Slavoj Zizek – Transcendental Subjectivity, Sexual Difference, Brain Sciences
Lecture · Majid Abed ·
2017-10-06 · 2:02:10 · 21,622 words
with Cathy Newman
communism-socialismideologycapitalismgeopolitics-warreligion-theologycinema-art-culturepsychoanalysissubjectivitysexuality-genderphilosophy-generalhegel-dialecticsecology-climate
Žižek critiques the standard leftist opposition to state power by analyzing the failures of socialist experiments in Venezuela, China, and elsewhere, arguing that authentic emancipatory politics must confront the state rather than avoid it. He posits a paradoxical 'Möbius strip' where capitalism's increasing abstraction leads to a return of direct, non-market forms of domination and slavery, citing figures like Steve Bannon and Elon Musk as unwittingly revealing capitalism's limits. Finally, he interprets the cultural popularity of 'Left Behind' narratives as a vulgar Marxist reflection of the economic reality of being 'left behind' by capital. Žižek critiques the leftist celebration of refugees as 'nomadic proletarians,' arguing instead for a focus on those left behind in origin countries and within Europe, proposing Merkel's investment strategy as a pragmatic alternative. He then transitions to subjectivity and brain sciences, using the 'coffee without milk/cream' joke to illustrate Hegelian determinate negation and the virtual status of the unconscious. Finally, he employs topological metaphors (Möbius strip, cross-cap) and the film It Follows to explain the logic of antagonism and the impossibility of a simple sexual duality, concluding with an analysis of the voyeuristic gaze in pornography. Žižek argues that sexual relations are never a simple duality but always include an excess element, which he illustrates using the film It Follows and a detailed analysis of hardcore pornography. He reinterprets Lacan’s concept of sublimation through the lens of venereal diseases and proposes the topological cross-cap as a formal metaphor for antagonism, where two interconnected surfaces create an unlocatable cut. Žižek analyzes the film It Follows to argue that sexual relations are never a simple duality but always include an excess or supplement (object a), illustrated by a detailed analysis of hardcore pornography where the viewer becomes the object of the gaze. He then introduces the topological concept of the cross-cap (a double Möbius strip) to model this logic of antagonism and redoubled suture, contrasting it with the standard Marxist/Lacanian notion of suture. Finally, he uses Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and quantum physics to illustrate how subjective and objective realities are mutually constituted through a double suture. Žižek argues for a materialist reinterpretation of Plato's Cave, positing that the subject is not outside reality trying to reach it, but is a blind spot within reality itself. He uses examples like the Klein bottle, medieval cosmology, and creationist fossils to illustrate how ideology functions as a structural closure. He concludes by promoting his new book on sexual difference and ontology, linking Kantian antinomies to Lacanian sexuation, and briefly critiques Jacques Milner's view of Stalinism. Žižek argues that class struggle is not a binary opposition but an open field involving 'third elements' like ecology and feminism, which can have reactionary dimensions, citing Engels' anti-Slavic views. He analyzes Hitchcock’s The Birds and Psycho to illustrate how cinematic 'God’s eye' views are subjectivized by the monster’s gaze, revealing the viewer's own monstrosity. He concludes by critiquing Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology for positing an 'animist depth' to objects, preferring Bruno Latour’s relational approach, and offers a counter-narrative to 'deep ecology' using the deforested history of Scotland.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 47
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
A topological shape used by Žižek as the necessary structure for subjectivity, following the cross-cap, implying a non-orientable surface where inside and outside are indistinguishable.
The hypothetical model of governance that Žižek argues has never been successfully institutionalized, contrasting with the failures of Venezuela, Greece, and China.
The early Soviet policy of partial return to capitalism, which Chinese theorists use to frame their own economic reforms as a temporary setback rather than a defeat.
The official Chinese Marxist interpretation of their hybrid economy, which Žižek critiques as ignoring the definition of capitalism by relations of production in favor of state control.
Marx's concept of non-market coercion (slavery/feudalism) which Žižek argues is returning in the modern era as money functions as a direct tool of social power rather than a medium of exchange.
as “formal freedom vs. de facto servitude”
The distinction between the legal freedom to sell one's labor (capitalism) and the actual condition of domination, which Žižek argues is worsening as money loses its function as a sphere of freedom.
A vulgar Marxist reading suggesting that the economic mechanism of 'leaving people behind' operates with the same divine inevitability as the Rapture.
A leftist trope celebrating refugees as free-floating revolutionary subjects, which Žižek rejects as a misreading of their actual desire for stability and proletarianization.
as “leftovers / Left Behind”
The dual meaning of the cultural phenomenon: the theological concept of the Rapture and the economic reality of those excluded from the market, who constitute the true position of the modern subject.
A Hegelian concept illustrated by the difference between 'coffee without milk' and 'coffee without cream': physically identical but specatively distinct due to the specific negation involved.
The status of the unconscious and possibilities that haunt actual events, analogous to quantum wave functions, which current digital programs cannot trace.
A topological metaphor for antagonism: two Möbius strips connected such that the cut between them cannot be located, representing the non-clear difference of social/political divisions.
as “logic of antagonism”
The purest form of social division found in the cross-cap topology, where interconnection creates an unlocatable cut rather than a clear boundary.
Reinterpreted by Lacan (and Žižek) not as elevating a drive, but as embodying a fundamental anxiety or guilt into a concrete form (e.g., a venereal disease).
The Lacanian principle that sexual relation is never a simple duality; there is always an 'excess' or supplement (object a) that disrupts the pair.
as “subjectified in a humiliating way”
The condition of the pornographic actress who, by looking at the camera, becomes a subject addressing the viewer, which Žižek argues is more humiliating than simple objectification.
as “object A”
The object-cause of desire; in the pornography example, the viewer/spectator becomes the object A, the pure object of the gaze, while the male performer is objectified.
Used here as a standard example of a 'suturing element' in Marxist history, a wastebasket category for societies that do not fit the standard progression (primitive, ancient, feudal, capitalist) but are treated as just another stage.
A Stalinist classification example of a suturing element: an objective social group that actually stands in for a subjective attitude or political position.
The Kantian concept that objective reality is not just given but constructed through the subjective addition of categories to confused sensual impressions.
In quantum physics, the act of subjective registration that collapses the wave function into stable external reality, serving as a model for how objectivity is supplemented by a subjective element.
Heidegger's 'being-in-the-world,' which Žižek critiques for positing a pseudo-problem by assuming a prior gap between subject and world.
as “Big Brother does not exist, you do not exist”
A Hegelian move derived from Orwell: skepticism brought to the end undermines the consistency of the subject, showing the subject is included in reality.
Epicurean 'swerve' or deviation; used to explain how reality allows for a turn from the outside to the inside, creating the subjective position.
Reinterpreting the Cave not as a gap between representation and reality, but as the structural position of the subject as a blind spot within reality itself.
A metaphor for ideology: the finite universe with a hole in the sky revealing the 'true outside,' illustrating how ideology creates a closure.
as “Creationist fossils / False depth”
The theory that God created fossils to make the world look old; used as a perfect theory of ideology where historical epochs create 'false depth' as a temptation.
Anachronistic horns invented by Wagner; cited as 'fossils' created by ideology to close the loop of historical narrative.
The subject's own gaze/position, which appears as an impossible, disgusting protrusion or blind spot in the field of vision because it is the condition of seeing.
A joke/painting title where Lenin is absent because he 'is in Warsaw'; used to describe Žižek's book title and the utopian idea of Lenin's spirit being present in Solidarność.
as “Lacanian formulas of sexuation”
The structure of Kantian antinomies corresponds precisely to these formulas, a discovery by Joan Copjec that Žižek claims Lacanians ignore.
as “Kantian antinomies (Dynamic/Mathematical)”
Contradictions arising when thinking the world as an ontological whole; Žižek argues these are features of reality itself, not just epistemological limits.
as “Hegelian solution to antinomies”
Reality in itself is antinomic/antagonistic; the way to reach objective reality is to locate the subjective position into this inconsistency.
A phrase from Beckett's late plays; used as the title of Žižek's official talk, referencing the tragic void and surplus-pleasure.
Jacques Milner's characterization of Stalinism, which Žižek disagrees with, arguing Stalinism proposed a solution to a deadlock in Leninism.
as “war of position”
Gramscian concept Žižek references but critiques as too simplistic for understanding the blurred, multi-front nature of contemporary class struggle.
The blurred dimension or 'other' in class struggle (e.g., ecology, feminism) that prevents a simple binary of 'us vs. them' and for which we must fight.
as “teleological necessity”
The simplistic Marxist assumption that all progressive movements (women, nature lovers) naturally align with socialist revolution, which Žižek rejects.
as “deadlock as such”
Žižek’s reading of transgender identity (specifically non-binary 'ze' pronouns) not as a third gender, but as the embodiment of the deadlock of sexual difference itself.
A Hegelian formula attributed to Ambedkar, used by Žižek to argue that the 'outcast' (lumpenproletariat/rabble) stands for universality.
as “rabble stands for universality”
Žižek’s claim that Hegel was 'not Hegelian enough' because he didn't fully recognize that the social 'rabble' constitutes the authentic position of universality.
A humorous concept where the analyst falls asleep and does the association/interpretation for the patient, who just rests.
as “Möbius strip (of capitalism)”
The paradoxical reversal where capitalism's increasing abstraction and virtualization lead not to greater freedom, but to a return of direct, explicit relations of domination and slavery.
Hitchcock’s establishing shot that appears objective but is subjectivized by the entrance of the monster, revealing the gaze as obscene.
as “redoubled suture”
The structure where the inside (subjective representation) requires an element from the outside to be complete, and the outside (objective reality) requires a subjective element to appear as reality; they mutually constitute each other.
as “animist depth”
Graham Harman’s claim that objects have an independent, hidden depth; Žižek rejects this, arguing depth is strictly relational.
The idea that indigenous philosophies are aware of, whereas the West is not, the supremacy of humans over nature.
Stories he reaches for 6
A painting shows Lenin's wife being screwed by a Komsomol guy; when asked where Lenin is, the answer is 'Lenin is in Warsaw.'
“You have a painting of 'Lenin in Warsaw,' and on the painting is just Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, being screwed by some young Komsomol guy”
Wagner invented Viking horns for operas; they are 'fossils' created by ideology to close the loop, just as historical epochs create false narratives.
“these horns were created like fossils, I say, they are—and this is how ideology functions.”
A story where a modern city and a 'Magic Wild West' are connected by a Dark Tower. Destroying the tower destroys both worlds, illustrating a 'redoubled suture' where each reality needs the other's representative to exist.
“Our reality cannot stand alone, it has to be sustained by a much more barbaric other world.”
Žižek notes that Steve Bannon called him his favorite Marxist, and observes that Bannon's populist arguments against saving banks sound surprisingly like Bernie Sanders.
“You know who? Steve Bannon said this. So I am in good company.”
Pro-Palestinian Jewish filmmaker Udi Aloni criticizes collaborators' clumsiness, saying 'If you were so efficient like this, you wouldn't have been able to do the Holocaust properly,' highlighting the taboo against such irony in Germany.
“"If you were so efficient like this, you wouldn't have been able to do the Holocaust properly."”
A leftist friend of Žižek tracked worker-run factories in Venezuela, noting that whenever Chávez announced a factory was given to workers, it was almost always a fiasco a year later.
“It was almost always a fiasco. Fiasco was unfortunately the rule.”
Works invoked 30
Ninotchka film
Referenced only for the 'coffee joke' contained within it, used to illustrate Hegelian determinate negation.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek’s own 'big fat Hegel book' where he develops the idea that the rabble stands for universality.
Psycho film
Used to illustrate the 'Arbogast murder' scene where the camera jump forces the viewer into Norman's point of view.
What is Sex? book
Alenka Zupančič's book, which sold well and with which Žižek defines his own book as a dialogue.
The Birds film
Used to illustrate the 'God's view' subjectivized by the monster's gaze, revealing the viewer's monstrosity.
Incontinence of the Void other
Title of Žižek's official talk, derived from Beckett.
Being and Time book
Heidegger's work, critiqued for positing a pseudo-problem of the gap between subject and world.
1984 book
Orwell's novel; Žižek finds it simplistic but loves the specific exchange between Winston Smith and O'Brien.
Atlas Shrugged book
Described as 'disgusting ideological thing' but containing the valid point about money and formal freedom.
New Left Review journal
Cited for an article by Julia Buxton on the Chávez revolution.
Blade Runner film
Used as a preliminary question to check for 'true Marxists' in the audience.
Left Behind book
The bestseller series by Tim LaHaye, used to analyze the cultural popularity of the 'Rapture' narrative.
The Order of Things book
Cited for Foucault's introduction and the Borges joke about the classification of dogs.
The Dark Tower film
Used to illustrate the 'cross-cap' and 'redoubled suture' where two realities (modern city and Wild West) sustain each other.
A TV series described as 'not a bad series' and 'very seriously done,' used as another example of the 'Left Behind' theme.
Relire la Révolution book
Jacques Milner's book, described as 'counter-revolutionary' and containing views on Stalinism Žižek disagrees with.
Pirate Bay other
Mentioned as an illegal activity/platform and associated with the Swedish Pirate Party; used as a brief example of antagonism.
American Gangster film
Cited as an example of 'true anti-racism' because it features a black gangster protagonist.
International Critical Thought journal
Described as the official Chinese social theory journal that tries to paint a picture of the world remaining the same as the Cold War.
It Follows film
Used as a primary example to analyze sexual anxiety and the impossibility of simple duality; Žižek appreciates its 'nice title' and proposes a 'refined reading' over the usual paranoid interpretation.
Origin (Dan Brown) book
Dan Brown's new thriller, mentioned as something Žižek is reading.
Darwin's work, cited in the context of the creationist theologian's reaction.
A book Žižek bought that describes the nomadic life in desert Africa; used to illustrate the potential of 'left behind' populations and the fusion of pre-modern life with digital capitalism.
Time magazine journal
Mentioned as the source of a rumor about Theresa May losing her voice.
Beyond Sorrow book
A book by 'Horton' (likely a mis-transcription of a specific author, possibly related to Scottish ecology) depicting ecological struggles and the history of Scotland's forests.
Lenin in Warsaw other
A joke/painting title used by Žižek to describe his own book title and utopian political idea.
Marx's doctoral thesis on Epicurus, which Žižek suggests we should rehabilitate.
Žižek's new book (published by Verso), described as a 'Lenin in Warsaw' version of his work.
A text by Jacques-Alain Miller that helped establish 'suture' as a key concept in film theory.
Wagner's operas, cited for the invention of Viking horns as ideological 'fossils'.
People invoked 58
Epicurus positive
Cited for the concept of 'clinamen' (swerve), which Marx wrote his dissertation on.
Actor in The Dark Tower, playing the 'good gunfighter'.
Jacques Milner negative
Writes a 'counter-revolutionary book'; Žižek disagrees with his view of Stalinism as a violent return of the Master's discourse.
Žižek says 'I love Loach' but is surprised by his age.
Theresa May negative
Used as an example of a fascist formula ('Britain for everybody') and hypocrisy (losing her voice after claiming to be the 'voice of the voiceless').
Udi Aloni positive
Described as a 'good friend' and 'cynical, beautiful' pro-Palestinian Jewish movie maker; Žižek likes his 'politically incorrect' nature.
Winston Smith positive
Character from 1984, used to illustrate the Hegelian move that 'you do not exist'.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Co-author of a book on sexual difference; Žižek defines his book as a dialogue with her.
Ayn Rand positive
Called 'the great American philosopher' ironically; Žižek extracts a valid point from her that abolishing money without exiting capitalism returns direct domination.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Referenced in the 'Lenin in Warsaw' joke and in the context of Stalinism/Leninism deadlock.
Steve Bannon positive
Called Žižek his 'favorite Marxist'; praised as an 'intelligent populist' whose arguments against saving banks sound like Bernie Sanders.
Jacques Lacan positive
Referenced implicitly in the concept of 'how what is oppressed from content returns in the form,' a core Lacanian/Žižekian idea.
Actor in The Dark Tower, playing the 'bad guy'.
Lenin's wife, featured in the 'Lenin in Warsaw' joke.
Donald Trump negative
Žižek says he would 'almost prefer Trump' to Zuckerberg, but mocks the 'infinite parodies' of Trump as showing the Left has no true answer.
B. R. Ambedkar positive
Described as 'the anti-Gandhi of Indian independence' whom Žižek 'admire[s] very much' for the formula 'no castes without outcasts'.
Mentioned as a Russian populist friend of Marx in his later years, associated with the dream of returning to primitive forms.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Vice President of Bolivia, spoken with by Žižek, who plays a social-democratic game carefully not to disturb capital too much.
Robin Blackburn positive
Cited for his book on the explosion of slavery at the end of medieval times, arguing slavery was present in advanced industry, not just the Caribbean.
Mentioned as a colleague at Oxford where Rebecca Carson studies.
Antonio Negri negative
Opposed to Negri's 'ultra-accelerationist' view that speculators are closer to communism than precarious workers.
Alain Badiou negative
Criticized for being 'a little bit into it' regarding the celebration of refugees as 'nomadic proletarians,' which Žižek rejects.
Graham Harman negative
Žižek critiques Harman’s 'animist depth' and 'naive ontology,' though he admits Harman is 'not a complete idiot' and draws 'wonderful conclusions'.
Elon Musk positive
Cited as a 'post-capitalist capitalist star' who, despite being a hypocrite, is one of the few openly discussing the end of capitalism.
George Orwell positive
Žižek finds Orwell 'too simplistic' and has 'problems with him,' but loves one specific line/exchange regarding Big Brother.
Friedrich Engels negative
Žižek says 'I still like him' but critiques his reactionary, anti-Slavic letters from 1848, where Engels claimed Slavic nations were politically reactionary.
Bruno Latour positive
Žižek is 'absolutely for Latour,' praising his relational ontology and political analysis, calling him 'not a complete idiot'.
Mark Zuckerberg positive
Described as a hypocrite who, like Musk, talks openly about capitalism's end and is even rumored to run for president.
David Hume positive
Cited as someone who brought skepticism to the end by questioning the consistent 'I'.
Stephen King positive
Used as a source for The Dark Tower, which illustrates the cross-cap/redoubled suture structure.
Denzel Washington positive
Cited in relation to American Gangster as an example of 'true anti-racism' (playing a bad guy).
Michel Foucault positive
Cited for his discussion of Borges' classification in The Order of Things, illustrating the need for a suturing element in representation.
Peter Sloterdijk negative
Critiques Sloterdijk's postmodern reading of the Cave ('culture is building your cave inside').
Ernesto Laclau positive
Žižek states he is 'maybe close to Laclau' regarding the idea that class struggle involves fighting for a field with third elements like feminism.
Lucretius positive
Mentioned alongside Epicurus regarding the clinamen.
