The Idea of Communism and its Actuality
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-03-23 · 2:06:59 · 16,576 words
communism-socialismideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismtechnology-ai-cyberspacereligion-theologygeopolitics-wardemocracyhistory
Delivered during a period of UK student strikes and austerity protests (circa 2011), Žižek argues that the left needs theory more than ever precisely when movements seem most urgent. He ranges across intellectual property and 'general intellect', the Arab Spring and geopolitical double standards (Libya vs. Bahrain), the Chinese famine under Mao, multiculturalism in Qatar, secular vs. Islamic critiques of seduction, Badiou's 'three negations' and the logic of communism as a Hegelian idea, and ends with a sustained attack on Jacques-Alain Miller's 'cynical hedonist liberalism' as a betrayal of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The process underway in Croatia and Greece by which popular protests strip the existing state machinery of its symbolic authority before any formal change of power.
Rather than Badiou's neo-Kantian regulative idea, Žižek reads 'idea' in the Hegelian sense: communism is an idea that contains within itself the power to actualize itself by mobilizing people to fight for it.
Marx's concept invoked to describe digital 'clouds', the collective intellectual commons of software and knowledge now owned by corporations rather than shared.
as “intellectual property”
Treated as a site of fundamental capitalist contradiction: knowledge products are 'in their very notion communist' yet increasingly privatized, making intellectual property one of capitalism's coming crises.
as “cloud (digital commons)”
Digital cloud computing is Žižek's contemporary name for Marx's general intellect, the externalized social mind that appears communal but is silently privatized and censored.
as “lifestyle ecologism”
Kojin Karatani's term (endorsed by Žižek) for the false ecological politics of individual consumption choices made by wealthy people, as opposed to structural change.
as “paraconsistent logic”
A logical system (da Costa, Brazilian school) in which the excluded middle holds but non-contradiction does not, both P and non-P can be simultaneously true, used by Žižek to describe how late capitalism functions as its own transgression.
Brouwer/Heyting logic that obeys non-contradiction but not excluded middle, allowing intermediate values, Badiou's model for social-democratic 'third way' politics.
Freud's utopian proposal (in the letter to Einstein and New Introductory Lectures) that humanity should collectively master its irrational unconscious, reread by Žižek as combining paraconsistent and intuitionist logics.
as “e pur si muove (ideological reading)”
Žižek rejects the naive empiricist reading of Galileo's phrase and proposes instead that 'and yet it moves' means: something can be denounced as false yet still function, the structure of ideological cynicism.
as “liberal Hegelians”
A 'disgusting freaky apparition' in Hegel studies (Pippin and the Pittsburgh school) who deflate Hegel into a theory of mutual recognition without ontological pretensions.
as “liberal Lacanians”
An emerging strand of Lacanism (exemplified by Miller's later position) that reduces psychoanalysis to cynical acceptance of social semblances and cultivation of personal jouissance.
The earlier Lacanian goal of analysis, confronting the fantasy structure, contrasted with the late Lacan/Miller's substitute goal of 'identifying with the symptom' or simply making life slightly easier.
as “cunning of reason (list der Vernunft)”
Hegel's concept deployed ironically: the early Lacan unwittingly relies on it when he tells patients to pursue truth and promises health will follow, a residual trust in the big Other.
as “big Other”
Invoked to describe the early Lacan's trust that pursuing truth will yield better outcomes, still relying on a 'big Other' (God, reason) to guarantee results, which the late Lacan then abandons.
as “jouissance (real of enjoyment)”
For Miller, jouissance is posited as the only real behind all symbolic semblances; Žižek rejects this, arguing it leads to cynical hedonism and that the real is instead the inconsistency of the symbolic order itself.
Lacan's formula ('those who are not taken in err') is reread by Žižek against Miller: it does not counsel cynical pretense that appearances are real, but insists the real is only in and through appearances.
as “the real as deadlock of symbolic formalization”
Lacan's formulation that the real is not an inaccessible beyond but the impossibility or limit inscribed within the symbolic itself, invoked against Miller's idea that the real is bodily jouissance behind semblances.
Against Miller's cynical equalization of all semblances, Žižek asserts there are semblances that carry the real within them, heroic acts, democratic ruptures, and these must be distinguished.
Stories he reaches for 3
The French satirist Alphonse Allais shows a woman and says 'beneath her dress she is completely naked', this is the real. The real is not behind appearances; it is only real beneath the appearance.
“Look that woman, what a shame, beneath her dress she is totally naked, no. This is the real. The real is the real only, you are only naked beneath your dress.”
In WWI, Germans telegraphed Austrians: 'situation serious but not catastrophic'; Austrians replied: 'with us, catastrophic but not serious.' Žižek uses this to capture our ideological predicament, we know things are catastrophic but cannot take it seriously.
“Germans to Austrians: 'Here the situation is serious but not catastrophic.' Austrians to Germans: 'With us the situation is catastrophic but not serious.'”
In Truffaut's 'Day for Night,' a man badgers a woman to sleep with him; when she finally starts to unbutton, he panics. Žižek uses this to describe Western liberal anxiety at Egypt's secular democracy: we kept asking Arabs to democratize but when they did it simply, we were shocked.
“Egypt was unbuttoning and this was our relation, no? Like, 'But how can you do my god, simply secular democracy?'”
Works invoked 10
Slumdog Millionaire film
Called 'shitty' but not totally bad; the torture scene (protagonist tortured by police merely on suspicion of cheating) is used as evidence that routine police torture of petty suspects in India is real.
Referenced for its short polemic against Žižek's Mao text; Žižek 'humbly' concedes the source criticism but defends his use of specific data.
Jameson's reading of this early Soviet negative utopia is endorsed: a world where 'perverts coexist in their space' (madman, paranoiac, hallucinator) is the communist ideal against Miller's liberal-individualist jouissance.
Used to illustrate Western liberal anxiety at Egypt's secular democratic uprising: the film's scene of a woman finally acquiescing sexually only to produce male panic is analogous to Egypt 'unbuttoning.'
The volume's critique of secular reason and defense of Islamic responses to blasphemy is engaged at length and ultimately rejected: Asad and Mahmood fail to see that the critique of seduction is internal to Western rationalism and that Islamic embodied practice is itself a mode of seduction.
Conceded to be an anti-communist book; Žižek uses only specific factual data (death toll numbers) while acknowledging the book's biased overall judgment.
Presented as the definitive account of the Great Leap Forward famine, uniquely credible because the author was a senior Xinhua journalist with access to all provincial archives; Chinese government silence rather than rebuttal is taken as admission of its truth.
Cited briefly as illustrating the capitalist logic of the parable of the talents: treat religion like money, invest, circulate, bring profit.
Described as 'Badiou at his best', Žižek takes it seriously and works through it carefully before arguing that Badiou too quickly dismisses the fourth logical option (negating both non-contradiction and excluded middle).
A 'wonderful film' despite Capra's pro-Mussolini politics; its Dickensian household of loveable eccentrics is read as an image of communist utopia, the kind of idiosyncratic coexistence capitalism's standardization forecloses.
People invoked 36
Their anti-communist biography of Mao is cited by Žižek only for specific data (death toll estimates); he concedes Badiou's point that it is a biased source but defends using it for those specific facts.
Brazilian logician credited with paraconsistent logic, the third form of negation in Badiou's taxonomy, which Žižek uses for his own analysis of contemporary capitalism.
Udi Aloni positive
Friend who made a documentary on Kashmir; mentioned in support of the argument that Indian treatment of Kashmiris and lower castes is ignored by liberal multiculturalists.
Yang Jisheng positive
Senior Xinhua journalist who spent years compiling provincial statistics on the Great Leap Forward famine and wrote 'Mubei' (Tombstone); Žižek regards his evidence as definitive and his survival in China as tacit state admission that the book is true.
Blaise Pascal positive
Listed alongside Tolstoy as a 'truly radical Christian theologian' who exemplifies Christianity's capacity for internal self-questioning.
Robert Brandom negative
The 'liberal Hegelians' (Pippin et al.) are described as a 'disgusting freaky apparition' that deflates Hegel into a theory of mutual recognition with no ontological pretensions.
Utsa Patnaik positive
Delhi economist who argued India's ongoing hunger deaths are underreported; Žižek agrees with her on this point.
Srećko Horvat positive
Croatian friend cited for information about massive underreported demonstrations in Croatia.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority; Žižek distinguishes the earlier Lacan (ethics of truth, traversing the fantasy) from the late Lacan (identifying with the symptom) and defends the earlier against Miller's appropriation of the later.
Organizer of the 'Is Critique Secular?' event; mentioned as part of the liberal feminist cluster without direct polemical engagement.
Francis Fukuyama negative
The left mocks him but is 'more Fukuyamaist than Fukuyama himself'; Fukuyama reportedly conceded privately to Žižek that 'the dream is over.'
Talal Asad negative
His argument in 'Is Critique Secular?' that Islam's condemnation of seduction is a critique of Western liberal corruption is engaged seriously but ultimately rejected: the critique of seduction is internal to Western rationalism.
Mentioned alongside Brown and the progressive Muslim scholars in the 'Is Critique Secular?' volume.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Bolivia's Vice President; a man who 'immediately started to exchange jokes' with Žižek; his anti-Badiou argument for seizing state power ('grab it and live the impossible') is endorsed.
Trofim Lysenko negative
His pseudo-scientific theory of intra-species solidarity (no competition within a species) is shown to have directly caused the agricultural catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward when the Chinese applied it to planting density.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as Žižek's best friend, against whose 'Three Negations' and 'Communist Hypothesis' he argues substantively while acknowledging affection, 'the only way to prove he is my best friend is to stick the knife into him all the time.'
Andrei Platonov positive
Author of the early Soviet novel 'Chevengur'; Jameson's reading of it as a communist utopia of coexisting 'perverts' is endorsed by Žižek against Miller.
Fredric Jameson positive
Introduced Žižek at Duke; his reading of Platonov's 'Chevengur' as communist utopia of coexisting 'perverts' is the source for Žižek's reading of Capra against Miller. Žižek introduced him as 'the great progressive bourgeois thinker.'
Wang Hui positive
Chinese philosopher friend who showed Žižek a photocopy of a North Korean textbook claiming the leader does not urinate.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
His notion of 'imitatio affecti' is cited alongside Descartes and Tolstoy as articulating a similar idea that affects/ideas operate as external germs controlling the subject.
Alphonse Allais positive
French satirist whose joke about a woman being 'naked beneath her dress' is the best illustration of Lacan's point that the real is only real beneath/within appearances, not behind them.
Claude Lefort positive
His description of the 'democratic revolution' (power's empty place) is invoked to illustrate how radical change in the order of appearances is possible even within bourgeois thought.
Kojin Karatani positive
Friend and source of 'lifestyle ecologism' critique; Žižek borrowed the title 'Parallax View' from him and endorses his post-Japan ecological analysis; his essay was rejected by the New York Times as too radical.
Richard Dawkins positive
His concept of memes is compared approvingly to Tolstoy's idea that good and bad ideas alike are germs that control us.
Frank Capra positive
Was privately pro-Mussolini but his film 'You Can't Take It With You' is read as encoding a communist utopia of coexisting eccentrics, the intellectual use is strongly positive despite the personal political note.
Kostas Douzinas positive
Called a 'pure-blood Englishman' ironically; source for the analysis that UK budget cuts are ideological rather than purely economic.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Target of sustained attack: his late-Lacanian 'cynical hedonist liberalism' and 'liberalism of jouissance' are characterized as politically conservative, theoretically false in Lacanian terms, and as a betrayal of Lacan.
François Truffaut positive
'Day for Night' is used as an allegory for Western liberal anxiety at Egypt's secular democracy.
Mao Zedong negative
The Great Leap Forward famine (tens of millions of deaths, knowingly accepted by the Politburo) is the central indictment; Žižek debates Badiouians who try to dismiss this as beneath the level of the Event.
Leo Tolstoy positive
'My hero', preferred over Dostoevsky; his radical idea that good and bad ideas alike are 'germs' that control us without our knowledge is compared to Richard Dawkins' memes and to Spinoza's imitatio affecti.
Saba Mahmood negative
Co-author in 'Is Critique Secular?'; her account of Islamic embodied practice as a 'labor of love' is challenged as itself describing a structure of seduction.
Karl Marx positive
Marx's 'general intellect' is the key concept for understanding the cloud and intellectual property; vulgar Marxist base-superstructure dialectics is credited for the best explanation of communist regime collapse.
His anti-feminist elitism, that women are more prone to seduction by images, is credited as part of the Enlightenment critique of seduction, deployed against Asad's claim that this critique is foreign to the West.
Sigmund Freud positive
Freud's 'dictatorship of reason' (letter to Einstein, New Introductory Lectures) is invoked as a utopian proposal combining paraconsistent and intuitionist logics in the domain of libidinal economy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The Hegelian concept of 'idea' (self-actualizing, not regulative) is proposed as the correct frame for communism; Hegel studies' three camps (conservative, leftist, liberal) are mapped onto psychoanalysis.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky negative
Dismissed as 'bullshit', today's Dostoevskian fashion ('am I free or not, God gave me freedom but the more I'm free the more I'm guilty') is contrasted unfavorably with Tolstoy's more radical pessimism.
What it argues
theory versus practice in left politicsintellectual property and the commons as communist terraingeopolitical double standards in Western media coverage of Arab uprisingsMao's Great Leap Forward famine and the limits of Badiouian dismissalIslamic vs. liberal secular critiques of seductioncommunism as a Hegelian self-actualizing ideaMiller's cynical hedonism as a betrayal of Lacan's real
Dialectical moves 12
“We all make fun of Fukuyama but in practice we are more Fukuyamaist than Fukuyama himself, who admits the dream is over.”
The left's practical horizon remains within liberal capitalism even as it theoretically mocks the 'end of history' thesis.
“The situation is catastrophic but not serious — we know things are catastrophic but we are still not ready to take it seriously, a gap sustained only by ideology.”
Ideological force consists precisely in neutralizing the affective weight of a catastrophe we intellectually acknowledge.
“Intellectual products are, in their very notion, communist — yet capitalism privatizes the very commons it depends on.”
The immanent contradiction of capitalism with the knowledge economy: its most productive form is structurally incompatible with private property.
“The bad news from Egypt was that we got exactly what we wanted — a secular democratic movement — and this was the shock.”
Western liberals secretly assumed Arab masses were incapable of secular democracy; getting it produced anxiety rather than celebration.
“Stalinist regimes, far from producing collective solidarity, produced extreme brutal survivalist individualism beneath their collectivist surface.”
The worse the collectivist regime, the more it generated the very egotism it officially denounced.
“Communism is an idea precisely insofar as it mobilizes people to fight for its own actualization — it is not an impotent ideal but the force that makes itself what it is.”
Redefining the 'idea' of communism from Badiou's Kantian regulative ideal to a Hegelian self-actualizing force.
“Today's late capitalism is paraconsistent: the order is its own transgression, capitalism thrives under communist rule, P is non-P.”
When reality itself is paraconsistent, classical revolutionary logic (A or non-A) no longer works, negation gets absorbed by the system.
“'E pur si muove' should mean not that reality persists despite wrong ideas, but that something denounced as false still functions — ideology moves you even when you don't believe in it.”
Inverting the standard empiricist use of Galileo's phrase to describe the structure of cynical ideology.
“The critique of seduction as manipulation, far from being an Islamic critique of the West, is the central content of Western Enlightenment rationalism itself.”
What Asad presents as an external Islamic critique of Western seduction is actually an immanent tradition of Enlightenment self-critique.
“The cynic who says 'I know appearances are just semblances but I'll play along' is wrong — the real is not behind appearances but only exists as the inconsistency within them.”
Miller's cynicism fails because it still presupposes a real 'behind' or 'beneath' semblances, when Lacan's point is that the real is the gap in the semblances themselves.
“The problem with neoliberal capitalism is not too little idiosyncrasy but too little — beneath its permissive surface it is extremely standardizing.”
Capitalist permissiveness (do whatever you want sexually, etc.) conceals a strict uniformity of prescribed enjoyment.
“Christ is not a secret true king unmasked — he is truly a clown, an object a, not a master in disguise.”
The crucifixion is not a Batman-style reveal of a hidden true authority; Christianity's greatness is that there is no hidden authority.
