The Capitalist Promise & The Paradoxes of Desire
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2021-06-19 · 1:00:57 · 6,149 words
psychoanalysiscapitalismideologysexuality-gendereveryday-lifesubjectivityhegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnessfascism-populism
Delivered at the Festival of Torino Spirituality during the Covid pandemic, this talk explores the paradoxes of desire and enjoyment under capitalism, beginning with pandemic fatigue and the 'destruction of everyday life.' Žižek argues that capitalism uniquely incorporates the Lacanian paradox of desire, the structural need for surplus enjoyment, into its own logic, making sacrifice and hedonism coincide. The talk extends this analysis to sexuality (which is intrinsically 'unhealthy' and fantasy-structured), the decline of symbolic paternal authority and the rise of obscene superego figures, and the impossibility of 'clean' desire without its constitutive excess.
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The ideas in it 23
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Byung-Chul Han's concept (Leistungszwang) cited by Žižek to explain why pandemic fatigue is worse in Western societies: subjects are permanently compelled to self-produce and self-display, intensified rather than relieved by lockdown and Zoom.
as “Dialektik im Stillstand”
Walter Benjamin's phrase ('dialectics at a standstill'), applied by Mladen Dolar to the pandemic: the feeling of suspended, numb standstill that paradoxically masks unprecedented social transformation already underway.
Enjoyment as mediated by the Big Other, not direct pleasure but a deeper satisfaction in a way of life or paranoia about the Other's way of life, irreducible to simple hedonic pleasure.
The anonymous symbolic order through which enjoyment is mediated and impersonal beliefs are sustained; its disintegration leaves subjects caught between narcissistic ideal egos and cruel superego commands.
The fantasy-structure whereby an ethnic or political Other is perceived as either stealing 'our' enjoyment (our way of life) or possessing an excessive, inaccessible enjoyment that eludes us, used here to explain Trump supporters' grievances and contemporary racism.
as “carnival (Bakhtinian)”
Bakhtin's concept of liberatory popular inversion, invoked and then critiqued: Žižek argues the January 6th Capitol storming was a carnival in form, but carnival has long been an 'obscene underside of power' (gang rapes, lynchings, Kristallnacht), it cannot serve as a model for progressive protest.
Žižek deploys Lacan's plus-de-jouir (itself modelled on Marx's surplus value) as the additional satisfaction provided not by achieving a goal but by the formal detours and obstacles en route to it, the excess that capitalism channels and that underlies racism's 'theft of enjoyment' logic.
as “surplus value / Mehrwert”
Marx's concept invoked as the structural template for Lacan's surplus enjoyment, the homology between the two is the key theoretical lever Žižek uses to link capitalism to libidinal economy.
Freud's 'gain of pleasure', the additional pleasure yielded by the formal detours and obstacles in pursuing satisfaction, structurally homologous to Lacan's surplus enjoyment and Marx's surplus value.
as “perversion (Lacanian)”
The psychic structure of contemporary consumerism: not hysterical disappointment (this is never 'it') but a cynical stance where one knows in advance the object won't satisfy yet goes through the formal process anyway, finding satisfaction in the form itself.
as “fetishism (commodity)”
The gap between the stupid reality of a commodity-thing and its fetishized image, Žižek argues this gap is not a capitalist distortion imposed on sexuality but is already inscribed in sexuality itself as taught by Freud.
Implicitly operative in Žižek's account of how capitalist subjects engage in sacrifice while believing they pursue self-interest, ideology works not as illusion but as a socially real abstraction that structures practice.
as “impersonal beliefs”
Beliefs that function as social facts and structure collective behaviour even though no individual actually holds them, sustained by the Big Other; illustrated by Father Christmas: everyone knows it's pretend yet the belief operates socially.
Paralleling impersonal beliefs, an enjoyment that cannot be attributed to any individual subject but belongs to the system itself, as when the capitalist does not personally enjoy but 'the capital itself enjoys its multiplication.'
Distinguished from Ego Ideal, the Superego is not a higher moral agency but a sadistic, insatiable injunction to enjoy whose paradox is that the more you obey it the guiltier you become, Žižek argues this is the dominant psychic structure today.
as “Ideal Ego / Ego Ideal / Superego (Lacanian triad)”
Žižek deploys Lacan's three-way distinction: Ideal Ego is my idealized self-image; Ego Ideal is the gaze I perform for; Superego is the cruel, punishing agency that commands enjoyment, a refinement of Freud's binary.
Lacan's nom-du-père as the symbolic prohibition that sustains desire by providing the transgression it feeds on; its decline in late modernity does not liberate but instead produces narcissistic disorder and obscene superego figures.
Without the symbolic prohibition to transgress, desire itself vanishes; hence paradoxically, the permissive society must compensate with hyper-regulation (political correctness codes, consent contracts) that produces new, more diffuse oppression.
The condition that every bearer of authority must accept: authority is conferred by the insignia/ritual (external to the person), not inherent, the authority is always already a failure at the empirical level.
as “cynical distance”
Jacques-Alain Miller's (and implicitly Sloterdijk's) stance: knowing every symbolic authority is a fake yet acting as if one believes, in order to keep desire alive, Žižek acknowledges this as insufficient and proposes sincerely assuming a groundless authority instead.
as “oppression / repression / depression (triad)”
Žižek distinguishes three psychopolitical modes: oppression (external constraint), repression (immanent self-blocking of desire), and depression (loss of the capacity to desire itself, 'the loss of the loss'), arguing contemporary subjects increasingly suffer the third.
as “loss of the loss”
Žižek's formulation for depression: not the loss of an object but the loss of the very capacity to desire and to experience loss, the affective correlate of full permissiveness without prohibition.
Inverted by Žižek: psychoanalysis and honest politics must throw out the clean baby (the fantasy of pure, equal, healthy sex or desire) and learn to enjoy only the dirty water, the constitutive excess and perversion that makes desire possible.
Stories he reaches for 7
The Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn, told that his films contained too many old clichés, responded by ordering his scenario department to 'produce more new clichés.' Žižek takes this seriously: creating new clichés, new stable routines, is our post-pandemic task.
“We need more new clichés.”
In the Soviet Union, criticizing Stalin was forbidden; but it was even more forbidden to publicly announce that criticism of Stalin was forbidden, meta-prohibition as the deepest level of ideological control.
“It was even more prohibited to announce this publicly. You were immediately arrested if you said 'in our country we are not allowed to criticize comrade Stalin.'”
During an economic crisis, people who can no longer afford to buy things still enter Walmart, fill a cart with items, and abandon it at the door, getting the pleasure of the purchasing ritual without any actual purchase. Pure surplus enjoyment extracted from the form alone.
“They just go in there, throw things in, the pleasure is simply this procedure of playing the game as if you are buying things, and then they leave.”
On a porn film set, a male performer loses his erection while with a real partner and recovers it by watching hardcore porn on his phone. Eva Wiseman finds this apocalyptic; Žižek argues it perfectly illustrates that sexuality is structurally dependent on fantasy-supplement even with a 'real' partner present.
“He was looking for a phantasmatic support of his performance.”
In the finale of Mozart's Don Giovanni, the protagonist sings 'Since I spend my money freely, I want to be amused', Žižek calls this the most anti-capitalist motto imaginable, because a capitalist never spends money for amusement but always to generate more money.
“Giacché spendo i miei danari, io mi voglio divertir. It is difficult to imagine a more anti-capitalist motto.”
A petty crook (Vittorio De Sica) is coerced by Germans into impersonating the dead General della Rovere in prison. He fully inhabits the role, refuses to betray prisoners' secrets, and ultimately accepts execution as della Rovere. Žižek uses this as an ethical paradigm: sincerely assuming a groundless authority, without cynicism, and being prepared to die for it.
“He dies as General della Rovere. That's the paradox that we have to accept.”
Žižek confesses he is an obsessional neurotic who enjoys excessively washing his hands, far beyond any rational pandemic requirement. This illustrates that one can enjoy not just transgression but oppression and compliance itself.
“I am among them, who enjoy—I am an obsessional neurotic—who enjoy obeying these rules, like I excessively wash my hands.”
Works invoked 6
Don Giovanni opera
Mozart's opera cited for the finale aria 'Giacché spendo i miei danari, io mi voglio divertir' as the most anti-capitalist motto imaginable, illustrating the difference between capitalist reinvestment-logic and pure expenditure for pleasure.
Bakhtin's book on carnival, noted to have been written in the 1930s as a reaction to Stalinist purges; the carnival concept from it is invoked and then turned against progressive uses.
Jon Ronson's podcast about internet pornography; the anecdote of the porn actor losing and recovering his erection via Pornhub is drawn from it and used to illustrate the constitutive role of fantasy in sexuality.
The Ego and the Id book
Freud's essay; Žižek highlights that its true novelty is the introduction of the Superego as a third term beyond Ego and Id, re-read through Lacan.
Short essay by Rainer Paris on the pandemic's destruction of everyday routine; cited approvingly as diagnosing the threat to the customs that hold society together.
Described as 'one of the most beautiful that I know Italian films'; deployed as the key ethical example of sincerely assuming groundless authority without cynicism.
People invoked 21
Eva Wiseman negative
Cited for a Guardian column on Jon Ronson's podcast about internet pornography; her conclusion that studying porn leads toward 'a healthy relationship with sexuality' is rejected, Žižek argues sexuality is constitutively unhealthy.
Todd McGowan positive
Described as 'my friend'; his Lacanian explanation of capitalism's resilience (capitalism incorporates the paradox of desire) is cited approvingly at length, including a direct quotation.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout: surplus enjoyment, plus-de-jouir, the Big Other, Superego/Ego Ideal/Ideal Ego triad, the theft of enjoyment, the Name of the Father, and symbolic castration are all deployed via Lacan. Žižek credits Lacan with predicting in the early 1970s that globalization would produce a new racism structured around the theft of enjoyment.
