Slavoj Žižek: It’s the End of the World as We Know It
Talk · Arlind Boshnjaku ·
2014-02-10 · 1:03:39 · 8,249 words
ideologycapitalismcinema-art-culturepsychoanalysisethicseveryday-lifesexuality-gendertechnology-ai-cyberspacereligion-theologyconsciousness-minddemocracy
Žižek analyzes the 'end of the world' as a collapse of the symbolic Big Other, using the documentary The Act of Killing to illustrate how ethnic cleansing requires a poetic/mythic narrative to function. He argues that modern capitalism and consumerism operate through a 'non-egotist' logic where harm is enjoyed as a superego injunction, and that the dissolution of communal bonds has led to a 'shared privacy' where public spaces are experienced as private monadic units. Žižek argues that contemporary sexuality is becoming solipsistic and 'safe,' characterized by a 'fall without falling' that eliminates the traumatic intersubjectivity of authentic love, illustrated by the erasure of sex in modern pop culture like James Bond and Dan Brown adaptations. He links this to a Westernized, distance-maintaining form of Buddhism and neuro-cognitive determinism, suggesting we are approaching an 'end of the world' where the autonomous subject dissolves into a neuronal automaton. He concludes that this deterministic, asectic future is not a catastrophe to be feared but a fate to be accepted in order to motivate radical political action against a ruling class that has lost its ability to govern.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “zero level”
The horizon of the end of the world where things reach a limit and the symbolic order disintegrates, allowing for the public display of obscenity.
as “no ethnic cleansing without poetry”
The thesis that perpetrators of mass violence require a quasi-religious or poetic mythic narrative to screen their brutality and perceive themselves as serving a sacred cause rather than being mere torturers.
as “dogmatism (ethical)”
The positive value of having ethical norms (like the unacceptability of rape) as automatic, unarguable substance rather than subjects of constant rational debate.
as “Big Other”
The public symbolic order or unwritten rules that determine social acceptability; its disintegration allows atrocities to be displayed without shame.
as “capitalism is a religious phenomenon”
The claim that capitalism functions not through hedonistic egoism but through a fanatical, quasi-ethical dedication to the circulation and expansion of capital, requiring the sacrifice of personal life and nature.
The idea that modern consumer goods appeal not to rational self-interest (health/safety) but to a superego injunction to transgress and suffer, making the danger part of the enjoyment.
The consumerist logic of extracting the 'safe' utility of a product (beer without alcohol, chocolate without sugar) while removing its potentially disruptive or traumatic substance.
The paradox of digital/internet culture where exposing one's private secrets or acts to a global audience does not create a public sphere but rather extends a private, monadic isolation.
as “fall without falling”
The contemporary ideal of love and connection that promises intimacy while strictly avoiding the traumatic, disruptive 'fall' or loss of control inherent in authentic desire.
Žižek's term for the predominant contemporary ideology of detached, self-actualizing mindfulness that serves as a coping mechanism for capitalism by maintaining emotional distance.
as “consensual sex as contractual sex”
The reduction of sexual interaction to a rational, risk-free contract between autonomous agents, which Žižek argues strips sex of its traumatic, intersubjective essence.
as “masturbating with a real partner”
The phenomenon where sexual partners function merely as props for one's own fantasy, allowing for physical proximity without genuine intersubjective engagement.
as “end of the world as we know it”
Not an apocalyptic event, but the structural dissolution of the autonomous, free-willed subject due to cognitive science and biogenetics, leading to a new form of social organization.
as “universalized society of universalized privacy”
The predicted social structure of the post-deterministic era: a shameless, amoral society where individuals are isolated yet connected through technology, lacking moral responsibility.
as “aseptic totally non-sexual spirituality”
The predicted spiritual outcome of a post-subjective society: a clean, controlled, non-arousing spirituality that mirrors the technological control of the body.
as “technological Gnostics”
The modern techno-utopian belief that technology will allow for the uploading of consciousness and eternal life, mirroring early Soviet dreams of creating a new, asexual man.
The 1920s Soviet psychological view (influenced by Pavlov) that sexual arousal is a biological weakness to be overcome to create the 'New Man.'
St. Augustine's theological concept that the uncontrollable nature of erection is God's punishment for the desire to be like God, reminding man of his finitude.
Žižek's provocative re-framing of September 11, 1973 (the US-backed coup against Allende) as the 'true' September 11th, contrasting it with the 2001 attacks.
Stories he reaches for 5
Žižek describes experiments where rats are connected to machines and controlled like remote-control cars, illustrating the potential for direct neural control in humans without the subject feeling controlled.
“So I saw it on DVD at least. What you can do is this you have a rat in a cage the rat is freely jumping around then you click a button the rat is connected and you can literally control the rat like a remote control car”
Žižek recounts a French dating agency ad promising to help you 'find yourself in love without the fall' (sans tomber), and a similar American agency, illustrating the desire for love without trauma.
“You say you use the verb fall you say tomber l’amour fall to fall in love. Okay Badiou found a publicity of one dating and marriage agency in France where basically the message was we will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall.”
Žižek points out that in The Da Vinci Code, despite the romantic plot between Langdon and Sophie, there is no sex, and even Jesus is depicted as engaging in love to cover up the absence of sexual consummation.
“Even Jesus Christ has to engage in love you know the thesis of the film the secret Jesus to cover up the fact that there is no sex here you know.”
Heinrich Himmler told SS officers that their crimes must remain a secret 'empty page in history books' but would be the 'most glorious chapter of German history,' treating evil as a private patriotic duty.
“He was telling them unfortunately your activity will have to remain a secret an empty page in history books but it will nonetheless be the most glorious chapter of German history.”
In Terry Gilliam's Brazil, rich patrons are served a plate of mud with a photo of a steak, illustrating how love now functions: consuming a 'piece of shit' while fantasizing about the exquisite reality.
“What they get when they are served food is a plate what is on the plate is just a shit-like like just something like like a piece of shit formless piece of mud and then a photo of the of the exquisite steak”
Works invoked 9
The Da Vinci Code film
Used to illustrate the absence of sex in modern pop culture, even when romantic plots exist.
Angels and Demons film
Used to illustrate the deletion of sex in film adaptations compared to the novels.
Brazil film
Called a 'mega classic'; the restaurant scene with the mud and steak photo is used to illustrate how love functions as a prop for fantasy.
The Act of Killing film
Documentary recommended by Žižek; used to illustrate the disintegration of the Big Other and the need for 'poetry' in ethnic cleansing.
St. Augustine's work cited for the theory that sexuality is not the source of sin but the punishment for it.
Brecht's learning play used as a structural parallel to the Peng Yu case in China.
Virginia Woolf's essay cited for the pseudo-empirical claim that 'on or about April human nature changed,' used to mark a shift in what it means to be human.
Biutiful film
Used to illustrate the fear of intersubjectivity and the brutality of love through a scene with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
Skyfall film
Used as an example of the trend where James Bond films no longer end in sex, illustrating the 'traumatized' nature of modern desire.
People invoked 26
Indonesian death squad member featured in The Act of Killing; described as a 'scum' and 'right-wing murderous thug' who reenacts massacres.
Humphrey Bogart positive
Film noir actor whose characters Indonesian killers used as imaginary models for their crimes.
Žižek admits he hates her, calling her a 'frigid bitch' and preferring Daphne du Maurier, but cites her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.
Chinese man who helped an elderly woman and was sued; his kindness was interpreted as guilt by the court.
Mangled ASR for 'Badiou' in the phrase 'my good friend Alain Badiou'.
Leader of Bosnian Serbs mentioned in the context of poets laying foundations for ethnic cleansing in ex-Yugoslavia.
Jacques Lacan positive
Source of the concept 'Big Other'; Žižek uses Lacanian framework to analyze the symbolic order.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Conservative thinker who confessed to Žižek he is 'no longer a Fukuyamaist' because his 'end of history' idea is over due to biogenetics and crisis.
Žižek claims she is a greater writer than Virginia Woolf.
Judith Butler negative
Personal friend, but Žižek critiques her description of sexual identity as performatively enacted, arguing she is merely describing the predominant ideology of detachment rather than subversion.
Patricia Churchland negative
Cognitivist who claims we can imagine our awareness to change according to knowledge; Žižek calls this position 'illusory'.
Terry Gilliam positive
Director of Brazil; Žižek calls the film a 'mega classic' and praises the restaurant scene as a 'stroke of genius'.
Danish documentary filmmaker who made The Act of Killing; Žižek calls him a friend and recommends the film.
Alain Badiou positive
Good friend who told Žižek the 'fall without falling' dating agency story; Žižek uses it to illustrate his point about love.
Leon Trotsky positive
Mentioned as having written about the Bolshevik task of creating a 'new man' who is asexual, a dream of 'technological Gnostics'.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Author of The Exception and the Rule, used as a didactic parallel to the Peng Yu case.
Ivan Pavlov positive
Key influence on 1920s Soviet psychology; privately against Bolsheviks but influenced the view that sexual arousal is a weakness of Homo sapiens.
Heinrich Himmler positive
Nazi officer whose Posen speech is cited to contrast Nazi secrecy with the open boasting of Indonesian killers.
Salvador Allende positive
Chilean minister murdered in the 1973 coup; Žižek refers to this event as the 'true September 11th'.