Claims 21
asserts
The radical left needs theory more than ever precisely at the moment of mass protest, because movements quickly confront the question of what they really want and where they are going.theory vs. activism in left politics
asserts
Neoliberalism is an ideology, not a description of reality: self-proclaimed neoliberal states spend more and more money and actually strengthen state power rather than reducing it.neoliberalism as ideology
asserts
UK education cuts are not primarily an economic measure but a purely ideological operation that rearranges the coordinates of what counts as public concern and privatizes the definition of education.UK austerity and education policy
asserts
Intellectual property is becoming increasingly incompatible with capitalism because intellectual products are, in their very notion, communist.intellectual property and capitalism
asserts
Digital cloud computing is the contemporary form of Marx's 'general intellect' — a communal intellectual commons whose private ownership by corporations is the central political struggle today.general intellect and the cloud
asserts
Western media's obsession with Libya over Bahrain reveals a double standard: Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to crush democratic protests was virtually ignored because it served Western interests.Western media and Arab Spring geopolitics
asserts
Western liberals were secretly shocked by Egypt's purely secular democratic uprising because they had assumed Arab masses could only mobilize through Islamism or antisemitism.Western liberal ideology and the Arab Spring
asserts
The Great Leap Forward famine killed tens of millions, was known to the Politburo, and constitutes a political-ethical fact that cannot be dismissed by Badiouians as mere 'politics of being' beneath the level of the Event.Mao and the Great Leap Forward famine
asserts
Stalinist and really-existing socialist regimes produced not collectivist solidarity but extreme brutalist survivalist individualism beneath their collective surface.Stalinism and individualism
reframes
Communism should be understood as a Hegelian idea — not Badiou's neo-Kantian regulative ideal — meaning an idea that has in itself the power of its own actualization.the idea of communism
rejects
Badiou is wrong to dismiss the fourth logical option (negating both non-contradiction and excluded middle): today's paraconsistent late capitalism requires this fourth option, not classical revolutionary logic.Badiou's three negations and revolutionary logic
asserts
Late capitalist reality is no longer intuitionistic but paraconsistent: transgression is the norm, capitalism thrives under communist rule, and things increasingly function as their own opposite.the logic of contemporary capitalism
reframes
The Galileo phrase 'e pur si muove' should not be read as naive empiricism but as describing ideological cynicism: something can be demonstrated false yet still function and move people.the structure of ideology and cynicism
rejects
Asad and Mahmood's critique of Western seduction is undermined by the fact that the dangers of seduction — and the critique of it — are themselves central to Enlightenment rationalism, not foreign to it.Islamic critique of Western seduction (Asad/Mahmood)
asserts
The privileging of seduction over rape in certain Islamic frameworks opens a dangerous space for blaming rape victims by recoding rape as the woman's seductive provocation.Islamic jurisprudence on seduction and rape
asserts
Christianity's greatness is its self-mocking dimension — Christ as clown and objet a rather than true king — which makes it more open to internal critique than other religions.Christianity and self-critique
rejects
Miller's reading of 'les non-dupes errent' as counseling cynical acceptance of social semblances is wrong: Lacan's point is that cynics fail to see that the real exists only in and through appearances.Miller's Lacanism and cynicism
rejects
Miller's cynical hedonist liberalism is not only politically conservative but theoretically false in Lacanian terms: the real is not bodily jouissance behind semblances but the inconsistency inscribed in the symbolic order itself.Miller's late Lacanism
asserts
Radical political change remains possible because one can restructure the order of appearances, and the real reverberates in certain semblances — the democratic revolution shows power's empty place can be integrated into the symbolic.possibility of radical change under Lacanian theory
rejects
Miller's linking of psychoanalytic freedom to neoliberal anti-regulation politics is a category error: capitalist commodification is not idiosyncratic but deeply standardizing beneath its permissive surface.Miller's neoliberal politics of psychoanalysis
asserts
Qatar's 'family day' Friday law is a perfect example of class exclusion operating through ideology that appears to have nothing to do with class but de facto bars foreign workers from public space.multiculturalism and class ideology in Qatar
Quotes 17
“The more these events will unfold, the more we all will discover that you need thinking theory more than ever to know what to do.”Slavoj Žižek · theory and practice
“We all know the situation is catastrophic. But we are still not ready to take it seriously. And this gap can only be sustained by a material force of ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · material force of ideology
“Intellectual products are, in their very notion, so-called intellectual property — communist. And I think that this is the big struggle, one of the big struggles going on today.”Slavoj Žižek · intellectual property is communist
“The bad news was that we got exactly what we wanted. We were all the time telling to Arab crowds that the only way to mobilize them is through antisemitic nationalism or Muslim fundamentalism. Now we got exactly what we secretly supposed they are not able to do.”Slavoj Žižek · Western liberal ideology and Arab Spring
“It's like saying 'No, Hitler wasn't a bad guy because he didn't kill six million Jews, it was only four and a half.' This changes everything.”Slavoj Žižek · numbers and the ethics of historical atrocity
“Idea is for Hegel precisely not a pure ideal or impotent idea. Idea is a notion or cause which has in itself the strength, the power for its actualization. An idea makes itself what it is.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian idea of communism
“Today's late capitalist world is no longer intuitionistic — it's paraconsistent: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule in China, and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · paraconsistent capitalism
“'E pur si muove' means something can be denounced as untrue, non-existent and so on but it nonetheless functions as ideology, it still moves you. This is today's cynicism: you don't believe in God but God still moves you.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological cynicism and e pur si muove
“The measure of a religion's greatness is the extent of self-questioning it is able to engage in.”Slavoj Žižek · religion and self-critique
“Christ is a clown from the standpoint of authority. There is no secret true authority. It's not king, not master, but object A, a saint and a clown, a dirty clown at the same time.”Slavoj Žižek · Christ as objet a, Christianity's self-mocking core
“The psychoanalyst occupies the position of ironist who takes care not to intervene into the political field... The ironist has no great design, he waits for the other to speak first and then brings about his fall.”Slavoj Žižek · Miller's ironic psychoanalyst as political quietism
“Enjoyment is the only thing that is true — the cynical position resides in saying that enjoyment is the only thing that is true.”Slavoj Žižek · Miller's hedonism
“The real is not simply behind semblances but it's only the real of these semblances so that if you take away the semblance, you lose the real itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's real and appearances
“The real for Lacan is ultimately a semblance of the real. The real is not a hard real beyond. The real is the impossibility, the limit of a semblance.”Slavoj Žižek · the real as limit of semblance
“You can have a heroic pathetic moment of heroic act sacrifice which is a semblance but my god it's semblance with the real in it.”Slavoj Žižek · semblances with the real in them
“The problem with capitalist commodification is precisely that it is too standardizing, which is why Miller is totally wrong.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's standardization beneath permissiveness
“Mother Earth is a dirty bitch who doesn't care about us.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-anthropocentric ecology
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. First I have to apologize but at the same time I am like I hope, I hope most of you glad that things are happening, no? I really think that I'm very glad that I am forced to correct my standard analysis, which is, you know that with the disappearance of any serious left in European countries the only political opposition of any weight is the one between, like, liberal multiculturalism, pure capitalism, and right-wing anti-immigrants. Now, from Greece to England, France, and also other places where media are under-reporting it. I don't know if he is here, he will be these days my friend from Croatia, Srećko Horvat. He told me, for example, that, you know, in Croatia it's crazy. There are almost daily massive demonstrations against the government. I mean, it's not yet the Greek situation but entering that stage slowly of kind of a symbolic delegitimization of the whole state machinery. And it's incredible how under-reported it is in the Western media. You would never have known that that's happening, that it's happening also in other countries. So again, I hope this compromise is okay for you because on the one hand I know I have an obligation and so on, it's like almost like what here in the UK your, how is he called, Minister for Universities would have proposed, you know, the rule for humanities, it's a private deal between me and you as citizens, no, to be here. So we have to keep to that. On the other hand, I'm glad that I'm here and that, you know, I always make this boring reflection of using the term between the two deaths and so on. Well, if I got it correctly, we are now here between the two strikes, no? Yesterday and tomorrow. And it's a very nice title because I think that this is our position now. Time to reflect. Why? I noticed how in some political circles of the radical left it appears fashionable to make a gentle stab, not so much against me as against Alain Badiou, like to cut it short and to simplify: yea yeah it's very good, the idea of communism, but what about doing something, no? Well, the more these events will unfold, different forms of protests and so on and so on, the more, not you but we all will discover, I say we all because I don't want to patronize you, that, you know, then you do a movement and then what then? And then you will see you need thinking theory more than ever to know what to do. Because it's easy to do, easy, okay, at some theoretical level, what you do now against cut cuts in spending for education, healthcare, and so on and so on, but you know then the more things develop, the more then you confront the serious issue: What now? What do we really want? And here Fukuyama's question will again, I claim, return with a vengeance: Do we want only a little bit more efficient, just, tolerant, multicultural state but still within the Fukuyama frames? Or should we be at least as radical as Fukuyama himself, my god, who the last time I met him conceded to me that the dream is over. So the tragedy now is that we all make fun of Fukuyama, but in practice we are more Fukuyamaist than the guy himself who knows, admits that it's over. So again, don't underestimate this. I mean, I don't want to boast this, conversations with Vice President Bolivia, Linera, but I sincerely, no, I will not bore you with, he is my type of a guy, like, we immediately started to exchange jokes which are so dirty that even I was slightly shocked. But nonetheless, to put it seriously, he gave me a very nice anti-Badiou in the sense of against this Badiou's notion of the state is not authentic subtract argumentation. He told me that what would this have meant in Bolivian situation? Basically to leave all the power to the existing elite which is the only one which is able to rule. And nonetheless, when there was a chance, they decided to do the impossible. They are well aware of all this stuff, state, inauthentic, and so on and so on, but they said, 'We see there is no way out. If you have a chance, grab the state power and live the impossible.' That is to say, try to make the state functioning against itself and do something. And I think it's worth taking this wager. So but at the same time, again, in order not to lose orientation, we need, I claim, especially today, theory more than ever. Because again, I ask you, I'm asking all of us, what if I ask you a simple question? When on Saturday we will all go, maybe not all, I don't know, to the big march, but if I ask you simply, what do you really want there? Now you will say we know what we want, these no budget cuts and so on and so on. But you know that it's not as simple as that. That the true question is not this. The true question is where do you see the... because if you really want only that, then it means you really want just a small change within the existing order. But the situation gets really tough when the price for a small change is a large change. You know when you cannot achieve small gains without asking for more. So again, I claim, more than ever, we need theory. We need a general overview to know what we want, where we are moving. This doesn't mean that I'm in any way skeptical against what is happening now in the UK. On the contrary, I fully support it for a very specific reason. Because when I say we need theory, I don't mean it in the way that, you know, we theorists know the general overview and will be able to guide you, ordinary participants. No, on the contrary, we also don't know exactly what to do and it's only through participating in the movement that we can learn. There is an additional reason for which I totally support this kind of movements, because it's not just a question of budget cuts and so on. It's nonetheless a question of what in one of my last performances here I called the problem of, in Marxian terms, general intellect or intellectual property or however you call it. I think that one very important aspect of the forthcoming crisis of capitalism is that it cannot really deal with what is usually referred to as intellectual property. I think that this is the problem that young people who demonstrate, students from Greece through France to England are well aware of, that simply there is no place for them. I mean, they are educated but they know in advance that for a large majority of them there is no place for them. I mean, finding work and so on and so on. Now, of course, what I claim is that we should reject the realist argument, which is, of course, there is no place for them because they were educated for useless, abstract, free-floating stuff, we need to, we need to reorganize education for our, for our market demands and so on and so on. But I claim that here the left should be very clear in the strategy of this protest and mobilize, maybe you will not disagree with me here, mobilize everyone including maybe some honest right-wingers, telling them: 'You really care for,' whatever you call them, 'Judeo-Christian European values.' The true victim of these reforms is ultimately precisely what is worth fighting for in European tradition. So I don't, I think that we should shamelessly adopt this attitude and tell them, like when David Cameron said we need robust liberalism against multiculturalism, again flirting with, with, with European legacy. But our answer to him should be not just this: 'No, no, others are also important,' but: 'Who are you to talk about European legacy?' Not, not the, the Muslim immigrant workers here. You are the true murderer of, I mean, the best thing he can do for European legacy is, to put it in my plastic terms so that you will understand me, to go into the toilet bowl and, and flush the water, no? No, I quite really mean it. You cannot imagine, I here I am a pessimist, if other countries are much more dynamic and intelligent here. Go to China, go to Singapore, even go to the United States, they don't play with this. So what's my point here? You know this old boring Marxist dialectics of productive forces and relations of production. I'm talking about it in the most vulgar possible sense, almost Stalinist evolutionary sense, like when the productive forces develop to a certain degree, they cannot any longer be contained by the existing relations of production. I know, I've written about it, what is the greatest irony of the disintegration of communist regimes in That the best ar-, the best explanation of that demise was precisely this, the most vulgar Marxist dialectics. It is quite obvious that state socialism worked for the standard industrial phase of development, quick industrialization and so on. The moment you approach whatever we call it, we don't have a good term, digitalized society, postmodern society, it simply didn't work. Which is clear in countries like even today, North Korea. If you want pure state socialism, you simply have to prohibit the access to it. But I claim now world capitalism is approaching the same problems. I think that so-called intellectual property in all its aspects is, it's becoming clear more and more in conflict with the form of capitalism. It is because it is, if you permit me this rather naive notion, it's in its very notion, so-called intellectual property, intellectual products, communist. And I think that this is the big struggle, one of the big struggles going on today. For example, you probably read about the latest tendency in the organization of cyberspace, the so-called move towards what they call clouds. That is to say, remember even five years ago our computers were big boxes at home. The bigger the box, all the better for you because you could then download whatever you want. Now the tendency is the opposite one. Not even PCs are needed. The idea is they are dying. The more and more it's enough, like some maybe iPad or even smaller iPhone, but you know, it's, it's, all the work is done out there, in a so-called cloud, big company computer network from where you download or whatever, all the data, software programs are out there. Now this may sound nice. It makes you as an individual incredibly more dynamic in the sense of easy access to whatever you want and so on and so on. The problem is however, and here again we are back to Marx, his notion of general intellect, no? Clouds mean is, I claim, a digital name for what Marx calls, called general intellect. All the knowledge, software programs and so on, they are out there. Fine, it sounds very communist in a primitive way, like our commons are out there. The problem is, of course, who owns them? And I think this is the crucial fight today. It goes on silently, many people are not even aware of it, but as I think I already mentioned, for example, are you aware that iTunes or whatever that Apple bullshit company which controls iPads and so on, they just made two months ago, I think, an exclusive deal with Rupert Murdoch. That Rupert Murdoch will be the exclusive provider of news to them. So we again, we have the same contradiction. The more our space is getting communal, in the sense of, you know, it's no longer your big box at home, but when you are in the world wide web, you participate in a common intellect. The greater the danger that this common intellect itself is privatized, silently censored, and so on and so on. Which is why I couldn't but laugh when I read recently, literally yesterday or two days ago, how in China they even stepped up censorship recently. For example, they automatically, on phone conversations, automatically detect problematic words and the moment the computer identifies a problematic word, the line is cut, you are cut off. And the way I read it in the newspapers, a wonderful thing happened when basically a lover was telling to his mistress something poetic like quoting some Shakespeare where the line goes on 'Oh, if you love a lady seduce her, she will not protest too much.' Ah, the noted protest, he was cut off, he was cut off, no. It's easy to laugh at the Chinese for us, but you know, are we aware that with clouds, we are close to doing exactly the same? We shouldn't laugh too much at the, at the Chinese, no? Although I think that China is nonetheless a wonderful example of crazy ideological trends today because are you aware what is going on now there with this latest Dalai Lama conflict? Dalai Lama, a religious guy, said, 'No, I want to step down, I want elections where Tibetan people will choose their leader.' You know what was the reply of the communist Chinese state? 'No, this is cheating. Dalai Lama must be reincarnated,' and so on. I love it. This is where we are today. It happens, no. Okay, but let's go on, more seriously. What this, all this brings us to is the awareness at multiple levels. You know, this is what I would like in a naive way to bring upon you. Again, my old joke, I repeated it many times, you know, that exchange of telegrams between Austrian and German headquarters, Germans in World War I. Germans to Austrians: 'Here the situation is serious but not catastrophic.' Austrians to Germans: 'With us the situation is catastrophic but not serious.' That this is our predicament today, I claim. We all know the situation is catastrophic. But we are still not ready to take it seriously. And this gap can only be sustained by a material force of ideology. And which is why the first thing to learn here is the material force of ideology. For example, I was, I was informed by my British friends, pure, pure-blood Englishmen like Costas Douzinas, no, seriously, that, for example, this budget cuts and so on in education, no? I mean, you know what's the basic trick? You should bear it in mind that if you read, that's how, I hope I'm resuming you correctly, Costas, that you look at all the numbers closely, you would have seen that it's not really about economy and money. That at least in the next years, there will be no, there will be no real cuts in the sense of state spending. It's a pure, basically it's not a question of spending less money. It's a question of purely ideological operation of changing the very coordinates of what education means, on privatizing education, of redefining what is public concern, what's not. This seems to me so important that you concede too much to so-called neoliberalism when you take it as reality. No, neoliberalism is ideology. States which proclaim themselves to be neoliberal are not really doing that. They are spending more and more money and so on. I mean, like United States neoliberal state, don't, don't joke, I mean, under Bush, the state exploded like crazy and so on and so on. States are getting stronger and stronger. It's always, it's so important, I think, when you attack the enemy, not to take the enemy at his words in the sense of taking his self-definition seriously. They are not doing that. When they talk about free trade, they cheat like crazy and so on and so on. This is absolutely important and again, especially here, for example, again, in this cuts, it's a rearrangement of the entire ideological space, of the distinction between private, public, and so on and so on. It's not about, about economy. It's not about spending less. It will probably cost even more. In the, in the same way, I claim, at, in all domains, we should be aware of how ideology pervades all our space. For example, I cannot resist telling you what happened to me in Qatar, where I was, I shamelessly admit, I spent the New Year, the last days of December there. I was invited by a museum of Islamic Art to blah, blah, and then they were very kind towards me there, I mean, the people at museum, I didn't have of course any state contacts. But what I liked is that I engaged in interesting conversation with these people who were kind to explain me some Marxist facts of life, no? Qatar is per capita even richer than Dubai and Abu Dhabi. So of course I asked immediately the question: 'Who does the work, the dirty work?' I was informed there are, of course, immigrant workers with absolutely no rights from countries like Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal, and so on. And the lowest I was told are not Philippines or Indonesians but Nepal workers. I was told that they are the ones who are building this high-rise building. Why they? My idea was they think Nepal, that Nepal, you know, the mountains there are high, so perhaps they know how to climb or what, I don't know, but okay then I asked concrete questions. Where do they live? Can I visit them? No, they live in an industrial city outside the town, which looks more like a prison, you cannot enter it. And I was told many of their houses are without air condition. Summer temperature, the last summer for a week it was Celsius, no. What's their salary? I asked. A little bit over dollars per month. From this you deduce food expenses, their passports are taken, they cannot leave for four years. So it's like, if not slavery, at least serfdom. But now comes multiculturalism, which is why I hate it. I asked them, I asked a totally naive question on purpose: 'How is it that I don't see them around?' 