Slavoj_zizek on Buddhism
Talk · EMANCIPATION IS COMMUNISM ·
2012-10-16 · 1:54:49 · 14,763 words
religion-theologypsychoanalysisideologycinema-art-culturephilosophy-generalcapitalismtechnology-ai-cyberspacesubjectivityethicsgeopolitics-wareveryday-lifedemocracyconsciousness-mind
Žižek opens by praising the University of Vermont for its Lacanian department, then critiques Buddhism’s ritualization (prayer wheels as 'canned laughter') and analyzes the paradoxical pro-Zionist/anti-Semitic stance of Anders Breivik and Glenn Beck. He contrasts Levinas’s ethics with a 'Jewish' suspicion of God’s proximity, using the Talmudic story of rabbis dismissing God and Kafka’s The Castle to illustrate divine distance. Finally, he interprets the movie Project X and European football hooliganism as manifestations of a 'living God' of excessive sacred violence, linking this to Lacan’s theory of paternal authority and the master’s prohibited enjoyment. Žižek analyzes the paradoxical nature of modern enjoyment, arguing that permissivity generates a superego injunction to enjoy, leading to anxiety and impotence. He uses 'Gangnam Style' and 'Kung Fu Panda' as examples of 'stupid sacredness' where ideology functions despite ironic distance. He then argues that a desublimated form of Buddhism, characterized by inner distance and the dissolution of the self, perfectly fits the demands of global capitalism and emerging biogenetic technologies that blur the boundary between internal consciousness and external control. Žižek critiques Mahayana Buddhism’s Bodhisattva ideal and the ethical prerequisites for enlightenment, arguing that authentic Zen detachment can enable horrific violence, as seen in WWII Japan. He contrasts Buddhist 'distance' with Judeo-Christian ethics of traumatic 'falling,' using film noir and Star Wars to illustrate the necessity of attachment and catastrophe in love. The excerpt concludes with a Q&A on political strategy and the GOP. Žižek argues that true freedom of choice requires a complex institutional framework, using healthcare and the chaotic reality of Soviet and Chinese governance to critique simplistic anti-state libertarianism. He shifts to the threat of neurobiological intervention via DARPA’s 'narrative analysis,' citing Benjamin Libet’s experiments on free will and the Habermas-Ratzinger collaboration to argue that simple prohibitions fail against technological determinism. Finally, he analyzes Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as a rejection of Hollywood’s Oedipal catastrophe tropes, praising its pessimistic realism over optimistic narratives.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 30
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Used ironically to describe the Lacanian department's dominance at the University of Vermont.
as “canned laughter”
A metaphor for externalized spiritual/behavioral mechanisms (like prayer wheels) that trigger a response regardless of inner state.
as “pro-Zionist and anti-Semitic”
The paradoxical combination found in figures like Breivik, who support Israel while hating Jews in Europe.
Levinas's concept of the ethical zero-level, which Žižek rejects as non-Jewish and insufficiently collective.
as “dead God”
God kept at a distance through word/law rather than image, representing a safe, non-brutal divine presence.
as “living God”
The terrifying, excessive, sublime divine force manifesting in modern sacred violence (e.g., Project X parties).
Lacan's description of the true function of the father/prohibition: to secretly solicit the violation of the law.
Lacan's reversal of Hegel: the master is restricted by the need to maintain authority, while the servant enjoys in marginal spaces.
The paradoxical command inherent in permissivity that transforms the freedom to do something into the obligation to enjoy it.
A condensation of stupid enjoyment that haunts the subject; unlike a symptom, it is a compulsive, irrational attachment one cannot get rid of despite knowing it is disgusting.
A phenomenon where something ridiculous or vulgar (like a pop song) functions with the intensity and compulsive power of the sacred, revealing a genuine spiritual dimension in mass culture.
The idea that the sacred is not merely a sublime ideal but can include horrible, vulgar, or compulsive forms of enjoyment, fitting modern secular contexts.
A psychological stance where one maintains an awareness that worldly phenomena are 'just phenomena' or a 'crazy game,' allowing one to function effectively in capitalism without fully identifying with it.
A contradiction between what is claimed (e.g., there is no free self) and how the claim is enacted (the researcher acts as a free, responsible agent).
The Buddhist concept of 'no-self' or renunciation of the self, which Žižek argues is the only spiritual position compatible with the scientific view of humans as neuronal machines.
A being who attains enlightenment but postpones final salvation to help others, which Žižek argues metaphysically hypostatizes Nirvana as a place one leaves and returns to.
The egoic sense of being a free, autonomous agent; abandoning this is claimed by some Zen thinkers to facilitate killing without guilt.
A state of redemption or liberation of the false self; Žižek discusses whether political actions (like voting GOP) might hasten this point.
A paradoxical concept where violence is justified as a means to discipline 'naughty children' (like China) to diminish their suffering.
A detached, impersonal perspective where the killer views themselves as a neutral observer of phenomena, with the sword performing justice/mercy automatically.
A state where reality loses substantial weight, becoming a void or lightning phenomenon, exemplified by the 'splash' in Zen haiku.
A Judeo-Christian ethical model celebrating traumatic, catastrophic attachment (like falling in love) rather than Buddhist distance and non-attachment.
The idea that even at the level of the absolute void, something can go terribly wrong, a concept found in Tibetan Buddhism.
The paradox that actual individual freedom depends on a vast, complex web of legal, ethical, and institutional constraints, rather than the absence of state intervention.
The geopolitical shift from US hegemony to a multipolar system, which Žižek argues allows for a more honest critique of capitalism by removing the US as the sole scapegoat.
The exploitation of African and Asian resources and labor by China, which Žižek uses to demonstrate that capitalism’s brutal dynamics are global, not just American.
A specific US defense project aimed at identifying terrorist narratives through direct neurological intervention, representing the ultimate form of ideological control.
Drawing on Benjamin Libet, the capacity to 'sabotage' or block a neurally determined action in the split second before conscious decision, rather than making a positive choice.
as “soul as radio transmitter”
A theological metaphor used by some theologians to explain the relationship between the eternal soul and the brain: the brain receives the signal (soul) but can be jammed by neurobiological interference.
The critique that Hollywood catastrophe films (like Armageddon or Deep Impact) reduce global disaster to a metaphor for resolving family/couple dynamics, always ending in a restored patriarchal order.
Stories he reaches for 8
Žižek describes experiments where a rat's brain signals are decoded to control its movement via a computer, and prosthetics allow humans to move objects with thought, highlighting the blurring of inside/outside and the potential for external steering of the self.
“You can direct it, you know, how it goes.”
D.T. Suzuki argues that a Buddhist soldier, having abandoned his 'false self,' sees himself as a neutral observer while the 'sword performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy.'
Žižek cites the cartoon 'Kung Fu Panda' as another example of making fun of its own ideology while it still functions, illustrating how irony does not negate belief.
“It makes fun of its own ideology, but it works.”
Libet’s experiment shows neural activity precedes conscious decision by a split second. However, Libet argues freedom lies in the ability to 'sabotage' or block this action, not in making the positive choice.
“He claims we are looking for freedom at the wrong place... freedom... is not a positive decision... you can sabotage it, block it.”
In Deep Impact, the asteroid represents the daughter's incestuous rage against her father who divorced her mother; the happy ending involves her embracing him before being killed by a wave.
“It's even worse... all this bullshit about again asteroid hitting Earth, it's her incestuous rage.”
The asteroid in Armageddon is a materialization of the father's wrath; the film is really about Ben Affleck wanting to sleep with Liv Tyler and the father (Bruce Willis) saving the day to restore order.
“It's so clear that it's really a film about Ben Affleck wants to screw Liv Tyler... the asteroid threatening the Earth is just a kind of a materialization of the wrath of the father.”
A doctor in a Brazilian military dictatorship unit diagnoses torture limits for prisoners, claiming ethical neutrality by 'just giving his opinion' while enabling suffering.
“Oh, I just said my opinion, it was all correct, I didn’t do anything.”
A noir protagonist is ruined by an evil woman but refuses to go back in time, insisting the catastrophe was 'worth every moment,' illustrating the desire to suffer.
“Even if I know that it's a catastrophe—this is the true noir spirit, you know—even if I know that it's a catastrophe, it was worth it.”
Works invoked 20
Hegel's book containing the master/slave dialectic, which Lacan criticizes by arguing the master is prohibited from enjoying.
Star Wars film
Critiqued for its ideology that attachment causes evil; used as a foil for the 'ethics of the fall.'
Melancholia film
Praised for breaking the 'standard Oedipal frame' of Hollywood; its pessimism and focus on fragility are seen as a 'beautiful' and 'genuine' artistic achievement.
Referenced in a student's question about hastening the 'zero point.'
Kung Fu Panda film
Used to illustrate how an ideology can make fun of itself while still functioning.
Logic of Sense book
Described as Deleuze's 'best book,' used to define the 'pure momentary event of sense.'
Annie Hall film
Used to analogize the Talmudic story of rabbis debating God; Žižek dislikes the film but finds the scene useful.
The Castle book
Used to illustrate the 'basic Jewish suspicion' that God's proximity is horror, not bliss.
The Ticklish Subject book
Žižek's own book, cited as containing a dialogue between a Tibetan lama and Saskia Sassen.
Armageddon film
Criticized as 'bullshit' that reduces the asteroid threat to an Oedipal deadlock between Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis.
Deep Impact film
Criticized as even worse than Armageddon, representing the daughter's incestuous rage against her father.
War of the Worlds film
Criticized as a movie about Tom Cruise reestablishing his paternal authority.
Project X film
Described as a 'shitty boring movie' but fascinating for illustrating the 'living God' of excessive sacred violence and paternal authority.
Being No One book
Thomas Metzinger's book, cited as providing the most beautiful and consequent theory linking Buddhism and neuroscience.
Coriolanus play
Ralph Fiennes' production, cited as an example of a great work that works shockingly new when decontextualized.
Bacchae play
Cited as Euripides' play presenting the 'living God' of excessive sacred orgies.
Gangnam Style song
Used as a primary example of 'stupid sacredness' and the 'sinthome' in modern ideology.
Cited by Vernon Turner, used to illustrate the link between Zen and war.
Bava Metzia 59b other
A Talmudic story used as a 'sacred version of Annie Hall' to illustrate the danger of divine proximity and the 'dead God'.
Likely a misremembered title or reference to Melancholia or another film; used as an example of the 'standard Hollywood formula' where the couple is created but dies.
People invoked 46
Referenced as 'that guy Colin whatever' in Finding a Friend to End the World (likely Melancholia).
Franz Kafka positive
Cited for The Castle, used to illustrate the idea that getting close to God reveals not bliss but horror/mundanity.
Cited as Breivik's 'American counterpart' who became openly anti-Semitic after the financial crisis while being pro-Zionist.
Humphrey Bogart positive
Cited as an example of the typical noir protagonist who chooses suffering.
Actress in Finding a Friend to End the World (likely referring to Melancholia or a similar film, though Žižek misremembers the title/actor combo).
Actress in Deep Impact, playing a character whose incestuous rage against her father drives the plot.
Author of Soul Sword, cited regarding Zen and war.
Lars von Trier positive
Defended against 'half-Nazi, anti-Semitic' accusations; called 'one of the few genuine talents' today, despite being 'crazy' and provocative.
Emmanuel Levinas positive
Žižek has 'great problems' with Levinas, arguing he smuggled pseudo-Christian attitudes into Judaism, but admires his insight that the commandment 'Don't kill' addresses God.
Robert Mitchum positive
Cited alongside Bogart as a noir actor.
Actress in Armageddon, the object of Ben Affleck's desire in the Oedipal reading.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek praises the University of Vermont for having Lacanians in power and extensively uses Lacan's theories on paternal authority and the master/slave dialectic.
Stephen Hawking positive
Cited as an example of a mobility-challenged person who uses technology to communicate, illustrating the merging of brain and machine.
Jean Baudrillard negative
Criticized as a 'European intellectual' who gives 'deep metaphysical visions' of the US from LA, representing a style Žižek rejects.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited for The Logic of Sense and the concept of the 'pure momentary event of sense.'
Francis Fukuyama positive
Noted as no longer a 'Fukuyamaist' because biogenetics ruins his 'End of History' thesis, requiring stronger regulation.
Referenced in the Annie Hall scene where he validates the protagonist's argument, used as an analogy for the Talmudic debate.
Steve Jobs positive
Cited as an example of a top businessman who was Buddhist or into oriental spirituality, illustrating the fit between Buddhism and capitalism.
George W. Bush positive
Žižek ironically suggests a monument for Bush because his eight years resulted in the loss of US hegemony, creating a 'multicentric world' that allows for more honest anti-capitalist critique.
Saskia Sassen positive
Cited in a dialogue with a Tibetan lama regarding the fragile, virtual nature of modern capitalism.
Patricia Churchland negative
Cited as a cognitivst who claims we can change self-perception to fit scientific results, which Žižek rejects due to 'pragmatic contradiction'.
Referenced as 'Pope Ratzo'; co-wrote a book with Habermas. Žižek uses the 'soul as radio transmitter' metaphor associated with some theologians to critique simple prohibitions.
Žižek states he does not like Annie Hall much, though he uses a scene from it as an analogy for the Talmudic story.
Actor in Armageddon, playing the father figure who saves humanity.
Ralph Fiennes positive
Cited as an actor who directed a version of 'Coriolanus' that Žižek loves for its ability to work in a modern context.
Alain Badiou positive
Friend who informed Žižek about dating agencies' formula.
Justin Bieber negative
Cited as a 'disgusting guy' whose record was surpassed by Gangnam Style, representing the old pop culture order.
Actor in War of the Worlds, whose character arc is about reestablishing paternal authority.
Mentioned as the object of Anakin's attachment.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Cited as a 'great true leftist' who was a 'dark pessimist' about human nature, arguing humans are evil and cannot be changed.
Described as a 'madman from Oslo' who killed over seventy people; used as an example of the pro-Zionist/anti-Semitic paradox.
D. T. Suzuki positive
Admired for his honesty about Zen being a technique; cited for his 'compassionate war' writings and logic of killing.
Mitt Romney negative
Mocked in a joke about blocking his speech.
Euripides positive
Cited as the author of Bacchae (or Bacchantes), which presents the clearest example of the 'living God' of excessive sacred orgies.
Actor in Armageddon, whose desire for Liv Tyler drives the plot's Oedipal subtext.
Anakin Skywalker negative
Used as a foil to critique the Star Wars ideology of attachment.
Matsuo Bashō positive
Cited as the author of the famous frog haiku.
Thomas Metzinger positive
Cited as a German neuroscientist/philosopher whose book 'Being No One' argues that Buddhist radical spiritual experience is the only form compatible with neuronal science.
Paul Churchland negative
Cited alongside his wife as claiming we can change self-perception to fit scientific results.
Psychological Medicine positive
The singer of 'Gangnam Style', whom Žižek analyzes as a 'Messiah' figure of a quasi-sacred ideological phenomenon.
Barack Obama positive
Liked for the ideological public debate he set in motion, despite disappointment.
Jürgen Habermas positive
Cited for arguing that the horror of the Holocaust requires a 'sacred' dimension of explanation because secular terms are insufficient.
Benjamin Libet positive
Described as 'the great guy from Berkeley'; his experiment on neural timing is used to argue for a 'Hegelian' view of freedom as the ability to block/sabotage actions.
Michael Haneke positive
Described as 'more acceptable' in Europe than von Trier, but Žižek implies von Trier may be a greater talent.
Steven Spielberg negative
Criticized for War of the Worlds as being 'about Tom Cruise reestablishing his paternal authority,' exemplifying Hollywood's Oedipal formula.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel negative
Žižek uses Lacan to criticize Hegel's dialectic of master and slave, arguing the master is prohibited from enjoying.