Alejandro González Iñárritu positive
Director of Biutiful; Žižek calls him 'pseudo-intellectual' and says 'I don't like them' but uses the film's scene to illustrate the brutality of love.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for the thesis that 'capitalism is a religious phenomenon,' which Žižek adopts and expands upon.
Mentioned as having signed a letter authorizing the murder of the Chilean minister in the 1973 coup.
Thomas Metzinger positive
German scientist whose position Žižek finds 'most interesting': that Buddhist enlightenment (accepting anātman) is the only existential position fitting modern cognitive science.
Paul Churchland negative
Cognitivist paired with Patricia; Žižek calls their position 'illusory'.
Augustine of Hippo positive
Cited for his theory that sexual arousal (erection) is God's punishment for the sin of wanting to be like God, reminding man of his finitude.
Ronald Reagan negative
Cited as an example of the disintegration of the Big Other; his claim about arguing with Holocaust deniers reveals the banality of his 'friends'.
Transcript 2 turns
Slavoj Žižek
tvo.org I want to tell you present here some of the signs of this dimension the of the end of the world in the sense that we are approaching there is on the horizon a certain zero level where things reach a limit. So let me begin with a film that I know already for four five years because the director who is my friend was kind enough to send me a copy. The premiere of the film was I think was I think not the premiere but it was shown a month ago here at Toronto Festival if some of you were lucky enough to see it if not please go and see it it’s maybe one of the most morally depressing films that I’ve seen. It’s called The Act of Killing made by a Danish documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. It was shot in the last years in Indonesia but they needed years so that it’s possible to show it in public because of course lives were threatened and so on you will immediately see why. This film shot in Medan Indonesia mostly in reports on a case of obscenity which reaches to the extreme. There is in Indonesia all this is real it’s a documentary a group of murderous gang members and members of the military Anwar Congo and some of his friends this is Indonesian now politician and officer who in the mid in you remember when there was a civil war first the attempted communist coup d’état then the anti-communist Suharto regime did strike back and around the idea is that around two and a half million of people mostly Chinese allegedly communists were slaughtered. This group Anwar Congo and his friends organized at that time in a murderous gang. They were serially raping, torturing, killing thousands of people. Now comes the they were not only ready but they even paid Oppenheimer they didn’t know what he will do with it to do a film on this. And they without any shame that’s so depressing they openly display stage show talk about show some photos how they were killing murdering raping torturing and so on and the high point of obscenity for me at least is a scene when on a local TV show in October TV show on Indonesian state TV this group presented itself and it’s horrible it’s like you know a couple of hundred people public talk with them and a nice lady moderator and for example this guy Anwar Congo I mean I you have to see it to believe your eyes and ears. After he explains this mode of torturing the moderator says look how inventive these guys are one big applause for Mr. Anwar and so on and they all applaud and so on and so on I mean it’s absolutely breath take breathtaking. But even so again you have a group of people who right-wing murderous thugs who even don’t have this let’s call it minimum of decency that even the Nazis had you know. You know what Heinrich Himmler said in that famous speech in Posen Poznań in this was a speech to SS officers and he was giving them lessons on how to do the Holocaust and he was telling them unfortunately your activity will have to remain a secret an empty page in history books but it will nonetheless be the most glorious chapter of German history. But you see they at least treated it as a private dirty secret you know this is the typical right-wing logic in the sense of a true patriot is not just the one who is ready to die for his country but the one who is ready to lose his soul for his country to do horrible things this true hero is ready to do crimes for his country so here it’s not even that they simply publicly boast about it all. And even more then they explain how they did it they explain that before they become killers they were in love with Hollywood film noir mostly Humphrey Bogart all that so they imagined themselves as noir detective Humphrey Bogart whoever they imagined as being a Hollywood noir hero when they were doing their terrifying acts this was their imaginary. Now we can do a lot here I don’t have time to go into it about how would you put it the use of poetry in ethnic cleansing this is my old thesis and I was once almost beaten in my own country by some poets who didn’t like the idea my formula was no ethnic cleansing without poetry you always need a poet to avoid a misunderstanding I’m not saying all poets are like that there are mega great poets. All I’m saying is that I’m a little bit tired as a philosopher to listen for decades you know this idea philosophers with their notion of totality total rationalism laid the foundation for totalitarianism and so on where poets are at least as guilty as we are. Why? It’s very simple my idea here. We are basically half-decent people. If I were to be ordered let me take again sorry somebody has to suffer if somebody were to tell me pick a take a knife and pick your eyes out well unfortunately I would have some problems to do it. So you need some strong quasi-religious mythic narrative which serves as a screen enabling you to do it so that then through this narrative I no longer perceive myself just as a brutal torturer but something who is doing necessary although cruel things on behalf of some sacred cause nation and so on and so on. You need you need something like poetry and it would be very nice to go through all ethnic cleansing cases that we know I of course began in my own country ex-Yugoslavia and discovered it’s not only Radovan Karadžić the leader of Bosnian Serbs who is now in Hague all other post-Yugoslav nations had their own poets who as it were with beautiful national myths laid the foundations for it. What interests me is to put it in Lacanian terms of Jacques Lacan the status of Big Other Big Other in the sense of the public symbolic order the unwritten or written rules which determine what is acceptable what is not acceptable. Another paradox I want to argue here for a good use of dogmatism. I think that I’m totally in ethical matters for dogmatism. In what sense? Let’s take rape sorry but I wouldn’t like to live in a society where you have you would have to argue all the time against rape I would like to live in a society where the fact that rape is unacceptable is simply part of our substance it’s automatically assumed so that if somebody plays this we all know them stupid tasteless games oh but women really enjoy it they are not only not ready to admit you don’t even feel the need to to argue against. The guy just appears as a weird jerk eccentric stupid or whatever. I claim the moment you have to reason we are already lost. So this is no let me give you an example here that’s what terrified me with Ronald Reagan. I remember you are probably most of you too too young for this once Reagan was accused Ronald Reagan that his some of his friends that he has many friends who are Holocaust deniers. And he said something which was I think quite funny but in a terrifying way namely he said no it’s not true that I have any sympathy for Holocaust denial whenever at my dinner table somebody denies Holocaust I always insist no this is not true there was a Holocaust well the question is okay but what kind of friends did he have if he had all the time to argue that there was a Holocaust you know. So you see my point? My point is and here I see that we are approaching as it were if you want the end of the world my point is that what is happening there in Indonesia? And let me be very clear here I don’t want to play any of the two easy games either to blame simply global capitalism like Indonesians are good ethical guys who were just confused by universal capitalism were thrown out of their ethical ethical substance and can act like this put the blame just on the developed West. But I also don’t accept of course the opposite Western racist version you know like oh primitive Indonesians they don’t have any real ethics. No I think we first the phenomenon as I will try to show soon is getting much more universal than it may appear this kind of a let’s call it disintegration of the Big Other in the very naive forget about Jacques Lacan here sense of automatic reliance or on certain basic dogmas why not. And I think progress can be measured precisely by the level of dogmatism in the sense that if there are many ethical dogmas which makes which make rape simply unacceptable nonsensical which make which make I don’t know racism nonsensical and so on and so on that’s one of the few signs of progress. So again the question is what is happening with the social body that something like that is acceptable? You see my point? I’m not worried about Anwar Congo and those guys they are just scum whatever they are what worries me is what kind of society it is where it is acceptable to talk about this boast about this in public? And here things are more complex than it may appear because let me give you another example now I will go through a couple of examples here. Some two decades ago I think there was a well-known scandal in Brooklyn Brooklyn across the river from Manhattan in New York where a woman was slowly beaten tortured and killed at a courtyard in the middle of housing development and it was later established that at least people were watching this from their windows none of them called the police. And what is depressing is that you know it’s not that they would have to identify themselves and then be afraid that the guy would come and also beat them it could have been done totally anonymously no one did it. Okay this was read as an example of moral decadence disintegration of ordinary people in United States. No I think it’s something more ambiguous that happened here. Because when some sociologists looked into it more in detail they discovered that all people had the same reaction namely I thought someone else will do it. It’s just that they relied everyone relied on someone else. And the interesting thing is that I think someone told me that they tried to do some kind of experiment where they tested this namely staged artificially of course a situation where the guy for example it was more a lonely house who was observing this knew well that he is the only one who is observing it. And in that case almost all of them did call did call the police. What I want what I want to say here is that how are we nonetheless to interpret what the two examples nonetheless share Indonesian example and Brooklyn example? This let’s call it naively growing indifference I don’t care or another one will do it this reluctance to ethically engage yourself. The usual thing to say is to refer to egotism you know this is the usual Catholic or generally religious strategy oh in our era of hedonist egotism nobody cares for the common good and so on and so on. Well I’m totally opposed to this reading. Here I want to refer to Walter Benjamin who already said that capitalism is a religious phenomenon. And the way I read this is in a very naive way look at an ideal capitalist ideal type I mean I know some of them fanatical businessmen well all I can tell you is if ever I encountered a non-hedonist and non-egotist guy it’s a totally dedicated capitalist. My god a proper capitalist is ready I don’t know to ruin his family life practically not to sleep work night night and day just that there is circulation and expansion of capital. It’s not capitalists are not hedonist egotists they are on the contrary extremely dedicated to some perverted but once perverted quasi-ethical cause. You know you have a cause capital has to circulate and basically you don’t care I ruin nature I ruin my life doesn’t matter it has to function. This is why I claim that we don’t need to fight for ecology in some stupid moralistic way like usually people say oh we think only in short terms what