'Ah,' they told me, 'they work all the days, they're free only on Friday because you know Friday is Muslim Sunday, no?' And then the government had a problem. Officially they should be free, but how to prevent them on Friday invading all those beautiful shopping malls, these dirty immigrant workers, no? They found a solution. Nothing to do, of course, superficially with censorship or class, no. Sheikh, their Sheikh of Qatar had a deep discovery that, look, look what he discovered, that family is a, in crisis today in our corrupted world. So they proclaimed Friday a family day. And to boost this, they claimed that on Fridays, only adults with parents or women can enter shops and shopping malls. Apparently it has nothing to do with class, not just u-u-u, but everybody knows the all foreign workers it's strictly prohibited to bring their families with them. So it's a wonderful way to pass a law which apparently has nothing to do with them, but de facto they are prohibited. This brings me to, okay, a brief comment I've written in it, they were stupid enough in the Guardian to publish it about Egypt and so on. But nonetheless I would like to do a short comment here. Namely Qatar being part of that network, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and so on and so on. I think it's crucial that this dynamics expands there. Because you know what is the true news of me, for me, of the last weeks? Why is Libya so popular? I mean, in the sense of top news, war, because Libya is a case of renormalization of the crisis. Egypt and so on, it was anxiety, no, in the sense of what does this mean? Like we have to support them but at the same time we are allies of Mubarak, can we trust them? We were a little bit perplexed. But this perplexity was, this is the joke I didn't even propose to Guardian, you know the shock of the crisis in Egypt especially, this is why it was so beautiful, was that the bad news was that we got exactly what we wanted. We were all the time telling, most of us, to Arab crowds, unfortunately this is the hypocrisy of Western liberals, unfortunately the only way to mobilize Arab crowds is through some antisemitic nationalism or Muslim fundamentalism. Now we got exactly what we secretly supposed they are not able to do. Purely secular, popular, democratic movement and so on. And our reaction was an incredible anxiety and shock. You know, this is the part which I didn't dare to propose to Guardian, this reminds me of a film, did you see, it's not a great film, but there is one nice scene, Francois Truffaut, 'Day for Night', 'La Nuit américaine', that movie you know with, with Jacqueline Bisset and so on, where, okay, I'm talking about two marginal persons who, okay, the guy wants to screw the girl, I don't know, a cameraman, a secretary. So all the time he is telling her, 'Oh my god please, why don't we do it?' blah, blah, blah. So okay, they have to take a car, the car breaks down, they have to wait for help close to a certain lake and then the guy again starts: 'Please, it's just quickly, let's do it here.' And the girl, you know what she does? She stands up and starts to unbutton her trousers and says: 'Okay, let's do it now.' And of course the guy is total, 'Oh my god, how do you mean? Just simply like that,' and so on, you know. This was, you know, Egypt was unbuttoning and this was our relation, no? Like, 'But how can you do my god, simply secular democracy? Why? Where are all our worries? You shouldn't be able to do this,' you know. And, but now I come to my point. Libya is a renormalization. There we know who is the bad guy, the terrorist and so on. That's why we were so glad. Tunis and especially Egypt unsettled the coordinates. In Libya, we can make, we can at least act as if the coordinates are reasserted. We are fighting one of, okay, he wasn't part of the original axis of evil, but you know, dialectics of life, axis of evil is changing, and so on. And so you can feel the, the relief, no, in the Western media, like, 'Now again we can...'. But I, the proof is the following one. Do you know that there is a country where there was unrest and a foreign, where there were big demonstrations which almost toppled the government, and a foreign power there intervened brutally, with the army, not to support, not to bring democracy, but to support the ruler, dictator? And the Western media were silent, marginal news. For me, true news is not Libya. The true news is Bahrain. Did you read the newspapers? A week ago, the Saudi army intervened there. Where is here the outcry? It was this B-news, like, it was at the level of like Slavoj Zizek was over- overrun by a, by a car in whatever, would be the nice. You know, this here, here you see the situation. I mean, this is why I think it would have been so important to, that this movement should spread also in these bastions, like Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and so on and so on. Let's hope. Then last thing, this of course earthquake, Japan. There I think also we can get lessons. The first lesson is that nonetheless, you know, we should stop with this simple anthropocentric attitude of, 'We are guilty for everything.' Here, this brought me also in trouble in Bolivia, because unfortunately there, President Morales did write an appeal to the, to world leaders about two years ago, where I think he accepted a little bit too quickly this standard New Age topic of, you know, from 17th century humanity is, capitalism is killing Mother Earth and so on and, I think that if anything, Japan demonstrates that yes, we are killing Mother Earth, but Mother Earth is a dirty bitch who doesn't care about us, you know. That's the first. The second thing, I think that Japan makes it clear now, what I was already speaking about once, namely that, my god, imagine, you don't even have to imagine, it's happening the Japan, if the catastrophe will, let's hope not, develop further. But it's even maybe it even will because the latest news this morning I read is that they are already advising, officially, not just rumors, officially, the government, children and old people in Tokyo not to drink water, public. So they already admit that water in Tokyo is contaminated. What I'm saying is that we were even lucky in Japan, and this is what should make us worry because, you know, propos Haiti, it was easy to say, 'Oh, underdeveloped country,' blah, blah, blah. But here we got a catastrophe in a country which should have been at the top with regard to how prepared they were. They knew, they confront this kind of a threat, they are one of the richest countries in the world, and so on and so on, and nonetheless, what happens is going on. So I think that the lesson of Japan is, among others, is that effectively, and I think it's not only ecological catastrophe, it's also possible social catastrophes, hungers and so on and so on, we need new forms of international solidarity, to put it very simply. It's quite possible that new situations will emerge, for example, what if the northern part of Japan becomes, how do you call it, unlivable for for years? And I always distrusted this racist argumentation, 'We have too many people, we have to invade foreign countries,' but in this case, you know, maybe there would even have been some truth in it. It's difficult to squeeze all the Japanese in the southern part. So who will take them, how? and so on. And I think there will be many situations like this, like what if the drought and desertification of sub-Saharan Africa goes on, and so on and so on? Who, who will be doing this, how? I mean, we will definitely need forms of international solidarity and cooperation, which would, like, the best formula I got is from my friend, my friend with whom I had many polemics but I appreciate him very much, I even stole the title from him, 'Parallax View', Kojin Karatani. Who wrote a text which of course, he told me they asked him at New York Times for a text, he sent the text, propos Japan, of course they didn't publish it, no. It was a little bit too radical, but he put it very nicely that in ecology, we should stop with this bluff of what he calls 'lifestyle ecologism', you know, rich guy explaining to you how even when I shit everything is recycled and so on and so on. That's not a topic, that's totally a false approach, totally mystifying. If anything, maybe I'm repeating myself I'm sorry, but if anything, I like what a, a German ecologist told me recently, that from ecological standpoint, the best thing we can do is that as many as possible of us humans, that we live in congested megalopolises, dirty capitals. Why? Because you know, per capita the pollution gets much, much lower like this. We pollute just a tiny piece where we live in shit all of us, but basically this, Japan was doing this till now. And I think they were doing right things. You know that you have a totally wrong idea of Japan if you think all those tiny yellow ants, Japanese friends, crawling all... No, no, no, I think that basically Japan's strategy was to percent. percent is like this Tokyo-Osaka area, but more or less percent is kept, you know, forests, mountains, just villages and so on and so on. I think it's the true catastrophe for us would have been if the majority of us were to be able to, to, to live in those self-sustainable ecological individual houses, no? Okay, so solidarity, you know, because here things are very sad, namely, where is solidarity today? What do I want to say? I read recently a book on North Korea, critical but honest one. And my god, a lesson I got there was a sad one. No, not that I had any sympathies for Kim Jong-il. Although he is a clean guy in the literal sense. You know what, when I was in China, I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, a friend, the friend is Wang Hui, the philosopher, showed me a photocopy, okay I have to trust him, he wasn't lying, on, of a North Korean elementary school textbook where they explain, teaching young children, that their leader is so clean that he doesn't need to shit and urinate. Happy people, okay. But what I want to say is that in this other book, it describes through interviewing, it's a very honest book, it doesn't do this standard dissidents or whatever, but it just nicely describes the famine of which started early 1990s, I think '92 in North Korea, how it affected everyday people in small towns. Because it was very simple, state machinery simply stopped providing things, like, you got salary there was nothing to buy or whatever. It stopped functioning. So here is the sad thing. The result was not what you may have thought, like people developing self-organized solidarity networks, but it was extremely brutal egotist survivalist individualism, tolerated by the state, otherwise half of them would have dropped dead, you know. Like some kind of half-legal, by this I mean formally illegal but de facto tolerated markets emerged where people did whatever they could to sell whatever, you went to the forest, cut grass, try to bake some kind... whatever. But the point is again that the reaction to this extreme crisis, people dying allegedly around percent of the people died in North Korea, reacted not by solidarity but by extreme kind of a wild zero-level capitalist survivalism. And I think if you ask me, this is the saddest thing about so-called really existing Stalinist and so on regimes. It's totally wrong to see in them simply some kind of excess of collectivization, you know, these stupidities that you read like, 'Oh, people are there like puppets, all the same,' and so on. No, the sad thing is that what these regimes, the worse they were, the more they produced it, what these regimes effectively produced was extreme, brutal survivalist individualism, egotism. And remembering at least back from this book on North Korea, what I read about Stalinism, what I experienced in my youth in my country, even if it was not real communist terror, I can say that even there the same was true. For example, reading different memoirs of Soviet Union, if you read it closely, you see that again, in Stalinism, beneath this surface of, 'Oh, all obeying the party line,' de facto lives were those of an extreme individualism, extreme lack of solidarity. This is, again, the saddest thing. Okay, so after... Ah, speaking about Korea, China, and so on. If you allow me, before we go nonetheless into more of a theory, one remark. A friend of mine drew my attention to the fact that some guys attack me on the web as accepting too much anti-communist propaganda and so on and so on. There are a couple of points where I am attacked. About Cuba, that I am unfair towards the suffering because of American imperialism, blah, blah, and then China. The idea is even my friend Badiou, if you read his book on 'The Idea of Communism', I think it's there, not on 'The Idea', 'Communist Hypothesis'. Isn't there at the end a short text of polemics against my Mao text, no? Okay, I partly, in a humble Stalinist self-critical way, concede the point that I am quoting there that very anti-communist book by Chang and Halliday about Mao. But I still defend my position. I did my homework, I repeat it. What do I mean by this? Listen. First, I quote that book not trusting the judgments, but I quote that book only for two-three specific data. First fact, in the Great Leap Forward, at least around million of people died. B, this wasn't an, a death which was unpredictable in chaos, but they, they in the Politburo, they knew it and they consciously took it into account. I'm sorry to tell you by I did my homework, I mean, when I was in China two times after that, I spoke with many academics, not anti-communist dissidents, or at least not only, but mostly people even close to the party line, and in private they all more than confirmed this. Many, I will not write it, but wait a minute, okay, okay, and they told me where to look, okay, this was a joke, I cannot read Chinese, but the book to read, they told me, is Yang Jisheng, J-I-S-H-E-N-G, Yang Jisheng, I'm not sure, probably not, I'm not sure, I am sure that I am pronouncing it wrongly. The title's book is 'Mubei', which means tombstone, the subtitle, an account of Chinese famine in the 1960s, published by Cosmos Books in Hong Kong Why is this book unique? Because it's not simply a Western propaganda book. The guy, this Yang and so on, was a senior Xinhua, Chinese state agency, journalist. He was, he even now lives in China. Under the pretext of exploring the agricultural policy in the building of socialism in China, he was allowed to circulate China with free access because he was member of the official journalist body in all provinces for years, looking through all these statistics. And it was incredible, he was in an ideal position, again, he gained access, he was allowed to go everywhere, all the local, local statistic bureaus and so on in all the provinces and, which is why the book has pages with an incredible amount of statistics and so on and, and, well, sorry to tell you, it's all there. His number is millions. And now we come to the crucial thing. What happened with this book? Of course, it wasn't allowed to be published in China. But the Chinese government did everything in its power, to put it ironically, to silently admit that it's true. For example, nothing happens to the author, he lives now in Beijing, he is still allowed to give talks and so on and so on, just you shouldn't mention the book. But everybody read the book, they are all smuggling it, it's, you know, it's a kind of a obscene secret, and even when the book was attacked, typically my Chinese friends drew my attention to it. Nobody said the book contains lies. A typical attack is like this, I quote it: 'The book is obscene, pornographic, violent and unhealthy for young children.' Did you notice that they don't say there are lies there or whatever? It's simply a, I mean, basically it's, you know, this typical state secret logic, we all know this is true but it's not patriotic to talk about that. And again, don't you think that because this is an extra traumatic topic, if the guy were to be really suspected of, I don't know, cheating, being a CIA agent, he wouldn't be there still invited to official colloquiums and so on and so on. So note the irony. His number is million higher than the one I quote. So I almost was tempted to reply to Badiou, 'Sorry Alain to publish that number, now I am raising the number,' no? Then, some people try to criticize this accounts of hunger, like Utsa Patnaik, professor of economics in New Delhi, claiming that in India even more people are dying but it's simply not reported enough. With this, frankly, I totally agree, and here I agree with my friend, maybe friend Udi Aloni, who did a young, a nice movie, documentary on Kashmir and so on. Namely, the problem of India, I love the people there, but not the ruling elite and especially not their multicultural, cultural critics or whatever, which are all Brahmin, I noticed, so that then, when you mention to them what about casts, untouchables, they tell you, 'Oh, and equality,' if you mention equality they tell you, 'Don't impose on us this imperialist notion,' and so on and so on, no, literally this... So okay, so what I want to say is that this is true, yes, I mean, India is in a way with respect to human rights, at least for lower class ordinary people, worse than China. Again, an example which I already evoked here. You saw that shitty movie 'Slumdog Millionaire'. I asked my Indian friends like is it true, you know, I nonetheless think the movie is not totally bad, but at the beginning, you remember that young guy only being suspected of cheating at a show is taken to the police and tortured with electricity and so on. And I asked my friends, like as a naive liberal, is this exaggeration? No, they told me everybody knows this. I mean, in India, everyone small thieves is more or less automatically tortured. It's absolute common practice. And they told me that so they told me that among the poor in India, they have a wonderful ironic joke, their address to the police is, 'Please treat us at least like the Chinese treat Tibetans in Tibet.' That is to say, their point is that in Tibet, at least you are tortured mostly if you are for political reasons, you know, if you are suspected of links with Dalai Lama, protesting, but not if you are a petty thief, in India everyone is tortured. I mean, can you imagine how again it's like those unrest in Croatia, how biased are media are? The official story is India, the biggest democracy against the bad totalitarian China, but my god, do you know that they have now an ongoing Naxalite, Maoist uprising with almost million, minimum rebels? And it's totally downplayed, only from time to time you hear about blah, blah, blah, and again, what Udi Aloni has shown in his movie in Kashmir, did you ever read in our media of the tremendous political event going on in Kashmir, that the anti-Indian resistance publicly renounced arms and opted for the peaceful way? No, India still treats them at terrorist and our media take over that line. So again, I, I am not saying focus all the evil on China. I'm just saying, ah, another thing, a wonderful link between ideology and practice. You know what were the causes of this disaster? Yeah, one was that okay, there was a little bit of shortage of, a little bit of drought. But basically the harvest was very good in those years of hunger. The first reason was that as I already wrote, that simply Mao wanted arms from Russia, and he said let's export food to get arms. The second thing was that, I love this example, when in Soviet Union they already abandoned, you know, that crazy Stalinist biologist Lysenko, in China they still believed in him. And I love this example. One of Lysenko's theories was that, that species, this was his special Darwinism kind of a humanist tribal Darwinism, that there is a struggle but between species not within a species. As Lysenko said, 'Rabbits eat grass, rabbits don't eat other rabbits,' no, or 'Lions eat or I don't know, foxes eat rabbits, not other foxes,' this was his notion of class solidarity or what, no. So, the Chinese drew from this a totally crazy solution, that since animals, and the Chinese thought also plants of the same species are basically solidary, they don't fight with each other, they help each other. So their conclusion was we can, we can raise the density of how many seeds per square meter you plant. They doubled or tripled it, claiming, 'No, no, no, they will not grab each other's water, they will help each other,' and so on, no. And of course there was a catastrophe and so on and so on, no. No, but again, you know, what I'm saying here is this: I'm still ambiguous, I'm not condemning Chinese and so on, but my god, Alain Badiou would have killed me for saying this in hi- but if you have a government which allows knowingly okay let's go down but you know, this reminds me of, no, you know, when I got engaged in these debates and somebody tells me the number is lower, no? I tell them, you know, it's like saying, 'No, Hitler wasn't a bad guy because he didn't kill million Jews, it was only four and a half,' no, so this changes everything. What I'm saying is that nonetheless, without any prejudices, don't you think that if million people were left to die as part of a politics, that maybe we should just take note of this, no? And not as some Badiouians are tempted to do, dismiss it as, 'It's part of the being, of servicing the goods, nothing to do with the event,' because not Alain himself, but some Badiouians adopted this arrogant attitude in attacking me, telling me, 'Oh, this is the politics of being, numbers and so on, this is not the event.' Okay, maybe. No, after this long introduction let's start doing some problematic maybe work. Okay. Let me begin with, why still the idea of communism? Again, I think that what I try to do is instead of reading the notion of idea in Badiou's sense, which is for me a little bit too neo-Kantian still, and incidentally when Badiou defends himself that he is not a neo-Kantian, well, fuck him, he refers to Kant in, not in 'Communist Hypothesis', in a previous text he says the idea of communism is a kind of Kantian regulative idea. He does. So, you know. Okay, but let's go on. I think that one so for me to put it in an ironic term, Badiou's, you know like Kant has critique of pure reason, no, what Alain does is for me a little bit too much of critique of pure communism, you know like 'Kritik der reinen Kommunismus', you know. Okay, but I think what would be nice is to replace this Kantian notion of idea with a Hegelian notion of idea. I would prefer to speak about communism in this way, namely what Hegel means by idea is precisely not a pure ideal or impotent idea. Idea is for Hegel a notion or a cause which has in itself the strength, the power for its actualization. Like that an idea, as Hegel puts it, makes itself what it is. This, now when you say but this is crazy idealism, no, think about communism as an idea which moves people to fight for communism. This would have been a perfect Hegelian example. Communism is an idea insofar as it mobilizes people for its own actualization. So I think that this is why it is crucial when precisely one talks about the idea of communism to explore in what sense this idea, as it were, mobilizes the people to fight for it. For me there is no opposition between pure idea of communism and empirical struggles and so on and so on. Idea is precisely what, what actualizes itself again in so-called real struggles. Next step, a little bit more philosophical. Now we will, for the second hour, start to work a little bit. A- ah, incidentally, no, no, you ruined Greece, Europe, you will not ruin me here. Sorry, sorry. You know, at least I can tell you this, I am only childishly tastelessly aggressive towards my close friends. Which holds also for Alain Badiou, my god, he is my best friend and the only way to prove it is to stick the knife into him all the time. That's life, no. Okay, no, no, but let's go more seriously. This is now Alain Badiou at his best. He tried recently, in a text published two years ago in Cardozo Law Review, I don't think it was reprinted here already, correct me if I am wrong, a wonderful philosophico-revolutionary text, 'The Three Negations'. I hope it's known to some of you, it's a wonderful text. He tries to approach at the conceptual level the topic of negation, of course in the sense of revolutionary transformation. And he does this in his best way in a totally abstract conceptual manner. He deploys three modes of negation with regard to how they relate to Aristotle's two laws. You know, the basic ontologic law principle for Aristotle is the principle of non-contradiction, A and non-A cannot be true at the same time, and the principle of the excluded middle. Now, as Badiou goes on, there are of course here four logical possibilities. Both could be valid, you cancel or renounce one or the other, or you cancel, violate both. Badiou begins with dismissing this last fourth possibility, a negation which obeys neither the excluded middle nor the non-contradiction. For Badiou this is something simply inconsistent, equivalent to complete dissolution of all negativity. I will try to prove that he is a little bit too fast here. So, Badiou goes on, focusing on the three remaining consistent forms, each of them fitting a certain logical framework. First we have a negation which obeys the two principles. That is to say, obeys both the, the non-contradiction law and the exclusion of the, the excluded middle. This is the classical Aristotelian logic. Then we have negation which still obeys the principle of contradiction but it doesn't obey the principle of the excluded middle. This is for Badiou the intuitionistic logic, Brouwer, Heyting and so on. And then we have third possibility, negation which obeys the excluded middle but not the principle of contradiction. A paraconsistent logic, Brazilian school, da Costa. Now, let me explain this a little bit. In classical logic, the negation of P excludes not only P itself but also any other possibility concerning the contents of the proposition P. So, if you negate P, you negate P and the only option is P or non-P. In intuitionist logic, the negation of P excludes P itself but not some other possibilities which are somewhere between P and non-P. So in this sense, intuitionism obeys the principle of contradiction but not the excluded middle, no, like, as you will immediately see Badiou's point is that this is like social democratic revisionism, no, like, we are workers, there are bourgeoisie, it's still either us or them, the basic opposition is here but there are some third parties, compromises, blah, blah, the third are not excluded. Then, for, then in paraconsistent logic, the negation of P excludes this third space between P and non-P but not P itself. P is not really suppressed by the negation. For example, again Badiou's example, in the classical ethico-legal domain, someone is guilty or innocent, no space in between. In the intuitionist space, we always have intermediate values, like, guilty with attenuating circumstances, innocent because certainly guilty but with insufficient proof, and so on and so on. In the paraconsistent space, not foreign to certain theologies, one can be both at the same time although there is no third option. My deep awareness of guilt is the only proof I can have of my innocence, for example. But you see, here you see the opposition between position two and three and one. In one it's either this or that. In two it's not only this or that but there are intermediate stages, you are partially guilty, like if I were to kill one I would be partially guilty because all of you would bear witness that I'm not quite responsible or whatever, no, and in the third position, which is for me the most interesting one, is that it's still like in the first position only A or non-A. You are guilty or not guilty, no third way, but paradoxically these two can directly coincide, like again as in this some kind of hardline Protestant theology where, since we are all guilty and sinful, the only innocence is in fully assuming your guilt and so on. So as expected, Badiou's royal example is here revolution. The communist revolution for Badiou is classical, a radical confrontation with no third option. It's either us or them. The poor worker who before the revolution appears as nothing in the political field becomes the new hero of this field. In the intuitionist space of social democratic reformism, the poor worker appears in the political field but it is not at all a new hero of the field. The idea is to bring about a compromise, to find a third way, maintain capitalism but with more social responsibility and so on. In the third case of paraconsistent space, we get a sort of undecidability between event and non-event. Something happens but from the point of view of the world everything is identical, so we have event and event simultaneously, a false event, a simulacrum, as in the fascist revolution which denounces plutocratic exploitation but keeps capitalism. So, Badiou's conclusion, the lesson is that when the world is intuitionistic, a true change must be classical and a false change paraconsistent. So again you got Badiou's point, our ordinary reality is