Slavoj Žižek Masterclass on Lacan, May-June '06, Lecture 1, (Restored Audio)
Lecture · Deep Guild ·
2006-05 · 0:59:55 · 8,557 words
ideologycapitalismviolencelanguagepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsecology-climatesubjectivityeveryday-lifecommunism-socialismtechnology-ai-cyberspacephilosophy-general
Žižek argues that contemporary attempts at tolerance (e.g., renaming foods) mask a deeper, systemic violence, proposing that alienation and distance are necessary for peaceful coexistence. He contends that language itself is a primary source of division and symbolic violence, rather than a medium of reconciliation, and distinguishes between subjective, symbolic, and objective (systemic) violence, suggesting that visible outbursts are often reactions to the invisible violence of the capitalist system. Žižek distinguishes between objective (systemic) violence, which sustains the social order, and subjective violence, which appears as a violation of that order. Using the example of the Russian intellectual Nikolai Lossky, he argues that 'gentle' bourgeois life is built on invisible exploitation. He extends this to modern 'tolerance' and 'harassment' discourse, arguing that the fear of proximity to the 'Other' serves to maintain distance, a function now fulfilled by charity and consumerism (e.g., Bill Gates). Finally, he addresses the ecological crisis, arguing that we know the facts but cannot 'believe' them because our common sense and scientific objectivity both fail to disrupt our immersion in the ordinary life-world, as illustrated by the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Žižek analyzes the dynamics of complex systems and tipping points in ecology, arguing that scientific cold appraisal fails to account for the unconscious 'unknown knowns' driving systemic violence. He critiques the distinction between communist and capitalist crimes, highlighting the invisible systemic violence of capitalism, and calls for the rehabilitation of radical collective social action, using historical examples like Japan's seclusion and CERN's experiments to illustrate the dangers of uncontrolled technological 'second nature'.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 23
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “Hegel's Owl of Minerva”
Referenced to argue that Hegel was a materialist who understood that social processes determine consciousness, contrary to the idealist reading that thought precedes being.
A coined term for the euphemistic renaming of 'French fries' to avoid political offense, illustrating the absurdity of political correctness and the failure of genuine tolerance.
A critical term for globalization, arguing that it does not bring unity but rather throws disparate ways of life together, increasing conflict by making 'neighbors' too close.
A psychoanalytic concept where the neighbor is defined not by proximity but by being 'too close,' a traumatic intruder whose difference disturbs our way of life, generating aggression.
The symbolic construction of an enemy (e.g., 'the Jew') that serves as the true target of hatred, rather than the actual individuals encountered.
The primary, constitutive violence of language and symbolic order that divides worlds and constructs phantasmatic figures (like 'the Jew'), preceding and enabling physical confrontation.
Violence enacted by specific agents (individuals, mobs, state apparatuses) which is perceived as a disturbance of the normal, peaceful state of things.
as “Objective Systemic Violence”
The invisible, background violence of the capitalist system (e.g., market fluctuations, capital reproduction) that sustains the 'normal' state of affairs, contrasted with visible 'subjective' violence.
A Marxist concept where an abstraction (like capital or financial speculation) is not just a mental construct but has real, material effects on social reality and human lives.
The invisible, systemic violence (exploitation, domination) that sustains the social order and serves as the zero-level standard against which subjective violence is perceived.
as “Higgs Field / Zero Energy”
A physics metaphor used to explain that maintaining social stasis (the 'zero level') requires significant energy, implying that doing nothing (withdrawal) can be the first gesture of change.
as “decaffeinated other”
A formulation describing the liberal ideal of the Other: someone who is 'tolerated' only insofar as they are stripped of their raw substance, desires, and intrusive proximity.
The central human right in late capitalism, defined as the right to be kept at a safe distance from the raw, intrusive presence of the Other.
as “charity as distance”
The function of modern charity (e.g., Bill Gates) not to close the gap with the Other, but to pay for the privilege of keeping the Other at a safe, non-intrusive distance.
The objective social order/historical inertia that traditionally mediates and contains subjective acts; today, it is threatened by subjective interventions (ecological catastrophe) that can cut directly into it.
as “knowledge vs. belief”
The paradox that we 'know' the ecological facts (scientific knowledge) but do not 'believe' them (psychic belief), because our common sense and immersion in the life-world reject the possibility of catastrophe.
as “life-world”
The ordinary, everyday experience of reality (grass, sky, routine) which, when confronted with ecological threat, proves unreliable and blinds us to the danger.
A threshold in complex systems where a small disturbance causes total catastrophe and a new order, which can only be perceived in retrospect.
A framework for categorizing knowledge states (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, unknown unknowns) applied to systemic risks and unconscious prejudices.
Things we know but are not aware of knowing them, such as life-world unconscious prejudices that run our lives.
A dual concept: 1) artificially generated new nature (monsters, GMOs), and 2) the autonomization of social processes where our creations become objective social fate; the danger is the short circuit between them.
A metaphor for the postmodern taboo against global intervention, which must be broken to allow for radical collective action.
The radical notion of conscious collective action as the only ethical solution to systemic violence, rehabilitated against postmodern fears of totalitarianism.
Stories he reaches for 3
When asked by a vulgar journalist about his first sexual partner, Gore Vidal replied, 'I was too polite to ask.' Žižek uses this to advocate for a 'code of discretion' against the intrusive proximity demanded by modern harassment culture.
“I was too polite to ask. That's that's that's the way.”
Scientists at CERN recreate conditions for the Big Bang; skeptics warn it might succeed 'all too well,' triggering a new Big Bang that destroys our world, illustrating the risk of 'unknown unknowns' in technology.
“some skeptics warned about the possibility that the experiment will succeed all too well, effectively setting in motion a new Big Bang which will simply undermine, if you want, destroy our world.”
Visiting Chernobyl, one sees that life looks exactly the same as before (nature has reclaimed it), leading locals to ignore the radiation. This illustrates the failure of 'common sense' and the 'life-world' to register the threat, as our gut feeling that 'life goes on' contradicts scientific reality.
“When one visits the site... what you see there is that with the exception of the sarcophagus... things look basically exactly the same as before.”
Works invoked 4
Communist Manifesto book
Cited as an example of a clear ideological text ('communist manifesto') that allows for playing the game of ideological responsibility, unlike capitalism.
The Shining (film) film
Used as a metaphor for the US: putting one family in a huge hotel is 'too much' because they are too close, illustrating intolerance of proximity.
Referred to as 'that unfortunate book The Black Crimes of Communism' (likely mis-transcribed title); used as a foil to contrast the clear responsibility of communist crimes with the systemic, perpetrator-less nature of capitalist crimes.
A book by Lesley Chamberlain that Žižek is reading and plans to review, containing the anecdote about Nikolai Lossky.
People invoked 26
Used as an example of a speculator whose virtual actions caused real suffering in Malaysia, illustrating systemic violence.
Leopold II of Belgium positive
Cited as the perpetrator of colonial crimes in the Congo, yet privately a 'saint' who funded social projects, used to illustrate the paradox of subjective goodness vs. systemic violence.
Mentioned as having a 'capitalist manifesto,' which Žižek dismisses as 'another story' to argue that capitalism lacks a coherent ideological text like the Communist Manifesto.
Mentioned to distinguish his concept of 'symbolic violence' (encoding authority) from Žižek's more elementary definition of language as a divider.
Gore Vidal positive
An American writer Žižek 'appreciates very much' for his 'code of discretion' and politeness, which Žižek contrasts with modern vulgarity.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited (specifically early Lacan) for the idea that imaginary investments distort pure symbolic exchange, though Žižek argues against the notion that language is inherently peaceful.
Donald Rumsfeld positive
Used as the source of a terminology ('known knowns, unknown knowns') which Žižek expands to 'unknown knowns' and 'unknown unknowns' for his own philosophical purposes.
Slavoj Žižek positive
Refers to himself as 'degenerate intellectuals like me' who travel freely, contrasting with those who flee war.
Al Gore negative
Someone Žižek 'doesn't appreciate too much'; criticized for culpabilizing individuals ('did you recycle') to distract from big companies' damage.
Vladimir Lossky positive
Identified as Nikolai's son, described as 'the best orthodox theologian of 20th century'.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak positive
Described as 'my friend'; Žižek cites her 'starving beggar/dieting lady' analogy to critique the ideological blurring of 'harassment'.
Étienne Balibar positive
Cited for the concept of 'objective systemic violence,' which Žižek adopts and expands upon.
Giorgio Agamben negative
Referenced implicitly in the critique of 'embeddedness' and 'life-world' as terms used by American reporters in Iraq, which Žižek finds 'obscene'.
Stéphane Courtois negative
Met by Žižek in Ljubljana; Žižek critiques his dismissal of capitalist crimes as merely 'systemic' and lacking a clear perpetrator, using him to highlight the invisibility of systemic violence.
Adolf Hitler negative
Cited as an example of the 'neighbor' concept: 'for Hitler there were always too many Jews, no matter how few.'
Nikolay Lossky positive
Used as an example of 'insensitivity to objective violence'; a sincere, benevolent bourgeois intellectual who could not see the exploitation sustaining his life.
Stephen King positive
Author of the novel 'The Shining', used as a metaphor for American intolerance of proximity.
Michel Foucault negative
Referenced implicitly in the critique of 'scientification of our lives' and 'embeddedness' as concepts that alienate us from the life-world.
Mentioned alongside Bill Gates in the 'disgusting photo' anecdote.
Martin Heidegger positive
Praised for emphasizing 'Gewalt' (violence) in speech, acknowledging the original violence of language.
Bill Gates negative
Described as the 'ideal capitalist today' who engages in 'ruthless objective violence' and counteracts it with 'charity' to maintain distance; his photo with Melinda in India is called 'disgusting'.
Lesley Chamberlain positive
Author of 'The Philosophy Steamer', from which Žižek is reading the Lossky anecdote.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Criticized for the idea that language/symbolic order is a medium of reconciliation and peaceful coexistence, which Žižek rejects.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for the concept of 'real abstraction' and the critique of capital's self-reproduction, which Žižek uses to explain systemic violence.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the suspicion that the neighbor is primarily a traumatic intruder whose difference disturbs our balance.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Reinterprets Hegel as a materialist who understood that social processes determine consciousness, correcting the idealist reading.
