Slavoj Zizek against Miller
Lecture · EMANCIPATION IS COMMUNISM ·
2016-04-19 · 2:20:27 · 16,438 words
with Cathy Newman
fascism-populismideologyhistoryeveryday-lifecapitalismpsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsecology-climatecommunism-socialismphilosophy-generalscience-physicsreligion-theologycinema-art-culturesexuality-gendergeopolitics-wardemocracyrevolution-violencesubjectivity
Žižek addresses accusations of being a 'fascist' by contrasting his own 'stupid' addiction to cocaine with the 'bright' evil of the modern billionaire. He argues that true evil requires intelligence, citing Albert Speer as the 'evil genius' whose organizational competence prolonged the war unnecessarily. He then contrasts his own 'nervous' persona with Woody Woodpecker, distinguishing him from the 'white liberal racist' Daffy Duck. Žižek analyzes the intersection of capitalism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, arguing that 'surplus' (value, knowledge, enjoyment) is structurally correlative to subjectivity rather than an external addition. He contrasts Spinoza’s external limits with Hegel’s internal negation, using film examples like North by Northwest and Home Alone to illustrate how reality and fiction interact. He critiques contemporary ecological and bioethical paradigms for relying on a myth of natural balance, advocating instead for a Hegelian view where the obstacle generates creativity and transcendence. Žižek critiques Jürgen Habermas and Pope Benedict XVI for imposing ethical limits on neuroscience to preserve the illusion of free will, arguing this is a conservative fear of knowledge. He extends this logic to ecology, viewing nature as a religious limit, and argues that evolution operates through 'excess' and 'surplus' rather than functional adaptation, citing Stephen Jay Gould and Lacan. Finally, he attacks Jacques-Alain Miller’s 21st-century Lacanian program for reifying the 'Real' as natural regularity, contrasting it with the contingent, non-functional surplus that defines both evolution and psychoanalysis. Žižek critiques Eric Miller’s Lacanian reading of the Real, arguing that Miller conflates Newtonian scientific regularity with the pre-modern symbolic order and mistakenly posits a 'pure lawless real' akin to Deleuze. He reasserts the Lacanian definition of the Real as an immanent deadlock of formalization, applying this to sexual difference and capitalism to argue that multiplicity is driven by inherent antagonism, not its absence. He concludes by proposing a political synthesis of the Master and Analyst discourses, using Lenin’s 'control commission' as a model for a revolutionary agency that functions as an object a. Žižek argues that democratic left governments fail because popular mobilization inevitably devolves into clientelism, citing Bolivia and the Visegrád Group. He provocatively calls for a 'pro-refugee neo-fascist' strong state to discipline right-wing militias and manage refugees. He then engages with a student on the materialist theory of subjectivity, linking quantum physics, Hegel, and Lacan to argue that subjectivity emerges from mechanical/ontological gaps rather than organic continuity, concluding with a critique of the Lula model in Brazil.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 43
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's characterization of the 'billionaire' type: evil but lacking the intellectual rigor of true evil, making them theoretically wrong but personally preferable to 'bright' evil.
Used to describe Albert Speer, whose high intelligence and organizational skill made Nazism more effective and thus more evil than it would have been otherwise.
as “Nazism with the human face”
Žižek's ironic label for Albert Speer, who apologized and presented a civilized, organized facade while managing the industrial machinery of the Holocaust.
Žižek's label for Daffy Duck, representing a form of racism that seeks to erase or ignore black aspects rather than confront them directly.
Žižek's self-description, aligning himself with Woody Woodpecker's manic, anxious energy as opposed to the calm or stupid evil of others.
The corpse in the North by Northwest scene, representing the surplus generated by production, which is precisely the subject in the guise of its opposite (object).
The surplus element in science that is inscribed into ordinary knowledge as an interminable process of discovery, contrasting with traditional/Gnostic surplus which posits a higher mystical knowledge outside ordinary reality.
The Marxist economic concept which Žižek reinterprets not as a secondary alienation but as a gap inscribed from the beginning of the labor process, where subjectivity contributes pure substanceless value.
Enjoyment derived from the repetitive act of the drive itself (e.g., sucking) rather than the satisfaction of the object (milk), distinct from ordinary pleasure.
Reinterpreted by Žižek (against Badiou) not as a desire for self-destruction, but as the form of immortality available only to mortal beings, emerging from the creative reply to an obstacle.
Spinoza’s concept of an entity’s striving for expanded power/assertion, which Žižek uses to contrast with Hegel’s view of internal negation.
Hegel’s concept used by Marx to explain that the development of human needs is merely a triggering mechanism for the real aim: expanding productive capacities.
as “pure substanceless subjectivity”
Marx’s concept of Arbeitskraft (labor power) as the pure substanceless contribution of subjectivity to the production process, generating surplus value.
Jacques-Alain Miller’s formula describing the contemporary state where nature’s stable laws are replaced by a contingent real that revolutionizes its own rules, echoing Mao’s 'great disorder in heavens'.
as “ethics of do not compromise your scientific desire”
The immanent ethics of scientific activity, which Žižek argues is betrayed by bioethics; it demands following the inexorable path of scientific intervention rather than imposing external moral limits.
The conservative ideological move (exemplified by Habermas) to impose limits on scientific inquiry to protect moral self-understanding, which Žižek rejects as catastrophic.
as “ecology as religion”
Alain Badiou’s concept, endorsed by Žižek, that ecology functions as the new religion by setting absolute limits ('natural balance') that cannot be transgressed.
as “bitchy evil mother”
Žižek’s phrase for nature, rejecting the idea of a homeostatic natural balance in favor of a view of nature as defined by catastrophe, imbalance, and excess.
Stephen Jay Gould’s term for when an organ or trait emerges without a specific function (surplus) and is later repurposed for a new function, which Žižek adopts to explain evolution and art.
as “transfunctionalized”
Žižek’s term (synonymous with exaptation/refunctionalization) for how surplus organs or cultural forms are 'kidnapped' for a new purpose after emerging from genetic confusion or contingency.
as “pure lawless real”
Miller’s proposed state of reality outside symbolic binary logic, which Žižek argues is an ideological mask for capitalist antagonism.
The mode of encountering the 'real unconscious' which is non-intentional and brute, contrasted with the intentional 'transferential unconscious' of traditional analysis.
Žižek’s critique of Lacan’s late topology, arguing that seeking the 'Real' stripped of meaning leads to a void devoid of human sentiment, similar to Oedipus at Colonus.
Miller’s concept suggesting regularity and prediction exist in the Real itself, which Žižek rejects as a veil that ignores the contingency of scientific laws.
Miller’s attribution to Lacan of a direct interpenetration of drives and signifiers prior to symbolic order, which Žižek identifies as a Deleuzian error.
as “immanent impossibility”
Žižek’s definition of the Real as an obstacle inscribed within the symbolic order itself, rather than an external substantial presence.
as “deadlock of formalization”
Lacan’s formula (le réel est une impasse de la formalisation) cited by Žižek to define the Real as the failure point of symbolic structures.
as “fetishism”
The elementary gesture of ascribing an external cause (like Jews in anti-semitism) to an immanent social antagonism to avoid its truth.
as “ideological self-description of late capitalism”
The Butlerian idea of no binaries and immanent self-construction, which Žižek argues is the deceptive mask of capitalist law.
One of the two axes of capitalism, characterized by incessant expansion and the demand for 'more,' distinct from the logic of domination.
The capitalist logic of knowledge as power and totalizing domination, which oscillates with hysterical discourse.
as “Möbius band”
Žižek’s metaphor for the capitalist structure where the logic of expansion and the logic of domination turn into one another.
A Lacanian discourse that Žižek argues progressive politics must shamelessly return to, exemplified by figures like Chávez.
as “analytic discourse”
The Lacanian discourse Žižek proposes as a social application for revolutionary politics, modeled on Lenin’s control commission.
The function of a revolutionary agency that acts not by knowing better, but by provoking and unsettling the master, serving as an eternal source of questioning.
A paradoxical formulation for a strong, efficient state intervention that is progressive in its treatment of refugees but brutal/authoritarian in its methods against the majority or right-wing militias.
The thesis that the human subject is fundamentally mediated by and constituted through technology/machines, rather than existing prior to them.
The idea that quantum probability is not merely epistemic (lack of knowledge) but ontological (nature itself is indeterminate/oscillating until observed).
as “two vacuums”
The concept that a vacuum (emptiness) requires energy to create, implying that 'nothing' has an ontological cost, which serves as the foundation for explaining subjectivity.
A quantum physics theory suggesting that systems become classical through interaction with the environment, which Žižek links to Hegelian self-observation.
The specific political strategy of Lula's Brazil, which lowered poverty but failed to create new social structures, leading to crisis when limits were reached.
The inevitable corruption of social movements when they gain state power, turning into a ruthless competition for tribal resources rather than progressive change.
A government that is distant from direct social/business pressures, potentially feeling 'guilty' or illegitimate, which paradoxically allows for more effective, less corrupt governance.
Stories he reaches for 4
Žižek argues that Slovenia's best government was during communism because the lack of democratic legitimacy made them feel 'guilty' and try harder, whereas democratic governments feel entitled to do whatever they want.
“they felt guilty all the time and they tried to do the best because they felt this pressure”
Žižek connects Jacques-Alain Miller’s phrase 'great disorder in the real' to Mao’s saying 'there is a great disorder in heavens, so the situation is perfect,' illustrating the shift from stable natural laws to a contingent, revolutionary real.
“there is a great disorder in heavens so the situation is perfect.”
Ancient Aztecs performed human sacrifices not to prevent catastrophe, but to guarantee the most ordinary, regular event: the sun rising. This illustrates that the 'natural order' is sustained by symbolic ritual, not just natural law.
“they sacrificed people to sustain the very regularity of nature... sun will raise in the morning”
A leftist friend checked factories given to workers by the Chavez government and found none succeeded; they were simply bankrupted and reprivatized, showing the failure of self-organization without structural change.
“Not even one was a success either they were simply bankrupted reprivatized government directly took over”
Works invoked 21
Anti-Oedipus book
Cited as the source of the Deleuzian formula regarding the 'true pre-Oedipal unconscious' that Miller erroneously attributes to Lacan.
North by Northwest film
Described as 'Hitchcock at his most Marxist'; the unshot Ford plant scene is used to illustrate surplus value and the subject.
Goldfinger film
Used as a visual gag (limousine chair) to illustrate the audience's desire to control the speaker.
By Samo Tomšič; cited for developing the Marxist point that surplus value is inscribed in the labor process from the beginning.
Gulliver's Travels book
Used to illustrate the origin of language via the 'Lilliputian' story of carrying object models, which Žižek finds circular and naive.
Spinoza’s work; cited for the passage where Spinoza justifies women's lesser social power/rights based on Conatus.
Ethics book
Spinoza’s work; cited for the passage stating 'no entity disintegrates falls apart immanently it's always an external obstacle'.
Gladiator film
Called 'stupid' for its use of digital effects to fill empty arenas, contrasted with the more interesting procedure of experiencing reality as fiction.
Lacan's Seminar II book
Cited for Lacan's description of the subject as 'ex machina' or 'deus ex machina'.
Referenced in the context of the 'Viking kitsch' (horned helmets) invented by Wagner and the later 'ascetic' staging revolution at Bayreuth, which was ironically caused by bankruptcy and free electricity.
Praised for the combination of real actors and cartoon figures, illustrating the intersection of reality and fiction.
Daffy Duck tv
Used as a foil to Woody Woodpecker; labeled a 'white liberal racist' who wants to 'erase the black aspects.'
A book co-authored by Habermas and Pope Benedict XVI arguing for limits on brain science. Žižek critiques it as a conservative attempt to protect the illusion of free will.
Home Alone 2 film
Cited for the 'cartoon universe' violence where a character survives explosion, illustrating the experience of reality as fiction.
A short booklet published by Verso where Lacan explicitly rejects the 'hand of friendship' to Catholics, stating religion and psychoanalysis are 'mortal enemies,' yet Žižek uses Lacan’s point about limits to critique ecology.
Žižek’s own work where he previously gave a 'too simplistic version' of Lenin’s control commission.
A programmatic text for a Lacanian congress. Žižek attacks Miller’s redefinition of the Real as natural regularity and his binary view of sexuation, calling for a 'death penalty' for his views.
Not Just Bits book
An expensive academic book on quantum computers/mechanisms, cited as an example of academic publishing.
Tao Te Ching book
Used to illustrate the pre-modern notion of nature as a global, stable order of meaning (Yin/Yang) rather than blind mathematics.
The Two Vacuums book
Žižek's own book, used to explain the ontological cost of emptiness/vacuum.
Identified with by Žižek as his 'correlate,' described as 'nervous' and 'incendiary.'
People invoked 51
Eric Miller negative
Žižek argues Miller proceeds too fast, conflates scientific and pre-modern nature, and adopts a Deleuzian error regarding the pure real.
Jonathan Swift positive
Cited for the 'Lilliputian' story of language origin, which Žižek uses to illustrate the circularity and naivety of utilitarian explanations of language.
Lynn Margulis positive
Scientist cited for her cell theory and the idea that life involves temporal circularity and complex integration.
Mentioned as the socialist MP murdered by fascist thugs, causing a crisis in Mussolini’s regime that Puccini responded to with a letter.
Mentioned in a comparison of psychoanalytic schools, with Lacanians being 'more unpleasant and stupid' than Kleinians.
Charles Darwin positive
Cited as a 'serious Darwinian' who understood that evolution is not Lamarckian utilitarianism but involves 'genetic confusion' and 'excess'.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek reinterprets Lenin’s late-life 'control commission' as a model for the analytic discourse/object a in revolutionary politics.
Mentioned as a right-wing intellectual/artist who wrote a letter of support to Mussolini, alongside Puccini.
Richard Wagner positive
Referenced in the context of Bayreuth staging; Žižek notes Wagner invented the 'horned Viking' image and that modern 'ascetic' stagings were ironically caused by bankruptcy/free electricity, not artistic intent.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for the proposition that 'to be really evil you have to be bright,' which Žižek agrees with.
Refers to 'creepy Lacanians' in Argentina who are 'personally much more unpleasant and stupid' than Kleinians or Freudians.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Žižek admires Gould for dropping the utilitarian view of evolution; he cites Gould’s concept of 'exaptation' (surplus organs repurposed) as a 'wonderful' and 'very Lacanian' insight.
Mentioned as one of the people who consider Spinoza a 'philosophical saint'.
Mentioned as one of the people who consider Spinoza a 'philosophical saint'.
Steven Pinker negative
Grouped with Dennett as having 'animosity' against Gould, representing the 'big names' who hold naive utilitarian views of evolution.
Daniel Dennett negative
Žižek mocks Dennett’s explanation of bipedalism (the 'lazy ape') as 'comically ridiculous' and 'stupid,' using it to illustrate the naivety of teleological evolutionary theories.
Judith Butler negative
Cited as someone who speaks like Miller regarding the 'binary' of man/woman, which Žižek rejects as a 'secondary construction' that doesn't fit the 'real of the 21st century' disorder.
SYRIZA negative
Cited as a failed example of a radical movement that lost contact with its social base by failing to change the state apparatus from within.
Mentioned in a pun about 'Trump cards' to illustrate the vulgarity of contemporary political discourse.
Benedict XVI negative
Cited as co-author with Habermas; Žižek finds it 'deeply ironic' that the 'philosopher of modernity' argues for limits on science to protect moral self-understanding.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Bolivian Vice President and friend; his experience with clientelism in Bolivia informs Žižek's critique of social mobilization.
Justin Trudeau negative
Mocked for bluffing about quantum computers, illustrating political pretension.
Antonio Negri negative
Cited as an 'accelerationist' who wrongly claims we should abandon ourselves to the pure real beyond symbolic laws.
David Bohm negative
Described as a 'new age quantum physicist' who solved some paradoxes but introduced others.
Alain Badiou negative
Respectfully disagrees with Badiou’s view that death is external; argues Badiou’s 'immortality' is actually the form of the death drive.
Podemos negative
Cited alongside Syriza as a modern radical movement that fails to demonstrate success without a centralizing master figure.
Mentioned as the candidate for whose reelection committee Miller became a member.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for the formula that the left's only task is to insist on social democratic demands.
Friedrich Engels negative
Cited as holding a 'naive' view that language/collaboration evolved simply because it was useful for labor, ignoring the contingent surplus.
Benedictus de Spinoza negative
Critiqued for viewing limits as always external (Conatus); Žižek argues this is a 'philosophical saint' myth and disagrees with his view on gender/rights.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva negative
Brazilian President whose 'model' lowered poverty but failed to create lasting structural change, leading to crisis.
Carl Jung negative
Žižek accuses Miller of regressing to 'the worst of Jungianism' by positing a 'deeper really crazy unconscious' outside of logic.
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as 'my friend' and 'the wise guy' who was drunk, used to contrast with Žižek's own abstinence from drugs.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Described as 'one of my teachers' but currently 'theoretically catastrophic'; criticized for his bioethics stance and political support of Sarkozy.
Cited as the source of the conversation with Hitchcock regarding the unshot Ford plant scene.
Angela Merkel negative
Criticized for the 'disgusting game' of border politics and pressuring Slovenia to build a wire fence.
Mao Zedong positive
Cited for the 'beautiful saying' 'there is a great disorder in heavens, so the situation is perfect,' which mirrors Miller’s 'great disorder in the real'.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited for her concept of the 'banality of evil' (implied by the contrast with 'evil genius'), which Žižek agrees with regarding the difficulty of being 'really evil' while stupid.
Albert Speer negative
Identified as 'the true evil' and an 'evil genius' whose organizational competence prolonged the war, making him guilty for the 'unnecessary additional year' of suffering.
Samo Tomšič positive
Author of Capitalist Unconscious, cited for developing the point that surplus value is not a secondary alienation.
Described as a 'fascist composer' whom Žižek 'hates,' but used as an example of how external constraints (recording length, political pressure) can produce genuine artistic effects.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Described as 'at his most Marxist'; Žižek quotes his unshot scene from North by Northwest to illustrate surplus value and the subject-object relation.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek criticizes Habermas for collaborating with the Pope to limit neuroscience, arguing Habermas’s 'conservative Catholic wisdom' that it is better not to know if we are free is ethico-politically catastrophic.
Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck negative
Used as a foil for 'stupid utilitarian teleology,' claiming organs develop because they are needed, which Lacan and Gould reject.
Used as an example of a 'big fat guy' leader in Venezuela to mock claims of successful radical social mobilization.
Karl Marx positive
Used to explain that surplus value is inscribed in the labor process from the beginning, and that communism aims to expand productive capacities beyond needs.
Mentioned in a comparison of psychoanalytic schools, with Lacanians being 'more unpleasant and stupid' than Freudians.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for his insight that Latin (mechanic) was superior to Greek (organic) for universal language, and for the master-slave dialectic.