Roland Barthes positive
Cited for the claim that 'language as such is maybe a fascist phenomenon'; Žižek uses this as a springboard to assert analogously that 'capitalism as such is in some sense a sexual phenomenon.'
Cited as the theorist of carnival (via his book on Rabelais, written in the 1930s as a reaction to Stalinist purges); the concept is then turned against progressive uses of carnival.
Rainer Paris positive
Cited for a short essay 'Die Zerstörung des Alltags' (The Destruction of Everyday Life) describing the pandemic's threat to the routines holding society together.
Robert Pfaller positive
Credited with the notion of 'impersonal beliefs', beliefs that function as social facts though no individual holds them, and the parallel notion of 'impersonal enjoyment'; both are deployed approvingly.
Donald Trump positive
Cited as the paradigm case of the 'obscene master', the figure that emerges when symbolic authority declines: 'an absolute obscene master, overpresent.' The January 6th storming is analysed through his framework.
Cited as the maker of The Butterfly Effect podcast about internet porn, from which the anecdote about the porn actor and Pornhub is drawn.
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as 'my friend'; credited with applying Walter Benjamin's 'Dialektik im Stillstand' to the pandemic situation.
Pierre Legendre negative
Along with other Lacanians, Legendre's claim that the core problem today is the decline of paternal authority is noted as 'interesting' but ultimately 'to be rejected', though it correctly points to how the decline of the master can engender more oppressive domination.
Byung-Chul Han positive
Cited approvingly for the concept of the 'compulsion to achieve' (Leistungszwang) and the argument that pandemic fatigue is worse in the West; a substantial passage is quoted from Han on social media, ego culture, and loss of ritual.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Miller's solution of 'cynical distance' (act as if you believe in authority while knowing it's fake) is described as 'a very sad' and 'too simple' response to the crisis of symbolic authority; Žižek rejects it in favor of sincerely assuming groundless authority.
Darian Leader positive
Cited approvingly for showing how people (including Žižek himself) enjoy obeying pandemic rules (hand-washing) excessively, an illustration that one can enjoy oppression itself, not only transgression.
Roberto Rossellini positive
Director of Il Generale della Rovere, described as 'one of the most beautiful that I know Italian films'; recommended enthusiastically.
Mentioned as the actor playing the crook-turned-della Rovere in Rossellini's Il Generale della Rovere.
Hannah Arendt positive
Quoted at length on the false abdication of parental responsibility, the refusal of adults to assume authority over children, as a diagnosis of modern crisis; cited approvingly as having 'seen this problem very clearly.'
Walter Benjamin positive
His concept 'Dialektik im Stillstand' (dialectics at a standstill) is borrowed by Dolar and cited approvingly as capturing the pandemic's frozen-yet-transforming temporality.
Samuel Goldwyn positive
The Hollywood producer whose eccentric memo, 'We need more new clichés', is taken by Žižek as surprisingly wise advice for the post-pandemic task of rebuilding stable everyday customs.
Karl Marx positive
Marx's concept of surplus value (Mehrwert) is the structural template enabling Lacan's surplus enjoyment (Mehrlust); the homology between the two is described as 'the predominant motive which permits all Lacan's references to Marx's analysis of commodities.'
Sigmund Freud positive
Freud's Lustgewinn, the Ego/Id/Superego triad, and the lesson that sexuality is constitutively pathological and fantasy-structured are all mobilized positively; Žižek notes Lacan refined Freud's three-way distinction more precisely.
What it argues
pandemic fatigue and the destruction of everyday lifesurplus enjoyment and the paradox of desire under capitalismsexuality as intrinsically perverted and fantasy-dependentthe decline of paternal symbolic authority and the return of the obscene superegoimpersonal belief and impersonal enjoymentthe impossibility of 'clean' desire without its dirty excesstheft of enjoyment and contemporary racism
Dialectical moves 12
“Although obeying repetitive stable customs is supposed to make life tiresome, what we are now tired of is precisely the absence of such stable customs.”
Pandemic fatigue inverts the usual logic: it is not boredom from routine but exhaustion from the lack of any routine that afflicts us.
“The big break that we are anxiously awaiting is already happening.”
The feeling of numb standstill masks the fact that unprecedented change is already underway, stasis is itself a form of transformation.
“The paradox is that with the pandemic, the continuous being on display is even strengthened by lockdown and homework.”
Lockdown, expected to relieve performative pressure, intensifies it by channeling all social contact through Zoom, isolation amplifies self-exposure.
“Repression of desire reverts into desire of repression.”
When a pleasure is prohibited and punished, the ritual of punishment itself becomes the object of enjoyment, surplus always emerges even from renunciation.
“In capitalism, hedonism and asceticism coincide.”
Capitalism presents itself as oriented toward pleasure but structurally demands perpetual sacrifice of present satisfaction for future gain, the two apparent opposites are the same movement.
“The more you obey Superego commands, the more you are guilty.”
Superego is not a moral restraint but a trap: compliance produces not satisfaction but heightened guilt and further demands, obedience is self-defeating.
“The decline of paternal authority does not bring more open personal freedom. No, it poses a serious obstacle to the emancipatory process.”
Less symbolic authority yields not liberation but narcissistic disorder and the return of far more oppressive obscene superego figures.
“Only a psychotic is a king who thinks that he is really a king in himself.”
Legitimate authority requires accepting that it is conferred externally (by insignia, ritual, the symbolic order), believing one's authority is intrinsic is psychotic.
“The true transgression is to stick strictly to the rule of prohibition.”
In communities where certain prohibitions are expected to be violated in prescribed ways, literal obedience to the explicit rule is the real transgression.
“Far from being an external distortion imposed on a healthy sexuality by pornography or capitalism, the gap between bodily reality and fantasy is already inscribed into sexuality itself.”
The phantasmatic supplement is not a corruption of sex but its constitutive condition, Freud's lesson.
“You throw out the healthy baby and begin to learn to enjoy only the dirty water.”
The inversion of the proverb: psychoanalysis asks us to abandon the fantasy of clean, equal desire and accept that what remains after purification, the dirty water of excess and perversion, is sex itself.
“Symbolic authority declines, the obscene master returns.”
When the dignified symbolic master-figure loses authority, it does not disappear but returns in a ridiculous, superego-driven, obscene form (Trump as example).
Claims 15
asserts
Pandemic fatigue is not tiredness of repetition but tiredness of the absence of stable customs—we are exhausted by living in a permanent state of exception.pandemic fatigue and the role of routine
rejects
The January 6th Capitol storming was a carnival, not a coup attempt, and carnival cannot serve as a model for progressive protest because it is equally the form of Kristallnacht and mass lynchings.carnival as a model for emancipatory politics
asserts
Contemporary racism is structured around the Lacanian 'theft of enjoyment'—the fantasy that an Other is stealing or monopolizing a jouissance that is rightfully ours.the libidinal structure of racism and populist resentment
asserts
Capitalism is uniquely resilient because it incorporates the basic paradox of human desire—that desire aims not at satisfaction but at its own self-reproduction—rather than promising false closure.capitalism's ideological durability
asserts
Capitalism makes hedonism and asceticism coincide: it presents sacrifice and renunciation as the means to future satisfaction while concealing that the promise of satisfaction is only a ploy to sustain sacrifice.the sacrificial logic of capitalism
asserts
Global capitalism cannot truly contain or integrate the Covid crisis because the crisis makes the sacrificial truth of capitalism explicit—people are openly asked to die to keep the economy going.capitalism's encounter with the pandemic
asserts
Human sexuality is in itself perverted and fantasy-structured; the gap between bodily reality and the universe of fantasy is not produced by patriarchy or capitalism but is constitutive of sexuality as such.the nature of human sexuality
reframes
Today's consumerism is perverse, not hysterical: subjects know in advance the commodity will not satisfy them but go through the process anyway, finding pleasure in the form of purchasing itself.the psychic structure of consumerism
asserts
The decline of paternal symbolic authority does not produce emancipation but rather pathological narcissism and the return of the obscene superego (e.g. Trump as obscene master).the consequences of the decline of symbolic authority
rejects
Jacques-Alain Miller's solution of cynical distance (act as if you believe in authority while knowing it's fake) is insufficient; instead, one must sincerely assume groundless authority and be ready to die for it.Miller's cynical-distance solution to the crisis of authority
asserts
There exist prohibitions we are not only permitted but obliged to violate, and conversely things officially allowed that are in fact dangerous to do—ideology operates through this double register of explicit and implicit rules.the double register of ideological prohibition
asserts
Permissiveness does not free desire but kills it, because desire is sustained by the prospect of transgression; the permissive society compensates with politically correct hyper-regulation.permissiveness and the fate of desire
reframes
The goal of psychoanalysis is not to liberate desire toward some pure, healthy form but to displace and accept the constitutive impossibility and paradox of desire itself.the aim of psychoanalysis
asserts
We cannot get rid of the 'dirty water' of fantasy, excess, and perversion while keeping the 'baby' of healthy sexuality; psychoanalysis teaches us to enjoy only the dirty water once the clean baby is discarded.fantasy, excess, and the impossibility of clean desire
rejects
Eva Wiseman's conclusion—that studying internet pornography can lead us toward a healthy relationship with sexuality—is wrong, because sexuality is constitutively unhealthy.the normative ideal of healthy sexuality
Quotes 15
“We need more new clichés.”Slavoj Žižek · the post-pandemic task of creating new stable routines
“The big break that we are anxiously awaiting is already happening.”Slavoj Žižek · stasis as disguised transformation
“Enjoyment is not to be confused here with sexual or other direct pleasures. It is a deeper satisfaction in our specific way of life or in paranoia about the Other's way of life.”Slavoj Žižek · jouissance as way-of-life satisfaction versus direct pleasure
“Repression of desire reverts into desire of repression.”Slavoj Žižek · the perverse dialectic of renunciation and surplus enjoyment
“Capitalism hides sacrifice and thus enables us to find our satisfaction in it without ever avowing the link between sacrifice and satisfaction.”Todd McGowan · capitalism's concealment of its own sacrificial logic
“In capitalism, hedonism and asceticism coincide.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's paradoxical fusion of pleasure-seeking and self-denial
“Every sexual interaction is potentially structured like masturbation with a real partner. I use the flesh and body of my partner as a prop to realize or enact my fantasies.”Slavoj Žižek · the constitutive role of fantasy in all sexual interaction
“Something is rotten in the state of sex as such. Human sexuality is in itself perverted, exposed to sado-masochistic reversals.”Slavoj Žižek · sexuality as constitutively pathological
