Slavoj Žižek talks Nick Land AI singularity, ethics of psychoanalysis, Compact Magazine, and so on!
Interview · theory underground ·
published 2024-03-18 · 1:57:15 · 15,864 words
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
ideologycommunism-socialismpsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismrevolution-violencesexuality-gendersubjectivityeveryday-lifetechnology-ai-cyberspacephilosophy-generalethicsgeopolitics-war
Žižek opens by establishing the audience's theoretical level and critiquing Susan Neiman’s liberal universalism as a 'useful idiot' stance. He engages in a dialectical exchange with audience members (Todd, Mikey, Dave) regarding cancel culture, arguing that its exclusionary logic contradicts true class struggle. He contrasts the right-wing logic of exclusion with the Marxist necessity of self-reflexivity, using Alenka Zupančič’s reading of Antigone to illustrate the tension between universal inclusion and particular exclusion. Žižek argues that contemporary capitalism has produced a 'Lumpen-bourgeoisie' (exemplified by Trump) lacking the organizational function of the old bourgeoisie, and that class struggle requires a 'third element' (such as trans people) to embody true antagonism. He redefines the working class to include precarious and informal labor, critiquing the 'workers' aristocracy' of privileged state employees and the ideological blurring of class in platform capitalism like Uber. The excerpt concludes with a listener’s question regarding the ethics of psychoanalysis, specifically the distinction between desire and drive, citing Žižek’s reading of Antigone. Žižek distinguishes between desire and drive, arguing that the ethics of psychoanalysis requires fidelity to desire without reliance on the Big Other, illustrated by Saint-Just’s stormy sea metaphor and the experience of falling in love. He refutes the serial killer objection by asserting radical responsibility and the paradox of freedom as inner necessity. Finally, he critiques Nick Land’s accelerationism and the concept of the Singularity as an overly optimistic, impossible theological projection, arguing instead for a Lovecraftian view of AI as an inconsistent, nightmare-like mess rooted in human finitude. Žižek critiques Nick Land’s projection of AI as a nightmare entity, arguing it is a fantasy projection of current social gaps, and dismisses Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus as their worst work while praising Logic of Sense. He analyzes the Chinese state’s ban on time-travel fiction as a 'neo-fascist' attempt to retain capitalist productivity without social decay, framing it as 'conservative modernity.' He then engages in a detailed re-reading of Marx through Baudrillard, arguing that exchange and symbolic forms are constitutive of production, not mere mirrors, before concluding with a lament about modern censorship and the necessity of 'moving the underground' to prepare for revolution.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 32
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
A Marxist/Hegelian concept where universality is not an abstract ideal but is constituted through the specific biases and particularities it attempts to encompass, contrasting with Neiman's 'simple liberal universalism'.
Žižek applies this Stalinist term to Susan Neiman, suggesting she is a temporary ally whose liberal universalism must eventually be 'purged' or transcended by a more concrete Marxist universality.
The idea that the act of enforcing political correctness or inclusion inherently transgresses its own stated goal by excluding those who do not fit the specific definition of inclusion.
as “l'énoncé vs. énonciation”
The Lacanian distinction between the explicit content (topic of diversity/inclusion) and the act of speaking (the process of exclusion), which Žižek uses to diagnose the failure of cancel culture.
as “logic of exclusion”
The defining feature of right-wing/fascist politics (and cancel culture) which seeks to preserve identity by excluding a 'foreign body,' contrasted with class struggle which requires self-reflexivity.
as “self-reflexive twist”
The necessary component of Marxist class struggle where one questions whether one's own identity is part of the oppressive situation being fought, avoiding the self-affirmative trap of exclusion.
A critique of the desire to simply be 'seen' as workers; Žižek aligns with the audience's view that true liberation involves the 'self-abolition' of the working-class identity itself.
A technical distinction Žižek makes with Todd MacGowan: 'lack' (Lacan) implies a structural void, whereas 'antagonism' (Marx) implies a positive social conflict; Žižek warns against conflating them.
as “Lumpen-bourgeoisie”
Žižek’s term for today's new oligarchs (like Trump) who, unlike the creative old bourgeoisie, lack a large social organizational function and represent pure exploitation without historical necessity.
The necessary 'third' or 'monster' in any antagonism (e.g., trans people in sexual difference) that prevents struggle from being a simple hierarchical opposition between two agents.
Lenin’s term for relatively privileged workers (e.g., state employees) whose strikes benefit only their own elite status at the expense of the broader proletariat.
A painful, excessive enjoyment or 'sticking' to a symptom, distinct from pleasure, which drive hooks into.
as “desire as yielding”
Žižek’s formulation that desire is itself a 'compromise-formation' and a 'yielding' or retreat against the intractable drive.
The force that undermines desire; in Žižek’s ethics, one should 'not cede on drive,' meaning one should not compromise on the fundamental, intractable force behind one's existence, unlike the Lacanian maxim to 'not cede on desire.'
Žižek’s inversion of the Lacanian ethical maxim; following Antigone means stepping out of the domain of desire (which is a compromise) into the modality of pure drive.
as “ethics of desire”
Fidelity to one's desire without relying on any figure of the Big Other (God, Nature, History) to guarantee or justify it.
The ontological gap where desire is a lack and drive is an excess, neither of which can fully capture the subject's relation to the object.
The way desire and drive are two sides of the same coin, intimately external to one another yet constitutive of the same structure.
An ethical stance that goes to the end of satisfaction, resulting in a self-destructive, suicidal loop (e.g., totalitarianism, addiction).
The conservative/Lacanian formula (e.g., Miller) that one must act as if social prohibitions are true, even if they lack foundation, to avoid self-destruction.
The psychoanalytic stance that one is fully responsible for what one is, rejecting the excuse of unconscious compulsion or inner urge.
The paradox that the highest form of freedom is experienced not as a choice, but as an unavoidable inner necessity (like falling in love).
The stance of seeing a clear line of development toward a desired goal, even if it appears catastrophic to others (critique of Land/Fukuyama).
A conception of artificial intelligence not as a divine, consistent totality, but as a breathtaking, inconsistent mess and pure nightmare that exceeds human processing.
as “Lebensgestalt”
Hegel's concept that philosophy can only grasp a social order or figure of life when it is already in decline.
The mechanism by which we project future entities (like AI) or alternate realities (like Nirvana) to cover over the ontological gap in our current situation.
as “conservative modernity”
A political formation, exemplified by the Chinese state, that seeks to maintain capitalist productivity and modern dynamics while enforcing a conservative, non-ideological social order (e.g., Confucianism).
Kōjin Karatani’s concept, utilized by Žižek to supplement Marx, suggesting that symbolic exchange and circulation are not secondary to but constitutive of the productive ground itself.
Marx’s concept where capital takes over existing production forms without immediately changing the material technology, which Žižek uses to argue against a naive reading of Marx that ignores symbolic/logical layers.
as “St. Louis Hegelians”
A historical reference to German high school teachers in St. Louis who established an early Hegelian school, which Žižek uses as an anecdote about the geographical displacement of 'Spirit'.
The Latin phrase 'I will move Acheron' (from Virgil), used by Žižek to describe the act of disturbing the underworld/unconscious to prepare for revolution.
Žižek’s strategic imperative to shift the unconscious fantasies and ideological foundations of society, as direct revolution is currently impossible, to lay the groundwork for future change.
Stories he reaches for 8
The Chinese government banned sci-fi depicting time travel. Žižek argues this is a ban on the future (preventing alternate futures), whereas Nick Land saw it as a ban on the past (preventing feudal fetishism). Žižek views this as a 'neo-fascist' strategy of 'conservative modernity', keeping capitalist productivity while suppressing social decay via Confucianism.
“The Chinese government was doing is trying to ban its people of thinking of alternate futures like it’s a kind of ban on the future.”
Saint-Just’s metaphor of revolutionaries as captains of a ship in a stormy sea without a compass, having to find their way through risk, illustrating the ethics of desire without a guaranteeing Big Other.
“revolutionaries are like passengers or captains of a ship in the middle of a white stormy sea without any compass where you have to find your way”
Uber’s ideology claims everyone is a 'small capitalist' because drivers own their cars/computers, thereby blurring class tension and hiding exploitation.
“Uber the company claims: we are not capitalists, we just organize a contact between those who offer a service... So on the one hand you usually own your own means of production: a car”
Explorers ask a tribe if there are cannibals left; the tribe replies, 'No, yesterday we ate the last one.' Žižek uses this to illustrate how cancel culture claims to have 'eaten' the last offender, thereby excluding anyone who doesn't fit their specific definition of the 'last one.'
“explorers come into a tribe and ask them are there still any cannibals among you? The answer is no yesterday we ate the last one.”
In Slovenia, only privileged state employees (doctors, judges) can afford to strike, leading to internal class resentment where top surgeons get richer while ordinary nurses suffer, illustrating the 'workers' aristocracy.'
“If they organize a strike the capitalist said: fuck off, we disband your factory we move elsewhere whatsoever.”
Žižek describes his intellectual friendship with Alenka Zupančič, noting that her book 'Antigone’s Parallax' converted him by arguing that Antigone’s act is not about liberal inclusion (trans/gay rights) but about a specific, exclusive loyalty to the brother, illustrating the paradox of inclusion/exclusion.
“Alenka’s Antigone’s Parallax... She takes into account my three versions and adds a fourth version.”
Citing Neil Gaiman, Žižek argues that love is a catastrophe that ruins daily life, representing a sacrifice of ordinary existence for a higher cause (fidelity to desire).
“what catastrophe is to fall in love. All your daily life is ruined you’re obsessed but which means that love as unconditional desire beyond the pleasure principle is in itself a sacrifice”
Žižek recounts the story of German high school teachers in St. Louis who founded the first Hegelian school in America, believing the 'Spirit' had moved from Europe to St. Louis. He uses this to mock the idea of a fixed geographical center of philosophy, noting how the 'Spirit' then moved to Chicago, then the West Coast, and now allegedly China.
“Some German high school teachers who around established the first Hegelian school there... Hegel came to his conclusion too quickly.”
Works invoked 20
Capital book
Cited as the work where Marx correctly distinguishes between formal and full subsumption, showing that the logic of exchange is part of the productive ground.
Antigone play
Sophocles' tragedy; Žižek uses it to discuss the difference between liberal inclusion (Butler) and the specific, exclusive nature of Antigone's act (Zupančič).
Žižek’s own work, referenced in the context of Baudrillard/Lyotard reception history.
Lukács’s book, cited for the idea that subject and substance are reconciled through communist revolution.
Anti-Oedipus book
Called 'arguably the worst book that they [Deleuze and Guattari] wrote' due to its image of the 'new earth' and non-neurotic desire, which Žižek sees as a fantasy projection.
Logic of Sense book
Highly praised. Žižek uses it to show Deleuze’s internal contradiction regarding Oedipus, viewing this tension as a strength.
Preferred over Anti-Oedipus.
The Trial book
Used to illustrate the cynical formula that the law is a lie but necessary.
A Thousand Plateaus book
Described as 'a little bit better' than Anti-Oedipus, but still lower than Logic of Sense.
Surplus Enjoyment book
Žižek’s own book where he previously noted Miller’s unknowing quote of Kafka.
Looking Awry book
Cited by the listener for the quote regarding the relation between drive and desire and the inversion of the Lacanian maxim.
Called 'the worst text of Marx' by Žižek, specifically criticizing its 'evolutionary stupidities' about production developing until it no longer fits the mode of production.
America book
Baudrillard’s travelogue, which Žižek implies tapped into 'immanent fantasies' of reality, though he admits he hasn't read all of Baudrillard.
Antigone’s Parallax book
A book by Alenka Zupančič; Žižek calls it an 'epiphany' and a 'friendly polemical reply' that converted him with its reading of Antigone's exclusive loyalty.
Praised for realizing that copying old Marxist categories doesn't work and that exchange/symbolic forms are constitutive of production, aligning with Žižek’s reading of Marx.
Underground Theory journal
The publication where Mikey wrote an article about Žižek’s concepts.
Why Woke is Not Left book
A book by Susan Neiman; Žižek critiques its argument as 'simple liberal universalism' that ignores particular biases.
Fort-Da other
Freud’s famous example of a child playing with a spool, used by Lacan to explain the logic of enjoying the lack.
Lucidities book
One of Baudrillard’s last books, where he seems to return to metaphysics, which Žižek notes but doesn't fully engage with.
Time Energy book
David McKerracher’s book, which Žižek calls 'My Bible' and 'an excellent book,' providing a foreword for.
People invoked 48
Dave (Dave Berry) positive
Listener who asks the main question about the ethics of psychoanalysis.
David McKerracher positive
A worker and theorist whose book Time Energy has a foreword by Žižek. Žižek calls it 'My Bible' and an 'excellent book,' supporting the platform Theory Underground.
Franz Kafka positive
Used to illustrate Miller’s cynical formula: the law is a lie but necessary.
The protagonist of The Trial, who asks the priest about the nature of the law.
Mikey (Mikey Dreger) positive
Listener and friend who wrote an article for Underground Theory about Žižek’s concepts.
Referenced by the listener regarding his idea of an 'ethics of desire' as a Heideggerian resolute stance.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as a best friend and close intellectual collaborator in Slovenia; Žižek praises her book 'Antigone’s Parallax' for converting him with a reading that highlights the exclusive nature of Antigone's act rather than a liberal one.
Todd McGowan positive
An audience member and friend; Žižek appreciates his analysis of cancel culture as 'super-egoic morality' and agrees with his point about the left being caught in a logic of exclusion, though he distinguishes his own use of 'antagonism' from Todd's 'lack'.
Antigone positive
The Greek tragic figure used to illustrate the tension between universal inclusion and particular exclusion; Žižek prefers Zupančič's reading of her exclusive loyalty to her brother over Butler's liberal reading.
Ayn Rand negative
Cited as a less faithful champion of capitalism than Land, because Land believes capitalism destroys humanity.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited for his analysis of the 'workers' aristocracy' and his fascination with American corporate bosses during the Civil War.
Described not as a 'crazy old communist' but as having an 'accurate insight into modern capitalism,' specifically regarding retaining productivity without social decay.
Georg Lukács positive
Cited for his reading of Marx in History and Class Consciousness, where subject and substance are reconciled through revolution.
H. P. Lovecraft positive
Used as a descriptor ('Lovecraftian') for the nature of AI: a pure nightmare we can't process.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the maxim 'not to cede one's desire' and the concepts of jouissance and drive.
Jean Baudrillard positive
Žižek admits to not having read all of Baudrillard but praises The Mirror of Production for tapping into the idea that exchange/symbolic forms are constitutive of production, agreeing with Baudrillard’s skepticism of naive Marxist categories.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Land is 'all about Deleuze and Guattari' and hates Lacan/Hegel.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Cited as thinking Hegel was too early, believing liberal democracy is the end of history.
Mentioned as a pragmatist who originated from the St. Louis Hegelian source, used in the anecdote about the geographical movement of the Spirit.
Mentioned as the one who actually read Žižek’s Sublime Object and didn't like it, correcting a rumor that Baudrillard had done so.
Neil Gaiman positive
Cited for the definition of love as a catastrophe/sacrifice that ruins daily life.
Curtis Yarvin negative
Co-founder of the neo-reaction movement with Land.
Sabine Hossenfelder positive
A quantum physicist whose claim that AI will be an 'inconsistent mess' supports Žižek’s critique of the Singularity.
Judith Butler negative
Referenced as representing the 'standard reading' of Antigone as a figure for trans/gay rights; Žižek dismisses this as 'radicalized liberalism' and 'our liberal notion of universal right.'
Donald Trump positive
Used as the prime example of the 'Lumpen-bourgeoisie' who lacks the creative organizational function of the old bourgeoisie.
Chantal Mouffe negative
Critiqued alongside Laclau for equalizing the working class with other struggles.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Described as a 'good friend' and ex-vice president of Bolivia; praised for developing the concept that the working class includes informal/precarious labor.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just positive
Cited for the metaphor of revolutionaries as captains of a ship without a compass, illustrating the ethics of desire.
Susan Neiman negative
Cited as a German-speaking philosopher of ethics who wrote 'Why Woke is Not Left'; Žižek critiques her argument as 'simple liberal universalism' and calls her a 'useful idiot' whose work must eventually be purged.
Félix Guattari negative
Co-author of Anti-Oedipus, which Žižek calls 'arguably the worst book that they wrote,' specifically criticizing its image of the 'new earth' and non-neurotic desire.
Mentioned as part of Žižek's 'inner circle friends' in Slovenia with whom he engages in 'deep polemics' despite being best friends personally.
Kojin Karatani positive
Cited for supplementing Marx with 'modes of exchange,' a concept Žižek adopts to argue that what orthodox Marxists dismiss as 'mirror' is actually the thing itself.
Mentioned in confusion with Saint-Just regarding the nature of revolution.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Critiqued for putting the working class on equal footing with other antagonisms (racism, feminism) rather than as the key to revolution.
Pierre Legendre negative
A Lacanian lawyer who argues for the necessity of social prohibitions; Žižek finds this formula 'horrible' and a form of cynicism.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Lacan’s son-in-law; Žižek criticizes his formula that we must act as if prohibitions are true, calling it a contemporary form of cynicism quoting Kafka.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited alongside Kant for the point that the highest form of freedom is experienced as an inner necessity.
Eckhart Tolle negative
Mocked as a representative of 'don't think too much' spirituality.
Described as a friend whose journal, Philosophical Salon, is one of the few places Žižek can publish due to censorship.
Identified as a top Chinese ideologist who is not an idiot, implementing a 'neo-fascist' solution of 'conservative modernity' (modernity with Confucianism).
Buddhists negative
Used as a foil in a debate about Nirvana. Žižek argues against the Buddhist opposition of finite desire vs. void, asserting a Hegelian view that the gap is the origin, not the fall from Nirvana.
Nick Land negative
Described as the 'most faithful champion of capitalism' because he believes it will destroy humanity; Žižek calls his theory 'too optimistic' and 'impossible.'
Otto von Bismarck positive
Cited as a historical example of a conservative leader who established social welfare (healthcare/retirement) for organizational stability.
Referenced only to invoke the term 'useful idiot' and 'purged' as a rhetorical device to describe the temporary utility of liberal allies like Neiman.
Karl Marx positive
Cited as the basis for being 'very careful' with universalism; his notion of class struggle is contrasted with the logic of exclusion, emphasizing self-reflexivity over the preservation of identity.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the Fort-Da example, which Lacan uses to explain the logic of enjoying the lack.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited as 'too early' for the reconciliation of subject and substance, which Land/Fukuyama claim is happening now.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the point that the highest form of freedom is experienced as an inner necessity.