Isaac Newton positive
Used as an example of scientific laws that are contingent and lack cosmic harmony, contrary to Miller’s reading.
Friedrich Nietzsche negative
Cited as writing like the 'worst of postmodernism' by treating the Real as an external truth too strong for us.
Noted as a close influence on early Lacan, who repeated the motive of nature vs. human subjectivity.
Transcript 59 turns
Cathy Newman
Welcome everybody to the second of Slavoj Žižek’s masterclasses for the Birkbeck and the last and the last the second and last for the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. I won’t introduce him extensively for two reasons many of you were here yesterday and I introduced him then and secondly he needs no introduction as I also said yesterday. But I will remark on one thing or else there would be an elephant
Welcome everybody to the second of Slavoj Žižek’s masterclasses for the Birkbeck and the last and the last the second and last for the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. I won’t introduce him extensively for two reasons many of you were here yesterday and I introduced him then and secondly he needs no introduction as I also said yesterday. But I will remark on one thing or else there would be an elephant
Slavoj Žižek
in the room yeah.
in the room yeah.
Cathy Newman
Um in between his visits to us he appeared on Channel News speaking about refugees in Europe with his predictable unpredictability he set off a social media storm of responses so really I didn't know really in into your delectation for yours too
Um in between his visits to us he appeared on Channel News speaking about refugees in Europe with his predictable unpredictability he set off a social media storm of responses so really I didn't know really in into your delectation for yours too
Slavoj Žižek
I'm I am accused of being a fascist right oh yeah of course
I'm I am accused of being a fascist right oh yeah of course
Cathy Newman
yeah yeah I got most choice once so some of the most recent epithets about Žižek completely useless mass of intellectualized garbage that I'm used to yeah okay coke-addled millionaire Nazi.
yeah yeah I got most choice once so some of the most recent epithets about Žižek completely useless mass of intellectualized garbage that I'm used to yeah okay coke-addled millionaire Nazi.
Slavoj Žižek
Well I would like what is the first phrase first part coke coke addled this is coke
Well I would like what is the first phrase first part coke coke addled this is coke
Cathy Newman
addled
addled
Slavoj Žižek
coke a coke is a coke addict like oh
coke a coke is a coke addict like oh
Cathy Newman
yeah but I think it means cocaine I don't know you should know. No but
yeah but I think it means cocaine I don't know you should know. No but
Slavoj Žižek
that's the point I like it so much when I visited the first time sorry to interrupt you there in Argentina all those creepy Lacanians there who are personally much more unpleasant and stupid than Kleinians and Freudians there was the general diagnosis I I by sniffing it's cocaine all the time. Believe me or not I'm the only person even you admit it look deep into your heart you at least tried maybe some marijuana or what everyone did my friend Mladen Dolar the wise guy was drunk at his home uh I never did I try not even nothing it's just I am naturally the way I am so that would no I didn't but how you know and then the big debate was is it cocaine or LSD like the only debate was which type of the last one fascist who knows it's up to you but the second one millionaire well fuck it I wouldn't mind to like should I pass a hat around and each of you throws maybe I approach that I wouldn't mind that you know I would like to be my idea is to be this type of a billionaire where you know you have ten billions which you get through blood torturing exploiting others but then you get a little bit of it back and then you are the greatest humanitarian and so on you know. Sorry let's
that's the point I like it so much when I visited the first time sorry to interrupt you there in Argentina all those creepy Lacanians there who are personally much more unpleasant and stupid than Kleinians and Freudians there was the general diagnosis I I by sniffing it's cocaine all the time. Believe me or not I'm the only person even you admit it look deep into your heart you at least tried maybe some marijuana or what everyone did my friend Mladen Dolar the wise guy was drunk at his home uh I never did I try not even nothing it's just I am naturally the way I am so that would no I didn't but how you know and then the big debate was is it cocaine or LSD like the only debate was which type of the last one fascist who knows it's up to you but the second one millionaire well fuck it I wouldn't mind to like should I pass a hat around and each of you throws maybe I approach that I wouldn't mind that you know I would like to be my idea is to be this type of a billionaire where you know you have ten billions which you get through blood torturing exploiting others but then you get a little bit of it back and then you are the greatest humanitarian and so on you know. Sorry let's
Cathy Newman
go on yes to continue so peak fascist a xenophobe in Lacanian pseudo-communist clothing and then the the slight I tried to find nice ones too so not as stupid or evil as detractors claim
go on yes to continue so peak fascist a xenophobe in Lacanian pseudo-communist clothing and then the the slight I tried to find nice ones too so not as stupid or evil as detractors claim
Slavoj Žižek
I like this because it's still stupid and evil just not as stupid and evil. But it's wrong theoretically don't you agree that even Adorno wrote this somewhere that to be really evil you have to be bright it's very difficult to be really evil and being stupid.
I like this because it's still stupid and evil just not as stupid and evil. But it's wrong theoretically don't you agree that even Adorno wrote this somewhere that to be really evil you have to be bright it's very difficult to be really evil and being stupid.
Cathy Newman
Mhm the evil genius
Mhm the evil genius
Slavoj Žižek
okay. Okay evil genius here I tend to agree with with Hannah Arendt you know that like you know who is for me would you agree for me the true evil is Albert Speer not only because he is this Nazism with the human face he apologized afterwards but I read recently a good biography of him where they they convinced me at least they claimed he was an organizational genius and Hitler's maybe wisest decision was already in when in late forty-three put him as the Minister for Armament and so on. He was organized things so well you know that with all the carpet bombing German military industrial production was record the top in forty-four he was and the idea is that without him the war would have ended immediately in forty-four after. So if you look for who was guilty for that totally unnecessary additional year it was Albert Speer. Sorry I interrupt you give me another another
okay. Okay evil genius here I tend to agree with with Hannah Arendt you know that like you know who is for me would you agree for me the true evil is Albert Speer not only because he is this Nazism with the human face he apologized afterwards but I read recently a good biography of him where they they convinced me at least they claimed he was an organizational genius and Hitler's maybe wisest decision was already in when in late forty-three put him as the Minister for Armament and so on. He was organized things so well you know that with all the carpet bombing German military industrial production was record the top in forty-four he was and the idea is that without him the war would have ended immediately in forty-four after. So if you look for who was guilty for that totally unnecessary additional year it was Albert Speer. Sorry I interrupt you give me another another
Cathy Newman
one um bizarre okay. All right and and my my favorite one give my favorite one given the whole cartoon thing was Eastern European Daffy Duck.
one um bizarre okay. All right and and my my favorite one give my favorite one given the whole cartoon thing was Eastern European Daffy Duck.
Slavoj Žižek
I'm not quite sure that I I preferred once that I was dressed even even uglier way I was compared to Eastern European state trade union functionary you know that guy who you know workers strike and I come there and say but comrades we are in power how can you know all those stupid communist sophistic trick how how can you strike against ourselves you know and so on so that's one mhm. What is Daffy Duck? Daffy Duck that I mean from from your domain. Yeah yeah from my
I'm not quite sure that I I preferred once that I was dressed even even uglier way I was compared to Eastern European state trade union functionary you know that guy who you know workers strike and I come there and say but comrades we are in power how can you know all those stupid communist sophistic trick how how can you strike against ourselves you know and so on so that's one mhm. What is Daffy Duck? Daffy Duck that I mean from from your domain. Yeah yeah from my
Cathy Newman
domain Donald and Daffy and all the gang. Ah cartoon female duck Donald's female archetype. Uh-huh
domain Donald and Daffy and all the gang. Ah cartoon female duck Donald's female archetype. Uh-huh
Slavoj Žižek
it but this is not Disney this is another series I think no is this Daffy Duck more black or what no I'm confusing something. No
it but this is not Disney this is another series I think no is this Daffy Duck more black or what no I'm confusing something. No
Cathy Newman
no
no
Slavoj Žižek
I think she's just a regular. Sorry? Yeah you see white white liberal racist you see she wanted to erase the the black aspects you
I think she's just a regular. Sorry? Yeah you see white white liberal racist you see she wanted to erase the the black aspects you
Cathy Newman
know. It's true oh God. Okay.
know. It's true oh God. Okay.
Slavoj Žižek
But you know whom I prefer don't you he is really nervous like me that woodpecker or what you know who Woody Woodpecker that's me if you want my correlate you know.
But you know whom I prefer don't you he is really nervous like me that woodpecker or what you know who Woody Woodpecker that's me if you want my correlate you know.
Cathy Newman
So there was uh yeah there was quite a bit of hate out there perhaps best to stick with the interview Cathy Newman's chosen adjective which was flamboyant which means flaming or blazing so
So there was uh yeah there was quite a bit of hate out there perhaps best to stick with the interview Cathy Newman's chosen adjective which was flamboyant which means flaming or blazing so
Slavoj Žižek
incendiary. Yeah well it also can mean be a nice way to say crazy confused or whatever I am yeah.
incendiary. Yeah well it also can mean be a nice way to say crazy confused or whatever I am yeah.
Cathy Newman
Um so Channel News got about five minutes of you yesterday which set off enough of a storm we have another two hours and the title is Surplus Value, Surplus Enjoyment, Surplus Knowledge so I shall
Um so Channel News got about five minutes of you yesterday which set off enough of a storm we have another two hours and the title is Surplus Value, Surplus Enjoyment, Surplus Knowledge so I shall
Slavoj Žižek
thank you very much thank you but you know I'm sorry I didn't want to go here into all that uh why I am accused ah you want to be the one who can control me admit it that you have one dream at least it's my dream that you would like to sit there that if the chair would have been like you know the famous two chairs in the limousine in Goldfinger where you have then that red button you know when I talk too much you press it and [unintelligible]. Okay sorry but where I really agree with you again read her book on on on cartoons I think that precisely because they appear childish stupid and so on you learn like things that things about brutality aggressiveness of everyday capitalism this is one of the aspects which would have been too brutal cannot be put into with real actors you can say stage it much more openly in cartoons. And what I especially like listen Esther do you have a soft spot for them I'm not saying it's a great movie but the one with uh with who was the guy I forgot about uh you know it's even with a leftist God it takes place in LA early fifties still there are still streetcars it's such a well-known movie where the guy is it even not Anthony Hopkins who an ordinary private detective who is hired by a rabbit. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Yeah yeah yeah you know what I like this combination of like real figures real in the sense of real actors and cartoon figures. I always like my preferred scenes in movies are those where although let's say it's all real but at a certain point the rules of the game change and again although it's reality we are in the universe of cartoons. That's why I admit one of my nasty dirty guilty pleasures scenes although they are disgusting for the first two-thirds but especially Home Alone One and Two. You remember especially in Two when the action moves to this final confrontation we are in this crazy cartoon universe you remember when a guy his head is burning so he puts his head into the toilet but the evil child put gasoline there so his head explodes and what I like is then he just comes out with a burnt you know it's indestructible absolutely. And not only there general you know it's very easy with this virtual technology whatever to to shot to recreate reality with artificial effects you know like we know for example if you saw that stupid ancient Rome movie with Russell Crowe Gladiator we know that all those arenas were really empty all the thousands of people were put in digitally and so on. That's easy but I find it artistically much more interesting the opposite thing which is that not that it's fiction but you experience it as reality but that it's reality and you experience it as fiction. This seems to me a much more interesting procedure. Okay losing time because I must apologize today I will have to disappear at four so again I will but so there is some theory here no is it possible maybe ah I am allowed to draw here I think. No no should I no but what is then this yeah this yes this is to draw this is no this is not a screen look it's fixed wait a minute yes I can okay I will maybe just the scheme of this course. Okay let me begin with a scene from a movie which is I think Alfred Hitchcock at his most Marxist. I quoted already this in some of my books but I wasn't aware of the Marxist dimension of it. Truffaut in his book of conversations with Hitchcock reports how Hitchcock told him that he was always dreaming of shooting a scene but he never did it and I think he Hitchcock was right not to do it because it would have been too vulgar too direct staging the fantasy of Hitchcock too openly. Here is the scene that Hitchcock wanted he claims claims to insert in North by Northwest I quote I wanted to have a long dialogue between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers at the Ford plant as they walk along the assembly line behind them a car is being assembled piece by piece finally the car they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete with gas and oil all ready to drive off the line the two men look at each other and say isn't it wonderful then one of them opens the door and of course a corpse dropped out. This is the Marxist surplus at its purest like you've seen everything assembled together where did the corpse come from? I think this corpse as surplus is precisely the objectal not so much objective counterpoint of subject. We have here ah you prefer me to use this one ah screw you I mean like I wanted a big one you are giving me a small one sorry oh it is okay I'm very sorry no no it's okay I'm very sorry but I noticed how you see fascist reaction at work now the hint is also no red here it has to be black this was noted you know yeah sorry let's go on. So I think this is how here you have it's a wonderful simple scene production process out of nowhere a a a surplus is generated and this surplus is precisely subject in the guise of its opposite of in the guise of object. So my point is that sorry we have surplus value then this is well known I hope you know it then we have surplus knowledge and here I wasn't clear yesterday the beauty is that I think Lacanian conceptual machinery works here very well to explain precisely the difference between traditional knowledge even today's new age knowledge and science. It's a different type of surplus in traditional knowledge surplus is what we usually call it's still knowledge Gnosticism. What's the basic premise of Gnosticism our ordinary reality and the objectively scientific or common-sense knowledge related to it is not all there is a higher mystical speculative theosophic whatever type of knowledge. So this is the traditional universe we have ordinary knowledge reality there is another higher kind of knowledge in science it is not like that there it's not simply an exception but the surplus is inscribed into the very ordinary knowledge as always more always more knowledge is never definitive you know who knows what science will discover and so on and so on. So it's precisely what Lacan would have called from the universal masculine structure of universality with exception we have ordinary knowledge about the world universal everything nature and then some exception metaphysical whatever different type of knowledge while what science opposes to this again is a surplus which is inscribed into the very knowledge about reality which you know it's always more we always have to discover a new truth and so on. Which is why as Lacan already pointed out something happens with this surplus element in capitalism the to put it very simply the surplus becomes accountable you can count it you can measure it. Before what is the classical form of surplus prior to commodity logic to capitalism? It's simply let's say something erotic when you see someone my God it's not just what I see it's something more that is undescribable cannot be quantified maybe the big revolution of capitalism is precisely that surplus can be quantified. So we have surplus knowledge which again in ordinary or pre-modern universe is a special type of knowledge a deeper knowledge whatever and then we have the properly scientific surplus which is precisely the the interminable process of scientific of scientific research of scientific discoveries and so on and so on. So we have surplus knowledge we have surplus value and we have of course surplus enjoyment which just to recapitulate what I was saying yesterday surplus enjoyment is is again it's not something more in the sense of beyond ordinary pleasures there is some enjoyment. No to get at it you have precisely to to reduce things for this is the basic Freudian definition of drive and the pleasure it brings. As Lacan put it in very simple terms oral drive does not strive for an object for example when a baby is sucking mother's breast ordinary pleasure satisfaction is the milk you are hungry you get the object but the enjoyment proper is the satisfaction brought by the very act repeated act of sucking the breast and so on and so on so it's in the so this again which to put it in another way means and I think maybe I'm wrong I'm jumping too quickly here but I think that this is the big difference between let's say in a very global way Spinoza and Hegel. For Spinoza the obstacle is always external for Spinoza as he puts it repetitively every entity tends towards expanded assertion of its power and the reason of its failure is always that there is another external counter power. Alain Badiou here I again very respectfully disagree with him tried to think in the same way death for him death is totally external to the living being at least to the human being it's not an inherent obstacle we just die and it's totally meaningless okay. In a short text on this published I think on the Verso website Badiou even uses this wonderful joke about Monsieur de la Palice you know this the whole series of French jokes about an idiot no or what is told about him and one of the proverbs or statements is ten seconds before his death Monsieur de la Palice was still alive no like his point being that yes death is something like this it's not it was already all pointing towards death death just happens from the outside. Now Badiou would have probably lynched me for that but I claim I hear respectfully in a Hegelian way disagree I think that what Badiou but I don't have time to go into it today what Badiou calls infinity or immortality is strictly a phenomenon available only to mortal beings immortality is the very form of death drive. This brings me to another much more important thing that how is transcendence born how does it emerge through an obstacle. We have a living entity which maybe still although I don't think they exist a Spinozean one just striving towards what Spinoza calls Conatus which is more kind of an extension of power and so on and so on and maybe I've already talked about this but I cannot resist this evil remark. I never understood it although it can be explained why is by many people Spinoza considered almost a philosophical saint you know whatever you do you don't touch Spinoza is this almost divinity Althusser, Deleuze name them. No I I think I don't know if I already told you this story I must apologize if I did once I was some ten years ago already at a conference on Spinoza in LA and there was a lady there totally fanatically Spinozean I'm not anti-feminist here usually women are more critical towards Spinoza usually men are more stupid Spinozeans but she said because we debated that passage towards the end of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus where Spinoza to explain his basic premise that right is might what do you have the right to is grounded in how much Conatus life power assertive you have and Spinoza gives the example of men and women and claims this is why the fact that women have much less social power means that they have less right and it's totally normal he justifies this and the poor lady said isn't this crazy it is as if someone else has written this this is totally against Spinoza no it's not it totally fits Spinoza I claim. What so again we have this idea that the limit of an entity is always external I every entity strives towards expansion assertion limit no or as Spinoza puts it in another passage of his ethics no entity disintegrates falls apart immanently it's always an external obstacle while for Hegel it's the opposite but it's not some some stupid death drive in the sense of ooh I want to destroy myself no Hegel has a much nicer version here of death drive is this one let's say again returning to what I said one minute ago I'm I have I am this Spinozean entity I'm just caught in interaction with other entities well we all strive to expand our power and then I stumble upon an obstacle that I cannot bypass and the way I do it is then you know whenever you have an obstacle as a reaction to an obstacle you go into transcendence. It's always even with love relations why do we have all that bullshit poetry and so on and so on because you cannot do it directly so this would be the Hegelian insight that obstacle is not simply an obstacle creativity the excess of creativity emerges precisely out of a if I may put this slightly naive term out of a creative reply to an obstacle and so again I'm here unfortunately on on Hegel's side so again today now I want to elaborate a little bit the ah yes sorry another point. So I said three types of surplus: surplus enjoyment which can also be called although it's not exclusively that enjoyment in pleasure, surplus value and surplus knowledge. Now I'm so sad okay read my next book or be here in July on my other seminar where I will go in detail into this in the book that I mentioned yesterday *Capitalist Unconscious* Samo Tomšič he develops very well one point that we should not read Marxist notion of surplus value exchange value and so on and so on as some kind of a secondary alienation you know for example that in a natural economy money is not a self-goal people just exchange like in a normal economy I do something I give it to others so that I get from