“The more you obey Superego commands, the more you are guilty.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of the Superego
“Only a psychotic is a king who thinks that he is really a king in himself.”Slavoj Žižek · symbolic castration as condition of legitimate authority
“The true transgression is to stick strictly to the rule of prohibition.”Slavoj Žižek · the double register of ideological prohibition
“You throw out the healthy baby and begin to learn to enjoy only the dirty water.”Slavoj Žižek · psychoanalysis inverts the proverb: accept perverse excess, discard the dream of clean desire
“The goal of psychoanalysis is not to liberate desire, but to accept and just to displace the impossibility, paradox of human desire.”Slavoj Žižek · psychoanalytic aim as accepting impossibility rather than achieving liberation
“Depression is not prohibition, depression is the loss of the loss. We lose desire, ability to desire itself.”Slavoj Žižek · depression as loss of the capacity to desire
“It is as though parents are daily saying: 'In this world, even we are not very securely at home… You must try to make out the best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call us to account. We are innocent, we wash our hands of you.'”Slavoj Žižek · Hannah Arendt on the false abdication of parental/political authority
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Greetings to all of you to the Festival of Torino Spirituality. Grazia a voi, and it's a great honor for me to be here. I found it a wonderful idea to have such a festival in such a crazy time, where not only our daily habits are interrupted, but in a way we are getting tired after the long pandemic of desire itself. The Covid fatigue extends now, I noticed, even into theory. At the beginning of I simply got tired of writing new and new comments on the pandemic. The same situation was dragging on and on, and one gets tired of making the same point again and again. The paradox is here that although obeying repetitive and stable customs is supposed to make life tiresome, what we are now tired of is precisely the absence of such stable customs. We are tired of living in a permanent state of exception, awaiting new regulations from the state that tell us how to interact. We are unable to relax in our daily life. Among many others, Rainer Paris published in late a short essay, "Die Zerstörung des Alltags," describing the destruction of everyday life. The pandemic poses a threat to routines which hold a society together. What does this mean? One of the best Goldwynisms, eccentric statements attributed to the legendary Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn, tells how, after he, Goldwyn, was informed that critics complained how there are too many old clichés in his films, he, Goldwyn, wrote a memo to his scenario department saying, "We need more new clichés." He was right. This is our very difficult task today, to create new clichés for our ordinary lives. There are, of course, great cultural differences in how this fatigue operates. Byung-Chul Han is right when he points out that Covid fatigue is much greater in Western developed societies because subjects live here more than elsewhere under the oppression of what Byung-Chul Han calls the compulsion to achieve, a quote from Han: "Social media turn all of us into producers, entrepreneurs whose selves are the business. It globalizes the ego culture that erodes community, erodes anything social. We produce ourselves and put ourselves on permanent display. This self-production, this ongoing being on display of the ego makes us tired and depressed. Fundamental tiredness is ultimately a kind of ego tiredness. The home office intensifies it by entangling us even deeper into ourselves. Other people who could distract us from our ego are missing. An absence of ritual is another reason for the tiredness induced by the home office. In the name of flexibility, we are losing the fixed temporal structures and architectures that stabilize and invigorate life." End of quote. Now, one would have thought that if depressive tiredness is caused by the way we are all the time self-exposing in late capitalism, then the pandemic lockdown should make things easier since we are much more time socially isolated. We experience less pressure to perform for others. Unfortunately, the effect is almost the opposite one. Our business and social contacts are to a large extent transferred onto the Zoom, as we are doing it now, Zoom and other social media where we play the game of self-exposing even more intensively, attentive of how we will appear there, while the space for socializing where we can relax and escape the pressure to exhibit is largely eliminated. The paradox is thus that with the pandemic, the continuous being on display is even strengthened by lockdown and homework. One tries to shine with energy on Zoom, but one sits tired and alone at home. My friend Mladen Dolar designated our situation with the term borrowed from Walter Benjamin, "Dialektik im Stillstand," dialectics at a standstill, but also in suspense, awaiting anxiously that things will begin to move, that the new will explode. However, the feeling of standstill, the numbness, the growing unresponsiveness, which lead more and more people to ignore news and to stop even caring about the future, is very deceptive. It masks the fact that we are within an unprecedented social change. Since the rise of the pandemic, the global capitalist order has changed immensely. The big break that we are anxiously awaiting is already happening. How does this strange mixture of fatigue and uncontrollable change affect our capacity to desire? Well, let's begin with some basics. We ultimately experience enjoyment, *jouissance*, as mediated by some figure of the Big Other. It is the Other's enjoyment, inaccessible to us, like woman's enjoyment for men, another ethnic group's enjoyment for our group, and so on. Or it is our rightful enjoyment stolen from us by an Other or threatened by an Other. This dimension of the theft of enjoyment played, for example, a crucial role when we all know the scene when Donald Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6th, What happened was not an attempt of a coup d'état, but a carnival. The idea that carnivals can serve as the model for progressive protest movements, the idea that such protests are carnivalesque not only in their form and atmosphere, theatrical performances, humorous chants and so on, but also in their non-centralized organization, this idea I think is deeply problematic. Let's take a brief look into history. Was the infamous Kristallnacht in half-organized, half-spontaneous outburst of violent attacks on Jewish homes, synagogues, businesses, and the people themselves in Germany, was it not a carnival? Furthermore, is carnival not also the name for the obscene underside of power, from gang rapes to mass lynchings? Let us not forget that Mikhail Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais, which is written in the 1930s, as a direct reaction to the carnival of the Stalinist purges. Traditionally, in resisting those in power, one of the strategies of the lower classes has always been to use terrifying display of brutality to disturb the middle-class sense of decency. But again, with the events on Capitol, carnival lost its innocence. Most of the Capitol protesters we know now flew from their affluent suburbs to Washington, ready to die for the cause of their white privilege. This is true, but many of them were also part of a lower middle class which sees their privileges threatened by the imagined coalition of big business, new digital media corporations, banks, state administration controlling our daily lives, imposing lockdowns, masks and so on, natural catastrophes, pandemic, forest fires and others, the poor, other races, LGBT and so on, who are allegedly exhausting the state's financial resources, compelling the state to raise taxes. Central is here the category of "our way of life": socializing in bars and cafeterias or in large sport events, free car movement, the right to possess guns, rejection of everything that poses a threat to these freedoms like masks and lockdowns, and rejection of state control. Everything that poses a threat to this way of life is denounced as a plot. This way of life is clearly not class-neutral. It is the way of life of the white middle class who perceive themselves as the true embodiment of what America is about. So when we hear that the agent of this conspiracy did not just steal elections but is taking from us, gradually eroding our way of life, we should apply here another category, that of the theft of enjoyment. Jacques Lacan predicted way back in the early 1970s that capitalist globalization will rise to a new mode of racism focused on the figure of an Other who either threatens to snatch from us our enjoyment, the deep satisfaction provided by our way of life, or itself possess and display an excessive enjoyment that eludes our grasp, like anti-Semitic fantasies about secret Jewish rituals, white fantasies about superior sexual prowess of the black man, the perception in the United States of Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers and so on. Enjoyment is not to be confused here with sexual or other direct pleasures. It is a deeper satisfaction in our specific way of life or in paranoia about the Other's way of life. What disturbs us in the Other is usually even embodied in small details of daily life, like the usual liberal tells us today something like: "I don't have anything against Jews, Arabs, Africans and so on, I just don't like the smell of their food, or their music is too loud for me," and so on and so on, something disturbs you, their laughter is too loud and so on. So this enjoyment, which is not direct enjoyment but enjoyment in a certain way of life, is, I claim, close to what Jacques Lacan called surplus enjoyment. Surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir*, as something that adds itself to, let's call it, the zero-level enjoyment. Now, we should bear in mind that it was Marx's notion of surplus value, *Mehrwert*, which enabled Lacan to deploy his notion of surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrlust*. The predominant motive which permits all Lacan's references to Marx's analysis of commodities is the structural homology between surplus value and surplus enjoyment. Freud called this surplus *Lustgewinn*, a gain of pleasure, which does not designate a simple stepping up of pleasure, but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours, obstacles in our effort to attain a pleasure. A crazy example that a friend of mine told me from the United States is what he saw in a big Walmart store. When he exited the store, he found there many shopping carts full of items thrown into them, but the shopping carts were simply abandoned there. He asked what is going on, and he was told that because of the economic crisis, many people cannot afford to buy a lot as they were used to. You know, you go to a big store, you have a cart, you just throw things in. So they don't buy anything. They just go in there, throw things in, the pleasure is simply this procedure of playing the game as if you are buying things, and then they leave the store. They buy nothing. They get a pure surplus, just the surplus without the basic game. Another example of *Lustgewinn* would be the standard experience of psychopathology. A certain prohibition forces you to renounce a pleasure, but then in a typically perverted way, you start to enjoy rituals of renunciation themselves. Repression of desire reverts into desire of repression. For example, you know that you will be punished for some prohibited act, the traditional example, by being beaten or whipped, and then you start to enjoy this very procedure of whipping, beating yourself, and so on. You know. So the lesson here is that you cannot escape these obscene pleasures. Even if you renounce pleasure, a surplus emerges, you start to enjoy rituals of self-humiliation of renunciation itself. This is how capitalist consumerism works. It may appear that capitalist consumerism is inherently hysterical because the game of consumerism is: you buy this, you expect that this will be the real thing what brings you full satisfaction, but you are always disappointed. This is not it. So okay, let's