Slavoj Zizek's "THE PARALLAX OF LACK AND SURPLUS IN POLITICS" (LACK V, 2025)
Talk · Todd McGowan ·
2025-03-15 · 1:28:55 · 10,667 words
ideologyhegel-dialecticscommunism-socialismhistoryphilosophy-generalpsychoanalysisreligion-theologycapitalismfascism-populismgeopolitics-wartechnology-ai-cyberspaceconsciousness-mindecology-climatesubjectivitydemocracyscience-physicseconomicsrace-antisemitismliberalism-political-correctnessrevolution-violencelanguage
Žižek apologizes for his age and senility before launching into a lecture on quantum mechanics as a metaphor for history, arguing that reality is the result of contingent collapses of superimposed possibilities. He uses the 'coffee without cream' joke and examples from South Africa and the US Civil Rights Movement to illustrate how the past is retroactively determined by the present outcome, rejecting deterministic evolutionism in favor of a radically open history that only becomes readable after the fact. Žižek argues that the past is open and actualized by the present, using Kurosawa’s Hamlet and quantum physics (video games) as examples. He critiques Marx for viewing communism as merely capitalism without capital, arguing instead that the obstacle (capital) is the condition of possibility for its expansion. He reinterprets alienation and Christianity through Hegel and Lacan, positing that the Big Other is incomplete, and applies the paradox of lack/excess to modern capitalism, culminating in an analysis of Trumpian 'liberal fascism' and contemporary shamelessness. Žižek analyzes shame as a psychoanalytic and political category, drawing on Lacan's Seminar XVII critique of May '68 and the Frankfurt School's concept of repressive de-sublimation to argue that contemporary shamelessness, illustrated by Israeli public admissions of prisoner abuse and Trumpian populism, signals not liberated desire but its catastrophic over-saturation. He maps an internal contradiction within Trumpism between Steve Bannon's right-wing populism defending organic community and the neo-Platonic zero-point utopianism of Elon Musk and Curtis Yarvin, urging the left to exploit this tension rather than simply label Trumpism fascist. The Q&A extends these themes to Abu Ghraib versus Israeli obscene openness, to quantum mechanics as the site of the Lacanian Real in nature (connecting to Žižek's earlier Schelling book), and to the limits of AI, its inability to spontaneously develop rituals and to authentically curse.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 48
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The quantum wave state where particles follow all possible paths simultaneously, representing the 'insistence' of possibilities before they collapse into actual reality.
The multiple potentialities that exist in a quantum superposition and continue to 'insist' or echo within the final collapsed form, rather than being erased.
as “evolutionism”
The progressive view of history where events follow a predestined path toward a specific goal (like communism or capitalism), which Žižek rejects.
The state of history before a collapse, where no single outcome is necessary or predestined, contrasting with deterministic evolutionism.
as “human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape”
A Marx quote used to explain retroactivity: higher development (humanity/capitalism) allows us to read the subordinate species (apes/prehistoric forms) as pointing toward it, though the path was originally open.
The mechanism by which things become what they are only through the event of a collapse, rendering the past necessary only after the fact.
Something that was a blind spot or not even a possibility in the past becomes actualized in the present, revealing the openness of history.
The idea that a future revolution will not just fix the present but will retroactively validate and redeem all previous failed attempts and struggles.
A metaphor for quantum indeterminacy: reality is not fully programmed/ontologically constituted until observed, similar to how video games only render details when approached.
A joke among physicists suggesting God did not program the details of the atom because He underestimated human intelligence, resulting in indeterminacy.
as “capitalism without capital”
Žižek’s critique of Marx: Marx envisions communism as capitalism stripped of its form (capital/profit), but Žižek argues the form is constitutive.
as “obstacle as condition of possibility”
A Hegelian insight: what appears as an obstacle to full development is actually the condition that makes that development possible.
as “imperfection giving birth to fantasy”
A personal anecdote illustrating that removing an imperfection (obstacle) results in blandness; the flaw is necessary for the fantasy structure.
as “separation vs. alienation”
Lacan’s 'separation' is not just reappropriating alienated forms, but recognizing that the distance/lack is immanent to the Big Other itself.
Žižek’s term for the realization that God is absent/incomplete, and the distance from God is immanent to God, following Hegel’s reading of the Crucifixion.
as “Eli Eli lama sabachthani”
Christ’s cry 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' which Hegel reads as the moment God experiences abandonment/incompleteness.
The Lacanian paradox: lack and excess are not two different things filling each other, but two sides of the same structural phenomenon.
as “poets of lack”
Žižek’s derogatory term for Lacanian followers who obsessively focus on 'lack' without understanding its relation to excess.
Contrasted with perversion: the hysterical subject (the May '68 protester) only dreams of going to the end but secretly wants a new master, an anti-feminist structure Žižek critically attributes to early revolutionary thinking.
The original Lacanian question of hysteria: the subject lacks not an object, but their own identity as an object for the Other.
as “Trumpian left”
Žižek’s ironic label for Steve Bannon, who claims 'money is for jerks' and represents a form of capitalism detached from traditional monetary value.
Money that no longer has tangible substance or utility, creating a house of cards that can collapse, characteristic of modern capitalism.
Hegel’s formula: the very excess of wealth in civil society creates the lack (poverty/rabble) it is supposed to fill.
as “rabble”
as “super-ego paradox”
The more you follow the injunction to enjoy/have, the more guilty you feel; the more you have, the more you feel the lack.
as “paradox of anti-semitism”
The more Jews are destroyed, the more powerful the 'remainder' or fantasy of the Jew becomes.
Žižek's characterization of tech billionaires like Musk and Zuckerberg who effectively behave as feudal lords exercising sovereignty outside democratic accountability.
Žižek’s preferred term for Trumpism: a fascism grounded in extreme liberalism, seeking to reduce the state while strengthening it through prohibitions.
as “prohibition on prohibiting”
Jacques-Alain Miller's formulation (approvingly cited) for the operative meta-rule of contemporary permissive capitalism: the new difficulty is not repression of enjoyment but the prohibition on prohibiting anything.
as “repressive de-sublimation”
Frankfurt School (Horkheimer/Adorno) concept invoked here to show that lifting repression and exposing drives does not reduce repression but intensifies it, de-sublimation rebounds as worse repression, not liberation.
Freud's term invoked against naive liberationism: the pervert acts out what the hysteric only dreams, yet Freud said the unconscious is nowhere more repressed than in perversion, so acting-out intensifies rather than dissolves repression.
Freud's Urverdrängung: desire is immanently inconsistent and self-divided from the start, which is why permissive perversion ends in a self-destructive deadlock rather than freedom.
The constitutive gap that structures desire; shame functions not to block excessive desire but to protect this foundational lack against an excess that would obliterate desire by over-saturating it.
Žižek's reinterpretation: shame is not a barrier against too-strong desire but the protective guard of desire's constitutive lack against excess that would saturate and obliterate desire altogether.
as “networked state”
Curtis Yarvin's concept (cited critically) of a patchwork of corporate-sovereign territories rebuilt from zero by authoritarian leaders and AI, which Žižek says is 'more communist in a vulgar way than communism ever dared to be.'
as “jouissance sans entrave”
Enjoying without obstacles, the utopian dream of May '68 that Elon Musk now embodies as capitalism's reappropriation of that liberatory logic, with multiple careers, children by many women, and colonizing Mars.
Excess enjoyment: used both as what capitalism now produces without prohibition and in the phrase 'jouissance sans entrave' as the unfulfillable '68 dream that Elon Musk currently embodies.
Žižek's thesis that the libidinal logic of the '68 uprising, unlimited self-reinvention, breaking all constraints, has been captured and enacted by figures like Elon Musk within capitalist production.
Laclau's lesson as cited by Žižek: fascism must be distinguished from the particular elements, disciplined marching crowds, anti-bank rhetoric, it reappropriated from the left; calling everything fascism conflates the two.
Lacanian concept: quantum physics, with its indeterminate quantum waves, is described (via Henry Krips) as the first time the Lacanian Real, what resists symbolization, appears within science.
A figure whose conspicuous presence makes the falseness of the surrounding spectacle immediately legible, Bernie Sanders sitting with mittens at the Biden inauguration rendered the whole event visibly fake to millions.
Žižek's ironic label for the consoling logic 'where danger grows, the saving power also'; he rejects it as too easy, insisting the situation may simply worsen with no redemptive counter-force.
The past is open at the symbolic level; Žižek extends this claim, drawing on his Schelling book, to suggest retroactivity may already operate in quantum mechanics, i.e. in nature itself.
as “past is open”
The past is not fixed but remains open to being re-read and actualized by new present phenomena, which make it readable in a new way.
Žižek's materialist-ecological claim that nature has no homeostatic essence, it is not a stable, balanced circulation but is characterized by the same catastrophic imbalance and excess as human history.
The contemporary political pathology of publicly and proudly admitting atrocities without shame, as opposed to older hypocritical denial, which Žižek argues is more alarming than hypocrisy because it dissolves the last fiction of norms.
The disappearance of shame in public life, where previously unimaginable acts (like torture) are openly defended and normalized.
Stories he reaches for 10
Sanders's conspicuous, unglamorous presence amid the spectacle of the Biden inauguration was a symptomal point: millions immediately grasped through his mere presence that the entire event was a big fake.
“he was the symptomal point you see him and he's very present there present there meant and what what was so nice is how millions got it”
Žižek cites Kurosawa’s 'The Bad Sleep Well' as an example of a 'blind spot' in Shakespeare’s Hamlet being actualized in a later work.
“Akira Kurosawa did a Hamlet in with the wonderful title that only bad men sleep well”
Žižek’s personal story: a woman said he was perfect except for needing to lose two pounds; he argues this 'imperfection' is necessary to generate fantasy.
“my body is perfect just it would have been just better if I were to lose two pounds”
T.S. Eliot’s claim that new art changes the past, which Žižek uses to argue the past is 'open' and actualized by the present, not just re-interpreted.
“every new phenomenon really new in art changes the entire past makes it readable in a new way”
A joke among physicists that God didn't program atomic details because He underestimated human intelligence, resulting in quantum indeterminacy.
“caught God with his pants down”
Hegel’s formula: the surplus of wealth in capitalism structurally creates the lack (poverty/rabble) it is supposed to fill.
“it becomes apparent that despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough”
In the Q&A, Žižek responds to the Abu Ghraib comparison by arguing that American torturers at least tried to cover up and deny, making hypocrisy preferable to the current practice of openly and proudly admitting prisoner abuse without any regret.
“hypocrisy is better than obscene openness at least till now they tried to cover it up interpret it away”
Hegel’s reading of Christ’s cry on the cross: the distance separating man from God is immanent to God Himself, proving the Big Other is incomplete.
“Eli Eli lama sabachthani father why have you abandoned me”
The more Jews are physically destroyed, the more powerful the fantasy/remainder of the Jew becomes in anti-Semitic ideology.
“the more Jews are destroyed the more powerful is the remainder”
A Knesset supporter defends the torture, asking if inserting a stick into a rectum is legitimate, only to be shouted down, illustrating shamelessness.
“to insert a stick into a person's rectum is this legitimate”
Works invoked 16
Ninotchka film
Used to illustrate the logic of 'coffee without cream' and quantum superposition.
Grundrisse book
Cited for the quote about human anatomy and the anatomy of the ape, illustrating retroactive determination.
The German Ideology book
Marx and Engels; cited for the description of the communist as not fixed to a single profession, applied ironically to Elon Musk as the ultimate figure of capitalism's reappropriation of '68.
1984 book
Orwell's novel; its tripartite world map (Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia) used as a template to critique BRICS as producing not multipolarity but three to five regional powers with their own spheres of influence.
The Bad Sleep Well film
Kurosawa’s Hamlet adaptation, cited as actualizing a 'blind spot' in Shakespeare’s original.
Écrits book
Lacan's collected writings; mentioned as containing a reprint of an early Lacan text (late 1930s) whose footnotes reference Horkheimer and Adorno, evidencing the Frankfurt School source of Lacan's concept of repressive de-sublimation.
Lacan's Seminar XVII; central source for the analysis of shame, the critique of May '68 protesters, and the argument about permissiveness; Žižek notes it is available in English translation and reads it as more refined than its provocative surface suggests.
Le Monde journal
Source of the Balladur quote illustrating retroactive necessity.
Praised for showing ancient societies as superpositions of different political forms.
Žižek's own Schelling book; its final chapter on retroactivity grounds his current claim that what we assume is exclusively symbolic may already operate in nature, as quantum mechanics suggests.
Heidegger's essay; mentioned only as the text at whose conclusion Hölderlin's 'where danger grows' line appears, which Žižek labels and rejects as the 'Hölderlin paradigm.'
thesis on history essay
Walter Benjamin's work cited for the idea that revolution redeems the past.