Transcript 2 turns
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The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema featuring Slavoj Žižek will be shown and then a discussion will take place. Now Slavoj is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and he's currently in the middle of a masterclass on Lacan which takes place in this very room every Tuesday and Thursday for the next three weeks at So he is very much part of the Birkbeck Humanities establishment and I should say just to finish that those of you who have read Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Hegel says that the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Now Minerva is the Latin bastardization of Athena, Athena the goddess of wisdom, and Hegel's position is that philosophy or theory comes to understand what happens in a particular historical period only towards the end of that period, that somehow philosophy or theory runs behind historical events, the political-historical becoming. Now I would say that Slavoj Žižek is clearly the Owl of Athena. He's someone who I think is making extremely important interventions in alarms and helping us to understand the difficult social-political international situation we live in. So welcome very much Slavoj and we're looking forward to listening to you.
The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema featuring Slavoj Žižek will be shown and then a discussion will take place. Now Slavoj is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and he's currently in the middle of a masterclass on Lacan which takes place in this very room every Tuesday and Thursday for the next three weeks at So he is very much part of the Birkbeck Humanities establishment and I should say just to finish that those of you who have read Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Hegel says that the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Now Minerva is the Latin bastardization of Athena, Athena the goddess of wisdom, and Hegel's position is that philosophy or theory comes to understand what happens in a particular historical period only towards the end of that period, that somehow philosophy or theory runs behind historical events, the political-historical becoming. Now I would say that Slavoj Žižek is clearly the Owl of Athena. He's someone who I think is making extremely important interventions in alarms and helping us to understand the difficult social-political international situation we live in. So welcome very much Slavoj and we're looking forward to listening to you.
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. I am honored to be here. Thanks for this kind invitation. Just I cannot abstain from making a direct reference to your gracious introduction, namely yes, Hegel said the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Why? Because Hegel was a materialist. He knew that the real social process determines consciousness. Marx then as we all know turned around Hegel in an idealist way and thought that, you know, first you have thought then thought translates into being. No, so we should maybe change the entire perspective, that it was Marx who did an idealist reversal of Hegel. More about this tomorrow in this very room. Okay. Today I would like to surprise you if some of you know me a little bit and know that I never stick to the title of my talk. I would like to say something really about violence, modalities of violence, what do they mean today, and especially modalities that we try to find violence or intolerance like respect and so on. Let me begin with an anecdote. I visited some two years ago the University of Champaign in Illinois close to Chicago. There I was taken to a restaurant, this was you see the meaning immediately just after the last US attack on Iraq. I was taken to a restaurant which offered on the menu Tuscany fries. I asked friends what this is. They explained it to me. The owner of the restaurant wanted to appear patriotic, apropos the French opposition to the US attack on Iraq. So he followed the US Congress and renamed French fries freedom fries. However, the progressive members of the faculty, the majority of his customers, threatened to boycott the place if freedom fries remained on the menu. So the owner didn't want to lose his customers but he also didn't want to appear unpatriotic. So he invented, I spoke with him, a new name: Tuscany fries. He said it's close to France and at the same time, you know, Under the Tuscan Sun, all those movies give the right association. So that's what he did, invented a new name. Now in a move similar to the one by the US Congress, maybe you know that after those Muhammad caricatures outrage in the Muslim world, Iranian authorities ordered the bakeries to change the name of Danish pastry into Roses of Muhammad as they are called now in Tehran. My initial observation is just that it would be nice to live in a world in which the US Congress would change the name from French fries into Muhammad's fries, and the Iranian authorities Danish pastry into freedom pastry. But the prospect of tolerance, respect for otherness and so on is the one in which I'm afraid our stores and restaurants' menus will be more and more full of the different versions of Tuscany fries. What lurks at the horizon if we follow this path is I think the nightmarish prospect of a society regulated by a perverse pact between religious fundamentalists and the politically correct preachers of tolerance and respect for the other's beliefs, a society immobilized by the concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel and superstitious this other is, and in which individuals will be engaged in regular rituals of witnessing their own victimization. The problem for me is how to avoid this. In other words, I claim not only is violence a problem today, as a good Hegelian reflexive thinker I think that the very way we perceive the problem of violence and try to fight it is part of the problem, is not a solution. So is there a different approach? Okay. Let me begin, not that I think that this really is an outstanding example of violence but because our media were full of it, let me begin with those infamous, now it's already half a year ago I think, demonstration in some Islam, Muslim-dominated countries against the Danish pastry, whatever, caricatures. The irony not to be missed, it's a simple observation but I think it's crucial, is that probably like the result of Stalinist elections, percent of the thousands who felt offended by and demonstrated against the Muhammad caricatures had never even seen these caricatures. That's a simple observation but it's crucial. This fact confronts us with another less attractive aspect of globalization. The so-called global informational village is the condition of the fact that something that took place in an obscure daily newspaper in Denmark caused such a violent stir in a faraway Muslim country. It is as if all of a sudden Denmark and Syria or Pakistan or Egypt or Afghanistan or Lebanon or Indonesia are neighboring countries. This is what those who see globalization simply as a chance for the entire earth to emerge as a unified space of communication, bringing together all humanity, this is what they fail to notice. Since a neighbor is, as Freud suspected long ago, primarily a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life materialized in his, her, their social practices and rituals disturbs us, throws off the rail the balance of our way of life, when a neighbor comes too close, this can also and as a rule it does give rise to aggressive reactions aimed at getting rid of this disturbing intruder. Namely the neighbor is the one who is close to us, but the problem with the neighbor is that it's by definition always too close. You know it's like for Hitler there were always too many Jews, no matter how few. It's the neighbor is always always too close. If some of you know Germany, you know Hamburg, the city. You know that the northern suburb of Hamburg is called Altona. You know, if it's not true, then as Italians put it, se non vero, ben trovato. But you know what's the local mythology of this term, that in some medieval times when Hamburg was a smaller town, this was the northern not even suburb, a Danish village, and that the Hamburger people nicknamed it All zu nah, all too close. You know, the other is always all too close. So what I am claiming is that in today's ideological constellation, global, more communication, that is to say the fact that through this global informational village, however we politely describe it, we are thrown different ways of life and so on all of a sudden more together, means at first and above all more conflict, more violence. This is why the first I hope provocative thought, I think that we should maybe neglect a little bit, keep it behind, this attitude of we understanding each other. We should understand each other, try to integrate ourselves into the other's way of life. Maybe we should supplement this attitude by the attitude of getting out of each other's way, by maintaining an appropriate distance, by a new code of discretion. We find it easier to tolerate different ways of life precisely on account of what the critics of our civilization often denounce as our weakness and failure, namely the alienation of social life. So I would like to propose a short celebration of alienation. Alienation means also that distance is intruded into the very social texture. Even if I live side by side with others, the normal state is to ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others. I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external mechanical rules without sharing the other's inner world. And perhaps again the lesson to be learned is that sometimes a dose of alienation is indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life. Sometimes alienation is not a problem but a solution. Again, I think that this is, if we should detect Eurocentrism somewhere, it is precisely in this obsessive attitude to unify, to understand the other. Why not, why not maintain a distance? I wouldn't like everybody to understand me. I would like to have, I would like to have a selective attitude. There are people, individuals, social groups, ethnic groups whom I want to understand, there are many others whom I don't want to understand and I don't hate them. And I think we should accept that this is not automatically racism. We should be permitted to be selective. That's my first observation. So again, I think that the problem is precisely that we try to understand maybe Muslims too much insofar as we are not Muslims. Or some of you are Muslims, Muslims try to understand ourselves too much. The problem is not so much that there is a deep mystery in the other in the sense of you will never really understand me. The problem is what if there really is nothing to understand? You know not that in reality we are just blind puppets, but in the sense of I am more and more convinced that, let you remember when you are witnessing, but this happens more often in movies than in real life, when you are witnessing some intense mysterious religious ritual or sacred experience, you don't understand it, you just know something extremely intense is going on. You always presuppose that you miss the meaning which those who are involved in it somehow must get it. But I don't think this is the case. I think that in all authentic rituals, and that's what I find almost liberating about a ritual, you participate in something the meaning of which is not clear even to you. I think that the, if you want to put it in this way, original experience of the sacred is: something has a deep meaning, but you don't know what this meaning is. And this is why I think that even revolutionaries shouldn't be afraid to adopt this attitude towards the sacred, because if you have this attitude, it means something I don't know what, this means the meaning is open. For me sacred can also be an opening space to put our meaning into it. Okay, that's the first observation. Let's go on. The second feature that we should be reminded of apropos of these violent outbursts is another obvious fact which is I think too much neglected, that the process, the protests and their very real violence were triggered by means of representations, words, images. The Muslim crowds did not react to caricatures as such, they didn't know them. They reacted to the complex figure image of the West which was perceived as the attitude behind the caricatures. What exploded in violence was, as we all know, the complex cobweb of symbols, images, attitudes, Western imperialism, godless materialism and hedonism, the suffering of Palestinians and so on and so on, that became attached to Danish caricatures, which is why the hatred then slowly expanded from caricatures to Denmark as a country, then Scandinavia, then to Europe, then to the West in general. As if all these humiliations and frustrations got condensed in the caricatures. And again, we should bear in mind that this condensation was a fact of language, of constructing, imposing a certain symbolic figure. This simple and all too obvious fact should compel us to render problematic the idea, now my second thesis proposal, the idea propagated lately by Jürgen Habermas but also not strange to a certain Jacques Lacan, I mean some of his works, the idea that language, symbolic order is the medium of reconciliation, mediation, of peaceful coexistence as opposed to the violence of immediate raw confrontation. The idea is that in language instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we debate, we exchange words, and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimum of a symbolic pact of the recognition of the other. The idea is thus that insofar as language gets infected by violence, this occurs under the influence of contingent empirical pathological in the Kantian sense circumstances