Transcript 29 turns
unknown
Hi, welcome. My
Hi, welcome. My
unknown
name is Todd McGowan, professor of film and television studies and English here at the University of Vermont, and it’s my great pleasure to introduce to you today Slavoj Žižek on his, I think, fourth visit here. So, he’s here. I’m just going to say a couple brief things. The film and television faculty and I would like to especially thank the English department and our colleagues there for all their support they’ve given us over the years. And we’d also like to thank the James and Mary Brigham Buckham Fund for sponsoring this event, which wouldn't be possible without the fund. Slavoj Žižek is author of over fifty books, some of the most notable of which are—and I think I’m choosing his favorites—*For They Know Not What They Do* *Tarrying with the Negative* *The Ticklish Subject* *The Parallax View* and just most recently *Less Than Nothing* I think his magnum opus on Hegel. As most of you know, on Friday the Dalai Lama spoke at Middlebury. And today's talk, Slavoj was going to formulate a critique of Buddhism, but after he heard the Dalai Lama speak, he was so taken by the message of the Buddha that he decided to completely change course, and so we're going to hear for the first time this is the new Buddhist Slavoj Žižek. You think I’m kidding? No, it’s true. Slavoj is, of course, universally known and sometimes criticized, I think, in quite unfair ways in public venues. He’s more than capable of defending himself, so I won't do that against the intellectual attacks. But what I don't think is often commented upon is the immensity of his generosity. In fact, it's usually said that he’s not generous at all, he hates students, etc. But I think it's difficult to imagine someone averaging two books per year while doing as much as Slavoj has done to support graduate students and younger theorists around the world, actually. And I think he’s capable of doing this because I’ve never seen him at one point, any time, act for the sake of recognition rather than for the sake of ideas. I think he’s someone for whom ideas are more important than life itself. And this is why he prefers always the company of graduate students to that of even famous professors. I once saw him sitting at a dinner in a restaurant with a group of graduate students; at another table, there were a group of famous professors. They kept coming over to him saying, "Do you want to come join us?" He's like, "No, no, no, I want to stay here just with the graduate students." Unfortunately, I was sitting alone at the restaurant at the time. Well, I want to conclude just by mentioning what I think is the magnitude of Slavoj’s achievement in his recent book *Less Than Nothing*. It’s an achievement of quantity—it's over a thousand pages—and when its publication was delayed by a couple of weeks, I think, a friend of mine said Amazon.com had to hire more workers to help lift up the copies of the book. But more than its quantity, I think it’s a work of great quality and represents the height of his intellectual achievement. And my, I think, that it fundamentally transforms the way that Hegel will be understood, and thus stands Slavoj alongside the work of the other great interpreter of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève. And so Kojève’s reading, I think, shaped the way that twentieth-century—his reading of Hegel shaped the way twentieth-century theoretical discourse developed. And it’s my feeling that Slavoj’s reading of Hegel will do the same for the twenty-first century. And would you join me in welcoming him?
name is Todd McGowan, professor of film and television studies and English here at the University of Vermont, and it’s my great pleasure to introduce to you today Slavoj Žižek on his, I think, fourth visit here. So, he’s here. I’m just going to say a couple brief things. The film and television faculty and I would like to especially thank the English department and our colleagues there for all their support they’ve given us over the years. And we’d also like to thank the James and Mary Brigham Buckham Fund for sponsoring this event, which wouldn't be possible without the fund. Slavoj Žižek is author of over fifty books, some of the most notable of which are—and I think I’m choosing his favorites—*For They Know Not What They Do* *Tarrying with the Negative* *The Ticklish Subject* *The Parallax View* and just most recently *Less Than Nothing* I think his magnum opus on Hegel. As most of you know, on Friday the Dalai Lama spoke at Middlebury. And today's talk, Slavoj was going to formulate a critique of Buddhism, but after he heard the Dalai Lama speak, he was so taken by the message of the Buddha that he decided to completely change course, and so we're going to hear for the first time this is the new Buddhist Slavoj Žižek. You think I’m kidding? No, it’s true. Slavoj is, of course, universally known and sometimes criticized, I think, in quite unfair ways in public venues. He’s more than capable of defending himself, so I won't do that against the intellectual attacks. But what I don't think is often commented upon is the immensity of his generosity. In fact, it's usually said that he’s not generous at all, he hates students, etc. But I think it's difficult to imagine someone averaging two books per year while doing as much as Slavoj has done to support graduate students and younger theorists around the world, actually. And I think he’s capable of doing this because I’ve never seen him at one point, any time, act for the sake of recognition rather than for the sake of ideas. I think he’s someone for whom ideas are more important than life itself. And this is why he prefers always the company of graduate students to that of even famous professors. I once saw him sitting at a dinner in a restaurant with a group of graduate students; at another table, there were a group of famous professors. They kept coming over to him saying, "Do you want to come join us?" He's like, "No, no, no, I want to stay here just with the graduate students." Unfortunately, I was sitting alone at the restaurant at the time. Well, I want to conclude just by mentioning what I think is the magnitude of Slavoj’s achievement in his recent book *Less Than Nothing*. It’s an achievement of quantity—it's over a thousand pages—and when its publication was delayed by a couple of weeks, I think, a friend of mine said Amazon.com had to hire more workers to help lift up the copies of the book. But more than its quantity, I think it’s a work of great quality and represents the height of his intellectual achievement. And my, I think, that it fundamentally transforms the way that Hegel will be understood, and thus stands Slavoj alongside the work of the other great interpreter of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève. And so Kojève’s reading, I think, shaped the way that twentieth-century—his reading of Hegel shaped the way twentieth-century theoretical discourse developed. And it’s my feeling that Slavoj’s reading of Hegel will do the same for the twenty-first century. And would you join me in welcoming him?
unknown
Thank you very much. I hope that this works. Yeah.
Thank you very much. I hope that this works. Yeah.
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I’m really glad, proud to be here. I really mean it. This is not empty rhetoric. The University of Vermont here is the favorite one for me in the United States for a simple reason that I think it's the only—they have the only department in the whole of United States where more or less Lacanians are in power to exert what we once called dictatorship of the proletariat here, no? So, I like to be here. And just, I hope you will not be disappointed. There will be no big Lacanian stuff today. I really want to do naively what the title says. Far from playing any cheap—proposing any cheap critique of Buddhism, simply to engage with it seriously. What I see as its possible limitations, what is great in it, especially considering our social, political, and ethic situation. Now, here the first problem begins. A friend of mine drew my attention to a fact that on some blog or whatever from Vermont, there was an ironic remark a couple of days ago at me. Somebody says, "I’m a card-carrying, as it were, atheist. Who am I to talk about Buddhism as a religion?" Well, I found this remark funny because, you know, Buddhism originally was not a religion. And this is, I think, what makes it so interesting already as a historical phenomena. As you know, Buddha was, to use contemporary terms, agnostic. He says—he said, "What I care about is human suffering. God, are gods, there are no gods, that's not my problem. I don’t—" And it’s—for me, it was always an enigma how the, let's call it spiritual orientation, which started as a disavowing all rituals and so on, ended up in some of its forms like Tibetan Buddhism as the most, for our Western tastes, ridiculously ritualized form of, in that case, yes, religion. Or to put it in a different way, how a spiritual attitude focused on inner life—you know, the point is what matters is your—these are not, I know, adequate terms, inner, outer, but nonetheless, just to change in your inner life went furthest into externalizing our inner life. For example, what can be more intimate than praying? But you know that Tibetan Buddhism—nothing against it, I just give you an example because the shift interested me—they invented, I would say already a thousand more years ago, something that is I think the closest equivalent to what today we call canned laughter. You know, when the TV set laughs for you? Namely, I’m of course referring to, you know, those praying wheels, mills, and so on where you write a prayer, you put it there, it turns around, you turn it around, or it can even be wind or whatever that turns it around, and then, how should I put it, objectively you are praying there through the other. It doesn't matter what you think. It's again as in the case of canned laughter. You look—and it works! At least it works with me, like you look some stupid show, *Cheers* or whatever, and you know, the set laughs for you. This is something that I—can—that I find very surprising. Why are people not more shocked? How something that's supposed to be your spontaneous emotional reaction can be so externalized. You know, like it's totally wrong, the behavioral explanation, which claims that the function of canned laughter is to trigger in this Pavlovian conditional reflex whatever way to trigger your laughter. No, I claim, it laughs for you. The typical thing is that—and again with me, maybe I’m the idiot here—it works. Like, I watch TV and I just watch at it as an idiot, and at the end of the show, I feel relieved as if I was laughing. It literally works. So again, there are here many enigmas. Is Buddhism a religion? Of course it's not. How did it end up there? So, before going to Buddhism, I would nonetheless like to draw your attention to a couple of weird things going on today in the, let's call it, domain—the domain of the sacred. Because, you know, strange things are going on today, shifts here and there. For example—and here, far from being anti-Semitic, I’m really worried for the Jews. You know in what sense? You know the madman from Oslo, Norway, Breivik, the guy who killed over seventy people? It's incredible how a feature in his—you know, he wrote over a thousand-page some crazy manifest. Of course, I didn't read it, but a Norwegian friend of mine did it and sent me translated some passages which quite fascinated me. Namely, in what sense: Usually we expect the extreme right to be anti-Semitic. With Breivik, we get a paradox. On the one hand, he is totally pro-Zionist. He emphasizes, since Islam is now the greatest danger, we should totally support the state of Israel to, whatever you want, simply throw all the Palestinians out from the West Bank and no problem there. At the same time, here in the West, he is anti-Semitic. For example, he says—he writes in his manifest that in Europe the problem—we don't no longer have Jewish problem, he means because Hitler took care of that. He said United States is so-so—no, sorry, United Kingdom, United States, six million Jews, too much influence, they will have a problem with that. You see the paradox, unimaginable till recently, of literally pro-Zionist and at the same time anti-Semitic attitude. And though you will say, "Okay, what does this mean? He is just a madman there." Ah, no, I will tell you, he is American counterpart madman. You remember, he was fired—you remember Glenn Beck from Fox News? Exactly the same. He was fired because he became, as a reaction to financial crisis here, more and more openly anti-Semitic. But at the same time, he is totally pro-Zionist. I think that the first sign of this enigma was that some twenty years ago, I think, you can correct me if I’m wrong, the American Christian fundamentalists—and if there is a group of people in whose very nature is to be anti-Semitic—like, I’m now consciously ironically sounding essentialist. It's not a matter of social conditions, discursive strategies; it's in their genes to be anti-Semitic. Why did they all of a sudden started to fanatically support the state of Israel? So again, what is happening here? Let me begin with what I think is really a great legacy of Judaism. Although I have great problems and I’m very critical of Emmanuel Levinas. The main reason is not that he is a Jew, but quite on the contrary. I think he is so popular because he smuggled into Judaism some, not even authentically, pseudo-Christian attitudes. I think that this idea of, you know, the face of the other as the ultimate ethical zero level of ethical experience, you see the vulnerability of the other's face and so on—this is profoundly non-Jewish, I claim. And then, you know how the original experience is this one, and then when you discover there are many others whose appeal to me to intervene is the just one, collective enters. No, from a Jewish standpoint, collectivity is from the beginning here. This—the very idea that the zero-level ethical experience is a single face of the other is non-Jewish, I claim. Much more Jewish would have been an attitude which I also prefer. I think that it's easy to be captivated by another person's gaze. You know, you see a weak child or whatever, no? And oh my god, like—but I think that it's easy, this is automatic reaction. But the ethics begin from me—for me—when you ask a question: "Is it something that I don't see which is the price for seeing this?" Like, okay, this is it, but I should look around. Where are the—you know what I mean? To see—if you don't do this, I think we are not dealing with real ethics. So, in spite of all this, I have nonetheless quite a great admiration for some insights of Levinas. One of them, it's a wonderful idiosyncratic reading, is that when you read in the Bible "Don’t kill," that it's not so much God addressing us humans with this. That the ultimate addressee of this commandment or rather prohibition is God himself. That is to say that the big problem from the very beginning, from Book of Job, here, there, is divine—brutal divine violence. It's interesting to reread the Old Testament from this standpoint. How many brutal outbursts of divine violence you get? Like, "wipe out this people," "destroy this," "that." It's just full of stories which tell you what—you know—which tell you basically that God is like Kafka—I mean, Castle in Kafka's novel *The Castle*. You know, it's sublime up there, but—that's so beautiful about the novel. You remember once, K—this is not Joseph K but K, the—this—who measures land or whatever, no?—that once he succeeds getting up almost the Castle and sees that what appeared from below a majestic building is really a couple of old dirty cottages and so on and so on. I’m tempted to claim that the basic Jewish suspicion is this one: Don't get too close to God, it will not be bliss, it will be fury, horror. So again, how to keep God at a distance? And if you think now I’m again involved in some Lacanian perverse postmodern sophisms—even if you know them, I will repeat to you—there are two absolutely wonderful, and I was in Israel and I as it were certified them, in the sense of I spoke with some people who don't bluff like me but really know Talmud and all that, which are wonderful. I think they are incredible. They are literally a sacred version of *Annie Hall*. I don't like so much *Annie Hall*, I mean Woody Allen, but you remember that wonderful scene at the beginning when Woody Allen character is in a line for movie tickets and gets engaged into debate with another guy? And then he is losing, but then who come—about Marshall McLuhan. And then Marshall McLuhan comes and does what we dream about, no? He says to the other guy, "You're a total idiot, this guy, he is totally right," you know? This happens, literally. Okay, if this means anything to you, it's from Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b. What happened there is the following—it's incredible. It's the story, but part of the sacred canon, of two—and there is even—it's not all, there is then another version, but let's not lose time—two rabbis debate a theological point. And the one who is losing the debate tries to pull a *Annie Hall* trick, no, and says, "Wait a minute, we are finite humans, too weak, let's call God to be the judge." And it happens! Jehovah comes, an old man, but before he is even allowed to start talking, the other rabbi shouts at God—okay, it's a longer speech but basically something like, "You old man, beat it! You did your job, you created the world, you did it pretty bad. So, you did your job, now please go away and leave us learned men to do the proper thing of a debate." And then comes the wonder. The reply of God is, God says, "My children have vanquished me," and with a merry laughter walks away. You know, this is the idea—it's a very beautiful one—is that it recognizes, let's call it, the danger of the proximity of God. The whole strategy is how to keep God at a proper distance. Maybe this is also how we should read—and Levinas has indications in this sense—the famous prohibition of images, no? The point is, again, God should be only in a word, in dead letter. Images bring him too close. God should be a dead God. Why? Let me give you another—I’m an atheist, but nonetheless, I think that the only way to be atheist is to go through theology today. Jacques Lacan said this. He said, "The only true—true—atheists today are theologians," you know? Namely, people usually say that, you know—this is even I think the title of a book or a famous article—God died in Auschwitz. You know the story like, "If there is God who is just, omnipotent, how could he have allowed, permitted something like that to happen?" But even the one who is not my friend philosophically, Jürgen Habermas, made here a nice answer where he says, in view of the horrors of the twentieth century—and I think that, you know, I don't like this negative teleological story which claims twentieth century greatest horror. If you look at it closely, things like Holocaust were happening all the time, you know, but nonetheless, okay, we are at least this is something more sensitive about them. Habermas says that these crimes are so horrible that to describe them in secular terms simply is not strong enough. You know, my God, you have there ten million people or whatever killed and to say, "Okay, this was because of social reasons, economic interest," you know, it doesn't match the horror. So, we need here some dimension of the sacred where "sacred" does not mean God is behind in some stupid personal sense. Sacred simply means excessive sublime. Like, it's too much. It's too much to—to simply explain it away as a small secular affair. So again, in this sense, I’m tempted to claim, horrible as it may appeal—appear—that not only God did not die at Auschwitz, maybe in Auschwitz God came back again too close to us. Because again, such a radically brutal violence is sacred. Again, sacred in the sense of if you can normalize it in the sense of, "Yeah, German interest, Hitler manipulating German people, blah blah blah," it's obscene to do this. It's ethically obscene. Now, I want to go a step further. I claim, and I will give you two surprising phenomena from pop culture where I see this God—not the Judeo-Christian God who is a dead God, but this much more terrifying living God. The God who, if you know a little bit of Greek tragedy, this living God—but living in the horrible sense, better not approach a living God. In Greek tragedies, of course, the clearest presentation of this God is, I think it's the last—correct me if I’m wrong—play by Euripides, how do you—some people translate it *Bacchae*, some people *Bacchantes*. You know, those crazy women exploding in orgy and so on? It's an extremely interesting play. Okay, where do we get this God, let's call it, of excessive sacred orgies today? I see signs of it. Now comes the surprise, two surprises: first modest, the other one more crazy. Did you see a movie—it's a shitty boring movie, but I was fascinated by it—*Project X*? You know, about a couple of young geeks in a small college who to impress their neighbors, to become popular, they want to organize a small party—they thought it would be a small party in the house of one of them when parents go for some vacation for the weekend. They—and of course you know what then happens? A couple of thousand people comes, the house is burned down, police has to bring helicopter—and I think already—although it's a stupid movie or whatever, but you can see how in a very nice strategy, it starts as jokes, you know, all this almost in—in—at the level of these obscene Hollywood sex comedies, the vulgar ones, sex jokes, drugs, people get drunk. But then at a certain point, you are almost—even I was transported—like, it's too much, something a kind of ecstasy, something sacred is going on. And I’m not even saying that it's bad. Obviously there is a demand for this kind of sacred dimension today. And don't be here—don't be afraid of what I’m saying because I’m not an arrogant European engaged in the usual America-bashing, you know, "You idiots, you—that's your idea of God," you know. No, no, if anything, we Europeans are worse. First, things like this happened—did you hear? It's a wonderful story of ideological tendencies today. Did you read—it was in the media—do you know, Todd, when, I would say some three, four weeks ago or more, in—a girl in—in Belgium, I think, no? Was it there? A girl announced on—on Facebook that she is organizing a party, a couple of friends to call, and this started to circulate in a small Belgian town—40,000 people came. Another thing, it's obvious this sacred dimension in Europe, in European football, soccer. It's such a place of brutal massive trance and violence, it's much worse than your football, you cannot compare it. So again, second example—now you think you've seen it all, no, but I will go lower. Ah, before I say this, I want to tell you something else. There is even one pretty nice and intelligent detail in the movie, which tells you a lot about how authority functions today. You know, at the beginning of the film, before father leaves, he gives to the son instructions like this, ha-ha, I mean not followed, like, you know, "Maximum five people, don't go into my study room work, just the living room, don't touch my