intuitionistic, is this that and the third, blah, blah, blah. Then you have two radical versions, a false change which pretends to change but doesn't change where the opposites in this perverted Hegelian way coincide and the authentic revolution, classical, it's either A or non-A and we have to win. Sounds nice but I have some problems as I always have with my friends. What if, my first question, what if today's late capitalist world is no longer in its logic intuitionistic? Is the postmodern capitalism not more and more a paraconsistent system in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P? The order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule in China, and so on and so on. Here classic change no longer works because negation gets caught in the game. So the only way out, this would be my solution, is to is the fourth form option dismissed by Badiou but which I think should be re-actualized. My option is that both principles should be negated, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of excluded middle. The first thing to remember is the radical asymmetry of what we once called the class struggle. I think it's wrong, totally wrong to inscribe what we still may call proletarian revolution into the classical logic. The aim of the proletariat is not simply to negate in whatever way its enemy, the capitalists, but to negate, abolish itself in the same movement as a class. This is why we are dealing here with the third way, not Blair but neither proletarian nor capitalist which is not excluded, but also with the suspension of the principle of contradiction. It is the proletariat itself which strives to abolish itself, its condition. So what does this mean in the terms of so-called libidinal economy? In a letter to Einstein as well as in his new introductory lectures to psychoanalysis, Freud proposes a utopian solution for the deadlocks of humanity, he calls it dictatorship of reason. Men should unite themselves and together subordinate and master their irrational unconscious forces and so on and so on. But I think that here we should instead of rejecting this idea of dictatorship of reason as a kind of a totalitarian dream, I think we should read it exactly as this kind of a unity of paraconsistent and intuitionist logic, that is to say the denial of, that is to say that the relationship between the dictatorship of reason and passions, libido, is the one of self-negating identity, and so on and so on. Okay but nonetheless, so to get back to the main point, I think that Badiou's revolution which moves in the classical space, us against them, goes for the traditional rebellions when reality is intuitionistic and in a revolutionary situation this, as they put it, everyday life is intuitionistic in the sense of this confusion, not only extremes but third ways, and so on and so on. But I claim that, again, today's reality is no longer intuitionistic, it's paraconsistent in the sense that things more and more function as their opposite, for example transgression is the norm, and so on and so on. Here I claim the fourth option dismissed by Badiou should be re-actualized. Now we will work a little bit, haha. The principle that I would like to mobilize for what I am trying to develop here is that of, I looked into it a little bit and I like it, I think I already maybe even mentioned it here but now I want to develop it in more detail. You know that Galileo Galilei in allegedly said 'e pur si muove', 'and yet it moves', after recanting before the Inquisition his theory that the earth moves around the sun. Now I claim that today this phrase is used in a totally misleading way. It is used in a naive empiricist way as if, 'yeah, yeah, you may deny it but in reality it still goes on.' Like as a naive empiricist assertion of reality which persists, 'e pur si muove', nonetheless it moves in spite of our wrong ideas. I claim that we should, it would have been much more interesting and appropriate to our situation to read this 'e pur si muove' in a, again, much more intelligent opposite way which is hinted at in Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, where 'e pur si muove' means something can be denounced as untrue, non-existent and so on but 'e pur si muove', it nonetheless functions as ideology, it still moves you. Like this is today's cynicism: you don't believe in God but God still moves you. You prove, it is demonstrated that something is wrong but it still functions. This is I think a much more interesting version of 'e pur si muove'. So what, where are we to look for the traces of this, things move, and which is this thing which moves? I think it's universality. Why? Haha, now comes the dangerous part, if there are any of those guys here who like to attack me on the web as proto-fascist and Euro-racist, now listen. I will try to go now into two detailed debates. The first one would be, it's a very respectful one, recently I read an interesting book, 'Is Critique Secular?'. It's a volume where the event I think was organized by Wendy Brown and then you have text by Talat Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood. A kind of a debate between the Wendy Brown Judith Butler school of whatever you call them, whatever I will would have called them would be denounced as wrong so I don't, and let's call it the progressive Muslims. What interests me is the critique of our notion of secular criticism elaborated there by Asad and Mahmood. Here is their idea, while in Western liberal secular societies state power protects public freedom and intervenes into the private space when it suspects, for example, child abuse, such intrusion into domestic space, the breaching of private domain is disallowed in Islamic law although conformity in public behavior may be much stricter. This is from, from Asad's text, or a further quote: 'For the community what matters is the Muslim subject's social practice including verbal publication, not her internal thoughts whatever they may be,' end of quote. In other words, what matters finally is belonging to a particular way of life in which the person does not own himself. Although as Quran says, quote from 'Let him who wills have faith and him who wills reject it,' end of quote, this right to think whatever one wishes does not include the right to express one's religious or moral beliefs publicly with the intention of converting people to a false commitment. This is why for Muslims it is impossible to remain silent when confronted with blasphemy. Their reaction is so passionate because for them, quote again Asad, 'blasphemy is neither freedom of speech nor the challenge of a new truth but something that seeks to disrupt a living relationship.' This living relationship is then described by Mahmood through the role of the icon in Orthodox Christianity. Although Islam is iconoclastic, for pious Muslims their, I quote now Mahmood, 'their embodied practices and virtues provide the substrate through which one comes to acquire a devoted and pious disposition. Such an inhabitation of the model is the result of a labor of love in which one is bound to the authorial figure through a sense of intimacy and desire. It is not due to the compulsion of the law that one emulates the prophet's conduct therefore but of the ethical capacities one has developed that incline one to behave in a certain way,' end of quote. This self-transcending surrender to a community held together by a complex web of practices which embody the shared living relationship to divinity, the very opposite of the Protestant focus on the inner belief of an isolated individual, also accounts for the passionate public protest of the Muslims to blasphemies against Islam. They experience themselves as living a full meaningful life only as members of their religious community, sharing their rituals and habits, so that an attack on Islam is for them not an intellectual matter of truth but a direct threat to their very collective form of life. This is the end of how I describe the position. Now comes my evil Eurocentric and so on counterpoint. The problem explodes when members of a religious community experience as blasphemous injury and a danger to their way of life not a direct attack on their religion but the very way of life of another community. As for example was the case, marginal I admit it, with attacks on gays and lesbians in Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, now I take the Muslims being the bad guys, or as it is the case with those Frenchmen and French women who see a woman covered by burqa as an attack on their French identity. You know, here again you see the problem is not only, 'My way of life is injured.' Here I'm totally for the protection of Islam and Christian fundamentalists. The problem for me, it considers both of them, is when you experience not the fact that others are attacking you but the very fact of a different way of life as an attack on you. As a situation where it is for you impossible to remain silent. As again, Christians are here the bad guys, as it is from not even Christians, from some French liberals they claim, 'When I see a woman covered in burqa it's impossible for me to remain silent.' As to the relationship between intimate and public freedom, it is true that for the democratic West, freedom is social, it is meaningless only as an inner conviction, it must be socialized, it must include the right not only to state publicly one's position in order to convince or seduce others but also to act socially on them. This however does not mean that with regard to intimate freedom and convictions, Western liberalism advocates probing into private sphere in order to establish a kind of totalitarian thought control. The problem for democratic liberalism is here the problem of seduction, when I am really free and when I think I am acting free while I am effectively being seduced by images and rhetorics. So when Asad deals with the topic of seduction, he contrasts Islam and liberal West. That's Asad's position, the West condemns rape, external violence, and but the West not only tolerates, it even celebrates seduction while in Islam seduction is considered worse. Quote: 'In liberal society, rape, the subjection of a person's body against his her wish for the purpose of sexual enjoyment is a serious crime whereas seduction, the mere manipulation of another person's desire is not. The first is a violence, the other is not. In liberal societies, seduction is not merely permitted, it is positively valued as a sign of individual freedom,' end of quote. Asad follows this description with two further critical remarks about the West. First, he claims that the distinction between coercion and seduction in the game of seduction is not clear cut since there is a large area between these two extremes. Second, seduction in liberal societies is a key constituent of commodification. Again I quote: 'The individual as consumer and as voter is subjected to a variety of allurements through appeals to greed, vanity, envy, revenge and so on. What in other circumstances may be identified and condemned as moral failings are here essential to the functioning of a particular kind of economy and polity,' end of quote. So seduction is a mode of manipulation since the seduced person loses its autonomy. Another quote: 'To seduce is to incite someone to open up his or her innermost self to images, sounds and words offered by the seducer and to lead the seduced implicitly or unwittingly to an end first conceived by the former,' end of quote. So for Asad, this liberal tolerance of seduction which de facto subverts the liberal free and autonomous subject, turning him or her into a passive victim of external stimulations, so that liberal freedom is ultimately the freedom to be seduced and manipulated by others, this tolerance is then contrasted with Islamic theology in which seduction is a matter of great concern and not only in the sexual sense. Seduction in all its forms is necessarily dangerous, not only for the individual because it indicates a loss of self-control but for the social order too because it could lead to violence and civil discord. So this is for Asad the horror of the Western system, Western market economy, where the functioning and stability of the system itself are sustained by seduction, by something potentially destabilizing. The conclusion is that liberal system is inherently perverse and corrupted since it has to rely on the very vices it publicly deplores for its normal functioning. Again, my counter argument here would be that the topic of seduction, of the seduction by the lure of commodities and seductive political manipulation, far from being foreign to the Western world, is the standard topic of enlightened secular rationalist critique. For example, precisely what Asad and Mahmood are enumerating as the troubles of seduction, sorry, the dangers of seduction, far to being opposed to Western individualist rationalism is its central part. For example, if you know Descartes, his whole point of, here I admit his vulgar anti-feminism, is that we men, that women can easily be seduced, not even primarily in sexual sense, but women are more prone to images, to impressions and so on and so on, so that the whole enlightenment elitist theory of freedom is based on this reasoning that, yes, we all have the right to freedom but freedom can be limited if you are suspected of being too open for seduction. Like, basically the argument is that primitive people are easily seduced by sensual notions and so on, so no freedom for them. So this would be my first counter-argument, that this whole line of reasoning is absolutely against seduction, is absolutely not foreign to the West. But there is another problem for me here. A Western rationalist would have added religious seduction to the list of seductions. That is to say, are the embodied practices which provide the substrate through which one comes to acquire a devoted pious disposition, are they also not techniques of seduction? Is the inhabitation of the model where one is bound to the authorial figure through a sense of intimacy and so on, not also the result of being seduced? I think this would be, I'm sorry that they are not here, this would be my point of debate with them. Okay, okay, I agree with their critique of seduction but what they, the two of them, describe in such poetic terms as participating in a living practice and so on and so on, does this not, does this not fit perfectly the notion of seduction? I claim that the truly radical Christian theologians from Pascal to Tolstoy, screw Dostoevsky, Tolstoy is my hero. You know, it's very fashionable today to be Dostoevskian with all this bullshit: 'Am I free or not? God gave me freedom but the more I'm free the more I'm guilty,' blah, blah. Tolstoy is not an idiot as it is often painted today. He has a much more radical, terribly pessimistic idea of, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, I think I already developed it once, the idea that, which is very close to Richard Dawkins' memes, no, that language ideas are like, how do you pronounce this in English, those small shitty organs who can screw you... bacilli... germs, yeah, are like germs which control you without knowing. You can't do, you don't have a free ego, your ego is just the battlefield where different germs are fighting, and here comes now Tolstoy's true heroism. He doesn't play this standard Cartesian game of opposing truly free individuality to germs, no. He claim, no, good ideas function in exactly the same way as bad ideas. They are both germs. The fight between good and evil is the fight between good and bad infection by germs. It's an incredibly radical position. Basically the same thing is said if you read really them really closely, although they are opposite, by Descartes and by, and by Spinoza. You know, Spinoza's notion of 'imitatio affecti' and so on and so on. So, now I must admit here absolutely my limitation. I am sure because Islamists are not, Muslims are not idiots, there are wonderful things in their theology. So I don't know enough to pass a general judgment. But I would like to see, and I don't mean this with a liberal hypocrisy where, you know, I'm asking a rhetorical question, but, you know, you know, like an antisemite saying, 'Jews of course can be honest, I would like to see one,' no, like... and it's not. No, no. I would nonetheless like to see, this would be a nice maybe deconstructive move, would a Muslim theologian be ready to admit this? That is to say, to admit that seduction works also in religion? That it's not a point of opposing seduction and free reason or whatever, no, that seduction is universal. Second thing which bothers me here in this privileging seduction as worse than rape. Of course there is an abstract truth in it. I mean, you can argue from an extreme moralist position, although I have some ethical doubts, that if you, now you will see immediately where my doubts come, you can say that within a very traditional ethical space that seducing a woman is worse than raping her, because you know, by raping her it's only her body, but she is terrified, which means her soul remains pure, but by seducing her it's even worse because you destroy not only her body but also her soul. Okay, okay, but the key question for me is not only the seductive force of violence itself and so on and so on. The true problem for me is in this privileging seduction over rape is that it opens up a space for, for me, a dangerous manipulation. That is to say that you, to cut a long story short, when a woman is raped, you know what will be my answer, no, you can put the blame on her by claiming that what appears as rape was in reality her act of seduction. And I'm not inventing her, I know many cases, and I know they are not central, they were often manipulated by the Western media, no, where, again, when there was a case of rape in, I know cases from Iran, even from Australia, Muslim community that the blame was put on the woman claiming that, for example, the very fact that she went out alone in the night where she was raped meant that she was trying to seduce men, that it was a provocation. So, what I'm saying here is that, not that we should simply reject this Muslim view, it's much more complicated of course, but that we should simply be much more radically critical and stop this game, comparative game of, you know, compare our culture to their culture and then try to prove which one is better and so on and so on. But to be radically critical towards both of them. Because again, what I tried to do here, I've written enough about Islam, for example praising its emancipatory potentials and so on and so on. But my result is basically pessimistic here. That is to say, it's that we cannot any, any, any taking sides here, any clear religious position. The measure of its greatness is the extent of self-questioning it is able to engage in. This is why, horrible thing to say, for example, I am ready to privilege Christianity a little bit, not because I believe in Christ and so on, come on, be serious, but because, you know, it's nice to have a religion where the God is proclaimed king but a king who is mocked and hanged up together with, together with two bandits and so on. That is to say that, you know, this would be my question, not answer, question because I don't know enough about Islam to Islamist, how would they react to this idea that obviously in Christianity, the only way for me at least, for example, to read the New Testament is to take Christ as a jokester? I mean, people often accuse me of, 'You never know when I say Hitler was not violent enough, am I joking or not or whatever.' Well, if you think I'm problematic, read Jesus Christ, no, and you will see. You know what I mean, like, for example, you know the story which is usually, which usually gives an instant multiple orgasm to American southern Baptist capitalists, maybe you, some of you know it better, it's the story about a master who goes away for some time and gives some money to two-three servants and then the first servant said, 'I manipulated the money, I invested it, you gave me one, whatever, piece of shit gold, here you have now five.' And he says, 'Okay, okay,' second one the same, okay, the third one said, 'I didn't want to put it, I kept it safe for you,' and here I think Jesus uses that formula, 'To those who have it will be taken even that what they have... no, no, no, to those who don't have it will be taken even what they don't have, to those who have it will be given more,' and so on and so on. So, this ultra-capitalist logic, like, it seems that through this fable Christ is saying be like active capitalist, you know, put money in circulation. Treat, it's the lesson of 'There Will Be Blood', the movie, no, like, treat religion like money, move it, invest it, and bring profit, no? Otherwise you lose the faith. But this is how it is usually read, not in a capitalist way, but nonetheless for an, let's say, active approach. But with great pleasure I learned, okay, through simple internet exploration, that there is a school which proves in detail, first you find the same story not only in, I don't know which one, don't ask me, of the four official gospels, but also in, in one of the apocryphal gospels, where it's given a slightly different twist which hints that the point of Christ is not to celebrate the master but simply to show how the true hero is the third one, who didn't want to put it in a circulation and in this way exploit the others. That you can read it in a totally opposite way. You know, and this is for me, coming back to the point, the greatness of Christianity, this self-mocking idea. For example, in, in, in, for example again, as what I always repeated, again, when Christ said, 'Ah, I will now use a parable to make it clear,' where the parables by Christ always make it even less clear and totally confuse the issue. And so it is, I think, totally wrong to read the crucifixion as, you know, this idea of by stupid men Christ was mockingly claimed God but he is the true God. No, there is no true God. Christ is a clown from the standpoint of authority, Christ is a stupid clown. There is no, you see my point? There is no secret true authority, like, you know, like this Batman logic or whatever, you put off your dress off and you are a true hero, no, it's, it's really a kind of a not king, not master, but object A, a saint and a clown, a dirty clown at the same time. Along these lines I would like to pursue the matter, not but you see what's my point here? I think that the only way to... What are the two of you traitors there talking, making fun of me? I mean, I am for clown and jokes but within certain limits, you know, which I impose, no? Sorry, let me go on. No, so you see my point. My point is that I don't believe in this pure respect. I think we, coming from different religious and atheist whatever background, we should be able to ask each other this type of questions. Okay, the last line of thought, to attack the attack on my own people. Where is in all this forthcoming changes psychoanalysis? Did you notice how the problem with psychoanalysis and politics is the same as the problem with Hegel and politics? In the same way, exactly as with Hegel, we have three readings. We have with Hegel, we have conservative Hegel, you know, those state Hegelians against liberal state, corporate Hegelians. We have leftist Hegel, not only Marx but also Bakunin and so on, who dialectic change and so on. And we have in the last years a disgusting freaky apparition called liberal Hegelians. I think this is maybe the only true philosophical revolution in Hegel studies in the last years, that a third way, this time yes in the Tony Blair sense, is emerging, a liberal Hegel. The sign now, if you are KGB theoretical policeman, the way you identify the culprits, watch for the word 'recognition'. This is the catchword of liberal Hegelians. They claim that the big, these are basically Pittsburgh Hegelian, Pippin, and so on and so on. It's a deflated Hegel, Hegel with no ontological pretensions, but the key is that the ultimate aim of Hegelian social thought is mutual recognition and so on and so on. Okay, then we have in Freud exactly the same. We have conservative Hegelians, sorry, conservative Freudians, even Lacanians, who claim Lacan's message is today's permissive society is narcissistic, as such, dangerous, can lead to psychotic breakdown. What we need is to reassert the authority of the symbolic law, you know the story, and so on and so on. Then we have leftist Lacanians, but unfortunately, the same as with Hegel studies, we have this growing species of the unfortunately not excluded third middle term, which is liberal Lacanians. I think that, now if you allow me for a little bit of speculation, I think that the original culprit here is already Lacan himself, who clearly in his last, like years, is oscillating between two modes of ethico-political. One is, one is worse than the other, I would have said that, like Stalin. One is the certain ethics of transgression best developed in his seminar on, in his chapters, the chapters of Antigone of his seminar seven, the idea of the ethical act as a kind of forcing, a violent act of transgression which is as such exceptional. Like, you know, you can blindly confront the truth but you cannot, you cannot endure in it, momentary transgression then you are... then it's the apparent opposite but which amounts to the same, namely, this common sense wisdom that authentic moments are rare, you can only survive if you return to the safe domain of semblances, you know, this fake Nietzschean idea that truth is too strong for us. We, in our daily lives, we must live in semblances, and the only thing that psychoanalysis gives us is an awareness that these semblances are ultimately false. So, to put it very simply, and I think we should put it simply, it's a simple position of some kind of hedonist cynicism. The idea is, after you experience the real in this horrible blinding moment, you have to return to ordinary life, but you are aware that this is just a game, you're playing a social game, don't take it too seriously, and so on and so on. Now it is, what makes it so interesting is that the late Lacan went even further along this liberal path and renounced even this idea of violent transgression. This is why in his last decade or two, his focus is on his definition of final moment of psychoanalysis is no longer traversing the fantasy, but identifying with the symptom. What he means here is something very clear, he says it, I quote you, no complicated phrases. For example, the late Lacan says, 'One should not push an analysis too far. When the patient thinks he is happy to live, it is enough.' You have many of this idea that, 'Don't push it to the end, just find a balance which would be a little bit more, a little bit less painful,' and that's make... So again, he Lacan often says that the goal of analysis is making life a little bit easier. Now it's nonetheless interesting here how Lacan oscillates between two versions which, again, unfortunately, are for me both worse, each worse than the other. One is, and it's very interesting to hear this from Lacan, who is otherwise so aggressive against Hegel's 'list der vernunft', the cunning of reason. It's a kind of a vulgarized Hegelianism. Lacan quotes Matthew to you know, that famous parable where believers worry, what will we eat, what will we drink, and so on and so on, and God tells them, 'Just