which distort the inherent logic of symbolic communication. That's the Habermasian idea, incidentally you find it even in early Lacan where it's the imaginary investments which distort the pure symbolic exchange. As if again language to itself is a peaceful egalitarian medium of exchange, it gets only pathologically disturbed. My counter-question: what if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? What if language, not primitive egotistic interests, what if language is the first and great divider, not decider as I think President Bush defined himself some couple of weeks ago, but divider? What if it is because of language that we and our neighbors can live in different worlds even when we live on the same street? What this means is that verbal violence is not a secondary distortion but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence. Let me take anti-Semitic pogroms, but of course you can replace Jews with Arabs, blacks, whoever, so racist violence. Anti-Semitic pogroms do not react to what they find intolerable and rage-provoking in the immediate reality of Jews, but to the image, the figure of the Jew constructed symbolically and circulating in their tradition. The catch of course is that you cannot simply distinguish the way the Jews appear to us to the way the Jews are really in themselves. I don't mean by this where there is a smoke there must have been fire, if all this is true then Jews must have been guilty. I only simply mean that the way the Jews are perceived by others affects the self-identity experience of Jews themselves. So again what makes, we should never forget it even if we have the most brutal immediate confrontation, a white idiot beating a Jew or an African or however, whomever. What makes the real Jew or African or Arab that an anti-Semite encounters on the street intolerable? What the anti-Semite tries to destroy when he attacks the Jew? The true target of his fury is this phantasmatic dimension which is symbolically constructed. So precisely when we are dealing with the scene of a furious crowd attacking, burning buildings and cars, lynching people, we should never forget that the placards, the posters that they are carrying, that all this is sustained by symbolic medium. You get my point, this absolute excess of violence, destruction, is precisely because we live in the world of language. Again, you got my point, I am not when I say use the term here symbolic violence, I don't mean it primarily in this Bourdieu sense how the relations of of of top of authority, master-pupil encoded in very language. But a much more elementary thing that, and here even somebody like Heidegger was right, we shouldn't be afraid to learn from him when in his bombastic poetic style he emphasizes Gewalt, the original violence of speech. It is simply, let's put it, with empirical physical violence we change things within the world, but isn't it in a way a much greater violence to make the world itself different? Isn't this in a way the ultimate violence? I am here, you are there, we are very close in the same space, but there is a radical break between how I, how you perceive this violence. That's the gap, that's the gap that we should bear in, take into account. So what is the lesson of this? The lesson is that we should resist the fascination, being too fascinated by what I am tempted to call subjective violence, violence enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds, cold murderers, whatever. You know this violence on which we usually focus: bureaucratic apparatus, murderers, enraged mob, secret police, there we know who is doing it. This violence is just the most visible peak of the triangle which comprises also symbolic violence in the sense that I briefly described it, and the third element I claim, something that following Étienne Balibar I am tempted to call objective systemic violence. What do I mean by this? Let me return to Marx a little bit. When Marx describes the mad self-enhancing circulation of capital whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation, self-reproduction is reaching its climax in today's speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern, that this is an ideological abstraction and that one should never forget that behind this abstraction there are real people, natural objects and so on on which the capital feeds itself like a gigantic parasite. You know this would be the classical humanist criticism: yes people may speculate with future in the City of London or on Wall Street, but we should never forget that this is just a big ideological dream, all this is sustained by real people, individuals, working in reality and so on and so on. This is too simple. It misses what Marx called the dimension of real abstraction. That is to say the problem is that this abstraction, the notion of capital as in this virtual space of financial speculation reproducing itself, this abstraction is not only in our financial speculators' misperception of social reality, it is real in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes. Isn't it that some rumor which causes a downfall or confusion on the stock market is something that happens precisely in this virtual space of speculation, but as we all know it can have extremely real in the sense of reality social consequences? My God, sometimes if it's a small vulnerable nation, a whole nation can go bankrupt, hundreds of thousands of people can lose jobs. You remember which one such example which caused even a little bit of anti-Semitism unfortunately, you remember how Soros' speculations with some Eastern currency I think or with pound, even here with pound, this was purely virtual playing but it in Malaysia I know it caused tremendous suffering and so on. This I think is systemic violence at its most elementary. We have social reality, this social reality is determined among other things by the reproduction of the capital. But reproduction of the capital is a kind of a monstrous machine which operates in its virtual space of speculations and so on and so on. It's a monster which exists nowhere in reality but has very real consequences. And what is crucial is the gap we experience between our everyday life, we suffer, we work hard, and this mysterious virtual entity which can determine our reality. So my first conclusion here is that we should whenever we witness, let's call it subjective violence, this violent irrational apparently outbursts and so on, we should never forget that they are usually, and I am not justifying them, but nonetheless they are a reaction or at least has to be conceived in opposition to this more invisible objective violence, the violence of the system which follows its path irrespective of what the people are doing. Let me use, I'm bluffing here but bluffing with a good intention as it would be put at least, let me use the notion which I barely understand but I love it from quantum physics, Higgs field. You know what this means, to simplify to the utmost, sometimes zero is not the cheapest state of a system, so that paradoxically nothing costs more than something. To keep a system at its absolute zero point, zero level energy, you must already invest paradoxically some energy. So in a rude analogy the social nothing, the stasis of a system, its mere reproduction without any changes, costs more than something sometimes, costs more than a change. It demands a lot of energy. So sometimes the first gesture to provoke a change in a system is to withdraw activity, to do nothing. I think that this objective systemic violence is maybe something, rather bombastic metaphor, like the notorious dark matter in physics, the counterpart to the all too visible subjective violence. Objective violence, although invisible, had to be taken into account if one is to account for the otherwise irrational explosions of subjective violence. The catch is that subjective and objective violence can't be perceived from the same standpoint. Subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of the non-violent zero level, as a perturbation of the normal peaceful state of things. Things were going normally in our society and look all of a sudden irrational outburst, demonstration, killings, whatever. However, objective violence is precisely the violence sustaining this normal state of things. It's like, you know, the something sustaining the nothing, nothing in the sense of nothing is changing in a society. In other words, objective violence is invisible insofar as it sustains the very zero level standard against which or as a violation of which we perceive something as subjective violence. Let me give you a touching example from a book that I'm reading now, I want to write a review of it, Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer. Of you know how in Lenin threw out or Lenin instigated the arrest and throw out of about of top religious, rather conservative liberal philosophers and so on from Soviet Union. It's the experience of one of them, Nikolai Lossky. For those who know orthodox theology, this is the father of Vladimir Lossky, I think for me the best orthodox theologian of 20th century. So Nikolai Lossky, one of the Russian intellectuals forced to exile in provided I think a touching example of this insensitivity to objective violence. He was enjoying with his family the comfortable old bourgeois life supported by servants, maids and so on. He simply couldn't understand who would want to destroy his way of life. What has his family and their kind done? His boys, their friends as they inherited the best of what Russia had to offer, filled the world with talk of literature, music, art. They led their gentle lives. What was wrong with that? That's how he describes his self-experience. Now while Lossky was without doubt a sincere benevolent person, really caring for the poor, trying to civilize Russian life and so on, I think that such an attitude betrays a breathtaking insensitivity to the objective violence, domination, exploitation, that had to go on in order for such a gentle life to be possible. The Losskys and their kind effectively did nothing. There was no subjective evil in their life, just the invisible background of objective violence. And then of course they all of a sudden started to experience something like strange intrusions of irrational violence. For example in May the family could hear the sound of riderless horses galloping down the neighboring streets after some such some street battle, or other ominous intrusions. Once in his school Lossky's son was brutally laughed at by a working-class schoolmate who shouted at him that the days of you and your family are over now and so on and so on. Lossky family in their benevolent gentle innocence, they perceived such signs of the forthcoming catastrophe as emerging out of nowhere, signals of an incomprehensible malevolent new spirit. But what they were unable to recognize in these signs of subjective violence was the truth, the reversal, the obverse of the objective violence inscribed into their very existence. That's what I think again is wrong in this notion of gentle gentle existence. And I claim that although we live in a world which is apparently much more sensitive and so on, this Lossky logic, I just live my gentle life, avoid violence, is inscribed also into our existence even if it appears that it's the opposite. Politically correct way it is inscribed in it in the guise of what today we call tolerance or the fear of harassment. I want to problematize the term harassment. I think it's another of those words which, although it seems to refer to a clearly defined fact, it effectively functions in a deeply ambiguous way. It's an ideological term. Why? Because it blurs the crucial opposition. Like ideological I claim in the same way that for me for example all these pseudo-Deleuzian hard Negri celebration of nomadic existence is ideological. Ideology for me is at its most elementary if you take two opposite phenomena and instead of allowing you to draw the line, it blurs the line. Like what is nomadic existence today? Obviously this term covers two totally opposite phenomena. One is degenerate intellectuals like me, I travel freely around earn money and earn money on the way. And on the other hand there are people who has to flee to abandon their homes because of war, hunger and so on. Isn't there something obscene in covering both these experiences with the same term? It's a little bit like to quote my, I don't agree with her theoretically but nonetheless personally I know her, my friend Gayatri Spivak who says that it's a little bit like when you take a starving, a starving beggar and rich fat lady who is doing her diet and claim that both are basically doing the same thing. Of course in a way they are but it's monstrous. So harassment is the same. On the one hand at its most elementary of course harassment designates brutal facts of rape, beating, other modes of social violence which of course should be ruthlessly condemned. Here I totally agree. But the problem for me is that in the predominant use of this term today in our societies, harassment, the meaning of harassment imperceptibly slips into the condemnation of any excessive proximity of another real human being with his, her, their desires, fears, pleasures. Two topics determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards others: the respect of otherness, openness towards the other, and the obsessive fear of harassment. The other is okay insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as to cut long story short, he is not really an other, insofar as he is as I like to put it a decaffeinated other. So what I claim is that in our actual experience tolerance, the way we use the term tolerance, means its exact opposite. It means intolerance. In what sense? What does it mean tolerance? Means let's be tolerant towards each other, it means let's not harass each other. But what does basically