The Real of the Capitalist Illusion
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-12-16 · 1:55:52 · 13,968 words
ideologypsychoanalysiscapitalismhegel-dialecticstechnology-ai-cyberspacecinema-art-culturedemocracycommunism-socialismsubjectivitysexuality-genderrace-antisemitismreligion-theologyphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture (likely in India, with Q&A) arguing that Pokémon GO externalizes the basic mechanism of ideology as 'augmented reality,' wherein a fantasmatic supplement is added to reality to make it meaningful. He links this to Lacan's notion of surplus-enjoyment and objet petit a, and to Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism and the theological dimension of capital, arguing that capitalism is not egotism but a perverted theology of value-multiplication. The talk extends into discussions of postmodern permissive authority, the limits of democratic transparency, the need to redefine the proletariat, the politics of local traditions versus universalism (with references to Mandela, Malcolm X, Ambedkar, Gandhi), and the implications of biogenetics and AI for human identity.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Following Derrida on Kafka's The Trial: in permissive times we have prohibitions that are themselves prohibited from being announced, one must not say publicly that something is forbidden, making domination more total than under open censorship.
as “postmodern permissive master”
A contemporary form of authority that pretends to be a colleague or 'coordinator,' forbids being addressed as a master, and demands not merely obedience but that you genuinely want what it wants, a harsher domination because it colonizes inner freedom.
Žižek uses the Pokémon GO mechanism, overlaying virtual entities onto physical reality via a screen, as a structural model for ideology: ideology is the primordial augmented reality that supplements bare reality with a fantasmatic frame (the Jew, God, the enemy) that makes it meaningful and desirable.
Lacan's fundamental invention: the object-cause of desire or surplus-enjoyment that structures fantasy; Žižek presents it as the core of the Lacanian formula of fantasy (subject confronted with objet a) and links it to Marx's surplus-value.
Hegel's concept illustrated via the Lubitsch waiter joke: 'coffee without cream' and 'coffee without milk' are empirically the same but symbolically different, negation is constitutive of identity, not merely its absence.
as “surplus-power”
By analogy with surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment, the obscene supplement every public authority requires beyond its formal legal limits, the implicit message 'but basically you can fuck off, we can do whatever we want with you', which Žižek calls a necessary part of power functioning.
as “capital as substance-subject”
Žižek's Hegelian reading of Marx: money passes from being a neutral substance (measure/intermediary) to becoming the self-relating subject of capitalism, caught in circular self-reproduction, the Hegelian passage from substance to subject applied to capital.
as “ideological fantasy”
The level between subjective appearances and social reality proper: the fantasmatic structure (e.g. capital as self-circulating Hegelian substance-subject) that participants do not consciously hold but that is operative in their practical activity.
For Žižek following Marx, fetishism is not false consciousness but an objective illusion in the social form itself: people may know perfectly well what they are doing, yet in their practical activity they obey an illusion, the theological subtleties are in the form, not the content.
Marx's term (used in Hegelian fashion) for commodity fetishism: not a subjective misperception but an illusion inscribed in the social form of reality itself, the fantasmatic structure of the commodity independent of what participants consciously believe.
as “perverted theologian (capitalist as)”
Žižek's reversal of the common view of capitalism as egotism: the average capitalist thinks he is a pragmatic egotist, but in practice he is a dogmatic theologian who dedicates his life to the multiplication of value even against his own survival interests.
as “real appearance”
A third level beyond appearance and reality (borrowed from Dennett's disparagement but used positively by Žižek following Freud and Marx): how things really appear to us, at the level of the unconscious form, not deep hidden reality but the unacknowledged structure of appearance itself.
as “C-M-C / M-C-M' / M-M'”
Marx's sequence of capitalist abstraction from commodity-money-commodity exchange through capitalist circulation to the theological miracle of money begetting money, which Žižek reads as escalating ideological mystification rather than a regression to be reversed.
as “Cartesian subject (as social form of precarious worker)”
Žižek argues that Lacan's subject of psychoanalysis is the Cartesian cogito, a pure empty subject, and that this subject's social reality in capitalism is the precarious worker, stripped of all substantial roots, reduced to bare capacity to work.
A properly Hegelian reversal noted in discussions of Bolshevik sexual politics: the program of sexual liberation in Soviet theory culminated in the project of creating an asexual being, because sexuality was identified as the last fortress of bourgeois sensibility.
Only through language does sex get sexualized: there is no direct pre-symbolic 'natural' sexuality; the eroticization of reality requires the symbolic detour, and even other mundane activities (like handshakes) become sexualized through repetition that exceeds their function.
as “surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir / Mehrlust)”
Lacan's concept, developed with reference to Marx's surplus-value, designating not simply more pleasure but the additional pleasure produced by the formal detours and renunciations in the pursuit of pleasure, the enjoyment that comes precisely from the obstacle or loss itself.