about our children and so on and so on. No the problem is not that we are too egotist today the problem is that if we try to rehabilitate the term egotism in a proper way of rational interest in your own good then I claim paradoxically in our consumerist society of global capitalism it’s maybe more difficult than ever to be a real egotist because on the one hand again as a capitalist you are not egotist on the other hand even the way commodities function more and more they don’t function in an egotist way. The deepest appeal of commodities is anti-egotism. What do I mean by this? Another sign for me of the end of the world did you read this now a month a little bit over a month ago in August media reported that from December of this year tobacco companies in Australia will no longer be allowed to display their distinctive colors brand designs and logos on cigarette packs. To make smoking as unglamorous as possible the packs of cigarettes will come in uniformly drab shade of olive and on the it’s no it will be without logo just a cigarette this and apart from information that this is a cigarette you will get sorry it will not I just have here you will get a big photo extremely disgusting like of of eye getting blind of of of your lungs open all black of an impotent penis whatever absolutely disgusting. The idea is of course to make people to stop I mean it’s obvious the idea. But I claim although okay people may think this is no longer commodity universe because there is no logo and so on and so on there is no longer commodity aesthetics it’s on the contrary the package of the product openly graphically draws attention to the dangerous and harm qualities of its product. Is this still then commodity logic? I claim it is and maybe even the most efficient one. This idea came to me in Germany when I saw already years ago there a wonderful in a terrifying sense poster for cigarettes it wasn’t Marlboro but they imitated that famous cowboy namely it was like this it was on a poster the usual cowboy and on the bottom of course that obligatory obligatory statement smoking is dangerous for your health. But the cowboy is pointing with his hand with his fingers towards that statement and the message was in German Jetzt erst recht! Now it’s for the real! And I think it was a wonderful male chauvinist message it was are you a coward? If you are a true man now that you know that it’s dangerous now you will do it. I mean I and I think that from the very beginning consumerism works like this. I don’t think we really care about all that bullshit oh it has so much vitamins so much this so much that. If I make all in this obscene way inauthentic consumerism there is always I think this excess of it’s dangerous but that’s why I want to do it. In even in of course this is not consumerism but even in some traditional societies in a much more if you think I doubt authentic way they played for example I was told in Japan that they that it’s a almost sacred ritualistic thing to eat a certain fish and the whole point is that that fish is poisonous and there is a certain chance that you will die. But that’s precisely that’s precisely the point. So again my point here is that that here it’s another example of non-egotism how publicity does not address you simply as an egotist rational egotist take care of your health and so on and so on but beneath all this there is a much stronger superego injunction no in the sense of you may die and that’s why if you are a true man you will do it and so on and so on. So let me go on what type of egotism are we then talking about today? Now I come to I don’t know if you know it I don’t think you do but this is the a story even more depressive than the one from Indonesia. I have a friend in China who sent me all the documents about this. It happened a couple of month ago in China. A story which in a strange way resembles one of the Bertolt Brecht’s so-called learning plays. Brecht wrote in a learning play with the title The Exception and the Rule. It’s a simple didactic communist play where a rich merchant and his poor servant are traversing a desert. Because of some storm they almost run out of water and then the merchant sorry the servant approaches the merchant with a bottle offering him because he is a good guy a little bit of water that he still has. But the merchant thinks that the servant is trying to kill him and kills the servant. Then you have the court in session and the judge gives right to the merchant. Because the judge says yes probably this was an exceptionally good servant but this is the exception it would have been typical in such a situation for the servant to try to attack the master so the master was right to react the way he did. Something even more horrible than this it’s not a joke happened in China. It was sorry already half a decade ago an elderly in one of these anonymous no this was even not anonymous in Nanjing a friend sent me all the documentation an elderly woman fell while getting off a bus she fell down when the door was opened and a young she was years old and she broke her hip. Behind her on the bus there was a young decent guy relatively wealthy but decent so when he saw my god woman there falling down broken he also stepped down helped her and when he saw that she is she cannot walk he called a taxi took her to a hospital and even gave her a little bit of money. A week later after the woman got home her relatives convinced her to prosecute the guy. The reasoning was what normal person would have helped a woman like that? No normal person. So the fact that he helped her means that he must have been responsible he probably pushed her down. Okay the thing got to the court and the depressive thing is that the judge gave right to the woman. The judge said that that no normal person would have acted I quote now literally the judgment no normal person would be as kind as Peng Yu this guy claimed he was. So since he was so kind it’s clear that he is guilty and he was punished quite a lot of money a couple of tens of thousand of dollars in US money and so on and so on. Now what is happening here? I think the thing is much more complex than it may appear. It’s not simply egotism or whatever Chinese are basically good people something else is happening. Namely this case caused quite a shock of course then in China and even the official media the People’s Daily made big opinion polls. They asked tens of thousand of young people between and what would you have done if you were to walk along the street and you would have to see somebody there bleeding dying or whatever would you have stopped and helped him or not? And the situation was made clear it’s not that there is a bad guy there beating the dying person so that you can say no no I’m afraid to no no the guy is alone you don’t risk anything the guy who is dying. The shock was that of people said no I would not help. Then they specified their answer they say I would first look around if there is a CCTV that camera no if it is then maybe I would have helped if not and so on and so on. So I think that the explanation of this it’s a very sad one it’s that in today’s capitalism and this is not about China the limit between public and private space is shifting changing. This friend of mine in China is a sociologist there and he told me that his reading and I tend to agree with it is that more and more with the dissolution of old communal forms even when we are formally at least in public like on a square or where with hundreds of other people even when we are there we still experience ourselves as being in private. We ignore each other it’s as if we are just different monads each in our private space passing by each other but no public you need something more like the the TV camera or whatever to make it a public space proper. And I think the same goes even for sexuality. I think that all this culture of confession and so on it’s privacy invading public space or this is I think also how internet works. Because you know when you tell all your secrets show your photos whatever masturbate in front of your Skype whatever the paradox is that you are still alone you are still private this is a kind of a shared privacy it can be wired through all the world but it’s absolutely not the same as you know that proverbial exhibitionist gesture that still addresses a public space the embarrassment here it’s privacy. That’s another so what does all this mean for sex? Ah here I’m also a pessimist not a total pessimist I just note tendencies. Namely what I see is that if once promiscuity was transgressive and the idea was that passionate individual sex love and so on is patriarchal oppressive I think that now more and more it’s almost the opposite which is imposed as the norm. What do I mean by this? Okay let me begin with popular culture and then give you some theoretical examples. Did you see the last James Bond film not the new one now Skyfall that shown Quantum of Solace? Politically pretty progressive I mean basically to cut a long story short James Bond saves the Morales regime in Bolivia from some company which wants to control water. But did you notice something very strange about this film? It’s the first James Bond where at the end there is no sex between Bond and Bond girl. They just embrace we are too traumatized okay. Now you will say this is an exception I’m not so sure now I go to the really lowest of the low. Did you see some Dan Brown films or novels? Did you notice for example that already in Da Vinci Code you have a couple Robert Langdon and the great-great-great-Sophie daughter of Christ. But there is no sex between the two of them and I claim that we have here a kind of a strange displacement. Even Jesus Christ has to engage in love you know the thesis of the film the secret Jesus to cover up the fact that there is no sex here you know. I think it’s strictly correlative you have sex up there but not here. With Angels and Demons it’s even worse. There still is sex in the novel between Vittoria Vetra the scientist and the same Robert Langdon in the end. But did you notice in the film there is no sex? Where are we coming once we said Hollywood is adding sex to make the story more attractive now Hollywood is deleting sex and so on. I think this is again a very sad tendency. The tendency is that sex is effectively becoming less and less authentically intersubjective it become it is more and more solipsistic. I will tell a story maybe you know it it was told to me by my good friend Alain Badiou and then I checked it up in the States you have the same phenomenon namely in French and in English it works. You say you use the verb fall you say tomber l’amour fall to fall in love. Okay Badiou found a publicity of one dating and marriage agency in France where basically the message was we will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall. Sans tomber and then I found an American agency who is doing the same. And I find this very sad because the idea is this one with all the permissivity and so on but you know what is love? Love is by definition a fall. If I exaggerate a little bit love is I walk on the street quite accidentally I stumble upon a person and oh my god all my ordinary life is ruined now I have a new focus everything changes. I mean authentic love is very traumatic in this sense. Even passionate sex is traumatic in this sense. You are obsessed by it like I want to have sex with that person even if I die even if whatever and I claim that more and more this is becoming this is experienced as too much. I claim the predominant ideology today is not marry and procreate no the predominant ideology today I claim is some kind of enlightened Western Buddhism I call it. Be authentically yourself or as they say the stupid Yodas in and so on in in Star Wars don’t get too attached to worldly subjects which means precisely don’t fall don’t get attached keep distance. This is my eternal problem with otherwise my personal friend Judith Butler. I agree with her description you know sex sorry our sexual identity is not eternally naturally given it’s performatively enacted through rituals of repetition ironic displacement. My problem is just why does she think that she is describing anything subversive? I claim she’s just describing precisely the predominant ideology today. Now you will say but what about neo-conservative backlash? Ah I claim it’s exactly that just a backlash a reaction. The action is this one. We are interpelled into this safety safety in the sense of no fall safe sex. Or you know my story I always repeat it at all level of consumerism like