there with money or without another another use value and so on and then money but capitalist money money which engenders money is then some kind of an unnatural perversion where money instead of being just a mediator becomes sorry how do you put it Zweck an sich in English self-goal self-aim whatever sorry. End in itself? End in itself sorry that's it yes an end in itself. But I think that this is not Marxist position. Marx is not claiming that we have some basic material level of use-value production which gets later through exchange inverted into no a gap is there from the very beginning. Marxist thesis is that even in the most elementary exchange use-value and so on even not exchange there is already a gap which is there. You know how I can just give you a hint how this works. Uh uh uh for Marx that's why capitalism is the first step towards liberation because in capitalism again profit more money becomes the the end in itself of production but for Marx communism is not a return to like normal state of things where production only aims at satisfying our needs no Marx explicitly said that the point of communism is that production explodes beyond needs production development of productive forces becomes an end in itself. And Marx even uses here a beautiful Hegelian reversal where he says that in capitalism already it may appear that we produce in order to satisfy our needs but Marx says that the general sociologic behind is the opposite one that the development of human needs is just a kind of following a kind of Hegelian list der vernunft cunning of reason is just a kind of a triggering mechanism whose real aim is to expand our productive capacities and so on. So again Marxist point is not to he is much more almost idealist but it's not really idealism here his point is not this classical anti-alienation point to reduce these perversions like oh my God instead of doing things in order to get pleasure you get pleasure out of just doing things doing things or earning money becomes an end in itself but we must return to a natural state no Marx the whole point of Marx is that a certain surplus is from the beginning in the labor process itself. Okay I don't have time to go into it now I want to so okay my last point so these three surpluses and what is the place that they fill in subject. I claim that surplus is strictly correlative to subject it's clear even in commodity where exchange where for Marx surplus value is precisely what subjectivity contributes in the production process and for Marx it's clear that Arbeitskraft working force I don't know labor force how you translate it is precisely pure substanceless without substance subjectivity. Now I want to shift it but we will return immanently to this big topic to a topic that I really like which is what does this mean for our concept of nature is a kind of a surplus already inscribed into nature? My final answer is yes not in a new age idealist sense that there is already spirit in nature I'm just claiming that and I'm here critical about critically disposed against a certain let's call it paradigm which so that people will not say that I'm not critical about Lacan which you find already in even in Lacan at least up to a certain point this opposition of a natural balance and subjectivity as the site of negativity excess and so on and so on. You know even the early Lacan at least who was very close to Sartre we should never forget this the secret of early Lacan is Sartre often repeats this motive how in nature there is sexual relation blah blah blah and human human subjectivity is a kind of a perverse reversal of nature things are no longer natural death drive self-sabotaging whatever. But I claim that that this notion of nature as some preceding homeostatic balance which is then disturbed by through human hubris is precisely the last idealist myth which is why incidentally also for me this is the worst type of ecology with this kind of anti-human hubris ecology you know we humanity exploited nature too much disturbed its balance now we have to pay our price to to mother nature and so on. I would like here to engage it will take some time but I think it's worth in a critical reading of one of my teachers Jacques-Alain Miller and I think what he is doing is not only politically but also theoretically catastrophic in last years. Not only politically he now even became openly the member of some support committee for Sarkozy's reelection or whatever but okay Miller's thesis is that nature is today in disorder not because it overwhelms our cognitive capacities like there is so much in nature we cannot ever know it people knew this always but because we are not able to master the effects of our own interventions into the course of nature. For example who knows what the ultimate consequences of our biogenetic engineering or of global warming will be? The surprise comes from ourselves it concerns the opacity of how we ourselves fit into the picture. The impenetrable stain in the picture is not some cosmic mystery like the explosion of a supernova the stain is are we ourselves our collective activity. Against this background one should understand Miller’s nice formula Il y a un grand désordre dans le réel. In simple English there is a great disorder in the real. If you are Maoists and Miller was long long ago a Maoist you immediately can detect here the echo of for me at least the most beautiful saying of Mao there is a great disorder in heavens so the situation is perfect. So that’s how Miller characterizes the way reality appears to us in our time in which we experience the full impact of two fundamental agents: modern science and capitalism. Nature as the real in which everything from stars to the sun always returns to its proper place as the realm of large reliable cycles and of stable laws this nature is gradually being replaced by a contingent real real outside the law real that is permanently revolutionizing its own rules real that resists any inclusion into a totalized world universe of meaning. Now how should we react to such constellation? Should we assume a defensive approach and search for a new limit a return to or rather the invention of some new balance? This is what so-called bioethics endeavors to do with regard to biotechnology. This is why I am deeply suspicious of so-called bioethics. Biotechnology pursues new possibilities of scientific interventions genetic manipulations cloning and so on and bioethics endeavors then to impose some moral or whatever limitations on biotechnology. As such I claim bioethics is not immanent to scientific practice it intervenes into this practice from outside imposing external morality onto it. So I think if anything bioethics is the betrayal of the ethics immanent to scientific activity it’s which is the ethics of do not compromise your scientific desire follow inexorably its path. And again for me a compromise sorry if I repeat myself but the line is crucial a nice example of this compromise is for me for example the stance of Habermas and those others who see in brain sciences a threat to human identity and it’s a very sad reaction again as I always repeat no wonder that Habermas published not wrote because they just collected texts but nonetheless published a book together with the previous Pope Ratzinger because they it’s deeply ironic for me how the guy who claims to be the big philosopher of modernity you know his big motive is modernity as an unfinished project we didn’t yet go to the end please all of a sudden argues for certain limits like don’t play with our brains and so on too much because you may endanger our basic self-understanding of humans as free responsible agents and so on and so on. But what should be the scientific answer to this? Of course we should bear in mind all possible threats but my God I am ready to go here to the end and say but nonetheless I want to know how my brain works I want to know are we really free beings or not I want simply to know is it true that all that I experience as my free decision is just registering something which already happened independently of my decision at the neural level and so on and so on. So I claim that Habermas although he provides a different transcendental transcendental argumentation basically what his argument amounts to is the old conservative Catholic mostly Catholic wisdom of for our moral sanity it’s better not to know some things. The secret reasoning of Habermas I claim is if we probe too much into how our mind works we may discover that we are not free and if we discover this it would have meant a catastrophe for our moral self-understanding like you can say fuck it it’s all predetermined so I’m not responsible and so on and so on. So let’s not probe too deep into that. I find not only from the scientific point but even ethico-politically such a limitation catastrophic. So but my point is how expand how omnipresent is getting this logic of self-limitation as if modernity immanently scientific modernity means some explosive expansion and let’s not go to the end we need a proper limit. As Lacan put it in his short booklet published by Verso here I think a letter a letter to religious people something like that Lacan's point is precisely that here it's incredible how some religious theorists quote this Lacan as his offering the hand of friendship to Catholics no he says there explicitly that today more than ever religion and psychoanalysis are mortal enemies he absolutely rejects this line but he says precisely this fear of how far will science go will it deprive us of all that makes our human life worth living poetry and so on moral responsibility that we should posit a limit and I think that it's also catastrophic to go to follow this line in ecology because this is how I understand Badiou here I agree fully with him when he wrote already a couple of years ago that ecology is a new candidate for religion today he didn't mean ecology's mystical and so on his point was simply that the traditional function of religion was to set certain limits you can do this that and today insofar as at least with most people a religion although there are fundamentalist attempts but religion is losing this ability so what remains simply nature as the ultimate limitation we cannot do this we will disturb the natural balance and so on and so on. My of course my problem here my answer you may have known it I am repeating it all the time is simply that there is no natural balance if there ever was a human projection ideological projection it's the idea of homeostatic nature or as I like to say if nature is our mother it's a very bitchy evil mother I mean nature is full of mega imbalances catastrophes and the the theory that I prefer of you know this eternal enigma how did humanity arise out of apes whatever nature is there must have been some terrible catastrophe where something happened and so on I always like this theory although I mean some of the theories of how humanity emerged are wonderful because they are so comically ridiculous in their naivety like a great guy he's not a total stupid like Daniel Dennett develops the most stupid by a lot of that I read explanation of how we humans began to walk on two feet. You know what is his explanation that those primordial apes I mean apes which were to become human were walking in those African savannas where grass is pretty high so to communicate with each other they had to jump up and then you see the story some of them said fuck it I am too lazy to jump up why don't I simply stand on my two legs. This for me is like exactly the same logic as that of Jonathan Swift I repeated this here often you must remember it in not in Lilliputians another Gulliver book where he has this theory of origin of language that in the beginning people didn't yet have words but they communicated so that they carried on their back small models of objects like this is I go to my house you made a signed go and you showed the model of a house but then after some time because humanity developed and so on you know this bag with objects grew larger and larger till I like this naivety till one of them says fuck it it's too heavy why why don't we replace these objects with words you know but you see the jokes it's circular no I mean you you all this type of explanations already presuppose that you are within the symbolic horizon which is why here I admired really Stephen Jay Gould the one who dropped that the unfortunately the great evolutionary biologist who and this is why there is such animosity against him with all the other big names Dennett, Steven Pinker and so on his idea was and I think it's very Lacanian one that language did not develop as part of simple process of adaptation you find this stupidity even with Friedrich Engels in this the role of labor of you know that Engels says that first there was labor people collaborated and oh my God is this so naive and at some point they discovered that that collaboration is so complex that in order for collaborative labor to work we have to communicate I have to tell you so you know it's again this absolute naivety no his idea I think it's wonderful is that language emerged as a pure nonsensical byproduct we don't know what something went wrong and this theory is today taken very seriously that that in different type of adaptation something happened with our so that it was absolutely a contingent excess surplus excess which then became refunctionalized we talk we collaborate better and so on and so on but again it was and I'm here back to the topic to the topic of surplus it was pure meaningless surplus and even every intelligent Darwinian will tell you Lacan here refers to good Darwinians that Darwin is not Lamarck Lamarck has this stupid utilitarian teleology for example he claims how do you call what do horn or what do those deer animals have no that that they needed this to I don't know what to kill the enemy to kill an animal for food so gradually the horns oh how do you call them the antlers yeah yeah yeah gradually they emerged you know so no what what Lacan uses exactly the same word as Gould the problem of human being is not I want to do something I don't have the organ for it and then through gradual adaptation or whatever this organ develops no Lacan says the original situation of not only human being of an animal is that through evolutionary confusion genetic mess we have too many organs we don't know what to do with them and then secondarily it's what Gould described in a wonderful way as exaptation as opposed to adaptation. There is a surplus maybe it's what went for something but it either it emerged simply through some genetic confusion or it serve one old purpose and it's no longer of any use and then it's transfunctionalized it's kidnapped for another purpose. So the idea that I like here and you find it with serious Darwinians is that it's not humanity everything serves its function and so on sorry nature animals with humans we have excess and so on no the basic mechanism of evolution is excess you have things which serve nothing and then secondarily you try to you try to make use of them that's how evolution works. I think I already used years ago you were not here even art develops like this I used years ago a beautiful example of this totally vulgar connections incredibly for example I hate him he was a fascist composer literally Giacomo Puccini. You know that the last letter he wrote when dying in Geneva was you know in twenty-three or four Mussolini regime just established was in a deep crisis because who was it Matteotti Matteotti or who the last socialist member of parliament was murdered by fascist thugs so there was an outcry in all of Italy and Mussolini seriously thought that he will lose power but then the good right-wing intellectuals artists Pirandello and so on all wrote a letter to Mussolini know we stand with you among them Puccini also wrote the letter. But what I’m saying is this you find around nineteen-hundred year a change in his the structure of his arias. Arias are usually just two to two and a half minutes now we can engage in some pseudo-Adornian speculation yes this was because you know the modernist disintegration of large organic totalities no he wanted money and the early recordings the length was two and a half minutes something like that so he did it and so on. But again this does you know what fascinated me is this how a totally external mechanical effect can produce much more serious great artistic genuine effects for example I’m sorry another story I tell it to you maybe you know it the biggest revolution is opera staging at least in Germany was when Bayreuth reopened with Wagner staging in and it was over with that Viking kitsch you know those helmets with horn ah this is a beautiful story I read it you know that even today we think that this is some kind of a historical fact that primitive Vikings had how do you call it not helmets sorry with this how do you call these horns or what yeah yeah yeah do and that Wagner just in his obsession with great Germanic past copied it no Wagner invented it there are absolutely no proofs no drawings nothing that before Wagner’s operas there were any Vikings with these horns or whatever it’s pure Wagnerian invention. Okay let’s go on so uh uh it was the big revolution towards this ascetic staging you know almost empty stage just some like uh runes the ancient Celtic uh Celtic uh big stones and singers dressed in kind of a almost ancient tunics and so on it’s a great revolution books are written what this meant and so on well I don’t know what it meant but I don’t know how it came to be. Bayreuth in was bankrupt they didn’t have any money the only thing they had was that Siemens or one of the big electro companies which started to function again properly offered Bayreuth a lot of as much as they want free electricity. And that’s it. But you see this is a nice example that Marx would have liked how how you can describe it quite adequately in immanent terms it functions it is a great revolution it’s even a crucial step in de-fascizing how should I put it in in kidnapping Wagner from the hold of fascist stagings but nonetheless the immediate cause was a totally ridiculous one. So again let’s go on what I’m saying here is that there is a surplus in surplus in the sense of an element which cannot which is not fun there there are too many things in nature again adaptation is not oh my God I need that no adaptation is okay there are many things I don’t know what to do with them so my God let’s try this let’s try let’s try that or whatever. Now I will do a slightly boring thing to boring thing to describe to you where Miller is wrong even more. It will be a long two pages quote from Miller but it’s from a programmatic text for a new congress of his Lacanian school which was dedicated to very bombastic title the real for the 21st century. Oh my god it’s okay please listen carefully it’s simple long quote from Miller. “There is this is something indicated by Lacan’s examples to illustrate the return of the real in the same place. His examples are the annual return of the seasons the spectacle of the skies and the heavenly bodies. You could say based on examples from all antiquity Chinese rituals of course used mathematical calculations and so on you could say that in this epoch the real as nature has the function of the other of the other. That is to say that the real was itself the guarantee of the symbolic order. The agitation the rhetorical agitation of the signifier in human speech was framed by the web of signifiers fixed like the heavenly bodies. Nature this is its very definition is defined by being ordered that is by the conduct of the symbolic and the real to such an extent that according to the most ancient traditions all human order should imitate natural order. The real invented by Lacan is not the real of science it is a contingent real random in as much as the natural law of the relations between the sexes is lacking it is a hole in the knowledge included in the real. Lacan made use of the language of mathematics the best support for science in the formulas of sexuation for example he tried to grasp the dead ends of sexuality in a weft of mathematical logic. This was like a heroic attempt to make psychoanalysis into a science of the real in the way that logic is but that can be done without imprisoning jouissance in the phallic function in a symbol. It implies a symbolization of the real it implies referring to the binary binary man woman for this Miller deserves death penalty I mean he speaks like Judith Butler here man woman is a binary no it’s not but okay sorry sorry as if living beings could be partitioned so neatly when we already see in the real of the 21st century a growing disorder of of sexuation. This is already a secondary construction Lacan’s formulas of sexuation that intervenes after the initial impact of the body and la langue. Lacan’s term la langue for language as the real prior to meaning just play of obscene significations and so on which constitutes a real without law without logical rule. Logic is only introduced afterwards with the elucubration the fantasy the subject supposed to know and with psychoanalysis. Until now under the inspiration of the 20th century our clinical cases as we recount them have been logical clinical constructions under transference. But the cause-effect relation is a scientific prejudice supported by the subject supposed to know. The cause-effect relation is not valid at the level of the real without law it is not valid except with the rupture between cause and effect. Lacan said it as a joke if one understands how an interpretation works it is not an analytic interpretation. In psychoanalysis as Lacan invites us to practice it we experience the rupture of the cause-effect link the opacity of the link and this is why we speak of the unconscious. I’m going to say it in another way psychoanalysis takes place at the level of the repressed and of the interpretation of the repressed thanks to the subject supposed to know. But in the 21st century it is a question of psychoanalysis exploring another dimension that of the defense against the real without law and without meaning. Lacan indicates this direction with his notion of the real as Freud does with his mythological concept of drive. The Lacanian unconscious that of the late Lacan is at the level of the real let us say for convenience below the Freudian unconscious.” Again here I start shooting. Lacan regresses here to the worst of Jungianism you know this is the standard Jungian criticism of Freud that Freudian unconscious is too close to logic it’s just a surface unconscious too rational but there is a deeper really crazy unconscious and so on. Therefore back to Miller “in order to enter into the 21st century our clinic will have to be centered on dismantling the defense disordering the defense against the real. The transferential unconscious in analysis is already a defense against the real and in the transferential unconscious there still is an intention a wanting to say a wanting you to tell me when in fact the real unconscious is not intentional it is encountered under the modality of that’s it c’est comme ça in French that’s how it is which you could say is like our amen. Various questions will be open to us for us at the next congress this is introductory address to congress the redefinition of the desire of the analyst which is not a pure desire not a pure infinity of metonymy but the desire to reach the real to reduce the other to its real and to liberate it of meaning. I would add that Lacan invented a way of representing the real with the Borromean knot. We will ask ourselves how valid this interpretation is. Lacan made use of the knot to arrive at this irremediable zone of existence where one can go no further with two. The passion Lacan’s passion for the Borromean knot led Lacan to the same zone as Oedipus at Colonus where one finds the absolute absence of charity of fraternity of any human sentiment. This is where the search for the real stripped of meaning leads us.” I mean this line of thought I hope it was relatively clear is simple is something for which if we were to live in people’s democracy Miller would end up in gulag without any possibility of getting out of it. Why? What do I found problematic in this passage? Problems begin with the