buy another object. It's again not it, not what you were really looking for, and then the game goes on endlessly. But I don't think it functions like that. I think that today's consumerism is a form of perversion, which means that you know in advance that what you will buy, a certain type of shoes, of hat, or whatever, will not satisfy you. You know that this is not it. But nonetheless, you go through the process on and on and on. It's a cynical stance. You don't expect anything, but nonetheless, the form as such of going on buying things satisfies you. Now, this brings us to capitalism. Why does capitalism today exert such ideological fascination? Why does it appear capitalism to many people as the social order that best fits human nature? Even many leftists privately admit that capitalism is the only thing that really works and they resign themselves to a more welfare and human rights-oriented capitalism, abandoning socialism as an impossible, unworkable utopia. Here I would like to refer to the work of my friend Todd McGowan, who provided a Lacanian explanation of the resiliency of capitalism. McGowan boldly admits that in some, of course very qualified sense, capitalism effectively fits human nature, namely, in contrast to pre-modern social orders which obfuscate the paradox of human desire, which presume that desire is structured in a straightforward teleological way: we humans strive towards some ultimate goal, but it happens, sorry, but happiness, ultimate goal, be it happiness or another kind of material or spiritual fulfillment, and we want to find peace and satisfaction in achieving this goal. But capitalism is the first and only social order that incorporates into its functioning the basic paradox of human desire. This paradox concerns the functioning of surplus in our libidinal economy. Whatever we achieve is never "that." We always want something else, something more. And the ultimate aim of our desire is not to achieve some ultimate goal, but to reproduce its own endless self-reproduction in an ever-expanded form. This is why the imbalance of the system defines capitalism. Capitalism can only thrive through its own constant self-undermining and revolutionizing. The paradox is that because we desire the surplus that eludes every object, our very orientation towards pleasure and satisfaction compels us permanently to sacrifice available satisfaction on behalf of some satisfaction to come. In capitalism, hedonism and asceticism coincide. Or to quote the concise recapitulation of this paradox by Todd McGowan, a brief quote: "Capitalism hides sacrifice and thus enables us to find our satisfaction in it without ever avowing, admitting, the link between sacrifice and satisfaction. All satisfaction depends on some form of sacrifice, of time, of resources, of utility, and so on. But capitalism disguises sacrifice as self-interest, which enables capitalist subjects to engage in satisfying sacrifice while believing they are just pursuing their self-interest." It's clear the idea of this paradox. Again, to recapitulate, according to Jacques Lacan, our desire is not really to achieve the goal but to reproduce itself as a desire. I want that, but I never get it, and I don't want ever to get it. I just want to again and again search for it. And this is how capitalism works. Yes, it is oriented towards consumerist satisfaction and so on, but you never want to be there. You always say, okay, I will rather invest this and sacrifice my recent pleasures for some future satisfaction which of course never comes. So capitalism is a paradox of hedonism which pushes us to sacrifice all the time. Now, there is another aspect in how capitalism and sexuality are linked. You know, Roland Barthes said years ago, language as such is maybe a fascist phenomenon. I am tempted to say that capitalism as such is in some sense a sexual phenomenon, incorporating the basic paradox of human sexuality. That is to say, capitalism and sexuality imply a homologous structure. We enjoy the fetishized image of a commodity, not the thing itself, that is this commodity. We often criticize capitalism as fetishized: you don't get the real object, you are just satisfied by images and so on and so on. And we claim this is how sexuality works under capitalist conditions. But I think that this gap between the stupid reality of the thing and its image is already inscribed into sexuality itself. This is the lesson of Freud. Let me explain this. About a little bit over a year ago, Eva Wiseman wrote a comment for *The Guardian* magazine where she refers to a moment in *The Butterfly Effect*, Jon Ronson's podcast series about internet porn. She refers to a scene where on the set of a porn film, an actor, in the middle of doing it, penetrating a lady, loses his erection. Now, to get the erection back, he turns away from the woman whom he was penetrating, who was lying naked beneath him, he grabs his phone and searches Pornhub, some hardcore pornography. And for Eva Wiseman, this is almost apocalyptic. She comments to it: "Something is rotten in the state of sex." What shocks her is that while you are there with the real woman, doing it with her, you lose erection. So you need to escape to your iPhone, to digital space, to visual pornography, in order to get excited again to do it in reality. But for psychoanalysis, this is not just unnatural wrong sexuality. Something is rotten in the state of sex as such. Human sexuality is in itself perverted, exposed to sado-masochistic reversals and specifically to the mixture of reality and fantasy. Even when I am alone with my partner, my sexual interaction with him or her is inextricably intertwined with my fantasies. Every sexual interaction is potentially structured like masturbation with a real partner. I use the flesh and body of my partner as a prop to realize or enact my fantasies. So we cannot reduce the gap between the bodily reality of me and my partner and the universe of fantasies to a distortion opened up by patriarchy or social domination and exploitation. The gap is here from the very beginning. So I must say I quite understand the actor who, in order to regain erection, searched Pornhub. He was looking for a phantasmatic support of his performance. It is for this same reason that as part of the sexual intercourse, one partner sometimes asks the other to go on talking, usually narrating something dirty. Even when you hold in your hands the thing itself, the beloved partner's naked body, this presence has to be supplemented by verbal fantasizing. So back to Eva Wiseman. She concludes her comment by saying, by attempting to understand the shadowed new landscape of porn, we may come closer to a healthy relationship with our own sexuality. But I think this is a wrong conclusion because sexuality is in itself not quite healthy. The shadowy aspect of pornography, these aspects do not just disturb from outside some kind of healthy sexuality. But sexuality itself is rendered possible by all the unhealthy fantasies, excesses and so on and so on. So back to my main line: pleasure, sacrifice, capitalism. Capitalism obfuscates the paradox of desire by permanently dangling before us, producers, before our producers' and consumers' eyes, the promise of some future satisfaction. In short, instead of admitting that the promise of future satisfaction is just an illusory ploy to justify the present sacrifice and renunciation, capitalism turns things around and presents sacrifices and renunciations as means to achieve future satisfaction. Once this devilish logic of surplus is directly mobilized, there is no return to pre-capitalist balance. I don't think there is any chance that we say we get rid of all these digital supplements, we want directly the real thing. No, we cannot step out of it. All we can do is to fully accept, admit sacrifice as such, to find directly pleasure in sacrifice without masking it as a promise of some future satisfaction. This is why I also claim global capitalism cannot really contain or integrate the Covid crisis. As we have seen, capitalism is in its core sacrificial. Instead of immediately consuming the profit, we should reinvest it. Full satisfaction is forever postponed. In the finale of Mozart's *Don Giovanni*, Don Giovanni triumphantly sings: "*Giacché spendo i miei danari, io mi voglio divertir*." Since I spend my money freely, I want to be amused. It is difficult to imagine a more anti-capitalist motto. A capitalist doesn't spend his money to be amused but to get more money. However, this sacrifice is not experienced as such. It is concealed. With the Covid epidemics, however, the sacrificial truth of capitalism comes out. How? We are openly solicited to sacrifice some of our lives even now to keep the economy going. I'm referring here to how some of Donald Trump's followers, in a reaction to pandemic, directly demanded that people over should accept to die to keep the US capitalist way of life going. Of course, workers in dangerous professions were risking their lives for centuries, and of course not to mention the horrors of colonization and so on and so on. But the risk is now directly spelled out, not only for the poor, and we simply are not able to assume this, to openly assume this paradox of sacrifice, this weird coincidence of hedonism—in capitalism you take care about your self-interest—and radical asceticism, sacrifice yourself, your present happiness. Another aspect of the same paradox: Robert Pfaller elaborated a wonderful notion of impersonal beliefs, beliefs which function as a social fact and which determine how we act although we don't really believe. The usual excuse of individuals is something like: "I know it's probably not true, but I follow the rules because they are a constituent part of my community." So the status of these impersonal beliefs—nobody believes in them, but they structure our reality—is that of the Big Other. I don't believe in it, but some other anonymous other believes in it. An extremely stupid, simple example, how do you call it, Babbo Natale, presents for Christmas and so on and so on. We parents buy the presents, we know that we bought them. Children know that we just pretend that it's Babbo Natale. So everybody knows that it's a play, nobody believes in Babbo Natale, but nonetheless, this belief functions socially. We act as if we believe in it. Now, the idea of Pfaller is that in parallel with impersonal beliefs, there is also something we should call impersonal enjoyment, enjoyment which cannot be attributed directly to a subject. It's as it were the system itself which enjoys. And this is how the standard capitalist functions. He doesn't enjoy. A good capitalist works day and night. But it is as if he is fascinated by this circular movement in which capital itself enjoys its multiplication. Already this brief overview makes it clear that desire and enjoyment are not simple, basic natural propensities. They involve intricate paradoxes. We all probably know at least the title of Freud's essay, *The Ego and the Id*. But you know, the true novelty of this essay, it's not simply Ego and the Id, but it's the third term, Superego. Now, what is Superego? Superego is not a higher moral agency. If one reads Freud closely, we see that as Lacan pointed out, that Superego, *Über-Ich*, is at its most basic the injunction to enjoy. To enjoy is not a matter of following one's spontaneous tendencies. It's rather that this excessive enjoyment, participate in orgies, do it and so on, it's usually even painful at the direct level. You obey a strangely twisted perverted notion of ethical commandment, of ethical duty. In this sense, Lacan was more precise than Freud. He elaborated a distinction between three terms which Freud treats as equal: Ideal Ego, Ego Ideal, and Superego. Ideal Ego is simply the idealized image of myself, how I would like to appear. But Ego Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image. When I try to appear beautiful, attractive, it's always for some presupposed gaze that I am acting. The Superego is something different. It's a revengeful, sadistic, punishing agency. It's a cruel, insatiable agency which bombards me with impossible demands and mocks my failed attempts to meet these demands. The agency in the eyes of which I'm all the more guilty the more I try to suppress my strivings and meet Superego