Slavoj Zizek lecture Totality or Assemblage 02
Lecture · John Hillman ·
published 2022-02-24 · 1:42:42 · 13,541 words
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
ideologyhegel-dialecticscommunism-socialismfascism-populismsexuality-gendergeopolitics-warrevolution-violenceeveryday-lifedemocracyhistoryphilosophy-generaltechnology-ai-cyberspacepsychoanalysisreligion-theologycinema-art-culturesubjectivitycapitalism
Žižek critiques the concept of 'assemblage' for lacking the dimension of antagonism, arguing that historical shifts (1960s to 1970s, Renaissance) involve a depoliticization where radical political content is lost while formal elements remain. He analyzes Bruno Latour’s 'Dingpolitik' and the state as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements, using Trump’s ideology and the intersection of feminism and Islamophobia as examples. He contrasts this with Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, emphasizing that assemblage must always involve a constitutive conflict ('us' vs. 'them') and the strategic prioritization of specific struggles, such as national liberation over class struggle. Žižek critiques Ernesto Laclau’s concept of 'chain of equivalences' as remaining strictly within the ideological realm, contrasting it with Bruno Latour’s 'Dingpolitik' and the material reality of political assemblages. He argues, through historical examples like the Russian and Yugoslav revolutions, that political change is never driven by a true majority but by a minority seizing a moment of crisis. He concludes by analyzing Lenin’s post-revolutionary vision of communication, noting its uncanny resemblance to Jürgen Habermas’s ideal of undistorted discourse. Žižek analyzes the 'politics of things' through the lens of sex robots and digitalization, arguing that technological intermediaries reconfigure subjectivity by turning partners into partial objects, a dynamic he traces to Kant’s legalistic definition of marriage. He contrasts Latour’s relational ontology with Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, asserting that purely relational entities (like communism) possess causal power. Finally, he critiques the illusion of digital freedom, suggesting that algorithmic control externalizes the 'Big Other,' and uses the 'God created fossils' joke to illustrate ideological deception. Žižek defines ideology as a hermeneutic circle where interactions create things, critiquing Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism for its premature leap to Cartesian rationalism. He contrasts Ernesto Laclau’s ideological politics with Bruno Latour’s assemblage theory, arguing that technology and 'things' themselves materialize interpersonal politics rather than merely serving as neutral tools. Žižek critiques Foucault’s transcendentalism and naive realism, arguing for a materialist position where the subject is a gap in reality (negativity/death drive) rather than outside it. He contrasts this with Latour and Harman’s realism, proposing that ideology functions through 'immanent impossibilities', things allowed only on condition they are not done. He illustrates these structural failures with examples from Stalinist jokes, Badiou’s taste in films, and sci-fi movies like Arrival and The Discovery.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 37
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “antagonism”
The dimension of conflict or struggle that Žižek argues is missing from standard assemblage theory but essential to political reality.
A formulation describing how the spirit of the 1960s survived in the 1970s as a vulgarized, depoliticized version fully integrated into official ideology.
Žižek’s phrase describing the process where a radical political movement (like the 1960s) is integrated into official ideology by retaining its form (sexual liberation) while stripping its political content.
Latour’s concept of politics that recognizes struggles over material processes and things as creating a new world beyond traditional ideology.
Laclau’s concept where independent elements (e.g., feminist, ecological struggles) are linked together under a hegemonic point, such as anti-capitalism.
The assumption that class struggle is the primary or natural hegemonic force, which Laclau rejects in favor of contingent unification of struggles.
Žižek’s corrective to Laclau, insisting that assemblage is not just linking elements but constructing an 'us' against a 'them' through conflict.
Žižek’s translation of the Bolshevik term 'perevorot,' highlighting that the Bolsheviks themselves did not initially call their event a 'revolution' (revolyutsiya) but a turnover/coup.
Žižek’s ironic coinage for Lenin’s post-revolutionary vision of 'normal rules of decent polite communication,' which Žižek argues mirrors Habermas’s ideal of undistorted discourse.
Žižek’s synthesis of Habermas’s 'undistorted' communication and the German term 'Zwanglose' (constraint-free/spontaneous) to describe Lenin’s ideal post-revolutionary social regulation.
Bruno Latour’s concept referring to the political impact and agency of technological inventions and objects in shaping social relations.
Lacanian concept referring to fragmented body parts (mouth, vagina) that serve as objects of enjoyment, replacing the whole partner in sexual practice.
Bruno Latour’s term for the 'politics of things,' referring to political struggles centered on material objects and technologies rather than just values.
as “Big Other”
The purely virtual, non-existing symbolic structure or normative order that structures our opinions and overdetermines our acts.
as “object-oriented ontology”
Graham Harman’s philosophical stance claiming things exist independently of their effects and preexist their activity.
Bruno Latour’s theory positing that things are constituted through their performativity and relations, rather than existing as substantial entities.
A notion from Deleuze and Spinoza involving the combination of heterogeneous elements, which Žižek critiques for lacking the dimension of antagonism.
Hegelian concept where purely relational entities (like communism or liberalism) do not exist as physical objects but exert actual causality on human struggle.
Quentin Meillassoux’s argument that science allows access to reality prior to human subjectivity (the arche-fossil), breaking the correlation between thinking and being.
as “theory of ideology”
Žižek’s ironic label for the theological solution that God created fossils to dupe us, illustrating how ideology stages reality to maintain a contradiction.
The inescapable loop where we can only qualify what exists 'before' through the interpretive framework we already possess.
The quantum physics view that what exists outside the mind are not things, but pure relations (e.g., strings or forces).
A quantum-inspired ontological claim that material objects are merely points where different wave interactions collapse or meet, rather than independent entities that interact.
Meillassoux’s concept that being is fundamentally contingent, which he uses to break out of the transcendental circle.
Meillassoux’s position that only nature as described in mathematical formulas exists in itself, which Žižek critiques as a premature leap.
as “ideological struggle”
Laclau’s focus on politics as the recombination of ideological elements, which Žižek argues lacks a dimension of 'things'.
Foucault’s concept of the horizon of understanding within which questions can be raised, which Žižek argues prohibits direct ontological inquiry.
A German term meaning 'unpassable' or 'untranscendable,' used to describe the transcendental horizon that cannot be stepped outside of.
Žižek’s book title referring to the move beyond transcendental idealism without regressing to naive realism, by accepting the 'recoil' of the subject into the Real.
as “transcendental circle”
The philosophical constraint that we cannot access reality outside of our transcendental conditions of knowledge.
Heidegger’s 'House of Being,' representing the view that language mediates all appearance of entities, trapping us in a horizon of understanding.
Lenin’s book, which Žižek critiques for defining matter as existing objectively outside the subjective mind, thereby missing that the subject is part of reality.
A mystical/philosophical term for the void or minimal distance/negativity that constitutes the subject, separating them from the natural cycle of reality.
Freud’s concept, reinterpreted by Žižek not as a longing to die, but as the minimal denaturalization/interruption of the natural cycle inherent in human sexuality and language.
Lacan’s/Sade’s concept of the radical interruption of the natural cycle of generation/corruption, which precedes biological death and signifies the entry into language/symbolic order.
Features of an ideological field that appear possible but are structurally impossible; doing something is allowed only on the condition that it is not done.
A portmanteau of 'kaput' and 'capitalism' used by a black theologian friend to describe capitalism’s structural failure to deliver the social goods (healthcare, security) it promises.
Stories he reaches for 7
Žižek describes an experiment where a rat’s limb nerves are connected to a computer, turning it into a remote-controlled car, and extends this to a hypothetical human experiment where the subject still feels free while being steered.
“You press a button and then you can steer the rat... I would still think that I'm free.”
Žižek notes Lenin’s specific term for the woman helping in the kitchen, which he uses to pivot to Lenin’s vision of post-revolutionary polite communication.
“It's for a woman. Yeah, the woman who helps there in the kitchen, yeah yeah, that specific term.”
A British priest, disturbed by Darwin’s fossils contradicting the Bible, solves the contradiction by claiming God directly created fossils to dupe us, staging a fake appearance of openness in a small world.
“To dupe us, God directly created fossils.”
Žižek quotes Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, defining marriage as a contract for the exclusive use of sexual organs, and notes Kant’s legalistic view that a husband running away is stealing his wife’s co-property (his penis).
“A mutual contract between two adult persons for the mutual exclusive use of their each other's sexual organs for pleasure.”
Žižek praises Evita Perón for introducing menstrual leave in Argentina, noting it as a 'tremendously ingenious' measure, despite his general critique of Peronism.
“We can make fun of Evita Perón, but I found this so tremendously ingenious... she was the first one to do it... Argentina was... the first country in the world which gave all employed women two days every month for their period of three days”
Žižek shares an encounter with a Boko Haram affiliate who claimed to be anti-capitalist, arguing that fighting women's rights is the local anti-colonial struggle against globalist ideology, illustrating how struggles can be assembled in contradictory ways.
“I met in London two years ago somebody who didn't want to admit it but was close to Boko Haram. And he told me that he is fundamentally anti-capitalist, but that the way to fight global capitalism is to fight the concrete effects of neo-global ideology in his country... ruining the local indigenous family and so on structures through the ideology of women's rights.”
Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, reportedly wrote that Lenin looked like he needed psychiatric help because he was 'going crazy' with his call for a proletarian revolution while others censored his writings.
“it looks that Vladimir Ilyich will look psychiatric help, that he is getting crazy.”
Works invoked 15
Titanic film
Another film Badiou likes, which Žižek dismisses.
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek’s 'preferred book,' dealing with moving beyond transcendental horizon without naive realism.
Homo Deus book
Cited for the argument that digital control allows computers to make better decisions than humans, supporting the critique of liberal freedom.
After Finitude book
Quentin Meillassoux’s book on the 'arche-fossil'; Žižek argues Meillassoux squeezes the problem of correlationism too easily.
Arrival film
A sci-fi movie Žižek praises for its 'deep subversive insight' regarding holistic vs. partial knowledge.
Lenin’s book, which Žiž1ek calls one of the 'big hits worst philosophical books in the history of humanity' for its definition of matter.
Used to extract Kant’s definition of marriage as a legal contract for sexual organs, illustrating the objectifying nature of the institution.
A film Alain Badiou thinks is a 'masterpiece' but Žižek calls 'horrible,' using it to mock Badiou’s taste.
Immaterialism book
Graham Harman's book from which Žižek quotes a journalist's remark about the 1960s/1970s.
The Discovery film
A sci-fi movie Žižek praises for its 'wonderful fact' that the soul survives to correct mistakes, calling it a 'nice intelligent movie.'
Black Lives Matter other
Cited as a concrete struggle that should be prioritized over a universal 'all lives matter' in the specific context of American racial injustice.
Dismissed as 'so boring' and 'mega-productions' compared to modest sci-fi.
Meillassoux’s dissertation, which he has held onto for years due to uncertainty, contrasting with Žižek’s prolific output.
May '68 other
Referenced as a 'great socio-political movement' with class antagonism, contrasting with its later depoliticized memory.
Pokémon tv
Used as an example of how implicit ideological structures (like racism) become real objects in the world through digitalization.
People invoked 43
Bruno Dostils negative
ASR error for Bruno Stieg? Interpreted Žižek’s pictures as effects of his 'deep psychological uncertainty'; used as a foil to explain Meillassoux’s publishing struggles.
Frantz Fanon positive
Cited as a 'good Marxist' who understood that class struggle must sometimes be subordinated to national liberation struggle, a point Žižek agrees with.
Mentioned alongside Kamenev as having published a protest letter against the October Revolution in Gorky’s newspaper.
Udi Aloni negative
Described as a 'good friend' and 'Israeli-Palestinian movie maker'; Žižek disagrees with Aloni's view that the struggle against Islamophobia and women's rights are the same.
Referenced as the discoverer of evolution, whose findings on fossils created the theological problem solved by the 'God created fossils' joke.
Marquis de Sade positive
Described as a 'prophet' regarding the treatment of partners as collections of partial objects rather than persons.
Blaise Pascal positive
Cited for the idea of 'gray indifferent reality' existing outside the human universe of meaning, marking the break with medieval times.
Marine Le Pen negative
Used as a foil; Žižek notes that some local Communist authorities in France were 'proto-Le Pen figures' in their treatment of immigrants.
Described as 'horrible' but noted for having a better position for women under his secular autocratic regime compared to the post-invasion period.
Aaron Schuster positive
Described as a 'good friend' whose formulation of Lacan’s critique of Sade (second death) Žižek quotes and envies.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek uses Lenin to illustrate that revolutions are minority coups (October turnover) and to highlight the irony of Lenin’s post-revolutionary vision resembling Habermas’s ideal discourse.
Mentioned as a Bolshevik who published a protest letter against the October Revolution and was opposed by Lenin.
Jacques Lacan positive
Referenced in the context of 'assemblage' and 'Deleuzian-Spinozean' thought, though not the primary focus of this excerpt.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Cited as the narrator of the 'God created fossils' joke, which serves as a perfect illustration of ideology.
Cited for his view that ideology exists in material state ideological apparatuses; Žižek uses this to contrast with Latour's materialist politics.
Cited for his notion of assemblage, which Žižek critiques for lacking antagonism.
Lenin’s wife, cited by Žižek as having written that Lenin needed psychiatric help because he was 'going crazy' with his revolutionary plans.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek has 'problems' with Butler’s book, arguing she uses 'assemblage' in the literal sense of people gathering in public spaces rather than in the theoretical sense of assemblage theory.
Donald Trump negative
Used as an example of a political assemblage where lower taxes for the rich are linked with Christian fundamentalism and populism, a link not present in traditional neoliberal arguments.
Mentioned as Laclau's collaborator on the theory of hegemony.
Yuval Noah Harari positive
Cited for the point in Homo Deus that computers can make better decisions than humans based on tracked data, supporting Žižek’s critique of digital freedom.
John Langshaw Austin positive
Cited for speech act theory ('with language we do things'), which Žižek discusses as a Marxist notion of praxis before rejecting it.
Alain Badiou positive
A friend and intellectual rival; Žižek jokes about his 'bad taste' in films (Bridges of the Madison County, Titanic) but claims he insults him behind his back out of respect.
Cited as the source of a quote about the 1960s/1970s from his book 'Immaterialism'; Žižek uses Harman's citation to launch his own critique.
Mentioned briefly as an example of a Greek leftist politician who might be 'controlled' by European banks, analogous to the remote-controlled rat.
John D. Caputo negative
An 'American theological deconstructionist' who criticized Žižek and Badiou for being obsessed with capitalism; Žižek argues capitalism structurally cannot deliver the social goods Caputo suggests.
Bruno Latour positive
Praised for his notion of 'Dingpolitik' and 'ontological politics,' which Žižek finds useful for understanding struggles over material things, though he critiques the lack of antagonism.
Cited alongside Deleuze for the notion of assemblage as a 'happy plurality of heterogeneous elements'.
Eva Perón positive
Praised for introducing menstrual leave in Argentina, a measure Žižek finds 'tremendously ingenious'.
Used in a hyperbolic joke: 'I almost wanted to burn the movie like Goebbels... no they discover a very interesting thing.'
Michel Foucault negative
Žižek calls Foucault the 'ultimate transcendental philosopher' but critiques his episteme for prohibiting direct ontological questions and naive realism.
Ernesto Laclau positive
Cited for his theory of hegemony and 'chain of equivalences'; Žižek agrees with Laclau that assemblage involves constructing an 'us' against 'them' but critiques the lack of explicit antagonism in some readings.
Martin Heidegger positive
Cited for his point that language is the 'house of being' and that modernity views reality as an object of manipulation; Žižek agrees with the horizon concept but seeks to move beyond it.
Robert Redford positive
Actor in The Discovery, played by Žižek as a scientist who discovers the soul survives death.
Quentin Meillassoux negative
Critiqued for 'squeezing out' the problem of correlationism too easily; Žižek argues that even science remains transcendentally predetermined by our horizon of understanding.
Jürgen Habermas positive
Žižek uses Habermas’s concept of 'undistorted communication' as a foil to show how Lenin’s post-revolutionary vision ironically mirrors Habermasian ideals.
Joseph Stalin negative
Žižek ironically calls Stalin the 'greatest genius of 20th century' due to his 'disappearance' and lack of presence during the October Revolution, using him to debunk the myth of Bolshevik unity.
