Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 7
Lecture · Justin Wagner ·
published 2018-11-28 · 1:33:07 · 12,328 words
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
ideologyhegel-dialecticsphilosophy-generalcinema-art-culturepsychoanalysisdemocracyfascism-populismreligion-theologyhistoryliberalism-political-correctnesstechnology-ai-cyberspacecapitalismecology-climate
Žižek argues that the theoretical opposition between Popper and the Frankfurt School masks a shared totalitarian error: the equation of grasping 'totality' or 'absolute truth' with political terror. He deconstructs the postmodern valorization of contingency by showing how historical conservatives (royalists) and figures like Hitler were contingentists, while revolutionaries were essentialists. He then critiques the 'wisdom' of finding a middle ground, arguing it fails to account for shifts in the measure itself, and contrasts this with Christianity's 'one-sidedness.' Finally, he evaluates Lacanian political theory, rejecting the 'radical democracy' interpretation (Laclau/Mouffe) and the 'Lacan as provocateur' view (Miller/Stavrakakis), arguing that both fail to grasp the political stakes of the psychoanalytic stance. Žižek analyzes Wendy Brown’s argument that democracy requires anti-democratic elements to remain vital, critiquing her failure to distinguish between rejuvenating critique and fascist takeover. He extends this to a historical comparison between the post-WWII welfare state and early Islamic communities, arguing both represent unique emancipatory potentials. Finally, he deconstructs the romanticization of Nietzsche, exposing his actual political alignment with conservative elites and antisemitism, contrasting this with his reception by post-structuralists. Žižek critiques Wendy Brown’s defense of democracy by arguing that democracy inherently requires a non-democratic, authoritarian core to function. He contrasts the modern 'politics of fear' (biopolitics) with a 'politics of terror,' drawing on Heidegger, Hegel, and Marx to argue that true political engagement requires the terrifying dissolution of fixed identities. He concludes that contemporary capitalism and biogenetics are achieving the 'melting into air' of nature itself, stripping it of its substantial reality. Žižek analyzes the intersection of biogenetics, ecology, and Heideggerian technology, arguing that genetic manipulation ends both humanity and nature by removing the 'impenetrable' natural ground. He critiques the liberal 'green' recycling attitude as merely technological, contrasting it with Heidegger’s tension between 'world' and 'earth.' He concludes by reinterpreting Heidegger’s Nazism not as a mistake but as a 'negative fidelity' to the technological engagement with modernity, a view he finds more honest than Heidegger’s later withdrawal.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 33
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Heidegger's concept that those who grasp ontological truth must err in their ontical (practical/historical) actions; Žižek critiques this as a withdrawal into 'wisdom'.
The positivism debate between Karl Popper and the Frankfurt School (Adorno), which Žižek uses to show their shared error.
as “wisdom”
Žižek's term for the conservative/liberal stance of seeking a 'right measure' or middle ground, which he rejects because it cannot problematize the field itself.
as “totalitarianism to cut a long story short”
Žižek's provocative equation: any theoretical pretense to grasp totality or absolute truth necessarily leads to social practice involving terror or totalitarianism.
The idea that true historical change is not a shift between extremes within a field, but a shift in the very definition of the 'middle' or 'measure' itself.
as “religion of one-sidedness”
Žižek's characterization of Christianity as the only true non-wise religion, characterized by utter partiality and 'Stalinist partiality' rather than moderation.
as “big other”
Lacan's concept of the symbolic order; Žižek discusses its 'barred' or non-existent nature as a basis for democratic theory.
as “radical democracy”
The political theory (Laclau/Mouffe) that uses Lacan's 'barred big other' to justify democracy as the institutionalization of incompleteness and lack of foundation.
as “Lacan as provocateur”
The view (Miller/Stavrakakis) that Lacan serves as a Socratic fly buzzing democracy, raising unpleasant questions without offering a positive political project.
The psychoanalytic experience of realizing the contingency of one's fundamental coordinates; Žižek critiques its political application as 'radical democracy'.
Žižek's label for the practical political attitude implied by the 'Lacan as provocateur' stance, which he identifies as a form of skepticism and moderate pragmatism.
The paradoxical idea that democracy requires its own negation (anti-democratic content/critique) to remain healthy and vital.
Wendy Brown’s concept that democracies naturally attach themselves to anti-democratic principles, requiring critical scrutiny to refound democracy.
The strategy of being a provocateur who moves boundaries but refuses to go too far, which Žižek critiques as insufficient.
as “Stalinist leading leanings”
Žižek’s ironic self-description of his own ideological stance, used to highlight the normative uniqueness of the post-war welfare state.
The fundamental position in Islam (contrasted with Christianity/Judaism) where the believer is an orphan, lacking a paternal Big Other, creating political potential for community without patriarchal order.
Fred Jameson’s reading of Saint Augustine, who discovered 'inner life' to compromise with power and establish Christianity as a state religion.
as “constitutive excess”
The non-democratic, authoritarian power that must sustain democracy for it to function; power is defined by this excess, otherwise it is not power.
The domestication of subversive theorists (like Nietzsche) into harmless gadflies whose provocations are meant only to awaken democratic slumber, not to be lived seriously.
as “terror vs. fear”
Heidegger's distinction: fear (Angst) is anxiety about specific things, while terror (Schrecken) is the necessary shock to awaken modern man from metaphysical slumber.
as “pure negativity”
The core of the bondsman's consciousness in Hegel, experienced through the fear of death and the dissolution of all fixed attachments.
as “politics of terror”
The radical emancipatory alternative to fear, involving the experience of 'terror' (Schrecken) as the dissolution of all fixed identities and substantial links.
The predominant mode of contemporary biopolitics, which mobilizes populations through paranoia and the defense against potential victimization rather than universal axioms.
Peter Hallward's term for the frightening rallying of frightened men, the basis of post-political manipulation.
Agamben's concept of humans reduced to 'bare life' or disposable objects of expert caretaking, one aspect of modern biopolitics.
as “melting into air”
Marx's description of capitalism dissolving all fixed identities, extended by Žižek to include the dissolution of nature itself via biogenetics.
The natural, given constraints of human biology that define what it means to be human; losing this through biogenetics is the loss of nature itself.
The paradoxical concept of 'recycling' and maximizing resource use, which Žižek argues is not true ecology but the continuation of the technological attitude of utilization, rather than accepting the 'unaccounted for shit' of the earth.
as “world and earth”
Heidegger’s distinction between the symbolic universe of meaning (world) and its imponderable, dense, self-withdrawing foundation (earth); Žižek locates the current ecological tension in the clash between these two.
Žižek’s description of the fluidified, virtualized, and desubstantialized nature of modern cyber/experiential reality, contrasted with the 'imponderable heaviness' of ecological catastrophe.
Heidegger’s view that the primary danger of technology is not physical destruction but the smooth functioning of the technological system itself, preventing any other mode of being.
Heidegger’s phrase from his Rectoral Address and Introduction to Metaphysics applied to Nazism ('innere Größe'), which Žižek notes Heidegger never applied to Bolshevism or Liberal Democracy, revealing his specific hierarchy of political forms.
Žižek’s reinterpretation of Heidegger’s post-war withdrawal from politics as a 'negative transfixion' or 'negative fidelity' to his earlier Nazi engagement, implying he never truly abandoned the 'truth' of that technological confrontation.
Stories he reaches for 4
Reference to G.K. Chesterton's story where police look for criminals by reading sonnets and attending intellectual parties, used to critique Adorno/Popper's fear of 'totalitarian crimes' in thought.
“Ordinary police looks for criminals who killed... we are reading sonnets and going to intellectual parties to detect potential crimes.”
Žižek argues Stalin was not a dogmatist but ruthlessly pragmatic, using bits of Marxism as needed, akin to British empiricism where 'everything depends on circumstances.'
“Stalin was just ruthlessly using bits of Marxism that he needed for his totally pragmatic purposes.”
Žižek claims Hitler was an anti-essentialist who viewed history as a 'meaningless battlefield' of contingency and will, not predetermined fate.
“Hitler's view is... history is a meaningless battlefield. Everything depends on contingency.”
Legendre argues gay rights undermine symbolic coordinates, leading to 'psychotic totalitarianism,' requiring a re-emergence of symbolic authority.
“All this gay rights... undermines the very symbolic coordinates of our social space.”
Works invoked 10
Hegel's work, specifically the Master-Servant dialectic, used to explain the bondsman's experience of fear and negativity.
Communist Manifesto book
Marx's work, cited for the description of capitalism dissolving all fixed identities ('all that is solid melts into air').
The Fountainhead book
Ayn Rand's novel; Žižek dismisses Rand but uses a specific courtroom scene to illustrate the experience of freedom through the dissolution of social approval.
T.S. Eliot's work arguing that an aristocratic class is necessary for democracy.
The Borrowed Kettle book
Žižek's own book where he expanded his critique of the radical democracy vision.
Heidegger’s work containing the phrase 'inner greatness' of Nazism; Žižek uses it to show Heidegger’s hierarchy (applying it to Nazism but not Bolshevism or Liberal Democracy) and later textual 'cheating' in reprints.
The New Heidegger book
Michel de Beistegui’s book, which Žižek largely agrees with, specifically regarding the interpretation of Heidegger’s Nazism as a 'negative fidelity' and a failed but authentic political confrontation with modernity.
Wendy Brown’s book, which Žižek advises reading for its important criticism of identity politics and the paradoxes of democracy.
Rectoral Address speech
Heidegger’s inaugural address where he first used the phrase 'inner greatness' of Nazism; Žižek notes Heidegger later rejected this phrase in printings, claiming it was only in the address.
People invoked 50
Mother of Ishmael, cited in the context of the 'self-employed single mother' and the orphan narrative of Islam.
Michel de Beistegui positive
Praised as one of the 'best English Heideggerians' for his book The New Heidegger, particularly for his analysis of the ambiguity of Heidegger’s attachment to Nazism as a 'failed' but 'authentic attempt' to confront modernity.
Howard Roark positive
The protagonist of The Fountainhead, used as an example of the individual who, by being free of the need for approval, frees others.
A left-wing intellectual Žižek jokingly suggests should be the target of 'London trials' instead of Moscow trials.
Jacques Derrida negative
Cited as sharing the equation of totality with totalitarianism.
Ayn Rand positive
Žižek calls her 'fake' and the book 'lowest,' but claims the specific scene in The Fountainhead is an 'authentic description' of freedom through the dissolution of social ties.
Muhammad’s wife, cited as the first believer and the 'big other' in the Islamic narrative.
Richard Wagner negative
Described as 'poor beloved guys' whose anti-semitism is picked up by deconstructionists, illustrating the political danger of Nietzsche’s legacy.
Theodor W. Adorno negative
Representing the Frankfurt School, he shares Popper's error of fearing 'totality' in thought.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Cited as sharing the equation of totality with totalitarianism.
Jacques Lacan positive
The central figure of the second half; Žižek analyzes various political interpretations of Lacan's theory.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Referenced for a fragment about police looking for criminals by reading sonnets, used to critique Adorno/Popper.
Wendy Brown positive
Žižek accepts her analysis of identity politics and the paradoxes of democracy but critiques her for failing to distinguish between rejuvenating critique and fascist takeover, calling her 'too soft'.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Criticized alongside Foucault for misreading Nietzsche’s politics.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek ironically suggests Fukuyama might be 'right' that humanity relies on a notion of 'human nature' (impenetrability), using this to argue that biogenetics ends humanity by removing these constraints.
Chantal Mouffe negative
Follower of Laclau, associated with the radical democracy interpretation of Lacan.
Étienne Balibar positive
Engaged in 'friendly polemics' with Žižek; drew his attention to the Popper/Adorno shared feature.
Commune Council positive
Cited as the concrete historical event Nietzsche opposed when speaking of the 'rebellion of slaves'.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Cited for the concept of 'Homo Sacer' (bare life) as an aspect of biopolitics.
Fredric Jameson positive
Praised for his ingenious thesis that Augustine’s focus on inner life was a social democratic revisionism.
Adolf Hitler negative
Used as a reductio ad absurdum to show that if Brown’s 'rejuvenating' anti-democratic critique is celebrated, Hitler was its ultimate realization.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Cited by Brown as an immanent critic of democracy who understood that democracy tends toward cathexis on anti-democratic principles.
Cited for formulas regarding democracy and the empty place of power.
T. S. Eliot positive
Cited for the argument in 'Notes towards a definition of culture' that a strong aristocratic class is necessary for feasible democracy.
Michel Foucault negative
Criticized for reading Nietzsche as a marginal deconstructionist figure, ignoring his explicit political stances and conservative alignment.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Represents the 'radical democracy' view that Lacan grounds democratic politics; Žižek rejects this.
Pierre Legendre negative
Described as a 'half-Lacanian' drifting into extreme positions; Žižek rejects his view on gay rights and symbolic authority.
Martin Heidegger positive
Cited as a great philosopher distrustful of democracy, whose critique Brown uses to rejuvenate it.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Represents the 'Lacan as provocateur' view; Žižek calls his position a 'center-right' attitude.
Cited as the 'original one' son of Hagar, representing the orphan status in Islamic myth compared to Isaac.
Tocqueville positive
Cited by Brown as an immanent critic of democracy, alongside Spinoza.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Placed in the lineage of 'provocateurs' from Socrates to Lacan.
Mark Wrathall negative
Cited as a 'Heideggerian' who defines the ecological attitude as 'getting the greatest possible use out of everything,' which Žižek uses to illustrate the contradiction of 'technological ecology' (recycling).
Peter Hallward positive
Described as one of 'three four people who interest me theoretically in United Kingdom today'; cited for the concept of 'paranoid ochlos' and the distinction between fear and terror.
Referenced in Heidegger’s formula about the 'forest man' who is 'screwing Lady Chatterley,' used to illustrate that even authentic, solitary acts in nature are moments of modern technological machinery.
A figure in German social democracy about whom Marx wrote a racist letter to Engels.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek quotes Habermas on the dangers of genetic manipulation but argues Habermas 'does not take this threat seriously enough' because he fails to see that biogenetics generates a 'second nature' rather than just reproducing the old one.
Augustine of Hippo positive
Cited via Fred Jameson as an 'original social democrat' who discovered 'inner life' to compromise with power and establish Christianity as a state religion.
Yannis Stavrakakis negative
A Lacanian closer to Lacan than Laclau/Mouffe, but still representing the 'radical democracy' view Žižek rejects.
Karl Popper negative
Used as a foil to show that even his empiricist approach shares the totalitarian error of equating totality with terror.
Joseph Stalin negative
Used to argue that totalitarian leaders were pragmatic empiricists, not dogmatic adherents to absolute theory.
Plato positive
Cited as a radical thinker tolerated as a provocateur.
Karl Marx positive
Defended by Marxists; Žižek discusses how critics reply to claims that Marx was 'betrayed' by Stalinism.
Socrates positive
Used as a model for the 'provocateur' who buzzes like a fly to regenerate the social order.