demands. That's, as Freud saw it clearly, the paradox of Superego: the more you obey its commands, the more you are guilty. And today, I think we are more and more in the domain of Superego. Ego Ideal, social normativity embodied in a Big Other, are disintegrated. We are more and more, I simplify the image of course, caught in a narcissistic struggle of ideal egos which are pushed by some insatiable superego demand to enjoy. Even patriarchal authority, fathers today, behave more and more as ideal egos. They no longer dare to assume the authority of a father. The paradox is that such a situation with the declining paternal authority does not bring more open personal freedom. No, it poses a serious obstacle to the emancipatory process. How? Let me explain this a little bit. If the symbolic law, Name of the Father, is losing its authority, that is to say, if there is no prohibition, then desire itself, sustained by the prospect to transgress it, vanishes. This is why permissiveness kills desire. Along these lines, Pierre Legendre and some other Lacanians—I don't agree with them but nonetheless it's an interesting idea—claim that the problem today is the decline of the paternal authority. In its absence, pathological narcissism explodes, evoking the specter of this primordial father, the pure superego authority which enjoins us to, commands us to enjoy. Now, although this idea is to be rejected, it correctly points out how the decline of the master figure, symbolic authority, again in no way automatically guarantees emancipation. It can well engender much more oppressive figures of domination. So what is the solution here? Jacques-Alain Miller's solution, a very sad one, is cynicism. We know every symbolic authority is a fake. We know authority is in itself impotent. But if we openly admit this, our desire is sabotaged, is blocked. So we should, although we know that there is no true, authentic symbolic authority, that every authority is a semblance, a fake, we should act as if we believe in it. Only in this way we can somehow keep our desire alive. I think that this cynical solution is a little bit too simple. Why? First, let's look at it from the standpoint of the father. Every authority has to rely on what Jacques Lacan called symbolic castration. Not I, the bearer of authority, itself is castrated. Let's say if I'm a king, I have to accept that the ritual of investiture makes me a king. My authority is embodied in the insignia that I wear. So my authority is in some sense external to me. As Lacan put it, only a psychotic is a king who thinks that he is really a king in himself. That's why being a father is by definition a failure. No empirical father can live up to his symbolic function, to his title. I'm always a failure as a father. How should we come to terms with this paradox? Again, Miller's solution is cynical distance. I am aware that I'm always a failure as a symbolic authority, but I should act as if, with a cynical distance, as if I believe that I have the authority. There are three possibilities to deal with this failure of authority. One is to accept the impossibility of acting with authority, to say, okay, I renounce my authority, I don't care, I know I'm impotent and so on and so on. The other possibility is to make oneself a neutral expert. Okay, I have no authority, but I simply report what I know and the authority is in the expert knowledge. But we cannot so easily escape the figure of a master. So in these conditions of expert rule—like today mostly authority apropos Covid is not that of a master, it's medical doctors who tell us, science tells us that this is what we have to do and so on and so on—but this doesn't work. So the master figure returns, not as a figure of dignity, but as a ridiculous, obscene master. Symbolic authority declines, the obscene master, almost I would say the real of a master, pure superego entity, returns. Wasn't Donald Trump this? An absolute obscene master, overpresent. But we cannot, again this is obviously an almost psychotic solution, we cannot deal with things in such a simple way. What's the problem? Hannah Arendt saw this problem very clearly. A quote from Hannah Arendt: "Modern man could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the world, for his disgust with things as they are, than by his refusal to assume in respect to his children responsibility for all this. It is as though parents are daily saying: 'In this world, even we are not very securely at home. How to move about it, what to know, what skills to master are mysterious to us too. You must try to make out,' we should say our children, 'the best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call us to account. We are innocent, we wash our hands of you.'" This solution of course, as Hannah Arendt knows very well, is false. Like we cannot say, children expect from us authority. We cannot tell to our, say to our children, "Listen, I have no authority, I am also lost in this world so find your way, I don't want to assume authority." Nonetheless, the paradox is that, but not in Miller's cynical way, we should act as if we know, but not in a cynical way. Although we know very well that we don't have any justification to really act as if we know, we should sincerely be ready to risk our lives—this is the ethical act—to risk our lives assuming an authority for which we don't have well real authority to assume it. And I would like to take here an example from one of the most beautiful that I know Italian films. Please look at it, take a look, you can get it for free on pirate bays if you don't know it, Roberto Rossellini's from late '50s, early '60s, I think, *Il Generale Della Rovere*. It's a movie about an ordinary small crook, played by Vittorio De Sica, who is in '44, I think, in Northern Italy, I think in Genoa, I'm not sure, arrested by Germans. And they tell him, "You look like General della Rovere, a big hero of resistance to us fascists. So we want to put you to prison because other prisoners will think that you are really della Rovere. So they will confide in you, they will tell you what," but the real General della Rovere is dead. Prisoners don't know this, that they will accept you as if, because you look like him, that you are della Rovere and they will tell you all the secret details and so on and so on. So Vittorio De Sica character does this, assumes an authority which is definitely not his, it's a fake. But then, in a beautiful ethical gesture, not only he doesn't tell the Germans what he learned from other prisoners, but he identifies fully with his role of General della Rovere and at the end, when Germans tell him, "Okay, enough of the game, you will die, we will shoot you as if you really want to act as General della Rovere then we will sentence you to death you will be shot," he graciously accepts this. He dies as General della Rovere. That's the paradox that we have to accept. Then again to conclude slowly. So this is one way how authority can function authentically, but in a not cynical way: that we fully assume with full responsibility, being ready to go to death, that we assume authority for which we are not authorized. Next paradox which complicates things here: there are prohibitions we are not only permitted to violate but we are obliged to violate, so that the true transgression is to stick strictly to the rule of prohibition. For example, in every community, departments at university, workplaces and so on, certain things are prohibited, but you are silently expected to violate these prohibitions. Just in a certain way. For example, I remember this was my big epiphany ideological on how ideology works. In the army, things were prohibited. But even officers directly solicited us to act in prohibited ways. There were dirty sexualized rituals and so on and so on. And you were simply considered stupid if you did not violate the explicit rules in certain ways. Then an even more complex example, that prohibitions can themselves be prohibited. Certain things are officially allowed but in reality you shouldn't do them. It can be dangerous. Like extreme example, in Stalinist Soviet Union, it was prohibited of course to criticize Stalin. But it was even more prohibited to announce this publicly. You were immediately arrested if you said "in our country we are not allowed to criticize comrade Stalin" and so on and so on. Then this brings us to the ultimate paradox, which I already mentioned, that we don't only enjoy when we violate a prohibition. We can enjoy oppression itself. For example, Darian Leader showed how obeying the rules imposed by authorities in the pandemic, wash your hands and so on, it's not only that many of us find pleasure in violating these rules. There are also people, sorry to tell you I am among them, who enjoy—I am an obsessional neurotic—who enjoy obeying these rules, like I excessively wash my hands, it's irrational from the standpoint of pandemic. No, I enjoy oppression itself. Next thing we should do here is to get clearly the opposition between oppression, repression, there are even three terms. Okay, first it's oppression, repression. They are not the same. Oppression is external, repression is the immanent self-blocking of desire. And then we have depression. What is depression? Depression is not prohibition, depression is the loss of the loss. We lose desire, ability to desire itself. And this is I think what we are more and more experiencing today in our so-called permissive times. We are no longer dealing with old repression or more radically oppression. We are dealing with permissiveness, but then we get new regulations justified by this permissivity itself. People say yes, of course, the goal of our life is to enjoy healthy sex and so on, but to guarantee this enjoyment you get caught in usually politically correct and so on numerous new regulations, regulations, not direct prohibitions. Like "to have a free sex," no domination, no power exercise, no humiliation, no aggressiveness and so on and so on. And of course, this is the big paradox today. We want, we think we live in a permissive society, but this society is overregulated through politically correct rules, you never know when you will make a mistake and so on and so on. What's the problem here? The problem is to admit the basic fact that again this power distortions, domination, brutality, masochism, self-objectivization is not something external to sexuality. Sexuality, if there is a lesson of Freud, it is that sexuality is in itself pathological, unhealthy if you want and so on and so on, so that if you want pure, equal sexuality, sexuality which is based on mutual agreement—you know both has in some countries it's already the law, like in some parts of Australia, that to have sex you have both parties have to sign an agreement that they both freely concede to sexual act and so on and so on—the problem is that in this way we get a dream of pure sex without the surplus. What if I find satisfaction in the very element of violence? I am not incidentally I am not justifying rape here, quite on the contrary. But I think things are more complex here because one thing is rape, another thing is an element of violence which can in itself bring enjoyment. And the problem is that as they say the old classical proverb: "when you are throwing out of a bathtub a glass sorry the dirty water you should be aware not to throw out also the baby which was taking a bath washing in it." This I claim is impossible to do. That's why the ultimate lesson of capitalism, actual especially today in this new form of consumerism called political correctness, healthy sex and so on, is just two conclusive statements. First: no, you cannot throw out the dirty water and keep the baby. The goal of psychoanalysis should be exactly the opposite one. You throw out the healthy baby—any dream of a just, democratic, equal sex and so on—and you begin learn to enjoy only the dirty water. Sex is not the clean baby, sex is the dirty water which remains after you throw out, after you get rid of the baby. Second, this is the first thing, the big lesson. Second thing, this is why the goal of psychoanalysis is not and general what we should today is not to strive for some pure sexuality, but to accept, to acknowledge not to liberate desire, but to accept and just to displace the impossibility, paradox of human desire.