Transcript 135 turns
unknown
What’s up everybody and welcome to Theory Underground. I’m its host and creator David McKerracher. This video you’re about to see technically has already existed online but it was in like a six-hour stream and so I am republishing it as a stand-alone interview. This is the first time that Slavoj Žižek collaborated with us via Zoom, you know. Before that he had submitted a piece to Underground Theory, which was just an amazing, amazing thing and this video you’re about to see is from the launch event for the Theory Underground book tour in which I did with a couple of my compatriots across the United States. We went to like different cities and talked about this book, sometimes to empty venues other times to groups of like people and so it was very DIY underground shit as has everything going on here been up until now. It was for these two books, the book tour, Underground Theory Coming to a City Near You. Stick around to the end of the video if you want to hear about how we're coming to a city near you if you are in Europe during the month of May And then my book Time Energy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. And as you can see here Slavoj Žižek wrote a foreword for this book for the second edition, but during the tour actually it was we were still on the first edition. Slavoj had not yet written this foreword, which came about because of things that he said during the following interview with him. Not this interview, but the following interview. This interview is where he first found out about Nick Land. My compatriot Michael Downs who’s interviewing Slavoj with me actually he led the charge on most of the questions here and he was really excited to ask Slavoj about Nick Land and so as some of you might know already Slavoj has agreed to debate Nick Land but that’s not in this video. This video is the first time he had ever heard about Nick Land. The second interview that we have with him is where he actually agrees to debate Nick Land. Now whether that’s ever going to actually happen or not kind of depends on whether Nick actually gets back to me or not like he said that he was going to get back to me after he got back from vacation but that was like two months ago. I know he’s back from vacation he just hasn’t responded so we’ll see. We’re hoping to see it happen but also who knows, right? And with that I’m about to play the interview for you all but I just want to finish off by saying if you are interested in getting involved at Theory Underground, if you’re interested in becoming a subscriber or a patron, or if you’re interested in knowing what the difference between those two things are, if you’re interested in taking some of the lecture courses because Theory Underground is a lecture course centered platform as well as a publishing house, stick around to the end of the video. I really look forward to telling you about all of that stuff as well as how I was able to quit my job at Amazon. Yay! Yeah, and I’m still wearing the hoodie that I got at Amazon but no, I was able to quit and do Theory Underground full-time so stick around to the end of the video if you want to hear about that. Thanks.
What’s up everybody and welcome to Theory Underground. I’m its host and creator David McKerracher. This video you’re about to see technically has already existed online but it was in like a six-hour stream and so I am republishing it as a stand-alone interview. This is the first time that Slavoj Žižek collaborated with us via Zoom, you know. Before that he had submitted a piece to Underground Theory, which was just an amazing, amazing thing and this video you’re about to see is from the launch event for the Theory Underground book tour in which I did with a couple of my compatriots across the United States. We went to like different cities and talked about this book, sometimes to empty venues other times to groups of like people and so it was very DIY underground shit as has everything going on here been up until now. It was for these two books, the book tour, Underground Theory Coming to a City Near You. Stick around to the end of the video if you want to hear about how we're coming to a city near you if you are in Europe during the month of May And then my book Time Energy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. And as you can see here Slavoj Žižek wrote a foreword for this book for the second edition, but during the tour actually it was we were still on the first edition. Slavoj had not yet written this foreword, which came about because of things that he said during the following interview with him. Not this interview, but the following interview. This interview is where he first found out about Nick Land. My compatriot Michael Downs who’s interviewing Slavoj with me actually he led the charge on most of the questions here and he was really excited to ask Slavoj about Nick Land and so as some of you might know already Slavoj has agreed to debate Nick Land but that’s not in this video. This video is the first time he had ever heard about Nick Land. The second interview that we have with him is where he actually agrees to debate Nick Land. Now whether that’s ever going to actually happen or not kind of depends on whether Nick actually gets back to me or not like he said that he was going to get back to me after he got back from vacation but that was like two months ago. I know he’s back from vacation he just hasn’t responded so we’ll see. We’re hoping to see it happen but also who knows, right? And with that I’m about to play the interview for you all but I just want to finish off by saying if you are interested in getting involved at Theory Underground, if you’re interested in becoming a subscriber or a patron, or if you’re interested in knowing what the difference between those two things are, if you’re interested in taking some of the lecture courses because Theory Underground is a lecture course centered platform as well as a publishing house, stick around to the end of the video. I really look forward to telling you about all of that stuff as well as how I was able to quit my job at Amazon. Yay! Yeah, and I’m still wearing the hoodie that I got at Amazon but no, I was able to quit and do Theory Underground full-time so stick around to the end of the video if you want to hear about that. Thanks.
Slavoj Žižek
How is it? I got the message. You begin, you an idiot—I include myself—introduces me, gives the word to another idiot who asks questions, blah, blah, blah, I get all that. That the public is—did I get it concretely?—people who are well disposed towards theory but maybe not fully professionally acquainted with high level philosophical speculation. So I can talk to about serious stuff but not too technically.
How is it? I got the message. You begin, you an idiot—I include myself—introduces me, gives the word to another idiot who asks questions, blah, blah, blah, I get all that. That the public is—did I get it concretely?—people who are well disposed towards theory but maybe not fully professionally acquainted with high level philosophical speculation. So I can talk to about serious stuff but not too technically.
unknown
Am I correct? Sure, but with us too like we don’t want you—we know normally you’re always trying to be as clear for the general public but when it comes to the theoretical questions we have, so many of us are students of you, we’ve read so many of your books, we’re well versed in Lacanian-Hegelian
Am I correct? Sure, but with us too like we don’t want you—we know normally you’re always trying to be as clear for the general public but when it comes to the theoretical questions we have, so many of us are students of you, we’ve read so many of your books, we’re well versed in Lacanian-Hegelian
Slavoj Žižek
theory and so you don’t have to hold back if you want to. I got it. I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah because I have many problems now, stances which may appear politically incorrect but I really think one should take them into account. There are now, incidentally, some new stuff Leftist against political correctness and wokeness, but I don’t totally trust it. It’s too standard liberal. Did you hear about this German-speaking philosopher of ethics Susan Neiman? She now published a book recently with an open title Why Woke is Not Left or something like that. It’s basically I agree but it’s—but her point against wokeness is simple liberal universalism, you know, like particular identities, no we need universal human rights, blah, blah, blah. Oh, oh, oh it’s not as simple as that because we as at least indebted to Marx have to be very careful here, you know. There is also this kind of how should I put it, concrete universality in the sense of every universality could be questioned with regard to its particular biases and so on. And she is just doing a useful job but—may I put it in Stalinist terms?—she is how to say this will be so evil, I hope she will not listen to this. She is more or less a useful idiot or a good fellow traveler, which means we need her now but at a later stage one never knows she will have to be purged, you know. But okay that’s another—thanks very much. Do you have any messages of what I should be attentive to now in advance?
theory and so you don’t have to hold back if you want to. I got it. I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah because I have many problems now, stances which may appear politically incorrect but I really think one should take them into account. There are now, incidentally, some new stuff Leftist against political correctness and wokeness, but I don’t totally trust it. It’s too standard liberal. Did you hear about this German-speaking philosopher of ethics Susan Neiman? She now published a book recently with an open title Why Woke is Not Left or something like that. It’s basically I agree but it’s—but her point against wokeness is simple liberal universalism, you know, like particular identities, no we need universal human rights, blah, blah, blah. Oh, oh, oh it’s not as simple as that because we as at least indebted to Marx have to be very careful here, you know. There is also this kind of how should I put it, concrete universality in the sense of every universality could be questioned with regard to its particular biases and so on. And she is just doing a useful job but—may I put it in Stalinist terms?—she is how to say this will be so evil, I hope she will not listen to this. She is more or less a useful idiot or a good fellow traveler, which means we need her now but at a later stage one never knows she will have to be purged, you know. But okay that’s another—thanks very much. Do you have any messages of what I should be attentive to now in advance?
unknown
Well I mean basically what I’m going to—I’m the idiot who’s going to introduce you and so after I introduce you. Then who
Well I mean basically what I’m going to—I’m the idiot who’s going to introduce you and so after I introduce you. Then who
Slavoj Žižek
is the mega-idiot? Okay, the mega-idiot it’s me but who is the idiot who asks the questions? Well
is the mega-idiot? Okay, the mega-idiot it’s me but who is the idiot who asks the questions? Well
unknown
yeah we’re Žižekian so you’ve made us idiots so it’s all your
yeah we’re Žižekian so you’ve made us idiots so it’s all your
Slavoj Žižek
fault. No I will put another term which I take very seriously. You are not a complete idiot, which I’m also not a complete idiot. I don’t think there are only two types of people, complete idiots and not complete idiots and that’s the highest that we can get, you know. The non-complete idiot. No, no, not complete idiots in the sense of not idiots at all, sorry, I haven’t yet encountered this type of human beings, you know.
fault. No I will put another term which I take very seriously. You are not a complete idiot, which I’m also not a complete idiot. I don’t think there are only two types of people, complete idiots and not complete idiots and that’s the highest that we can get, you know. The non-complete idiot. No, no, not complete idiots in the sense of not idiots at all, sorry, I haven’t yet encountered this type of human beings, you know.
unknown
Yeah, basically what I’m going to do, I’m going to give a brief introduction and then we want you to elaborate. We want you to have time to do that but we do each have, I don’t know, two, three main questions we want to get to and you know just let you riff off of. I just to warn you I’m in a bad mood, blah, blah, not because of you. It here it was a heatwave, a flooding, it is this strange weather when from a heatwave you pass all of a sudden to cold weather. So I am all the time with some kind of allergies. So again the point is you do
Yeah, basically what I’m going to do, I’m going to give a brief introduction and then we want you to elaborate. We want you to have time to do that but we do each have, I don’t know, two, three main questions we want to get to and you know just let you riff off of. I just to warn you I’m in a bad mood, blah, blah, not because of you. It here it was a heatwave, a flooding, it is this strange weather when from a heatwave you pass all of a sudden to cold weather. So I am all the time with some kind of allergies. So again the point is you do
unknown
whatever
whatever
Slavoj Žižek
you want with me. Cut it short,
you want with me. Cut it short,
unknown
I’m sad that you
I’m sad that you
Slavoj Žižek
don’t have somebody to imitate my voice so that you could even simply. Do we just use ChatGPT to have it talk for you? Another guy to say what I am not aware but I really want to say according to your judgment, you know. Yeah, yeah. David you want to say
don’t have somebody to imitate my voice so that you could even simply. Do we just use ChatGPT to have it talk for you? Another guy to say what I am not aware but I really want to say according to your judgment, you know. Yeah, yeah. David you want to say
unknown
something? All right, I want to see if this, can you all hear me okay on this computer?
something? All right, I want to see if this, can you all hear me okay on this computer?
Slavoj Žižek
Yes. I do. I see you and I hear you.
Yes. I do. I see you and I hear you.
unknown
All right everybody. Slavoj it’s so good to have you here with us. Thank you so much for joining. I’m good
All right everybody. Slavoj it’s so good to have you here with us. Thank you so much for joining. I’m good
Slavoj Žižek
too. I appreciate very much what you are doing, yeah.
too. I appreciate very much what you are doing, yeah.
unknown
Thank you Slavoj. So everybody welcome to the official book and books and tour launch for Theory Underground. I’m holding up the books but I guess they kind of got, the computer’s making them not show up. But anyway we’ve got the Time Energy book and the Underground Theory book both of them are now available as of today on Amazon and today is the day that we begin the tour across the United States and back again and then we’ll go into Europe in April of next year. We’re kind of planning that one out a little bit more ahead of time. But this tour basically it’s our first real foray into the world and Slavoj came just to sort of give us that boost and to say you know good luck on your travels and so thank you. It means the world and Mikey and I basically we kind of have you for an hour. We just have some questions we’ve always wanted to ask you and so I’m about to—sorry to
Thank you Slavoj. So everybody welcome to the official book and books and tour launch for Theory Underground. I’m holding up the books but I guess they kind of got, the computer’s making them not show up. But anyway we’ve got the Time Energy book and the Underground Theory book both of them are now available as of today on Amazon and today is the day that we begin the tour across the United States and back again and then we’ll go into Europe in April of next year. We’re kind of planning that one out a little bit more ahead of time. But this tour basically it’s our first real foray into the world and Slavoj came just to sort of give us that boost and to say you know good luck on your travels and so thank you. It means the world and Mikey and I basically we kind of have you for an hour. We just have some questions we’ve always wanted to ask you and so I’m about to—sorry to
Slavoj Žižek
interrupt you but I hope we agree that if I don’t collapse one hour is for us Marxists a dialectical notion not a mechanical materialist notion. You know like from quantum physics you can stretch the time and so on.
interrupt you but I hope we agree that if I don’t collapse one hour is for us Marxists a dialectical notion not a mechanical materialist notion. You know like from quantum physics you can stretch the time and so on.
unknown
This is not fixed time, this is variable time right? Traditional right? The time of symbolic exchange. So okay so everybody welcome. I’m a little frazzled. I’m not going to say very much about Theory Underground or the books themselves because we have speakers who will talk about that after this interview. But I will just say that Theory Underground is a platform. It’s a teaching platform. It’s a social media site. There’s an app for it. It’s also a publishing house and when Slavoj found out that it’s a publishing house he said well I’ll give you a manuscript then and so he gave, he gifted that to me and I said okay well then it would be unfair of me not to open this up to some others and so other people who have been with Theory Underground in the courses who wrote really good papers for some of the courses they get an opportunity to be in the volume. And then also some other colleagues also are in the volume. And some of the names in the volume created a lot of backlash. Some people were not very happy apparently about some of the people including Slavoj and he’s been canceled a few times this year and so we’ve come to his defense for at least a couple of things, maybe not everything but just kidding. But the I don’t know I just I think that all I really need to say about Theory Underground is wait for Nance and Anne after this, they will both explain what the books are, explain what the tour is. But for right now Michael Downs is somebody that I’ve been in dialogue with for years. He’s a
This is not fixed time, this is variable time right? Traditional right? The time of symbolic exchange. So okay so everybody welcome. I’m a little frazzled. I’m not going to say very much about Theory Underground or the books themselves because we have speakers who will talk about that after this interview. But I will just say that Theory Underground is a platform. It’s a teaching platform. It’s a social media site. There’s an app for it. It’s also a publishing house and when Slavoj found out that it’s a publishing house he said well I’ll give you a manuscript then and so he gave, he gifted that to me and I said okay well then it would be unfair of me not to open this up to some others and so other people who have been with Theory Underground in the courses who wrote really good papers for some of the courses they get an opportunity to be in the volume. And then also some other colleagues also are in the volume. And some of the names in the volume created a lot of backlash. Some people were not very happy apparently about some of the people including Slavoj and he’s been canceled a few times this year and so we’ve come to his defense for at least a couple of things, maybe not everything but just kidding. But the I don’t know I just I think that all I really need to say about Theory Underground is wait for Nance and Anne after this, they will both explain what the books are, explain what the tour is. But for right now Michael Downs is somebody that I’ve been in dialogue with for years. He’s a
unknown
warehouse worker in Raytown, Missouri. He’s probably the most enthusiastic supporter of Slavoj Žižek that I’ve ever known. He teaches Žižek better than anyone else I’ve ever heard. I’ve learned a lot about Žižek and Lacan through Mikey. Mikey
warehouse worker in Raytown, Missouri. He’s probably the most enthusiastic supporter of Slavoj Žižek that I’ve ever known. He teaches Žižek better than anyone else I’ve ever heard. I’ve learned a lot about Žižek and Lacan through Mikey. Mikey
Slavoj Žižek
taught—sorry to interrupt you so maybe I should call him if I don’t understand something from my old books. You should. I’ll explain inherent transgression to you. You
taught—sorry to interrupt you so maybe I should call him if I don’t understand something from my old books. You should. I’ll explain inherent transgression to you. You
unknown
definitely should, yeah. And so basically what I thought it would be cool is because a lot of people are hearing from Mikey about Žižek for the first time today, I just wanted to give Mikey an opportunity to talk about why he cares about the theory of Slavoj Žižek. So Mikey go ahead and take it away you can introduce Slavoj.
definitely should, yeah. And so basically what I thought it would be cool is because a lot of people are hearing from Mikey about Žižek for the first time today, I just wanted to give Mikey an opportunity to talk about why he cares about the theory of Slavoj Žižek. So Mikey go ahead and take it away you can introduce Slavoj.
unknown
Okay, yeah. I mean there’s somebody in philosophy who needs no introduction, it’s Slavoj Žižek. But I think a lot of the time who he is in the world of philosophy gets obfuscated by his media image and for us most importantly Slavoj Žižek is the guy who wrote Sublime Object of Ideology, Tarrying with the Negative, For They Know Not What They Do, Ticklish Subject, Parallax View, Less Than Nothing. Slavoj for us is a serious philosopher working at the highest levels of the German Idealist tradition mixing it with Lacanian psychoanalysis. And so for those of us who are in underground theory and big into philosophy online, he’s primarily a serious philosopher and I think that gets lost a lot of the time because he is so entertaining, he has so many great examples from pop culture. But we’ve seen how the media wants to turn him into the Elvis of cultural theory or a philosophical clown and that’s not who he is for us. He’s on that level of Hegel, Kant, Schelling and then you know Freud, Lacan and so that’s how we engage with Slavoj’s work is as a serious theoretical position. And for us it’s primarily two things. It’s how Slavoj has taken Lacanian theory and Hegelian ontology and worked at it book after book after book refining this philosophical paradigm, this philosophical view. And that is without a shadow of a doubt Slavoj’s longest lasting impact on the history of philosophy is going to be how he read Hegel through Lacan and read Lacan through Hegel. And it’s very easy whenever you see somebody talking Lacan and Hegel to act like it’s just Lacan or just Hegel. No, Slavoj did that, he made that connection and that’s where his lasting contribution is going to be is in this ontology of extimacy, this ontology of dialectical contradiction. And that’s where we primarily focus and I mean the second thing of course is the theory of ideology which has been so influential on me and on us because the problem with traditional ideology is that it always situated the problem at the level of ideas or representations or meaning. And what Slavoj figured out using Lacan is like no, it’s there’s this facet of enjoyment, this thing which jouissance that keeps us locked into certain ideological formations. It’s the glue that keeps us hooked on ideology and you have to get beyond thinking about ideology as just merely false consciousness or you know deceptive representation and understand it as a libidinal effect. And that’s where it’s been so influential on me and just on a I mean on a personal note I mean that’s why he matters theoretically but I want to say why he matters to me personally is during the pandemic
Okay, yeah. I mean there’s somebody in philosophy who needs no introduction, it’s Slavoj Žižek. But I think a lot of the time who he is in the world of philosophy gets obfuscated by his media image and for us most importantly Slavoj Žižek is the guy who wrote Sublime Object of Ideology, Tarrying with the Negative, For They Know Not What They Do, Ticklish Subject, Parallax View, Less Than Nothing. Slavoj for us is a serious philosopher working at the highest levels of the German Idealist tradition mixing it with Lacanian psychoanalysis. And so for those of us who are in underground theory and big into philosophy online, he’s primarily a serious philosopher and I think that gets lost a lot of the time because he is so entertaining, he has so many great examples from pop culture. But we’ve seen how the media wants to turn him into the Elvis of cultural theory or a philosophical clown and that’s not who he is for us. He’s on that level of Hegel, Kant, Schelling and then you know Freud, Lacan and so that’s how we engage with Slavoj’s work is as a serious theoretical position. And for us it’s primarily two things. It’s how Slavoj has taken Lacanian theory and Hegelian ontology and worked at it book after book after book refining this philosophical paradigm, this philosophical view. And that is without a shadow of a doubt Slavoj’s longest lasting impact on the history of philosophy is going to be how he read Hegel through Lacan and read Lacan through Hegel. And it’s very easy whenever you see somebody talking Lacan and Hegel to act like it’s just Lacan or just Hegel. No, Slavoj did that, he made that connection and that’s where his lasting contribution is going to be is in this ontology of extimacy, this ontology of dialectical contradiction. And that’s where we primarily focus and I mean the second thing of course is the theory of ideology which has been so influential on me and on us because the problem with traditional ideology is that it always situated the problem at the level of ideas or representations or meaning. And what Slavoj figured out using Lacan is like no, it’s there’s this facet of enjoyment, this thing which jouissance that keeps us locked into certain ideological formations. It’s the glue that keeps us hooked on ideology and you have to get beyond thinking about ideology as just merely false consciousness or you know deceptive representation and understand it as a libidinal effect. And that’s where it’s been so influential on me and just on a I mean on a personal note I mean that’s why he matters theoretically but I want to say why he matters to me personally is during the pandemic
unknown
my my mom she always owned she had owned a small business since I was a kid and the reason I had a lot of time and energy to work on philosophy is because I helped at the the family business. During the pandemic the the business closed, it shut down, we lost it and I had to figure out how to go into typical wage labor. And I got a job as a bouncer working at a bar, a barcade, and.
my my mom she always owned she had owned a small business since I was a kid and the reason I had a lot of time and energy to work on philosophy is because I helped at the the family business. During the pandemic the the business closed, it shut down, we lost it and I had to figure out how to go into typical wage labor. And I got a job as a bouncer working at a bar, a barcade, and.