Martin Heidegger negative
Critiques Heidegger's 'being-in-the-world' for positing a pseudo-problem by assuming a gap between subject and world.
Mentioned as an actor in a movie plot used for a joke about Žižek's celebrity.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Mentioned for writing the famous text 'Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier)' when young.
Tim LaHaye negative
Co-author of the 'Left Behind' series, described as 'total shit' and 'totally crazy American conservatives.'
Angela Merkel positive
Žižek states he has 'no illusions about her' but praises her 'wonderful proposal' to invest EU budget in refugees' home countries, which was ignored by humanists.
Francisco Varela positive
Cited for developing the idea of animal vision (fly) showing we are engaged with our environs.
Joan Copjec positive
Cited for the 'mega discovery' that Kantian antinomies correspond to Lacanian formulas of sexuation.
Mentioned as the author of the new thriller Origin, which Žižek says he is reading.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Žižek praises Hitchcock’s 'touch of a genius' in The Birds and Psycho for revealing the monstrosity of the viewer's gaze.
Julia Grace Elcock positive
Cited from New Left Review for her analysis that the Chávez revolution transformed social relations but was never properly institutionalized.
Walter Scott negative
Cited as an example of the 'romanticization of nature' that projects authenticity onto what is actually the effect of social devastation.
Mentioned as an actress in a movie plot used for a joke about Žižek's celebrity.
Robert Burns negative
Cited alongside Walter Scott as part of the romanticization of nature.
Antonio Gramsci negative
Žižek references Gramsci's 'war of position' but rejects it as 'too simplistic' for explaining the blurred third elements of class struggle.
Hugo Chávez positive
Used as a case study for genuine attempts at socialist democracy and worker cooperatives, despite their ultimate failure/fiasco.
Cited as an example of a regime where direct domination returned, yet which maintained huge wage differences between workers and managers.
Plato positive
Returns to Plato's cave metaphor, rejecting standard/postmodern readings in favor of a materialist one.
Rebecca Carson positive
A young researcher who wrote an important text on the renewed role of violence and slavery in capitalism.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for his awareness that money opens space for formal freedom, and for the concept of 'direct domination'.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
Source of the 'Chinese Encyclopedia' joke about dogs, used by Foucault to illustrate suture.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the concept of 'determinate negation,' which Žižek uses to explain the virtual differences between 'coffee without milk' and 'coffee without cream.'
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the concept of subjective synthesis: that we must add subjective elements to get objective reality.
Dr. O'Brien-Bell positive
Interrogator in 1984, whose answer about Big Brother is cited.
Transcript 30 turns
unknown
Welcome everybody to this week's second masterclass by Slavoj Žižek, hosted by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. As ever, Žižek needs no introduction, so I'll do a stupid one. He's a man with the game—I mean, he's so notorious or famous, he's a man with a game based on him where people at parties and in bars and so on pretend that they've never heard of him in order to wind up the person from the theory brigade who's talking to them. And also this year, a film's been released called *Daphne*, and quoting from one of the reviews of it, it's about a woman wallowing in meaninglessness, joyless encounters with men. Her brain is infused with the works of philosopher Slavoj Žižek to the same extent her liver is a sponge full of white wine. So, what does that say about him? I'm
Welcome everybody to this week's second masterclass by Slavoj Žižek, hosted by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. As ever, Žižek needs no introduction, so I'll do a stupid one. He's a man with the game—I mean, he's so notorious or famous, he's a man with a game based on him where people at parties and in bars and so on pretend that they've never heard of him in order to wind up the person from the theory brigade who's talking to them. And also this year, a film's been released called *Daphne*, and quoting from one of the reviews of it, it's about a woman wallowing in meaninglessness, joyless encounters with men. Her brain is infused with the works of philosopher Slavoj Žižek to the same extent her liver is a sponge full of white wine. So, what does that say about him? I'm
Slavoj Žižek
anti-alcohol, that doesn't work.
anti-alcohol, that doesn't work.
unknown
So Žižek is here with us to continue his discussions of transcendental subjectivity, sexual difference, and brain science, and he will deliver his lecture, and we hope for around minutes of discussion,
So Žižek is here with us to continue his discussions of transcendental subjectivity, sexual difference, and brain science, and he will deliver his lecture, and we hope for around minutes of discussion,
Slavoj Žižek
debate, if you want, at the end. So over to you. Because you know, the only other movie was some crazy melodrama in intellectual circles, I forgot the title, it was with Julianne Moore or whatever, where a guy played by Ethan Hawke doesn't want to go to a conference and then Julianne Moore tells him, "But Žižek, me, will be there, you can get a signature." My God, I was tempted to write to the producers that maybe they should do a premiere in New York and I will be there to give a signature if they pay me a first-class trip and a nice hotel. Because you know, don't you agree, there is—I hate people who say money is not everything and so on. I mean, you can say this when you have enough money, to put it very nicely. I mean, isn't this for me always this middle-class guilt attitude? If you speak about authentic—if they exist, which I doubt—poor people, why, they love money and they are right, you know. And it's the same with consumerism. I think that there is always an ambiguity with this critique of consumerism, you know. Like I have here some leftist friends who told me, "Oh, Oxford Street is ruined," or "No, you know, all those stores and so on." And I told them, "Of course, you also get nothing good there. If you want to buy something properly, go at least to the southern part of Bond Street and so on." There's their anti-consumerism and so on. Okay, just the last introductory question: Let's see if there are true Marxists here in the room. Did any of you already see *Blade Runner*? I am among traitors. No, no, but okay, let's not lose time. Let's do it. As usual, I will begin with some political topics which will bring us to the Klein bottle and all that stuff and so on. I want to begin with a rather pessimistic note, political. The standard radical leftist reproach to the Left in power is that instead of effectively socializing production and imposing or organizing actual democracy, it remains, the Left in power, within the constraints of standard leftist policies: nationalizing means of production, or tolerating capitalism in a social-democratic way, or imposing an authoritarian dictatorship, or playing the game of parliamentary democracy and so on. But I think maybe the time has come to raise the brutal question: okay, but what should or could they have done? How would the authentic model of socialist democracy have looked in practice? Let me turn to Chávez, of course. Don't forget, he was not only a populist throwing around the oil money. What is largely ignored in international media are the complex and often inconsistent efforts when Chávez was still alive to overcome capitalist economy by experimenting with numerous new forms of the organization of production. Forms which, of course, endeavored to move beyond the alternative of private versus state property: farmers' and workers' cooperatives, workers' participation, control and organization of production, different hybrid forms combining private property and social control and so on and so on. Say, factories not used by the owners were often given to workers to run them. There were many hits and runs on this path, but a friend of mine who is a leftist and who just followed this from Venezuela told me that unfortunately—because he did something very evil, I think I even already used this example here some years ago—whenever it was, when Chávez was still alive, big news, you know, "this factory given to workers," he noted it down and then he went there one year later. It was almost always a fiasco. Fiasco was unfortunately the rule. So although we are dealing here with genuine attempts in which grassroots initiatives interacted with state proposals, we should also note failures, inefficiencies, corruption and so on and so on. So the big question for me remains here when we criticize Chávez for this, or Chavistas: how does or how should the reliance on popular self-organization affect running a government? Can we even imagine an authentic communist or radically left power today? Because what we got is either a disaster (Venezuela), a more or less total capitulation (Greece), or a return to capitalism (China, Vietnam and so on). And the case of China is especially interesting here because official attempts at Marxist social theory in China—and now with this slight turn towards harsher politics, Marxism is again in, in China—but it's a very strange Marxism. They are sending me, maybe you know it, a journal called *International Critical Thought*, something like this. It's in English, the official Chinese social theory journal. They try to paint a picture of today's world which, to put it simply, basically remains the same as that of the Cold War. "We still have the worldwide struggle between capitalism and socialism. The fiasco of 1990s was just a temporary setback so that today the big opponents are no longer United States and Soviet Union, but United States and China, which remains a socialist country." So the explosion of capitalism in China is then read as a gigantic case of what in the early Soviet Union they called NEP, New Economic Policy, partial return to capitalism, so that we have in China a new socialism with Chinese characteristics, but still socialism. Communist Party remains in power and tightly controls and directs, regulates market forces. From this standpoint, the economic success of China in the last decades is not interpreted as a proof of the productive potential of capitalism, but as a proof of the superiority of socialism over capitalism. They claim the old struggle goes on and finally today socialism is winning with China and so on. Now, to sustain this view, which also counts Vietnam, Venezuela, Cuba, even Russia as socialist countries, one has to give this new socialism a strong socially conservative twist. And I think this is not the only reason why such a rehabilitation of socialism is totally non-Marxist. It totally ignores the basic Marxist point that capitalism is defined by capitalist relations of production, not the type of state power. I mean, when I was in China, I asked them, "Why are you still a socialist country?" They said—they gave me a very primitive answer—"Because in capitalist countries, through their representatives, big capital is in power, holds state power. With us, it's still the Communist Party which is in power and they just strategically use..." and so on and so on. But so again, that's my problem. Back to Venezuela. As in a nice article in *New Left Review*, Julia Buxton, she put it, "the Chávez revolution has transformed social relations in Venezuela and had a huge impact on the continent as a whole, but the tragedy is that it was never properly institutionalized and thus it proved to be unsustainable." Again, I have this question: okay, to institutionalize it in an authentic way, how? It is all too easy to say that authentic emancipatory politics should remain at a distance—sorry—at a distance from state. The big problem lurks—that lurks behind—is what to do with state. One should deal, I think, with this problem here and now. Like again, I don't see what happens in Venezuela as an object of cheap criticism, like "no, they got corrupted, Maduro government" and so on and so on. I'm always asking a much more tough question: but what should or could they have done? I mean, this is what makes me nervous when I hear this standard leftist approach: "we should avoid both traps of state socialism, Soviet Union style, and of social democracy," and then the terms all of a sudden become vague, you know, like "true people's democracy, abolish the alienation of state, true socialization of production, not just nationalization," because nation is not the same as society and so on and so on. And I'm tempted to say, okay, okay, but give me one model. Do you have an answer here? Give me one model. The countries which succeeded relatively, even in Latin America—and I know, I spoke with him, the vice president Álvaro García Linera in Bolivia—they basically play a little bit, but not even that radicalized, social-democratic game. They are very careful not to disturb the capital too much and so on and so on. So you know what I mean, like maybe it's time—my argument is not let's drop the game and just play capitalist welfare state, because the situation is much more tragic, I think. We will have to move beyond capitalism. I precisely think that this is the greatest utopia, that as your gracious Prime Minister said a couple of days ago, "Britain for everybody, a place with a place for everyone," you know. And I like this formula because it's basically a fascist formula, you know. The fascist promise is society as an organic body, a place for everyone. But why do I like it? You remember how I mentioned two days ago of this how I took some examples from movies and so on, how what is oppressed from content returns in the form? It happened—my source is because I just found it when I was driving a tube here, abandoned example of *Times* magazine and I don't know if it's true, but they reported on it—you know when did Theresa May lose her voice? A little bit after she proclaimed that she wants to be the "voice of the voiceless." It's wonderful, like, fuck you, you are not even that, you lose the voice. It was a nice example of that up there, you know, how the lie in her content returned in the form. So again, this deadlock of—this is, I think, the deepest reason of the moralization of the Left. Because I don't—and now the situation is even more sad. Did you notice how this paradox of our predicament? While resistances against global capitalism fail again and again to undermine the advance of capitalism because they at the same time remain strangely out of touch with many trends which clearly signal capitalism's progressive disintegration. It's for me so strange—and this is a really sad thing—that on the one hand, we have all these protesters who are, in spite of different phrases, blah blah, basically playing this conservative game of "keep the old results, welfare state" and so on and so on, "trade union rights." On the other hand—I mean, I find them disgusting, don't misunderstand me, but—the only people who talk openly about capitalism is coming to its end are these new digital whatever post-capitalist capitalist stars like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and so on. They are doing something that we Marxists should be doing. They are—of course it's a fake and so on—but nonetheless, they are really looking in the present trends in production for the traces, elements of something which can no longer be controlled, regulated within a market mechanism. Isn't this a sad paradox that—it's as if these top capitalists are in a faux, fake way—don't misunderstand me, I don't think—I heard this rumor that maybe Mark Zuckerberg will try to be a candidate for US presidency. Well, I return to my old dogma, I would almost prefer Trump, not quite, but to that guy. I mean, Zuckerberg is, you know, the usual hypocrite. You remember news in our media half a year ago how he wanted to buy a whole island and evict all the natives—it's the usual story. But isn't something very sad in this? That here, where we wouldn't expect them, we find people who seriously think, although in a fake way, think about limits of capitalism. They are—and you find this surprises. That's why—I am not for them—that's why the guy who—did I already mention this two days ago?—who, I'm proud to say, he said that I'm his favorite Marxist. You know who? Steve Bannon said this. So I am in good company. But nonetheless, I said, "Okay, let's see who this guy is," you know, the one who was now evicted from the White House. And again, he is an intelligent populist in the sense that it's very sad to observe how sometimes, and as part of his right-wing strategy, he almost sounds like Bernie Sanders. For example, he opposes the state saving with injections of money banks and big companies. But you know what's his argument? That this is "socialism for the rich" and that no, we need better life for the poor, not and so on. That's the danger. So again, my point is don't just laugh at Trump. This is for me the saddest thing, these infinite parodies, making fun of Trump and so on and so on. This just renders visible you don't have a true answer. So let's go on. Where do we find this internal limit of capitalism? In—in another unexpected thing that is happening. A young researcher who studies there with Balibar here, Rebecca Carson, wrote—you can get it in, it will appear in some journal now—a very important text on the renewed role of violence, slavery, what Marx called "direct domination." You see, this is our—the tragedy of our situation. On the one hand, capitalism is getting more and more virtual. Virtual in the sense that, you know, relations are non-transparent, financial speculations and so on and so on, it's more and more abstract. And one would have thought—again, it's pure Möbius strip—because one would have thought that this means that more and more we will be formally free and domination will be more and more impenetrable. No, what is happening more and more is the exact opposite. We are getting at all different levels a mega return of direct relations of domination. In what? New hierarchies. For—okay, sorry so that I don't get lost. I—one result is, and here we should also—my God, it's strange, you should lynch me with which persons am I mentioning today. There is one lesson of—I will burn in hell for mentioning her—from Ayn Rand, you know, the great American philosopher. Who nonetheless made a point—it's the most disgusting ideological thing, unreadable even to me. The final pages of *Atlas Shrugged*, when that guy, the new prophet, comes and delivers a mega speech more boring than all Mao's and Fidel Castro's and Stalin's together, praising capitalism. But she makes one point. The point is that if you abolish the role of money that, as Marx was well aware of this, whatever we have against money, it at least opens the space to some kind of formal freedom. In money relations, you work for me—of course it's de facto servitude—or I work for you, but let's say I don't—this is the only way for me to survive and so on—but at least the form of freedom is retained. The problem is that if you abolish money or the key role of money without properly exiting capitalist relations and so on, what has to return are direct relations of domination. Which unfortunately happened exactly in Stalinism and so on. Although incidentally, don't have any illusions there. Stalin didn't have any problem with social differences. You know that—read good history of Soviet Union—you will learn that in mid-thirties, the wage difference in a company between ordinary worker and top manager was like one to three hundred, up to four hundred times more. But nonetheless, what I am saying is that today when—the whole—what happens today is something—is something for me at least extremely interesting. Is that—and some intelligent Marxists even got it—that more and more people are paid, not in a proper exchange selling their labor force for to capital to enable the reproduction of capital, but money serves in a way more and more as a direct, as literally a direct means of social power, a way to exert this power and to control this and to control it. For example, you know how many of us are dependent on, in many at least developed countries, to cultural culture, to contributions from big companies, or where state is more generous and so on, jobless people, many of contracts with state and so on. We should be very careful here. It's no longer market. It's not even done in market criteria. So de facto, money doesn't even allow you for that minimum of personal freedom but is more and more functioning as simply a much more direct means of domination. So this would be again another nice example of this Möbius strip reversal of how the official story of capitalism, the official party line is, we begin in dark medieval times and then we progress, more and more freedoms. And even many Marxists up to a point buy this story claiming, "Yes, it's still false freedom, but nonetheless at least, you know, like you can criticize precarious workers, but at least formally you are free to choose, if you get it haha, a new job every year and so on." I claim no, for structural reasons, at a certain point, although money remains here, we get new relations of at all different levels of slavery, direct, direct interpersonal domination. Not only—and this was from the beginning Robin Blackburn wrote some years ago, I think, a big book on it, how at the end of medieval times, more or less not quite, slavery was marginalized and then with capitalism it was a new explosion of slavery. And what is so interesting to read—I read this in books on Haiti and so on—that you cannot say "but it was basically big industry, efficient, and slavery was only in those Caribbean islands or..." No, slavery was precisely where the most advanced industry was developed at that point. So my last point of this Möbius strip political would be another one. I—I like religious fundamentalist bullshit. I told you and I warned you the last time that you have the right to put signs in this anti-Semitic way but instead of "Jew" put my name, like, you know: to this building and so on, entrance prohibited to dogs and to Žižek or whatever, after you hear this. I'm just reading—I told you this, no—the new Dan Brown, *Origin*. No, let's go. But but in a way, one topic of these religious thrillers that I like is—and I wonder, I will make now a very vulgar Marxist point, hardline reductionist, but I think it's true—what intrigued me, I don't think I already mentioned this here, is the popularity of the topic of "Left Behind". And you don't only get total shit, like Tim LaHaye and those totally crazy American conservatives. They wrote a big tens of millions sold bestseller series of books where the topic is that of the population of Earth disappears. It's of course divine rupture because it's we are approaching Armageddon and God wanted to redeem, to keep them out of suffering, all who were faithful to him. You also get much more interesting versions, like what is that TV series? Is it *Remainders* or *Leftovers*? No, no, wait a minute, this one is not a bad series. It's very seriously done. It's just that a couple of millions disappear and the trauma of others. But a vulgar idea came to me: why the popularity of this topic? I here, I propose a very vulgar simple Protestant reading. As we all know, the voice of capital is the voice of God and so on and so on. That maybe God, as is so often the case, God himself listened to the voice of capital. Isn't exactly the same happening vaguely in our economy? Like are really needed and more and more of us are left behind. We are leftovers. This is up—absolutely our position. And I think we should follow this logic to the end. I remember—maybe you know this, I mentioned it a long time ago—here I am in a friendly way opposed to Tony Negri, who is always obsessed, he has this primordial I would say bourgeois fear of communism or progressive politics today should remain in touch—he is ultra-accelerationist, how do you call it—with the top capitalist development. Once he went even so far as to say that that these speculations with futures double, all those speculators are much closer to communism than jobless workers, precarious workers and so on and so