People invoked 52
Mentioned as a friend present at the event.
Henry Krips positive
Žižek's colleague and friend, affectionately described as an 'old European elitist'; credited with the formulation that quantum mechanics is the first time the Lacanian Real is brought out in science; introduced also as Josef Krips's nephew.
Pontalis positive
A Lacanian follower who developed the idea of the subject’s lack as the object for the Other.
Zhou Enlai positive
Attributed (falsely) with the 'too early to say' quote about the French Revolution, illustrating retroactive meaning.
Carlo Rovelli positive
A quantum physicist Žižek has exchanged ideas with; Rovelli liked Žižek’s 'video game' metaphor for quantum physics.
Likely a mangled reference to a person or event (possibly 'LAC' as an acronym or name) mentioned in the context of a minor conference.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as Žižek's 'good friend' and 'best theorist of catastrophes,' quoted regarding retroactive necessity.
Todd McGowan negative
Excluded from the list of friends; Žižek jokes that Todd is 'out' for wanting peace, implying a disagreement on political strategy.
David Graeber positive
Co-author of The Dawn of Everything, praised for showing ancient societies as 'superpositions' of authoritarian and democratic forms.
Great classical conductor, uncle of Henry Krips; Žižek jokes that the only reason he initially appreciated Henry was because of Josef, personal warmth, no intellectual deployment.
French politician mentioned in a Le Monde quote about retroactive necessity.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Frankfurt School co-author; cited alongside Horkheimer as the theoretical source of repressive de-sublimation that Lacan's Seminar XVII implicitly draws on.
Mentioned in audience Q&A: one of her last essays addressed Abu Ghraib and argued that only after images went public did a response emerge, framing the power of the image in the context of documented atrocity.
Steve Bannon positive
Ironically called the 'Trumpian left'; cited for his podcast claim that 'money is for jerks' to illustrate virtual money.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for 'separation' vs. 'alienation,' the paradox of lack/excess, and the question 'what am I for the other?'
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek’s 'favorite British Catholic,' cited for understanding the incompleteness of God in Christianity.
Black Panther Party positive
Cited as the violent threat that made MLK's peaceful success possible.
Curtis Yarvin negative
ASR likely correct (pseudonym Mencius Moldbug); founder of neo-reactionary movement. Žižek finds him 'very interesting' but criticizes his networked state / patchwork-of-SovCorps as 'more communist in a vulgar way than communism ever dared to be' and as dangerous neo-Platonic utopianism.
Donald Trump negative
Central political target; Žižek argues Trump's practice is neo-feudal while his rhetoric invokes common sense and sanity, the doctor/wife joke captures how Trump frames democracy's demolition as reassurance.
Mentioned as a friend present at the event.
Mentioned as a friend present at the event.
Contrasted with Bannon; associated with the goal to 'reduce the state' in Trumpian politics.
George Orwell positive
1984's three-superstate geopolitical map (Oceania/Eurasia/Eastasia) deployed to argue that BRICS produces not genuine multipolarity but a world of regional hegemons dividing the globe into spheres of influence.
Mentioned as a friend present at the event.
Mentioned as a friend present at the event.
Bernie Sanders positive
Used positively as the 'symptomal point' at Biden's inauguration: his unglamorous presence with mittens instantly revealed the event's hollowness to millions, an example of immediacy that makes mediation visible.
Mark Zuckerberg negative
Grouped with Musk as one of the 'neo-feudal masters', tech billionaires who effectively exercise sovereign power outside democratic structures.
T. S. Eliot positive
Cited for his famous text on how new art changes the past, which Žižek uses to support his view of the open past.
Mentioned in the context of a meeting with Trump and Fed, used to mock 'multiculturalist idiots' and their manners.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Cited for the term 'techno-feudalism,' which Žižek finds partially correct but problematic.
Ernesto Laclau positive
Called 'another of my enemies' yet Žižek explicitly agrees with Laclau's lesson: fascism as ideological edifice must be distinguished from the elements (marching crowds, anti-bank rhetoric) it reappropriated from the left.
Referenced only as the vehicle through which Hölderlin's line enters the conversation, a questioner mentions Heidegger quotes it at the end of 'The Question Concerning Technology.'
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Director of Ninotchka, whose joke Žižek quotes frequently.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Žižek says 'here I agree with him' on Miller's commentary that contemporary capitalism shifted from repression to permissiveness, and on his phrase 'prohibition on prohibiting' as the new operative meta-rule.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Implicit reference through Žižek's 'Schelling book' (The Invisible Remainder), whose final chapter addresses retroactivity and now grounds his claim that retroactivity may operate in quantum mechanics as well as the symbolic.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for his thesis on history, that a revolution redeems all past failed attempts.
His inauguration described as 'one of the most disgusting events I can imagine' and 'one big fake', redeemed only by Bernie Sanders's symptomatic presence revealing its emptiness.
David Wengrow positive
Co-author of The Dawn of Everything, praised for showing ancient societies as 'superpositions' of authoritarian and democratic forms.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited as a 'good theologian' who understood the basic move of Christianity regarding separation from God.
Mentioned in audience Q&A (not by Žižek directly) as co-founder of the neo-reactionary movement alongside Curtis Yarvin; Žižek does not comment on Land independently.
Friedrich Hölderlin negative
His line 'where danger grows, the saving power also' (quoted by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology) is labeled by Žižek the 'Hölderlin paradigm' and rejected as too easy a consolation, the danger may simply get worse.
Max Horkheimer positive
Co-author with Adorno of repressive de-sublimation; cited via Lacan's early texts (footnotes in Écrits) as a source Lacan drew on for his critique of '68.
Akira Kurosawa positive
Cited for his film 'The Bad Sleep Well' (Hamlet adaptation) as an example of actualizing a blind spot in Shakespeare.
Nelson Mandela positive
Cited as an example of a leader who used peaceful negotiation backed by the threat of violence (ANC).
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Cited as an example of a leader who won peacefully through negotiations with LBJ, backed by the threat of the Black Panthers.
Cited as a past failed attempt that would be redeemed by a future revolution.
Balaji Srinivasan negative
ASR plausible spelling; proposes gradually opening new 'rebooted' territories instead of reforming existing society, criticized as 'Platonism at its purest': first digitally imagine a state, then apply the idea to an actual territory.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for his insight that capitalism emerged contingently, not necessarily, and for the retroactive reading of history (human anatomy/ape).
Mentioned as a friend present at the event.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for knowing that the primordial experience of lack is one of excess.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek’s primary philosophical guide, especially regarding the 'open past,' 'obstacle as condition,' and the incompleteness of the Big Other.
Mentioned as the politician with whom Martin Luther King negotiated.
Transcript 66 turns
unknown
but that leads into actually my next point which is to really really thank Danny Cho and Paul Eisenstein this has been the best LAC ever I think and not only that but they had to deal with the most people by far and they've just done it with incredible aplomb if you've noticed them leaving your session it wasn't because they were rude it's because they were called into an emergency if anyone else left your session I don't know what to say about that so that's number one number two I want to especially thank Jennifer Friedlander I can't tell you how many panels I was at where I was like wow seems like this was actually planned to be a panel and it was solely the work of Jennifer Friedlander every other LAC we've had multiple people there
but that leads into actually my next point which is to really really thank Danny Cho and Paul Eisenstein this has been the best LAC ever I think and not only that but they had to deal with the most people by far and they've just done it with incredible aplomb if you've noticed them leaving your session it wasn't because they were rude it's because they were called into an emergency if anyone else left your session I don't know what to say about that so that's number one number two I want to especially thank Jennifer Friedlander I can't tell you how many panels I was at where I was like wow seems like this was actually planned to be a panel and it was solely the work of Jennifer Friedlander every other LAC we've had multiple people there
unknown
so not
so not
unknown
only an incredible thinker but also an incredible organizer of things so if you have any conference planning you want to do Jennifer is now going to hire out to do no she just said no okay so I also want to say afterward please do not rush Slavoj we have a wheelchair coming in to help him out so we're going to have to
only an incredible thinker but also an incredible organizer of things so if you have any conference planning you want to do Jennifer is now going to hire out to do no she just said no okay so I also want to say afterward please do not rush Slavoj we have a wheelchair coming in to help him out so we're going to have to
unknown
no
no
unknown
just a little joke but I do want to say that most of you know and I have to say that I totally support him in this that he's for since the United States has abandoned Ukraine Slavoj is for rearming Europe and then and supporting Ukraine and he's actually doing his personal part in that and you saw the book that I gave to Danny Slavoj has offered all remaindered hardcovers of Less Than Nothing to the Ukrainian army to drop them on Russia because they're so heavy so just it was a nice gesture on his part and I do want to say that some of you might know this I recently had the pleasure of reading Slavoj's new book on quantum mechanics and he's trying to introduce mathematics more into his thought so today he'll be going off on a lot of tangents
just a little joke but I do want to say that most of you know and I have to say that I totally support him in this that he's for since the United States has abandoned Ukraine Slavoj is for rearming Europe and then and supporting Ukraine and he's actually doing his personal part in that and you saw the book that I gave to Danny Slavoj has offered all remaindered hardcovers of Less Than Nothing to the Ukrainian army to drop them on Russia because they're so heavy so just it was a nice gesture on his part and I do want to say that some of you might know this I recently had the pleasure of reading Slavoj's new book on quantum mechanics and he's trying to introduce mathematics more into his thought so today he'll be going off on a lot of tangents
unknown
so that's the really
so that's the really
unknown
that was the only one that was for me that was for Alexis okay all right so I also want to say to Slavoj do not push that table out because it will fall and then we'll have a disaster this is the last thing because we're not allowed to speak long at LAC that I once was talking to Joan Copjec at a dinner which was a place that was my Slavoj and my level not her level and she said to me you know everything that we do is possible because of him and I just thought that's just really true and I also want to say that even the ethos of LAC is really in his spirit I was just talking to him in the lobby of the hotel and somebody came up to him and said are you the really great philosopher Slavoj Zizek he said
that was the only one that was for me that was for Alexis okay all right so I also want to say to Slavoj do not push that table out because it will fall and then we'll have a disaster this is the last thing because we're not allowed to speak long at LAC that I once was talking to Joan Copjec at a dinner which was a place that was my Slavoj and my level not her level and she said to me you know everything that we do is possible because of him and I just thought that's just really true and I also want to say that even the ethos of LAC is really in his spirit I was just talking to him in the lobby of the hotel and somebody came up to him and said are you the really great philosopher Slavoj Zizek he said
unknown
no no no you've mistaken me for someone
no no no you've mistaken me for someone
unknown
else so I think in that spirit I want to introduce Slavoj Zizek who needs no introduction I have
else so I think in that spirit I want to introduce Slavoj Zizek who needs no introduction I have
Slavoj Žižek
many things to say so please stop let's say after minutes throw something at me or remind me to conclude first I must say a sincere apology it's you know believe me next week I will be and that it is nothing dignified in getting old you just get more senile and more lazy I hate it so my apology goes to all those it was physically for me impossible to spend more time here I was every day sleeping around even this afternoon around hours per day so my sincere apology it wasn't my ignorance or whatever I'm really glad to be here it's not just all my friends who are here Henry and Jennifer Hillary Paul and all of them Russell Ross we can go on I will not enumerate them I will just say that Todd is not included I will tell you why you know I was told by some multiculturalist idiots that when you come to a foreign country you must obey their manners so I looked what are the manners here I looked at meeting Zelensky Trump and Fed and that's what you will get no gratitude for me because you treated me disrespectfully you didn't say thanks enough when I came here this was disrespectful you didn't wait for me at the airport you just told me that he has some minor conference LAC I don't know I have to be there then you know he sent me a message before the conference saying he will make everything to make feel me good and Trump your great leader's reaction to Zelensky came to me like who are you to tell me how I should feel so Todd you are out when you want peace come they say here otherwise you are out now let's go for it's a long speech I hope I will be able to do it I apologize again in advance if some of you will recognize some of the stuff because I really want to focus on this topic lack excess and so on while I'm still learning about quantum mechanics among other people from Jennifer and Henry of course I find its insights enable us to read human history in a holographic way as the result of a series of contingent collapses of superimposed possibilities what do I mean by this quantum waves describe the world at some kind of I like this expression pre-existent level what exists or rather what insists I would say in our as our reality is only the outcome of the collapse of quantum superpositions at this pre-existing quantum waves level particles follow all possible paths when they move from one to another point consider the well-known double-slit experiment in which individual electrons follow not one but every possible path from the gun to the screen one path takes the electron through the left slit another through the right slit back out through the left into a U-turn and so on to understand how something emerges in our reality in a particular form we have to understand that it enacted all possible forms and that these superimposed forms continue to echo in the final form so it's not simply we have superposition of different possibilities and then once you have a collapse one form erases others no the superimposed other forms insist I'm sorry not to have time but I will briefly improvise for example one of my favorite jokes I quoted it at least in my work I would say times you know from Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka where a guy comes to a cafeteria and says please bring me coffee without cream the waiter says sorry I don't have we don't have cream so I cannot give you coffee without cream we only have milk so I can only give you coffee without milk this may appear as a joke but this is I claim A quantum reality and B also how our history works when something happens to understand it you can include into its identity all things that might have happened but didn't happen now you will say what has this to do with history I think precisely a similar thing holds for our political struggles you remember two big examples I don't think they were such a big success but okay some kind of success that we had where peaceful negotiation won over armed resistance but okay the two examples