harassment means? Especially in the United States, I'm shocked at it. No wonder that I'm turning in my old days more pro-Japanese. Japan I love, there you go, it's not the myth, I was surprised how this racist cliché fits reality. You go to a packed subway train, you are really squeezed among other people and somehow your space is not in, is not, is not invaded too much. The best metaphor for United States for me is if you see that Stephen King based on his novel movie Shining, you put just one single family, mother, father and son in a big hotel, it's still too much, they are too close, they explode. That is so what I mean is that if you look at it close, so tolerance means let's tolerate each other, it means don't harass me, it means don't come too close to me with your desires, whatever I do, I look you into the eyes, it's visual rape. I talk dirty, it's verbal rape and so on. It's this incredible fear of coming of coming too close. So I claim that what we call tolerance is precisely the intolerance towards the other's over-proximity. It is as if in our late capitalist societies this is what is more and more emerging as the central human right: the right not to be harassed, the right to be kept at the safe distance from others. Which is why which is what explains I think the attraction of cybersex. In it we are dealing only with virtual partners, there is no harassment. This idea, this aspect of cyberspace, the idea of a space in which because we are not directly interacting with real people, nobody is harassed, we are free to let go and so on. This I think found, but I develop this in my books, its ultimate expression in a proposal which recently resurfaced in some circles in the United States, a proposal to rethink the right of necrophiliacs. It really happened in some circles. The idea is that necrophiliacs should also have the right to their way of life, so why wouldn't we do in the same way as we if you die, you know sign with politically correct sign an agreement that if I suddenly die my organs can be used for transplant, why not sign an agreement that your body can be given to a necrophiliac [unintelligible]. I think the crucial thing, this would be then the ultimate politically correct sex. Nobody is harassed and so on. Against this, I am tempted to say that this tells a lot about our sense of subjectivity in our late capitalism. So the question to be asked is of course why this fear of over-proximity of the other? Why the need to decaffeinate as it were the other? To deprive the other of his or her or their raw substance of enjoyment, of way of life? Is this not a reaction to the disintegration of the protective symbolic walls which keep others at the proper distance? It is as if in our culture, which is a brutal culture of self-confessing, it is as if this self-confessing should be, has to be countered by the politically correct fear of harassment. Again, I'm returning to my starting proposal, what we maybe need is a kind of a code of discretion best professed by an American writer whom I appreciate very much, Gore Vidal, who as you probably know, he was known for his bisexuality and a vulgar intrusive journalist once asked him: okay, what was your first sexual partner, a man or a woman? You know what he answered? I was too polite to ask. That's that's that's the way. So you know what I mean, today we should maybe turn it around. It's not that the upper classes have this polite Henry James attitude even if the world is falling apart, they ask you how much sugar you want in your tea and so on. Maybe the upper classes are vulgar enough so that maybe we need the proletarian code of discretion and fineness and so on. Of course, now comes the next paradox. Of course, the form of this maintaining distance towards the other is exactly charity, I claim. This is why charity is turning into a crucial category today of capitalist discourse. You're allowed to grab all the money that you want, which is why Bill Gates is an icon today. First you grab billion dollars then you give billions back and you are the greatest humanitarian in the history of humanity and so on and so on. And it's so I claim that what's the function of charity? It's not to get close to the other. It's we are paying charity so that the other remains far away there. Especially I find so hypocritical this logic of pseudo-personalized charity, you know you give pounds a month to a boy in Africa, once in a year you get a personalized letter from him. What makes you really warm in your heart is that he is far away there. Which is why I don't think there is anything subversive or critical in this discourse of are we aware that we live in ivory towers of our developed society but out there in Africa there are people starving, dying of rape and AIDS and so on. This is the form of ideology today. My God Bill Gates is saying this all the time. He said recently what do all the computers and Microsoft programs help when there are people still dying of diarrhea and so on and so on. So I think that this false demystification reference to brutal reality out there is the very mode of our inner safe space to to reproduce itself. And which is why I think that these are the modes of distance towards the other. Either I already some of you also visit my classes here mentioned it this this pseudo sense of ethical urgency like if I were to say now this is very popular in the States holy more than in Europe, I hope this is not the case in Europe like if I were to say are you aware that in a talk on violence that for every sentence that I spoken here children died of hunger in Africa or are you aware that for every phrase that I read here a woman was raped in the United States. It's true and it's horrible but to mention it in this way it's a fake because it precisely I claim the function is anti-intellectual: don't think act. As if they are afraid that you withdraw into thinking. And it's the same even with consumerism. I remember entering recently in the States a Starbucks coffee place where there was a big poster greeting me saying of every cup of coffee that you buy with us goes to Guatemala children to help them and so on and so on. It's just the reverse of it. This this this fake charity is here precisely to make us blind for objective what I called objective systemic violence. That's for me the ideal capitalist today, somewhere between Soros and Bill Gates. You engage ruthlessly in objective violence, systemic violence and then you counter it with this subjective goodness. I mean if there is a photo which deserves to be called the disgusting photo of the last decade, it's for me recently when Bill Gates and what's his wife Melinda visited some children's hospital for crippled children in India. You should have seen those sincerely smiling sympathetic faces and so on and so on. So I hope you got my point, I think that this kind of charitable approach aiming at as it were subjective violence, all this neo-capitalist are terribly worried by global dying, rapists, violence, we should do something and so on, that's the way the system reproduces itself. However things are even more complex, now I come to something new I hope. This category of objective violence or systemic violence is crucial especially for understanding our today's predicament because we are in the midst of a radical change. Till now historical substance, I don't mean anything big Hegelian, by this I mean the objective social order, society in its objective aspect as something which runs following its own inertia independently of our interventions and so on. Till now historical substance played its role as the foundation of all of our subjective acts, interventions. Whatever social and political subjects did, it was mediated, ultimately dominated, over-determined by the historical substance. Whatever you did somehow it was incorporated into it. What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will cut directly into the historical substance, catastrophically disturbing its run, by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful bio-genetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe or whatsoever. So no longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts. It no longer holds that whatever we do history will go on. For the first time in human history the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter or even interrupt the global historical process. So what is the problem today? The problem is that although our sometimes even individual acts can have catastrophic ecological and so on consequences, we continue to perceive such consequences as anonymous systemic, as something for which we are not responsible, for which there is no clear agent. Now you will tell me but this is not true, we are all the time bombarded by the media, did you recycle, do your duty. But I think this exactly is in the same way as charity the wrong approach. This is the ultimate strategy of the system to counteract again systemic violence with our individualities. My God even somebody whom otherwise I don't appreciate too much like Al Gore once already years ago put it nicely, he says if there is something obscene it's big companies who with one single stroke of a business deal do more damage than we all with all our with all our non-processing all the time try to culpabilize us individual. Did you throw the newspapers into the basket simply or did you put it away for us and we should reject this. So what is going on? I will now try to describe our experience today. Back to the joke that I repeat all the times, you know the madman who knew he is not a grain but the chicken didn't know it so he was afraid to be eaten. We know we are responsible but the chicken, the big Other, society doesn't know it. Or what do I mean by this? Insofar as knowledge is the function of the I and belief the function of the I, we know it very well but we do not believe it. What do I mean by this? Contrary, usually when a scientist oppose already acting on ecological matter, they evoke the principle of precaution and usually it is claimed that we don't know for certain, there is too much uncertainty to act. I claim it's not that we don't know enough. We know but we cannot make ourselves believe in what we know. Take the global warming. With all the data about it, the problem is not the uncertainty about facts, but our inability to believe that it can really happen. I think really, now I come to my central point, simple phenomenological description, that we live in a horrible situation where our knowledge runs against our most elementary not natural, but let's say part of human nature in the historical sense, but nonetheless in the sense of what you immediately experience, our human experience which tells you: look, look out through the window, the grass, the blue sky are there, life is going on, nature follows its rhythm. You know can we really imagine that all this will fall apart? I claim that secretly we don't really believe that it can happen. Therein resides the horror of the Chernobyl accident. When one visits the site and I didn't but I would love to, why? Because what you see there is that with the exception of the sarcophagus which covers the the the site of explosion, things look basically exactly the same as before. Life seems to have deserted the site leaving everything the way it was. And nonetheless we are aware that it is something wrong. No wonder then that there are so many people there living close to the site of the accident, you know these some farmers who simply adopted to ignore the threat. They say I don't care all that shit scientists, look my cows are here I live here. And some of them were lucky, they were not affected by radiation so they can pretend life goes on. So what's my point here? My point here is that we should not as some phenomenologists or humanists want to do, the reason we cannot take, here I want to defend sciences, the reason we are not ready to take ecological threat seriously we should not attribute it to the impregnation of our mind by scientific ideology in the sense of through this scientification of our lives we lost our roots, our our our embeddedness to to use this term which today because it's used for American reporters in Iraq is obscene for me, our embeddedness in daily life, we lost the meaning of what does it mean to live in a concrete life world. No I think that it's precisely this most elementary gut sense of that's the real life which cannot serve as a reliable guide as a point of reference here. Of course this gut sense tells us that something is fundamentally wrong with scientific technological attitude. But the problem is nonetheless much deeper. Again it resides in the unreliability of our common sense itself which, habituated as it is to an ordinary life world, finds it difficult really to accept that the flow of everyday reality can be perturbed. The problem is thus that we can rely neither on scientific mind nor on our common sense. They both mutually reinforce each other's blindness. The scientific mind, at least the usual scientific mind, advocates a cold objective appraisal of dangers and risks involved. The problem is that no such appraisal is effectively possible. While common sense finds it hard to accept that a catastrophe can really occur. So the difficult ethical task is to unlearn the most basic coordinates of our immersion in our life world. What usually serves as the recourse to wisdom, the basic trust into the coordinates of our life world, is now the source of danger. We should really grow up and learn to cut the ultimate umbilical cord to our life sphere. The problem with science and technology attitude is not its alienation, detachment from our life world, but the abstract character of this detachment which compels the science and technology attitude to combine itself with the worst of our life world immersion. Scientists perceive themselves as rational, able to appraise