The Monstrocity of Christ
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-04-20 · 1:21:01 · 10,677 words
ideologycapitalismreligion-theologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnesseconomicsgeopolitics-warfascism-populismhistoryeveryday-lifephilosophy-general
In this wide-ranging lecture, Žižek discusses the contemporary obsession with 'toxic subjects' and the neighbor as an irreducible abyss of otherness in Judeo-Christian thought. He critiques post-secular theology, liberal multiculturalism's 'hear the enemy's story' ideology, and the experiential logic of late capitalism illustrated via commodity publicity and Starbucks charity. He then analyzes the 2008 financial crisis as revealing capitalism's authoritarian tendencies, drawing on Marx's concept of 'general intellect' to argue that rent is displacing profit as capitalism's dominant mode, necessitating a stronger authoritarian state, exemplified by Singapore and China, and concludes with a call for a theologico-political voluntarism as a substitute for the exhausted Marxist faith in historical progress.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The contemporary theological-philosophical turn (Marion, Derrida, Vattimo) that abandons strong metaphysical claims about God while retaining a 'weak' divine dimension of unfathomable transcendent otherness grounded in human finitude, which Žižek rejects as ideologically timid.
Gianni Vattimo's pensiero debole: a post-metaphysical philosophy aware of its own limitations and renouncing strong ontological claims, which Žižek ironically accepts only if paired with a 'strong secret police' to defend it.
Freud's concept, reread by Žižek as the paradoxical name for immortality, a persistence that insists beyond life and death, exemplified by undead figures (vampires), not a desire for nirvana or self-annihilation.
Not explicitly named but structurally invoked in the discussion of the neighbor as the remainder that exceeds empathic understanding, the irreducible kernel of otherness.
as “neighbor”
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the neighbor is not the empathic fellow-man but the abyss of traumatic otherness, the toxic, incomprehensible dimension that shatters one's understanding of another person.
The contemporary ideological category that conflates radically different threats (immigrant, terrorist, sexual abuser) under a single label, scapegoating an Other to displace structural critique; ultimately, the modern subject as such is characterized as inherently toxic.
Following Agamben, the normalization of the state of exception whereby armed forces are deployed in everyday civilian life (as in Berlusconi's Italy), life continuing as normal while exceptional measures become permanent.
as “reasonable racism”
A formula for moderate, civilized discrimination, derived from Brasillach's 'reasonable antisemitism', whereby liberal democratic governments reject crude populist racism while enacting its structural equivalent against immigrants under the guise of protecting social order.
The uncanny experience, triggered by films like Eagle Eye or The Truman Show, in which one perceives everyday reality as fully controlled and manipulated, stripping it of its neutral appearance.
The ideological tendency in recent superhero films to humanize protagonists by giving them psychological depth, nightmares, and fragility, which Žižek reads as a form of ideological false humanization that excuses anything.
The contemporary ideological structure in which commodities, social relations, and politics are filtered through the lens of individual authentic experience, making structural critique harder and enabling charity to function as ideological cover.
The third stage of capitalist publicity in which commodities are sold not by referring to their properties or status-value but by promising an authentic subjective experience, freedom, ecological virtue, spiritual participation, integrated with consumption.
Naomi Klein's concept that capitalism exploits traumatic crises (wars, disasters, financial meltdowns) to clear ideological space and impose its agenda, which Žižek applies to the 2008 financial crisis.
A model of capitalism, first implemented by Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and adopted by China, that combines full market dynamics with authoritarian political rule, demonstrating that capitalism no longer requires liberal democracy.
Marx's concept of the collective scientific-intellectual substance whose growing centrality in production renders classical labor-time-based exploitation increasingly obsolete; in late capitalism this common knowledge is privatized, generating rent rather than profit.
as “rent replacing profit”
Žižek's thesis (drawing on Italian economists close to Negri) that the privatization of general intellect and natural resources means the dominant form of capitalist appropriation has shifted from profit (extracted through labor exploitation) to rent (monopolistic claims on shared intellectual or natural property).
Žižek's paradox that intellectual property is by its nature collective, unlike material goods, sharing knowledge leaves everyone with more, so its privatization requires arbitrary state enforcement rather than natural market logic.
as “monstrosity of Christ”
Žižek's theological concept, the title of his book, pointing to the scandalous, rebellious dimension of Christ, the moment of 'Father, why have you forsaken me?', as a figure of radical atheist theology and political resistance.
as “big Other of history”
The naive Marxist presupposition that history itself supports the left's cause and guarantees that communism is the telos of historical development, a teleological guarantee Žižek argues is no longer available.
A reference to theology not as divine backing but as a domain of unconditional commitment and voluntarism that fills the vacuum left by the collapse of Marxist faith in historical necessity, enabling genuine political action without a 'big Other' of history.
Stories he reaches for 8
Žižek uses Bill Gates to exemplify how wealth in the knowledge economy is not profit extracted from labor but rent from the monopolistic privatization of general intellect, Windows' price has no basis in labor value or market competition.
“he privatized the digital general intellect. And we are paying rent.”
Žižek uses organic food as an example of the experiential commodity: you buy it not because you believe it is healthier but because it gives you the experience of participating in a larger ecological/spiritual project.
“oh my God listen even when I buy apples I participate in some greater social project of keeping our planet alive”
When asked in an interview whether his first sexual partner was male or female, Gore Vidal replied 'I was too polite to ask', a model of refined distance that Žižek holds up as the ideal attitude toward the neighbor.
“"I was too polite to ask".”
Žižek cites Weinberg's line that without religion good people do good things and bad people do bad things, but you need religion to make good people do bad things, deployed as an ambivalent critique he partially endorses.
“without religion it would be simply that good people would be doing good things and bad people bad things… But you need religion to make good people do bad things.”
Žižek's friend Peter Sloterdijk poses the thought experiment: who will people erect statues to in 200 years? His answer is Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of capitalism with Asian values, as the most consequential political innovator of our era.
“if the present tendencies will go on, to whom will people raise monuments 200 years from our time… His idea was Lee Kuan Yew.”
Starbucks sells 'Ethos Water' at a premium, donating five cents per bottle to clean water projects; Žižek reads this as ideology integrated into consumption, buying coffee becomes a form of activism that allows one to ignore real suffering while feeling good.
“with every cup of cappuccino that you buy in our store you save another Guatemala children from blindness or something like that”
Žižek uses Tarkovsky to illustrate the paradox of 20th-century finitude-based spiritualism: precisely because we are stuck in our bodies and environment, this gives existence an unfathomable abyss, the most materialist filmmaker is also the most spiritual.
“who is the most materialist cinema maker… My choice would have been Andrei Tarkovsky… but he is also the most spiritualist”
Žižek cites a documentary interview with Hitler's secretary who described him as warm and kind, giving children cake, caring for his dog, to illustrate that what makes monsters terrible is precisely their humanity, not their inhumanity.
“he liked to embrace small children giving them cakes with cream… warm human being, absolutely”
Works invoked 15
The Dark Knight film
Žižek says he would 'publicly burn it' (in his Stalinist mood); criticizes its psychologization of the hero as false humanization and ideological.
Žižek's own book (co-authored with Milbank); its cover and argument are central to the talk's conclusion about the rebellious Christ.
Empire book
Negri and Hardt's book; Žižek says there is much valuable material in it but rejects their thesis about the declining importance of the state.
Das Kapital book
Marx's Capital; cited for its discussion of oil as (paradoxically) not a source of value, used to show Chavez's wealth as rent rather than profit.
The Shock Doctrine book
Naomi Klein's book; its concept is deployed to analyze the 2008 financial crisis as a potential tool for imposing capitalism's agenda.
Jonathan Littell's novel; Žižek recommends it and defends it, the first-person SS narrator illustrates his thesis about the humanity of perpetrators.
The Truman Show film
Referenced alongside Enemy of the State as exemplars of paranoiac denaturalization of reality, reality secretly being a constructed, controlled environment.
Eagle Eye film
Žižek praises this paranoiac thriller for its idea of a Pentagon supercomputer deciding the President is a danger to American interests, he endorses the computer's logic and loves the effect of paranoiac denaturalization of reality.
Emotional Vampires book
Albert Bernstein's book; cited alongside other popular psychology texts as symptom of the toxic-subject ideology.
Toxic People book
Lillian Glass's self-help book; listed as evidence of the ideological obsession with toxic subjects.
Toxic Parents book
Susan Forward's book; Žižek uses it to make the point that all parents are in some sense toxic, it is a constitutive feature of subjectivity, not an individual pathology.
Documentary interview with Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary; used to illustrate that Hitler was a warm, human person, making him more disturbing, not less.
Enemy of the State film
Mentioned alongside Truman Show as a paranoiac thriller about total surveillance and control, inverted by Eagle Eye's premise.
God Without Being book
Jean-Luc Marion's book; cited as the emblematic title of post-metaphysical theology that Žižek entirely rejects.
Habermas's book; Žižek disagrees with its content but finds the title perfectly apt for today's situation of fundamental opacity.
People invoked 33
Identified as the inventor of 'capitalism with Asian values' in Singapore; Sloterdijk predicts he will be the figure future generations erect statues to, Žižek presents this as a warning, not an endorsement.
Bernard Madoff positive
Defended not personally but analytically: Žižek argues he was following the logic of the financial system to its conclusion and that his scapegoating contained antisemitic undertones.
Robert Brasillach positive
French fascist intellectual shot in 1945; Žižek quotes his 'reasonable antisemitism' as the template for today's 'reasonable racism' in immigration policy, using him as an analytical key, not to endorse him.
Theodor W. Adorno negative
Grouped with Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason; Žižek rejects the generalization from critique of capitalism to critique of technology/domination.
Gianni Vattimo negative
Called 'a good friend' and 'reformed communist who became communist again'; Žižek nonetheless rejects his pensiero debole / weak thought and satirizes 'weak communism' as needing a strong secret police.
Gore Vidal positive
Cited as 'your great liberal writer'; his anecdote of being 'too polite to ask' about a sexual partner's gender is held up as the ideal model of keeping the neighbor at a distance.
Historical reference: visited Singapore before launching China's reforms and declared it China's model, illustrating the genealogy of capitalism with Asian values.
Jacques Lacan positive
Implicit background framework throughout; the concept of the neighbor as abyss is fundamentally Lacanian.
Steven Weinberg positive
His famous line that religion makes good people do bad things is quoted and described as 'a very evil thought and I love it.'
Naomi Klein positive
Her Shock Doctrine is invoked to analyze the 2008 financial crisis as a potential instrument for imposing capitalism's agenda.
Antonio Negri positive
Credited with writing valuably about immaterial labor and the multitude; Žižek disagrees with his thesis that the state is becoming obsolete, arguing the state is more important than ever.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'good colleague and theoretical friend'; they share the rejection of post-secular theology and both stand on the side of infinity against weak thought.
Giorgio Agamben positive
His theory of the emergency state / normalization of the state of exception is deployed as the framework for analyzing Italy's military deployment in civilian life.
Jonathan Littell positive
Author of Les Bienveillantes / The Kindly Ones; Žižek advises readers to read it and defends it against critics who find it obscene, the novel's first-person Nazi narrator illustrates the humanity of perpetrators.
Described as 'half friend' and co-author of The Monstrosity of Christ; they disagreed about the cover inscription, Milbank wanted 'This is God' rather than Žižek's preferred 'This is not a god'.
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as a friend and intellectual companion; appears in the anecdote about the American university dinner and the Mediterranean beach with Eric Santner.
Evo Morales negative
Described as having more interesting politics than Chavez; Žižek agrees with his empirical ecological diagnosis but rejects the ideological framework of Mother Earth and the narrative of the fall into capitalism.
Peter Sloterdijk negative
Called 'my good friend but political opponent', Žižek jokes he would send Sloterdijk to the Gulag when he takes power; used to introduce the question of who future generations will monumentalize (Lee Kuan Yew).
Jean-Luc Marion negative
His 'God Without Being' is cited as exemplary of the post-metaphysical theology Žižek totally rejects.
Martin Heidegger positive
Credited with inaugurating the 20th-century turn to finitude as the basis of spirituality; Žižek says he has great respect for Heidegger while rejecting the Heideggerian critique of technology/instrumental reason.
Bill Gates positive
Used as the paradigm case for how monopolistic privatization of general intellect generates rent rather than profit, not morally blamed but analytically deployed.
Called 'a good friend from Chicago' and subjected to gentle mockery for his discomfort at a Mediterranean topless beach, used to illustrate European vs. American modalities of restraint.
Michelangelo positive
His drawing for Vittoria Colonna of the crucifixion is on the book cover; Žižek interprets Christ's right hand as gesturing 'fuck off' to the Father, the image of rebellious theology.
Met on the day of the talk; the occasion for the joke about 'Brother Anton' / 'Brother Adolf', Žižek gently satirizes West's habitual use of 'Brother' as an honorific.
Mentioned for the title of his book Neue Unübersichtlichkeit (The New Opacity), Žižek says he disagrees with the book but finds the title apt for today's confused situation.
Max Horkheimer negative
Grouped with Adorno; their Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason is rejected as too general, the problem is capitalism, not technology as such.
René Magritte positive
Referenced for the 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' logic applied to the book cover: 'Ceci n'est pas un dieu' as the desired inscription.
Described as 'just lucky, he has oil dollars, he is Fidel Castro with oil', used as a case study for rent displacing profit in Marxist terms.
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
Called 'the most materialist cinema maker of the 20th century' who is paradoxically also the most spiritualist, used to illustrate the finitude-based spiritualization of the post-Heideggerian tradition.
Karl Marx positive
Praised for the concept of general intellect and the critique of capitalism; criticized for failing to foresee the privatization of general intellect and for a naive teleological assumption that this would automatically destroy capitalism.
Michael Hardt positive
Co-author with Negri of Empire; same assessment, valuable on immaterial labor but wrong to dismiss the state's growing importance.