are of course South Africa how ANC came to power and here Martin Luther King but I read history books about both these examples and in both cases you know and Martin Luther King was fully aware of this yes he won peacefully through all those shady negotiations with LBJ Johnson and so on but he was fully aware that this worked only because behind there was a threat of Black Panthers and so on of a more violent without that threat it wouldn't have happened peaceful negotiation it's the same Mandela was fully aware of it he was able to play peaceful negotiations because there was always a threat that ANC might resort to more violence why is this so important today I think that for a whole series of reasons first I think that we cannot any longer afford this progressive view of history where even if it's not absolute determinism things follow a certain predestined path I'm here even critical of Marx Marx was aware that communism will not necessarily arrive but for him the possibility of communism was inscribed into the situation it may fail but that was the logical outcome that's why although I don't agree with that I think we should reject this evolutionism that's why I although I don't agree with them fully I quite enjoyed The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow you know the bestseller where they point out apropos ancient Inca society how it wasn't simply all this human sacrifice authoritarian society it was the superposition of this authoritarian version and of another much more democratic version what does this mean for people like me who in some sense are still close to Marxism I think that there is another level of Marx where he is aware of this Marx always emphasized that capitalism is not a necessary culmination of alienated history capitalism emerged Marx made this clear in a totally contingent way because of a series of again contingent reasons the discovery of gold in Latin America the privatization of commons in the UK and so on so now comes my point there was the situation was radically open but once capitalism was here it as it were retroactively it literally at the symbolic level of course changed the past the history became readable retroactively as leading to capitalism so you know there is a famous quote in Marx's manuscript Grundrisse where he wrote human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape the intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species however can be understood only after the higher development is already known now this does not mean teleology to understand apes you already have to know that it will end in humanity and so on no I think it's the exact opposite Marx's point is that everything was open but once humanity is here history becomes readable as a progress towards humanity and in human history once capitalism is here then then all the prehistoric forms point towards point towards capitalism I don't have time of course here to go into what really interests me the logic of reactivity how through a collapse things retroactively become what they are I was I wrote enough about this in my books quoting usually my good friend maybe the best theorist of catastrophes Jean-Pierre Dupuy who you must know this if you know my work who had a wonderful quote from Le Monde about some some elections in France years ago where in Le Monde the journalist wrote if Monsieur Balladur politician at that time win win next Saturday if he will win then his victory will be necessary you know what's the idea the idea is precisely that the situation is in itself open but it's not simply contingency openness retroactively it becomes necessary but all other variations remain as a potentiality and this is I think what Walter Benjamin in his thesis on history made it clear with his famous thesis that history should be read retroactively in the sense that today's revolution if it will happen I doubt that it will in the form he predicted but today's revolution will not just redeem the present it will redeem all the past failed attempts which were just there waiting in shadows as so that for all the history from Spartacus and so on to whatever will be redeemed here another quote that I usually like to use I will not go into it I misattributed it to but it really happened in '68 unfortunately but I like the false version it's better you know that Zhou Enlai was in Geneva making final negotiations about the end of the Korean War and somebody asked him what do you think about French Revolution and he answered it's too early to say he was fully right because do you remember when exactly more or less years after the French Revolution that is to say and there socialism so-called real socialism fell apart the whole for liberal and conservative view the entire past became readable in a different way it was that this revolutionary period became just a just a false way it has to be forgotten and so on but if there will be a revolutionary way our reading of the past will change you know who knew this I always like conservatives who are not stupid I often quote him T.S. Eliot when in his famous text about artistic he says that every new phenomenon really new in art changes the entire past makes it readable in a new way now you will say of course this means that just with every new period we get a different interpretation no no no of course we are not at a magic level but it's nonetheless more than just a different reading and you know in what sense it is more in the precise sense that the past is in itself open that's why I am against historicists idiots who claim that for example to understand Shakespeare you have to read fat books about Elizabethan England and so on no my idea is exactly the opposite one we now can understand Shakespeare much better than not only his era but he himself was able to understand himself for example Hamlet my discovery was you know Akira Kurosawa did a Hamlet in with the wonderful title that only bad men sleep well which is true so what I want to say is that something that was open at that stage but not even as a possibility a kind of a blind spot is actualized afterwards if you allow me also another I will try to go as fast as possible improvisation here I often quote this example and I must tell you proudly that I I have now you know I am a ass-kissing guy who likes to flirt with great people and I mean scientists quantum physics fascinates me and for example I had some exchange with some of the big names Carlo Rovelli and so on and they all liked my metaphor which is that to understand quantum physics the best way are video games because you know how they are done you are in a video game virtual reality but it is not programmed to the end like you see trees in the background but since it's not part of the game that you will go there and approach the trees the programmer didn't lose unnecessary time to program the details of the trees and so on and I took this from a popular introduction to philosophy the idea is that something similar happens in quantum physics although it's a wonderful attack on the notion of God the idea is I was even taught that among quantum physicists this is a standard joke that with quantum physics we humans we how do you say in a vulgar way caught God with his pants down God thought that we humans will not be intelligent enough to break to penetrate deeper than the structure of the atom so he said why should I lose time programming there I didn't we did and we came to indeterminacy and so on now you will say but is this not idealism like there must be a programmer no the whole point is to conceive in a materialist way reality as not fully ontologically constituted that's another story you find all this in my books now we come to new more interesting stuff my attitude towards Marx here is ambiguous I think and here I will link my thesis to Todd's work I think that Marx to jump quickly but you are Lacanians at least some of you here Marx's vision of communism remains all too much a vision of capitalism without capital without capitalism Marx always speaks as if we have this incredible dynamic in capitalism but then at a certain stage of development you drop the form of capital search for profit and so on and you will get a self-propelled even more crazy wild expansion reproduction I think precisely and here I'm entering your topic of lack and excess I think that precisely as we are experiencing today this will not happen the greatest Hegelian insight that we get is that something that may appear to be an obstacle to full development of a field is its condition of possibility so you take away the obstacle and you lose at the same time what this was an obstacle to now I will take an example I apologize myself sincerely but I just don't have a better example if it will sound slightly male chauvinist no it's an old story that I repeat again all the time I was flirting years ago with a lady I will not tell you where who said the last lover who saw me naked saw that told me that my body is perfect just it would have been just better if I were to lose two pounds a little and I told her immediately just don't do that because you need this imperfection to give birth to the fantasy my God without that you would be perfect but if you take away the obstacle she would just be bland average you lose it so I will not lose time here something among this I think happens this with Marx when he all the time says that the form of capital is the obstacle yes but only in the form of this obstacle can the expanded self-reproduction function another point of critical but with all the sympathy my disagreement with Marx concerns and again I refer to your stupid book for alienation on alienation no you know Marx's Marx's notion of alienation is still that I don't like the word humanism pseudo-Hegelian one alienation means humanity collectively produces reified forms which appear as an alien force and then in communism this alienated substance will be reappropriated by humans the lesson of Hegel is a totally different one what happens for Hegel but also if one reads you in detail for you it's not simply that oh we have to accept that we are decentered that we always alienation is constitutive for Lacan this is not the last word the last word is what Lacan calls separation but separation is not this alienation it's not I ink at a reified world then I discover oh but it's us humanity who really created this world no no Hegel is here very precise the move out of alienation is not this total reappropriation it is that the distance that separates me from the alienated substance is already a separation in the substance itself so we are not faced we don't have a decentered substance in the sense of we are just puppets there is some big alienated mechanism which controls us no the lack the instability antagonism is in the big other itself already and to calm you down those of you many of my friends are telling me listen you are getting crazy with your Christian atheism no this is what I mean in my Christian atheism that and people miss this I think really good theologians like Kierkegaard or my favorite British Catholic Gilbert Keith Chesterton knew it that the basic move of Christianity and Hegel put this clearly is that of course authentic religious experience is I am here outside God God is up there as an absolute substance what Christianity does is not oh if you pray if you are good blah blah blah you may approach God no it's simply to realize that when you feel separated from God God is out but your the distance that separates you from God is immanent to God itself and this is for Hegel already the message of this Eli Eli lama sabachthani father why have you abandoned me the one who says this in is Christ who is himself divine but I will not lose time with this just I hope you will agree when you attack me later no how it's not the alienation again is not our ultimate fate in the sense of we are just small puppets we have to realize that that another absolute power which is decentered impenetrable to us pulls the strings no this big other is in itself incomplete not in control and I don't have time to go into details here this incompleteness of the big other itself opens up the space of freedom that's why I nonetheless think without any naivety that freedom is not simply just an illusion now we go on all these paradoxes bring us to the topic which is the topic of this conference lack but I would have added lack in lack and excess as a couple what is the Lacanian paradox here according to the common view you would say yes lack and excess at one level lack at a different level excess so the solution is simply if something is lacking and there is another thing in access excess let's take that excess to fill in the lack and we live in a perfect world precisely this is not possible why for Lacan because lack and excess are strictly coexisting they are the same thing at two different levels it's not that here something lacks there there is too much it's the same thing from two at two different levels this is why I don't know where you stand here but for me I am sometimes a little bit tired of these pseudo-Lacanian I call them poets of lack you know it's always the lack blah blah blah no I think maybe I'm not sure but our primordial experience of lack is that of an excess which already Freud knew how does human desire arise Lacan himself but then some of his followers like Pontalis develop this nicely the situation of a young child is that soon he discovers that others others want something from him but it's impenetrable to him what they want this so the original question for Lacan of hysteria is not I don't know what I want you know this boring motive whatever object I have it's never that it's endless metonymy of desire no the original question is what am I for the other the original lacking subject is not oh I cannot ever get a perfect subject you will all no it's the object which is always missing is me the subject as object I never can fully identify what I am for what I am for what I am for the for the others okay this is also in all my books so let's slowly come close to politics I think that this paradox of lack and excess as being two sides of the same are absolutely crucial to understand the madness of our present situation you Todd wrote at some point this was many years ago when I like this nice crazy idea didn't you say that that capitalism comes closest to human nature or something like this I think we should say that maybe Trumpian madness comes even closer you know in one sense let me be precise new poverty and excess of money are the two sides of the same coin since money cash especially no longer really matters as none other than Steve Bannon who is as I ironically like to call him in contrast to Elon Musk he is haha the Trumpian left to put it like this he put it very nicely that in one of his podcasts like today money is for jerks we are afloat in virtual money many people quite literally don't know what to do with money but the affluence is like a house of cards we can which can collapse at any moment as it almost did in financial meltdown so Hegel I think was the first to describe this paradox when he pointed out that in a modern which means capitalist society there is not not enough money precisely because there is too much of it and this imbalance is structural so that we cannot say rich are too rich poor are too poor so okay let's redistribute and everybody will get just enough in the paragraph sorry of his philosophy of right Hegel produces the exact formula of this paradoxical relationship between lack and surplus apropos his notion of rabble a very brief quote "it becomes apparent that despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough its own resources are insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble" end of quote it is thus the very surplus that recreates the lack it is supposed to fill in so that we should even radicalize Hegel's formulation it is not only that despite the excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough no it is the very excess of wealth that makes it not rich enough namely rich enough to get rich enough to fill in the lack this is I think the precise wonderful formulation in capitalism especially again excess and lack are the two sides of the same the two sides of the same paradox the paradox of wealth resides in the fact that the more you have the more you feel the lack it is again the super-ego paradox the more you follow the injunction the more guilty you are or this is also discernible in the paradox of anti-semitism the more Jews are destroyed the more powerful is the remainder this paradox I think is crucial to understand what is happening today I am now directly approaching the big question is Trump a fascist or not I have problems here my problem is that all too often did you notice this the left displays some kind of intellectual laziness they see that something new is emerging but then they are too lazy to analyze this novelty in a close way and they say okay it's something bad so look look look our usual term for really bad thing is fascism so it must be fascism I I don't have yet a good term for what is going on you can say maybe Varoufakis has this techno-feudalism I have prob- he did hit upon something but I have some problems with that which is why strategically I am tempted to use the term liberal fascism I think the to really understand Trump is to point out that he is not simply a