car," of course all—five people, ha-ha, and so on, the house burned down. But then is a beautiful detail. At the end of the film when father returns, you expect him to explode, you know, like, "What—" Father says then, but this is almost a beautiful line where father at the end when he returns, all in ruins and so on, he says to the son, "You know, okay, you did it. It's damaged, you will have to work for years to repay it, but nonetheless, I didn't think you—you were able to do this. I must admit it, you are a man. I didn't think you were able." And Jacques Lacan gave us a theory for this where it's a—a quote from one of his late seminars where he says, "Beyond the mother, stands out the image of a father who would turn a blind eye to desires. This marks the true function of the father, which is fundamentally to unite and not to oppose a desire to the law." So, this is I think how good paternal authority functions. While formally prohibiting children's escapades, father discreetly not only ignores and tolerates them, but even solicits them. That’s the proper paternal authority is that you know you prohibit it, but there is some kind of unwritten understanding that this prohibition means that you are even expected in some way discreetly to—to violate these prohibitions. And—and this is why I think that a permissive father can be, not necessarily but can be, much worse. Because when you have a father who prohibits, if he prohibits it in a correct way, by playing this game of "I turn a blind eye, just do it but out of my sight," you know. And are you aware that in the Bible itself, insofar as God is father, you have a—a—a wonderful ambiguity in Old Testament which hints at this dimension of turning a blind eye? You know the prohibition "Don’t celebrate"—or how was it—I don't know which commandment, "Don't celebrate other gods" basically. But if you look closely at the words in the Bible, they say, "Don’t celebrate other gods *in front of me*." Like, it's the same, you know, what you do discreetly there, it's your problem, you know, just not—it's a wonderful detail. So what I’m saying is that in this sense I think Lacan was right in criticizing Hegel here. You know, Hegel, in maybe the most famous passage of his maybe greatest book, *Phenomenology of Spirit*, develops this legendary dialectic of master and slave or and servant where he claims: servant who didn't—wasn't ready to risk his life, servant works, servant has to renounce enjoyment, master enjoys. But Lacan turns this around. He says, "No, master is so worried about his authority that the master is prohibited, really prohibited to enjoy." Because he can enjoy but in such a regulated way that it's all ruined. Why? The only enjoyment that there is is on the side of the servant in these tiny marginal spaces where, as it were, the master turns his—his—his eye away. And now you will say, "But masters do have orgies and so on." Yes and no, they are usually so regulated. For example, sorry, I have a dirty mind, I read a recent book about—it's horrible—it's horrible means I enjoyed it—about private life of ancient Indian maharajas. And I learned that they had a wonderful, wonderful—means disgusting or—sexual practice. They were usually so fat that they were barely able to walk. So, okay, they had mistresses, wives, whatever you want, how did they do it? You ask yourself, you know. There was a procedure. This big fat guy was just laying down. Then—don't ask me how, fellatio, whatever—they somehow aroused him and there was a complicated system of ropes where—let's say I am, I’m sorry for this, I’m the maharaja like this—they—they descended a woman on ropes with her legs spread descended, somehow they managed to put his penis in, and then the slaves were, you know, pulling the woman up and down. Like, this is not my idea of enjoyment, if I may put it so, you know. Because it was a public act with then, you know, you have some stupid singers then, as it were, to keep up your pleasure, you know. You had some cronies, "Oh, Her Majesty showed great pleasure and this" and so on and so on. That's the master's enjoyment, I think, no? It doesn't work. Okay, the other example—ah yes, today—I claim that, you know, if you—now you will say, "But what about a normal permissive father?" Ay ay ay, the problem is, as Lacan knew very well, that permissivity—"You can do it"—tends to turn imperceptibly into a superego injunction: "You have to do it, you have to enjoy." And then you get something which although it may appear more permissive, at the end it turns a much more—into a much more oppressive thing. Let me give you a simple example. I experienced it—no, it wasn't—I will not be tasteless, don't be afraid, I will not tell you—but simply on one of my last flights across the Atlantic, I read—it was United flight *Hemispheres* there, flight journal—and there I saw a text which totally depressed me. This is the worst of permissivity. It was a text basically propagating healthy sex. But in such a terrifying utilitarian way that thesis was this one: we should often make love because it's good for your blood circulation, it's good for your heart and so on, and it even goes on where they say we should also do a lot of kissing, French kissing because they fortify your muscles here so when you will be old, saliva will not be dripping about. And it's horrible, you know, like, what is this? Is this sex? You know. You see what I mean? In this way through this, let's call it, as it were, medical assertion like "Sex is good, it's healthy," well, I don't want to make love because sex is good and healthy, certainly not. It's much more liberating for the father to prohibit it to you but then father goes out and then you bring your girlfriend or whomever in. You know, so again, this is why I claim, but this is just a superficial note, I’m not at all surprised that precisely today, in the area of generalized more or less permissivity, we get so much of anxiety, impotence, frigidity, and so on and so on. But that's another story. I want to give you my last example of this divine obscenity, this living God returning. Ah-ha-ha, now we will see if you manage it—Gangnam Style. Do you follow it? I—it's if there ever was a pure ideological phenomenon today, this is it, I claim. Why? You know what it is? A South Korean song mockingly—it's in this rave or tech trance, how do you call it, this kind of a repetitive stupid mechanic music—describing Gangnam, is a fashionable district in south of Seoul where, you know, mostly young people, middle-aged meet, you have all the madness is there, cafeterias, people who play for days on computers and so on. It's the "in" part. And the words are extremely vulgar. It's a middle-aged slightly fat singer who basically praises a Gangnam girl who during the day—this is male chauvinist ideal—during the day she is modest, serves her man, but in the night she opens up and—and so on and so on. Okay, what fascinates me so much is how it started as a stupid song, then again, it exploded into something quasi-sacred. You can check it on the web. There were now a series of concerts there on stadiums where you have—you know, we haven't seen something like this, I claim, from early Beatles days when I was young—like people rhythmically getting caught and addressing the singer, who incidentally it's called PSY, P-S-Y, like Psycho, but I think this stands for Psi dance, for psychedelic dance. Okay, what I want to say is that and they refer to him as Messiah. Okay, now your first reaction is maybe, "Fuck them stupid Koreans." It's not as simple as that, it's exploding everywhere, here also. You know that now if you do this superficial test and look at YouTube, how many hits? It's now around—around three quarters of a billion. So if you like—the disgusting guy up here from Canada, Justin Bieber—he is history. He had a record till now and there is another—now there are two further features here which are I think interesting. First, how the words are obviously ironic. They make fun of its own—of the scene described by the song. But, and again this is another example of what I like to describe as today's functioning of ideology, how you can make fun of it, not believe it, but a belief still functions. You know, you make—you make fun of it, but you are caught into it. It works. This is why in my previous books I like to use—it's similar—that stupid cartoon movie, which I saw five times because of my small son, *Kung Fu Panda*. You see, you have all this bullshit, you know, sacred warrior. Okay, it makes fun all the time, but did you notice the miracle? It makes fun of its own ideology, but it works. At the end, you have the sacred act and so on and so on. That's one thing. The other thing is, how does it function? I read from a Korean friend who sent me the analysis, I’ve read an investigation the results into—they simply try to get how you—you usually get caught into this song. And it's very interesting. As a rule, large majority, you don't like it. It's more like—doesn't it happen to you when you hear some totally disgusting commercial song or what? You know, you know it's disgusting, but it haunts you. You—you cannot get rid of it. And it functions like this. My small son who is now twelve, he started like this. He said, "Ugh, it's disgusting. My God, Dad, it's so disgusting you have to hear it." Then he played it to me. Then he says, "It's so disgusting I have to hear it again to see how—" He ended up listening to it times per day. You know, like this is what Lacan calls *sinthome*—not symptom but sinthome, this kind of a condensation of stupid enjoyment. It haunts you, it's stupid, but although you are fully aware how stupid it is, you cannot get rid of it. So this was stage one. Now, stage two. What does this mean? To what do these returns of the sacred react? And I don’t—I’m not using here the terms in a mocking way. I think genuinely that *Project X*, even Gangnam Style, do have a sacred dimension. My point here is not to—to—to claim this is pseudo-sacred. No, it’s—why shouldn't it be at some level authentically sacred? My tendency is more the Judeo-Christian one, not to claim this is false synthetic sacred dimension, but to claim, what if you have this ambiguity between sublime and ridiculously vulgar compulsive enjoyment in the very notion of the sacred, no? I think the notion of the sacred should be desublimated. Sacred can be many things, even horrible things. So, to what does all this react? It's clear that to I claim to today's society in which there is less and less place in traditional churches and so on for the dimension of the—of the sacred. And so, the way to approach this problem of stupid returns of the sacred is to ask a much more radical question, which is: okay, these are ridiculous reactions to some process of where our society is moving. But we should ask a more radical question: which is, okay, which form of spirituality is—fits perfectly, would be ideal for our global capitalist societies? Is there a form of spirituality which would fit them really? What characterizes our societies? On the one hand, on the one hand it is global capitalism with its crazy dynamics. On the other hand, it's the latest results of biogenetic and other revolutions. And I claim—this is not a critical statement, I just try to explain the popularity of it—I claim that some a version of Buddhism—I’m not entering now into the debate, is this authentic Buddhism or not—fits perfectly. First, I think it's more than an accident that do you know that the majority of at least the younger generation, top businessmen, managers, creators, from Steve Jobs down, they were if not outright Buddhist into some kind of oriental spirituality. In my book, I forgot which one, I think it's the end of *The Ticklish Subject*, I even quote a wonderful dialogue between a Tibetan lama and some social critics like Saskia Sassen for today, where they claim that today's capitalism with all these crazy virtual speculations, future hedge funds and so on, is so dynamic and at the same time the image of reality that it implies is so fragile. You know, like you have a stable company, some rumor starts, everything goes wrong, you never can rely on it. That only some kind of Buddhist ontology which totally dis-substantializes reality, making it into just kind of a inconsistent flow of phenomena which all the time can fall apart, makes it sustainable. In the sense that if you fully identify, fully throw yourself into capitalist stream, you go crazy. The only way to sustain it is through an inner distance, you know like, "I must be aware that this doesn't really matter, that these are just phenomena, this is a crazy game, my true inner self is somewhere else," or whatever you want. And if I may be a little bit vicious here, I noticed how in when you read this propaganda—okay, leaflets for transcendental meditation and so on—did you notice their ambiguity? How they usually start with the first paragraph saying we are leading false lives, today we are too much focused on material possessions, pleasures, we should see that this is all vain, blah blah blah, withdraw into yourself. Okay, but then there is usually a second paragraph, always, which says something like, "And in this way, through a proper distance, you will function even better on the market and be even better there." So this is one dimension where Buddhism fits. This kind of a general let's call it withdrawal from fully falling into the world, you know, experiencing the world from a distance as a play of phenomena. Second fact: the result of biogenetics and other sciences today, where as you probably know, things are getting pretty serious there. Pretty serious in the sense that I’m not a scientist to judge if this really can be done or not. I’m just saying that the way it looks, we will be able relatively soon to overcome a certain limitation which I think will maybe affect the very definition of what means to be human. Namely, the way we experience ourselves now: to be human means to have a proper distance between inside and outside. Reality is out there, here I’m free inside, I can think whatever you want, you know, the gap between outside-inside. But you know what they can do now, in both ways. There are already first signs. Did you read, for example, it was in all the media here about two years ago I think, when they enabled a crippled young guy, they—through computer, they were able to decode some of his brain signals, connected to a computer and computer to his prosthetic arm, so he was able to move an object in reality with thoughts alone. And they are already now I think on the edge of producing—I saw a model in London—this crippled—sorry, for—no, what's the politically correct term for crippled—mobility-challenged or what? I hate all these, but people—you know, like you have a wheelchair and literally you don't need even Stephen Hawking's finger. You can move it simply, your brain is wired just by thinking strongly "forward," it goes forward and so on. What's the problem here? Well, to speak in terms of ancient stupid wisdoms, the problem is that what goes out also goes in. That they can also do it in the other way. For example, I’m in contact now with some scientists in Germany who are connected with other scientists in United States at NYU, who already did it on a rat. What? They succeeded in decoding the signals of a rat—elementary, it's still very elementary—just signals for forward, left, right and so on. And then they wired the rat so that you can infect the rat—you can, so that a computer can artificially generate these elementary neuronal signals and pass it onto the rat. How does this work? I have a video—I’m sorry I didn't bring it—it's pretty terrifying. You see a rat in a big cage freely wandering around and then you simply, it's like a remote control car, you connect the rat and you can direct it, you know, how it goes. Now I spoke with some of the scientists in Germany—I wonder if their grandparents were some Nazis whatever because they told me that what really interests them is of course the same thing that immediately interested me. That they told me just that they don't want to publicize this because they are afraid that then there will be pressure on them, ethical pressure—namely, to do it on humans. Why? You know which problem bothers them? The right one, philosophically even. Let's say they can do this on me, and discreetly they hinted at me that they already can do, that they did it. Namely, like, I walk around here and I don't know anything about it, but you, Todd the mean guy, you have a machine, you plug—and you direct me, no? Okay, what bothers them is the following question: how will I experience this? Will it be that, "Oh my god, all of a sudden I will feel like a foreign power took over"? Which is, in a way, good; at least I’m aware. They told me no, the preliminary results are that I still think I’m freely walking around. I don't even know that I’m steered by this evil guy here, my host here, no. Okay, I will not go on with these horrors, blah blah blah. All I’m saying is that in this constellation of total naturalization of man where brain sciences are telling us, you know, "There is no self, there are just neuronal processes" or whatever, here also Buddhism enters, and I would say not as a fake. Why? There are, as far as I could establish, four main—if four main attitudes towards this neuronal breakthrough, which is not yet here, if you accept it as a fact. I have some problems—problems because incidentally I don't think that we can abolish human freedom just like that. But nonetheless, let's say at a certain level of general ideological perception of ourselves, we accept now that we are just neuronal machines and so on, that our freedom is an illusion, there is no self, there is no autonomous agent. The first reaction is the predominant one—is to admit the gap. The majority of scientists claim the way our brain is wired evolutionarily, we are condemned to experience ourselves as free, autonomous, responsible agents. "I do something because I decided to do it" and so on. So that we simply have to accept the gap, which will stay here forever. On the one hand our inner experience, which is as it were biologically wired to be wrong, and then the scientific truth. There is a gap. Second attitude: it's basically the same one, but it tries nonetheless to give a higher dignity to this view of agents. It's the Habermasian, Habermas and some other typically transcendental continental philosophy solution, which is that we know that we are neuronal automata, that there is no freedom. But how did we get to know this? Through our scientific endeavor which works precisely as free, rational debate, research, and so on. In other words, you cannot deny our free rationality because it is through the exercise of this rationality that we assert what we are. So, in a way you end up in a dualism. At the level of content, we should be naturalists, but we should never forget that the very frame of science presupposes some in some sense rational free subjectivity. So, it's only as rational free subject, paradoxically, that we can establish that we are neuronal machines. Okay. Then we have a third version, which is for me the most attractive but it doesn't hold. Some cognitivists like especially that California couple, Patricia and Paul Churchland, they claim that we—that we can maybe change our self-perception to fit scientific results. That is to say that we are not necessarily wired to this naive belief in freedom and so on. They claim that in the same way that once when there was a thunder, we perceived some higher ghost, now we know it's just mathematics, in the same way it will be possible to change even our daily perception, self-perception. And they claim maybe even it will engender a better, more tolerant society where people will not be held so strictly responsible and so on and so on. I have problems with this explanation because again, you know, the problem is that although they claim we should accept that there is no free self, blah blah blah, but in the way these people think, act, do their research, the free self is still here. There is too much of what in—in philosophy is called pragmatic contradiction here. But let's drop that. Then there is, now I come to Buddhism and I think it's the only really consequent position, it's the one developed also by others—it's a whole school—but in the most beautiful way I think by a German neuroscientist and philosopher, Thomas Metzinger. He wrote a thick book translated—I am called *Being No One*, I think. It's a wonderful book. His thesis is this one: Of course we are not able biologically, as it were, to believe the results of neuronal sciences. I mean, we believe it rationally, you know in an abstract way, "My brain is just blah blah blah." But we cannot really existentially accept it because nonetheless, automatically, the way we think, we act, we perceive ourselves as—as autonomous free agents and so on and so on. It's already a very nice theory of how we can know it rationally, but we cannot really subjectively assume. Ah, now comes his exception. It's beautifully done. Except he claims in some radical forms of Buddhist meditation, where you go into Anatman, renounce, you know, renounce your self and so on. He claims that the Buddhists' radical spiritual experience of, you know, seeing the falsity of your self and so on and so on, is the only form of spirituality which is compatible with what science is telling us today. And again, I take this seriously. I don't buy the usual historicist bullshit, which goes into how, "Yeah, but Buddhism came from another era, it's part of a totally different culture." No, all great spiritual edifices have precisely this magical ability to survive from one to another cultural context. For example, I’m very traditional here: why is Shakespeare so great? Precisely because he is not limited to his era. You can—you know, the really great works of art, you can decontextualize them and they work even better, shockingly new. You know, this is why I love these attempts—what the guy whom I have the honor to know but through his sister, I don’t move in that circles—Ralph Fiennes did *Coriolanus*, you know? And it works wonderfully. He put it in today's colonial megalopolis fighting some resistant movement and so on and so on. That's the magic of it. So again, I don't think this simple historicist case of we—we abuse Buddhism today. No, Buddhism precisely can work in a totally different context, like today. What—but the problem I have with—okay, I should slowly conclude, so you will have to suffer a little bit more nonetheless. Okay, I have a systematic—the point is not critique, the point is rather—and I had debates with Buddhists here and they half-admitted it, so I’m not bullshitting here totally at least. The limit, you know what is for me the limit? Look, we know how Buddhism starts, you know. The problem is suffering. All living beings want happiness, want to suffer less. And how to—then what is the source of our suffering? Desire, attachment to worldly objects, you know the story. Here comes my first problem, but I will not go into it. If there is a lesson of psychoanalysis, it's precisely that we want to suffer, that we—and it's a simple phenomenon like—isn't this so fascinating about, you know, the old film noir, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and so on? Isn't it a typical noir scene