beer yes but without alcohol and what and what sweet chocolate yes but without sugar and so on and so on to get thing the thing a product without this potentially dangerous dimension and that’s my problem with multiculturalism. Of course I am for other cultures but that official multiculturalism and tolerance also wants the Other without the fall. You know the Other who is like us and then you idealize the Other which is for me the worst form of racism like I had the experience of my lifetime when I met a couple of years ago in Missoula Montana three or four so-called Native Americans. First they protested about this term I loved them they said we are Native Americans so you are cultural we are native or what? They they told me we much prefer be called Indians because at least our name is a monument to white man’s stupidity then you know they thought they are in India. They they in a very nice way they immediately detect this you know they they told me they hate so much when white guys come to them and say you are wonderful holistic sensitive and so on. No with such pride I loved them they told me fuck you white people we burned more forest we killed more buffaloes than you ever will do and so on because they got very well how false this celebration of you know harmonious holistic approach of them is and so on. No so again what I’m saying is that that’s the paradox of our era where the more we talk about tolerance the more intolerant we are. And again this is what bothers me in this obsession with harassment. Of course I’m against harassment when it’s real harassment my god there are rapes and I’m one of the few people that I know who is still for death penalty and I’m here radically for punishing them I don’t have any understanding for rapists. All I’m saying is that with harassment it can get more problematic as many intelligent also feminist critics pointed out that those if you go to the end in this logic of no harassment basically you end up as they say consensual sex of course I’m for consensual sex if it simply means no one is raped we are both for it. But this consensual sex then all too sudden turns into contractual sex. You know as two rational people we made a contract you do this to me I do this to you and so on and so on okay why not if you enjoy it I have nothing against it. All I’m saying is that when you have authentic passionate love in the process of seduction and not necessarily from the side of the man you always necessarily have to do something that crucial step which retroactively it depends on the receiver can be proclaimed to be a harassment. Harassment means simply in all brutality I show you I display my desire. You know where you have a very nice scene although they are pseudo-intellectuals I don’t like them that guy Iñárritu the the director did you see his with Naomi Watts Sean Penn his nice movie grams? oh don’t let’s go into Freudian what is it When he Sean Penn tells her Naomi Watts well that he loves her. And her reaction is do you know how brutal this is? How dare you tell me something like this? Do you know that you ruined my life and so on? In a way she is right this is love. Again so quite often I claim what this fear of harassment covers is precisely a fear of effective intersubjectivity proximity of the Other. Where are we here what are we approaching? Did you see the movie which I think is a mega classic the old now old British dystopia Terry Gilliam Brazil? There is a wonderful scene towards the beginning where they the rich people with the hero of them Jonathan Pryce go to a restaurant and they have to select food and it’s a stroke of genius. What they get when they are served food is a plate what is on the plate is just a shit-like like just something like like a piece of shit formless piece of mud and then a photo of the of the exquisite steak with all the so the idea is you eat that shit but the photo tells you what. And I think that’s how love more and more functions you know you just need some minimal prop piece of shit to masturbate with your fantasy. I claim that in this sense even when we really make love we more and more masturbate. We masturbate with a real partner. It’s possible. Because you know in the same just partner is here more and more just to do the work of your hand or whatever but you are really you remain with your fantasy. Now to conclude if I can conclude a little bit which then would be generally the ideology that would fit this situation? I claim but I have deep respect for Buddhism now I’m talking about our type of Western Buddhism I claim it’s the way this Oriental spirituality functions today. On the one hand as I already developed in some of my books I claim that no wonder that the majority of top managers today do some type of Oriental spirituality and so on. I think that to survive in a dynamic of today’s capitalism you simply go crazy if you fully identify with it. The only way to survive is to maintain a distance to say it’s just a crazy dance of appearances I’m not really there and so on and so on. On the other hand now I come to the interesting point. This is the most radical maybe aspect of the end of the world as we know it. And when I say the end of the world I don’t mean only in a bad sense I’m just saying we are approaching a certain limit who knows what will come maybe a better world maybe a bad world. We I think should nonetheless take seriously the results of today’s cognitivism and brain sciences which and I’m not interested here in the fact is it true or not? I have my doubts about it. But the point is that the point they are making and it’s taken seriously is that you know the result. We first we have no free will and point two soon it will be possible to directly link our brain to external machines. And the consequences can be quite radical here. For example I met some scientists in Germany who together with American scientists they even the German sent me some videos you know for example they already decoded the signals a rat is sending to its legs when it moves around. So I saw it on DVD at least. What you can do is this you have a rat in a cage the rat is freely jumping around then you click a button the rat is connected and you can literally control the rat like a remote control car left right and so on. Because again through this link you give signals to her neurons which are giving direction and so on. Now I spoke with these scientists and of course they are doing what I always suspected that they are doing. What they are really interested is to do this on a human being and they are afraid to go with this into public that there will be some ethical outcry but they hinted at me that the result is the predictable one namely what interests them in this let’s say now you will be the good guy at the bet you control me no like I walk here freely around I don’t know when you push the button so that you control my neurons which give orders of turn left right forward. How will I experience this? And they told me that it looks that the paranoiac bad solution is the true one that is to say I will not even know that I’m controlled it will not be oh my god some foreign power took over I will still continue to think that I freely roam around and all that stuff then you know this how you can move already objects with thoughts and so on okay my problem is to conclude the following one. How will we subjectivize this? If we will have to accept at least the scientific ideology is telling us this I don’t think it’s true but nonetheless that in this sense we are not free. There is no ego there is no self which is autonomous free we are just the result of a complex neuronal mechanisms and so on and so on. There are as far as I can see four main attitudes here. The first one is the naive dualism most of the scientists think that it is true that we have no free will but in our daily life the way we are wired constructed is that we necessarily experience ourselves as having free will. So there will forever be a gap between scientific knowledge and how we experience ourselves. The second position more radical interesting but I think illusory is the one of more radical cognitivists like that California couple Patricia and Paul Churchland where they claim we can imagine our awareness to change according to the state of our knowledge they say in the same way that once people thought they are obsessed by demons but now when you go crazy we know it’s not demons it’s just your madness we can also imagine a society where people would communicate blah blah blah without their activity being sustained by the notions of free will moral responsibility and so on. You have this position. Then you have some other positions I will not lose time but the most interesting position for me here is the one developed by the German scientist Thomas Metzinger who claims that although insofar as we remain in our ordinary state of mind we cannot ever accept the result of cognitivism like we can rationally know it but you cannot really live it you never treat yourself as it you are just a neuronal automaton. He says except Buddhism. If you reach the Buddhist enlightenment where you accept anātman you have no self and so on that Buddhist enlightenment is the only existential position which fits the result of modern science. Now this and now I will slowly finish but I hope you got naively my message at a couple of levels from this sexuality personal identity moral responsibility and so on. I just wanted to outline a certain zero level that we are approaching where we will no longer experience ourselves as free responsible beings where again all moral consideration will fall away we will live in a kind of a universalized society of universalized privacy shameless and so on and so on all that stuff. I I am not a pessimist in the sense that this is our fate but I think that the only way to fight this fate paradoxically is to accept it as fate. I claim that what we have to do is precisely to paint a dark picture of where things move if we just let them to move spontaneously where they go. And this picture again it’s interesting because it’s a society in which overcoming of morality and total self-naturalization will coexist with some kind of a new aseptic totally non-sexual spirituality. And it would be so interesting to compare here early Soviet communism with today’s technological Gnostics you know all those crazy stories about how technology will bring us to some kind of collective identity where we will live eternally just downloading ourselves as a software program from one to another identity all that. Do you know that all this was already dreamed throughout the 20s in the Soviet Union? Even Trotsky wrote something about this the idea was that the true task of Bolsheviks is not only to change society but to create a new man and the predominant reading of this new man was that’s crucial that he is asexual sexuality was it was really a kind of a spiritual materialist Gnosticism. The predominant attitude of Soviet psychologists in the 20s under the influence of Pavlov although Pavlov was against Bolsheviks privately but he was the key influence. It was that sexual arousal is the basic weakness of Homo sapiens that it’s unnatural and it’s incredible how what the most advanced dreamers of the Soviet Union in the 20s invented was something that you already find in St. Augustine on some Christians namely St. Augustine when he speaks about sexuality he says of course of course there was sex in paradise but it wasn’t sex in this sense of arousal like a man was able to get erection in the same totally controlled way in which you raise your hand to work on a field and so on. It was just pure instrumental activity and then you maybe know it’s beautiful what St. Augustine the title of the work is De nuptiis et concupiscentia what he develops there that sexuality is not the source of sin but it’s the punishment for the sin he claims the original sin of man is that he wanted to be like God master but then God tells him I will punish you and I will punish you so that you will have a desire that you will not control so that you wanted to be the master of the world like me haha I will install a drive in you of which even in your own house you will not be the master. And then St. Augustine has a wonderful theory of erection where he says that erection is the ultimate revenge on God towards to man he says that I will take one of your organs penis and you will not control it like you will want it to get up ah ah it will not or when it will be most embarrassing for you it will get up and so on and so on. So the idea