on. I don't believe in this. I believe that we should not be afraid to see for hope that in every authentic historical dialectics, the big reversal always happens like this, that what seems to be left behind out of use, all of a sudden becomes the true site of progress. That's the—it's not—and I think we should look for the same things here. Even—and this is the topic, some of you maybe know it, which accounts for so many troubles that I get into—refugees. Another problem that I have with refugees: all my sympathy with them and so on and so on, and I am very much a pessimist here, you know. And I think that again, that's the reason I didn't accept this leftist mantra. Look, the situation came with my good friend Udi Aloni, the pro-Palestinian Jewish movie maker. He is now in Germany because—and he gave me, he's my friend, so cynical, beautiful—he told me, "You know, Germany still has money to finance cinemas, and if you are a Jew and say Holocaust, Holocaust, you cannot get refused money, so Berlin is my place today," you know. And I like him because he is the image of politically incorrect Jew and gets into so many troubles. Here you can see how we no longer live in proper ironic times. I was with him in Dortmund or one of the German towns. He was staging an—some theatrical piece. And I was there, and he was mad at his collaborators there. He said, "But look how clumsy you are, because some costume should have been done..." He said, "If you were so efficient like this, you wouldn't have been able to do the Holocaust properly," you know. And they were so embarrassed. They were especially embarrassed by the fact that he as a Jew said this, you know. You cannot talk like this today. I mean, it's horrible, whatever. Okay, let's go on. So what I wanted to say is that with refugees, even he—and I shouted at him, stopped him—wanted to do a movie in near future taking place in years from now in Berlin where all refugees are isolated, like in new concentration camps, they have—they have—how do you call this, as in old ghettos—where you have [unintelligible] hours when you are allowed to leave it and so on. And I told him, "Are you aware what you are doing? Okay, Germany, Nazi Europe, but the only country which behaved in a half-decent way..." This is so typically leftist. You attack them for not being radical enough. And what about all the others? Especially my shitty part: Slovenia, Croatia—this is the new axis of evil, I'm telling you—Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Baltic countries. Yeah, okay, but you focus all the energy on them. So again, concerning refugees, are we aware? Why people don't talk more about this? Are we aware, and I'm not bluffing, I read some statistical, not theory, analysis that there is already a kind of even class selection, especially from Syria, from others. Those who arrive to Europe, they are already the dynamic, usually more educated, financially stronger part. What about those—I'm back to my topic—left behind? I mean, that's what I wonder. Okay, half of Syria moved out. What about those who didn't move out? There, we have to solve the problem. So again, that's my problem with this celebration of—Badiou is a little bit into it—as refugees as nomadic proletarians and so on and so on. They are potentially nomadic proletarians, but they are simply refugees in search of becoming proper proletarians. That's their—that's their desire. I mean, we should again focus on the leftovers. Where are billions of dollars to do that? And I'm not a utopian here. Again, Angela Merkel, I have no illusions about her, but she made a wonderful proposal—I think I already mentioned it here one year ago—which was totally ignored. Why don't we simply give of the entire European Union budget to not only refugees, to help them, but to solve the problem, invest there and so on and so on? Oh, all the humanists, everybody passed in silence over it because you know, when people say we should open our hearts to refugees, I say no, open your wallets to refugees, you know. Every liberal is ready to open your heart to it. So what I'm saying is that we should do—these are our left behind today. According to some statistics, in the long term at least, with robotization and so on, of the people will be in some sense left behind. Within the scope, within the coordinates of the system, okay, we can play humanitarian games, but properly there is no place for them. And I think we should not do what—I mentioned this already years ago, even here once—it was one of the most depressing experiences that I had. Tony Negri, he did some TV show in Italian, I think, and since at that time he was living in Venice, he walked with a cameraman in some factory to be soon closed in Venezia Mestre, you know, the city on land with more industrial base of Venice, and some workers were demonstrating there because their factory will be closed. And I was shocked. He said, "Look at them, they are already dead, they don't know it but they already dead," and so on. Yeah, but that's why they should be our—our base, I think. We should absolutely drop this primitive progressive logic of obsession with those who are at the top and so on and so on. Those left behind should be our—should be our obsession even. That's why, for example, I bought now—you know I like those, not second-hand, but like judge books, those bookstores which sell old stock, you know. And I'm an anal character, I especially like it when they say, you know, "everything must disappear, closing down" and so on. I especially like such sales in France because there, you may have noticed, the way they put it in French for "everything must disappear" is *liquidation totale*, you know. It erases all my Stalinist shit. But now on the way here, there is one on Southampton Road. I—it's a wonderful book for I bought it. *The Timbuktu School for Nomads*. You know that mysterious, totally left behind area, south of Algeria, east of Morocco, Timbuktu and so on, the very heart of desert Africa there. It's a whole life, nomadic, millions there. Okay, they are terrorized by—they have droughts, they are terrorized by Al-Qaeda and so on. But that life there, it's the only serious nomadic society today. How they live and so on. And I have this dream, which always tempted Marxists, even Marx in his last years when he became friend with Vera Zasulich and some Russian populists, had this dream that maybe social progress will allow us to return to those few so-called pre-modern primitive forms and somehow find in them the base for immediately joining the most progressive form. So I will believe in—and it's already almost happening there. I think this is how you should imagine digital capitalism. There, nomads on their stupid camels and so on, they can very nicely walk around with a simple iPhone or whatever, you know, get in contact and so on. Again, it did strike me how their form of life, how modern it sounds in a way. This should be our orientation. Look at those left behind and find in them new potentials. I mean, this is usually, I think, the form of historical progress again, that what appears to be left—what appears desperate remainder of the past can have a new potential. So now let's go on. Okay, but this is all this simple logic of Möbius strip of just you follow one line, it's a reversal and so on. Now I would like to do what I promised you to do, at the end we get to subjectivity and so on. Since I just—one improvisation since I will not have time for it, I maybe already even used it here a year ago, but I would like to repeat it because in between I had some debates with some people who claim that they understand brain sciences and so on and so on. And I want to repeat you this story because, you know, we are involved in these games of what challenge brain sciences are. If they will be able to somehow discern processes in our brain, control us, is this the end of freedom or not and so on and so forth. And one—and I wonder if there is somebody among you here who knows this. Am I wrong or not? From the contacts that I had, I didn't get a good answer of this one. You know, because I was playing, I admit it, this standard game of, "But will the computer be able to do this?" If, maybe you remember it, again, I think I'm aware that I probably already used it, it's the—this differentiality. In what sense? Sorry, I will again repeat a story that I even yesterday I repeated at Emmanuel Hall, that so ashamed, I used it here I would say between and times in this room. You know that *Ninotchka* joke about coffee: "Bring me coffee with cream." "Sorry, we don't have cream, we only have milk, so I can only bring you coffee without milk," you know. Again, a very Hegelian point, which means that—this is what Hegel meant by determinate negation. Although they are physically the same. There are three coffees which are physically the same: plain coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream. But from a speculative Hegelian point they are not the same. My point is simply: Do we have a digital program which can trace this? Which can trace this totally virtual negative determination? Is—do we have a computer program which is ready to discern the difference between coffee without milk and coffee without cream? Although they are totally the same. Because the Freudian unconscious has exactly this status. The whole of psychoanalysis deals with these virtual presences. The idea being that, if I use this parallel in an extra-vulgarized way—like it's like in quantum physics where when something happens, to understand it you have to include in an analysis the wave function. Is it as if all the possibilities, what might have happened, are positive part of what effectively happens? Now I wonder, again, if machines will be able to—machines, I don't fear machines, digital program the way we have them today—are—are ready to operate at this level, counting for these virtualities that haunt, like "it is this because it's not that," although it's physically the same thing. Again, can machine do this? I have doubts, maybe I'm wrong. I didn't yet get a good answer. But let's go on. So all this is the simple Möbius strip. Now I want to go to the next step, I will show you the images—ah, we have here to "cross-cap." Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images two days ago how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but and you know that some people in in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it," this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim—I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut, but it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: subjectivity, this—cross-cap. Maybe the best way to illustrate it would be through this old—and here you will see why cross-cap is double, redoubled quilting point, *point de capiton*, or redoubled, redoubled Möbius strip. I will try to be as short as possible here because time is running. The notion of suture. You know the old classic Lacanian notion and so on. It's a very interesting notion. Why? Because we have, and it's crucial even for Marxist theory this, I claim. Because we have the usual predominant notion of suture which made history, especially it's a wonderful concept. I described it in one of my—I don't know which chapter in which of my books—but the point is that this notion made history, it's a wonderful example how: First, Lacan uses it not only one time that I thought, he uses it two times, two-three times before, but not as a term, more just as a verb, sutures and so on. Then Jacques-Alain Miller, when he was very young, he wrote that famous short text, "Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier)", whatever. But still it was marginal. Then some French cinema theorists took it over to account for how montage, cutting, subjective, objective point of view, this exchange works in cinema. And then *Screen* in the UK, no, it made history out of it. But as far as I was able to see, the standard use of suture, this notion, its standard use was more the simple use of this one. The idea is, part of theory of ideology: we have—it was supposed to be a materialist theory—we have a site of production where things are really produced. And this site of production is mirrored in ideological representation. And by suture they mean that precisely because every field of representation, even in the most primitive—let's let's call representation: legal representation, ideological representation—cannot ever fully recapture its site of production. It's the ideological illusion that it can do it fully. Like the classical example of early Marx would have been: you have real life, actual production, and it's always in excess of the idealist, ideological, or philosophical circle. So you need suture. You need an element within the circle of ideology which enables it to find some kind of a false closure. So in the same way that, you know, Michel Foucault, I mentioned it times, that from the end of the introduction to his *Les Mots et les choses* (the English title is *The Order of Things*, and the English title is correct, I read somewhere that Foucault first wanted the title *L'Ordre des choses* or what, but the publisher put pressure and then it's again bit how in the English translation the repressed returned). So, you remember he lists that famous ironic from Borges' classification of all dogs: where you have dogs who belong the Emperor (fake Chinese, it's a joke), dogs who are brown, dogs who belong to the Emperor, dogs who this that, and at the end of course all dogs who are not included into this list as one of them. So the idea is to to get a complete circle at the level of representation, you need an element which literally sutures the field. It really stands for what is not included into the field, but it—that's the illusion of suture—it presents it as simply one among the elements of the field. I don't want to repeat another example, maybe I even did it two times ago which I think if you count all my years in London, I—it's modest—I used it only some times. I would—you must remember this, my point is that in Marxist classification of modes of production, the so-called Asiatic mode of production is the suturing element, I think. In what sense? You can clearly see how the original categorization is simply: primitive societies, ancient slave societies, medieval societies, feudalism, capitalism and whatever shit will be afterwards, communism or whatever. But then Marx noticed that there are quite some societies—ancient China, 18th Latin America, Egypt—which do not fit any of this. And he proposed the category Asiatic mode of production. And it's clear that it functions as a suturing element. It pretends to be just one category, but it really stands as a, like wastebasket into which you throw everything that doesn't fit not just any of the other categories, but everything that simply doesn't fit the very principle of Marxist notion of the—of the—of the modes of production. So again, this is the standard notion of suture. You have some positive field of productivity, actual life whatever, you have its ideological representation, and then for the field of representation again to retain its consistency you have to suture it precisely to close—to close the field. But here things get complicated. Because if you read clearly Lacan, especially if you combine Lacan with German idealism and so on and so on, that's the lesson of Kantian transcendentalism, is that this suture, which means the internal space of representation, needs a suturing element from the outside to—to be sutured, to act as a whole. So there is no inside without in—within this inside—an element which stands for what is excluded from it, from the outside. The beauty of theory would be to proclaim that there is also the opposite insight. That also outside, not actual outside, but outside the way we relate to it, is only constituted if we add to it an element which is from our own subjectivity, inside. So it's not only—let's to simplify to the utmost—let's say inside-outside is our subjective representations versus objective reality. It's not only that our subjective representations can only appear as our full subjective universe with some element which is a stand-in for—for the outside. It's also the opposite. In order to relate to something as external objective reality, you have to add to it a subjective element. Something which is really a stand-in out there for subjective position. Two days ago, I gave you the example, I don't want to repeat it, just to remind you of that Stalinist attempt at classification of kulaks and so on. Where they try to—you have this mysterious notion of "sub-kulak". Which appears to be one of the objective social groups, but it's really a stand-in for certain subjective attitude. But I would like to take here another example even from high theory, philosophy. This is the beauty—I don't have time to go into it in detail, just to bring you some associations. This is what Kant is saying. We get when we are affected by outside phenomena, things, we—our experience is this confused—not even reality. How do we arrive at objective reality from all the confusion of our sensual affects and so on? How do we get from here to "no, it's not just a confusion of impression, I see objective reality out there"? Through subjective synthesis. That's the beauty of Kant. You add something, you have to add something to your psychic impressions to get at reality. But it's not you have to add something objective. You have to add something precisely subjective, your subjective gesture itself. It's the same paradox, although I am opposed to this simplistic confusion between quantum physics and Kantian transcendentalism. But nonetheless, a—you know in quantum physics, I mentioned it a little bit but now I want to make different point two days ago: we have all this quantum wave function blah blah blah. How do we get from there to this what we perceive as hard, stable external reality? Through measurement. Through subjective registration. This is a nice example of this second notion of suture. Where it's not that subjectivity has to be supplemented by a trace of an object, but no, objectivity itself has to be supplemented by a master signifier, object A, whatever, to make out of this confused objectivity the harsh objective reality. And here I already mentioned it two days ago, I think, here we can get another example from—from—from popular literature: Stephen King, *The Dark Tower*. There was a movie now again, please, don't even bother to download the movie. It's not good enough. But I like the central idea, which is precisely cross-cap, this double suture. The idea is that there is a Dark Tower which is at the same time what holds our reality, our developed world, this in our reality, part of the story takes place in contemporary, I think it's New York or Chicago, doesn't matter, a modern American city. And then if you pass through it into another reality, it's very interesting what is this other reality, the true one. It's something like Magic Wild West. It's really as if—he is very Marxist here—it's as if our reality cannot stand alone, it has to be sustained by a much more barbaric other world. And again, the whole point is that some evil forces want to destroy this tower and in this case both worlds would disintegrate. And then you have the—as usual—it's nice who the actors are, keeping in line with this politically correct fact where the good—this is why I liked *American Gangster* or what, a movie with Denzel Washington where the big guy was a black American gangster. My God, that's for me true anti-racism. Aren't you sick and tired of this political correctness where black guys should always be some kind of a saints or the good guys? No, I want bad black guys, that's fighting racism, no. So here, it's Idris Elba of course who is the good gunfighter and it's the—how do you pronounce the name?—Matthew McConaughey, yeah, who is the—the bad guy, you know. But again, I like this idea that it's not just the primitive materialist reading would have been: our reality, our splendid megalopolis life, is just an ideological illusion, the real life is but our barbaric reality. No, the suture is redoubled. You need in our world a representative of the outside, that outside also needs a representative of our inside. They are—in this sense they are—they are doubly sutured. So let's move on even more. Yes, ah. Now things will become more interesting. Because here we can go on what, you see, here would be the tower, no. And you have one circle of reality and the other. You remember how this is formed? The two are twisted and you cannot put them together, you need—you need a Dark Tower keeping them together. You destroy the Dark Tower, everything unravels. But even this is not enough to do subjectivity. For subjectivity you need Klein bottle. Now I will try to go a little bit on, just to give you an idea. I will keep my promise, I will send the text and so on, where this is for my—from my forthcoming book and so on. I think philosophically here things become even more interesting for me at least. Because to—to be a materialist today is not is to reject—I think a true materialist today should return to Plato's cave metaphor. The what's fashionable today is to claim that oh, Plato's cave but also the Cartesian representation notion that we as subjects are caught in our circle but that reality is out and then you have this typical modern problem, can we reach out of the circle of our representation to things themselves or not? And the fashionable thing to say, especially this was done among others in a model way by Heidegger: the point of Heidegger's "being in the world", *In-der-Welt-sein*, is that precisely this kind of a gap opens up a pseudo problem. Of course you first posit a gap, "how do I know that my ideas, perceptions are not only in my mind, how do I know that they are outside?" That first you posit a gap and then you wonder that you cannot step over it. So the—the standard psycho—philosophical idea is that it's false to say, "How can we reach the world? I as a subject am already engaged in the world, I already am in the world, I constitutively participate, am engaged in the world." That's our original, as it were, original position. Against this predominant idea, I am more tempted to return to—to Plato's cave. In what precise sense? I don't think that, of course we shouldn't put it in this standard way, it's all too simple. And Hegel showed this nicely: that the mistake of this skepticism of "I am here and out there is reality but can I ever reach that reality, is it beyond my scope?" It's not that it's too skeptic, it's that it's not skeptic enough. It presupposes as safely given, well known, my own reality, as it were. As if that part is sure and then we play the game can I reach the outside or not. What we should do is this: of course I am in the world, always engaged among objects and so on. But all of it, the combination of in and out, me and the world, is already a certain circle which is—and precisely people like Francisco Varela show this nicely, because—where is that Chavista terrorist? He is not today here. Gigi, Oscar, yeah, yeah, no he will never get an Oscar for theory, okay that's another one. Varela developed this nicely: how take any animal. Even at a very vulgar level, we know, for example, how vision of a—of I don't know which animal, of a fly is totally different from our vision, so that I am not just me. I'm me together with my environs. And reality is not simply something out of these environments. Reality is simply the interconnection of different totalities: my life world, the other life world, and so on and so on. What I mean by this? Let's make a—step further here. So now you will say, "but nonetheless, is this universalized subjectivity, subjectivism?" No, my point is this one, and that should be a true answer. That of course the reality I encounter is always in a certain way subjectivized. Like I see you certain colors of your dresses and of course only certain colors are visible to me blah blah, even at the more practical level whatever. But I think it's wrong to say "oh, so all our realities are subjective." Yes they are, but I myself am not subjective. In the sense that reality that I see is subjectively distorted precisely because I am included into reality. You know what I mean? The very idea of objective reality means that I'm somewhere out. But I cannot see directly objective reality precisely because I am part of it. I'm a partial element of it. I don't have a position outside of it. So the true overcoming of