believe in me and all these things will come for free,' and so on and so on. Lacan positively refers to this, but it's, I noticed, you know, always when Lacan quotes in different years the same passage, you should be attentive to the context, it's usually the opposite reading, no. There are times when he sounds, in his earlier years around ethics seminar, when he reads it in a, in the way of still clinging to this radical ethics of confronting the truth, like, the idea is, 'Confront the truth courageously, don't think about curing yourself and it will come by itself, your life will be easier, you will be happier but don't think about that,' you know, confront the truth and, here Lacan comes close to cunning of reason, it will come by itself, life will be better and so on and so on. But often, so again, this reading would be, you know, like, 'Take care of the of the, you know, take care of the of the pence and the pounds, or the cents and the pounds will take care of themselves. Take care of the truth, risk everything, ignore the consequences and health will come by itself.' Again, 'Take care of the truth and the healing will take care of itself. Just be consistent, go to the end ethically.' And again, as you notice, this is a very naive, I claim, pre-Hegelian idea of cunning of reason, very strange to get it from Lacan. The idea here you have, I claim, you see still the big other. Trust God or the big other that somehow you will also feel better, have better sex, whatever you want, no, just go for the truth. But then you have the late Lacan, who is again, who goes again, even a step further and who claims that, 'No, abandon truth, be modest, you suffer here, you suffer there, rearrange a little bit your symptoms, that's all you can do.' Now, what Jacques-Alain Miller does in his last years is brutally, fully developing this line of thought. He, he, first, let me give you some, for me at least, horrible quotes. First, Miller claims that Lacan's basic moment in the last years is that he rejects symbolic truth and go into jouissance as the only real. So, Miller's position is, be aware that all symbols, speech is only a semblance, that the only thing that matters is enjoyment. And Miller openly claimed this, a kind of a hedonist liberalism where he claims the liberalism of jouissance. The best you can do is found to find your own mode of, of, of jouissance. Here Miller opposes modern science where he says modern science precisely and psychiatry doesn't give you this freedom. It wants to level you, to prescribe how people should be free, how they should enjoy and so on and so on. But again, the idea is that a cynical position that don't count on the others, formulate your own idiosyncratic mode of enjoyment, that's all you can do. Here come some for me pretty tasteless quotes. Psychoanalysis, I quote Miller, reveals social ideals in their nature of semblances and as we add we can add, of semblances with regard to a real which is the real of enjoyment. This is the cynical position which resides in saying that enjoyment is the only thing that is true, end of quote. What this means is that a psychoanalyst, quote again, occupies the position of ironist who takes care not to intervene into the political field. The psychoanalyst acts so that semblances remain at their places while making it sure that subjects under his care do not take them for real. One should somehow bring oneself to remain taken in by them, fooled by them. Lacan could say that those who are not taken in are wrong, 'les non-dupes errent'. If one doesn't act as if semblances are real, if one doesn't live the their efficiency undisturbed, things turn out for the worse. This is all from Miller. Those who think that all the signs of power are mere semblances and rely on the arbitrariness of the discourse of master are bad boys. So now I say in the matter of politics a psychoanalyst does, quote, doesn't propose projects, he cannot propose them, he can only mock the projects of others which limits the scope of his statements. The ironist has no great design, he waits for the other to speak first and then bring about his fall as fast as possible. Let us say this is a political wisdom, nothing more. Another quote, the axiom of this wisdom is that, quote, 'One should protect, protect semblances of power for the good reason that one should be able to continue to enjoy. The point is not to attach oneself to the semblances of the existing power but to consider them necessary.' This defines a cynicism in the mode of Voltaire which let it be understood that God is our invention which is necessary to maintain people in a proper decorum. Society is kept together only by semblances, which means there is no society without repression, without identification and above all without routine. Routine is essential. The result is thus a kind of cynical liberal conservatism. In order to retain stability, one has to respect and follow routines established by a choice which is always arbitrary and authoritarian. There is no progressivism which holds but rather a particular kind of hedonism called hedonism of enjoyment. One has to maintain intact the routine of the city, its laws and traditions and accept that a kind of obscurantism is necessary in order to maintain social order. Literal quote from Miller: 'There are questions one shouldn't ask, my god, psychoanalyst saying this. If you turn the social turtle on its back, you will never succeed to turn it back on its paws.' Typical conservative wisdom. This then, unfortunately, is Miller's position today, a kind of liberal conservative hedonist position. We are all freaks of individual fantasies which structure our enjoyment, society is as such a semblance, a lie, but at the same time, we should be cynical realists, realists, we should admit that without this semblance, which is always ultimately authoritarian, that of a master, there is a catastrophe, society disintegrates, so all you can do is this kind of cynical hedonist wisdom. I know there are appearances but I will not disturb them too much, it may provoke chaos. Against this cynical hedonist idea of a subject who while admitting the necessity of symbolic semblances relates to them with a distance, aware that the only real is that of the bodily jouissance, I claim, this would be my first point against Miller. I claim that this position, and I'm shocked that Miller doesn't notice it, you see here how Lacan was right when he says the unconscious is political. That is to say that even when we debate about the status of the unconscious, we really, I read it in this very brutal way, we really pass a political judgment. I'm not so antipathetic towards this idea of, you know, build your idiosyncratic enjoyment. But and Fred Jameson gave me this idea, I claim that Miller is totally wrong to link this to the liberal political order. Jameson in his reading of that wonderful early Soviet negative utopia Platonov, 'Chevengur', claims that precisely the idea of Platonov is that imagine communism as a kind of a strange world where perverts coexist in their space. A madman here, a paranoiac there, somebody hallucinating up there, and I told this to Fred, to Jameson, when I met him and of course first I insulted it in my way. My god, did I tell you this, this was wonderful, he introduced me at Duke and I, you know how I referred to him, I said my gratitude to the great progressive bourgeois thinker, you know like, he is there, no? But but he agreed with my example. It's, I know he was privately half a fascist, but do you know the best of Frank Capra? Really, Frank Capra, people thought he was a progressive Rooseveltian, but Capra was pro-Mussolini. It's good to know Frank Capra, not to have any illusions, but nonetheless, in his nonetheless wonderful film 'You Can't Take It With You'. You remember the rich man's son James Stewart falls in love with a girl who lives in such a big Dickensian madhouse. Who lives in that house? You have Essie Carmichael, a guy who makes candy as a hobby and dreams of being a ballerina, Paul Sycamore, a thinker who manufactures fireworks, Mr. De Pinna, an iceman who comes who always speaks to to to about about certain politics before, Ed Carmichael, an amateur printer who prints anything that sounds good to him, then you have Boris Kolenkov, a Russian concerned with world politics for whom everyone stinks. You know, is this typical like in Dickens, alternate worlds where idiots of all kinds, madmen and so on live happily together. I think against Miller I would say no, sorry, I don't allow you this, he doesn't see that this is the communist utopia and that under the pretense of plurality of commodification, capitalism precisely doesn't allow this. The problem with capitalist commodification is precisely that it is too standardizing, which is why I claim Miller is totally wrong when in his, now I come to two basic Miller's mistakes, first when he, he started, you maybe even have heard of it, this big movement against standardization in psychoanalysis, this subordination of psychoanalysis to state control regulation. Okay, nothing against, but the horror is that he, and he asked me many times could I gave a speech to support his movement and so on and so on. Sorry, but the horror is that he inscribed this protest movement explicitly into a neoliberal Thatcherite right-wing position. They published even in their press in French translation of some British, I forgot the names, neoliberal economists who claim that, you know, this typical neoliberal idea, totalitarian social democratic state pretends to wants to know for us what really makes us happy, no, we should give to the people the freedom to decide. And his idea is that the totalitarian state psychiatry wants this to determine when you are happy normal, while the psychoanalyst allows you and so on and so on. But I claim this is simply a wrong point, what he doesn't see is the inherent contradiction of liberal ideology that at the same time it appears idiosyncratic, to each his her own enjoyment, but at the same time it's extremely, as it were, normativizing, you must be totally free but totally free in a way which is strictly prescribed. So again, the problem for me, again as with Stalinism, the problem for me with neoliberalism is not not enough solidarity and so on and so on, no, not enough idiosyncrasy. The joke is that this multiplicity, you can I don't know screw dogs, two women at the same time, whatever you want, it's beneath it, it's a terrible uniformity. The second point, which is now absolutely crucial, theoretical, and with this I conclude, is that Miller's re- it's horrible this, how and if I make you understand this, you and myself because I include myself into the idiots among the idiots, is crucial. Miller's notion of cynicism and the real of jouissance is totally false in the Lacanian terms. Why? When you have the real and semblances, Lacan always emphasizes that cynicism is a false position because it doesn't see that the real is not simply behind semblances, but it's only the real of this semblances so that if you take away the semblance, you lose the real itself. Like you know, I often quoted it, that old joke quoted by Lacan, Alphonse Allais, the great French satirist, who showed, I don't want to be then accused of politically correctness to a woman like Udi, let's say you are a woman now, no, and I show at him and say, 'Look that woman, what a shame, beneath her dress she is totally naked, no.' This is the real. The real is the real only, you are only naked beneath your dress. So in other words, this for Lacan isn't cynicism, because the cynic's idea is precisely that semblances, appearances are only appearances. The whole point of psychoanalysis is to be aware that the real is the real of appearances. The real is not behind appearances. That is to say, to go to the much more theoretical level, that the real is only in the appearances. It's a gap, inconsistency of appearances, which is why, again, one, we should read, you know, Miller, you remember quote this 'les non-dupes errent', those who are not taken in are wrong. He reads it as, you remember I hope, in a cynical way, which is, even if you know the real, you have to be, you have to cynically accept the social spectacle, pretend as if it's true although you know it's not true. But Lacan's point of 'les non-dupes errent' is not this cynical point, you know it's not true but pretend it's true. Is that those 'les non-dupes errent' are for Lacan cynics who do not see, again, the weight of appearances. They do not see that the real is in the appearances, that the real is not behind the appearances. Which is why I claim, here we come to politics, if you take Lacanian notion of the real seriously, then I think you should absolutely drop this kind of cynical hedonist individualism. You should on the contrary say that the social field is not simply opposed to individual real in the sense of I have my tiny fantasy and so on and so on, but that the real is inscribed into the social field itself as its antagonisms, inconsistencies and so on and so on, which means point two, that it's Miller falls here into what I consider the most horrible postmodern skepticism, which is this kind of, how should I call it, clear ontological counter-revolutionary attitude. It goes something like this: although the world is unjust, but all radical political projects are ultimately logocentric, metaphysical, you think you can realize the idea and so on and so on. The beauty of this position of course is that it's conservative but it appears it, it, it appears, apparently, it allows you to appear more critical than radical critics. You can still say you communist, you want to change the world, but ha-ha-ha, you are still logocentric, you think you can introduce an ideal world and so on. Basically enlightened pragmatic conformism appears the most radical position. A true Lacanian answer here, I think, is that nonetheless, that if you posit the real into the symbolic itself as its inconsistency and so on, and this, I think, is the single greatest achievement of Lacan. How he, for him again, as I developed innumerable times, the real is not an inaccessible beyond. As Lacan put it, the real is nothing but a deadlock of a symbolic formalization. If you put it in this way, then of course the point is not, forget about this bullshit, to construct an ideal happy society, but you definitely can radically change the order of appearance. You can radically restructure the order of appearance, and point two, now you will say, but still, what about the point that appearances are only semblances and so on and so on? There are, they are semblances, but you know, Lacan here again is a genius if you read him closely, but the real for Lacan is ultimately a semblance, on how to put it, a semblance of the real. The real is not again, a hard real beyond. The real is the impossibility, the limit of a semblance and so on and so on. So again, radical changes are possible and my argument here a triumphant one, I hope acceptable to all of you, would have been a democracy. Okay, we can say like, I will stop immediately, I got your much much much too much more... yeah no, you know like, we can say like Miller says, 'Oh, something shouldn't be talked about mystery and so on and so on.' But sorry, nonetheless, you can do what even bourgeois thinkers like Lefort describe as democratic revolution where you can demystify power, you can proclaim power empty and like it, you know what I mean like, it is some kind of a progress for me. Sorry, you no longer have to substantialize power, you have a radical gap between power and power and its power and the agent of power so what precisely Miller claims has to remain a secret, in democracy it's no longer a secret. It's part of the game to claim that everyone, any leader, is just occupying the place of power not having full right to it and so on and so on. Again if you de-substantialize the real, then you can see that this idea, this equalizing of all symbolic space works in the same way. No, democracy is a nice example of how the real, the real of this gap gap impossibility of power empty place of power and so on and so on, can be successfully integrated into the symbolic order. So again I think that this is the true choice of psychoanalytic political ethics for me. Either it will get caught into this late capitalist cynical hedonism, where I'm saying then, ah-ah, I am against death penalty but for the time being let's keep it open when you have psychoanalysts like that, no? Or or again, I'm not preaching for any Marxist revolution here or what, just for this basic opening. Don't go too fast in this equalization, 'Oh, all politics is just semblance.' Yes, but in a way all is semblance. But nonetheless, you have semblances which may be semblances but the real itself reverberates in them. Like you can have a heroic pathetic moment of heroic act sacrifice which it is a semblance but my god it's semblance with the real in it. I mean, this is for Lacan's whole point that semblances does not mean they are all the same semblances. Absolutely we should break out of this hedonist cynical skepticism. I'm sorry if I was too long but it's my nature and so, in two days, no, so that you will not be disappointed. I hope you agree, I'm a little bit tired of this political bullshit and I'm bluffing in it and so on, I warn you. What if the next two times we do some real Hegel-Lacanian theory? Because I developed ah, why did you say yes, this was a trap? You mean today it was not real, no? Okay, no no no. No no I mean, no semblance, yeah no no seriously, if you agree, next time I want to do some new stuff, I further developed it, I think only now I understood it. What Lacan really means by there is no sexual difference, his formulas and what this means for progressive struggle, I really think only now I understood it and on Saturday I propose to go into Hegel, the limits of Hegel again with a detailed new analysis because you know, enemies of the people claim I'm just bluffing, bluffing that big book of Hegel, ha-ha I will never write it. Fuck you, I have it, pages. No, okay.
Thanks very much. First I have to apologize but at the same time I am like I hope, I hope most of you glad that things are happening, no? I really think that I'm very glad that I am forced to correct my standard analysis, which is, you know that with the disappearance of any serious left in European countries the only political opposition of any weight is the one between, like, liberal multiculturalism, pure capitalism, and right-wing anti-immigrants. Now, from Greece to England, France, and also other places where media are under-reporting it. I don't know if he is here, he will be these days my friend from Croatia, Srećko Horvat. He told me, for example, that, you know, in Croatia it's crazy. There are almost daily massive demonstrations against the government. I mean, it's not yet the Greek situation but entering that stage slowly of kind of a symbolic delegitimization of the whole state machinery. And it's incredible how under-reported it is in the Western media. You would never have known that that's happening, that it's happening also in other countries. So again, I hope this compromise is okay for you because on the one hand I know I have an obligation and so on, it's like almost like what here in the UK your, how is he called, Minister for Universities would have proposed, you know, the rule for humanities, it's a private deal between me and you as citizens, no, to be here. So we have to keep to that. On the other hand, I'm glad that I'm here and that, you know, I always make this boring reflection of using the term between the two deaths and so on. Well, if I got it correctly, we are now here between the two strikes, no? Yesterday and tomorrow. And it's a very nice title because I think that this is our position now. Time to reflect. Why? I noticed how in some political circles of the radical left it appears fashionable to make a gentle stab, not so much against me as against Alain Badiou, like to cut it short and to simplify: yea yeah it's very good, the idea of communism, but what about doing something, no? Well, the more these events will unfold, different forms of protests and so on and so on, the more, not you but we all will discover, I say we all because I don't want to patronize you, that, you know, then you do a movement and then what then? And then you will see you need thinking theory more than ever to know what to do. Because it's easy to do, easy, okay, at some theoretical level, what you do now against cut cuts in spending for education, healthcare, and so on and so on, but you know then the more things develop, the more then you confront the serious issue: What now? What do we really want? And here Fukuyama's question will again, I claim, return with a vengeance: Do we want only a little bit more efficient, just, tolerant, multicultural state but still within the Fukuyama frames? Or should we be at least as radical as Fukuyama himself, my god, who the last time I met him conceded to me that the dream is over. So the tragedy now is that we all make fun of Fukuyama, but in practice we are more Fukuyamaist than the guy himself who knows, admits that it's over. So again, don't underestimate this. I mean, I don't want to boast this, conversations with Vice President Bolivia, Linera, but I sincerely, no, I will not bore you with, he is my type of a guy, like, we immediately started to exchange jokes which are so dirty that even I was slightly shocked. But nonetheless, to put it seriously, he gave me a very nice anti-Badiou in the sense of against this Badiou's notion of the state is not authentic subtract argumentation. He told me that what would this have meant in Bolivian situation? Basically to leave all the power to the existing elite which is the only one which is able to rule. And nonetheless, when there was a chance, they decided to do the impossible. They are well aware of all this stuff, state, inauthentic, and so on and so on, but they said, 'We see there is no way out. If you have a chance, grab the state power and live the impossible.' That is to say, try to make the state functioning against itself and do something. And I think it's worth taking this wager. So but at the same time, again, in order not to lose orientation, we need, I claim, especially today, theory more than ever. Because again, I ask you, I'm asking all of us, what if I ask you a simple question? When on Saturday we will all go, maybe not all, I don't know, to the big march, but if I ask you simply, what do you really want there? Now you will say we know what we want, these no budget cuts and so on and so on. But you know that it's not as simple as that. That the true question is not this. The true question is where do you see the... because if you really want only that, then it means you really want just a small change within the existing order. But the situation gets really tough when the price for a small change is a large change. You know when you cannot achieve small gains without asking for more. So again, I claim, more than ever, we need theory. We need a general overview to know what we want, where we are moving. This doesn't mean that I'm in any way skeptical against what is happening now in the UK. On the contrary, I fully support it for a very specific reason. Because when I say we need theory, I don't mean it in the way that, you know, we theorists know the general overview and will be able to guide you, ordinary participants. No, on the contrary, we also don't know exactly what to do and it's only through participating in the movement that we can learn. There is an additional reason for which I totally support this kind of movements, because it's not just a question of budget cuts and so on. It's nonetheless a question of what in one of my last performances here I called the problem of, in Marxian terms, general intellect or intellectual property or however you call it. I think that one very important aspect of the forthcoming crisis of capitalism is that it cannot really deal with what is usually referred to as intellectual property. I think that this is the problem that young people who demonstrate, students from Greece through France to England are well aware of, that simply there is no place for them. I mean, they are educated but they know in advance that for a large majority of them there is no place for them. I mean, finding work and so on and so on. Now, of course, what I claim is that we should reject the realist argument, which is, of course, there is no place for them because they were educated for useless, abstract, free-floating stuff, we need to, we need to reorganize education for our, for our market demands and so on and so on. But I claim that here the left should be very clear in the strategy of this protest and mobilize, maybe you will not disagree with me here, mobilize everyone including maybe some honest right-wingers, telling them: 'You really care for,' whatever you call them, 'Judeo-Christian European values.' The true victim of these reforms is ultimately precisely what is worth fighting for in European tradition. So I don't, I think that we should shamelessly adopt this attitude and tell them, like when David Cameron said we need robust liberalism against multiculturalism, again flirting with, with, with European legacy. But our answer to him should be not just this: 'No, no, others are also important,' but: 'Who are you to talk about European legacy?' Not, not the, the Muslim immigrant workers here. You are the true murderer of, I mean, the best thing he can do for European legacy is, to put it in my plastic terms so that you will understand me, to go into the toilet bowl and, and flush the water, no? No, I quite really mean it. You cannot imagine, I here I am a pessimist, if other countries are much more dynamic and intelligent here. Go to China, go to Singapore, even go to the United States, they don't play with this. So what's my point here? You know this old boring Marxist dialectics of productive forces and relations of production. I'm talking about it in the most vulgar possible sense, almost Stalinist evolutionary sense, like when the productive forces develop to a certain degree, they cannot any longer be contained by the existing relations of production. I know, I've written about it, what is the greatest irony of the disintegration of communist regimes in That the best ar-, the best explanation of that demise was precisely this, the most vulgar Marxist dialectics. It is quite obvious that state socialism worked for the standard industrial phase of development, quick industrialization and so on. The moment you approach whatever we call it, we don't have a good term, digitalized society, postmodern society, it simply didn't work. Which is clear in countries like even today, North Korea. If you want pure state socialism, you simply have to prohibit the access to it. But I claim now world capitalism is approaching the same problems. I think that so-called intellectual property in all its aspects is, it's becoming clear more and more in conflict with the form of capitalism. It is because it is, if you permit me this rather naive notion, it's in its very notion, so-called intellectual property, intellectual products, communist. And I think that this is the big struggle, one of the big struggles going on today. For example, you probably read about the latest tendency in the organization of cyberspace, the so-called move towards what they call clouds. That is to say, remember even five years ago our computers were big boxes at home. The bigger the box, all the better for you because you could then download whatever you want. Now the tendency is the opposite one. Not even PCs are needed. The idea is they are dying. The more and more it's enough, like some maybe iPad or even smaller iPhone, but you know, it's, it's, all the work is done out there, in a so-called cloud, big company computer network from where you download or whatever, all the data, software programs are out there. Now this may sound nice. It makes you as an individual incredibly more dynamic in the sense of easy access to whatever you want and so on and so on. The problem is however, and here again we are back to Marx, his notion of general intellect, no? Clouds mean is, I claim, a digital name for what Marx calls, called general intellect. All the knowledge, software programs and so on, they are out there. Fine, it sounds very communist in a primitive way, like our commons are out there. The problem is, of course, who owns them? And I think this is the crucial fight today. It goes on silently, many people are not even aware of it, but as I think I already mentioned, for example, are you aware that iTunes or whatever that Apple bullshit company which controls iPads and so on, they just made two months ago, I think, an exclusive deal with Rupert Murdoch. That Rupert Murdoch will be the exclusive provider of news to them. So we again, we have the same contradiction. The more our space is getting communal, in the sense of, you know, it's no longer your big box at home, but when you are in the world wide web, you participate in a common intellect. The greater the danger that this common intellect itself is privatized, silently censored, and so on and so on. Which is why I couldn't but laugh when I read recently, literally yesterday or two days ago, how in China they even stepped up censorship recently. For example, they automatically, on phone conversations, automatically detect problematic words and the moment the computer identifies a problematic word, the line is cut, you are cut off. And the way I read it in the newspapers, a wonderful thing happened when basically a lover was telling to his mistress something poetic like quoting some Shakespeare where the line goes on 'Oh, if you love a lady seduce her, she will not protest too much.' Ah, the noted protest, he was cut off, he was cut off, no. It's easy to laugh at the Chinese for us, but you know, are we aware that with clouds, we are close to doing exactly the same? We shouldn't laugh too much at the, at the Chinese, no? Although I think that China is nonetheless a wonderful example of crazy ideological trends today because are you aware what is going on now there with this latest Dalai Lama conflict? Dalai Lama, a religious guy, said, 'No, I want to step down, I want elections where Tibetan people will choose their leader.' You know what was the reply of the communist Chinese state? 