is precisely the uncontrollable status of erection is God’s reminder of our finitude like you dare to. So what I’m saying is that the goal explicitly is to get out of this dimension. And here I think we should be very open through cloning through all this maybe sexuality will disappear sexuality as we know it which is not biological. The problem is what will remain of human sexuality the way we know it because again human sexuality is not the same as we all know as natural sexuality. We can imagine a copulation which is totally mechanic and there is nothing sexual about it. Human sexuality is something totally different I try to develop it something it’s always linked to failure repetition and so on in what sense? Let me imagine a very everyday obscene scene. Let’s say I’m shaking a hand to one of you instead of dropping the hand I go on squeezing it rhythmically. Admit it your association would be what dirty plans what like the situation would through just doing repeatedly what normally is done only once the situation would go sexual in a very embarrassing way. And so it’s something much more mysterious that goes so what will be the fate of that so what’s my point here? I’m sorry if it appeared that I’m painting some dark picture whatever no I’m just saying that and with this I really want to conclude do you know that what Virginia Woolf otherwise I must say I hate her I think she was a frigid bitch I think that that Daphne du Maurier is greater writer than Virginia Woolf I was almost lynched for saying this. But she did something wonderful. You know that in April in in her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown from she said that it’s on or about April human nature changed and so on it’s wonderful British style of this pseudo-empiricism like the most famous statement in this lines is you know a theologian in mid-19th century claimed God created the world and something years BC at nine in the morning and so on wonderful. But what I’m saying is that with all the changes we are living now it’s not just the capitalist dynamic it’s what biogenetics means what all this stuff happening with our desires means and so on I think that effectively the very basic dimension of what is to be human is changing. In this sense I claim it’s the end of the world it’s the end of the world as we know it. It will change what does it mean to have sex to be human and so on. But it’s not still I think the determinism in the sense of new catastrophe or whatever the situation is open more than ever. And this is my concluding paradox you know it looks as if we can’t really change anything even after September 11th sorry I mean occupy Wall Street even after that one no because you know I’m a leftist here you know when you say September 11th my association is always the putsch against Salvador Allende you know we should remember the true September 11th organized paid by the United States. You know that the smoking gun was found there Kissinger signed a letter authorizing the murder of that Chilean minister but what I’m saying is that on the one hand the situation may appear to be desperate like my god like and it is desperate in the sense that leftists were telling us for decades when our situation was relatively prosperous you remember they were telling us ah now we have apparent welfare but wait a minute there will be the crisis blah. Where the crisis is here revolts and so on and did the left propose anything I am not aware of any viable plan even general idea you can maybe correct me here. I met demonstrators and on Zuccotti Park Frankfurt and so on and I was always asking them a simple stupid question what do you want? And I got answers like we want a more just capitalism is you know it’s but but I don’t blame them. I think that the tragedy of our situation is the following one and this should be again paradoxically at the same time the source of our hope namely when people tell me but do you think really that we can change anything well my answer is I don’t know that but I do know that things are already changing radically that everything is changing so fast that’s some aspects I tried to identify discern today in our economy in our and it’s not just capital look for example again look at today’s capitalism. I think the whole digital phenomena and so on is much more ambiguous it may be a triumph of capitalism but you can see how at the same time the more we have this informational technology the more private property itself becomes almost meaningless. I mean soon everything will be downloading and so on and so on it will not be possible to control it so again my point is this one when people tell me nothing can be changed no it can because things are already changing like crazy. And what we should say is just this if we let things change the way they are changing automatically we are approaching a kind of a new perverse permissively authoritarian society which will be authoritarian but in a new way which is why I don’t like terms like new fascism and so on you know I mean to use this term means just you are too lazy to think what really is new. And this is what should give us an motivation to act things are already changing will be simply follow this change so again things are changing I don’t think that if we do nothing we will simply go on enjoying our relative at least in some parts of the world prosperity. No I think that again even my god even Fukuyama himself the last time I met him confessed to me he is an honest guy I like honest conservatives that to put it in an ironic way he is no longer a Fukuyamaist. He told me that with biogenetics financial crisis and so on that his idea of the end of history is over. He admits it. Things are radically changing and this is what should worry us. We should return the question to those in power because you know what’s more and more my impression if I look around the present state of economy that you know my answer to the leftist paranoiacs who claim oh there are some people mysterious meeting somewhere between Washington and China and Wall Street deciding everything. I’m tempted to say I’m asking God praying that it would at least be like that but it’s not. I really don’t think we still have a ruling class which is able to rule properly. The situation is much more horrible I don’t think there is some big ruling class manipulating everything they don’t know what is happening they themselves don’t know what is happening. In Europe where I come from this is even more obvious than anywhere else. So again the very reason to worry should be already what motivates us to think what is happening maybe to do something. I spoke for much too long but haha what can you do you had to listen no thanks very much for your patience. You have been listening to a TVO podcast. Support Ontario’s public television. Donate
tvo.org I want to tell you present here some of the signs of this dimension the of the end of the world in the sense that we are approaching there is on the horizon a certain zero level where things reach a limit. So let me begin with a film that I know already for four five years because the director who is my friend was kind enough to send me a copy. The premiere of the film was I think was I think not the premiere but it was shown a month ago here at Toronto Festival if some of you were lucky enough to see it if not please go and see it it’s maybe one of the most morally depressing films that I’ve seen. It’s called The Act of Killing made by a Danish documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. It was shot in the last years in Indonesia but they needed years so that it’s possible to show it in public because of course lives were threatened and so on you will immediately see why. This film shot in Medan Indonesia mostly in reports on a case of obscenity which reaches to the extreme. There is in Indonesia all this is real it’s a documentary a group of murderous gang members and members of the military Anwar Congo and some of his friends this is Indonesian now politician and officer who in the mid in you remember when there was a civil war first the attempted communist coup d’état then the anti-communist Suharto regime did strike back and around the idea is that around two and a half million of people mostly Chinese allegedly communists were slaughtered. This group Anwar Congo and his friends organized at that time in a murderous gang. They were serially raping, torturing, killing thousands of people. Now comes the they were not only ready but they even paid Oppenheimer they didn’t know what he will do with it to do a film on this. And they without any shame that’s so depressing they openly display stage show talk about show some photos how they were killing murdering raping torturing and so on and the high point of obscenity for me at least is a scene when on a local TV show in October TV show on Indonesian state TV this group presented itself and it’s horrible it’s like you know a couple of hundred people public talk with them and a nice lady moderator and for example this guy Anwar Congo I mean I you have to see it to believe your eyes and ears. After he explains this mode of torturing the moderator says look how inventive these guys are one big applause for Mr. Anwar and so on and they all applaud and so on and so on I mean it’s absolutely breath take breathtaking. But even so again you have a group of people who right-wing murderous thugs who even don’t have this let’s call it minimum of decency that even the Nazis had you know. You know what Heinrich Himmler said in that famous speech in Posen Poznań in this was a speech to SS officers and he was giving them lessons on how to do the Holocaust and he was telling them unfortunately your activity will have to remain a secret an empty page in history books but it will nonetheless be the most glorious chapter of German history. But you see they at least treated it as a private dirty secret you know this is the typical right-wing logic in the sense of a true patriot is not just the one who is ready to die for his country but the one who is ready to lose his soul for his country to do horrible things this true hero is ready to do crimes for his country so here it’s not even that they simply publicly boast about it all. And even more then they explain how they did it they explain that before they become killers they were in love with Hollywood film noir mostly Humphrey Bogart all that so they imagined themselves as noir detective Humphrey Bogart whoever they imagined as being a Hollywood noir hero when they were doing their terrifying acts this was their imaginary. Now we can do a lot here I don’t have time to go into it about how would you put it the use of poetry in ethnic cleansing this is my old thesis and I was once almost beaten in my own country by some poets who didn’t like the idea my formula was no ethnic cleansing without poetry you always need a poet to avoid a misunderstanding I’m not saying all poets are like that there are mega great poets. All I’m saying is that I’m a little bit tired as a philosopher to listen for decades you know this idea philosophers with their notion of totality total rationalism laid the foundation for totalitarianism and so on where poets are at least as guilty as we are. Why? It’s very simple my idea here. We are basically half-decent people. If I were to be ordered let me take again sorry somebody has to suffer if somebody were to tell me pick a take a knife and pick your eyes out well unfortunately I would have some problems to do it. So you need some strong quasi-religious mythic narrative which serves as a screen enabling you to do it so that then through this narrative I no longer perceive myself just as a brutal torturer but something who is doing necessary although cruel things on behalf of some sacred cause nation and so on and so on. You need you need something like poetry and it would be very nice to go through all ethnic cleansing cases that we know I of course began in my own country ex-Yugoslavia and discovered it’s not only Radovan Karadžić the leader of Bosnian Serbs who is now in Hague all other post-Yugoslav nations had their own poets who as it were with beautiful national myths laid the foundations for it. What interests me is to put it in Lacanian terms of Jacques Lacan the status of Big Other Big Other in the sense of the public symbolic order the unwritten or written rules which determine what is acceptable what is not acceptable. Another paradox I want to argue here for a good use of dogmatism. I think that I’m totally in ethical matters for dogmatism. In what sense? Let’s