fascist it's a fascism grounded in extreme liberalism fascism usually is a strong state and all that but Trump's professed goal is what Musk is doing reduce the state cut everything down the paradox of course is that to do this you have to strengthen the state even more or at the level of freedoms they want full freedom and it's clear where you end the full freedom with more and more prohibitions so how does this work now I will develop something which some of you may know I think that it's not just a psychological feature of Trumpian universe something that I cannot but call shamelessness shame is disappearing now you will say are you a conservative or what no no no I'm much more precise here we obviously have today examples of shamelessness by shamelessness I mean something very simple let's not yet go into theory that things which were unimaginable years ago are now openly done although my position with regard to Israel and Hamas and war there I am often attacked by both sides as usual I nonetheless find problematic at least some things that are happening very problematic in in Israel you know which is for me maybe the lowest moment do you remember in July some guards in a military prison just out of Jerusalem guards who were very honest escaped and rendered public what went on there that that Palestinians suspected of being a Hamas member are were tortured in a well to put it very mildly incredibly brutal ways they even some of these honest defectors they even brought out some video you can find them on the web video clips for example the standard procedure was they held you down on your stomach and penetrated your ass ass-hole with the big metal stick full of razor's needles and so on so that dozens of Palestinian prisoners died of bleeding but okay I'm here skeptical in the sense of who knows what others are doing I don't have any illusions here what really depressed me is that when this became public and this is shamelessness nobody denies this in Israel in their public life it's accepted but you know what happened IDF military police was honest enough to arrest some of these guards who were doing the torturing and we got there its wide demonstrations like they are our heroes they're fighting terrorism we cannot arrest that so I didn't want to take too much time you can find it on on on YouTube immediately there was a following debate in Knesset a supporter of torturing the prisoner said "this is insanity someone in the prosecutor office think it's possible to arrest soldiers for things they do to Nukhba" Hamas elite units to Nukhba terrorists "we can't continue as usual" he was defending what they were doing in that prison somebody then interjected him "to insert a stick into a person's rectum is this legitimate" he was immediately interrupted "Shut up! Yes if he is Nukhba everything is legitimate to do everything" then I could have shown you a debate on Israeli TV a guy said soldiers are suspected of raping a shackled prisoner doesn't this concern you the reply "I don't give a rat's ass for what they do to that Hamas man the only problem I see is that it's not state policy to abuse that Nukhba they deserve it and it's a great form of revenge maybe it will act as a deterrent" so this I must say makes me sad it's no longer that they denied it and so on they openly proudly state it now there are many examples of this I don't know how much it was reported here on November the 7th there were clashes in Amsterdam between Maccabi Tel Aviv European football club and pro-Palestinian protesters and Israel exploded it's a new Kristallnacht Crystal night but then it became absolutely clear that the Jewish fans did incredible things you can easily find on the web hundreds of them shouting incredibly open obscene slogans like "there are no schools open in Gaza because we killed all the children there" and so on and again shamelessness you know like nobody even reacted really to it so again where does shame enter here in his seminar "The Other Side of Psychoanalysis" it's Lacan's reaction to the May '68 events he Lacan makes a much more important point than his decried provocative statement "you protesting students aspires you aspire to as what you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master you will get one" this sounds to be the usual liberal conservative gesture you protest because you really want a new master and you will get it but if you read Lacan in detail and there is English translation of this seminar his position is much more refined in his critique of protesting students he surprisingly says "all you are lacking is a bit of shame" again then Lacan repeatedly varies this motive like saying that students fear that they might be carried away by buffoonery let us start rather from the fact that buffoonery is already here perhaps by mixing in a little shame who knows we may be able to hold it back and even he concludes the seminar with "what I put forward for the majority of you is just that I managed to make you ashamed not too much but precisely enough" Jacques-Alain Miller here I agree with him I don't know he provided a nice commentary to this point the he says that no longer capitalism no we no longer have today a capitalism that relies on repression of enjoyment the new mode of capitalism is rather that of permissiveness where what can sometimes be the cause of difficulty is the prohibition on on prohibiting now comes the central point Lacan doesn't advocate here a minimum of morality or repression that should be maintained to prevent social disintegration you know his point is not yes on the one hand psychoanalysis should bring out the unconscious on the other hand if we bring it out too much it will explode in self-destructive enjoyment so let's stay somewhere in the middle no no Lacan's point is a much more refined it echoes and a friend friend of mine found a proof in Lacan's early some early text from late 1930s that he maybe even took this from Frankfurt school because if you look at complete notes to this text I forgot which one which was reprinted in Écrits Lacan referred to Horkheimer and Adorno and so on namely to the notion of repressive de-sublimation in the sense of when you de-sublimate it in the sense of let's brutally admit the way things are you don't get rid of depression repression gets even worse I don't have time here to go I just warn you into Freud's wonderful statement which already points in this direction you know why I must say this self-critically as a guy who was already here in '68 the idea was there secretly anti-feminist one I remember as young revolutionaries blah blah the idea was hysteria is bad and secretly although we didn't say hysteria is feminine no they just protest but they really want a new master while perverts go to the end what a hysterical subject only dreams about perverts effectively do it but Freud already said that nowhere is the unconscious more inaccessible more repressed than in perversion that's the key statement perversion is not I have all these dirty dreams what I do to you or you to me or group orgy no even if you bring it all out repression is even worse why the catch is that desire is in itself immanently inconsistent traversed by what Freud called primordial repression which is why the permissiveness of perversion ends up in a self-destructive deadlock which gives birth to call for a new master and as the ongoing now wave of new populism actually demonstrated the new master's shamelessness by far exceeds the shamelessness of the old leftist protesters so one has to be very precise here and again I'm referring to that idiot there in the first row shame would you agree with this referring to formula shame is not a defense against too much desire like I would like to do I will not name them don't play with my fantasy it gets really dirty I have a secret desire to do horrible things to you but out of shame I don't do it no shame is not a defense against too much desire it is a defense of desire of the lack that constitutes it against the excess of its over-saturation which obliterates this as at this level as you point in your last book pure excess desire and need can also be correlated as excess and lack the capitalist excess of useless of useless products necessarily leads to a lack of things we actually need for survival and this imbalance is structural you cannot simply resolve it by way of saying no no we produce too much too many excessive things we will produce just things that we things that we really need so you see my point again shame should be reinterpreted not as this type of yes I don't want too harsh a morality but nonetheless we can I cannot bring all the dirt out no when you bring all the dirt out repression is stronger than ever and this is why again shame should be at the political level at the sexual level maintained let's go on with where am I sorry stop pretty soon yeah I will do it's okay I will do my usual joke I'm stopping myself now and then the debate is open I see my hand I will ask myself Professor Zizek would you tell us what did you want to say in the remaining part and I will try really briefly to go through you know to approach from this standpoint Trumpian populism what we should do is bring out its immanent inconsistency it doesn't make Trumpian populism weak it makes it strong but it's a potential trap people only talk about Trumpian populism as this old neo-fascist organic community get rid of immigrants of LGBT of trans and people will be united again but this is one side of Trumpian revolution this is again with all irony I say this the Trumpian left Steve Bannon and so on but look at Elon Musk and all those guys they are doing exactly practically exactly the they are doing exactly exactly the exactly the opposite their dream you can find it where do you know who is I find him very interesting Curtis Yarvin this radical whatever you call him I didn't know how to call his presentation his basic notion is networked state which is more communist in a vulgar way than communist ever dare to be his idea is that democracy no longer works we have to erase tradition and in an almost Platonic way we should reinvent from the zero point a new society this should be done by new authoritarian leaders and artificial intelligence and so on and so on so so that and of course his point is then against what he calls the cathedral universities which are trying to block this but let me go really quickly first he already predicted what Trump is doing now years ago or when when he said when asked how would you do this new state he says first you gain power lawfully through an election then you exercise it unlawfully you simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address yes you got this yes but you know this echoes Trump who said he who saves his country does not violate any laws in other words you can do it then the next crucial author is I don't know if I pronounce it correctly Balaji Srinivasan he brings this to reality he simply proposes that instead of trying to change society let's gradually open territories which will be totally rebooted reconstructed by the zero point and this is I think in a bad sense Platonism at its purest we tradition is no longer needed we first digitally imagine a state and then apply the idea to an actual territory so again do you feel the gap here between this standard Trumpian Steve Bannon Trumpian populism real Americans deeply defending their way of life and this worse than the wildest communism idea of beginning from a zero point now you will say I'm dreaming hey hey hey can't you find clear traces of this in this was a hint an awakening what Trump planned to do in Gaza empty it reboot it create a new society create a new society from the zero point and in this sense as we spoke Todd before I told you that for me we already have such a new man I'm more and more fascinated no intellectualist blah blah pseudo-deep but Elon Musk he often reminds me of how Marx in German ideology describes communism you will not have a single profession in the morning you will be a farmer in the afternoon this that isn't this Elon Musk like you know he does politics he wants to travel to Mars he does these Teslas and so on all that and at the same time didn't he that I didn't count the number now I think he had children with or different women and so on so he tries to enact what we may call in the '68 jouissance sans entrave enjoying without obstacles another reason I'm opposed to the legacy of '68 I think to put it brutally Elon Musk is the ultimate consequence of is the last figure the let's call it capitalist reappropriation of '68 of '68 protesters so I'm cutting short many provocative things like my my immediately I go to the end my where I really wanted to provoke you but if you are Substack inscribed you can find this in my last text which appeared there I think three four hours ago namely my idea is that often that's where we are wrong when we as these ruthless liberals quickly dismiss opponents as fascist well fascism is not a clear term quite often we liberals what we don't understand we quickly designate it as fascism now I'm not saying there is a good fascism but we should never forget another of my enemies but here I agree with him lesson of Ernesto Laclau which is don't confuse fascism as a ideological edifice and practice with elements of fascism fascism simply reappropriated elements which he often took even from the left for example what's your and mine I'm not patronizing you elementary image of fascism crowds disciplined crowds marching haha you know where Hitler and Mussolini took this from working class protests this is leftist the right before fascism was not doing this and many other examples like in the longer version I wanted to provoke you to read a one paragraph description of Nazi dealing with banks totally they said a big Nazi banker a text from '36 in capitalist society banks just reproduce themselves without taking care of the needs of the ordinary people we shouldn't allow this in our Nazi state banks should be controlled regulated so that money circulates for the needs of the real people and so on and so on so now really I'm sorry to disappoint you to conclude yes you so this is for me the mega tension of Trumpian population on the one hand you get the craziest neo-Platonic speculations erase tradition build a new society at the same time you remember Trump's inaugural speech the two words were crucial common sense and sanity I think that the paradox is that Trump is doing both at the same time his practice is the worst attack on common sense that you can imagine but nonetheless he he what do I mean by his practice it's a neo-feudal practice a couple of guys Zuckerberg Elon Musk and so on effectively behave as neo-feudal masters and I think we the left should focus on this inner on this inner contradiction now just one concluding remark as a matter of fact two of them the first one is don't be afraid to steal from the enemy what it appears no what the enemy already has stolen from us I will not go into it now I know people will accuse me of oh now I am flirting with fascism I don't care but what I want to say is that now I am addressing you Anna in a good way your immediacy book but would you agree or not that for mediacy for debunking immediacy sometimes it's needed in everyday practice to propose an apparently immediate figure but a figure which literally makes visible the media my example is this one I'm sorry you can't see it clearly for me the event was you remember Biden's inauguration all the bullshit it was maybe one of the most disgusting events that I can imagine and then one man stole the show Bernie Sanders sitting there with his mittens and so on but what I want to say is that this was some sort of immediacy but wouldn't you agree not a bad immediacy he was the symptomal point you see him and he's very present there present there meant and what what was so nice is how millions got it his very presence there meant millions got it the Biden inauguration was one big fake just now to really conclude I mean it really I it's in my nature don't criticize me to conclude with a vulgar cruel joke which I think best describes the situation not just you Europe can be even worse you know I've somewhere quoted already this I apologize myself but the vulgarity is intended because that's our situation a vulgar joke after a guy's wife underwent a long and risky surgery the husband approaches the doctor who is his friend and inquires about the outcome the doctor begins your wife survived she will probably live longer than you but there are some minor complications she will no longer be able to control her anal muscles so shit will drift out continuously out of her anus there will also be a continuous flow of bad smelling jelly from her vagina so sex is out plus her mouth will malfunction and food will be falling out of it noting the growing expression of worry and panic on the husband's face the doctor taps him on shoulder gently and says don't worry I was just joking everything is okay she died immediately during the why I can imagine the same reality today let's replace the doctor with Trump who promises to cure our democracy and this is how he says our democracy is well and alive there are just some complications we have to throw out millions of immigrants we have to limit abortion to make it de facto impossible we have to use National Guard to crush protests and then he Trump notices the