'No, this is cheating. Dalai Lama must be reincarnated,' and so on. I love it. This is where we are today. It happens, no. Okay, but let's go on, more seriously. What this, all this brings us to is the awareness at multiple levels. You know, this is what I would like in a naive way to bring upon you. Again, my old joke, I repeated it many times, you know, that exchange of telegrams between Austrian and German headquarters, Germans in World War I. Germans to Austrians: 'Here the situation is serious but not catastrophic.' Austrians to Germans: 'With us the situation is catastrophic but not serious.' That this is our predicament today, I claim. We all know the situation is catastrophic. But we are still not ready to take it seriously. And this gap can only be sustained by a material force of ideology. And which is why the first thing to learn here is the material force of ideology. For example, I was, I was informed by my British friends, pure, pure-blood Englishmen like Costas Douzinas, no, seriously, that, for example, this budget cuts and so on in education, no? I mean, you know what's the basic trick? You should bear it in mind that if you read, that's how, I hope I'm resuming you correctly, Costas, that you look at all the numbers closely, you would have seen that it's not really about economy and money. That at least in the next years, there will be no, there will be no real cuts in the sense of state spending. It's a pure, basically it's not a question of spending less money. It's a question of purely ideological operation of changing the very coordinates of what education means, on privatizing education, of redefining what is public concern, what's not. This seems to me so important that you concede too much to so-called neoliberalism when you take it as reality. No, neoliberalism is ideology. States which proclaim themselves to be neoliberal are not really doing that. They are spending more and more money and so on. I mean, like United States neoliberal state, don't, don't joke, I mean, under Bush, the state exploded like crazy and so on and so on. States are getting stronger and stronger. It's always, it's so important, I think, when you attack the enemy, not to take the enemy at his words in the sense of taking his self-definition seriously. They are not doing that. When they talk about free trade, they cheat like crazy and so on and so on. This is absolutely important and again, especially here, for example, again, in this cuts, it's a rearrangement of the entire ideological space, of the distinction between private, public, and so on and so on. It's not about, about economy. It's not about spending less. It will probably cost even more. In the, in the same way, I claim, at, in all domains, we should be aware of how ideology pervades all our space. For example, I cannot resist telling you what happened to me in Qatar, where I was, I shamelessly admit, I spent the New Year, the last days of December there. I was invited by a museum of Islamic Art to blah, blah, and then they were very kind towards me there, I mean, the people at museum, I didn't have of course any state contacts. But what I liked is that I engaged in interesting conversation with these people who were kind to explain me some Marxist facts of life, no? Qatar is per capita even richer than Dubai and Abu Dhabi. So of course I asked immediately the question: 'Who does the work, the dirty work?' I was informed there are, of course, immigrant workers with absolutely no rights from countries like Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal, and so on. And the lowest I was told are not Philippines or Indonesians but Nepal workers. I was told that they are the ones who are building this high-rise building. Why they? My idea was they think Nepal, that Nepal, you know, the mountains there are high, so perhaps they know how to climb or what, I don't know, but okay then I asked concrete questions. Where do they live? Can I visit them? No, they live in an industrial city outside the town, which looks more like a prison, you cannot enter it. And I was told many of their houses are without air condition. Summer temperature, the last summer for a week it was Celsius, no. What's their salary? I asked. A little bit over dollars per month. From this you deduce food expenses, their passports are taken, they cannot leave for four years. So it's like, if not slavery, at least serfdom. But now comes multiculturalism, which is why I hate it. I asked them, I asked a totally naive question on purpose: 'How is it that I don't see them around?' 'Ah,' they told me, 'they work all the days, they're free only on Friday because you know Friday is Muslim Sunday, no?' And then the government had a problem. Officially they should be free, but how to prevent them on Friday invading all those beautiful shopping malls, these dirty immigrant workers, no? They found a solution. Nothing to do, of course, superficially with censorship or class, no. Sheikh, their Sheikh of Qatar had a deep discovery that, look, look what he discovered, that family is a, in crisis today in our corrupted world. So they proclaimed Friday a family day. And to boost this, they claimed that on Fridays, only adults with parents or women can enter shops and shopping malls. Apparently it has nothing to do with class, not just u-u-u, but everybody knows the all foreign workers it's strictly prohibited to bring their families with them. So it's a wonderful way to pass a law which apparently has nothing to do with them, but de facto they are prohibited. This brings me to, okay, a brief comment I've written in it, they were stupid enough in the Guardian to publish it about Egypt and so on. But nonetheless I would like to do a short comment here. Namely Qatar being part of that network, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and so on and so on. I think it's crucial that this dynamics expands there. Because you know what is the true news of me, for me, of the last weeks? Why is Libya so popular? I mean, in the sense of top news, war, because Libya is a case of renormalization of the crisis. Egypt and so on, it was anxiety, no, in the sense of what does this mean? Like we have to support them but at the same time we are allies of Mubarak, can we trust them? We were a little bit perplexed. But this perplexity was, this is the joke I didn't even propose to Guardian, you know the shock of the crisis in Egypt especially, this is why it was so beautiful, was that the bad news was that we got exactly what we wanted. We were all the time telling, most of us, to Arab crowds, unfortunately this is the hypocrisy of Western liberals, unfortunately the only way to mobilize Arab crowds is through some antisemitic nationalism or Muslim fundamentalism. Now we got exactly what we secretly supposed they are not able to do. Purely secular, popular, democratic movement and so on. And our reaction was an incredible anxiety and shock. You know, this is the part which I didn't dare to propose to Guardian, this reminds me of a film, did you see, it's not a great film, but there is one nice scene, Francois Truffaut, 'Day for Night', 'La Nuit américaine', that movie you know with, with Jacqueline Bisset and so on, where, okay, I'm talking about two marginal persons who, okay, the guy wants to screw the girl, I don't know, a cameraman, a secretary. So all the time he is telling her, 'Oh my god please, why don't we do it?' blah, blah, blah. So okay, they have to take a car, the car breaks down, they have to wait for help close to a certain lake and then the guy again starts: 'Please, it's just quickly, let's do it here.' And the girl, you know what she does? She stands up and starts to unbutton her trousers and says: 'Okay, let's do it now.' And of course the guy is total, 'Oh my god, how do you mean? Just simply like that,' and so on, you know. This was, you know, Egypt was unbuttoning and this was our relation, no? Like, 'But how can you do my god, simply secular democracy? Why? Where are all our worries? You shouldn't be able to do this,' you know. And, but now I come to my point. Libya is a renormalization. There we know who is the bad guy, the terrorist and so on. That's why we were so glad. Tunis and especially Egypt unsettled the coordinates. In Libya, we can make, we can at least act as if the coordinates are reasserted. We are fighting one of, okay, he wasn't part of the original axis of evil, but you know, dialectics of life, axis of evil is changing, and so on. And so you can feel the, the relief, no, in the Western media, like, 'Now again we can...'. But I, the proof is the following one. Do you know that there is a country where there was unrest and a foreign, where there were big demonstrations which almost toppled the government, and a foreign power there intervened brutally, with the army, not to support, not to bring democracy, but to support the ruler, dictator? And the Western media were silent, marginal news. For me, true news is not Libya. The true news is Bahrain. Did you read the newspapers? A week ago, the Saudi army intervened there. Where is here the outcry? It was this B-news, like, it was at the level of like Slavoj Zizek was over- overrun by a, by a car in whatever, would be the nice. You know, this here, here you see the situation. I mean, this is why I think it would have been so important to, that this movement should spread also in these bastions, like Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and so on and so on. Let's hope. Then last thing, this of course earthquake, Japan. There I think also we can get lessons. The first lesson is that nonetheless, you know, we should stop with this simple anthropocentric attitude of, 'We are guilty for everything.' Here, this brought me also in trouble in Bolivia, because unfortunately there, President Morales did write an appeal to the, to world leaders about two years ago, where I think he accepted a little bit too quickly this standard New Age topic of, you know, from 17th century humanity is, capitalism is killing Mother Earth and so on and, I think that if anything, Japan demonstrates that yes, we are killing Mother Earth, but Mother Earth is a dirty bitch who doesn't care about us, you know. That's the first. The second thing, I think that Japan makes it clear now, what I was already speaking about once, namely that, my god, imagine, you don't even have to imagine, it's happening the Japan, if the catastrophe will, let's hope not, develop further. But it's even maybe it even will because the latest news this morning I read is that they are already advising, officially, not just rumors, officially, the government, children and old people in Tokyo not to drink water, public. So they already admit that water in Tokyo is contaminated. What I'm saying is that we were even lucky in Japan, and this is what should make us worry because, you know, propos Haiti, it was easy to say, 'Oh, underdeveloped country,' blah, blah, blah. But here we got a catastrophe in a country which should have been at the top with regard to how prepared they were. They knew, they confront this kind of a threat, they are one of the richest countries in the world, and so on and so on, and nonetheless, what happens is going on. So I think that the lesson of Japan is, among others, is that effectively, and I think it's not only ecological catastrophe, it's also possible social catastrophes, hungers and so on and so on, we need new forms of international solidarity, to put it very simply. It's quite possible that new situations will emerge, for example, what if the northern part of Japan becomes, how do you call it, unlivable for for years? And I always distrusted this racist argumentation, 'We have too many people, we have to invade foreign countries,' but in this case, you know, maybe there would even have been some truth in it. It's difficult to squeeze all the Japanese in the southern part. So who will take them, how? and so on. And I think there will be many situations like this, like what if the drought and desertification of sub-Saharan Africa goes on, and so on and so on? Who, who will be doing this, how? I mean, we will definitely need forms of international solidarity and cooperation, which would, like, the best formula I got is from my friend, my friend with whom I had many polemics but I appreciate him very much, I even stole the title from him, 'Parallax View', Kojin Karatani. Who wrote a text which of course, he told me they asked him at New York Times for a text, he sent the text, propos Japan, of course they didn't publish it, no. It was a little bit too radical, but he put it very nicely that in ecology, we should stop with this bluff of what he calls 'lifestyle ecologism', you know, rich guy explaining to you how even when I shit everything is recycled and so on and so on. That's not a topic, that's totally a false approach, totally mystifying. If anything, maybe I'm repeating myself I'm sorry, but if anything, I like what a, a German ecologist told me recently, that from ecological standpoint, the best thing we can do is that as many as possible of us humans, that we live in congested megalopolises, dirty capitals. Why? Because you know, per capita the pollution gets much, much lower like this. We pollute just a tiny piece where we live in shit all of us, but basically this, Japan was doing this till now. And I think they were doing right things. You know that you have a totally wrong idea of Japan if you think all those tiny yellow ants, Japanese friends, crawling all... No, no, no, I think that basically Japan's strategy was to percent. percent is like this Tokyo-Osaka area, but more or less percent is kept, you know, forests, mountains, just villages and so on and so on. I think it's the true catastrophe for us would have been if the majority of us were to be able to, to, to live in those self-sustainable ecological individual houses, no? Okay, so solidarity, you know, because here things are very sad, namely, where is solidarity today? What do I want to say? I read recently a book on North Korea, critical but honest one. And my god, a lesson I got there was a sad one. No, not that I had any sympathies for Kim Jong-il. Although he is a clean guy in the literal sense. You know what, when I was in China, I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, a friend, the friend is Wang Hui, the philosopher, showed me a photocopy, okay I have to trust him, he wasn't lying, on, of a North Korean elementary school textbook where they explain, teaching young children, that their leader is so clean that he doesn't need to shit and urinate. Happy people, okay. But what I want to say is that in this other book, it describes through interviewing, it's a very honest book, it doesn't do this standard dissidents or whatever, but it just nicely describes the famine of which started early 1990s, I think '92 in North Korea, how it affected everyday people in small towns. Because it was very simple, state machinery simply stopped providing things, like, you got salary there was nothing to buy or whatever. It stopped functioning. So here is the sad thing. The result was not what you may have thought, like people developing self-organized solidarity networks, but it was extremely brutal egotist survivalist individualism, tolerated by the state, otherwise half of them would have dropped dead, you know. Like some kind of half-legal, by this I mean formally illegal but de facto tolerated markets emerged where people did whatever they could to sell whatever, you went to the forest, cut grass, try to bake some kind... whatever. But the point is again that the reaction to this extreme crisis, people dying allegedly around percent of the people died in North Korea, reacted not by solidarity but by extreme kind of a wild zero-level capitalist survivalism. And I think if you ask me, this is the saddest thing about so-called really existing Stalinist and so on regimes. It's totally wrong to see in them simply some kind of excess of collectivization, you know, these stupidities that you read like, 'Oh, people are there like puppets, all the same,' and so on. No, the sad thing is that what these regimes, the worse they were, the more they produced it, what these regimes effectively produced was extreme, brutal survivalist individualism, egotism. And remembering at least back from this book on North Korea, what I read about Stalinism, what I experienced in my youth in my country, even if it was not real communist terror, I can say that even there the same was true. For example, reading different memoirs of Soviet Union, if you read it closely, you see that again, in Stalinism, beneath this surface of, 'Oh, all obeying the party line,' de facto lives were those of an extreme individualism, extreme lack of solidarity. This is, again, the saddest thing. Okay, so after... Ah, speaking about Korea, China, and so on. If you allow me, before we go nonetheless into more of a theory, one remark. A friend of mine drew my attention to the fact that some guys attack me on the web as accepting too much anti-communist propaganda and so on and so on. There are a couple of points where I am attacked. About Cuba, that I am unfair towards the suffering because of American imperialism, blah, blah, and then China. The idea is even my friend Badiou, if you read his book on 'The Idea of Communism', I think it's there, not on 'The Idea', 'Communist Hypothesis'. Isn't there at the end a short text of polemics against my Mao text, no? Okay, I partly, in a humble Stalinist self-critical way, concede the point that I am quoting there that very anti-communist book by Chang and Halliday about Mao. But I still defend my position. I did my homework, I repeat it. What do I mean by this? Listen. First, I quote that book not trusting the judgments, but I quote that book only for two-three specific data. First fact, in the Great Leap Forward, at least around million of people died. B, this wasn't an, a death which was unpredictable in chaos, but they, they in the Politburo, they knew it and they consciously took it into account. I'm sorry to tell you by I did my homework, I mean, when I was in China two times after that, I spoke with many academics, not anti-communist dissidents, or at least not only, but mostly people even close to the party line, and in private they all more than confirmed this. Many, I will not write it, but wait a minute, okay, okay, and they told me where to look, okay, this was a joke, I cannot read Chinese, but the book to read, they told me, is Yang Jisheng, J-I-S-H-E-N-G, Yang Jisheng, I'm not sure, probably not, I'm not sure, I am sure that I am pronouncing it wrongly. The title's book is 'Mubei', which means tombstone, the subtitle, an account of Chinese famine in the 1960s, published by Cosmos Books in Hong Kong Why is this book unique? Because it's not simply a Western propaganda book. The guy, this Yang and so on, was a senior Xinhua, Chinese state agency, journalist. He was, he even now lives in China. Under the pretext of exploring the agricultural policy in the building of socialism in China, he was allowed to circulate China with free access because he was member of the official journalist body in all provinces for years, looking through all these statistics. And it was incredible, he was in an ideal position, again, he gained access, he was allowed to go everywhere, all the local, local statistic bureaus and so on in all the provinces and, which is why the book has pages with an incredible amount of statistics and so on and, and, well, sorry to tell you, it's all there. His number is millions. And now we come to the crucial thing. What happened with this book? Of course, it wasn't allowed to be published in China. But the Chinese government did everything in its power, to put it ironically, to silently admit that it's true. For example, nothing happens to the author, he lives now in Beijing, he is still allowed to give talks and so on and so on, just you shouldn't mention the book. But everybody read the book, they are all smuggling it, it's, you know, it's a kind of a obscene secret, and even when the book was attacked, typically my Chinese friends drew my attention to it. Nobody said the book contains lies. A typical attack is like this, I quote it: 'The book is obscene, pornographic, violent and unhealthy for young children.' Did you notice that they don't say there are lies there or whatever? It's simply a, I mean, basically it's, you know, this typical state secret logic, we all know this is true but it's not patriotic to talk about that. And again, don't you think that because this is an extra traumatic topic, if the guy were to be really suspected of, I don't know, cheating, being a CIA agent, he wouldn't be there still invited to official colloquiums and so on and so on. So note the irony. His number is million higher than the one I quote. So I almost was tempted to reply to Badiou, 'Sorry Alain to publish that number, now I am raising the number,' no? Then, some people try to criticize this accounts of hunger, like Utsa Patnaik, professor of economics in New Delhi, claiming that in India even more people are dying but it's simply not reported enough. With this, frankly, I totally agree, and here I agree with my friend, maybe friend Udi Aloni, who did a young, a nice movie, documentary on Kashmir and so on. Namely, the problem of India, I love the people there, but not the ruling elite and especially not their multicultural, cultural critics or whatever, which are all Brahmin, I noticed, so that then, when you mention to them what about casts, untouchables, they tell you, 'Oh, and equality,' if you mention equality they tell you, 'Don't impose on us this imperialist notion,' and so on and so on, no, literally this... So okay, so what I want to say is that this is true, yes, I mean, India is in a way with respect to human rights, at least for lower class ordinary people, worse than China. Again, an example which I already evoked here. You saw that shitty movie 'Slumdog Millionaire'. I asked my Indian friends like is it true, you know, I nonetheless think the movie is not totally bad, but at the beginning, you remember that young guy only being suspected of cheating at a show is taken to the police and tortured with electricity and so on. And I asked my friends, like as a naive liberal, is this exaggeration? No, they told me everybody knows this. I mean, in India, everyone small thieves is more or less automatically tortured. It's absolute common practice. And they told me that so they told me that among the poor in India, they have a wonderful ironic joke, their address to the police is, 'Please treat us at least like the Chinese treat Tibetans in Tibet.' That is to say, their point is that in Tibet, at least you are tortured mostly if you are for political reasons, you know, if you are suspected of links with Dalai Lama, protesting, but not if you are a petty thief, in India everyone is tortured. I mean, can you imagine how again it's like those unrest in Croatia, how biased are media are? The official story is India, the biggest democracy against the bad totalitarian China, but my god, do you know that they have now an ongoing Naxalite, Maoist uprising with almost million, minimum rebels? And it's totally downplayed, only from time to time you hear about blah, blah, blah, and again, what Udi Aloni has shown in his movie in Kashmir, did you ever read in our media of the tremendous political event going on in Kashmir, that the anti-Indian resistance publicly renounced arms and opted for the peaceful way? No, India still treats them at terrorist and our media take over that line. So again, I, I am not saying focus all the evil on China. I'm just saying, ah, another thing, a wonderful link between ideology and practice. You know what were the causes of this disaster? Yeah, one was that okay, there was a little bit of shortage of, a little bit of drought. But basically the harvest was very good in those years of hunger. The first reason was that as I already wrote, that simply Mao wanted arms from Russia, and he said let's export food to get arms. The second thing was that, I love this example, when in Soviet Union they already abandoned, you know, that crazy Stalinist biologist Lysenko, in China they still believed in him. And I love this example. One of Lysenko's theories was that, that species, this was his special Darwinism kind of a humanist tribal Darwinism, that there is a struggle but between species not within a species. As Lysenko said, 'Rabbits