that, for example, you get a guy, normal guy, suddenly he is seduced by an evil femme fatale? His life is ruined, at the end he is betrayed by her, everything. And at the edge of his death, at the end, somebody tells him, "Oh my god, now that you know how evil she was, do you want—would you like to go back in time and start again avoiding her?" And the typical noir answer is, "No, it was worth every moment." Even if I know that it's a catastrophe—this is the true noir spirit, you know—even if I know that it's a catastrophe, it was worth it. But that's another problem. What I want to say—what I want to draw your attention to is—first, okay, I have to go quickly, so just a couple of coordinates. The first problem I see, and it's nicely rendered by the first big split in Buddhism between Mahayana and the more traditional early one, it's that I think to put it very naively, Mahayana is for me the source of evil. You know why? Mahayana introduces the notion of Bodhisattva. Bodhisattva is the one who did attain enlightenment, got rid of karma, his acts no longer leave traces, but he decides in a non-egotist way, out of sympathy with all other human and even living beings suffering, that he returns to our value of tears, he postpones his final salvation so that he returns here and helps others reach salvation. I think—I found this from an original radical Buddhist standpoint deeply problematic. Because for me, and I wonder—I would like to have maybe even violent responses from you—the point of authentic Buddhism is that precisely reaching Nirvana is not this bullshit you know you are up there or whatever. You are still fully here, maybe even more fully here than before. You can still interact with others and so on, just in a different, let's call it naively, spiritual mode. This is already, I think, a wrong metaphysical reading that Nirvana means you go somewhere else out. You don't. But I think the moment you introduce the notion of Bodhisattva, you already have to hypostasize in a metaphysical way Nirvana as if, again, it means you go somewhere then you return here. No, you are all the time here. Second problem, I claim, connected with this one. And it's I think *the* problem of Buddhism, believe me, I read books, I debated with them. It's the following one. Buddhism starts as—ah yes, sorry, another ambiguity here, if you noticed it. I think that Buddhism, the way I see it, oscillates between two goals: one is minimal, the other is maximal. That is to say, on the one hand, the way and I love these descriptions, great Buddhist thinkers describe Nirvana or Shunyata or however you call it, Satori in Zen Buddhism, they always emphasize that it's just a spiritual shift in you. Nothing changes in reality. You change, your entire attitude. Everything remains out there. On the other hand, you have this, let's call it radical ontic, in the sense of covering all entities, reading where the idea is that since life is suffering, the global goal should be to basically—to change everything so that even worms and so on, so that life as suffering would be redeemed, would no longer be here, you know. So this I find an effect of the same deadlock. Then the third one. Buddhism tries to argue that you—that the problem is less suffering and that somehow less suffering means you have to begin by elementary ethical training. You know, be kind to others, don't steal, don't engage in promiscuity or too much passions, help others, and that these are necessary steps towards high meditative self-enlightenment. This is up to a point true, and it's typical—this is I think the big difference between our Western perception of Buddhism and the practice of Buddhism in countries like Thailand, whatever, where Buddhism is a way of life. That we, if you—if somebody tells you, "I’m a Buddhist," it mostly means "I meditate." For us, it's identified almost with meditation. But you know that very few people meditate in Asian countries. They—to be a Buddhist means mostly just to be kind, practice certain ethical codes, and then monks who meditate are more like a reminder to you that there is hope, you see there are people who were—who are there, who did achieve wisdom. But okay, now the problem with which many, many people are fighting is that why the hell should there be a necessary link between all this elementary goodness and Nirvana enlightenment? And the more I think about it, the more I agree—and they are among Buddhists also present—with those, especially here Zen Buddhism is the most honest. I almost admire Suzuki who, you know, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, when I was young in hippie times he was the—the main popularizer, who says quite openly, Zen Buddhism is a technique of meditation and that's all. You can be, he says, totalitarian, fascist, communist, capitalist, it doesn't matter, it's just certain meditative stance. And I think that one has to accept this gap, and it's a very painful gap, that—and here I think again the predominant Buddhism cheats. They try somehow to convince you that in order to arrive at Nirvana or whatever we call it, the zero point, redemption, liberation of your false self, that you should be a good person, that you should start with that and then grow up, up, up. Things are here much more problematic. The reason that this is not true is precisely, for example, you will say, "But the whole point of Buddhism is compassion, compassion towards all living beings and so on." Yeah, yeah, but then you know you get the notion of compassionate war, for example, no? For example, Suzuki himself wrote texts in the late thirties where he, fully supporting Japanese invasion of China, claimed this is a compassionate war. We intervene in China, killing millions, globally to—to lower the—the—the Chinese are like naughty children, they have to be disciplined to diminish their suffering and so on and so on. Even more, do you know that there is—and I have many cases of this, from Suzuki to others—for example, a book by Vernon Turner, *Soul Sword: The Way and Mind of a Zen Warrior*. Suzuki himself wrote about this and he claimed that Buddhist enlightenment can be even very helpful in a war because, to cut a long story short, it makes much easier for you to kill people. No, no, he is very open here, Suzuki. He claims that if I’m still caught in my false self, perceiving myself as a free autonomous agent, then, thought, you are the victim, I will reply to you. Let's say in a combat I have to cut out your eyes and slaughter you. Unfortunately, I don’t know why, I would have some problems doing this. But then a Buddhist friend comes and tells me, "Yes, I feel responsible blah blah blah because I misperceive myself as an agent." And here comes—Suzuki, I quote Suzuki. Suzuki claims, "If the soldier is trained by Buddhism to abandon his false self, then the whole perspective changes. Let's say again, me knife you. I no longer experience I’m sticking my knife into you, but it would be rather something like, I’m a totally neutral impersonal observer of phenomena. I see there in the cosmic dance the hand with knife dancing around and somehow in this cosmic dance your body or what can we do, no, your body falls on it." You think I’m—I’m exaggerating? Look at—this is quote from Suzuki. "It is really not he, the warrior, but the sword itself that does the killing. The warrior has no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy." And I’m not kidding here. This was the attitude of Japanese army. Now, let me to conclude be very clear here. I’m absolutely not mocking Buddhism in any way. It's a tremendously important spiritual experience. I’m just saying don't expect from it what you will not get. It's a spiritual experience, and the tragic gap that we have to accept is that you can be authentically enlightened in the Buddhist sense and at the same time a terrible torturer or whatever. It's even that when I was in Brazil—I always, I don’t know how, I have this misfortune of encountering people who tell me interesting but horrifying things. And I wonder if you to provoke you agree with me, but in Brazil I had an experience which allowed me to imagine a situation—I wonder if you would agree—where I would be ready to kill someone. Simply to kill him and even in this hypocritical way. Only I go even a step further, to kill someone who is not himself a murderer, who didn't kill anyone. You know what? When I talked with friends in Brazil who were tortured in the times of military dictatorship and so on, no? They told me that every unit of the secret military police which were kidnapping leftists, torturing them, the same in Argentina, Chile and so on, had a doctor who examined the patient and then basically told the torturers, gave the diagnosis, like, "This guy has a weak heart, torture him in this way, but you can torture him up to this level. What do you want? If you want him to survive, don't do this; if you don't care, do that. What will hurt him most is this." He didn't do anything. He just gave his opinion. But in a way, I wonder if you would agree, I—ethically this seems to me even more disgusting than to do the torturing itself. "Oh, I just said my opinion, it was all correct, I didn't do anything." If I were to be at a coffee or tea with such a guy and I would like, I would tell him like, "Look, there is a bird up," he looks up, I put poison into his tea or whatever. I found—okay. What they told me also in Brazil is very interesting. It's how the secret police, of course people are still up to a point people, they were very traumatized by—you know, nobody, very few people—maybe some top Nazis, maybe Pol Pot of Khmer Rouge—are—can be calm murderers and torturers. That, of course, they needed some kind of a wild religion to survive psychologically. And it's extremely interesting what happened, they told me. That within these circles of secret policemen torturing arresting, a kind of a wild spontaneous religion emerged—Christianity didn't work, too much, you know, help your neighbor, blah blah. A kind of a kind of a pseudo-reinvented New Age Buddhism where the point was precisely, you know, "There is no real other, we don't have selves, it's all a game of phenomena" and so on and so on. So this is—ah, the last problem with Buddhism and they have great debates here is: they admit it, many honest Buddhists, that we already can through some chemical means, pills and so on, artificially generate—okay, it's a debate, can we really?—but something that resembles to liberation, Nirvana. Now, how can we then distinguish between, let's call it, authentic enlightenment where you worked hard, all the meditating bullshit to come there, or simply taking a pill? It's very problematic, you know. Some of them cheat, I claim, because they introduce an ethical clause. They claim, "You should work and deserve Nirvana; if you do it directly, it doesn't count." Well, sorry, why not? They admit it, it's exactly the result itself, they claim—they admit—it's indistinguishable. So, you know, you see now where I see the problem. It's a beautiful spiritual attitude, Buddhism, this type of—and I would like to be able—sometimes I think I’m almost there, I’m not sure—but this idea of, you know, that this is something that Gilles Deleuze in his best book, maybe, *The Logic of Sense*, describes as the pure momentary event of sense. You know, how reality loses its substantial weight and becomes just a tiny, tiny, like a momentary lightning phenomena which stands for eternity, the void and so on. This is why, of course, the poetic form of Buddhism, especially Zen, we all know is the Japanese haiku, Matsuo Bashō. You know the best-known one, I translate, I give you a vague English translation: "Old pond, a frog jumps in, splash." Typical three lines. First you have the situation, material: old pond. Then you have the act: a frog jumps in. And then you have what the poem is about: this pure effect as Deleuze would have said referring to Stoics, incorporeal—this just bodiless pure phenomenon. The problem I claim—now I warn you to conclude, it doesn't go with me, you have to get a little bit of vulgarity, no?—is if you are truly Buddhist, you shouldn't cheat. And by cheating, I mean always taking these innocent noble cases, you know, like "water, pond, splash." Okay, first a vulgar way: what about—this—when I was in Japan, I talked with a friend, he agreed with me and we together composed this haiku where also you have splash, pure effect. It goes like this: "Toilet bowl with stale water, I sit on it, splash." My shit. Sorry, if you are seriously Buddhist, you should say "I have no right to cheat," you know, and say "This is not authentic." Why not? If your shit drops, it's splash, it can also be a pure phenomenon. Now let's go even further. Are you ready to do this? Let's say you are a murderer, a person is hanging on a rope in front of you, and in a moment of wisdom you compose this haiku: "Fat body wiggling in front of me, the swing of my sword, splash." His blood. You have to go to the end here. I think if you humanize it, "No, it should be ethically good, blah blah blah," it's not Buddhism. Again, I have—please again, now really to conclude, don't misunderstand me. I really think that like there are only two serious ethics in the world: Buddhist and properly reread, not the way it was done, Judeo-Christian ethics. The way I tend more towards Judeo-Christian ethics is—and with this I will conclude—it's a very simple reason: it's an ethic of external traumatic encounter. I think this is the difference, that you know Buddhism is like "Distance, don't be too attached to objects, don't fall." I think our ethics is precisely the ethics of the fall. What we celebrate is precisely what? Let's take falling in love. It's precisely—you know, this is why I really don't like the ideology of *Star Wars*. Where it's all this bullshit, you know, why did Anakin Skywalker become a bad guy? Because he got too attached to objects—to Natalie Portman, and before to her mother and so on. No, it—I think that's for us a proper spiritual event, like what is love? You are in your ordinary shitty life, you may be very happy even, you know, like one-night stand maybe here and there, drinking with friends, blah blah. Then you meet the one. You literally—I insist on this term which works only in English and French, other languages as far as I know don't use this term—fall, to fall in love. It's a fall! You fall! You are attached—all love is a catastrophe in this sense, like you know all your life turns around this traumatic encounter, and it's—love is a nice example of what Hegel calls this reversal of contingency into necessity, no? Love is like—I don't know—you sleep on the street, you enter a store, you see there a girl or a boy, it's love of your lifetime, and retroactively it is as if—you know this beautiful retroactive teleology of love—"All my life was secretly moving towards this moment" and so on. And no wonder that today—that's the saddest thing about today, it is connected with what I mocked at the beginning as healthy sex—that today we like to avoid this type of falling in love. My friend Alain Badiou told me in France that many dating and marriage agencies refer to this phrase and incidentally in United States I also already found some agencies. Namely, the formula that they use is this one: "We, marriage-dating agency, we will enable you to be in love without the fall." You know, like, none of these "ah" encounters, just we will tell you, "Ah, you like this, breasts, this type of that, okay, okay, we bring you together." But something is lost here, precisely what is lost is encounter. Now, as a final compromise, I will—and with this I will end—I will maybe correct myself a little bit. Now that I’m really trying to get deeply into—more deep into Buddhism. My friend, maybe you know him, he wrote a good book on—on Parallax, the book on Kant and Marx—in one of his recent texts, he found some Japanese minority of Buddhists where they claim that the true Nirvana, in the sense of getting over of your false self, it's not withdrawing into you, but it's precisely to fall fully. That we, as far as we stick to our self, we are not ready fully to fall. So, if you reread Buddhism in this way, God knows, maybe something wonderful can happen. And even to end up in a more conciliatory note, even with Tibetan Buddhism, something I found attractive there. Namely, first idea came to me when I heard—do you remember when was this, years ago?—that crazy siege of the fundamentalist Waco, Texas. I read, do you know, to terrorize them, to make them break down, do you know what music FBI was playing to them? You know those "ooo, ooo" low Buddhist horn songs, no? And then I asked a Tibetan friend of mine whom I met in India, and like—and he told me that yes, Buddhists are aware that there is what in *Star Wars* terminology we would have called the Dark Side of Power. That is to say that it's not simply nice Nirvana and then we fall into, that like already at the level of void, the absolute, something can go terribly wrong. That's what for example fascinates me in Tibetan Buddhism. So again, the dialogue is open here. I just wanted to complicate things a little bit. That's all. I’m really grateful for your patience. Then I saw that only two, three people left the room, but I hope my police agent out there put their names down and tomorrow you will be asking who saw them the last time and so on. Thanks very much. Now if you want Nonetheless, you know, we can—there I know there will be another Q&A debate this evening at nine. At nine? Yeah, yeah. But maybe we can do a little bit of rehearsal, so listen, Mitt, Mitt, you can ask me a question or whatever. Ha-ha, that's it, that's what Democrats should do, to block the—to block Romney speaking whenever. Oh, ah no, this one works, I’m sorry. Yes. Maybe you should come up here, yeah. This one? No, what's happening? Take mine. Hello? Hello? Yes. Yes, this one’s good. Okay. It works? Uh, yeah. Okay, so if someone would like to play Mitt Romney to his Obama and ask the first question, you’re welcome. Uh, come on. I’ll bring it around, yeah. There I see two. Typically you privilege the right over the left. This will be noted, yes. Okay, do you want to say your name and then—Hi. Hi there, my name is Adam. Ah, I hear you. Okay, thanks. Okay. I—I wondered if you would consider, uh, in these times, a vote for the GOP to be a potentially radical gesture toward—Did you hear my question? No. No. No. Would you consider—Yes. —a vote for the GOP, to be the Republican party, to be a potentially radical gesture towards hastening the zero point that you wrote about in *Living in the End Times*? To be what? A radical gesture? Could it potentially be considered a radical gesture towards hastening that zero point? So that we get quicker there? Or what? In what sense, a radical gesture? Yeah, I think if the—there's a—there’s a certain bad faith tongue-in-cheek aspect to it, which doesn't feel so good, but I am truly curious. I don’t know, it's a difficult question because I’m not bluffing here, I’m not trying opportunistically to avoid it. You know, nonetheless, I’ll put it this—this is all that I can say as a—how's that story, science fiction, foreigner in a foreign land or what, you know? Stranger in a strange land, yeah. You know, in spite of all the disappointment in Obama, I like the ideological public debate that he set in motion. For example, and it's not a question of is he right, but for example the whole debate about health care and so on is, I think, extremely important—no wonder it was so traumatic, they even dragged it to Supreme Court and so on—because it touches the very fundamentals of, let's call it, American ideology: freedom of choice, state shouldn't mess into it. Namely, the debate that I would like to hear is, are you really aware to what extent you need an extremely complex legal, ethical, institutional, whatever network so that you can really practice, as it were, the freedom of choice? I think that, you know, okay, abstractly you can always have a freedom of choice. You can step out, kill yourself or whatever. But what is for me a freedom of choice? To give you a simple example: is that I can go out and either go to cinema, buy that. But you know what this means? This means that when I meet another person there, I can be relatively sure that we share the same basic ethical rules, like when I meet him he will not spit on me or whatever. Or I should count that if nonetheless he beats me, there is some kind of public authority—you know, this is a very primitive example, but you see what I mean? We should become aware that it's not a simple alternative: state or society intervenes versus our freedom. That again, to have actual freedom of choice, you need an extremely complex—you need an extremely complex network. And I think this is not an argument, don't be afraid, for any kind of totalitarianism, that we should just have our tiny freedom with the vast state mechanism. My critical example here is precisely the one of twentieth-century communist societies. If you look at, you know, often communism was described as "Okay, it was planned, organized, and it was so stifling, everybody everything was regulated, not enough space for individual initiative." All good books about Soviet Union, the de facto state of economy there, at least in the last twenty years, tell you it was exactly the opposite. Beneath the surface of total control, nothing functions, there was an incredible chaos, you had to improvise, bribe people all the time. No, no, no, my point is not to claim not too much democracy. My point is that—and that's the best argument that I can imagine for democracy—that it's not either you have totalitarian order, you have order but you have to sacrifice democracy, or you have democracy but it's chaos. No, the best organized societies are precisely, as a rule, democratic societies. It's the same in China. They have capitalism without, okay, at least our Western democracy. But this is what my friends are telling me: go to a—one of these anonymous, they have forty of them, cities which have four, five millions people and we don't even know about them. And you will see the chaos in China. Even the central party, politburo, is worried about—about this. So again, this is the reason I have a certain—that's all I can say honestly—a certain sympathy for Obama. That at least he triggered the right debate. You know, that's all I can say, sorry, I cannot say more. I cannot say more because, you know, aren't you tired of this—he is not always stupid but like this Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard type of European intellectuals who go to L.A. and then give you your—his—their deep metaphysical vision of what is United States and so on? I don't want. I think that—I’m very honest here—I am critical of United States, but I’m critical of all of them, and this may horrify some leftists, but I think that—okay, I’ll put it in this way, in a very ironic way. You know, every honest leftist should support the idea to do a big monument for George Bush, the son. Why? Because in his eight years United States definitely lost most of its hegemonic situation. At the beginning United States were still some global policeman. Now, fuck it, they—they cannot even get rid of poor Afghanistan, of starved countries. North Korea can just smile at you all the time, you know. So what I’m saying is that we are effectively entering a more multicentric world. And, hard as it is to recognize for a leftist who is used to this, you know, anti-American imperialism, but this means that, you know, whenever there is a crisis in the world, it's not automatically the United States who are to blame, you know? Like, maybe there is the time to start to raise the question also about, for example—I admire the country, it's tremendous, impressive, but nonetheless—about Chinese economic colonialism. Are you aware what China is now doing at a gigantic level in—in Asia—sorry, in—in Africa? Buying almost whole countries, buying the best land, buying mines and introducing such a brutal exploitation there. That there are already—was it reported here?—for example, in Zambia, the Chinese bought a mine promising to local people the work. Then they have by state in Zambia determined that the lowest minimum wage is per month, of course. Chinese said this is too much and started to import their own workers who are ready to work for Local people were so furious that they lynched two of the Chinese managers, and so on and so on. Myanmar, everyone knows, generals, Myanmar is Chinese colony practically at economic level and so on. Sudan, whatever you want. So all I’m saying is that, yes, we should be critical towards the United States, blah blah, but we should whenever a critic of today's capitalism focuses too much against American imperialism, I always suspect, not that they are too radical, but that they are