Sigmund Freud positive
Read as providing a theory of immortality through the death drive, the 'Freudian infinity' against both vulgar materialism and idealist spiritualism.
Creston Davis negative
Described as 'good friend' who wrote the introduction to The Monstrosity of Christ; Žižek objects to being inscribed into a post-secular turn he rejects.
What it argues
The neighbor as traumatic toxic other beyond empathic fellow-manPost-secular theology and the spiritualization of finitudeExperiential commodity logic and the integration of '68 rebellionThe 2008 financial crisis and capitalism's authoritarian turnGeneral intellect, intellectual property, and rent replacing profitCapitalism with Asian values and the decoupling of capitalism from democracyTheologico-political voluntarism as substitute for Marxist historical teleology
Dialectical moves 11
“The true neighbor is the very opposite of the fellow-man: not empathy and understanding, but the traumatic abyss that shatters understanding.”
The concept of neighbor is inverted: genuine neighborliness is not warm fellow-feeling but the encounter with irreducible toxic otherness.
“The death drive is paradoxically the Freudian name for immortality — its very opposite of death.”
Freud's death drive is not a wish to die but a form of obscene persistence beyond life and death.
“American openness about sexuality is precisely a mode of practicing its exact opposite — a refined mode of keeping the neighbor at a distance.”
What appears as excessive openness in American culture functions structurally as a method of maintaining distance and preventing genuine intimacy.
“The modern subject is as such toxic — toxicity is not a predicate of deviant subjects but the characterization of the subject itself.”
The obsession with identifying and defending against toxic people merely externalizes what is a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity.
“Far from being a check on corporate power, the strong state is paradoxically what capitalism — especially intellectual-property capitalism — needs most.”
The neoliberal image of market versus state is reversed: the expansion of intellectual-property rent requires an ever-stronger authoritarian state.
“The strong state was needed even to keep the market alive — anti-monopoly moves against Microsoft prove that the market requires state intervention to survive.”
Free-market ideology is self-undermining: without state enforcement of competition, monopoly would eliminate the market it claims to celebrate.
“By privatizing fossil fuels as wealth, we are privatizing the traces of nature's own catastrophes — mother earth's madness becomes capitalist rent.”
The ecological romanticization of nature ignores that fossil fuels are themselves the product of prior natural catastrophes, not harmony.
“Theology paradoxically emerges precisely where there is nobody on our side — it is a resource not of divine support but of unconditional commitment without guarantee.”
The theologico-political is not triumphalism but the structure of action without a big Other, it fills the void left by the collapse of historical teleology.
“What we attribute to modern technology — domination and exploitation of nature — is not technology's essence but what happens to technology within the capitalist frame.”
The Frankfurt School / Heideggerian critique of technology as such is misplaced; the real target is the capitalist mode of organizing technology.
“Intellectual property is by its nature communist — the more it is shared, the more there is; yet capitalism enforces it as private property through arbitrary state power.”
The privatization of general intellect runs against its fundamental logic of abundance through sharing, requiring non-market coercion to sustain.
“What makes the Nazi perpetrators so terrible is not their inhumanity but their humanity — the horror is that their story is a warm, human story.”
The conventional comfort of the monster-perpetrator narrative is undone: the truly disturbing truth is the banality and humanness of evil.
Claims 22
asserts
The neighbor in the Judeo-Christian sense is not the empathic fellow-man but the traumatic abyss of otherness — the toxic, incomprehensible dimension of the other that shatters understanding.the concept of the neighbor
asserts
The proliferation of 'toxic subject' discourse conflates radically heterogeneous threats under one ideological label and serves a scapegoating function, displacing critique of structural causes onto individual pathological others.toxic subject ideology
rejects
Post-secular theology (Marion, Vattimo, Derrida) represents a false modesty that retains a theological dimension while disclaiming it — a move Žižek entirely rejects along with Badiou.post-secular/post-metaphysical theology
asserts
Freud's death drive is the paradoxical name for immortality — a persistence beyond life and death — not a wish for annihilation or nirvana.the Freudian death drive
reframes
American declarations of sexual orientation in social introductions are not openness but a mode of establishing distance from the other — a puritan practice in liberal dress.American cultural openness vs. European restraint
asserts
Modern subject is as such toxic: toxicity is not a predicate describing deviant individuals but the constitutive character of subjectivity itself in late capitalism.the nature of modern subjectivity
asserts
Today's liberal democratic governments enact a 'reasonable racism' against immigrants — rejecting crude populist racism while endorsing structurally equivalent protective measures.European immigration policy
asserts
Contemporary capitalist publicity has shifted from selling product properties, to status symbols, to selling authentic experiences — and this experiential logic ideologically integrates the 1968 rebellion's critique of alienation.the ideology of consumer capitalism
asserts
Charity functions ideologically by allowing people to continue doing nothing about global suffering while feeling they have contributed — it is a way to make the toxic neighbor disappear.the ideological function of charity
asserts
The 2008 financial bailout demonstrated that liberal democracy can be de facto suspended when capitalist priorities demand it — Congress was overridden by a cross-partisan consensus.the 2008 financial crisis and democracy
rejects
The financial crisis will not automatically produce socialist consciousness — the first reaction to trauma is to cling more desperately to the existing ideology rather than to question it.the automatic radicalizing effect of economic crisis
reframes
Marx's prediction that general intellect would cause capitalism to collapse was naive and non-dialectical; he failed to grasp that general intellect itself could be privatized, generating rent rather than destroying capitalism.Marx's theory of general intellect and capitalist crisis
asserts
The dominant form of capitalist profit has shifted from surplus-value extracted from labor to rent extracted from monopolistic control of intellectual property and natural resources.the transformation of capitalist profit into rent
asserts
Capitalism with Asian values (Singapore, China) demonstrates that capitalism no longer requires democracy and is in fact more dynamic without it — liberal capitalism's historic link to democracy is becoming obsolete.the relationship between capitalism and democracy
asserts
The growing importance of rent and intellectual property requires an increasingly strong and authoritarian state to arbitrarily enforce property rights — contrary to the neoliberal narrative of the state withering away.the state, capitalism, and authoritarianism
reframes
The ecological crisis should not be addressed through the ideology of restoring harmony with Mother Earth, but by accepting the radical contingency and 'blind stupidity' of nature — capitalism is the cause, not industrialization as such.ecology, nature, and capitalism
rejects
Morales' ecological manifesto relies on a narrative of the fall from pre-capitalist harmony with Mother Earth that is ideologically limited and naturalizes what is a specific structural problem of capitalism.Evo Morales' eco-socialist ideology
asserts
We need a theologico-political voluntarism today because the left can no longer rely on history as a 'big Other' guaranteeing its cause — if we want change, we will simply have to act without metaphysical guarantee.political voluntarism and the exhaustion of Marxist teleology
rejects
The critique of capitalism should not be generalized into a critique of technology or instrumental reason (as with Heideggerians or the Frankfurt School) — technological domination of nature is specific to the capitalist frame.Frankfurt School / Heideggerian critique of technology
asserts
What makes the Nazi executioners so horrifying is precisely their humanity, not their inhumanity — The Kindly Ones is correct to show them as ordinary human beings, and this is harder to accept than the myth of monster-perpetrators.the banality of evil / Holocaust perpetrators
rejects
The liberal multicultural saying 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard' is dangerous ideology — understanding the inner world of perpetrators does not make them less terrifying and in fact naturalizes their humanity as exculpatory.liberal multicultural empathy ideology
reframes
Bernard Madoff was presented as a personal pathology when in fact he was merely following the logic of the financial system to its conclusion — his persecution contained traces of antisemitism.the Madoff scandal and antisemitism
Quotes 21
“The neighbor is precisely the abyss beyond the fellow man.”Slavoj Žižek · neighbor as traumatic other
“Love the toxic dimension of the other.”Slavoj Žižek · Christian love of neighbor as love of the abyss
“The Freudian name for immortality is paradoxically precisely death drive.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive as immortality
“I accept weak communism, if you accept that precisely because it's weak it needs a strong secret police to defend it.”Slavoj Žižek · ironic rejection of 'weak thought'
“"I was too polite to ask." That's the attitude that we need.”Slavoj Žižek · politeness as proper distance from the neighbor
“The subject as such is toxic, toxic in its very form.”Slavoj Žižek · toxicity as constitutive of modern subjectivity
“What makes them so terrible is not their inhumanity but their humanity.”Slavoj Žižek · banality of evil / humanity of perpetrators
“An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard — that's cheap wisdom and dangerous ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of liberal empathy ideology
“We are allowing you that for the price of couple of cappuccinos you could ignore the plight of these children, but at the same time you can ignore it with good feeling that you are doing something.”Slavoj Žižek · charity as ideological cover for inaction
“He was just doing what the logic of the system demanded of him, pushing it a little bit further.”Slavoj Žižek · Madoff as symptom of systemic logic not personal pathology
“We cannot play now this games of voting majority minority, fuck off, this simply has to be done.”Slavoj Žižek · democracy suspended by capitalist emergency
“He privatized the digital general intellect. And we are paying rent.”Slavoj Žižek · Bill Gates / intellectual property as rent
“Intellectual property is by its nature communist — if I read a book and write something about it we all have more.”Slavoj Žižek · knowledge as inherently collective / anti-privatization
“There is always a light at the end of the tunnel, but usually it's another train coming towards us.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of Marxist historical optimism
“You need religion to make good people do bad things.”Slavoj Žižek · religion as moral corruption / Weinberg citation
“Theology paradoxically emerges precisely where there is nobody on our side.”Slavoj Žižek · the theologico-political as resource without divine guarantee
“The face is false, the face is ah that submission, but the hand is the truth, 'Fuck off father'. It's the rebelling Christ.”Slavoj Žižek · the monstrosity of Christ as political rebellion
“Nature doesn't give any messages, it's just stupid, it improvises, it's half crazy.”Slavoj Žižek · radical contingency of nature against Mother Earth ideology
“Under capitalism mother earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials — well, at least one good thing that capitalism did.”Slavoj Žižek · ironic endorsement of capitalism's demystification of nature
“What we attribute to modern technology — domination over nature — is what happens to technology within the capitalist frame.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism not technology is the problem
“In my Stalinist mood I would say publicly burn it — the Dark Knight is a very dangerous film.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's playful Stalinist persona / critique of Batman's ideology
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much, I’m glad to be here. I would like to begin with just stating what I want to do today. Of course, I don’t want to give you a recapitulated version of the book, this would have meant that I’m like treating myself as a classic, like poets reading their poems, I cannot do that. Just a short note of friendly polemics. Melissa was quoting that introduction as kind of an inscribing me also into that, not against you, but against my good friend Creston, no, who wrote the introduction where he tries to squeeze me into this kind of a, how should I put it, post-secular turn, you know, like secular politics as at its end, we need to redescribe, we need to return to a divine dimension and then, as the story goes, it’s not the old metaphysical God, but and then all this deconstructionist improvisations began, of course there is no God, but this nothingness, this voice itself is a divine dimension from where an unfathomable ethical call originates and all that stuff and so on and so on. I’m not part of that. If there is a thing I’m totally opposed to, it’s this kind of a, how should I put it, this kind of a sublime return of the post-metaphysical theological dimension, like Jean-Luc Marion’s title of his book, God Without Being, you know, no longer the onto-theological God, but and so on. I think that this, and if I were to give here a more philosophical talk, that’s the direction I would have taken, what I reject, together with my good colleague, theoretical friend, and practical Alain Badiou, what I reject is precisely the modesty of this, let’s call it post-secular theology. The thought is often called weak thought, like you know Gianni Vattimo has this idea of pensiero debole, weak thought. In the sense of, the traditional metaphysics was strong with great ontological claims, contact with the absolute, we should have a weak thought, aware of its own limitation and so on and so on. When the last time I met Gianni Vattimo who is also a good friend of mine and reformed communist, now he, that’s very nice, he become again a communist, and I told him that I agree with his idea of weak thought on condition that, like he also introduced the term weak communism, I told him, okay, it’s weak, I accept it, if you accept that precisely because it’s weak it needs a strong secret police and so on to defend it, no? Then I’m for weak thought. But more seriously, there is something else we should make you wonder, in a slightly more serious direction, namely did you notice how in contrast to previous centuries, especially the 19th century when the topic of finitude was as it were reserved for materialism? Spiritualists, idealists were talking, I simplify very much but nonetheless, about the infinite, the spiritual dimension is our contact with the infinite and so on. All of a sudden, it started with Heidegger, taken over by others in the 20th century, it’s the very finitude which becomes the ultimate support of spiritualization. The idea is that precisely insofar as we are finite beings, that is to say irreducibly thrown into a world that we cannot ever dominate, rooted in this world, unable to withdraw from our concrete place in historical reality to gain a kind of a neutral position above the run of outside the run of things, precisely because of this we cannot ever think of dominating technologically or in any of other way reality, so we have to remain open for an unfathomable transcendent otherness. So again, no wonder that even with cinema makers I noticed, like who is the most materialist cinema maker, arguably, probably, of the 20th century? My choice would have been Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian guy, but he is also the most spiritualist. You see this idea that precisely because we are stuck into our bodies, our place, we, this gives to our existence an unfathomable abyss that sustains it, which is the proper place of spirituality. And on the other hand, the only ones who are ready to take over in a way that I don’t accept, but nonetheless, the old topics of immortality, infinity in the sense of getting out of one’s body, are some usually even the more vulgar ones, Darwinists or brain scientists or cognitive scientists, you know who claim, you know this idea that the ultimate, in especially in so-called tech-gnosis movement, where the idea is that the ultimate goal of recent digital bio-genetic developments is to transform our very personal identity into, to cut a long story short, into software, into a virtual program which can be then downloaded from one to another hardware so we can indefinitely reproduce ourselves. So that’s an interesting reversal where I am together with Alain Badiou on the side of infinity here, not this vulgar materialist infinity, but nonetheless an infinity, if nothing else, the Freudian infinity, even immortality. It’s my old thesis which I also developed in the book that the Freudian name for immortality is paradoxically precisely death drive. You should read here very carefully Freud. Death drive has