Karl Marx positive
Cited as a 'classical Marxist' who linked ideology to material practices; Žižek critiques some Marxist interpretations for class essentialism.
Josip Broz Tito negative
Žižek cites Tito’s secret negotiations with the Ustasha and German army to prevent an Allied landing in Istria, using this to argue that the Partisans prioritized power over national liberation.
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek defends Freud’s death drive against the misinterpretation of it as a longing to die, reinterpreting it as the interruption of the natural cycle.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the concept that purely relational entities (like communism) are 'virtual non-existing causes' that exert actual causality.
Immanuel Kant positive
Praised for his 'beautiful' and 'great' definition of marriage as a legal contract for using sexual organs, revealing the sadistic/objectifying nature of the institution.
Mentioned in the context of Peronism, which Žižek finds difficult to sympathize with despite some 'good things'.
Transcript 26 turns
Slavoj Žižek
But don't again, don't forget the past where okay, but I will nonetheless, don't be afraid. This is not another excuse because I already caught myself yesterday in secretly, not even subconsciously, but consciously, half-consciously, playing the game of fuck you, you will never get me to talk about assemblage, you know, and find something to postpone. So, no, I will. I will, today we do it. I just warn you, as I already did it, that it may be a little bit more boring. So enough, enough of all this. Now I go to assemblage. I will just recapitulate yesterday's result because what you got in the last minutes was a more confused improvisation, I admit it, about how what is missing for me in the notion of assemblage is the dimension of antagonism. You just get this Deleuzian-Spinozean, for me happy plurality of heterogeneous elements combining, territorializing, deterritorializing themselves. No antagonism. I think one way to show the traces of this antagonism is to, I would like to quote you a nice remark on the 1960s. 1960s, you remember as the time of sexual revolution and so on, from Graham Harman's book Immaterialism. Harman says, I quote, "You have to remember," no, he quotes another guy, a journalist, who said writing about the 1960s, the spirit of sexual revolution and so on, "You have to remember that the 1960s really happened in the 1970s." What does he mean by this? Harman's comment, here it is: "An object somehow exists even more in the state following its initial heyday. The marijuana smoking, free love, and internal violence of the dramatic American 60s were in some ways better exemplified by the campy and tasteless 1970s," and so on. So the idea is, again, what we identify 60s with, it really fully developed in the 1970s. I oppose this reading because again, something disappears. What? Antagonism. Namely, if one takes a closer look, and I am unfortunately old enough that I remember it personally, at the passage from 1960s to 1970s, one can easily see the key difference. In 1960s, the spirit of permissiveness, sexual liberation, counter-culture, and drugs was part of a utopian political protest movement. And what happened in the 1970s was that this spirit remains but in its vulgarized version: orgy, drugs, sexual liberation, but precisely, again, deprived of its political content. And as such, fully integrated into official ideology. Now I am not saying that in a way this was not good in some sense. We should nonetheless, with all the criticism of the limitation of sexual liberation of the 60s and so on, we should nonetheless remember that the spirit of the 60s did leave some important traces in our popular culture. Like at least officially till now, now with Trump the horror is back up to a point, like it was simply not possible to talk in a certain way about women, about homosexuals, about other races and so on. You know, you can, I remember still in the early 60s when I was very young, it was simply possible publicly to make absolutely today publicly dirty jokes about gay people and so on and so on. So certain standards emerged. But nonetheless, again, it was depoliticized. And this is for me ideological movement at its closest. We tend to forget, for example in France, that 1960s, May '68, was not just sexual liberation and so on, it was a great political movement. I remember, I saw it on TV, I was watching it live in France, thousands of students joining workers, I think in front of the Renault car factory doing it and so on. Okay, we may say they didn't have a chance, but it definitely was a great socio-political movement. And again, the way to the integration was that this socio-economic background, social antagonism echoing it, simply disappeared. And something the same, of the same, I think helps for Renaissance. If you ask a person today, half-educated as I am, Renaissance, give me an association. It would be all those princely states, Florence, all the big families, big names and so on. But read a good history of Renaissance and you will learn that exactly, in exact parallel with 1960s and 1970s, the thing truly happened already in the 14th century and maybe early 15th. There, that was the true moment of Florence, with local democracy, much more lower class and so on. And that political moment then disappeared with the passage to all those Sforzas, whatever, all those big prince families, prince states and so on and so forth. Which again totally obliterated this socio-economic dimension where it was really class struggle. Local artisans, workers tried to take over in some cities and so on and so on. So what I like is that you see the dialectics, very simple one that I try to describe. It's not simply that first something happens and then it gets deeper and deeper and deeper. No, the first time it happens, it's much closer to the truth: a political-economic struggle, antagonisms and so on. And then the way things develop, the thing, the tendency appears to triumph but the price is paid by the loss of this radical political dimension. So this much as an introduction, just a remark. Now I want to go on returning to this notion of assemblage because confused as I was yesterday I simplified the notion very much. I would like to begin with, again, with Bruno Latour, his notion of what he calls Dingpolitik. Ding, the thing in German, politik, politics. So what he calls politics of things. His idea is that today what we should learn, why assemblage theory is so useful for our political struggles, is that it's not just struggles are today not just struggles which turn around values, beliefs and so on. They are struggles through and about things. How we deal with things, with new technological inventions and so on. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms, pathogens, new infrastructure, new reproductive technology and so on. This is creating a new world beyond just political institutions, political interests or ideologies. This politics, he, Latour, even calls it ontological politics, recognizes not only that what we usually call politics, ideological politics, we fight for different visions which should orient state politics, should always be viewed, and this is almost a direct even a little bit simplified Marxist view, that ideology should be always linked to concrete material practices. Not just in the sense of Louis Althusser, that ideology only exists in material state ideological apparatuses, but also in the sense that the real base of, for example, can you even imagine the entire abortion debate and so on without all these tremendous inventions, contraception pills, new developments in medicine and so on? That it's always a struggle about very material processes. So this for this reason we, when we analyze the state for example, that's Latour's big point, we should not conceive state as a unified actor, but it should be approached as an assemblage which makes heterogeneous points of order resonate together: geographic order, ethnic, linguistic, economic, technological, legal and so on and so on. So that this is the idea of assemblage, state as an assemblage. State usually in our countries provides education. It's not necessary. For example, in medieval times in Europe it was the Church. State organizes health service. As far as I know, again in medieval times usually you have for the rich people those big doctors traveling, okay doctors, medical guys, and for the ordinary people in a poor village, I don't know, some local old lady who was either a good doctor or the other choice for her was to be burned as a witch or something like that. So what I am saying is that we should see how many different phenomena and material practices, education, which for example again till modern times education was a family matter, only at a certain point education became the affair of first Church, then family and so on. So the lesson of Latour here is that state comprises a series of heterogeneous phenomena which could have been assembled also in a different way. It's not a natural way to assemble them like that. Again, my next example which I already mentioned yesterday I think, in the domain of politics look at Trump, the elements that consist, that are assembled in Trump ideology. You can easily imagine for example what Trump advocates, lower taxes for the rich. This measure is usually advocated on purely economic grounds with all those, that pseudo-scientific bluffing, you know, that Laffer curve or whatever, which is pure imagination. You know, the idea being that if the taxes are too high, the state gets low income because it destimulates production. Then if taxes are again too low, of course you also get little money because taxes are too low. So that the art is, this is a standard neoliberal argument, the art is to find the right level of taxes so that you get maximum amount. But this is, as it was proven, a total pseudo-argument, it's a total imaginary, totally imaginary mathematics because of course the point is then always that we, the state, doesn't get enough money because taxes are too high, that if we lower the taxes this will give an impulse to production and so on and even the state will get more money and so on. What I want to say is that in its traditional form this argument against high taxes is not linked in any way with Christian fundamentalism or with populism. This is something specifically Trumpist to establish this link. Another assemblage problem is for me something that is very dear to old leftists. Like here I have usually a conflict with my good friend the Israeli-Palestinian movie maker Udi Aloni who always claims the struggle against Islamophobia and the struggle for women's rights are one and the same struggle. My cynical answer is yes, it sounds nice but what if they are not the same struggle? For example, it's a fact that today's feminism, not all of course but a strong part for example of American official feminism, as we know they even supported invasion of Iraq. It will bring freedom to Iraqi women. Okay, we know today if anything it was the exact opposite. My god, horrible as he was, no sympathy for Saddam Hussein, but under his regime the position of women in Iraq was much better than now. Because he was at that point a secular autocrat who supported a certain public role for women, public education and so on, I mean education for women and so on. So what I'm saying is that quite often you have, you use struggle for women's rights as an instrument of Islamophobia. And not to mention the other way around, Islamist politics dismissing women's rights as a tool of Western imperialism to ruin traditional non-European societies. It's incredible, it's very sad to watch, to what extent... I quote this somewhere I think or mentioned it already to you, I met in London two years ago somebody who didn't want to admit it but was close to Boko Haram. And he told me that he is fundamentally anti-capitalist, but that the way to fight global capitalism is to fight the concrete effects of neo-global ideology in his country. And he claimed in his country, Northern Nigeria, Mali, that central part of Africa, the main effect of globalist neo-colonial ideology is ruining the local indigenous family and so on structures through the ideology of women's rights. So he claimed for us fighting against women's rights, it's our version of anti-colonial struggle. Now it's easy to say you are wrong, but what would you have done there? What I'm trying to say here is simply that it's easy to pose and we should stick to it of course, it's easy to posit as a goal this struggle and that struggle should become one and the same struggle. But the big struggle is to bring these two struggles together. It's an assemblage in this sense. Now let me go on and do a little bit of self-criticism of what I said yesterday. You remember when I compared assemblage, when I compared assemblage to the, to Laclau's theory of, and Mouffe, they collaborated here, to the, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe theory of hegemony. And I claim that Laclau has a similar idea that an ideological field is constructed through a specific articulation where a series of relatively independent of each other elements are put together into what Laclau calls a chain of equivalences. For example, in a classical Marxist socialist vision: the struggle of women, the struggle for ecology, anti-racist struggle are all put into the same series with anti-capitalist struggle. In the sense, you know, to put it in very simplistic terms, like the standard Marxist explanation would have been: ecology is, sorry, our environment is exploited in capitalist conditions because capitalism ultimately only cares about profit and so on and so on. Or that women are exploited or in the subordinate position in capitalist patriarchy and then they try to explain why in what sense capitalism needs patriarchy. Or racism, again the same logic. Of course, any intelligent Marxist would reject the idea that, but the criticism of Marxism is justified here, any intelligent Marxist would reject the idea that this means just that we as Marxist revolutionaries should tell for example to women or to other races, wait a little bit, let's focus on the big central struggle and, as it were, feminine liberation or a different attitude towards nature or the end of racism will come by itself as a side product, byproduct of basic anti-capitalist struggle. Of course, we should reject this but nonetheless in some sense all these other struggles are put under hegemony of anti-capitalist struggle. Okay, I will not go here into what Ernesto, how Ernesto at the end rejects this hegemonic role of anti-capitalist struggle. For him, all struggles are ultimately not equal but on the same level in the sense that none of the struggle has, if I may put it like this, the natural right to play the hegemonic role. In a certain constellation it can be political struggle for democracy, in another constellation it can be ecological struggle, in a third constellation it can be anti-racist struggle, whatever. The point is how these struggles are enchained into a series of equivalences. By series of equivalences I mean what I just exemplified to you through my example of classical Marxist anti-capitalism, where I can tell you but struggle for women, for women's rights, struggle for nature, struggle for, against racism, they are all part and have their full meaning only as subsumed under anti-capitalist struggle. This would have been the classical Marxist chain of equivalences. Ernesto would have said no, the field is totally open. There is no, when he, Ernesto, criticizes class essentialism, his idea is precisely that we cannot a priori assume there is no, how should I put it, natural or deeper tendency to privilege one struggle. It's a contingent process of unification of assemblage of struggles where we can decide which struggle will play the hegemonic role. And Marxists here, good Marxists were honest and very open, for example third world Marxists, intelligent ones, were very clear that, especially Fanon and others who reflected on how West European Communist parties in the 50s reacted to anti-colonial struggles. Many of them reflected on it in a racist way. For example, did you know that till almost, the official politics of the French Communist party was no, French colonization of Algiers, because it was focused on Algiers because there was anti-colonial war in Algiers, is basically a progressive thing. If we give independence to Algiers it would just mean that the conservative structure there will take over, so we should offer Algerians equality but within French democratic dominance and so on. They were against decolonization. Only later in the 60s. And the traces of this patriotic, falsely patriotic, bourgeois patriotic French Communist attitude lasted till, till, well as long as the Communist party lasted. Now it's extremely marginal and so on. It's so interesting to, I remember it, how when the first problems with immigrants developed some years ago, it was quite scandalous to discover that the harshest, the proto-Le Pen figures, the harshest were some local authorities, you know, all that at that point it existed, Red Belt, Saint-Denis and so on around Paris, small suburban towns where often Communists were running the towns with a large majority. They were the first ones to cut electricity and water to immigrants and so on and so forth because they played French patriotism and so on and so forth. So back to this point, for example, I totally agree with Fanon who said that to be, to really fight the class struggle means that in certain concrete constellation you should privilege national liberation struggle over class struggle. This is the fine dialectical point that radical struggle means that you have class struggle means that you should also know in what constellation you should neglect strategically class struggle. It's the same today in the United States with Black Lives Matter. Many white liberals escape into an easy option and claim: why only black, sorry, why only black lives matter? Shouldn't all lives matter? No, this universalization is already false, because in concrete American situation now the social injustice of authorities, killing people and so on, is exemplified in how they treat black protesters. So the moment you want to universalize the position and say no we should care about all, you already play the game of those in power. And you know, my god, a movie should be written about it, or a tragicomic episode. Did you listen to what happened now a couple of weeks ago in United States, that there was some conflict between white policemen and black demonstrators, and that a black policeman who was their colleague, ran there, he was in his civil clothes there by chance on a private business, he saw what's going on and out of pure professional solidarity he ran to that post to help his white policemen colleagues, and they shot him, mistaking him for a black threat and so on? It's brutal irony. But again, so what I'm saying is that okay, I agree, where is my problem and what was my... I'm now in this Stalinist self-critical mood... what was my... I just praised yesterday Laclau because of how he has also assemblage in the sense of putting different elements together, but he has assemblage together with antagonism. Assemblage is for him always a moment of constructing an *us*, but us against *them*. It's always the big conflict and whom will be enchained... and this is a big problem. For example, one of the lowest moments of European working class movement, even the left is not totally innocent in it, is that in certain constellations they risk the game of playing with antisemitism. They claimed but nonetheless there is a working class element in antisemitism, okay they focus on Jews not generally on the capitalists, but nonetheless popular antisemitism is an element of popular protest against the rich and so on, so why not use it? No wonder that Ernesto remained a Peronist to the end, because that's nonetheless, I never got this sympathy of many people in Argentina for Peronism. They did some good things, some incredible things. For example, we can make fun of Evita Perón, but I found this so tremendously ingenious and as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, she was the first one to do it, I think already when before her death '50, '51. You know that Argentina was, as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, the first country in the world which gave all employed women two days every month for their period of three days... Hollywood. Why did I say Hollywood? Don't ask me. What I want to say is that I find this a wonderful simple measure she thought, and many other things. But