subjectivism is to bring it to the end, to claim everything is subjective, but then to undermine even the consistency of subjectivity itself. That's why, my favorite line—I'm sorry if I already used it but not today ago, at least a couple of months ago—I think George Orwell was way too simplistic, I have problems with him. But there is one line which I love, one exchange between Winston Smith and who is the Richard Burton, Dr. O'Brien or who, his interrogator? Doesn't matter. Where then, when he is investigated, examined by the interrogator Winston Smith, he asks this half-paternal figure of sadistic investigator, torturer: "But tell me, does the Big Brother really exist? Or is he just our..." And the answer you get in Orwell is a perfect one. He says, "No, you are totally wrong. It's not that Big Brother doesn't exist, you don't exist." You think you exist, you know, that's the Hegelian move. Skepticism brought to the end means even in a way even David Hume did this, you know, "but do I exist? what am I? am I a consistent 'I' or whatever?" And the paradox is only in this way by focusing on me, I see how I myself fall into reality. And this is for me—so—yes, Plato's cave. Of course I reject all the standard readings of Plato's cave. There are many postmodern versions of it, I like them. One version of Plato's cave is to turn it around and claim "but the sun out there is black sun, it's evil, so avoid sun, let's remain, it's nice in the warm cave, why to go up there?" A similar thing is done by Sloterdijk, who claims "but it's windy up there, it's not nice, culture is precisely that you build your cave inside," no. Then you have the postmodern version, which I hate most. The postmodern version is: "but there is nothing outside cave, there are just endless caves, and the ultimate ideology is precisely that there is reality outside cave" and so on and so forth. No, I think that's how—I will give you a very simple reading, it will be the result of... aha, aha. We have this one. That's how I read it. Imagine this is whatever this would be: the pre-symbolic real, world outside of us. This world as it is in itself, not even world, let's call it, it's even difficult to name it reality, external whatever, has to have an abyss, has to be already somehow thwarted, marked by... so you fall into this—hole, and what happens is that this would be something like what, for example—for example Epicurus and those—thinkers—Lucretius called, you know Marx wrote a dissertation, maybe we should rehabilitate Marx's very early writings, his doctor's thesis, the *clinamen*, no. Otherwise you would just fall down, nothing happens. You have a *clinamen* here, you see you progress here, you turn around, and where do you find yourself? On the opposite side, the inside. From the outside you are inside, and I think that if you look at it here, you are in Plato's cave. This is the screen of—from the inside of what you see in Plato's cave. And now you will say "but you see also this, like a kind of a disgusting snout or whatever". This is you, this is the impossible. And this is like a—blind spot. You cannot see this. Because this is precisely where you as a gaze here are inscribed into reality. So I think the—the proper materialist approach is not, "Oh, this is just a screen, let's break through there." No, do this, this is the materialist question: through what twist or turn in reality did I acquire this subjective position to look at it? Now I will give you a couple of other—I think they are at least nice—nice examples for it. This is why I think—now I go into madness—the most crazy medieval theories were basically right. I cannot reproduce it here, I didn't want too much bother you with this. But remember those wonderful medieval drawings of a finite universe where there is one famous drawing where it's as if it's like a *Truman Show*, you remember? You reach the end of the world, the sky, and you dig a hole in it, and you see the true outside. This would be like you come here, no, you and although again, this is of course an astronomically a stupidity, but it's a perfect metaphor for ideology. For ideology. So again, critique of ideology is not just I'm inside here, how to see it outside? No, the materialist theory is this loop: how does reality itself allow for this turn? Or another—another that I like—story that I often used—another example of this—closure. You know this—I used it years ago, I will repeat it. You know my favorite theory of—you know the creationist reply to to Darwin. My God, that guy was a genius. I forgot his name, an English theologian friend of Darwin, was deeply disturbed by Darwin's *Origin of Species*. Because on the one hand he saw, my God, Darwin is right, correct description. At the same time he was deeply religious, and fuck it, if it says in the Bible that if you count the years that our world should have been created like years ago, God cannot be wrong. So you must know what was the solution of this guy. The best theory of ideology that I know: Of course God, Bible cannot be wrong. God did create the world and I don't know how much years ago. But he created directly the fossils, you know. He created false depth to make it look infinite, as a temptation for us and so on and so forth. And isn't this absolutely a correct theory of ideology? Isn't every historical epoch like that? For example, the last detail that I learned here, a trivial one as an old Wagnerian: you know this Viking idea that they have those stupid horns? You know that early stagings of Wagner invented it. There are no ancient Nordic helms with those stupid horns, because they would be from the fighting point totally meaningless. They are clumsy, you are more vulnerable and so on. So you know, like, this is this: these horns were created like fossils, I say, they were—and this is how ideology functions. The closure of—the closure of ideology. So again, this is our view of reality, which is always ideologically conditioned and so on and so on. But again, the way to break out is not in an idealist way, it would be to try to directly adopt a God's view, divine view, like "oh, we should abstract from this and see the way things really are." No, what we should see is this disgusting protuberance: how do we ourselves fit, where are we, the blind spot where we, this is our gaze, where we are inscribed into it. This—this reversal. Here, when the subject you see here yourself, as it were, as an object. But of course, it's elusive, it's literally like a blind spot. So—okay, maybe I should leave you now some time for a debate. I cheated of course, but I will give you an explanation directly. First, for this part of Klein bottle and so on, I promise this evening, not afternoon because now I have to prepare myself for that Milner stuff, in the evening I will send you, I have it in a rough form, if some of you are interested in it, that Klein bottle part. Second, as to the title of my talk, no, it was like you know, I will now repeat a very bad joke, you know like you know that stupid joke that I often quote in different versions. You have a painting of "Lenin in Warsaw," and on the painting is just Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, being screwed by some young Komsomol guy, no, and the visitor asks, "But where is Lenin?" "Lenin is in Warsaw, no." And I try in the introduction to my book that just appeared by Verso, no, I try in a very utopian way, but maybe it is, claim that we can maybe imagine a similar painting like, you know, let's imagine Soviet Politburo worrying about early years when it was still progressive of Solidarność, how to crash Solidarność, free trade unions in Poland, and the title is "Lenin in Warsaw." And then, again, Lenin where? "Lenin is in Warsaw," let's hope his spirit was more alive there among... So—in the same way, second, what was the stupid title of my official? "Some Transcendental Subjectivity, Sexual Difference and Brain Science." Where you find that, you find it in my new book which just came out, this kind of a "Lenin in Warsaw." No, seriously, I didn't want to follow that line because I discovered too late that I repeated it so often. The line is simply the parallel between—there are two books out now, allow me please to make a little bit of propaganda: the first one is—it's incredible, it's selling so well already, it will be a classic—Alenka Zupančič, *What is Sex?*. It exploded already in United States and here. And I, in a very modest way, I even I had long negotiations with MIT and asked them to publish my book to make it appear at least a month later. I even define my book as a dialogue with her. So—in that book in detail you can find that topic, that is to say, sexual difference and ontology. I directly approach this paradox. Isn't sexual difference something animal or even human, my God, in its specific human being? What has all this to do with ontology? And I try to prove, you know my line, if you know a little bit of my work, how the basic insight of modern transcendental ontology is that of Kant: antinomies. If you try to think the world as an ontological whole, you get necessarily entangled in antinomies. Two types of antinomies: dynamic, mathematical. Next step, and this is the mega discovery of Joan Copjec—incredible how ignored it is—that the structure of these antinomies fits precisely, even Lacan didn't know it. So I'm not criticizing others not to be Lacanian. I'm just shocked how even Lacanians ignore this. How the structure of Kantian antinomies exactly corresponds to Lacan's formulas of sexuation. And then my Hegelian solution: that with Kant, antinomies are simply epistemological. The fact that we get caught into antinomies means that we cannot reach reality as it is in itself. My Hegelian solution: but what if reality in itself is antinomic in this way? So again, to apply it to here: the way to reach objective reality is not trying to erase our subjective position, but precisely—to locate what appears as our subjective position into a feature of reality itself: its inconsistency, its antagonism and so on and so on. That's I endlessly repeat it, that's the Hegelian formula. That what appears as—as Hegel puts it so nicely, his critique of Kant is that Kant was all too tender towards things. Kant thought that when he discovers an antinomy, it must be limited to our mind, that it cannot be a feature of—reality
debate, if you want, at the end. So over to you. Because you know, the only other movie was some crazy melodrama in intellectual circles, I forgot the title, it was with Julianne Moore or whatever, where a guy played by Ethan Hawke doesn't want to go to a conference and then Julianne Moore tells him, "But Žižek, me, will be there, you can get a signature." My God, I was tempted to write to the producers that maybe they should do a premiere in New York and I will be there to give a signature if they pay me a first-class trip and a nice hotel. Because you know, don't you agree, there is—I hate people who say money is not everything and so on. I mean, you can say this when you have enough money, to put it very nicely. I mean, isn't this for me always this middle-class guilt attitude? If you speak about authentic—if they exist, which I doubt—poor people, why, they love money and they are right, you know. And it's the same with consumerism. I think that there is always an ambiguity with this critique of consumerism, you know. Like I have here some leftist friends who told me, "Oh, Oxford Street is ruined," or "No, you know, all those stores and so on." And I told them, "Of course, you also get nothing good there. If you want to buy something properly, go at least to the southern part of Bond Street and so on." There's their anti-consumerism and so on. Okay, just the last introductory question: Let's see if there are true Marxists here in the room. Did any of you already see *Blade Runner*? I am among traitors. No, no, but okay, let's not lose time. Let's do it. As usual, I will begin with some political topics which will bring us to the Klein bottle and all that stuff and so on. I want to begin with a rather pessimistic note, political. The standard radical leftist reproach to the Left in power is that instead of effectively socializing production and imposing or organizing actual democracy, it remains, the Left in power, within the constraints of standard leftist policies: nationalizing means of production, or tolerating capitalism in a social-democratic way, or imposing an authoritarian dictatorship, or playing the game of parliamentary democracy and so on. But I think maybe the time has come to raise the brutal question: okay, but what should or could they have done? How would the authentic model of socialist democracy have looked in practice? Let me turn to Chávez, of course. Don't forget, he was not only a populist throwing around the oil money. What is largely ignored in international media are the complex and often inconsistent efforts when Chávez was still alive to overcome capitalist economy by experimenting with numerous new forms of the organization of production. Forms which, of course, endeavored to move beyond the alternative of private versus state property: farmers' and workers' cooperatives, workers' participation, control and organization of production, different hybrid forms combining private property and social control and so on and so on. Say, factories not used by the owners were often given to workers to run them. There were many hits and runs on this path, but a friend of mine who is a leftist and who just followed this from Venezuela told me that unfortunately—because he did something very evil, I think I even already used this example here some years ago—whenever it was, when Chávez was still alive, big news, you know, "this factory given to workers," he noted it down and then he went there one year later. It was almost always a fiasco. Fiasco was unfortunately the rule. So although we are dealing here with genuine attempts in which grassroots initiatives interacted with state proposals, we should also note failures, inefficiencies, corruption and so on and so on. So the big question for me remains here when we criticize Chávez for this, or Chavistas: how does or how should the reliance on popular self-organization affect running a government? Can we even imagine an authentic communist or radically left power today? Because what we got is either a disaster (Venezuela), a more or less total capitulation (Greece), or a return to capitalism (China, Vietnam and so on). And the case of China is especially interesting here because official attempts at Marxist social theory in China—and now with this slight turn towards harsher politics, Marxism is again in, in China—but it's a very strange Marxism. They are sending me, maybe you know it, a journal called *International Critical Thought*, something like this. It's in English, the official Chinese social theory journal. They try to paint a picture of today's world which, to put it simply, basically remains the same as that of the Cold War. "We still have the worldwide struggle between capitalism and socialism. The fiasco of 1990s was just a temporary setback so that today the big opponents are no longer United States and Soviet Union, but United States and China, which remains a socialist country." So the explosion of capitalism in China is then read as a gigantic case of what in the early Soviet Union they called NEP, New Economic Policy, partial return to capitalism, so that we have in China a new socialism with Chinese characteristics, but still socialism. Communist Party remains in power and tightly controls and directs, regulates market forces. From this standpoint, the economic success of China in the last decades is not interpreted as a proof of the productive potential of capitalism, but as a proof of the superiority of socialism over capitalism. They claim the old struggle goes on and finally today socialism is winning with China and so on. Now, to sustain this view, which also counts Vietnam, Venezuela, Cuba, even Russia as socialist countries, one has to give this new socialism a strong socially conservative twist. And I think this is not the only reason why such a rehabilitation of socialism is totally non-Marxist. It totally ignores the basic Marxist point that capitalism is defined by capitalist relations of production, not the type of state power. I mean, when I was in China, I asked them, "Why are you still a socialist country?" They said—they gave me a very primitive answer—"Because in capitalist countries, through their representatives, big capital is in power, holds state power. With us, it's still the Communist Party which is in power and they just strategically use..." and so on and so on. But so again, that's my problem. Back to Venezuela. As in a nice article in *New Left Review*, Julia Buxton, she put it, "the Chávez revolution has transformed social relations in Venezuela and had a huge impact on the continent as a whole, but the tragedy is that it was never properly institutionalized and thus it proved to be unsustainable." Again, I have this question: okay, to institutionalize it in an authentic way, how? It is all too easy to say that authentic emancipatory politics should remain at a distance—sorry—at a distance from state. The big problem lurks—that lurks behind—is what to do with state. One should deal, I think, with this problem here and now. Like again, I don't see what happens in Venezuela as an object of cheap criticism, like "no, they got corrupted, Maduro government" and so on and so on. I'm always asking a much more tough question: but what should or could they have done? I mean, this is what makes me nervous when I hear this standard leftist approach: "we should avoid both traps of state socialism, Soviet Union style, and of social democracy," and then the terms all of a sudden become vague, you know, like "true people's democracy, abolish the alienation of state, true socialization of production, not just nationalization," because nation is not the same as society and so on and so on. And I'm tempted to say, okay, okay, but give me one model. Do you have an answer here? Give me one model. The countries which succeeded relatively, even in Latin America—and I know, I spoke with him, the vice president Álvaro García Linera in Bolivia—they basically play a little bit, but not even that radicalized, social-democratic game. They are very careful not to disturb the capital too much and so on and so on. So you know what I mean, like maybe it's time—my argument is not let's drop the game and just play capitalist welfare state, because the situation is much more tragic, I think. We will have to move beyond capitalism. I precisely think that this is the greatest utopia, that as your gracious Prime Minister said a couple of days ago, "Britain for everybody, a place with a place for everyone," you know. And I like this formula because it's basically a fascist formula, you know. The fascist promise is society as an organic body, a place for everyone. But why do I like it? You remember how I mentioned two days ago of this how I took some examples from movies and so on, how what is oppressed from content returns in the form? It happened—my source is because I just found it when I was driving a tube here, abandoned example of *Times* magazine and I don't know if it's true, but they reported on it—you know when did Theresa May lose her voice? A little bit after she proclaimed that she wants to be the "voice of the voiceless." It's wonderful, like, fuck you, you are not even that, you lose the voice. It was a nice example of that up there, you know, how the lie in her content returned in the form. So again, this deadlock of—this is, I think, the deepest reason of the moralization of the Left. Because I don't—and now the situation is even more sad. Did you notice how this paradox of our predicament? While resistances against global capitalism fail again and again to undermine the advance of capitalism because they at the same time remain strangely out of touch with many trends which clearly signal capitalism's progressive disintegration. It's for me so strange—and this is a really sad thing—that on the one hand, we have all these protesters who are, in spite of different phrases, blah blah, basically playing this conservative game of "keep the old results, welfare state" and so on and so on, "trade union rights." On the other hand—I mean, I find them disgusting, don't misunderstand me, but—the only people who talk openly about capitalism is coming to its end are these new digital whatever post-capitalist capitalist stars like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and so on. They are doing something that we Marxists should be doing. They are—of course it's a fake and so on—but nonetheless, they are really looking in the present trends in production for the traces, elements of something which can no longer be controlled, regulated within a market mechanism. Isn't this a sad paradox that—it's as if these top capitalists are in a faux, fake way—don't misunderstand me, I don't think—I heard this rumor that maybe Mark Zuckerberg will try to be a candidate for US presidency. Well, I return to my old dogma, I would almost prefer Trump, not quite, but to that guy. I mean, Zuckerberg is, you know, the usual hypocrite. You remember news in our media half a year ago how he wanted to buy a whole island and evict all the natives—it's the usual story. But isn't something very sad in this? That here, where we wouldn't expect them, we find people who seriously think, although in a fake way, think about limits of capitalism. They are—and you find this surprises. That's why—I am not for them—that's why the guy who—did I already mention this two days ago?