Slavoj Žižek
Are you strong enough to do it? I would be afraid to do this.
Are you strong enough to do it? I would be afraid to do this.
unknown
It’s terrible like I absolutely hate wage labor. It’s the
It’s terrible like I absolutely hate wage labor. It’s the
Slavoj Žižek
worst thing in the world to me. No, no, no, I was more concrete. I thought about bouncing. This means you were throwing out or supposed to throw out? Yeah, we got to break up fights.
worst thing in the world to me. No, no, no, I was more concrete. I thought about bouncing. This means you were throwing out or supposed to throw out? Yeah, we got to break up fights.
unknown
Yeah, or or make sure that we diffuse fights or whatever. But here’s the funny thing Slavoj. I think so our our mutual friend Todd McGowan—Todd’s basically like my teacher in all things Lacan, Žižek, Hegel and I Todd means the world to me. But I I told him about this and I I think he might have told you at some point. But so my form of inherent transgression at my job as a bouncer is so they were real strict on us carding everybody who comes in and I got tired of it and it was so boring just to sit there for eight hours doing it. What I would end up doing is I would just start reading your books on my phone throughout my shift. So I would read Parallax View or Sublime Object or whatever over and over and just kind of bullshit act like I’m carding but I had more important things to do which was read your books. But seriously on a personal level reading your main theoretical works is what got me through this incredibly rough patch of my life and so you know on the one hand it was you know a kind of therapy in a sense it got me through my hard times but on the other it was my form of inherent transgression where I’m like I hate this fucking job so you know what I’m gonna read Slavoj all night and pass the time that way. And so that’s really where my understanding of you came from was through reading your books being my form of inherent transgression at my shitty job. And so that’s that’s just you know I again it was just it was really important for me like it really got me through. But the last thing I’ll just say so I I came up with a joke for you. I know how much you love jokes, jokes are so so central to your work. Please
Yeah, or or make sure that we diffuse fights or whatever. But here’s the funny thing Slavoj. I think so our our mutual friend Todd McGowan—Todd’s basically like my teacher in all things Lacan, Žižek, Hegel and I Todd means the world to me. But I I told him about this and I I think he might have told you at some point. But so my form of inherent transgression at my job as a bouncer is so they were real strict on us carding everybody who comes in and I got tired of it and it was so boring just to sit there for eight hours doing it. What I would end up doing is I would just start reading your books on my phone throughout my shift. So I would read Parallax View or Sublime Object or whatever over and over and just kind of bullshit act like I’m carding but I had more important things to do which was read your books. But seriously on a personal level reading your main theoretical works is what got me through this incredibly rough patch of my life and so you know on the one hand it was you know a kind of therapy in a sense it got me through my hard times but on the other it was my form of inherent transgression where I’m like I hate this fucking job so you know what I’m gonna read Slavoj all night and pass the time that way. And so that’s really where my understanding of you came from was through reading your books being my form of inherent transgression at my shitty job. And so that’s that’s just you know I again it was just it was really important for me like it really got me through. But the last thing I’ll just say so I I came up with a joke for you. I know how much you love jokes, jokes are so so central to your work. Please
Slavoj Žižek
let them be politically incorrect but this is very difficult to do. Politically incorrect, vulgar, but in a sense that they are not really anti-feminist blah, blah, you know. The problem is to be apparently vulgar but with a much more ambiguous finer message. So please do it.
let them be politically incorrect but this is very difficult to do. Politically incorrect, vulgar, but in a sense that they are not really anti-feminist blah, blah, you know. The problem is to be apparently vulgar but with a much more ambiguous finer message. So please do it.
unknown
Okay, well I hope not to disappoint this isn’t really a a political joke. It’s more of just those of us who are in the world of Žižekian theory right? So um there’s a funny thing that you’ve done in a couple of your books where you spelled Todd’s last name with an extra A. You turned it into MacGowan instead of McGowan and um I was joking with Todd about it. So here’s the little joke. Um Why does Slavoj Žižek purposely misspell Todd McGowan’s last name as MacGowan? Because Žižek really has a thing for that little a.
Okay, well I hope not to disappoint this isn’t really a a political joke. It’s more of just those of us who are in the world of Žižekian theory right? So um there’s a funny thing that you’ve done in a couple of your books where you spelled Todd’s last name with an extra A. You turned it into MacGowan instead of McGowan and um I was joking with Todd about it. So here’s the little joke. Um Why does Slavoj Žižek purposely misspell Todd McGowan’s last name as MacGowan? Because Žižek really has a thing for that little a.
Slavoj Žižek
That’s politically correct, perfectly done, I agree that I insert the small a, you know. Exactly. Although you know why I also admire Todd, not because I always agree with him, but precisely because I don’t always agree with him. And that’s what I also expect from you. With all my inner circle friends, for example here in Slovenia, Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar and so on, we are best friends personally but whoever reads us closely will soon notice that in a very noble, gentle way there is a deep polemics between the three of us going on all the time. For example, the last book which really hit me as a kind of epiphany, Alenka’s Antigone’s Parallax. Let’s cut the bullshit. This book is a friendly polemical reply to my reading of Antigone. She takes into account my three versions and adds a fourth version. And the reason I, that’s the highest sign of friendship that I can express, the reason I really hate her is that she instantly converted me, convinced me. The way she reads Antigone, which is precisely the anti-liberal Judith Butler way. You know, the standard reading is that for Antigone Polynices stands for all those excluded, trans, gay, whatever. This is for me just radicalized liberalism, you know. This typical liberal worry but it’s our liberal notion of universal right really only all-inclusive blah, blah, blah. But again that’s not, she converted me, that’s not what Antigone does. What she does is the exact opposite. You remember those famous lines which are the key although I also quote them but she gives the full reading, where she says if it were for my sons, for my husband, blah, blah, blah, let them rot, I wouldn’t care. It’s only for my brother that I’m doing this. And then in a wonderful way, another secret of her reading, one would have expected a vulgar psychoanalytic reading. Yeah, of course, incest, sister, brother. No, she doesn’t go into this. But she does talk about incest but in a much more refined way in the sense that I shouldn’t lose too much time but that the topic of incest it’s not simply, ultimately it’s not at all about having sex with your parents or brothers or sisters or children or whatever. It’s about a certain short circuit which is a constitutive illusion implied by our language itself. And then she, not to lose time, I’m sorry, links this to the wonderful old saying in my new book there will be a long chapter on it, you know this old paradox which she rehabilitates or reuses, the old joke, explorers come into a tribe and ask them are there still any cannibals among you? The answer is no yesterday we ate the last one. Isn’t it, that’s my just to provoke you, isn’t something similar going on with cancel culture at its worst? We should use here the Lacanian tension between what Lacan calls l'énoncé, the topic of what you are talking about and process of enunciation, what you are doing, what is inscribed into the very mode how you are doing it. That’s for me the problem of cancel culture. The topic, what they want to assert is diversity and inclusion. But then all they are actually doing is excluding people who don’t fit their definition of inclusion. So it’s a clear case of how with their very discursive practice they exclude more and more people and for a Hegelian like me this is an elementary paradox of the tension between universal and particular. That’s my problem with cancel culture. What we need today, and here I deeply sympathize with you, is the inclusionary leftist politics. We need popular fronts how to bring together women, workers, those who fight for the preservation of our environment and so on and so on. But isn’t, if I may put it in this naive way, the spirit of cancel culture precisely the spirit of permanent suspicion and exclusion? Well what do you think about how Todd links it to super-ego? He thinks like what the left is caught up in is a kind of super-egoic morality that it’s so based on bombarding everybody with guilt that it actually undermines what we’re doing. Exactly, exactly and I would I totally agree what Todd is saying here and just to I’m very sorry I have some kind of allergy, just to bring it even maybe a step further. I agree with Todd’s sorry, more general point that the typical right-wing mode of enjoyment is that of exclusion. Even in the grand scheme of you exclude Jews or whomever and so on and so on like in anti-semitism. And this is for me, sorry, this is for me the problem how the logic of exclusion is the very opposite of class struggle. Class struggle does not imply the logic of exclusion. Why not? Ah, because exclusion is always self-affirmative. The problem of the anti-Semite, other racists is how to preserve our identity. A foreign body is presented as the disturbing factor so let’s exclude them, Jews or other racists and we will assert our identity. While the central point of Marxist notion of class struggle is that what you question, undermine in class struggle is your own
That’s politically correct, perfectly done, I agree that I insert the small a, you know. Exactly. Although you know why I also admire Todd, not because I always agree with him, but precisely because I don’t always agree with him. And that’s what I also expect from you. With all my inner circle friends, for example here in Slovenia, Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar and so on, we are best friends personally but whoever reads us closely will soon notice that in a very noble, gentle way there is a deep polemics between the three of us going on all the time. For example, the last book which really hit me as a kind of epiphany, Alenka’s Antigone’s Parallax. Let’s cut the bullshit. This book is a friendly polemical reply to my reading of Antigone. She takes into account my three versions and adds a fourth version. And the reason I, that’s the highest sign of friendship that I can express, the reason I really hate her is that she instantly converted me, convinced me. The way she reads Antigone, which is precisely the anti-liberal Judith Butler way. You know, the standard reading is that for Antigone Polynices stands for all those excluded, trans, gay, whatever. This is for me just radicalized liberalism, you know. This typical liberal worry but it’s our liberal notion of universal right really only all-inclusive blah, blah, blah. But again that’s not, she converted me, that’s not what Antigone does. What she does is the exact opposite. You remember those famous lines which are the key although I also quote them but she gives the full reading, where she says if it were for my sons, for my husband, blah, blah, blah, let them rot, I wouldn’t care. It’s only for my brother that I’m doing this. And then in a wonderful way, another secret of her reading, one would have expected a vulgar psychoanalytic reading. Yeah, of course, incest, sister, brother. No, she doesn’t go into this. But she does talk about incest but in a much more refined way in the sense that I shouldn’t lose too much time but that the topic of incest it’s not simply, ultimately it’s not at all about having sex with your parents or brothers or sisters or children or whatever. It’s about a certain short circuit which is a constitutive illusion implied by our language itself. And then she, not to lose time, I’m sorry, links this to the wonderful old saying in my new book there will be a long chapter on it, you know this old paradox which she rehabilitates or reuses, the old joke, explorers come into a tribe and ask them are there still any cannibals among you? The answer is no yesterday we ate the last one. Isn’t it, that’s my just to provoke you, isn’t something similar going on with cancel culture at its worst? We should use here the Lacanian tension between what Lacan calls l'énoncé, the topic of what you are talking about and process of enunciation, what you are doing, what is inscribed into the very mode how you are doing it. That’s for me the problem of cancel culture. The topic, what they want to assert is diversity and inclusion. But then all they are actually doing is excluding people who don’t fit their definition of inclusion. So it’s a clear case of how with their very discursive practice they exclude more and more people and for a Hegelian like me this is an elementary paradox of the tension between universal and particular. That’s my problem with cancel culture. What we need today, and here I deeply sympathize with you, is the inclusionary leftist politics. We need popular fronts how to bring together women, workers, those who fight for the preservation of our environment and so on and so on. But isn’t, if I may put it in this naive way, the spirit of cancel culture precisely the spirit of permanent suspicion and exclusion? Well what do you think about how Todd links it to super-ego? He thinks like what the left is caught up in is a kind of super-egoic morality that it’s so based on bombarding everybody with guilt that it actually undermines what we’re doing. Exactly, exactly and I would I totally agree what Todd is saying here and just to I’m very sorry I have some kind of allergy, just to bring it even maybe a step further. I agree with Todd’s sorry, more general point that the typical right-wing mode of enjoyment is that of exclusion. Even in the grand scheme of you exclude Jews or whomever and so on and so on like in anti-semitism. And this is for me, sorry, this is for me the problem how the logic of exclusion is the very opposite of class struggle. Class struggle does not imply the logic of exclusion. Why not? Ah, because exclusion is always self-affirmative. The problem of the anti-Semite, other racists is how to preserve our identity. A foreign body is presented as the disturbing factor so let’s exclude them, Jews or other racists and we will assert our identity. While the central point of Marxist notion of class struggle is that what you question, undermine in class struggle is your own
unknown
fixed identity as it is conferred on you by the existing legal order. Here although I don’t follow them all the way I agree with those feminists but I don’t want to go into it now who claim that against this pseudo-hardline feminism, feminism is not about asserting feminine identity and then exclude men or whoever
fixed identity as it is conferred on you by the existing legal order. Here although I don’t follow them all the way I agree with those feminists but I don’t want to go into it now who claim that against this pseudo-hardline feminism, feminism is not about asserting feminine identity and then exclude men or whoever
Slavoj Žižek
opposes a threat to it but it’s this exclusion, of course we have to fight enemies, should always be accompanied by a self-reflexive twist. To what extent is our identity already part of the situation that we are trying to get rid of? I’m coming here back to your back to your sorry, do I talk too much? No, no, no, you’re doing really good I just want to I don’t want you to say our thing. We have to say it ourselves is that we we Mikey had something we wanted to ask you about. As blue collar workers. Maybe sorry if I went so far? No you’re good, you’re good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay listen I like what you did now. I need to be very brutal that’s why you Mikey you are the only one as far as I can see properly dressed in black. I need a male or female figure of domina, you know. Domina in the sense of master. Somebody has to whip me and cut me short. So yes I stop at a time. All right Dave. Mark. Yeah. So the point Dave what you got Dave? So just it’s
opposes a threat to it but it’s this exclusion, of course we have to fight enemies, should always be accompanied by a self-reflexive twist. To what extent is our identity already part of the situation that we are trying to get rid of? I’m coming here back to your back to your sorry, do I talk too much? No, no, no, you’re doing really good I just want to I don’t want you to say our thing. We have to say it ourselves is that we we Mikey had something we wanted to ask you about. As blue collar workers. Maybe sorry if I went so far? No you’re good, you’re good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay listen I like what you did now. I need to be very brutal that’s why you Mikey you are the only one as far as I can see properly dressed in black. I need a male or female figure of domina, you know. Domina in the sense of master. Somebody has to whip me and cut me short. So yes I stop at a time. All right Dave. Mark. Yeah. So the point Dave what you got Dave? So just it’s
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something
something
Slavoj Žižek
Mikey and I’ve been talking a lot because you know Theory Underground it’s by and for like blue-collar working-class people, people who aren’t don’t really have upward mobility blah, blah, blah. When people hear this they think oh okay it’s like they think in terms of identity politics so they basically think of in terms of working-class identity politics. We’re trying to be seen as workers. What you were just getting at is that no, we’re not trying to be seen as workers. As workers we’re saying we advocate for our own our own self-abolition. We don’t want there to be a working class. We don’t want to be wage laborers, we want to destroy this identity. We’re trying to free ourselves from this identity. Right. Is this a question already or do you want to finish it because but isn’t that get at the heart of what you I mean because both you and Todd you have this thing in common. You’re both champions of universalist politics. And so the difference is a real universalist politics is going to have to center the movement around a a contradiction antagonism at the heart of society that all of us are struggling from. You call it an antagonism or a um contradiction. Todd will call it a lack but both of you are are tapped into this thing where it’s like no, there’s a there’s a deadlock in society that everybody is struggling from and if you focus it on one
Mikey and I’ve been talking a lot because you know Theory Underground it’s by and for like blue-collar working-class people, people who aren’t don’t really have upward mobility blah, blah, blah. When people hear this they think oh okay it’s like they think in terms of identity politics so they basically think of in terms of working-class identity politics. We’re trying to be seen as workers. What you were just getting at is that no, we’re not trying to be seen as workers. As workers we’re saying we advocate for our own our own self-abolition. We don’t want there to be a working class. We don’t want to be wage laborers, we want to destroy this identity. We’re trying to free ourselves from this identity. Right. Is this a question already or do you want to finish it because but isn’t that get at the heart of what you I mean because both you and Todd you have this thing in common. You’re both champions of universalist politics. And so the difference is a real universalist politics is going to have to center the movement around a a contradiction antagonism at the heart of society that all of us are struggling from. You call it an antagonism or a um contradiction. Todd will call it a lack but both of you are are tapped into this thing where it’s like no, there’s a there’s a deadlock in society that everybody is struggling from and if you focus it on one
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identity or the other that universal dimension gets lost. And if we’re going to change society on a universal scale we all have to
identity or the other that universal dimension gets lost. And if we’re going to change society on a universal scale we all have to
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get tapped into this fundamental antagonism or lack that we’re we’re all
get tapped into this fundamental antagonism or lack that we’re we’re all
Slavoj Žižek
dealing with. Ah here again a very friendly I wouldn’t even say distance but shift of accent from Todd. You know Todd MacGowan with an A you know my Todd whom I appreciate very much. You know my problem with using the term lack as synonymous or in the same line with with with antagonism and so on is that I the the basic lesson for me is that lack always appears in the
dealing with. Ah here again a very friendly I wouldn’t even say distance but shift of accent from Todd. You know Todd MacGowan with an A you know my Todd whom I appreciate very much. You know my problem with using the term lack as synonymous or in the same line with with with antagonism and so on is that I the the basic lesson for me is that lack always appears in the
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form of excess, surplus. The two
form of excess, surplus. The two
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are two sides of the same coin, especially apropos of antagonism. Look this is one of my now things as you challenged me will go a little bit we will get a little bit more complex. Go do it. Go go for it. All intelligent Marxists are absolutely against this primitive evolutionary notions that we have class antagonism which is usually blurred by other classes blah, blah, blah but then in a revolutionary situation or in the objective tendency we will have a clear-cut distinction it’s the exploited and the other side. We will get the pure binary opposition. No, we never get that. Antagonism means that precisely the difference is never a clear difference between two opposed poles. And to Marx this was clear. You don’t