basically, basically Peronism was a soft fascist movement for me, because the basic vision is unity of capital and work and some external intruders, capitalists, communists, whoever, are trying to undermine this solidarity. So let's forget this, I hope you noticed it, I was mad at myself that I didn't get it yesterday. What's the big difference nonetheless where I am on the side of Latour and so on? Laclau's chain of equivalences remains strictly at the level of ideology. Ideology in the sense of mental construct and practices and so on. When he speaks about chain of equivalences, of assembling elements, it's simply ideological elements. It's for example ecologism as an ideological trend, sorry, it's women's rights but as an ideological trend and so on and so forth. What is missing in Ernesto, okay he would have said "but I mean it," well fuck you I don't care what you mean but what you say. What is missing is precisely what Bruno Latour mentions as Dingpolitik, the politics of things. That's what I find extremely productive in assemblage theory. This mixing all of it together. You know, true assemblage it's not just politics and, sorry, it's not just like I don't know economic struggle, democratic struggle, whatever. This is still ideology. These are ideological conflicts. You have to put into assemblage also for example material practices of assemblage, of assembling. Judith Butler recently, I have problems with that book although it's a nice problem, this is more in the spirit of assemblage, wrote a book where assemblage is in the title I think, no? Yes, assemblage. Yeah, but what she means, that's my problem. I will tell you and we can debate it if you agree with me. She doesn't mean assemblage in the terms of assemblage theory. She means assemblage in the literal sense of, and she is in a way right, the last years demonstrated again how assemblage in the simple sense of large groups of people assembling in some public space and occupying it and so on, how this proves an important political strategy. My only problem is the usual one that I mentioned here on the first day I think: yes it's important as the first step, but what interests me is what happens when people are no longer assembling in public places, you know, like what remains of it? But I agree here with Judith when she speaks about, at this level when she speaks about assemblage, she means a very material political practice. Okay, you can say this is still ideological practice, practice of protest. But nonetheless, she means a very material process of hundreds of thousand even more people assembling with a certain demand, you know, all that stuff of "we are here, we will not leave till we get..." And here, I don't have time to go into it, what would have interested me here tremendously is the notion of majority at work here. Let me, let me formulate to you some of my deep pessimism. Are we aware that, now I'm ready to go to the end, crazy, when we are speaking about these popular upheavals, popular presence, were they ever really a majority? I claim practically never. Take French Revolution. Fuck it, it was basically people in Paris, maybe not even there majority. Take October Revolution. Are you crazy? It was Bolsheviks in a, I think it was still authentic revolution, Bolsheviks calculating on how to use political public discontent which was very clearly articulated in their big slogan "Land and Peace." Even the Central Committee was against it on 25th of October. Lenin had to walk out. Kamenev and Zinoviev published a protest letter the same night, in Gorky's newspaper, which came back against them as you know in I know. And even more, even more, the greatest genius of 20th century, I mean it ironically, Stalin disappeared for those couple of days. This was the big secret of Stalin. He was nowhere there. Do you know that? Well he was an editor of Pravda. Yeah, but he was very hard to find. Well I don't know, well I'll have to look into it. Yeah, he was never... no no... but your point stands that you can't even... it's even more radical than what you say... it's not even possible to speak about a majority within the Central Committee at the most. Yeah, it's her, there is virtual... it's really one of those throws of the dice where Lenin throws his fit essentially as he did throughout this saying you're either going into it or not. Kamenev also, you must know it, you maybe know it better than me, my favorite example: you know even Nadezhda Krupskaya, his wife, wrote I think to Kamenev, it looks that Vladimir Ilyich will look psychiatric help, that he is getting crazy. She's been saying that since May of when he comes back from Switzerland in a German train and starts saying "hey, we've got to convert this revolution into a proletarian one." And all the people around him they're saying like Vladimir Ilyich has been gone since he lost his mind, we really need to you know kind of go along with it and they censored his writings. I know, I know. But what is here so interesting for me is that nonetheless, to put it in the spirit of this assemblage theory, then you have the, sorry for using this old Marxist cliché, the bourgeois reading is that we can see here how October Revolution was just a Lenin's coup d'état. No, it's not as simple as that. If you read a good history of October Revolution you can see that what saved Lenin was not just how he in a good sense through his personal force terrorized finally members. There was a popular support for him. You know, very limited in big cities, there was some, otherwise you don't do it, there was some popular support. Many people in factories and so on. They wanted more. They wanted more. But your point stands, but it's a very complicated... I know, absolutely. But I want to say this that, do we agree at this that no revolution, not even Cuban, whatever you want, Chinese, followed this model "finally the majority took arms" and so on and so on. Can you give me one example? Ah sure, March You mean February? Right, February Revolution in Russia. Even there, you know what do you mean people? Who were these people? It was basically... Well it was an assemblage, but a striking, a striking contrast to the October event. Yeah, but I'm still for October. I am... sorry? I'm still for October. I think that... No, I just want to throw this in because it's important I think in the evolution of the Bolshevik discourse about this event of October 25th, right? The term that would was always used even to my day which is the 80s is perevorot. What? Oktyabrsky perevorot. October turnover. I'm just translating it directly. They wouldn't call it a revolution themselves. So this is the Bolshevik discourse itself acknowledged that the October events were not revolyutsiya, they were not revolution. No no, okay I see your point but let's... and it we had to... I mean they had to wait until to... years to call it "Velikaya Oktyabrskaya revolyutsiya." But that's so nice because at it was basically over, it was Stalinism. Right. So I'm just saying... no no... so give me one example and the example... Yeah but even there you know, I would even complicate that example because okay the majority was against the Tsar but what did they want positively? It gets blurred, everything. Okay I'll stop at that. Okay. Okay, no but what I wanted to say is that if you look at all revolutions, there is a minority... and don't misunderstand me, I'm not opposed to it, I'm still for it. But let's be clear what is happening. A minority seizes the opportunity. For example, look at allegedly authentic from my country, Yugoslav revolution. Partisans used German occupation as an excuse to do communist revolution. And now what we are learning now, it's very dark. It's that they went even too far. This is maybe the darkest moment of partisan struggle in Yugoslavia. You know that in late '42, early '43, when Allies got all Africa, they were preparing a landing in the south of Europe. And for some time they oscillated between Sicily, Italy... for some time they preferred to do it in the Istrian peninsula, that is to say to go directly through the Adriatic Sea and to hit in the north of the Adriatic Sea in what is today Croatia and Slovenia and to cut through there directly to Austria. You know what happened at that point? It's now officially admitted even by historians who are fully sympathetic to communist cause. Tito immediately sent messengers to Ustasha and to German army: let's be ready if Allies invade there, Americans, English, Istria, together with German army we throw them out. It was so clear that for him this mattered. For him the whole point was who will get power afterwards. So I am just trying to say this that we should not mystify or take the example of for example you remember those in Cairo, what is there the big square, no, Tahrir is in Cairo, is in Cairo, sorry, in Istanbul, Gezi Square or what? Gezi. Yeah we were so, some were so enthusiastic. Yes but it was always a minority. It was always a minority. Now I am not saying the majority has right. No, I am in the site of minority. But I think we should have no illusions about how assemblage in a political situation like this works. You always in a way which is a little bit cheating, but it's justified, the name of this cheating is politics, you use it, you use this universal pretext, struggle for liberation and so on, to take power. Which
But don't again, don't forget the past where okay, but I will nonetheless, don't be afraid. This is not another excuse because I already caught myself yesterday in secretly, not even subconsciously, but consciously, half-consciously, playing the game of fuck you, you will never get me to talk about assemblage, you know, and find something to postpone. So, no, I will. I will, today we do it. I just warn you, as I already did it, that it may be a little bit more boring. So enough, enough of all this. Now I go to assemblage. I will just recapitulate yesterday's result because what you got in the last minutes was a more confused improvisation, I admit it, about how what is missing for me in the notion of assemblage is the dimension of antagonism. You just get this Deleuzian-Spinozean, for me happy plurality of heterogeneous elements combining, territorializing, deterritorializing themselves. No antagonism. I think one way to show the traces of this antagonism is to, I would like to quote you a nice remark on the 1960s. 1960s, you remember as the time of sexual revolution and so on, from Graham Harman's book Immaterialism. Harman says, I quote, "You have to remember," no, he quotes another guy, a journalist, who said writing about the 1960s, the spirit of sexual revolution and so on, "You have to remember that the 1960s really happened in the 1970s." What does he mean by this? Harman's comment, here it is: "An object somehow exists even more in the state following its initial heyday. The marijuana smoking, free love, and internal violence of the dramatic American 60s were in some ways better exemplified by the campy and tasteless 1970s," and so on. So the idea is, again, what we identify 60s with, it really fully developed in the 1970s. I oppose this reading because again, something disappears. What? Antagonism. Namely, if one takes a closer look, and I am unfortunately old enough that I remember it personally, at the passage from 1960s to 1970s, one can easily see the key difference. In 1960s, the spirit of permissiveness, sexual liberation, counter-culture, and drugs was part of a utopian political protest movement. And what happened in the 1970s was that this spirit remains but in its vulgarized version: orgy, drugs, sexual liberation, but precisely, again, deprived of its political content. And as such, fully integrated into official ideology. Now I am not saying that in a way this was not good in some sense. We should nonetheless, with all the criticism of the limitation of sexual liberation of the 60s and so on, we should nonetheless remember that the spirit of the 60s did leave some important traces in our popular culture. Like at least officially till now, now with Trump the horror is back up to a point, like it was simply not possible to talk in a certain way about women, about homosexuals, about other races and so on. You know, you can, I remember still in the early 60s when I was very young, it was simply possible publicly to make absolutely today publicly dirty jokes about gay people and so on and so on. So certain standards emerged. But nonetheless, again, it was depoliticized. And this is for me ideological movement at its closest. We tend to forget, for example in France, that 1960s, May '68, was not just sexual liberation and so on, it was a great political movement. I remember, I saw it on TV, I was watching it live in France, thousands of students joining workers, I think in front of the Renault car factory doing it and so on. Okay, we may say they didn't have a chance, but it definitely was a great socio-political movement. And again, the way to the integration was that this socio-economic background, social antagonism echoing it, simply disappeared. And something the same, of the same, I think helps for Renaissance. If you ask a person today, half-educated as I am, Renaissance, give me an association. It would be all those princely states, Florence, all the big families, big names and so on. But read a good history of Renaissance and you will learn that exactly, in exact parallel with 1960s and 1970s, the thing truly happened already in the 14th century and maybe early 15th. There, that was the true moment of Florence, with local democracy, much more lower class and so on. And that political moment then disappeared with the passage to all those Sforzas, whatever, all those big prince families, prince states and so on and so forth. Which again totally obliterated this socio-economic dimension where it was really class struggle. Local artisans, workers tried to take over in some cities and so on and so on. So what I like is that you see the dialectics, very simple one that I try to describe. It's not simply that first something happens and then it gets deeper and deeper and deeper. No, the first time it happens, it's much closer to the truth: a political-economic struggle, antagonisms and so on. And then the way things develop, the thing, the tendency appears to triumph but the price is paid by the loss of this radical political dimension. So this much as an introduction, just a remark. Now I want to go on returning to this notion of assemblage because confused as I was yesterday I simplified the notion very much. I would like to begin with, again, with Bruno Latour, his notion of what he calls Dingpolitik. Ding, the thing in German, politik, politics. So what he calls politics of things. His idea is that today what we should learn, why assemblage theory is so useful for our political struggles, is that it's not just struggles are today not just struggles which turn around values, beliefs and so on. They are struggles through and about things. How we deal with things, with new technological inventions and so on. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms, pathogens, new infrastructure, new reproductive technology and so on. This is creating a new world beyond just political institutions, political interests or ideologies. This politics, he, Latour, even calls it ontological politics, recognizes not only that what we usually call politics, ideological politics, we fight for different visions which should orient state politics, should always be viewed, and this is almost a direct even a little bit simplified Marxist view, that ideology should be always linked to concrete material practices. Not just in the sense of Louis Althusser, that ideology only exists in material state ideological apparatuses, but also in the sense that the real base of, for example, can you even imagine the entire abortion debate and so on without all these tremendous inventions, contraception pills, new developments in medicine and so on? That it's always a struggle about very material processes. So this for this reason we, when we analyze the state for example, that's Latour's big point, we should not conceive state as a unified actor, but it should be approached as an assemblage which makes heterogeneous points of order resonate together: geographic order, ethnic, linguistic, economic, technological, legal and so on and so on. So that this is the idea of assemblage, state as an assemblage. State usually in our countries provides education. It's not necessary. For example, in medieval times in Europe it was the Church. State organizes health service. As far as I know, again in medieval times usually you have for the rich people those big doctors traveling, okay doctors, medical guys, and for the ordinary people in a poor village, I don't know, some local old lady who was either a good doctor or the other choice for her was to be burned as a witch or something like that. So what I am saying is that we should see how many different phenomena and material practices, education, which for example again till modern times education was a family matter, only at a certain point education became the affair of first Church, then family and so on. So the lesson of Latour here is that state comprises a series of heterogeneous phenomena which could have been assembled also in a different way. It's not a natural way to assemble them like that. Again, my next example which I already mentioned yesterday I think, in the domain of politics look at Trump, the elements that consist, that are assembled in Trump ideology. You can easily imagine for example what Trump advocates, lower taxes for the rich. This measure is usually advocated on purely economic grounds with all those, that pseudo-scientific bluffing, you know, that Laffer curve or whatever, which is pure imagination. You know, the idea being that if the taxes are too high, the state gets low income because it destimulates production. Then if taxes are again too low, of course you also get little money because taxes are too low. So that the art is, this is a standard neoliberal argument, the art is to find the right level of taxes so that you get maximum amount. But this is, as it was proven, a total pseudo-argument, it's a total imaginary, totally imaginary mathematics because of course the point is then always that we, the state, doesn't get enough money because taxes are too high, that if we lower the taxes this will give an impulse to production and so on and even the state will get more money and so on. What I want to say is that in its traditional form this argument against high taxes is not linked in any way with Christian fundamentalism or with populism. This is something specifically Trumpist to establish this link. Another assemblage problem is for me something that is very dear to old leftists. Like here I have usually a conflict with my good friend the Israeli-Palestinian movie maker Udi Aloni who always claims the struggle against Islamophobia and the struggle for women's rights are one and the same struggle. My cynical answer is yes, it sounds nice but what if they are not the same struggle? For example, it's a fact that today's feminism, not all of course but a strong part for example of American official feminism, as we know they even supported invasion of Iraq. It will bring freedom to Iraqi women. Okay, we know today if anything it was the exact opposite. My god, horrible as he was, no sympathy for Saddam Hussein, but under his regime the position of women in Iraq was much better than now. Because he was at that point a secular autocrat who supported a certain public role for women, public education and so on, I mean education for women and so on. So what I'm saying is that quite often you have, you use struggle for women's rights as an instrument of Islamophobia. And not to mention the other way around, Islamist politics dismissing women's rights as a tool of Western imperialism to ruin traditional non-European societies. It's incredible, it's very sad to watch, to what extent... I quote this somewhere I think or mentioned it already to you, I met in London two years ago somebody who didn't want to admit it but was close to Boko Haram. And he told me that he is fundamentally anti-capitalist, but that the way to fight global capitalism is to fight the concrete effects of neo-global ideology in his country. And he claimed in his country, Northern Nigeria, Mali, that central part of Africa, the main effect of globalist neo-colonial ideology is ruining the local indigenous family and so on structures through the ideology of women's rights. So he claimed for us fighting against women's rights, it's our version of anti-colonial struggle. Now it's easy to say you are wrong, but what would you have done there? What I'm trying to say here is