notion of the real as nature in its regularity as that which always returns at its place. This sounds understandable you know in pre-modern society ancient Egypt and so on the ultimate point of reference was the regularity of bodily movements that stars reappear every morning at that place winter fall seasons they there is a higher regularity in nature which should be also this heavenly regularity the ultimate point of reference for our human universe and so on. But I think Miller misses something here which he gives a well too simplified reading of this pre-modern regularity. As it was noted by Lacan for example for ancient Aztecs and other civilizations of sacrifice the natural real was not simply a regularity that nothing can that cannot be perturbed. Ancient Aztecs organized human sacrifices to guarantee what and that’s what Lacan noted it’s a wonderful deal why did ancient Aztecs sacrifice people not to not to not to not to fight against chance not to make it sure when there was a drought that there will be rain or whatever but that’s so beautiful they did it precisely to guarantee that the most ordinary and expected thing will happen. They sacrificed people to sustain the very regularity of nature. Human lives have to be sacrificed so that nature will rotate in its regular way so that sun will raise in the morning and so on and so on. You can find this in what we know about ancient Aztec and so on mythology. Again their great fear was if we humans do not perform our rituals sun will not rise and so on and so on. We will so again the real of the natural order where everything returns at its own place already relies on a symbolic intervention. It’s not just a natural real which is there on which we can rely it’s not independent of us we have to sustain it through our rituals and sacrifices. And there is a key passage from this real sustained by symbolic sacrifice to the real of modern science the Newtonian real of natural laws of the network of causes and effects. It’s only this real the scientific real which really turns around by itself. I mean you don’t have to sacrifice your let’s say your mother-in-law although I would like to do this so that sun will rise next morning why not but okay another story. So here again just one shorter this time quote from Miller. “With the infinite universe of mathematical physics nature disappears it becomes solely a moral instance. With the philosophers of the 18th century with the infinite universe nature disappears and the real begins to be unveiled. Fine but I have been asking myself Miller still about the formula there is a knowledge in the real. It would be a temptation to say that the unconscious is at this level. On the contrary the supposition of a knowledge in the real appears to me to be an ultimate veil that needs to be lifted. If there is a knowledge in the real there is regularity and scientific knowledge allows prediction. It is so proud of prediction in so far as this demonstrates the existence of laws and it does not require a divine utterance of this laws for them to remain valid. It is by way of this idea of loss that the old idea of nature has been preserved in the very expression the laws of nature.” So again for Miller even without gods and so on the Newtonian nature remains the same it’s still nature regulated by eternal by eternal laws things always function in the same way and so on and so on. But I think Miller again proceeds here too fast. The break between traditional nature and nature of modern science is more radical. In contrast to traditional nature whose regular rhythm is supposed to point towards a deeper cosmic sexualized meaning day and night as the regular exchange of masculine and feminine principles and so on. That’s crucial for me the traditional real pre-modern Yin Yang and so on is always a sexualized real a meaningful real something which that’s the whole point of Tao Te Ching Yin Yang and so on that it’s not just blind mathematics it’s a global guaranteed stable order of meaning. While scientific laws of nature are themselves contingent there is no deeper meaningful necessity sustaining them. When Miller says that today we encounter the real under the modality of that’s it c’est comme ça but this is precisely how Newtonian laws function. When Newton proposes his whatever formula it’s wrong to ask what cosmic harmony is expressed in this way is this a reflection of some deeper cosmic meaning no it’s not although I know very well that Newton himself was ambiguous here you know that he spent much more time on theosophical questions and so on than on science. So that’s my first problem with Miller that he brings too much together under the sign of regularity pre-modern notion of natural order which is always already a symbolized order order of meaning grounded in a sacrificial gesture and on the other hand the scientific order of nature. But I have another problem with Miller. Miller’s search for the pure real outside the symbolic a real not yet stained by the symbolic that he attributes to Lacan I think has to be abandoned. Tragically Miller gets clear too close to Deleuze. In a very Deleuzian way repeating literally a formula from Anti-Oedipus Miller speaks of the true pre-Oedipal unconscious beneath the Freudian one. As if we first have the pure pre-Oedipal movement of drives the direct interpenetration of signifying material and jouissance. This is what Lacan means by la langue and as if it is only in a logically if not temporary afterward that this flux is ordered ordained by symbolic elucubrations forced into the symbolic straightjacket of binary logic of paternal law of castration of normative structure of two sexual identities and so on and so on. According to Miller even Lacan’s formulas of sexuation fall into this category they are an attempt to grab to symbolize the real imposing on it a binary logic and so on and so on. Miller’s point is then that today in the 21st century we see that new forms of sexuality transgender all that stuff that this binary that sex itself becomes a totally irregular sex sex as the real with no fixed symbolic identities and so on and so on. From my point is here very simple my reproach to Miller. It would be very good for him to read Lacan a little bit. Because from a Lacanian standpoint something is terribly wrong with this line of reasoning. Miller passes directly from the real as nature which follows its regular rhythm or its laws to the pure lawless real lawless without law. What goes missing here is I think precisely what Lacan calls the real. You know now we come to the crucial even philosophical point. For Lacan the real is not some substantial presence outside the symbolic. The real is an inherent obstacle impossibility inscribed into the symbolic order itself. The real is totally immanent. The real is something on account of which every symbolization fails but it’s not an external obstacle. It’s the in this sense for Lacan sexual difference is not binary it’s not male female but it’s a certain antagonism which as such cannot be symbolized but it doesn’t pre-exist symbolization. It is the real is the immanent impossibility of the symbolic order itself. Lacan says this literally le réel est une impasse de la formalisation. The real is a deadlock of formalization. That’s Lacan’s best formula and that’s how we should read formulas of sexuation. Again you know I often develop this point I will not now go into it in detail you can find it in my books and so on all around how antagonism is primordial antagonism impossibility and uh uh it doesn't have a clear real external point this is the worst of postmodernism sometimes Nietzsche writes like this as if the real is the truth too strong for us if you look at it directly you get blind we just can grab it from this from that perspective and so on and so on. No the real is just an immanent impossibility and when we ascribe to this impossibility an external cause this is maybe the most elementary gesture of fetishism and I can give you a very simple political example here anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is precisely this in order to avoid the immanence of social antagonism you project its cause onto an external disturbing element the Jews who introduce antagonism and so on and so on and so on. But there is something you find all this in practically all of my books but what is more important what I want to develop here is two things how first Miller in order to pursue this line of thought all of a sudden becomes Butlerian referring to Judith Butler that is to say he reduces sexual difference to a binary symbolic operation men do this women do that and so on but what Lacan does in his formulas of sexuation is exactly the opposite when Lacan speaks of male position he doesn't describe a certain set of features but just a certain deadlock or to put it in another way at the level of social relations and this is where things become where are we now you know I will do oh my god life is running. Okay let me go on. With Miller the most dangerous point is how Miller extends this logic also to capitalism for him again we are passing today from sexual difference and his idea is that sexual difference is gradually undermined no longer two sexes but just crazy multiplicity of sexual identities and for him it's the same with capitalism no longer binary logic but just kind of a proliferation of multiplicities. Here comes the dangerous conclusion without antagonism without any binary logic and so on and so on. And I think the whole so in other words when Miller inscribes science and capitalism into this logic of pure real outside symbolization and so on and so on he simply accepts late capitalism's ideological self-description. This is how capitalism today now I will say something very nasty although she is still my personal friend the ideological descriptions of today's late capitalism is Judith Butlerian you know no binaries just immanent self-construction outside any symbolic law and so on and so on. I claim no I claim that this precisely is the ideological deception this idea of today's capitalism and it doesn't matter if you want to control it or if you want like some so-called accelerationists like Negri and some others who claim no the only way through capitalism is to to abandon ourselves totally to this crazy pure real beyond any symbolic laws and so on and so on. No I here I'm sorry I remain here a traditional Marxist this idea of capitalism where it's this kind of flourishing multiplicity of identities we are all capitalists entrepreneurs of the self there is no law there is an injunction just to be to be free to these are the beautiful mottos of sixty-eight vivre sans temps mort to live without dead time jouir sans entraves to enjoy without obstacles and so on. I think that what Miller misses is that the pure real that he describes it's precisely an ideological mask which covers up the antagonism that precisely not only is this pure real what Lacan describes as pure real scientific or social or sexual not only is it not really without law but there is okay not a fixed law but law in the sense of a certain basic antagonism which engenders this explosive multiplicity. You remember how before I mentioned the positive role of obstacle. It's precisely the obstacle in the sense of contradiction of capitalism which explodes this crazy dynamic of capitalism. Miller totally obliterates this and even Marx is not as I developed often even Marx is not pure here because Marx accepts this logic of crazy capitalist dynamics but he thinks that capitalism at a certain point becomes an obstacle for this dynamics so if we abolish capitalism to put it very simply we will get this dynamics at its even more crazy you know then it'll be true crazy creativity and so on I don't think this is the case. I think it's a big problem for us more than ever even to imagine a true post-capitalist society because neither one nor the other of predominant models work. I don't believe in this Deleuzian notion of let's get rid of capitalist deterritorialization because it's very strange that Miller doesn't use here the term deterritorialization because this is really what he means by this lawless real is just reterritorialized by capitalism so we should destroy this reterritorialization to get pure deterritorialization pure expansive multiplicity or the opposite let's call it more conservative logic although you have leftist conservatives along these lines who claim that no that this radical modernization openness no obstacles it's a catastrophe that we have to invent a new limit a new self-limitation it can be nature for other people it's a religion and so on. No I claim the true answer is that this is the false opposition that there already is a capitalism explodes all the time precisely in order to avoid the the impetus is given by its by its by its immanent antagonism. Since I promised you half an hour or whatever for debate I will do the usual thing are you most of you at least in any contact with organizers Birkbeck here like I try to at least pay for my sins which are I'm talking too much and so on uh uh by at least delivering the text. So is there any system here where I send the text that I have to someone and then all this crowd here can get access to it? Should I send it to Madison or I don't know? Uh yeah you could send it to to Madison. Okay so that you know Madison or the Birkbeck yeah the Birkbeck this evening I promise you she will have the text where I go into what I can tell you very quickly my point my point is that I go into polemics with predominant version which is that this multiplicity of capitalism is a form of universalized perversion masochism and so on. My thesis I think it works much better is that capitalism is split between two discourses irreducibly hysterical discourse which is this always more expansion and university discourse so that the axis university hysteria is or even to put it in terms it can be even translated into the terms of classical Frankfurt School we have on the one hand this capitalist logic of incessant self-expansion and and it’s not the same logic the logic of knowledge is power domination which would have been the university discourse. And I think capitalism has to oscillate all the time not even oscillate but it’s like it’s like it’s like Möbius band you know one turning into another on the one hand we have this incessant hysterical logic I want more expansion it’s never that on the other hand we have the university knowledge domination logic and it’s interesting how often for example the greatest danger of the last fifty years I think is that those who were followers of not of Marxism of critical theory but not just Frankfurt School emphasized way too much I claim the logic of domination the the university discourse aspect you know today’s power even now through internet control and so on it’s some totalizing knowledge domination through knowledge but I think it’s absolutely crucial for capitalism also the other hysterical aspect. So now the problem is and that would have been my final Trump card and I doubt I’m always surprised why Trump it would be precisely vulgar at his level didn’t use this play with words you know I’m the Trump card I have a you say like this in English no Trump the Trump card. Okay would be that what then does what should be our answer to is? I claim the other axis master analyst. That is to say that on the one hand it’s my madness I will earn even worse designation for this on the one hand progressive movement today should shamelessly return to a certain type of discourse of the master and when people shout I tell them show me one modern relatively successful radical movement from even minor figures from Podemos to Syriza I had to laugh when a friend told me from Venezuela but listen you are too centralist European we have genuine social mobilization in Venezuela and I died laughing I say yeah but what about the big fat guy on the top you know Chavez and so on. On the other hand and that’s what I really wanted to do we don’t have time I wanted to develop the idea of a something that would be the social application of a analytic discourse and you know what I wanted to reread in this way it’s totally crazy idea when Lenin was close to his death not yet incapacitated he saw where things are moving so his idea was to establish a kind of he has different names for it like uh uh like uh control control committee or another sorry I I try to find his term yes central control commission and he was struggling with the right problem we need strong authoritarian party control but if it's that alone it will be a catastrophe so what kind of counter force to keep it in balance can we imagine and it was incredible I already quote this but I was too stupid when I quoted it in my living in the dead times I gave a too simplistic version Lenin now I got it what Lenin is saying because it's incredible he says it has to be an agency which it's incredible which may appear to know things better but they really don't know it. It’s like analyst supposed to know. Then he says it’s not what they know it’s the way they act maybe even jokes all elusive and so on it’s absolutely incredible how he describes a body that should have acted like the analyst to the master not some stupid democratic counter power but a kind of a eternal source of provocation like the object a of the master. Do you really mean it how do you know it and so on. So I think that I think that this will have maybe to be invented because to conclude I don’t know if I already mentioned this yesterday I think this is I think I mentioned it yesterday I will nonetheless repeat it this is for me maybe the most important trap today yes I mentioned it yesterday when things go wrong for the left in power they always seek a solution in oh we were not enough connected with social movements with social bad with social our social base we should keep that connection alive and so on and so on. But I claim this is just a way to avoid the basic fundamental question which is how to change from within the state apparatus itself. You know that’s the tragedy of Syriza for example they now and that’s where I don’t agree with critics of Syriza who claim the government now lost its contact with social base and so on and so on. For me the
thank you very much thank you but you know I'm sorry I didn't want to go here into all that uh why I am accused ah you want to be the one who can control me admit it that you have one dream at least it's my dream that you would like to sit there that if the chair would have been like you know the famous two chairs in the limousine in Goldfinger where you have then that red button you know when I talk too much you press it and [unintelligible]. Okay sorry but where I really agree with you again read her book on on on cartoons I think that precisely because they appear childish stupid and so on you learn like things that things about brutality aggressiveness of everyday capitalism this is one of the aspects which would have been too brutal cannot be put into with real actors you can say stage it much more openly in cartoons. And what I especially like listen Esther do you have a soft spot for them I'm not saying it's a great movie but the one with uh with who was the guy I forgot about uh you know it's even with a leftist God it takes place in LA early fifties still there are still streetcars it's such a well-known movie where the guy is it even not Anthony Hopkins who an ordinary private detective who is hired by a rabbit. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Yeah yeah yeah you know what I like this combination of like real figures real in the sense of real actors and cartoon figures. I always like my preferred scenes in movies are those where although let's say it's all real but at a certain point the rules of the game change and again although it's reality we are in the universe of cartoons. That's why I admit one of my nasty dirty guilty pleasures scenes although they are disgusting for the first two-thirds but especially Home Alone One and Two. You remember especially in Two when the action moves to this final confrontation we are in this crazy cartoon universe you remember when a guy his head is burning so he puts his head into the toilet but the evil child put gasoline there so his head explodes and what I like is then he just comes out with a burnt you know it's indestructible absolutely. And not only there general you know it's very easy with this virtual technology whatever to to shot to recreate reality with artificial effects you know like we know for example if you saw that stupid ancient Rome movie with Russell Crowe Gladiator we know that all those arenas were really empty all the thousands of people were put in digitally and so on. That's easy but I find it artistically much more interesting the opposite thing which is that not that it's fiction but you experience it as reality but that it's reality and you experience it as fiction. This seems to me a much more interesting procedure. Okay losing time because I must apologize today I will have to disappear at four so again I will but so there is some theory here no is it possible maybe ah I am allowed to draw here I think. No no should I no but what is then this yeah this yes this is to draw this is no this is not a screen look it's fixed wait a minute yes I can okay I will maybe just the scheme of this course. Okay let me begin with a scene from a movie which is I think Alfred Hitchcock at his most Marxist. I quoted already this in some of my books but I wasn't aware of the Marxist dimension of it. Truffaut in his book of conversations with Hitchcock reports how Hitchcock told him that he was always dreaming of shooting a scene but he never did it and I think he Hitchcock was right not to do it because it would have been too vulgar too direct staging the fantasy of Hitchcock too openly. Here is the scene that Hitchcock wanted he claims claims to insert in North by Northwest I quote I wanted to have a long dialogue between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers at the Ford plant as they walk along the assembly line behind them a car is being assembled piece by piece finally the car they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete with gas and oil all ready to drive off the line the two men look at each other and say isn't it wonderful then one of them opens the door and of course a corpse dropped out. This is the Marxist surplus at its purest like you've seen everything assembled together where did the corpse come from? I think this corpse as surplus is precisely the objectal not so much objective counterpoint of subject. We have here ah you prefer me to use this one ah screw you I mean like I wanted a big one you are giving me a small one sorry oh it is okay I'm very sorry no no it's okay I'm very sorry but I noticed how you see fascist reaction at work now the hint is also no red here it has to be black this was noted you know yeah sorry let's go on. So I think this is how here you have it's a wonderful simple scene production process out of nowhere a a a surplus is generated and this surplus is precisely subject in the guise of its opposite of in the guise of object. So my point is that sorry we have surplus value then this is well known I hope you know it then we have surplus knowledge and here I wasn't clear yesterday the beauty is that I think Lacanian conceptual machinery works here very well to explain precisely the difference between traditional knowledge even today's new age knowledge and science. It's a different type of surplus in traditional knowledge surplus is what we usually call it's still knowledge Gnosticism. What's the basic premise of Gnosticism our ordinary reality and the objectively scientific or common-sense knowledge related to it is not all there is a higher mystical speculative theosophic whatever type of knowledge. So this is the traditional universe we have ordinary knowledge reality there is another higher kind of knowledge in science it is not like that there it's not simply an exception but the surplus is inscribed into the very ordinary knowledge as always more always more knowledge is never definitive you know who knows what science will discover and so on and so on. So it's precisely what Lacan would have called from the universal masculine structure of