Greetings to all of you to the Festival of Torino Spirituality. Grazia a voi, and it's a great honor for me to be here. I found it a wonderful idea to have such a festival in such a crazy time, where not only our daily habits are interrupted, but in a way we are getting tired after the long pandemic of desire itself. The Covid fatigue extends now, I noticed, even into theory. At the beginning of I simply got tired of writing new and new comments on the pandemic. The same situation was dragging on and on, and one gets tired of making the same point again and again. The paradox is here that although obeying repetitive and stable customs is supposed to make life tiresome, what we are now tired of is precisely the absence of such stable customs. We are tired of living in a permanent state of exception, awaiting new regulations from the state that tell us how to interact. We are unable to relax in our daily life. Among many others, Rainer Paris published in late a short essay, "Die Zerstörung des Alltags," describing the destruction of everyday life. The pandemic poses a threat to routines which hold a society together. What does this mean? One of the best Goldwynisms, eccentric statements attributed to the legendary Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn, tells how, after he, Goldwyn, was informed that critics complained how there are too many old clichés in his films, he, Goldwyn, wrote a memo to his scenario department saying, "We need more new clichés." He was right. This is our very difficult task today, to create new clichés for our ordinary lives. There are, of course, great cultural differences in how this fatigue operates. Byung-Chul Han is right when he points out that Covid fatigue is much greater in Western developed societies because subjects live here more than elsewhere under the oppression of what Byung-Chul Han calls the compulsion to achieve, a quote from Han: "Social media turn all of us into producers, entrepreneurs whose selves are the business. It globalizes the ego culture that erodes community, erodes anything social. We produce ourselves and put ourselves on permanent display. This self-production, this ongoing being on display of the ego makes us tired and depressed. Fundamental tiredness is ultimately a kind of ego tiredness. The home office intensifies it by entangling us even deeper into ourselves. Other people who could distract us from our ego are missing. An absence of ritual is another reason for the tiredness induced by the home office. In the name of flexibility, we are losing the fixed temporal structures and architectures that stabilize and invigorate life." End of quote. Now, one would have thought that if depressive tiredness is caused by the way we are all the time self-exposing in late capitalism, then the pandemic lockdown should make things easier since we are much more time socially isolated. We experience less pressure to perform for others. Unfortunately, the effect is almost the opposite one. Our business and social contacts are to a large extent transferred onto the Zoom, as we are doing it now, Zoom and other social media where we play the game of self-exposing even more intensively, attentive of how we will appear there, while the space for socializing where we can relax and escape the pressure to exhibit is largely eliminated. The paradox is thus that with the pandemic, the continuous being on display is even strengthened by lockdown and homework. One tries to shine with energy on Zoom, but one sits tired and alone at home. My friend Mladen Dolar designated our situation with the term borrowed from Walter Benjamin, "Dialektik im Stillstand," dialectics at a standstill, but also in suspense, awaiting anxiously that things will begin to move, that the new will explode. However, the feeling of standstill, the numbness, the growing unresponsiveness, which lead more and more people to ignore news and to stop even caring about the future, is very deceptive. It masks the fact that we are within an unprecedented social change. Since the rise of the pandemic, the global capitalist order has changed immensely. The big break that we are anxiously awaiting is already happening. How does this strange mixture of fatigue and uncontrollable change affect our capacity to desire? Well, let's begin with some basics. We ultimately experience enjoyment, *jouissance*, as mediated by some figure of the Big Other. It is the Other's enjoyment, inaccessible to us, like woman's enjoyment for men, another ethnic group's enjoyment for our group, and so on. Or it is our rightful enjoyment stolen from us by an Other or threatened by an Other. This dimension of the theft of enjoyment played, for example, a crucial role when we all know the scene when Donald Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6th, What happened was not an attempt of a coup d'état, but a carnival. The idea that carnivals can serve as the model for progressive protest movements, the idea that such protests are carnivalesque not only in their form and atmosphere, theatrical performances, humorous chants and so on, but also in their non-centralized organization, this idea I think is deeply problematic. Let's take a brief look into history. Was the infamous Kristallnacht in half-organized, half-spontaneous outburst of violent attacks on Jewish homes, synagogues, businesses, and the people themselves in Germany, was it not a carnival? Furthermore, is carnival not also the name for the obscene underside of power, from gang rapes to mass lynchings? Let us not forget that Mikhail Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais, which is written in the 1930s, as a direct reaction to the carnival of the Stalinist purges. Traditionally, in resisting those in power, one of the strategies of the lower classes has always been to use terrifying display of brutality to disturb the middle-class sense of decency. But again, with the events on Capitol, carnival lost its innocence. Most of the Capitol protesters we know now flew from their affluent suburbs to Washington, ready to die for the cause of their white privilege. This is true, but many of them were also part of a lower middle class which sees their privileges threatened by the imagined coalition of big business, new digital media corporations, banks, state administration controlling our daily lives, imposing lockdowns, masks and so on, natural catastrophes, pandemic, forest fires and others, the poor, other races, LGBT and so on, who are allegedly exhausting the state's financial resources, compelling the state to raise taxes. Central is here the category of "our way of life": socializing in bars and cafeterias or in large sport events, free car movement, the right to possess guns, rejection of everything that poses a threat to these freedoms like masks and lockdowns, and rejection of state control. Everything that poses a threat to this way of life is denounced as a plot. This way of life is clearly not class-neutral. It is the way of life of the white middle class who perceive themselves as the true embodiment of what America is about. So when we hear that the agent of this conspiracy did not just steal elections but is taking from us, gradually eroding our way of life, we should apply here another category, that of the theft of enjoyment. Jacques Lacan predicted way back in the early 1970s that capitalist globalization will rise to a new mode of racism focused on the figure of an Other who either threatens to snatch from us our enjoyment, the deep satisfaction provided by our way of life, or itself possess and display an excessive enjoyment that eludes our grasp, like anti-Semitic fantasies about secret Jewish rituals, white fantasies about superior sexual prowess of the black man, the perception in the United States of Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers and so on. Enjoyment is not to be confused here with sexual or other direct pleasures. It is a deeper satisfaction in our specific way of life or in paranoia about the Other's way of life. What disturbs us in the Other is usually even embodied in small details of daily life, like the usual liberal tells us today something like: "I don't have anything against Jews, Arabs, Africans and so on, I just don't like the smell of their food, or their music is too loud for me," and so on and so on, something disturbs you, their laughter is too loud and so on. So this enjoyment, which is not direct enjoyment but enjoyment in a certain way of life, is, I claim, close to what Jacques Lacan called surplus enjoyment. Surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir*, as something that adds itself to, let's call it, the zero-level enjoyment. Now, we should bear in mind that it was Marx's notion of surplus value, *Mehrwert*, which enabled Lacan to deploy his notion of surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrlust*. The predominant motive which permits all Lacan's references to Marx's analysis of commodities is the structural homology between surplus value and surplus enjoyment. Freud called this surplus *Lustgewinn*, a gain of pleasure, which does not designate a simple stepping up of pleasure, but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours, obstacles in our effort to attain a pleasure. A crazy example that a friend of mine told me from the United States is what he saw in a big Walmart store. When he exited the store, he found there many shopping carts full of items thrown into them, but the shopping carts were simply abandoned there. He asked what is going on, and he was told that because of the economic crisis, many people cannot afford to buy a lot as they were used to. You know, you go to a big store, you have a cart, you just throw things in. So they don't buy anything. They just go in there, throw things in, the pleasure is simply this procedure of playing the game as if you are buying things, and then they leave the store. They buy nothing. They get a pure surplus, just the surplus without the basic game. Another example of *Lustgewinn* would be the standard experience of psychopathology. A certain prohibition forces you to renounce a pleasure, but then in a typically perverted way, you start to enjoy rituals of renunciation themselves. Repression of desire reverts into desire of repression. For example, you know that you will be punished for some prohibited act, the traditional example, by being beaten or whipped, and then you start to enjoy this very procedure of whipping, beating yourself, and so on. You know. So the lesson here is that you cannot escape these obscene pleasures. Even if you renounce pleasure, a surplus emerges, you start to enjoy rituals of self-humiliation of renunciation itself. This is how capitalist consumerism works. It may appear that capitalist consumerism is inherently hysterical because the game of consumerism is: you buy this, you expect that this will be the real thing what brings you full satisfaction, but you are always disappointed. This is not it. So okay, let's buy another object. It's again not it, not what you were really looking for, and then the game goes on endlessly. But I don't think it functions like that. I think that today's consumerism is a form of perversion, which means that you know in advance that what you will buy, a certain type of shoes, of hat, or whatever, will not satisfy you. You know that this is not it. But nonetheless, you go through the process on and on and on. It's a cynical stance. You don't expect anything, but nonetheless, the form as such of going on buying things satisfies you. Now, this brings us to capitalism. Why does capitalism today exert such ideological fascination? Why does it appear capitalism to many people as the social order that best fits human nature? Even many leftists privately admit that capitalism is the only thing that really works and they resign themselves to a more welfare and human rights-oriented