Stories he reaches for 13
In Lubitsch's Ninotchka, a customer asks for plain coffee without cream; the waiter says they only have milk, so he can have coffee without milk. Empirically the same coffee, but symbolically different, negation is part of the object's identity. Žižek uses this to illustrate Hegelian determinate negation.
“'Sorry sir, we don't have cream, we only have milk. So I cannot give you coffee without cream, I can only give you coffee without milk.'”
V for Vendetta ends with the crowd storming parliament, triumph of the multitude à la Negri, but Žižek demands a sequel showing what the new government actually does the day after: nationalize? regulate? The film's inability to answer this is the symbol of the Western left's utter misery.
“I'm ready to sell my mother into slavery—and it's a safe bet because she is already dead—for seeing simply a movie called V for Vendetta part two. Okay, but what happens the day after?”
Malcolm X (the X standing for lost African roots) refused the game of searching for original African identity (à la Roots) and instead proposed using the dispossession of roots as a chance to build a new, freer universality, which is why he became a Muslim (the Umma as community of orphans, from zero).
“'Let's use the fact that we are deprived of our roots as a unique chance to build a new free universality much more free and emancipatory as that of the white people.'”
Scientists connect a rat's motor neurons to a computer and steer it like a remote-control toy. The same experiment done on humans showed that the person felt free and did not notice being directed, a horror scenario for autonomous agency and a concrete illustration of how brain transparency would undermine subjectivity.
“You can literally direct a rat, play with it as with a remote control toy car... they also did the same experiment on humans. He thought he was free, he didn't feel anything.”
In the film Brassed Off, Ewan McGregor's character is invited up by a woman who asks if he'd like coffee. He says he doesn't drink coffee; she says she doesn't have any. Despite no coffee and no explicit invitation, the exchange is intensely erotic, because the indirect detour is not a mere politeness but the constitutive mechanism of eroticization itself.
“She tells him: 'Do you—would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?' And he answers: 'I would love to, but I don't drink coffee.' And she answers: 'No problem, I don't have any.'”
The old authoritarian father says 'I don't care how you feel, go visit your grandmother.' The postmodern permissive father says 'only go if you really want to, remember how much she loves you.' The child gets a harsher order: not merely to go but to want to go, colonizing inner freedom entirely.
“The order is not only 'You must go and visit your grandmother,' but 'You must do it freely. You must really wish to visit your grandmother.'”
Žižek recalls a South African apartheid government brochure arguing against giving blacks the vote on the grounds that this would destroy their 'wonderful local cultures' (Bushman, Hottentot, etc.), which Žižek calls the most disgusting multiculturalism he ever read, and exactly what global capitalism does today.
“'We could give blacks the freedom to vote, but this would be horrible. Blacks have such wonderful local culture...'”
In a thought experiment set in the Stalinist Central Committee: criticizing Stalin gets you arrested; but standing up to publicly announce that criticizing Stalin is prohibited gets you arrested even faster. The meta-prohibition is more fundamental than the first-order prohibition.
“It's not only that it was prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to announce publicly this prohibition.”
Žižek recounts apologizing to Judith Butler for rude behavior; she said he didn't need to apologize. He argues this shows the retroactive logic of symbolic gestures: the apology worked, but the proof of its working is that it was declared superfluous, as superfluous, it was necessary.
“My apology did work, but the proof that it worked is that it was retroactively proclaimed unnecessary. But as such, as superfluous, it was necessary.”
Under communism Žižek entered a store asking for toilet paper (suspecting they didn't have it). The saleswoman said: 'You're in the wrong store, we are the store that doesn't have soap. The store that doesn't have toilet paper is across the street.' A real personal experience illustrating determinate negation under shortage.
“'No, sorry, you're in a wrong store. We are the store which doesn't have soap. The store which doesn't have toilet paper is across the street.'”
Žižek shows footage of Goebbels' February 1943 Sportpalast speech after Stalingrad, in which the crowd ecstatically consents to maximum hardship and total war. The expression on Goebbels' face is one of perverted satisfaction, not joy, but joy in utter pain. This is surplus-enjoyment at its purest: excessive enjoyment provided by renunciation itself.
“At that point it's perversion at its purest. The expression of his face is one of strange passivity, kind of a perverted satisfaction. Not joy, but joy in utter pain.”
Žižek cites Malebranche (following Augustine): in paradise, humans were not identified with their bodies but felt sensations as neutral indicators like a machine's readout. The original sin was Adam losing this distance. God's punishment was erection, the one organ a man cannot fully control, as a reminder that he is not master of his body.
“'I will give men, males, only an organ which he will not control: erection. It will happen when he doesn't want it and when he wants it, it will not happen.'”
Žižek uses the augmented-reality game Pokémon GO, where players overlay virtual creatures onto physical reality via a smartphone screen, to illustrate how ideology functions as a fantasmatic supplement that makes bare reality meaningful and desirable. Nazi antisemitism made Germans see a Pokémon called 'the Jew'; religious believers see God pop up; an anti-immigrant version would have Muslim rapists lurking everywhere.