universality with exception we have ordinary knowledge about the world universal everything nature and then some exception metaphysical whatever different type of knowledge while what science opposes to this again is a surplus which is inscribed into the very knowledge about reality which you know it's always more we always have to discover a new truth and so on. Which is why as Lacan already pointed out something happens with this surplus element in capitalism the to put it very simply the surplus becomes accountable you can count it you can measure it. Before what is the classical form of surplus prior to commodity logic to capitalism? It's simply let's say something erotic when you see someone my God it's not just what I see it's something more that is undescribable cannot be quantified maybe the big revolution of capitalism is precisely that surplus can be quantified. So we have surplus knowledge which again in ordinary or pre-modern universe is a special type of knowledge a deeper knowledge whatever and then we have the properly scientific surplus which is precisely the the interminable process of scientific of scientific research of scientific discoveries and so on and so on. So we have surplus knowledge we have surplus value and we have of course surplus enjoyment which just to recapitulate what I was saying yesterday surplus enjoyment is is again it's not something more in the sense of beyond ordinary pleasures there is some enjoyment. No to get at it you have precisely to to reduce things for this is the basic Freudian definition of drive and the pleasure it brings. As Lacan put it in very simple terms oral drive does not strive for an object for example when a baby is sucking mother's breast ordinary pleasure satisfaction is the milk you are hungry you get the object but the enjoyment proper is the satisfaction brought by the very act repeated act of sucking the breast and so on and so on so it's in the so this again which to put it in another way means and I think maybe I'm wrong I'm jumping too quickly here but I think that this is the big difference between let's say in a very global way Spinoza and Hegel. For Spinoza the obstacle is always external for Spinoza as he puts it repetitively every entity tends towards expanded assertion of its power and the reason of its failure is always that there is another external counter power. Alain Badiou here I again very respectfully disagree with him tried to think in the same way death for him death is totally external to the living being at least to the human being it's not an inherent obstacle we just die and it's totally meaningless okay. In a short text on this published I think on the Verso website Badiou even uses this wonderful joke about Monsieur de la Palice you know this the whole series of French jokes about an idiot no or what is told about him and one of the proverbs or statements is ten seconds before his death Monsieur de la Palice was still alive no like his point being that yes death is something like this it's not it was already all pointing towards death death just happens from the outside. Now Badiou would have probably lynched me for that but I claim I hear respectfully in a Hegelian way disagree I think that what Badiou but I don't have time to go into it today what Badiou calls infinity or immortality is strictly a phenomenon available only to mortal beings immortality is the very form of death drive. This brings me to another much more important thing that how is transcendence born how does it emerge through an obstacle. We have a living entity which maybe still although I don't think they exist a Spinozean one just striving towards what Spinoza calls Conatus which is more kind of an extension of power and so on and so on and maybe I've already talked about this but I cannot resist this evil remark. I never understood it although it can be explained why is by many people Spinoza considered almost a philosophical saint you know whatever you do you don't touch Spinoza is this almost divinity Althusser, Deleuze name them. No I I think I don't know if I already told you this story I must apologize if I did once I was some ten years ago already at a conference on Spinoza in LA and there was a lady there totally fanatically Spinozean I'm not anti-feminist here usually women are more critical towards Spinoza usually men are more stupid Spinozeans but she said because we debated that passage towards the end of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus where Spinoza to explain his basic premise that right is might what do you have the right to is grounded in how much Conatus life power assertive you have and Spinoza gives the example of men and women and claims this is why the fact that women have much less social power means that they have less right and it's totally normal he justifies this and the poor lady said isn't this crazy it is as if someone else has written this this is totally against Spinoza no it's not it totally fits Spinoza I claim. What so again we have this idea that the limit of an entity is always external I every entity strives towards expansion assertion limit no or as Spinoza puts it in another passage of his ethics no entity disintegrates falls apart immanently it's always an external obstacle while for Hegel it's the opposite but it's not some some stupid death drive in the sense of ooh I want to destroy myself no Hegel has a much nicer version here of death drive is this one let's say again returning to what I said one minute ago I'm I have I am this Spinozean entity I'm just caught in interaction with other entities well we all strive to expand our power and then I stumble upon an obstacle that I cannot bypass and the way I do it is then you know whenever you have an obstacle as a reaction to an obstacle you go into transcendence. It's always even with love relations why do we have all that bullshit poetry and so on and so on because you cannot do it directly so this would be the Hegelian insight that obstacle is not simply an obstacle creativity the excess of creativity emerges precisely out of a if I may put this slightly naive term out of a creative reply to an obstacle and so again I'm here unfortunately on on Hegel's side so again today now I want to elaborate a little bit the ah yes sorry another point. So I said three types of surplus: surplus enjoyment which can also be called although it's not exclusively that enjoyment in pleasure, surplus value and surplus knowledge. Now I'm so sad okay read my next book or be here in July on my other seminar where I will go in detail into this in the book that I mentioned yesterday *Capitalist Unconscious* Samo Tomšič he develops very well one point that we should not read Marxist notion of surplus value exchange value and so on and so on as some kind of a secondary alienation you know for example that in a natural economy money is not a self-goal people just exchange like in a normal economy I do something I give it to others so that I get from there with money or without another another use value and so on and then money but capitalist money money which engenders money is then some kind of an unnatural perversion where money instead of being just a mediator becomes sorry how do you put it Zweck an sich in English self-goal self-aim whatever sorry. End in itself? End in itself sorry that's it yes an end in itself. But I think that this is not Marxist position. Marx is not claiming that we have some basic material level of use-value production which gets later through exchange inverted into no a gap is there from the very beginning. Marxist thesis is that even in the most elementary exchange use-value and so on even not exchange there is already a gap which is there. You know how I can just give you a hint how this works. Uh uh uh for Marx that's why capitalism is the first step towards liberation because in capitalism again profit more money becomes the the end in itself of production but for Marx communism is not a return to like normal state of things where production only aims at satisfying our needs no Marx explicitly said that the point of communism is that production explodes beyond needs production development of productive forces becomes an end in itself. And Marx even uses here a beautiful Hegelian reversal where he says that in capitalism already it may appear that we produce in order to satisfy our needs but Marx says that the general sociologic behind is the opposite one that the development of human needs is just a kind of following a kind of Hegelian list der vernunft cunning of reason is just a kind of a triggering mechanism whose real aim is to expand our productive capacities and so on. So again Marxist point is not to he is much more almost idealist but it's not really idealism here his point is not this classical anti-alienation point to reduce these perversions like oh my God instead of doing things in order to get pleasure you get pleasure out of just doing things doing things or earning money becomes an end in itself but we must return to a natural state no Marx the whole point of Marx is that a certain surplus is from the beginning in the labor process itself. Okay I don't have time to go into it now I want to so okay my last point so these three surpluses and what is the place that they fill in subject. I claim that surplus is strictly correlative to subject it's clear even in commodity where exchange where for Marx surplus value is precisely what subjectivity contributes in the production process and for Marx it's clear that Arbeitskraft working force I don't know labor force how you translate it is precisely pure substanceless without substance subjectivity. Now I want to shift it but we will return immanently to this big topic to a topic that I really like which is what does this mean for our concept of nature is a kind of a surplus already inscribed into nature? My final answer is yes not in a new age idealist sense that there is already spirit in nature I'm just claiming that and I'm here critical about critically disposed against a certain let's call it paradigm which so that people will not say that I'm not critical about Lacan which you find already in even in Lacan at least up to a certain point this opposition of a natural balance and subjectivity as the site of negativity excess and so on and so on. You know even the early Lacan at least who was very close to Sartre we should never forget this the secret of early Lacan is Sartre often repeats this motive how in nature there is sexual relation blah blah blah and human human subjectivity is a kind of a perverse reversal of nature things are no longer natural death drive self-sabotaging whatever. But I claim that that this notion of nature as some preceding homeostatic balance which is then disturbed by through human hubris is precisely the last idealist myth which is why incidentally also for me this is the worst type of ecology with this kind of anti-human hubris ecology you know we humanity exploited nature too much disturbed its balance now we have to pay our price to to mother nature and so on. I would like here to engage it will take some time but I think it's worth in a critical reading of one of my teachers Jacques-Alain Miller and I think what he is doing is not only politically but also theoretically catastrophic in last years. Not only politically he now even became openly the member of some support committee for Sarkozy's reelection or whatever but okay Miller's thesis is that nature is today in disorder not because it overwhelms our cognitive capacities like there is so much in nature we cannot ever know it people knew this always but because we are not able to master the effects of our own interventions into the course of nature. For example who knows what the ultimate consequences of our biogenetic engineering or of global warming will be? The surprise comes from ourselves it concerns the opacity of how we ourselves fit into the picture. The impenetrable stain in the picture is not some cosmic mystery like the explosion of a supernova the stain is are we ourselves our collective activity. Against this background one should understand Miller’s nice formula Il y a un grand désordre dans le réel. In simple English there is a great disorder in the real. If you are Maoists and Miller was long long ago a Maoist you immediately can detect here the echo of for me at least the most beautiful saying of Mao there is a great disorder in heavens so the situation is perfect. So that’s how Miller characterizes the way reality appears to us in our time in which we experience the full impact of two fundamental agents: modern science and capitalism. Nature as the real in which everything from stars to the sun always returns to its proper place as the realm of large reliable cycles and of stable laws this nature is gradually being replaced by a contingent real real outside the law real that is permanently revolutionizing its own rules real that resists any inclusion into a totalized world universe of meaning. Now how should we react to such constellation? Should we assume a defensive approach and search for a new limit a return to or rather the invention of some new balance? This is what so-called bioethics endeavors to do with regard to biotechnology. This is why I am deeply suspicious of so-called bioethics. Biotechnology pursues new possibilities of scientific interventions genetic manipulations cloning and so on and bioethics endeavors then to impose some moral or whatever limitations on biotechnology. As such I claim bioethics is not immanent to scientific practice it intervenes into this practice from outside imposing external morality onto it. So I think if anything bioethics is the betrayal of the ethics immanent to scientific activity it’s which is the ethics of do not compromise your scientific desire follow inexorably its path. And again for me a compromise sorry if I repeat myself but the line is crucial a nice example of this compromise is for me for example the stance of Habermas and those others who see in brain sciences a threat to human identity and it’s a very sad reaction again as I always repeat no wonder that Habermas published not wrote because they just collected texts but nonetheless published a book together with the previous Pope Ratzinger because they it’s deeply ironic for me how the guy who claims to be the big philosopher of modernity you know his big motive is modernity as an unfinished project we didn’t yet go to the end please all of a sudden argues for certain limits like don’t play with our brains and so on too much because you may endanger our basic self-understanding of humans as free responsible agents and so on and so on. But what should be the scientific answer to this? Of course we should bear in mind all possible threats but my God I am ready to go here to the end and say but nonetheless I want to know how my brain works I want to know are we really free beings or not I want simply to know is it true that all that I experience as my free decision is just registering something which already happened independently of my decision at the neural level and so on and so on. So I claim that Habermas although he provides a different transcendental transcendental argumentation basically what his argument amounts to is the old conservative Catholic mostly Catholic wisdom of for our moral sanity it’s better not to know some things. The secret reasoning of Habermas I claim is if we probe too much into how our mind works we may discover that we are not free and if we discover this it would have meant a catastrophe for our moral self-understanding like you can say fuck it it’s all predetermined so I’m not responsible and so on and so on. So let’s not probe too deep into that. I find not only from the scientific point but even ethico-politically such a limitation catastrophic. So but my point is how expand how omnipresent is getting this logic of self-limitation as if modernity immanently scientific modernity means some explosive expansion and let’s not go to the end we need a proper limit. As Lacan put it in his short booklet published by Verso here I think a letter a letter to religious people something like that Lacan's point is precisely that here it's incredible how some religious theorists quote this Lacan as his offering the hand of friendship to Catholics no he says there explicitly that today more than ever religion and psychoanalysis are mortal enemies he absolutely rejects this line but he says precisely this fear of how far will science go will it deprive us of all that makes our human life worth living poetry and so on moral responsibility that we should posit a limit and I think that it's also catastrophic to go to follow this line in ecology because this is how I understand Badiou here I agree fully with him when he wrote already a couple of years ago that ecology is a new candidate for religion today he didn't mean ecology's mystical and so on his point was simply that the traditional function of religion was to set certain limits you can do this that and today insofar as at least with most people a religion although there are fundamentalist attempts but religion is losing this ability so what remains simply nature as the ultimate limitation we cannot do this we will disturb the natural balance and so on and so on. My of course my problem here my answer you may have known it I am repeating it all the time is simply that there is no natural balance if there ever was a human projection ideological projection it's the idea of homeostatic nature or as I like to say if nature is our mother it's a very bitchy evil mother I mean nature is full of mega imbalances catastrophes and the the theory that I prefer of you know this eternal enigma how did humanity arise out of apes whatever nature is there must have been some terrible catastrophe where something happened and so on I always like this theory although I mean some of the theories of how humanity emerged are wonderful because they are so comically ridiculous in their naivety like a great guy he's not a total stupid like Daniel Dennett develops the most stupid by a lot of that I read explanation of how we humans began to walk on two feet. You know what is his explanation that those primordial apes I mean apes which were to become human were walking in those African savannas where grass is pretty high so to communicate with each other they had to jump up and then you see the story some of them said fuck it I am too lazy to jump up why don't I simply stand on my two legs. This for me is like exactly the same logic as that of Jonathan Swift I repeated this here often you must remember it in not in Lilliputians another Gulliver book where he has this theory of origin of language that in the beginning people didn't yet have words but they communicated so that they carried on their back small models of objects like this is I go to my house you made a signed go and you showed the model of a house but then after some time because humanity developed and so on you know this bag with objects grew larger and larger till I like this naivety till one of them says fuck it it's too heavy why why don't we replace these objects with words you know but you see the jokes it's circular no I mean you you all this type of explanations already presuppose that you are within the symbolic horizon which is why here I admired really Stephen Jay Gould the one who dropped that the unfortunately the great evolutionary biologist who and this is why there is such animosity against him with all the other big names Dennett, Steven Pinker and so on his idea was and I think it's very Lacanian one that language did not develop as part of simple process of adaptation you find this stupidity even with Friedrich Engels in this the role of labor of you know that Engels says that first there was labor people collaborated and oh my God is this so naive and at some point they discovered that that collaboration is so complex that in order for collaborative labor to work we have to communicate I have to tell you so you know it's again this absolute naivety no his idea I think it's wonderful is that language emerged as a pure nonsensical byproduct we don't know what something went wrong and this theory is today taken very seriously that that in different type of adaptation something happened with our so that it was absolutely a contingent excess surplus excess which then became refunctionalized we talk we collaborate better and so on and so on but again it was and I'm here back to the topic to the topic of surplus it was pure meaningless surplus and even every intelligent Darwinian will tell you Lacan here refers to good Darwinians that Darwin is not Lamarck Lamarck has this stupid utilitarian teleology for example he claims how do you call what do horn or what do those deer animals have no that that they needed this to I don't know what to kill the enemy to kill an animal for food so gradually the horns oh how do you call them the antlers yeah yeah yeah gradually they emerged you know so no what what Lacan uses exactly the same word as Gould the problem of human being is not I want to do something I don't have the organ for it and then through gradual adaptation or whatever this organ develops no Lacan says the original situation of not only human being of an animal is that through evolutionary confusion genetic mess we have too many organs we don't know what to do with them and then secondarily it's what Gould described in a wonderful way as exaptation as opposed to adaptation. There is a surplus maybe it's what went for something but it either it emerged simply through some genetic confusion or it serve one old purpose and it's no longer of any use and then it's transfunctionalized it's kidnapped for another purpose. So the idea that I like here and you find it with serious Darwinians is that it's not humanity everything serves its function and so on sorry nature animals with humans we have excess and so on no the basic mechanism of evolution is excess you have things which serve nothing and then secondarily you try to you try to make use of them that's how evolution works. I think I already used years ago you were not here even art develops like this I used years ago a beautiful example of this totally vulgar connections incredibly for example I hate him he was a fascist composer literally Giacomo Puccini. You know that the last letter he wrote when dying in Geneva was you know in twenty-three or four Mussolini regime just established was in a deep crisis because who was it Matteotti Matteotti or who the last socialist member of parliament was murdered by fascist thugs so there was an outcry in all of Italy and Mussolini seriously thought that he will lose power but then the good right-wing intellectuals artists Pirandello and so on all wrote a letter to Mussolini know we stand with you among them Puccini also wrote the letter. But what I’m saying is this you find around nineteen-hundred year a change in his the structure of his arias. Arias are usually just two to two and a half minutes now we can engage in some pseudo-Adornian speculation yes this was because you know the modernist disintegration of large organic totalities no he wanted money and the early recordings the length was two and a half minutes something like that so he did it and so on. But again this does you know what fascinated me is this how a totally external mechanical effect can produce much more serious great artistic genuine effects for example I’m sorry another story I tell it to you maybe you know it the biggest revolution is opera staging at least in Germany was when Bayreuth reopened with Wagner staging in and it was over with that Viking kitsch you know those helmets with horn ah this is a beautiful story I read it you know that even today we think that this is some kind of a historical fact that primitive Vikings had how do you call it not helmets sorry with this how do you call these horns or what yeah yeah yeah do and that Wagner just in his obsession with great Germanic past copied it no Wagner invented it there are absolutely no proofs no drawings nothing that before Wagner’s operas there were any Vikings with these horns or whatever it’s pure Wagnerian invention. Okay let’s go on so uh uh it was the big revolution towards this ascetic staging you know almost empty stage just some like uh runes the ancient Celtic