capitalism, abandoning socialism as an impossible, unworkable utopia. Here I would like to refer to the work of my friend Todd McGowan, who provided a Lacanian explanation of the resiliency of capitalism. McGowan boldly admits that in some, of course very qualified sense, capitalism effectively fits human nature, namely, in contrast to pre-modern social orders which obfuscate the paradox of human desire, which presume that desire is structured in a straightforward teleological way: we humans strive towards some ultimate goal, but it happens, sorry, but happiness, ultimate goal, be it happiness or another kind of material or spiritual fulfillment, and we want to find peace and satisfaction in achieving this goal. But capitalism is the first and only social order that incorporates into its functioning the basic paradox of human desire. This paradox concerns the functioning of surplus in our libidinal economy. Whatever we achieve is never "that." We always want something else, something more. And the ultimate aim of our desire is not to achieve some ultimate goal, but to reproduce its own endless self-reproduction in an ever-expanded form. This is why the imbalance of the system defines capitalism. Capitalism can only thrive through its own constant self-undermining and revolutionizing. The paradox is that because we desire the surplus that eludes every object, our very orientation towards pleasure and satisfaction compels us permanently to sacrifice available satisfaction on behalf of some satisfaction to come. In capitalism, hedonism and asceticism coincide. Or to quote the concise recapitulation of this paradox by Todd McGowan, a brief quote: "Capitalism hides sacrifice and thus enables us to find our satisfaction in it without ever avowing, admitting, the link between sacrifice and satisfaction. All satisfaction depends on some form of sacrifice, of time, of resources, of utility, and so on. But capitalism disguises sacrifice as self-interest, which enables capitalist subjects to engage in satisfying sacrifice while believing they are just pursuing their self-interest." It's clear the idea of this paradox. Again, to recapitulate, according to Jacques Lacan, our desire is not really to achieve the goal but to reproduce itself as a desire. I want that, but I never get it, and I don't want ever to get it. I just want to again and again search for it. And this is how capitalism works. Yes, it is oriented towards consumerist satisfaction and so on, but you never want to be there. You always say, okay, I will rather invest this and sacrifice my recent pleasures for some future satisfaction which of course never comes. So capitalism is a paradox of hedonism which pushes us to sacrifice all the time. Now, there is another aspect in how capitalism and sexuality are linked. You know, Roland Barthes said years ago, language as such is maybe a fascist phenomenon. I am tempted to say that capitalism as such is in some sense a sexual phenomenon, incorporating the basic paradox of human sexuality. That is to say, capitalism and sexuality imply a homologous structure. We enjoy the fetishized image of a commodity, not the thing itself, that is this commodity. We often criticize capitalism as fetishized: you don't get the real object, you are just satisfied by images and so on and so on. And we claim this is how sexuality works under capitalist conditions. But I think that this gap between the stupid reality of the thing and its image is already inscribed into sexuality itself. This is the lesson of Freud. Let me explain this. About a little bit over a year ago, Eva Wiseman wrote a comment for *The Guardian* magazine where she refers to a moment in *The Butterfly Effect*, Jon Ronson's podcast series about internet porn. She refers to a scene where on the set of a porn film, an actor, in the middle of doing it, penetrating a lady, loses his erection. Now, to get the erection back, he turns away from the woman whom he was penetrating, who was lying naked beneath him, he grabs his phone and searches Pornhub, some hardcore pornography. And for Eva Wiseman, this is almost apocalyptic. She comments to it: "Something is rotten in the state of sex." What shocks her is that while you are there with the real woman, doing it with her, you lose erection. So you need to escape to your iPhone, to digital space, to visual pornography, in order to get excited again to do it in reality. But for psychoanalysis, this is not just unnatural wrong sexuality. Something is rotten in the state of sex as such. Human sexuality is in itself perverted, exposed to sado-masochistic reversals and specifically to the mixture of reality and fantasy. Even when I am alone with my partner, my sexual interaction with him or her is inextricably intertwined with my fantasies. Every sexual interaction is potentially structured like masturbation with a real partner. I use the flesh and body of my partner as a prop to realize or enact my fantasies. So we cannot reduce the gap between the bodily reality of me and my partner and the universe of fantasies to a distortion opened up by patriarchy or social domination and exploitation. The gap is here from the very beginning. So I must say I quite understand the actor who, in order to regain erection, searched Pornhub. He was looking for a phantasmatic support of his performance. It is for this same reason that as part of the sexual intercourse, one partner sometimes asks the other to go on talking, usually narrating something dirty. Even when you hold in your hands the thing itself, the beloved partner's naked body, this presence has to be supplemented by verbal fantasizing. So back to Eva Wiseman. She concludes her comment by saying, by attempting to understand the shadowed new landscape of porn, we may come closer to a healthy relationship with our own sexuality. But I think this is a wrong conclusion because sexuality is in itself not quite healthy. The shadowy aspect of pornography, these aspects do not just disturb from outside some kind of healthy sexuality. But sexuality itself is rendered possible by all the unhealthy fantasies, excesses and so on and so on. So back to my main line: pleasure, sacrifice, capitalism. Capitalism obfuscates the paradox of desire by permanently dangling before us, producers, before our producers' and consumers' eyes, the promise of some future satisfaction. In short, instead of admitting that the promise of future satisfaction is just an illusory ploy to justify the present sacrifice and renunciation, capitalism turns things around and presents sacrifices and renunciations as means to achieve future satisfaction. Once this devilish logic of surplus is directly mobilized, there is no return to pre-capitalist balance. I don't think there is any chance that we say we get rid of all these digital supplements, we want directly the real thing. No, we cannot step out of it. All we can do is to fully accept, admit sacrifice as such, to find directly pleasure in sacrifice without masking it as a promise of some future satisfaction. This is why I also claim global capitalism cannot really contain or integrate the Covid crisis. As we have seen, capitalism is in its core sacrificial. Instead of immediately consuming the profit, we should reinvest it. Full satisfaction is forever postponed. In the finale of Mozart's *Don Giovanni*, Don Giovanni triumphantly sings: "*Giacché spendo i miei danari, io mi voglio divertir*." Since I spend my money freely, I want to be amused. It is difficult to imagine a more anti-capitalist motto. A capitalist doesn't spend his money to be amused but to get more money. However, this sacrifice is not experienced as such. It is concealed. With the Covid epidemics, however, the sacrificial truth of capitalism comes out. How? We are openly solicited to sacrifice some of our lives even now to keep the economy going. I'm referring here to how some of Donald Trump's followers, in a reaction to pandemic, directly demanded that people over should accept to die to keep the US capitalist way of life going. Of course, workers in dangerous professions were risking their lives for centuries, and of course not to mention the horrors of colonization and so on and so on. But the risk is now directly spelled out, not only for the poor, and we simply are not able to assume this, to openly assume this paradox of sacrifice, this weird coincidence of hedonism—in capitalism you take care about your self-interest—and radical asceticism, sacrifice yourself, your present happiness. Another aspect of the same paradox: Robert Pfaller elaborated a wonderful notion of impersonal beliefs, beliefs which function as a social fact and which determine how we act although we don't really believe. The usual excuse of individuals is something like: "I know it's probably not true, but I follow the rules because they are a constituent part of my community." So the status of these impersonal beliefs—nobody believes in them, but they structure our reality—is that of the Big Other. I don't believe in it, but some other anonymous other believes in it. An extremely stupid, simple example, how do you call it, Babbo Natale, presents for Christmas and so on and so on. We parents buy the presents, we know that we bought them. Children know that we just pretend that it's Babbo Natale. So everybody knows that it's a play, nobody believes in Babbo Natale, but nonetheless, this belief functions socially. We act as if we believe in it. Now, the idea of Pfaller is that in parallel with impersonal beliefs, there is also something we should call impersonal enjoyment, enjoyment which cannot be attributed directly to a subject. It's as it were the system itself which enjoys. And this is how the standard capitalist functions. He doesn't enjoy. A good capitalist works day and night. But it is as if he is fascinated by this circular movement in which capital itself enjoys its multiplication. Already this brief overview makes it clear that desire and enjoyment are not simple, basic natural propensities. They involve intricate paradoxes. We all probably know at least the title of Freud's essay, *The Ego and the Id*. But you know, the true novelty of this essay, it's not simply Ego and the Id, but it's the third term, Superego. Now, what is Superego? Superego is not a higher moral agency. If one reads Freud closely, we see that as Lacan pointed out, that Superego, *Über-Ich*, is at its most basic the injunction to enjoy. To enjoy is not a matter of following one's spontaneous tendencies. It's rather that this excessive enjoyment, participate in orgies, do it and so on, it's usually even painful at the direct level. You obey a strangely twisted perverted notion of ethical commandment, of ethical duty. In this sense, Lacan was more precise than Freud. He elaborated a distinction between three terms which Freud treats as equal: Ideal Ego, Ego Ideal, and Superego. Ideal Ego is simply the idealized image of myself, how I would like to appear. But Ego Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image. When I try to appear beautiful, attractive, it's always for some presupposed gaze that I am acting. The Superego is something different. It's a revengeful, sadistic, punishing agency. It's a cruel, insatiable agency which bombards me with impossible demands and mocks my failed attempts to meet these demands. The agency in the eyes of which I'm all the more guilty the more I try to suppress my strivings and meet Superego demands. That's, as Freud saw it clearly, the paradox of Superego: the more you obey its commands, the more you are guilty. And today, I think we are more and more in the domain of Superego. Ego Ideal, social normativity embodied in a Big Other, are disintegrated. We are more and more, I simplify the image of course, caught in a narcissistic struggle of ideal egos which are pushed by some insatiable superego demand to enjoy. Even patriarchal authority, fathers