are two sides of the same coin, especially apropos of antagonism. Look this is one of my now things as you challenged me will go a little bit we will get a little bit more complex. Go do it. Go go for it. All intelligent Marxists are absolutely against this primitive evolutionary notions that we have class antagonism which is usually blurred by other classes blah, blah, blah but then in a revolutionary situation or in the objective tendency we will have a clear-cut distinction it’s the exploited and the other side. We will get the pure binary opposition. No, we never get that. Antagonism means that precisely the difference is never a clear difference between two opposed poles. And to Marx this was clear. You don’t
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have Marx used in an ambiguous way here, he can also be criticized the term of Lumpenproletariat. Marx was I think too dismissive towards them. They, Lumpenproletariat, were for him potential traitors. Those who in a crucial moment can serve as a popular base for those in power. Marx’s trauma was here of course the revolution and its aftermath when precisely the Lumpenproletariat was the immediate material support of the coup d'état of Napoleon the Little, Napoleon III. I think that here things are today getting more complex. First element to add and my other friend Adrian Johnston even establishes here a link with Hegel who in his not simply conservative but very refined critique of the English British new election law in or when which expanded elect electoral base warns against what Adrian Johnston calls Lumpen-bourgeoisie, you know that opposed to Lumpenproletariat,
have Marx used in an ambiguous way here, he can also be criticized the term of Lumpenproletariat. Marx was I think too dismissive towards them. They, Lumpenproletariat, were for him potential traitors. Those who in a crucial moment can serve as a popular base for those in power. Marx’s trauma was here of course the revolution and its aftermath when precisely the Lumpenproletariat was the immediate material support of the coup d'état of Napoleon the Little, Napoleon III. I think that here things are today getting more complex. First element to add and my other friend Adrian Johnston even establishes here a link with Hegel who in his not simply conservative but very refined critique of the English British new election law in or when which expanded elect electoral base warns against what Adrian Johnston calls Lumpen-bourgeoisie, you know that opposed to Lumpenproletariat,
Slavoj Žižek
those discarded vulgar classes we are getting more and more a bourgeoisie which is not even a proper bourgeoisie. Look, now I will say something horrible. But does a person like Trump, Donald, even deserve the title of great bourgeoisie? No, sorry. Great bourgeoisie with all my opposition to them had a certain, under quotation marks but nonetheless creative function of large social organization and so on. No wonder that in the last years of his sanity, not the then he became crazy but he then became too ill, when Bolshevik after Bolsheviks won Civil War, Lenin was extremely, maybe even too much, fascinated by big American corporate bosses who came to visit Soviet Union to make deal. He saw that Bolsheviks need a socialist form of this large corporate managers. So what I’m saying, I didn’t lose my thread, is that today’s new oligarchs are in a sense Lumpen-bourgeoisie, because we should be honest with all the exploitation and so on. At some point big corporate capitalists did incredible things, large industrial organization even for their own profit. Some kind of a workers safety, do you know that for example the big example from Germany. The big conservative Otto Bismarck was the first, earlier than England, to establish some kind of a health care, retirement and so on and so on. So the point is that and I then try to transfer this point also onto sexual difference, that class struggle is not simply we against us. It’s a struggle against all those who are somewhere in between. For example so-called middle classes or other struggles and so on and so on. Without this complex situation where there are never just two agents but always a third one or many monsters we don’t get antagonism, we get a simple hierarchic opposition. And I think it’s the same with sexual difference. Trans people are for me precisely this third element, element which embodies sexual antagonism as such. And this is, just to finish, especially important for me today when when we talk about working class. Yes, we should insist on working class for a couple of reasons. The first being that I don’t agree with theory of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and others who simply put working class into the series of other antagonisms as equal: working class racism, working class struggle, feminist struggle, tolerance struggle and so on and so on. No, but nonetheless the and here my good friend, I’m honored to meet him, Alvaro Garcia Linera, the ex-vice president of Bolivia, developed it well how the key to the revolution or successful, relatively, transformation of Bolivia was they got it that today working class is not just workers in the old sense of wage workers. I respect your stance here absolutely. But for example, I’m sorry if I repeat stuff known to many of you. In my country, Slovenia, as your beloved president ex-, with brutal irony Trump would have called it a small shithole of a country, in Slovenia I a couple of times opposed strikes. People were: are you getting a right-winger? No. Because in specific Slovene situation who can afford to strike? Only the already privileged state employees. Those who work in private companies they don’t have a chance to strike. If they organize a strike the capitalist said: fuck off, we disband your factory we move elsewhere whatsoever. It’s only the relatively privileged state employees: policemen, doctors, judges and so on. And so I think, to put it in Lenin’s terms, that to be able to strike today, not it’s not a general point like for precarious workers those who work for Amazon, blah, blah, trade unions and strike would be a mega-important thing. But there are situations when strikes tend to become strikes of what Lenin called workers' aristocracy. Because the only effect in Slovenia of some successful strikes was that the already overpaid upper level surgeons and other top-paid doctors got even more so ordinary nurses got less, there was less there were less new instruments bought and so on and so on. So my point is not only working class, which of course still exists very strongly, not only it exists in big western countries, it exists in third world countries. But what about all this gray zone of unpaid and non- not transparent work for the state, wage labor which is even more exploitative like I don’t know where you are but from I was told from my friends in California, Mexican immigrants are crucial there, their illegal work in harvesting isn’t it and so on. Or in personal personal life you hire them as gardeners taking care of your children, blah, blah, and we have to somehow include, mobilize all this. Here, I’m sorry if I repeat an old point, but if we are addressing a broader public it’s crucial. The crucial point and here the term working class becomes important are new forms like for example Uber. What’s so horrible about Uber? It’s that it blurs in its very structure class tension. Uber the company claims: we are not capitalists, we just organize a contact between those who offer a service, those who own a car and those who need a ride. So on the one hand you usually own your own means of production: a car, a computer, whatever. And the ideology is then that we are all capitalists. Just I don’t have it but I have a factory fuck you you have just a car or whatever. But the idea is we are all small capitalists and so. Well this hold on because this is a good point because we this gets at something we wanted to ask you about. So yeah. Let’s because we got these two main questions we want to get to. Dave ask the your main one. So my main question and we were going to do this last but we decided you know it’s so important we want to see if you’ll actually just you know what you said before we started recording about how you kind of hold back from getting into the theoretical weeds but that’s kind of right after just finishing a couple courses on your work that’s where we want to go for a hot minute and so the question is a question of the ethics of psychoanalysis. When Mikey was doing his introduction to you what he left out that is in the article he wrote for Underground Theory where he talks about how useful your concept is. It’s really understanding jouissance and drive and how if your drive gets hooked into certain things you get jouissance from those things. That’s not pleasure, it’s the opposite of pleasure in a sort of sense right? And so understanding how jouissance functions in the workplace is so important. Drive though if we understand correctly is the is almost like the enemy of desire. Like drive gets off on undermining whatever it is that you’re desiring and so in the ethics of psychoanalysis the idea is Lacan says you should never compromise on your desire and then the the controversial thing that you say according to Mikey at least is that there’s an inversion of that, that you say no don’t compromise on drive. And so for me my question then because I’ve been thinking about this for months, you know my drive is hooked into, hold on I do one thing just just for somebody watching and Slavoj I know you don’t you don’t like us quoting your books but this is for everybody who’s watching. You have this great line from Looking Awry let me read it just for context. You said: "With regard to this relation between drive and desire, we could perhaps risk a small amplification of the Lacanian maxim of the psychoanalytic ethic 'not to cede one's desire.' Is not desire as such already a certain yielding, a kind of compromise-formation, a metonymic displacement, retreat, a defense against intractable drive? To desire means to give way on the drive. In so far as we follow Antigone and do not give way on our desire, do we not precisely step out of the domain of desire, do we not shift from the modality of desire into the modality of pure drive?" Looking Awry page And so my question then is based in look, Mikey and I and a lot of the people at Theory Underground we didn’t really think that we were going to live to to the age that we have, we didn’t really think that we were going to survive. We’ve lost a lot of friends on the way to being where we are to overdose to other kinds of self-destructive behaviors. We’ve lost friends along the way who didn’t cede ground relative to their drive and and so but then for me and for Mikey part of what gets us through the work week, part of what gets us going like I mean we our drive is hooked into philosophy, it’s hooked into theory, it’s hooked into for me organizing. And so obviously well that’s good I think that it’s a lot better that it’s that than say heroin or you know cocaine but you know people who haven’t had the opportunity to develop that drive formation it’s sex, drugs, rock and roll and if you just lean into that it ends in a short you know a destruction not just of self but of relationships, of of family and and it just causes a lot of heartbreak. And so I just feel like this is a delicate issue, it’s a complicated issue and I kind of just wanted to give you an opportunity to elaborate on your position about this. Yeah like how how do you at this point after all these years of like you were talking about Antigone with Alenka and I mean you know Todd’s idea is that an ethics of desire would be almost a Heideggerian resolute you know stance on the fact we are always going to lack we’re never going to not be lacking so it’s a kind of embrace of our fundamental lack. But you’ve you’ve gone back to the ethics of psychoanalysis so many times across your main works we just want to know where you’re at with it and what you think the ethics of psychoanalysis actually is and how do we prevent it from just being a kind of affirmation of the worst forms of self-destruction. It’s a an excellent question and I am in advance I
those discarded vulgar classes we are getting more and more a bourgeoisie which is not even a proper bourgeoisie. Look, now I will say something horrible. But does a person like Trump, Donald, even deserve the title of great bourgeoisie? No, sorry. Great bourgeoisie with all my opposition to them had a certain, under quotation marks but nonetheless creative function of large social organization and so on. No wonder that in the last years of his sanity, not the then he became crazy but he then became too ill, when Bolshevik after Bolsheviks won Civil War, Lenin was extremely, maybe even too much, fascinated by big American corporate bosses who came to visit Soviet Union to make deal. He saw that Bolsheviks need a socialist form of this large corporate managers. So what I’m saying, I didn’t lose my thread, is that today’s new oligarchs are in a sense Lumpen-bourgeoisie, because we should be honest with all the exploitation and so on. At some point big corporate capitalists did incredible things, large industrial organization even for their own profit. Some kind of a workers safety, do you know that for example the big example from Germany. The big conservative Otto Bismarck was the first, earlier than England, to establish some kind of a health care, retirement and so on and so on. So the point is that and I then try to transfer this point also onto sexual difference, that class struggle is not simply we against us. It’s a struggle against all those who are somewhere in between. For example so-called middle classes or other struggles and so on and so on. Without this complex situation where there are never just two agents but always a third one or many monsters we don’t get antagonism, we get a simple hierarchic opposition. And I think it’s the same with sexual difference. Trans people are for me precisely this third element, element which embodies sexual antagonism as such. And this is, just to finish, especially important for me today when when we talk about working class. Yes, we should insist on working class for a couple of reasons. The first being that I don’t agree with theory of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and others who simply put working class into the series of other antagonisms as equal: working class racism, working class struggle, feminist struggle, tolerance struggle and so on and so on. No, but nonetheless the and here my good friend, I’m honored to meet him, Alvaro Garcia Linera, the ex-vice president of Bolivia, developed it well how the key to the revolution or successful, relatively, transformation of Bolivia was they got it that today working class is not just workers in the old sense of wage workers. I respect your stance here absolutely. But for example, I’m sorry if I repeat stuff known to many of you. In my country, Slovenia, as your beloved president ex-, with brutal irony Trump would have called it a small shithole of a country, in Slovenia I a couple of times opposed strikes. People were: are you getting a right-winger? No. Because in specific Slovene situation who can afford to strike? Only the already privileged state employees. Those who work in private companies they don’t have a chance to strike. If they organize a strike the capitalist said: fuck off, we disband your factory we move elsewhere whatsoever. It’s only the relatively privileged state employees: policemen, doctors, judges and so on. And so I think, to put it in Lenin’s terms, that to be able to strike today, not it’s not a general point like for precarious workers those who work for Amazon, blah, blah, trade unions and strike would be a mega-important thing. But there are situations when strikes tend to become strikes of what Lenin called workers' aristocracy. Because the only effect in Slovenia of some successful strikes was that the already overpaid upper level surgeons and other top-paid doctors got even more so ordinary nurses got less, there was less there were less new instruments bought and so on and so on. So my point is not only working class, which of course still exists very strongly, not only it exists in big western countries, it exists in third world countries. But what about all this gray zone of unpaid and non- not transparent work for the state, wage labor which is even more exploitative like I don’t know where you are but from I was told from my friends in California, Mexican immigrants are crucial there, their illegal work in harvesting isn’t it and so on. Or in personal personal life you hire them as gardeners taking care of your children, blah, blah, and we have to somehow include, mobilize all this. Here, I’m sorry if I repeat an old point, but if we are addressing a broader public it’s crucial. The crucial point and here the term working class becomes important are new forms like for example Uber. What’s so horrible about Uber? It’s that it blurs in its very structure class tension. Uber the company claims: we are not capitalists, we just organize a contact between those who offer a service, those who own a car and those who need a ride. So on the one hand you usually own your own means of production: a car, a computer, whatever. And the ideology is then that we are all capitalists. Just I don’t have it but I have a factory fuck you you have just a car or whatever. But the idea is we are all small capitalists and so. Well this hold on because this is a good point because we this gets at something we wanted to ask you about. So yeah. Let’s because we got these two main questions we want to get to. Dave ask the your main one. So my main question and we were going to do this last but we decided you know it’s so important we want to see if you’ll actually just you know what you said before we started recording about how you kind of hold back from getting into the theoretical weeds but that’s kind of right after just finishing a couple courses on your work that’s where we want to go for a hot minute and so the question is a question of the ethics of psychoanalysis. When Mikey was doing his introduction to you what he left out that is in the article he wrote for Underground Theory where he talks about how useful your concept is. It’s really understanding jouissance and drive and how if your drive gets hooked into certain things you get jouissance from those things. That’s not pleasure, it’s the opposite of pleasure in a sort of sense right? And so understanding how jouissance functions in the workplace is so important. Drive though if we understand correctly is the is almost like the enemy of desire. Like drive gets off on undermining whatever it is that you’re desiring and so in the ethics of psychoanalysis the idea is Lacan says you should never compromise on your desire and then the the controversial thing that you say according to Mikey at least is that there’s an inversion of that, that you say no don’t compromise on drive. And so for me my question then because I’ve been thinking about this for months, you know my drive is hooked into, hold on I do one thing just just for somebody watching and Slavoj I know you don’t you don’t like us quoting your books but this is for everybody who’s watching. You have this great line from Looking Awry let me read it just for context. You said: "With regard to this relation between drive and desire, we could perhaps risk a small amplification of the Lacanian maxim of the psychoanalytic ethic 'not to cede one's desire.' Is not desire as such already a certain yielding, a kind of compromise-formation, a metonymic displacement, retreat, a defense against intractable drive? To desire means to give way on the drive. In so far as we follow Antigone and do not give way on our desire, do we not precisely step out of the domain of desire, do we not shift from the modality of desire into the modality of pure drive?" Looking Awry page And so my question then is based in look, Mikey and I and a lot of the people at Theory Underground we didn’t really think that we were going to live to to the age that we have, we didn’t really think that we were going to survive. We’ve lost a lot of friends on the way to being where we are to overdose to other kinds of self-destructive behaviors. We’ve lost friends along the way who didn’t cede ground relative to their drive and and so but then for me and for Mikey part of what gets us through the work week, part of what gets us going like I mean we our drive is hooked into philosophy, it’s hooked into theory, it’s hooked into for me organizing. And so obviously well that’s good I think that it’s a lot better that it’s that than say heroin or you know cocaine but you know people who haven’t had the opportunity to develop that drive formation it’s sex, drugs, rock and roll and if you just lean into that it ends in a short you know a destruction not just of self but of relationships, of of family and and it just causes a lot of heartbreak. And so I just feel like this is a delicate issue, it’s a complicated issue and I kind of just wanted to give you an opportunity to elaborate on your position about this. Yeah like how how do you at this point after all these years of like you were talking about Antigone with Alenka and I mean you know Todd’s idea is that an ethics of desire would be almost a Heideggerian resolute you know stance on the fact we are always going to lack we’re never going to not be lacking so it’s a kind of embrace of our fundamental lack. But you’ve you’ve gone back to the ethics of psychoanalysis so many times across your main works we just want to know where you’re at with it and what you think the ethics of psychoanalysis actually is and how do we prevent it from just being a kind of affirmation of the worst forms of self-destruction. It’s a an excellent question and I am in advance I
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apologize if I will not fully answer it. First let me return to the point which I already made. I want to in what you said quoting Ted involves some kind of a primacy of lack. This for me if you
apologize if I will not fully answer it. First let me return to the point which I already made. I want to in what you said quoting Ted involves some kind of a primacy of lack. This for me if you
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say just this comes just a little bit too close to what I often cynically call this poetry of lack, you know. This hysterical formula of whatever you give me it’s not that, it’s never that. You always miss the true object. I this let’s call it metonymy of object this poetry of lack at the end you have to accept the lack and so on