uh Celtic uh big stones and singers dressed in kind of a almost ancient tunics and so on it’s a great revolution books are written what this meant and so on well I don’t know what it meant but I don’t know how it came to be. Bayreuth in was bankrupt they didn’t have any money the only thing they had was that Siemens or one of the big electro companies which started to function again properly offered Bayreuth a lot of as much as they want free electricity. And that’s it. But you see this is a nice example that Marx would have liked how how you can describe it quite adequately in immanent terms it functions it is a great revolution it’s even a crucial step in de-fascizing how should I put it in in kidnapping Wagner from the hold of fascist stagings but nonetheless the immediate cause was a totally ridiculous one. So again let’s go on what I’m saying here is that there is a surplus in surplus in the sense of an element which cannot which is not fun there there are too many things in nature again adaptation is not oh my God I need that no adaptation is okay there are many things I don’t know what to do with them so my God let’s try this let’s try let’s try that or whatever. Now I will do a slightly boring thing to boring thing to describe to you where Miller is wrong even more. It will be a long two pages quote from Miller but it’s from a programmatic text for a new congress of his Lacanian school which was dedicated to very bombastic title the real for the 21st century. Oh my god it’s okay please listen carefully it’s simple long quote from Miller. “There is this is something indicated by Lacan’s examples to illustrate the return of the real in the same place. His examples are the annual return of the seasons the spectacle of the skies and the heavenly bodies. You could say based on examples from all antiquity Chinese rituals of course used mathematical calculations and so on you could say that in this epoch the real as nature has the function of the other of the other. That is to say that the real was itself the guarantee of the symbolic order. The agitation the rhetorical agitation of the signifier in human speech was framed by the web of signifiers fixed like the heavenly bodies. Nature this is its very definition is defined by being ordered that is by the conduct of the symbolic and the real to such an extent that according to the most ancient traditions all human order should imitate natural order. The real invented by Lacan is not the real of science it is a contingent real random in as much as the natural law of the relations between the sexes is lacking it is a hole in the knowledge included in the real. Lacan made use of the language of mathematics the best support for science in the formulas of sexuation for example he tried to grasp the dead ends of sexuality in a weft of mathematical logic. This was like a heroic attempt to make psychoanalysis into a science of the real in the way that logic is but that can be done without imprisoning jouissance in the phallic function in a symbol. It implies a symbolization of the real it implies referring to the binary binary man woman for this Miller deserves death penalty I mean he speaks like Judith Butler here man woman is a binary no it’s not but okay sorry sorry as if living beings could be partitioned so neatly when we already see in the real of the 21st century a growing disorder of of sexuation. This is already a secondary construction Lacan’s formulas of sexuation that intervenes after the initial impact of the body and la langue. Lacan’s term la langue for language as the real prior to meaning just play of obscene significations and so on which constitutes a real without law without logical rule. Logic is only introduced afterwards with the elucubration the fantasy the subject supposed to know and with psychoanalysis. Until now under the inspiration of the 20th century our clinical cases as we recount them have been logical clinical constructions under transference. But the cause-effect relation is a scientific prejudice supported by the subject supposed to know. The cause-effect relation is not valid at the level of the real without law it is not valid except with the rupture between cause and effect. Lacan said it as a joke if one understands how an interpretation works it is not an analytic interpretation. In psychoanalysis as Lacan invites us to practice it we experience the rupture of the cause-effect link the opacity of the link and this is why we speak of the unconscious. I’m going to say it in another way psychoanalysis takes place at the level of the repressed and of the interpretation of the repressed thanks to the subject supposed to know. But in the 21st century it is a question of psychoanalysis exploring another dimension that of the defense against the real without law and without meaning. Lacan indicates this direction with his notion of the real as Freud does with his mythological concept of drive. The Lacanian unconscious that of the late Lacan is at the level of the real let us say for convenience below the Freudian unconscious.” Again here I start shooting. Lacan regresses here to the worst of Jungianism you know this is the standard Jungian criticism of Freud that Freudian unconscious is too close to logic it’s just a surface unconscious too rational but there is a deeper really crazy unconscious and so on. Therefore back to Miller “in order to enter into the 21st century our clinic will have to be centered on dismantling the defense disordering the defense against the real. The transferential unconscious in analysis is already a defense against the real and in the transferential unconscious there still is an intention a wanting to say a wanting you to tell me when in fact the real unconscious is not intentional it is encountered under the modality of that’s it c’est comme ça in French that’s how it is which you could say is like our amen. Various questions will be open to us for us at the next congress this is introductory address to congress the redefinition of the desire of the analyst which is not a pure desire not a pure infinity of metonymy but the desire to reach the real to reduce the other to its real and to liberate it of meaning. I would add that Lacan invented a way of representing the real with the Borromean knot. We will ask ourselves how valid this interpretation is. Lacan made use of the knot to arrive at this irremediable zone of existence where one can go no further with two. The passion Lacan’s passion for the Borromean knot led Lacan to the same zone as Oedipus at Colonus where one finds the absolute absence of charity of fraternity of any human sentiment. This is where the search for the real stripped of meaning leads us.” I mean this line of thought I hope it was relatively clear is simple is something for which if we were to live in people’s democracy Miller would end up in gulag without any possibility of getting out of it. Why? What do I found problematic in this passage? Problems begin with the notion of the real as nature in its regularity as that which always returns at its place. This sounds understandable you know in pre-modern society ancient Egypt and so on the ultimate point of reference was the regularity of bodily movements that stars reappear every morning at that place winter fall seasons they there is a higher regularity in nature which should be also this heavenly regularity the ultimate point of reference for our human universe and so on. But I think Miller misses something here which he gives a well too simplified reading of this pre-modern regularity. As it was noted by Lacan for example for ancient Aztecs and other civilizations of sacrifice the natural real was not simply a regularity that nothing can that cannot be perturbed. Ancient Aztecs organized human sacrifices to guarantee what and that’s what Lacan noted it’s a wonderful deal why did ancient Aztecs sacrifice people not to not to not to not to fight against chance not to make it sure when there was a drought that there will be rain or whatever but that’s so beautiful they did it precisely to guarantee that the most ordinary and expected thing will happen. They sacrificed people to sustain the very regularity of nature. Human lives have to be sacrificed so that nature will rotate in its regular way so that sun will raise in the morning and so on and so on. You can find this in what we know about ancient Aztec and so on mythology. Again their great fear was if we humans do not perform our rituals sun will not rise and so on and so on. We will so again the real of the natural order where everything returns at its own place already relies on a symbolic intervention. It’s not just a natural real which is there on which we can rely it’s not independent of us we have to sustain it through our rituals and sacrifices. And there is a key passage from this real sustained by symbolic sacrifice to the real of modern science the Newtonian real of natural laws of the network of causes and effects. It’s only this real the scientific real which really turns around by itself. I mean you don’t have to sacrifice your let’s say your mother-in-law although I would like to do this so that sun will rise next morning why not but okay another story. So here again just one shorter this time quote from Miller. “With the infinite universe of mathematical physics nature disappears it becomes solely a moral instance. With the philosophers of the 18th century with the infinite universe nature disappears and the real begins to be unveiled. Fine but I have been asking myself Miller still about the formula there is a knowledge in the real. It would be a temptation to say that the unconscious is at this level. On the contrary the supposition of a knowledge in the real appears to me to be an ultimate veil that needs to be lifted. If there is a knowledge in the real there is regularity and scientific knowledge allows prediction. It is so proud of prediction in so far as this demonstrates the existence of laws and it does not require a divine utterance of this laws for them to remain valid. It is by way of this idea of loss that the old idea of nature has been preserved in the very expression the laws of nature.” So again for Miller even without gods and so on the Newtonian nature remains the same it’s still nature regulated by eternal by eternal laws things always function in the same way and so on and so on. But I think Miller again proceeds here too fast. The break between traditional nature and nature of modern science is more radical. In contrast to traditional nature whose regular rhythm is supposed to point towards a deeper cosmic sexualized meaning day and night as the regular exchange of masculine and feminine principles and so on. That’s crucial for me the traditional real pre-modern Yin Yang and so on is always a sexualized real a meaningful real something which that’s the whole point of Tao Te Ching Yin Yang and so on that it’s not just blind mathematics it’s a global guaranteed stable order of meaning. While scientific laws of nature are themselves contingent there is no deeper meaningful necessity sustaining them. When Miller says that today we encounter the real under the modality of that’s it c’est comme ça but this is precisely how Newtonian laws function. When Newton proposes his whatever formula it’s wrong to ask what cosmic harmony is expressed in this way is this a reflection of some deeper cosmic meaning no it’s not although I know very well that Newton himself was ambiguous here you know that he spent much more time on theosophical questions and so on than on science. So that’s my first problem with Miller that he brings too much together under the sign of regularity pre-modern notion of natural order which is always already a symbolized order order of meaning grounded in a sacrificial gesture and on the other hand the scientific order of nature. But I have another problem with Miller. Miller’s search for the pure real outside the symbolic a real not yet stained by the symbolic that he attributes to Lacan I think has to be abandoned. Tragically Miller gets clear too close to Deleuze. In a very Deleuzian way repeating literally a formula from Anti-Oedipus Miller speaks of the true pre-Oedipal unconscious beneath the Freudian one. As if we first have the pure pre-Oedipal movement of drives the direct interpenetration of signifying material and jouissance. This is what Lacan means by la langue and as if it is only in a logically if not temporary afterward that this flux is ordered ordained by symbolic elucubrations forced into the symbolic straightjacket of binary logic of paternal law of castration of normative structure of two sexual identities and so on and so on. According to Miller even Lacan’s formulas of sexuation fall into this category they are an attempt to grab to symbolize the real imposing on it a binary logic and so on and so on. Miller’s point is then that today in the 21st century we see that new forms of sexuality transgender all that stuff that this binary that sex itself becomes a totally irregular sex sex as the real with no fixed symbolic identities and so on and so on. From my point is here very simple my reproach to Miller. It would be very good for him to read Lacan a little bit. Because from a Lacanian standpoint something is terribly wrong with this line of reasoning. Miller passes directly from the real as nature which follows its regular rhythm or its laws to the pure lawless real lawless without law. What goes missing here is I think precisely what Lacan calls the real. You know now we come to the crucial even philosophical point. For Lacan the real is not some substantial presence outside the symbolic. The real is an inherent obstacle impossibility inscribed into the symbolic order itself. The real is totally immanent. The real is something on account of which every symbolization fails but it’s not an external obstacle. It’s the in this sense for Lacan sexual difference is not binary it’s not male female but it’s a certain antagonism which as such cannot be symbolized but it doesn’t pre-exist symbolization. It is the real is the immanent impossibility of the symbolic order itself. Lacan says this literally le réel est une impasse de la formalisation. The real is a deadlock of formalization. That’s Lacan’s best formula and that’s how we should read formulas of sexuation. Again you know I often develop this point I will not now go into it in detail you can find it in my books and so on all around how antagonism is primordial antagonism impossibility and uh uh it doesn't have a clear real external point this is the worst of postmodernism sometimes Nietzsche writes like this as if the real is the truth too strong for us if you look at it directly you get blind we just can grab it from this from that perspective and so on and so on. No the real is just an immanent impossibility and when we ascribe to this impossibility an external cause this is maybe the most elementary gesture of fetishism and I can give you a very simple political example here anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is precisely this in order to avoid the immanence of social antagonism you project its cause onto an external disturbing element the Jews who introduce antagonism and so on and so on and so on. But there is something you find all this in practically all of my books but what is more important what I want to develop here is two things how first Miller in order to pursue this line of thought all of a sudden becomes Butlerian referring to Judith Butler that is to say he reduces sexual difference to a binary symbolic operation men do this women do that and so on but what Lacan does in his formulas of sexuation is exactly the opposite when Lacan speaks of male position he doesn't describe a certain set of features but just a certain deadlock or to put it in another way at the level of social relations and this is where things become where are we now you know I will do oh my god life is running. Okay let me go on. With Miller the most dangerous point is how Miller extends this logic also to capitalism for him again we are passing today from sexual difference and his idea is that sexual difference is gradually undermined no longer two sexes but just crazy multiplicity of sexual identities and for him it's the same with capitalism no longer binary logic but just kind of a proliferation of multiplicities. Here comes the dangerous conclusion without antagonism without any binary logic and so on and so on. And I think the whole so in other words when Miller inscribes science and capitalism into this logic of pure real outside symbolization and so on and so on he simply accepts late capitalism's ideological self-description. This is how capitalism today now I will say something very nasty although she is still my personal friend the ideological descriptions of today's late capitalism is Judith Butlerian you know no binaries just immanent self-construction outside any symbolic law and so on and so on. I claim no I claim that this precisely is the ideological deception this idea of today's capitalism and it doesn't matter if you want to control it or if you want like some so-called accelerationists like Negri and some others who claim no the only way through capitalism is to to abandon ourselves totally to this crazy pure real beyond any symbolic laws and so on and so on. No I here I'm sorry I remain here a traditional Marxist this idea of capitalism where it's this kind of flourishing multiplicity of identities we are all capitalists entrepreneurs of the self there is no law there is an injunction just to be to be free to these are the beautiful mottos of sixty-eight vivre sans temps mort to live without dead time jouir sans entraves to enjoy without obstacles and so on. I think that what Miller misses is that the pure real that he describes it's precisely an ideological mask which covers up the antagonism that precisely not only is this pure real what Lacan describes as pure real scientific or social or sexual not only is it not really without law but there is okay not a fixed law but law in the sense of a certain basic antagonism which engenders this explosive multiplicity. You remember how before I mentioned the positive role of obstacle. It's precisely the obstacle in the sense of contradiction of capitalism which explodes this crazy dynamic of capitalism. Miller totally obliterates this and even Marx is not as I developed often even Marx is not pure here because Marx accepts this logic of crazy capitalist dynamics but he thinks that capitalism at a certain point becomes an obstacle for this dynamics so if we abolish capitalism to put it very simply we will get this dynamics at its even more crazy you know then it'll be true crazy creativity and so on I don't think this is the case. I think it's a big problem for us more than ever even to imagine a true post-capitalist society because neither one nor the other of predominant models work. I don't believe in this Deleuzian notion of let's get rid of capitalist deterritorialization because it's very strange that Miller doesn't use here the term deterritorialization because this is really what he means by this lawless real is just reterritorialized by capitalism so we should destroy this reterritorialization to get pure deterritorialization pure expansive multiplicity or the opposite let's call it more conservative logic although you have leftist conservatives along these lines who claim that no that this radical modernization openness no obstacles it's a catastrophe that we have to invent a new limit a new self-limitation it can be nature for other people it's a religion and so on. No I claim the true answer is that this is the false opposition that there already is a capitalism explodes all the time precisely in order to avoid the the impetus is given by its by its by its immanent antagonism. Since I promised you half an hour or whatever for debate I will do the usual thing are you most of you at least in any contact with organizers Birkbeck here like I try to at least pay for my sins which are I'm talking too much and so on uh uh by at least delivering the text. So is there any system here where I send the text that I have to someone and then all this crowd here can get access to it? Should I send it to Madison or I don't know? Uh yeah you could send it to to Madison. Okay so that you know Madison or the Birkbeck yeah the Birkbeck this evening I promise you she will have the text where I go into what I can tell you very quickly my point my point is that I go into polemics with predominant version which is that this multiplicity of capitalism is a form of universalized perversion masochism and so on. My thesis I think it works much better is that capitalism is split between two discourses irreducibly hysterical discourse which is this always more expansion and university discourse so that the axis university hysteria is or even to put it in terms it can be even translated into the terms of classical Frankfurt School we have on the one hand this capitalist logic of incessant self-expansion and and it’s not the same logic the logic of knowledge is power domination which would have been the university discourse. And I think capitalism has to oscillate all the time not even oscillate but it’s like it’s like it’s like Möbius band you know one turning into another on the one hand we have this incessant hysterical logic I want more expansion it’s never that on the other hand we have the university knowledge domination logic and it’s interesting how often for example the greatest danger of the last fifty years I think is that those who were followers of not of Marxism of critical theory but not just Frankfurt School emphasized way too much I claim the logic of domination the the university discourse aspect you know today’s power even now through internet control and so on it’s some totalizing knowledge domination through knowledge but I think it’s absolutely crucial for capitalism also the other hysterical aspect. So now the problem is and that would have been my final Trump card and I doubt I’m always surprised why Trump it would be precisely vulgar at his level didn’t use this play with words you know I’m the Trump card I have a you say like this in English no Trump the Trump card. Okay would be that what then does what should be our answer to is? I claim the other axis master analyst. That is to say that on the one hand it’s my madness I will earn even worse designation for this on the one hand progressive movement today should shamelessly return to a certain type of discourse of the master and when people shout I tell them show me one modern relatively successful radical movement from even minor figures from Podemos to Syriza I had to laugh when a friend told me from Venezuela but listen you are too centralist European we have genuine social mobilization in Venezuela and I died laughing I say yeah but what about the big fat guy on the top you know Chavez and so on. On the other hand and that’s what I really wanted to do we don’t have time I wanted to develop the idea of a something that would be the social application of a analytic discourse and you know what I wanted to reread in this way it’s totally crazy idea when Lenin was close to his death not yet incapacitated he saw where things are moving so his idea was to establish a kind of he has different names for it like uh uh like uh control control committee or another sorry I I try to find his term yes central control commission and he was struggling with the right problem we need strong authoritarian party control but if it's that alone it will be a catastrophe so what kind of counter force to keep it in balance can we imagine and it was incredible I already quote this but I was too stupid when I quoted it in my living in the dead times I gave a too simplistic version Lenin now I got it what Lenin is saying because it's incredible he says it has to be an agency which it's incredible which may appear to know things better but they really don't know it. It’s like analyst supposed to know. Then he says it’s not what they know it’s the way they act maybe even jokes all elusive and so on it’s absolutely incredible how he describes a body that should have acted like the analyst to the master not some stupid democratic counter power but a kind of a eternal source of provocation like the object a of the master. Do you really mean it how do you know it and so on. So I think that I think that this will have maybe to be invented because to conclude I don’t know if I already mentioned this yesterday I think this is I think I mentioned it yesterday I will nonetheless repeat it this is for me maybe the most important trap today yes I mentioned it yesterday when things go wrong for the left in power they always seek a solution in oh we were not enough connected with social movements with social bad with social our social base we should keep that connection alive and so on and so on. But I claim this is just a way to avoid the basic fundamental question which is how to change from within the state apparatus itself. You know that’s the tragedy of Syriza for example they now and that’s where I don’t agree with critics of Syriza who claim the government now lost its contact with social base and so on and so on. For me the