simply that it's easy to pose and we should stick to it of course, it's easy to posit as a goal this struggle and that struggle should become one and the same struggle. But the big struggle is to bring these two struggles together. It's an assemblage in this sense. Now let me go on and do a little bit of self-criticism of what I said yesterday. You remember when I compared assemblage, when I compared assemblage to the, to Laclau's theory of, and Mouffe, they collaborated here, to the, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe theory of hegemony. And I claim that Laclau has a similar idea that an ideological field is constructed through a specific articulation where a series of relatively independent of each other elements are put together into what Laclau calls a chain of equivalences. For example, in a classical Marxist socialist vision: the struggle of women, the struggle for ecology, anti-racist struggle are all put into the same series with anti-capitalist struggle. In the sense, you know, to put it in very simplistic terms, like the standard Marxist explanation would have been: ecology is, sorry, our environment is exploited in capitalist conditions because capitalism ultimately only cares about profit and so on and so on. Or that women are exploited or in the subordinate position in capitalist patriarchy and then they try to explain why in what sense capitalism needs patriarchy. Or racism, again the same logic. Of course, any intelligent Marxist would reject the idea that, but the criticism of Marxism is justified here, any intelligent Marxist would reject the idea that this means just that we as Marxist revolutionaries should tell for example to women or to other races, wait a little bit, let's focus on the big central struggle and, as it were, feminine liberation or a different attitude towards nature or the end of racism will come by itself as a side product, byproduct of basic anti-capitalist struggle. Of course, we should reject this but nonetheless in some sense all these other struggles are put under hegemony of anti-capitalist struggle. Okay, I will not go here into what Ernesto, how Ernesto at the end rejects this hegemonic role of anti-capitalist struggle. For him, all struggles are ultimately not equal but on the same level in the sense that none of the struggle has, if I may put it like this, the natural right to play the hegemonic role. In a certain constellation it can be political struggle for democracy, in another constellation it can be ecological struggle, in a third constellation it can be anti-racist struggle, whatever. The point is how these struggles are enchained into a series of equivalences. By series of equivalences I mean what I just exemplified to you through my example of classical Marxist anti-capitalism, where I can tell you but struggle for women, for women's rights, struggle for nature, struggle for, against racism, they are all part and have their full meaning only as subsumed under anti-capitalist struggle. This would have been the classical Marxist chain of equivalences. Ernesto would have said no, the field is totally open. There is no, when he, Ernesto, criticizes class essentialism, his idea is precisely that we cannot a priori assume there is no, how should I put it, natural or deeper tendency to privilege one struggle. It's a contingent process of unification of assemblage of struggles where we can decide which struggle will play the hegemonic role. And Marxists here, good Marxists were honest and very open, for example third world Marxists, intelligent ones, were very clear that, especially Fanon and others who reflected on how West European Communist parties in the 50s reacted to anti-colonial struggles. Many of them reflected on it in a racist way. For example, did you know that till almost, the official politics of the French Communist party was no, French colonization of Algiers, because it was focused on Algiers because there was anti-colonial war in Algiers, is basically a progressive thing. If we give independence to Algiers it would just mean that the conservative structure there will take over, so we should offer Algerians equality but within French democratic dominance and so on. They were against decolonization. Only later in the 60s. And the traces of this patriotic, falsely patriotic, bourgeois patriotic French Communist attitude lasted till, till, well as long as the Communist party lasted. Now it's extremely marginal and so on. It's so interesting to, I remember it, how when the first problems with immigrants developed some years ago, it was quite scandalous to discover that the harshest, the proto-Le Pen figures, the harshest were some local authorities, you know, all that at that point it existed, Red Belt, Saint-Denis and so on around Paris, small suburban towns where often Communists were running the towns with a large majority. They were the first ones to cut electricity and water to immigrants and so on and so forth because they played French patriotism and so on and so forth. So back to this point, for example, I totally agree with Fanon who said that to be, to really fight the class struggle means that in certain concrete constellation you should privilege national liberation struggle over class struggle. This is the fine dialectical point that radical struggle means that you have class struggle means that you should also know in what constellation you should neglect strategically class struggle. It's the same today in the United States with Black Lives Matter. Many white liberals escape into an easy option and claim: why only black, sorry, why only black lives matter? Shouldn't all lives matter? No, this universalization is already false, because in concrete American situation now the social injustice of authorities, killing people and so on, is exemplified in how they treat black protesters. So the moment you want to universalize the position and say no we should care about all, you already play the game of those in power. And you know, my god, a movie should be written about it, or a tragicomic episode. Did you listen to what happened now a couple of weeks ago in United States, that there was some conflict between white policemen and black demonstrators, and that a black policeman who was their colleague, ran there, he was in his civil clothes there by chance on a private business, he saw what's going on and out of pure professional solidarity he ran to that post to help his white policemen colleagues, and they shot him, mistaking him for a black threat and so on? It's brutal irony. But again, so what I'm saying is that okay, I agree, where is my problem and what was my... I'm now in this Stalinist self-critical mood... what was my... I just praised yesterday Laclau because of how he has also assemblage in the sense of putting different elements together, but he has assemblage together with antagonism. Assemblage is for him always a moment of constructing an *us*, but us against *them*. It's always the big conflict and whom will be enchained... and this is a big problem. For example, one of the lowest moments of European working class movement, even the left is not totally innocent in it, is that in certain constellations they risk the game of playing with antisemitism. They claimed but nonetheless there is a working class element in antisemitism, okay they focus on Jews not generally on the capitalists, but nonetheless popular antisemitism is an element of popular protest against the rich and so on, so why not use it? No wonder that Ernesto remained a Peronist to the end, because that's nonetheless, I never got this sympathy of many people in Argentina for Peronism. They did some good things, some incredible things. For example, we can make fun of Evita Perón, but I found this so tremendously ingenious and as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, she was the first one to do it, I think already when before her death '50, '51. You know that Argentina was, as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, the first country in the world which gave all employed women two days every month for their period of three days... Hollywood. Why did I say Hollywood? Don't ask me. What I want to say is that I find this a wonderful simple measure she thought, and many other things. But basically, basically Peronism was a soft fascist movement for me, because the basic vision is unity of capital and work and some external intruders, capitalists, communists, whoever, are trying to undermine this solidarity. So let's forget this, I hope you noticed it, I was mad at myself that I didn't get it yesterday. What's the big difference nonetheless where I am on the side of Latour and so on? Laclau's chain of equivalences remains strictly at the level of ideology. Ideology in the sense of mental construct and practices and so on. When he speaks about chain of equivalences, of assembling elements, it's simply ideological elements. It's for example ecologism as an ideological trend, sorry, it's women's rights but as an ideological trend and so on and so forth. What is missing in Ernesto, okay he would have said "but I mean it," well fuck you I don't care what you mean but what you say. What is missing is precisely what Bruno Latour mentions as Dingpolitik, the politics of things. That's what I find extremely productive in assemblage theory. This mixing all of it together. You know, true assemblage it's not just politics and, sorry, it's not just like I don't know economic struggle, democratic struggle, whatever. This is still ideology. These are ideological conflicts. You have to put into assemblage also for example material practices of assemblage, of assembling. Judith Butler recently, I have problems with that book although it's a nice problem, this is more in the spirit of assemblage, wrote a book where assemblage is in the title I think, no? Yes, assemblage. Yeah, but what she means, that's my problem. I will tell you and we can debate it if you agree with me. She doesn't mean assemblage in the terms of assemblage theory. She means assemblage in the literal sense of, and she is in a way right, the last years demonstrated again how assemblage in the simple sense of large groups of people assembling in some public space and occupying it and so on, how this proves an important political strategy. My only problem is the usual one that I mentioned here on the first day I think: yes it's important as the first step, but what interests me is what happens when people are no longer assembling in public places, you know, like what remains of it? But I agree here with Judith when she speaks about, at this level when she speaks about assemblage, she means a very material political practice. Okay, you can say this is still ideological practice, practice of protest. But nonetheless, she means a very material process of hundreds of thousand even more people assembling with a certain demand, you know, all that stuff of "we are here, we will not leave till we get..." And here, I don't have time to go into it, what would have interested me here tremendously is the notion of majority at work here. Let me, let me formulate to you some of my deep pessimism. Are we aware that, now I'm ready to go to the end, crazy, when we are speaking about these popular upheavals, popular presence, were they ever really a majority? I claim practically never. Take French Revolution. Fuck it, it was basically people in Paris, maybe not even there majority. Take October Revolution. Are you crazy? It was Bolsheviks in a, I think it was still authentic revolution, Bolsheviks calculating on how to use political public discontent which was very clearly articulated in their big slogan "Land and Peace." Even the Central Committee was against it on 25th of October. Lenin had to walk out. Kamenev and Zinoviev published a protest letter the same night, in Gorky's newspaper, which came back against them as you know in I know. And even more, even more, the greatest genius of 20th century, I mean it ironically, Stalin disappeared for those couple of days. This was the big secret of Stalin. He was nowhere there. Do you know that? Well he was an editor of Pravda. Yeah, but he was very hard to find. Well I don't know, well I'll have to look into it. Yeah, he was never... no no... but your point stands that you can't even... it's even more radical than what you say... it's not even possible to speak about a majority within the Central Committee at the most. Yeah, it's her, there is virtual... it's really one of those throws of the dice where Lenin throws his fit essentially as he did throughout this saying you're either going into it or not. Kamenev also, you must know it, you maybe know it better than me, my favorite example: you know even Nadezhda Krupskaya, his wife, wrote I think to Kamenev, it looks that Vladimir Ilyich will look psychiatric help, that he is getting crazy. She's been saying that since May of when he comes back from Switzerland in a German train and starts saying "hey, we've got to convert this revolution into a proletarian one." And all the people around him they're saying like Vladimir Ilyich has been gone since he lost his mind, we really need to you know kind of go along with it and they censored his writings. I know, I know. But what is here so interesting for me is that nonetheless, to put it in the spirit of this assemblage theory, then you have the, sorry for using this old Marxist cliché, the bourgeois reading is that we can see here how October Revolution was just a Lenin's coup d'état. No, it's not as simple as that. If you read a good history of October Revolution you can see that what saved Lenin was not just how he in a good sense through his personal force terrorized finally members. There was a popular support for him. You know, very limited in big cities, there was some, otherwise you don't do it, there was some popular support. Many people in factories and so on. They wanted more. They wanted more. But your point stands, but it's a very complicated... I know, absolutely. But I want to say this that, do we agree at this that no revolution, not even Cuban, whatever you want, Chinese, followed this model "finally the majority took arms" and so on and so on. Can you give me one example? Ah sure, March You mean February? Right, February Revolution in Russia. Even there, you know what do you mean people? Who were these people? It was basically... Well it was an assemblage, but a striking, a striking contrast to the October event. Yeah, but I'm still for October. I am... sorry? I'm still for October. I think that... No, I just want to throw this in because it's important I think in the evolution of the Bolshevik discourse about this event of October 25th, right? The term that would was always used even to my day which is the 80s is perevorot. What? Oktyabrsky perevorot. October turnover. I'm just translating it directly. They wouldn't call it a revolution themselves. So this is the Bolshevik discourse itself acknowledged that the October events were not revolyutsiya, they were not revolution. No no, okay I see your point but let's... and it we had to... I mean they had to wait until to... years to call it "Velikaya Oktyabrskaya revolyutsiya." But that's so nice because at it was basically over, it was Stalinism. Right. So I'm just saying... no no... so give me one example and the example... Yeah but even there you know, I would even complicate that example because okay the majority was against the Tsar but what did they want positively? It gets blurred, everything. Okay I'll stop at that. Okay. Okay, no but what I wanted to say is that if you look at all revolutions, there is a minority... and don't misunderstand me, I'm not opposed to it, I'm still for it. But let's be clear what is happening. A minority seizes the opportunity. For example, look at allegedly authentic from my country, Yugoslav revolution. Partisans used German occupation as an excuse to do communist revolution. And now what we are learning now, it's very dark. It's that they went even too far. This is maybe the darkest moment of partisan struggle in Yugoslavia. You know that in late '42, early '43, when Allies got all Africa, they were preparing a landing in the south of Europe. And for some time they oscillated between Sicily, Italy... for some time they preferred to do it in the Istrian peninsula, that is to say to go directly through the Adriatic Sea and to hit in the north of the Adriatic Sea in what is today Croatia and Slovenia and to cut through there directly to Austria. You know what happened at that point? It's now officially admitted even by historians who are fully sympathetic to communist cause. Tito immediately sent messengers to Ustasha and to German army: let's be ready if Allies invade there, Americans, English, Istria, together with German army we throw them out. It was so clear that for him this mattered. For him the whole point was who will get power afterwards. So I am just trying to say this that we should not mystify or take the example of for example you remember those in Cairo, what is there the big square, no, Tahrir is in Cairo, is in Cairo, sorry, in Istanbul, Gezi Square or what? Gezi. Yeah we were so, some were so enthusiastic. Yes but it was always a minority. It was always a minority. Now I am not saying the majority has right. No, I am in the site of minority. But I think we should have no illusions about how assemblage in a political situation like this works. You always in a way which is a little bit cheating, but it's justified, the name of this cheating is politics, you use it, you use this universal pretext, struggle for liberation and so on, to take power. Which
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is why communists they were very intelligent here. I read memoirs of some old communists. I report this in one
is why communists they were very intelligent here. I read memoirs of some old communists. I report this in one
Slavoj Žižek
of my books. I spoke, no red, sorry, I spoke with him and I asked him: if in '46 there were to be in ex-Yugoslavia immediately after World War II really free elections, who would have won? I told him, you would have won, you were still genuinely
of my books. I spoke, no red, sorry, I spoke with him and I asked him: if in '46 there were to be in ex-Yugoslavia immediately after World War II really free elections, who would have won? I told him, you would have won, you were still genuinely
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popular. Why didn't you allow free elections? You know what he told me? Yes, we would have won, but then people would get used to this election. What about next elections? Like they were absolutely aware that in the long term
popular. Why didn't you allow free elections? You know what he told me? Yes, we would have won, but then people would get used to this election. What about next elections? Like they were absolutely aware that in the long term
Slavoj Žižek
they would
they would
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have lost. But okay, let's drop it. This, all I am saying is that even when we are talking about political assemblage in the sense of bringing
have lost. But okay, let's drop it. This, all I am saying is that even when we are talking about political assemblage in the sense of bringing
Slavoj Žižek
them all together and so on, it's always a question of a limited minority getting the initiative, seizing the moment. Which is why, and I am so sorry... okay I will give you another example here. I will not have time, not even an example, just send you to one text of mine. If you again go to that Los Angeles
them all together and so on, it's always a question of a limited minority getting the initiative, seizing the moment. Which is why, and I am so sorry... okay I will give you another example here. I will not have time, not even an example, just send you to one text of mine. If you again go to that Los Angeles
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Review of Books about a month and a half ago, I published there a text "Lenin Navigating." Okay go to Google, put my name, LARB, Lenin Navigating and you will get it. Where I found something so incredibly almost tragicomic again. When in
Review of Books about a month and a half ago, I published there a text "Lenin Navigating." Okay go to Google, put my name, LARB, Lenin Navigating and you will get it. Where I found something so incredibly almost tragicomic again. When in
Slavoj Žižek
his most radical work, when
his most radical work, when
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he was dreaming, Lenin, about this direct
he was dreaming, Lenin, about this direct
Slavoj Žižek
democracy,
democracy,
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"every cook can run a state."
"every cook can run a state."