say just this comes just a little bit too close to what I often cynically call this poetry of lack, you know. This hysterical formula of whatever you give me it’s not that, it’s never that. You always miss the true object. I this let’s call it metonymy of object this poetry of lack at the end you have to accept the lack and so on
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and so on
and so on
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is I must emphasize this just one side of the story. There is the opposite side of the story in Lacan himself where where lack means also getting rid of an
is I must emphasize this just one side of the story. There is the opposite side of the story in Lacan himself where where lack means also getting rid of an
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excess. The first appearance of antagonism even at the level of individual psychic development is an excess. I refer here to Lacan but also to one who was not a pure Lacanian but I think he elaborated this point very well, Jean Laplanche, in his volume Essays on Otherness where he claims that the lack that we experience it’s not primarily our lack in the sense of I don’t know what I really want because when I get what I want it’s never that. The original lack is the lack of myself as subjectivity, it’s what I am for the other. Laplanche’s idea is to put it very simply already a small baby somehow guesses that others around him eventually brothers, sisters, uncles, mother, father have a certain libidinal investment in him, her, I prefer to say it. But it’s
excess. The first appearance of antagonism even at the level of individual psychic development is an excess. I refer here to Lacan but also to one who was not a pure Lacanian but I think he elaborated this point very well, Jean Laplanche, in his volume Essays on Otherness where he claims that the lack that we experience it’s not primarily our lack in the sense of I don’t know what I really want because when I get what I want it’s never that. The original lack is the lack of myself as subjectivity, it’s what I am for the other. Laplanche’s idea is to put it very simply already a small baby somehow guesses that others around him eventually brothers, sisters, uncles, mother, father have a certain libidinal investment in him, her, I prefer to say it. But it’s
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impenetrable to him what this investment is. What do they see in me? What do they want from me? So the original form of lack is I don’t know what I am as an object for others. And that’s the original enigma why this enigma appears precisely as an excess of the other’s desire for me. The other wants something from me but I never can guess, identify what the other see in me. So you’re combining lack sorry just this of the unconscious is that because and that’s for Laplanche the primordial form of unconscious that the other also doesn’t know what he/she/it wants. That’s the beginning of being human. When you see that the lack is not yours so that you have an
impenetrable to him what this investment is. What do they see in me? What do they want from me? So the original form of lack is I don’t know what I am as an object for others. And that’s the original enigma why this enigma appears precisely as an excess of the other’s desire for me. The other wants something from me but I never can guess, identify what the other see in me. So you’re combining lack sorry just this of the unconscious is that because and that’s for Laplanche the primordial form of unconscious that the other also doesn’t know what he/she/it wants. That’s the beginning of being human. When you see that the lack is not yours so that you have an
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impenetrable other, no, the lack is in the other itself. So now this is very abstract but this would have been my basic formula of ethics of psychoanalysis: not to betray not your own lack because this poetic proposition: ah I always lack I never get it, that’s bullshit, that’s usual pessimist wisdom. The crucial point is to transpose this lack into the figure of the big other itself. Society, God or whatever, they the the lack is there. So I here returning, I didn’t lose the thread, to your question desire, drive. I oscillate here. I admit it. My first point here is now I will not just criticize trans ideologies but as I always refer here to Judith Butler say something good about them. You know the problem with excess of jouissance it’s not just that it’s always missing whatever we get it’s not that, but also that that we never can get rid of it. As Judith Butler points out nicely: let’s say you renounce try to renounce jouissance. You have a certain idea which is unacceptable for you of perverted whatever sexual enjoyment, you renounce it. But then you begin to enjoy the very rituals measures of exclusion. This is the standard. That’s the
impenetrable other, no, the lack is in the other itself. So now this is very abstract but this would have been my basic formula of ethics of psychoanalysis: not to betray not your own lack because this poetic proposition: ah I always lack I never get it, that’s bullshit, that’s usual pessimist wisdom. The crucial point is to transpose this lack into the figure of the big other itself. Society, God or whatever, they the the lack is there. So I here returning, I didn’t lose the thread, to your question desire, drive. I oscillate here. I admit it. My first point here is now I will not just criticize trans ideologies but as I always refer here to Judith Butler say something good about them. You know the problem with excess of jouissance it’s not just that it’s always missing whatever we get it’s not that, but also that that we never can get rid of it. As Judith Butler points out nicely: let’s say you renounce try to renounce jouissance. You have a certain idea which is unacceptable for you of perverted whatever sexual enjoyment, you renounce it. But then you begin to enjoy the very rituals measures of exclusion. This is the standard. That’s the
unknown
surplus jouissance right? Yeah, yeah. So I go to the end here. There is no enjoyment without this surplus enjoyment. Enjoyment as such is a as such is a surplus. So to go a step further the meaning in which I said that desire is also an escape is that in the drive you get caught into this closed loop of jouissance. Now the desire is a reaction to the deadlock of this closed loop. You see it’s suffocating so you say: let’s move the object to a beyond with desire some x we never get. In the same way I also say that that drive is an escape from the deadlock of desire. Desire is this desire for the
surplus jouissance right? Yeah, yeah. So I go to the end here. There is no enjoyment without this surplus enjoyment. Enjoyment as such is a as such is a surplus. So to go a step further the meaning in which I said that desire is also an escape is that in the drive you get caught into this closed loop of jouissance. Now the desire is a reaction to the deadlock of this closed loop. You see it’s suffocating so you say: let’s move the object to a beyond with desire some x we never get. In the same way I also say that that drive is an escape from the deadlock of desire. Desire is this desire for the
Slavoj Žižek
always missing object. The answer of drive is: but what if I really desire this lack itself? What the lack is not simply a lack but I enjoy this lack itself and I like repeating this lack? That’s how, it’s a very detailed point, how Lacan reads Freud’s famous example of fort-da, the child who plays. He doesn’t simply want to keep the object. He enjoys in the full sense of the term the very disappearing and reappearing of the object. And I think this logic of enjoying the lack and all that it’s crucial to understand all the strange perversities, here I use the term in a strict way, going on in today’s politics. We find this in certain forms of cancel culture where the pleasure in discovering new and new transgressions to be canceled is obvious, not to mention the the right-wing populism which is full of obscene desires and so on. So these are not just abstract theoretical points. So but nonetheless to come back to your point my ultimate answer, it will not satisfy you now, would have been that there is the parallax between desire and drive. Drive is an excess, desire is a lack and they are like two sides of the same coin and it’s you could say they have an extimate relation right? Yeah, yeah. But point to a certain I call it ontological gap. Gap which cannot be recaptured neither by desire nor by drive. In this sense I agree with you that that we shouldn’t there was a tendency a couple of years ago which is why when I will take power I will first send myself to Gulag or re-education camp, I was at some point years ago tempted by this idea of desire a compromise good drive. No, I agree with you. Totalitarianism at its purest has the structure of a drive, of this stupid closed loop of satisfaction and it’s precisely the way you described your friends who lost their way. I think that only people who go to the end into whatever alcoholism, drugs and so on they go to the end in assuming jouissance and it’s self-destructive. The problem that we have today, I don’t have time to go into it, is that conservatives in some sense know this, they are aware of this, but they offer as the only solution a return to desire but desire in this old-fashioned Christian sense desire as grounded in a prohibition. Unfortunately even some Lacanians like Pierre Legendre the lawyer, also Jacques-Alain Miller follow this path. They say that if you fully abandon yourself to drive it’s self-destruction. So the formula proposed by Miller is for me a horrible one: so even if social prohibitions, the paternal law and so on are not true in the sense that they have no true foundation we have to accept them as necessary, we have to act as if they are true. I find this formula horrible because I think this was already in my Surplus-Enjoyment book or I forgot, I noticed that you know that Miller unknowingly quotes here Kafka when at the end of The Trial Joseph K. asks the priest but this means that the law is a fake, a lie? The priest’s answer is no what matters with the law is not that it’s true, of course it’s not true but that it is necessary. This is for me the contemporary form of cynicism. You know it’s not true but you are afraid that if you abandon this appearance you get lost, everything disintegrates, so let’s stick to it. And I think that I don’t have yet a clear answer, I admit always my limitations, where I don’t think I found the final formula, that the great task of Lacan is precisely to avoid this choice which is crucial in today’s globalized so-called falsely so-called permissive. Avoid avoid the choice of drive or desire? Avoid the choice of the ethics of drive: whatever it costs go to the end which is a suicidal loop. I think about it if we let somebody just. Or ethics of prohibition, like the only enjoyment is you have a prohibition and you transgress it a little bit and so on and so on. I think just to finish that Lacan’s answer to this is that in the opposition between sacrifice and desire there for Lacan not opposed. I will now very briefly then I let you speak quote an example which I quoted four or five times from that Neil Gaiman you know when he says what catastrophe is to fall in love. All your daily life is ruined you’re obsessed but which means that love as unconditional desire beyond the pleasure principle is in itself a sacrifice, sacrifice of your ordinary daily life and so on and so on. You ruin your daily life but this type of sacrifice for a cause is how I read fidelity the fidelity to a drive, not sorry to desire not to compromise your desire. So it’s not that desire must be controlled by some higher authority. Now you will say but still what if my desire is sorry for the vulgarity a desire to kill the Jews or to kill the Palestinians or whatever. My answer here is to return to what I already said the big other. The ethics of desire means do not rely on any figure of the big other to guarantee it and this figure can have many forms: not just the obvious ideological form: God, divine order, it can be a naturalist form, natural laws blah, blah, it can be it can be sorry or any conservative form it can there are many forms of inventing of relying on the big other even the Marxist for example the idea of historical progress inscribed into history. This is the permanent metaphorics not yet of Lenin but of traditional Stalinist Marxism: we are just instruments of the historical will or whatever and so on and so on. So again ethics of psychoanalysis imposes fidelity to your desire but a desire which is not sustained by any coherent figure of the big other which somehow serves as the ultimate reference. It is to and revolution I think that’s why I like to quote I always forget it is Robespierre, no I think it’s Saint-Just who says no revolution is not a process where you follow a higher necessity. You remember that wonderful metaphor I quote it often where Saint-Just says revolutionaries are like passengers or captains of a ship in the middle of a white stormy sea without any compass where you have to find your way, make risks and so on and so on. That’s our situation today. And that’s the position of the ethics of desire right there is to not rely on a compass. Precisely, precisely you don’t have. To accept to accept that the compass itself is lacking right that’s the. Can’t guarantee anything. Yeah it a wait a minute but now this doesn’t mean any kind of stupid pure contingency like it doesn’t matter blah blah blah. But what about what about a serial killer? Like a serial killer who says this is my this is what I desire I don’t care about the big other or morality this is what I desire so I’m going to act on it. Like what do you say because I’ve seen people make this criticism of the psycho of the ethics of psychoanalysis is basically the ethical hero then becomes the worst of the serial killer that just doesn’t care about social norms, doesn’t care about the law, doesn’t care about morality, simply acts on their desire doesn’t compromise it in any way shape or form. Like what would you say to somebody who makes the serial killer counterpoint to you on the ethics of desire? I would say that if you analyze first a serial killer, that all serial serial killers that I’ve studied and I did some follow the logic of perversion. Perversion means you assume the position of the instrument of another’s desire. This desire can even be the desire of the victim itself. You never a serial killer acts as an instrument even if this is an instrument of his, usually there are very few feminine or trans not that I know, so let’s say a man, he experiences himself as obsessed by a kind of deeper urge in himself I unconditionally had to do it. This is not what I mean by not relying on it other on the big other because for me the lack of big other means that and here I am still a Hegelian Kantian but in a way acceptable totally for Marx. You know radical ethics allows for no excuse. You cannot say what a serial killer would have been compelled to say sooner or later which is: okay I know I’m breaking all the moral rules blah, blah, but I feel this urge in me. Sorry no, you are radically responsible for what you are. This is and this Freud says this. Freud for Freud unconscious is not oh my God there is something in me more than myself I cannot do it. Lacan himself says already in the early 50s that that for psychoanalysis psychoanalysts even a psychotic is free in the formal sense of responsible for what he is doing. Now you will say but nonetheless how can you then be in love blah, blah. Ah that’s the beauty, the last key for me to this ethics of desire. For psychoanalysis, and here the link to what you mentioned Kant, Schelling and so on is obvious. The most radical freedom is the freedom that we experience as an inner necessity. Like sorry my old example you I’m sure know it some of our listeners I hope don’t know it, when you fall fortunately in love you never make the choice to fall in love all of a sudden you experience yourself as being in love. And this always comes after the fact, it’s never: oh my God now I want to fall in love. The moment you do this but nonetheless although you experience this as a deeper necessity, your fate, you are fully responsible for it. Kant and Schelling made wonderfully this point that the highest form of freedom is experienced as an inner necessity. And I think this even holds for political ethical freedom when pathetic example: your political cause, country, but I don’t like to mention country because I’m not a cheap patriot, but let’s say country should be defended because it’s brutally attacked, it’s not that you make a choice symmetric choice you simply feel that sorry for this cheap pathetics you cannot look yourself into a mirror in the morning without getting engaged. And that’s the true freedom. Dave you want to say something? You got the. Yeah so really quick here that’s probably that’s I think that’s enough to we’ll be thinking about that one for the next year here and then maybe we’ll follow up with you. Don’t think too much, fuck you don’t think too much, just do it. Just do it, just do it. Yeah just we should not read you we should just read Eckhart Tolle. We’ll just be in the in the present, in the now, all of our problems will go away. But okay the I wanted to highlight for you that we got a camera working before we started recording we were having trouble showing the in-person audience here in Boise but this tour is we’re going through the United States, every part of it will be most most of the parts of this tour are going to be hybrid and so I wanted to give I wanted to point out the Boise audience I don’t know if you can see it there. Everyone go ahead and wave. Nance you got to go actually get in the frame. I see some of you, yeah, yeah, yeah. I even see a guy from Austin called Lukács, I hope he is not a grandson of the Lukács. I see Castellucci, Marilyn Lawrence, in my dirty mind I immediately combine this: Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Lawrence or who is the famous one there? Sorry I am confused. But yes I see many of you not all of you. Who is the mysterious? Do you see this one? Do you see this one? Do you see the people I just pinned it? Everyone go ahead and wave. This is the people here in Boise. Dave is on only the sign of Theory Underground. That’s me. Yeah but that’s it it says Boise audience. Ah so you are immediate you Dave if I got it you are the immediate embodiment of the big other then. Yes. And I have this virtual background behind me but I am in the same space as the Boise audience here. I love you because my background unfortunately is the same one as as Marx and the big Signorelli. We pretend to be intellectuals and want to impress through some books in the background, you know. We call these in Liverpool hardbacks. simply that it’s the only room in my yes. Are they real books or are you doing this what some of my professors that I knew do they buy pocket books and then break just break the back so that the books look as if they are read, you know. Yes! Okay so now the question I want the I told you in the email beforehand that there’s two questions that Mikey has that the internet is dying to hear. And so the first of those. Fuck them death drive let them die, okay go forward. One of those questions is not
always missing object. The answer of drive is: but what if I really desire this lack itself? What the lack is not simply a lack but I enjoy this lack itself and I like repeating this lack? That’s how, it’s a very detailed point, how Lacan reads Freud’s famous example of fort-da, the child who plays. He doesn’t simply want to keep the object. He enjoys in the full sense of the term the very disappearing and reappearing of the object. And I think this logic of enjoying the lack and all that it’s crucial to understand all the strange perversities, here I use the term in a strict way, going on in today’s politics. We find this in certain forms of cancel culture where the pleasure in discovering new and new transgressions to be canceled is obvious, not to mention the the right-wing populism which is full of obscene desires and so on. So these are not just abstract theoretical points. So but nonetheless to come back to your point my ultimate answer, it will not satisfy you now, would have been that there is the parallax between desire and drive. Drive is an excess, desire is a lack and they are like two sides of the same coin and it’s you could say they have an extimate relation right? Yeah, yeah. But point to a certain I call it ontological gap. Gap which cannot be recaptured neither by desire nor by drive. In this sense I agree with you that that we shouldn’t there was a tendency a couple of years ago which is why when I will take power I will first send myself to Gulag or re-education camp, I was at some point years ago tempted by this idea of desire a compromise good drive. No, I agree with you. Totalitarianism at its purest has the structure of a drive, of this stupid closed loop of satisfaction and it’s precisely the way you described your friends who lost their way. I think that only people who go to the end into whatever alcoholism, drugs and so on they go to the end in assuming jouissance and it’s self-destructive. The problem that we have today, I don’t have time to go into it, is that conservatives in some sense know this, they are aware of this, but they offer as the only solution a return to desire but desire in this old-fashioned Christian sense desire as grounded in a prohibition. Unfortunately even some Lacanians like Pierre Legendre the lawyer, also Jacques-Alain Miller follow this path. They say that if you fully abandon yourself to drive it’s self-destruction. So the formula proposed by Miller is for me a horrible one: so even if social prohibitions, the paternal law and so on are not true in the sense that they have no true foundation we have to accept them as necessary, we have to act as if they are true. I find this formula horrible because I think this was already in my Surplus-Enjoyment book or I forgot, I noticed that you know that Miller unknowingly quotes here Kafka when at the end of The Trial Joseph K. asks the priest but this means that the law is a fake, a lie? The priest’s answer is no what matters with the law is not that it’s true, of course it’s not true but that it is necessary. This is for me the contemporary form of cynicism. You know it’s not true but you are afraid that if you abandon this appearance you get lost, everything disintegrates, so let’s stick to it. And I think that I don’t have yet a clear answer, I admit always my limitations, where I don’t think I found the final formula, that the great task of Lacan is precisely to avoid this choice which is crucial in today’s globalized so-called falsely so-called permissive. Avoid avoid the choice of drive or desire? Avoid the choice of the ethics of drive: whatever it costs go to the