nothing to do with this nirvana, of course understood in our vulgar westernized way, we all want to die, oh I want to disappear, no, what Freud calls death drive is some kind of persistence which insists beyond life and death, even after death, like as I developed often in my book, one of the figures of this immortality, this obscene immortality, are vampires, living dead, all these undead figures. This is the Freudian death drive, it’s again the name for the very opposite of death, finitude and so on. But that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about today is nonetheless some more political stuff. Why, and I don't think this is entirely a bad phenomenon, why theology is reemerging as a reference in today's politics. I would like to begin with my old topic, but some new things to say about it, the topic of neighbor, neighbor precisely in the sense this notion, this word was elaborated, is present in the entire Judeo-Christian tradition where neighbor as we all know, I hope, is not the fellow man. Neighbor is not the one with whom I have a relationship of empathy, understanding his world and so on. No, the elementary experience of neighbor is precisely the opposite one. I experience someone as neighbor, let's say there is someone whom I know very well all my life and then all of a sudden this person does something, usually evil, something totally unexpected which shatters my perception, my knowledge, my understanding of him or her, an evil smile, a momentary sadistic gesture or whatever, like you kick a small child, whatever, how can you do this? At that point he becomes a neighbor. That’s the neighbor, the neighbor is precisely the abyss beyond the fellow man. And I think this notion is more and more acquiring political significance lately. When Christianity, the way I read it in a totally atheist way of course, when Christianity says love your neighbor, it means precisely love this terrifying dimension beneath all these nice aspects where one can sympathize with others. Love the toxic dimension of the other. And I will talk immediately more about it, because I think this is one of the signals of our fear of the neighbor, namely how, I don't know if you noticed it, I noticed it only recently, surfing on internet Amazon.com and so on, how popular all of a sudden has become in last years the topic of toxic subjects. In what sense others can become toxic for us. And what is a clear signal that this notion of toxic subjects is ideological, a clear signal is how the predicate toxic in toxic subjects covers a series of properties which belong to totally different levels, natural, cultural, psychological, political, military and so on. A toxic subject can be an immigrant with a deadly disease, Ebola, whatever, we must quarantine him. It can be a terrorist who should be prevented or should be sent til now to Guantanamo, now we will see where, I'm sure other places are prepared. It can be a fundamentalist ideologist, it can be a sexual molester, parent, teacher, it can be a priest who abuses corrupt children, whatever. So why, which is the dimension of this toxic other? Let me, I hope I’m not, I checked it up, repeating myself here, let me tell you if again please interrupt me if I'm repeating myself with regard to when I was the last time here. All I remember is that when I was here one time before the last time, one year and a half ago, something very weird happened, weird to my decadent European tastes, but I will not be involved in usual Europe, sorry, US-America bashing, quite the opposite. Namely, what happened is that after the talk, I was here with my friend Mladen Dolar, we were invited with some professors and postgraduate students to a dinner, and then since we didn't know each other, the professor who moderated the evening asked each of us to present himself, herself with the title, where the, I mean employment, work, with topic he or she is dealing, and with sexual orientation. Now for my European taste, this was pretty weird. I mean like, what's going on, no? Now, again, what I don't want to imply here is that oh these are you vulgar Americans, your idea is just you want to be coming out in all possible ways, declare it. No, that's not my point. My point is first, I'm not so stupid as not to notice that this way of declaring your toxic aspects as it were, no, is precisely a way to keep it at a distance. You in United States know very well, and it took me a long time to understand this, how what we Europeans understand as this almost pushy excessive openness is at a much more refined level a mode of practicing the exact opposite. For example, when I came to New York first time, old story I repeat it all the time, I was shocked at how a waiter, at least this happens in Lower Manhattan, no, to establish some kind of personal contact tells you immediately, "Oh hi, how are you?". I mean I’m an idiot, idiot is defined as a guy who takes things too literally, and I answer, I didn't know that this is pure ritual where you are supposed to answer "I'm okay", I told him "No, very bad, I just had a bad flight, I'm in a jet lag", and he looked me as if I am what I was, an idiot, no? Because you see and I claim that when we were asked for our sexual orientations it was the same, it wasn't this over-intrusive, oh I see if yours is the same as mine then we go somewhere afterwards. No, it was precisely to establish a distance. But nonetheless, what and here maybe is one of the ways to formulate the difference between at very elementary level between United States and Europe. You in United States you have this openness, declare your sexuality, which is the very mode of appearance of what I claim, if I may use this horrible abstract generalities, is your puritanism. There is something I think very puritan in this urge that you must declare yourself. We, but we in Europe may be less open at this level, but we in Europe are more open at other levels. For example, what happened to me and also my friend Mladen Dolar is a couple of years ago we were visited by an American friend of ours and we went to the, there on the Mediterranean sea, to a beach and this friend of ours was shocked by how, well, all the women there were, almost all, were with naked breasts. That's considered, I don't know, it happened already under communism in the last years, it's totally liberalized, it's considered normal, nobody even notices it. But our American friend was, this friend is incidentally I like to say bad things about my friend especially if they are good friends, Eric Santner from Chicago, he felt, even after we explained it to him, he felt we saw how he felt bad as if you know all these breasts bouncing about him are somehow too close, too open, you know, like putting some kind of pressure, pressure on him, how should I put it, no? So you see the point is not you the point is not we Europeans are more restrained, we are more restrained at some level, you are more restrained at another level, but my message here is that this restraint is precisely a way to keep the neighbor at a distance. Which is why I think that in today's vulgar times when precisely good manners are no longer upper class good manners, upper classes are, I will not name your and our politicians, are getting more and more vulgar, sometimes in United States and in Europe. When I listen to today's politicians my reaction is not only I don't agree with them but where is their decency, where are their manners? My moral ideal here is almost an ideal is a wonderful anecdote and if I know it correctly it's a true one about your great liberal writer Gore Vidal. You know that famous anecdote once he was asked in an interview, he is well known to be homosexual or more precisely bisexual, who was your first sexual partner, male or female? You know what was his answer? "I was too polite to ask". That's the attitude that we need. I don't think there is anything kind of a bourgeois individualist about it and so on and so on. We should, but again all the point of all these stories is to maintain a distance towards a toxic subject. No wonder again there are many books about it, just let me enumerate you one, Lillian Glass, Toxic People, which gives a characterization of types of toxic people, some with funny labels like two-faced sneaky backstabber and so on and so on. Then you have Albert Bernstein, Emotional Vampires, dealing with people who drain you dry and so on and so on. Then you have Susan Forward, Toxic Parents, overcoming their hurtful legacy and so on and so on. And what I wanted to say here is something very simple, it's that ultimately of course there is no ideal parent, all parents in a way are toxic. The conclusion to be drawn is that toxic is not just a predicate but within this radical perspective the characterization of the subject itself. Modern subject is as such toxic. In the sense that, which is why, and this is our maybe fundamental experience today, which is why again we are I claim in our late capitalist everyday morality so obsessed with harassment. We are harassed by the toxicity of the subject, which can be real harassment, beating, it can be obscene remarks, it's just this traumatic intrusion of otherness. The subject as such is toxic, toxic in its very form. And again the political consequences are quite crucial here because I think that especially today in the times of crisis, the usual reaction is a paranoiac one, that you put the blame on some toxic subjects, terrorists or bankers and so on. For example, even if I am definitely a critic of the Zionist politics of Israel and so on, but I also try to detect ruthlessly traces of antisemitism and I found them in, you remember a couple of months ago that Bernard Madoff scandal. How quickly he was crucified as what, a perverted guy. I think I don't defend him but I'm saying he was just doing what the logic of the system demanded of him, pushing it a little bit further. I don't and I was shocked at this secret underlying antisemitism when he was presented as this kind of a creepy exploiting and so on, when what was rather the effect of the system, he was just following the logic of the system to the end, was presented as his personal pathology and so on and so on. So I claim that insofar as we are slowly moving and the names can be war on terror or ecology whatever, towards some kind of emergency state, ultimately what we are fighting is the toxic other. It can be for conservatives it can be terrorists, it can be, for example, for radical multiculturalist liberals these racist fundamentalist low-class rednecks. The other way around for Pat Robertson and other nice guys it's you probably, New York, Boston and so on who are toxic. But so where is all this coming? You know Giorgio Agamben's theory about emergency state. And it's ironic that Italy is now the first country where this is realized, namely his theory about emergency state not precisely as state of exception but as something more and more normalized. Do you know that in July the Italian government proclaimed the state of emergency in entire Italy with the explicit aim to legitimize the deployment of armed forces, not only police, in the cities, in everyday life their presence today. The first excuse was precisely the toxic neighbor for this, it was against the illegal entry of the immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. Then, so again, already at the beginning of August of the last year, arms soldiers were deployed to control sensitive points in big cities, train stations, commercial centers and so on and so on. Then it goes on, they were used soldiers in Naples to against mafia, now there are even serious plans to use them to protect women against rapes. Against rape, the idea is to deploy them in parks or in suburbs and so on and so on. Now you will say but I'm exaggerating but nothing but life goes on normally in Italy, but that's my point, that's how we will pass into emergency state. It will not be this old-fashioned one morning you awaken, curfew and so on, life will go on as normal, just it will be an emergency, an emergency state. Which is the underlying procedure here, namely the procedure of protecting us against this toxic neighbor? It's the formula of reasonable racism. I think this is more and more becoming part of our daily lives. The originator creator of this formula, not reasonable racism but rather reasonable antisemitism, was the well-known French fascist intellectual Robert Brasillach who was shot after liberation in '45. In he proposed the formula of reasonable antisemitism. He presented himself as moderately antisemitic and here is a quote which is worth quoting today. I quote: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half-Jew, at the movies. To admire Proust, a half-Jew. To applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew. And even, I like this, the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogroms. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of institutional instinctual antisemitism is to organize a reasonable antisemitism." End of quote. I claim that this same attitude is at work in the way our governments are dealing, especially in Europe, we are worse here than you Americans, are dealing with the so-called immigrant threat. After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as unreasonable, unacceptable for our civilized democratic standards, they then endorse a reasonably racist protective measures. Or as today's Brasillachs, many of them social democrats, are telling us, here I invent their argumentation: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud African sportsmen, African and East European singers, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant defensive measures is to organize a reasonable anti-immigrant protection." That’s I think in Europe generally accepted, often in the mode of this disgusting excuse that by enacting as already Brasillach put it, by enacting reasonable antisemitism we just do it in order to prevent violent mob and so on antisemitism or anti-immigrant outbursts. Another aspect of this fear of the neighbor is what, you will say I'm talking about imaginary things. No, the latest, I wouldn't say literary scandal, but interesting phenomenon in book publishing lately, after my great book published by MIT is, sorry, is did you notice how traumatically was received a book which is very interesting. I'm not saying it's a very good book but I advise you to read it. Jonathan, I don't know how to pronounce it, Littell, probably because it's e and double L, Les Bienveillantes, The Kindly Ones. I mean, you know some people celebrate it as a great book, others as a total obscenity. What is so traumatic in this book? It provides, it's pages, it appeared a couple of months ago here in United States in American translation. The book provides a fictional first-person account of the Holocaust from a German participant, the SS-Obersturmbannführer Maximilian Aue. The catch is precisely how to render the way the Nazi executioners experienced and symbolized their predicament without engendering sympathy for them or even justifying there. And this is I think what makes the book so sympathetic, it’s, some people claim, "Wait a minute, he is presenting us the guy who organized Holocaust at the mid-level, he is not the top level, as somebody basically like us" and so on, but I claim but that was the horror of it. My point is this one, already the last time when I was here I remember I quoted as something to which I'm really opposed this noble noble multiculturalist anti-racist saying, "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." Like you know this cheap wisdom, I hate you because I don't know your dreams, your fears and so on, if I attentively listen to also to your side of the story I will discover you are human like me with your weaknesses blah blah blah. Even I claim this ideology we find it lately, that's why I hate the the movie, with Dark Knight, the last Batman. It's very dangerous film. In my Stalinist mood I would say publicly burn it. Why? Two reasons. One, no no no, I have nothing against this kind of a commercial big spectacle movies. For example, a movie that I liked very much and it failed for very interesting reasons is did you see, I forgot the director, The Eagle Eye. A very interesting paranoiac thriller about an ordinary guy who gets, okay it's more complex story I will simplify it, who got gets a phone call and the feminine voice tells him, "You will be arrested in five minutes, run out of the house." He doesn't believe it, it really happens. Then something very mysterious happens, like he doesn't believe this voice, he runs somewhere, then he sees there on a big commercial display, "Turn left, run there," and so on. As if somebody controls the entire reality and directs him. Okay, what happens in the middle of the film when we learn what is really going on is that Pentagon has a mega-mega secret ultra-strong computer which makes decisions and so on and so on. And what happens in the beginning of the film is that United States have to decide, they suspect that in a small Arab village there is a mega terrorist. And but they are not sure, should they bomb the village or not. The President says "Yes, bomb it" and they kill many civilians and the result is that there are as a counter-attack many new terrorist attacks on the American soil and so on and so on. So what, it's an intelligent plot. The idea is that this super computer which is ordered which is a mega computer connected digitally to other media which is why it's so spread out its control that it can control traffic lights or whatever whatever is somehow connected with the web. This computer then decided, this computer is programmed so that it takes care of the true American interest, safety and so on. And this computer decided that this stupid president who ordered this bombing is a clear and present danger for the safety of the United States. So he, sorry, it, she, whatever, the computer enlists the