eat grass, rabbits don't eat other rabbits,' no, or 'Lions eat or I don't know, foxes eat rabbits, not other foxes,' this was his notion of class solidarity or what, no. So, the Chinese drew from this a totally crazy solution, that since animals, and the Chinese thought also plants of the same species are basically solidary, they don't fight with each other, they help each other. So their conclusion was we can, we can raise the density of how many seeds per square meter you plant. They doubled or tripled it, claiming, 'No, no, no, they will not grab each other's water, they will help each other,' and so on, no. And of course there was a catastrophe and so on and so on, no. No, but again, you know, what I'm saying here is this: I'm still ambiguous, I'm not condemning Chinese and so on, but my god, Alain Badiou would have killed me for saying this in hi- but if you have a government which allows knowingly okay let's go down but you know, this reminds me of, no, you know, when I got engaged in these debates and somebody tells me the number is lower, no? I tell them, you know, it's like saying, 'No, Hitler wasn't a bad guy because he didn't kill million Jews, it was only four and a half,' no, so this changes everything. What I'm saying is that nonetheless, without any prejudices, don't you think that if million people were left to die as part of a politics, that maybe we should just take note of this, no? And not as some Badiouians are tempted to do, dismiss it as, 'It's part of the being, of servicing the goods, nothing to do with the event,' because not Alain himself, but some Badiouians adopted this arrogant attitude in attacking me, telling me, 'Oh, this is the politics of being, numbers and so on, this is not the event.' Okay, maybe. No, after this long introduction let's start doing some problematic maybe work. Okay. Let me begin with, why still the idea of communism? Again, I think that what I try to do is instead of reading the notion of idea in Badiou's sense, which is for me a little bit too neo-Kantian still, and incidentally when Badiou defends himself that he is not a neo-Kantian, well, fuck him, he refers to Kant in, not in 'Communist Hypothesis', in a previous text he says the idea of communism is a kind of Kantian regulative idea. He does. So, you know. Okay, but let's go on. I think that one so for me to put it in an ironic term, Badiou's, you know like Kant has critique of pure reason, no, what Alain does is for me a little bit too much of critique of pure communism, you know like 'Kritik der reinen Kommunismus', you know. Okay, but I think what would be nice is to replace this Kantian notion of idea with a Hegelian notion of idea. I would prefer to speak about communism in this way, namely what Hegel means by idea is precisely not a pure ideal or impotent idea. Idea is for Hegel a notion or a cause which has in itself the strength, the power for its actualization. Like that an idea, as Hegel puts it, makes itself what it is. This, now when you say but this is crazy idealism, no, think about communism as an idea which moves people to fight for communism. This would have been a perfect Hegelian example. Communism is an idea insofar as it mobilizes people for its own actualization. So I think that this is why it is crucial when precisely one talks about the idea of communism to explore in what sense this idea, as it were, mobilizes the people to fight for it. For me there is no opposition between pure idea of communism and empirical struggles and so on and so on. Idea is precisely what, what actualizes itself again in so-called real struggles. Next step, a little bit more philosophical. Now we will, for the second hour, start to work a little bit. A- ah, incidentally, no, no, you ruined Greece, Europe, you will not ruin me here. Sorry, sorry. You know, at least I can tell you this, I am only childishly tastelessly aggressive towards my close friends. Which holds also for Alain Badiou, my god, he is my best friend and the only way to prove it is to stick the knife into him all the time. That's life, no. Okay, no, no, but let's go more seriously. This is now Alain Badiou at his best. He tried recently, in a text published two years ago in Cardozo Law Review, I don't think it was reprinted here already, correct me if I am wrong, a wonderful philosophico-revolutionary text, 'The Three Negations'. I hope it's known to some of you, it's a wonderful text. He tries to approach at the conceptual level the topic of negation, of course in the sense of revolutionary transformation. And he does this in his best way in a totally abstract conceptual manner. He deploys three modes of negation with regard to how they relate to Aristotle's two laws. You know, the basic ontologic law principle for Aristotle is the principle of non-contradiction, A and non-A cannot be true at the same time, and the principle of the excluded middle. Now, as Badiou goes on, there are of course here four logical possibilities. Both could be valid, you cancel or renounce one or the other, or you cancel, violate both. Badiou begins with dismissing this last fourth possibility, a negation which obeys neither the excluded middle nor the non-contradiction. For Badiou this is something simply inconsistent, equivalent to complete dissolution of all negativity. I will try to prove that he is a little bit too fast here. So, Badiou goes on, focusing on the three remaining consistent forms, each of them fitting a certain logical framework. First we have a negation which obeys the two principles. That is to say, obeys both the, the non-contradiction law and the exclusion of the, the excluded middle. This is the classical Aristotelian logic. Then we have negation which still obeys the principle of contradiction but it doesn't obey the principle of the excluded middle. This is for Badiou the intuitionistic logic, Brouwer, Heyting and so on. And then we have third possibility, negation which obeys the excluded middle but not the principle of contradiction. A paraconsistent logic, Brazilian school, da Costa. Now, let me explain this a little bit. In classical logic, the negation of P excludes not only P itself but also any other possibility concerning the contents of the proposition P. So, if you negate P, you negate P and the only option is P or non-P. In intuitionist logic, the negation of P excludes P itself but not some other possibilities which are somewhere between P and non-P. So in this sense, intuitionism obeys the principle of contradiction but not the excluded middle, no, like, as you will immediately see Badiou's point is that this is like social democratic revisionism, no, like, we are workers, there are bourgeoisie, it's still either us or them, the basic opposition is here but there are some third parties, compromises, blah, blah, the third are not excluded. Then, for, then in paraconsistent logic, the negation of P excludes this third space between P and non-P but not P itself. P is not really suppressed by the negation. For example, again Badiou's example, in the classical ethico-legal domain, someone is guilty or innocent, no space in between. In the intuitionist space, we always have intermediate values, like, guilty with attenuating circumstances, innocent because certainly guilty but with insufficient proof, and so on and so on. In the paraconsistent space, not foreign to certain theologies, one can be both at the same time although there is no third option. My deep awareness of guilt is the only proof I can have of my innocence, for example. But you see, here you see the opposition between position two and three and one. In one it's either this or that. In two it's not only this or that but there are intermediate stages, you are partially guilty, like if I were to kill one I would be partially guilty because all of you would bear witness that I'm not quite responsible or whatever, no, and in the third position, which is for me the most interesting one, is that it's still like in the first position only A or non-A. You are guilty or not guilty, no third way, but paradoxically these two can directly coincide, like again as in this some kind of hardline Protestant theology where, since we are all guilty and sinful, the only innocence is in fully assuming your guilt and so on. So as expected, Badiou's royal example is here revolution. The communist revolution for Badiou is classical, a radical confrontation with no third option. It's either us or them. The poor worker who before the revolution appears as nothing in the political field becomes the new hero of this field. In the intuitionist space of social democratic reformism, the poor worker appears in the political field but it is not at all a new hero of the field. The idea is to bring about a compromise, to find a third way, maintain capitalism but with more social responsibility and so on. In the third case of paraconsistent space, we get a sort of undecidability between event and non-event. Something happens but from the point of view of the world everything is identical, so we have event and event simultaneously, a false event, a simulacrum, as in the fascist revolution which denounces plutocratic exploitation but keeps capitalism. So, Badiou's conclusion, the lesson is that when the world is intuitionistic, a true change must be classical and a false change paraconsistent. So again you got Badiou's point, our ordinary reality is intuitionistic, is this that and the third, blah, blah, blah. Then you have two radical versions, a false change which pretends to change but doesn't change where the opposites in this perverted Hegelian way coincide and the authentic revolution, classical, it's either A or non-A and we have to win. Sounds nice but I have some problems as I always have with my friends. What if, my first question, what if today's late capitalist world is no longer in its logic intuitionistic? Is the postmodern capitalism not more and more a paraconsistent system in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P? The order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule in China, and so on and so on. Here classic change no longer works because negation gets caught in the game. So the only way out, this would be my solution, is to is the fourth form option dismissed by Badiou but which I think should be re-actualized. My option is that both principles should be negated, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of excluded middle. The first thing to remember is the radical asymmetry of what we once called the class struggle. I think it's wrong, totally wrong to inscribe what we still may call proletarian revolution into the classical logic. The aim of the proletariat is not simply to negate in whatever way its enemy, the capitalists, but to negate, abolish itself in the same movement as a class. This is why we are dealing here with the third way, not Blair but neither proletarian nor capitalist which is not excluded, but also with the suspension of the principle of contradiction. It is the proletariat itself which strives to abolish itself, its condition. So what does this mean in the terms of so-called libidinal economy? In a letter to Einstein as well as in his new introductory lectures to psychoanalysis, Freud proposes a utopian solution for the deadlocks of humanity, he calls it dictatorship of reason. Men should unite themselves and together subordinate and master their irrational unconscious forces and so on and so on. But I think that here we should instead of rejecting this idea of dictatorship of reason as a kind of a totalitarian dream, I think we should read it exactly as this kind of a unity of paraconsistent and intuitionist logic, that is to say the denial of, that is to say that the relationship between the dictatorship of reason and passions, libido, is the one of self-negating identity, and so on and so on. Okay but nonetheless, so to get back to the main point, I think that Badiou's revolution which moves in the classical space, us against them, goes for the traditional rebellions when reality is intuitionistic and in a revolutionary situation this, as they put it, everyday life is intuitionistic in the sense of this confusion, not only extremes but third ways, and so on and so on. But I claim that, again, today's reality is no longer intuitionistic, it's paraconsistent in the sense that things more and more function as their opposite, for example transgression is the norm, and so on and so on. Here I claim the fourth option dismissed by Badiou should be re-actualized. Now we will work a little bit, haha. The principle that I would like to mobilize for what I am trying to develop here is that of, I looked into it a little bit and I like it, I think I already maybe even mentioned it here but now I want to develop it in more detail. You know that Galileo Galilei in allegedly said 'e pur si muove', 'and yet it moves', after recanting before the Inquisition his theory that the earth moves around the sun. Now I claim that today this phrase is used in a totally misleading way. It is used in a naive empiricist way as if, 'yeah, yeah, you may deny it but in reality it still goes on.' Like as a naive empiricist assertion of reality which persists, 'e pur si muove', nonetheless it moves in spite of our wrong ideas. I claim that we should, it would have been much more interesting and appropriate to our situation to read this 'e pur si muove' in a, again, much more intelligent opposite way which is hinted at in Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, where 'e pur si muove' means something can be denounced as untrue, non-existent and so on but 'e pur si muove', it nonetheless functions as ideology, it still moves you. Like this is today's cynicism: you don't believe in God but God still moves you. You prove, it is demonstrated that something is wrong but it still functions. This is I think a much more interesting version of 'e pur si muove'. So what, where are we to look for the traces of this, things move, and which is this thing which moves? I think it's universality. Why? Haha, now comes the dangerous part, if there are any of those guys here who like to attack me on the web as proto-fascist and Euro-racist, now listen. I will try to go now into two detailed debates. The first one would be, it's a very respectful one, recently I read an interesting book, 'Is Critique Secular?'. It's a volume where the event I think was organized by Wendy Brown and then you have text by Talat Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood. A kind of a debate between the Wendy Brown Judith Butler school of whatever you call them, whatever I will would have called them would be denounced as wrong so I don't, and let's call it the progressive Muslims. What interests me is the critique of our notion of secular criticism elaborated there by Asad and Mahmood. Here is their idea, while in Western liberal secular societies state power protects public freedom and intervenes into the private space when it suspects, for example, child abuse, such intrusion into domestic space, the breaching of private domain is disallowed in Islamic law although conformity in public behavior may be much stricter. This is from, from Asad's text, or a further quote: 'For the community what matters is the Muslim subject's social practice including verbal publication, not her internal thoughts whatever they may be,' end of quote. In other words, what matters finally is belonging to a particular way of life in which the person does not own himself. Although as Quran says, quote from 'Let him who wills have faith and him who wills reject it,' end of quote, this right to think whatever one wishes does not include the right to express one's religious or moral beliefs publicly with the intention of converting people to a false commitment. This is why for Muslims it is impossible to remain silent when confronted with blasphemy. Their reaction is so passionate because for them, quote again Asad, 'blasphemy is neither freedom of speech nor the challenge of a new truth but something that seeks to disrupt a living relationship.' This living relationship is then described by Mahmood through the role of the icon in Orthodox Christianity. Although Islam is iconoclastic, for pious Muslims their, I quote now Mahmood, 'their embodied practices and virtues provide the substrate through which one comes to acquire a devoted and pious disposition. Such an inhabitation of the model is the result of a labor of love in which one is bound to the authorial figure through a sense of intimacy and desire. It is not due to the compulsion of the law that one emulates the prophet's conduct therefore but of the ethical capacities one has developed that incline one to behave in a certain way,' end of quote. This self-transcending surrender to a community held together by a complex web of practices which embody the shared living relationship to divinity, the very opposite of the Protestant focus on the inner belief of an isolated individual, also accounts for the passionate public protest of the Muslims to blasphemies against Islam. They experience themselves as living a full meaningful life only as members of their religious community, sharing their rituals and habits, so that an attack on Islam is for them not an intellectual matter of truth but a direct threat to their very collective form of life. This is the end of how I describe the position. Now comes my evil Eurocentric and so on counterpoint. The problem explodes when members of a religious community experience as blasphemous injury and a danger to their way of life not a direct attack on their religion but the very way of life of another community. As for example was the case, marginal I admit it, with attacks on gays and lesbians in Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, now I take the Muslims being the bad guys, or as it is the case with those Frenchmen and French women who see a woman covered by burqa as an attack on their French identity. You know, here again you see the problem is not only, 'My way of life is injured.' Here I'm totally for the protection of Islam and Christian fundamentalists. The problem for me, it considers both of them, is when you experience not the fact that others are attacking you but the very fact of a different way of life as an attack on you. As a situation where it is for you impossible to remain silent. As again, Christians are here the bad guys, as it is from not even Christians, from some French liberals they claim, 'When I see a woman covered in burqa it's impossible for me to remain silent.' As to the relationship between intimate and public freedom, it is true that for the democratic West, freedom is social, it is meaningless only as an inner conviction, it must be socialized, it must include the right not only to state publicly one's position in order to convince or seduce others but also to act socially on them. This however does not mean that with regard to intimate freedom and convictions, Western liberalism advocates probing into private sphere in order to establish a kind of totalitarian thought control. The problem for democratic liberalism is here the problem of seduction, when I am really free and when I think I am acting free while I am effectively being seduced by images and rhetorics. So when Asad deals with the topic of seduction, he contrasts Islam and liberal West. That's Asad's position, the West condemns rape, external violence, and but the West not only tolerates, it even celebrates seduction while in Islam seduction is considered worse. Quote: 'In liberal society, rape, the subjection of a person's body against his her wish for the purpose of sexual enjoyment is a serious crime whereas seduction, the mere manipulation of another person's desire is not. The first is a violence, the other is not. In liberal societies, seduction is not merely permitted, it is positively valued as a sign of individual freedom,' end of quote. Asad follows this description with two further critical remarks about the West. First, he claims that the distinction between coercion and seduction in the game of seduction is not clear cut since there is a large area between these two extremes. Second, seduction in liberal societies is a key constituent of commodification. Again I quote: 'The individual as consumer and as voter is subjected to a variety of allurements through appeals to greed, vanity, envy, revenge and so on. What in other circumstances may be identified and condemned as moral failings are here essential to the functioning of a particular kind of economy and polity,' end of quote. So seduction is a mode of manipulation since the seduced person loses its autonomy. Another quote: 'To seduce is to incite someone to open up his or her innermost self to images, sounds and words offered by the seducer and to lead the seduced implicitly or unwittingly to an end first conceived by the former,' end of quote. So for Asad, this liberal tolerance of seduction which de facto subverts the liberal free and autonomous subject, turning him or her into a passive victim of external stimulations, so that liberal freedom is ultimately the freedom to be seduced and manipulated by others, this tolerance is then contrasted with Islamic theology in which seduction is a matter of great concern and not only in the sexual sense. Seduction in all its forms is necessarily dangerous, not only for the individual because it indicates a loss of self-control but for the social order too because it could lead to violence and civil discord. So this is for Asad the horror of the Western system, Western market economy, where the functioning and stability of the system itself are sustained by seduction, by something potentially destabilizing. The conclusion is that liberal system is inherently perverse and corrupted since it has to rely on the very vices it publicly deplores for its normal functioning. Again, my counter argument here would be that the topic of seduction, of the seduction by the lure of commodities and seductive political manipulation, far from being foreign to the Western world, is the standard topic of enlightened secular rationalist critique. For example, precisely what Asad and Mahmood are enumerating as the troubles of seduction, sorry, the dangers of seduction, far to being opposed to Western individualist rationalism is its central part. For example, if you know Descartes, his whole point of, here I admit his vulgar anti-feminism, is that we men, that women can easily be seduced, not even primarily in sexual sense, but women are more prone to images, to impressions and so on and so on, so that the whole enlightenment elitist theory of freedom is based on this reasoning that, yes, we all have the right to freedom but freedom can be limited if you are suspected of being too open for seduction. Like, basically the argument is that primitive people are easily seduced by sensual notions and so on, so no freedom for them. So this would be my first counter-argument, that this whole line of reasoning is absolutely against seduction, is absolutely not foreign to the West. But there is another problem for me here. A Western rationalist would have added religious seduction to the list of seductions. That is to say, are the embodied practices which provide the substrate through which one comes to acquire a devoted pious disposition, are they also not techniques of seduction? Is the inhabitation of the model where one is bound to the authorial figure through a sense of intimacy and so on, not also the result of being seduced? I think this would be, I'm sorry that they are not here, this would be my point of debate with them. Okay, okay, I agree with their critique of seduction but what they, the two of them, describe in such poetic terms as participating in a living practice and so on and so on, does this not, does this not fit perfectly the notion of seduction? I claim that the truly radical Christian theologians from Pascal to Tolstoy, screw Dostoevsky, Tolstoy is my hero. You know, it's very fashionable today to be Dostoevskian with all this bullshit: 'Am I free or not? God gave me freedom but the more I'm free the more I'm guilty,' blah, blah. Tolstoy is not an idiot as it is often painted today. He has a much more radical, terribly pessimistic idea of, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, I think I already developed it once, the idea that, which is very close to Richard Dawkins' memes, no, that language ideas are like, how do you pronounce this in English, those small shitty organs who can screw you... bacilli... germs, yeah, are like germs which control you without knowing. You can't do, you don't have a free ego, your ego is just the battlefield where different germs are fighting, and here comes now Tolstoy's true heroism. He doesn't play this standard Cartesian game of opposing truly free individuality to germs, no. He claim, no, good ideas function in exactly the same way as bad ideas. They are both germs. The fight between good and evil is the fight between good and bad infection by germs. It's an incredibly radical position. Basically the same thing is said if you read really them really closely, although they are opposite, by Descartes and by, and by Spinoza. You know, Spinoza's notion of 'imitatio affecti' and so on and so on. So, now I must admit here absolutely my limitation. I am sure because Islamists are not, Muslims are not idiots, there are wonderful things in their theology. So I don't know enough to pass a general judgment. But I would like to see, and I don't mean this with a liberal hypocrisy where, you know, I'm asking a rhetorical question, but, you know, you know, like an antisemite saying, 'Jews of course can be honest, I would like to see one,' no, like... and it's not. No, no. I would nonetheless like to see, this would be a nice maybe deconstructive move, would a Muslim theologian be ready to admit this? That is to say, to admit that seduction works also in religion? That it's not a point of opposing seduction and free reason or whatever, no, that seduction is universal. Second thing which bothers me here in this privileging seduction as worse than rape. Of course there is an abstract truth in it. I mean, you can argue from an extreme moralist position, although I have some ethical doubts, that if you, now you will see immediately where my doubts come, you can say that within a very traditional ethical space that seducing a woman is worse than raping her, because you know, by raping her it's only her body, but she is terrified, which means her soul remains pure, but by seducing her it's even worse because you destroy not only her body but also her soul. Okay, okay, but the key question for me is not only the seductive force of violence itself and so on and so on. The true problem for me is in this privileging seduction over rape is that it opens up a space for, for me, a dangerous manipulation. That is to say that you, to cut a long story short, when a woman is raped, you know what will be my answer, no, you can put the blame on her by claiming that what appears as rape was in reality her act of seduction. And I'm not inventing her, I know many cases, and I know they are not central, they were often manipulated by the Western media, no, where, again, when there was a case of rape in, I know cases from Iran, even from Australia, Muslim community that the blame was put on the woman claiming that, for example, the very fact that she went out alone in the night where she was raped meant that she was trying to seduce men, that it was