Slavoj Žižek
And it's very interesting, I read some good analysis what term Lenin uses there. It's not a cook... It's for a woman. Yeah, the woman who helps there in the kitchen, yeah yeah, that specific term. Okay, but you know what is so interesting? Again, I will not bore you with it now, look at my text, well, he says, he almost becomes, I say this without any irony, a Habermasian Lenin. He says what will happen then after the revolution is that, I'm quoting Lenin, "normal rules of decent polite communication which are now distorted by class relations
And it's very interesting, I read some good analysis what term Lenin uses there. It's not a cook... It's for a woman. Yeah, the woman who helps there in the kitchen, yeah yeah, that specific term. Okay, but you know what is so interesting? Again, I will not bore you with it now, look at my text, well, he says, he almost becomes, I say this without any irony, a Habermasian Lenin. He says what will happen then after the revolution is that, I'm quoting Lenin, "normal rules of decent polite communication which are now distorted by class relations
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will
will
Slavoj Žižek
be asserted and will regulate society." So he literally refers to some... he even says, Lenin, "it's part of human nature to talk freely, openly, democratically, argumentation, argument, and that this will, we will get the pure
be asserted and will regulate society." So he literally refers to some... he even says, Lenin, "it's part of human nature to talk freely, openly, democratically, argumentation, argument, and that this will, we will get the pure
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structure of communication,"
structure of communication,"
Slavoj Žižek
what Habermas would have called undistorted *Zwanglose* communication. So
what Habermas would have called undistorted *Zwanglose* communication. So
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okay,
okay,
Slavoj Žižek
let's drop this,
let's drop this,
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let's stop this. I hope you got my point. My point is that where I am critical of Laclau and some people even criticized me and maybe up to a point they are right, their argument is this one: that societies run at two levels. On the one hand, societies function through ideological struggles. We fight struggles for which story will predominate, interpretation and so on and so on. But at the same time it's what Bruno Latour calls Dingpolitik, politics of things. Not just in the brutal sense of how production is going, but also all the technological invention, or even daily matters. How we deal with each other, in sexuality, at the level of friendship and so on, which are always grounded in ideology but has a dynamics of its own. For example, how did lately all these technological inventions of
let's stop this. I hope you got my point. My point is that where I am critical of Laclau and some people even criticized me and maybe up to a point they are right, their argument is this one: that societies run at two levels. On the one hand, societies function through ideological struggles. We fight struggles for which story will predominate, interpretation and so on and so on. But at the same time it's what Bruno Latour calls Dingpolitik, politics of things. Not just in the brutal sense of how production is going, but also all the technological invention, or even daily matters. How we deal with each other, in sexuality, at the level of friendship and so on, which are always grounded in ideology but has a dynamics of its own. For example, how did lately all these technological inventions of
Slavoj Žižek
first a long play records, then CDs and so on, how did this change our entire perception
first a long play records, then CDs and so on, how did this change our entire perception
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and practice of listening to classical
and practice of listening to classical
Slavoj Žižek
music? It functioned till years ago in a totally different way and so on. So again, this is I think what Latour means with politics of things. All the impact of technological inventions and so on. And even, speak about the latest of them, I checked today I think on Guardian this morning, they... ah you are also thinking about dirty things, no? That those how do you call them my god the the sex robots. You know there is now a big debate that if you allow sex robots, some people claim that this will help brutal people who like to torture partners and so on, like they can do it now on a doll, you know. Other people claim this is a scandal and so on, you know. I would, I agree with critics, but on the top of it, again this is an example of politics of things. Okay you can get better and better sex robots with total plasticity and so on. But how will this affect our inter-human relations? I am here not simply a pessimist but my position is more mixed here. What worries me is that we will not have here are interpersonal relations and there are you do it with some plastic partner, or even better more in a Sadean way, not even a whole partner. You know you can buy the mouth, a vagina, an asshole, whatever and you combine them and so on. How will this affect our sexual practice? The problem I see is that again that the ideology... first this technical replacement, that is to say plastic artificial props instead of another human body, is not something that concerns only technology. It's a certain universal stance where instead of a partner you get what Lacan calls partial objects, and you enjoy through them. I claim that the true danger is that we will even begin, and we already do it, to treat real partners if we still use them in this way. For example, that's what is happening with Marquis de Sade. Here he was a prophet. It's clear that for him all those sex objects, men, women, tortured and so on, are not... it's a question to what extent they are even treated as persons or it's only a collection of partial objects. Now the solution to this enigma is not a simple one, because I claim that at some level there are persons. Why? Because remember always as Lacan emphasizes, the point of sexual sadism is never simply to reduce your partner to an object and torture him, but by reducing it to an object to provoke shame in him or her or it, to humiliate him. There is no sadistic pleasure without this awareness of "look how totally humiliated he or she or it is." So this is why Lacan says in a nice way that in so far as this reaction "he is treating me as an object, I'm totally humiliated," in so far as this is a typical subjective reaction, Lacan's point is that the sadist constitutes his victim as a subject. Of course, not a subject in this fashionable sense today, an agent who controls its fate, but on the contrary, a subject in this sense of radical self-division. "Am I there? How is it possible?" You simply cannot accept what is happening to you. So again, at this level I think we should operate with the unity of Dingpolitik, politics of things and ideological politics. And the question we should ask, for example, apropos all this sexual object, sorry, plastic sexual robotic whatever we call them sexual objects, what do they mean? How will they be subjectivized? Again, my thesis is that it cannot, you cannot say "oh you can have a real relation with another full-blown person and then if you want just a partial satisfaction you do it with a plastic thing" and so on and so on. No, it doesn't work in this way because the moment again you shift to plastic thing and the whole notion of subjectivity changes. And it's so interesting and here you can see the deep truth of Lacan's statement that Kant was a sadist. Do you know that this idea of reducing your sexual partner to a partial object to be exploited is explicitly found already in Kant? You would be surprised. His definition of marriage? Sorry? His definition of marriage. And there on the next page, you know. Yes. First is his definition. You know how Kant is beautiful. Don't tell me that philosophers are stupid and naive. You know how Kant defines marriage? "A mutual contract between two adult persons for the mutual exclusive use of their each other's sexual organs for pleasure." So it's none of this deep spiritual union. Like you have a piece in your body that I need, I have a piece that you need, let's cut the crap, that's it. We made a contract. And but then you will say this is a joke. This is in *Metaphysics of Morals*, *Metaphysik der Sitten*. Part one, marriage. But then go to the next page and there you find why Kant is great. When Kant asks a crazy question, which is: so if a husband runs away from his wife... it's incidentally a little bit male chauvinist that he uses this example, but I think the opposite example would maybe also work. Kant asks: does the wife have the right to call police to bring her husband back? And Kant says yes. But you know why? Not because of the moral unity. He says because the husband ran away with a piece of property, his penis, which according to the contract was her co-property. You know? It's purely in legal terms. Like sorry for the... I am married to you, I run away, you send police "no that I want you as a person but sorry guy, you ran away with a part of my property," you know. Here you have again it's, we can go further. But okay, let's stop it. You got my point. I am for Latour and all those guys against this all too ideological politics, which or again at the level of digitalization. What does this mean? This politics of things. I think I already maybe even improvised about this here. Think about digitalization and forget about all those scare stories control. Just think about this, I'm here referring to a cheap bestselling book. It's Yuval Harari, *Homo Deus*. It's very naive but at a certain point he makes a good point, which is this one: with the control that we already have today, if you allow yourself to be digitally controlled, everything is tracked, your health record, your opinions, blah blah, on average a computer can make a better decision than you on what you should do. Not in the sense, not on behalf of some higher social Stalinist knowledge, but precisely following your own interests. For example, already today, or they are not yet developed, if you allow a computerized machine to measure, take your blood, blah blah, and make a diagnosis, nobody is saying that computers are perfect. They are just saying that and they are right that on average the diagnosis of a computer will be definitely much better than an average diagnosis of a real human doctor. The same point, and I love this experiment, marriage. I read that some they made an experiment in United States where they convinced couples who were confronting the prospect of marriage to be totally digital, controlled computer recorded their messages and whatever and then they didn't tell them, that was the deal, but the computer made a judgment "should they marry or not." The computer was right. For example, the couple decided to marry, the computer discreetly, they didn't let the couple know, make a judgment "no they will divorce in one to two years," the computer was practically always right. They even made a political experiment. They, some people allowed so that their opinions were registered and so on and then when voting came they voted. But it can be easily proven that the actual votes of individuals were so influenced by some last minute spinning and so on that if you allow the computer to cast a vote for you, the vote would have been much better not with regard to some objective social interest, but with regard to your own long-term interests of which you were usually even aware and so on. So we do have a problem here. Literally. And it's not some prophetic vision whatever. Because the idea of liberal democracy is nobody can know about us better than we ourselves. We need machines blah blah, but ultimately you yourself are the one who looks deep into your heart and decides what's best for you. No. Empirically computers can do it. Now comes, I will stop this line so that I don't get lost, a nice I claim it's a nice Lacanian point here. Because the idea is this one: but we are losing in this way our freedom, our spontaneity, will we become puppets of the machines and so on and so on? No, I think... I would have to go too much into theory here but just to give you a hint. I think that you know when we interact with each other, as Lacan would have put it, we always interact against the background of what Lacan calls the Big Other. This purely virtual non-existing in the sense that it doesn't really exist out there. It's just a pure normative symbolic structure. That's the Big Other which is again purely virtual. It doesn't exist but it structures our opinions, it overdetermines our acts and so on and so on. So I claim that what happens with digitalization is that, I already mentioned to you remember about Pokémon, how in Pokémon the implicit ideological structure which, for example, makes me if I am a racist, I meet an Arab, I see in him a potential terrorized, terrorist, raping women, whatever. But what happens with digitalization and with Pokémon in a way is that this structure which was implicit non-substantial becomes a real object in the world. It's no longer the Big Other, it's a machine really existing out there. So that I claim that would be my paradox. We would not, what is threatened by radical digitalization is not the freedom of our self. The freedom of our self is more or less an illusion and this illusion is kept in place. Like did I use it here? I think I did it because I used it so many times anyway... my favorite example, I think did I in last two days that example of a rat which is remote controlled? I think I did. Did I? No? No. Okay, but you all know it. I will be very brief. You know that my friends, I have evil friends who send this to me, showed to me how you can already do this. You take a rat, you can connect the nerves which give signals to its limbs to a computerized machine and it's wonderful. The rat changes into a remote controlled car. That is to say the rat is running around. Wouldn't you like Maria, did... such a nice I would like to, do you have a favorite pet animal? Cat? And then I will control that cat. Better not to think what she will do to me. Okay let's go on. What I want to say is that the horror is this one: you press a button and then you can steer the rat it... Okay now I like my friends because they are evil. What do I mean by this? They went a step further and discreetly they are afraid to go into public, they did the same experiment with a human being. You can do it. It's very primitive because you don't have to control the brain, just the neurons which regulate your movement. It can be done. And of course what interested them is this. Let's say I walk here around and then you let's say you are evil, you press a button and you can steer me, you know. The problem is how will I experience this? Will it be oh my god some foreign power it's no, that's the crazy situation. I would still think that I'm free. I you know what a Greek leftist friend of mine, you will hate me for me told me, "this explains Tsipras," that at certain point Tsipras is controlled by by European banks like this now in Greece. Okay let's drop there, the situation and complex there. But what I want to say is that if it's only the question of this external control, you can always say, because that's our usual defense, like if somebody tells you "but do you know that about your sexual passion or freedom there is nothing really free about it, it's all your neuronal processes," you can still say "I don't care, this is happening simply outside my scope, but in my mind I feel free, passion, whatever, that's it." That's true, that's not threatened. What is threatened is the Big Other. What is threatened is that the agency through which I am controlled is no longer a purely virtual symbolic agency which is nonetheless linked to my subjectivity. In the sense that if I disappear, the Big Other also disappears. What do I mean by this? Let me give you here another example from object oriented ontology. Graham Harman likes to develop this idea that things exist independently of their effects. And I almost like this line of him because it's so counter it runs against our intuition, no? That things are not just their effects. This is incidentally the big opposition between Harman, this hardline object-oriented ontology, and Latour and those action network theory. Action network theorists are more dynamic lateral and so on. Things are their effects. Things exist and are constituted through their performativity. Things are not substantial entities which preexist their activity. Now in an apparently crazy way Harman opts for the opposite conclusion. I quote him: "Things preexist their activity rather than being created by it." Interestingly, his main argument is change. He claims that if things are reducible to their relations, then all their potentials are always already actualized in these relations. So that exactly the fact that things cannot be reduced to their actualized relations with others, that they have potentials which they fail to actualize and so on. This is what opens up the possibility of change because in a change situation they may actualize their relations. I sympathize here with Harman although of course I don't share his substantialism. I think that he constructs a false opposition here. In what sense? I claim that things can be purely relational in the sense of they don't preexist their relations in which they act, but that out of a purely relational entity still can possess a certain autonomy, a certain let's call it like this hidden side. That relations can out of assemblage relations an entity can emerge which has a depth of its own, hidden potentials and so on. I think Harman here builds a wrong opposition. And I will give you an example here. Especially of, and it's strange that Harman does not elaborate this distinction. I think the first thing to do here is of course to distinguish between material objects which in some sense up to a point, there it's also debatable, exist independently of relations. It's not as simple as that. But let's say stupidly if we all leave this room, this chair will hopefully I'm not so sure will remain here. Like in this primitive sense this chair has a certain substantial being. But it's clear that what Hegel calls *geistige*, spiritual formations, they are more radically purely relational. To put it in very simplified terms, think about communism. Or fascism, or liberalism. Communism exists only in so far as there are people fighting for it or against it. If you liquidate, sorry for the sadistic undertone, if you liquidate all people who deal with communism, there will be no communism. But you know what's the point of Hegel? Nonetheless it's the cause. We fight for communism, we fight against communism, we die for communism. And Hegel is here against nominalism. We cannot say communism is just an illusion, in reality we just fight with each other. No, communism again is a purely relational entity. It exists only, that's the Big Other, as a symbolic presupposition of our acts. I fight for communism. Communism doesn't exist. But although it's in this sense purely relational, it effects an actual causality. I really fight for communism. There are virtual non-existing causes. And so the point I want to make is that you remember all those analysis, don't be afraid, I'm not a right-winger, I'm still a communist, but all those analysis, or the same analysis were made also about liberalism, which is the same virtual cause we are fighting for. You know all those analysis like where do the so-called totalitarian potentials of communism come from? I think that nonetheless, although I don't agree with the simplistic versions, that this is a quite legitimate line of questioning. You are it's totally justified to raise the question was there already some kind of a, if not root, an opening for, space for what later exploded as Stalinism already in Marx's vision of communism itself and so on? So you see how an entity which is purely relational can also have a hidden side and so on. This paradox I think that's the mistake of Harman I think maybe you can confirm me or not if you read the thin book Immaterialism. Harman thinks that from the fact that an object has a certain ontological autonomy that it has to be non-relational. I... yes? -But isn't he harnessing that to Meillassoux's collapse of correlationism to do with the arche-fossil which is in this deep ancestral space, you know that book *After Finitude* where he makes the argument that you know it, I'm sure? -Yeah, yeah. -That the fossil in this deep ancestral space before humans, they've been able to measure its radiation in relation to the Big Bang, and on the basis of that there's something that is not a correlative subjectivity even though mathematics and technology is used to measure the radiation, and that's how they produce this. -Yeah, now you raise an extremely complex ontological question. The first thing I would say is that and Meillassoux does deal with this problem, I think he's squeezed it out too easily. The first problem I see is that nonetheless although of course Meillassoux is right, the only way to take science seriously is to accept that it literally talks about for example reality before we humans were there and so on and so on. But nonetheless a hermeneutician would make a point: yes, but nonetheless the way you talk about that reality is always transcendentally predetermined by your horizon of understanding. In this sense it remains ultimately relational. So of course there are arche-traces and so on. But now I will give probably you know it my ultimate answer, it's my favorite case of ideology. You know what I'm referring to, Steven Jay Gould and that wonderful reply to Darwin. I think the guy, British priest, should be given a posthumous medal, ultra-Nobel Prize for theory of ideology. You know, Darwin had a good friend who was, I forgot his name sorry I knew it, who was very sympathetic to him to Darwin. And he was deeply disturbed by Darwin's discovery because he saw it immediately: Darwin is talking about something that should have really happened, like it's not just God created... that the Bible literally cannot be right. The moment you have fossils which you can prove today even much more explicitly through that atomic decay measuring and so on, that they are millions years old. So it cannot be that the world was created... I love my other... was it the same? No it was earlier, one English theologian who said, I love this, that the world was created the year and something, he even added "in the late morning." You know like God had a good English breakfast and then now now we create the world. But what, you know what was this guy's solution? First, what Darwin proves is conclusive. No way he is not wrong. Second, God also cannot be wrong. If it says in the Bible, you know if you take into account all the generations that our universe was created I don't know thousand years ago, that's it. And you must know the conclusion, no? You don't know it, then I... oh my god so nice, you are getting senile like me so I can repeat all jokes, you know... The solution is beautiful is that to dupe us, God directly created fossils. It's like you know when you want to create the illusion of openness in a on stage often, you know how in opera it happens in a big field, there is no field but you paint a perfect image of an open field. In the same sense, sense, we live in a very small world, but God consciously created a fake appearance of openness. He staged reality for us. Now of course this is madness. But it's a madness which is the best