worried face of those who he said don't worry I was just joking democracy is dead under my reign and so on you know we really live in shitty times to conclude so I'm sorry if I was too long but I was just condensing what I'm writing in all my stuff and if you are interested in it there are quite a lot of texts which you can found for free I mean I'm not a bad guy I feel so bad about this Substack you know at the same time at this point three of my publishers are threatening to prosecute me because they discovered that I'm giving my manuscript for free in I I feel so thanks very much and it was really nice to be here thanks I'm not through yet I'm looking for I'm for Big Brother Oceania United States and England then this then this Eurasia is Russia swallowing Europe and then China and the round there East Asia and this is why I am I must say opposed to BRICS if it were to be the good BRICS nothing against but what BRICS is amounting to is yes it's no longer a unipolar world but in reality it means three maybe four maybe even five powers each has its own domain of influence that's why the problem with Trump I don't care if they will make a deal with Putin or not the tragedy is that they are already speaking the same language which is the language like Russia he admits it's Ukraine whatever Trump is Greenland Canada whatever and China is whatever you want Taiwan and so on although they have some variety there let's do some questions we have to do some questions or else we're going to but I don't want to repeat the time of a Christ like figure sacrificing myself I'm already in advance answering your question so please I stop really okay all right let me just say if your question goes over seconds you're cut off and it's not going to get answered okay and secondly Slavoj did not win the prize because this talk went way too long okay here we go but let you should be the tough master make it systematic I will yeah thank you Zizek for a wonderful talk when you begin like this I see a knife you are stabbing the knife there is a poem quoted by Heidegger at the end of the question concerning technology by Hölderlin yeah but where danger is grows the saving power also I want to know what you think of it I know they appear the same thing but but I think that it's much this is for me I even called it ironically in some of my books Hölderlin paradigm it's too easy many friends told me oh but it looks the situation is bad but then they called Hölderlin I think no the situation is bad and it may just get even worse you know so not to lose time yeah yeah I will I will answer you in a precise way in our situation where we have so many promises artificial intelligence populism of better I would almost say that we should turn around Hölderlin where where the solution appears grows no the the danger is around the corner wonderful I wanted to ask about retroactivity so you said the past is open and then you said literally and then you said at the symbolic level and then I said at the symbolic level so you said literally and then symbolic sorry but if you just finish sorry it's just that is it is the past open at the symbolic or are you dealing a lot with quantum mechanics are you trying to think that it's open in nature and maybe these are not different my position here I don't have time to go read my whichever book I repeat myself all the time I'm struggling with it it's a little bit more complex I think this is my old thesis from I think already the Invisible Remainder my Schelling book that the wonder of quantum mechanics for me is that something for which we thought it's exclusive to the symbolic universe this retroactive and so on at some level it seems that it can happen already in nature so my point is a much more refined this maybe close to we didn't have too much time but Henry Henry Krips and you know who is for me Henry we are old European elitists forget about Henry his uncle oh God Josef Krips great classical conductor that's why I liked him otherwise no sorry to go back so I would say that as Henry told me wonderful formula that that quantum mechanics and he claims I I am too old and tired to read Lacan he claims that in quantum physics was the first time that the real in the Lacanian sense is brought out in in science so it's more complex I'm struggling with it the original miracle again is that something and already my Invisible Remainder book at the last chapter I go through all this retroactivity and other stuff something that we automatically assume this is nature not culture exists already in what at least appears as as nature in other words that's my big paradox just a consequence I'm totally opposed to this deep ecological bullshit Mother Earth we humans are hubris we ruined it no sorry to repeat an old joke if Earth is our mother it's a bloody bitch of a mother just look at oil and coal our big still main sources of energy can you even imagine what mega catastrophes must have happened in the pre-human past of the Earth to get all this gigantic reserves of oil and so on can you even imagine like I read somewhere when they are when they are getting oil in Antarctica or or they discover there tropic animals and tropic remainder of trees and so on in other words one speculation is that the Earth at a certain point changed its axis and so on so I think that the beginning of a truly materialist ecology is nature doesn't exist no no I'm not crazy it is out there independently of us but in our spontaneous approach we understand nature as you know in contrast to us humans who are always full of surprises creatively thinking nature is this homeostatic circulation the sun will rise tomorrow always the same no nature has the same basic dynamic as human society at the beginning is madness imbalance which very temporarily can get a balance so again my point is as Henry said you know to introduce and that's quantum what quantum mechanics does the Lacanian point of the distinction between reality and real ordinary physics speaks about reality reality natural laws and so on quantum physics with this quantum waves and so on brings out the Lacanian real in nature itself sorry I would like to go on but life is shit hi
many things to say so please stop let's say after minutes throw something at me or remind me to conclude first I must say a sincere apology it's you know believe me next week I will be and that it is nothing dignified in getting old you just get more senile and more lazy I hate it so my apology goes to all those it was physically for me impossible to spend more time here I was every day sleeping around even this afternoon around hours per day so my sincere apology it wasn't my ignorance or whatever I'm really glad to be here it's not just all my friends who are here Henry and Jennifer Hillary Paul and all of them Russell Ross we can go on I will not enumerate them I will just say that Todd is not included I will tell you why you know I was told by some multiculturalist idiots that when you come to a foreign country you must obey their manners so I looked what are the manners here I looked at meeting Zelensky Trump and Fed and that's what you will get no gratitude for me because you treated me disrespectfully you didn't say thanks enough when I came here this was disrespectful you didn't wait for me at the airport you just told me that he has some minor conference LAC I don't know I have to be there then you know he sent me a message before the conference saying he will make everything to make feel me good and Trump your great leader's reaction to Zelensky came to me like who are you to tell me how I should feel so Todd you are out when you want peace come they say here otherwise you are out now let's go for it's a long speech I hope I will be able to do it I apologize again in advance if some of you will recognize some of the stuff because I really want to focus on this topic lack excess and so on while I'm still learning about quantum mechanics among other people from Jennifer and Henry of course I find its insights enable us to read human history in a holographic way as the result of a series of contingent collapses of superimposed possibilities what do I mean by this quantum waves describe the world at some kind of I like this expression pre-existent level what exists or rather what insists I would say in our as our reality is only the outcome of the collapse of quantum superpositions at this pre-existing quantum waves level particles follow all possible paths when they move from one to another point consider the well-known double-slit experiment in which individual electrons follow not one but every possible path from the gun to the screen one path takes the electron through the left slit another through the right slit back out through the left into a U-turn and so on to understand how something emerges in our reality in a particular form we have to understand that it enacted all possible forms and that these superimposed forms continue to echo in the final form so it's not simply we have superposition of different possibilities and then once you have a collapse one form erases others no the superimposed other forms insist I'm sorry not to have time but I will briefly improvise for example one of my favorite jokes I quoted it at least in my work I would say times you know from Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka where a guy comes to a cafeteria and says please bring me coffee without cream the waiter says sorry I don't have we don't have cream so I cannot give you coffee without cream we only have milk so I can only give you coffee without milk this may appear as a joke but this is I claim A quantum reality and B also how our history works when something happens to understand it you can include into its identity all things that might have happened but didn't happen now you will say what has this to do with history I think precisely a similar thing holds for our political struggles you remember two big examples I don't think they were such a big success but okay some kind of success that we had where peaceful negotiation won over armed resistance but okay the two examples are of course South Africa how ANC came to power and here Martin Luther King but I read history books about both these examples and in both cases you know and Martin Luther King was fully aware of this yes he won peacefully through all those shady negotiations with LBJ Johnson and so on but he was fully aware that this worked only because behind there was a threat of Black Panthers and so on of a more violent without that threat it wouldn't have happened peaceful negotiation it's the same Mandela was fully aware of it he was able to play peaceful negotiations because there was always a threat that ANC might resort to more violence why is this so important today I think that for a whole series of reasons first I think that we cannot any longer afford this progressive view of history where even if it's not absolute determinism things follow a certain predestined path I'm here even critical of Marx Marx was aware that communism will not necessarily arrive but for him the possibility of communism was inscribed into the situation it may fail but that was the logical outcome that's why although I don't agree with that I think we should reject this evolutionism that's why I although I don't agree with them fully I quite enjoyed The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow you know the bestseller where they point out apropos ancient Inca society how it wasn't simply all this human sacrifice authoritarian society it was the superposition of this authoritarian version and of another much more democratic version what does this mean for people like me who in some sense are still close to Marxism I think that there is another level of Marx where he is aware of this Marx always emphasized that capitalism is not a necessary culmination of alienated history capitalism emerged Marx made this clear in a totally contingent way because of a series of again contingent reasons the discovery of gold in Latin America the privatization of commons in the UK and so on so now comes my point there was the situation was radically open but once capitalism was here it as it were retroactively it literally at the symbolic level of course changed the past the history became readable retroactively as leading to capitalism so you know there is a famous quote in Marx's manuscript Grundrisse where he wrote human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape the intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species however can be understood only after the higher development is already known now this does not mean teleology to understand apes you already have to know that it will end in humanity and so on no I think it's the exact opposite Marx's point is that everything was open but once humanity is here history becomes readable as a progress towards humanity and in human history once capitalism is here then then all the prehistoric forms point towards point towards capitalism I don't have time of course here to go into what really interests me the logic of reactivity how through a collapse things retroactively become what they are I was I wrote enough about this in my books quoting usually my good friend maybe the best theorist of catastrophes Jean-Pierre Dupuy who you must know this if you know my work who had a wonderful quote from Le Monde about some some elections in France years ago where in Le Monde the journalist wrote if Monsieur Balladur politician at that time win win next Saturday if he will win then his victory will be necessary you know what's the idea the idea is precisely that the situation is in itself open but it's not simply contingency openness retroactively it becomes necessary but all other variations remain as a potentiality and this is I think what Walter Benjamin in his thesis on history made it clear with his famous thesis that history should be read retroactively in the sense that today's revolution if it will happen I doubt that it will in the form he predicted but today's revolution will not just redeem the present it will redeem all the past failed attempts which were just there waiting in shadows as so that for all the history from Spartacus and so on to whatever will be redeemed here another quote that I usually like to use I will not go into it I misattributed it to but it really happened in '68 unfortunately but I like the false version it's better you know that Zhou Enlai was in Geneva making final negotiations about the end of the Korean War and somebody asked him what do you think about French Revolution and he answered it's too early to say he was fully right because do you remember when exactly more or less years after the French Revolution that is to say and there socialism so-called real socialism fell apart the whole for liberal and conservative view the entire past became readable in a different way it was that this revolutionary period became just a just a false way it has to be forgotten and so on but if there will be a revolutionary way our reading of the past will change you know who knew this I always like conservatives who are not stupid I often quote him T.S. Eliot when in his famous text about artistic he says that every new phenomenon really new in art changes the entire past makes it readable in a new way now you will say of course this means that just with every new period we get a different interpretation no no no of course we are not at a magic level but it's nonetheless more than just a different reading and you know in what sense it is more in the precise sense that the past is in itself open that's why I am against historicists idiots who claim that for example to understand Shakespeare you have to read fat books about Elizabethan England and so on no my idea is exactly the opposite one we now can understand Shakespeare much better than not only his era but he himself was able to understand himself for example Hamlet my discovery was you know Akira Kurosawa did a Hamlet in with the wonderful title that only bad men sleep well which is true so what I want to say is that something that was open at that stage but not even as a possibility a kind of a blind spot is actualized afterwards if you allow me also another I will try to go as fast as possible improvisation here I often quote this example and I must tell you proudly that I I have now you know I am a ass-kissing guy who likes to flirt with great people and I mean scientists quantum physics fascinates me and for example I had some exchange with some of the big names Carlo Rovelli and so on and they all liked my metaphor which is that to understand quantum physics the best way are video games because you know how they are done you are in a video game virtual reality but it is not programmed to the end like you see trees in the background but since it's not part of the game that you will go there and approach the trees the programmer didn't lose unnecessary time to program the details of the trees and so on and I took this from a popular introduction to philosophy the idea is that something similar happens in quantum physics although it's a wonderful attack on the notion of God the idea is I was even taught that among quantum physicists this is a standard joke that with quantum physics we humans we how do you say in a vulgar way caught God with his pants down God thought that we humans will not be intelligent enough to break to penetrate deeper than