Thank you very much. I’m really glad, proud to be here. I really mean it. This is not empty rhetoric. The University of Vermont here is the favorite one for me in the United States for a simple reason that I think it's the only—they have the only department in the whole of United States where more or less Lacanians are in power to exert what we once called dictatorship of the proletariat here, no? So, I like to be here. And just, I hope you will not be disappointed. There will be no big Lacanian stuff today. I really want to do naively what the title says. Far from playing any cheap—proposing any cheap critique of Buddhism, simply to engage with it seriously. What I see as its possible limitations, what is great in it, especially considering our social, political, and ethic situation. Now, here the first problem begins. A friend of mine drew my attention to a fact that on some blog or whatever from Vermont, there was an ironic remark a couple of days ago at me. Somebody says, "I’m a card-carrying, as it were, atheist. Who am I to talk about Buddhism as a religion?" Well, I found this remark funny because, you know, Buddhism originally was not a religion. And this is, I think, what makes it so interesting already as a historical phenomena. As you know, Buddha was, to use contemporary terms, agnostic. He says—he said, "What I care about is human suffering. God, are gods, there are no gods, that's not my problem. I don’t—" And it’s—for me, it was always an enigma how the, let's call it spiritual orientation, which started as a disavowing all rituals and so on, ended up in some of its forms like Tibetan Buddhism as the most, for our Western tastes, ridiculously ritualized form of, in that case, yes, religion. Or to put it in a different way, how a spiritual attitude focused on inner life—you know, the point is what matters is your—these are not, I know, adequate terms, inner, outer, but nonetheless, just to change in your inner life went furthest into externalizing our inner life. For example, what can be more intimate than praying? But you know that Tibetan Buddhism—nothing against it, I just give you an example because the shift interested me—they invented, I would say already a thousand more years ago, something that is I think the closest equivalent to what today we call canned laughter. You know, when the TV set laughs for you? Namely, I’m of course referring to, you know, those praying wheels, mills, and so on where you write a prayer, you put it there, it turns around, you turn it around, or it can even be wind or whatever that turns it around, and then, how should I put it, objectively you are praying there through the other. It doesn't matter what you think. It's again as in the case of canned laughter. You look—and it works! At least it works with me, like you look some stupid show, *Cheers* or whatever, and you know, the set laughs for you. This is something that I—can—that I find very surprising. Why are people not more shocked? How something that's supposed to be your spontaneous emotional reaction can be so externalized. You know, like it's totally wrong, the behavioral explanation, which claims that the function of canned laughter is to trigger in this Pavlovian conditional reflex whatever way to trigger your laughter. No, I claim, it laughs for you. The typical thing is that—and again with me, maybe I’m the idiot here—it works. Like, I watch TV and I just watch at it as an idiot, and at the end of the show, I feel relieved as if I was laughing. It literally works. So again, there are here many enigmas. Is Buddhism a religion? Of course it's not. How did it end up there? So, before going to Buddhism, I would nonetheless like to draw your attention to a couple of weird things going on today in the, let's call it, domain—the domain of the sacred. Because, you know, strange things are going on today, shifts here and there. For example—and here, far from being anti-Semitic, I’m really worried for the Jews. You know in what sense? You know the madman from Oslo, Norway, Breivik, the guy who killed over seventy people? It's incredible how a feature in his—you know, he wrote over a thousand-page some crazy manifest. Of course, I didn't read it, but a Norwegian friend of mine did it and sent me translated some passages which quite fascinated me. Namely, in what sense: Usually we expect the extreme right to be anti-Semitic. With Breivik, we get a paradox. On the one hand, he is totally pro-Zionist. He emphasizes, since Islam is now the greatest danger, we should totally support the state of Israel to, whatever you want, simply throw all the Palestinians out from the West Bank and no problem there. At the same time, here in the West, he is anti-Semitic. For example, he says—he writes in his manifest that in Europe the problem—we don't no longer have Jewish problem, he means because Hitler took care of that. He said United States is so-so—no, sorry, United Kingdom, United States, six million Jews, too much influence, they will have a problem with that. You see the paradox, unimaginable till recently, of literally pro-Zionist and at the same time anti-Semitic attitude. And though you will say, "Okay, what does this mean? He is just a madman there." Ah, no, I will tell you, he is American counterpart madman. You remember, he was fired—you remember Glenn Beck from Fox News? Exactly the same. He was fired because he became, as a reaction to financial crisis here, more and more openly anti-Semitic. But at the same time, he is totally pro-Zionist. I think that the first sign of this enigma was that some twenty years ago, I think, you can correct me if I’m wrong, the American Christian fundamentalists—and if there is a group of people in whose very nature is to be anti-Semitic—like, I’m now consciously ironically sounding essentialist. It's not a matter of social conditions, discursive strategies; it's in their genes to be anti-Semitic. Why did they all of a sudden started to fanatically support the state of Israel? So again, what is happening here? Let me begin with what I think is really a great legacy of Judaism. Although I have great problems and I’m very critical of Emmanuel Levinas. The main reason is not that he is a Jew, but quite on the contrary. I think he is so popular because he smuggled into Judaism some, not even authentically, pseudo-Christian attitudes. I think that this idea of, you know, the face of the other as the ultimate ethical zero level of ethical experience, you see the vulnerability of the other's face and so on—this is profoundly non-Jewish, I claim. And then, you know how the original experience is this one, and then when you discover there are many others whose appeal to me to intervene is the just one, collective enters. No, from a Jewish standpoint, collectivity is from the beginning here. This—the very idea that the zero-level ethical experience is a single face of the other is non-Jewish, I claim. Much more Jewish would have been an attitude which I also prefer. I think that it's easy to be captivated by another person's gaze. You know, you see a weak child or whatever, no? And oh my god, like—but I think that it's easy, this is automatic reaction. But the ethics begin from me—for me—when you ask a question: "Is it something that I don't see which is the price for seeing this?" Like, okay, this is it, but I should look around. Where are the—you know what I mean? To see—if you don't do this, I think we are not dealing with real ethics. So, in spite of all this, I have nonetheless quite a great admiration for some insights of Levinas. One of them, it's a wonderful idiosyncratic reading, is that when you read in the Bible "Don’t kill," that it's not so much God addressing us humans with this. That the ultimate addressee of this commandment or rather prohibition is God himself. That is to say that the big problem from the very beginning, from Book of Job, here, there, is divine—brutal divine violence. It's interesting to reread the Old Testament from this standpoint. How many brutal outbursts of divine violence you get? Like, "wipe out this people," "destroy this," "that." It's just full of stories which tell you what—you know—which tell you basically that God is like Kafka—I mean, Castle in Kafka's novel *The Castle*. You know, it's sublime up there, but—that's so beautiful about the novel. You remember once, K—this is not Joseph K but K, the—this—who measures land or whatever, no?—that once he succeeds getting up almost the Castle and sees that what appeared from below a majestic building is really a couple of old dirty cottages and so on and so on. I’m tempted to claim that the basic Jewish suspicion is this one: Don't get too close to God, it will not be bliss, it will be fury, horror. So again, how to keep God at a distance? And if you think now I’m again involved in some Lacanian perverse postmodern sophisms—even if you know them, I will repeat to you—there are two absolutely wonderful, and I was in Israel and I as it were certified them, in the sense of I spoke with some people who don't bluff like me but really know Talmud and all that, which are wonderful. I think they are incredible. They are literally a sacred version of *Annie Hall*. I don't like so much *Annie Hall*, I mean Woody Allen, but you remember that wonderful scene at the beginning when Woody Allen character is in a line for movie tickets and gets engaged into debate with another guy? And then he is losing, but then who come—about Marshall McLuhan. And then Marshall McLuhan comes and does what we dream about, no? He says to the other guy, "You're a total idiot, this guy, he is totally right," you know? This happens, literally. Okay, if this means anything to you, it's from Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b. What happened there is the following—it's incredible. It's the story, but part of the sacred canon, of two—and there is even—it's not all, there is then another version, but let's not lose time—two rabbis debate a theological point. And the one who is losing the debate tries to pull a *Annie Hall* trick, no, and says, "Wait a minute, we are finite humans, too weak, let's call God to be the judge." And it happens! Jehovah comes, an old man, but before he is even allowed to start talking, the other rabbi shouts at God—okay, it's a longer speech but basically something like, "You old man, beat it! You did your job, you created the world, you did it pretty bad. So, you did your job, now please go away and leave us learned men to do the proper thing of a debate." And then comes the wonder. The reply of God is, God says, "My children have vanquished me," and with a merry laughter walks away. You know, this is the idea—it's a very beautiful one—is that it recognizes, let's call it, the danger of the proximity of God. The whole strategy is how to keep God at a proper distance. Maybe this is also how we should read—and Levinas has indications in this sense—the famous prohibition of images, no? The point is, again, God should be only in a word, in dead letter. Images bring him too close. God should be a dead God. Why? Let me give you another—I’m an atheist, but nonetheless, I think that the only way to be atheist is to go through theology today. Jacques Lacan said this. He said, "The only true—true—atheists today are theologians," you know? Namely, people usually say that, you know—this is even I think the title of a book or a famous article—God died in Auschwitz. You know the story like, "If there is God who is just, omnipotent, how could he have allowed, permitted something like that to happen?" But even the one who is not my friend philosophically, Jürgen Habermas, made here a nice answer where he says, in view of the horrors of the twentieth century—and I think that, you know, I don't like this negative teleological story which claims twentieth century greatest horror. If you look at it closely, things like Holocaust were happening all the time, you know, but nonetheless, okay, we are at least this is something more sensitive about them. Habermas says that these crimes are so horrible that to describe them in secular terms simply is not strong enough. You know, my God, you have there ten million people or whatever killed and to say, "Okay, this was because of social reasons, economic interest," you know, it doesn't match the horror. So, we need here some dimension of the sacred where "sacred" does not mean God is behind in some stupid personal sense. Sacred simply means excessive sublime. Like, it's too much. It's too much to—to simply explain it away as a small secular affair. So again, in this sense, I’m tempted to claim, horrible as it may appeal—appear—that not only God did not die at Auschwitz, maybe in Auschwitz God came back again too close to us. Because again, such a radically brutal violence is sacred. Again, sacred in the sense of if you can normalize it in the sense of, "Yeah, German interest, Hitler manipulating German people, blah blah blah," it's obscene to do this. It's ethically obscene. Now, I want to go a step further. I claim, and I will give you two surprising phenomena from pop culture where I see this God—not the Judeo-Christian God who is a dead God, but this much more terrifying living God. The God who, if you know a little bit of Greek tragedy, this living God—but living in the horrible sense, better not approach a living God. In Greek tragedies, of course, the clearest presentation of this God is, I think it's the last—correct me if I’m wrong—play by Euripides, how do you—some people translate it *Bacchae*, some people *Bacchantes*. You know, those crazy women exploding in orgy and so on? It's an extremely interesting play. Okay, where do we get this God, let's call it, of excessive sacred orgies today? I see signs of it. Now comes the surprise, two surprises: first modest, the other one more crazy. Did you see a movie—it's a shitty boring movie, but I was fascinated by it—*Project X*? You know, about a couple of young geeks in a small college who to impress their neighbors, to become popular, they want to organize a small party—they thought it would be a small party in the house of one of them when parents go for some vacation for the weekend. They—and of course you know what then happens? A couple of thousand people comes, the house is burned down, police has to bring helicopter—and I think already—although it's a stupid movie or whatever, but you can see how in a very nice strategy, it starts as jokes, you know, all this almost in—in—at the level of these obscene Hollywood sex comedies, the vulgar ones, sex jokes, drugs, people get drunk. But then at a certain point, you are almost—even I was transported—like, it's too much, something a kind of ecstasy, something sacred is going on. And I’m not even saying that it's bad. Obviously there is a demand for this kind of sacred dimension today. And don't be here—don't be afraid of what I’m saying because I’m not an arrogant European engaged in the usual America-bashing, you know, "You idiots, you—that's your idea of God," you know. No, no, if anything, we Europeans are worse. First, things like this happened—did you hear? It's a wonderful story of ideological tendencies today. Did you read—it was in the media—do you know, Todd, when, I would say some three, four weeks ago or more, in—a girl in—in Belgium, I think, no? Was it there? A girl announced on—on Facebook that she is organizing a party, a couple of friends to call, and this started to circulate in a small Belgian town—40,000 people came. Another thing, it's obvious this sacred dimension in Europe, in European football, soccer. It's such a place of brutal massive trance and violence, it's much worse than your football, you cannot compare it. So again, second example—now you think you've seen it all, no, but I will go lower. Ah, before I say this, I want to tell you something else. There is even one pretty nice and intelligent detail in the movie, which tells you a lot about how authority functions today. You know, at the beginning of the film, before father leaves, he gives to the son instructions like this, ha-ha, I mean not followed, like, you know, "Maximum five people, don't go into my study room work, just the living room, don't touch my car," of course all—five people, ha-ha, and so on, the house burned down. But then is a beautiful detail. At the end of the film when father returns, you expect him to explode, you know, like, "What—" Father says then, but this is almost a beautiful line where father at the end when he returns, all in ruins and so on, he says to the son, "You know, okay, you did it. It's damaged, you will have to work for years to repay it, but nonetheless, I didn't think you—you were able to do this. I must admit it, you are a man. I didn't think you were able." And Jacques Lacan gave us a theory for this where it's a—a quote from one of his late seminars where he says, "Beyond the mother, stands out the image of a father who would turn a blind eye to desires. This marks the true function of the father, which is fundamentally to unite and not to oppose a desire to the law." So, this is I think how good paternal authority functions. While formally prohibiting children's escapades, father discreetly not only ignores and tolerates them, but even solicits them. That’s the proper paternal authority is that you know you prohibit it, but there is some kind of unwritten understanding that this prohibition means that you are even expected in some way discreetly to—to violate these prohibitions. And—and this is why I think that a permissive father can be, not necessarily but can be, much worse. Because when you have a father who prohibits, if he prohibits it in a correct way, by playing this game of "I turn a blind eye, just do it but out of my sight," you know. And are you aware that in the Bible itself, insofar as God is father, you have a—a—a wonderful ambiguity in Old Testament which hints at this dimension of turning a blind eye? You know the prohibition "Don’t celebrate"—or how was it—I don't know which commandment, "Don't celebrate other gods" basically. But if you look closely at the words in the Bible, they say, "Don’t celebrate other gods *in front of me*." Like, it's the same, you know, what you do discreetly there, it's your problem, you know, just not—it's a wonderful detail. So what I’m saying is that in this sense I think Lacan was right in criticizing Hegel here. You know, Hegel, in maybe the most famous passage of his maybe greatest book, *Phenomenology of Spirit*, develops this legendary dialectic of master and slave or and servant where he claims: servant who didn't—wasn't ready to risk his life, servant works, servant has to renounce enjoyment, master enjoys. But Lacan turns this around. He says, "No, master is so worried about his authority that the master is prohibited, really prohibited to enjoy." Because he can enjoy but in such a regulated way that it's all ruined. Why? The only enjoyment that there is is on the side of the servant in these tiny marginal spaces where, as it were, the master turns his—his—his eye away. And now you will say, "But masters do have orgies and so on." Yes and no, they are usually so regulated. For example, sorry, I have a dirty mind, I read a recent book about—it's horrible—it's horrible means I enjoyed it—about private life of ancient Indian maharajas. And I learned that they had a wonderful, wonderful—means disgusting or—sexual practice. They were usually so fat that they were barely able to walk. So, okay, they had mistresses, wives, whatever you want, how did they do it? You ask yourself, you know. There was a procedure. This big fat guy was just laying down. Then—don't ask me how, fellatio, whatever—they somehow aroused him and there was a complicated system of ropes where—let's say I am, I’m sorry for this, I’m the maharaja like this—they—they descended a woman on ropes with her legs spread descended, somehow they managed to put his penis in, and then the slaves were, you know, pulling the woman up and down. Like, this is not my idea of enjoyment, if I may put it so, you know. Because it was a public act with then, you know, you have some stupid singers then, as it were, to keep up your pleasure, you know. You had some cronies, "Oh, Her Majesty showed great pleasure and this" and so on and so on. That's the master's enjoyment, I think, no? It doesn't work. Okay, the other example—ah yes, today—I claim that, you know, if you—now you will say, "But what about a normal permissive father?" Ay ay ay, the problem is, as Lacan knew very well, that permissivity—"You can do it"—tends to turn imperceptibly into a superego injunction: "You have to do it, you have to enjoy." And then you get something which although it may appear more permissive, at the end it turns a much more—into a much more oppressive thing. Let me give you a simple example. I experienced it—no, it wasn't—I will not be tasteless, don't be afraid, I will not tell you—but simply on one of my last flights across the Atlantic, I read—it was United flight *Hemispheres* there, flight journal—and there I saw a text which totally depressed me. This is the worst of permissivity. It was a text basically propagating healthy sex. But in such a terrifying utilitarian way that thesis was this one: we should often make love because it's good for your blood circulation, it's good for your heart and so on, and it even goes on where they say we should also do a lot of kissing, French kissing because they fortify your muscles here so when you will be old, saliva will not be dripping about. And it's horrible, you know, like, what is this? Is this sex? You know. You see what I mean? In this way through this, let's call it, as it were, medical assertion like "Sex is good, it's healthy," well, I don't want to make love because sex is good and healthy, certainly not. It's much more liberating for the father to prohibit it to you but then father goes out and then you bring your girlfriend or whomever in. You know, so again, this is why I