—who, I'm proud to say, he said that I'm his favorite Marxist. You know who? Steve Bannon said this. So I am in good company. But nonetheless, I said, "Okay, let's see who this guy is," you know, the one who was now evicted from the White House. And again, he is an intelligent populist in the sense that it's very sad to observe how sometimes, and as part of his right-wing strategy, he almost sounds like Bernie Sanders. For example, he opposes the state saving with injections of money banks and big companies. But you know what's his argument? That this is "socialism for the rich" and that no, we need better life for the poor, not and so on. That's the danger. So again, my point is don't just laugh at Trump. This is for me the saddest thing, these infinite parodies, making fun of Trump and so on and so on. This just renders visible you don't have a true answer. So let's go on. Where do we find this internal limit of capitalism? In—in another unexpected thing that is happening. A young researcher who studies there with Balibar here, Rebecca Carson, wrote—you can get it in, it will appear in some journal now—a very important text on the renewed role of violence, slavery, what Marx called "direct domination." You see, this is our—the tragedy of our situation. On the one hand, capitalism is getting more and more virtual. Virtual in the sense that, you know, relations are non-transparent, financial speculations and so on and so on, it's more and more abstract. And one would have thought—again, it's pure Möbius strip—because one would have thought that this means that more and more we will be formally free and domination will be more and more impenetrable. No, what is happening more and more is the exact opposite. We are getting at all different levels a mega return of direct relations of domination. In what? New hierarchies. For—okay, sorry so that I don't get lost. I—one result is, and here we should also—my God, it's strange, you should lynch me with which persons am I mentioning today. There is one lesson of—I will burn in hell for mentioning her—from Ayn Rand, you know, the great American philosopher. Who nonetheless made a point—it's the most disgusting ideological thing, unreadable even to me. The final pages of *Atlas Shrugged*, when that guy, the new prophet, comes and delivers a mega speech more boring than all Mao's and Fidel Castro's and Stalin's together, praising capitalism. But she makes one point. The point is that if you abolish the role of money that, as Marx was well aware of this, whatever we have against money, it at least opens the space to some kind of formal freedom. In money relations, you work for me—of course it's de facto servitude—or I work for you, but let's say I don't—this is the only way for me to survive and so on—but at least the form of freedom is retained. The problem is that if you abolish money or the key role of money without properly exiting capitalist relations and so on, what has to return are direct relations of domination. Which unfortunately happened exactly in Stalinism and so on. Although incidentally, don't have any illusions there. Stalin didn't have any problem with social differences. You know that—read good history of Soviet Union—you will learn that in mid-thirties, the wage difference in a company between ordinary worker and top manager was like one to three hundred, up to four hundred times more. But nonetheless, what I am saying is that today when—the whole—what happens today is something—is something for me at least extremely interesting. Is that—and some intelligent Marxists even got it—that more and more people are paid, not in a proper exchange selling their labor force for to capital to enable the reproduction of capital, but money serves in a way more and more as a direct, as literally a direct means of social power, a way to exert this power and to control this and to control it. For example, you know how many of us are dependent on, in many at least developed countries, to cultural culture, to contributions from big companies, or where state is more generous and so on, jobless people, many of contracts with state and so on. We should be very careful here. It's no longer market. It's not even done in market criteria. So de facto, money doesn't even allow you for that minimum of personal freedom but is more and more functioning as simply a much more direct means of domination. So this would be again another nice example of this Möbius strip reversal of how the official story of capitalism, the official party line is, we begin in dark medieval times and then we progress, more and more freedoms. And even many Marxists up to a point buy this story claiming, "Yes, it's still false freedom, but nonetheless at least, you know, like you can criticize precarious workers, but at least formally you are free to choose, if you get it haha, a new job every year and so on." I claim no, for structural reasons, at a certain point, although money remains here, we get new relations of at all different levels of slavery, direct, direct interpersonal domination. Not only—and this was from the beginning Robin Blackburn wrote some years ago, I think, a big book on it, how at the end of medieval times, more or less not quite, slavery was marginalized and then with capitalism it was a new explosion of slavery. And what is so interesting to read—I read this in books on Haiti and so on—that you cannot say "but it was basically big industry, efficient, and slavery was only in those Caribbean islands or..." No, slavery was precisely where the most advanced industry was developed at that point. So my last point of this Möbius strip political would be another one. I—I like religious fundamentalist bullshit. I told you and I warned you the last time that you have the right to put signs in this anti-Semitic way but instead of "Jew" put my name, like, you know: to this building and so on, entrance prohibited to dogs and to Žižek or whatever, after you hear this. I'm just reading—I told you this, no—the new Dan Brown, *Origin*. No, let's go. But but in a way, one topic of these religious thrillers that I like is—and I wonder, I will make now a very vulgar Marxist point, hardline reductionist, but I think it's true—what intrigued me, I don't think I already mentioned this here, is the popularity of the topic of "Left Behind". And you don't only get total shit, like Tim LaHaye and those totally crazy American conservatives. They wrote a big tens of millions sold bestseller series of books where the topic is that of the population of Earth disappears. It's of course divine rupture because it's we are approaching Armageddon and God wanted to redeem, to keep them out of suffering, all who were faithful to him. You also get much more interesting versions, like what is that TV series? Is it *Remainders* or *Leftovers*? No, no, wait a minute, this one is not a bad series. It's very seriously done. It's just that a couple of millions disappear and the trauma of others. But a vulgar idea came to me: why the popularity of this topic? I here, I propose a very vulgar simple Protestant reading. As we all know, the voice of capital is the voice of God and so on and so on. That maybe God, as is so often the case, God himself listened to the voice of capital. Isn't exactly the same happening vaguely in our economy? Like are really needed and more and more of us are left behind. We are leftovers. This is up—absolutely our position. And I think we should follow this logic to the end. I remember—maybe you know this, I mentioned it a long time ago—here I am in a friendly way opposed to Tony Negri, who is always obsessed, he has this primordial I would say bourgeois fear of communism or progressive politics today should remain in touch—he is ultra-accelerationist, how do you call it—with the top capitalist development. Once he went even so far as to say that that these speculations with futures double, all those speculators are much closer to communism than jobless workers, precarious workers and so on and so on. I don't believe in this. I believe that we should not be afraid to see for hope that in every authentic historical dialectics, the big reversal always happens like this, that what seems to be left behind out of use, all of a sudden becomes the true site of progress. That's the—it's not—and I think we should look for the same things here. Even—and this is the topic, some of you maybe know it, which accounts for so many troubles that I get into—refugees. Another problem that I have with refugees: all my sympathy with them and so on and so on, and I am very much a pessimist here, you know. And I think that again, that's the reason I didn't accept this leftist mantra. Look, the situation came with my good friend Udi Aloni, the pro-Palestinian Jewish movie maker. He is now in Germany because—and he gave me, he's my friend, so cynical, beautiful—he told me, "You know, Germany still has money to finance cinemas, and if you are a Jew and say Holocaust, Holocaust, you cannot get refused money, so Berlin is my place today," you know. And I like him because he is the image of politically incorrect Jew and gets into so many troubles. Here you can see how we no longer live in proper ironic times. I was with him in Dortmund or one of the German towns. He was staging an—some theatrical piece. And I was there, and he was mad at his collaborators there. He said, "But look how clumsy you are, because some costume should have been done..." He said, "If you were so efficient like this, you wouldn't have been able to do the Holocaust properly," you know. And they were so embarrassed. They were especially embarrassed by the fact that he as a Jew said this, you know. You cannot talk like this today. I mean, it's horrible, whatever. Okay, let's go on. So what I wanted to say is that with refugees, even he—and I shouted at him, stopped him—wanted to do a movie in near future taking place in years from now in Berlin where all refugees are isolated, like in new concentration camps, they have—they have—how do you call this, as in old ghettos—where you have [unintelligible] hours when you are allowed to leave it and so on. And I told him, "Are you aware what you are doing? Okay, Germany, Nazi Europe, but the only country which behaved in a half-decent way..." This is so typically leftist. You attack them for not being radical enough. And what about all the others? Especially my shitty part: Slovenia, Croatia—this is the new axis of evil, I'm telling you—Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Baltic countries. Yeah, okay, but you focus all the energy on them. So again, concerning refugees, are we aware? Why people don't talk more about this? Are we aware, and I'm not bluffing, I read some statistical, not theory, analysis that there is already a kind of even class selection, especially from Syria, from others. Those who arrive to Europe, they are already the dynamic, usually more educated, financially stronger part. What about those—I'm back to my topic—left behind? I mean, that's what I wonder. Okay, half of Syria moved out. What about those who didn't move out? There, we have to solve the problem. So again, that's my problem with this celebration of—Badiou is a little bit into it—as refugees as nomadic proletarians and so on and so on. They are potentially nomadic proletarians, but they are simply refugees in search of becoming proper proletarians. That's their—that's their desire. I mean, we should again focus on the leftovers. Where are billions of dollars to do that? And I'm not a utopian here. Again, Angela Merkel, I have no illusions about her, but she made a wonderful proposal—I think I already mentioned it here one year ago—which was totally ignored. Why don't we simply give of the entire European Union budget to not only refugees, to help them, but to solve the problem, invest there and so on and so on? Oh, all the humanists, everybody passed in silence over it because you know, when people say we should open our hearts to refugees, I say no, open your wallets to refugees, you know. Every liberal is ready to open your heart to it. So what I'm saying is that we should do—these are our left behind today. According to some statistics, in the long term at least, with robotization and so on, of the people will be in some sense left behind. Within the scope, within the coordinates of the system, okay, we can play humanitarian games, but properly there is no place for them. And I think we should not do what—I mentioned this already years ago, even here once—it was one of the most depressing experiences that I had. Tony Negri, he did some TV show in Italian, I think, and since at that time he was living in Venice, he walked with a cameraman in some factory to be soon closed in Venezia Mestre, you know, the city on land with more industrial base of Venice, and some workers were demonstrating there because their factory will be closed. And I was shocked. He said, "Look at them, they are already dead, they don't know it but they already dead," and so on. Yeah, but that's why they should be our—our base, I think. We should absolutely drop this primitive progressive logic of obsession with those who are at the top and so on and so on. Those left behind should be our—should be our obsession even. That's why, for example, I bought now—you know I like those, not second-hand, but like judge books, those bookstores which sell old stock, you know. And I'm an anal character, I especially like it when they say, you know, "everything must disappear, closing down" and so on. I especially like such sales in France because there, you may have noticed, the way they put it in French for "everything must disappear" is *liquidation totale*, you know. It erases all my Stalinist shit. But now on the way here, there is one on Southampton Road. I—it's a wonderful book for I bought it. *The Timbuktu School for Nomads*. You know that mysterious, totally left behind area, south of Algeria, east of Morocco, Timbuktu and so on, the very heart of desert Africa there. It's a whole life, nomadic, millions there. Okay, they are terrorized by—they have droughts, they are terrorized by Al-Qaeda and so on. But that life there, it's the only serious nomadic society today. How they live and so on. And I have this dream, which always tempted Marxists, even Marx in his last years when he became friend with Vera Zasulich and some Russian populists, had this dream that maybe social progress will allow us to return to those few so-called pre-modern primitive forms and somehow find in them the base for immediately joining the most progressive form. So I will believe in—and it's already almost happening there. I think this is how you should imagine digital capitalism. There, nomads on their stupid camels and so on, they can very nicely walk around with a simple iPhone or whatever, you know, get in contact and so on. Again, it did strike me how their form of life, how modern it sounds in a way. This should be our orientation. Look at those left behind and find in them new potentials. I mean, this is usually, I think, the form of historical progress again, that what appears to be left—what appears desperate remainder of the past can have a new potential. So now let's go on. Okay, but this is all this simple logic of Möbius strip of just you follow one line, it's a reversal and so on. Now I would like to do what I promised you to do, at the end we get to subjectivity and so on. Since I just—one improvisation since I will not have time for it, I maybe already even used it here a year ago, but I would like to repeat it because in between I had some debates with some people who claim that they understand brain sciences and so on and so on. And I want to repeat you this story because, you know, we are involved in these games of what challenge brain sciences are. If they will be able to somehow discern processes in our brain, control us, is this the end of freedom or not and so on and so forth. And one—and I wonder if there is somebody among you here who knows this. Am I wrong or not? From the contacts that I had, I didn't get a good answer of this one. You know, because I was playing, I admit it, this standard game of, "But will the computer be able to do this?" If, maybe you remember it, again, I think I'm aware that I probably already used it, it's the—this differentiality. In what sense? Sorry, I will again repeat a story that I even yesterday I repeated at Emmanuel Hall, that so ashamed, I used it here I would say between and times in this room. You know that *Ninotchka* joke about coffee: "Bring me coffee with cream." "Sorry, we don't have cream, we only have milk, so I can only bring you coffee without milk," you know. Again, a very Hegelian point, which means that—this is what Hegel meant by determinate negation. Although they are physically the same. There are three coffees which are physically the same: plain coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream. But from a speculative Hegelian point they are not the same. My point is simply: Do we have a digital program which can trace this? Which can trace this totally virtual negative determination? Is—do we have a computer program which is ready to discern the difference between coffee without milk and coffee without cream? Although they are totally the same. Because the Freudian unconscious has exactly this status. The whole of psychoanalysis deals with these virtual presences. The idea being that, if I use this parallel in an extra-vulgarized way—like it's like in quantum physics where when something happens, to understand it you have to include in an analysis the wave function. Is it as if all the possibilities, what might have happened, are positive part of what effectively happens? Now I wonder, again, if machines will be able to—machines, I don't fear machines, digital program the way we have them today—are—are ready to operate at this level, counting for these virtualities that haunt, like "it is this because it's not that," although it's physically the same thing. Again, can machine do this? I have doubts, maybe I'm wrong. I didn't yet get a good answer. But let's go on. So all this is the simple Möbius strip. Now I want to go to the next step, I will show you the images—ah, we have here to "cross-cap." Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images two days ago how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but and you know that some people in in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it," this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim—I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut, but it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: this cross-cap. Topologically cross-cap is simply a re—you saw through those obscene strange moving images today how—it's a redoubled Möbius strip, two Möbius strips connected in this way. What—what is for me so productive as a formal metaphor in cross-cap is that you get in a way the logic of antagonism at its purest. Two Möbius strips are interconnected, and this interconnection is precisely not a clear difference. It's, you know, the Möbius strip is in itself unlimited. It doesn't have an external limit. You can circulate endlessly. But if you connect the two, you get a cut. But it's not a cut in the sense of a clear difference. "Up to here it's one, then other side." No, it's a cut which precisely cannot be located. How does this function? Let me give you two examples. One, a rather bad—don't even—I often provoke you, incite you to do illegal activity, Pirate Bay. No, but—and you know that some people in Sweden, Pirate Bay is there. When I was there, they really, they have a Pirate Party, they wanted to invite me to support their candidate because they heard... Okay, whatever. There is—I don't advise you to download this movie, it's not enough, but the idea is nice. To give an idea of this. Maybe some of you saw it: *It Follows*. That's the title of a movie. *It Follows* from a supernatural horror. It tells the story of Jay, a girl, Detroit college student girl, who is pursued by a supernatural entity after every sexual encounter. At the beginning of the movie, when she, Jay, goes to a movie theater with her new boyfriend, Hugh, he points out a girl whom Jay says she cannot see her. And later, after the two, Jay and Hugh, make love, he explains to her that she will be pursued by an entity that only she can see now, which can take the appearance of any person. Although it only moves at a walking pace, this entity will always know where she is and will be constantly approaching her. And if it catches her, Jay, it will kill her and pursue the previous person to have it passed on, Hugh. So the story goes on and so on, but so the idea is this one. If you are among the damned, every time you make love to somebody and you are prosecuted, persecuted by this "it", this "it"... it's a wonderful nasty dream. This "it" you transmit it onto the other person. So the only way to get rid of it is quickly to sleep with another person and so on and so on. So what is the usual reading of—the story is more complex, but let's not lose time—the usual reading—and I like the ambiguity of the title. *It Follows* means "it," the monster, follows you, but it's also "this from what I've said, it follows" and so on. It's quite a nice title. Typically, the usual way this movie was read was a kind of a paranoid construction which echoes our sexual fears, AIDS, promiscuity and so on and so on. But I claim, I propose a little bit more refined reading. That it's rather the other way round. What if our sexual relation is—never, never functions as a simple duality and so on? There is something wrong there always. And it's the other way round: it's that "it" gives body to—even I claim it's even the same with AIDS or other fears. When years ago, syphilis and so on, venereal diseases. They are so fascinating, I claim, not simply because they are physically, medically really dangerous. But they in a way give body to some deeper personal guilt, fear or whatever. So I claim, again, here you can understand in what sense Lacan turns around the term sublimation. In usual way, sublimation means you take some vulgar drive, fear and you sublimate it. But no, the logic should be the opposite one. As Lacan points out, the true sublimation can be, for example, a venereal disease itself, when you have some more fundamental anxiety which is then sublimated into, embodied in this, embodied in this fear. So again, the fundamental lesson of it, *It Follows*, the movie, it's a very nice one, is that one and one is never two. There is always some excess, which can be "it", which can be—some supplement. In sexual relationship, it can be the threat of another partner, it can be simply another's gaze. I think I already mentioned to you the last time I was here, but it's such a dirty story that I cannot resist to repeat it. You know, if you look at the most vulgar—and I don't, I was just told about it—hardcore pornography, how—I was looking for a paradigmatic scene in it. And I think I found it. It's—I'm ashamed to draw it, but the position is this one. Woman is lying on her back with, of course, legs spread out, high, and the guy is screwing her, but they must put such a lot of effort into it. Because from the position of the camera, it's absolutely crucial that, like, you see, you see the legs, you see here penetration, but between her legs always—that's crucial—in the background you see her face. Looking into the camera, breaking all the rules of, you know, in a proper fiction movie you should never look into the camera. And this tells us a lot. I don't justify pornography. I'm against pornography, prostitution and so on. I'm just saying that the standard feminist doxa, according to which in pornography woman is objectified. It's not true, and this doesn't make it any better. You can be subjectified in a way which is much more humiliating than being objectified. Because so you see it, the thing itself, blah blah, the stupid action. But if you see just that, it would become a medical case, you know. And it wouldn't be attractive. You have to see at the same time her face—I will not go into those, just, you know—for this you should raise my salary if you want to include into performance this, you know, that fascinated... So you see how even here, what this gaze, looking at whom? At the viewer. This means that I, as a spectator, am the pure object A. It's me, it's one and one, the guy screwing the girl, lady, and me, my gaze. Without that, it doesn't function. So if anything, I made this point often here, the one who is truly objectified is the guy. You know, usually in most of the hardcore movies that my friends picked up for me with this case, you don't even see the guy's face. Nobody cares about that. Usually he approaches from behind and just, you know, because of course he does his duty because you see ejaculation, no. So okay, that's enough. We don't want your stupid face and so on. But what I'm saying is that this is a very simple example of one plus one is not simply two, but it's plus small "a", something is added to it. So with such more complicated space, I would like now to explain it more in detail: subjectivity, this—cross-cap. Maybe the best way to illustrate it would be through this old—and here you will see why cross-cap is double, redoubled quilting point, *point de capiton*, or redoubled, redoubled Möbius strip. I will try to be as short as possible here because time is running. The notion of suture. You know the old classic Lacanian notion and so on. It's a very interesting notion. Why? Because we have, and it's crucial even for Marxist theory this, I claim. Because we have the usual predominant notion of suture which made history, especially it's a wonderful concept. I described it in one of my—I don't know which chapter in which of my books—but the point is that this notion made history, it's a wonderful example how: First, Lacan uses it not only one time that I thought, he uses it two times, two-three times before, but not as a term, more just as a verb, sutures and so on. Then Jacques-Alain Miller, when he was very young, he wrote that famous short text, "Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier)", whatever. But still it was marginal. Then some French cinema theorists took it over to account for how montage, cutting, subjective, objective point of view, this exchange works in cinema. And then *Screen* in the UK, no, it made history out of it. But as far as I was able to see, the standard use of suture, this notion, its standard use was more the simple use of this one. The idea is, part of theory of ideology: we have—it was supposed to be a materialist theory—we have a site of production where things are really produced. And this site of production is mirrored in ideological representation. And by suture they mean that precisely because every field of representation, even in the most primitive—let's let's call representation: legal representation, ideological representation—cannot ever fully recapture its site of production. It's the ideological illusion that it can do it fully. Like the classical example of early Marx would have been: you have real life, actual production, and it's always in excess of the idealist, ideological, or philosophical circle. So you need suture. You need an element within the circle of ideology which enables it to find some kind of a false closure. So in the same way that, you know, Michel Foucault, I mentioned it times, that from the end of the introduction