today, behave more and more as ideal egos. They no longer dare to assume the authority of a father. The paradox is that such a situation with the declining paternal authority does not bring more open personal freedom. No, it poses a serious obstacle to the emancipatory process. How? Let me explain this a little bit. If the symbolic law, Name of the Father, is losing its authority, that is to say, if there is no prohibition, then desire itself, sustained by the prospect to transgress it, vanishes. This is why permissiveness kills desire. Along these lines, Pierre Legendre and some other Lacanians—I don't agree with them but nonetheless it's an interesting idea—claim that the problem today is the decline of the paternal authority. In its absence, pathological narcissism explodes, evoking the specter of this primordial father, the pure superego authority which enjoins us to, commands us to enjoy. Now, although this idea is to be rejected, it correctly points out how the decline of the master figure, symbolic authority, again in no way automatically guarantees emancipation. It can well engender much more oppressive figures of domination. So what is the solution here? Jacques-Alain Miller's solution, a very sad one, is cynicism. We know every symbolic authority is a fake. We know authority is in itself impotent. But if we openly admit this, our desire is sabotaged, is blocked. So we should, although we know that there is no true, authentic symbolic authority, that every authority is a semblance, a fake, we should act as if we believe in it. Only in this way we can somehow keep our desire alive. I think that this cynical solution is a little bit too simple. Why? First, let's look at it from the standpoint of the father. Every authority has to rely on what Jacques Lacan called symbolic castration. Not I, the bearer of authority, itself is castrated. Let's say if I'm a king, I have to accept that the ritual of investiture makes me a king. My authority is embodied in the insignia that I wear. So my authority is in some sense external to me. As Lacan put it, only a psychotic is a king who thinks that he is really a king in himself. That's why being a father is by definition a failure. No empirical father can live up to his symbolic function, to his title. I'm always a failure as a father. How should we come to terms with this paradox? Again, Miller's solution is cynical distance. I am aware that I'm always a failure as a symbolic authority, but I should act as if, with a cynical distance, as if I believe that I have the authority. There are three possibilities to deal with this failure of authority. One is to accept the impossibility of acting with authority, to say, okay, I renounce my authority, I don't care, I know I'm impotent and so on and so on. The other possibility is to make oneself a neutral expert. Okay, I have no authority, but I simply report what I know and the authority is in the expert knowledge. But we cannot so easily escape the figure of a master. So in these conditions of expert rule—like today mostly authority apropos Covid is not that of a master, it's medical doctors who tell us, science tells us that this is what we have to do and so on and so on—but this doesn't work. So the master figure returns, not as a figure of dignity, but as a ridiculous, obscene master. Symbolic authority declines, the obscene master, almost I would say the real of a master, pure superego entity, returns. Wasn't Donald Trump this? An absolute obscene master, overpresent. But we cannot, again this is obviously an almost psychotic solution, we cannot deal with things in such a simple way. What's the problem? Hannah Arendt saw this problem very clearly. A quote from Hannah Arendt: "Modern man could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction with the world, for his disgust with things as they are, than by his refusal to assume in respect to his children responsibility for all this. It is as though parents are daily saying: 'In this world, even we are not very securely at home. How to move about it, what to know, what skills to master are mysterious to us too. You must try to make out,' we should say our children, 'the best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call us to account. We are innocent, we wash our hands of you.'" This solution of course, as Hannah Arendt knows very well, is false. Like we cannot say, children expect from us authority. We cannot tell to our, say to our children, "Listen, I have no authority, I am also lost in this world so find your way, I don't want to assume authority." Nonetheless, the paradox is that, but not in Miller's cynical way, we should act as if we know, but not in a cynical way. Although we know very well that we don't have any justification to really act as if we know, we should sincerely be ready to risk our lives—this is the ethical act—to risk our lives assuming an authority for which we don't have well real authority to assume it. And I would like to take here an example from one of the most beautiful that I know Italian films. Please look at it, take a look, you can get it for free on pirate bays if you don't know it, Roberto Rossellini's from late '50s, early '60s, I think, *Il Generale Della Rovere*. It's a movie about an ordinary small crook, played by Vittorio De Sica, who is in '44, I think, in Northern Italy, I think in Genoa, I'm not sure, arrested by Germans. And they tell him, "You look like General della Rovere, a big hero of resistance to us fascists. So we want to put you to prison because other prisoners will think that you are really della Rovere. So they will confide in you, they will tell you what," but the real General della Rovere is dead. Prisoners don't know this, that they will accept you as if, because you look like him, that you are della Rovere and they will tell you all the secret details and so on and so on. So Vittorio De Sica character does this, assumes an authority which is definitely not his, it's a fake. But then, in a beautiful ethical gesture, not only he doesn't tell the Germans what he learned from other prisoners, but he identifies fully with his role of General della Rovere and at the end, when Germans tell him, "Okay, enough of the game, you will die, we will shoot you as if you really want to act as General della Rovere then we will sentence you to death you will be shot," he graciously accepts this. He dies as General della Rovere. That's the paradox that we have to accept. Then again to conclude slowly. So this is one way how authority can function authentically, but in a not cynical way: that we fully assume with full responsibility, being ready to go to death, that we assume authority for which we are not authorized. Next paradox which complicates things here: there are prohibitions we are not only permitted to violate but we are obliged to violate, so that the true transgression is to stick strictly to the rule of prohibition. For example, in every community, departments at university, workplaces and so on, certain things are prohibited, but you are silently expected to violate these prohibitions. Just in a certain way. For example, I remember this was my big epiphany ideological on how ideology works. In the army, things were prohibited. But even officers directly solicited us to act in prohibited ways. There were dirty sexualized rituals and so on and so on. And you were simply considered stupid if you did not violate the explicit rules in certain ways. Then an even more complex example, that prohibitions can themselves be prohibited. Certain things are officially allowed but in reality you shouldn't do them. It can be dangerous. Like extreme example, in Stalinist Soviet Union, it was prohibited of course to criticize Stalin. But it was even more prohibited to announce this publicly. You were immediately arrested if you said "in our country we are not allowed to criticize comrade Stalin" and so on and so on. Then this brings us to the ultimate paradox, which I already mentioned, that we don't only enjoy when we violate a prohibition. We can enjoy oppression itself. For example, Darian Leader showed how obeying the rules imposed by authorities in the pandemic, wash your hands and so on, it's not only that many of us find pleasure in violating these rules. There are also people, sorry to tell you I am among them, who enjoy—I am an obsessional neurotic—who enjoy obeying these rules, like I excessively wash my hands, it's irrational from the standpoint of pandemic. No, I enjoy oppression itself. Next thing we should do here is to get clearly the opposition between oppression, repression, there are even three terms. Okay, first it's oppression, repression. They are not the same. Oppression is external, repression is the immanent self-blocking of desire. And then we have depression. What is depression? Depression is not prohibition, depression is the loss of the loss. We lose desire, ability to desire itself. And this is I think what we are more and more experiencing today in our so-called permissive times. We are no longer dealing with old repression or more radically oppression. We are dealing with permissiveness, but then we get new regulations justified by this permissivity itself. People say yes, of course, the goal of our life is to enjoy healthy sex and so on, but to guarantee this enjoyment you get caught in usually politically correct and so on numerous new regulations, regulations, not direct prohibitions. Like "to have a free sex," no domination, no power exercise, no humiliation, no aggressiveness and so on and so on. And of course, this is the big paradox today. We want, we think we live in a permissive society, but this society is overregulated through politically correct rules, you never know when you will make a mistake and so on and so on. What's the problem here? The problem is to admit the basic fact that again this power distortions, domination, brutality, masochism, self-objectivization is not something external to sexuality. Sexuality, if there is a lesson of Freud, it is that sexuality is in itself pathological, unhealthy if you want and so on and so on, so that if you want pure, equal sexuality, sexuality which is based on mutual agreement—you know both has in some countries it's already the law, like in some parts of Australia, that to have sex you have both parties have to sign an agreement that they both freely concede to sexual act and so on and so on—the problem is that in this way we get a dream of pure sex without the surplus. What if I find satisfaction in the very element of violence? I am not incidentally I am not justifying rape here, quite on the contrary. But I think things are more complex here because one thing is rape, another thing is an element of violence which can in itself bring enjoyment. And the problem is that as they say the old classical proverb: "when you are throwing out of a bathtub a glass sorry the dirty water you should be aware not to throw out also the baby which was taking a bath washing in it." This I claim is impossible to do. That's why the ultimate lesson of capitalism, actual especially today in this new form of consumerism called political correctness, healthy sex and so on, is just two conclusive statements. First: no, you cannot throw out the dirty water and keep the baby. The goal of psychoanalysis should be exactly the opposite one. You throw out the healthy baby—any dream of a just, democratic, equal sex and so on—and you begin learn to enjoy only the dirty water. Sex is not the clean baby, sex is the dirty water which remains after you throw out, after you get rid of the baby. Second, this is the first thing, the big lesson. Second thing, this is why the goal of psychoanalysis is not and general what we should today is not to strive for some pure sexuality, but to accept, to acknowledge not to liberate desire, but to accept and just to displace the impossibility, paradox of human desire.