claim, but this is just a superficial note, I’m not at all surprised that precisely today, in the area of generalized more or less permissivity, we get so much of anxiety, impotence, frigidity, and so on and so on. But that's another story. I want to give you my last example of this divine obscenity, this living God returning. Ah-ha-ha, now we will see if you manage it—Gangnam Style. Do you follow it? I—it's if there ever was a pure ideological phenomenon today, this is it, I claim. Why? You know what it is? A South Korean song mockingly—it's in this rave or tech trance, how do you call it, this kind of a repetitive stupid mechanic music—describing Gangnam, is a fashionable district in south of Seoul where, you know, mostly young people, middle-aged meet, you have all the madness is there, cafeterias, people who play for days on computers and so on. It's the "in" part. And the words are extremely vulgar. It's a middle-aged slightly fat singer who basically praises a Gangnam girl who during the day—this is male chauvinist ideal—during the day she is modest, serves her man, but in the night she opens up and—and so on and so on. Okay, what fascinates me so much is how it started as a stupid song, then again, it exploded into something quasi-sacred. You can check it on the web. There were now a series of concerts there on stadiums where you have—you know, we haven't seen something like this, I claim, from early Beatles days when I was young—like people rhythmically getting caught and addressing the singer, who incidentally it's called PSY, P-S-Y, like Psycho, but I think this stands for Psi dance, for psychedelic dance. Okay, what I want to say is that and they refer to him as Messiah. Okay, now your first reaction is maybe, "Fuck them stupid Koreans." It's not as simple as that, it's exploding everywhere, here also. You know that now if you do this superficial test and look at YouTube, how many hits? It's now around—around three quarters of a billion. So if you like—the disgusting guy up here from Canada, Justin Bieber—he is history. He had a record till now and there is another—now there are two further features here which are I think interesting. First, how the words are obviously ironic. They make fun of its own—of the scene described by the song. But, and again this is another example of what I like to describe as today's functioning of ideology, how you can make fun of it, not believe it, but a belief still functions. You know, you make—you make fun of it, but you are caught into it. It works. This is why in my previous books I like to use—it's similar—that stupid cartoon movie, which I saw five times because of my small son, *Kung Fu Panda*. You see, you have all this bullshit, you know, sacred warrior. Okay, it makes fun all the time, but did you notice the miracle? It makes fun of its own ideology, but it works. At the end, you have the sacred act and so on and so on. That's one thing. The other thing is, how does it function? I read from a Korean friend who sent me the analysis, I’ve read an investigation the results into—they simply try to get how you—you usually get caught into this song. And it's very interesting. As a rule, large majority, you don't like it. It's more like—doesn't it happen to you when you hear some totally disgusting commercial song or what? You know, you know it's disgusting, but it haunts you. You—you cannot get rid of it. And it functions like this. My small son who is now twelve, he started like this. He said, "Ugh, it's disgusting. My God, Dad, it's so disgusting you have to hear it." Then he played it to me. Then he says, "It's so disgusting I have to hear it again to see how—" He ended up listening to it times per day. You know, like this is what Lacan calls *sinthome*—not symptom but sinthome, this kind of a condensation of stupid enjoyment. It haunts you, it's stupid, but although you are fully aware how stupid it is, you cannot get rid of it. So this was stage one. Now, stage two. What does this mean? To what do these returns of the sacred react? And I don’t—I’m not using here the terms in a mocking way. I think genuinely that *Project X*, even Gangnam Style, do have a sacred dimension. My point here is not to—to—to claim this is pseudo-sacred. No, it’s—why shouldn't it be at some level authentically sacred? My tendency is more the Judeo-Christian one, not to claim this is false synthetic sacred dimension, but to claim, what if you have this ambiguity between sublime and ridiculously vulgar compulsive enjoyment in the very notion of the sacred, no? I think the notion of the sacred should be desublimated. Sacred can be many things, even horrible things. So, to what does all this react? It's clear that to I claim to today's society in which there is less and less place in traditional churches and so on for the dimension of the—of the sacred. And so, the way to approach this problem of stupid returns of the sacred is to ask a much more radical question, which is: okay, these are ridiculous reactions to some process of where our society is moving. But we should ask a more radical question: which is, okay, which form of spirituality is—fits perfectly, would be ideal for our global capitalist societies? Is there a form of spirituality which would fit them really? What characterizes our societies? On the one hand, on the one hand it is global capitalism with its crazy dynamics. On the other hand, it's the latest results of biogenetic and other revolutions. And I claim—this is not a critical statement, I just try to explain the popularity of it—I claim that some a version of Buddhism—I’m not entering now into the debate, is this authentic Buddhism or not—fits perfectly. First, I think it's more than an accident that do you know that the majority of at least the younger generation, top businessmen, managers, creators, from Steve Jobs down, they were if not outright Buddhist into some kind of oriental spirituality. In my book, I forgot which one, I think it's the end of *The Ticklish Subject*, I even quote a wonderful dialogue between a Tibetan lama and some social critics like Saskia Sassen for today, where they claim that today's capitalism with all these crazy virtual speculations, future hedge funds and so on, is so dynamic and at the same time the image of reality that it implies is so fragile. You know, like you have a stable company, some rumor starts, everything goes wrong, you never can rely on it. That only some kind of Buddhist ontology which totally dis-substantializes reality, making it into just kind of a inconsistent flow of phenomena which all the time can fall apart, makes it sustainable. In the sense that if you fully identify, fully throw yourself into capitalist stream, you go crazy. The only way to sustain it is through an inner distance, you know like, "I must be aware that this doesn't really matter, that these are just phenomena, this is a crazy game, my true inner self is somewhere else," or whatever you want. And if I may be a little bit vicious here, I noticed how in when you read this propaganda—okay, leaflets for transcendental meditation and so on—did you notice their ambiguity? How they usually start with the first paragraph saying we are leading false lives, today we are too much focused on material possessions, pleasures, we should see that this is all vain, blah blah blah, withdraw into yourself. Okay, but then there is usually a second paragraph, always, which says something like, "And in this way, through a proper distance, you will function even better on the market and be even better there." So this is one dimension where Buddhism fits. This kind of a general let's call it withdrawal from fully falling into the world, you know, experiencing the world from a distance as a play of phenomena. Second fact: the result of biogenetics and other sciences today, where as you probably know, things are getting pretty serious there. Pretty serious in the sense that I’m not a scientist to judge if this really can be done or not. I’m just saying that the way it looks, we will be able relatively soon to overcome a certain limitation which I think will maybe affect the very definition of what means to be human. Namely, the way we experience ourselves now: to be human means to have a proper distance between inside and outside. Reality is out there, here I’m free inside, I can think whatever you want, you know, the gap between outside-inside. But you know what they can do now, in both ways. There are already first signs. Did you read, for example, it was in all the media here about two years ago I think, when they enabled a crippled young guy, they—through computer, they were able to decode some of his brain signals, connected to a computer and computer to his prosthetic arm, so he was able to move an object in reality with thoughts alone. And they are already now I think on the edge of producing—I saw a model in London—this crippled—sorry, for—no, what's the politically correct term for crippled—mobility-challenged or what? I hate all these, but people—you know, like you have a wheelchair and literally you don't need even Stephen Hawking's finger. You can move it simply, your brain is wired just by thinking strongly "forward," it goes forward and so on. What's the problem here? Well, to speak in terms of ancient stupid wisdoms, the problem is that what goes out also goes in. That they can also do it in the other way. For example, I’m in contact now with some scientists in Germany who are connected with other scientists in United States at NYU, who already did it on a rat. What? They succeeded in decoding the signals of a rat—elementary, it's still very elementary—just signals for forward, left, right and so on. And then they wired the rat so that you can infect the rat—you can, so that a computer can artificially generate these elementary neuronal signals and pass it onto the rat. How does this work? I have a video—I’m sorry I didn't bring it—it's pretty terrifying. You see a rat in a big cage freely wandering around and then you simply, it's like a remote control car, you connect the rat and you can direct it, you know, how it goes. Now I spoke with some of the scientists in Germany—I wonder if their grandparents were some Nazis whatever because they told me that what really interests them is of course the same thing that immediately interested me. That they told me just that they don't want to publicize this because they are afraid that then there will be pressure on them, ethical pressure—namely, to do it on humans. Why? You know which problem bothers them? The right one, philosophically even. Let's say they can do this on me, and discreetly they hinted at me that they already can do, that they did it. Namely, like, I walk around here and I don't know anything about it, but you, Todd the mean guy, you have a machine, you plug—and you direct me, no? Okay, what bothers them is the following question: how will I experience this? Will it be that, "Oh my god, all of a sudden I will feel like a foreign power took over"? Which is, in a way, good; at least I’m aware. They told me no, the preliminary results are that I still think I’m freely walking around. I don't even know that I’m steered by this evil guy here, my host here, no. Okay, I will not go on with these horrors, blah blah blah. All I’m saying is that in this constellation of total naturalization of man where brain sciences are telling us, you know, "There is no self, there are just neuronal processes" or whatever, here also Buddhism enters, and I would say not as a fake. Why? There are, as far as I could establish, four main—if four main attitudes towards this neuronal breakthrough, which is not yet here, if you accept it as a fact. I have some problems—problems because incidentally I don't think that we can abolish human freedom just like that. But nonetheless, let's say at a certain level of general ideological perception of ourselves, we accept now that we are just neuronal machines and so on, that our freedom is an illusion, there is no self, there is no autonomous agent. The first reaction is the predominant one—is to admit the gap. The majority of scientists claim the way our brain is wired evolutionarily, we are condemned to experience ourselves as free, autonomous, responsible agents. "I do something because I decided to do it" and so on. So that we simply have to accept the gap, which will stay here forever. On the one hand our inner experience, which is as it were biologically wired to be wrong, and then the scientific truth. There is a gap. Second attitude: it's basically the same one, but it tries nonetheless to give a higher dignity to this view of agents. It's the Habermasian, Habermas and some other typically transcendental continental philosophy solution, which is that we know that we are neuronal automata, that there is no freedom. But how did we get to know this? Through our scientific endeavor which works precisely as free, rational debate, research, and so on. In other words, you cannot deny our free rationality because it is through the exercise of this rationality that we assert what we are. So, in a way you end up in a dualism. At the level of content, we should be naturalists, but we should never forget that the very frame of science presupposes some in some sense rational free subjectivity. So, it's only as rational free subject, paradoxically, that we can establish that we are neuronal machines. Okay. Then we have a third version, which is for me the most attractive but it doesn't hold. Some cognitivists like especially that California couple, Patricia and Paul Churchland, they claim that we—that we can maybe change our self-perception to fit scientific results. That is to say that we are not necessarily wired to this naive belief in freedom and so on. They claim that in the same way that once when there was a thunder, we perceived some higher ghost, now we know it's just mathematics, in the same way it will be possible to change even our daily perception, self-perception. And they claim maybe even it will engender a better, more tolerant society where people will not be held so strictly responsible and so on and so on. I have problems with this explanation because again, you know, the problem is that although they claim we should accept that there is no free self, blah blah blah, but in the way these people think, act, do their research, the free self is still here. There is too much of what in—in philosophy is called pragmatic contradiction here. But let's drop that. Then there is, now I come to Buddhism and I think it's the only really consequent position, it's the one developed also by others—it's a whole school—but in the most beautiful way I think by a German neuroscientist and philosopher, Thomas Metzinger. He wrote a thick book translated—I am called *Being No One*, I think. It's a wonderful book. His thesis is this one: Of course we are not able biologically, as it were, to believe the results of neuronal sciences. I mean, we believe it rationally, you know in an abstract way, "My brain is just blah blah blah." But we cannot really existentially accept it because nonetheless, automatically, the way we think, we act, we perceive ourselves as—as autonomous free agents and so on and so on. It's already a very nice theory of how we can know it rationally, but we cannot really subjectively assume. Ah, now comes his exception. It's beautifully done. Except he claims in some radical forms of Buddhist meditation, where you go into Anatman, renounce, you know, renounce your self and so on. He claims that the Buddhists' radical spiritual experience of, you know, seeing the falsity of your self and so on and so on, is the only form of spirituality which is compatible with what science is telling us today. And again, I take this seriously. I don't buy the usual historicist bullshit, which goes into how, "Yeah, but Buddhism came from another era, it's part of a totally different culture." No, all great spiritual edifices have precisely this magical ability to survive from one to another cultural context. For example, I’m very traditional here: why is Shakespeare so great? Precisely because he is not limited to his era. You can—you know, the really great works of art, you can decontextualize them and they work even better, shockingly new. You know, this is why I love these attempts—what the guy whom I have the honor to know but through his sister, I don’t move in that circles—Ralph Fiennes did *Coriolanus*, you know? And it works wonderfully. He put it in today's colonial megalopolis fighting some resistant movement and so on and so on. That's the magic of it. So again, I don't think this simple historicist case of we—we abuse Buddhism today. No, Buddhism precisely can work in a totally different context, like today. What—but the problem I have with—okay, I should slowly conclude, so you will have to suffer a little bit more nonetheless. Okay, I have a systematic—the point is not critique, the point is rather—and I had debates with Buddhists here and they half-admitted it, so I’m not bullshitting here totally at least. The limit, you know what is for me the limit? Look, we know how Buddhism starts, you know. The problem is suffering. All living beings want happiness, want to suffer less. And how to—then what is the source of our suffering? Desire, attachment to worldly objects, you know the story. Here comes my first problem, but I will not go into it. If there is a lesson of psychoanalysis, it's precisely that we want to suffer, that we—and it's a simple phenomenon like—isn't this so fascinating about, you know, the old film noir, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and so on? Isn't it a typical noir scene that, for example, you get a guy, normal guy, suddenly he is seduced by an evil femme fatale? His life is ruined, at the end he is betrayed by her, everything. And at the edge of his death, at the end, somebody tells him, "Oh my god, now that you know how evil she was, do you want—would you like to go back in time and start again avoiding her?" And the typical noir answer is, "No, it was worth every moment." Even if I know that it's a catastrophe—this is the true noir spirit, you know—even if I know that it's a catastrophe, it was worth it. But that's another problem. What I want to say—what I want to draw your attention to is—first, okay, I have to go quickly, so just a couple of coordinates. The first problem I see, and it's nicely rendered by the first big split in Buddhism between Mahayana and the more traditional early one, it's that I think to put it very naively, Mahayana is for me the source of evil. You know why? Mahayana introduces the notion of Bodhisattva. Bodhisattva is the one who did attain enlightenment, got rid of karma, his acts no longer leave traces, but he decides in a non-egotist way, out of sympathy with all other human and even living beings suffering, that he returns to our value of tears, he postpones his final salvation so that he returns here and helps others reach salvation. I think—I found this from an original radical Buddhist standpoint deeply problematic. Because for me, and I wonder—I would like to have maybe even violent responses from you—the point of authentic Buddhism is that precisely reaching Nirvana is not this bullshit you know you are up there or whatever. You are still fully here, maybe even more fully here than before. You can still interact with others and so on, just in a different, let's call it naively, spiritual mode. This is already, I think, a wrong metaphysical reading that Nirvana means you go somewhere else out. You don't. But I think the moment you introduce the notion of Bodhisattva, you already have to hypostasize in a metaphysical way Nirvana as if, again, it means you go somewhere then you return here. No, you are all the time here. Second problem, I claim, connected with this one. And it's I think *the* problem of Buddhism, believe me, I read books, I debated with them. It's the following one. Buddhism starts as—ah yes, sorry, another ambiguity here, if you noticed it. I think that Buddhism, the way I see it, oscillates between two goals: one is minimal, the other is maximal. That is to say, on the one hand, the way and I love these descriptions, great Buddhist thinkers describe Nirvana or Shunyata or however you call it, Satori in Zen Buddhism, they always emphasize that it's just a spiritual shift in you. Nothing changes in reality. You change, your entire attitude. Everything remains out there. On the other hand, you have this, let's call it radical ontic, in the sense of covering all entities, reading where the idea is that since life is suffering, the global goal should be to basically—to change everything so that even worms and so on, so that life as suffering would be redeemed, would no longer be here, you know. So this I find an effect of the same deadlock. Then the third one. Buddhism tries to argue that you—that the problem is less suffering and that somehow less suffering means you have to begin by elementary ethical training. You know, be kind to others, don't steal, don't engage in promiscuity or too much passions, help others, and that these are necessary steps towards high meditative self-enlightenment. This is up to a point true, and it's typical—this is I think the big difference between our Western perception of Buddhism and the practice of Buddhism in countries like Thailand, whatever, where Buddhism is a way of life. That we, if you—if somebody tells you, "I’m a Buddhist," it mostly means "I meditate." For us, it's identified almost with meditation. But you know that very few people meditate in Asian countries. They—to be a Buddhist means mostly just to be kind, practice certain ethical codes, and then monks who meditate are more like a reminder to you that there is hope, you see there are people who were—who are there, who did achieve wisdom. But okay, now the problem with which many, many people are fighting is that why the hell should there be a necessary link between all this elementary goodness and Nirvana enlightenment? And the more I think about it, the more I agree—and they are among Buddhists also present—with those, especially here Zen Buddhism is the most honest. I almost admire Suzuki who, you know, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, when I was young in hippie times he was the—the main popularizer, who says quite openly, Zen Buddhism is a technique of meditation and that's all. You can be, he says, totalitarian, fascist, communist, capitalist, it doesn't matter, it's just certain meditative stance. And I think that one has to accept this gap, and it's a very painful gap, that—and here I think again the predominant Buddhism cheats. They try somehow to convince you that in order to arrive at Nirvana or whatever we call it, the zero point, redemption, liberation of your false self, that you should be a good person, that you should start with that and then grow up, up, up. Things are here much more problematic. The reason that this is not true is precisely, for example, you will say, "But the whole point of Buddhism is compassion, compassion towards all living beings and so on." Yeah, yeah, but then you know you get the notion of compassionate war, for example, no? For example, Suzuki himself wrote texts in the late thirties where he, fully supporting Japanese invasion of China, claimed this is a compassionate war. We intervene in China, killing millions, globally to—to lower the—the—the Chinese are