Referenced as the father of two sons (Ishmael and Isaac) in the Arab myth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Used to explain the bondsman's experience of 'pure negativity' and 'fear of death' as the basis of freedom.
Immanuel Kant positive
Used to frame the 'negative critique' of Lacan as a Kantian criticism of limits.
Friedrich Nietzsche negative
Used to show the danger of turning cultural criticism into a social program (Nazism).
Muhammad positive
Referenced in the context of Islamic theology, specifically the story of his wife Khadija as the first believer who convinced him he wasn't crazy.
Hubert Dreyfus negative
Described as an 'American pragmatic Heideggerian' whose suggestion to resist technology via 'everyday pleasures' (sunset, friends) is mocked as comical and already mediated by technology (tourist agencies).
Transcript 11 turns
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Okay welcome back to the last but one of Slavoj's masterclasses. Just one announcement. Next Wednesday at o'clock Slavoj will give an extra session, we'll have an extra session of debate with friends in the audience. So that will be at o'clock next Wednesday but not in this room because this is booked. We will be moving to Gordon Square which is a square north of Malet Street north of here. Number Gordon Square. This is where the Department of History of Art and
Okay welcome back to the last but one of Slavoj's masterclasses. Just one announcement. Next Wednesday at o'clock Slavoj will give an extra session, we'll have an extra session of debate with friends in the audience. So that will be at o'clock next Wednesday but not in this room because this is booked. We will be moving to Gordon Square which is a square north of Malet Street north of here. Number Gordon Square. This is where the Department of History of Art and
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Languages are. So it's Gordon Square room B04, B04 Gordon Square on
Languages are. So it's Gordon Square room B04, B04 Gordon Square on
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Wednesday at o'clock. The last formal session will be on Tuesday here next this coming Tuesday and then on Wednesday we'll have the extra one. So Slavoj. I hope this works. Thanks very much and just to calm you down today no mess, no video and so on. Just what I promised Heidegger, Foucault, politics, intellectual today so on. I like the name Gordon Square. How should I put it, I already feel like General Gordon and you the Mahdi soldiers and I will honorably die there. No, I hope not. How should I be evil? Mahdi Buddhists or whoever you will be there. Okay, okay. So, let me directly go to the point because I really want to say some maybe surprising things starting to show my political cards
Wednesday at o'clock. The last formal session will be on Tuesday here next this coming Tuesday and then on Wednesday we'll have the extra one. So Slavoj. I hope this works. Thanks very much and just to calm you down today no mess, no video and so on. Just what I promised Heidegger, Foucault, politics, intellectual today so on. I like the name Gordon Square. How should I put it, I already feel like General Gordon and you the Mahdi soldiers and I will honorably die there. No, I hope not. How should I be evil? Mahdi Buddhists or whoever you will be there. Okay, okay. So, let me directly go to the point because I really want to say some maybe surprising things starting to show my political cards
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like you want them, you will get them. The commonplace today is that philosophers in politics stand for a catastrophic misfortune. Either they miserably fail or they succeed and they fail even more, they cause a catastrophe. Plato we know sold as a slave or Plato in power even worse a tyrant. The idea, common sense idea is that philosophers try to impose their abstract notion onto reality then they rape, violate reality, so no wonder that from Plato to Heidegger they are basically anti-democratic except some people claim some empiricists, pragmatists and so on. But here I would like to introduce the first complication because even there
like you want them, you will get them. The commonplace today is that philosophers in politics stand for a catastrophic misfortune. Either they miserably fail or they succeed and they fail even more, they cause a catastrophe. Plato we know sold as a slave or Plato in power even worse a tyrant. The idea, common sense idea is that philosophers try to impose their abstract notion onto reality then they rape, violate reality, so no wonder that from Plato to Heidegger they are basically anti-democratic except some people claim some empiricists, pragmatists and so on. But here I would like to introduce the first complication because even there
Slavoj Žižek
I think the image is much more complex. Look at the two great opponents in theory, I mean Karl Popper and Frankfurt School, Adorno. You know the big so-called Positivismusstreit positivism debate. They nonetheless share a fundamental feature. Etienne Balibar once I was in very friendly polemics with him he drew my attention to it. Namely, this equation which even people like Derrida, Levinas share with this bunch of totality is totalitarianism to cut a long story short. That is to say, any pretense in theory to grasp totality or if you want to put it in more absolute terms precisely to get a contact with the absolute, absolute truth, divinity whatever necessarily leads in social practice to some kind of terror totalitarianism whatsoever. I think this has to be categorically rejected. Not only in the empirical sense like when you say but look at Stalin in effect he was no dogmatist. If you look what Stalin was doing he was just ruthlessly using bits of Marxism that he needed for his totally pragmatic purposes. I'm not just making the point the as it were empirical ad hominem point that totalitarian leaders were just referring to this absolute theory but in their practice they were ruthlessly pragmatic. I claim that even if you look closely at their theory it wasn't that. It was to be slightly cynical much closer to a certain version of British empiricism. I mean the basic if you want to grasp a true Stalin as it were you get it when he says everything depends on circumstances, no dogmatism, utter flexibility, everything changes all the time and so on. And it's so it's interesting how even with Hitler my problem with Hitler is that and this is my big debate with some well-known anti-essentialists. Whatever you accuse Hitler of he was the opposition of essentialist, contingentist. I mean Hitler's view was not I'm simply an instrument of fate, everything is predetermined. No, Hitler's view is if you really read him which is a difficult task Hitler is boring but it's a history is a meaningless battlefield. Everything depends on contingency. Finally, we all fail. All we can do is heroically insist imposing our will. There is no guarantee of the ultimate outcome. Hitler even was mocking the very idea that humanity, men or humanity in general can ever dominate nature. Hitler's idea was we are always ultimately losers. It's an open contingent process. So Hitler was again absolutely no no reference to any eternal essence and so on and so on. So even on the contrary I claim isn't it that often in a concrete situation it can be that the contingency view is more progressive. But I think we were too brainwashed by this postmodern deconstructionists who automatically equate, you know, identity bad, totality imposed terror, contingency, multiplicity, negotiation, democracy, dialogue whatever. Look for example at the situation in France in the late 18th century. Definitely the royalists, conservatives were much more contingency people. Their idea was this was the whole point I claim of the debate between historical right and natural right. Historical right was basically those who insisted on the right of princes, kings to rule was basically a contingency right was this is what come out of historical contingency. Don't mess with it because like we have a vulgar saying in Slovene probably you have your own version don't mess too much with shit because it will start to smell bad. That's basically the message you got. But you get my point it was precisely the revolutionaries who if anything were essentialists. Now there are eternal human rights and so on and so on. So back to my point even if we forget all this complexity the feature to retain is that usually this identification which again to get my to my starting point Popper to the two as opposed as Karl Popper with his more British empiricist approach falsificationist and so on and Adorno they nonetheless share this approach of identity in thought, strong conceptual thought is the theory of of political totalitarianism. Or one can even and this would be a nice exercise you remember towards the end yesterday I was boring you with that fragment of from Chesterton of how ordinary police looks for criminals who killed blah-blah we are reading sonnets and going to intellectual parties to detect potential crimes. But I think that in a way both Adorno and Popper would have accepted a kind of rewriting of this Chesterton like ordinary fighters for freedom has to fight real dictators criminals we go to read Plato, Rousseau and so on to discern there totalitarian crimes being prepared. I again my point is to reject this line. So when Marxists defend Marx claiming that his ideas were not faithfully realized for example in Stalinism that Marx was betrayed there are two ways that critics of Marxism reply to this. One is a Hegelian motive which is the repetition of the Hegelian well-known proposition if the idea is not strong enough to realize itself so much the worse for the idea itself so that you cannot simply play the ideal against reality. It must have been you cannot simply say Marx was betrayed if he was Marx why not? Because Hegel is quite right here Marx pretended to grasp the historical totality and the moment you aim at totality you cannot say oh but it wasn't as I planned you know you cannot use empirical facts which disturb your plans as an excuse. But then there is another more tricky defense which you find in true conservatives who say Marx was betrayed thanks god if he were to be realized effectively what he planned it would have been even much worse than Stalinism. The idea is that if you try to translate into actual social organization Marx's, not Marx's but Marx's of Marx vision of society as that you know where relations between people are transformed into relations, dominance of things total transparency, general intellect ruling society that this would have been even worse. And then the usual conservative trick that Heidegger at least was willing to draw consequences of his catastrophic experience and consider that those who think ontologically who are ready to grasp the fundamental ontological truth of our time have to err ontically. This is I think the utter if you want not so much despair as withdrawal of late Heidegger. He is very clear here. I think that the key political statement of Heidegger is that those who try to get to approach the ontological truth the basic transcendental coordinates of our time where we are have to err ontically. You cannot have it both ways you cannot have your ontological cake and eat it ontically as it were. My problem here is that this position is that of wisdom. A wise man knows that one should not enforce reality, that a little bit of corruption is the best defense against big corruption and so on and so on. My problem with this position of wisdom is its formalism. Why? Because I think that the weakness of wisdom is that it cannot render problematic the very general field within which it operates. What do I mean by this? For example one of the wise commonplaces today is the idea of avoiding the extremes like in politics we need neither total state control nor total liberalism individualism. If you have a total state control then individual initiative is crushed to bone, we get enlightened totalitarianism. If on the other hand you neglect state control you don't get healthcare, social security and so on. So we need the right measure. But a brief philosophical reflection here you know what's the problem with the right measure is that in a certain historical constellation you always presuppose the right measure and the true historical change is not a change simply from one extreme to the other like more state control or whatever but is a change precisely in what you perceive as the right measure. For example let me give you an example if you take 18th century debates on the role of women what would have been their vision? On the one hand we have the guys who think husband is the total master you can beat wives they don't shouldn't be allowed to say anything then for them the other extreme would have been oh my god free love, woman can decide, equality they would have said no that's going too much. So let's have the right measure. Yes you shouldn't beat your wife you but you should nonetheless dominate your wife but in a benevolent way. You know what I mean the true historical feminist revolution was that what we experience as the middle the middle itself shifts and this is I think where wisdom fails. This is the true revolution is not a revolution within a field so when they say yes from revolution extreme no it's the revolution in the very common measure. For example one way to see the limit of this attitude of wisdom would be again my eternal example but why not it was one of the big traumas let's say we are in Germany in early 30s it would be easy to say on the one hand the Nazi extreme yes this cannot be true that Jews are responsible for all the evil but on the other hand there is the Jewish extreme. My god listen and all those data are true I'm consciously provoking here it is simply true that like even of lawyers in Berlin in early 30s were Jews that of journalists were Jews and so on and so on. So you get my point the attitude of wisdom here would have been but Jews are always pushing also pushing it a little bit too far. So let's adopt the middle attitude. Let's not directly crush the Jews but let's slightly you know and so on and so on. But you see the how utterly disgusting and false this position is. So what all I'm saying here is that there are clearly limits of wisdom. And I cannot develop this now but my next point here is that this is another of my materialist Christian points. Maybe again you can accuse me next Wednesday of being one-sided Western Eurocentrist here but for me I have this deep suspicion that my god this is horrible what I will say but to provoke you for next Wednesday I will say that the only true non-wise religion is for me Christianity. It has this madness that with all other religions I suspect that ultimately they play the card of wisdom which is you know ultimately we all die don't push into extremes and so on. Christianity is for me the religion of one-sidedness. It's no it's here one it's the only religion that I know of utter partiality almost a Stalinist partiality. This is for me the truth of that you know I bring sword not peace and so on and so on. It truth is on one side, truth is in the extreme. Okay, let's go on. So where does Lacan stand with regard to all this? A brutal question. Lacan's theory of course can be used as a tool to throw a new light on numerous political ideological phenomena bringing to the light hidden libidinal economy of today's liberalism, totalitarianism whatever you want. But I'm asking here a much more basic and even simple naive question. Does Lacan's theory imply a precise political stance? The attempts to deal with this issue seem to focus around two main versions if we discount positions which are for me clearly extreme not in accordance with the letter and the spirit and all of Lacan's thought like the position defended by otherwise very interesting he's not stupid French Lacanian half-Lacanian he's drifting now Pierre Legendre according to whom the lesson of Lacan today is that all this gay rights blah-blah same-sex couples gay adoption that this is too much in the sense that it undermines the very symbolic coordinates of our social space so if we go in this way it will be a new psychotic totalitarianism so we need some kind of re-emergence of the symbolic authority. But I think this clearly sticks out. What we have are two versions. One, some Lacanians but not even exclusively Lacanians I will name some of them Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe their follower who is closer to Lacan Yannis Stavrakakis and others try to demonstrate that Lacanian theory can be directly applied used to ground democratic politics. The terms are well known here. There is no big other Lacan's notion of the big other the barred, thwarted, non-existent, inconsistent whatever you want symbolic order means that the social symbolic order is inconsistent there is no as Lacan put it no other of the other no ultimate guarantee. And their idea is that democracy is the way to integrate into the edifice of power this lack of ultimate foundation. Insofar as all organic visions of a harmonious hollow society rely on a fantasy democracy thus appears to offer a political stance which traverses fantasy. That's the wager here. Now that what Lacan describes as the most radical experience in the psychoanalytic treatment the final point when you traverse the fantasy that is to say problematize or rather experience in its utter meaninglessness and contingency the very ultimate coordinates fantasmatic coordinates of your being, of your experience of reality. That their claim is that the claim of those who pursue this line that we can produce generate, practice even a how should I put it political version of this insight which is simply radical democracy. For them to present this logic in a simplified way fantasy is always fantasy of an organic whole society without antagonism blah-blah and democracy precisely renounces this impossible ideal of a non-antagonistic society. The idea is thus that for democracy for the authentic core of democracy what for other theories totalitarian theories pre-modern theories is the problem the fact that you never know who is in power who is in charge who is the king this emptiness vacillation of power multiple contenders for power which as you know this was always in pre-modern theories the moment of panic. Here this is not only allowed, tolerated but even elevated into the saving feature. That is to say for from a democratic perspective the occasional shake-ups are what shake-ups in the sense of the shattering of the established social edifice through democratic process it's what makes society function. So democracy elevates incompleteness into principle. It institutionalizes the regular shake-up in the guise of election. In short, the barred S no sorry signifier of the barred big other the fact that is for example for Miller the signifier of democracy. So democracy goes here further than the common realistic wisdom according to which in order to actualize a certain political vision one should allow for concrete unpredictable circumstances be ready to make compromises and so on. You get my point. Democracy turns imperfection itself into a notion. We know all Claude Lefort formulas here how for democracy the place of power is is a priori empty, inconsistent and so on and so on. So we have here this vision. I already criticized this vision in some of my books even I forgot which one I think the most expanded version in my Iraq book The Borrowed Kettle. All I want to tell you is that I find very funny the polemics in which this critique involved me because what shocked me a little bit is how those who criticized me either ignored or if they did not ignore treated as a simple regression of my part an obvious fact which I openly admit that I myself in my early my god this is so megalomaniac to say but early works developed this notion. This notion of democracy as basically something that fits Lacanian logic of non-all, democracy as the inscription of the inexistence of the big other into the very social order and so on and so on. Okay for reasons we don't have time to go into it now