively to address the big ontological question: what does all this Lacanian Hegelian bullshit of mine mean for what what is objective reality? In what sense do we have access to it and so on and so on. So there, it's not so much retroactivity as precisely this idea, messages from the future, ontological openness, the objectivity of antagonism. I am for realism in the sense that things are not out there as some in-itself to which we don't have access. But I think we should change all this naive realist perspective "There is reality out there and if we purify our false perceptions somehow we will get at it." You know, already John Locke did this with his otherwise beautiful distinction, no? between primary and secondary qualities. For Locke, those qualities that we perceive with only one of our senses, like color, they are subjective. But those like shape, which a shape I can see it and I can touch it, so I can confirm the shape of an object with more than one sense, which means it's an objective property. I don't buy this. I think the true paradox, my solution is as always Hegelian, is that the true point of the real is how we are inscribed into reality. Every reality can be dismissed as subjectively constructed. But how we fit it, there you touch the real. It's too much now, I cannot... I'd like to really thank Slavoj, he's he's back again at the second week of the Critical Theory Summer School and on an open panel, open to everybody on Friday afternoon, I think it's the 7th of July, the first Friday in July. But can I tell you something? And he's got he's got a big deal this evening so he needs to be helped along his way. Thank you. Can I tell you something evil but isn't the truth of it? It's open to everybody who will pay the price, no? No no, it's free on the Friday afternoon. On the Friday afternoon it's free. Ah, yeah. Friday afternoon is free because it's just the stupid debate, no? That's right. Yeah, but the previous the big seminar, no? [Laughter
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and
and
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applause]
applause]