like naughty children, they have to be disciplined to diminish their suffering and so on and so on. Even more, do you know that there is—and I have many cases of this, from Suzuki to others—for example, a book by Vernon Turner, *Soul Sword: The Way and Mind of a Zen Warrior*. Suzuki himself wrote about this and he claimed that Buddhist enlightenment can be even very helpful in a war because, to cut a long story short, it makes much easier for you to kill people. No, no, he is very open here, Suzuki. He claims that if I’m still caught in my false self, perceiving myself as a free autonomous agent, then, thought, you are the victim, I will reply to you. Let's say in a combat I have to cut out your eyes and slaughter you. Unfortunately, I don’t know why, I would have some problems doing this. But then a Buddhist friend comes and tells me, "Yes, I feel responsible blah blah blah because I misperceive myself as an agent." And here comes—Suzuki, I quote Suzuki. Suzuki claims, "If the soldier is trained by Buddhism to abandon his false self, then the whole perspective changes. Let's say again, me knife you. I no longer experience I’m sticking my knife into you, but it would be rather something like, I’m a totally neutral impersonal observer of phenomena. I see there in the cosmic dance the hand with knife dancing around and somehow in this cosmic dance your body or what can we do, no, your body falls on it." You think I’m—I’m exaggerating? Look at—this is quote from Suzuki. "It is really not he, the warrior, but the sword itself that does the killing. The warrior has no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy." And I’m not kidding here. This was the attitude of Japanese army. Now, let me to conclude be very clear here. I’m absolutely not mocking Buddhism in any way. It's a tremendously important spiritual experience. I’m just saying don't expect from it what you will not get. It's a spiritual experience, and the tragic gap that we have to accept is that you can be authentically enlightened in the Buddhist sense and at the same time a terrible torturer or whatever. It's even that when I was in Brazil—I always, I don’t know how, I have this misfortune of encountering people who tell me interesting but horrifying things. And I wonder if you to provoke you agree with me, but in Brazil I had an experience which allowed me to imagine a situation—I wonder if you would agree—where I would be ready to kill someone. Simply to kill him and even in this hypocritical way. Only I go even a step further, to kill someone who is not himself a murderer, who didn't kill anyone. You know what? When I talked with friends in Brazil who were tortured in the times of military dictatorship and so on, no? They told me that every unit of the secret military police which were kidnapping leftists, torturing them, the same in Argentina, Chile and so on, had a doctor who examined the patient and then basically told the torturers, gave the diagnosis, like, "This guy has a weak heart, torture him in this way, but you can torture him up to this level. What do you want? If you want him to survive, don't do this; if you don't care, do that. What will hurt him most is this." He didn't do anything. He just gave his opinion. But in a way, I wonder if you would agree, I—ethically this seems to me even more disgusting than to do the torturing itself. "Oh, I just said my opinion, it was all correct, I didn't do anything." If I were to be at a coffee or tea with such a guy and I would like, I would tell him like, "Look, there is a bird up," he looks up, I put poison into his tea or whatever. I found—okay. What they told me also in Brazil is very interesting. It's how the secret police, of course people are still up to a point people, they were very traumatized by—you know, nobody, very few people—maybe some top Nazis, maybe Pol Pot of Khmer Rouge—are—can be calm murderers and torturers. That, of course, they needed some kind of a wild religion to survive psychologically. And it's extremely interesting what happened, they told me. That within these circles of secret policemen torturing arresting, a kind of a wild spontaneous religion emerged—Christianity didn't work, too much, you know, help your neighbor, blah blah. A kind of a kind of a pseudo-reinvented New Age Buddhism where the point was precisely, you know, "There is no real other, we don't have selves, it's all a game of phenomena" and so on and so on. So this is—ah, the last problem with Buddhism and they have great debates here is: they admit it, many honest Buddhists, that we already can through some chemical means, pills and so on, artificially generate—okay, it's a debate, can we really?—but something that resembles to liberation, Nirvana. Now, how can we then distinguish between, let's call it, authentic enlightenment where you worked hard, all the meditating bullshit to come there, or simply taking a pill? It's very problematic, you know. Some of them cheat, I claim, because they introduce an ethical clause. They claim, "You should work and deserve Nirvana; if you do it directly, it doesn't count." Well, sorry, why not? They admit it, it's exactly the result itself, they claim—they admit—it's indistinguishable. So, you know, you see now where I see the problem. It's a beautiful spiritual attitude, Buddhism, this type of—and I would like to be able—sometimes I think I’m almost there, I’m not sure—but this idea of, you know, that this is something that Gilles Deleuze in his best book, maybe, *The Logic of Sense*, describes as the pure momentary event of sense. You know, how reality loses its substantial weight and becomes just a tiny, tiny, like a momentary lightning phenomena which stands for eternity, the void and so on. This is why, of course, the poetic form of Buddhism, especially Zen, we all know is the Japanese haiku, Matsuo Bashō. You know the best-known one, I translate, I give you a vague English translation: "Old pond, a frog jumps in, splash." Typical three lines. First you have the situation, material: old pond. Then you have the act: a frog jumps in. And then you have what the poem is about: this pure effect as Deleuze would have said referring to Stoics, incorporeal—this just bodiless pure phenomenon. The problem I claim—now I warn you to conclude, it doesn't go with me, you have to get a little bit of vulgarity, no?—is if you are truly Buddhist, you shouldn't cheat. And by cheating, I mean always taking these innocent noble cases, you know, like "water, pond, splash." Okay, first a vulgar way: what about—this—when I was in Japan, I talked with a friend, he agreed with me and we together composed this haiku where also you have splash, pure effect. It goes like this: "Toilet bowl with stale water, I sit on it, splash." My shit. Sorry, if you are seriously Buddhist, you should say "I have no right to cheat," you know, and say "This is not authentic." Why not? If your shit drops, it's splash, it can also be a pure phenomenon. Now let's go even further. Are you ready to do this? Let's say you are a murderer, a person is hanging on a rope in front of you, and in a moment of wisdom you compose this haiku: "Fat body wiggling in front of me, the swing of my sword, splash." His blood. You have to go to the end here. I think if you humanize it, "No, it should be ethically good, blah blah blah," it's not Buddhism. Again, I have—please again, now really to conclude, don't misunderstand me. I really think that like there are only two serious ethics in the world: Buddhist and properly reread, not the way it was done, Judeo-Christian ethics. The way I tend more towards Judeo-Christian ethics is—and with this I will conclude—it's a very simple reason: it's an ethic of external traumatic encounter. I think this is the difference, that you know Buddhism is like "Distance, don't be too attached to objects, don't fall." I think our ethics is precisely the ethics of the fall. What we celebrate is precisely what? Let's take falling in love. It's precisely—you know, this is why I really don't like the ideology of *Star Wars*. Where it's all this bullshit, you know, why did Anakin Skywalker become a bad guy? Because he got too attached to objects—to Natalie Portman, and before to her mother and so on. No, it—I think that's for us a proper spiritual event, like what is love? You are in your ordinary shitty life, you may be very happy even, you know, like one-night stand maybe here and there, drinking with friends, blah blah. Then you meet the one. You literally—I insist on this term which works only in English and French, other languages as far as I know don't use this term—fall, to fall in love. It's a fall! You fall! You are attached—all love is a catastrophe in this sense, like you know all your life turns around this traumatic encounter, and it's—love is a nice example of what Hegel calls this reversal of contingency into necessity, no? Love is like—I don't know—you sleep on the street, you enter a store, you see there a girl or a boy, it's love of your lifetime, and retroactively it is as if—you know this beautiful retroactive teleology of love—"All my life was secretly moving towards this moment" and so on. And no wonder that today—that's the saddest thing about today, it is connected with what I mocked at the beginning as healthy sex—that today we like to avoid this type of falling in love. My friend Alain Badiou told me in France that many dating and marriage agencies refer to this phrase and incidentally in United States I also already found some agencies. Namely, the formula that they use is this one: "We, marriage-dating agency, we will enable you to be in love without the fall." You know, like, none of these "ah" encounters, just we will tell you, "Ah, you like this, breasts, this type of that, okay, okay, we bring you together." But something is lost here, precisely what is lost is encounter. Now, as a final compromise, I will—and with this I will end—I will maybe correct myself a little bit. Now that I’m really trying to get deeply into—more deep into Buddhism. My friend, maybe you know him, he wrote a good book on—on Parallax, the book on Kant and Marx—in one of his recent texts, he found some Japanese minority of Buddhists where they claim that the true Nirvana, in the sense of getting over of your false self, it's not withdrawing into you, but it's precisely to fall fully. That we, as far as we stick to our self, we are not ready fully to fall. So, if you reread Buddhism in this way, God knows, maybe something wonderful can happen. And even to end up in a more conciliatory note, even with Tibetan Buddhism, something I found attractive there. Namely, first idea came to me when I heard—do you remember when was this, years ago?—that crazy siege of the fundamentalist Waco, Texas. I read, do you know, to terrorize them, to make them break down, do you know what music FBI was playing to them? You know those "ooo, ooo" low Buddhist horn songs, no? And then I asked a Tibetan friend of mine whom I met in India, and like—and he told me that yes, Buddhists are aware that there is what in *Star Wars* terminology we would have called the Dark Side of Power. That is to say that it's not simply nice Nirvana and then we fall into, that like already at the level of void, the absolute, something can go terribly wrong. That's what for example fascinates me in Tibetan Buddhism. So again, the dialogue is open here. I just wanted to complicate things a little bit. That's all. I’m really grateful for your patience. Then I saw that only two, three people left the room, but I hope my police agent out there put their names down and tomorrow you will be asking who saw them the last time and so on. Thanks very much. Now if you want Nonetheless, you know, we can—there I know there will be another Q&A debate this evening at nine. At nine? Yeah, yeah. But maybe we can do a little bit of rehearsal, so listen, Mitt, Mitt, you can ask me a question or whatever. Ha-ha, that's it, that's what Democrats should do, to block the—to block Romney speaking whenever. Oh, ah no, this one works, I’m sorry. Yes. Maybe you should come up here, yeah. This one? No, what's happening? Take mine. Hello? Hello? Yes. Yes, this one’s good. Okay. It works? Uh, yeah. Okay, so if someone would like to play Mitt Romney to his Obama and ask the first question, you’re welcome. Uh, come on. I’ll bring it around, yeah. There I see two. Typically you privilege the right over the left. This will be noted, yes. Okay, do you want to say your name and then—Hi. Hi there, my name is Adam. Ah, I hear you. Okay, thanks. Okay. I—I wondered if you would consider, uh, in these times, a vote for the GOP to be a potentially radical gesture toward—Did you hear my question? No. No. No. Would you consider—Yes. —a vote for the GOP, to be the Republican party, to be a potentially radical gesture towards hastening the zero point that you wrote about in *Living in the End Times*? To be what? A radical gesture? Could it potentially be considered a radical gesture towards hastening that zero point? So that we get quicker there? Or what? In what sense, a radical gesture? Yeah, I think if the—there's a—there’s a certain bad faith tongue-in-cheek aspect to it, which doesn't feel so good, but I am truly curious. I don’t know, it's a difficult question because I’m not bluffing here, I’m not trying opportunistically to avoid it. You know, nonetheless, I’ll put it this—this is all that I can say as a—how's that story, science fiction, foreigner in a foreign land or what, you know? Stranger in a strange land, yeah. You know, in spite of all the disappointment in Obama, I like the ideological public debate that he set in motion. For example, and it's not a question of is he right, but for example the whole debate about health care and so on is, I think, extremely important—no wonder it was so traumatic, they even dragged it to Supreme Court and so on—because it touches the very fundamentals of, let's call it, American ideology: freedom of choice, state shouldn't mess into it. Namely, the debate that I would like to hear is, are you really aware to what extent you need an extremely complex legal, ethical, institutional, whatever network so that you can really practice, as it were, the freedom of choice? I think that, you know, okay, abstractly you can always have a freedom of choice. You can step out, kill yourself or whatever. But what is for me a freedom of choice? To give you a simple example: is that I can go out and either go to cinema, buy that. But you know what this means? This means that when I meet another person there, I can be relatively sure that we share the same basic ethical rules, like when I meet him he will not spit on me or whatever. Or I should count that if nonetheless he beats me, there is some kind of public authority—you know, this is a very primitive example, but you see what I mean? We should become aware that it's not a simple alternative: state or society intervenes versus our freedom. That again, to have actual freedom of choice, you need an extremely complex—you need an extremely complex network. And I think this is not an argument, don't be afraid, for any kind of totalitarianism, that we should just have our tiny freedom with the vast state mechanism. My critical example here is precisely the one of twentieth-century communist societies. If you look at, you know, often communism was described as "Okay, it was planned, organized, and it was so stifling, everybody everything was regulated, not enough space for individual initiative." All good books about Soviet Union, the de facto state of economy there, at least in the last twenty years, tell you it was exactly the opposite. Beneath the surface of total control, nothing functions, there was an incredible chaos, you had to improvise, bribe people all the time. No, no, no, my point is not to claim not too much democracy. My point is that—and that's the best argument that I can imagine for democracy—that it's not either you have totalitarian order, you have order but you have to sacrifice democracy, or you have democracy but it's chaos. No, the best organized societies are precisely, as a rule, democratic societies. It's the same in China. They have capitalism without, okay, at least our Western democracy. But this is what my friends are telling me: go to a—one of these anonymous, they have forty of them, cities which have four, five millions people and we don't even know about them. And you will see the chaos in China. Even the central party, politburo, is worried about—about this. So again, this is the reason I have a certain—that's all I can say honestly—a certain sympathy for Obama. That at least he triggered the right debate. You know, that's all I can say, sorry, I cannot say more. I cannot say more because, you know, aren't you tired of this—he is not always stupid but like this Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard type of European intellectuals who go to L.A. and then give you your—his—their deep metaphysical vision of what is United States and so on? I don't want. I think that—I’m very honest here—I am critical of United States, but I’m critical of all of them, and this may horrify some leftists, but I think that—okay, I’ll put it in this way, in a very ironic way. You know, every honest leftist should support the idea to do a big monument for George Bush, the son. Why? Because in his eight years United States definitely lost most of its hegemonic situation. At the beginning United States were still some global policeman. Now, fuck it, they—they cannot even get rid of poor Afghanistan, of starved countries. North Korea can just smile at you all the time, you know. So what I’m saying is that we are effectively entering a more multicentric world. And, hard as it is to recognize for a leftist who is used to this, you know, anti-American imperialism, but this means that, you know, whenever there is a crisis in the world, it's not automatically the United States who are to blame, you know? Like, maybe there is the time to start to raise the question also about, for example—I admire the country, it's tremendous, impressive, but nonetheless—about Chinese economic colonialism. Are you aware what China is now doing at a gigantic level in—in Asia—sorry, in—in Africa? Buying almost whole countries, buying the best land, buying mines and introducing such a brutal exploitation there. That there are already—was it reported here?—for example, in Zambia, the Chinese bought a mine promising to local people the work. Then they have by state in Zambia determined that the lowest minimum wage is per month, of course. Chinese said this is too much and started to import their own workers who are ready to work for Local people were so furious that they lynched two of the Chinese managers, and so on and so on. Myanmar, everyone knows, generals, Myanmar is Chinese colony practically at economic level and so on. Sudan, whatever you want. So all I’m saying is that, yes, we should be critical towards the United States, blah blah, but we should whenever a critic of today's capitalism focuses too much against American imperialism, I always suspect, not that they are too radical, but that they are
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Slavoj Žižek
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Slavoj Žižek
imperialism, the dream behind is
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Slavoj Žižek
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Slavoj Žižek
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Yeah, yeah. I cannot wait the moment when I take power to give you some five years of education—re-education—Kent,
Yeah, yeah. I cannot wait the moment when I take power to give you some five years of education—re-education—Kent,
Slavoj Žižek
you know. Your lovely wife will be allowed to visit you once a year for two days, isn't it? If you will behave well there. Sorry, let's go on. Um, my name is Duncan Crowell, I’m a film and television studies major. Uh, I wanted to go back to, uh, what you said about the rat with the remote control. Yeah. Um, while we may not yet have physical control of people's brains in that way, it almost seems like we have psychological control through the permissive father. Um, so I guess my question is, what is the proper response to the permissive father and the idea of enjoy as a—It's a good question because first, do you know that—and you again—this is if anything an argument for the United States because at least with you it's public, you know it—you have something called—it sounds pretty bureaucratic, horrible, maybe you heard about it—sorry, ah yeah. Did you hear about something which is called DARPA? D-A-R-P-A. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's a big U.S. agency connected with all the national security where they are already doing it and again, I’m not involved in cheap America-bashing here—Chinese, Russians, everyone is doing it, just there you don't even learn that they are doing it. The idea is a pretty terrifying one of DARPA. It's their main project is "narrative analysis." Now you will say, "What is going on? Are they hiring deconstructionists now or whatever?" No, no. The idea is the following one. The main target are terrorists. What narrative makes a person a terrorist? What line of argumentation seduces you into it and so on and so on? So far, so good. But then comes the twist, which is, the point is not then to invent, I don't know, a counter-strategy, narrative strategy to undermine totalitarian set of mind or even straight brainwashing. No, it's direct—I don’t—I don't know how they want to do it, but that's the plan, you can check it on the net easily—direct neurological intervention. The dream is directly to locate is there a center for decisions where something went wrong with your neurons that you become a—a terrorist bomber and to direct to intervene directly at that point. Which I find pretty horrifying. It's worse than the worst North Korean nightmare. At least there they brainwash you or whatever. Here it's you know like you argue and you're not even taken seriously as arguing. It's simply your arguing is translated into a neuronal process and how we change things there and so on and so on. So what do we do? Ah, here I’m a pessimist in this sense. First, theoretically we should approach a crucial question, the naively metaphysical one, which is: what does all this bullshit biogenetics and so on mean? Are we free human beings or not? Is freedom just as some people say user's illusion, or not? Can freedom be saved? Because if the answer is no, then we are lost. Then treating us as free is just a superficial game. And there we basically adopt the Catholic Habermasian—I mean it seriously because Jürgen Habermas co-wrote a book—not co-wrote, they just put together the texts—with Joseph Ratzinger, now the Pope. You know how they call Ratzinger, the Pope, when he became a Pope in Germany where they hate him? Ratzinger-Ratzo, Papa Ratzo, you know, Pope the rat, the Ratzo or whatever. But okay. My point is that where the reaction is simply defensive: it's dangerous to mess with our brain, so we should prohibit doing it. But I think this is a purely defensive strategy, which doesn't work if nothing else for the obvious reason that well, there are people around there who, independently of what we prohibit, will be doing it like crazy. I often like to quote when I was in China I met a guy from their Institute of Sciences, biogenetic department, and he gave me in English the program of their that department where they say openly the goal of the development of biogenetics in China is to regulate the physical and psychic well-being of the Chinese people. You can't be clearer, you know. And again, I’m not here blaming the China. They are all doing it. So, first is this as it were metaphysical question: are we free or not? And the debate is far from conclusive here. This is fascinating topic. Do you know who is Benjamin Libet, no? The great guy from Berkeley who did *the* experiment, now it's much more elaborated, already twenty years ago, which is usually quoted as a conclusive proof that we don't have free will. You must have heard about it, it's wonderful. I simplify, it's more complex. You are wired and then you are asked to do a totally contingent gesture, like pick up this pen. Okay. What he proved is that a split of a second before you consciously make the decision, uh, your neurons already transmit the order to your hand to do it. This seems to be an argument that what when we do something and we think we do it freely, we are just becoming aware, registering a decision, if we may call it decision, or some process at a neurobiological level which started earlier independently of our will. Now things here get wonderfully complex. This guy himself, Benjamin Libet, rejects this interpretation. He claims in a beautifully Hegelian way that we are wrong here because he claims we are looking for freedom at the wrong place. In a very Hegelian line, freedom, the zero level of freedom, is not a positive decision like "I want this." He claims that okay, this is all neurally over-determined, blah blah. But in that split of a second, you can sabotage it, block it. And freedom intervenes there. And again, the debate is going on and so on and so on. So, that's the first thing. The second thing is, frankly, the only way I see is to take the risk,