end which is a suicidal loop. I think about it if we let somebody just. Or ethics of prohibition, like the only enjoyment is you have a prohibition and you transgress it a little bit and so on and so on. I think just to finish that Lacan’s answer to this is that in the opposition between sacrifice and desire there for Lacan not opposed. I will now very briefly then I let you speak quote an example which I quoted four or five times from that Neil Gaiman you know when he says what catastrophe is to fall in love. All your daily life is ruined you’re obsessed but which means that love as unconditional desire beyond the pleasure principle is in itself a sacrifice, sacrifice of your ordinary daily life and so on and so on. You ruin your daily life but this type of sacrifice for a cause is how I read fidelity the fidelity to a drive, not sorry to desire not to compromise your desire. So it’s not that desire must be controlled by some higher authority. Now you will say but still what if my desire is sorry for the vulgarity a desire to kill the Jews or to kill the Palestinians or whatever. My answer here is to return to what I already said the big other. The ethics of desire means do not rely on any figure of the big other to guarantee it and this figure can have many forms: not just the obvious ideological form: God, divine order, it can be a naturalist form, natural laws blah, blah, it can be it can be sorry or any conservative form it can there are many forms of inventing of relying on the big other even the Marxist for example the idea of historical progress inscribed into history. This is the permanent metaphorics not yet of Lenin but of traditional Stalinist Marxism: we are just instruments of the historical will or whatever and so on and so on. So again ethics of psychoanalysis imposes fidelity to your desire but a desire which is not sustained by any coherent figure of the big other which somehow serves as the ultimate reference. It is to and revolution I think that’s why I like to quote I always forget it is Robespierre, no I think it’s Saint-Just who says no revolution is not a process where you follow a higher necessity. You remember that wonderful metaphor I quote it often where Saint-Just says revolutionaries are like passengers or captains of a ship in the middle of a white stormy sea without any compass where you have to find your way, make risks and so on and so on. That’s our situation today. And that’s the position of the ethics of desire right there is to not rely on a compass. Precisely, precisely you don’t have. To accept to accept that the compass itself is lacking right that’s the. Can’t guarantee anything. Yeah it a wait a minute but now this doesn’t mean any kind of stupid pure contingency like it doesn’t matter blah blah blah. But what about what about a serial killer? Like a serial killer who says this is my this is what I desire I don’t care about the big other or morality this is what I desire so I’m going to act on it. Like what do you say because I’ve seen people make this criticism of the psycho of the ethics of psychoanalysis is basically the ethical hero then becomes the worst of the serial killer that just doesn’t care about social norms, doesn’t care about the law, doesn’t care about morality, simply acts on their desire doesn’t compromise it in any way shape or form. Like what would you say to somebody who makes the serial killer counterpoint to you on the ethics of desire? I would say that if you analyze first a serial killer, that all serial serial killers that I’ve studied and I did some follow the logic of perversion. Perversion means you assume the position of the instrument of another’s desire. This desire can even be the desire of the victim itself. You never a serial killer acts as an instrument even if this is an instrument of his, usually there are very few feminine or trans not that I know, so let’s say a man, he experiences himself as obsessed by a kind of deeper urge in himself I unconditionally had to do it. This is not what I mean by not relying on it other on the big other because for me the lack of big other means that and here I am still a Hegelian Kantian but in a way acceptable totally for Marx. You know radical ethics allows for no excuse. You cannot say what a serial killer would have been compelled to say sooner or later which is: okay I know I’m breaking all the moral rules blah, blah, but I feel this urge in me. Sorry no, you are radically responsible for what you are. This is and this Freud says this. Freud for Freud unconscious is not oh my God there is something in me more than myself I cannot do it. Lacan himself says already in the early 50s that that for psychoanalysis psychoanalysts even a psychotic is free in the formal sense of responsible for what he is doing. Now you will say but nonetheless how can you then be in love blah, blah. Ah that’s the beauty, the last key for me to this ethics of desire. For psychoanalysis, and here the link to what you mentioned Kant, Schelling and so on is obvious. The most radical freedom is the freedom that we experience as an inner necessity. Like sorry my old example you I’m sure know it some of our listeners I hope don’t know it, when you fall fortunately in love you never make the choice to fall in love all of a sudden you experience yourself as being in love. And this always comes after the fact, it’s never: oh my God now I want to fall in love. The moment you do this but nonetheless although you experience this as a deeper necessity, your fate, you are fully responsible for it. Kant and Schelling made wonderfully this point that the highest form of freedom is experienced as an inner necessity. And I think this even holds for political ethical freedom when pathetic example: your political cause, country, but I don’t like to mention country because I’m not a cheap patriot, but let’s say country should be defended because it’s brutally attacked, it’s not that you make a choice symmetric choice you simply feel that sorry for this cheap pathetics you cannot look yourself into a mirror in the morning without getting engaged. And that’s the true freedom. Dave you want to say something? You got the. Yeah so really quick here that’s probably that’s I think that’s enough to we’ll be thinking about that one for the next year here and then maybe we’ll follow up with you. Don’t think too much, fuck you don’t think too much, just do it. Just do it, just do it. Yeah just we should not read you we should just read Eckhart Tolle. We’ll just be in the in the present, in the now, all of our problems will go away. But okay the I wanted to highlight for you that we got a camera working before we started recording we were having trouble showing the in-person audience here in Boise but this tour is we’re going through the United States, every part of it will be most most of the parts of this tour are going to be hybrid and so I wanted to give I wanted to point out the Boise audience I don’t know if you can see it there. Everyone go ahead and wave. Nance you got to go actually get in the frame. I see some of you, yeah, yeah, yeah. I even see a guy from Austin called Lukács, I hope he is not a grandson of the Lukács. I see Castellucci, Marilyn Lawrence, in my dirty mind I immediately combine this: Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Lawrence or who is the famous one there? Sorry I am confused. But yes I see many of you not all of you. Who is the mysterious? Do you see this one? Do you see this one? Do you see the people I just pinned it? Everyone go ahead and wave. This is the people here in Boise. Dave is on only the sign of Theory Underground. That’s me. Yeah but that’s it it says Boise audience. Ah so you are immediate you Dave if I got it you are the immediate embodiment of the big other then. Yes. And I have this virtual background behind me but I am in the same space as the Boise audience here. I love you because my background unfortunately is the same one as as Marx and the big Signorelli. We pretend to be intellectuals and want to impress through some books in the background, you know. We call these in Liverpool hardbacks. simply that it’s the only room in my yes. Are they real books or are you doing this what some of my professors that I knew do they buy pocket books and then break just break the back so that the books look as if they are read, you know. Yes! Okay so now the question I want the I told you in the email beforehand that there’s two questions that Mikey has that the internet is dying to hear. And so the first of those. Fuck them death drive let them die, okay go forward. One of those questions is not
unknown
going to go up and be public on YouTube,
going to go up and be public on YouTube,
unknown
it will not be it’s actually only for the people who are here. I don’t care, I don’t care. He said he said we could but he doesn’t care. Mikey take it away you get to ask both
it will not be it’s actually only for the people who are here. I don’t care, I don’t care. He said he said we could but he doesn’t care. Mikey take it away you get to ask both
unknown
questions go for it. Okay, yeah. Slavoj
questions go for it. Okay, yeah. Slavoj
unknown
yeah we got two questions here about other
yeah we got two questions here about other
Slavoj Žižek
thinkers. So the first one because none of us have ever heard you mention this guy, we want to know what do you do you know who Nick Land is? No. You don’t know. What about
thinkers. So the first one because none of us have ever heard you mention this guy, we want to know what do you do you know who Nick Land is? No. You don’t know. What about
unknown
the Nick like N-I-C-K, Land like land, land of glory blah, blah. Yeah, so Nick Land is a British philosopher and at this point he’s one of the most famous philosophers on the internet like I know you’re a meme in some way certain philosophers that catch on with people online. You’re one of them. Nick Land is another one. Nick Land’s a British philosopher, he’s a Deleuzo-Guattarian and he has the most I don’t even know how to describe his concept of capitalism real quick is this. He takes Deleuze and Guattari, he doesn’t he doesn’t factor in reterritorialization that much. He thinks capitalism is basically synonymous with deterritorialization. So he thinks capitalism is just
the Nick like N-I-C-K, Land like land, land of glory blah, blah. Yeah, so Nick Land is a British philosopher and at this point he’s one of the most famous philosophers on the internet like I know you’re a meme in some way certain philosophers that catch on with people online. You’re one of them. Nick Land is another one. Nick Land’s a British philosopher, he’s a Deleuzo-Guattarian and he has the most I don’t even know how to describe his concept of capitalism real quick is this. He takes Deleuze and Guattari, he doesn’t he doesn’t factor in reterritorialization that much. He thinks capitalism is basically synonymous with deterritorialization. So he thinks capitalism is just
Slavoj Žižek
going to decode and deterritorialize everything up until the point that it produces artificial intelligence. He thinks that this is going to be a super intelligence and basically like a god-like entity and it’s going to bring about the extinction of the human race. Because he’s a Bataillean he thinks somehow our death is a good thing and so his theory of capitalism he basically in the 90s he was around leftists and he was at Warwick University and he was embraced as a kind of leftist back then. Nowadays he’d say he never was. But he’s basically the most faithful champion of capitalism I’ve ever seen even maybe more so than Ayn Rand or anything, but precisely because he thinks it’s going to bring about the end of humanity. And he he he he basically got into amphetamines he had an overdose or he had a psychotic break. He moves to China and now he’s like the biggest proponent spokesman for Shanghai because he thinks actually Shanghai or the megacity of Shanghai is going to give rise to artificial intelligence and that’s where the singularity’s going to emerge and so he’s all for China he’s all for capitalism. He ends up becoming one of the founding figures in the neo-reaction movement with Mencius Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin. Um so he now has this really strong following online with people on the neo-reactionary right and they all love him because they think he loves capitalism so much. And he does but what they don’t get is he loves it because it thinks it’s going to produce a god entity that destroys all of us. And so because he’s so influential though, um and here’s the thing I mean he hates Lacan, he hates Hegel, he’s all about Deleuze and Guattari and so it’s one of those things everybody’s always been curious though about what you think of him because he having such a you know he had such an impact on the neo-reaction movement. He’s also considered the father of accelerationism. I know you’re not a fan of accelerationism. Yeah. But here’s the thing for him acceleration means accelerating capital turning itself into a god entity that’s going to annihilate all of us. And so with all that being said what do you think of what you just heard? I think it it may sound shocking, I don’t want to lose too much time, but I think it’s a way too optimist theory. Really? You know optimism can for me optimism is not simply everything will turn out good well and so on and so on. Optimism is precisely this stance of seeing a clear line of development and then there is some point which appear to most of us catastrophic but for him it’s a desired goal and so on and so on. For theoretical reasons I think that I think that singularity
going to decode and deterritorialize everything up until the point that it produces artificial intelligence. He thinks that this is going to be a super intelligence and basically like a god-like entity and it’s going to bring about the extinction of the human race. Because he’s a Bataillean he thinks somehow our death is a good thing and so his theory of capitalism he basically in the 90s he was around leftists and he was at Warwick University and he was embraced as a kind of leftist back then. Nowadays he’d say he never was. But he’s basically the most faithful champion of capitalism I’ve ever seen even maybe more so than Ayn Rand or anything, but precisely because he thinks it’s going to bring about the end of humanity. And he he he he basically got into amphetamines he had an overdose or he had a psychotic break. He moves to China and now he’s like the biggest proponent spokesman for Shanghai because he thinks actually Shanghai or the megacity of Shanghai is going to give rise to artificial intelligence and that’s where the singularity’s going to emerge and so he’s all for China he’s all for capitalism. He ends up becoming one of the founding figures in the neo-reaction movement with Mencius Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin. Um so he now has this really strong following online with people on the neo-reactionary right and they all love him because they think he loves capitalism so much. And he does but what they don’t get is he loves it because it thinks it’s going to produce a god entity that destroys all of us. And so because he’s so influential though, um and here’s the thing I mean he hates Lacan, he hates Hegel, he’s all about Deleuze and Guattari and so it’s one of those things everybody’s always been curious though about what you think of him because he having such a you know he had such an impact on the neo-reaction movement. He’s also considered the father of accelerationism. I know you’re not a fan of accelerationism. Yeah. But here’s the thing for him acceleration means accelerating capital turning itself into a god entity that’s going to annihilate all of us. And so with all that being said what do you think of what you just heard? I think it it may sound shocking, I don’t want to lose too much time, but I think it’s a way too optimist theory. Really? You know optimism can for me optimism is not simply everything will turn out good well and so on and so on. Optimism is precisely this stance of seeing a clear line of development and then there is some point which appear to most of us catastrophic but for him it’s a desired goal and so on and so on. For theoretical reasons I think that I think that singularity
unknown
in this precise sense, I’ve elaborated this in my book Hegel in a Wired Brain, singularity in the sense of
in this precise sense, I’ve elaborated this in my book Hegel in a Wired Brain, singularity in the sense of
Slavoj Žižek
all of us single individuals becoming like
all of us single individuals becoming like
unknown
collectively
collectively
Slavoj Žižek
flowing in some kind of a divine-like mind, that it simply is immanently impossible, that again here again we have a wonderfully example of what I was talking about before the
flowing in some kind of a divine-like mind, that it simply is immanently impossible, that again here again we have a wonderfully example of what I was talking about before the
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big other. Singularity in the sense of god-like artificial intelligence is the latest figure of the big other and it’s interesting that I forgot who I quote it in one of my books that some there are even some Hegelian thinkers of singularity who claim that you know I count them among what I ironically call not yet Hegelians, those readers of Hegel who think Hegel was in some sense right but he jumped to his conclusion too early. What Hegel aimed total reconciliation of subject and substance of man
big other. Singularity in the sense of god-like artificial intelligence is the latest figure of the big other and it’s interesting that I forgot who I quote it in one of my books that some there are even some Hegelian thinkers of singularity who claim that you know I count them among what I ironically call not yet Hegelians, those readers of Hegel who think Hegel was in some sense right but he jumped to his conclusion too early. What Hegel aimed total reconciliation of subject and substance of man
Slavoj Žižek
and God needs some more time. So even Marx was this in a sense, at least in the reading of young Lukács History and Class Consciousness, Marx’s idea was that not in the spiritual domain but in the social domain subject and substance which means work and capital will be reconciled only through communist revolution. So Hegel was too early. Then you have of course Fukuyama who thought Hegel was too early it’s only with today’s liberal democracy global capital that we are there. And then you had
and God needs some more time. So even Marx was this in a sense, at least in the reading of young Lukács History and Class Consciousness, Marx’s idea was that not in the spiritual domain but in the social domain subject and substance which means work and capital will be reconciled only through communist revolution. So Hegel was too early. Then you have of course Fukuyama who thought Hegel was too early it’s only with today’s liberal democracy global capital that we are there. And then you had
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again artificial intelligence Hegelians who said what Hegel prophesied as the synthesis as the
again artificial intelligence Hegelians who said what Hegel prophesied as the synthesis as the
Slavoj Žižek
reconciliation of subject and substance will happen only with singularity where individual subjectivity will
reconciliation of subject and substance will happen only with singularity where individual subjectivity will
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be drowned in
be drowned in
Slavoj Žižek
and in this sense totally reconciled with substance. My first point here is that already at the limited level of artificial intelligence that
and in this sense totally reconciled with substance. My first point here is that already at the limited level of artificial intelligence that
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we know today why do we presuppose and I just one detour I follow here even some intelligent, I don’t agree
we know today why do we presuppose and I just one detour I follow here even some intelligent, I don’t agree
Slavoj Žižek
with them but they are not idiots, quantum physicists and quantum cosmologists like the German lady Sabine Hossenfelder who who claims that why do we always imagine artificial intelligence in this transhuman sense as some consistent godlike totality. What if it will be a breathtaking total inconsistent mess? It will not be anything divine. The but a more important point for me is this one that I would strictly prohibit here the use of the term God because here I follow another person whom you mentioned in your last letter to me,
with them but they are not idiots, quantum physicists and quantum cosmologists like the German lady Sabine Hossenfelder who who claims that why do we always imagine artificial intelligence in this transhuman sense as some consistent godlike totality. What if it will be a breathtaking total inconsistent mess? It will not be anything divine. The but a more important point for me is this one that I would strictly prohibit here the use of the term God because here I follow another person whom you mentioned in your last letter to me,
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Heidegger. The thing to learn from Heidegger is that what we imagine as the divine immortal dimension is always
Heidegger. The thing to learn from Heidegger is that what we imagine as the divine immortal dimension is always
Slavoj Žižek
rooted in our finitude, which I read in a more materialist way in our
rooted in our finitude, which I read in a more materialist way in our
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concrete social constellation. There is no God in itself. What we experience as divine is a moment of our concrete historical texture. Which means that the moment we become infinite in the sense of directly
concrete social constellation. There is no God in itself. What we experience as divine is a moment of our concrete historical texture. Which means that the moment we become infinite in the sense of directly
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participating in godlike entity we not
participating in godlike entity we not
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only lose our humanity but we lose the divine dimension
only lose our humanity but we lose the divine dimension
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itself also. We step out into a only thing I’ll add is for him I don’t know if divine for Land he thinks this deity or entity as he calls it is
itself also. We step out into a only thing I’ll add is for him I don’t know if divine for Land he thinks this deity or entity as he calls it is
Slavoj Žižek
more Lovecraftian. It’s a pure nightmare we can’t even begin to process it.
more Lovecraftian. It’s a pure nightmare we can’t even begin to process it.