definition one of the best definitions I claim of the theory of ideology. Doesn't every ideology do exactly this? Every epoch creates its fossils, in the sense of writes its own pre-history and so on. Now I'm not a subjectivist, I'm not saying there is nothing really before and so on. I'm just saying that like when you want to qualify really what is before you always get in this type of hermeneutic, hermeneutic circle. For example, are these things? Quantum physics is teaching us, I'm too stupid, I don't know if it's true or not, but if we are to take it seriously, that what exists outside our mind are pure relations either you call them string or other terms. And you know that the quantum physics vision is not the that things interact, but that in some form or another we have interaction of forces, waves, and on the opposite things, material objects, are just points where different wave interactions collapse or meet each other. So again it's not things interact, it's that interactions create things. Interact and here I find he was often criticized for this Meillassoux problematic when from his basic insight how through contingency through radical contingency of being you can break out of transcendental circle. From here he all of a sudden jumps into I think a way too quick Cartesian rationalist realism, when he says that only nature as described in mathematical formulas exists in itself. I don't see the reason why. I think he jumps way too quick there. And I think if I may give the same reading of him as Bruno Dostils [unintelligible] gave of me, when interpreting my pics and so on as the effect of my deep psychological uncertainty, I think that maybe this is the reason why Meillassoux, he is an extremely nice bright even a genius and honest person, has such problems in publishing his next work. I admire him. I who publish I publish every shit that I as you know write practically. You know that he has for years over pages of manuscript *L'inexistence divine* (Divine Inexistence). It's his dissertation. Sorry? It's his dissertation. Yeah, big Badiou incidentally. Yeah. And he knows he is well aware how unsure he is. So again Meillassoux is far from simple anti-transcendentalist. He is deeply aware that his type of realism is accessible only through transcendental dimension and so on and so on. But okay I don't want to go too far into it now. So just... but this brings us to another point. I agree with you. Which is okay first I said where I agree with assemblage theory against this purely ideological theories of politics. I mean with all his insistence on on ideological struggle, real fight, for Laclau politics remains politics of ideology. It's a question of recombining ideological elements and so on and so forth. There is no dimension of politics of things. Laclau's answer would probably have been, and here I'm on the side of assemblage theory, Laclau's answer would probably have been that ideological that things are just things. They exist but for them to have any political effect they must be somehow ideologized. You know that things in themselves are not a political fact. While Latour is right in pointing how apropos all these technical inventions and so on, no there is a certain literally politics of things. Not only in the sense that things like all those plastic sexual robots or digital means of communication, not only that they have political effects but that they in themselves already materialize a certain interpersonal politics. Like our digital universe is not simply apolitical. It embodies a set of presuppositions of how we communicate or how we interact and so
music? It functioned till years ago in a totally different way and so on. So again, this is I think what Latour means with politics of things. All the impact of technological inventions and so on. And even, speak about the latest of them, I checked today I think on Guardian this morning, they... ah you are also thinking about dirty things, no? That those how do you call them my god the the sex robots. You know there is now a big debate that if you allow sex robots, some people claim that this will help brutal people who like to torture partners and so on, like they can do it now on a doll, you know. Other people claim this is a scandal and so on, you know. I would, I agree with critics, but on the top of it, again this is an example of politics of things. Okay you can get better and better sex robots with total plasticity and so on. But how will this affect our inter-human relations? I am here not simply a pessimist but my position is more mixed here. What worries me is that we will not have here are interpersonal relations and there are you do it with some plastic partner, or even better more in a Sadean way, not even a whole partner. You know you can buy the mouth, a vagina, an asshole, whatever and you combine them and so on. How will this affect our sexual practice? The problem I see is that again that the ideology... first this technical replacement, that is to say plastic artificial props instead of another human body, is not something that concerns only technology. It's a certain universal stance where instead of a partner you get what Lacan calls partial objects, and you enjoy through them. I claim that the true danger is that we will even begin, and we already do it, to treat real partners if we still use them in this way. For example, that's what is happening with Marquis de Sade. Here he was a prophet. It's clear that for him all those sex objects, men, women, tortured and so on, are not... it's a question to what extent they are even treated as persons or it's only a collection of partial objects. Now the solution to this enigma is not a simple one, because I claim that at some level there are persons. Why? Because remember always as Lacan emphasizes, the point of sexual sadism is never simply to reduce your partner to an object and torture him, but by reducing it to an object to provoke shame in him or her or it, to humiliate him. There is no sadistic pleasure without this awareness of "look how totally humiliated he or she or it is." So this is why Lacan says in a nice way that in so far as this reaction "he is treating me as an object, I'm totally humiliated," in so far as this is a typical subjective reaction, Lacan's point is that the sadist constitutes his victim as a subject. Of course, not a subject in this fashionable sense today, an agent who controls its fate, but on the contrary, a subject in this sense of radical self-division. "Am I there? How is it possible?" You simply cannot accept what is happening to you. So again, at this level I think we should operate with the unity of Dingpolitik, politics of things and ideological politics. And the question we should ask, for example, apropos all this sexual object, sorry, plastic sexual robotic whatever we call them sexual objects, what do they mean? How will they be subjectivized? Again, my thesis is that it cannot, you cannot say "oh you can have a real relation with another full-blown person and then if you want just a partial satisfaction you do it with a plastic thing" and so on and so on. No, it doesn't work in this way because the moment again you shift to plastic thing and the whole notion of subjectivity changes. And it's so interesting and here you can see the deep truth of Lacan's statement that Kant was a sadist. Do you know that this idea of reducing your sexual partner to a partial object to be exploited is explicitly found already in Kant? You would be surprised. His definition of marriage? Sorry? His definition of marriage. And there on the next page, you know. Yes. First is his definition. You know how Kant is beautiful. Don't tell me that philosophers are stupid and naive. You know how Kant defines marriage? "A mutual contract between two adult persons for the mutual exclusive use of their each other's sexual organs for pleasure." So it's none of this deep spiritual union. Like you have a piece in your body that I need, I have a piece that you need, let's cut the crap, that's it. We made a contract. And but then you will say this is a joke. This is in *Metaphysics of Morals*, *Metaphysik der Sitten*. Part one, marriage. But then go to the next page and there you find why Kant is great. When Kant asks a crazy question, which is: so if a husband runs away from his wife... it's incidentally a little bit male chauvinist that he uses this example, but I think the opposite example would maybe also work. Kant asks: does the wife have the right to call police to bring her husband back? And Kant says yes. But you know why? Not because of the moral unity. He says because the husband ran away with a piece of property, his penis, which according to the contract was her co-property. You know? It's purely in legal terms. Like sorry for the... I am married to you, I run away, you send police "no that I want you as a person but sorry guy, you ran away with a part of my property," you know. Here you have again it's, we can go further. But okay, let's stop it. You got my point. I am for Latour and all those guys against this all too ideological politics, which or again at the level of digitalization. What does this mean? This politics of things. I think I already maybe even improvised about this here. Think about digitalization and forget about all those scare stories control. Just think about this, I'm here referring to a cheap bestselling book. It's Yuval Harari, *Homo Deus*. It's very naive but at a certain point he makes a good point, which is this one: with the control that we already have today, if you allow yourself to be digitally controlled, everything is tracked, your health record, your opinions, blah blah, on average a computer can make a better decision than you on what you should do. Not in the sense, not on behalf of some higher social Stalinist knowledge, but precisely following your own interests. For example, already today, or they are not yet developed, if you allow a computerized machine to measure, take your blood, blah blah, and make a diagnosis, nobody is saying that computers are perfect. They are just saying that and they are right that on average the diagnosis of a computer will be definitely much better than an average diagnosis of a real human doctor. The same point, and I love this experiment, marriage. I read that some they made an experiment in United States where they convinced couples who were confronting the prospect of marriage to be totally digital, controlled computer recorded their messages and whatever and then they didn't tell them, that was the deal, but the computer made a judgment "should they marry or not." The computer was right. For example, the couple decided to marry, the computer discreetly, they didn't let the couple know, make a judgment "no they will divorce in one to two years," the computer was practically always right. They even made a political experiment. They, some people allowed so that their opinions were registered and so on and then when voting came they voted. But it can be easily proven that the actual votes of individuals were so influenced by some last minute spinning and so on that if you allow the computer to cast a vote for you, the vote would have been much better not with regard to some objective social interest, but with regard to your own long-term interests of which you were usually even aware and so on. So we do have a problem here. Literally. And it's not some prophetic vision whatever. Because the idea of liberal democracy is nobody can know about us better than we ourselves. We need machines blah blah, but ultimately you yourself are the one who looks deep into your heart and decides what's best for you. No. Empirically computers can do it. Now comes, I will stop this line so that I don't get lost, a nice I claim it's a nice Lacanian point here. Because the idea is this one: but we are losing in this way our freedom, our spontaneity, will we become puppets of the machines and so on and so on? No, I think... I would have to go too much into theory here but just to give you a hint. I think that you know when we interact with each other, as Lacan would have put it, we always interact against the background of what Lacan calls the Big Other. This purely virtual non-existing in the sense that it doesn't really exist out there. It's just a pure normative symbolic structure. That's the Big Other which is again purely virtual. It doesn't exist but it structures our opinions, it overdetermines our acts and so on and so on. So I claim that what happens with digitalization is that, I already mentioned to you remember about Pokémon, how in Pokémon the implicit ideological structure which, for example, makes me if I am a racist, I meet an Arab, I see in him a potential terrorized, terrorist, raping women, whatever. But what happens with digitalization and with Pokémon in a way is that this structure which was implicit non-substantial becomes a real object in the world. It's no longer the Big Other, it's a machine really existing out there. So that I claim that would be my paradox. We would not, what is threatened by radical digitalization is not the freedom of our self. The freedom of our self is more or less an illusion and this illusion is kept in place. Like did I use it here? I think I did it because I used it so many times anyway... my favorite example, I think did I in last two days that example of a rat which is remote controlled? I think I did. Did I? No? No. Okay, but you all know it. I will be very brief. You know that my friends, I have evil friends who send this to me, showed to me how you can already do this. You take a rat, you can connect the nerves which give signals to its limbs to a computerized machine and it's wonderful. The rat changes into a remote controlled car. That is to say the rat is running around. Wouldn't you like Maria, did... such a nice I would like to, do you have a favorite pet animal? Cat? And then I will control that cat. Better not to think what she will do to me. Okay let's go on. What I want to say is that the horror is this one: you press a button and then you can steer the rat it... Okay now I like my friends because they are evil. What do I mean by this? They went a step further and discreetly they are afraid to go into public, they did the same experiment with a human being. You can do it. It's very primitive because you don't have to control the brain, just the neurons which regulate your movement. It can be done. And of course what interested them is this. Let's say I walk here around and then you let's say you are evil, you press a button and you can steer me, you know. The problem is how will I experience this? Will it be oh my god some foreign power it's no, that's the crazy situation. I would still think that I'm free. I you know what a Greek leftist friend of mine, you will hate me for me told me, "this explains Tsipras," that at certain point Tsipras is controlled by by European banks like this now in Greece. Okay let's drop there, the situation and complex there. But what I want to say is that if it's only the question of this external control, you can always say, because that's our usual defense, like if somebody tells you "but do you know that about your sexual passion or freedom there is nothing really free about it, it's all your neuronal processes," you can still say "I don't care, this is happening simply outside my scope, but in my mind I feel free, passion, whatever, that's it." That's true, that's not threatened. What is threatened is the Big Other. What is threatened is that the agency through which I am controlled is no longer a purely virtual symbolic agency which is nonetheless linked to my subjectivity. In the sense that if I disappear, the Big Other also disappears. What do I mean by this? Let me give you here another example from object oriented ontology. Graham Harman likes to develop this idea that things exist independently of their effects. And I almost like this line of him because it's so counter it runs against our intuition, no? That things are not just their effects. This is incidentally the big opposition between Harman, this hardline object-oriented ontology, and Latour and those action network theory. Action network theorists are more dynamic lateral and so on. Things are their effects. Things exist and are constituted through their performativity. Things are not substantial entities which preexist their activity. Now in an apparently crazy way Harman opts for the opposite conclusion. I quote him: "Things preexist their activity rather than being created by it." Interestingly, his main argument is change. He claims that if things are reducible to their relations, then all their potentials are always already actualized in these relations. So that exactly the fact that things cannot be reduced to their actualized relations with others, that they have potentials which they fail to actualize and so on. This is what opens up the possibility of change because in a change situation they may actualize their relations. I sympathize here with Harman although of course I don't share his substantialism. I think that he constructs a false opposition here. In what sense? I claim that things can be purely relational in the sense of they don't preexist their relations in which they act, but that out of a purely relational entity still can possess a certain autonomy, a certain let's call it like this hidden side. That relations can out of assemblage relations an entity can emerge which has a depth of its own, hidden potentials and so on. I think Harman here builds a wrong opposition. And I will give you an example here. Especially of, and it's strange that Harman does not elaborate this distinction. I think the first thing to do here is of course to distinguish between material objects which in some sense up to a point, there it's also debatable, exist independently of relations. It's not as simple as that. But let's say stupidly if we all leave this room, this chair will hopefully I'm not so sure will remain here. Like in this primitive sense this chair has a certain substantial being. But it's clear that what Hegel calls *geistige*, spiritual formations, they are more radically purely relational. To put it in very simplified terms, think about communism. Or fascism, or liberalism. Communism exists only in so far as there are people fighting for it or against it. If you liquidate, sorry for the sadistic undertone, if you liquidate all people who deal with communism, there will be no communism. But you know what's the point of Hegel? Nonetheless it's the cause. We fight for communism, we fight against communism, we die for communism. And Hegel is here against nominalism. We cannot say communism is just an illusion, in reality we just fight with each other. No, communism again is a purely relational entity. It exists only, that's the Big Other, as a symbolic presupposition of our acts. I fight for communism. Communism doesn't exist. But although it's in this sense purely relational, it effects an actual causality. I really fight for communism. There are virtual non-existing causes. And so the point I want to make is that you remember all those analysis, don't be afraid, I'm not a right-winger, I'm still a communist, but all those analysis, or the same analysis were made also about liberalism, which is the same virtual cause we are fighting for. You know all those analysis like where do the so-called totalitarian potentials of communism come from? I think that nonetheless, although I don't agree with the simplistic versions, that this is a quite legitimate line of questioning. You are it's totally justified to raise the question was there already some kind of a, if not root, an opening for, space for what later exploded as Stalinism already in Marx's vision of communism itself and so on? So you see how an entity which is purely relational can also have a hidden side and so on. This paradox I think that's the mistake of Harman I think maybe you can confirm me or not if you read the thin book Immaterialism. Harman thinks that from the fact that an object has a certain ontological autonomy that it has to be non-relational. I... yes? -But isn't he harnessing that to Meillassoux's collapse of correlationism to do with the arche-fossil which is in this deep ancestral space, you know that book *After Finitude* where he makes the argument that you know it, I'm sure? -Yeah, yeah. -That the fossil in this deep ancestral space before humans, they've been able to measure its radiation in relation to the Big Bang, and on the basis of that there's something that is not a correlative subjectivity even though mathematics and technology is used to measure the radiation, and that's how they produce this. -Yeah, now you raise an extremely complex ontological question. The first thing I would say is that and Meillassoux does deal with this problem, I think he's squeezed it out too easily. The first problem I see is that nonetheless although of course Meillassoux is right, the only way to take science seriously is to accept that it literally talks about for example reality before we humans were there and so on and so on. But nonetheless a hermeneutician would make a point: yes, but nonetheless the way you talk about that reality is always transcendentally predetermined by your horizon of understanding. In this sense it remains ultimately relational. So of course there are arche-traces and so on. But now I will give probably you know it my ultimate answer, it's my favorite case of ideology. You know what I'm referring to, Steven Jay Gould and that wonderful reply to Darwin. I think the guy, British priest, should be given a posthumous medal, ultra-Nobel Prize for theory of ideology. You know, Darwin had a good friend who was, I forgot his name sorry I knew it, who was very sympathetic to him to Darwin. And he was deeply disturbed by Darwin's discovery because he saw it immediately: Darwin is talking about something that should have really happened, like it's not just God created... that the Bible literally cannot be right. The moment you have fossils which you can prove today even much more explicitly through that atomic decay measuring and so on, that they are millions years old. So it cannot be that the world was created... I love my other... was it the same? No it was earlier, one English theologian who said, I love this, that the world was created the year and something, he even added "in the late morning." You know like God had a good English breakfast and then now now we create the world. But what, you know what was this guy's solution? First, what Darwin proves is conclusive. No way he is not wrong. Second, God also cannot be wrong. If it says in the Bible, you know if you take into account all the generations that our universe was created I don't know thousand years ago, that's it. And you must know the conclusion, no? You don't know it, then I... oh my god so nice, you are getting senile like me so I can repeat all jokes, you know... The solution is beautiful is that to dupe us, God directly created fossils. It's like you know when you want to create the illusion of openness in a on stage often, you know how in opera it happens in a big field, there is no field but you paint a perfect image of an open field. In the same sense, sense, we live in a very small world, but God consciously created a fake appearance of openness. He staged reality for us. Now of course this is madness. But it's a madness which is the best definition one of the best definitions I claim of the theory of ideology. Doesn't every ideology do exactly this? Every epoch creates its fossils, in the sense of writes its own pre-history and so on. Now I'm not a subjectivist, I'm not saying there is nothing really before and so on. I'm just saying that like when you want to qualify really what is before you always get in this type of hermeneutic, hermeneutic circle. For example, are these things? Quantum physics is teaching us, I'm too stupid, I don't know if it's true or not, but if we are to take it seriously, that what exists outside our mind are pure relations either you call them string or other terms. And you know that the quantum physics vision is not the that things interact, but that in some form or another we have interaction of forces, waves, and on the opposite things, material objects, are just points where different wave interactions collapse or meet each other. So again it's not things interact, it's that interactions create things. Interact and here I find he was often criticized for this Meillassoux problematic when from his basic insight how through contingency through radical contingency of being you can break out of transcendental circle. From here he all of a sudden jumps into I think a way too quick Cartesian rationalist realism, when he says that only nature as described in mathematical formulas exists in itself. I don't see the reason why. I think he jumps way too quick there. And I think if I may give the same reading of him as Bruno Dostils [unintelligible] gave of me, when interpreting my pics and so on as the effect of my deep psychological uncertainty, I think that maybe this is the reason why Meillassoux, he is an extremely nice bright even a genius and honest person, has such problems in publishing his next work. I admire him. I who publish I publish every shit that I as you know write practically. You know that he has for years over pages of manuscript *L'inexistence divine* (Divine Inexistence). It's his dissertation. Sorry? It's his dissertation. Yeah, big Badiou incidentally. Yeah. And he knows he is well aware how unsure he is. So again Meillassoux is far from simple anti-transcendentalist. He is deeply aware that his type of realism is accessible only through transcendental dimension and so on and so on. But okay I don't want to go too far into it now. So just... but this brings us to another point. I agree with you. Which is okay first I said where I agree with assemblage theory against this purely ideological theories of politics. I mean with all his insistence on on ideological struggle, real fight, for Laclau politics remains politics of ideology. It's a question of recombining ideological elements and so on and so forth. There is no dimension of politics of things. Laclau's answer would probably have been, and here I'm on the side of assemblage theory, Laclau's answer would probably have been that ideological that things are just things. They exist but for them to have any political effect they must be somehow ideologized. You know that things in themselves are not a political fact. While Latour is right in pointing how apropos all these technical inventions and so on, no there is a certain literally politics of things. Not only in the sense that things like all those plastic sexual robots or digital means of communication, not only that they have political effects but that they in themselves already materialize a certain interpersonal politics. Like our digital universe is not simply apolitical. It embodies a set of presuppositions of how we communicate or how we interact and so