hero and another single mother, it’s a complex story, I will not bore you with it, to to organize the bombing to kill the President of the United States. Now the problem is this one that, this is I think the one of the ambiguities of the film that, no of course you are supposed to be on the side of the hero trying to prevent the this act, but I would say my God it's a good computer, a good proposal. I mean what's wrong about it? Maybe we need such computers, no I mean. It doesn't work but it's also you know I always fell for this dream because it's almost like Truman Show or rather this Enemy of the State paranoia but turned around. You know I always like this effect of let's call it paranoiac denaturalization of reality. You know you walk on the street and you see how there is not just neutral reality there, publicity displays, lights and so on, somehow everything is controlled, manipulated to guide you. As if it's a very nice paranoiac vision. So in contrast to this film I have two problems with Black Knight. I wonder if you agree. I mean again I do it in my Hegelian way, I haven't seen the film, I have more important things to do. The first one is I hate so much, it started a couple of years ago and here we are going back to the topic of the neighbor, this how should I call it psychologization of the hero. You know in the last years did you notice how all these movies about superheroes Spider-Man, Batman and so on, they as some critics put it, they show us the hero as a fragile person with nightmares, weaknesses, anxieties, not just a flat superhero, as if this makes the hero somehow more human and the movie more serious humanistic or whatever. On the contrary I think, this is how ideology today works, through this false humanization. I mean everything can be excused by saying oh but you see I'm a human being and so on and so on. My God everybody is a human being. Hitler was absolutely a human being. Listen to that documentary that they did a couple of years ago with the secretary of Hitler who died a couple of years ago. Just before that she finished a documentary where you definitely see Hitler. She was very nice, he was very nice to his dog, he liked to embrace small children giving them cakes with cream and so on and so on, warm human being, absolutely. So I think back to this The Kindly Ones, this is for us so difficult to accept that even the most terrifying guys, what makes them so terrible is not their inhumanity but their humanity. That you know when you try to understand them from within as that big shitty proverb says, to hear their story, you see that it's a nice warm even why not sincere story and nonetheless they can be no less terrifying. So again this is not the neighbor, you don't get at the toxic dimension in this way. The toxic dimension is elsewhere. A step further now. So how did we arrive at this how should I call it at this obsession with toxicity, with the toxic subject? Why are we so sensitive to it today? Because our everyday ideology is more and more permitted penetrated by the subjectivized logic of experience. I’m sorry if I repeat myself here a little bit, but it’s a crucial line of thought. What do I mean by it? Just to make it clear let me refer to three stages of capitalism, you know the Protestant, the this organization man capitalism and today's postmodern whatever capitalism and especially linked to this, let me presentify, illustrate these three steps by three logics of publicity. This will bring us to how ideology functions today, precisely the ideology which generates toxic which needs toxic neighbors and protection against harassing toxic neighbors. Let's imagine I want to buy a Land Rover. What kind of publicity would there have been in different levels of stages of capitalism? The traditional capitalism would probably involve predominantly at least some kind of direct publicity referring to real or imagined it doesn't matter properties of the object. Like it would emphasize the quality of the Land Rover, only so many gasoline it spends per mile, it can really go through rivers, steep mountains, whatever, what it does. Then more appropriate towards this organization men whatever we call it, monopoly capitalism, big companies, managerial capitalism, would have been this keeping up with the Joneses competition level. The message of publicity would not have been so much real qualities as symbolic status, like by having this car you signal something your status your superiority and so on with regard to your neighbors. But I claim today more and more a different kind of publicity is present. A publicity which does not present itself referring to which doesn't function through the reference to real properties of the object or to object as a status symbol, but rather the object that you have to that you want to buy, that it solicits you to buy, the object as something that provides an as we put it authentic experience. Today, for example, probably predominantly the publicity for Land Rover would have been: Do you feel oppressed, impotent in a big city? Drive our Land Rover you will see what does it mean the freedom of nature, to be a true man, feel free and so on, like the experience it provides. And this experience is I claim, if I may repeat my old joke some of you may know it, much more expanded than it may appear. For example let me take the example simple similar one of organic food. I'm skeptical about organic food. Don't tell me that those rotten apples which cost double of the bad apples are that you really believe that they are more healthy and so on. Maybe they are, maybe they are not, I doubt. What I don't doubt is the following: that the reason you buy them is not because you really believe you take care of your health. It's more that it makes you feel good, you know, like oh my God listen even when I buy apples I participate in some greater social project of keeping our planet alive, of keeping the unity of all spiritual and living beings, all the Dalai Lama stuff and so on and so on. Or it’s the same with Starbucks are the bad guys for me here. You know all the stuff they do like basically the message is in one or another form, with every cup of cappuccino that you buy in our store you save another Guatemala children from blindness or something like that and so on. You know it's to provide the additional experience. Like this acquired for me at least the most disgusting form around half a year ago when I noticed I don't know what goes on now that Starbucks were selling something they called Ethos, Ethos like ethics, maybe you noticed it, Ethos Water. It's part of a program, let me quote it: "Ethos Water from their website of Starbucks. Ethos water is a brand with a social mission helping children around the world get clean water and raising awareness of the world water crisis. Every time you purchase a bottle of Ethos water, Ethos water will contribute US dollars five cents, towards our goal of raising at least millions by and so on and so on and so on. So what does this mean? Well practically this means that with other providers, others, Caffè Nero or what, a bottle costs two dollars, here it costs and you buy it because of the lousy five cents, they profit even more. But again the point is that the ideology is integrated with consumation. Like you buy water at the same time it provides an experience helping children and so on all that stuff. I claim that the neighbor is the one who how should I put it who disturbs this field of experience. Which is why one of the defenses against the neighbor is of course charity which you always find also in Starbucks and so on and so on. It's my old thing, I think I will repeat it, I think the last time I was here I also put it that why is charity so popular today among other things for purely ideological reasons. When you see you know those disgusting manipulations, a crippled black child, and then again the message something like, "For the price of two cappuccinos you can save this child's life". What this means is the true message is what is something like, "We all know horrible things are going around the world and we don't really care about them, screw them, but we have to pretend. What we are allowing you is that for the price of couple of cappuccinos you could ignore the plight of these children, but at the same time you can ignore it with good feeling that you are doing something and so on. You can go on doing really nothing about it". That’s how ideology functions today. Okay, so you see you again the toxic neighbor disappears, charity is a way to make the toxic neighbor disappearing again. How is this linked to our present? How is this linked to our present? Something happened with the '68 movement, I mean this generally in France it was the rebellion student rebellion in Germany also, here it was more a larger movement. And I think the key to today's capitalism is how this rebellion was triumphantly integrated. Integrated in the sense that all the main motives of rebellion, fight against alienation, commodification of daily life or whatever, was taken over, was perfectly integrated. You want to fight against bureaucracy, commodification of daily life, of course we provide you now with commodities with experience and so on which can render your life meaningful and all the stuff and so on and so on. So now I want to slowly approach a conclusion with a much more traumatic and real question. The question is, okay I can complain, manipulation and so on, suffering, but there is a simple pertinent question. Isn't it obvious that alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism don't work, that liberal democratic capitalism works better than all known alternatives? So why insist on changes? Why not simply basically accept the system the way it is and just fight for a little bit of change, better here better there and so on and so on. Now the obvious leftist answer would have been, "Wait a minute, where do you live, the ongoing financial crisis, financial meltdown, isn't this not the proof that things don't function?". Well I’m not so sure. Of course it’s a proof that there is a flaw in the system itself, but I don't believe that the result of the ongoing crisis will be some kind of socialist awareness and so on and so on. If you ask me, it's very ambiguous. You know when there is a crisis, especially a traumatic shocking crisis, people react in different way. The first reaction is not so much to question the fundamental ideology but to stick to it even more desperately. So I think that you know probably Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, the idea that capitalism can use traumatic events, wars, even natural disasters and so on as something which as it were shatters things, clears the table of old ideological religious whatever prejudices to then impose its brutal agenda. I claim what if the ongoing financial crisis will also be used as another another of this kind of shock therapy? The first effect of crisis was this kind of effect. It was one of making our priorities clear. Let me just point out two things here. The first one is did you remember something weird, when I heard it was still President Bush addressing for the first time the US nation about the crisis, what did strike me and many commentators noticed this is that he almost used often the same phrases as in his public address after September 11th. "Let's leave aside partisan divisions, this is the moment of great great crisis where our very way of life in it is in trouble, we have all work together to save our way of life" and so on and so on. It's almost a new version of the of terror. Second thing, how immediately priorities were set straight. What do I mean by this? You know we often debate about like how many billions for hunger, for ecology and so on, and there you can always postpone and so on. There was a meeting about in Bali, you remember, about ecological crisis. It was held as a success because the result was that, I'm not joking, there they will meet in two years to debate again and so on and so on. You can postpone. There were billion dollars that the great powers wanted to give to countries in development to help the food crisis, prevent the food crisis. Only two billions were effectively given. There you can compromise. But did you notice how different things was with the financial meltdown? There there was how should I put it, no bullshit. In one, two weeks the impossible was done, an unimaginable almost in the Kantian sense sublime sum of money that we can mean let's admit it, around billions we can still somehow manage to imagine what it means. After billions it’s you say, okay it’s not it’s what do I care, I mean it becomes unrepresentable. But it was absolutely accepted. Your democracy itself was put into a kind of emergency state. In what sense? Don't you, it was practically de facto suspended. You know in what sense? Don't you remember how the first time the vote was negative, this bailout plan, you remember thousand billions dollars was rejected by Congress and what then happened was something for me at least unique. They all got together, by all I mean Bush, McCain, Obama, all of them with basically the same message to the to the Congress which was, "Wait a minute we are not joking here, we cannot play now this games of voting majority minority, fuck off, this simply has to be done". And they did it. Isn't this wonderful? In one week they turned it around, like the message was clear, "Now we don't have time for this democratic games debate, it simply it simply has to be done". That's how things function, priorities were set straight. So that's the first, the second, okay I will now shorten it a little bit so that I don't talk too long because the second thing I want to develop apropos of this crisis is nonetheless, how do we react to this crisis? Nonetheless the thing to avoid absolutely I claim is the and here I almost agree with those who advocate helping big banks. You know things are much more desperate than you think. Of course we can say, help real people not Wall Street, but sorry the logic of capitalism is that without Wall Street there is no mainstream. You can I mean that's the logic of capitalism, you cannot say let's help directly people. You cannot, it was necessary to do this. So problems are more radical here. It's not just a small flaw that can be regulated with new laws and so on and so on. The danger here is the danger of anti-modernity. This populist danger, yesterday evening here in the hotel after I arrived, I saw on my favorite channel for purely masochistic reasons Fox News, I watch them, the only interesting cable, no? And I saw in Texas some stupid folk singer, Republican conservative. The shock was, you know which one, it tells us a lot. This is how you should study ideology today. At the same time on I don't know which one PBS or what, there was a long documentary on your great almost communist pop singer Pete Seeger. My God I thought but this guy this disgusting redneck Republican from Texas, my God he was almost saying the same thing, of course with the opposite political meaning, but you know bad rich elite Wall Street, we hardworking people of Texas who as you know the new Alamo now want to secede now, you know the latest news no? But what I'm saying is that we should precisely resist this simple populist temptation. You know like screw the rich people, no it doesn't work this way. You have to question the system if you want to do something more radically or you have to accept the game. And we have to go here to the end. Like what? Like for example I like Morales, Evo Morales. I think his politics are much more interesting incidentally than what Chavez is doing. I think Chavez is just lucky, he has oil dollars, he can he is Fidel Castro with oil. But the problems of Morales are much more interesting. But nonetheless recently a couple of months ago, I think I found it on the internet, he issued, Morales, a public letter with the title, "Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism". Listen to what he said: "Sisters and brothers", sounds like as you know Cornel West no with this, today I had a nice conversation with Cornel West, he told me that he is giving couple of years ago a talk on Brother Anton, it took me some time to take to get it that he means Anton Chekhov, no you know? So I did something very evil, I'm good friend by him but he looked at me with such I told him, "Oh and I'm giving a seminar on the ideology of Brother Adolf," you know like on Nazi Nazi ideology, no okay but let's go on. That's how Morales talks. "Sisters and brothers, today our mother earth is ill. From the beginning of the 21st century we have lived the hottest years of the last thousand years. Global warming is generating abrupt changes in the weather, the retreat of glaciers and the decrease of the polar ice caps, the increase of the sea level and the flooding of coastal areas where approximately percent of the world population live, the increase in the process of desertification and the decrease of fresh water sources" and so on and so on. That I agree. But listen: "Everything began with the Industrial Revolution in which gave birth to the capitalist system. In two and a half centuries the so-called developed countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries. Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under capitalism we are not human beings but but consumers. Under capitalism mother earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world." Again end of quote, while totally subscribing to the first part, all the ecological catastrophes, I don't like the ideology in the second part. These lines that I just quoted render I think with painful clarity a certain ideological limitation. Morales relies on an unproblematic way in an unproblematic way on the narrative about the fall which took place at a precise historical moment. I quote: "Everything began with the Industrial Revolution in And predictably this fall consists in losing our roots in mother earth. Quote again, remember: "Under capitalism mother earth does not exist". Well I'm tempted to add this, at least one good thing that capitalism did. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. The way to face ecological crisis is not to construct it nature as some kind of mother earth that we hurt balance to be restored, but it's to accept the radical contingency and blind stupidity of nature. It's much more tragic, you know. Nature doesn't give any messages, it's just stupid, it improvises, it's half crazy. For example Morales himself mentions how we are using fossil and so on. Yeah, but what are these fossils? They are if we already speak this language, they are traces of the madness of mother nature. My God can you imagine what kind of ecological catastrophe there must have been so that we have oil? I mean that's the first thing for me. The second thing one should even go further here and remain and remain specific. I don't think our target should be as some either Heideggerians otherwise I have a great respect for Heidegger, or Frankfurt school people Adorno Horkheimer with their critique of instrumental reason claim. I don't like this generalization which is very fashionable today from critique of capitalism to critique of whatever you call it technology, instrumental reason, manipulation, domination and so on. I remain in an old-fashioned Marxist way convinced that not that I'm blaming capitalism in an immoralistic way but that what we attribute to modern technology this tendency to dominate over nature more and more to exploit nature is what happens to technology within the capitalist frame. It's the capitalism which is in its uniqueness the only social system which as we know can only thrive by constant through its constant reproduction, expanded reproduction. It's that which pushes us towards more and more towards excess. So that's the next point. Finally, so where are we today? If things are like this I return to my crucial question which is why even demand any change? I mean aren't things at least till now if we abstract from these paranoiac visions which are for me not paranoiac very real but nonetheless they may appear exaggerated of ecological catastrophe and so on, why? Because I think capitalism itself is slowly entering a new stage. Where do we find signs? Peter Sloterdijk, my good friend but political opponent, when we meet I always tell him "Wait a minute when I take power you get immediately first class ticket to Gulag there far", but we are friends, we are friends. He told he told me a very nice adequate thing recently. He told me that if there will he told me that he likes to play an imaginary game, if the present tendencies will go on, to whom will people raise monuments years from our time, to what which to whom of our contemporaries will people build statues monuments years from now? His idea was Lee Kuan Yew. You know who he was? The long years President of Singapore who the first invented and successfully practiced the so-called what we poetically today like to call capitalism with Asian values, or less poetically capitalism which at the economic level functions more or less with all the brutal market logic following it, but at the same time capitalism sustained with basically more or less authoritarian rule. This I think is one of the threats that I see today and that's for me the message of China of today's China much more dangerous than all that Falun Gong oppression of religion or Tibetans or whatever. What? Till now capitalism at least had one good thing to say for it, that it was somehow more or less inextricably linked with democracy. You had true from time to time like five ten years maybe even more of military dictatorship like to make thing run, but then it's true there was after years when things start functioning more or less at the level of economy there was a push towards democracy which usually did win, Chile, South Korea and so on and so on. I think that what we are getting now with this capitalism with Asian values, first invented in only in Singapore by Lee Kuan Yew then expanded to China. I don't know if you know that when he was preparing his reforms still Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore and said, "This is our model, this is what we need in China." Here we are getting something which should make us fear if you want. Which is the capitalism which is in a way even more dynamic than our Western liberal capitalism in its force of expansion, revolutionizing daily lives and so on, but no longer needs democracy. That is to say I know relatively well China and I don't believe those liberals who think "Wait a minute give them years democracy will explode." What if it will not? I don't think it will if you ask me. And it's incredible to what extent this how should I put it fear of democracy whatever or especially of labor's movement is really integrated into the Chinese system. For example a half dissident friend of mine in China told me something wonderful that the Chinese leadership is so afraid of any independent trade union workers protest movement that and okay I have to trust him, he showed me the book I don't know what those stupid signs mean I mean he translated them he claimed that it's incredible that you know as every Communist Party they publish their own official history of the Chinese Communist Party, that the very glorious otherwise and historically it's true chapters which in previous editions celebrated the role of the Communist Party in organizing workers resistance in Shanghai in 1920s 30s basically the role of the communists in organizing workers to strike to demand better conditions is censored now. Even if it's the glory of the Communist Party, they are afraid that this may give wrong idea today to people, no? So this I think is what is so unsettling about it, or more precisely what is so unsettling and don't be afraid I will conclude now soon about all this is that I don't think this is just some kind of a result of of you know Eastern more primitive or more authoritarian spirit or whatever. What makes me a pessimist, I will conclude now with just a brief hypothesis, I'm not an economist but since if there is a lesson about this financial meltdown is that economists obviously don't know what is going on so whatever I will also risk a hypothesis is I think that there is something in the changes in today's global capitalism which pushes it towards more authoritarian political form. Strong state is more and more needed. Contrary to those even Negri and Hardt, otherwise I think there are many valuable things to learn from them, but often they play this game: empire is just the molecular interaction of multitude of companies blah blah state no longer important. I think that state is maybe more important than ever. Why? What is happening today? It is what Negri and Hardt write a lot about, the so-called predominance of intellectual labor. That is to say the process that was somehow imagined in very vague terms already by Marx but in a fatally wrong way of a moment when knowledge, expertise, or intersubjective practical practical ability however you call it becomes the crucial factor in creating the wealth so that spending the labor force time, work time, labor time as a measure of value becomes meaningless. Marx calls this this objectivized knowledge, he uses the famous expression in English general intellect. In the sense that the more capitalism is developed, the less it's even meaningless to have this standard form of exploitation where you exploit worker, you know work value is created through the time of the labor spent and all that extra profit appropriation and so on and so on. We know the story. So here is Marx at his best and at his worst. On the one hand he imagined a society where the classical capitalism with this standard exploitation of work no longer functions, but in a very non-dialectical naive technocratic reasoning he thought this will here he comes the closest to the simple catastrophe natural end of capitalism theory. He simply thinks that capitalism will have to collapse. The moment I mean the moment it's not a moment, but the more physical labor becomes a quantité négligeable, negligible marginal element in creating wealth, the more meaningless inoperative capitalism based on exploitation becomes. What Marx, what is the mistake of Marx done for philosophical reasons, the way he conceptualizes labor his neglect of intersubjectivity and so on, that's another story. But the point is that what he was not able to grasp, it wasn't in his horizon is that yes we have general intellect, the shared let's call it spiritual substance, substance of collective intelligence, scientific and so on today, but that one can also privatize this general intellect itself. And this I think I rely here on some Italian economists who are not exactly the same with Negri but close to him, I think they provide a nice formula. They claim that the result of this privatization of general intellect of collective knowledge is what, is that the main source of wealth of capitalist profit what goes on is not exploitation, profit proper, but rent, you know like rent control rent. That if historically capitalism moved from rent land rent I give you land to profit, now at least up to a point we are going back from profit to rent. And I think to me at least with my limited Balkan primitive whatever knowledge, this works in what way? Let me be very naive, let me take an example like Bill Gates. How did he become in one in years from a nobody who was just playing in his garage the wealthiest man in the world? Where does his now down to if I read it correctly billion dollars come from? You cannot play the game of exploitation, you cannot even say he really exploits his workers. I totally believe he is paying his own employees relatively well. I also don't think some desperate traditional Marxist attempts to say he is sucking extra profit from others works. I think why where does his wealth come from? In the guise of his quasi-monopolistic position with Windows and so on he privatized the digital general intellect. And we are paying rent. I claim it's clear example of rent profit. It's no longer profit it's rent. And at the same time the same goes for natural resources. I mean if you stick to the classical Marxist theory of exploitation then Hugo Chavez is exploiting American workers, because his main source of money is oil and for Marx he is emphatic here, ironically in Capital he even uses oil as an example, trying to prove that natural resources are never the source of money, sorry, the source of value. So again we have rent. And what's my point here? What has this to do with the stronger role of state authoritarian capitalism and so on. My thesis is that a very precise one here, that in contrast to simple material commodities where you are selling something on the market it's clear what it yours, it can be touched usually the product and so on, where the price can be determined through simple market competition and so on and so on, with natural resources already but especially with intellectual property you cannot do it in this simple way of marketing. Because you know intellectual property is to put it naively by its nature communist, it tends to be collectivized. It has this which with material property it's the more you use it the less of use it is for the others. I buy a cake, if I eat half you have less. But if I read a book and write something about it we all have more, it's much more collective in nature. So here even if it looks that it's market competition, the very conditions for what will be the price, what counts as your property and so on have to be fixed by state by legal regulations. Which is why the whole immaterial work scheme presupposes a very strong state which has to guarantee and arbitrarily enforce, I cannot emphasize enough the word arbitrarily, the fact that you pay for Windows I don't know what which Windows, I don't know how it is dollars. There is nothing there is no logic of value there. You know it's not that so much materials so much I don't know what was spent. It's also not really competition. It's not that Bill Gates competed with others and so on and so on. It's rent monopoly and at the same time based on arbitrary legally enforced regulation which tell this is your property this is not where I mean intellectual property it's always arbitrary how you fix what is property. Because we know that if you leave it totally to the market we wouldn't have more competition we would have less competition. If we were to leave it totally to the market Bill Gates would have probably today. That’s the nice paradox that the strong state, you know with all those anti-Microsoft anti-monopoly moves, the strong state was needed even to keep the market alive and so on and so on. So again what I think is that because of this growing role of rent at the expense of profit, market economy will have to be more and more sustained by strong state measures which I claim will have to be more and more will demand more and more some form of authoritarian state. It may still be formally a democratic state but the key decisions will be done like the one to get the bailout money. You know like okay okay democracy but wait a minute this is serious now like. So in this this is for me a possible opening. What gave capitalism legitimacy is precisely its how should I call it till now almost I’m tempted to say through experiment experimentally tested link with democracy. Now that is slowly passé, past. We are entering a new era where things will change. And we have to be ready. We don't know what is really going on I’m the last to point all I think is if you allow me just to conclude very briefly that’s life sorry all I think is that we are entering a new confused era where and here I’m coming back to my book The Monstrosity of Christ, where on the one hand the role of religion is mixed. On the one hand the role of religion is of course to be very much problematized in this confused state where the situation is not transparent but fundamentally opaque. Habermas wrote a book, I don't agree with the book but the title is nice, already years ago Neue Unübersichtlichkeit, the new opacity. Here the temptation is the populist temptation, which usually then assumes the form of some kind of ethnic or religious justification. Here, of course, one can say with a little bit of evil spirit, one can say what Steven Weinberg said. You know, he said, it's a very evil thought and I love it, that without religion it would be simply that good people would be doing good things and bad people bad things the way it is. But you need religion to make good people do bad things. That is to say you need religion to convince good people that killing, torturing whatever is part of a larger higher sacred goal whatever. But that's not all. I'm not this kind of a naively anti-religious. I think that although I am a total atheist that I understand the progressive use of religion as part of another dangerous topic, dangerous tendency. Namely, you know in old Marxism we could rely on what I ironically refer to as the big other of history. We are, you know this naive Marxist progressivism in the sense of it's not maybe determinism but somehow history is on our side. History opens up the possibility of communism, we just have to use it and so on and so on. Today we no longer can rely on this. I don't think that we I think we need much more arbitrary voluntarism. If we want to survive we will just have to do it. There will be no big other of historical tendency supporting us. We cannot say this old Marxist metaphor oh we have to write the train of history and even if things look bad there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. It is always a light at the end of the tunnel, but usually it's another train coming towards us. So I think this is why maybe a dose of theologico-political dimension is not so bad. Because today we live in a world which is more and more legally ethical. Did you notice how today's left thinks either in ethical terms, you know human rights or whatever, like ethical complaints, intolerance, racism and so on, or legally how to regulate it and so on and so on. That’s the limitation. We need genuine politics, here some reference to the theologico-political can be helpful. No wonder that I was told by a friend from Latin America already from the late 50s there is one memo of the CIA, I was told about the situation in Latin America where they say, "In spite of Cuba don't be don't be worried too much about communism, theology of liberation is the true danger there". So it's not theology does not mean oh we have God on our side. Theology paradoxically emerge precisely where there is nobody on our side. And this is in a way for me the monstrosity of Christ. Now I'm coming back to the book. Look at the cover of the book. I know what I put there and I had a long fight with otherwise my friend, half friend, okay John Milbank who protested it. You know of course I wanted this ironic reference to Magritte, I wanted Ceci n'est pas un dieu. This is not a god. He insisted, "No, it must be 'This is God'". So okay I said it's basically the same, what I'm a Hegelian so. But you know this is a painting of Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, drawing for Vittoria Colonna, where it was a great scandal, Michelangelo tried to destroy that painting. Why? This is the theologico-political I want. Look at it carefully, unfortunately probably some conservatives at MIT bungled it and made too small a painting so that you don't see it clearly. Look at the feet and especially the right hand of Christ, it’s fuck off. That is to say it shows Christ at the moment of dying, at the moment of "Father why have you forsaken me?". The face is false, the face is ah that submission, but the hand is the truth, "Fuck off father". It's the rebelling Christ. That's we need what we need. Thanks very much.