take rape sorry but I wouldn’t like to live in a society where you have you would have to argue all the time against rape I would like to live in a society where the fact that rape is unacceptable is simply part of our substance it’s automatically assumed so that if somebody plays this we all know them stupid tasteless games oh but women really enjoy it they are not only not ready to admit you don’t even feel the need to to argue against. The guy just appears as a weird jerk eccentric stupid or whatever. I claim the moment you have to reason we are already lost. So this is no let me give you an example here that’s what terrified me with Ronald Reagan. I remember you are probably most of you too too young for this once Reagan was accused Ronald Reagan that his some of his friends that he has many friends who are Holocaust deniers. And he said something which was I think quite funny but in a terrifying way namely he said no it’s not true that I have any sympathy for Holocaust denial whenever at my dinner table somebody denies Holocaust I always insist no this is not true there was a Holocaust well the question is okay but what kind of friends did he have if he had all the time to argue that there was a Holocaust you know. So you see my point? My point is and here I see that we are approaching as it were if you want the end of the world my point is that what is happening there in Indonesia? And let me be very clear here I don’t want to play any of the two easy games either to blame simply global capitalism like Indonesians are good ethical guys who were just confused by universal capitalism were thrown out of their ethical ethical substance and can act like this put the blame just on the developed West. But I also don’t accept of course the opposite Western racist version you know like oh primitive Indonesians they don’t have any real ethics. No I think we first the phenomenon as I will try to show soon is getting much more universal than it may appear this kind of a let’s call it disintegration of the Big Other in the very naive forget about Jacques Lacan here sense of automatic reliance or on certain basic dogmas why not. And I think progress can be measured precisely by the level of dogmatism in the sense that if there are many ethical dogmas which makes which make rape simply unacceptable nonsensical which make which make I don’t know racism nonsensical and so on and so on that’s one of the few signs of progress. So again the question is what is happening with the social body that something like that is acceptable? You see my point? I’m not worried about Anwar Congo and those guys they are just scum whatever they are what worries me is what kind of society it is where it is acceptable to talk about this boast about this in public? And here things are more complex than it may appear because let me give you another example now I will go through a couple of examples here. Some two decades ago I think there was a well-known scandal in Brooklyn Brooklyn across the river from Manhattan in New York where a woman was slowly beaten tortured and killed at a courtyard in the middle of housing development and it was later established that at least people were watching this from their windows none of them called the police. And what is depressing is that you know it’s not that they would have to identify themselves and then be afraid that the guy would come and also beat them it could have been done totally anonymously no one did it. Okay this was read as an example of moral decadence disintegration of ordinary people in United States. No I think it’s something more ambiguous that happened here. Because when some sociologists looked into it more in detail they discovered that all people had the same reaction namely I thought someone else will do it. It’s just that they relied everyone relied on someone else. And the interesting thing is that I think someone told me that they tried to do some kind of experiment where they tested this namely staged artificially of course a situation where the guy for example it was more a lonely house who was observing this knew well that he is the only one who is observing it. And in that case almost all of them did call did call the police. What I want what I want to say here is that how are we nonetheless to interpret what the two examples nonetheless share Indonesian example and Brooklyn example? This let’s call it naively growing indifference I don’t care or another one will do it this reluctance to ethically engage yourself. The usual thing to say is to refer to egotism you know this is the usual Catholic or generally religious strategy oh in our era of hedonist egotism nobody cares for the common good and so on and so on. Well I’m totally opposed to this reading. Here I want to refer to Walter Benjamin who already said that capitalism is a religious phenomenon. And the way I read this is in a very naive way look at an ideal capitalist ideal type I mean I know some of them fanatical businessmen well all I can tell you is if ever I encountered a non-hedonist and non-egotist guy it’s a totally dedicated capitalist. My god a proper capitalist is ready I don’t know to ruin his family life practically not to sleep work night night and day just that there is circulation and expansion of capital. It’s not capitalists are not hedonist egotists they are on the contrary extremely dedicated to some perverted but once perverted quasi-ethical cause. You know you have a cause capital has to circulate and basically you don’t care I ruin nature I ruin my life doesn’t matter it has to function. This is why I claim that we don’t need to fight for ecology in some stupid moralistic way like usually people say oh we think only in short terms what about our children and so on and so on. No the problem is not that we are too egotist today the problem is that if we try to rehabilitate the term egotism in a proper way of rational interest in your own good then I claim paradoxically in our consumerist society of global capitalism it’s maybe more difficult than ever to be a real egotist because on the one hand again as a capitalist you are not egotist on the other hand even the way commodities function more and more they don’t function in an egotist way. The deepest appeal of commodities is anti-egotism. What do I mean by this? Another sign for me of the end of the world did you read this now a month a little bit over a month ago in August media reported that from December of this year tobacco companies in Australia will no longer be allowed to display their distinctive colors brand designs and logos on cigarette packs. To make smoking as unglamorous as possible the packs of cigarettes will come in uniformly drab shade of olive and on the it’s no it will be without logo just a cigarette this and apart from information that this is a cigarette you will get sorry it will not I just have here you will get a big photo extremely disgusting like of of eye getting blind of of of your lungs open all black of an impotent penis whatever absolutely disgusting. The idea is of course to make people to stop I mean it’s obvious the idea. But I claim although okay people may think this is no longer commodity universe because there is no logo and so on and so on there is no longer commodity aesthetics it’s on the contrary the package of the product openly graphically draws attention to the dangerous and harm qualities of its product. Is this still then commodity logic? I claim it is and maybe even the most efficient one. This idea came to me in Germany when I saw already years ago there a wonderful in a terrifying sense poster for cigarettes it wasn’t Marlboro but they imitated that famous cowboy namely it was like this it was on a poster the usual cowboy and on the bottom of course that obligatory obligatory statement smoking is dangerous for your health. But the cowboy is pointing with his hand with his fingers towards that statement and the message was in German Jetzt erst recht! Now it’s for the real! And I think it was a wonderful male chauvinist message it was are you a coward? If you are a true man now that you know that it’s dangerous now you will do it. I mean I and I think that from the very beginning consumerism works like this. I don’t think we really care about all that bullshit oh it has so much vitamins so much this so much that. If I make all in this obscene way inauthentic consumerism there is always I think this excess of it’s dangerous but that’s why I want to do it. In even in of course this is not consumerism but even in some traditional societies in a much more if you think I doubt authentic way they played for example I was told in Japan that they that it’s a almost sacred ritualistic thing to eat a certain fish and the whole point is that that fish is poisonous and there is a certain chance that you will die. But that’s precisely that’s precisely the point. So again my point here is that that here it’s another example of non-egotism how publicity does not address you simply as an egotist rational egotist take care of your health and so on and so on but beneath all this there is a much stronger superego injunction no in the sense of you may die and that’s why if you are a true man you will do it and so on and so on. So let me go on what type of egotism are we then talking about today? Now I come to I don’t know if you know it I don’t think you do but this is the a story even more depressive than the one from Indonesia. I have a friend in China who sent me all the documents about this. It happened a couple of month ago in China. A story which in a strange way resembles one of the Bertolt Brecht’s so-called learning plays. Brecht wrote in a learning play with the title The Exception and the Rule. It’s a simple didactic communist play where a rich merchant and his poor servant are traversing a desert. Because of some storm they almost run out of water and then the merchant sorry the servant approaches the merchant with a bottle offering him because he is a good guy a little bit of water that he still has. But the merchant thinks that the servant is trying to kill him and kills the servant. Then you have the court in session and the judge gives right to the merchant. Because the judge says yes probably this was an exceptionally good servant but this is the exception it would have been typical in such a situation for the servant to try to attack the master so the master was right to react the way he did. Something even more horrible than this it’s not a joke happened in China. It was sorry already half a decade ago an elderly in one of these anonymous no this was even not anonymous in Nanjing a friend sent me all the documentation an elderly woman fell while getting off a bus she fell down when the door was opened and a young she was years old and she broke her hip. Behind her on the bus there was a young decent guy relatively wealthy but decent so when he saw my god woman there falling down broken he also stepped down helped her and when he saw that she is she cannot walk he called a taxi took her to a hospital and even gave her a little bit of money. A week later after the woman got home her relatives convinced her to prosecute the guy. The reasoning was what normal person would have helped a woman like that? No normal person. So the fact that he helped her means that he must have been responsible he probably pushed her down. Okay the thing got to the court and the depressive thing is that the judge gave right to the woman. The judge said that that no normal person would have acted I quote now literally the judgment no normal person would be as kind as Peng Yu this guy claimed he was. So since he was so kind it’s clear that he is guilty and he was punished quite a lot of money a couple of tens of thousand of dollars in US money and so on and so on. Now what is happening here? I think the thing is much more complex than it may appear. It’s not simply egotism or whatever Chinese are basically good people something else is happening. Namely this case caused quite a shock of course then in China and even the official media the People’s Daily made big opinion polls. They asked tens of thousand of young people between and what would you have done if you were to walk along the street and you would have to see somebody there bleeding dying or whatever would you have stopped and helped him or not? And the situation was made clear it’s not that there is a bad guy there beating the dying person so that you can say no no I’m afraid to no no the guy is alone you don’t risk anything the guy who is dying. The shock was that of people said no I would