the structure of the atom so he said why should I lose time programming there I didn't we did and we came to indeterminacy and so on now you will say but is this not idealism like there must be a programmer no the whole point is to conceive in a materialist way reality as not fully ontologically constituted that's another story you find all this in my books now we come to new more interesting stuff my attitude towards Marx here is ambiguous I think and here I will link my thesis to Todd's work I think that Marx to jump quickly but you are Lacanians at least some of you here Marx's vision of communism remains all too much a vision of capitalism without capital without capitalism Marx always speaks as if we have this incredible dynamic in capitalism but then at a certain stage of development you drop the form of capital search for profit and so on and you will get a self-propelled even more crazy wild expansion reproduction I think precisely and here I'm entering your topic of lack and excess I think that precisely as we are experiencing today this will not happen the greatest Hegelian insight that we get is that something that may appear to be an obstacle to full development of a field is its condition of possibility so you take away the obstacle and you lose at the same time what this was an obstacle to now I will take an example I apologize myself sincerely but I just don't have a better example if it will sound slightly male chauvinist no it's an old story that I repeat again all the time I was flirting years ago with a lady I will not tell you where who said the last lover who saw me naked saw that told me that my body is perfect just it would have been just better if I were to lose two pounds a little and I told her immediately just don't do that because you need this imperfection to give birth to the fantasy my God without that you would be perfect but if you take away the obstacle she would just be bland average you lose it so I will not lose time here something among this I think happens this with Marx when he all the time says that the form of capital is the obstacle yes but only in the form of this obstacle can the expanded self-reproduction function another point of critical but with all the sympathy my disagreement with Marx concerns and again I refer to your stupid book for alienation on alienation no you know Marx's Marx's notion of alienation is still that I don't like the word humanism pseudo-Hegelian one alienation means humanity collectively produces reified forms which appear as an alien force and then in communism this alienated substance will be reappropriated by humans the lesson of Hegel is a totally different one what happens for Hegel but also if one reads you in detail for you it's not simply that oh we have to accept that we are decentered that we always alienation is constitutive for Lacan this is not the last word the last word is what Lacan calls separation but separation is not this alienation it's not I ink at a reified world then I discover oh but it's us humanity who really created this world no no Hegel is here very precise the move out of alienation is not this total reappropriation it is that the distance that separates me from the alienated substance is already a separation in the substance itself so we are not faced we don't have a decentered substance in the sense of we are just puppets there is some big alienated mechanism which controls us no the lack the instability antagonism is in the big other itself already and to calm you down those of you many of my friends are telling me listen you are getting crazy with your Christian atheism no this is what I mean in my Christian atheism that and people miss this I think really good theologians like Kierkegaard or my favorite British Catholic Gilbert Keith Chesterton knew it that the basic move of Christianity and Hegel put this clearly is that of course authentic religious experience is I am here outside God God is up there as an absolute substance what Christianity does is not oh if you pray if you are good blah blah blah you may approach God no it's simply to realize that when you feel separated from God God is out but your the distance that separates you from God is immanent to God itself and this is for Hegel already the message of this Eli Eli lama sabachthani father why have you abandoned me the one who says this in is Christ who is himself divine but I will not lose time with this just I hope you will agree when you attack me later no how it's not the alienation again is not our ultimate fate in the sense of we are just small puppets we have to realize that that another absolute power which is decentered impenetrable to us pulls the strings no this big other is in itself incomplete not in control and I don't have time to go into details here this incompleteness of the big other itself opens up the space of freedom that's why I nonetheless think without any naivety that freedom is not simply just an illusion now we go on all these paradoxes bring us to the topic which is the topic of this conference lack but I would have added lack in lack and excess as a couple what is the Lacanian paradox here according to the common view you would say yes lack and excess at one level lack at a different level excess so the solution is simply if something is lacking and there is another thing in access excess let's take that excess to fill in the lack and we live in a perfect world precisely this is not possible why for Lacan because lack and excess are strictly coexisting they are the same thing at two different levels it's not that here something lacks there there is too much it's the same thing from two at two different levels this is why I don't know where you stand here but for me I am sometimes a little bit tired of these pseudo-Lacanian I call them poets of lack you know it's always the lack blah blah blah no I think maybe I'm not sure but our primordial experience of lack is that of an excess which already Freud knew how does human desire arise Lacan himself but then some of his followers like Pontalis develop this nicely the situation of a young child is that soon he discovers that others others want something from him but it's impenetrable to him what they want this so the original question for Lacan of hysteria is not I don't know what I want you know this boring motive whatever object I have it's never that it's endless metonymy of desire no the original question is what am I for the other the original lacking subject is not oh I cannot ever get a perfect subject you will all no it's the object which is always missing is me the subject as object I never can fully identify what I am for what I am for what I am for the for the others okay this is also in all my books so let's slowly come close to politics I think that this paradox of lack and excess as being two sides of the same are absolutely crucial to understand the madness of our present situation you Todd wrote at some point this was many years ago when I like this nice crazy idea didn't you say that that capitalism comes closest to human nature or something like this I think we should say that maybe Trumpian madness comes even closer you know in one sense let me be precise new poverty and excess of money are the two sides of the same coin since money cash especially no longer really matters as none other than Steve Bannon who is as I ironically like to call him in contrast to Elon Musk he is haha the Trumpian left to put it like this he put it very nicely that in one of his podcasts like today money is for jerks we are afloat in virtual money many people quite literally don't know what to do with money but the affluence is like a house of cards we can which can collapse at any moment as it almost did in financial meltdown so Hegel I think was the first to describe this paradox when he pointed out that in a modern which means capitalist society there is not not enough money precisely because there is too much of it and this imbalance is structural so that we cannot say rich are too rich poor are too poor so okay let's redistribute and everybody will get just enough in the paragraph sorry of his philosophy of right Hegel produces the exact formula of this paradoxical relationship between lack and surplus apropos his notion of rabble a very brief quote "it becomes apparent that despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough its own resources are insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble" end of quote it is thus the very surplus that recreates the lack it is supposed to fill in so that we should even radicalize Hegel's formulation it is not only that despite the excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough no it is the very excess of wealth that makes it not rich enough namely rich enough to get rich enough to fill in the lack this is I think the precise wonderful formulation in capitalism especially again excess and lack are the two sides of the same the two sides of the same paradox the paradox of wealth resides in the fact that the more you have the more you feel the lack it is again the super-ego paradox the more you follow the injunction the more guilty you are or this is also discernible in the paradox of anti-semitism the more Jews are destroyed the more powerful is the remainder this paradox I think is crucial to understand what is happening today I am now directly approaching the big question is Trump a fascist or not I have problems here my problem is that all too often did you notice this the left displays some kind of intellectual laziness they see that something new is emerging but then they are too lazy to analyze this novelty in a close way and they say okay it's something bad so look look look our usual term for really bad thing is fascism so it must be fascism I I don't have yet a good term for what is going on you can say maybe Varoufakis has this techno-feudalism I have prob- he did hit upon something but I have some problems with that which is why strategically I am tempted to use the term liberal fascism I think the to really understand Trump is to point out that he is not simply a fascist it's a fascism grounded in extreme liberalism fascism usually is a strong state and all that but Trump's professed goal is what Musk is doing reduce the state cut everything down the paradox of course is that to do this you have to strengthen the state even more or at the level of freedoms they want full freedom and it's clear where you end the full freedom with more and more prohibitions so how does this work now I will develop something which some of you may know I think that it's not just a psychological feature of Trumpian universe something that I cannot but call shamelessness shame is disappearing now you will say are you a conservative or what no no no I'm much more precise here we obviously have today examples of shamelessness by shamelessness I mean something very simple let's not yet go into theory that things which were unimaginable years ago are now openly done although my position with regard to Israel and Hamas and war there I am often attacked by both sides as usual I nonetheless find problematic at least some things that are happening very problematic in in Israel you know which is for me maybe the lowest moment do you remember in July some guards in a military prison just out of Jerusalem guards who were very honest escaped and rendered public what went on there that that Palestinians suspected of being a Hamas member are were tortured in a well to put it very mildly incredibly brutal ways they even some of these honest defectors they even brought out some video you can find them on the web video clips for example the standard procedure was they held you down on your stomach and penetrated your ass ass-hole with the big metal stick full of razor's needles and so on so that dozens of Palestinian prisoners died of bleeding but okay I'm here skeptical in the sense of who knows what others are doing I don't have any illusions here what really depressed me is that when this became public and this is shamelessness nobody denies this in Israel in their public life it's accepted but you know what happened IDF military police was honest enough to arrest some of these guards who were doing the torturing and we got there its wide demonstrations like they are our heroes they're fighting terrorism we cannot arrest that so I didn't want to take too much time you can find it on on on YouTube immediately there was a following debate in Knesset a supporter of torturing the prisoner said "this is insanity someone in the prosecutor office think it's possible to arrest soldiers for things they do to Nukhba" Hamas elite units to Nukhba terrorists "we can't continue as usual" he was defending what they were doing in that prison somebody then interjected him "to insert a stick into a person's rectum is this legitimate" he was immediately interrupted "Shut up! Yes if he is Nukhba everything is legitimate to do everything" then I could have shown you a debate on Israeli TV a guy said soldiers are suspected of raping a shackled prisoner doesn't this concern you the reply "I don't give a rat's ass for what they do to that Hamas man the only problem I see is that it's not state policy to abuse that Nukhba they deserve it and it's a great form of revenge maybe it will act as a deterrent" so this I must say makes me sad it's no longer that they denied it and so on they openly proudly state it now there are many examples of this I don't know how much it was reported here on November the 7th there were clashes in Amsterdam between Maccabi Tel Aviv European football club and pro-Palestinian protesters and Israel exploded it's a new Kristallnacht Crystal night but then it became absolutely clear that the Jewish fans did incredible things you can easily find on the web hundreds of them shouting incredibly open obscene slogans like "there are no schools open in Gaza because we killed all the children there" and so on and again shamelessness you know like nobody even reacted really to it so again where does shame enter here in his seminar "The Other Side of Psychoanalysis" it's Lacan's reaction to the May '68 events he Lacan makes a much more important point than his decried provocative statement "you protesting students aspires you aspire to as what you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master you will get one" this sounds to be the usual liberal conservative gesture you protest because you really want a new master and you will get it but if you read Lacan in detail and there is English translation of this seminar his position is much more refined in his critique of protesting students he surprisingly says "all you are lacking is a bit of shame" again then Lacan repeatedly varies this motive like saying that students fear that they might be carried away by buffoonery let us start rather from the fact that buffoonery is already here perhaps by mixing in a little shame who knows we may be able to hold it back and even he concludes the seminar with "what I put forward for the majority of you is just that I managed to make you ashamed not too much but precisely enough" Jacques-Alain Miller here I agree with him I don't know he provided a nice commentary to this point the he says that no longer capitalism no we no longer have today a capitalism that relies on repression of enjoyment the new mode of capitalism is rather that of permissiveness where what can sometimes be the cause of difficulty is the prohibition on on prohibiting now comes the central point Lacan doesn't advocate here a minimum of morality or repression that should be maintained to prevent social disintegration you know his point is not yes on the one hand psychoanalysis should bring out the unconscious on the other hand if we bring it out too much it will explode in self-destructive enjoyment so let's stay somewhere in the middle no no Lacan's point is a much more refined it echoes and a friend friend of mine found a proof in Lacan's early some early text from late 1930s that he maybe even took this from Frankfurt school because if you look at complete notes to this text I forgot which one which was reprinted in Écrits Lacan referred to Horkheimer and Adorno and so on namely to the notion of repressive de-sublimation in the sense of when you de-sublimate it in the sense of let's brutally admit the way things are you don't get rid of depression repression gets even worse I don't have time here to go I just warn you into Freud's wonderful statement which already points in this direction you know why I must say this self-critically as a guy who was already here in '68 the idea was there secretly anti-feminist one I remember as young revolutionaries blah blah the idea was hysteria is bad and secretly although we didn't say hysteria is feminine no they just protest but they really want a new master while perverts go to the end what a hysterical subject only dreams about perverts effectively do it but Freud already said that nowhere is the unconscious more inaccessible more repressed than in perversion that's the key statement perversion is not I have all these dirty dreams what I do to you or you to me or group orgy no even if you bring it all out repression is even worse why the catch is that desire is in itself immanently inconsistent traversed by what Freud called primordial repression which is why the permissiveness of perversion ends up in a self-destructive deadlock which gives birth