objectively potential risks. For them the only unpredictable irrational elements are panic reactions of the uneducated crowd. With ordinary people a small and controllable risk can spread all around and trigger global panic since they project into the situation their basic fears and fantasies. What scientists are unable to perceive is the irrational inadequate nature of their own cold distance appraisal. Why? The theory of complex systems accounts for the two opposite features of such systems, their robust stable character and their extreme vulnerability. These systems can accommodate themselves to great disturbances. They can integrate these disturbances and find new balance and stability up to a certain threshold, a tipping point, above which a small disturbance can cause total catastrophe and it can lead to the establishment of a totally different order. For long centuries humanity did not have to worry about the impact on the environment of its activity. Nature was able to accommodate itself to deforestation, to the use of coal, oil and so on and so on. However one cannot be sure if today we are not approaching a tipping point. One really cannot be sure, since such points can only be perceived once it's already too late in retro, in retrospect. So that's the problem I think of this cold appraisal of the situation. There is no middle ground, you cannot you cannot do it. Either the catastrophe will occur or not, but obviously we can say it only too late. I would like here to nonetheless use the two terms of what I tempted to call Rumsfeldian ontology. Of course I'm referring here to Donald Rumsfeld, you know his famous statement of there are known knowns, unknown knowns and so on and so on. Not only would I like to focus on the fourth term that he forgot, the unknown knowns, things we know but are not even aware of knowing them and they run our life, which are these life world unconscious prejudices, like we really cannot accept that nature will fall apart. We don't take it seriously. But even more there are unknown unknowns, like we even don't know what we don't know about natural what about natural balance. Now the last thought here if you give me another five minutes, yeah. Science and technology today no longer aim only at understanding reproducing natural process. They aim at generating new forms of life that will surprise us. The goal is no longer just to dominate nature the way it is, nature, but to generate something new, greater, stronger than ordinary nature, including ourselves, like the obsession with artificial intelligence which aims at producing a brain stronger than human brain. The dream that sustains the scientific technological endeavor is to trigger a process with no return, a process that would exponentially reproduce itself and go on on its own. The notion of second nature is therefore today more pertinent than ever, in its two meanings. First, it is literally the artificially generated new nature, monsters of nature, deformed cows, genetically manipulated trees and so on. Or, a more positive link, genetically manipulated organisms enhanced in the direction that fits us. Then second nature in the more standard sense of autonomization of the results of our activity, how our own acts elude us in their consequences. What we created becomes a monster. The problem today I think is is the short circuit between these two senses of second nature. Second nature in the sense of objective social fate, autonomized social process, is generating second nature in the sense of artificially created nature, natural monsters, and this process threatens to run out of control in different forms, from unforeseen nuclear catastrophe to global warming and so on and so on. One can even imagine what can be for example the unforeseen result of nano-technological experiments, new life forms reproducing themselves out of control in a cancer-like way. My favorite example here is when in you know that mysterious Swiss laboratory for particle for particle collider CERN, there scientists are preparing conditions to recreate the Big Bang explosion. And some skeptics warned about the possibility that the experiment will succeed all too well, effectively setting in motion a new Big Bang which will simply undermine, if you want, destroy our world. So our blindness for the results of this systemic violence is I think most clearly discernible in the debate on communist crimes. I met myself when he visited Ljubljana, by he I mean Stéphane Courtois the author, main editor of that unfortunate book The Black Crimes of Communism. I asked him the standard leftist question: okay what about the capitalist crimes? No Belgian Congo all the story. He told me: yeah yeah, but there nobody is clearly responsible. You know this is the easy way to say. There is no capitalist, with communism you can play the game of: what's the ideology? Marx, already Rousseau or whatever, you have communist manifesto. With capitalism you can say it's just systemic, there is no capitalist manifesto. There is one by Ayn Rand but that's another but that's another story. So what I am saying is that it's more than an irony that the perpetrator of one of the greatest crimes, the Belgian king Leopold was and I don't think he was a hypocrite, if you read he was privately a saint, he did all that to help the Belgian people, most of the money he gave to Belgian social projects, museum, public works and so on. He was even beatified to become a saint and so on. So today our ethical task apropos violence, the crucial one is double. Not primarily even this subjective violence, new racisms, new fundamentalisms, but also its opposite the invisible systemic violence. Two things: a) to develop responsibility somehow also for to learn to see the invisible systemic violence and second point, that's the only solution I see, to reassert the good old socialist notion, not of proletarian democracy or whatever naive but of a conscious collective act. And there are nice examples in history, for example let me return now I am finishing, let me return to Japan. You know that after Shogunate in early 17th century or when, Japan is for me a nice example of a large articulated society, early modern Japan, where after they threw out the, not they didn't throw all the Jesuits, they cordoned themselves off, they simply made, okay not the people, the ruling class, but nonetheless a society in its concrete class structure made a collective decision to pursue a certain mode of life and to avoid the different more dynamic one. And whatever you think about it, my God for three, four hundred years it worked. What I'm, I'm not praising that model, I'm well aware how conservative it was. I'm just saying that that what the tragic thing about the disintegration of communism is that at the same time in the West also in the guise of the of the end of the welfare state logic the very the logic of fate, destiny is accepted again, like globalization is here, you follow globalization capitalist logic or you are out. All you can do is globalization with the human face, we call this Third Way today. What I'm saying is that we need more. We need, when again the tragedy is precisely today when we most need it, the idea of a radical global intervention of humanity or at least people as collective subject is dismissed as proto-totalitarian, don't do this, it will end in gulag and so on and so on. So precisely it's this what most of these postmodern thinkers, especially pro-capitalist one who try to convince us, no, we live in a multiple self-organized dynamic society, every idea of a globally imposed act is totalitarian and so on and so on. No, that's the how should I put it crazy metaphor, that's the sound barrier that we should break. This is the ethical task today, to fully rehabilitate this radical notion of a collective social act. That's the only thing that can save us, I think. Thank you very much. Now I see that because we were supposed to finish at it's now past however tomorrow at Slavoj will be continuing in this very room with his masterclass on Lacan, there's no need to register so if you turn up he very very graciously gives up to half an hour before and after for discussion. So if you come tomorrow and ask questions we'd be very grateful. Tomorrow at
Thanks very much. I am honored to be here. Thanks for this kind invitation. Just I cannot abstain from making a direct reference to your gracious introduction, namely yes, Hegel said the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Why? Because Hegel was a materialist. He knew that the real social process determines consciousness. Marx then as we all know turned around Hegel in an idealist way and thought that, you know, first you have thought then thought translates into being. No, so we should maybe change the entire perspective, that it was Marx who did an idealist reversal of Hegel. More about this tomorrow in this very room. Okay. Today I would like to surprise you if some of you know me a little bit and know that I never stick to the title of my talk. I would like to say something really about violence, modalities of violence, what do they mean today, and especially modalities that we try to find violence or intolerance like respect and so on. Let me begin with an anecdote. I visited some two years ago the University of Champaign in Illinois close to Chicago. There I was taken to a restaurant, this was you see the meaning immediately just after the last US attack on Iraq. I was taken to a restaurant which offered on the menu Tuscany fries. I asked friends what this is. They explained it to me. The owner of the restaurant wanted to appear patriotic, apropos the French opposition to the US attack on Iraq. So he followed the US Congress and renamed French fries freedom fries. However, the progressive members of the faculty, the majority of his customers, threatened to boycott the place if freedom fries remained on the menu. So the owner didn't want to lose his customers but he also didn't want to appear unpatriotic. So he invented, I spoke with him, a new name: Tuscany fries. He said it's close to France and at the same time, you know, Under the Tuscan Sun, all those movies give the right association. So that's what he did, invented a new name. Now in a move similar to the one by the US Congress, maybe you know that after those Muhammad caricatures outrage in the Muslim world, Iranian authorities ordered the bakeries to change the name of Danish pastry into Roses of Muhammad as they are called now in Tehran. My initial observation is just that it would be nice to live in a world in which the US Congress would change the name from French fries into Muhammad's fries, and the Iranian authorities Danish pastry into freedom pastry. But the prospect of tolerance, respect for otherness and so on is the one in which I'm afraid our stores and restaurants' menus will be more and more full of the different versions of Tuscany fries. What lurks at the horizon if we follow this path is I think the nightmarish prospect of a society regulated by a perverse pact between religious fundamentalists and the politically correct preachers of tolerance and respect for the other's beliefs, a society immobilized by the concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel and superstitious this other is, and in which individuals will be engaged in regular rituals of witnessing their own victimization. The problem for me is how to avoid this. In other words, I claim not only is violence a problem today, as a good Hegelian reflexive thinker I think that the very way we perceive the problem of violence and try to fight it is part of the problem, is not a solution. So is there a different approach? Okay. Let me begin, not that I think that this really is an outstanding example of violence but because our media were full of it, let me begin with those infamous, now it's already half a year ago I think, demonstration in some Islam, Muslim-dominated countries against the Danish pastry, whatever, caricatures. The irony not to be missed, it's a simple observation but I think it's crucial, is that probably like the result of Stalinist elections, percent of the thousands who felt offended by and demonstrated against the Muhammad caricatures had never even seen these caricatures. That's a simple observation but it's crucial. This fact confronts us with another less attractive aspect of globalization. The so-called global informational village is the condition of the fact that something that took place in an obscure daily newspaper in Denmark caused such a violent stir in a faraway Muslim country. It is as if all of a sudden Denmark and Syria or Pakistan or Egypt or Afghanistan or Lebanon or Indonesia are neighboring countries. This is what those who see globalization simply as a chance for the entire earth to emerge as a unified space of communication, bringing together all humanity, this is what they fail to notice. Since a neighbor is, as Freud suspected long ago, primarily a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life materialized in his, her, their social practices and rituals disturbs us, throws off the rail the balance of our way of life, when a neighbor comes too close, this can also and as a rule it does give rise to aggressive reactions aimed at getting rid of this disturbing intruder. Namely the neighbor is the one who is close to us, but the problem with the neighbor is that it's by definition always too close. You know it's like for Hitler there were always too many Jews, no matter how few. It's the neighbor is always always too close. If some of you know Germany, you know Hamburg, the city. You know that the northern suburb of Hamburg is called Altona. You know, if it's not true, then as Italians put it, se non vero, ben trovato. But you know what's the local mythology of this term, that in some medieval times when Hamburg was a smaller town, this was the northern not even suburb, a Danish