to his *Les Mots et les choses* (the English title is *The Order of Things*, and the English title is correct, I read somewhere that Foucault first wanted the title *L'Ordre des choses* or what, but the publisher put pressure and then it's again bit how in the English translation the repressed returned). So, you remember he lists that famous ironic from Borges' classification of all dogs: where you have dogs who belong the Emperor (fake Chinese, it's a joke), dogs who are brown, dogs who belong to the Emperor, dogs who this that, and at the end of course all dogs who are not included into this list as one of them. So the idea is to to get a complete circle at the level of representation, you need an element which literally sutures the field. It really stands for what is not included into the field, but it—that's the illusion of suture—it presents it as simply one among the elements of the field. I don't want to repeat another example, maybe I even did it two times ago which I think if you count all my years in London, I—it's modest—I used it only some times. I would—you must remember this, my point is that in Marxist classification of modes of production, the so-called Asiatic mode of production is the suturing element, I think. In what sense? You can clearly see how the original categorization is simply: primitive societies, ancient slave societies, medieval societies, feudalism, capitalism and whatever shit will be afterwards, communism or whatever. But then Marx noticed that there are quite some societies—ancient China, 18th Latin America, Egypt—which do not fit any of this. And he proposed the category Asiatic mode of production. And it's clear that it functions as a suturing element. It pretends to be just one category, but it really stands as a, like wastebasket into which you throw everything that doesn't fit not just any of the other categories, but everything that simply doesn't fit the very principle of Marxist notion of the—of the—of the modes of production. So again, this is the standard notion of suture. You have some positive field of productivity, actual life whatever, you have its ideological representation, and then for the field of representation again to retain its consistency you have to suture it precisely to close—to close the field. But here things get complicated. Because if you read clearly Lacan, especially if you combine Lacan with German idealism and so on and so on, that's the lesson of Kantian transcendentalism, is that this suture, which means the internal space of representation, needs a suturing element from the outside to—to be sutured, to act as a whole. So there is no inside without in—within this inside—an element which stands for what is excluded from it, from the outside. The beauty of theory would be to proclaim that there is also the opposite insight. That also outside, not actual outside, but outside the way we relate to it, is only constituted if we add to it an element which is from our own subjectivity, inside. So it's not only—let's to simplify to the utmost—let's say inside-outside is our subjective representations versus objective reality. It's not only that our subjective representations can only appear as our full subjective universe with some element which is a stand-in for—for the outside. It's also the opposite. In order to relate to something as external objective reality, you have to add to it a subjective element. Something which is really a stand-in out there for subjective position. Two days ago, I gave you the example, I don't want to repeat it, just to remind you of that Stalinist attempt at classification of kulaks and so on. Where they try to—you have this mysterious notion of "sub-kulak". Which appears to be one of the objective social groups, but it's really a stand-in for certain subjective attitude. But I would like to take here another example even from high theory, philosophy. This is the beauty—I don't have time to go into it in detail, just to bring you some associations. This is what Kant is saying. We get when we are affected by outside phenomena, things, we—our experience is this confused—not even reality. How do we arrive at objective reality from all the confusion of our sensual affects and so on? How do we get from here to "no, it's not just a confusion of impression, I see objective reality out there"? Through subjective synthesis. That's the beauty of Kant. You add something, you have to add something to your psychic impressions to get at reality. But it's not you have to add something objective. You have to add something precisely subjective, your subjective gesture itself. It's the same paradox, although I am opposed to this simplistic confusion between quantum physics and Kantian transcendentalism. But nonetheless, a—you know in quantum physics, I mentioned it a little bit but now I want to make different point two days ago: we have all this quantum wave function blah blah blah. How do we get from there to this what we perceive as hard, stable external reality? Through measurement. Through subjective registration. This is a nice example of this second notion of suture. Where it's not that subjectivity has to be supplemented by a trace of an object, but no, objectivity itself has to be supplemented by a master signifier, object A, whatever, to make out of this confused objectivity the harsh objective reality. And here I already mentioned it two days ago, I think, here we can get another example from—from—from popular literature: Stephen King, *The Dark Tower*. There was a movie now again, please, don't even bother to download the movie. It's not good enough. But I like the central idea, which is precisely cross-cap, this double suture. The idea is that there is a Dark Tower which is at the same time what holds our reality, our developed world, this in our reality, part of the story takes place in contemporary, I think it's New York or Chicago, doesn't matter, a modern American city. And then if you pass through it into another reality, it's very interesting what is this other reality, the true one. It's something like Magic Wild West. It's really as if—he is very Marxist here—it's as if our reality cannot stand alone, it has to be sustained by a much more barbaric other world. And again, the whole point is that some evil forces want to destroy this tower and in this case both worlds would disintegrate. And then you have the—as usual—it's nice who the actors are, keeping in line with this politically correct fact where the good—this is why I liked *American Gangster* or what, a movie with Denzel Washington where the big guy was a black American gangster. My God, that's for me true anti-racism. Aren't you sick and tired of this political correctness where black guys should always be some kind of a saints or the good guys? No, I want bad black guys, that's fighting racism, no. So here, it's Idris Elba of course who is the good gunfighter and it's the—how do you pronounce the name?—Matthew McConaughey, yeah, who is the—the bad guy, you know. But again, I like this idea that it's not just the primitive materialist reading would have been: our reality, our splendid megalopolis life, is just an ideological illusion, the real life is but our barbaric reality. No, the suture is redoubled. You need in our world a representative of the outside, that outside also needs a representative of our inside. They are—in this sense they are—they are doubly sutured. So let's move on even more. Yes, ah. Now things will become more interesting. Because here we can go on what, you see, here would be the tower, no. And you have one circle of reality and the other. You remember how this is formed? The two are twisted and you cannot put them together, you need—you need a Dark Tower keeping them together. You destroy the Dark Tower, everything unravels. But even this is not enough to do subjectivity. For subjectivity you need Klein bottle. Now I will try to go a little bit on, just to give you an idea. I will keep my promise, I will send the text and so on, where this is for my—from my forthcoming book and so on. I think philosophically here things become even more interesting for me at least. Because to—to be a materialist today is not is to reject—I think a true materialist today should return to Plato's cave metaphor. The what's fashionable today is to claim that oh, Plato's cave but also the Cartesian representation notion that we as subjects are caught in our circle but that reality is out and then you have this typical modern problem, can we reach out of the circle of our representation to things themselves or not? And the fashionable thing to say, especially this was done among others in a model way by Heidegger: the point of Heidegger's "being in the world", *In-der-Welt-sein*, is that precisely this kind of a gap opens up a pseudo problem. Of course you first posit a gap, "how do I know that my ideas, perceptions are not only in my mind, how do I know that they are outside?" That first you posit a gap and then you wonder that you cannot step over it. So the—the standard psycho—philosophical idea is that it's false to say, "How can we reach the world? I as a subject am already engaged in the world, I already am in the world, I constitutively participate, am engaged in the world." That's our original, as it were, original position. Against this predominant idea, I am more tempted to return to—to Plato's cave. In what precise sense? I don't think that, of course we shouldn't put it in this standard way, it's all too simple. And Hegel showed this nicely: that the mistake of this skepticism of "I am here and out there is reality but can I ever reach that reality, is it beyond my scope?" It's not that it's too skeptic, it's that it's not skeptic enough. It presupposes as safely given, well known, my own reality, as it were. As if that part is sure and then we play the game can I reach the outside or not. What we should do is this: of course I am in the world, always engaged among objects and so on. But all of it, the combination of in and out, me and the world, is already a certain circle which is—and precisely people like Francisco Varela show this nicely, because—where is that Chavista terrorist? He is not today here. Gigi, Oscar, yeah, yeah, no he will never get an Oscar for theory, okay that's another one. Varela developed this nicely: how take any animal. Even at a very vulgar level, we know, for example, how vision of a—of I don't know which animal, of a fly is totally different from our vision, so that I am not just me. I'm me together with my environs. And reality is not simply something out of these environments. Reality is simply the interconnection of different totalities: my life world, the other life world, and so on and so on. What I mean by this? Let's make a—step further here. So now you will say, "but nonetheless, is this universalized subjectivity, subjectivism?" No, my point is this one, and that should be a true answer. That of course the reality I encounter is always in a certain way subjectivized. Like I see you certain colors of your dresses and of course only certain colors are visible to me blah blah, even at the more practical level whatever. But I think it's wrong to say "oh, so all our realities are subjective." Yes they are, but I myself am not subjective. In the sense that reality that I see is subjectively distorted precisely because I am included into reality. You know what I mean? The very idea of objective reality means that I'm somewhere out. But I cannot see directly objective reality precisely because I am part of it. I'm a partial element of it. I don't have a position outside of it. So the true overcoming of subjectivism is to bring it to the end, to claim everything is subjective, but then to undermine even the consistency of subjectivity itself. That's why, my favorite line—I'm sorry if I already used it but not today ago, at least a couple of months ago—I think George Orwell was way too simplistic, I have problems with him. But there is one line which I love, one exchange between Winston Smith and who is the Richard Burton, Dr. O'Brien or who, his interrogator? Doesn't matter. Where then, when he is investigated, examined by the interrogator Winston Smith, he asks this half-paternal figure of sadistic investigator, torturer: "But tell me, does the Big Brother really exist? Or is he just our..." And the answer you get in Orwell is a perfect one. He says, "No, you are totally wrong. It's not that Big Brother doesn't exist, you don't exist." You think you exist, you know, that's the Hegelian move. Skepticism brought to the end means even in a way even David Hume did this, you know, "but do I exist? what am I? am I a consistent 'I' or whatever?" And the paradox is only in this way by focusing on me, I see how I myself fall into reality. And this is for me—so—yes, Plato's cave. Of course I reject all the standard readings of Plato's cave. There are many postmodern versions of it, I like them. One version of Plato's cave is to turn it around and claim "but the sun out there is black sun, it's evil, so avoid sun, let's remain, it's nice in the warm cave, why to go up there?" A similar thing is done by Sloterdijk, who claims "but it's windy up there, it's not nice, culture is precisely that you build your cave inside," no. Then you have the postmodern version, which I hate most. The postmodern version is: "but there is nothing outside cave, there are just endless caves, and the ultimate ideology is precisely that there is reality outside cave" and so on and so forth. No, I think that's how—I will give you a very simple reading, it will be the result of... aha, aha. We have this one. That's how I read it. Imagine this is whatever this would be: the pre-symbolic real, world outside of us. This world as it is in itself, not even world, let's call it, it's even difficult to name it reality, external whatever, has to have an abyss, has to be already somehow thwarted, marked by... so you fall into this—hole, and what happens is that this would be something like what, for example—for example Epicurus and those—thinkers—Lucretius called, you know Marx wrote a dissertation, maybe we should rehabilitate Marx's very early writings, his doctor's thesis, the *clinamen*, no. Otherwise you would just fall down, nothing happens. You have a *clinamen* here, you see you progress here, you turn around, and where do you find yourself? On the opposite side, the inside. From the outside you are inside, and I think that if you look at it here, you are in Plato's cave. This is the screen of—from the inside of what you see in Plato's cave. And now you will say "but you see also this, like a kind of a disgusting snout or whatever". This is you, this is the impossible. And this is like a—blind spot. You cannot see this. Because this is precisely where you as a gaze here are inscribed into reality. So I think the—the proper materialist approach is not, "Oh, this is just a screen, let's break through there." No, do this, this is the materialist question: through what twist or turn in reality did I acquire this subjective position to look at it? Now I will give you a couple of other—I think they are at least nice—nice examples for it. This is why I think—now I go into madness—the most crazy medieval theories were basically right. I cannot reproduce it here, I didn't want too much bother you with this. But remember those wonderful medieval drawings of a finite universe where there is one famous drawing where it's as if it's like a *Truman Show*, you remember? You reach the end of the world, the sky, and you dig a hole in it, and you see the true outside. This would be like you come here, no, you and although again, this is of course an astronomically a stupidity, but it's a perfect metaphor for ideology. For ideology. So again, critique of ideology is not just I'm inside here, how to see it outside? No, the materialist theory is this loop: how does reality itself allow for this turn? Or another—another that I like—story that I often used—another example of this—closure. You know this—I used it years ago, I will repeat it. You know my favorite theory of—you know the creationist reply to to Darwin. My God, that guy was a genius. I forgot his name, an English theologian friend of Darwin, was deeply disturbed by Darwin's *Origin of Species*. Because on the one hand he saw, my God, Darwin is right, correct description. At the same time he was deeply religious, and fuck it, if it says in the Bible that if you count the years that our world should have been created like years ago, God cannot be wrong. So you must know what was the solution of this guy. The best theory of ideology that I know: Of course God, Bible cannot be wrong. God did create the world and I don't know how much years ago. But he created directly the fossils, you know. He created false depth to make it look infinite, as a temptation for us and so on and so forth. And isn't this absolutely a correct theory of ideology? Isn't every historical epoch like that? For example, the last detail that I learned here, a trivial one as an old Wagnerian: you know this Viking idea that they have those stupid horns? You know that early stagings of Wagner invented it. There are no ancient Nordic helms with those stupid horns, because they would be from the fighting point totally meaningless. They are clumsy, you are more vulnerable and so on. So you know, like, this is this: these horns were created like fossils, I say, they were—and this is how ideology functions. The closure of—the closure of ideology. So again, this is our view of reality, which is always ideologically conditioned and so on and so on. But again, the way to break out is not in an idealist way, it would be to try to directly adopt a God's view, divine view, like "oh, we should abstract from this and see the way things really are." No, what we should see is this disgusting protuberance: how do we ourselves fit, where are we, the blind spot where we, this is our gaze, where we are inscribed into it. This—this reversal. Here, when the subject you see here yourself, as it were, as an object. But of course, it's elusive, it's literally like a blind spot. So—okay, maybe I should leave you now some time for a debate. I cheated of course, but I will give you an explanation directly. First, for this part of Klein bottle and so on, I promise this evening, not afternoon because now I have to prepare myself for that Milner stuff, in the evening I will send you, I have it in a rough form, if some of you are interested in it, that Klein bottle part. Second, as to the title of my talk, no, it was like you know, I will now repeat a very bad joke, you know like you know that stupid joke that I often quote in different versions. You have a painting of "Lenin in Warsaw," and on the painting is just Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, being screwed by some young Komsomol guy, no, and the visitor asks, "But where is Lenin?" "Lenin is in Warsaw, no." And I try in the introduction to my book that just appeared by Verso, no, I try in a very utopian way, but maybe it is, claim that we can maybe imagine a similar painting like, you know, let's imagine Soviet Politburo worrying about early years when it was still progressive of Solidarność, how to crash Solidarność, free trade unions in Poland, and the title is "Lenin in Warsaw." And then, again, Lenin where? "Lenin is in Warsaw," let's hope his spirit was more alive there among... So—in the same way, second, what was the stupid title of my official? "Some Transcendental Subjectivity, Sexual Difference and Brain Science." Where you find that, you find it in my new book which just came out, this kind of a "Lenin in Warsaw." No, seriously, I didn't want to follow that line because I discovered too late that I repeated it so often. The line is simply the parallel between—there are two books out now, allow me please to make a little bit of propaganda: the first one is—it's incredible, it's selling so well already, it will be a classic—Alenka Zupančič, *What is Sex?*. It exploded already in United States and here. And I, in a very modest way, I even I had long negotiations with MIT and asked them to publish my book to make it appear at least a month later. I even define my book as a dialogue with her. So—in that book in detail you can find that topic, that is to say, sexual difference and ontology. I directly approach this paradox. Isn't sexual difference something animal or even human, my God, in its specific human being? What has all this to do with ontology? And I try to prove, you know my line, if you know a little bit of my work, how the basic insight of modern transcendental ontology is that of Kant: antinomies. If you try to think the world as an ontological whole, you get necessarily entangled in antinomies. Two types of antinomies: dynamic, mathematical. Next step, and this is the mega discovery of Joan Copjec—incredible how ignored it is—that the structure of these antinomies fits precisely, even Lacan didn't know it. So I'm not criticizing others not to be Lacanian. I'm just shocked how even Lacanians ignore this. How the structure of Kantian antinomies exactly corresponds to Lacan's formulas of sexuation. And then my Hegelian solution: that with Kant, antinomies are simply epistemological. The fact that we get caught into antinomies means that we cannot reach reality as it is in itself. My Hegelian solution: but what if reality in itself is antinomic in this way? So again, to apply it to here: the way to reach objective reality is not trying to erase our subjective position, but precisely—to locate what appears as our subjective position into a feature of reality itself: its inconsistency, its antagonism and so on and so on. That's I endlessly repeat it, that's the Hegelian formula. That what appears as—as Hegel puts it so nicely, his critique of Kant is that Kant was all too tender towards things. Kant thought that when he discovers an antinomy, it must be limited to our mind, that it cannot be a feature of—reality
Cathy Newman
itself. I just then try to develop in detail in this book of mine. But what
itself. I just then try to develop in detail in this book of mine. But what
Slavoj Žižek
you will find maybe more interesting,
you will find maybe more interesting,
Cathy Newman
doing a little bit of propaganda, in this book it has an obscene
doing a little bit of propaganda, in this book it has an obscene
Slavoj Žižek
title, but it's from Beckett, *Incontinence of the Void*. You know that he said, she said, rather some late Beckett's play, a very tragic one, an old senile lady is dying and then there you have this phrase, "incontinence the void". Then I try to, in second part will maybe be of more interest to you, because I deal with Marx's surplus-pleasure. I presented all this here, and then I try to draw the consequences, how we should renovate Marx and so on, all these polemics against which type of discourse is—should be the revolutionary discourse, or even the capitalist discourse, and there will be many polemical points there. One is even propos* Milner. So let me conclude with the point that Milner today, whom we will meet at six, wrote a book about *Relire la Révolution* [To Reread Revolution]. It's basically, I mean it in a benevolent way, a counter-revolutionary book. But he is intelligent and and he sees it correctly in that book. I wonder if we will have time to debate this: that you cannot simply say "Stalin is a deviation". Stalin did propose a solution to a certain deadlock in Leninism already. But I nonetheless don't agree with his version of
title, but it's from Beckett, *Incontinence of the Void*. You know that he said, she said, rather some late Beckett's play, a very tragic one, an old senile lady is dying and then there you have this phrase, "incontinence the void". Then I try to, in second part will maybe be of more interest to you, because I deal with Marx's surplus-pleasure. I presented all this here, and then I try to draw the consequences, how we should renovate Marx and so on, all these polemics against which type of discourse is—should be the revolutionary discourse, or even the capitalist discourse, and there will be many polemical points there. One is even propos* Milner. So let me conclude with the point that Milner today, whom we will meet at six, wrote a book about *Relire la Révolution* [To Reread Revolution]. It's basically, I mean it in a benevolent way, a counter-revolutionary book. But he is intelligent and and he sees it correctly in that book. I wonder if we will have time to debate this: that you cannot simply say "Stalin is a deviation". Stalin did propose a solution to a certain deadlock in Leninism already. But I nonetheless don't agree with his version of