a provocation. So, what I'm saying here is that, not that we should simply reject this Muslim view, it's much more complicated of course, but that we should simply be much more radically critical and stop this game, comparative game of, you know, compare our culture to their culture and then try to prove which one is better and so on and so on. But to be radically critical towards both of them. Because again, what I tried to do here, I've written enough about Islam, for example praising its emancipatory potentials and so on and so on. But my result is basically pessimistic here. That is to say, it's that we cannot any, any, any taking sides here, any clear religious position. The measure of its greatness is the extent of self-questioning it is able to engage in. This is why, horrible thing to say, for example, I am ready to privilege Christianity a little bit, not because I believe in Christ and so on, come on, be serious, but because, you know, it's nice to have a religion where the God is proclaimed king but a king who is mocked and hanged up together with, together with two bandits and so on. That is to say that, you know, this would be my question, not answer, question because I don't know enough about Islam to Islamist, how would they react to this idea that obviously in Christianity, the only way for me at least, for example, to read the New Testament is to take Christ as a jokester? I mean, people often accuse me of, 'You never know when I say Hitler was not violent enough, am I joking or not or whatever.' Well, if you think I'm problematic, read Jesus Christ, no, and you will see. You know what I mean, like, for example, you know the story which is usually, which usually gives an instant multiple orgasm to American southern Baptist capitalists, maybe you, some of you know it better, it's the story about a master who goes away for some time and gives some money to two-three servants and then the first servant said, 'I manipulated the money, I invested it, you gave me one, whatever, piece of shit gold, here you have now five.' And he says, 'Okay, okay,' second one the same, okay, the third one said, 'I didn't want to put it, I kept it safe for you,' and here I think Jesus uses that formula, 'To those who have it will be taken even that what they have... no, no, no, to those who don't have it will be taken even what they don't have, to those who have it will be given more,' and so on and so on. So, this ultra-capitalist logic, like, it seems that through this fable Christ is saying be like active capitalist, you know, put money in circulation. Treat, it's the lesson of 'There Will Be Blood', the movie, no, like, treat religion like money, move it, invest it, and bring profit, no? Otherwise you lose the faith. But this is how it is usually read, not in a capitalist way, but nonetheless for an, let's say, active approach. But with great pleasure I learned, okay, through simple internet exploration, that there is a school which proves in detail, first you find the same story not only in, I don't know which one, don't ask me, of the four official gospels, but also in, in one of the apocryphal gospels, where it's given a slightly different twist which hints that the point of Christ is not to celebrate the master but simply to show how the true hero is the third one, who didn't want to put it in a circulation and in this way exploit the others. That you can read it in a totally opposite way. You know, and this is for me, coming back to the point, the greatness of Christianity, this self-mocking idea. For example, in, in, in, for example again, as what I always repeated, again, when Christ said, 'Ah, I will now use a parable to make it clear,' where the parables by Christ always make it even less clear and totally confuse the issue. And so it is, I think, totally wrong to read the crucifixion as, you know, this idea of by stupid men Christ was mockingly claimed God but he is the true God. No, there is no true God. Christ is a clown from the standpoint of authority, Christ is a stupid clown. There is no, you see my point? There is no secret true authority, like, you know, like this Batman logic or whatever, you put off your dress off and you are a true hero, no, it's, it's really a kind of a not king, not master, but object A, a saint and a clown, a dirty clown at the same time. Along these lines I would like to pursue the matter, not but you see what's my point here? I think that the only way to... What are the two of you traitors there talking, making fun of me? I mean, I am for clown and jokes but within certain limits, you know, which I impose, no? Sorry, let me go on. No, so you see my point. My point is that I don't believe in this pure respect. I think we, coming from different religious and atheist whatever background, we should be able to ask each other this type of questions. Okay, the last line of thought, to attack the attack on my own people. Where is in all this forthcoming changes psychoanalysis? Did you notice how the problem with psychoanalysis and politics is the same as the problem with Hegel and politics? In the same way, exactly as with Hegel, we have three readings. We have with Hegel, we have conservative Hegel, you know, those state Hegelians against liberal state, corporate Hegelians. We have leftist Hegel, not only Marx but also Bakunin and so on, who dialectic change and so on. And we have in the last years a disgusting freaky apparition called liberal Hegelians. I think this is maybe the only true philosophical revolution in Hegel studies in the last years, that a third way, this time yes in the Tony Blair sense, is emerging, a liberal Hegel. The sign now, if you are KGB theoretical policeman, the way you identify the culprits, watch for the word 'recognition'. This is the catchword of liberal Hegelians. They claim that the big, these are basically Pittsburgh Hegelian, Pippin, and so on and so on. It's a deflated Hegel, Hegel with no ontological pretensions, but the key is that the ultimate aim of Hegelian social thought is mutual recognition and so on and so on. Okay, then we have in Freud exactly the same. We have conservative Hegelians, sorry, conservative Freudians, even Lacanians, who claim Lacan's message is today's permissive society is narcissistic, as such, dangerous, can lead to psychotic breakdown. What we need is to reassert the authority of the symbolic law, you know the story, and so on and so on. Then we have leftist Lacanians, but unfortunately, the same as with Hegel studies, we have this growing species of the unfortunately not excluded third middle term, which is liberal Lacanians. I think that, now if you allow me for a little bit of speculation, I think that the original culprit here is already Lacan himself, who clearly in his last, like years, is oscillating between two modes of ethico-political. One is, one is worse than the other, I would have said that, like Stalin. One is the certain ethics of transgression best developed in his seminar on, in his chapters, the chapters of Antigone of his seminar seven, the idea of the ethical act as a kind of forcing, a violent act of transgression which is as such exceptional. Like, you know, you can blindly confront the truth but you cannot, you cannot endure in it, momentary transgression then you are... then it's the apparent opposite but which amounts to the same, namely, this common sense wisdom that authentic moments are rare, you can only survive if you return to the safe domain of semblances, you know, this fake Nietzschean idea that truth is too strong for us. We, in our daily lives, we must live in semblances, and the only thing that psychoanalysis gives us is an awareness that these semblances are ultimately false. So, to put it very simply, and I think we should put it simply, it's a simple position of some kind of hedonist cynicism. The idea is, after you experience the real in this horrible blinding moment, you have to return to ordinary life, but you are aware that this is just a game, you're playing a social game, don't take it too seriously, and so on and so on. Now it is, what makes it so interesting is that the late Lacan went even further along this liberal path and renounced even this idea of violent transgression. This is why in his last decade or two, his focus is on his definition of final moment of psychoanalysis is no longer traversing the fantasy, but identifying with the symptom. What he means here is something very clear, he says it, I quote you, no complicated phrases. For example, the late Lacan says, 'One should not push an analysis too far. When the patient thinks he is happy to live, it is enough.' You have many of this idea that, 'Don't push it to the end, just find a balance which would be a little bit more, a little bit less painful,' and that's make... So again, he Lacan often says that the goal of analysis is making life a little bit easier. Now it's nonetheless interesting here how Lacan oscillates between two versions which, again, unfortunately, are for me both worse, each worse than the other. One is, and it's very interesting to hear this from Lacan, who is otherwise so aggressive against Hegel's 'list der vernunft', the cunning of reason. It's a kind of a vulgarized Hegelianism. Lacan quotes Matthew to you know, that famous parable where believers worry, what will we eat, what will we drink, and so on and so on, and God tells them, 'Just believe in me and all these things will come for free,' and so on and so on. Lacan positively refers to this, but it's, I noticed, you know, always when Lacan quotes in different years the same passage, you should be attentive to the context, it's usually the opposite reading, no. There are times when he sounds, in his earlier years around ethics seminar, when he reads it in a, in the way of still clinging to this radical ethics of confronting the truth, like, the idea is, 'Confront the truth courageously, don't think about curing yourself and it will come by itself, your life will be easier, you will be happier but don't think about that,' you know, confront the truth and, here Lacan comes close to cunning of reason, it will come by itself, life will be better and so on and so on. But often, so again, this reading would be, you know, like, 'Take care of the of the, you know, take care of the of the pence and the pounds, or the cents and the pounds will take care of themselves. Take care of the truth, risk everything, ignore the consequences and health will come by itself.' Again, 'Take care of the truth and the healing will take care of itself. Just be consistent, go to the end ethically.' And again, as you notice, this is a very naive, I claim, pre-Hegelian idea of cunning of reason, very strange to get it from Lacan. The idea here you have, I claim, you see still the big other. Trust God or the big other that somehow you will also feel better, have better sex, whatever you want, no, just go for the truth. But then you have the late Lacan, who is again, who goes again, even a step further and who claims that, 'No, abandon truth, be modest, you suffer here, you suffer there, rearrange a little bit your symptoms, that's all you can do.' Now, what Jacques-Alain Miller does in his last years is brutally, fully developing this line of thought. He, he, first, let me give you some, for me at least, horrible quotes. First, Miller claims that Lacan's basic moment in the last years is that he rejects symbolic truth and go into jouissance as the only real. So, Miller's position is, be aware that all symbols, speech is only a semblance, that the only thing that matters is enjoyment. And Miller openly claimed this, a kind of a hedonist liberalism where he claims the liberalism of jouissance. The best you can do is found to find your own mode of, of, of jouissance. Here Miller opposes modern science where he says modern science precisely and psychiatry doesn't give you this freedom. It wants to level you, to prescribe how people should be free, how they should enjoy and so on and so on. But again, the idea is that a cynical position that don't count on the others, formulate your own idiosyncratic mode of enjoyment, that's all you can do. Here come some for me pretty tasteless quotes. Psychoanalysis, I quote Miller, reveals social ideals in their nature of semblances and as we add we can add, of semblances with regard to a real which is the real of enjoyment. This is the cynical position which resides in saying that enjoyment is the only thing that is true, end of quote. What this means is that a psychoanalyst, quote again, occupies the position of ironist who takes care not to intervene into the political field. The psychoanalyst acts so that semblances remain at their places while making it sure that subjects under his care do not take them for real. One should somehow bring oneself to remain taken in by them, fooled by them. Lacan could say that those who are not taken in are wrong, 'les non-dupes errent'. If one doesn't act as if semblances are real, if one doesn't live the their efficiency undisturbed, things turn out for the worse. This is all from Miller. Those who think that all the signs of power are mere semblances and rely on the arbitrariness of the discourse of master are bad boys. So now I say in the matter of politics a psychoanalyst does, quote, doesn't propose projects, he cannot propose them, he can only mock the projects of others which limits the scope of his statements. The ironist has no great design, he waits for the other to speak first and then bring about his fall as fast as possible. Let us say this is a political wisdom, nothing more. Another quote, the axiom of this wisdom is that, quote, 'One should protect, protect semblances of power for the good reason that one should be able to continue to enjoy. The point is not to attach oneself to the semblances of the existing power but to consider them necessary.' This defines a cynicism in the mode of Voltaire which let it be understood that God is our invention which is necessary to maintain people in a proper decorum. Society is kept together only by semblances, which means there is no society without repression, without identification and above all without routine. Routine is essential. The result is thus a kind of cynical liberal conservatism. In order to retain stability, one has to respect and follow routines established by a choice which is always arbitrary and authoritarian. There is no progressivism which holds but rather a particular kind of hedonism called hedonism of enjoyment. One has to maintain intact the routine of the city, its laws and traditions and accept that a kind of obscurantism is necessary in order to maintain social order. Literal quote from Miller: 'There are questions one shouldn't ask, my god, psychoanalyst saying this. If you turn the social turtle on its back, you will never succeed to turn it back on its paws.' Typical conservative wisdom. This then, unfortunately, is Miller's position today, a kind of liberal conservative hedonist position. We are all freaks of individual fantasies which structure our enjoyment, society is as such a semblance, a lie, but at the same time, we should be cynical realists, realists, we should admit that without this semblance, which is always ultimately authoritarian, that of a master, there is a catastrophe, society disintegrates, so all you can do is this kind of cynical hedonist wisdom. I know there are appearances but I will not disturb them too much, it may provoke chaos. Against this cynical hedonist idea of a subject who while admitting the necessity of symbolic semblances relates to them with a distance, aware that the only real is that of the bodily jouissance, I claim, this would be my first point against Miller. I claim that this position, and I'm shocked that Miller doesn't notice it, you see here how Lacan was right when he says the unconscious is political. That is to say that even when we debate about the status of the unconscious, we really, I read it in this very brutal way, we really pass a political judgment. I'm not so antipathetic towards this idea of, you know, build your idiosyncratic enjoyment. But and Fred Jameson gave me this idea, I claim that Miller is totally wrong to link this to the liberal political order. Jameson in his reading of that wonderful early Soviet negative utopia Platonov, 'Chevengur', claims that precisely the idea of Platonov is that imagine communism as a kind of a strange world where perverts coexist in their space. A madman here, a paranoiac there, somebody hallucinating up there, and I told this to Fred, to Jameson, when I met him and of course first I insulted it in my way. My god, did I tell you this, this was wonderful, he introduced me at Duke and I, you know how I referred to him, I said my gratitude to the great progressive bourgeois thinker, you know like, he is there, no? But but he agreed with my example. It's, I know he was privately half a fascist, but do you know the best of Frank Capra? Really, Frank Capra, people thought he was a progressive Rooseveltian, but Capra was pro-Mussolini. It's good to know Frank Capra, not to have any illusions, but nonetheless, in his nonetheless wonderful film 'You Can't Take It With You'. You remember the rich man's son James Stewart falls in love with a girl who lives in such a big Dickensian madhouse. Who lives in that house? You have Essie Carmichael, a guy who makes candy as a hobby and dreams of being a ballerina, Paul Sycamore, a thinker who manufactures fireworks, Mr. De Pinna, an iceman who comes who always speaks to to to about about certain politics before, Ed Carmichael, an amateur printer who prints anything that sounds good to him, then you have Boris Kolenkov, a Russian concerned with world politics for whom everyone stinks. You know, is this typical like in Dickens, alternate worlds where idiots of all kinds, madmen and so on live happily together. I think against Miller I would say no, sorry, I don't allow you this, he doesn't see that this is the communist utopia and that under the pretense of plurality of commodification, capitalism precisely doesn't allow this. The problem with capitalist commodification is precisely that it is too standardizing, which is why I claim Miller is totally wrong when in his, now I come to two basic Miller's mistakes, first when he, he started, you maybe even have heard of it, this big movement against standardization in psychoanalysis, this subordination of psychoanalysis to state control regulation. Okay, nothing against, but the horror is that he, and he asked me many times could I gave a speech to support his movement and so on and so on. Sorry, but the horror is that he inscribed this protest movement explicitly into a neoliberal Thatcherite right-wing position. They published even in their press in French translation of some British, I forgot the names, neoliberal economists who claim that, you know, this typical neoliberal idea, totalitarian social democratic state pretends to wants to know for us what really makes us happy, no, we should give to the people the freedom to decide. And his idea is that the totalitarian state psychiatry wants this to determine when you are happy normal, while the psychoanalyst allows you and so on and so on. But I claim this is simply a wrong point, what he doesn't see is the inherent contradiction of liberal ideology that at the same time it appears idiosyncratic, to each his her own enjoyment, but at the same time it's extremely, as it were, normativizing, you must be totally free but totally free in a way which is strictly prescribed. So again, the problem for me, again as with Stalinism, the problem for me with neoliberalism is not not enough solidarity and so on and so on, no, not enough idiosyncrasy. The joke is that this multiplicity, you can I don't know screw dogs, two women at the same time, whatever you want, it's beneath it, it's a terrible uniformity. The second point, which is now absolutely crucial, theoretical, and with this I conclude, is that Miller's re- it's horrible this, how and if I make you understand this, you and myself because I include myself into the idiots among the idiots, is crucial. Miller's notion of cynicism and the real of jouissance is totally false in the Lacanian terms. Why? When you have the real and semblances, Lacan always emphasizes that cynicism is a false position because it doesn't see that the real is not simply behind semblances, but it's only the real of this semblances so that if you take away the semblance, you lose the real itself. Like you know, I often quoted it, that old joke quoted by Lacan, Alphonse Allais, the great French satirist, who showed, I don't want to be then accused of politically correctness to a woman like Udi, let's say you are a woman now, no, and I show at him and say, 'Look that woman, what a shame, beneath her dress she is totally naked, no.' This is the real. The real is the real only, you are only naked beneath your dress. So in other words, this for Lacan isn't cynicism, because the cynic's idea is precisely that semblances, appearances are only appearances. The whole point of psychoanalysis is to be aware that the real is the real of appearances. The real is not behind appearances. That is to say, to go to the much more theoretical level, that the real is only in the appearances. It's a gap, inconsistency of appearances, which is why, again, one, we should read, you know, Miller, you remember quote this 'les non-dupes errent', those who are not taken in are wrong. He reads it as, you remember I hope, in a cynical way, which is, even if you know the real, you have to be, you have to cynically accept the social spectacle, pretend as if it's true although you know it's not true. But Lacan's point of 'les non-dupes errent' is not this cynical point, you know it's not true but pretend it's true. Is that those 'les non-dupes errent' are for Lacan cynics who do not see, again, the weight of appearances. They do not see that the real is in the appearances, that the real is not behind the appearances. Which is why I claim, here we come to politics, if you take Lacanian notion of the real seriously, then I think you should absolutely drop this kind of cynical hedonist individualism. You should on the contrary say that the social field is not simply opposed to individual real in the sense of I have my tiny fantasy and so on and so on, but that the real is inscribed into the social field itself as its antagonisms, inconsistencies and so on and so on, which means point two, that it's Miller falls here into what I consider the most horrible postmodern skepticism, which is this kind of, how should I call it, clear ontological counter-revolutionary attitude. It goes something like this: although the world is unjust, but all radical political projects are ultimately logocentric, metaphysical, you think you can realize the idea and so on and so on. The beauty of this position of course is that it's conservative but it appears it, it, it appears, apparently, it allows you to appear more critical than radical critics. You can still say you communist, you want to change the world, but ha-ha-ha, you are still logocentric, you think you can introduce an ideal world and so on. Basically enlightened pragmatic conformism appears the most radical position. A true Lacanian answer here, I think, is that nonetheless, that if you posit the real into the symbolic itself as its inconsistency and so on, and this, I think, is the single greatest achievement of Lacan. How he, for him again, as I developed innumerable times, the real is not an inaccessible beyond. As Lacan put it, the real is nothing but a deadlock of a symbolic formalization. If you put it in this way, then of course the point is not, forget about this bullshit, to construct an ideal happy society, but you definitely can radically change the order of appearance. You can radically restructure the order of appearance, and point two, now you will say, but still, what about the point that appearances are only semblances and so on and so on? There are, they are semblances, but you know, Lacan here again is a genius if you read him closely, but the real for Lacan is ultimately a semblance, on how to put it, a semblance of the real. The real is not again, a hard real beyond. The real is the impossibility, the limit of a semblance and so on and so on. So again, radical changes are possible and my argument here a triumphant one, I hope acceptable to all of you, would have been a democracy. Okay, we can say like, I will stop immediately, I got your much much much too much more... yeah no, you know like, we can say like Miller says, 'Oh, something shouldn't be talked about mystery and so on and so on.' But sorry, nonetheless, you can do what even bourgeois thinkers like Lefort describe as democratic revolution where you can demystify power, you can proclaim power empty and like it, you know what I mean like, it is some kind of a progress for me. Sorry, you no longer have to substantialize power, you have a radical gap between power and power and its power and the agent of power so what precisely Miller claims has to remain a secret, in democracy it's no longer a secret. It's part of the game to claim that everyone, any leader, is just occupying the place of power not having full right to it and so on and so on. Again if you de-substantialize the real, then you can see that this idea, this equalizing of all symbolic space works in the same way. No, democracy is a nice example of how the real, the real of this gap gap impossibility of power empty place of power and so on and so on, can be successfully integrated into the symbolic order. So again I think that this is the true choice of psychoanalytic political ethics for me. Either it will get caught into this late capitalist cynical hedonism, where I'm saying then, ah-ah, I am against death penalty but for the time being let's keep it open when you have psychoanalysts like that, no? Or or again, I'm not preaching for any Marxist revolution here or what, just for this basic opening. Don't go too fast in this equalization, 'Oh, all politics is just semblance.' Yes, but in a way all is semblance. But nonetheless, you have semblances which may be semblances but the real itself reverberates in them. Like you can have a heroic pathetic moment of heroic act sacrifice which it is a semblance but my god it's semblance with the real in it. I mean, this is for Lacan's whole point that semblances does not mean they are all the same semblances. Absolutely we should break out of this hedonist cynical skepticism. I'm sorry if I was too long but it's my nature and so, in two days, no, so that you will not be disappointed. I hope you agree, I'm a little bit tired of this political bullshit and I'm bluffing in it and so on, I warn you. What if the next two times we do some real Hegel-Lacanian theory? Because I developed ah, why did you say yes, this was a trap? You mean today it was not real, no? Okay, no no no. No no I mean, no semblance, yeah no no seriously, if you agree, next time I want to do some new stuff, I further developed it, I think only now I understood it. What Lacan really means by there is no sexual difference, his formulas and what this means for progressive struggle, I really think only now I understood it and on Saturday I propose to go into Hegel, the limits of Hegel again with a detailed new analysis because you know, enemies of the people claim I'm just bluffing, bluffing that big book of Hegel, ha-ha I will never write it. Fuck you, I have it, pages. No, okay.