village, and that the Hamburger people nicknamed it All zu nah, all too close. You know, the other is always all too close. So what I am claiming is that in today's ideological constellation, global, more communication, that is to say the fact that through this global informational village, however we politely describe it, we are thrown different ways of life and so on all of a sudden more together, means at first and above all more conflict, more violence. This is why the first I hope provocative thought, I think that we should maybe neglect a little bit, keep it behind, this attitude of we understanding each other. We should understand each other, try to integrate ourselves into the other's way of life. Maybe we should supplement this attitude by the attitude of getting out of each other's way, by maintaining an appropriate distance, by a new code of discretion. We find it easier to tolerate different ways of life precisely on account of what the critics of our civilization often denounce as our weakness and failure, namely the alienation of social life. So I would like to propose a short celebration of alienation. Alienation means also that distance is intruded into the very social texture. Even if I live side by side with others, the normal state is to ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others. I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external mechanical rules without sharing the other's inner world. And perhaps again the lesson to be learned is that sometimes a dose of alienation is indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life. Sometimes alienation is not a problem but a solution. Again, I think that this is, if we should detect Eurocentrism somewhere, it is precisely in this obsessive attitude to unify, to understand the other. Why not, why not maintain a distance? I wouldn't like everybody to understand me. I would like to have, I would like to have a selective attitude. There are people, individuals, social groups, ethnic groups whom I want to understand, there are many others whom I don't want to understand and I don't hate them. And I think we should accept that this is not automatically racism. We should be permitted to be selective. That's my first observation. So again, I think that the problem is precisely that we try to understand maybe Muslims too much insofar as we are not Muslims. Or some of you are Muslims, Muslims try to understand ourselves too much. The problem is not so much that there is a deep mystery in the other in the sense of you will never really understand me. The problem is what if there really is nothing to understand? You know not that in reality we are just blind puppets, but in the sense of I am more and more convinced that, let you remember when you are witnessing, but this happens more often in movies than in real life, when you are witnessing some intense mysterious religious ritual or sacred experience, you don't understand it, you just know something extremely intense is going on. You always presuppose that you miss the meaning which those who are involved in it somehow must get it. But I don't think this is the case. I think that in all authentic rituals, and that's what I find almost liberating about a ritual, you participate in something the meaning of which is not clear even to you. I think that the, if you want to put it in this way, original experience of the sacred is: something has a deep meaning, but you don't know what this meaning is. And this is why I think that even revolutionaries shouldn't be afraid to adopt this attitude towards the sacred, because if you have this attitude, it means something I don't know what, this means the meaning is open. For me sacred can also be an opening space to put our meaning into it. Okay, that's the first observation. Let's go on. The second feature that we should be reminded of apropos of these violent outbursts is another obvious fact which is I think too much neglected, that the process, the protests and their very real violence were triggered by means of representations, words, images. The Muslim crowds did not react to caricatures as such, they didn't know them. They reacted to the complex figure image of the West which was perceived as the attitude behind the caricatures. What exploded in violence was, as we all know, the complex cobweb of symbols, images, attitudes, Western imperialism, godless materialism and hedonism, the suffering of Palestinians and so on and so on, that became attached to Danish caricatures, which is why the hatred then slowly expanded from caricatures to Denmark as a country, then Scandinavia, then to Europe, then to the West in general. As if all these humiliations and frustrations got condensed in the caricatures. And again, we should bear in mind that this condensation was a fact of language, of constructing, imposing a certain symbolic figure. This simple and all too obvious fact should compel us to render problematic the idea, now my second thesis proposal, the idea propagated lately by Jürgen Habermas but also not strange to a certain Jacques Lacan, I mean some of his works, the idea that language, symbolic order is the medium of reconciliation, mediation, of peaceful coexistence as opposed to the violence of immediate raw confrontation. The idea is that in language instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we debate, we exchange words, and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimum of a symbolic pact of the recognition of the other. The idea is thus that insofar as language gets infected by violence, this occurs under the influence of contingent empirical pathological in the Kantian sense circumstances which distort the inherent logic of symbolic communication. That's the Habermasian idea, incidentally you find it even in early Lacan where it's the imaginary investments which distort the pure symbolic exchange. As if again language to itself is a peaceful egalitarian medium of exchange, it gets only pathologically disturbed. My counter-question: what if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? What if language, not primitive egotistic interests, what if language is the first and great divider, not decider as I think President Bush defined himself some couple of weeks ago, but divider? What if it is because of language that we and our neighbors can live in different worlds even when we live on the same street? What this means is that verbal violence is not a secondary distortion but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence. Let me take anti-Semitic pogroms, but of course you can replace Jews with Arabs, blacks, whoever, so racist violence. Anti-Semitic pogroms do not react to what they find intolerable and rage-provoking in the immediate reality of Jews, but to the image, the figure of the Jew constructed symbolically and circulating in their tradition. The catch of course is that you cannot simply distinguish the way the Jews appear to us to the way the Jews are really in themselves. I don't mean by this where there is a smoke there must have been fire, if all this is true then Jews must have been guilty. I only simply mean that the way the Jews are perceived by others affects the self-identity experience of Jews themselves. So again what makes, we should never forget it even if we have the most brutal immediate confrontation, a white idiot beating a Jew or an African or however, whomever. What makes the real Jew or African or Arab that an anti-Semite encounters on the street intolerable? What the anti-Semite tries to destroy when he attacks the Jew? The true target of his fury is this phantasmatic dimension which is symbolically constructed. So precisely when we are dealing with the scene of a furious crowd attacking, burning buildings and cars, lynching people, we should never forget that the placards, the posters that they are carrying, that all this is sustained by symbolic medium. You get my point, this absolute excess of violence, destruction, is precisely because we live in the world of language. Again, you got my point, I am not when I say use the term here symbolic violence, I don't mean it primarily in this Bourdieu sense how the relations of of of top of authority, master-pupil encoded in very language. But a much more elementary thing that, and here even somebody like Heidegger was right, we shouldn't be afraid to learn from him when in his bombastic poetic style he emphasizes Gewalt, the original violence of speech. It is simply, let's put it, with empirical physical violence we change things within the world, but isn't it in a way a much greater violence to make the world itself different? Isn't this in a way the ultimate violence? I am here, you are there, we are very close in the same space, but there is a radical break between how I, how you perceive this violence. That's the gap, that's the gap that we should bear in, take into account. So what is the lesson of this? The lesson is that we should resist the fascination, being too fascinated by what I am tempted to call subjective violence, violence enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds, cold murderers, whatever. You know this violence on which we usually focus: bureaucratic apparatus, murderers, enraged mob, secret police, there we know who is doing it. This violence is just the most visible peak of the triangle which comprises also symbolic violence in the sense that I briefly described it, and the third element I claim, something that following Étienne Balibar I am tempted to call objective systemic violence. What do I mean by this? Let me return to Marx a little bit. When Marx describes the mad self-enhancing circulation of capital whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation, self-reproduction is reaching its climax in today's speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern, that this is an ideological abstraction and that one should never forget that behind this abstraction there are real people, natural objects and so on on which the capital feeds itself like a gigantic parasite. You know this would be the classical humanist criticism: yes people may speculate with future in the City of London or on Wall Street, but we should never forget that this is just a big ideological dream, all this is sustained by real people, individuals, working in reality and so on and so on. This is too simple. It misses what Marx called the dimension of real abstraction. That is to say the problem is that this abstraction, the notion of capital as in this virtual space of financial speculation reproducing itself, this abstraction is not only in our financial speculators' misperception of social reality, it is real in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes. Isn't it that some rumor which causes a downfall or confusion on the stock market is something that happens precisely in this virtual space of speculation, but as we all know it can have extremely real in the sense of reality social consequences? My God, sometimes if it's a small vulnerable nation, a whole nation can go bankrupt, hundreds of thousands of people can lose jobs. You remember which one such example which caused even a little bit of anti-Semitism unfortunately, you remember how Soros' speculations with some Eastern currency I think or with pound, even here with pound, this was purely virtual playing but it in Malaysia I know it caused tremendous suffering and so on. This I think is systemic violence at its most elementary. We have social reality, this social reality is determined among other things by the reproduction of the capital. But reproduction of the capital is a kind of a monstrous machine which operates in its virtual space of speculations and so on and so on. It's a monster which exists nowhere in reality but has very real consequences. And what is crucial is the gap we experience between our everyday life, we suffer, we work hard, and this mysterious virtual entity which can determine our reality. So my first conclusion here is that we should whenever we witness, let's call it subjective violence, this violent irrational apparently outbursts and so on, we should never forget that they are usually, and I am not justifying them, but nonetheless they are a reaction or at least has to be conceived in opposition to this more invisible objective violence, the violence of the system which follows its path irrespective of what the people are doing. Let me use, I'm bluffing here but bluffing with a good intention as it would be put at least, let me use the notion which I barely understand but I love it from quantum physics, Higgs field. You know what this means, to simplify to the utmost, sometimes zero is not the cheapest state of a system, so that paradoxically nothing costs more than something. To keep a system at its absolute zero point, zero level energy, you must already invest paradoxically some energy. So in a rude analogy the social nothing, the stasis of a system, its mere reproduction without any changes, costs more than something sometimes, costs more than a change. It demands a lot of energy. So sometimes the first gesture to provoke a change in a system is to withdraw activity, to do nothing. I think that this objective systemic violence is maybe something, rather bombastic metaphor, like the notorious dark matter in physics, the counterpart to the all too visible subjective violence. Objective violence, although invisible, had to be taken into account if one is to account for the otherwise irrational explosions of subjective violence. The catch is that subjective and objective violence can't be perceived from the same standpoint. Subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of the non-violent zero level, as a perturbation of the normal peaceful state of things. Things were going normally in our society and look all of a sudden irrational outburst, demonstration, killings, whatever. However, objective violence is precisely the