unknown
that there, because he, I think wrongly, reads
that there, because he, I think wrongly, reads
Slavoj Žižek
Stalinism as violent return of the discourse of the Master, in all its arbitrariness and so on and so on. I absolutely disagree with him here. I think that it's crucial for Stalinism that it has to appear
Stalinism as violent return of the discourse of the Master, in all its arbitrariness and so on and so on. I absolutely disagree with him here. I think that it's crucial for Stalinism that it has to appear
unknown
falsely but nonetheless as a pure university discourse. Stalinism is objective knowledge, laws of history and so on and so on. So let's just hope that it will be at six an interesting debate. So okay, so now I propose that we play democracy a little bit. Okay, so time actually for questions. So please, we have a roving microphone over here, so please... You really don't want this? No really, no, Cherry Max Coke. Indicate who's got a question or a comment or a point? Or I'm sorry again, if you were still confused, I know I was stealing from my future stuff improvising, but again: A, Klein bottle. It's, I just must warn you, it's still a confused draft, because the book will appear maybe over a year from now. I'm still working on it. And as to this title, again, the book is out. And ah, so that I will be honest, so that you will not tell tell me that I'm just making cheap propaganda for myself. I don't know it, maybe you know it, but there are a couple of websites, I think especially a Russian website where they copy all of them and you instantly get all our theory. So if you want to know, I'm not even telling you buy the book, I'm telling you download it. The other day you spoke about how you could boil down capitalist class relations into just two classes and all the proliferation of other classes are just antagonistic categories. Could you just elaborate a little on what you think this means for an aggressive political agenda today? Like how would you approach an aggressive
falsely but nonetheless as a pure university discourse. Stalinism is objective knowledge, laws of history and so on and so on. So let's just hope that it will be at six an interesting debate. So okay, so now I propose that we play democracy a little bit. Okay, so time actually for questions. So please, we have a roving microphone over here, so please... You really don't want this? No really, no, Cherry Max Coke. Indicate who's got a question or a comment or a point? Or I'm sorry again, if you were still confused, I know I was stealing from my future stuff improvising, but again: A, Klein bottle. It's, I just must warn you, it's still a confused draft, because the book will appear maybe over a year from now. I'm still working on it. And as to this title, again, the book is out. And ah, so that I will be honest, so that you will not tell tell me that I'm just making cheap propaganda for myself. I don't know it, maybe you know it, but there are a couple of websites, I think especially a Russian website where they copy all of them and you instantly get all our theory. So if you want to know, I'm not even telling you buy the book, I'm telling you download it. The other day you spoke about how you could boil down capitalist class relations into just two classes and all the proliferation of other classes are just antagonistic categories. Could you just elaborate a little on what you think this means for an aggressive political agenda today? Like how would you approach an aggressive
Slavoj Žižek
political agenda given this feature of class antagonism? Well, the most obvious reading, but I don't like it because it's too simplistic, I'm self-critical here, would have been to read it as another version of that war of position, Gramsci and so on, so that it's never simply us against them, although ultimately it is us against them. But it's always that we struggle for a certain field. Class struggle means precisely that it's not only us against them, but always some blurred dimension, a third element for which we fight. This would be basically the elementary lesson: that not only different groups of people, but even different fields of struggle. For example, here I'm maybe close to Laclau: feminism. It's not automatic that it's all one big progressive struggle: ecology, feminism, minorities, whatever. You can well have—we can debate if it's consistent—but as a fact you can well have a racist working-class position. And I'm not now talking about Nigel Farage and all those pseudo-workers Marine Le Pen. Let me reach to the highest: I'm talking about Engels. I still like him, I'm not a Slovene nationalist, but all the right-wingers in Slovenia attack like crazy, quote Engels who said even in a beautiful rhetorical twist: in some letters, he says that speaking about Slovenes, Croats and so on, that these nations, no wonder they are politically reactionary, because their existence itself is a reaction. Remember? So he even uses a term which can be—but shouldn't be, it's not—but with evil intention they sometimes translated it as Holocaust: that European revolution will be a big Holocaust which will swipe away... you know what what was his trauma? '48, where it looked well for Austrian especially Hungarian revolution, but then us, Croats, Slovenes, with our voluntary military units helped to crush it. And this determined Marxist perception, which is why for Marx and Engels, only Poles, Poland—Poles and Hungarians were the one who deserved to survive, as it were. Who progressive, all others were considered in their object... So what I'm trying to say here is that what I mean is that we cannot simply claim, but this is one-sided not authentic nationalism. No, there is no teleological necessity for it. In the same way that you have anti-feminist working-class movement and so on. So this would have meant that class struggle means precisely that it's not directly this class difference in this pure way. But it's class struggle, which means undefined space, you have to fight for it. Or just mention ecology and so on. It's clear that you can have five-six versions of ecology, my God. You can get conservative ecology, this kind of a rural ecology, we should return to pre-modernity and so on. You can have capitalist ecology, only market, if we leave it to the market, taxing the polluters can save us. You can have state ecology, strict state regulation and so on and so on. So the idea would have been that this is an open process and that we should reject, leave behind this simplistic pseudo-Marxist, although it was very popular, teleology where it says, "but women should see that their only solution is true socialist revolution," I don't know, "nature lovers should see that the only solution" and so on and so on. No, the fight is—the fight is genuinely open. This is the empirical consequence. But what interests me more as a degenerate theorist is this theoretical, this paradox that class struggle means precisely that empirically, empirically there are never simply two classes. The same as, although the parallel of course is not perfect, sexual difference in its Lacanian version means precisely that you cannot fix it as a field of male-female and so on. It means that, for example, for me a transgender person in a radical sense, not just a guy who wants to be a girl or other way round, but those who call themselves I don't know "ze" or whatever, neither he nor she, all those problems, that they are not beyond difference, they stand for difference or deadlock as such. Even in a sense I'm ready to claim that here maybe Marx was a little bit too simplistic with his dismissal of lumpenproletariat, as you know those decadent always being corrupted by the ruling class and so on and so on. No, no, no, I think that lumpenproletarians are precisely the deadlock. It's the same thing that my—the one who I admire very much, the anti-Gandhi of Indian independence, Ambedkar. He put it so nicely when he says that—it's a beautiful Hegelian formula—"no castes without outcasts". You cannot have a perfect caste system without producing an effect, and as a Hegelian he should have added that precisely those without outcasts are precisely the one who stand for universality. And this is where, as I try to develop in my big fat Hegel book, *Less Than Nothing*, this is also where Hegel, I think, was not Hegelian enough: when he speaks about "rabble" as those without place in social edifice. He should have added that precisely as such, rabble stands for universality as such. Universality is always an authentic position of those with no place. Okay, I didn't answer your question but I hope I [unintelligible] some kind of a direction. Yes, oh. Now I am afraid, you are usually ask tough questions, okay. I'll take up your
political agenda given this feature of class antagonism? Well, the most obvious reading, but I don't like it because it's too simplistic, I'm self-critical here, would have been to read it as another version of that war of position, Gramsci and so on, so that it's never simply us against them, although ultimately it is us against them. But it's always that we struggle for a certain field. Class struggle means precisely that it's not only us against them, but always some blurred dimension, a third element for which we fight. This would be basically the elementary lesson: that not only different groups of people, but even different fields of struggle. For example, here I'm maybe close to Laclau: feminism. It's not automatic that it's all one big progressive struggle: ecology, feminism, minorities, whatever. You can well have—we can debate if it's consistent—but as a fact you can well have a racist working-class position. And I'm not now talking about Nigel Farage and all those pseudo-workers Marine Le Pen. Let me reach to the highest: I'm talking about Engels. I still like him, I'm not a Slovene nationalist, but all the right-wingers in Slovenia attack like crazy, quote Engels who said even in a beautiful rhetorical twist: in some letters, he says that speaking about Slovenes, Croats and so on, that these nations, no wonder they are politically reactionary, because their existence itself is a reaction. Remember? So he even uses a term which can be—but shouldn't be, it's not—but with evil intention they sometimes translated it as Holocaust: that European revolution will be a big Holocaust which will swipe away... you know what what was his trauma? '48, where it looked well for Austrian especially Hungarian revolution, but then us, Croats, Slovenes, with our voluntary military units helped to crush it. And this determined Marxist perception, which is why for Marx and Engels, only Poles, Poland—Poles and Hungarians were the one who deserved to survive, as it were. Who progressive, all others were considered in their object... So what I'm trying to say here is that what I mean is that we cannot simply claim, but this is one-sided not authentic nationalism. No, there is no teleological necessity for it. In the same way that you have anti-feminist working-class movement and so on. So this would have meant that class struggle means precisely that it's not directly this class difference in this pure way. But it's class struggle, which means undefined space, you have to fight for it. Or just mention ecology and so on. It's clear that you can have five-six versions of ecology, my God. You can get conservative ecology, this kind of a rural ecology, we should return to pre-modernity and so on. You can have capitalist ecology, only market, if we leave it to the market, taxing the polluters can save us. You can have state ecology, strict state regulation and so on and so on. So the idea would have been that this is an open process and that we should reject, leave behind this simplistic pseudo-Marxist, although it was very popular, teleology where it says, "but women should see that their only solution is true socialist revolution," I don't know, "nature lovers should see that the only solution" and so on and so on. No, the fight is—the fight is genuinely open. This is the empirical consequence. But what interests me more as a degenerate theorist is this theoretical, this paradox that class struggle means precisely that empirically, empirically there are never simply two classes. The same as, although the parallel of course is not perfect, sexual difference in its Lacanian version means precisely that you cannot fix it as a field of male-female and so on. It means that, for example, for me a transgender person in a radical sense, not just a guy who wants to be a girl or other way round, but those who call themselves I don't know "ze" or whatever, neither he nor she, all those problems, that they are not beyond difference, they stand for difference or deadlock as such. Even in a sense I'm ready to claim that here maybe Marx was a little bit too simplistic with his dismissal of lumpenproletariat, as you know those decadent always being corrupted by the ruling class and so on and so on. No, no, no, I think that lumpenproletarians are precisely the deadlock. It's the same thing that my—the one who I admire very much, the anti-Gandhi of Indian independence, Ambedkar. He put it so nicely when he says that—it's a beautiful Hegelian formula—"no castes without outcasts". You cannot have a perfect caste system without producing an effect, and as a Hegelian he should have added that precisely those without outcasts are precisely the one who stand for universality. And this is where, as I try to develop in my big fat Hegel book, *Less Than Nothing*, this is also where Hegel, I think, was not Hegelian enough: when he speaks about "rabble" as those without place in social edifice. He should have added that precisely as such, rabble stands for universality as such. Universality is always an authentic position of those with no place. Okay, I didn't answer your question but I hope I [unintelligible] some kind of a direction. Yes, oh. Now I am afraid, you are usually ask tough questions, okay. I'll take up your
unknown
topology points at the end, redoubling of the suture. And I wanted—I'm thinking of the way Bruno Latour uses the quasi-object of Michel Serres. And also thinking of the work of the psychoanalyst artist Lygia Clark, the Brazilian artist who does this performance where she cuts the Möbius band, but every time you go around you cut in a different place to avoid repetition. So my question is—I'm thinking as a filmmaker about how *Screen* took up this redoubling of the suture, and the importance was to cut the suture. As a filmmaker and for the spectator, and I'm just wondering how you would break through an act at producing change in terms of suture-ology?
topology points at the end, redoubling of the suture. And I wanted—I'm thinking of the way Bruno Latour uses the quasi-object of Michel Serres. And also thinking of the work of the psychoanalyst artist Lygia Clark, the Brazilian artist who does this performance where she cuts the Möbius band, but every time you go around you cut in a different place to avoid repetition. So my question is—I'm thinking as a filmmaker about how *Screen* took up this redoubling of the suture, and the importance was to cut the suture. As a filmmaker and for the spectator, and I'm just wondering how you would break through an act at producing change in terms of suture-ology?
Slavoj Žižek
The only thing, because I'm not—I'm very sorry, I talk too much. Did you finish your question? I finished. All right, sorry because as you know better maybe better than me, I tend to—it's my standard joke, that's why I will never be an analyst, because can you imagine me sitting there for more than seconds listening to another? Although I would be a nice interpassive analyst, like my idea is the patient lays down and then he just says one-two words and I say, "Fall asleep, I will do the association for you and interpret them, you just have a nice rest there," that would be my. No, but seriously. So as a woman, at some level, making fun of myself, not of women—you know this male chauvinist prejudice that women cannot think in abstract terms, they need examples, okay then obviously I'm a woman, no—I will give one example of how to what to do precisely at the level of film. I already used this example in my books and I think it's precisely at the same time a nice example of Möbius strip, but even more, of what to do here. Two typical, even archetypal Hitchcock shots. You remember in *Bodega Bay*, *The Birds*, the fire in the city? You have when a stupid guy throws his matches, doesn't see that gasoline is leaking, and then it explodes, fire. The first part of this short scene is shot in the standard suturing: subjective-objective. You see—you see Tippi Hedren, Melanie, in this ridiculous [unintelligible] looking at it and you see what she sees, that guy unknowingly killing himself, subjective-objective, subjective-objective. Then from this exchange of subjective-objective, you get into what Hitchcock calls pure "God's view" so-called. You see the whole city from—from up, like in this [unintelligible] establishing shot, general view, you see all of it. And then, it's the touch of a genius I claim, then all of a sudden from behind—that's crucial—one bird enters, the other bird enters, and that's the beauty. What appeared as just an objective shot, now we see reality, becomes subjectivized but in an obscene way. My God, my gaze was not really just an objective view, it was the gaze of a monster. This shift is that—and here this is, I think: what we look at reality, no? We should see that this look at reality is never objective precisely when we think that it's an objective view. It's a kind of a suture shift raised to a higher potency even, in the sense that there is no cut. It's the same shot, just with the entrance from behind of the birds, the shot gets subjectivized but in a terrific way. So that's what I like it: the terrible thing is not what you see, it's not all that bullshit you tore the curtain [unintelligible] some octopus gigantic craken squid is there. No, the horrible element you discover is the position of your gaze itself. You think you have a safe, "oh I'm just looking at it," then you see, "my God, but I'm a monster, my position." And the same of course happens in a little bit more primitive but supreme way in *Psycho*. I always advocated this, you know, forget about that boring that murder in—how do you call it?—the shower murder. No, no, no, the second, Arbogast detective murder. You have the same: you have the exchange of point-of-view shot and objective shot when detective Arbogast climbs the stairs. Then the camera moves up, almost like geometric, you have again this so-called "God's view" shot, and then we later learn Norman the monster enters, and then a sudden jump to the face of the detective [unintelligible] you see the cut being and here again you are violently thrown into the point of view of the thing Norman himself. So I think this would be how to undermine the suture. Because at least in *The Birds*, what you get again, it's not a direct cut, but it's—just a radical reversal of the subjective status of a shot. Again, you thought, "oh okay now I'm at safe distance let's take a look at it," and then you discover you are the eye of the storm, you are in the very center of it. That's what we should do with our gaze. Not try to see it objectively, but to include into the picture as it were the horror, the monstrosity of our own position. That's all I can say in a very feminine way, just a partial view. I really think I'm getting desperate. I think that now I will sound as a neo-conservative almost, but today it's we men who get feminized and as I already repeated it, all the good books on Hegel in the last years were written by women, my God. Where are we coming, you know? So thanks very much but it's very interesting. Unfortunately the other authors I'm trying to read Bruno Latour and of course in this big conflict among so-called object-oriented guy, between Latour and—and for example Harman, I'm absolutely for Latour. Because Harman makes a very stupid metaphysical move where—he in a totally philosophically non-justified way, he projects onto reality a certain naive ontology where he claims we just see superficial aspect of reality but there is an animist depth of the object things in themselves and so on and so on. But Latour is well aware that this depth is strictly relational and so on. No, no, I'm here and also Latour, I quoted him in one of my political texts, he wrote also a wonderful analysis of all this European Union confusion now and so on and so on. Although I don't agree often with him but let's put it like this: Latour is not a complete idiot. And you know how I mean this, like there are only two types of people I claim: complete idiots and those who are not complete idiots. There is no third position, you know. Like for me to really praise a guy is to say, "not only you are a genius you wrote a wonderful book, but you are even not a complete idiot," you know. That's the highest. So—and do you agree? This is the difficult thing to do today. To find this kind of thinkers, authors who, although you may not agree with them, but they—but they raise the right questions, they are worth reading, I mean. And the saddest thing for me is that quite often these guys worth reading are not Lacanians, you know. Lacanians can also be boring, predictable and so on and so on. So thanks for—we can do one more? Yeah, well, have we got another—here? A very boring and predictable question: what do you mean by no animist depth? By no— Animist depth. You used to talk about no animist depth just now. Seemed like a deliberate