you know. Your lovely wife will be allowed to visit you once a year for two days, isn't it? If you will behave well there. Sorry, let's go on. Um, my name is Duncan Crowell, I’m a film and television studies major. Uh, I wanted to go back to, uh, what you said about the rat with the remote control. Yeah. Um, while we may not yet have physical control of people's brains in that way, it almost seems like we have psychological control through the permissive father. Um, so I guess my question is, what is the proper response to the permissive father and the idea of enjoy as a—It's a good question because first, do you know that—and you again—this is if anything an argument for the United States because at least with you it's public, you know it—you have something called—it sounds pretty bureaucratic, horrible, maybe you heard about it—sorry, ah yeah. Did you hear about something which is called DARPA? D-A-R-P-A. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's a big U.S. agency connected with all the national security where they are already doing it and again, I’m not involved in cheap America-bashing here—Chinese, Russians, everyone is doing it, just there you don't even learn that they are doing it. The idea is a pretty terrifying one of DARPA. It's their main project is "narrative analysis." Now you will say, "What is going on? Are they hiring deconstructionists now or whatever?" No, no. The idea is the following one. The main target are terrorists. What narrative makes a person a terrorist? What line of argumentation seduces you into it and so on and so on? So far, so good. But then comes the twist, which is, the point is not then to invent, I don't know, a counter-strategy, narrative strategy to undermine totalitarian set of mind or even straight brainwashing. No, it's direct—I don’t—I don't know how they want to do it, but that's the plan, you can check it on the net easily—direct neurological intervention. The dream is directly to locate is there a center for decisions where something went wrong with your neurons that you become a—a terrorist bomber and to direct to intervene directly at that point. Which I find pretty horrifying. It's worse than the worst North Korean nightmare. At least there they brainwash you or whatever. Here it's you know like you argue and you're not even taken seriously as arguing. It's simply your arguing is translated into a neuronal process and how we change things there and so on and so on. So what do we do? Ah, here I’m a pessimist in this sense. First, theoretically we should approach a crucial question, the naively metaphysical one, which is: what does all this bullshit biogenetics and so on mean? Are we free human beings or not? Is freedom just as some people say user's illusion, or not? Can freedom be saved? Because if the answer is no, then we are lost. Then treating us as free is just a superficial game. And there we basically adopt the Catholic Habermasian—I mean it seriously because Jürgen Habermas co-wrote a book—not co-wrote, they just put together the texts—with Joseph Ratzinger, now the Pope. You know how they call Ratzinger, the Pope, when he became a Pope in Germany where they hate him? Ratzinger-Ratzo, Papa Ratzo, you know, Pope the rat, the Ratzo or whatever. But okay. My point is that where the reaction is simply defensive: it's dangerous to mess with our brain, so we should prohibit doing it. But I think this is a purely defensive strategy, which doesn't work if nothing else for the obvious reason that well, there are people around there who, independently of what we prohibit, will be doing it like crazy. I often like to quote when I was in China I met a guy from their Institute of Sciences, biogenetic department, and he gave me in English the program of their that department where they say openly the goal of the development of biogenetics in China is to regulate the physical and psychic well-being of the Chinese people. You can't be clearer, you know. And again, I’m not here blaming the China. They are all doing it. So, first is this as it were metaphysical question: are we free or not? And the debate is far from conclusive here. This is fascinating topic. Do you know who is Benjamin Libet, no? The great guy from Berkeley who did *the* experiment, now it's much more elaborated, already twenty years ago, which is usually quoted as a conclusive proof that we don't have free will. You must have heard about it, it's wonderful. I simplify, it's more complex. You are wired and then you are asked to do a totally contingent gesture, like pick up this pen. Okay. What he proved is that a split of a second before you consciously make the decision, uh, your neurons already transmit the order to your hand to do it. This seems to be an argument that what when we do something and we think we do it freely, we are just becoming aware, registering a decision, if we may call it decision, or some process at a neurobiological level which started earlier independently of our will. Now things here get wonderfully complex. This guy himself, Benjamin Libet, rejects this interpretation. He claims in a beautifully Hegelian way that we are wrong here because he claims we are looking for freedom at the wrong place. In a very Hegelian line, freedom, the zero level of freedom, is not a positive decision like "I want this." He claims that okay, this is all neurally over-determined, blah blah. But in that split of a second, you can sabotage it, block it. And freedom intervenes there. And again, the debate is going on and so on and so on. So, that's the first thing. The second thing is, frankly, the only way I see is to take the risk,
unknown
go to the end and then adopt
go to the end and then adopt
Slavoj Žižek
some regulation or whatever because you know I think that more and more, even at that more and more events at the level of ecology, financial capital, biogenetics show that these poetic times of Deleuzian-Negri revolution, you know, molecular multitudes, are over. That we will need more and
some regulation or whatever because you know I think that more and more, even at that more and more events at the level of ecology, financial capital, biogenetics show that these poetic times of Deleuzian-Negri revolution, you know, molecular multitudes, are over. That we will need more and
unknown
more incredibly large-scale global regulations, decisions and so on and so on. Also at this level. Interestingly enough, I respect honest
more incredibly large-scale global regulations, decisions and so on and so on. Also at this level. Interestingly enough, I respect honest
Slavoj Žižek
conservatives. Do you know that because of all this even, if I may put it like this, Fukuyama himself is no longer a Fukuyamaist? Lately he is openly claiming that the very fact of biogenetics, for example, ruins his idea of the end of history. That we need a much stronger regulation, organization and so on and so on. So that would be—I don't know how concretely to do it. I have just two axioms: first, don't try to escape through a simple prohibition. Because you know here I had debates with, even in Munich years ago, with some Catholic bishops where I asked them a simple question. Because their reaction to brain intervention was the following one: "Human being has an eternal soul, a human being is not just a neurobiological machine, and neurobiology tries to reduce him only to a machine, that's why we should prohibit this." But then I asked them the most obvious common-sense question: If this is true, that you believe that we cannot be reduced to neurobiological machines, that we have free soul, why then are you afraid of what scientist is doing to your brain? If you really believe in it, you should tell him, "Fuck you, do whatever you want, I’m not there, I have a free soul," you know. It’s as if secretly they know that they are wrong and they only want to maintain the illusion. Incidentally, I hope you know it, some theologians nonetheless provided a wonderful further argument. It's a beautiful theory. They claim the metaphor is the one with radio transmitter. They say that of course we have eternal soul, but this soul speaks to our body—is received in our body in the same way that radio waves are received by, if you want to hear them, through a radio transmitter. And they claim that our brain is like a radio transmitter for our soul. So, in the same way that if you mess with the radio too much, you will no longer hear the program, if we mess with our brain we will—and so on. So it's an interesting debate, but you see my point is very simple one: is that we are in deep shit here. There are no simple ethical solutions like the Habermasian one: "Let's admit as an axiom the dignity of human being, blah blah blah." Sorry, but what does this mean and so on, you know? Okay. To the left. Did somebody—Okay. You really have a problem. Please save my honor and make a move towards the left. Still center-left, social democracy, not true left. I’m sorry, please go on. Hi, Slavoj. My name is Mark Agostini, I was a film student and I’m a recent graduate of UVM. I’m sorry, can you maybe—Hello, hear me? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Um, I just have a quick film question for you. Um, you’ve been talking about *Melancholia* recently and you’ve done a fairly optimistic reading of the film. Uh, do you see that stemming from—from Buddhism, and could you maybe connect it to modern ecology? Uh, you call—you refer to the film von Trier, *Melancholia*? Lars von Trier, yes. Yep. Uh, yeah that's—that's—that’s a good—no, I mean I would nonetheless I would exaggerate to call it "optimist" reading, but nonetheless you know what I wanted to break with? This idea which I find pretty stupid that to be a—a—a leftist, radical politically, often people equate this, means that in some stupid way you have to be also optimist about human nature. You know that being a dark pessimist automatically entails reactionary social position. No, I think that all the great true leftists were very dark pessimist—like, take Bertolt Brecht. My God, what he is saying: human being is evil, we cannot change them and so on. In this sense I think that in a way maybe this is close to some version of Buddhism, this awareness of, you know, of our ultimate powerlessness. It can come a—a gigantic asteroid or whatever and we are—that this in a way, in a beautiful way, almost poetic although it's cynical to use here the term "poetry," renders palpable our fragility, how it all hinges on contingencies and so on and so on. And—and I don't see any problem in accepting this. There is another reason that I like the film. I think it should be read as an implicit negation of the standard Hollywood formula—maybe you know it—where till now the catastrophe was always just an external presentation of a usually Oedipal libidinal deadlock. Like, the examples I know is they are funny ones, maybe you know them. Did you see that bullshit with Bruce Willis and who and Ben Affleck and blah blah—*Armageddon*? It's so clear that it's really a film about Ben Affleck wants to screw Liv Tyler, he—and the father—Bruce Willis doesn't—and that this asteroid threatening the Earth is just a kind of a materialization of the wrath of the father. Because as you know at the end, father goes up there, okay saves humanity, explodes with it and the Earth is saved, the couple is created. And I claim even I did the detailed analysis of the other one. You remember it—sorry? *Deep Impact*, yes. It's even worse. It's Téa Leoni plays a girl whose father divorces mother, marries a young colleague of her. And I think all this bullshit about again asteroid hitting Earth, it's her incestuous rage. Which is why the end of the film is in this cynical sense happy. She goes to the father on the beach, they embrace, a gigantic wave kills them and so on. And what I like again in *Melancholia* is that precisely it turns around, it rejects this formula. It’s—I think although it can be read at that level but I think it's wrong. That is to say, I think it's wrong to read *Melancholia* as a film where the end of the world is just a cosmic ideological projection of this
conservatives. Do you know that because of all this even, if I may put it like this, Fukuyama himself is no longer a Fukuyamaist? Lately he is openly claiming that the very fact of biogenetics, for example, ruins his idea of the end of history. That we need a much stronger regulation, organization and so on and so on. So that would be—I don't know how concretely to do it. I have just two axioms: first, don't try to escape through a simple prohibition. Because you know here I had debates with, even in Munich years ago, with some Catholic bishops where I asked them a simple question. Because their reaction to brain intervention was the following one: "Human being has an eternal soul, a human being is not just a neurobiological machine, and neurobiology tries to reduce him only to a machine, that's why we should prohibit this." But then I asked them the most obvious common-sense question: If this is true, that you believe that we cannot be reduced to neurobiological machines, that we have free soul, why then are you afraid of what scientist is doing to your brain? If you really believe in it, you should tell him, "Fuck you, do whatever you want, I’m not there, I have a free soul," you know. It’s as if secretly they know that they are wrong and they only want to maintain the illusion. Incidentally, I hope you know it, some theologians nonetheless provided a wonderful further argument. It's a beautiful theory. They claim the metaphor is the one with radio transmitter. They say that of course we have eternal soul, but this soul speaks to our body—is received in our body in the same way that radio waves are received by, if you want to hear them, through a radio transmitter. And they claim that our brain is like a radio transmitter for our soul. So, in the same way that if you mess with the radio too much, you will no longer hear the program, if we mess with our brain we will—and so on. So it's an interesting debate, but you see my point is very simple one: is that we are in deep shit here. There are no simple ethical solutions like the Habermasian one: "Let's admit as an axiom the dignity of human being, blah blah blah." Sorry, but what does this mean and so on, you know? Okay. To the left. Did somebody—Okay. You really have a problem. Please save my honor and make a move towards the left. Still center-left, social democracy, not true left. I’m sorry, please go on. Hi, Slavoj. My name is Mark Agostini, I was a film student and I’m a recent graduate of UVM. I’m sorry, can you maybe—Hello, hear me? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Um, I just have a quick film question for you. Um, you’ve been talking about *Melancholia* recently and you’ve done a fairly optimistic reading of the film. Uh, do you see that stemming from—from Buddhism, and could you maybe connect it to modern ecology? Uh, you call—you refer to the film von Trier, *Melancholia*? Lars von Trier, yes. Yep. Uh, yeah that's—that's—that’s a good—no, I mean I would nonetheless I would exaggerate to call it "optimist" reading, but nonetheless you know what I wanted to break with? This idea which I find pretty stupid that to be a—a—a leftist, radical politically, often people equate this, means that in some stupid way you have to be also optimist about human nature. You know that being a dark pessimist automatically entails reactionary social position. No, I think that all the great true leftists were very dark pessimist—like, take Bertolt Brecht. My God, what he is saying: human being is evil, we cannot change them and so on. In this sense I think that in a way maybe this is close to some version of Buddhism, this awareness of, you know, of our ultimate powerlessness. It can come a—a gigantic asteroid or whatever and we are—that this in a way, in a beautiful way, almost poetic although it's cynical to use here the term "poetry," renders palpable our fragility, how it all hinges on contingencies and so on and so on. And—and I don't see any problem in accepting this. There is another reason that I like the film. I think it should be read as an implicit negation of the standard Hollywood formula—maybe you know it—where till now the catastrophe was always just an external presentation of a usually Oedipal libidinal deadlock. Like, the examples I know is they are funny ones, maybe you know them. Did you see that bullshit with Bruce Willis and who and Ben Affleck and blah blah—*Armageddon*? It's so clear that it's really a film about Ben Affleck wants to screw Liv Tyler, he—and the father—Bruce Willis doesn't—and that this asteroid threatening the Earth is just a kind of a materialization of the wrath of the father. Because as you know at the end, father goes up there, okay saves humanity, explodes with it and the Earth is saved, the couple is created. And I claim even I did the detailed analysis of the other one. You remember it—sorry? *Deep Impact*, yes. It's even worse. It's Téa Leoni plays a girl whose father divorces mother, marries a young colleague of her. And I think all this bullshit about again asteroid hitting Earth, it's her incestuous rage. Which is why the end of the film is in this cynical sense happy. She goes to the father on the beach, they embrace, a gigantic wave kills them and so on. And what I like again in *Melancholia* is that precisely it turns around, it rejects this formula. It’s—I think although it can be read at that level but I think it's wrong. That is to say, I think it's wrong to read *Melancholia* as a film where the end of the world is just a cosmic ideological projection of this
unknown
melancholic family deadlock or whatever. It's wrong, really. Incidentally, I just told Ted before, you know that you have another modest film, which is not total shit, it is
melancholic family deadlock or whatever. It's wrong, really. Incidentally, I just told Ted before, you know that you have another modest film, which is not total shit, it is
Slavoj Žižek
shit but not total shit, with who was the actor, Keira Knightley and that guy Colin whatever—no, you know, something like *Finding a Friend to End the World*. Where it's again an asteroid, gigantic one, approaching Earth. And what I liked so much is that okay, the couple is created, but nonetheless they die. The final moment is the end. I like this breaking out of this standard Oedipal frame. How—and this is typical Hollywood, I’ve written about this, how whatever happens, it's a metaphorical extensions of the problem of a couple or whatever. And again, Spielberg is in this, like his *War of the Worlds* with Tom Cruise. Did you notice? It's really a movie about Tom Cruise reestablishing his paternal authority. At the beginning he is—it's all these poor aliens have to lose their time attacking Earth so that Tom Cruise becomes a good father, no? This is why again—because I always had a soft spot for von Trier. It's so fashionable in Europe to dismiss him as some suspicious half-Nazi, anti-Semitic. You remember that scandal at Cannes Festival? Listen, I know people who knew him. He is a crazy guy, definitely not anti-Semitic. He likes to provoke, blah blah, he was just—he got lost there and so on. No, I think that he definitely is one of the few genuine talents, I claim, today. Maybe even more than the one who is now more acceptable and some of his films I do like, Michael Haneke, the Austrian guy, no? Sorry, I’m—I think we should stop there. So let's—I’m sorry, traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor. He is—that's for him the political space, you know: the right, center-right, center-left. All others are terrorists, marginals, whatever. People will remember this when they take power. Thank you very much, sorry.
shit but not total shit, with who was the actor, Keira Knightley and that guy Colin whatever—no, you know, something like *Finding a Friend to End the World*. Where it's again an asteroid, gigantic one, approaching Earth. And what I liked so much is that okay, the couple is created, but nonetheless they die. The final moment is the end. I like this breaking out of this standard Oedipal frame. How—and this is typical Hollywood, I’ve written about this, how whatever happens, it's a metaphorical extensions of the problem of a couple or whatever. And again, Spielberg is in this, like his *War of the Worlds* with Tom Cruise. Did you notice? It's really a movie about Tom Cruise reestablishing his paternal authority. At the beginning he is—it's all these poor aliens have to lose their time attacking Earth so that Tom Cruise becomes a good father, no? This is why again—because I always had a soft spot for von Trier. It's so fashionable in Europe to dismiss him as some suspicious half-Nazi, anti-Semitic. You remember that scandal at Cannes Festival? Listen, I know people who knew him. He is a crazy guy, definitely not anti-Semitic. He likes to provoke, blah blah, he was just—he got lost there and so on. No, I think that he definitely is one of the few genuine talents, I claim, today. Maybe even more than the one who is now more acceptable and some of his films I do like, Michael Haneke, the Austrian guy, no? Sorry, I’m—I think we should stop there. So let's—I’m sorry, traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor. He is—that's for him the political space, you know: the right, center-right, center-left. All others are terrorists, marginals, whatever. People will remember this when they take power. Thank you very much, sorry.