violence sustaining this normal state of things. It's like, you know, the something sustaining the nothing, nothing in the sense of nothing is changing in a society. In other words, objective violence is invisible insofar as it sustains the very zero level standard against which or as a violation of which we perceive something as subjective violence. Let me give you a touching example from a book that I'm reading now, I want to write a review of it, Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer. Of you know how in Lenin threw out or Lenin instigated the arrest and throw out of about of top religious, rather conservative liberal philosophers and so on from Soviet Union. It's the experience of one of them, Nikolai Lossky. For those who know orthodox theology, this is the father of Vladimir Lossky, I think for me the best orthodox theologian of 20th century. So Nikolai Lossky, one of the Russian intellectuals forced to exile in provided I think a touching example of this insensitivity to objective violence. He was enjoying with his family the comfortable old bourgeois life supported by servants, maids and so on. He simply couldn't understand who would want to destroy his way of life. What has his family and their kind done? His boys, their friends as they inherited the best of what Russia had to offer, filled the world with talk of literature, music, art. They led their gentle lives. What was wrong with that? That's how he describes his self-experience. Now while Lossky was without doubt a sincere benevolent person, really caring for the poor, trying to civilize Russian life and so on, I think that such an attitude betrays a breathtaking insensitivity to the objective violence, domination, exploitation, that had to go on in order for such a gentle life to be possible. The Losskys and their kind effectively did nothing. There was no subjective evil in their life, just the invisible background of objective violence. And then of course they all of a sudden started to experience something like strange intrusions of irrational violence. For example in May the family could hear the sound of riderless horses galloping down the neighboring streets after some such some street battle, or other ominous intrusions. Once in his school Lossky's son was brutally laughed at by a working-class schoolmate who shouted at him that the days of you and your family are over now and so on and so on. Lossky family in their benevolent gentle innocence, they perceived such signs of the forthcoming catastrophe as emerging out of nowhere, signals of an incomprehensible malevolent new spirit. But what they were unable to recognize in these signs of subjective violence was the truth, the reversal, the obverse of the objective violence inscribed into their very existence. That's what I think again is wrong in this notion of gentle gentle existence. And I claim that although we live in a world which is apparently much more sensitive and so on, this Lossky logic, I just live my gentle life, avoid violence, is inscribed also into our existence even if it appears that it's the opposite. Politically correct way it is inscribed in it in the guise of what today we call tolerance or the fear of harassment. I want to problematize the term harassment. I think it's another of those words which, although it seems to refer to a clearly defined fact, it effectively functions in a deeply ambiguous way. It's an ideological term. Why? Because it blurs the crucial opposition. Like ideological I claim in the same way that for me for example all these pseudo-Deleuzian hard Negri celebration of nomadic existence is ideological. Ideology for me is at its most elementary if you take two opposite phenomena and instead of allowing you to draw the line, it blurs the line. Like what is nomadic existence today? Obviously this term covers two totally opposite phenomena. One is degenerate intellectuals like me, I travel freely around earn money and earn money on the way. And on the other hand there are people who has to flee to abandon their homes because of war, hunger and so on. Isn't there something obscene in covering both these experiences with the same term? It's a little bit like to quote my, I don't agree with her theoretically but nonetheless personally I know her, my friend Gayatri Spivak who says that it's a little bit like when you take a starving, a starving beggar and rich fat lady who is doing her diet and claim that both are basically doing the same thing. Of course in a way they are but it's monstrous. So harassment is the same. On the one hand at its most elementary of course harassment designates brutal facts of rape, beating, other modes of social violence which of course should be ruthlessly condemned. Here I totally agree. But the problem for me is that in the predominant use of this term today in our societies, harassment, the meaning of harassment imperceptibly slips into the condemnation of any excessive proximity of another real human being with his, her, their desires, fears, pleasures. Two topics determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards others: the respect of otherness, openness towards the other, and the obsessive fear of harassment. The other is okay insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as to cut long story short, he is not really an other, insofar as he is as I like to put it a decaffeinated other. So what I claim is that in our actual experience tolerance, the way we use the term tolerance, means its exact opposite. It means intolerance. In what sense? What does it mean tolerance? Means let's be tolerant towards each other, it means let's not harass each other. But what does basically harassment means? Especially in the United States, I'm shocked at it. No wonder that I'm turning in my old days more pro-Japanese. Japan I love, there you go, it's not the myth, I was surprised how this racist cliché fits reality. You go to a packed subway train, you are really squeezed among other people and somehow your space is not in, is not, is not invaded too much. The best metaphor for United States for me is if you see that Stephen King based on his novel movie Shining, you put just one single family, mother, father and son in a big hotel, it's still too much, they are too close, they explode. That is so what I mean is that if you look at it close, so tolerance means let's tolerate each other, it means don't harass me, it means don't come too close to me with your desires, whatever I do, I look you into the eyes, it's visual rape. I talk dirty, it's verbal rape and so on. It's this incredible fear of coming of coming too close. So I claim that what we call tolerance is precisely the intolerance towards the other's over-proximity. It is as if in our late capitalist societies this is what is more and more emerging as the central human right: the right not to be harassed, the right to be kept at the safe distance from others. Which is why which is what explains I think the attraction of cybersex. In it we are dealing only with virtual partners, there is no harassment. This idea, this aspect of cyberspace, the idea of a space in which because we are not directly interacting with real people, nobody is harassed, we are free to let go and so on. This I think found, but I develop this in my books, its ultimate expression in a proposal which recently resurfaced in some circles in the United States, a proposal to rethink the right of necrophiliacs. It really happened in some circles. The idea is that necrophiliacs should also have the right to their way of life, so why wouldn't we do in the same way as we if you die, you know sign with politically correct sign an agreement that if I suddenly die my organs can be used for transplant, why not sign an agreement that your body can be given to a necrophiliac [unintelligible]. I think the crucial thing, this would be then the ultimate politically correct sex. Nobody is harassed and so on. Against this, I am tempted to say that this tells a lot about our sense of subjectivity in our late capitalism. So the question to be asked is of course why this fear of over-proximity of the other? Why the need to decaffeinate as it were the other? To deprive the other of his or her or their raw substance of enjoyment, of way of life? Is this not a reaction to the disintegration of the protective symbolic walls which keep others at the proper distance? It is as if in our culture, which is a brutal culture of self-confessing, it is as if this self-confessing should be, has to be countered by the politically correct fear of harassment. Again, I'm returning to my starting proposal, what we maybe need is a kind of a code of discretion best professed by an American writer whom I appreciate very much, Gore Vidal, who as you probably know, he was known for his bisexuality and a vulgar intrusive journalist once asked him: okay, what was your first sexual partner, a man or a woman? You know what he answered? I was too polite to ask. That's that's that's the way. So you know what I mean, today we should maybe turn it around. It's not that the upper classes have this polite Henry James attitude even if the world is falling apart, they ask you how much sugar you want in your tea and so on. Maybe the upper classes are vulgar enough so that maybe we need the proletarian code of discretion and fineness and so on. Of course, now comes the next paradox. Of course, the form of this maintaining distance towards the other is exactly charity, I claim. This is why charity is turning into a crucial category today of capitalist discourse. You're allowed to grab all the money that you want, which is why Bill Gates is an icon today. First you grab billion dollars then you give billions back and you are the greatest humanitarian in the history of humanity and so on and so on. And it's so I claim that what's the function of charity? It's not to get close to the other. It's we are paying charity so that the other remains far away there. Especially I find so hypocritical this logic of pseudo-personalized charity, you know you give pounds a month to a boy in Africa, once in a year you get a personalized letter from him. What makes you really warm in your heart is that he is far away there. Which is why I don't think there is anything subversive or critical in this discourse of are we aware that we live in ivory towers of our developed society but out there in Africa there are people starving, dying of rape and AIDS and so on. This is the form of ideology today. My God Bill Gates is saying this all the time. He said recently what do all the computers and Microsoft programs help when there are people still dying of diarrhea and so on and so on. So I think that this false demystification reference to brutal reality out there is the very mode of our inner safe space to to reproduce itself. And which is why I think that these are the modes of distance towards the other. Either I already some of you also visit my classes here mentioned it this this pseudo sense of ethical urgency like if I were to say now this is very popular in the States holy more than in Europe, I hope this is not the case in Europe like if I were to say are you aware that in a talk on violence that for every sentence that I spoken here children died of hunger in Africa or are you aware that for every phrase that I read here a woman was raped in the United States. It's true and it's horrible but to mention it in this way it's a fake because it precisely I claim the function is anti-intellectual: don't think act. As if they are afraid that you withdraw into thinking. And it's the same even with consumerism. I remember entering recently in the States a Starbucks coffee place where there was a big poster greeting me saying of every cup of coffee that you buy with us goes to Guatemala children to help them and so on and so on. It's just the reverse of it. This this this fake charity is here precisely to make us blind for objective what I called objective systemic violence. That's for me the ideal capitalist today, somewhere between Soros and Bill Gates. You engage ruthlessly in objective violence, systemic violence and then you counter it with this subjective goodness. I mean if there is a photo which deserves to be called the disgusting photo of the last decade, it's for me recently when Bill Gates and what's his wife Melinda visited some children's hospital for crippled children in India. You should have seen those sincerely smiling sympathetic faces and so on and so on. So I hope you got my point, I think that this kind of charitable approach aiming at as it were subjective violence, all this neo-capitalist are terribly worried by global dying, rapists, violence, we should do something and so on, that's the way the system reproduces itself. However things are even more complex, now I come to something new I hope. This category of objective violence or systemic violence is crucial especially for understanding our today's predicament because we are in the midst of a radical change. Till now historical substance, I don't mean anything big Hegelian, by this I mean the objective social order, society in its objective aspect as something which runs following its own inertia independently of our interventions and so on. Till now historical substance played its role as the foundation of all of our subjective acts, interventions. Whatever social and political subjects did, it was mediated, ultimately dominated, over-determined by the historical substance. Whatever you did somehow it was incorporated into it. What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will cut directly into the historical substance, catastrophically disturbing its run, by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful bio-genetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe or whatsoever. So no longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts. It no longer holds that whatever we do history will go on. For