Thanks very much, I’m glad to be here. I would like to begin with just stating what I want to do today. Of course, I don’t want to give you a recapitulated version of the book, this would have meant that I’m like treating myself as a classic, like poets reading their poems, I cannot do that. Just a short note of friendly polemics. Melissa was quoting that introduction as kind of an inscribing me also into that, not against you, but against my good friend Creston, no, who wrote the introduction where he tries to squeeze me into this kind of a, how should I put it, post-secular turn, you know, like secular politics as at its end, we need to redescribe, we need to return to a divine dimension and then, as the story goes, it’s not the old metaphysical God, but and then all this deconstructionist improvisations began, of course there is no God, but this nothingness, this voice itself is a divine dimension from where an unfathomable ethical call originates and all that stuff and so on and so on. I’m not part of that. If there is a thing I’m totally opposed to, it’s this kind of a, how should I put it, this kind of a sublime return of the post-metaphysical theological dimension, like Jean-Luc Marion’s title of his book, God Without Being, you know, no longer the onto-theological God, but and so on. I think that this, and if I were to give here a more philosophical talk, that’s the direction I would have taken, what I reject, together with my good colleague, theoretical friend, and practical Alain Badiou, what I reject is precisely the modesty of this, let’s call it post-secular theology. The thought is often called weak thought, like you know Gianni Vattimo has this idea of pensiero debole, weak thought. In the sense of, the traditional metaphysics was strong with great ontological claims, contact with the absolute, we should have a weak thought, aware of its own limitation and so on and so on. When the last time I met Gianni Vattimo who is also a good friend of mine and reformed communist, now he, that’s very nice, he become again a communist, and I told him that I agree with his idea of weak thought on condition that, like he also introduced the term weak communism, I told him, okay, it’s weak, I accept it, if you accept that precisely because it’s weak it needs a strong secret police and so on to defend it, no? Then I’m for weak thought. But more seriously, there is something else we should make you wonder, in a slightly more serious direction, namely did you notice how in contrast to previous centuries, especially the 19th century when the topic of finitude was as it were reserved for materialism? Spiritualists, idealists were talking, I simplify very much but nonetheless, about the infinite, the spiritual dimension is our contact with the infinite and so on. All of a sudden, it started with Heidegger, taken over by others in the 20th century, it’s the very finitude which becomes the ultimate support of spiritualization. The idea is that precisely insofar as we are finite beings, that is to say irreducibly thrown into a world that we cannot ever dominate, rooted in this world, unable to withdraw from our concrete place in historical reality to gain a kind of a neutral position above the run of outside the run of things, precisely because of this we cannot ever think of dominating technologically or in any of other way reality, so we have to remain open for an unfathomable transcendent otherness. So again, no wonder that even with cinema makers I noticed, like who is the most materialist cinema maker, arguably, probably, of the 20th century? My choice would have been Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian guy, but he is also the most spiritualist. You see this idea that precisely because we are stuck into our bodies, our place, we, this gives to our existence an unfathomable abyss that sustains it, which is the proper place of spirituality. And on the other hand, the only ones who are ready to take over in a way that I don’t accept, but nonetheless, the old topics of immortality, infinity in the sense of getting out of one’s body, are some usually even the more vulgar ones, Darwinists or brain scientists or cognitive scientists, you know who claim, you know this idea that the ultimate, in especially in so-called tech-gnosis movement, where the idea is that the ultimate goal of recent digital bio-genetic developments is to transform our very personal identity into, to cut a long story short, into software, into a virtual program which can be then downloaded from one to another hardware so we can indefinitely reproduce ourselves. So that’s an interesting reversal where I am together with Alain Badiou on the side of infinity here, not this vulgar materialist infinity, but nonetheless an infinity, if nothing else, the Freudian infinity, even immortality. It’s my old thesis which I also developed in the book that the Freudian name for immortality is paradoxically precisely death drive. You should read here very carefully Freud. Death drive has nothing to do with this nirvana, of course understood in our vulgar westernized way, we all want to die, oh I want to disappear, no, what Freud calls death drive is some kind of persistence which insists beyond life and death, even after death, like as I developed often in my book, one of the figures of this immortality, this obscene immortality, are vampires, living dead, all these undead figures. This is the Freudian death drive, it’s again the name for the very opposite of death, finitude and so on. But that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about today is nonetheless some more political stuff. Why, and I don't think this is entirely a bad phenomenon, why theology is reemerging as a reference in today's politics. I would like to begin with my old topic, but some new things to say about it, the topic of neighbor, neighbor precisely in the sense this notion, this word was elaborated, is present in the entire Judeo-Christian tradition where neighbor as we all know, I hope, is not the fellow man. Neighbor is not the one with whom I have a relationship of empathy, understanding his world and so on. No, the elementary experience of neighbor is precisely the opposite one. I experience someone as neighbor, let's say there is someone whom I know very well all my life and then all of a sudden this person does something, usually evil, something totally unexpected which shatters my perception, my knowledge, my understanding of him or her, an evil smile, a momentary sadistic gesture or whatever, like you kick a small child, whatever, how can you do this? At that point he becomes a neighbor. That’s the neighbor, the neighbor is precisely the abyss beyond the fellow man. And I think this notion is more and more acquiring political significance lately. When Christianity, the way I read it in a totally atheist way of course, when Christianity says love your neighbor, it means precisely love this terrifying dimension beneath all these nice aspects where one can sympathize with others. Love the toxic dimension of the other. And I will talk immediately more about it, because I think this is one of the signals of our fear of the neighbor, namely how, I don't know if you noticed it, I noticed it only recently, surfing on internet Amazon.com and so on, how popular all of a sudden has become in last years the topic of toxic subjects. In what sense others can become toxic for us. And what is a clear signal that this notion of toxic subjects is ideological, a clear signal is how the predicate toxic in toxic subjects covers a series of properties which belong to totally different levels, natural, cultural, psychological, political, military and so on. A toxic subject can be an immigrant with a deadly disease, Ebola, whatever, we must quarantine him. It can be a terrorist who should be prevented or should be sent til now to Guantanamo, now we will see where, I'm sure other places are prepared. It can be a fundamentalist ideologist, it can be a sexual molester, parent, teacher, it can be a priest who abuses corrupt children, whatever. So why, which is the dimension of this toxic other? Let me, I hope I’m not, I checked it up, repeating myself here, let me tell you if again please interrupt me if I'm repeating myself with regard to when I was the last time here. All I remember is that when I was here one time before the last time, one year and a half ago, something very weird happened, weird to my decadent European tastes, but I will not be involved in usual Europe, sorry, US-America bashing, quite the opposite. Namely, what happened is that after the talk, I was here with my friend Mladen Dolar, we were invited with some professors and postgraduate students to a dinner, and then since we didn't know each other, the professor who moderated the evening asked each of us to present himself, herself with the title, where the, I mean employment, work, with topic he or she is dealing, and with sexual orientation. Now for my European taste, this was pretty weird. I mean like, what's going on, no? Now, again, what I don't want to imply here is that oh these are you vulgar Americans, your idea is just you want to be coming out in all possible ways, declare it. No, that's not my point. My point is first, I'm not so stupid as not to notice that this way of declaring your toxic aspects as it were, no, is precisely a way to keep it at a distance. You in United States know very well, and it took me a long time to understand this, how what we Europeans understand as this almost pushy excessive openness is at a much more refined level a mode of practicing the exact opposite. For example, when I came to New York first time, old story I repeat it all the time, I was shocked at how a waiter, at least this happens in Lower Manhattan, no, to establish some kind of personal contact tells you immediately, "Oh hi, how are you?". I mean I’m an idiot, idiot is defined as a guy who takes things too literally, and I answer, I didn't know that this is pure ritual where you are supposed to answer "I'm okay", I told him "No, very bad, I just had a bad flight, I'm in a jet lag", and he looked me as if I am what I was, an idiot, no? Because you see and I claim that when we were asked for our sexual orientations it was the same, it wasn't this over-intrusive, oh I see if yours is the same as mine then we go somewhere afterwards. No, it was precisely to establish a distance. But nonetheless, what and here maybe is one of the ways to formulate the difference between at very elementary level between United States and Europe. You in United States you have this openness, declare your sexuality, which is the very mode of appearance of what I claim, if I may use this horrible abstract generalities, is your puritanism. There is something I think very puritan in this urge that you must declare yourself. We, but we in Europe may be less open at this level, but we in Europe are more open at other levels. For example, what happened to me and also my friend Mladen Dolar is a couple of years ago we were visited by an American friend of ours and we went to the, there on the Mediterranean sea, to a beach and this friend of ours was shocked by how, well, all the women there were, almost all, were with naked breasts. That's considered, I don't know, it happened already under communism in the last years, it's totally liberalized, it's considered normal, nobody even notices it. But our American friend was, this friend is incidentally I like to say bad things about my friend especially if they are good friends, Eric Santner from Chicago, he felt, even after we explained it to him, he felt we saw how he felt bad as if you know all these breasts bouncing about him are somehow too close, too open, you know, like putting some kind of pressure, pressure on him, how should I put it, no? So you see the point is not you the point is not we Europeans are more restrained, we are more restrained at some level, you are more restrained at another level, but my message here is that this restraint is precisely a way to keep the neighbor at a distance. Which is why I think that in today's vulgar times when precisely good manners are no longer upper class good manners, upper classes are, I will not name your and our politicians, are getting more and more vulgar, sometimes in United States and in Europe. When I listen to today's politicians my reaction is not only I don't agree with them but where is their decency, where are their manners? My moral ideal here is almost an ideal is a wonderful anecdote and if I know it correctly it's a true one about your great liberal writer Gore Vidal. You know that famous anecdote once he was asked in an interview, he is well known to be homosexual or more precisely bisexual, who was your first sexual partner, male or female? You know what was his answer? "I was too polite to ask". That's the attitude that we need. I don't think there is anything kind of a bourgeois individualist about it and so on and so on. We should, but again all the point of all these stories is to maintain a distance towards a toxic subject. No wonder again there are many books about it, just let me enumerate you one, Lillian Glass, Toxic People, which gives a characterization of types of toxic people, some with funny labels like two-faced sneaky backstabber and so on and so on. Then you have Albert Bernstein, Emotional Vampires, dealing with people who drain you dry and so on and so on. Then you have Susan Forward, Toxic Parents, overcoming their hurtful legacy and so on and so on. And what I wanted to say here is something very simple, it's that ultimately of course there is no ideal parent, all parents in a way are toxic. The conclusion to be drawn is that toxic is not just a predicate but within this radical perspective the characterization of the subject itself. Modern subject is as such toxic. In the sense that, which is why, and this is our maybe fundamental experience today, which is why again we are I claim in our late capitalist everyday morality so obsessed with harassment. We are harassed by the toxicity of the subject, which can be real harassment, beating, it can be obscene remarks, it's just this traumatic intrusion of otherness. The subject as such is toxic, toxic in its very form. And again the political consequences are quite crucial here because I think that especially today in the times of crisis, the usual reaction is a paranoiac one, that you put the blame on some toxic subjects, terrorists or bankers and so on. For example, even if I am definitely a critic of the Zionist politics of Israel and so on, but I also try to detect ruthlessly traces of antisemitism and I found them in, you remember a couple of months ago that Bernard Madoff scandal. How quickly he was crucified as what, a perverted guy. I think I don't defend him but I'm saying he was just doing what the logic of the system demanded of him, pushing it a little bit further. I don't and I was shocked at this secret underlying antisemitism when he was presented as this kind of a creepy exploiting and so on, when what was rather the effect of the system, he was just following the logic of the system to the end, was presented as his personal pathology and so on and so on. So I claim that insofar as we are slowly moving and the names can be war on terror or ecology whatever, towards some kind of emergency state, ultimately what we are fighting is the toxic other. It can be for conservatives it can be terrorists, it can be, for example, for radical multiculturalist liberals these racist fundamentalist low-class rednecks. The other way around for Pat Robertson and other nice guys it's you probably, New York, Boston and so on who are toxic. But so where is all this coming? You know Giorgio Agamben's theory about emergency state. And it's ironic that Italy is now the first country where this is realized, namely his theory about emergency state not precisely as state of exception but as something more and more normalized. Do you know that in July the Italian government proclaimed the state of emergency in entire Italy with the explicit aim to legitimize the deployment of armed forces, not only police, in the cities, in everyday life their presence today. The first excuse was precisely the toxic neighbor for this, it was against the illegal entry of the immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. Then, so again, already at the beginning of August of the last year, arms soldiers were deployed to control sensitive points in big cities, train stations, commercial centers and so on and so on. Then it goes on, they were used soldiers in Naples to against mafia, now there are even serious plans to use them to protect women against rapes. Against rape, the idea is to deploy them in parks or in suburbs and so on and so on. Now you will say but I'm exaggerating but nothing but life goes on normally in Italy, but that's my point, that's how we will pass into emergency state. It will not be this old-fashioned one morning you awaken, curfew and so on, life will go on as normal, just it will be an emergency, an emergency state. Which is the underlying procedure here, namely the procedure of protecting us against this toxic neighbor? It's the formula of reasonable racism. I think this is more and more becoming part of our daily lives. The originator creator of this formula, not reasonable racism but rather reasonable antisemitism, was the well-known French fascist intellectual Robert Brasillach who was shot after liberation in '45. In he proposed the formula of reasonable antisemitism. He presented himself as moderately antisemitic and here is a quote which is worth quoting today. I quote: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half-Jew, at the movies. To admire Proust, a half-Jew. To applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew. And even, I like this, the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogroms. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of institutional instinctual antisemitism is to organize a reasonable antisemitism." End of quote. I claim that this same attitude is at work in the way our governments are dealing, especially in Europe, we are worse here than you Americans, are dealing with the so-called immigrant threat. After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as unreasonable, unacceptable for our civilized democratic standards, they then endorse a reasonably racist protective measures. Or as today's Brasillachs, many of them social democrats, are telling us, here I invent their argumentation: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud African sportsmen, African and East European singers, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant defensive measures is to organize a reasonable anti-immigrant protection." That’s I think in Europe generally accepted, often in the mode of this disgusting excuse that by enacting as already Brasillach put it, by enacting reasonable antisemitism we just do it in order to prevent violent mob and so on antisemitism or anti-immigrant outbursts. Another aspect of this fear of the neighbor is what, you will say I'm talking about imaginary things. No, the latest, I wouldn't say literary scandal, but interesting phenomenon in book publishing lately, after my great book published by MIT is, sorry, is did you notice how traumatically was received a book which is very interesting. I'm not saying it's a very good book but I advise you to read it. Jonathan, I don't know how to pronounce it, Littell, probably because it's e and double L, Les Bienveillantes, The Kindly Ones. I mean, you know some people celebrate it as a great book, others as a total obscenity. What is so traumatic in this book? It provides, it's pages, it appeared a couple of months ago here in United States in American translation. The book provides a fictional first-person account of the Holocaust from a German participant, the SS-Obersturmbannführer Maximilian Aue. The catch is precisely how to render the way the Nazi executioners experienced and symbolized their predicament without engendering sympathy for them or even justifying there. And this is I think what makes the book so sympathetic, it’s, some people claim, "Wait a minute, he is presenting us the guy who organized Holocaust at the mid-level, he is not the top level, as somebody basically like us" and so on, but I claim but that was the horror of it. My point is this one, already the last time when I was here I remember I quoted as something to which I'm really opposed this noble noble multiculturalist anti-racist saying, "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." Like you know this cheap wisdom, I hate you because I don't know your dreams, your fears and so on, if I attentively listen to also to your side of the story I will discover you are human like me with your weaknesses blah blah blah. Even I claim this ideology we find it lately, that's why I hate the the movie, with Dark Knight, the last Batman. It's very dangerous film. In my Stalinist mood I would say publicly burn it. Why? Two reasons. One, no no no, I have nothing against this kind of a commercial big spectacle movies. For example, a movie that I liked very much and it failed for very interesting reasons is did you see, I forgot the director, The Eagle Eye. A very interesting paranoiac thriller about an ordinary guy who gets, okay it's more complex story I will simplify it, who got gets a phone call and the feminine voice tells him, "You will be arrested in five minutes, run out of the house." He doesn't believe it, it really happens. Then something very mysterious happens, like he doesn't believe this voice, he runs somewhere, then he sees there on a big commercial display, "Turn left, run there," and so on. As if somebody controls the entire reality and directs him. Okay, what happens in the middle of the film when we learn what is really going on is that Pentagon has a mega-mega secret ultra-strong computer which makes decisions and so on and so on. And what happens in the beginning of the film is that United States have to decide, they suspect that in a small Arab village there is a mega terrorist. And but they are not sure, should they bomb the village or not. The President says "Yes, bomb it" and they kill many civilians and the result is that there are as a counter-attack many new terrorist attacks on the American soil and so on and so on. So what, it's an intelligent plot. The idea is that this super computer which is ordered which is a mega computer connected digitally to other media which is why it's so spread out its control that it can control traffic lights or whatever whatever is somehow connected with the web. This computer then decided, this computer is programmed so that it takes care of the true American interest, safety and so on. And this computer decided that this stupid president who ordered this bombing is a clear and present danger for the safety of the United States. So he, sorry, it, she, whatever, the computer enlists the hero and another single mother, it’s a complex story, I will not bore you with it, to to organize the bombing to kill the President of the United States. Now the problem is this one that, this is I think the one of the ambiguities of the film that, no of course you are supposed to be on the side of the hero trying to prevent the this act, but I would say my God it's a good computer, a good proposal. I mean what's wrong about it? Maybe we need such computers, no I mean. It doesn't work but it's also you know I always fell for this dream because it's almost like Truman Show or rather this Enemy of the State paranoia but turned around. You know I always like this effect of let's call it paranoiac denaturalization of reality. You know you walk on the street and you see how there is not just neutral reality there, publicity displays, lights and so on, somehow everything is controlled, manipulated to guide you. As if it's a very nice paranoiac vision. So in contrast to this film I have two problems with Black Knight. I wonder if you agree. I mean again I do it in my Hegelian way, I haven't seen the film, I have more important things to do. The first one is I hate so much, it started a couple of years ago and here we are going back to the topic of the neighbor, this how should I call it psychologization of the hero. You know in the last years did you notice how all these movies about superheroes Spider-Man, Batman and so on, they as some critics put it, they show us the hero as a fragile person with nightmares, weaknesses, anxieties, not just a flat superhero, as if this makes the hero somehow more human and the movie more serious humanistic or whatever. On the contrary I think, this is how ideology today works, through this false humanization. I mean everything can be excused by saying oh but you see I'm a human being and so on and so on. My God everybody is a human being. Hitler was absolutely a human being. Listen to that documentary that they did a couple of years ago with the secretary of Hitler who died a couple of years ago. Just before that she finished a documentary where you definitely see Hitler. She was very nice, he was very nice to his dog, he liked to embrace small children giving them cakes with cream and so on and so on, warm human being, absolutely. So I think back to this The Kindly Ones, this is for us so difficult to accept that even the most terrifying guys, what makes them so terrible is not their inhumanity but their humanity. That you know when you try to understand them from within as that big shitty proverb says, to hear their story, you see that it's a nice warm even why not sincere story and nonetheless they can be no less terrifying. So again this is not the neighbor, you don't get at the toxic dimension in this way. The toxic dimension is elsewhere. A step further now. So how did we arrive at this how should I call it at this obsession with toxicity, with the toxic subject? Why are we so sensitive to it today? Because our everyday ideology is more and more permitted penetrated by the subjectivized logic of experience. I’m sorry if I repeat myself here a little bit, but it’s a crucial line of thought. What do I mean by it? Just to make it clear let me refer to three stages of capitalism, you know the Protestant, the this organization man capitalism and today's postmodern whatever capitalism and especially linked to this, let me presentify, illustrate these three steps by three logics of publicity. This will bring us to how ideology functions today, precisely the ideology which generates toxic which needs toxic neighbors and protection against harassing toxic neighbors. Let's imagine I want to buy a Land Rover. What kind of publicity would there have been in different levels of stages of capitalism? The traditional capitalism would probably involve predominantly at least some kind of direct publicity referring to real or imagined it doesn't matter properties of the object. Like it would emphasize the quality of the Land Rover, only so many gasoline it spends per mile, it can really go through rivers, steep mountains, whatever, what it does. Then more appropriate towards this organization men whatever we call it, monopoly capitalism, big companies, managerial capitalism, would have been this keeping up with the Joneses competition level. The message of publicity would not have been so much real qualities as symbolic status, like by having this car you signal something your status your superiority and so on with regard to your neighbors. But I claim today more and more a different kind of publicity is present. A publicity which does not present itself referring to which doesn't function through the reference to real properties of the object or to object as a status symbol, but rather the object that you have to that you want to buy, that it solicits you to buy, the object as something that provides an as we put it authentic experience. Today, for example, probably predominantly the publicity for Land Rover would have been: Do you feel oppressed, impotent in a big city? Drive our Land Rover you will see what does it mean the freedom of nature, to be a true man, feel free and so on, like the experience it provides. And this experience is I claim, if I may repeat my old joke some of you may know it, much more expanded than it may appear. For example let me take the example simple similar one of organic food. I'm skeptical about organic food. Don't tell me that those rotten apples which cost double of the bad apples are that you really believe that they are more healthy and so on. Maybe they are, maybe they are not, I doubt. What I don't doubt is the following: that the reason you buy them is not because you really believe you take care of your health. It's more that it makes you feel good, you know, like oh my God listen even when I buy apples I participate in some greater social project of keeping our planet alive, of keeping the unity of all spiritual and living beings, all the Dalai Lama stuff and so on and so on. Or it’s the same with Starbucks are the bad guys for me here. You know all the stuff they do like basically the message is in one or another form, with every cup of cappuccino that you buy in our store you save another Guatemala children from blindness or something like that and so on. You know it's to provide the additional experience. Like this acquired for me at least the most disgusting form around half a year ago when I noticed I don't know what goes on now that Starbucks were selling something they called Ethos, Ethos like ethics, maybe you noticed it, Ethos Water. It's part of a program, let me quote it: "Ethos Water from their website of Starbucks. Ethos water is a brand with a social mission helping children around the world get clean water and raising awareness of the world water crisis. Every time you purchase a bottle of Ethos water, Ethos water will contribute US dollars five cents, towards our goal of raising at least millions by and so on and so on and so on. So what does this mean? Well practically this means that with other providers, others, Caffè Nero or what, a bottle costs two dollars, here it costs and you buy it because of the lousy five cents, they profit even more. But again the point is that the ideology is integrated with consumation. Like you buy water at the same time it provides an experience helping children and so on all that stuff. I claim that the neighbor is the one who how should I put it who disturbs this field of experience. Which is why one of the defenses against the neighbor is of course charity which you always find also in Starbucks and so on and so on. It's my old thing, I think I will repeat it, I think the last time I was here I also put it that why is charity so popular today among other things for purely ideological reasons. When you see you know those disgusting manipulations, a crippled black child, and then again the message something like, "For the price of two cappuccinos you can save this child's life". What this means is the true message is what is something like, "We all know horrible things are going around the world and we don't really care about them, screw them, but we have to pretend. What we are allowing you is that for the price of couple of cappuccinos you could ignore the plight of these children, but at the same time you can ignore it with good feeling that you are doing something and so on. You can go on doing really nothing about it". That’s how ideology functions today. Okay, so you see you again the toxic neighbor disappears, charity is a way to make the toxic neighbor disappearing again. How is this linked to our present? How is this linked to our present? Something happened with the '68 movement, I mean this generally in France it was the rebellion student rebellion in Germany also, here it was more a larger movement. And I think the key to today's capitalism is how this rebellion was triumphantly integrated. Integrated in the sense that all the main motives of rebellion, fight against alienation, commodification of daily life or whatever, was taken over, was perfectly integrated. You want to fight against bureaucracy, commodification of daily life, of course we provide you now with commodities with experience and so on which can render your life meaningful and all the stuff and so on and so on. So now I want to slowly approach a conclusion with a much more traumatic and real question. The question is, okay I can complain, manipulation and so on, suffering, but there is a simple pertinent question. Isn't it obvious that alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism don't work, that liberal democratic capitalism works better than all known alternatives? So why insist on changes? Why not simply basically accept the system the way it is and just fight for a little bit of change, better here better there and so on and so on. Now the obvious leftist answer would have been, "Wait a minute, where do you live, the ongoing financial crisis, financial meltdown, isn't this not the proof that things don't function?". Well I’m not so sure. Of course it’s a proof that there is a flaw in the system itself, but I don't believe that the result of the ongoing crisis will be some kind of socialist awareness and so on and so on. If you ask me, it's very ambiguous. You know when there is a crisis, especially a traumatic shocking crisis, people react in different way. The first reaction is not so much to question the fundamental ideology but to stick to it even more desperately. So I think that you know probably Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, the idea that capitalism can use traumatic events, wars, even natural disasters and so on as something which as it were shatters things, clears the table of old ideological religious whatever prejudices to then impose its brutal agenda. I claim what if the ongoing financial crisis will also be used as another another of this kind of shock therapy? The first effect of crisis was this kind of effect. It was one of making our priorities clear. Let me just point out two things here. The first one is did you remember something weird, when I heard it was still President Bush addressing for the first time the US nation about the crisis, what did strike me and many commentators noticed this is that he almost used often the same phrases as in his public address after September 11th. "Let's leave aside partisan divisions, this is the moment of great great crisis where our very way of life in it is in trouble, we have all work together to save our way of life" and so on and so on. It's almost a new version of the of terror. Second thing, how immediately priorities were set straight. What do I mean by this? You know we often debate about like how many billions for hunger, for ecology and so on, and there you can always postpone and so on. There was a meeting about in Bali, you remember, about ecological crisis. It was held as a success because the result was that, I'm not joking, there they will meet in two years to debate again and so on and so on. You can postpone. There were billion dollars that the great powers wanted to give to countries in development to help the food crisis, prevent the food crisis. Only two billions were effectively given. There you can compromise. But did you notice how different things was with the financial meltdown? There there was how should I put it, no bullshit. In one, two weeks the impossible was done, an unimaginable almost in the Kantian sense sublime sum of money that we can mean let's admit it, around billions we can still somehow manage to imagine what it means. After billions it’s you say, okay it’s not it’s what do I care, I mean it becomes unrepresentable. But it was absolutely accepted. Your democracy itself was put into a kind of emergency state. In what sense? Don't you, it was practically de facto suspended. You know in what sense? Don't you remember how the first time the vote was negative, this bailout plan, you remember thousand billions dollars was rejected by Congress and what then happened was something for me at least unique. They all got together, by all I mean Bush, McCain, Obama, all of them with basically the same message to the to the Congress which was, "Wait a minute we are not joking here, we cannot play now this games of voting majority minority, fuck off, this simply has to be done". And they did it. Isn't this wonderful? In one week they turned it around, like the message was clear, "Now we don't have time for this democratic games debate, it simply it simply has to be done". That's how things function, priorities were set straight. So that's the first, the second, okay I will now shorten it a little bit so that I don't talk too long because the second thing I want to develop apropos of this crisis is nonetheless, how do we react to this crisis? Nonetheless the thing to avoid absolutely I claim is the and here I almost agree with those who advocate helping big banks. You know things are much more desperate than you think. Of course we can say, help real people not Wall Street, but sorry the logic of capitalism is that without Wall Street there is no mainstream. You can I mean that's the logic of capitalism, you cannot say let's help directly people. You cannot, it was necessary to do this. So problems are more radical here. It's not just a small flaw that can be regulated with new laws and so on and so on. The danger here is the danger of anti-modernity. This populist danger, yesterday evening here in the hotel after I arrived, I saw on my favorite channel for purely masochistic reasons Fox News, I watch them, the only interesting cable, no? And I saw in Texas some stupid folk singer, Republican conservative. The shock was, you know which one, it tells us a lot. This is how you should study ideology today. At the same time on I don't know which one PBS or what, there was a long documentary on your great almost communist pop singer Pete Seeger. My God I thought but this guy this disgusting redneck Republican from Texas, my God he was almost saying the same thing, of course with the opposite political meaning, but you know bad rich elite Wall Street, we hardworking people of Texas who as you know the new Alamo now want to secede now, you know the latest news no? But what I'm saying is that we should precisely resist this simple populist temptation. You know like screw the rich people, no it doesn't work this way. You have to question the system if you want to do something more radically or you have to accept the game. And we have to go here to the end. Like what? Like for example I like Morales, Evo Morales. I think his politics are much more interesting incidentally than what Chavez is doing. I think Chavez is just lucky, he has oil dollars, he can he is Fidel Castro with oil. But the problems of Morales are much more interesting. But nonetheless recently a couple of months ago, I think I found it on the internet, he issued, Morales, a public letter with the title, "Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism". Listen to what he said: "Sisters and brothers", sounds like as you know Cornel West no with this, today I had a nice conversation with Cornel West, he told me that he is giving couple of years ago a talk on Brother Anton, it took me some time to take to get it that he means Anton Chekhov, no you know? So I did something very evil, I'm good friend by him but he looked at me with such I told him, "Oh and I'm giving a seminar on the ideology of Brother Adolf," you know like on Nazi Nazi ideology, no okay but let's go on. That's how Morales talks. "Sisters and brothers, today our mother earth is ill. From the beginning of the 21st century we have lived the hottest years of the last thousand years. Global warming is generating abrupt changes in the weather, the retreat of glaciers and the decrease of the polar ice caps, the increase of the sea level and the flooding of coastal areas where approximately percent of the world population live, the increase in the process of desertification and the decrease of fresh water sources" and so on and so on. That I agree. But listen: "Everything began with the Industrial Revolution in which gave birth to the capitalist system. In two and a half centuries the so-called developed countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries. Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under capitalism we are not human beings but but consumers. Under capitalism mother earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world." Again end of quote, while totally subscribing to the first part, all the ecological catastrophes, I don't like the ideology in the second part. These lines that I just quoted render I think with painful clarity a certain ideological limitation. Morales relies on an unproblematic way in an unproblematic way on the narrative about the fall which took place at a precise historical moment. I quote: "Everything began with the Industrial Revolution in And predictably this fall consists in losing our roots in mother earth. Quote again, remember: "Under capitalism mother earth does not exist". Well I'm tempted to add this, at least one good thing that capitalism did. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. The way to face ecological crisis is not to construct it nature as some kind of mother earth that we hurt balance to be restored, but it's to accept the radical contingency and blind stupidity of nature. It's much more tragic, you know. Nature doesn't give any messages, it's just stupid, it improvises, it's half crazy. For example Morales himself mentions how we are using fossil and so on. Yeah, but what are these fossils? They are if we already speak this language, they are traces of the madness of mother nature. My God can you imagine what kind of ecological catastrophe there must have been so that we have oil? I mean that's the first thing for me. The second thing one should even go further here and remain and remain specific. I don't think our target should be as some either Heideggerians otherwise I have a great respect for Heidegger, or Frankfurt school people Adorno Horkheimer with their critique of instrumental reason claim. I don't like this generalization which is very fashionable today from critique of capitalism to critique of whatever you call it technology, instrumental reason, manipulation, domination and so on. I remain in an old-fashioned Marxist way convinced that not that I'm blaming capitalism in an immoralistic way but that what we attribute to modern technology this tendency to dominate over nature more and more to exploit nature is what happens to technology within the capitalist frame. It's the capitalism which is in its uniqueness the only social system which as we know can only thrive by constant through its constant reproduction, expanded reproduction. It's that which pushes us towards more and more towards excess. So that's the next point. Finally, so where are we today? If things are like this I return to my crucial question which is why even demand any change? I mean aren't things at least till now if we abstract from these paranoiac visions which are for me not paranoiac very real but nonetheless they may appear exaggerated of ecological catastrophe and so on, why? Because I think capitalism itself is slowly entering a new stage. Where do we find signs? Peter Sloterdijk, my good friend but political opponent, when we meet I always tell him "Wait a minute when I take power you get immediately first class ticket to Gulag there far", but we are friends, we are friends. He told he told me a very nice adequate thing recently. He told me that if there will he told me that he likes to play an imaginary game, if the present tendencies will go on, to whom will people raise monuments years from our time, to what which to whom of our contemporaries will people build statues monuments years from now? His idea was Lee Kuan Yew. You know who he was? The long years President of Singapore who the first invented and successfully practiced the so-called what we poetically today like to call capitalism with Asian values, or less poetically capitalism which at the economic level functions more or less with all the brutal market logic following it, but at the same time capitalism sustained with basically more or less authoritarian rule. This I think is one of the threats that I see today and that's for me the message of China of today's China much more dangerous than all that Falun Gong oppression of religion or Tibetans or whatever. What? Till now capitalism at least had one good thing to say for it, that it was somehow more or less inextricably linked with democracy. You had true from time to time like five ten years maybe even more of military dictatorship like to make thing run, but then it's true there was after years when things start functioning more or less at the level of economy there was a push towards democracy which usually did win, Chile, South Korea and so on and so on. I think that what we are getting now with this capitalism with Asian values, first invented in only in Singapore by Lee Kuan Yew then expanded to China. I don't know if you know that when he was preparing his reforms still Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore and said, "This is our model, this is what we need in China." Here we are getting something which should make us fear if you want. Which is the capitalism which is in a way even more dynamic than our Western liberal capitalism in its force of expansion, revolutionizing daily lives and so on, but no longer needs democracy. That is to say I know relatively well China and I don't believe those liberals who think "Wait a minute give them years democracy will explode." What if it will not? I don't think it will if you ask me. And it's incredible to what extent this how should I put it fear of democracy whatever or especially of labor's movement is really integrated into the Chinese system. For example a half dissident friend of mine in China told me something wonderful that the Chinese leadership is so afraid of any independent trade union workers protest movement that and okay I have to trust him, he showed me the book I don't know what those stupid signs mean I mean he translated them he claimed that it's incredible that you know as every Communist Party they publish their own official history of the Chinese Communist Party, that the very glorious otherwise and historically it's true chapters which in previous editions celebrated the role of the Communist Party in organizing workers resistance in Shanghai in 1920s 30s basically the role of the communists in organizing workers to strike to demand better conditions is censored now. Even if it's the glory of the Communist Party, they are afraid that this may give wrong idea today to people, no? So this I think is what is so unsettling about it, or more precisely what is so unsettling and don't be afraid I will conclude now soon about all this is that I don't think this is just some kind of a result of of you know Eastern more primitive or more authoritarian spirit or whatever. What makes me a pessimist, I will conclude now with just a brief hypothesis, I'm not an economist but since if there is a lesson about this financial meltdown is that economists obviously don't know what is going on so whatever I will also risk a hypothesis is I think that there is something in the changes in today's global capitalism which pushes it towards more authoritarian political form. Strong state is more and more needed. Contrary to those even Negri and Hardt, otherwise I think there are many valuable things to learn from them, but often they play this game: empire is just the molecular interaction of multitude of companies blah blah state no longer important. I think that state is maybe more important than ever. Why? What is happening today? It is what Negri and Hardt write a lot about, the so-called predominance of intellectual labor. That is to say the process that was somehow imagined in very vague terms already by Marx but in a fatally wrong way of a moment when knowledge, expertise, or intersubjective practical practical ability however you call it becomes the crucial factor in creating the wealth so that spending the labor force time, work time, labor time as a measure of value becomes meaningless. Marx calls this this objectivized knowledge, he uses the famous expression in English general intellect. In the sense that the more capitalism is developed, the less it's even meaningless to have this standard form of exploitation where you exploit worker, you know work value is created through the time of the labor spent and all that extra profit appropriation and so on and so on. We know the story. So here is Marx at his best and at his worst. On the one hand he imagined a society where the classical capitalism with this standard exploitation of work no longer functions, but in a very non-dialectical naive technocratic reasoning he thought this will here he comes the closest to the simple catastrophe natural end of capitalism theory. He simply thinks that capitalism will have to collapse. The moment I mean the moment it's not a moment, but the more physical labor becomes a quantité négligeable, negligible marginal element in creating wealth, the more meaningless inoperative capitalism based on exploitation becomes. What Marx, what is the mistake of Marx done for philosophical reasons, the way he conceptualizes labor his neglect of intersubjectivity and so on, that's another story. But the point is that what he was not able to grasp, it wasn't in his horizon is that yes we have general intellect, the shared let's call it spiritual substance, substance of collective intelligence, scientific and so on today, but that one can also privatize this general intellect itself. And this I think I rely here on some Italian economists who are not exactly the same with Negri but close to him, I think they provide a nice formula. They claim that the result of this privatization of general intellect of collective knowledge is what, is that the main source of wealth of capitalist profit what goes on is not exploitation, profit proper, but rent, you know like rent control rent. That if historically capitalism moved from rent land rent I give you land to profit, now at least up to a point we are going back from profit to rent. And I think to me at least with my limited Balkan primitive whatever knowledge, this works in what way? Let me be very naive, let me take an example like Bill Gates. How did he become in one in years from a nobody who was just playing in his garage the wealthiest man in the world? Where does his now down to if I read it correctly billion dollars come from? You cannot play the game of exploitation, you cannot even say he really exploits his workers. I totally believe he is paying his own employees relatively well. I also don't think some desperate traditional Marxist attempts to say he is sucking extra profit from others works. I think why where does his wealth come from? In the guise of his quasi-monopolistic position with Windows and so on he privatized the digital general intellect. And we are paying rent. I claim it's clear example of rent profit. It's no longer profit it's rent. And at the same time the same goes for natural resources. I mean if you stick to the classical Marxist theory of exploitation then Hugo Chavez is exploiting American workers, because his main source of money is oil and for Marx he is emphatic here, ironically in Capital he even uses oil as an example, trying to prove that natural resources are never the source of money, sorry, the source of value. So again we have rent. And what's my point here? What has this to do with the stronger role of state authoritarian capitalism and so on. My thesis is that a very precise one here, that in contrast to simple material commodities where you are selling something on the market it's clear what it yours, it can be touched usually the product and so on, where the price can be determined through simple market competition and so on and so on, with natural resources already but especially with intellectual property you cannot do it in this simple way of marketing. Because you know intellectual property is to put it naively by its nature communist, it tends to be collectivized. It has this which with material property it's the more you use it the less of use it is for the others. I buy a cake, if I eat half you have less. But if I read a book and write something about it we all have more, it's much more collective in nature. So here even if it looks that it's market competition, the very conditions for what will be the price, what counts as your property and so on have to be fixed by state by legal regulations. Which is why the whole immaterial work scheme presupposes a very strong state which has to guarantee and arbitrarily enforce, I cannot emphasize enough the word arbitrarily, the fact that you pay for Windows I don't know what which Windows, I don't know how it is dollars. There is nothing there is no logic of value there. You know it's not that so much materials so much I don't know what was spent. It's also not really competition. It's not that Bill Gates competed with others and so on and so on. It's rent monopoly and at the same time based on arbitrary legally enforced regulation which tell this is your property this is not where I mean intellectual property it's always arbitrary how you fix what is property. Because we know that if you leave it totally to the market we wouldn't have more competition we would have less competition. If we were to leave it totally to the market Bill Gates would have probably today. That’s the nice paradox that the strong state, you know with all those anti-Microsoft anti-monopoly moves, the strong state was needed even to keep the market alive and so on and so on. So again what I think is that because of this growing role of rent at the expense of profit, market economy will have to be more and more sustained by strong state measures which I claim will have to be more and more will demand more and more some form of authoritarian state. It may still be formally a democratic state but the key decisions will be done like the one to get the bailout money. You know like okay okay democracy but wait a minute this is serious now like. So in this this is for me a possible opening. What gave capitalism legitimacy is precisely its how should I call it till now almost I’m tempted to say through experiment experimentally tested link with democracy. Now that is slowly passé, past. We are entering a new era where things will change. And we have to be ready. We don't know what is really going on I’m the last to point all I think is if you allow me just to conclude very briefly that’s life sorry all I think is that we are entering a new confused era where and here I’m coming back to my book The Monstrosity of Christ, where on the one hand the role of religion is mixed. On the one hand the role of religion is of course to be very much problematized in this confused state where the situation is not transparent but fundamentally opaque. Habermas wrote a book, I don't agree with the book but the title is nice, already years ago Neue Unübersichtlichkeit, the new opacity. Here the temptation is the populist temptation, which usually then assumes the form of some kind of ethnic or religious justification. Here, of course, one can say with a little bit of evil spirit, one can say what Steven Weinberg said. You know, he said, it's a very evil thought and I love it, that without religion it would be simply that good people would be doing good things and bad people bad things the way it is. But you need religion to make good people do bad things. That is to say you need religion to convince good people that killing, torturing whatever is part of a larger higher sacred goal whatever. But that's not all. I'm not this kind of a naively anti-religious. I think that although I am a total atheist that I understand the progressive use of religion as part of another dangerous topic, dangerous tendency. Namely, you know in old Marxism we could rely on what I ironically refer to as the big other of history. We are, you know this naive Marxist progressivism in the sense of it's not maybe determinism but somehow history is on our side. History opens up the possibility of communism, we just have to use it and so on and so on. Today we no longer can rely on this. I don't think that we I think we need much more arbitrary voluntarism. If we want to survive we will just have to do it. There will be no big other of historical tendency supporting us. We cannot say this old Marxist metaphor oh we have to write the train of history and even if things look bad there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. It is always a light at the end of the tunnel, but usually it's another train coming towards us. So I think this is why maybe a dose of theologico-political dimension is not so bad. Because today we live in a world which is more and more legally ethical. Did you notice how today's left thinks either in ethical terms, you know human rights or whatever, like ethical complaints, intolerance, racism and so on, or legally how to regulate it and so on and so on. That’s the limitation. We need genuine politics, here some reference to the theologico-political can be helpful. No wonder that I was told by a friend from Latin America already from the late 50s there is one memo of the CIA, I was told about the situation in Latin America where they say, "In spite of Cuba don't be don't be worried too much about communism, theology of liberation is the true danger there". So it's not theology does not mean oh we have God on our side. Theology paradoxically emerge precisely where there is nobody on our side. And this is in a way for me the monstrosity of Christ. Now I'm coming back to the book. Look at the cover of the book. I know what I put there and I had a long fight with otherwise my friend, half friend, okay John Milbank who protested it. You know of course I wanted this ironic reference to Magritte, I wanted Ceci n'est pas un dieu. This is not a god. He insisted, "No, it must be 'This is God'". So okay I said it's basically the same, what I'm a Hegelian so. But you know this is a painting of Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, drawing for Vittoria Colonna, where it was a great scandal, Michelangelo tried to destroy that painting. Why? This is the theologico-political I want. Look at it carefully, unfortunately probably some conservatives at MIT bungled it and made too small a painting so that you don't see it clearly. Look at the feet and especially the right hand of Christ, it’s fuck off. That is to say it shows Christ at the moment of dying, at the moment of "Father why have you forsaken me?". The face is false, the face is ah that submission, but the hand is the truth, "Fuck off father". It's the rebelling Christ. That's we need what we need. Thanks very much.