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It’s not like a anything divine in in the way that we would think of Christ or Allah or something as divine. It’s a complete Lovecraftian nightmare that we can’t begin to process. I still
It’s not like a anything divine in in the way that we would think of Christ or Allah or something as divine. It’s a complete Lovecraftian nightmare that we can’t begin to process. I still
Slavoj Žižek
think that the way he describes it it’s too risky. Because if
think that the way he describes it it’s too risky. Because if
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there he does think it’s just it’s just gonna refine its intelligence and just it’s almost like surplus intelligence just more and more it’s just gonna get better and better more consistent. It’s gonna refine its own algorithms. Okay the question here is what does he mean by intelligence. Because my basic point in my Hegel and the Wired Brain book is that if there is a and I ask this question many many theorists with whom I’m in regular contact you know I have my strange connections with quantum physicists with artificial intelligence theorists and my big question one of the big questions to them is is precisely this one how that obviously his representation of artificial intelligence is Deleuzian. It is, yeah absolutely. He bases it on desiring production and machinic unconscious. Yeah machine but I think that again here my Freudian approach enters. Unconscious is simply a meaningless term without subjectivity because for Freud unconscious is not some basic flux without subject and so on. What Freud calls unconscious is unconscious formations, fantasies and so on are answers, replies to a certain deadlock. Deadlock which characterizes the rise of the subject. So all these descriptions infinite flux no border no longer human blah blah for me still remain fantasies. Fantasies in the sense of avoiding a certain break. My counter-answer would have been we don’t know if this will happen I don’t think it will happen we don’t why doesn’t he draw the conclusion that we are already there? Well I’ll tell you why because he has a teleological concept of time. He thinks the future’s more real than the present moment is and that the future’s actually in I mean look you’re the you’re one of the great thinkers of retroactivity. But he takes it not as a quilting point we change the past because we resymbolize it. There’s something in him he’s taking like a literal physical retrocausality like this thing exists out in the future and it’s time traveling or sending influence by causes retrocauses back in time to affect. I know, I know. My thing now we are coming
there he does think it’s just it’s just gonna refine its intelligence and just it’s almost like surplus intelligence just more and more it’s just gonna get better and better more consistent. It’s gonna refine its own algorithms. Okay the question here is what does he mean by intelligence. Because my basic point in my Hegel and the Wired Brain book is that if there is a and I ask this question many many theorists with whom I’m in regular contact you know I have my strange connections with quantum physicists with artificial intelligence theorists and my big question one of the big questions to them is is precisely this one how that obviously his representation of artificial intelligence is Deleuzian. It is, yeah absolutely. He bases it on desiring production and machinic unconscious. Yeah machine but I think that again here my Freudian approach enters. Unconscious is simply a meaningless term without subjectivity because for Freud unconscious is not some basic flux without subject and so on. What Freud calls unconscious is unconscious formations, fantasies and so on are answers, replies to a certain deadlock. Deadlock which characterizes the rise of the subject. So all these descriptions infinite flux no border no longer human blah blah for me still remain fantasies. Fantasies in the sense of avoiding a certain break. My counter-answer would have been we don’t know if this will happen I don’t think it will happen we don’t why doesn’t he draw the conclusion that we are already there? Well I’ll tell you why because he has a teleological concept of time. He thinks the future’s more real than the present moment is and that the future’s actually in I mean look you’re the you’re one of the great thinkers of retroactivity. But he takes it not as a quilting point we change the past because we resymbolize it. There’s something in him he’s taking like a literal physical retrocausality like this thing exists out in the future and it’s time traveling or sending influence by causes retrocauses back in time to affect. I know, I know. My thing now we are coming
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I
I
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like this very much to even more fundamental let’s call them naively I don’t like this term metaphysical questions. I remain here a Hegelian materialist let me explain
like this very much to even more fundamental let’s call them naively I don’t like this term metaphysical questions. I remain here a Hegelian materialist let me explain
Slavoj Žižek
this crazy notion. You know when Hegel says I quoted this at least times when Hegel says philosophy can only grasp a certain Lebensgestalt, figure of life, social order when it enters its decline. That and I think that I agree with Land yes the representation of human being that is now endangered with artificial intelligence is something disintegrating today but what he Land projects into the future as this okay let’s not use godlike but this infinite abyss maybe nightmare entity with a capital E the entity. Yeah yeah yeah I think that this is this is a strict again projection fantasy formation on the gap in our situation here which is already here. Did you see that Deleuze and Guattari even do this at the end of Anti-Oedipus with their their image of the new earth which it’s like oh we we have a form of desire that’s not neurotic it’s not based on the signifier law it’s not caught up in any of that. Yeah exactly, exactly. I think that I this is why we don’t have time to enter it but this is why I think that Anti-Oedipus is arguably the worst book that they wrote. I much prefer Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense than maybe their last book is a little bit better introduction to philosophy or what what about a thousand plateaus? Sorry. What do you think of A Thousand Plateaus where do you put that? A little bit better, it’s already a little bit better than that lower point of of Anti-Oedipus. You know how I would read Deleuze and Guattari especially Deleuze. In Anti-Oedipus, Oedipus is defined as the agent of territorialization, retotalizing whatever. But read his own Logic of Sense where towards the end Oedipus is introduced precisely as an unlocatable outcast. He so Deleuze is for me a wonderful example of something that holds for many great thinkers. Their big moment is not at the end. It can be at the beginning, in the middle or where for example as I repeatedly tried to show with Schelling. So what I would say again but let’s not lose time with Nick Land. Well there’s one more point I just want to ask you about because okay one more thing. So you and Land even though I don’t think you know you disagreed with each other on this particular event you both take different positions and I just wanted to ask you about this real quick. Back in when the Chinese government banned all fiction depicting time travel science fiction narratives etc. um you in Less Than Nothing talk about how you view it as what China was doing the Chinese government was doing is trying to ban its people of thinking of alternate futures like it’s a kind of ban on the future. Land though as a supporter of China he saw it as banning the past. It didn’t what the Chinese government didn't want is people fetishizing their feudal past thinking about the past because China’s actually the driving agent of the future and so for him the ban is on the past for you the ban is on the future and I’m just curious about what you would say thinking about him saying the ban is on the past. Okay I’ll put it like this of course Chinese state bureaucracy their top ideologists like Wang Huning are not idiots. I respect them very much. I never dismiss Xi, the present leader as some kind of a crazy old communist. No he is based on a quite almost I would say accurate insight accurate insight into into modern capitalism. His problem is how to retain American productivity capitalist productivity without the effect of social decay. Unfortunately their solution is, but I don’t mean this term in a bad sense, a neo-fascist one. The typical neo-fascist solution is if you put you want a modernity without ideological modernization you want the modern dynamic you want conservative modernity. Their idea is modernity but with Confucianism. I think it will not function. But
this crazy notion. You know when Hegel says I quoted this at least times when Hegel says philosophy can only grasp a certain Lebensgestalt, figure of life, social order when it enters its decline. That and I think that I agree with Land yes the representation of human being that is now endangered with artificial intelligence is something disintegrating today but what he Land projects into the future as this okay let’s not use godlike but this infinite abyss maybe nightmare entity with a capital E the entity. Yeah yeah yeah I think that this is this is a strict again projection fantasy formation on the gap in our situation here which is already here. Did you see that Deleuze and Guattari even do this at the end of Anti-Oedipus with their their image of the new earth which it’s like oh we we have a form of desire that’s not neurotic it’s not based on the signifier law it’s not caught up in any of that. Yeah exactly, exactly. I think that I this is why we don’t have time to enter it but this is why I think that Anti-Oedipus is arguably the worst book that they wrote. I much prefer Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense than maybe their last book is a little bit better introduction to philosophy or what what about a thousand plateaus? Sorry. What do you think of A Thousand Plateaus where do you put that? A little bit better, it’s already a little bit better than that lower point of of Anti-Oedipus. You know how I would read Deleuze and Guattari especially Deleuze. In Anti-Oedipus, Oedipus is defined as the agent of territorialization, retotalizing whatever. But read his own Logic of Sense where towards the end Oedipus is introduced precisely as an unlocatable outcast. He so Deleuze is for me a wonderful example of something that holds for many great thinkers. Their big moment is not at the end. It can be at the beginning, in the middle or where for example as I repeatedly tried to show with Schelling. So what I would say again but let’s not lose time with Nick Land. Well there’s one more point I just want to ask you about because okay one more thing. So you and Land even though I don’t think you know you disagreed with each other on this particular event you both take different positions and I just wanted to ask you about this real quick. Back in when the Chinese government banned all fiction depicting time travel science fiction narratives etc. um you in Less Than Nothing talk about how you view it as what China was doing the Chinese government was doing is trying to ban its people of thinking of alternate futures like it’s a kind of ban on the future. Land though as a supporter of China he saw it as banning the past. It didn’t what the Chinese government didn't want is people fetishizing their feudal past thinking about the past because China’s actually the driving agent of the future and so for him the ban is on the past for you the ban is on the future and I’m just curious about what you would say thinking about him saying the ban is on the past. Okay I’ll put it like this of course Chinese state bureaucracy their top ideologists like Wang Huning are not idiots. I respect them very much. I never dismiss Xi, the present leader as some kind of a crazy old communist. No he is based on a quite almost I would say accurate insight accurate insight into into modern capitalism. His problem is how to retain American productivity capitalist productivity without the effect of social decay. Unfortunately their solution is, but I don’t mean this term in a bad sense, a neo-fascist one. The typical neo-fascist solution is if you put you want a modernity without ideological modernization you want the modern dynamic you want conservative modernity. Their idea is modernity but with Confucianism. I think it will not function. But
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what I would say controlling the past and so on is that I see here no big contradiction. My only point is the Hegelian one there is no future. Every image of future that we I’m more of a pessimist even here. We don’t know what will happen. I’m not I have many scenarios what I just don’t believe is there will be this one large let’s drop the name God but artificial intelligence general flow and so on and so on if this happens then we will not be able to use
what I would say controlling the past and so on is that I see here no big contradiction. My only point is the Hegelian one there is no future. Every image of future that we I’m more of a pessimist even here. We don’t know what will happen. I’m not I have many scenarios what I just don’t believe is there will be this one large let’s drop the name God but artificial intelligence general flow and so on and so on if this happens then we will not be able to use
Slavoj Žižek
these terms which we project into it from today’s experience. But my basic point would have been that the
these terms which we project into it from today’s experience. But my basic point would have been that the
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couple of deterritorialization and territorialization is not the ultimate point. That again we are maybe even rejoining the couple of desire and drive. Desire is in its nature at least apparently deterritorializing no it moves always
couple of deterritorialization and territorialization is not the ultimate point. That again we are maybe even rejoining the couple of desire and drive. Desire is in its nature at least apparently deterritorializing no it moves always
Slavoj Žižek
beyond. Yeah. Drive is territorializing you move in a closed loop and so on and so on. And I think that again in order for all this space to happen you have to have a certain radical ontological gap. And that’s why I’m looking also into this all this topic of quantum physics, void and so on. Reality in some sense doesn’t objectively exist. There is a multiplicity of inconsistencies and so on. There is a mess, a gap, a mega the you know even in my new book I would like if you don’t put it on your web on the web but keep it in your inner party circle. I would love to send you the manuscript
beyond. Yeah. Drive is territorializing you move in a closed loop and so on and so on. And I think that again in order for all this space to happen you have to have a certain radical ontological gap. And that’s why I’m looking also into this all this topic of quantum physics, void and so on. Reality in some sense doesn’t objectively exist. There is a multiplicity of inconsistencies and so on. There is a mess, a gap, a mega the you know even in my new book I would like if you don’t put it on your web on the web but keep it in your inner party circle. I would love to send you the manuscript
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of my new book not freedom but it will appear in April called Christian Atheism. Okay that’s a
of my new book not freedom but it will appear in April called Christian Atheism. Okay that’s a
Slavoj Žižek
provocative title it’s totally materialist don’t be afraid I didn’t begin to discover God or what. My point I try to sharpen my debate with Buddhists you know. My point is that Buddhists have this opposition Nirvana, this it’s not the same as what Land dreams about but this kind of a eternal it’s not the proper term it’s not peace but whatever flow of nothingness. Annihilation right? Yeah, yeah and then my point is that the true choice is not between these two. My point is always a Hegelian one. Not can we rise from our finite world of desire to the void of Nirvana but the other way around: how what went wrong with Nirvana that we fall into finite world. And for me the gap this is the origin. The origin is a gap. and Nirvana is always already a
provocative title it’s totally materialist don’t be afraid I didn’t begin to discover God or what. My point I try to sharpen my debate with Buddhists you know. My point is that Buddhists have this opposition Nirvana, this it’s not the same as what Land dreams about but this kind of a eternal it’s not the proper term it’s not peace but whatever flow of nothingness. Annihilation right? Yeah, yeah and then my point is that the true choice is not between these two. My point is always a Hegelian one. Not can we rise from our finite world of desire to the void of Nirvana but the other way around: how what went wrong with Nirvana that we fall into finite world. And for me the gap this is the origin. The origin is a gap. and Nirvana is always already a
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retroactive projection out of this gap. So the same thing would be I don’t have time to go into it my ultimate answer to to Nick Land is that it’s not we live today as humans and then we will blah, blah already as humans today we are not fully human. That’s why I remain faithful to the old structuralist notion of anti-humanism, which means that in in the core of being human there is a constitutive madness. And this madness, which is not
retroactive projection out of this gap. So the same thing would be I don’t have time to go into it my ultimate answer to to Nick Land is that it’s not we live today as humans and then we will blah, blah already as humans today we are not fully human. That’s why I remain faithful to the old structuralist notion of anti-humanism, which means that in in the core of being human there is a constitutive madness. And this madness, which is not
Slavoj Žižek
just human madness, which echoes some fundamental ontological disorder depicted for example by quantum physics of reality itself. That’s the ultimate truth. So I would say that that’s probably that’s I think that’s a perfect that’s I I think we probably need to let you go here in a second but Mikey you’ve got the one that you wanted to ask kind of off the record just go for it really quick. All right one last question Slavoj so when Dave and I I don’t know a last question tell me the story of your life in two hours. You know isn’t this so liberating politically correct the only way for me
just human madness, which echoes some fundamental ontological disorder depicted for example by quantum physics of reality itself. That’s the ultimate truth. So I would say that that’s probably that’s I think that’s a perfect that’s I I think we probably need to let you go here in a second but Mikey you’ve got the one that you wanted to ask kind of off the record just go for it really quick. All right one last question Slavoj so when Dave and I I don’t know a last question tell me the story of your life in two hours. You know isn’t this so liberating politically correct the only way for me
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to be friendly with somebody is to presuppose that
to be friendly with somebody is to presuppose that
Slavoj Žižek
in some sense they are evil you know you project evil this is for me the only form of true trust and friendliness. It’s not oh I know you are
in some sense they are evil you know you project evil this is for me the only form of true trust and friendliness. It’s not oh I know you are
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good no sorry nobody is good you know sorry go forward. Okay so when Dave and I met you the first time we were at the International Žižek Conference in Athens, Georgia. Oh my God I have sorry that you didn’t approach me but this was we did we did you did good memories of that one. But ok so
good no sorry nobody is good you know sorry go forward. Okay so when Dave and I met you the first time we were at the International Žižek Conference in Athens, Georgia. Oh my God I have sorry that you didn’t approach me but this was we did we did you did good memories of that one. But ok so
Slavoj Žižek
here’s the thing though when no I I the thing I mentioned to you um was I had plans like I wanted to get what you thought about Baudrillard. And so I told you that I had an idea for a book on you and Baudrillard. Well the last five years have been me doing constant research and the book’s gonna be out next year. It’s it’s happening next year. But what I just wanted to kind of refresh my memory real quick didn’t you say to me that Baudrillard actually like he he had read Sublime Object and sent word to you that he appreciated your work? Is that do I remember that correctly that he had some contact? Yeah but this is what they call in detective novels second-hand circumstantial evidence. Somebody told me this and it wasn’t even that he read Sublime Object. The one who read Sublime Object and didn’t like it was Lyotard. Oh okay. But Baudrillard it was just at the end before he died with this new confusion and contradictions ecological crisis and so on there I got a message immediately before his death, I think even from his wife, that
here’s the thing though when no I I the thing I mentioned to you um was I had plans like I wanted to get what you thought about Baudrillard. And so I told you that I had an idea for a book on you and Baudrillard. Well the last five years have been me doing constant research and the book’s gonna be out next year. It’s it’s happening next year. But what I just wanted to kind of refresh my memory real quick didn’t you say to me that Baudrillard actually like he he had read Sublime Object and sent word to you that he appreciated your work? Is that do I remember that correctly that he had some contact? Yeah but this is what they call in detective novels second-hand circumstantial evidence. Somebody told me this and it wasn’t even that he read Sublime Object. The one who read Sublime Object and didn’t like it was Lyotard. Oh okay. But Baudrillard it was just at the end before he died with this new confusion and contradictions ecological crisis and so on there I got a message immediately before his death, I think even from his wife, that
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he that he liked me and so on. and you know where is nonetheless maybe a difference between him and me. In a very naive way and you may feel it already what I was telling now recently. I think we have to step out of this deconstructive mode. It’s very naive what I will say now: oh philosophy means reading readings of how other people read books and then you know in this sense deconstructing. I think we should begin to risk big ontological projects. How to do this without regressing to some traditional metaphysics that’s the big problem I’m struggling in my last works. So Baudrillard is for me here a little bit too deconstructionist still. And that’s what I like about Deleuze. Deleuze is to the end not afraid to simply posit as
he that he liked me and so on. and you know where is nonetheless maybe a difference between him and me. In a very naive way and you may feel it already what I was telling now recently. I think we have to step out of this deconstructive mode. It’s very naive what I will say now: oh philosophy means reading readings of how other people read books and then you know in this sense deconstructing. I think we should begin to risk big ontological projects. How to do this without regressing to some traditional metaphysics that’s the big problem I’m struggling in my last works. So Baudrillard is for me here a little bit too deconstructionist still. And that’s what I like about Deleuze. Deleuze is to the end not afraid to simply posit as
Slavoj Žižek
in Logic of Sense strong ontological theses, propositions. I think this is what we should do today. You know and even in the the last books Baudrillard wrote though like Lucididity Pact, he seemed to return to metaphysics a little bit where he he’s kind of taking this distinction between sign and symbol or you know the code and symbolic exchange and basically seeing them as almost like metaphysical tendencies. And so I almost see it like a return later on in him where he he warms up to it a bit. I have nothing I must now make a confession, I bluff enough I don’t want to bluff too much, that I I there is a lot of Baudrillard that I simply didn’t read. So I’m not qualified to make statements here. But do you have a like a Baudrillard work that you really appreciated did you like Simulacra and Simulation or The Mirror of Production see with The Mirror of Production I think. I am sorry please finish I am. No I was just saying like at one point like with Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production I feel like he’s really tapped in to a lot of the stuff that you’re always trying to explain to Marxists like in your book on the Communist Manifesto which is both you and Baudrillard seem to have realized that just copying and pasting old Marxist categories that Marx used in his time onto our situation don’t work. You can’t just take proletariat as Marx understood it and it just perfectly makes sense of the working class now. You can’t just take wages the way Marx understood them and say oh yes that’s how wages work now or the strike that’s how strikes work now. Both you and Baudrillard seemed to convey a skepticism saying these concepts just don’t work exactly the same way that they did for Marx. No but my agreement that one I did read The Mirror of Production and my agreement with Baudrillard is even deeper here in the sense that if I remember correctly Baudrillard’s point is Marx but not only Marx, it’s not so much Hegel it’s more maybe Fichte and some others established this logic of we live in an imaginary world of mirrors, exchange and so on and the real productive ground is then some process of production. I think but I would first be here a little bit more merciful towards Marx. This is a naive reading of Marx and there are big debates in Marxism about this. Do you know who made this term critical of Bart? Do you do you read Kōjin Karatani? Yeah, yeah. I forgot the title of his book no longer the last one when he tries to supplement in very Baudrillardian view I think the notion of modes of production with the notion of modes of exchange. Okay. So that again what orthodox productivist Marxists would dismiss as mirror is the thing itself. And I think that even if we reread Marx in this way you see that things are not as simple as that. For me the worst text of Marx is that introduction to the or forward to the Critique of Political Economy where he has this evolutionary stupidities, you know production develops and then when it develops up to a certain degree it no longer fits the old mode of production and so on. No, Marx in his own work doesn’t follow this. For example in Capital he distinguishes between formal subsumption under capital and then full subsumption. He said that with early artisans, weavers and so on the the form material of production, weaving machine remained the same there isn’t privately owned, capitalist was just the one who immediately bought the products and so on that first it’s a formal subsumption at the level of the logic of exchange then the machines, the concrete material mode of production itself changes. So it gets it gets much more concrete. Here I agree with Baudrillard. Also I admired very much it really affected me was it Baudrillard? and I’m sorry old senile guy am I confusing him with somebody else? Didn’t he visit it was Korea South not North I think and then portraying Korea as this kind of a land of the future where people are at the same time I’m not sure if that’s him or not honestly. Yeah but it it reminds me of his maybe too pathetic but nonetheless wonderful