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Slavoj Žižek
is not this the problem is the opposite one why do they need social base outside? Yes immediately I will because they do we even have a way to do this and it’s a great problem I think that this idea that we should strive for a democratic left government but it should be kept alive avoid alienation avoid bureaucratization through permanent popular mobilization and so on and so on this formula absolutely doesn’t work in what sense my great example here is Bolivia with which I totally sympathize as it was made clear to me by my good friend by my good friends there from the top Linera vice president. If you have the state the same as we have it now and if you then then all of a sudden because you have state power the problem with these social movements is that they become an immense field of clientelism that’s what happened in Bolivia that’s the great catastrophe there that all yes they have all these tribal social move but as Linera complained to me they come here to La Paz they spend money and all they try to do is to get more money for that tribe and it’s an immense ruthless competition so that Linera told me we need a very strong state to discipline these stupid representatives of social base or whatever. So again the absolute question is for me not how to supplement parliamentary democratic state from outside with some social mobilization but how to change in a more immanent way its functioning. And to end up with a true horror I don’t mean this just to make it more democratic I think that it’s absolutely crucial that’s for me the big experience of today’s people accuse me of being a fascist maybe I am but I this would be a self-characterization that I would have liked pro-refugee neo-fascist how should I put it? That is to say how to assert an efficient even brutally strong state intervention that would have worked in a progressive way even against the majority of the people. Sorry to tell you but this is for me the primary task today in Europe. If you go for democracy fine because our democracies are nation-state democracies this means there may be some exceptions and so on and so on but the moment things will become real the majority will be again I know from my own we are a small shitty country but it's interesting what happened. You know we were the bad guys ooh you built a wall or sorry that wall of just of wire whatever no. But you know what was the problem? It was the dirty German game. Slovene diplomat Angela Merkel made that kommt auf wir schaffen es come we will do it then within no longer when it no longer functioned Angela Merkel didn't want directly to renounce it and was putting this was such a disgusting game was putting extreme pressure on Slovenia, Croatia, now Macedonia you stop them so that they can now play this disgusting game oh again old Balkan those barbarians wires. Fuck her we put wires because discretely Germans demanded because Germans were breaking their own rules. They claimed just let them through then they started to stop them first in Austria which only means for me that you cannot deal with the problem the way it is dealt with. It has to be done that's why more than ever I will go to the end in my madness I see the solution in militarization. Of course not European army killing or building a wall against the immigrants. If I may be a little bit nasty for this popular self-organization is quite enough. You know what horrible thing is now happening so that you don't have any illusions? They want to do it also in Slovenia now they already are doing in Croatia, Slovak Republic and some other places. Here you have fuck you your self-organization of the people. Right-wing anti-immigrant organizing themselves as popular militias of self-defense and they are cruising around the forest and catching immigrants and bringing them to the police. So when people tell me are you crazy you call the army well I trust much more the army than police and I will tell you something horrible at least in some countries in this specific tragic situation I trust more police than ordinary people who get self-organized. So again I'm not saying you see what I mean by militarization is a large action you establish base in Syria in Libya whatever you process refugees in you do it in a very brutal way not towards the refugees. For me the true target should be today shitty countries like my own like but all this Visegrád ex-East European group Baltic countries who even they are really not all of them but some of them. In one of those countries I forgot which one they want against Russia NATO forces so they put a couple of NATO battalions there. You know what happened a month or two ago was it in your newspapers? Discreetly they protested that there are too many blacks in NATO forces and that they disturb their population and so on. So even there they want the pure you know they want they want they want the pure. No my problem is not some kind of a totally transparent government my problem is a government which would be in a progressive sense strong with strong executive privileges. Of course it should definitely be controlled in some way and so on no but I really worry without such a strong agency I really worry what will happen with Europe. Okay enough of provocations so that I keep my word we still have twenty minutes please you were the first please attack. Who will run the show? You or you? I'll answer too yeah. Sorry? Yeah I'll answer too. Yeah but the gentleman there already was raising his hand before maybe. Are you Greek sorry? No. Ah yeah because in my racist imagination many Greeks that I know are dressed like you and you know my big motto is the only thing you can rely on in today's confusion are racist clichés. When I was in Ireland I went to a pub it was exactly as in Hollywood kitsch films people playing harmonica people singing and so on sorry I talk too much please. I'm a student at Birkbeck and uh I've also got background in sciences in physical sciences. Ah the real sciences not fluffing like our stuff yeah yeah. Neurosciences sorry? Physics physics. Uh-huh. Yeah. So uh my my question is this what is the materialist theory of subjectivity? Now uh this materialist theory of subjectivity has to connect the domain of physics on one hand uh with the subject since science is the study of the material universe. Yeah. Yeah so as such since physics is the study of material objects the theory of the subject must conform to this criteria. Yeah. Yeah if we are to have a subject who knows. Yeah but why do you connect for me subject is one thing subject who knows is another thing I don't think that knowledge is something that we really spontaneously want. But okay another point go on please. So I'm sorry. So the subject is part of the material universe. Yeah yeah okay. Yeah. Uh so the only possibility for this to occur is that somehow human subjectivity must be mediated in some way by technology. And why sorry why technology when humans emerged out of apes there was no technology. Oh well subjectivity we have the subject as part of the material universe it's not outside of it. Yeah yeah. Yeah so we need a theory of the subject that is material. Material in what sense so that it it explained how subjectivity emerges out of material world and and as part of that world? Is this that you mean or something more? Something more probably but it's the subject is actually material so the only way that this can occur for me and you might agree is that the subject itself so there's many discussions about this so is the subject of the machine. Okay? That's interesting why? Can you explain this? Because this presupposes that a living organism and I'm not saying that my answer is no just it's not self-evident that a living being can be reduced to a machine also. Like yeah well it's the subject you know that in the sense of the Lacanian subject yes. You know so if you kind of if you start with Lacan and you also kind of add a bit of Hegel um there's passage in book two of Lacan's seminars yeah where he starts to describe um the what he asks the question directly so what on earth is the nature of the subject. Yeah. And he asks this question and he speaks he talks about like uh some sort of he relates it to some sort of ex machina some sort of deus ex machina he uses that phrase I don't know if you're aware of that. Yeah yeah I know it yeah. Yeah so and now we're in an era of artificial intelligence for example so we're considering machine subjectivity as well so that's what kind of led me into making this conclusion that the subject itself is the subject of the machine. In a way I agree with you but sorry finish your question or did you? Okay. No no no it's a wonder sorry. Yeah so ultimately I mean this this leads to um this conception of a universal subject so the principle of the universal subject comes about as a result of this interplay between the subject itself subject for the machine mediated human subjectivity and this kind of master slave dialectic by Hegel yeah to
is not this the problem is the opposite one why do they need social base outside? Yes immediately I will because they do we even have a way to do this and it’s a great problem I think that this idea that we should strive for a democratic left government but it should be kept alive avoid alienation avoid bureaucratization through permanent popular mobilization and so on and so on this formula absolutely doesn’t work in what sense my great example here is Bolivia with which I totally sympathize as it was made clear to me by my good friend by my good friends there from the top Linera vice president. If you have the state the same as we have it now and if you then then all of a sudden because you have state power the problem with these social movements is that they become an immense field of clientelism that’s what happened in Bolivia that’s the great catastrophe there that all yes they have all these tribal social move but as Linera complained to me they come here to La Paz they spend money and all they try to do is to get more money for that tribe and it’s an immense ruthless competition so that Linera told me we need a very strong state to discipline these stupid representatives of social base or whatever. So again the absolute question is for me not how to supplement parliamentary democratic state from outside with some social mobilization but how to change in a more immanent way its functioning. And to end up with a true horror I don’t mean this just to make it more democratic I think that it’s absolutely crucial that’s for me the big experience of today’s people accuse me of being a fascist maybe I am but I this would be a self-characterization that I would have liked pro-refugee neo-fascist how should I put it? That is to say how to assert an efficient even brutally strong state intervention that would have worked in a progressive way even against the majority of the people. Sorry to tell you but this is for me the primary task today in Europe. If you go for democracy fine because our democracies are nation-state democracies this means there may be some exceptions and so on and so on but the moment things will become real the majority will be again I know from my own we are a small shitty country but it's interesting what happened. You know we were the bad guys ooh you built a wall or sorry that wall of just of wire whatever no. But you know what was the problem? It was the dirty German game. Slovene diplomat Angela Merkel made that kommt auf wir schaffen es come we will do it then within no longer when it no longer functioned Angela Merkel didn't want directly to renounce it and was putting this was such a disgusting game was putting extreme pressure on Slovenia, Croatia, now Macedonia you stop them so that they can now play this disgusting game oh again old Balkan those barbarians wires. Fuck her we put wires because discretely Germans demanded because Germans were breaking their own rules. They claimed just let them through then they started to stop them first in Austria which only means for me that you cannot deal with the problem the way it is dealt with. It has to be done that's why more than ever I will go to the end in my madness I see the solution in militarization. Of course not European army killing or building a wall against the immigrants. If I may be a little bit nasty for this popular self-organization is quite enough. You know what horrible thing is now happening so that you don't have any illusions? They want to do it also in Slovenia now they already are doing in Croatia, Slovak Republic and some other places. Here you have fuck you your self-organization of the people. Right-wing anti-immigrant organizing themselves as popular militias of self-defense and they are cruising around the forest and catching immigrants and bringing them to the police. So when people tell me are you crazy you call the army well I trust much more the army than police and I will tell you something horrible at least in some countries in this specific tragic situation I trust more police than ordinary people who get self-organized. So again I'm not saying you see what I mean by militarization is a large action you establish base in Syria in Libya whatever you process refugees in you do it in a very brutal way not towards the refugees. For me the true target should be today shitty countries like my own like but all this Visegrád ex-East European group Baltic countries who even they are really not all of them but some of them. In one of those countries I forgot which one they want against Russia NATO forces so they put a couple of NATO battalions there. You know what happened a month or two ago was it in your newspapers? Discreetly they protested that there are too many blacks in NATO forces and that they disturb their population and so on. So even there they want the pure you know they want they want they want the pure. No my problem is not some kind of a totally transparent government my problem is a government which would be in a progressive sense strong with strong executive privileges. Of course it should definitely be controlled in some way and so on no but I really worry without such a strong agency I really worry what will happen with Europe. Okay enough of provocations so that I keep my word we still have twenty minutes please you were the first please attack. Who will run the show? You or you? I'll answer too yeah. Sorry? Yeah I'll answer too. Yeah but the gentleman there already was raising his hand before maybe. Are you Greek sorry? No. Ah yeah because in my racist imagination many Greeks that I know are dressed like you and you know my big motto is the only thing you can rely on in today's confusion are racist clichés. When I was in Ireland I went to a pub it was exactly as in Hollywood kitsch films people playing harmonica people singing and so on sorry I talk too much please. I'm a student at Birkbeck and uh I've also got background in sciences in physical sciences. Ah the real sciences not fluffing like our stuff yeah yeah. Neurosciences sorry? Physics physics. Uh-huh. Yeah. So uh my my question is this what is the materialist theory of subjectivity? Now uh this materialist theory of subjectivity has to connect the domain of physics on one hand uh with the subject since science is the study of the material universe. Yeah. Yeah so as such since physics is the study of material objects the theory of the subject must conform to this criteria. Yeah. Yeah if we are to have a subject who knows. Yeah but why do you connect for me subject is one thing subject who knows is another thing I don't think that knowledge is something that we really spontaneously want. But okay another point go on please. So I'm sorry. So the subject is part of the material universe. Yeah yeah okay. Yeah. Uh so the only possibility for this to occur is that somehow human subjectivity must be mediated in some way by technology. And why sorry why technology when humans emerged out of apes there was no technology. Oh well subjectivity we have the subject as part of the material universe it's not outside of it. Yeah yeah. Yeah so we need a theory of the subject that is material. Material in what sense so that it it explained how subjectivity emerges out of material world and and as part of that world? Is this that you mean or something more? Something more probably but it's the subject is actually material so the only way that this can occur for me and you might agree is that the subject itself so there's many discussions about this so is the subject of the machine. Okay? That's interesting why? Can you explain this? Because this presupposes that a living organism and I'm not saying that my answer is no just it's not self-evident that a living being can be reduced to a machine also. Like yeah well it's the subject you know that in the sense of the Lacanian subject yes. You know so if you kind of if you start with Lacan and you also kind of add a bit of Hegel um there's passage in book two of Lacan's seminars yeah where he starts to describe um the what he asks the question directly so what on earth is the nature of the subject. Yeah. And he asks this question and he speaks he talks about like uh some sort of he relates it to some sort of ex machina some sort of deus ex machina he uses that phrase I don't know if you're aware of that. Yeah yeah I know it yeah. Yeah so and now we're in an era of artificial intelligence for example so we're considering machine subjectivity as well so that's what kind of led me into making this conclusion that the subject itself is the subject of the machine. In a way I agree with you but sorry finish your question or did you? Okay. No no no it's a wonder sorry. Yeah so ultimately I mean this this leads to um this conception of a universal subject so the principle of the universal subject comes about as a result of this interplay between the subject itself subject for the machine mediated human subjectivity and this kind of master slave dialectic by Hegel yeah to
unknown
arrive
arrive
Slavoj Žižek
at the universal subject. What do you mean by universal subject I don't get it. The universal subject is like the kind of endpoint of this master slave dialectic between man and machine to arrive at some sort of ultimate point kind of Hegelian. Yeah sorry I got it yeah yeah yeah. So um thanks again. Thank you but I will try to be as it's really sad that we don't have
at the universal subject. What do you mean by universal subject I don't get it. The universal subject is like the kind of endpoint of this master slave dialectic between man and machine to arrive at some sort of ultimate point kind of Hegelian. Yeah sorry I got it yeah yeah yeah. So um thanks again. Thank you but I will try to be as it's really sad that we don't have
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because admit this is a question a modest answer would be between three and four hours my
because admit this is a question a modest answer would be between three and four hours my
Slavoj Žižek
part. But I will try to say this you know I would put it like this for some people maybe
part. But I will try to say this you know I would put it like this for some people maybe
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to have been even too idealist. I claim that something happens with human subjectivity symbolic universe and so on and to for me the first materialist question is how should nature be structured material nature so that something like human subjectivity is possible because I think that no amount of dialectical deduction and so on no amount of evolutionary
to have been even too idealist. I claim that something happens with human subjectivity symbolic universe and so on and to for me the first materialist question is how should nature be structured material nature so that something like human subjectivity is possible because I think that no amount of dialectical deduction and so on no amount of evolutionary
Slavoj Žižek
gradualism will enable you to begin with stupid totally inert mechanic material objects and then somehow through complex integration to come to animality to come to human life because things get complex already with animality. I love reading modern
gradualism will enable you to begin with stupid totally inert mechanic material objects and then somehow through complex integration to come to animality to come to human life because things get complex already with animality. I love reading modern
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biologists like the one who is the grand old lady I think
biologists like the one who is the grand old lady I think
Slavoj Žižek
she died Lynn Margulis and others who point out and
she died Lynn Margulis and others who point out and
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even
even
Slavoj Žižek
some intelligent Darwinists have this idea that living being presupposes a certain temporal circularity. A living being means that something that is the
some intelligent Darwinists have this idea that living being presupposes a certain temporal circularity. A living being means that something that is the
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effect of a process retroactively takes over the process itself. For
effect of a process retroactively takes over the process itself. For
Slavoj Žižek
example I was so deeply fascinated by Lynn Margulis she is famous for his her cell theory. She claims forget about animals and plants the basic magic of life is a cell. How nature self-organizes itself in such a way that a certain entity
example I was so deeply fascinated by Lynn Margulis she is famous for his her cell theory. She claims forget about animals and plants the basic magic of life is a cell. How nature self-organizes itself in such a way that a certain entity
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posits a limit between inside and outside. The big problem of self-organization is the skin the limit so that you say this is in this is out. And the idea is that okay I will not go into it. My okay to cut a long story short my point is that maybe I am too naive speculative here that you have to go to quantum physics. That's maybe a kind of sorry oh that's that is the kind of response sorry I have to interrupt there as background in physics. In quantum physics it's still
posits a limit between inside and outside. The big problem of self-organization is the skin the limit so that you say this is in this is out. And the idea is that okay I will not go into it. My okay to cut a long story short my point is that maybe I am too naive speculative here that you have to go to quantum physics. That's maybe a kind of sorry oh that's that is the kind of response sorry I have to interrupt there as background in physics. In quantum physics it's still
Slavoj Žižek
materialist theory it describes the particles in terms of probability that's correct. Oh
materialist theory it describes the particles in terms of probability that's correct. Oh
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but not only this but in the subject the subject object relation there is always the observer and the observed so the subject object relation is always
but not only this but in the subject the subject object relation there is always the observer and the observed so the subject object relation is always
Slavoj Žižek
conserved in every quantum physics experiment.
conserved in every quantum physics experiment.