The only thing, because I'm not—I'm very sorry, I talk too much. Did you finish your question? I finished. All right, sorry because as you know better maybe better than me, I tend to—it's my standard joke, that's why I will never be an analyst, because can you imagine me sitting there for more than seconds listening to another? Although I would be a nice interpassive analyst, like my idea is the patient lays down and then he just says one-two words and I say, "Fall asleep, I will do the association for you and interpret them, you just have a nice rest there," that would be my. No, but seriously. So as a woman, at some level, making fun of myself, not of women—you know this male chauvinist prejudice that women cannot think in abstract terms, they need examples, okay then obviously I'm a woman, no—I will give one example of how to what to do precisely at the level of film. I already used this example in my books and I think it's precisely at the same time a nice example of Möbius strip, but even more, of what to do here. Two typical, even archetypal Hitchcock shots. You remember in *Bodega Bay*, *The Birds*, the fire in the city? You have when a stupid guy throws his matches, doesn't see that gasoline is leaking, and then it explodes, fire. The first part of this short scene is shot in the standard suturing: subjective-objective. You see—you see Tippi Hedren, Melanie, in this ridiculous [unintelligible] looking at it and you see what she sees, that guy unknowingly killing himself, subjective-objective, subjective-objective. Then from this exchange of subjective-objective, you get into what Hitchcock calls pure "God's view" so-called. You see the whole city from—from up, like in this [unintelligible] establishing shot, general view, you see all of it. And then, it's the touch of a genius I claim, then all of a sudden from behind—that's crucial—one bird enters, the other bird enters, and that's the beauty. What appeared as just an objective shot, now we see reality, becomes subjectivized but in an obscene way. My God, my gaze was not really just an objective view, it was the gaze of a monster. This shift is that—and here this is, I think: what we look at reality, no? We should see that this look at reality is never objective precisely when we think that it's an objective view. It's a kind of a suture shift raised to a higher potency even, in the sense that there is no cut. It's the same shot, just with the entrance from behind of the birds, the shot gets subjectivized but in a terrific way. So that's what I like it: the terrible thing is not what you see, it's not all that bullshit you tore the curtain [unintelligible] some octopus gigantic craken squid is there. No, the horrible element you discover is the position of your gaze itself. You think you have a safe, "oh I'm just looking at it," then you see, "my God, but I'm a monster, my position." And the same of course happens in a little bit more primitive but supreme way in *Psycho*. I always advocated this, you know, forget about that boring that murder in—how do you call it?—the shower murder. No, no, no, the second, Arbogast detective murder. You have the same: you have the exchange of point-of-view shot and objective shot when detective Arbogast climbs the stairs. Then the camera moves up, almost like geometric, you have again this so-called "God's view" shot, and then we later learn Norman the monster enters, and then a sudden jump to the face of the detective [unintelligible] you see the cut being and here again you are violently thrown into the point of view of the thing Norman himself. So I think this would be how to undermine the suture. Because at least in *The Birds*, what you get again, it's not a direct cut, but it's—just a radical reversal of the subjective status of a shot. Again, you thought, "oh okay now I'm at safe distance let's take a look at it," and then you discover you are the eye of the storm, you are in the very center of it. That's what we should do with our gaze. Not try to see it objectively, but to include into the picture as it were the horror, the monstrosity of our own position. That's all I can say in a very feminine way, just a partial view. I really think I'm getting desperate. I think that now I will sound as a neo-conservative almost, but today it's we men who get feminized and as I already repeated it, all the good books on Hegel in the last years were written by women, my God. Where are we coming, you know? So thanks very much but it's very interesting. Unfortunately the other authors I'm trying to read Bruno Latour and of course in this big conflict among so-called object-oriented guy, between Latour and—and for example Harman, I'm absolutely for Latour. Because Harman makes a very stupid metaphysical move where—he in a totally philosophically non-justified way, he projects onto reality a certain naive ontology where he claims we just see superficial aspect of reality but there is an animist depth of the object things in themselves and so on and so on. But Latour is well aware that this depth is strictly relational and so on. No, no, I'm here and also Latour, I quoted him in one of my political texts, he wrote also a wonderful analysis of all this European Union confusion now and so on and so on. Although I don't agree often with him but let's put it like this: Latour is not a complete idiot. And you know how I mean this, like there are only two types of people I claim: complete idiots and those who are not complete idiots. There is no third position, you know. Like for me to really praise a guy is to say, "not only you are a genius you wrote a wonderful book, but you are even not a complete idiot," you know. That's the highest. So—and do you agree? This is the difficult thing to do today. To find this kind of thinkers, authors who, although you may not agree with them, but they—but they raise the right questions, they are worth reading, I mean. And the saddest thing for me is that quite often these guys worth reading are not Lacanians, you know. Lacanians can also be boring, predictable and so on and so on. So thanks for—we can do one more? Yeah, well, have we got another—here? A very boring and predictable question: what do you mean by no animist depth? By no— Animist depth. You used to talk about no animist depth just now. Seemed like a deliberate
unknown
manipulation
manipulation
Slavoj Žižek
of the other. No, no, wait a minute, I'm not manipulating Graham Harman, I otherwise I—we are kind of almost friends and so on—but he—his thesis is explicitly, even pathetically that thing, objects have their own depth which is independent of how they relate to other things. And he even talks, for example in his book on—on—on that quadruple or whatever, he even potentially, although in an ambiguous way, endorses some kind of animism in the sense that there is a depth in objects. While my position here is, maybe I'm wrong, I'm just drawing the line, is first: one of his, Harman's arguments is that things have a much larger scope of potentialities and in their actual relation just some of the potentials are actualized. You know, like I don't know, you—for example usually, primitive not his, my more primitive example, you use a hammer for nails or whatever. But you can also use it to to crack the skull of your—of your mother-in-law or whatever, and so on. It's more productive. But but it has all these potentials and just some of them are actualized, you know. I think that I wouldn't put this as an "in-itself". Why not externalize these potentials? Isn't it that often the same object acquires new potentials when it's displaced into another context and so on and so on? And this is basically Latour's logic more. That so I don't see why, because also—in a way I appreciate this, he's not totally wrong—he, Graham Harman, is also very anti-dynamic. For him, the way things are in themselves has a priority over how they develop and so on, over the dynamic of interrelation. Now as I mentioned it here, often quite often, he is not, again, not a complete idiot, Harman. He draws wonderful conclusions from this. For example, he has, I just would put, I think already used this example here, a different accent. For example in his—when he quotes some popular report where they claim that "the sixties, sixties in the sense of sexual revolution or really happened in the seventies." Like that all the criteria or the usual features that we identify as those of the sixties (again, rock music, acid rock, drugs, sexual revolution) really exploded in the seventies. I had a—I talked with him when I the last time visited him in LA and my only point was that it's also another political dynamic at work here. That yes, it's true, but at the same time this move from the sixties to the seventies was gentrification, inclusion into dominant ideology. Because what happened in the seventies is that the energy of the sixties—or the energy, I hate this term, whatever the movement—was totally cleansed of its political edge and turned into this, you know, Playboy, sexual revolution, music, drugs and so on and so on. So precisely the seventies was the sixties as they existed in the seventies were already the politically heavily censored. And then I propose, maybe I mentioned it here, another example: he agreed with it. Renaissance. It's typical how we identify Renaissance with that—with that—all the duchies or whatever, the you know late 4-5th-16th century... Can I just come back? Yes, please. You're talking about the 1960s. Have you
of the other. No, no, wait a minute, I'm not manipulating Graham Harman, I otherwise I—we are kind of almost friends and so on—but he—his thesis is explicitly, even pathetically that thing, objects have their own depth which is independent of how they relate to other things. And he even talks, for example in his book on—on—on that quadruple or whatever, he even potentially, although in an ambiguous way, endorses some kind of animism in the sense that there is a depth in objects. While my position here is, maybe I'm wrong, I'm just drawing the line, is first: one of his, Harman's arguments is that things have a much larger scope of potentialities and in their actual relation just some of the potentials are actualized. You know, like I don't know, you—for example usually, primitive not his, my more primitive example, you use a hammer for nails or whatever. But you can also use it to to crack the skull of your—of your mother-in-law or whatever, and so on. It's more productive. But but it has all these potentials and just some of them are actualized, you know. I think that I wouldn't put this as an "in-itself". Why not externalize these potentials? Isn't it that often the same object acquires new potentials when it's displaced into another context and so on and so on? And this is basically Latour's logic more. That so I don't see why, because also—in a way I appreciate this, he's not totally wrong—he, Graham Harman, is also very anti-dynamic. For him, the way things are in themselves has a priority over how they develop and so on, over the dynamic of interrelation. Now as I mentioned it here, often quite often, he is not, again, not a complete idiot, Harman. He draws wonderful conclusions from this. For example, he has, I just would put, I think already used this example here, a different accent. For example in his—when he quotes some popular report where they claim that "the sixties, sixties in the sense of sexual revolution or really happened in the seventies." Like that all the criteria or the usual features that we identify as those of the sixties (again, rock music, acid rock, drugs, sexual revolution) really exploded in the seventies. I had a—I talked with him when I the last time visited him in LA and my only point was that it's also another political dynamic at work here. That yes, it's true, but at the same time this move from the sixties to the seventies was gentrification, inclusion into dominant ideology. Because what happened in the seventies is that the energy of the sixties—or the energy, I hate this term, whatever the movement—was totally cleansed of its political edge and turned into this, you know, Playboy, sexual revolution, music, drugs and so on and so on. So precisely the seventies was the sixties as they existed in the seventies were already the politically heavily censored. And then I propose, maybe I mentioned it here, another example: he agreed with it. Renaissance. It's typical how we identify Renaissance with that—with that—all the duchies or whatever, the you know late 4-5th-16th century... Can I just come back? Yes, please. You're talking about the 1960s. Have you
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seen *Days of Hope*? Ken Loach, it was made in the 1960s.
seen *Days of Hope*? Ken Loach, it was made in the 1960s.
Slavoj Žižek
Was it made already then? Yes. Oh my God, my—I love Loach but I didn't know he is so old.
Was it made already then? Yes. Oh my God, my—I love Loach but I didn't know he is so old.
unknown
I love Loach and he says and I agree with him but it doesn't fit with what you've just been saying that—he was in the 1960s given agency to to present some, you know, pseudo-authentic working-class realism. And, you know, he laments the fact that what we've completely lost is, there's no opportunity to make that kind of filmmaking at the moment and what we really need is an authentic representation of elite—elite, the elite class, you know, looking at them more objectively. Why is it that they they always escape? But I just—I just resist, I'm resisting your kind of slightly negative kind of almost cynical evaluation of the sixties which which is implicit in your kind of dismissal of animism because I'm sorry, I think there were some very good things started to be thought about in in the sixties and and I think we're linking up
I love Loach and he says and I agree with him but it doesn't fit with what you've just been saying that—he was in the 1960s given agency to to present some, you know, pseudo-authentic working-class realism. And, you know, he laments the fact that what we've completely lost is, there's no opportunity to make that kind of filmmaking at the moment and what we really need is an authentic representation of elite—elite, the elite class, you know, looking at them more objectively. Why is it that they they always escape? But I just—I just resist, I'm resisting your kind of slightly negative kind of almost cynical evaluation of the sixties which which is implicit in your kind of dismissal of animism because I'm sorry, I think there were some very good things started to be thought about in in the sixties and and I think we're linking up
Slavoj Žižek
with them now to some notion of non-human experience is is important and the limits of Cartesianism and the limits that it wasn't just some
with them now to some notion of non-human experience is is important and the limits of Cartesianism and the limits that it wasn't just some
unknown
teleological breakthrough in in kind of human intellectual development, it was actually a regression vis-à-vis nature, it wasn't... and and I know you disagree with this Slavoj, but this you say we should be more alienated but I'm sorry, I think that's that's where we started to go wrong. And I think we've and a lot of radical activists are saying quite rightly at the moment that we really started to go wrong in industrialization, you know, at the start of industrialization, if not the agricultural revolution, and that will all need rethinking vis-à-vis environmental agency and the agency of non-human life. This, okay, we obviously cannot go into this debate because I would really like to pursue it because I see where you are aiming. But, you know what's my problem? First, I don't want to—you are for me with all the irony which is not directed at you but more at myself, you are too—too much into Evo Morales now for me, you know. He made that famous letter to—a couple of years ago, Evo Morales, claiming capitalism killed Mother Nature, blah blah. My God, first, are you aware how many ecological mega catastrophes were done already by human agency in pre-modern times? Almost more. Look when I—I love the country, I visited—how do you pronounce it here? Iceland
teleological breakthrough in in kind of human intellectual development, it was actually a regression vis-à-vis nature, it wasn't... and and I know you disagree with this Slavoj, but this you say we should be more alienated but I'm sorry, I think that's that's where we started to go wrong. And I think we've and a lot of radical activists are saying quite rightly at the moment that we really started to go wrong in industrialization, you know, at the start of industrialization, if not the agricultural revolution, and that will all need rethinking vis-à-vis environmental agency and the agency of non-human life. This, okay, we obviously cannot go into this debate because I would really like to pursue it because I see where you are aiming. But, you know what's my problem? First, I don't want to—you are for me with all the irony which is not directed at you but more at myself, you are too—too much into Evo Morales now for me, you know. He made that famous letter to—a couple of years ago, Evo Morales, claiming capitalism killed Mother Nature, blah blah. My God, first, are you aware how many ecological mega catastrophes were done already by human agency in pre-modern times? Almost more. Look when I—I love the country, I visited—how do you pronounce it here? Iceland
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or Iceland? The
or Iceland? The
Slavoj Žižek
city place whose capital is Reykjavík. Iceland. Iceland, okay. I love the country. But, you know that before Norwegians moved there, this was full of forests? And I—this may amuse you, this would be my counterpoint. Recently, in the same bookstore Southampton Road which is now closing down, I bought also for a book by somebody called Horton or what, I don't know, *Beyond Sorrow*, something like this: a depiction of ecological struggles now in the last decades in Scotland. Claiming how those who are against now repopulation of Scotland and want to keep it pristine and so on, don't see that this, all this, glens or whatever which are uninhabited, this is part of an eco-social—this is not the original Scotland. The original Scotland in 12-13th century was full of forests, was much more full of people and so on and so on. So all those ecologists who claim "let's keep those pristine glens wild nature", this is a not an original wild nature, this is devastated by the effects of early capitalism and so on and so on. And he provides—the guy in this book—a devastating for me critique of all those with Walter Scott, Robert Burns, romanticization of nature which projects an authenticity into what was effectively an effect—the effect of an extremely brutal social devastation, disintegration and so on and so on. So his point is that quite often deep ecologists can be—which is why he tries to explain why he claims—it just sounds nice as a theory to me, I don't guarantee that it's true—he claims that quite often that's why these ecologists who want to be—get in big—the true conflict is between very benevolent ecologists and local people. I mean, we should idealize neither of them. Quite often ecologists who pretend to speak for closer relationship to earth can be quite alienated from authentic local traditions. When you say local people, are you talking about indigenous people, Aboriginal people? No, okay, here you can catch me, I'm not sure which would be the politically correct term. By local people I simply mean people who live there and are not recent immigrants. My very limited knowledge of indigenous people and their philosophies are that they are very aware of the myth of human supremacy, whereas the West is not. Oh, sorry, the myth of what supremacy? The myth of human supremacy. You mean that original Aborigines are well aware that we humans do not have supremacy and so on. I here, I again, we are entering dangerous topic, because what I am afraid is that precisely this apparently non-anthropocentric views, secretly in a way I always suspect them that in a more refined way they nonetheless privilege humans and so on. It's a much more—it's very difficult to be really non-anthropocentric and so on. It's not just you know I feel I have the same spirit with a mountain and so on whatever, whatever. I think it's very difficult to to really, to
city place whose capital is Reykjavík. Iceland. Iceland, okay. I love the country. But, you know that before Norwegians moved there, this was full of forests? And I—this may amuse you, this would be my counterpoint. Recently, in the same bookstore Southampton Road which is now closing down, I bought also for a book by somebody called Horton or what, I don't know, *Beyond Sorrow*, something like this: a depiction of ecological struggles now in the last decades in Scotland. Claiming how those who are against now repopulation of Scotland and want to keep it pristine and so on, don't see that this, all this, glens or whatever which are uninhabited, this is part of an eco-social—this is not the original Scotland. The original Scotland in 12-13th century was full of forests, was much more full of people and so on and so on. So all those ecologists who claim "let's keep those pristine glens wild nature", this is a not an original wild nature, this is devastated by the effects of early capitalism and so on and so on. And he provides—the guy in this book—a devastating for me critique of all those with Walter Scott, Robert Burns, romanticization of nature which projects an authenticity into what was effectively an effect—the effect of an extremely brutal social devastation, disintegration and so on and so on. So his point is that quite often deep ecologists can be—which is why he tries to explain why he claims—it just sounds nice as a theory to me, I don't guarantee that it's true—he claims that quite often that's why these ecologists who want to be—get in big—the true conflict is between very benevolent ecologists and local people. I mean, we should idealize neither of them. Quite often ecologists who pretend to speak for closer relationship to earth can be quite alienated from authentic local traditions. When you say local people, are you talking about indigenous people, Aboriginal people? No, okay, here you can catch me, I'm not sure which would be the politically correct term. By local people I simply mean people who live there and are not recent immigrants. My very limited knowledge of indigenous people and their philosophies are that they are very aware of the myth of human supremacy, whereas the West is not. Oh, sorry, the myth of what supremacy? The myth of human supremacy. You mean that original Aborigines are well aware that we humans do not have supremacy and so on. I here, I again, we are entering dangerous topic, because what I am afraid is that precisely this apparently non-anthropocentric views, secretly in a way I always suspect them that in a more refined way they nonetheless privilege humans and so on. It's a much more—it's very difficult to be really non-anthropocentric and so on. It's not just you know I feel I have the same spirit with a mountain and so on whatever, whatever. I think it's very difficult to to really, to
unknown
really
really
Slavoj Žižek
break out of. I'm sorry we can't go on but I agree with you, I just want to—no, no, I just want to complicate things and so on. You know? I don't believe here—I agree with you that those one of the—I hope we agree here—complete idiots are those techno-ecologists who simply "we just apply science, blah blah, the problem—problems will disappear" and so on and so on. But at the same time—I'm sorry, let's get your—strike back and then we conclude. Do a quickie, you know what I want to say, yeah.
break out of. I'm sorry we can't go on but I agree with you, I just want to—no, no, I just want to complicate things and so on. You know? I don't believe here—I agree with you that those one of the—I hope we agree here—complete idiots are those techno-ecologists who simply "we just apply science, blah blah, the problem—problems will disappear" and so on and so on. But at the same time—I'm sorry, let's get your—strike back and then we conclude. Do a quickie, you know what I want to say, yeah.
unknown
Literary young, which on the one side is quite Eurocentric but on the other side is Atlantic. And that is the Klein bottle and the Möbius band, two-dimensional three-dimensional are definitely Eurocentric. But they gave reason for a huge body of theory, Barnet's theory, Vienna Circle, which all emanated and included the kind of criticism that you as a Hegelian have of Engels in an inverse way on the one side from Vienna and on the other side from the Negroponte object-oriented developments which are Harvard-oriented and are completely not public. So what the MIT, in its development strategy did exactly with this development is you cannot read anywhere. You can go into the MIT databases and see what they have come out in terms of development but there is much much more which is in in absolute crystalized by Negroponte himself who was everybody thought a designer, quite, yeah, you know, yeah,
Literary young, which on the one side is quite Eurocentric but on the other side is Atlantic. And that is the Klein bottle and the Möbius band, two-dimensional three-dimensional are definitely Eurocentric. But they gave reason for a huge body of theory, Barnet's theory, Vienna Circle, which all emanated and included the kind of criticism that you as a Hegelian have of Engels in an inverse way on the one side from Vienna and on the other side from the Negroponte object-oriented developments which are Harvard-oriented and are completely not public. So what the MIT, in its development strategy did exactly with this development is you cannot read anywhere. You can go into the MIT databases and see what they have come out in terms of development but there is much much more which is in in absolute crystalized by Negroponte himself who was everybody thought a designer, quite, yeah, you know, yeah,
Slavoj Žižek
yeah, no yeah,
yeah, no yeah,
unknown
but on the other side he was an absolute security deep state man who would not tell anything what he actually was told to do. So you mentioned that you are at it and are going to publish, just make sure that you don't just happen to cover just out and looking at my bravado is the only one who can give information. I don't know whether this is clear but he was a quite an Argentinean when he was young a communist but then it's a huge influential designer with Olivetti, he ran the Ulm school. Okay, I'll right. Okay thank you.
but on the other side he was an absolute security deep state man who would not tell anything what he actually was told to do. So you mentioned that you are at it and are going to publish, just make sure that you don't just happen to cover just out and looking at my bravado is the only one who can give information. I don't know whether this is clear but he was a quite an Argentinean when he was young a communist but then it's a huge influential designer with Olivetti, he ran the Ulm school. Okay, I'll right. Okay thank you.
Slavoj Žižek
Okay let's—okay thank you very much, thank you Slavoj. Wait a minute, you missed the point, I
Okay let's—okay thank you very much, thank you Slavoj. Wait a minute, you missed the point, I
unknown
praised his book. Now he brought it back.
praised his book. Now he brought it back.