the first time in human history the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter or even interrupt the global historical process. So what is the problem today? The problem is that although our sometimes even individual acts can have catastrophic ecological and so on consequences, we continue to perceive such consequences as anonymous systemic, as something for which we are not responsible, for which there is no clear agent. Now you will tell me but this is not true, we are all the time bombarded by the media, did you recycle, do your duty. But I think this exactly is in the same way as charity the wrong approach. This is the ultimate strategy of the system to counteract again systemic violence with our individualities. My God even somebody whom otherwise I don't appreciate too much like Al Gore once already years ago put it nicely, he says if there is something obscene it's big companies who with one single stroke of a business deal do more damage than we all with all our with all our non-processing all the time try to culpabilize us individual. Did you throw the newspapers into the basket simply or did you put it away for us and we should reject this. So what is going on? I will now try to describe our experience today. Back to the joke that I repeat all the times, you know the madman who knew he is not a grain but the chicken didn't know it so he was afraid to be eaten. We know we are responsible but the chicken, the big Other, society doesn't know it. Or what do I mean by this? Insofar as knowledge is the function of the I and belief the function of the I, we know it very well but we do not believe it. What do I mean by this? Contrary, usually when a scientist oppose already acting on ecological matter, they evoke the principle of precaution and usually it is claimed that we don't know for certain, there is too much uncertainty to act. I claim it's not that we don't know enough. We know but we cannot make ourselves believe in what we know. Take the global warming. With all the data about it, the problem is not the uncertainty about facts, but our inability to believe that it can really happen. I think really, now I come to my central point, simple phenomenological description, that we live in a horrible situation where our knowledge runs against our most elementary not natural, but let's say part of human nature in the historical sense, but nonetheless in the sense of what you immediately experience, our human experience which tells you: look, look out through the window, the grass, the blue sky are there, life is going on, nature follows its rhythm. You know can we really imagine that all this will fall apart? I claim that secretly we don't really believe that it can happen. Therein resides the horror of the Chernobyl accident. When one visits the site and I didn't but I would love to, why? Because what you see there is that with the exception of the sarcophagus which covers the the the site of explosion, things look basically exactly the same as before. Life seems to have deserted the site leaving everything the way it was. And nonetheless we are aware that it is something wrong. No wonder then that there are so many people there living close to the site of the accident, you know these some farmers who simply adopted to ignore the threat. They say I don't care all that shit scientists, look my cows are here I live here. And some of them were lucky, they were not affected by radiation so they can pretend life goes on. So what's my point here? My point here is that we should not as some phenomenologists or humanists want to do, the reason we cannot take, here I want to defend sciences, the reason we are not ready to take ecological threat seriously we should not attribute it to the impregnation of our mind by scientific ideology in the sense of through this scientification of our lives we lost our roots, our our our embeddedness to to use this term which today because it's used for American reporters in Iraq is obscene for me, our embeddedness in daily life, we lost the meaning of what does it mean to live in a concrete life world. No I think that it's precisely this most elementary gut sense of that's the real life which cannot serve as a reliable guide as a point of reference here. Of course this gut sense tells us that something is fundamentally wrong with scientific technological attitude. But the problem is nonetheless much deeper. Again it resides in the unreliability of our common sense itself which, habituated as it is to an ordinary life world, finds it difficult really to accept that the flow of everyday reality can be perturbed. The problem is thus that we can rely neither on scientific mind nor on our common sense. They both mutually reinforce each other's blindness. The scientific mind, at least the usual scientific mind, advocates a cold objective appraisal of dangers and risks involved. The problem is that no such appraisal is effectively possible. While common sense finds it hard to accept that a catastrophe can really occur. So the difficult ethical task is to unlearn the most basic coordinates of our immersion in our life world. What usually serves as the recourse to wisdom, the basic trust into the coordinates of our life world, is now the source of danger. We should really grow up and learn to cut the ultimate umbilical cord to our life sphere. The problem with science and technology attitude is not its alienation, detachment from our life world, but the abstract character of this detachment which compels the science and technology attitude to combine itself with the worst of our life world immersion. Scientists perceive themselves as rational, able to appraise objectively potential risks. For them the only unpredictable irrational elements are panic reactions of the uneducated crowd. With ordinary people a small and controllable risk can spread all around and trigger global panic since they project into the situation their basic fears and fantasies. What scientists are unable to perceive is the irrational inadequate nature of their own cold distance appraisal. Why? The theory of complex systems accounts for the two opposite features of such systems, their robust stable character and their extreme vulnerability. These systems can accommodate themselves to great disturbances. They can integrate these disturbances and find new balance and stability up to a certain threshold, a tipping point, above which a small disturbance can cause total catastrophe and it can lead to the establishment of a totally different order. For long centuries humanity did not have to worry about the impact on the environment of its activity. Nature was able to accommodate itself to deforestation, to the use of coal, oil and so on and so on. However one cannot be sure if today we are not approaching a tipping point. One really cannot be sure, since such points can only be perceived once it's already too late in retro, in retrospect. So that's the problem I think of this cold appraisal of the situation. There is no middle ground, you cannot you cannot do it. Either the catastrophe will occur or not, but obviously we can say it only too late. I would like here to nonetheless use the two terms of what I tempted to call Rumsfeldian ontology. Of course I'm referring here to Donald Rumsfeld, you know his famous statement of there are known knowns, unknown knowns and so on and so on. Not only would I like to focus on the fourth term that he forgot, the unknown knowns, things we know but are not even aware of knowing them and they run our life, which are these life world unconscious prejudices, like we really cannot accept that nature will fall apart. We don't take it seriously. But even more there are unknown unknowns, like we even don't know what we don't know about natural what about natural balance. Now the last thought here if you give me another five minutes, yeah. Science and technology today no longer aim only at understanding reproducing natural process. They aim at generating new forms of life that will surprise us. The goal is no longer just to dominate nature the way it is, nature, but to generate something new, greater, stronger than ordinary nature, including ourselves, like the obsession with artificial intelligence which aims at producing a brain stronger than human brain. The dream that sustains the scientific technological endeavor is to trigger a process with no return, a process that would exponentially reproduce itself and go on on its own. The notion of second nature is therefore today more pertinent than ever, in its two meanings. First, it is literally the artificially generated new nature, monsters of nature, deformed cows, genetically manipulated trees and so on. Or, a more positive link, genetically manipulated organisms enhanced in the direction that fits us. Then second nature in the more standard sense of autonomization of the results of our activity, how our own acts elude us in their consequences. What we created becomes a monster. The problem today I think is is the short circuit between these two senses of second nature. Second nature in the sense of objective social fate, autonomized social process, is generating second nature in the sense of artificially created nature, natural monsters, and this process threatens to run out of control in different forms, from unforeseen nuclear catastrophe to global warming and so on and so on. One can even imagine what can be for example the unforeseen result of nano-technological experiments, new life forms reproducing themselves out of control in a cancer-like way. My favorite example here is when in you know that mysterious Swiss laboratory for particle for particle collider CERN, there scientists are preparing conditions to recreate the Big Bang explosion. And some skeptics warned about the possibility that the experiment will succeed all too well, effectively setting in motion a new Big Bang which will simply undermine, if you want, destroy our world. So our blindness for the results of this systemic violence is I think most clearly discernible in the debate on communist crimes. I met myself when he visited Ljubljana, by he I mean Stéphane Courtois the author, main editor of that unfortunate book The Black Crimes of Communism. I asked him the standard leftist question: okay what about the capitalist crimes? No Belgian Congo all the story. He told me: yeah yeah, but there nobody is clearly responsible. You know this is the easy way to say. There is no capitalist, with communism you can play the game of: what's the ideology? Marx, already Rousseau or whatever, you have communist manifesto. With capitalism you can say it's just systemic, there is no capitalist manifesto. There is one by Ayn Rand but that's another but that's another story. So what I am saying is that it's more than an irony that the perpetrator of one of the greatest crimes, the Belgian king Leopold was and I don't think he was a hypocrite, if you read he was privately a saint, he did all that to help the Belgian people, most of the money he gave to Belgian social projects, museum, public works and so on. He was even beatified to become a saint and so on. So today our ethical task apropos violence, the crucial one is double. Not primarily even this subjective violence, new racisms, new fundamentalisms, but also its opposite the invisible systemic violence. Two things: a) to develop responsibility somehow also for to learn to see the invisible systemic violence and second point, that's the only solution I see, to reassert the good old socialist notion, not of proletarian democracy or whatever naive but of a conscious collective act. And there are nice examples in history, for example let me return now I am finishing, let me return to Japan. You know that after Shogunate in early 17th century or when, Japan is for me a nice example of a large articulated society, early modern Japan, where after they threw out the, not they didn't throw all the Jesuits, they cordoned themselves off, they simply made, okay not the people, the ruling class, but nonetheless a society in its concrete class structure made a collective decision to pursue a certain mode of life and to avoid the different more dynamic one. And whatever you think about it, my God for three, four hundred years it worked. What I'm, I'm not praising that model, I'm well aware how conservative it was. I'm just saying that that what the tragic thing about the disintegration of communism is that at the same time in the West also in the guise of the of the end of the welfare state logic the very the logic of fate, destiny is accepted again, like globalization is here, you follow globalization capitalist logic or you are out. All you can do is globalization with the human face, we call this Third Way today. What I'm saying is that we need more. We need, when again the tragedy is precisely today when we most need it, the idea of a radical global intervention of humanity or at least people as collective subject is dismissed as proto-totalitarian, don't do this, it will end in gulag and so on and so on. So precisely it's this what most of these postmodern thinkers, especially pro-capitalist one who try to convince us, no, we live in a multiple self-organized dynamic society, every idea of a globally imposed act is totalitarian and so on and so on. No, that's the how should I put it crazy metaphor, that's the sound barrier that we should break. This is the ethical task today, to fully rehabilitate this radical notion of a collective social act. That's the only thing that can save us, I think. Thank you very much. Now I see that because we were supposed to finish at it's now past however tomorrow at Slavoj will be continuing in this very room with his masterclass on Lacan, there's no need to register so if you turn up he very very graciously gives up to half an hour before and after for discussion. So if you come tomorrow and ask questions we'd be very grateful. Tomorrow at