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It is always ah no no no wait a minute now I am not totally bluffing here I spoke with many of them it's true what you are saying but nonetheless I claim and even you find this even with Niels Bohr you first the
It is always ah no no no wait a minute now I am not totally bluffing here I spoke with many of them it's true what you are saying but nonetheless I claim and even you find this even with Niels Bohr you first the
Slavoj Žižek
problem the true problem of quantum physics for me is that this probability is not just a cognitive probability that it's an ontological probability and point two this I develop this point wisely in my books this ontological probability means that nature in itself it's not fully determined. It's not that things fully exist out there we observers just cannot fully get to know them. The the beauty of quantum physics for me is almost the opposite what pre-exists the subject is some totally not totally relatively indeterminate oscillation and it’s only through the observer that this indeterminate oscillation collapses into determinate thing and so on and so on. So in other words I am not an idealist and I know very I am not talking here about ooh some kind of observing ghost creates reality and so on and so on it’s not that. But nonetheless it’s also not naive realism what fascinates me is this what type of reality is described there. First it’s a reality in which if I may put it in this way possibility as virtual reality has a positive ontological status of its own. In our ordinary material reality different things can happen but when one thing happens others fuck off are disappeared not in quantum physics. In quantum physics now I’m talking in very abstract ontological terms if you want to understand what a thing is you have to include what it might have been but didn’t and so on in a in a variations possibility has a certain okay I don’t want to get lost in this now. That would be my my first answer I don't. So now we come to the second point here. When you say materialism yes but what notion of matter. I think we should abandon this naive notion of matter like you know small particles which run around in the void and so on and so on. The big lesson of quantum physics for me
problem the true problem of quantum physics for me is that this probability is not just a cognitive probability that it's an ontological probability and point two this I develop this point wisely in my books this ontological probability means that nature in itself it's not fully determined. It's not that things fully exist out there we observers just cannot fully get to know them. The the beauty of quantum physics for me is almost the opposite what pre-exists the subject is some totally not totally relatively indeterminate oscillation and it’s only through the observer that this indeterminate oscillation collapses into determinate thing and so on and so on. So in other words I am not an idealist and I know very I am not talking here about ooh some kind of observing ghost creates reality and so on and so on it’s not that. But nonetheless it’s also not naive realism what fascinates me is this what type of reality is described there. First it’s a reality in which if I may put it in this way possibility as virtual reality has a positive ontological status of its own. In our ordinary material reality different things can happen but when one thing happens others fuck off are disappeared not in quantum physics. In quantum physics now I’m talking in very abstract ontological terms if you want to understand what a thing is you have to include what it might have been but didn’t and so on in a in a variations possibility has a certain okay I don’t want to get lost in this now. That would be my my first answer I don't. So now we come to the second point here. When you say materialism yes but what notion of matter. I think we should abandon this naive notion of matter like you know small particles which run around in the void and so on and so on. The big lesson of quantum physics for me
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is that how should I put it well we all know this that zero even that becomes the title of my book less than nothing and so on. All this is not just our epistemological imperfection but part of matter part of reality. Matter is not
is that how should I put it well we all know this that zero even that becomes the title of my book less than nothing and so on. All this is not just our epistemological imperfection but part of matter part of reality. Matter is not
Slavoj Žižek
just some little little tiny particles running around there in some space and so on and so on that matter I'm not talking now I'm not a physicist about anti-matter and so on and so on. But for example what absolutely fascinated me like a intellectual unfortunately orgasm permanent is this idea that I very clumsily probably resume in my big fat book of two vacuums. That is to say the basic ontological paradox that if you imagine by vacuum a total emptiness zero level that you already have to spend some energy to get at this. That is to say it's not as we think nothing costs nothing and then you have to add something so I claim that without this type of ontological foundation you cannot explain subjectivity. It's a big speculation we may disagree but where I agree with you and I read now a wonderful book I forgot the guy's name it's one of these expensive books that academic publishers I hate them publish you know where it's it's like soft cover pages and it's pounds you know those and but it's a one mechanism in early Hegel and it demonstrates that Hegel became in your sense Hegel became Hegel when he abandoned this stupid romantic notion of lower level alienation mechanism and then higher level organicism and so on and so on. You know what Hegel already says in your sense that we have this lively organic interaction but how do we pass to subjectivity in the sense of symbolic human being only so that this lively organic process is brutally submitted to a mechanism. Language for Hegel is at its most elementary precisely not a living organic entity but a mechanism and Hegel was always fascinated by this. For example in an ingenious insight he says how wise was history so that as the universal language of Europe it was Latin not Greek which was selected because precisely Greek ancient Greek was perceived as more organic you know all this Heideggerian mythology while Latin was perceived as mechanic drill and so on. Hegel was always aware that the the background of our free thinking is always an empty blind mechanism. We have to rehabilitate mechanism symbolic mechanism this is of course the sense in which Lacan uses it but precisely in its alienating force. It's not a mechanism which is organic part of ourselves whatever it's precisely something extremely disruptive. Language is for Lacan a kind of a stupid I underline stupid mechanical apparatus which takes over a living organism and so on and so on. So I know I didn't answer to you in a satisfactory way but just to reassure you I am following very closely all these all ah sorry I'm so stupid the process is called decoherence no this process and the there are attempts but it's tricky they don't work the interest of decoherence theory is to formulate you know the big hope decades ago was string theory I may be wrong but the way I get the simplified version from my spies in science departments is that string theory is now gradually losing ground. There are problems with experimental verification it’s not only that they cannot do it it’s that they even cannot imagine a way how to do it it’s just a different reading and it’s you pay too much of you get rid of certain paradoxes but then you have to introduce you know it’s like how did the guy called the a little bit too much of a new age quantum physicist David Bohm you know. Okay he did solve some paradoxes but you have to buy a lot more of other paradoxes for it. So I am being told maybe I'm wrong I would be grateful if some of you know it better that decoherence is now the central effort. It’s precisely an it also sounds wonderfully Hegelian because in one of the versions I cannot go now into detailed line but as they put it is that when it reaches a certain quantity a a process starts to observe itself because it's so you know that you don't need an external observer its own complexity registers what its parts are doing. Now I'm not sure this works I admit totally openly that I am here more or less this kind of a I'm much worse than it was a wonderful surprise and a big victory of the left I was so glad did you read it how Justin Trudeau the relatively progressive some stupid journalist thought that he will catch him and ask him but uh what is this how do they call it my god this uh not just bits. High-tech? Quantum computers. Because and they the idiots thought they would catch him and he was like sorry it was not like that apparently. Apparently he asked the journalists in advance he said to them I hope someone asks so he was bluffing total bluff even better for him that's how the left will win. Yeah okay no no no when I form somebody you will never catch me you know like he was a Hegelian no like asking himself and so on really but this is very sad so is what all states. Yeah and he was rehearsing the answer all morning and then it became viral then oh my god now why did you I will kill you you now ruined you ruined my but on
just some little little tiny particles running around there in some space and so on and so on that matter I'm not talking now I'm not a physicist about anti-matter and so on and so on. But for example what absolutely fascinated me like a intellectual unfortunately orgasm permanent is this idea that I very clumsily probably resume in my big fat book of two vacuums. That is to say the basic ontological paradox that if you imagine by vacuum a total emptiness zero level that you already have to spend some energy to get at this. That is to say it's not as we think nothing costs nothing and then you have to add something so I claim that without this type of ontological foundation you cannot explain subjectivity. It's a big speculation we may disagree but where I agree with you and I read now a wonderful book I forgot the guy's name it's one of these expensive books that academic publishers I hate them publish you know where it's it's like soft cover pages and it's pounds you know those and but it's a one mechanism in early Hegel and it demonstrates that Hegel became in your sense Hegel became Hegel when he abandoned this stupid romantic notion of lower level alienation mechanism and then higher level organicism and so on and so on. You know what Hegel already says in your sense that we have this lively organic interaction but how do we pass to subjectivity in the sense of symbolic human being only so that this lively organic process is brutally submitted to a mechanism. Language for Hegel is at its most elementary precisely not a living organic entity but a mechanism and Hegel was always fascinated by this. For example in an ingenious insight he says how wise was history so that as the universal language of Europe it was Latin not Greek which was selected because precisely Greek ancient Greek was perceived as more organic you know all this Heideggerian mythology while Latin was perceived as mechanic drill and so on. Hegel was always aware that the the background of our free thinking is always an empty blind mechanism. We have to rehabilitate mechanism symbolic mechanism this is of course the sense in which Lacan uses it but precisely in its alienating force. It's not a mechanism which is organic part of ourselves whatever it's precisely something extremely disruptive. Language is for Lacan a kind of a stupid I underline stupid mechanical apparatus which takes over a living organism and so on and so on. So I know I didn't answer to you in a satisfactory way but just to reassure you I am following very closely all these all ah sorry I'm so stupid the process is called decoherence no this process and the there are attempts but it's tricky they don't work the interest of decoherence theory is to formulate you know the big hope decades ago was string theory I may be wrong but the way I get the simplified version from my spies in science departments is that string theory is now gradually losing ground. There are problems with experimental verification it’s not only that they cannot do it it’s that they even cannot imagine a way how to do it it’s just a different reading and it’s you pay too much of you get rid of certain paradoxes but then you have to introduce you know it’s like how did the guy called the a little bit too much of a new age quantum physicist David Bohm you know. Okay he did solve some paradoxes but you have to buy a lot more of other paradoxes for it. So I am being told maybe I'm wrong I would be grateful if some of you know it better that decoherence is now the central effort. It’s precisely an it also sounds wonderfully Hegelian because in one of the versions I cannot go now into detailed line but as they put it is that when it reaches a certain quantity a a process starts to observe itself because it's so you know that you don't need an external observer its own complexity registers what its parts are doing. Now I'm not sure this works I admit totally openly that I am here more or less this kind of a I'm much worse than it was a wonderful surprise and a big victory of the left I was so glad did you read it how Justin Trudeau the relatively progressive some stupid journalist thought that he will catch him and ask him but uh what is this how do they call it my god this uh not just bits. High-tech? Quantum computers. Because and they the idiots thought they would catch him and he was like sorry it was not like that apparently. Apparently he asked the journalists in advance he said to them I hope someone asks so he was bluffing total bluff even better for him that's how the left will win. Yeah okay no no no when I form somebody you will never catch me you know like he was a Hegelian no like asking himself and so on really but this is very sad so is what all states. Yeah and he was rehearsing the answer all morning and then it became viral then oh my god now why did you I will kill you you now ruined you ruined my but on
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the
the
Slavoj Žižek
other hand I must say I thought that it was too nice to be true almost you know. But oh my god I hate you fuck off no put a door. I will not I will not say I don't want appear to be a racist but just persons who are from Greece whose family name begins with with M and no family name with A and Christian name with with M let’s leave it totally neutral are not permitted to enter this room I get my coat. Yeah yeah sorry so maybe let’s try another one before I have to disappear. I’m not Greek I’m Iranian just for the. Are you Iranian? My god I would like okay let’s not lose time but I would like to visit the country because I was shocked how much more intellectual life you have than many other Arab countries no you translate a lot and so on.
other hand I must say I thought that it was too nice to be true almost you know. But oh my god I hate you fuck off no put a door. I will not I will not say I don't want appear to be a racist but just persons who are from Greece whose family name begins with with M and no family name with A and Christian name with with M let’s leave it totally neutral are not permitted to enter this room I get my coat. Yeah yeah sorry so maybe let’s try another one before I have to disappear. I’m not Greek I’m Iranian just for the. Are you Iranian? My god I would like okay let’s not lose time but I would like to visit the country because I was shocked how much more intellectual life you have than many other Arab countries no you translate a lot and so on.
unknown
Not Arab. Sorry? Not Arab. Iranian's not Arab.
Not Arab. Sorry? Not Arab. Iranian's not Arab.
Slavoj Žižek
I know sorry I always make this mistake but I know I know this is your big point of you are here a little bit like us Slovenes when they say Slovenia is the most developed part of Balkan and every proud Slovene will tell you no we are Mitteleuropa we are not Balkan. But no but okay the racist answer is because of this because you are not Arabs but isn't it true that your intellectual life is much more yes modest answer yes. Okay let’s do one more quickly. There was a lady here you. Hi it’s not really a question just if you
I know sorry I always make this mistake but I know I know this is your big point of you are here a little bit like us Slovenes when they say Slovenia is the most developed part of Balkan and every proud Slovene will tell you no we are Mitteleuropa we are not Balkan. But no but okay the racist answer is because of this because you are not Arabs but isn't it true that your intellectual life is much more yes modest answer yes. Okay let’s do one more quickly. There was a lady here you. Hi it’s not really a question just if you
unknown
could comment in what’s
could comment in what’s
Slavoj Žižek
happening in Brazil so it’s just you are a dirty neo-fascist or what without okay sorry no no sorry sorry just if you
happening in Brazil so it’s just you are a dirty neo-fascist or what without okay sorry no no sorry sorry just if you
unknown
could comment on what’s happening in Brazil no I don’t know enough
could comment on what’s happening in Brazil no I don’t know enough
Slavoj Žižek
I don’t know enough but I think it’s a general trap I’ve spoken about this corruption with Negri five years ago who just returned from a visit to Brazil and Negri is a friend of Lula no and he his justification maybe was that because of the complexity of electoral system they need to to to enforce their measures they need the collaboration of smaller parties the only way to get things done was to corrupt a little bit the smaller parties but now it look it went way beyond that. My if you ask me but I don't know my spontaneous reaction is maybe all is true that is to say there was corruption in Labour Party but at the same time there also is a plot and so on you know I tend to be a pessimist if you ask me but it made me very sad because I could not predict I saw for a long time the Argentinian crisis coming the Venezuela crisis coming but I must say I didn't expect such a strong crisis in in Brazil and I would demoralize it in the sense that not demoralize but in the sense that the true problem is not just you know oh corruption or whatever it's that obviously there is a certain limit to the Lula model of government you know it worked very well for some time even my radical leftist friends were telling me whatever your criticism of Lula but he did lower the level of poverty build infrastructure all that and so on but they claimed it’s not just a contingent deviation this explosion now you know so I’m very sad because but I was pessimist from the beginning
I don’t know enough but I think it’s a general trap I’ve spoken about this corruption with Negri five years ago who just returned from a visit to Brazil and Negri is a friend of Lula no and he his justification maybe was that because of the complexity of electoral system they need to to to enforce their measures they need the collaboration of smaller parties the only way to get things done was to corrupt a little bit the smaller parties but now it look it went way beyond that. My if you ask me but I don't know my spontaneous reaction is maybe all is true that is to say there was corruption in Labour Party but at the same time there also is a plot and so on you know I tend to be a pessimist if you ask me but it made me very sad because I could not predict I saw for a long time the Argentinian crisis coming the Venezuela crisis coming but I must say I didn't expect such a strong crisis in in Brazil and I would demoralize it in the sense that not demoralize but in the sense that the true problem is not just you know oh corruption or whatever it's that obviously there is a certain limit to the Lula model of government you know it worked very well for some time even my radical leftist friends were telling me whatever your criticism of Lula but he did lower the level of poverty build infrastructure all that and so on but they claimed it’s not just a contingent deviation this explosion now you know so I’m very sad because but I was pessimist from the beginning
unknown
but uh I asked because um some psychoanalysts they are claiming the interesting thing that what needs to happen is a psychoanalysis of the whole nation. Oh my god yeah maybe because what he said that you know they misread the figure of the of the analyst yeah but how do they how do they imagine? For example on Sunday the Congress voted the starting of the impeachment yeah yeah and
but uh I asked because um some psychoanalysts they are claiming the interesting thing that what needs to happen is a psychoanalysis of the whole nation. Oh my god yeah maybe because what he said that you know they misread the figure of the of the analyst yeah but how do they how do they imagine? For example on Sunday the Congress voted the starting of the impeachment yeah yeah and
Slavoj Žižek
despite the fact that at least percent of them dedicated their votes to God and to their own families to the President family apart from that horrible part of it there was a wall built in front of the Congress separating people dressed in red then people dressed in the flag yeah yeah and there's been a lot of uh people on the streets with very different politics the elite basically that is neoliberal and then the rest but the solutions that have been presented so far at least to my understanding are exactly what he said the biggest uh left parties that and they are still very minority but they're saying that what the Labour Party in government missed out on is the touch with the social movements so they are proposing that there is more presence of the social movements in the government as a way of change but then you're saying you don't. I don't because again when you have the government functioning in this way it was exactly the same thing if there is some Argentinian here he can lynch me or she afterwards but I know in Argentina how this touch with social movements developed into developed into clientelism and so on. You know this this maybe my paradoxical formula would have been that what we maybe need is on the opposite a more alienated government alienated of course not in the classical Marxist sense but in the sense that really at a distance not too much involved with social business and so on you know where like in Slovenia my country I like this paradox although I was very much against communist regime but now retroactively we can say that the best government we had was in the last years under communism you know why? Because it was of course formally a government without democratic legitimization but you know election the disintegration of communism was at the horizon so now comes the beautiful irony because of this and because they knew their rule is not properly legitimized they felt guilty all the time and they tried to do the best because they felt this pressure. The moment we got democratically elected government they said now we're in power democratically fuck off vote for us but now we can do whatever we want and it went much no so I would like to invent something like this a government which is not fully democratically legitimized but because of this feels guilty all the time and is totally terrorized you know. I mean because again let's be open here but it really mhm but you know what interests me is not just corruption but what was wrong what was the limitation of the model itself. Because I like Brazil why because from what I learned maybe I'm wrong in Venezuela the sad thing is not just the crisis of Chavismo the sad thing is that did they really with all those social local communities whatever self-organization but did they really invent anything new? I doubt it. I know they made experiments all the time I think I already told this story here it’s my favorite because I’m a pessimist. You know Chavez was often giving the government was giving factories to workers workers take it over to organize it I have a leftist friend there who was extremely evil in a good sense and he just when it was reported on TV that factory is given to workers he put it down and then a year later he went to check it up what happened to that factory. Not even one was a success either they were simply bankrupted reprivatized government directly took over I mean what I'm saying is that this is a terrific dilemma Fred Jameson's formula is the only thing that the left can do today is to insist on social democratic demands you know like in United States universal healthcare and so on free education with the with the secret account that no government will
despite the fact that at least percent of them dedicated their votes to God and to their own families to the President family apart from that horrible part of it there was a wall built in front of the Congress separating people dressed in red then people dressed in the flag yeah yeah and there's been a lot of uh people on the streets with very different politics the elite basically that is neoliberal and then the rest but the solutions that have been presented so far at least to my understanding are exactly what he said the biggest uh left parties that and they are still very minority but they're saying that what the Labour Party in government missed out on is the touch with the social movements so they are proposing that there is more presence of the social movements in the government as a way of change but then you're saying you don't. I don't because again when you have the government functioning in this way it was exactly the same thing if there is some Argentinian here he can lynch me or she afterwards but I know in Argentina how this touch with social movements developed into developed into clientelism and so on. You know this this maybe my paradoxical formula would have been that what we maybe need is on the opposite a more alienated government alienated of course not in the classical Marxist sense but in the sense that really at a distance not too much involved with social business and so on you know where like in Slovenia my country I like this paradox although I was very much against communist regime but now retroactively we can say that the best government we had was in the last years under communism you know why? Because it was of course formally a government without democratic legitimization but you know election the disintegration of communism was at the horizon so now comes the beautiful irony because of this and because they knew their rule is not properly legitimized they felt guilty all the time and they tried to do the best because they felt this pressure. The moment we got democratically elected government they said now we're in power democratically fuck off vote for us but now we can do whatever we want and it went much no so I would like to invent something like this a government which is not fully democratically legitimized but because of this feels guilty all the time and is totally terrorized you know. I mean because again let's be open here but it really mhm but you know what interests me is not just corruption but what was wrong what was the limitation of the model itself. Because I like Brazil why because from what I learned maybe I'm wrong in Venezuela the sad thing is not just the crisis of Chavismo the sad thing is that did they really with all those social local communities whatever self-organization but did they really invent anything new? I doubt it. I know they made experiments all the time I think I already told this story here it’s my favorite because I’m a pessimist. You know Chavez was often giving the government was giving factories to workers workers take it over to organize it I have a leftist friend there who was extremely evil in a good sense and he just when it was reported on TV that factory is given to workers he put it down and then a year later he went to check it up what happened to that factory. Not even one was a success either they were simply bankrupted reprivatized government directly took over I mean what I'm saying is that this is a terrific dilemma Fred Jameson's formula is the only thing that the left can do today is to insist on social democratic demands you know like in United States universal healthcare and so on free education with the with the secret account that no government will
unknown
be able to fulfill to meet them so that in the long term people will learn that we need more radical measures but isn't this an extremely depressive sad option that all we can do is just to provoke the opponent by demands that we know that our only hope is that what we demand will not be met that it will fail. That's all the that's all the crisis of today's left and it I mean something will happen I don't know what but I really think we really do not have the formula and what makes the situation even worse is that and that's why I'm still a communist that we cannot simply say okay so let's be realists and accept the existing order and play a kind of a third way you know we play the capitalist game but a little bit more healthcare a little bit more no that will also not work I crisis is approaching who knows what will happen and so on. So I'm sorry I don't know more but if you are from Brazil I can tell you something else this may strange. I hate up there Bahia Salvador they are lazy they dance too much and so on I like dirty cities down Sao Paulo and so on they are dynamic they are dirty. You know I had dirty joke I will conclude a wonderful I became the best you know in Europe when I was young there was a myth that in Bahia are you from Bahia oh good you have black guys with gigantic penises so I met one there a psychoanalyst and tasteless as I am I asked him you know like is it true you have it you know what he told me it was very sad story. He told me it's true but we pay the price for it because it's so big that many of us are impotent because when we get erection so much blood goes in there that we almost collapse and so on and my reaction was so stupid European racist I started to jump haha revenge of the white man you know and so on. But he was a wonderful guy the result was that I became good personal friend with that guy he gave me all the sympathy and so on whatever I gave him it was a real example of how a touch of obscenity creates true friendship how you put it. No but really I don't like the atmosphere up there. I like this dirty dynamic Brazil you know not that Brazil of already already Rio is for me suspicious they dance too much there yeah we need hard work not dancing yeah. Sorry I have to stop now thank you very much and uh I will not forget the central line of thought.
be able to fulfill to meet them so that in the long term people will learn that we need more radical measures but isn't this an extremely depressive sad option that all we can do is just to provoke the opponent by demands that we know that our only hope is that what we demand will not be met that it will fail. That's all the that's all the crisis of today's left and it I mean something will happen I don't know what but I really think we really do not have the formula and what makes the situation even worse is that and that's why I'm still a communist that we cannot simply say okay so let's be realists and accept the existing order and play a kind of a third way you know we play the capitalist game but a little bit more healthcare a little bit more no that will also not work I crisis is approaching who knows what will happen and so on. So I'm sorry I don't know more but if you are from Brazil I can tell you something else this may strange. I hate up there Bahia Salvador they are lazy they dance too much and so on I like dirty cities down Sao Paulo and so on they are dynamic they are dirty. You know I had dirty joke I will conclude a wonderful I became the best you know in Europe when I was young there was a myth that in Bahia are you from Bahia oh good you have black guys with gigantic penises so I met one there a psychoanalyst and tasteless as I am I asked him you know like is it true you have it you know what he told me it was very sad story. He told me it's true but we pay the price for it because it's so big that many of us are impotent because when we get erection so much blood goes in there that we almost collapse and so on and my reaction was so stupid European racist I started to jump haha revenge of the white man you know and so on. But he was a wonderful guy the result was that I became good personal friend with that guy he gave me all the sympathy and so on whatever I gave him it was a real example of how a touch of obscenity creates true friendship how you put it. No but really I don't like the atmosphere up there. I like this dirty dynamic Brazil you know not that Brazil of already already Rio is for me suspicious they dance too much there yeah we need hard work not dancing yeah. Sorry I have to stop now thank you very much and uh I will not forget the central line of thought.