not help. Then they specified their answer they say I would first look around if there is a CCTV that camera no if it is then maybe I would have helped if not and so on and so on. So I think that the explanation of this it’s a very sad one it’s that in today’s capitalism and this is not about China the limit between public and private space is shifting changing. This friend of mine in China is a sociologist there and he told me that his reading and I tend to agree with it is that more and more with the dissolution of old communal forms even when we are formally at least in public like on a square or where with hundreds of other people even when we are there we still experience ourselves as being in private. We ignore each other it’s as if we are just different monads each in our private space passing by each other but no public you need something more like the the TV camera or whatever to make it a public space proper. And I think the same goes even for sexuality. I think that all this culture of confession and so on it’s privacy invading public space or this is I think also how internet works. Because you know when you tell all your secrets show your photos whatever masturbate in front of your Skype whatever the paradox is that you are still alone you are still private this is a kind of a shared privacy it can be wired through all the world but it’s absolutely not the same as you know that proverbial exhibitionist gesture that still addresses a public space the embarrassment here it’s privacy. That’s another so what does all this mean for sex? Ah here I’m also a pessimist not a total pessimist I just note tendencies. Namely what I see is that if once promiscuity was transgressive and the idea was that passionate individual sex love and so on is patriarchal oppressive I think that now more and more it’s almost the opposite which is imposed as the norm. What do I mean by this? Okay let me begin with popular culture and then give you some theoretical examples. Did you see the last James Bond film not the new one now Skyfall that shown Quantum of Solace? Politically pretty progressive I mean basically to cut a long story short James Bond saves the Morales regime in Bolivia from some company which wants to control water. But did you notice something very strange about this film? It’s the first James Bond where at the end there is no sex between Bond and Bond girl. They just embrace we are too traumatized okay. Now you will say this is an exception I’m not so sure now I go to the really lowest of the low. Did you see some Dan Brown films or novels? Did you notice for example that already in Da Vinci Code you have a couple Robert Langdon and the great-great-great-Sophie daughter of Christ. But there is no sex between the two of them and I claim that we have here a kind of a strange displacement. Even Jesus Christ has to engage in love you know the thesis of the film the secret Jesus to cover up the fact that there is no sex here you know. I think it’s strictly correlative you have sex up there but not here. With Angels and Demons it’s even worse. There still is sex in the novel between Vittoria Vetra the scientist and the same Robert Langdon in the end. But did you notice in the film there is no sex? Where are we coming once we said Hollywood is adding sex to make the story more attractive now Hollywood is deleting sex and so on. I think this is again a very sad tendency. The tendency is that sex is effectively becoming less and less authentically intersubjective it become it is more and more solipsistic. I will tell a story maybe you know it it was told to me by my good friend Alain Badiou and then I checked it up in the States you have the same phenomenon namely in French and in English it works. You say you use the verb fall you say tomber l’amour fall to fall in love. Okay Badiou found a publicity of one dating and marriage agency in France where basically the message was we will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall. Sans tomber and then I found an American agency who is doing the same. And I find this very sad because the idea is this one with all the permissivity and so on but you know what is love? Love is by definition a fall. If I exaggerate a little bit love is I walk on the street quite accidentally I stumble upon a person and oh my god all my ordinary life is ruined now I have a new focus everything changes. I mean authentic love is very traumatic in this sense. Even passionate sex is traumatic in this sense. You are obsessed by it like I want to have sex with that person even if I die even if whatever and I claim that more and more this is becoming this is experienced as too much. I claim the predominant ideology today is not marry and procreate no the predominant ideology today I claim is some kind of enlightened Western Buddhism I call it. Be authentically yourself or as they say the stupid Yodas in and so on in in Star Wars don’t get too attached to worldly subjects which means precisely don’t fall don’t get attached keep distance. This is my eternal problem with otherwise my personal friend Judith Butler. I agree with her description you know sex sorry our sexual identity is not eternally naturally given it’s performatively enacted through rituals of repetition ironic displacement. My problem is just why does she think that she is describing anything subversive? I claim she’s just describing precisely the predominant ideology today. Now you will say but what about neo-conservative backlash? Ah I claim it’s exactly that just a backlash a reaction. The action is this one. We are interpelled into this safety safety in the sense of no fall safe sex. Or you know my story I always repeat it at all level of consumerism like beer yes but without alcohol and what and what sweet chocolate yes but without sugar and so on and so on to get thing the thing a product without this potentially dangerous dimension and that’s my problem with multiculturalism. Of course I am for other cultures but that official multiculturalism and tolerance also wants the Other without the fall. You know the Other who is like us and then you idealize the Other which is for me the worst form of racism like I had the experience of my lifetime when I met a couple of years ago in Missoula Montana three or four so-called Native Americans. First they protested about this term I loved them they said we are Native Americans so you are cultural we are native or what? They they told me we much prefer be called Indians because at least our name is a monument to white man’s stupidity then you know they thought they are in India. They they in a very nice way they immediately detect this you know they they told me they hate so much when white guys come to them and say you are wonderful holistic sensitive and so on. No with such pride I loved them they told me fuck you white people we burned more forest we killed more buffaloes than you ever will do and so on because they got very well how false this celebration of you know harmonious holistic approach of them is and so on. No so again what I’m saying is that that’s the paradox of our era where the more we talk about tolerance the more intolerant we are. And again this is what bothers me in this obsession with harassment. Of course I’m against harassment when it’s real harassment my god there are rapes and I’m one of the few people that I know who is still for death penalty and I’m here radically for punishing them I don’t have any understanding for rapists. All I’m saying is that with harassment it can get more problematic as many intelligent also feminist critics pointed out that those if you go to the end in this logic of no harassment basically you end up as they say consensual sex of course I’m for consensual sex if it simply means no one is raped we are both for it. But this consensual sex then all too sudden turns into contractual sex. You know as two rational people we made a contract you do this to me I do this to you and so on and so on okay why not if you enjoy it I have nothing against it. All I’m saying is that when you have authentic passionate love in the process of seduction and not necessarily from the side of the man you always necessarily have to do something that crucial step which retroactively it depends on the receiver can be proclaimed to be a harassment. Harassment means simply in all brutality I show you I display my desire. You know where you have a very nice scene although they are pseudo-intellectuals I don’t like them that guy Iñárritu the the director did you see his with Naomi Watts Sean Penn his nice movie grams? oh don’t let’s go into Freudian what is it When he Sean Penn tells her Naomi Watts well that he loves her. And her reaction is do you know how brutal this is? How dare you tell me something like this? Do you know that you ruined my life and so on? In a way she is right this is love. Again so quite often I claim what this fear of harassment covers is precisely a fear of effective intersubjectivity proximity of the Other. Where are we here what are we approaching? Did you see the movie which I think is a mega classic the old now old British dystopia Terry Gilliam Brazil? There is a wonderful scene towards the beginning where they the rich people with the hero of them Jonathan Pryce go to a restaurant and they have to select food and it’s a stroke of genius. What they get when they are served food is a plate what is on the plate is just a shit-like like just something like like a piece of shit formless piece of mud and then a photo of the of the exquisite steak with all the so the idea is you eat that shit but the photo tells you what. And I think that’s how love more and more functions you know you just need some minimal prop piece of shit to masturbate with your fantasy. I claim that in this sense even when we really make love we more and more masturbate. We masturbate with a real partner. It’s possible. Because you know in the same just partner is here more and more just to do the work of your hand or whatever but you are really you remain with your fantasy. Now to conclude if I can conclude a little bit which then would be generally the ideology that would fit this situation? I claim but I have deep respect for Buddhism now I’m talking about our type of Western Buddhism I claim it’s the way this Oriental spirituality functions today. On the one hand as I already developed in some of my books I claim that no wonder that the majority of top managers today do some type of Oriental spirituality and so on. I think that to survive in a dynamic of today’s capitalism you simply go crazy if you fully identify with it. The only way to survive is to maintain a distance to say it’s just a crazy dance of appearances I’m not really there and so on and so on. On the other hand now I come to the interesting point. This is the most radical maybe aspect of the end of the world as we know it. And when I say the end of the world I don’t mean only in a bad sense I’m just saying we are approaching a certain limit who knows what will come maybe a better world maybe a bad world. We I think should nonetheless take seriously the results of today’s cognitivism and brain sciences which and I’m not interested here in the fact is it true or not? I have my doubts about it. But the point is that the point they are making and it’s taken seriously is that you know the result. We first we have no free will and point two soon it will be possible to directly link our brain to external machines. And the consequences can be quite radical here. For example I met some scientists in Germany who together with American scientists they even the German sent me some videos you know for example they already decoded the signals a rat is sending to its legs when it moves around. So I saw it on DVD at least. What you can do is this you have a rat in a cage the rat is freely jumping around then you click a button the rat is connected and you can literally control the rat like a remote control car left right and so on. Because again through this link you give signals to her neurons which are giving direction and so on. Now I spoke with these scientists and of course they are doing what I always suspected that they are doing. What they are really interested is to do this on a human being and they are afraid to go with this into public that there will be some ethical outcry but they hinted at me that the result is the predictable one namely what interests them in this let’s say now you will be the good guy at the bet you control me no like I walk here freely around I don’t know when you push the button so that you