I no longer buy this version. Then there are others, other Lacanians, the majority I would say who while retaining a kind of a general liberal attitude okay so but back to my critics you know what really pisses me off with them nonetheless that they simply I mean they basically reproach to me my own old quotes saying but don't I see that and what but I don't see that what I was writing years ago or what. I mean especially I'm trying to my god I'm developing now slowly into a liberal in the sense that what I really hate is when people use this dirty rhetorical trick in polemics where you know instead of honestly saying you think this, I think that, they say I you don't see what I see. My god of course I don't see but so they don't see, you know what I mean. Okay, but let's go on. Nonetheless the majority of Lacanians as far as I can see have a different attitude towards politics. It is the attitude of positing Lacan as an internal critic of democracy, a provocateur who raises unpleasant questions without proposing his own positive political project. It's just that Lacan is just this kind of a you know like Socrates I think somewhere even in Plato I forgot where he identified himself as this fly buzz who is annoying the organism but in the long term this ironic biting serves helps to regenerate the social order. The foundation of this is the another much stronger thesis. It is that and Miller in his last writings put it incidentally in his writings where he unfortunately Jacques-Alain Miller openly adopts the attitude which I think in the best of the terms could be called some kind of a center-right position bluntly. That the idea is that politics as such is a domain of imaginary symbolic identification. That politics involves a kind of a constitutive misrecognition or self-blinding. That is to say this is precisely the opposite of the position of Stavrakakis and others. It's the opposition that it's meaningless to talk about traversing the fantasy within politics because politics is a domain of collective acts and it's basically I think this second position which is why if I were to choose between the two I would nonetheless choose the first Stavrakakis position. The idea is that politics as such is a domain how to put it ontologically it's constituted always based on a certain blindness misrecognition. In the sense of involving fundamental act of imaginary of symbolic identification. And since the ultimate insight of psychoanalysis is traversing the fantasy as disidentification precisely you cannot it's meaningless to ask what would have been a political stance of an analyst because it there is none because the ultimate stance of an analyst is precisely a distance, a disidentification with the political domain as such. Now if you ask me as an old Stalinist what do I think about this? Of course my first answer is that this position says more than it intends to say. Because I claim that precisely such a distance towards politics is involves a very precise political attitude. Usually let's call it by name liberal-rightist individualist whatever you know this kind of a skepticism which in practice means kind of a moderate pragmatic politics and so on and so on. So Lacan as a provocateur in the line from Socrates to Kierkegaard. Lacan as the one who discerns democracy's illusions, hidden metaphysical presuppositions but should not be taken it's a kind of a priori almost Kantian criticism of Lacan. It's a in the sense that this position locates a legitimate what is the the underlying premise of this attitude? That all radical thinkers from Plato to Lacan, Nietzsche whoever you want should be tolerated within their own domain as this provocateurs making us aware of the limitations of our position. But I'm consciously putting it here in Kantian terms. If you go too far and read this negative critique as a positive constitutive project, as a project to be enacted in social reality, it's a catastrophe. It's totalitarianism, racism whatever you want. Like Nietzsche. Good Nietzsche cultural criticism you know ironic denouncing of the falsity, hypocrisy of our morality blah-blah. But the moment you take Nietzsche as a program it's nightmare. It's Nazism or whatever. The one who elaborated this position in as far as I know you may correct me if I'm wrong in the most articulate way is Wendy Brown in her book which I advise you to read it it's I think it's called is it Politics Out of History I think it's Politics Out of History. Okay I know now don't laugh at me I know she is not Lacanian but I think that her criticism of her approach to public position of critical intellectuals is extremely important. Brown reads the post-modern politics of identity based on the wrongs committed to special groups along the sex, gender, race line as an expression of the ambiguous relationship one entertains towards the good old liberal democratic egalitarian frame of human rights. One feels betrayed by it. With regard to women, blacks, gays the universal liberal rhetoric didn't deliver. It masks continuous exclusion and exploitation. But one nonetheless remains deeply attached to these liberal ideals. A short quote from page yes sorry Politics Out of History Princeton University Press It's it is when the telos of the good vanishes liberal democratic good but the yearning for it remains that morality appears to devolve into moralism in politics end of quote. So after the disintegration of the large all-encompassing leftist narratives of progress when political activity dissolved into a multitude of identity issues the excess over these particular struggles can only find an outlet in impotent moralistic outrage. I basically accept this analysis. However, Wendy Brown makes a crucial step further and deploys the paradoxes of democracy to the end. According to her Spinoza, Tocqueville and other immanent critics of democracy were right. Democracy is in itself inchoate, empty, lacking a firm principle. It needs anti-democratic content to fill in its form. As such, it is really constitutively formal. This anti-democratic content is provided by philosophy, ideology, theory. No wonder that most of the great philosophers from Plato to Heidegger were distrustful towards democracy if not directly anti-democratic. Another quote from Wendy Brown page What if democratic politics the most untheoretical of all political forms paradoxically requires theory, requires an antithesis to itself in both the form and substance of theory if it is to satisfy its ambition to produce a free and egalitarian order. End of quote. So Brown deploys all the paradoxes from the fact that democracy requires for its health a non-democratic element. Ironically I'm tempted to refer to this as a homeopathic theory of for obvious reasons of democracy. In order to remain a vital democracy democracy needs a permanent influx of anti-democratic self-questioning. So again the cure for democracy's ills is homeopathic. Another quote page If as the musings of Spinoza and Tocqueville suggest democracies tend toward cathexis onto principles antithetical to democracy then critical scrutiny of these principles and of the political formations animated by them is crucial to the project of refounding or recovering democracy. End of quote. I got the point but I think here we can perceive the first crack in her edifice. Because first her idea was that democracy is in itself impossible to fill it in gets ossified to fill in its own content so it needs a critical anti-democratic influx. Now we learn that democracy tends toward cathexis on principle and that the critical scrutiny is how should I put it against anti-democratic elements in democracy. Okay but more about this later. Let's return to Wendy Brown. So she defines the tension between politics and theory democratic politics and contemporary theory as the tension between and here problems for me begin as the tension between the political necessity to fixate meaning, to suture the textual drift in a form principle which can only guide us in action the tension between this and between theory's permanent deconstruction which cannot ever be recuperated in a new positive program. The point is I think even very banal. In order to be operative in politics you should forget about deconstruction. You need fixed goals, simple slogans and so on and so on. And on the other hand theory's basically destructive, undermining, deconstructing and so on. And there is a tension between the two. Another quote. Among human practices politics is peculiarly untheoretical because the bids for power that constitute it are necessarily at odds with the theoretical project of opening up meaning, of making meaning slide. Discursive power functions by concealing the terms of its fabrication and hence its malleability and contingency. Discourse fixes meaning by naturalizing it or else ceases to have sway as a discourse. This fixing or naturalizing of meanings is the necessary idiom in which politics takes place. Incidentally with this I violently disagree. I continue the quote. Even the politics of deconstructive displacement implies such normativity at least provisionally. End of quote. So the idea is that theoretical analysis which unnerve the contingent and inconsistent nature or the lack of ultimate foundation of all normative constructs and political projects are anti-political endeavors insofar as each destabilizes meaning without proposing alternative codes or institutions. Yet each may also be essential in sustaining an existing democratic regime by rejuvenating it. That's what in when I will be in power you go when you get years of Gulag without what do you call it without then where there is no what's the legal term sorry when there is no chance of lowering it without yes no yes no probation. Why? Again you got the point. The point is this very naive democratic sorry deconstructionist idea that in order to be politically active we need minimum of naturalization, fixation which is inherently anti-theoretical because theory precisely shows the contingent foundation of every meaning and so on and so on. So the tension is irreducible because on the other hand with this deconstructionist endeavor you cannot found any politics, any positive politics. Where do I see problems here? In her further analysis Wendy Brown attributes the same ambiguous link also to the relationship between state and people. In the same way that democracy needs anti-democracy to rejuvenate itself state needs people's resistance to rejuvenate itself. Another quote this time page Only through the state are the people constituted as a people. Only in resistance to the state do the people remain a people. Thus just as democracy requires anti-democratic critique in order to remain democratic so too the democratic state may require you note the revisionist Menshevik withdrawal may require she in the trial against her it will be the next that my dream would be not if Moscow trials were against politicians what if with Costas we are trying to establishing kind of a think-tank of the new left we should organize London trials now intellectual trials now. Just as democracy requires anti-so so too the democratic state may require democratic resistance rather than failure rather if it is not to become the death of democracy. Similarly democracy may require theory's provision of unlivable critiques and unreachable ideals. So you got the point it's this simple transgressive model you should be a provocateur make it move but don't go too far. Okay here I think things explode for me into serious questions. In this parallel between the two couples of democracy anti-democracy and state people I think that Wendy Brown's argumentation gets caught in a strange dynamic of reversals. First she claims democracy needs anti-democratic critique to remain alive to shake its false certainties. That was the first thesis no. The big philosophers you remember from Plato to Heidegger, Nietzsche mock democracy but let's not be afraid of it what appears as a threat is really a rejuvenating cure. But then she claims the democratic state needs democratic resistance of the people. Wait a minute where is the parallel? Why not it needs anti-democratic resistance. Does Brown not confound here two or rather a whole series of resistances to democratic state. We have the anti-democratic elitist theoretician's resistance the Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger line. We have the popular democratic resistance against the insufficiently democratic character of the state and so on and so on. Furthermore, is not each of these two resistances accompanied by its dark shadowy double. The brutal cynical elitism that justifies those in power or the violent outbursts of a rabble. And what if the two join hands. You got my point that okay we have like what Wendy Brown celebrates as this Nietzsche, Heidegger line of provocative rejuvenating of democracy. Yes but the problem is that this provocative rejuvenating attitude was sometimes taken very seriously no. What if it doesn't want to stay provocative rejuvenating critique and what if these guys get in power my god no. So you know the true heroism of Wendy Brown and here I will do something that you will kill me afterwards but I do it out of pure viciousness maybe as a woman she is too soft to say okay I say for her would be you know where her logic should have bring her to claim what if Hitler was the ultimate rejuvenating force of democracy and I'm sorry to inform you but he was in a way. Are we aware that all our here I give pay the due what they deserve to third way social democracy my god I mean with all my radical criticism of them. Let's be frank after World War II the social welfare project was something and I don't have any illusions I wrote about it but let's admit it I will say something horrible if you are radical leftists I don't think that at any point in not only Western but even human history this is what is important the state power itself accepted not only as a mercy benevolence of the ruler but accepted even if it violated it in practice accepted as its founding principle that it is here to secure the majority healthcare, school this egalitarian openness. I mean with all my cynicism and Stalinist leading leanings we shouldn't make fun of it. I mean I'm here very traditional and don't accuse me of becoming a liberal don't be afraid but there is something normatively unique here. As far as I can say for the first time in human history this happened no. First twenty years of London code First Omar Al-Khattab you mean first twenty years of in first welfare state in history according to Ben's Column doing a comparison with the Danes. Where was this in [unintelligible] just after the prophet died. Okay no I again I'm sorry that I wasn't able to go into Islam because first as I already emphasized it but don't be afraid you're already I will not now go into another version of Buddhism and I half know. I fully admit it because I tried to develop it in my texts my god I am aware that where I see the unique potential of Islam again what I emphasize two things first non in contrast to Christianity and Judaism non-paternal. The fundamental position of Islam believer is an orphan and not only an orphan in this Christian trick we are earthly orphans so that you get the true big death in God. No in a way you remain an orphan. It's not just an empirical feature that for example okay now I'm talking about Arabs more specifically but that you know Ishmael as the original one is the son of Hagar they clearly opt for the and I'm using here the term without irony for how do you call that self-employed single mother no is is literally the primordial you know the you know the story which is the Arab myth that you know you know Abraham two wives two sons no and it's the other one which is and this the other thing connected to it is precisely this is why I think Islam has such problems with femininity it's the other the obverse of a hidden narrative of much stronger reliance of femininity you know we should be a little bit analysts here when you have such fear of covering woman women all the time I would like to know what woman is that and I think that implicitly they construct a much stronger person of the woman like are you aware that in Muhammad's story itself there is woman is the big other you know the story of his wife Khadija who was the first believer. Maybe I improvised it here you know that when Muhammad got his visions no he thought he is getting crazy it's devil. And then his wife was the first one who convinced him and so on and so on. Back to that orphan story because of this I think you have this tremendous political potential in Islam. Because the problem of Islam even if it may sound different is precisely this is the famous Ummah not something Ummah as community of believers it's the problem is a tremendous one and crucial even today how to build a community without relying on any pre-established patriarchal order or whatever. But so that nonetheless I don't lose my thread. Agreeing with all this I'm nonetheless a little bit afraid to pose this kind of a direct equation between modern notion of welfare state and again conceding all the points which is a they were for that time incredibly progressive it was something unheard of and so on and so on I concede all this but nonetheless okay I would be a little bit afraid to I okay I even give you this point that they are probably the ones who come the closest to it how should I put it the closest in the sense that you cannot even compare it with it's as if in early Islamic community something of the emancipatory potential of early Christian communities this Paulinian community of believers which was then screwed up if no later by Saint Augustine. Which is why I love Fred Jameson's texts which I published in my volume on Saint Augustine as the original social democrat. You know it's an ingenious thesis by Fred Jameson you know what it is that in that that structurally Saint Augustine plays the same role in Christianity as a revolutionary movement early as American renegades in the 50s did that is to say this con this criticism bourgeois of Marxism claiming leftism is too simplistic usually with some reference of psychoanalysis you know all the partisan review story we have to discover inner life. This the reference to inner life to betray your radical leftist cause. This is exactly what Augustine did. He discovered inner life which is for Fred Jameson strictly a social democratic revisionism in the sense that in this way he was able to make compromise with those in power no. That is to say this is what I like about in this thesis that this so celebrated inner doubt all this inner filth that it evokes my dirtiest Stalinist instincts. In Saint Augustine all this inner blah-blah this is strictly the obverse of his crucial push of Christianity into becoming the state religion. And I'm ready to concede that some of this impetus you definitely have it in in in okay no I but okay let's not get lost in it. Okay let's go back. So let's go back where we were and we were with this contradiction of contradiction in Wendy Brown's line of argumentation how on the one hand yes we have the that this critique that she celebrates as rejuvenating can not only become an ideology of those in power but can also be used as the brutal cynical elitism that justifies those in power. Like you know I'm getting a little bit tired with all my love of Nietzsche of those who present Nietzsche as some kind of a radical outcast critical figure. I mean screw it Nietzsche was a extreme in the last decades when he was already crazy he was an extremely popular cult figure among German youth conservatives and so on and again as I already said here it pisses me off when my poor beloved guys like Wagner every detail when they when you can detect some kind of an anti-semitism deconstructionists pick it up. But if you read Foucault if you read Deleuze on Nietzsche my god where is Nietzsche's politics you don't even have to deconstruct it. Nietzsche all the time was taking explicit political stance when Nietzsche spoke about the rebellion of slaves as their ultimate horror that threat he it wasn't an abstract phrase it meant Paris Commune. Because as a good conservative you know Nietzsche believed that the rumors that there was a rumor circulating that that the that the Paris Communards were burning Louvre museum or whatever oh Nietzsche immediately of course so you know like all this disappears from Nietzsche. Nietzsche was not a marginal figure in the sense of crazy lunatic. Already before Hitler Nietzsche was the one of the key elements in practically a state philosopher if you want. So that's one aspect, the other aspect is