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on and so on. So here my heart is with immaterialists. Now we come to
on and so on. So here my heart is with immaterialists. Now we come to
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the crucial point where I nonetheless have some problems. I wonder if you would agree. I now move into this transcendental topic. By transcendental I mean this is the classical transcendental argument of how the way we approach reality is always already overdetermined by a certain horizon of understanding as hermeneuticians would have put it. And you don't have to understand this in this classical idealist tradition. I claim that the entire
the crucial point where I nonetheless have some problems. I wonder if you would agree. I now move into this transcendental topic. By transcendental I mean this is the classical transcendental argument of how the way we approach reality is always already overdetermined by a certain horizon of understanding as hermeneuticians would have put it. And you don't have to understand this in this classical idealist tradition. I claim that the entire
Slavoj Žižek
deconstructionism still moves at this level. In this sense the ultimate transcendental philosopher is Michel Foucault for me. Why? What is Foucault's ultimate Michel Foucault ultimate position of his notion of episteme and so on? It's that, again I'm repeating myself from a couple of years ago but the line of reasoning is crucial, it's that the, it's that it's the prohibition of basic naive ontological questions. Like to be a little bit caricatured, when you ask a radical Foucauldian does this bottle exist? A Foucauldian answer would have been let's look at the horizon of understanding or episteme within which you can raise this question. You know they don't, they would say you cannot directly ask "does this exist?" You always ask this question within a certain horizon. For example, if you ask a Foucauldian "does man have immortal soul?" His answer would have been the notion of immortal soul only has meaning within certain philosophical ideological horizon. And all we can do is bring out this implicit horizon into open. And we cannot go beyond. Germans have here a beautiful term, *unhintergehbar*. You cannot go behind it. That this is why for them, for transcendentalists, these direct ontological questions of being like "does reality exist out there?" In a way, in a quite justified way as for example Heidegger does it, in his big they would have said "wait a minute, if you raise the question 'does reality exist out there?' you are already in the horizon of modern subjectivity." Such questions only emerge with modernity when you have in the clear break with medieval times this idea that there is out there, as Pascal put it, gray indifferent reality and here it's me with my universe of meaning. And then you get this problem can I step outside this and reach reality? They would say you are already within a certain horizon of being to raise this question. So what I want to say is that the big problem and that's what I like to solve in my books, my preferred book still now book of mine, sorry, narcissistic bit is *Absolute Recoil* where I the whole first part is dealing with this problem. How to move beyond this transcendental horizon without regressing to some naive realism? Because on the one hand it's clearly that I take this from Quentin Meillassoux that transcendentalism cannot be the ultimate position. But on the other hand it's impossible for us to adopt any simple objective position. In other words, to put ourselves directly into reality. "I am that, I am that piece in reality." No, we are in it not because I am an idealist, but precisely because of materialism. To be able to put ourselves into reality we would have somehow to step out of it. But we are not out, we are in. So so okay I will not go into all this more. What I want to say is this that when and you already put, you the evil guy in the first row, you you you you you, don't look look "no it's not me it's you," it's you it's you... no no back leave the blonde lady like Isolde there alone. Oh. You tried to put the blame on her no he like "no it's not me it's her it's you it's you." Sorry it's my basicness. -I liked that you thought I was evil. -Oh sorry. No what I want to say is that you asked me and you gave me some good formulas of how in so far as we read Harman and at a different level Latour and so on as resorting to a simple realism, a view of reality where politics of things and ideological politics of language simply collapse together in a certain totality, I don't think this is possible. I think, let me do it in a very simple way: how does language relate to reality? First we have naive realism. We simply say language is an instrument for representing reality. Things are out there, language relates to them. Then we have the opposite reflexive transcendental position where we say but how things appear to us is always already mediated through language. That would be Heidegger's point with his *Haus des Seins*, that that language is the the house of being. The way being appears to us entities is always mediated through a certain horizon of understanding. For example Heidegger's point, modernity means that reality appears to us basically as an object of possible scientific technological manipulation. Which is why if you acknowledge poetry and so on it's claimed but this is just subjective. You don't reach reality with this. Reality out there you reach it only again through science, technology and so on. Then we have a third attempt which would be maybe closest to what Latour and his friends, friends theoretical colleagues try to do, this old Marxist notion of praxis. Claiming that both naive realism or transcendental horizon presuppose that we are somehow outside reality and we either reflect it or totalize it transcendentally, like "I subject am constitutive of reality." If I'm not, if I reflect it I'm strictly still outside it. And everybody knows that's for example the mega-mistake philosophical of Lenin's *Materialism and Empirio-criticism* which with utmost sympathy for Lenin if one were to compose in this fashion of big hits worst philosophical books in the history of humanity that book by Lenin would come pretty close to the top. Why? Because you know Lenin gives there his famous definition of matter: matter is any without any qualification reality which exists objectively out of subjective mind. My point is fine, then Plato is a materialist in this sense. For him idea definitely exists outside our mind. You see what's the problem? The problem is not is reality outside my mind? The problem is that I am part of reality. If you say reality is outside my mind, yes and no. No not because not because I'm independent of reality but reality is not outside because I'm part of reality. All my illusions and so on are part of reality. That's why I don't think the proper realism is this one: get rid of subjective illusions how I distort reality and we will get some pure reality, some pure mathematical formula. That reality is the purest... okay me... So I'm saying that then the third option popular in some Marxism would be the notion of practice where the point is you find different version of it even in in late Wittgenstein and so on. The idea being that language is a material practice, not just material, in the sense of to quote Austin with language we do things. Language is part of a life form. For example, this is very nicely done with some now it's no longer so fashionable when I was young it was speech act theory. You know how we do acts with language. We use language to seduce other people, to communicate, to collaborate with them. Language is a form of social activity and as such embedded in the totality of social activity. It's meaningless to analyze language outside of relations of power, production and so on and so on. This would be... I what I tend to claim is that I don't accept this solution. I think that language, the fact of language, is a kind of a more radical ontological scandal. Language is linked to a gap in reality. In what sense? You know people always like to emphasize all these philosophers of practice that we are not outside reality, language is the way we work socially intervene in reality. But where does this worry come from that I will not remain outside? I think no, what happens with language in what language is based is some kind of minimal distance what German idealists called negativity. That I acquire in an abyss a minimal distance towards reality. In the sense is I am not in reality, I am in a void of reality. Even if I may refer here to some big mystical names, and I am not a mystic, that's the point wonderfully described by great mystics as the night of the world. This moment of collapse of reality, the void. I'm nothing, I'm not part of reality. This is not idealism. I'm not saying I'm some substance outside and so on. Just the constitutive of language is the problem is not how I fit into reality. The problem is how is it possible that I have a distance, that I don't fit into reality. And because of this distance I cannot ever locate myself fully into reality. Every every structure that I present, unity of politics of things and of symbolic value of things and so on, any structure like this is always predetermined by a certain symbolic horizon. You cannot get out of language. And again I repeat it, this is not this is not idealism. The point is just this, so again we are in a way always caught in a circle. You cannot step outside yourself and look at reality objectively. But the big problem here and this is the this void is the space of subject. Subject is not some kind of a mega-object ultra-active and so on, subject is as Hegel knew it the name for a gap in reality. Or to put it in the terms of German idealism again negativity, to put it in terms of Freud death drive. We should be very careful by Freud here. Freud's death drive has nothing to do, Freud as all great thinkers at the moment of his greatest invention he missed the point. He re-translated his own death drive into some stupid longing to die and so on and so on. No, you know who gave here a wonderful formulation I envy him, I quote him in the last chapter of my disparity book my good friend Aaron Schuster. He in a wonderful way he shows where Lacan in a justified way criticizes Sade. You know that in Sade we have this distinction between first death and second death. For Sade he began as a brutal materialist. Why should we kill and torture? Because it's part of nature. Nature is this eternal process where everything changes, things are born, they die, so outside all morality we should act as part of nature. Then Sade who wanted a radical liberation got the right idea that even in this way we remain slaves of nature. So then Sade come to the idea of a radical crime. Of a crime which does not only bring death as part of this eternal cycle of generation corruption but interrupts this circle itself. Kills not just elements in nature but kills the natural cycle itself. And as Kant point... sorry, as Lacan points out nicely, the Sade's mistake was that he didn't see that what he calls second death, this radical interruption of natural cycle, is not... Sade projected this disruption into reality itself and thought it must be some mega-catastrophe, the end of the world. He didn't see that as Lacan puts it in an ingenious precise way, he didn't see that second death precedes the first death. Second death always already happened the moment we are speaking beings. Second death means this minimal denaturalization. We are not part of nature. This what again what mystic calls the night of the world, what Freud calls death drive, this minimal interruption of the natural cycle. In this sense for Freud sexuality and death drive belong together. Not because in sexuality you look for obliteration and so on, but because precisely for Freud human sexuality is something which interrupts natural cycle. In the natural cycle sexuality is part of a regular rhythm. You have the mating season, blah blah. If you are a passionate human being you go crazy. It's like Tristan and Isolde. You want it's an absolute all the time and so on. So what what I want to say, again back to my final point, is that this is my reproach among others to assemblage theory. It was very unsatisfactory today but just to give you a hint where I will go on tomorrow. In a wonderful point Graham Harman says that and here I agree with his privilege of stable object over change but I read it against him, he claims that we learn what is an object through its point of failure, through its limitations. More than to learn what is an object you have to look where it fails, what it cannot do, not what it can do. But I agree with it but not in his sense. The way I would read it is how... just to give you an idea, I quote him somewhere... for example, criticize... you know John Caputo the American theological deconstructionist. He criticized once me and Badiou in this sense. He said why are we so obsessed by this monster fetish of capitalism? And he says if you give me Swedish style social democracy, social security, human rights, healthcare, if you give me all this I can well live with capitalism. Yes, if you can, but for structural reasons you cannot. You know the key when you analyze a certain assemblage and you try to bring out its potentials, what can be done, the most interesting point of ideology for me is to isolate those features which appear possible but are de facto impossible. Every ideological field has some point like this. Like it appears possible but de facto it shouldn't be possible. And with this we can begin we can return to my earlier points. I didn't even maybe develop them here, which always fascinate me of how every ideology allows you to do things but at a certain crucial point you are allowed to do it on condition that you don't do it. And this brings out I think I mentioned them here maybe last year not now a wonderful paradoxes of how you are officially allowed to do something on condition that you don't do it. And we can go even step further: this prohibition like you are allowed to do it but really it's prohibited to do it, this prohibition is itself prohibited. In the sense that no no no, if it's mystical let me conclude with an old joke that I used here already four five times. I've repeated it so often that I'm bored by it. Imagine, sorry old joke most of you know it, we are in Soviet Union '35, golden era of Stalinism. I'm Stalin, I give a speech then there is a debate. One of you stands up and criticizes me. Ha ha ha. Next day again the last time you've seen him. But let's say then another guy stands up and shouts at the first guy: "Are you crazy? We don't criticize Comrade Stalin here, it's prohibited." He would have disappeared even faster. You see in Stalinism it was prohibited to criticize Stalin. But it was also absolutely prohibited to state this prohibition explicitly. So what interests me are these immanent impossibilities. In this sense to understand capitalism we have to understand its failure. It promises something that a priori structurally it cannot deliver. That's why a friend of mine, a black theologian, in a wonderful way called this "Kaputolism," capitalism where you have enjoy everything Kaputolism, you know... he wants Kaputolism where you have healthcare everything. Well it would be nice if you can but you cannot. You know what? I got lost now. I promise you tomorrow we go much more into these precise things of structural failure and so on. And then you gave me the idea, I remember where I said how Latour it's more complex, he knows that this collaboration of two levels is always relative. How to reach it in itself from here? It was confused, I apologize for what I did today, but I feel a little bit more fresh that we at least approach theory a little bit and tomorrow we go to the end. Although I'm already glad in advance of being able to cheat you, unfortunately there will not be enough time and so on, you know. But I will keep my word if I will not come to the end you get through... is she here, Madison? You are, okay. Okay so I must not say anything bad against you. You know Alain Badiou, I gave him a triumphant answer. Once accused me that only behind his back I'm telling all the dirty stories which are horrible, but I tell them in French. Like you know which movies Alain Badiou likes? Which ones? I hope you did see it, it's horrible, he thinks it's a masterpiece: *Bridges of the Madison County*. Sorry... not to mention *Titanic* and so on. And Badiou attacked me "why are you saying this behind my back?" And I told him "because I'm a humanist, if I tell you this to your face it would hurt you." So it's my great respect for you that I'm only saying bad things behind your back. So Madison, unfortunately I will not say it now, but probably you will get tomorrow a text to distribute to them, no? And we are here tomorrow at the same time we finish. If you pardon me, we do have like today we can go some minutes over and so on. Or is it a limit? -No, it's fine. -Sorry? -We can go over I'm sure. -Yeah. No because now I'm tired. I mean I'm in a bad mood, I'm tired of life and so on. But well no, you know why? Because I would nonetheless also like after a substantial part to give you a chance to counter-attack and please this is not an empty offer to be rejected. Since I talk too much, please really I mean it I'm not cheating. It's not like oh I will pay then you count the the other guy with no no I will pay. Please simply interrupt me and ask a question in the middle. Because otherwise I don't think you will get many chances, no? No but I would really like like for you to do it. Unfortunately I will not be able to do it then what I wanted to do what I promised already the last time: the analysis of the circularity of time through through some relatively interesting science fiction movies. They're not ingenious movies but the theoretical problems they they they generate are interesting. I think I already mentioned them when I was here a couple of months ago, like did you see *Arrival* and *The Discovery*? Pretty interesting movies, again I'm not saying they're great movies, I'm saying that these paradoxes of for example did you see *Arrival*, those squid heptapods which come? I think you know what's the crucial point of *Arrival* for me? They come here to humanity because they know that years from now they will need our help. But we are stupid humans partial, they have the holistic approach. How can we help them? The only answer is the Hegelian one: they know that their complete holistic knowledge is too stupid, they need our one-sided, it's a very deep subversive insight in that movie. It's not at all what it appears to be just celebrating this holistic mind whatever you know. Also that one, download it, propaganda for Pirate Bay. It's *The Discovery* with Robert Redford. He plays a partial role, it's a good... it's a wonderful theory where a guy, scientist, old Robert Redford played by, discovers it looked idealist but it's not. He's a scientist who discovers that the soul survives the death of the body. My god I almost wanted to burn the movie like Goebbels... no they discover a very interesting thing: he discovers this but first it's a materialist explanation, just some stupid electromagnetic waves survive. Then he thinks that you get some scenes from the future and so on and so on. But then at the end a wonderful fact is established that what survives is that if you made some mega mistakes, missed the point in your life, at the moment of death that's the mind which survives, you try to return back and do in a new way repeat all your mistakes. It's a nice idea. It's maybe the best idea of immortality. Not oh I live endlessly but just to and of course just to go back and correct your mistakes. And in a wonderful way this complicates things, it's a nice intelligent movie. I almost begin to believe in this this mega-productions *Guardians* or whatever they're so boring. I'm beginning to believe in this new sub-genre of relatively modest, okay modest means to million dollars, my god I kill my mother if you give them to me but you know what I mean, these relatively modest intelligent science fiction movies which focus on one nice on one crucial problem. We will not have time for this but I can maybe also if you want send you a text or whatever you know. So thanks very much. I am tired now so see you tomorrow at three and we can go a little bit further. Thanks very much.