control my neurons which give orders of turn left right forward. How will I experience this? And they told me that it looks that the paranoiac bad solution is the true one that is to say I will not even know that I’m controlled it will not be oh my god some foreign power took over I will still continue to think that I freely roam around and all that stuff then you know this how you can move already objects with thoughts and so on okay my problem is to conclude the following one. How will we subjectivize this? If we will have to accept at least the scientific ideology is telling us this I don’t think it’s true but nonetheless that in this sense we are not free. There is no ego there is no self which is autonomous free we are just the result of a complex neuronal mechanisms and so on and so on. There are as far as I can see four main attitudes here. The first one is the naive dualism most of the scientists think that it is true that we have no free will but in our daily life the way we are wired constructed is that we necessarily experience ourselves as having free will. So there will forever be a gap between scientific knowledge and how we experience ourselves. The second position more radical interesting but I think illusory is the one of more radical cognitivists like that California couple Patricia and Paul Churchland where they claim we can imagine our awareness to change according to the state of our knowledge they say in the same way that once people thought they are obsessed by demons but now when you go crazy we know it’s not demons it’s just your madness we can also imagine a society where people would communicate blah blah blah without their activity being sustained by the notions of free will moral responsibility and so on. You have this position. Then you have some other positions I will not lose time but the most interesting position for me here is the one developed by the German scientist Thomas Metzinger who claims that although insofar as we remain in our ordinary state of mind we cannot ever accept the result of cognitivism like we can rationally know it but you cannot really live it you never treat yourself as it you are just a neuronal automaton. He says except Buddhism. If you reach the Buddhist enlightenment where you accept anātman you have no self and so on that Buddhist enlightenment is the only existential position which fits the result of modern science. Now this and now I will slowly finish but I hope you got naively my message at a couple of levels from this sexuality personal identity moral responsibility and so on. I just wanted to outline a certain zero level that we are approaching where we will no longer experience ourselves as free responsible beings where again all moral consideration will fall away we will live in a kind of a universalized society of universalized privacy shameless and so on and so on all that stuff. I I am not a pessimist in the sense that this is our fate but I think that the only way to fight this fate paradoxically is to accept it as fate. I claim that what we have to do is precisely to paint a dark picture of where things move if we just let them to move spontaneously where they go. And this picture again it’s interesting because it’s a society in which overcoming of morality and total self-naturalization will coexist with some kind of a new aseptic totally non-sexual spirituality. And it would be so interesting to compare here early Soviet communism with today’s technological Gnostics you know all those crazy stories about how technology will bring us to some kind of collective identity where we will live eternally just downloading ourselves as a software program from one to another identity all that. Do you know that all this was already dreamed throughout the 20s in the Soviet Union? Even Trotsky wrote something about this the idea was that the true task of Bolsheviks is not only to change society but to create a new man and the predominant reading of this new man was that’s crucial that he is asexual sexuality was it was really a kind of a spiritual materialist Gnosticism. The predominant attitude of Soviet psychologists in the 20s under the influence of Pavlov although Pavlov was against Bolsheviks privately but he was the key influence. It was that sexual arousal is the basic weakness of Homo sapiens that it’s unnatural and it’s incredible how what the most advanced dreamers of the Soviet Union in the 20s invented was something that you already find in St. Augustine on some Christians namely St. Augustine when he speaks about sexuality he says of course of course there was sex in paradise but it wasn’t sex in this sense of arousal like a man was able to get erection in the same totally controlled way in which you raise your hand to work on a field and so on. It was just pure instrumental activity and then you maybe know it’s beautiful what St. Augustine the title of the work is De nuptiis et concupiscentia what he develops there that sexuality is not the source of sin but it’s the punishment for the sin he claims the original sin of man is that he wanted to be like God master but then God tells him I will punish you and I will punish you so that you will have a desire that you will not control so that you wanted to be the master of the world like me haha I will install a drive in you of which even in your own house you will not be the master. And then St. Augustine has a wonderful theory of erection where he says that erection is the ultimate revenge on God towards to man he says that I will take one of your organs penis and you will not control it like you will want it to get up ah ah it will not or when it will be most embarrassing for you it will get up and so on and so on. So the idea is precisely the uncontrollable status of erection is God’s reminder of our finitude like you dare to. So what I’m saying is that the goal explicitly is to get out of this dimension. And here I think we should be very open through cloning through all this maybe sexuality will disappear sexuality as we know it which is not biological. The problem is what will remain of human sexuality the way we know it because again human sexuality is not the same as we all know as natural sexuality. We can imagine a copulation which is totally mechanic and there is nothing sexual about it. Human sexuality is something totally different I try to develop it something it’s always linked to failure repetition and so on in what sense? Let me imagine a very everyday obscene scene. Let’s say I’m shaking a hand to one of you instead of dropping the hand I go on squeezing it rhythmically. Admit it your association would be what dirty plans what like the situation would through just doing repeatedly what normally is done only once the situation would go sexual in a very embarrassing way. And so it’s something much more mysterious that goes so what will be the fate of that so what’s my point here? I’m sorry if it appeared that I’m painting some dark picture whatever no I’m just saying that and with this I really want to conclude do you know that what Virginia Woolf otherwise I must say I hate her I think she was a frigid bitch I think that that Daphne du Maurier is greater writer than Virginia Woolf I was almost lynched for saying this. But she did something wonderful. You know that in April in in her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown from she said that it’s on or about April human nature changed and so on it’s wonderful British style of this pseudo-empiricism like the most famous statement in this lines is you know a theologian in mid-19th century claimed God created the world and something years BC at nine in the morning and so on wonderful. But what I’m saying is that with all the changes we are living now it’s not just the capitalist dynamic it’s what biogenetics means what all this stuff happening with our desires means and so on I think that effectively the very basic dimension of what is to be human is changing. In this sense I claim it’s the end of the world it’s the end of the world as we know it. It will change what does it mean to have sex to be human and so on. But it’s not still I think the determinism in the sense of new catastrophe or whatever the situation is open more than ever. And this is my concluding paradox you know it looks as if we can’t really change anything even after September 11th sorry I mean occupy Wall Street even after that one no because you know I’m a leftist here you know when you say September 11th my association is always the putsch against Salvador Allende you know we should remember the true September 11th organized paid by the United States. You know that the smoking gun was found there Kissinger signed a letter authorizing the murder of that Chilean minister but what I’m saying is that on the one hand the situation may appear to be desperate like my god like and it is desperate in the sense that leftists were telling us for decades when our situation was relatively prosperous you remember they were telling us ah now we have apparent welfare but wait a minute there will be the crisis blah. Where the crisis is here revolts and so on and did the left propose anything I am not aware of any viable plan even general idea you can maybe correct me here. I met demonstrators and on Zuccotti Park Frankfurt and so on and I was always asking them a simple stupid question what do you want? And I got answers like we want a more just capitalism is you know it’s but but I don’t blame them. I think that the tragedy of our situation is the following one and this should be again paradoxically at the same time the source of our hope namely when people tell me but do you think really that we can change anything well my answer is I don’t know that but I do know that things are already changing radically that everything is changing so fast that’s some aspects I tried to identify discern today in our economy in our and it’s not just capital look for example again look at today’s capitalism. I think the whole digital phenomena and so on is much more ambiguous it may be a triumph of capitalism but you can see how at the same time the more we have this informational technology the more private property itself becomes almost meaningless. I mean soon everything will be downloading and so on and so on it will not be possible to control it so again my point is this one when people tell me nothing can be changed no it can because things are already changing like crazy. And what we should say is just this if we let things change the way they are changing automatically we are approaching a kind of a new perverse permissively authoritarian society which will be authoritarian but in a new way which is why I don’t like terms like new fascism and so on you know I mean to use this term means just you are too lazy to think what really is new. And this is what should give us an motivation to act things are already changing will be simply follow this change so again things are changing I don’t think that if we do nothing we will simply go on enjoying our relative at least in some parts of the world prosperity. No I think that again even my god even Fukuyama himself the last time I met him confessed to me he is an honest guy I like honest conservatives that to put it in an ironic way he is no longer a Fukuyamaist. He told me that with biogenetics financial crisis and so on that his idea of the end of history is over. He admits it. Things are radically changing and this is what should worry us. We should return the question to those in power because you know what’s more and more my impression if I look around the present state of economy that you know my answer to the leftist paranoiacs who claim oh there are some people mysterious meeting somewhere between Washington and China and Wall Street deciding everything. I’m tempted to say I’m asking God praying that it would at least be like that but it’s not. I really don’t think we still have a ruling class which is able to rule properly. The situation is much more horrible I don’t think there is some big ruling class manipulating everything they don’t know what is happening they themselves don’t know what is happening. In Europe where I come from this is even more obvious than anywhere else. So again the very reason to worry should be already what motivates us to think what is happening maybe to do something. I spoke for much too long but haha what can you do you had to listen no thanks very much for your patience. You have been listening to a TVO podcast. Support Ontario’s public television. Donate
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