I think the image is much more complex. Look at the two great opponents in theory, I mean Karl Popper and Frankfurt School, Adorno. You know the big so-called Positivismusstreit positivism debate. They nonetheless share a fundamental feature. Etienne Balibar once I was in very friendly polemics with him he drew my attention to it. Namely, this equation which even people like Derrida, Levinas share with this bunch of totality is totalitarianism to cut a long story short. That is to say, any pretense in theory to grasp totality or if you want to put it in more absolute terms precisely to get a contact with the absolute, absolute truth, divinity whatever necessarily leads in social practice to some kind of terror totalitarianism whatsoever. I think this has to be categorically rejected. Not only in the empirical sense like when you say but look at Stalin in effect he was no dogmatist. If you look what Stalin was doing he was just ruthlessly using bits of Marxism that he needed for his totally pragmatic purposes. I'm not just making the point the as it were empirical ad hominem point that totalitarian leaders were just referring to this absolute theory but in their practice they were ruthlessly pragmatic. I claim that even if you look closely at their theory it wasn't that. It was to be slightly cynical much closer to a certain version of British empiricism. I mean the basic if you want to grasp a true Stalin as it were you get it when he says everything depends on circumstances, no dogmatism, utter flexibility, everything changes all the time and so on. And it's so it's interesting how even with Hitler my problem with Hitler is that and this is my big debate with some well-known anti-essentialists. Whatever you accuse Hitler of he was the opposition of essentialist, contingentist. I mean Hitler's view was not I'm simply an instrument of fate, everything is predetermined. No, Hitler's view is if you really read him which is a difficult task Hitler is boring but it's a history is a meaningless battlefield. Everything depends on contingency. Finally, we all fail. All we can do is heroically insist imposing our will. There is no guarantee of the ultimate outcome. Hitler even was mocking the very idea that humanity, men or humanity in general can ever dominate nature. Hitler's idea was we are always ultimately losers. It's an open contingent process. So Hitler was again absolutely no no reference to any eternal essence and so on and so on. So even on the contrary I claim isn't it that often in a concrete situation it can be that the contingency view is more progressive. But I think we were too brainwashed by this postmodern deconstructionists who automatically equate, you know, identity bad, totality imposed terror, contingency, multiplicity, negotiation, democracy, dialogue whatever. Look for example at the situation in France in the late 18th century. Definitely the royalists, conservatives were much more contingency people. Their idea was this was the whole point I claim of the debate between historical right and natural right. Historical right was basically those who insisted on the right of princes, kings to rule was basically a contingency right was this is what come out of historical contingency. Don't mess with it because like we have a vulgar saying in Slovene probably you have your own version don't mess too much with shit because it will start to smell bad. That's basically the message you got. But you get my point it was precisely the revolutionaries who if anything were essentialists. Now there are eternal human rights and so on and so on. So back to my point even if we forget all this complexity the feature to retain is that usually this identification which again to get my to my starting point Popper to the two as opposed as Karl Popper with his more British empiricist approach falsificationist and so on and Adorno they nonetheless share this approach of identity in thought, strong conceptual thought is the theory of of political totalitarianism. Or one can even and this would be a nice exercise you remember towards the end yesterday I was boring you with that fragment of from Chesterton of how ordinary police looks for criminals who killed blah-blah we are reading sonnets and going to intellectual parties to detect potential crimes. But I think that in a way both Adorno and Popper would have accepted a kind of rewriting of this Chesterton like ordinary fighters for freedom has to fight real dictators criminals we go to read Plato, Rousseau and so on to discern there totalitarian crimes being prepared. I again my point is to reject this line. So when Marxists defend Marx claiming that his ideas were not faithfully realized for example in Stalinism that Marx was betrayed there are two ways that critics of Marxism reply to this. One is a Hegelian motive which is the repetition of the Hegelian well-known proposition if the idea is not strong enough to realize itself so much the worse for the idea itself so that you cannot simply play the ideal against reality. It must have been you cannot simply say Marx was betrayed if he was Marx why not? Because Hegel is quite right here Marx pretended to grasp the historical totality and the moment you aim at totality you cannot say oh but it wasn't as I planned you know you cannot use empirical facts which disturb your plans as an excuse. But then there is another more tricky defense which you find in true conservatives who say Marx was betrayed thanks god if he were to be realized effectively what he planned it would have been even much worse than Stalinism. The idea is that if you try to translate into actual social organization Marx's, not Marx's but Marx's of Marx vision of society as that you know where relations between people are transformed into relations, dominance of things total transparency, general intellect ruling society that this would have been even worse. And then the usual conservative trick that Heidegger at least was willing to draw consequences of his catastrophic experience and consider that those who think ontologically who are ready to grasp the fundamental ontological truth of our time have to err ontically. This is I think the utter if you want not so much despair as withdrawal of late Heidegger. He is very clear here. I think that the key political statement of Heidegger is that those who try to get to approach the ontological truth the basic transcendental coordinates of our time where we are have to err ontically. You cannot have it both ways you cannot have your ontological cake and eat it ontically as it were. My problem here is that this position is that of wisdom. A wise man knows that one should not enforce reality, that a little bit of corruption is the best defense against big corruption and so on and so on. My problem with this position of wisdom is its formalism. Why? Because I think that the weakness of wisdom is that it cannot render problematic the very general field within which it operates. What do I mean by this? For example one of the wise commonplaces today is the idea of avoiding the extremes like in politics we need neither total state control nor total liberalism individualism. If you have a total state control then individual initiative is crushed to bone, we get enlightened totalitarianism. If on the other hand you neglect state control you don't get healthcare, social security and so on. So we need the right measure. But a brief philosophical reflection here you know what's the problem with the right measure is that in a certain historical constellation you always presuppose the right measure and the true historical change is not a change simply from one extreme to the other like more state control or whatever but is a change precisely in what you perceive as the right measure. For example let me give you an example if you take 18th century debates on the role of women what would have been their vision? On the one hand we have the guys who think husband is the total master you can beat wives they don't shouldn't be allowed to say anything then for them the other extreme would have been oh my god free love, woman can decide, equality they would have said no that's going too much. So let's have the right measure. Yes you shouldn't beat your wife you but you should nonetheless dominate your wife but in a benevolent way. You know what I mean the true historical feminist revolution was that what we experience as the middle the middle itself shifts and this is I think where wisdom fails. This is the true revolution is not a revolution within a field so when they say yes from revolution extreme no it's the revolution in the very common measure. For example one way to see the limit of this attitude of wisdom would be again my eternal example but why not it was one of the big traumas let's say we are in Germany in early 30s it would be easy to say on the one hand the Nazi extreme yes this cannot be true that Jews are responsible for all the evil but on the other hand there is the Jewish extreme. My god listen and all those data are true I'm consciously provoking here it is simply true that like even of lawyers in Berlin in early 30s were Jews that of journalists were Jews and so on and so on. So you get my point the attitude of wisdom here would have been but Jews are always pushing also pushing it a little bit too far. So let's adopt the middle attitude. Let's not directly crush the Jews but let's slightly you know and so on and so on. But you see the how utterly disgusting and false this position is. So what all I'm saying here is that there are clearly limits of wisdom. And I cannot develop this now but my next point here is that this is another of my materialist Christian points. Maybe again you can accuse me next Wednesday of being one-sided Western Eurocentrist here but for me I have this deep suspicion that my god this is horrible what I will say but to provoke you for next Wednesday I will say that the only true non-wise religion is for me Christianity. It has this madness that with all other religions I suspect that ultimately they play the card of wisdom which is you know ultimately we all die don't push into extremes and so on. Christianity is for me the religion of one-sidedness. It's no it's here one it's the only religion that I know of utter partiality almost a Stalinist partiality. This is for me the truth of that you know I bring sword not peace and so on and so on. It truth is on one side, truth is in the extreme. Okay, let's go on. So where does Lacan stand with regard to all this? A brutal question. Lacan's theory of course can be used as a tool to throw a new light on numerous political ideological phenomena bringing to the light hidden libidinal economy of today's liberalism, totalitarianism whatever you want. But I'm asking here a much more basic and even simple naive question. Does Lacan's theory imply a precise political stance? The attempts to deal with this issue seem to focus around two main versions if we discount positions which are for me clearly extreme not in accordance with the letter and the spirit and all of Lacan's thought like the position defended by otherwise very interesting he's not stupid French Lacanian half-Lacanian he's drifting now Pierre Legendre according to whom the lesson of Lacan today is that all this gay rights blah-blah same-sex couples gay adoption that this is too much in the sense that it undermines the very symbolic coordinates of our social space so if we go in this way it will be a new psychotic totalitarianism so we need some kind of re-emergence of the symbolic authority. But I think this clearly sticks out. What we have are two versions. One, some Lacanians but not even exclusively Lacanians I will name some of them Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe their follower who is closer to Lacan Yannis Stavrakakis and others try to demonstrate that Lacanian theory can be directly applied used to ground democratic politics. The terms are well known here. There is no big other Lacan's notion of the big other the barred, thwarted, non-existent, inconsistent whatever you want symbolic order means that the social symbolic order is inconsistent there is no as Lacan put it no other of the other no ultimate guarantee. And their idea is that democracy is the way to integrate into the edifice of power this lack of ultimate foundation. Insofar as all organic visions of a harmonious hollow society rely on a fantasy democracy thus appears to offer a political stance which traverses fantasy. That's the wager here. Now that what Lacan describes as the most radical experience in the psychoanalytic treatment the final point when you traverse the fantasy that is to say problematize or rather experience in its utter meaninglessness and contingency the very ultimate coordinates fantasmatic coordinates of your being, of your experience of reality. That their claim is that the claim of those who pursue this line that we can produce generate, practice even a how should I put it political version of this insight which is simply radical democracy. For them to present this logic in a simplified way fantasy is always fantasy of an organic whole society without antagonism blah-blah and democracy precisely renounces this impossible ideal of a non-antagonistic society. The idea is thus that for democracy for the authentic core of democracy what for other theories totalitarian theories pre-modern theories is the problem the fact that you never know who is in power who is in charge who is the king this emptiness vacillation of power multiple contenders for power which as you know this was always in pre-modern theories the moment of panic. Here this is not only allowed, tolerated but even elevated into the saving feature. That is to say for from a democratic perspective the occasional shake-ups are what shake-ups in the sense of the shattering of the established social edifice through democratic process it's what makes society function. So democracy elevates incompleteness into principle. It institutionalizes the regular shake-up in the guise of election. In short, the barred S no sorry signifier of the barred big other the fact that is for example for Miller the signifier of democracy. So democracy goes here further than the common realistic wisdom according to which in order to actualize a certain political vision one should allow for concrete unpredictable circumstances be ready to make compromises and so on. You get my point. Democracy turns imperfection itself into a notion. We know all Claude Lefort formulas here how for democracy the place of power is is a priori empty, inconsistent and so on and so on. So we have here this vision. I already criticized this vision in some of my books even I forgot which one I think the most expanded version in my Iraq book The Borrowed Kettle. All I want to tell you is that I find very funny the polemics in which this critique involved me because what shocked me a little bit is how those who criticized me either ignored or if they did not ignore treated as a simple regression of my part an obvious fact which I openly admit that I myself in my early my god this is so megalomaniac to say but early works developed this notion. This notion of democracy as basically something that fits Lacanian logic of non-all, democracy as the inscription of the inexistence of the big other into the very social order and so on and so on. Okay for reasons we don't have time to go into it now I no longer buy this version. Then there are others, other Lacanians, the majority I would say who while retaining a kind of a general liberal attitude okay so but back to my critics you know what really pisses me off with them nonetheless that they simply I mean they basically reproach to me my own old quotes saying but don't I see that and what but I don't see that what I was writing years ago or what. I mean especially I'm trying to my god I'm developing now slowly into a liberal in the sense that what I really hate is when people use this dirty rhetorical trick in polemics where you know instead of honestly saying you think this, I think that, they say I you don't see what I see. My god of course I don't see but so they don't see, you know what I mean. Okay, but let's go on. Nonetheless the majority of Lacanians as far as I can see have a different attitude towards politics. It is the attitude of positing Lacan as an internal critic of democracy, a provocateur who raises unpleasant questions without proposing his own positive political project. It's just that Lacan is just this kind of a you know like Socrates I think somewhere even in Plato I forgot where he identified himself as this fly buzz who is annoying the organism but in the long term this ironic biting serves helps to regenerate the social order. The foundation of this is the another much stronger thesis. It is that and Miller in his last writings put it incidentally in his writings where he unfortunately Jacques-Alain Miller openly adopts the attitude which I think in the best of the terms could be called some kind of a center-right position bluntly. That the idea is that politics as such is a domain of imaginary symbolic identification. That politics involves a kind of a constitutive misrecognition or self-blinding. That is to say this is precisely the opposite of the position of Stavrakakis and others. It's the opposition that it's meaningless to talk about traversing the fantasy within politics because politics is a domain of collective acts and it's basically I think this second position which is why if I were to choose between the two I would nonetheless choose the first Stavrakakis position. The idea is that politics as such is a domain how to put it ontologically it's constituted always based on a certain blindness misrecognition. In the sense of involving fundamental act of imaginary of symbolic identification. And since the ultimate insight of psychoanalysis is traversing the fantasy as disidentification precisely you cannot it's meaningless to ask what would have been a political stance of an analyst because it there is none because the ultimate stance of an analyst is precisely a distance, a disidentification with the political domain as such. Now if you ask me as an old Stalinist what do I think about this? Of course my first answer is that this position says more than it intends to say. Because I claim that precisely such a distance towards politics is involves a very precise political attitude. Usually let's call it by name liberal-rightist individualist whatever you know this kind of a skepticism which in practice means kind of a moderate pragmatic politics and so on and so on. So Lacan as a provocateur in the line from Socrates to Kierkegaard. Lacan as the one who discerns democracy's illusions, hidden metaphysical presuppositions but should not be taken it's a kind of a priori almost Kantian criticism of Lacan. It's a in the sense that this position locates a legitimate what is the the underlying premise of this attitude? That all radical thinkers from Plato to Lacan, Nietzsche whoever you want should be tolerated within their own domain as this provocateurs making us aware of the limitations of our position. But I'm consciously putting it here in Kantian terms. If you go too far and read this negative critique as a positive constitutive project, as a project to be enacted in social reality, it's a catastrophe. It's totalitarianism, racism whatever you want. Like Nietzsche. Good Nietzsche cultural criticism you know ironic denouncing of the falsity, hypocrisy of our morality blah-blah. But the moment you take Nietzsche as a program it's nightmare. It's Nazism or whatever. The one who elaborated this position in as far as I know you may correct me if I'm wrong in the most articulate way is Wendy Brown in her book which I