to call for a new master and as the ongoing now wave of new populism actually demonstrated the new master's shamelessness by far exceeds the shamelessness of the old leftist protesters so one has to be very precise here and again I'm referring to that idiot there in the first row shame would you agree with this referring to formula shame is not a defense against too much desire like I would like to do I will not name them don't play with my fantasy it gets really dirty I have a secret desire to do horrible things to you but out of shame I don't do it no shame is not a defense against too much desire it is a defense of desire of the lack that constitutes it against the excess of its over-saturation which obliterates this as at this level as you point in your last book pure excess desire and need can also be correlated as excess and lack the capitalist excess of useless of useless products necessarily leads to a lack of things we actually need for survival and this imbalance is structural you cannot simply resolve it by way of saying no no we produce too much too many excessive things we will produce just things that we things that we really need so you see my point again shame should be reinterpreted not as this type of yes I don't want too harsh a morality but nonetheless we can I cannot bring all the dirt out no when you bring all the dirt out repression is stronger than ever and this is why again shame should be at the political level at the sexual level maintained let's go on with where am I sorry stop pretty soon yeah I will do it's okay I will do my usual joke I'm stopping myself now and then the debate is open I see my hand I will ask myself Professor Zizek would you tell us what did you want to say in the remaining part and I will try really briefly to go through you know to approach from this standpoint Trumpian populism what we should do is bring out its immanent inconsistency it doesn't make Trumpian populism weak it makes it strong but it's a potential trap people only talk about Trumpian populism as this old neo-fascist organic community get rid of immigrants of LGBT of trans and people will be united again but this is one side of Trumpian revolution this is again with all irony I say this the Trumpian left Steve Bannon and so on but look at Elon Musk and all those guys they are doing exactly practically exactly the they are doing exactly exactly the exactly the opposite their dream you can find it where do you know who is I find him very interesting Curtis Yarvin this radical whatever you call him I didn't know how to call his presentation his basic notion is networked state which is more communist in a vulgar way than communist ever dare to be his idea is that democracy no longer works we have to erase tradition and in an almost Platonic way we should reinvent from the zero point a new society this should be done by new authoritarian leaders and artificial intelligence and so on and so on so so that and of course his point is then against what he calls the cathedral universities which are trying to block this but let me go really quickly first he already predicted what Trump is doing now years ago or when when he said when asked how would you do this new state he says first you gain power lawfully through an election then you exercise it unlawfully you simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address yes you got this yes but you know this echoes Trump who said he who saves his country does not violate any laws in other words you can do it then the next crucial author is I don't know if I pronounce it correctly Balaji Srinivasan he brings this to reality he simply proposes that instead of trying to change society let's gradually open territories which will be totally rebooted reconstructed by the zero point and this is I think in a bad sense Platonism at its purest we tradition is no longer needed we first digitally imagine a state and then apply the idea to an actual territory so again do you feel the gap here between this standard Trumpian Steve Bannon Trumpian populism real Americans deeply defending their way of life and this worse than the wildest communism idea of beginning from a zero point now you will say I'm dreaming hey hey hey can't you find clear traces of this in this was a hint an awakening what Trump planned to do in Gaza empty it reboot it create a new society create a new society from the zero point and in this sense as we spoke Todd before I told you that for me we already have such a new man I'm more and more fascinated no intellectualist blah blah pseudo-deep but Elon Musk he often reminds me of how Marx in German ideology describes communism you will not have a single profession in the morning you will be a farmer in the afternoon this that isn't this Elon Musk like you know he does politics he wants to travel to Mars he does these Teslas and so on all that and at the same time didn't he that I didn't count the number now I think he had children with or different women and so on so he tries to enact what we may call in the '68 jouissance sans entrave enjoying without obstacles another reason I'm opposed to the legacy of '68 I think to put it brutally Elon Musk is the ultimate consequence of is the last figure the let's call it capitalist reappropriation of '68 of '68 protesters so I'm cutting short many provocative things like my my immediately I go to the end my where I really wanted to provoke you but if you are Substack inscribed you can find this in my last text which appeared there I think three four hours ago namely my idea is that often that's where we are wrong when we as these ruthless liberals quickly dismiss opponents as fascist well fascism is not a clear term quite often we liberals what we don't understand we quickly designate it as fascism now I'm not saying there is a good fascism but we should never forget another of my enemies but here I agree with him lesson of Ernesto Laclau which is don't confuse fascism as a ideological edifice and practice with elements of fascism fascism simply reappropriated elements which he often took even from the left for example what's your and mine I'm not patronizing you elementary image of fascism crowds disciplined crowds marching haha you know where Hitler and Mussolini took this from working class protests this is leftist the right before fascism was not doing this and many other examples like in the longer version I wanted to provoke you to read a one paragraph description of Nazi dealing with banks totally they said a big Nazi banker a text from '36 in capitalist society banks just reproduce themselves without taking care of the needs of the ordinary people we shouldn't allow this in our Nazi state banks should be controlled regulated so that money circulates for the needs of the real people and so on and so on so now really I'm sorry to disappoint you to conclude yes you so this is for me the mega tension of Trumpian population on the one hand you get the craziest neo-Platonic speculations erase tradition build a new society at the same time you remember Trump's inaugural speech the two words were crucial common sense and sanity I think that the paradox is that Trump is doing both at the same time his practice is the worst attack on common sense that you can imagine but nonetheless he he what do I mean by his practice it's a neo-feudal practice a couple of guys Zuckerberg Elon Musk and so on effectively behave as neo-feudal masters and I think we the left should focus on this inner on this inner contradiction now just one concluding remark as a matter of fact two of them the first one is don't be afraid to steal from the enemy what it appears no what the enemy already has stolen from us I will not go into it now I know people will accuse me of oh now I am flirting with fascism I don't care but what I want to say is that now I am addressing you Anna in a good way your immediacy book but would you agree or not that for mediacy for debunking immediacy sometimes it's needed in everyday practice to propose an apparently immediate figure but a figure which literally makes visible the media my example is this one I'm sorry you can't see it clearly for me the event was you remember Biden's inauguration all the bullshit it was maybe one of the most disgusting events that I can imagine and then one man stole the show Bernie Sanders sitting there with his mittens and so on but what I want to say is that this was some sort of immediacy but wouldn't you agree not a bad immediacy he was the symptomal point you see him and he's very present there present there meant and what what was so nice is how millions got it his very presence there meant millions got it the Biden inauguration was one big fake just now to really conclude I mean it really I it's in my nature don't criticize me to conclude with a vulgar cruel joke which I think best describes the situation not just you Europe can be even worse you know I've somewhere quoted already this I apologize myself but the vulgarity is intended because that's our situation a vulgar joke after a guy's wife underwent a long and risky surgery the husband approaches the doctor who is his friend and inquires about the outcome the doctor begins your wife survived she will probably live longer than you but there are some minor complications she will no longer be able to control her anal muscles so shit will drift out continuously out of her anus there will also be a continuous flow of bad smelling jelly from her vagina so sex is out plus her mouth will malfunction and food will be falling out of it noting the growing expression of worry and panic on the husband's face the doctor taps him on shoulder gently and says don't worry I was just joking everything is okay she died immediately during the why I can imagine the same reality today let's replace the doctor with Trump who promises to cure our democracy and this is how he says our democracy is well and alive there are just some complications we have to throw out millions of immigrants we have to limit abortion to make it de facto impossible we have to use National Guard to crush protests and then he Trump notices the worried face of those who he said don't worry I was just joking democracy is dead under my reign and so on you know we really live in shitty times to conclude so I'm sorry if I was too long but I was just condensing what I'm writing in all my stuff and if you are interested in it there are quite a lot of texts which you can found for free I mean I'm not a bad guy I feel so bad about this Substack you know at the same time at this point three of my publishers are threatening to prosecute me because they discovered that I'm giving my manuscript for free in I I feel so thanks very much and it was really nice to be here thanks I'm not through yet I'm looking for I'm for Big Brother Oceania United States and England then this then this Eurasia is Russia swallowing Europe and then China and the round there East Asia and this is why I am I must say opposed to BRICS if it were to be the good BRICS nothing against but what BRICS is amounting to is yes it's no longer a unipolar world but in reality it means three maybe four maybe even five powers each has its own domain of influence that's why the problem with Trump I don't care if they will make a deal with Putin or not the tragedy is that they are already speaking the same language which is the language like Russia he admits it's Ukraine whatever Trump is Greenland Canada whatever and China is whatever you want Taiwan and so on although they have some variety there let's do some questions we have to do some questions or else we're going to but I don't want to repeat the time of a Christ like figure sacrificing myself I'm already in advance answering your question so please I stop really okay all right let me just say if your question goes over seconds you're cut off and it's not going to get answered okay and secondly Slavoj did not win the prize because this talk went way too long okay here we go but let you should be the tough master make it systematic I will yeah thank you Zizek for a wonderful talk when you begin like this I see a knife you are stabbing the knife there is a poem quoted by Heidegger at the end of the question concerning technology by Hölderlin yeah but where danger is grows the saving power also I want to know what you think of it I know they appear the same thing but but I think that it's much this is for me I even called it ironically in some of my books Hölderlin paradigm it's too easy many friends told me oh but it looks the situation is bad but then they called Hölderlin I think no the situation is bad and it may just get even worse you know so not to lose time yeah yeah I will I will answer you in a precise way in our situation where we have so many promises artificial intelligence populism of better I would almost say that we should turn around Hölderlin where where the solution appears grows no the the danger is around the corner wonderful I wanted to ask about retroactivity so you said the past is open and then you said literally and then you said at the symbolic level and then I said at the symbolic level so you said literally and then symbolic sorry but if you just finish sorry it's just that is it is the past open at the symbolic or are you dealing a lot with quantum mechanics are you trying to think that it's open in nature and maybe these are not different my position here I don't have time to go read my whichever book I repeat myself all the time I'm struggling with it it's a little bit more complex I think this is my old thesis from I think already the Invisible Remainder my Schelling book that the wonder of quantum mechanics for me is that something for which we thought it's exclusive to the symbolic universe this retroactive and so on at some level it seems that it can happen already in nature so my point is a much more refined this maybe close to we didn't have too much time but Henry Henry Krips and you know who is for me Henry we are old European elitists forget about Henry his uncle oh God Josef Krips great classical conductor that's why I liked him otherwise no sorry to go back so I would say that as Henry told me wonderful formula that that quantum mechanics and he claims I I am too old and tired to read Lacan he claims that in quantum physics was the first time that the real in the Lacanian sense is brought out in in science so it's more complex I'm struggling with it the original miracle again is that something and already my Invisible Remainder book at the last chapter I go through all this retroactivity and other stuff something that we automatically assume this is nature not culture exists already in what at least appears as as nature in other words that's my big paradox just a consequence I'm totally opposed to this deep ecological bullshit Mother Earth we humans are hubris we ruined it no sorry to repeat an old joke if Earth is our mother it's a bloody bitch of a mother just look at oil and coal our big still main sources of energy can you even imagine what mega catastrophes must have happened in the pre-human past of the Earth to get all this gigantic reserves of oil and so on can you even imagine like I read somewhere when they are when they are getting oil in Antarctica or or they discover there tropic animals and tropic remainder of trees and so on in other words one speculation is that the Earth at a certain point changed its axis and so on so I think that the beginning of a truly materialist ecology is nature doesn't exist no no I'm not crazy it is out there independently of us but in our spontaneous approach we understand nature as you know in contrast to us humans who are always full of surprises creatively thinking nature is this homeostatic circulation the sun will rise tomorrow always the same no nature has the same basic dynamic as human society at the beginning is madness imbalance which very temporarily can get a balance so again my point is as Henry said you know to introduce and that's quantum what quantum mechanics does the Lacanian point of the distinction between reality and real ordinary physics speaks about reality reality natural laws and so on quantum physics with this quantum waves and so on brings out the Lacanian real in nature itself sorry I would like to go on but life is shit hi
unknown
Slavoj just going back
Slavoj just going back
Slavoj Žižek
to the remarks about the brutal torture techniques by the Israeli military and I'm reminded of Abu Ghraib the Abu Ghraib scandal as well sorry the Abu Ghraib scandal the American torturing Iraqi yeah yeah yeah Abu Ghraib sorry yes and I know that Hillary's done some work on this as well from the perspective of torture yeah but sorry to interrupt you then you go on you know what's my problem I'm absolutely not anti-Semitic I know but what makes me infinitely sad is that at least with Abu Ghraib and I think my point is hypocrisy is better than obscene openness at least till now they tried to cover it up interpret it away you know they claimed oh it was just marginal it didn't really happen blah blah what horrified me in that example is that they openly admit it without any regret and so on that's this absolute shamelessness yeah well that was part of my question I