in Logic of Sense strong ontological theses, propositions. I think this is what we should do today. You know and even in the the last books Baudrillard wrote though like Lucididity Pact, he seemed to return to metaphysics a little bit where he he’s kind of taking this distinction between sign and symbol or you know the code and symbolic exchange and basically seeing them as almost like metaphysical tendencies. And so I almost see it like a return later on in him where he he warms up to it a bit. I have nothing I must now make a confession, I bluff enough I don’t want to bluff too much, that I I there is a lot of Baudrillard that I simply didn’t read. So I’m not qualified to make statements here. But do you have a like a Baudrillard work that you really appreciated did you like Simulacra and Simulation or The Mirror of Production see with The Mirror of Production I think. I am sorry please finish I am. No I was just saying like at one point like with Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production I feel like he’s really tapped in to a lot of the stuff that you’re always trying to explain to Marxists like in your book on the Communist Manifesto which is both you and Baudrillard seem to have realized that just copying and pasting old Marxist categories that Marx used in his time onto our situation don’t work. You can’t just take proletariat as Marx understood it and it just perfectly makes sense of the working class now. You can’t just take wages the way Marx understood them and say oh yes that’s how wages work now or the strike that’s how strikes work now. Both you and Baudrillard seemed to convey a skepticism saying these concepts just don’t work exactly the same way that they did for Marx. No but my agreement that one I did read The Mirror of Production and my agreement with Baudrillard is even deeper here in the sense that if I remember correctly Baudrillard’s point is Marx but not only Marx, it’s not so much Hegel it’s more maybe Fichte and some others established this logic of we live in an imaginary world of mirrors, exchange and so on and the real productive ground is then some process of production. I think but I would first be here a little bit more merciful towards Marx. This is a naive reading of Marx and there are big debates in Marxism about this. Do you know who made this term critical of Bart? Do you do you read Kōjin Karatani? Yeah, yeah. I forgot the title of his book no longer the last one when he tries to supplement in very Baudrillardian view I think the notion of modes of production with the notion of modes of exchange. Okay. So that again what orthodox productivist Marxists would dismiss as mirror is the thing itself. And I think that even if we reread Marx in this way you see that things are not as simple as that. For me the worst text of Marx is that introduction to the or forward to the Critique of Political Economy where he has this evolutionary stupidities, you know production develops and then when it develops up to a certain degree it no longer fits the old mode of production and so on. No, Marx in his own work doesn’t follow this. For example in Capital he distinguishes between formal subsumption under capital and then full subsumption. He said that with early artisans, weavers and so on the the form material of production, weaving machine remained the same there isn’t privately owned, capitalist was just the one who immediately bought the products and so on that first it’s a formal subsumption at the level of the logic of exchange then the machines, the concrete material mode of production itself changes. So it gets it gets much more concrete. Here I agree with Baudrillard. Also I admired very much it really affected me was it Baudrillard? and I’m sorry old senile guy am I confusing him with somebody else? Didn’t he visit it was Korea South not North I think and then portraying Korea as this kind of a land of the future where people are at the same time I’m not sure if that’s him or not honestly. Yeah but it it reminds me of his maybe too pathetic but nonetheless wonderful
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it’s a fantasy but a nice fantasy description of landing in L.A., Los Angeles and landing in hell and all that. These are fantasies but I think they are
it’s a fantasy but a nice fantasy description of landing in L.A., Los Angeles and landing in hell and all that. These are fantasies but I think they are
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in some sense
in some sense
Slavoj Žižek
fantasies immanent to reality itself. And isn’t that the thing that’s like because you always emphasize that like with an ideological ideological formation there’s always an unconscious fantasy holding it together and so would you say that maybe when Baudrillard was doing his travelogues like he was doing America going across he’s actually tapped
fantasies immanent to reality itself. And isn’t that the thing that’s like because you always emphasize that like with an ideological ideological formation there’s always an unconscious fantasy holding it together and so would you say that maybe when Baudrillard was doing his travelogues like he was doing America going across he’s actually tapped
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into the phantasmatic structure of America and that’s what he’s describing. Yes and that’s very important because
into the phantasmatic structure of America and that’s what he’s describing. Yes and that’s very important because
Slavoj Žižek
now comes my final point. I think that he was
now comes my final point. I think that he was
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able to do it precisely he was not himself an American. I’m I was never this fake historicist in the sense of you have to be there to really see it how it is. No. I believe that we can understand Shakespeare today much better than people in Shakespeare’s time and so on and so on and that again to understand what is happening in America we it’s better not to be too American. Where are you in Chicago? Where are you? I live right in a a small suburb Raytown Missouri but I’m right outside of Kansas City Missouri. Ah you are there my god. Yeah, yeah,
able to do it precisely he was not himself an American. I’m I was never this fake historicist in the sense of you have to be there to really see it how it is. No. I believe that we can understand Shakespeare today much better than people in Shakespeare’s time and so on and so on and that again to understand what is happening in America we it’s better not to be too American. Where are you in Chicago? Where are you? I live right in a a small suburb Raytown Missouri but I’m right outside of Kansas City Missouri. Ah you are there my god. Yeah, yeah,
Slavoj Žižek
yeah. Because no no no no because do you know was it no it wasn’t Kansas City. Which is the big gateway to the West city with the gateway? That’s St. Louis. Sorry St. Louis. Do you know about the strangest phenomenon in American philosophy, the so-called St. Louis Hegelians? No. Some German high school teachers who around established the first Hegelian school there. It was pretty influential, even the great pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce originally originated from this Hegelian source. But their idea was this one, Hegel came to his conclusion too quickly. It’s not the West that in the 20th century or already late 19th century the spirit moved from Western Europe to America and then even then they moved further. First it was East Coast now it’s moving to St. Louis. and they thought this is it. And I like this fantasy, of course they were proven immediately empirically wrong because Chicago won over St. Louis soon. But then you know you had their followers who claimed no they didn’t go far enough it’s West Coast. We had this dream L.A., Seattle that’s it. And now you have I love this some not only Japanese guys but even Chinese guys who claim the only way to be truly Hegelian maybe Nick Land would agree with this is China. You know for Hegel China, Africa is before, China is the beginning of history. Well it should
yeah. Because no no no no because do you know was it no it wasn’t Kansas City. Which is the big gateway to the West city with the gateway? That’s St. Louis. Sorry St. Louis. Do you know about the strangest phenomenon in American philosophy, the so-called St. Louis Hegelians? No. Some German high school teachers who around established the first Hegelian school there. It was pretty influential, even the great pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce originally originated from this Hegelian source. But their idea was this one, Hegel came to his conclusion too quickly. It’s not the West that in the 20th century or already late 19th century the spirit moved from Western Europe to America and then even then they moved further. First it was East Coast now it’s moving to St. Louis. and they thought this is it. And I like this fantasy, of course they were proven immediately empirically wrong because Chicago won over St. Louis soon. But then you know you had their followers who claimed no they didn’t go far enough it’s West Coast. We had this dream L.A., Seattle that’s it. And now you have I love this some not only Japanese guys but even Chinese guys who claim the only way to be truly Hegelian maybe Nick Land would agree with this is China. You know for Hegel China, Africa is before, China is the beginning of history. Well it should
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also end there. It comes full circle around you know. So I mean
also end there. It comes full circle around you know. So I mean
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to sorry oh. So I know we it’s getting late for you and we gotta we’re about to let the other two speakers here go up but right before we do that um I had my final question as well and I thought you know since you’re I’m just gonna ask it because I think the whole internet’s dying to know about your
to sorry oh. So I know we it’s getting late for you and we gotta we’re about to let the other two speakers here go up but right before we do that um I had my final question as well and I thought you know since you’re I’m just gonna ask it because I think the whole internet’s dying to know about your
Slavoj Žižek
relation to Compact because you are on the board of editors or you can explain that in a second but I just wanted to say that we’ve gotten a
relation to Compact because you are on the board of editors or you can explain that in a second but I just wanted to say that we’ve gotten a
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lot of heat from people who don’t know us and don’t read us but they see that
lot of heat from people who don’t know us and don’t read us but they see that
Slavoj Žižek
we’re
we’re
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affiliated with you they see that Nina Power is in the volume they see that you two are affiliated with Compact and so there’s like this this criticism that we’ve received that this is a Red-Brown operation, that this is a reactionary operation, that this is blah blah blah. You know the thing. And so I kind of just wanted to give you a moment to as we close out say why it is that that project over there at Compact magazine why it matters to you? What value is it that you see in that? Can I give you a surprising brutal answer? I don’t regularly follow Compact. Just I am not even sure where do they really stand. Are
affiliated with you they see that Nina Power is in the volume they see that you two are affiliated with Compact and so there’s like this this criticism that we’ve received that this is a Red-Brown operation, that this is a reactionary operation, that this is blah blah blah. You know the thing. And so I kind of just wanted to give you a moment to as we close out say why it is that that project over there at Compact magazine why it matters to you? What value is it that you see in that? Can I give you a surprising brutal answer? I don’t regularly follow Compact. Just I am not even sure where do they really stand. Are
Slavoj Žižek
they some kind of an anti-woke left? Are they more in the middle? Blah, blah. What matters to me is, and that’s the desperate situation we are in today, that for example did I publish with them that text some radioactive reflections and so on? No, I published that one with Philosophical. It doesn’t matter. There are many texts where the only two options for me to publish are Compact or my friend Michael Marder’s Philosophical Salon. The censorship is so strong. For example my last text it’s now published in that Project Syndicate website with a strange title National Disorder I don’t know what. It’s critical but very respectfully, not anti-semitic, the final theorist is a Jew, but it’s critical of some extreme phenomena on in Israel today. Absolutely it was impossible to publish it anywhere in Germany, in United States and so on. Are people aware how strict the censorship is in these days? So it’s not that I looked around and said okay let’s choose Compact. They invited me, I sent them a text which nobody no one else wanted, they said yes. That’s it for me. And it’s a very tragic situation, you know. It’s from all sides, from of course a right-wing side but also from the woke leftist side and so on. The censorship is getting so incredible that, and with this I will finish immediately, that do you know that some people asked me, they were stupid enough I warned them I will not name them, for a letter of recommendation. I did it but I warned them: I may appear well-known but this may cause you trouble. And afterwards they told me: you were right, we didn’t get the job not in spite of your recommendation but because of it. We already thought of they got their spies within that committee and they learned that precisely somebody said: no, no, let’s not give the job to this guy he has a letter of support from Slavoj Žižek, that’s bad. So you know don’t underestimate in what a desperate situation I am. In the sense of how difficult it is to reach the
they some kind of an anti-woke left? Are they more in the middle? Blah, blah. What matters to me is, and that’s the desperate situation we are in today, that for example did I publish with them that text some radioactive reflections and so on? No, I published that one with Philosophical. It doesn’t matter. There are many texts where the only two options for me to publish are Compact or my friend Michael Marder’s Philosophical Salon. The censorship is so strong. For example my last text it’s now published in that Project Syndicate website with a strange title National Disorder I don’t know what. It’s critical but very respectfully, not anti-semitic, the final theorist is a Jew, but it’s critical of some extreme phenomena on in Israel today. Absolutely it was impossible to publish it anywhere in Germany, in United States and so on. Are people aware how strict the censorship is in these days? So it’s not that I looked around and said okay let’s choose Compact. They invited me, I sent them a text which nobody no one else wanted, they said yes. That’s it for me. And it’s a very tragic situation, you know. It’s from all sides, from of course a right-wing side but also from the woke leftist side and so on. The censorship is getting so incredible that, and with this I will finish immediately, that do you know that some people asked me, they were stupid enough I warned them I will not name them, for a letter of recommendation. I did it but I warned them: I may appear well-known but this may cause you trouble. And afterwards they told me: you were right, we didn’t get the job not in spite of your recommendation but because of it. We already thought of they got their spies within that committee and they learned that precisely somebody said: no, no, let’s not give the job to this guy he has a letter of support from Slavoj Žižek, that’s bad. So you know don’t underestimate in what a desperate situation I am. In the sense of how difficult it is to reach the
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public. And in that sense then I see why you jumped at the opportunity to submit something to us because. And you know
public. And in that sense then I see why you jumped at the opportunity to submit something to us because. And you know
Slavoj Žižek
why I also like you? Just one point that
why I also like you? Just one point that
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you will like. Theory Underground, you know. I read this with, you know the famous quote from from Virgil
you will like. Theory Underground, you know. I read this with, you know the famous quote from from Virgil
Slavoj Žižek
Enied: Acheronta movebo, move the underground. In so far as the underground is the all the unconscious fantasies things that we know but we don’t know that we know it that’s the crucial thing to do today. We cannot do direct revolution but the only way to lay the foundation for it is to do what you are doing to move the underground. It’s a
Enied: Acheronta movebo, move the underground. In so far as the underground is the all the unconscious fantasies things that we know but we don’t know that we know it that’s the crucial thing to do today. We cannot do direct revolution but the only way to lay the foundation for it is to do what you are doing to move the underground. It’s a
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theoretically correct title. Thank you Slavoj. It’s been a it’s been a complete honor
theoretically correct title. Thank you Slavoj. It’s been a it’s been a complete honor
Slavoj Žižek
to have you and. Don’t screw me with this type of bullshit you know. You should say something: fuck off Slavoj, we don’t give shit, it doesn’t matter, we don’t fucking you should say: it wasn’t totally bad but you should put a lot of work into it to make it somewhat better. That’s the only thing that I accept. Okay. Have a nice time. You’ve got a better talk in you. Yeah. Okay thanks very much. Bye-bye. Appreciate you. Thanks Slavoj. Bye-bye. Thank you. Take care. Yeah. Take care of what, of my shits? Yeah. I’m going to do a quick little point of order here for you folks because we cannot do direct revolution but the only way to lay the foundation for it is to do what you are doing to move the underground. It’s a theoretically correct title. Welcome to Theory Underground. A place for workers with earbuds. We’re tired of the bullshit and just want to get down to it. Big ideas, rigorous thinking, and ultimately, liberation from necessity. Research at Theory Underground focuses on what is most important for understanding our current situation. Theory of the subject, capital, time energy theory,
to have you and. Don’t screw me with this type of bullshit you know. You should say something: fuck off Slavoj, we don’t give shit, it doesn’t matter, we don’t fucking you should say: it wasn’t totally bad but you should put a lot of work into it to make it somewhat better. That’s the only thing that I accept. Okay. Have a nice time. You’ve got a better talk in you. Yeah. Okay thanks very much. Bye-bye. Appreciate you. Thanks Slavoj. Bye-bye. Thank you. Take care. Yeah. Take care of what, of my shits? Yeah. I’m going to do a quick little point of order here for you folks because we cannot do direct revolution but the only way to lay the foundation for it is to do what you are doing to move the underground. It’s a theoretically correct title. Welcome to Theory Underground. A place for workers with earbuds. We’re tired of the bullshit and just want to get down to it. Big ideas, rigorous thinking, and ultimately, liberation from necessity. Research at Theory Underground focuses on what is most important for understanding our current situation. Theory of the subject, capital, time energy theory,
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critical media theory, CMT, and the most essential critiques necessary for understanding why the theory, ideology, and common sense of influencers, left to right, misses the mark. Theory Underground is coming to a city near you. Besides a commitment to publishing certain underground theorists and popularizing certain fundamental concepts, we have toured the United States and are touring Europe to promote our ideas, courses, and publications. You've been reading Underground Theory? Amazing book. I’m a publisher and an editor, I run a review of books, literally it’s my living. This is the best edited collection I have ever read. Okay, picture the scene. America. Early An Amazon warehouse worker arises from the emerging underground theory internet scene to create spaces for untimely topics and concerns that are too often
critical media theory, CMT, and the most essential critiques necessary for understanding why the theory, ideology, and common sense of influencers, left to right, misses the mark. Theory Underground is coming to a city near you. Besides a commitment to publishing certain underground theorists and popularizing certain fundamental concepts, we have toured the United States and are touring Europe to promote our ideas, courses, and publications. You've been reading Underground Theory? Amazing book. I’m a publisher and an editor, I run a review of books, literally it’s my living. This is the best edited collection I have ever read. Okay, picture the scene. America. Early An Amazon warehouse worker arises from the emerging underground theory internet scene to create spaces for untimely topics and concerns that are too often
Slavoj Žižek
neglected or kept in isolation today. Joined by a revolving cast of underground theorists, academics, and critics, he established what would become Theory Underground. A teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for working-class intellectuals, autodidacts, and academics who want to do more than they’re able to do within the confines of academia. That warehouse worker’s name is David McKerracher and his book Time Energy is his first major contribution to the world of theory. It was recently reprinted with a foreword by none other than Slavoj Žižek. My Bible. It’s an excellent book. He’s also contributed to Theory Underground's latest book, a collection of essays called Underground Theory. What you just heard is an excerpt from the Strange Exiles Podcast Episode where Bram from
neglected or kept in isolation today. Joined by a revolving cast of underground theorists, academics, and critics, he established what would become Theory Underground. A teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for working-class intellectuals, autodidacts, and academics who want to do more than they’re able to do within the confines of academia. That warehouse worker’s name is David McKerracher and his book Time Energy is his first major contribution to the world of theory. It was recently reprinted with a foreword by none other than Slavoj Žižek. My Bible. It’s an excellent book. He’s also contributed to Theory Underground's latest book, a collection of essays called Underground Theory. What you just heard is an excerpt from the Strange Exiles Podcast Episode where Bram from
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Strange
Strange
Slavoj Žižek
Exiles interviewed me and Mikey. For those who don't know Mikey is the author of The Dangerous Maybe blog. We are publishing one of his books here shortly at Theory Underground. He’s also a lecturer at Theory Underground and he’s someone I've been friends and a collaborator with for over years. But most importantly for you all he’s a fantastic lecturer and it’s a crime that he has to do wage labor right now. One of the long-term goals of Theory Underground has been now for a couple of years to hashtag FreeMikey. That is something that I’ve been really pushing. But first obviously
Exiles interviewed me and Mikey. For those who don't know Mikey is the author of The Dangerous Maybe blog. We are publishing one of his books here shortly at Theory Underground. He’s also a lecturer at Theory Underground and he’s someone I've been friends and a collaborator with for over years. But most importantly for you all he’s a fantastic lecturer and it’s a crime that he has to do wage labor right now. One of the long-term goals of Theory Underground has been now for a couple of years to hashtag FreeMikey. That is something that I’ve been really pushing. But first obviously
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I have to get freed myself so that the two of us are able to do this because
I have to get freed myself so that the two of us are able to do this because
Slavoj Žižek
you know as Mikey said build it and they will come. Well I tried and I built a website and platform. I had my own app and everything but it’s been really buggy and it’s more than one person can handle and that’s you know what? A really good lesson for me. And so for now what we're doing is moving it to a temporary intermediary
you know as Mikey said build it and they will come. Well I tried and I built a website and platform. I had my own app and everything but it’s been really buggy and it’s more than one person can handle and that’s you know what? A really good lesson for me. And so for now what we're doing is moving it to a temporary intermediary
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platform until we are able to get some more serious funding and ultimately
platform until we are able to get some more serious funding and ultimately
Slavoj Žižek
we want to be in a place like this, a real
we want to be in a place like this, a real
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brick-and-mortar digital nomadic mecca where
brick-and-mortar digital nomadic mecca where
Slavoj Žižek
people can come from all over the world but also the app was really expensive and so by quitting it
people can come from all over the world but also the app was really expensive and so by quitting it
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I am now able to save a lot of money
I am now able to save a lot of money
Slavoj Žižek
and with the help of my patrons and the students at
and with the help of my patrons and the students at
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Theory Underground, especially the monthly subscribers, I am officially able to quit
Theory Underground, especially the monthly subscribers, I am officially able to quit
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Amazon and do Theory Underground full-time. So thank you so much everybody. This is one huge step forward. My way of giving back to everybody is by promoting everyone who is at a current tier to
Amazon and do Theory Underground full-time. So thank you so much everybody. This is one huge step forward. My way of giving back to everybody is by promoting everyone who is at a current tier to
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the benefits of the tier above them as far as subscribers go and also rolling out a new lower tier and so check out the tier
the benefits of the tier above them as far as subscribers go and also rolling out a new lower tier and so check out the tier
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subscription setup and if
subscription setup and if
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you're not interested in taking the courses or what’s being offered for subscribers and you want to support anyway check out the Patreon. Finally just stay tuned for more information on the tour in Europe during the month of May and the conference in Mexico during the last weekend of October If you want to be there hit me up ASAP. Let’s get talking because it’s happening very soon. All right. Bye-bye.
you're not interested in taking the courses or what’s being offered for subscribers and you want to support anyway check out the Patreon. Finally just stay tuned for more information on the tour in Europe during the month of May and the conference in Mexico during the last weekend of October If you want to be there hit me up ASAP. Let’s get talking because it’s happening very soon. All right. Bye-bye.