advise you to read it it's I think it's called is it Politics Out of History I think it's Politics Out of History. Okay I know now don't laugh at me I know she is not Lacanian but I think that her criticism of her approach to public position of critical intellectuals is extremely important. Brown reads the post-modern politics of identity based on the wrongs committed to special groups along the sex, gender, race line as an expression of the ambiguous relationship one entertains towards the good old liberal democratic egalitarian frame of human rights. One feels betrayed by it. With regard to women, blacks, gays the universal liberal rhetoric didn't deliver. It masks continuous exclusion and exploitation. But one nonetheless remains deeply attached to these liberal ideals. A short quote from page yes sorry Politics Out of History Princeton University Press It's it is when the telos of the good vanishes liberal democratic good but the yearning for it remains that morality appears to devolve into moralism in politics end of quote. So after the disintegration of the large all-encompassing leftist narratives of progress when political activity dissolved into a multitude of identity issues the excess over these particular struggles can only find an outlet in impotent moralistic outrage. I basically accept this analysis. However, Wendy Brown makes a crucial step further and deploys the paradoxes of democracy to the end. According to her Spinoza, Tocqueville and other immanent critics of democracy were right. Democracy is in itself inchoate, empty, lacking a firm principle. It needs anti-democratic content to fill in its form. As such, it is really constitutively formal. This anti-democratic content is provided by philosophy, ideology, theory. No wonder that most of the great philosophers from Plato to Heidegger were distrustful towards democracy if not directly anti-democratic. Another quote from Wendy Brown page What if democratic politics the most untheoretical of all political forms paradoxically requires theory, requires an antithesis to itself in both the form and substance of theory if it is to satisfy its ambition to produce a free and egalitarian order. End of quote. So Brown deploys all the paradoxes from the fact that democracy requires for its health a non-democratic element. Ironically I'm tempted to refer to this as a homeopathic theory of for obvious reasons of democracy. In order to remain a vital democracy democracy needs a permanent influx of anti-democratic self-questioning. So again the cure for democracy's ills is homeopathic. Another quote page If as the musings of Spinoza and Tocqueville suggest democracies tend toward cathexis onto principles antithetical to democracy then critical scrutiny of these principles and of the political formations animated by them is crucial to the project of refounding or recovering democracy. End of quote. I got the point but I think here we can perceive the first crack in her edifice. Because first her idea was that democracy is in itself impossible to fill it in gets ossified to fill in its own content so it needs a critical anti-democratic influx. Now we learn that democracy tends toward cathexis on principle and that the critical scrutiny is how should I put it against anti-democratic elements in democracy. Okay but more about this later. Let's return to Wendy Brown. So she defines the tension between politics and theory democratic politics and contemporary theory as the tension between and here problems for me begin as the tension between the political necessity to fixate meaning, to suture the textual drift in a form principle which can only guide us in action the tension between this and between theory's permanent deconstruction which cannot ever be recuperated in a new positive program. The point is I think even very banal. In order to be operative in politics you should forget about deconstruction. You need fixed goals, simple slogans and so on and so on. And on the other hand theory's basically destructive, undermining, deconstructing and so on. And there is a tension between the two. Another quote. Among human practices politics is peculiarly untheoretical because the bids for power that constitute it are necessarily at odds with the theoretical project of opening up meaning, of making meaning slide. Discursive power functions by concealing the terms of its fabrication and hence its malleability and contingency. Discourse fixes meaning by naturalizing it or else ceases to have sway as a discourse. This fixing or naturalizing of meanings is the necessary idiom in which politics takes place. Incidentally with this I violently disagree. I continue the quote. Even the politics of deconstructive displacement implies such normativity at least provisionally. End of quote. So the idea is that theoretical analysis which unnerve the contingent and inconsistent nature or the lack of ultimate foundation of all normative constructs and political projects are anti-political endeavors insofar as each destabilizes meaning without proposing alternative codes or institutions. Yet each may also be essential in sustaining an existing democratic regime by rejuvenating it. That's what in when I will be in power you go when you get years of Gulag without what do you call it without then where there is no what's the legal term sorry when there is no chance of lowering it without yes no yes no probation. Why? Again you got the point. The point is this very naive democratic sorry deconstructionist idea that in order to be politically active we need minimum of naturalization, fixation which is inherently anti-theoretical because theory precisely shows the contingent foundation of every meaning and so on and so on. So the tension is irreducible because on the other hand with this deconstructionist endeavor you cannot found any politics, any positive politics. Where do I see problems here? In her further analysis Wendy Brown attributes the same ambiguous link also to the relationship between state and people. In the same way that democracy needs anti-democracy to rejuvenate itself state needs people's resistance to rejuvenate itself. Another quote this time page Only through the state are the people constituted as a people. Only in resistance to the state do the people remain a people. Thus just as democracy requires anti-democratic critique in order to remain democratic so too the democratic state may require you note the revisionist Menshevik withdrawal may require she in the trial against her it will be the next that my dream would be not if Moscow trials were against politicians what if with Costas we are trying to establishing kind of a think-tank of the new left we should organize London trials now intellectual trials now. Just as democracy requires anti-so so too the democratic state may require democratic resistance rather than failure rather if it is not to become the death of democracy. Similarly democracy may require theory's provision of unlivable critiques and unreachable ideals. So you got the point it's this simple transgressive model you should be a provocateur make it move but don't go too far. Okay here I think things explode for me into serious questions. In this parallel between the two couples of democracy anti-democracy and state people I think that Wendy Brown's argumentation gets caught in a strange dynamic of reversals. First she claims democracy needs anti-democratic critique to remain alive to shake its false certainties. That was the first thesis no. The big philosophers you remember from Plato to Heidegger, Nietzsche mock democracy but let's not be afraid of it what appears as a threat is really a rejuvenating cure. But then she claims the democratic state needs democratic resistance of the people. Wait a minute where is the parallel? Why not it needs anti-democratic resistance. Does Brown not confound here two or rather a whole series of resistances to democratic state. We have the anti-democratic elitist theoretician's resistance the Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger line. We have the popular democratic resistance against the insufficiently democratic character of the state and so on and so on. Furthermore, is not each of these two resistances accompanied by its dark shadowy double. The brutal cynical elitism that justifies those in power or the violent outbursts of a rabble. And what if the two join hands. You got my point that okay we have like what Wendy Brown celebrates as this Nietzsche, Heidegger line of provocative rejuvenating of democracy. Yes but the problem is that this provocative rejuvenating attitude was sometimes taken very seriously no. What if it doesn't want to stay provocative rejuvenating critique and what if these guys get in power my god no. So you know the true heroism of Wendy Brown and here I will do something that you will kill me afterwards but I do it out of pure viciousness maybe as a woman she is too soft to say okay I say for her would be you know where her logic should have bring her to claim what if Hitler was the ultimate rejuvenating force of democracy and I'm sorry to inform you but he was in a way. Are we aware that all our here I give pay the due what they deserve to third way social democracy my god I mean with all my radical criticism of them. Let's be frank after World War II the social welfare project was something and I don't have any illusions I wrote about it but let's admit it I will say something horrible if you are radical leftists I don't think that at any point in not only Western but even human history this is what is important the state power itself accepted not only as a mercy benevolence of the ruler but accepted even if it violated it in practice accepted as its founding principle that it is here to secure the majority healthcare, school this egalitarian openness. I mean with all my cynicism and Stalinist leading leanings we shouldn't make fun of it. I mean I'm here very traditional and don't accuse me of becoming a liberal don't be afraid but there is something normatively unique here. As far as I can say for the first time in human history this happened no. First twenty years of London code First Omar Al-Khattab you mean first twenty years of in first welfare state in history according to Ben's Column doing a comparison with the Danes. Where was this in [unintelligible] just after the prophet died. Okay no I again I'm sorry that I wasn't able to go into Islam because first as I already emphasized it but don't be afraid you're already I will not now go into another version of Buddhism and I half know. I fully admit it because I tried to develop it in my texts my god I am aware that where I see the unique potential of Islam again what I emphasize two things first non in contrast to Christianity and Judaism non-paternal. The fundamental position of Islam believer is an orphan and not only an orphan in this Christian trick we are earthly orphans so that you get the true big death in God. No in a way you remain an orphan. It's not just an empirical feature that for example okay now I'm talking about Arabs more specifically but that you know Ishmael as the original one is the son of Hagar they clearly opt for the and I'm using here the term without irony for how do you call that self-employed single mother no is is literally the primordial you know the you know the story which is the Arab myth that you know you know Abraham two wives two sons no and it's the other one which is and this the other thing connected to it is precisely this is why I think Islam has such problems with femininity it's the other the obverse of a hidden narrative of much stronger reliance of femininity you know we should be a little bit analysts here when you have such fear of covering woman women all the time I would like to know what woman is that and I think that implicitly they construct a much stronger person of the woman like are you aware that in Muhammad's story itself there is woman is the big other you know the story of his wife Khadija who was the first believer. Maybe I improvised it here you know that when Muhammad got his visions no he thought he is getting crazy it's devil. And then his wife was the first one who convinced him and so on and so on. Back to that orphan story because of this I think you have this tremendous political potential in Islam. Because the problem of Islam even if it may sound different is precisely this is the famous Ummah not something Ummah as community of believers it's the problem is a tremendous one and crucial even today how to build a community without relying on any pre-established patriarchal order or whatever. But so that nonetheless I don't lose my thread. Agreeing with all this I'm nonetheless a little bit afraid to pose this kind of a direct equation between modern notion of welfare state and again conceding all the points which is a they were for that time incredibly progressive it was something unheard of and so on and so on I concede all this but nonetheless okay I would be a little bit afraid to I okay I even give you this point that they are probably the ones who come the closest to it how should I put it the closest in the sense that you cannot even compare it with it's as if in early Islamic community something of the emancipatory potential of early Christian communities this Paulinian community of believers which was then screwed up if no later by Saint Augustine. Which is why I love Fred Jameson's texts which I published in my volume on Saint Augustine as the original social democrat. You know it's an ingenious thesis by Fred Jameson you know what it is that in that that structurally Saint Augustine plays the same role in Christianity as a revolutionary movement early as American renegades in the 50s did that is to say this con this criticism bourgeois of Marxism claiming leftism is too simplistic usually with some reference of psychoanalysis you know all the partisan review story we have to discover inner life. This the reference to inner life to betray your radical leftist cause. This is exactly what Augustine did. He discovered inner life which is for Fred Jameson strictly a social democratic revisionism in the sense that in this way he was able to make compromise with those in power no. That is to say this is what I like about in this thesis that this so celebrated inner doubt all this inner filth that it evokes my dirtiest Stalinist instincts. In Saint Augustine all this inner blah-blah this is strictly the obverse of his crucial push of Christianity into becoming the state religion. And I'm ready to concede that some of this impetus you definitely have it in in in okay no I but okay let's not get lost in it. Okay let's go back. So let's go back where we were and we were with this contradiction of contradiction in Wendy Brown's line of argumentation how on the one hand yes we have the that this critique that she celebrates as rejuvenating can not only become an ideology of those in power but can also be used as the brutal cynical elitism that justifies those in power. Like you know I'm getting a little bit tired with all my love of Nietzsche of those who present Nietzsche as some kind of a radical outcast critical figure. I mean screw it Nietzsche was a extreme in the last decades when he was already crazy he was an extremely popular cult figure among German youth conservatives and so on and again as I already said here it pisses me off when my poor beloved guys like Wagner every detail when they when you can detect some kind of an anti-semitism deconstructionists pick it up. But if you read Foucault if you read Deleuze on Nietzsche my god where is Nietzsche's politics you don't even have to deconstruct it. Nietzsche all the time was taking explicit political stance when Nietzsche spoke about the rebellion of slaves as their ultimate horror that threat he it wasn't an abstract phrase it meant Paris Commune. Because as a good conservative you know Nietzsche believed that the rumors that there was a rumor circulating that that the that the Paris Communards were burning Louvre museum or whatever oh Nietzsche immediately of course so you know like all this disappears from Nietzsche. Nietzsche was not a marginal figure in the sense of crazy lunatic. Already before Hitler Nietzsche was the one of the key elements in practically a state philosopher if you want. So that's one aspect, the other aspect is
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of a mob. In other words, what about the paradox this would be the true democracy I claim. The paradox that there are situations I can very well imagine them in which an authentic democrat can say now we are facing blind obedience to ossified alienated rules and popular will. But I stick to rules, crush them with police and so on. Sorry but for me there are situations where when crowds are mobilized for a reactionary cause when where I would be absolutely for use the police crush them brutally whatever you want. So and again what about the idea that the two resistances join hands. What about anti-democratic resistance of the people themselves authoritarian populism. Furthermore does Brown not dismiss all too lightly again I'm restating my point sorry the anti-democratic theories like Nietzsche as proposing unlivable critiques of democracy. But wait a minute Nietzsche didn't propose an unlivable critique of democracy. Okay we can play again the games as with Marx did the Nazis really realize Nietzsche. But at least it was not unlivable in the sense that we have an actual political movement which exerted its brutal power legitimizing itself to a large extent with a reference to Nietzsche. Of course they did distort Nietzsche but so did Stalinism distort Marx so did every theory change or if you want was betrayed in its practical-political application. The weakness of Brown's description is perhaps that she locates the undemocratic ingredient that keeps democracy alive only in crazy theoreticians questioning its foundations from unlivable premises. But what about the very real undemocratic elements that sustain democracy. I think that it's I found it a nice paradox how although Foucault is Wendy Brown's main reference how she doesn't she doesn't mention here Foucault. The way I read Foucault's analysis of modern power is precisely this. It's not some crazy rejuvenating critique is that there is a non-democratic institutionalized core which is necessary for the effective functioning of modern democracy. Democratic power has to be sustained by a complex network of controlling regulating non-democratic regulating mechanisms. In his notes towards a definition of culture T.S. Eliot I think convincingly argued that a strong aristocratic class is a necessary ingredient of a feasible democracy. The highest cultural values can only thrive if they are transmitted through a complex continuous familial group background. So when Brown claims that democracy requires anti-democratic critique in order to remain democratic a liberal conservative would deeply agree and would say but this is what we are saying today when we warn against what American conservatives calls call de-mocracy like more too much democracy. There should be a tension in the opposition between state and democracy, a state should not simply be dissolved in democracy. It should retain an excess of unconditional power over the people, a firm rule of law to prevent its own dissolution. If the state democratic as it is is not sustained by this specter of the unconditional exercise of power it does not have the power the authority to function. Power is by definition an excess otherwise it is not power. Now we may not disagree with it but I think it's a fact that in order for us to accept power, state power seriously it must have this excess. It must have this super-ego message between the lines yeah-yeah you elect me but fuck you in at the ultimately I can do whatever I want. I mean I'm not making fun here. I think that this is not just an excess, it's a constitutive excess. You need it. Furthermore, apropos and here I think she is triumphantly wrong Wendy Brown. Apropos stopping the sliding of meaning. The idea that politics need this stupid fixated meaning while we deconstructionist undermine slide meaning and so on. But wait a minute does