to the remarks about the brutal torture techniques by the Israeli military and I'm reminded of Abu Ghraib the Abu Ghraib scandal as well sorry the Abu Ghraib scandal the American torturing Iraqi yeah yeah yeah Abu Ghraib sorry yes and I know that Hillary's done some work on this as well from the perspective of torture yeah but sorry to interrupt you then you go on you know what's my problem I'm absolutely not anti-Semitic I know but what makes me infinitely sad is that at least with Abu Ghraib and I think my point is hypocrisy is better than obscene openness at least till now they tried to cover it up interpret it away you know they claimed oh it was just marginal it didn't really happen blah blah what horrified me in that example is that they openly admit it without any regret and so on that's this absolute shamelessness yeah well that was part of my question I
unknown
was going
was going
Slavoj Žižek
to mention Susan Sontag's one of the last essays that she
to mention Susan Sontag's one of the last essays that she
unknown
wrote was
wrote was
Slavoj Žižek
was about Abu Ghraib and in that short essay she basically said you know she was saying the Red Cross and other aid agencies were were talking about this it was well documented but it was only after the images came out that you know there was there was a response but today it sort of seems like you're saying image or no image
was about Abu Ghraib and in that short essay she basically said you know she was saying the Red Cross and other aid agencies were were talking about this it was well documented but it was only after the images came out that you know there was there was a response but today it sort of seems like you're saying image or no image
unknown
that you know and I
that you know and I
Slavoj Žižek
thought this is what you were getting at with you know whether
thought this is what you were getting at with you know whether
unknown
the shame or the shamelessness is disappearing
the shame or the shamelessness is disappearing
Slavoj Žižek
the question I wanted to ask is is there any hope for the image I suppose can it still do something here things get really problematic because first is the obvious you all know
the question I wanted to ask is is there any hope for the image I suppose can it still do something here things get really problematic because first is the obvious you all know
unknown
it that with now still somehow maybe we can see a fake image from authentic but quite soon I think it will become
it that with now still somehow maybe we can see a fake image from authentic but quite soon I think it will become
Slavoj Žižek
indistinguishable you know like images will be suspicious to such an extent and what worries me is not just
indistinguishable you know like images will be suspicious to such an extent and what worries me is not just
unknown
this the usual fear like you produce a fake image or not just an image clip me doing unimaginable things and so on I fear almost more things happening in the
this the usual fear like you produce a fake image or not just an image clip me doing unimaginable things and so on I fear almost more things happening in the
Slavoj Žižek
opposite direction that I really do horrible things you catch me and
opposite direction that I really do horrible things you catch me and
unknown
then I say oh it's a fake image and so on and so on you know this brings me if you allow me very brief
then I say oh it's a fake image and so on and so on you know this brings me if you allow me very brief
Slavoj Žižek
improvisation I said I didn't have time for my next book to the question of artificial intelligence I am not a traditional humanist in the sense of
improvisation I said I didn't have time for my next book to the question of artificial intelligence I am not a traditional humanist in the sense of
unknown
but there are
but there are
Slavoj Žižek
things that it cannot do creativity whatever who knows who knows at this level would you agree with me here I think about two deep things that at least now it cannot do artificial intelligence first but it first is to spontaneously develop rituals not of course you can program them
things that it cannot do creativity whatever who knows who knows at this level would you agree with me here I think about two deep things that at least now it cannot do artificial intelligence first but it first is to spontaneously develop rituals not of course you can program them
unknown
but you know I read
but you know I read
unknown
recently I forgot who is the author a book on these everyday rituals many of my friends have you know when you have squares on the floor many people have this you shouldn't step two times of the same you get a whole many things like this I will not lose time here
recently I forgot who is the author a book on these everyday rituals many of my friends have you know when you have squares on the floor many people have this you shouldn't step two times of the same you get a whole many things like this I will not lose time here
Slavoj Žižek
but the whole point is that what I like in these rituals is that we should resist a pseudo-Freudian temptation what does it mean the no I think they don't have a deeper meaning they are on the contrary attempts to in
but the whole point is that what I like in these rituals is that we should resist a pseudo-Freudian temptation what does it mean the no I think they don't have a deeper meaning they are on the contrary attempts to in
unknown
a
a
unknown
meaningless
meaningless
Slavoj Žižek
situation to give the appearance of meaning you follow some rules and so on and it appears meaningful but there is no meaning second thing I follow Lacan here swearing curses you know Lacan puts it in a wonderful way I forgot where that he claims even that cursing is the original symbolic act cursing means what for Lacan it's not that I try to do
situation to give the appearance of meaning you follow some rules and so on and it appears meaningful but there is no meaning second thing I follow Lacan here swearing curses you know Lacan puts it in a wonderful way I forgot where that he claims even that cursing is the original symbolic act cursing means what for Lacan it's not that I try to do
unknown
something
something
Slavoj Žižek
it goes wrong I curse no it's that cursing means although we live in language we are never at home with language and when you realize this that not only things go bad but you cannot even
it goes wrong I curse no it's that cursing means although we live in language we are never at home with language and when you realize this that not only things go bad but you cannot even
unknown
articulate it
articulate it
Slavoj Žižek
clearly what went wrong that this frustration is cursing now of course you can program
clearly what went wrong that this frustration is cursing now of course you can program
unknown
artificial intelligence but
artificial intelligence but
Slavoj Žižek
can it authentically curse with subjectivity and I have many other points so again I I think it's wrong to be obsessed
can it authentically curse with subjectivity and I have many other points so again I I think it's wrong to be obsessed
unknown
with this anthropocentric
with this anthropocentric
Slavoj Žižek
question will artificial intelligence ever be able to think in the authentic sense first this means nothing of the people probably don't think in an authentic sense and I don't mean here ordinary people I think they're especially so-called intellectuals are the worst you know so what I want to say is that I just want to be open who knows a one thing I'm sure maybe if artificial intelligence will organize itself into some kind of new I hate the word but nonetheless
question will artificial intelligence ever be able to think in the authentic sense first this means nothing of the people probably don't think in an authentic sense and I don't mean here ordinary people I think they're especially so-called intellectuals are the worst you know so what I want to say is that I just want to be open who knows a one thing I'm sure maybe if artificial intelligence will organize itself into some kind of new I hate the word but nonetheless
unknown
spirituality it will not
spirituality it will not
Slavoj Žižek
be on the human scale like ours or better it may be something radically different we may even miss it
be on the human scale like ours or better it may be something radically different we may even miss it
unknown
ignore it at all we should be
ignore it at all we should be
Slavoj Žižek
very open here I think but it matters here here here sorry you know what from my and you measure from my did you notice his politics he strictly is sticking to the right that tells everything I just want to point out something that this is Slavoj's typical here because he looks at things from the perspective of the master idiot idiot from the perspective of the people I was on the left no from up look down no in parliament you left and right and from the view of up there on you so you are even worse you are the right-winger pretending to be a leftist when we take power off you go to Gulag okay hi Slavoj hey I was
very open here I think but it matters here here here sorry you know what from my and you measure from my did you notice his politics he strictly is sticking to the right that tells everything I just want to point out something that this is Slavoj's typical here because he looks at things from the perspective of the master idiot idiot from the perspective of the people I was on the left no from up look down no in parliament you left and right and from the view of up there on you so you are even worse you are the right-winger pretending to be a leftist when we take power off you go to Gulag okay hi Slavoj hey I was
unknown
surprised to see
surprised to see
Slavoj Žižek
you discuss Curtis Yarvin who founded the neo-reactionary movement alongside Nick Land yeah his whole thing Yarvin's whole thing is he wants a patchwork of SovCorps which is he
you discuss Curtis Yarvin who founded the neo-reactionary movement alongside Nick Land yeah his whole thing Yarvin's whole thing is he wants a patchwork of SovCorps which is he
unknown
wants corporations to literally own entire states where workers are essentially
wants corporations to literally own entire states where workers are essentially
Slavoj Žižek
and I just want to know
and I just want to know
unknown
what you think about this idea of the SovCorp the sovereign
what you think about this idea of the SovCorp the sovereign
Slavoj Žižek
corporation I think that first it's not as new as he thinks in the history of now I will be politically correct old leftist you know I was always fascinated by this early imperialist or whatever you call them like British East Company the Dutch
corporation I think that first it's not as new as he thinks in the history of now I will be politically correct old leftist you know I was always fascinated by this early imperialist or whatever you call them like British East Company the Dutch
unknown
East Asian Company they were corporate structures which had fully their own their own sovereign territory the Dutch company whatever it's they owned today's Indonesia and large part of Malaysia and so on and without any responsibility to the Dutch laws they created their own order there and now I will tell you something that even
East Asian Company they were corporate structures which had fully their own their own sovereign territory the Dutch company whatever it's they owned today's Indonesia and large part of Malaysia and so on and without any responsibility to the Dutch laws they created their own order there and now I will tell you something that even
unknown
traumatizes me we were lucky although I doubt that this is lucky to learn how they were punishing prisoners something this is which is my
traumatizes me we were lucky although I doubt that this is lucky to learn how they were punishing prisoners something this is which is my
Slavoj Žižek
nightmare
nightmare
unknown
they tied you to a tree or whatever and then
they tied you to a tree or whatever and then
Slavoj Žižek
fixed head like this and then the water was slowly dripping into your throat so that to breathe you had to swallow it and then like the joke was people observed when you got to the edge of explosion it went on for hours and they were just waiting where literally your stomach will explode and so on it was extreme brutality so again it it already happened you know but what interested me I'm not a specialist in this is how ridiculously this idea of new corporate state is opposed to what I ironically called Steve Bannon left Trump because their entire rhetoric is against big corporate power and here I see a problem I'm not saying I sympathize with Steve Bannon but don't forget something in the first Trump mandate whatever you know that he was fired from the White House for a very interesting reason at least he was an honest populist he proposed now you have I think in United States maximum tax the tax for the rich he demanded to raise it to he lost his job in the White House and so on and even do you remember how two
fixed head like this and then the water was slowly dripping into your throat so that to breathe you had to swallow it and then like the joke was people observed when you got to the edge of explosion it went on for hours and they were just waiting where literally your stomach will explode and so on it was extreme brutality so again it it already happened you know but what interested me I'm not a specialist in this is how ridiculously this idea of new corporate state is opposed to what I ironically called Steve Bannon left Trump because their entire rhetoric is against big corporate power and here I see a problem I'm not saying I sympathize with Steve Bannon but don't forget something in the first Trump mandate whatever you know that he was fired from the White House for a very interesting reason at least he was an honest populist he proposed now you have I think in United States maximum tax the tax for the rich he demanded to raise it to he lost his job in the White House and so on and even do you remember how two
unknown
months
months
Slavoj Žižek
ago or when he brutally reacted to Elon Musk but now he made a compromise and so on so would you agree that the difficulty that was my basic message even the difficulty with Trumpism is precisely to think this contradiction because I think it will never happen that then there will be a big battle will it be at least a right-wing populist regime or will it be a corporate regime he needs both can I just say I'm going to be like Zelensky and after the fact thank you so much it was incredible no I mean I'm just kidding I mean it was just incredibly generous of Slavoj to come and give a great talk and I just thank you so much here I must in a friendly way disagree with you it's so against my nature to play I to play this elitist guy you know stays in the hotel fuck off
ago or when he brutally reacted to Elon Musk but now he made a compromise and so on so would you agree that the difficulty that was my basic message even the difficulty with Trumpism is precisely to think this contradiction because I think it will never happen that then there will be a big battle will it be at least a right-wing populist regime or will it be a corporate regime he needs both can I just say I'm going to be like Zelensky and after the fact thank you so much it was incredible no I mean I'm just kidding I mean it was just incredibly generous of Slavoj to come and give a great talk and I just thank you so much here I must in a friendly way disagree with you it's so against my nature to play I to play this elitist guy you know stays in the hotel fuck off
unknown
you and then comes at the end to to swallow to take appropriate
you and then comes at the end to to swallow to take appropriate
Slavoj Žižek
so much time
so much time
unknown
it's not in my nature I am sincerely I am sincerely
it's not in my nature I am sincerely I am sincerely
Slavoj Žižek
ashamed we all know that no thank you very much thank you and you are for Big
ashamed we all know that no thank you very much thank you and you are for Big
unknown
Brother Oceania United States and England then this then this Eurasia is Russia swallowing Europe and then China and the round there East Asia and this is why I am I must say opposed to BRICS if it were to be the good BRICS nothing against but what
Brother Oceania United States and England then this then this Eurasia is Russia swallowing Europe and then China and the round there East Asia and this is why I am I must say opposed to BRICS if it were to be the good BRICS nothing against but what
Slavoj Žižek
BRICS is amounting to is yes it's no longer a unipolar world but in reality it means three maybe four maybe even five powers each has its own domain of influence that's why the problem with Trump I don't care if they will make a deal with Putin or not the tragedy is that they are already speaking the same language which is the language like Russia he admits it's Ukraine whatever Trump is Greenland Canada whatever and China is whatever you want Taiwan and so on although they have some variety
BRICS is amounting to is yes it's no longer a unipolar world but in reality it means three maybe four maybe even five powers each has its own domain of influence that's why the problem with Trump I don't care if they will make a deal with Putin or not the tragedy is that they are already speaking the same language which is the language like Russia he admits it's Ukraine whatever Trump is Greenland Canada whatever and China is whatever you want Taiwan and so on although they have some variety
unknown
there
there