deconstructionism still moves at this level. In this sense the ultimate transcendental philosopher is Michel Foucault for me. Why? What is Foucault's ultimate Michel Foucault ultimate position of his notion of episteme and so on? It's that, again I'm repeating myself from a couple of years ago but the line of reasoning is crucial, it's that the, it's that it's the prohibition of basic naive ontological questions. Like to be a little bit caricatured, when you ask a radical Foucauldian does this bottle exist? A Foucauldian answer would have been let's look at the horizon of understanding or episteme within which you can raise this question. You know they don't, they would say you cannot directly ask "does this exist?" You always ask this question within a certain horizon. For example, if you ask a Foucauldian "does man have immortal soul?" His answer would have been the notion of immortal soul only has meaning within certain philosophical ideological horizon. And all we can do is bring out this implicit horizon into open. And we cannot go beyond. Germans have here a beautiful term, *unhintergehbar*. You cannot go behind it. That this is why for them, for transcendentalists, these direct ontological questions of being like "does reality exist out there?" In a way, in a quite justified way as for example Heidegger does it, in his big they would have said "wait a minute, if you raise the question 'does reality exist out there?' you are already in the horizon of modern subjectivity." Such questions only emerge with modernity when you have in the clear break with medieval times this idea that there is out there, as Pascal put it, gray indifferent reality and here it's me with my universe of meaning. And then you get this problem can I step outside this and reach reality? They would say you are already within a certain horizon of being to raise this question. So what I want to say is that the big problem and that's what I like to solve in my books, my preferred book still now book of mine, sorry, narcissistic bit is *Absolute Recoil* where I the whole first part is dealing with this problem. How to move beyond this transcendental horizon without regressing to some naive realism? Because on the one hand it's clearly that I take this from Quentin Meillassoux that transcendentalism cannot be the ultimate position. But on the other hand it's impossible for us to adopt any simple objective position. In other words, to put ourselves directly into reality. "I am that, I am that piece in reality." No, we are in it not because I am an idealist, but precisely because of materialism. To be able to put ourselves into reality we would have somehow to step out of it. But we are not out, we are in. So so okay I will not go into all this more. What I want to say is this that when and you already put, you the evil guy in the first row, you you you you you, don't look look "no it's not me it's you," it's you it's you... no no back leave the blonde lady like Isolde there alone. Oh. You tried to put the blame on her no he like "no it's not me it's her it's you it's you." Sorry it's my basicness. -I liked that you thought I was evil. -Oh sorry. No what I want to say is that you asked me and you gave me some good formulas of how in so far as we read Harman and at a different level Latour and so on as resorting to a simple realism, a view of reality where politics of things and ideological politics of language simply collapse together in a certain totality, I don't think this is possible. I think, let me do it in a very simple way: how does language relate to reality? First we have naive realism. We simply say language is an instrument for representing reality. Things are out there, language relates to them. Then we have the opposite reflexive transcendental position where we say but how things appear to us is always already mediated through language. That would be Heidegger's point with his *Haus des Seins*, that that language is the the house of being. The way being appears to us entities is always mediated through a certain horizon of understanding. For example Heidegger's point, modernity means that reality appears to us basically as an object of possible scientific technological manipulation. Which is why if you acknowledge poetry and so on it's claimed but this is just subjective. You don't reach reality with this. Reality out there you reach it only again through science, technology and so on. Then we have a third attempt which would be maybe closest to what Latour and his friends, friends theoretical colleagues try to do, this old Marxist notion of praxis. Claiming that both naive realism or transcendental horizon presuppose that we are somehow outside reality and we either reflect it or totalize it transcendentally, like "I subject am constitutive of reality." If I'm not, if I reflect it I'm strictly still outside it. And everybody knows that's for example the mega-mistake philosophical of Lenin's *Materialism and Empirio-criticism* which with utmost sympathy for Lenin if one were to compose in this fashion of big hits worst philosophical books in the history of humanity that book by Lenin would come pretty close to the top. Why? Because you know Lenin gives there his famous definition of matter: matter is any without any qualification reality which exists objectively out of subjective mind. My point is fine, then Plato is a materialist in this sense. For him idea definitely exists outside our mind. You see what's the problem? The problem is not is reality outside my mind? The problem is that I am part of reality. If you say reality is outside my mind, yes and no. No not because not because I'm independent of reality but reality is not outside because I'm part of reality. All my illusions and so on are part of reality. That's why I don't think the proper realism is this one: get rid of subjective illusions how I distort reality and we will get some pure reality, some pure mathematical formula. That reality is the purest... okay me... So I'm saying that then the third option popular in some Marxism would be the notion of practice where the point is you find different version of it even in in late Wittgenstein and so on. The idea being that language is a material practice, not just material, in the sense of to quote Austin with language we do things. Language is part of a life form. For example, this is very nicely done with some now it's no longer so fashionable when I was young it was speech act theory. You know how we do acts with language. We use language to seduce other people, to communicate, to collaborate with them. Language is a form of social activity and as such embedded in the totality of social activity. It's meaningless to analyze language outside of relations of power, production and so on and so on. This would be... I what I tend to claim is that I don't accept this solution. I think that language, the fact of language, is a kind of a more radical ontological scandal. Language is linked to a gap in reality. In what sense? You know people always like to emphasize all these philosophers of practice that we are not outside reality, language is the way we work socially intervene in reality. But where does this worry come from that I will not remain outside? I think no, what happens with language in what language is based is some kind of minimal distance what German idealists called negativity. That I acquire in an abyss a minimal distance towards reality. In the sense is I am not in reality, I am in a void of reality. Even if I may refer here to some big mystical names, and I am not a mystic, that's the point wonderfully described by great mystics as the night of the world. This moment of collapse of reality, the void. I'm nothing, I'm not part of reality. This is not idealism. I'm not saying I'm some substance outside and so on. Just the constitutive of language is the problem is not how I fit into reality. The problem is how is it possible that I have a distance, that I don't fit into reality. And because of this distance I cannot ever locate myself fully into reality. Every every structure that I present, unity of politics of things and of symbolic value of things and so on, any structure like this is always predetermined by a certain symbolic horizon. You cannot get out of language. And again I repeat it, this is not this is not idealism. The point is just this, so again we are in a way always caught in a circle. You cannot step outside yourself and look at reality objectively. But the big problem here and this is the this void is the space of subject. Subject is not some kind of a mega-object ultra-active and so on, subject is as Hegel knew it the name for a gap in reality. Or to put it in the terms of German idealism again negativity, to put it in terms of Freud death drive. We should be very careful by Freud here. Freud's death drive has nothing to do, Freud as all great thinkers at the moment of his greatest invention he missed the point. He re-translated his own death drive into some stupid longing to die and so on and so on. No, you know who gave here a wonderful formulation I envy him, I quote him in the last chapter of my disparity book my good friend Aaron Schuster. He in a wonderful way he shows where Lacan in a justified way criticizes Sade. You know that in Sade we have this distinction between first death and second death. For Sade he began as a brutal materialist. Why should we kill and torture? Because it's part of nature. Nature is this eternal process where everything changes, things are born, they die, so outside all morality we should act as part of nature. Then Sade who wanted a radical liberation got the right idea that even in this way we remain slaves of nature. So then Sade come to the idea of a radical crime. Of a crime which does not only bring death as part of this eternal cycle of generation corruption but interrupts this circle itself. Kills not just elements in nature but kills the natural cycle itself. And as Kant point... sorry, as Lacan points out nicely, the Sade's mistake was that he didn't see that what he calls second death, this radical interruption of natural cycle, is not... Sade projected this disruption into reality itself and thought it must be some mega-catastrophe, the end of the world. He didn't see that as Lacan puts it in an ingenious precise way, he didn't see that second death precedes the first death. Second death always already happened the moment we are speaking beings. Second death means this minimal denaturalization. We are not part of nature. This what again what mystic calls the night of the world, what Freud calls death drive, this minimal interruption of the natural cycle. In this sense for Freud sexuality and death drive belong together. Not because in sexuality you look for obliteration and so on, but because precisely for Freud human sexuality is something which interrupts natural cycle. In the natural cycle sexuality is part of a regular rhythm. You have the mating season, blah blah. If you are a passionate human being you go crazy. It's like Tristan and Isolde. You want it's an absolute all the time and so on. So what what I want to say, again back to my final point, is that this is my reproach among others to assemblage theory. It was very unsatisfactory today but just to give you a hint where I will go on tomorrow. In a wonderful point Graham Harman says that and here I agree with his privilege of stable object over change but I read it against him, he claims that we learn what is an object through its point of failure, through its limitations. More than to learn what is an object you have to look where it fails, what it cannot do, not what it can do. But I agree with it but not in his sense. The way I would read it is how... just to give you an idea, I quote him somewhere... for example, criticize... you know John Caputo the American theological deconstructionist. He criticized once me and Badiou in this sense. He said why are we so obsessed by this monster fetish of capitalism? And he says if you give me Swedish style social democracy, social security, human rights, healthcare, if you give me all this I can well live with capitalism. Yes, if you can, but for structural reasons you cannot. You know the key when you analyze a certain assemblage and you try to bring out its potentials, what can be done, the most interesting point of ideology for me is to isolate those features which appear possible but are de facto impossible. Every ideological field has some point like this. Like it appears possible but de facto it shouldn't be possible. And with this we can begin we can return to my earlier points. I didn't even maybe develop them here, which always fascinate me of how every ideology allows you to do things but at a certain crucial point you are allowed to do it on condition that you don't do it. And this brings out I think I mentioned them here maybe last year not now a wonderful paradoxes of how you are officially allowed to do something on condition that you don't do it. And we can go even step further: this prohibition like you are allowed to do it but really it's prohibited to do it, this prohibition is itself prohibited. In the sense that no no no, if it's mystical let me conclude with an old joke that I used here already four five times. I've repeated it so often that I'm bored by it. Imagine, sorry old joke most of you know it, we are in Soviet Union '35, golden era of Stalinism. I'm Stalin, I give a speech then there is a debate. One of you stands up and criticizes me. Ha ha ha. Next day again the last time you've seen him. But let's say then another guy stands up and shouts at the first guy: "Are you crazy? We don't criticize Comrade Stalin here, it's prohibited." He would have disappeared even faster. You see in Stalinism it was prohibited to criticize Stalin. But it was also absolutely prohibited to state this prohibition explicitly. So what interests me are these immanent impossibilities. In this sense to understand capitalism we have to understand its failure. It promises something that a priori structurally it cannot deliver. That's why a friend of mine, a black theologian, in a wonderful way called this "Kaputolism," capitalism where you have enjoy everything Kaputolism, you know... he wants Kaputolism where you have healthcare everything. Well it would be nice if you can but you cannot. You know what? I got lost now. I promise you tomorrow we go much more into these precise things of structural failure and so on. And then you gave me the idea, I remember where I said how Latour it's more complex, he knows that this collaboration of two levels is always relative. How to reach it in itself from here? It was confused, I apologize for what I did today, but I feel a little bit more fresh that we at least approach theory a little bit and tomorrow we go to the end. Although I'm already glad in advance of being able to cheat you, unfortunately there will not be enough time and so on, you know. But I will keep my word if I will not come to the end you get through... is she here, Madison? You are, okay. Okay so I must not say anything bad against you. You know Alain Badiou, I gave him a triumphant answer. Once accused me that only behind his back I'm telling all the dirty stories which are horrible, but I tell them in French. Like you know which movies Alain Badiou likes? Which ones? I hope you did see it, it's horrible, he thinks it's a masterpiece: *Bridges of the Madison County*. Sorry... not to mention *Titanic* and so on. And Badiou attacked me "why are you saying this behind my back?" And I told him "because I'm a humanist, if I tell you this to your face it would hurt you." So it's my great respect for you that I'm only saying bad things behind your back. So Madison, unfortunately I will not say it now, but probably you will get tomorrow a text to distribute to them, no? And we are here tomorrow at the same time we finish. If you pardon me, we do have like today we can go some minutes over and so on. Or is it a limit? -No, it's fine. -Sorry? -We can go over I'm sure. -Yeah. No because now I'm tired. I mean I'm in a bad mood, I'm tired of life and so on. But well no, you know why? Because I would nonetheless also like after a substantial part to give you a chance to counter-attack and please this is not an empty offer to be rejected. Since I talk too much, please really I mean it I'm not cheating. It's not like oh I will pay then you count the the other guy with no no I will pay. Please simply interrupt me and ask a question in the middle. Because otherwise I don't think you will get many chances, no? No but I would really like like for you to do it. Unfortunately I will not be able to do it then what I wanted to do what I promised already the last time: the analysis of the circularity of time through through some relatively interesting science fiction movies. They're not ingenious movies but the theoretical problems they they they generate are interesting. I think I already mentioned them when I was here a couple of months ago, like did you see *Arrival* and *The Discovery*? Pretty interesting movies, again I'm not saying they're great movies, I'm saying that these paradoxes of for example did you see *Arrival*, those squid heptapods which come? I think you know what's the crucial point of *Arrival* for me? They come here to humanity because they know that years from now they will need our help. But we are stupid humans partial, they have the holistic approach. How can we help them? The only answer is the Hegelian one: they know that their complete holistic knowledge is too stupid, they need our one-sided, it's a very deep subversive insight in that movie. It's not at all what it appears to be just celebrating this holistic mind whatever you know. Also that one, download it, propaganda for Pirate Bay. It's *The Discovery* with Robert Redford. He plays a partial role, it's a good... it's a wonderful theory where a guy, scientist, old Robert Redford played by, discovers it looked idealist but it's not. He's a scientist who discovers that the soul survives the death of the body. My god I almost wanted to burn the movie like Goebbels... no they discover a very interesting thing: he discovers this but first it's a materialist explanation, just some stupid electromagnetic waves survive. Then he thinks that you get some scenes from the future and so on and so on. But then at the end a wonderful fact is established that what survives is that if you made some mega mistakes, missed the point in your life, at the moment of death that's the mind which survives, you try to return back and do in a new way repeat all your mistakes. It's a nice idea. It's maybe the best idea of immortality. Not oh I live endlessly but just to and of course just to go back and correct your mistakes. And in a wonderful way this complicates things, it's a nice intelligent movie. I almost begin to believe in this this mega-productions *Guardians* or whatever they're so boring. I'm beginning to believe in this new sub-genre of relatively modest, okay modest means to million dollars, my god I kill my mother if you give them to me but you know what I mean, these relatively modest intelligent science fiction movies which focus on one nice on one crucial problem. We will not have time for this but I can maybe also if you want send you a text or whatever you know. So thanks very much. I am tired now so see you tomorrow at three and we can go a little bit further. Thanks very much.