not does non-democratic theory as a rule not articulate its horror at democracy precisely because it perceives it as too much sliding of meaning, as too sophistic. Too involved in sliding of meaning so that theory far from reproaching democracy for the fixity of meaning desperately wants to impose a stable order on social life. Again if you read all great conservatives to which she refers from Plato through Nietzsche to Heidegger. My god it's not democracy is too fixed and we want to deconstruct free floating. No it's democracy is too sophistic floating we want firm principles order and so on. Furthermore is this incessant sliding of meaning not something that is already a feature of capitalist economy itself. Which in its contemporary dynamic raises to a new degree Marx's old motto of dissolving all fixed identities. So this homeopathic logic evoked by Wendy Brown is I think deeply ambiguous. The remedy against ossified state democracy is external theoretical anti-democratic critique which shatters its certainties and rejuvenates it. But at the same time there is opposite homeopathy. As the saying goes the only true remedy against the obvious democratic failures is more of democracy itself. And all dangers that lurk in democracy can be developed I think as grounded in this constitutive inconsistencies of the democratic project. As ways of dealing with these inconsistencies. With the price that in trying to get rid of the imperfections of democracy of its non-democratic ingredients we inadvertently lose the the democracy itself. So I think that Wendy Brown is effectively all too non-Nietzschean in her reduction or even domestication of Nietzsche to a provocative correction to democracy which through his exaggeration renders visible the inconsistencies, weaknesses of the democratic project. Again when she proclaims Nietzsche's implicit or explicit anti-democratic project unlivable she thereby all too glibly passes over the fact that there were very real political projects which directly referred to Nietzsche. Brown thus I think accomplishes the domestication of Nietzsche the transformation of his theory into an exercise in what I call inherent transgression. Provocations which are not really meant seriously which only aim through their provocative character to awaken us from the democratic dogmatic slumber and thus contribute to the revitalization of democracy itself. This is how the establishment liked subversive theorists to be. Turned into harmless gadflies who bite us and thus awaken us up to our inconsistencies and imperfections. God forbid us to take their project seriously and try to live their project. Again I think that the model that Wendy Brown proposes is precisely part of this post-modern wisdom that we should avoid. Against her I am tempted to ruthlessly assert precisely the Heidegger which many people consider the most problematic Heidegger. The brutal Heidegger of the early 30s. The Heidegger who heroically risked full engagement. I agree with Fred Jameson who says that Heidegger's Nazi engagement was the only really sympathetic thing that he did. He only did it in the right direction but it was a correct formal act. What do I mean by this? Ah now you will get your political stuff. I want to take as a starting point Heidegger's thesis developed already in and repeated at least till that terror, Schrecken and by terror he uses here this important although we don't have time to go into it terror not not Angst, not anxiety. Terror is necessary if the modern man is to be awakened from his metaphysico-technological slumber into what Heidegger calls a new beginning. What does he mean by this? Let me give you a nice quote which I totally subscribe. We must principally concern ourselves with preparing for man for humanity the very basis and dimension upon which and within which something like a mystery of his Dasein, Dasein the [unintelligible] could once again be encountered. We should not be at all surprised if the contemporary man in the street feels disturbed or perhaps sometimes dazed and clutches all the more stubbornly at his idols when confronted with this challenge and with the effort required to approach this mystery. It would be a mistake to expect anything else. We must first call for someone capable of instilling terror into our Dasein again end of quote. That's where I feel at home. What does this mean? So Heidegger opposes wonder as the basic disposition of the first Greek beginning. You know for Heidegger the original philosophical mood is wonder, wonder and how is it there are beings and so on. To terror as the basic disposition of our maybe if we have a chance of it second new beginning. Another quote. In wonder the basic disposition of the first beginning, beings first come to stand in their own. Terror, the basic disposition of the other beginning reveals behind all progress and all domination over beings a dark emptiness of irrelevance. Now what I'm saying here before we dismiss this as proto-fascist terrorism and so on and so on is that basically Hegel and Marx were saying the same thing. First Hegel. You remember one of the most famous Hegelian passages from his analysis of master and servant, bondsman. I will not go into this Hegelian topic how to translate the term when Hegel emphasized how now listen carefully please because it's relatively complex. Since the bondsman, okay the servant, is also a self-consciousness, freedom, negativity. Now quote from the introduction, sorry no from the forward to Phenomenology. The master is taken to be the essential reality for the state of bondage. I will try to comment it to avoid misunderstanding. So you are a bondsman, you experience yourself as servant not autonomous so the foundation of your being is outside of you in the figure of your master. Hence for the servant the truth is the independent consciousness existing for itself although this truth is not taken yet as inherent in bondage itself. What he means is that in some way the servant is already aware that the true core of being human is this readiness to expose yourself to to terror, to risk your life where all firm attachments all fixed identity dissolve. Just in the first move the bondsman is not ready to take it on himself but he has it out there. That's what master is for him. Still, I continue Hegel's quote. Still, it does in fact contain the consciousness of the bondsman of the servant it does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and self-existence because it has experienced this reality within it. For this consciousness, the consciousness of the servant was this consciousness not in peril and fear for this moment for this moment or that moment nor for this or that moment of time it was afraid for its entire being when it faced being annihilated by the master. It felt the fear of death the sovereign master. It has been in that experience this fear was in that experience melted to its servant's innermost soul. It has trembled throughout its every fiber and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. You know retroactive quote from Communist Manifesto and so on. This complete perturbation of one's entire substance this absolute dissolution of all our stability into fluent continuity is however the simple ultimate nature of self-consciousness absolute negativity, pure self-referent existence which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness. This moment of pure self-existence is moreover a fact for it for the servant for in the master it finds this as its object. Further, this servant's consciousness is not only the total this total dissolution in a general way in serving and toiling the servant actually carries this out. By serving he cancels in every particular aspect his dependence on and attachment to natural existence and by his work removes this natural existence away. So you got the point of Hegel. It's a very simple one is that even if servant doesn't risk his life he nonetheless in itself already does it. In the very fear of risking his life he experience this radical exposure negativity as his freedom which is still out there but then okay you know how the dialectic goes on. What I want to say now another provocation is that this is I think how again a theological detour how we should read encounter with freedom. And I think even in this sense I am tempted to say within a religious framework Christ's sacrifice sets us free. Not as the payment for our sins nor as some kind of a legalistic ransom but remember like when you are afraid of something and fear of death is the ultimate fear that makes us slaves a true friend says don't be afraid look I will do it what you are afraid so afraid of and I will do it for free not because I have to but out of my own love for you I am not afraid. He does it and in this way he sets us free. Demonstrating that it can be done. That we can also do it. That we are not slaves in this shock when you encounter somebody who simply can do it. Now I will give you an example to shock you you think I cannot fall lower than what I did I can. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead. It's the lowest. But I was always fascinated by the final you know it's this ultimate liberal I mean individualist heroic architect Howard Roark who defends his position at the end in front of the jury and convinces them and there of course the ordinary man enslaved and how do they the jury in the courtroom experience him. A quote. Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind but Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant they grasped the manner of his Roark's consciousness. Each asked himself do I need anyone's approval, does it matter, am I tied and for that brief instant each man was free. Free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room. It was only a moment the moment of silence when Roark was about to speak and so on and so on. Whatever fake Ayn Rand is I claim this is an authentic I claim this is an authentic description. So my first thesis Heidegger, Hegel, Marx because I think that to experience this kind of a terror of dissolution this is what Marx calls the proletarian the proletarian experience I'm sorry to inform you. It's precisely this utter void when all substantial links are dissolved. So my first thesis we do need and we will get it don't worry about it this experience of terror. Next thesis I think that the true choice, political choice today is not between terror fear and so on and on the other hand safety welfare. The true choice is between fear and terror. What do I mean by this? Today's predominant mode of politics the I've talked about it enough elsewhere I will presuppose that you know it. The post-political biopolitics is fundamentally a politics of fear. Formulated as a defense against a potential victimization or harassment. As Peter Hallward pointed out the you know him I hope the one of the three four people who interest me theoretically in United Kingdom today. This is the true line of separation between radical emancipatory politics and the predominant status quo politics. It is not a difference of two different positive visions, two sets of axioms but rather the difference between the politics based on a set of universal axioms and the politics which renounces the very dimension of the political since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilizing principle. Fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state with too high taxation and so on, fear of economic decline, fear of ecological catastrophes and so on and so on. To quote Peter Hallward such a post-politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid ochlos, the frightening rallying of frightened men. End of quote. This is why if you ask me what was the big event not only in Europe in early now but also elsewhere was that and it happened very silently it was rarely noticed was that anti-immigration politics and I think this is one of the privileged politics of fear today went mainstream. They finally cut the umbilical link that connected them to the far right fringe parties. From France to Germany from Austria to Holland in the new spirit of pride at once cultural and historical identity the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that the immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society. It is our country, love it or leave it and so on and so on. Now what I'm saying is just that this is a further victory for the politics of fear. And this I think accounts for the fundamental tension within today's biopolitics. Today's biopolitics has two aspects which may appear as belonging to two opposite ideological spaces. On the one hand this Homo Sacer as Agamben would have put it aspect reduction of humans to bare life. Humans reduced to disposable objects of the expert caretaking knowledge. On the other hand this extreme individualism respect for the vulnerable other brought to extreme. The attitude of narcissistic subjectivity always threatened, exposed to harassments potential victim. Now one will say isn't there a contrast here. On the one hand sigh we are objects of biopolitics on the other hand we are afraid of being victimized. But what I claim is that these two stances rely on the same root. They are the two aspects of one and the same underlying attitude. Which is because the goal of biopolitics is precisely to relieve us of the fear as it were to secure our identity our safe self to relieve us from the horror terror sorry that we should go through. Of course again this experience of horror we know was articulated in famous definition of Marx of the impact of capitalism. You know the quotes all fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify all that is solid melts into air and so on and so on. What I'm saying here is that not only Marx was right but that things are maybe only today with biogenetics and so on and new social dynamics approaching the true climax which even Marx okay it's a stupid historicist thing to say why should he was able to to imagine no and incidentally this is where I like Marx what makes him human. Like this absolutely dirty incredible sometimes even racist homophobe homophobic outbursts which simply make him my god now I will sound disgusting a human man like it's so wonderful to read when they had the split in German social democracy with Ferdinand Lassalle. You know what Marx writes to Engels that Lassalle who was also a Jew have a dark complexion and Marx involved in a totally crazy racist speculation that probably he must be a like grand-grand-grand-grand-son of some Jewish whore who while they were escaping the Jews from Egypt ran back and screwed with some Egyptian or black slave and so on. I mean it's total madness no I think. But you know what's the point the point is that the greatness was not in Marx's private character it was in the theory. We have to accept don't have to repress this we have to accept it that Marx gave us tools to make fun of Marx in this way how should I put it but not not to not to cover this up. Okay so what we have today not only that this all that is solid melts into air at a personal level sexual practices and so on whatever you want. The ultimate element here I think is which was not imaginable for Marx the melting into air of nature itself. I think that the main consequence of the scientific breakthrough in biogenetics is not as people usually claim the end of humanity in the sense of we will just become a disposable another natural object but it's on the contrary the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature human and inhuman is thus desubstantialized deprived of its impenetrable density deprived of what Heidegger called earth. Biogenetics with its reduction of the human psyche itself to an object of technological manipulation is therefore a kind of empirical instantiation of what Heidegger perceived as the danger inherent to modern technology. And again crucial is here I think the interdependence of man and nature by reducing man to just another natural object whose properties can be manipulated again what we lose is not humanity but nature itself. In this sense maybe Fukuyama was right humanity itself relies on some notion of human nature as what we inherited or what was simply given to us the impenetrable dimension of ourselves into which we are thrown. So you know my point being that we are human in the sense we understand it only against the background of this impenetrability natural impenetrability. Once the end of humanity in this sense human being become something totally technologically that can be in principle manipulated and so on and so on is at the same time the end of nature. Nature becomes just another artificial mechanism. So we know what's the formula here. With the prospect of biogenetic interventions opened up by the access to the genome the species human species can freely change or redefine itself its own coordinates. So biogenetics potentially emancipates humankind from the constraints of a finite species from its enslavement to its own genes. And let me quote you again the famous passage where Habermas formulated the danger the way he sees it. Quote. With interventions into man's genetic inheritance the domination over nature reverts into the act of taking control over oneself which changes our genetic generic ethical self-understanding and can disturb the necessary conditions for an autonomous way of life and universalistic understanding of morals and so on and so on. I agree but what I'm saying is that Habermas does not take this threat seriously enough. Okay the first point which I already developed here but I think not here here but here in that talk where only people came because it was that public talk no. Is how I want just to repeat this point which seems to me crucial how what's so revolutionary about today's science is that it no longer only tries to reproduce nature it literally generates a second nature new unnatural mechanisms like not only hybrid species of animals sorry of of plants of animals and so on and so on. So and this is I think the true horror this producing of new forms of life. And it's here we confront what is the most fundamental in the ecological problem. I find it so interesting how and why now precisely when we should think more about it ecology has okay at least relatively disappeared, retreated. Of course I'm aware how ecology is also a pseudo-topic one of the great sites of mystification today not only a site of the New Age mystification ecology as returning to some some homeo- some some homeostatic balance with nature but also the way ecology is often used as a refined tool of the first world to fight against third world. Like we always need a whenever a third world country is starting to explode economically all of a sudden we feel threatened like Brazil oh my god by cutting the rainforest in Amazon they are depriving humanity of of their lungs of their well I mean I'm sorry to inform you but United States still spent much more pollute per capita so why don't they okay if they worry so much about forests why don't they plant more for I mean it's ridiculous or China today oh it will be a catastrophe and so on and so on. Then no wonder that ecology is a the favorite cause of honor of liberal communists. Buy but buy green natural sustainable and so on as if taking into account ecology justifies exploitation. And what really I find so sometimes tragicomic if ecology is how the most radical ecology can copy repeat the worst of what is think of what it thinks that it undermines technological attitude. Because look here is a quote from a Heideggerian I think Mark Wrathall. In the technological age what matters to us most is getting the greatest possible use out of everything. Now it is supposed to criticize this technological attitude of utilizing. But wait a minute don't we call this ecological recycling which is precisely this. So you see what I mean how a Heideggerian would have said that true ecological attitude is not this recycle use everything. This is precisely technological ecology. True ecology is yes there must be unaccounted for shit everywhere and you have to accept it. True ecology is precisely not this closed circle of everything should be a max- should be maximized. Where Heidegger can be of some use and don't be afraid I will criticize Heidegger later. In ecology is I think that you know Heidegger's my god I will use stupid terms but nonetheless vision of the world as our experience of being in the world torn we are located in the tension between what Heidegger calls world and earth. World as the symbolic universe logos of meaning earth as its imponderable dense ground so with self-withdrawing foundation. But do not find do we not find this tension today in the most radical way in the antinomy that defines our experience. On the one hand there is the fluidification volatilization of our experience. Its desubstantialization. This exponentially exploding lightness of being culminates of course in the cyber dream of the transformation of our very identity as a human being from hardware to software. A program able to be reloaded from one another hardware. Reality is here virtualized any failure can be undone by running back and making another try at it. That's one aspect no this virtualization everything can be recreated infinite plasticity of reality. However this virtualized world in which we dwell is threatened by the shadow of what we usually designate as the prospect of ecological catastrophe. The imponderable heaviness and complexity the inertia of earth catching up reminding us of the fragile equilibrium which forms the background foundation of our survival on earth and that we can inadvertently destroy of course global warming new viruses whatever. Never in the history of humanity I think was the tension so palpable between the unbearable lightness of our being media providing us with strangest sensations through a click and so on and so on and the unpredictable background of earth. Even at the level of our experience of reality industrial reality do you notice how on the one hand we have all this idea today material production no longer matters it's informal production, virtual programming blah-blah. But wait a minute material production doesn't matter but at the same time we worry all the time what what to do with the toxic remainders ecology and so on and so on. So it doesn't matter but it's here more and more as the problem. So what is the interest of a Heidegger here? I think the interest of Heidegger is that he is able to show how where the danger is. For Heidegger the notion of danger inscribed into modern technology is not primarily the danger of physical self-destruction the threat that something will go wrong. For Heidegger it's precisely the threat that nothing will go wrong. That genetic manipulation will function smoothly so that we will simply follow this path to the end. So here I think we should follow Heidegger. I think that the moment we accept we formulate the problem the way it is usually formulated like modern technology brings danger so where should we set up a limit so that we don't go too far, stem cells yes and no, atomic energy yes and no. We are already within the technological domain. Here I agree that the problem is the very fundamental technological attitude. But the problem I see with Heidegger the one that I already mentioned is that although how should I put it although Heidegger is well aware of how the danger of technology of how there is no way to return to the old notion of the traditional roots close to world and so on. Of how we must go through technology, experience its horror. Nonetheless he remains here inconsistent and in a way breaks down because typically all examples that he give are precisely examples of this Schwarzwald roots and so on and so on. No wonder then that this gets even a comical form in some of American pragmatic Heideggerians like Hubert Dreyfus who says the way we can resist technology is just to do not get too overfunctionalized to retain in everyday life this opening for everyday pleasures, you meet in the evening with friends get a drink enjoy a sunset and so on as if this escapes this meritum. But from true Heidegger's point the tragedy is precisely that you do it how through a tourist agency and so on you know so that precisely how should I put it you don't Heidegger himself provides a good formula. When he says even a lone how do you call it the forest man the who who is screwing Lady Chatterley the forest man okay even if that guy walks alone in the forest as authentic as he is it's already a moment of modern technological machinery. So the way is not to look for the non-mediated authentic remainders. Here I think Heidegger was right in his Nazi engagement. The moment of truth in it was that he saw it correctly that the way is to embrace to the end technological engagement. And I think that if anything the true falsity is the later Heidegger. Why? One of the best English Heideggerians for me would have been Michel de sorry if I don't pronounce the name correctly Michel de Beistegui. But at there is one detail that I don't quite under- that I don't quite agree with in his book The New Heidegger where on the one there he says two things and I think the truth was would have been would have been to bring these two things together. One statement very nice by him is how the ambiguity of Heidegger's attachment to Nazism that of course he was sincerely disappointed by Nazism. But to the end not only in private letter in public the Nazism was for Heidegger failed but it was the only authentic attempt to to confront modernity the danger of modernity through a political movement. Which is why as Michel de Beistegui points out to the end he referred to is as Die Bewegung, The Movement as it needs no qualification. That was the only attempt. Of course it miserably failed. But for Heidegger this failure was the failure of politics as such. He never again you know it is as if Heidegger's withdrawal later from political engagement was a kind of a negative fidelity to Nazism. I screwed it up there okay but that's it you won't get you know like as if that was it and as if to try at another engagement would would betray it. Which is why I think that when Michel de Beistegui then reads Heidegger's later withdrawal from politics as too positive as Heidegger did try later to got the lesson political engagement cannot that Heidegger didn't want to burn his fingers again. But I think not wanting to burn his fingers again was exactly Heidegger's negative way of kind of a negative fidelity. You know it's as if sorry for the tasteless metaphor but my nature is tasteless you have an affair it gets turns out bad the woman is evil and then you say never again another woman. But this is your negative transfix it's exactly the same to the end with Heidegger. Which is why for example people didn't notice this as I emphasized in my books Heidegger to the end insists of the inner greatness of Nazism. Okay but he never wrote about inner greatness okay it's interesting here what is Heidegger's hierarchy. Potentially there are some passages which can be determined as read as inner greatness of Bolshevism. But never inner greatness of liberal democracy no. (Audience member: He didn't use the inner greatness of that [unintelligible] rector's address?) Sorry? (Audience member: He didn't use the inner greatness in that [unintelligible] address? That phrase only occurred in the rector's address the inaugural address of Yeah. (Audience member: Sorry he didn't he rejected that in his he justified it he rejected it with inner greatness?) No no wait a minute I did my homework here I know it up to the detail. Not only he rejected it I know I just don't want to lose too much time here. I know in detail how it was in Introduction to Metaphysics Einführung in die Metaphysik you have only the phrase inner greatness. Then when the book was reprinted in I think he added it's the famous inserted passage the encounter between modern man and technology. Here of course Heidegger cheats, cheats in what sense because as it was discovered he if you compare it with first printing he qualified it in a way which says to cut a long story short exactly the opposite of what he meant. Because it is clear from his other texts from that period that what Heidegger Heidegger's
of a mob. In other words, what about the paradox this would be the true democracy I claim. The paradox that there are situations I can very well imagine them in which an authentic democrat can say now we are facing blind obedience to ossified alienated rules and popular will. But I stick to rules, crush them with police and so on. Sorry but for me there are situations where when crowds are mobilized for a reactionary cause when where I would be absolutely for use the police crush them brutally whatever you want. So and again what about the idea that the two resistances join hands. What about anti-democratic resistance of the people themselves authoritarian populism. Furthermore does Brown not dismiss all too lightly again I'm restating my point sorry the anti-democratic theories like Nietzsche as proposing unlivable critiques of democracy. But wait a minute Nietzsche didn't propose an unlivable critique of democracy. Okay we can play again the games as with Marx did the Nazis really realize Nietzsche. But at least it was not unlivable in the sense that we have an actual political movement which exerted its brutal power legitimizing itself to a large extent with a reference to Nietzsche. Of course they did distort Nietzsche but so did Stalinism distort Marx so did every theory change or if you want was betrayed in its practical-political application. The weakness of Brown's description is perhaps that she locates the undemocratic ingredient that keeps democracy alive only in crazy theoreticians questioning its foundations from unlivable premises. But what about the very real undemocratic elements that sustain democracy. I think that it's I found it a nice paradox how although Foucault is Wendy Brown's main reference how she doesn't she doesn't mention here Foucault. The way I read Foucault's analysis of modern power is precisely this. It's not some crazy rejuvenating critique is that there is a non-democratic institutionalized core which is necessary for the effective functioning of modern democracy. Democratic power has to be sustained by a complex network of controlling regulating non-democratic regulating mechanisms. In his notes towards a definition of culture T.S. Eliot I think convincingly argued that a strong aristocratic class is a necessary ingredient of a feasible democracy. The highest cultural values can only thrive if they are transmitted through a complex continuous familial group background. So when Brown claims that democracy requires anti-democratic critique in order to remain democratic a liberal conservative would deeply agree and would say but this is what we are saying today when we warn against what American conservatives calls call de-mocracy like more too much democracy. There should be a tension in the opposition between state and democracy, a state should not simply be dissolved in democracy. It should retain an excess of unconditional power over the people, a firm rule of law to prevent its own dissolution. If the state democratic as it is is not sustained by this specter of the unconditional exercise of power it does not have the power the authority to function. Power is by definition an excess otherwise it is not power. Now we may not disagree with it but I think it's a fact that in order for us to accept power, state power seriously it must have this excess. It must have this super-ego message between the lines yeah-yeah you elect me but fuck you in at the ultimately I can do whatever I want. I mean I'm not making fun here. I think that this is not just an excess, it's a constitutive excess. You need it. Furthermore, apropos and here I think she is triumphantly wrong Wendy Brown. Apropos stopping the sliding of meaning. The idea that politics need this stupid fixated meaning while we deconstructionist undermine slide meaning and so on. But wait a minute does not does non-democratic theory as a rule not articulate its horror at democracy precisely because it perceives it as too much sliding of meaning, as too sophistic. Too involved in sliding of meaning so that theory far from reproaching democracy for the fixity of meaning desperately wants to impose a stable order on social life. Again if you read all great conservatives to which she refers from Plato through Nietzsche to Heidegger. My god it's not democracy is too fixed and we want to deconstruct free floating. No it's democracy is too sophistic floating we want firm principles order and so on. Furthermore is this incessant sliding of meaning not something that is already a feature of capitalist economy itself. Which in its contemporary dynamic raises to a new degree Marx's old motto of dissolving all fixed identities. So this homeopathic logic evoked by Wendy Brown is I think deeply ambiguous. The remedy against ossified state democracy is external theoretical anti-democratic critique which shatters its certainties and rejuvenates it. But at the same time there is opposite homeopathy. As the saying goes the only true remedy against the obvious democratic failures is more of democracy itself. And all dangers that lurk in democracy can be developed I think as grounded in this constitutive inconsistencies of the democratic project. As ways of dealing with these inconsistencies. With the price that in trying to get rid of the imperfections of democracy of its non-democratic ingredients we inadvertently lose the the democracy itself. So I think that Wendy Brown is effectively all too non-Nietzschean in her reduction or even domestication of Nietzsche to a provocative correction to democracy which through his exaggeration renders visible the inconsistencies, weaknesses of the democratic project. Again when she proclaims Nietzsche's implicit or explicit anti-democratic project unlivable she thereby all too glibly passes over the fact that there were very real political projects which directly referred to Nietzsche. Brown thus I think accomplishes the domestication of Nietzsche the transformation of his theory into an exercise in what I call inherent transgression. Provocations which are not really meant seriously which only aim through their provocative character to awaken us from the democratic dogmatic slumber and thus contribute to the revitalization of democracy itself. This is how the establishment liked subversive theorists to be. Turned into harmless gadflies who bite us and thus awaken us up to our inconsistencies and imperfections. God forbid us to take their project seriously and try to live their project. Again I think that the model that Wendy Brown proposes is precisely part of this post-modern wisdom that we should avoid. Against her I am tempted to ruthlessly assert precisely the Heidegger which many people consider the most problematic Heidegger. The brutal Heidegger of the early 30s. The Heidegger who heroically risked full engagement. I agree with Fred Jameson who says that Heidegger's Nazi engagement was the only really sympathetic thing that he did. He only did it in the right direction but it was a correct formal act. What do I mean by this? Ah now you will get your political stuff. I want to take as a starting point Heidegger's thesis developed already in and repeated at least till that terror, Schrecken and by terror he uses here this important although we don't have time to go into it terror not not Angst, not anxiety. Terror is necessary if the modern man is to be awakened from his metaphysico-technological slumber into what Heidegger calls a new beginning. What does he mean by this? Let me give you a nice quote which I totally subscribe. We must principally concern ourselves with preparing for man for humanity the very basis and dimension upon which and within which something like a mystery of his Dasein, Dasein the [unintelligible] could once again be encountered. We should not be at all surprised if the contemporary man in the street feels disturbed or perhaps sometimes dazed and clutches all the more stubbornly at his idols when confronted with this challenge and with the effort required to approach this mystery. It would be a mistake to expect anything else. We must first call for someone capable of instilling terror into our Dasein again end of quote. That's where I feel at home. What does this mean? So Heidegger opposes wonder as the basic disposition of the first Greek beginning. You know for Heidegger the original philosophical mood is wonder, wonder and how is it there are beings and so on. To terror as the basic disposition of our maybe if we have a chance of it second new beginning. Another quote. In wonder the basic disposition of the first beginning, beings first come to stand in their own. Terror, the basic disposition of the other beginning reveals behind all progress and all domination over beings a dark emptiness of irrelevance. Now what I'm saying here before we dismiss this as proto-fascist terrorism and so on and so on is that basically Hegel and Marx were saying the same thing. First Hegel. You remember one of the most famous Hegelian passages from his analysis of master and servant, bondsman. I will not go into this Hegelian topic how to translate the term when Hegel emphasized how now listen carefully please because it's relatively complex. Since the bondsman, okay the servant, is also a self-consciousness, freedom, negativity. Now quote from the introduction, sorry no from the forward to Phenomenology. The master is taken to be the essential reality for the state of bondage. I will try to comment it to avoid misunderstanding. So you are a bondsman, you experience yourself as servant not autonomous so the foundation of your being is outside of you in the figure of your master. Hence for the servant the truth is the independent consciousness existing for itself although this truth is not taken yet as inherent in bondage itself. What he means is that in some way the servant is already aware that the true core of being human is this readiness to expose yourself to to terror, to risk your life where all firm attachments all fixed identity dissolve. Just in the first move the bondsman is not ready to take it on himself but he has it out there. That's what master is for him. Still, I continue Hegel's quote. Still, it does in fact contain the consciousness of the bondsman of the servant it does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and self-existence because it has experienced this reality within it. For this consciousness, the consciousness of the servant was this consciousness not in peril and fear for this moment for this moment or that moment nor for this or that moment of time it was afraid for its entire being when it faced being annihilated by the master. It felt the fear of death the sovereign master. It has been in that experience this fear was in that experience melted to its servant's innermost soul. It has trembled throughout its every fiber and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. You know retroactive quote from Communist Manifesto and so on. This complete perturbation of one's entire substance this absolute dissolution of all our stability into fluent continuity is however the simple ultimate nature of self-consciousness absolute negativity, pure self-referent existence which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness. This moment of pure self-existence is moreover a fact for it for the servant for in the master it finds this as its object. Further, this servant's consciousness is not only the total this total dissolution in a general way in serving and toiling the servant actually carries this out. By serving he cancels in every particular aspect his dependence on and attachment to natural existence and by his work removes this natural existence away. So you got the point of Hegel. It's a very simple one is that even if servant doesn't risk his life he nonetheless in itself already does it. In the very fear of risking his life he experience this radical exposure negativity as his freedom which is still out there but then okay you know how the dialectic goes on. What I want to say now another provocation is that this is I think how again a theological detour how we should read encounter with freedom. And I think even in this sense I am tempted to say within a religious framework Christ's sacrifice sets us free. Not as the payment for our sins nor as some kind of a legalistic ransom but remember like when you are afraid of something and fear of death is the ultimate fear that makes us slaves a true friend says don't be afraid look I will do it what you are afraid so afraid of and I will do it for free not because I have to but out of my own love for you I am not afraid. He does it and in this way he sets us free. Demonstrating that it can be done. That we can also do it. That we are not slaves in this shock when you encounter somebody who simply can do it. Now I will give you an example to shock you you think I cannot fall lower than what I did I can. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead. It's the lowest. But I was always fascinated by the final you know it's this ultimate liberal I mean individualist heroic architect Howard Roark who defends his position at the end in front of the jury and convinces them and there of course the ordinary man enslaved and how do they the jury in the courtroom experience him. A quote. Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind but Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant they grasped the manner of his Roark's consciousness. Each asked himself do I need anyone's approval, does it matter, am I tied and for that brief instant each man was free. Free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room. It was only a moment the moment of silence when Roark was about to speak and so on and so on. Whatever fake Ayn Rand is I claim this is an authentic I claim this is an authentic description. So my first thesis Heidegger, Hegel, Marx because I think that to experience this kind of a terror of dissolution this is what Marx calls the proletarian the proletarian experience I'm sorry to inform you. It's precisely this utter void when all substantial links are dissolved. So my first thesis we do need and we will get it don't worry about it this experience of terror. Next thesis I think that the true choice, political choice today is not between terror fear and so on and on the other hand safety welfare. The true choice is between fear and terror. What do I mean by this? Today's predominant mode of politics the I've talked about it enough elsewhere I will presuppose that you know it. The post-political biopolitics is fundamentally a politics of fear. Formulated as a defense against a potential victimization or harassment. As Peter Hallward pointed out the you know him I hope the one of the three four people who interest me theoretically in United Kingdom today. This is the true line of separation between radical emancipatory politics and the predominant status quo politics. It is not a difference of two different positive visions, two sets of axioms but rather the difference between the politics based on a set of universal axioms and the politics which renounces the very dimension of the political since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilizing principle. Fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state with too high taxation and so on, fear of economic decline, fear of ecological catastrophes and so on and so on. To quote Peter Hallward such a post-politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid ochlos, the frightening rallying of frightened men. End of quote. This is why if you ask me what was the big event not only in Europe in early now but also elsewhere was that and it happened very silently it was rarely noticed was that anti-immigration politics and I think this is one of the privileged politics of fear today went mainstream. They finally cut the umbilical link that connected them to the far right fringe parties. From France to Germany from Austria to Holland in the new spirit of pride at once cultural and historical identity the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that the immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society. It is our country, love it or leave it and so on and so on. Now what I'm saying is just that this is a further victory for the politics of fear. And this I think accounts for the fundamental tension within today's biopolitics. Today's biopolitics has two aspects which may appear as belonging to two opposite ideological spaces. On the one hand this Homo Sacer as Agamben would have put it aspect reduction of humans to bare life. Humans reduced to disposable objects of the expert caretaking knowledge. On the other hand this extreme individualism respect for the vulnerable other brought to extreme. The attitude of narcissistic subjectivity always threatened, exposed to harassments potential victim. Now one will say isn't there a contrast here. On the one hand sigh we are objects of biopolitics on the other hand we are afraid of being victimized. But what I claim is that these two stances rely on the same root. They are the two aspects of one and the same underlying attitude. Which is because the goal of biopolitics is precisely to relieve us of the fear as it were to secure our identity our safe self to relieve us from the horror terror sorry that we should go through. Of course again this experience of horror we know was articulated in famous definition of Marx of the impact of capitalism. You know the quotes all fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify all that is solid melts into air and so on and so on. What I'm saying here is that not only Marx was right but that things are maybe only today with biogenetics and so on and new social dynamics approaching the true climax which even Marx okay it's a stupid historicist thing to say why should he was able to to imagine no and incidentally this is where I like Marx what makes him human. Like this absolutely dirty incredible sometimes even racist homophobe homophobic outbursts which simply make him my god now I will sound disgusting a human man like it's so wonderful to read when they had the split in German social democracy with Ferdinand Lassalle. You know what Marx writes to Engels that Lassalle who was also a Jew have a dark complexion and Marx involved in a totally crazy racist speculation that probably he must be a like grand-grand-grand-grand-son of some Jewish whore who while they were escaping the Jews from Egypt ran back and screwed with some Egyptian or black slave and so on. I mean it's total madness no I think. But you know what's the point the point is that the greatness was not in Marx's private character it was in the theory. We have to accept don't have to repress this we have to accept it that Marx gave us tools to make fun of Marx in this way how should I put it but not not to not to cover this up. Okay so what we have today not only that this all that is solid melts into air at a personal level sexual practices and so on whatever you want. The ultimate element here I think is which was not imaginable for Marx the melting into air of nature itself. I think that the main consequence of the scientific breakthrough in biogenetics is not as people usually claim the end of humanity in the sense of we will just become a disposable another natural object but it's on the contrary the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature human and inhuman is thus desubstantialized deprived of its impenetrable density deprived of what Heidegger called earth. Biogenetics with its reduction of the human psyche itself to an object of technological manipulation is therefore a kind of empirical instantiation of what Heidegger perceived as the danger inherent to modern technology. And again crucial is here I think the interdependence of man and nature by reducing man to just another natural object whose properties can be manipulated again what we lose is not humanity but nature itself. In this sense maybe Fukuyama was right humanity itself relies on some notion of human nature as what we inherited or what was simply given to us the impenetrable dimension of ourselves into which we are thrown. So you know my point being that we are human in the sense we understand it only against the background of this impenetrability natural impenetrability. Once the end of humanity in this sense human being become something totally technologically that can be in principle manipulated and so on and so on is at the same time the end of nature. Nature becomes just another artificial mechanism. So we know what's the formula here. With the prospect of biogenetic interventions opened up by the access to the genome the species human species can freely change or redefine itself its own coordinates. So biogenetics potentially emancipates humankind from the constraints of a finite species from its enslavement to its own genes. And let me quote you again the famous passage where Habermas formulated the danger the way he sees it. Quote. With interventions into man's genetic inheritance the domination over nature reverts into the act of taking control over oneself which changes our genetic generic ethical self-understanding and can disturb the necessary conditions for an autonomous way of life and universalistic understanding of morals and so on and so on. I agree but what I'm saying is that Habermas does not take this threat seriously enough. Okay the first point which I already developed here but I think not here here but here in that talk where only people came because it was that public talk no. Is how I want just to repeat this point which seems to me crucial how what's so revolutionary about today's science is that it no longer only tries to reproduce nature it literally generates a second nature new unnatural mechanisms like not only hybrid species of animals sorry of of plants of animals and so on and so on. So and this is I think the true horror this producing of new forms of life. And it's here we confront what is the most fundamental in the ecological problem. I find it so interesting how and why now precisely when we should think more about it ecology has okay at least relatively disappeared, retreated. Of course I'm aware how ecology is also a pseudo-topic one of the great sites of mystification today not only a site of the New Age mystification ecology as returning to some some homeo- some some homeostatic balance with nature but also the way ecology is often used as a refined tool of the first world to fight against third world. Like we always need a whenever a third world country is starting to explode economically all of a sudden we feel threatened like Brazil oh my god by cutting the rainforest in Amazon they are depriving humanity of of their lungs of their well I mean I'm sorry to inform you but United States still spent much more pollute per capita so why don't they okay if they worry so much about forests why don't they plant more for I mean it's ridiculous or China today oh it will be a catastrophe and so on and so on. Then no wonder that ecology is a the favorite cause of honor of liberal communists. Buy but buy green natural sustainable and so on as if taking into account ecology justifies exploitation. And what really I find so sometimes tragicomic if ecology is how the most radical ecology can copy repeat the worst of what is think of what it thinks that it undermines technological attitude. Because look here is a quote from a Heideggerian I think Mark Wrathall. In the technological age what matters to us most is getting the greatest possible use out of everything. Now it is supposed to criticize this technological attitude of utilizing. But wait a minute don't we call this ecological recycling which is precisely this. So you see what I mean how a Heideggerian would have said that true ecological attitude is not this recycle use everything. This is precisely technological ecology. True ecology is yes there must be unaccounted for shit everywhere and you have to accept it. True ecology is precisely not this closed circle of everything should be a max- should be maximized. Where Heidegger can be of some use and don't be afraid I will criticize Heidegger later. In ecology is I think that you know Heidegger's my god I will use stupid terms but nonetheless vision of the world as our experience of being in the world torn we are located in the tension between what Heidegger calls world and earth. World as the symbolic universe logos of meaning earth as its imponderable dense ground so with self-withdrawing foundation. But do not find do we not find this tension today in the most radical way in the antinomy that defines our experience. On the one hand there is the fluidification volatilization of our experience. Its desubstantialization. This exponentially exploding lightness of being culminates of course in the cyber dream of the transformation of our very identity as a human being from hardware to software. A program able to be reloaded from one another hardware. Reality is here virtualized any failure can be undone by running back and making another try at it. That's one aspect no this virtualization everything can be recreated infinite plasticity of reality. However this virtualized world in which we dwell is threatened by the shadow of what we usually designate as the prospect of ecological catastrophe. The imponderable heaviness and complexity the inertia of earth catching up reminding us of the fragile equilibrium which forms the background foundation of our survival on earth and that we can inadvertently destroy of course global warming new viruses whatever. Never in the history of humanity I think was the tension so palpable between the unbearable lightness of our being media providing us with strangest sensations through a click and so on and so on and the unpredictable background of earth. Even at the level of our experience of reality industrial reality do you notice how on the one hand we have all this idea today material production no longer matters it's informal production, virtual programming blah-blah. But wait a minute material production doesn't matter but at the same time we worry all the time what what to do with the toxic remainders ecology and so on and so on. So it doesn't matter but it's here more and more as the problem. So what is the interest of a Heidegger here? I think the interest of Heidegger is that he is able to show how where the danger is. For Heidegger the notion of danger inscribed into modern technology is not primarily the danger of physical self-destruction the threat that something will go wrong. For Heidegger it's precisely the threat that nothing will go wrong. That genetic manipulation will function smoothly so that we will simply follow this path to the end. So here I think we should follow Heidegger. I think that the moment we accept we formulate the problem the way it is usually formulated like modern technology brings danger so where should we set up a limit so that we don't go too far, stem cells yes and no, atomic energy yes and no. We are already within the technological domain. Here I agree that the problem is the very fundamental technological attitude. But the problem I see with Heidegger the one that I already mentioned is that although how should I put it although Heidegger is well aware of how the danger of technology of how there is no way to return to the old notion of the traditional roots close to world and so on. Of how we must go through technology, experience its horror. Nonetheless he remains here inconsistent and in a way breaks down because typically all examples that he give are precisely examples of this Schwarzwald roots and so on and so on. No wonder then that this gets even a comical form in some of American pragmatic Heideggerians like Hubert Dreyfus who says the way we can resist technology is just to do not get too overfunctionalized to retain in everyday life this opening for everyday pleasures, you meet in the evening with friends get a drink enjoy a sunset and so on as if this escapes this meritum. But from true Heidegger's point the tragedy is precisely that you do it how through a tourist agency and so on you know so that precisely how should I put it you don't Heidegger himself provides a good formula. When he says even a lone how do you call it the forest man the who who is screwing Lady Chatterley the forest man okay even if that guy walks alone in the forest as authentic as he is it's already a moment of modern technological machinery. So the way is not to look for the non-mediated authentic remainders. Here I think Heidegger was right in his Nazi engagement. The moment of truth in it was that he saw it correctly that the way is to embrace to the end technological engagement. And I think that if anything the true falsity is the later Heidegger. Why? One of the best English Heideggerians for me would have been Michel de sorry if I don't pronounce the name correctly Michel de Beistegui. But at there is one detail that I don't quite under- that I don't quite agree with in his book The New Heidegger where on the one there he says two things and I think the truth was would have been would have been to bring these two things together. One statement very nice by him is how the ambiguity of Heidegger's attachment to Nazism that of course he was sincerely disappointed by Nazism. But to the end not only in private letter in public the Nazism was for Heidegger failed but it was the only authentic attempt to to confront modernity the danger of modernity through a political movement. Which is why as Michel de Beistegui points out to the end he referred to is as Die Bewegung, The Movement as it needs no qualification. That was the only attempt. Of course it miserably failed. But for Heidegger this failure was the failure of politics as such. He never again you know it is as if Heidegger's withdrawal later from political engagement was a kind of a negative fidelity to Nazism. I screwed it up there okay but that's it you won't get you know like as if that was it and as if to try at another engagement would would betray it. Which is why I think that when Michel de Beistegui then reads Heidegger's later withdrawal from politics as too positive as Heidegger did try later to got the lesson political engagement cannot that Heidegger didn't want to burn his fingers again. But I think not wanting to burn his fingers again was exactly Heidegger's negative way of kind of a negative fidelity. You know it's as if sorry for the tasteless metaphor but my nature is tasteless you have an affair it gets turns out bad the woman is evil and then you say never again another woman. But this is your negative transfix it's exactly the same to the end with Heidegger. Which is why for example people didn't notice this as I emphasized in my books Heidegger to the end insists of the inner greatness of Nazism. Okay but he never wrote about inner greatness okay it's interesting here what is Heidegger's hierarchy. Potentially there are some passages which can be determined as read as inner greatness of Bolshevism. But never inner greatness of liberal democracy no. (Audience member: He didn't use the inner greatness of that [unintelligible] rector's address?) Sorry? (Audience member: He didn't use the inner greatness in that [unintelligible] address? That phrase only occurred in the rector's address the inaugural address of Yeah. (Audience member: Sorry he didn't he rejected that in his he justified it he rejected it with inner greatness?) No no wait a minute I did my homework here I know it up to the detail. Not only he rejected it I know I just don't want to lose too much time here. I know in detail how it was in Introduction to Metaphysics Einführung in die Metaphysik you have only the phrase inner greatness. Then when the book was reprinted in I think he added it's the famous inserted passage the encounter between modern man and technology. Here of course Heidegger cheats, cheats in what sense because as it was discovered he if you compare it with first printing he qualified it in a way which says to cut a long story short exactly the opposite of what he meant. Because it is clear from his other texts from that period that what Heidegger Heidegger's
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Slavoj Žižek
project in early 30s was that Nazism is a way to not escape but...
project in early 30s was that Nazism is a way to not escape but...