“Did Hitler not offer the Germans the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology, which made them to see a specific Pokémon, the Jew, popping up all around?”
Works invoked 14
Capital book
Žižek quotes extensively from the Fetishism of Commodities chapter and from the M-C-M' passages; treats Capital as a Hegelian speculative text whose categories (substance-subject, determinate negation) are essential to understanding capitalism.
Ninotchka film
Ernst Lubitsch comedy used for the 'coffee without cream / coffee without milk' scene to illustrate Hegelian determinate negation.
Grundrisse book
Referenced as the text in which Marx, after returning to reading Hegel seriously, saw that reality needs a fantasy to function and that the capitalist excess is irreducible.
V for Vendetta film
Described as 'a symbol of what is wrong with today's left': its triumphant ending with the crowd storming parliament says nothing about what comes next, symptomizing the Western European left's inability to articulate a concrete post-revolutionary program.
Elysium film
Grouped with Hunger Games as Hollywood leftist dystopia that correctly shows where capitalism leads but fails to offer alternatives.
The Hunger Games film
Grouped with Elysium as 'Hollywood Marxism' films that paint an apartheid-style class society after catastrophe; vaguely progressive but wrong in the way Alenka Zupančič described.
Brassed Off film
English working-class melodrama cited for the 'coffee invitation' scene (would you like coffee / I don't drink coffee / I don't have any) as the most erotic exchange imaginable, illustrating surplus-enjoyment and the constitutive role of indirect detour.
Roots tv
Cited as the paradigm of the wrong emancipatory strategy, searching for African roots, against which Malcolm X's approach (using rootlessness as a starting point for new universality) is contrasted.
The Trial book
Cited via Derrida's reading as the text that develops the concept of prohibitions that are themselves prohibited, the 'meta-prohibition' structure.
Called 'ingenious' and a Chinese mega-hit sci-fi novel; used to explore what it would mean for a civilization to have direct thought-emission without language, and hence no capacity for lying or eroticism.
Les non-dupes errent other
Žižek quotes from this seminar Lacan's declaration that his greatest invention was objet a, and glosses the double reading of the title (those not deceived err / Names of the Father) as a beautiful dialectical thought.
Pokémon GO other
The central example of the lecture: its augmented-reality mechanism is used to model the structure of ideology as fantasmatic supplement added to reality to make it meaningful.
Cited for Freud's crucial insight that the secret of dreams is their form, not their hidden content, the model for Žižek's parallel between Marx's commodity fetishism and Freudian dream-work.
Umbr(a) (journal) journal
Publication in which Alenka Zupančič's text on Lars von Trier and the postmodern permissive master appeared; mentioned in passing.
People invoked 39
Liu Cixin positive
Žižek calls The Three-Body Problem 'ingenious' and a 'mega-hit'; uses the alien civilization's thought-emission (no language) to argue that language and the capacity to lie are constitutive of human thought and eroticism.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi negative
Cited as the South African political figure who followed authentic black roots and was paid and corrupted by the white apartheid government, counterexample to Mandela.
Mentioned alongside Jeremy Rifkin as 'too naive' but 'onto something' with their ideas about cooperative commons and digitalization as post-capitalist tendencies.
Mahatma Gandhi negative
Žižek criticizes Gandhi's South African writings as not claiming equality but only that Indians be admitted to the white section, with explicit exclusion of black people; positions him as the wrong model versus Ambedkar.
François Fillon negative
Cited as almost worse than Le Pen in some respects as the other French presidential candidate, illustrating the impossibility of a genuine choice.
Narendra Modi negative
Cited as the relevant example of today's political figure; his image as celibate (Brahmacharya) is raised by an audience member as a question about renunciation and surplus-enjoyment; Žižek does not develop the comparison but engages with it.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Co-presenter and close collaborator; Žižek repeatedly credits her for examples and ideas (postmodern permissive authority, Lars von Trier text in Umbr(a), her formulation that sex gets sexualized through language).
Marine Le Pen negative
Cited as an example of the impossible electoral situation: anti-immigrant racist in the French presidential final, making non-voting a legitimate option.
Jacques Derrida positive
Cited with qualification ('with whom I otherwise often don't agree') for his reading of Kafka's The Trial, which developed the idea that prohibitions can themselves be prohibited.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout: Žižek deploys Lacan's objet a, surplus-enjoyment, formula of fantasy, and reading of Descartes as foundational for his analysis. He quotes and paraphrases from Lacan's seminar Les non-dupes errent.
Mentioned incidentally as reportedly no longer needing the finger he used to communicate, cited as illustration of direct brain-computer interfaces becoming reality.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek recalls a debate in which Fukuyama conceded that communists (China, Vietnam) are the best managers of capitalism, a dialectical irony Žižek uses against the end-of-history thesis.
Aaron Bastani positive
Co-presenter; Žižek credits him with describing the neoliberal ideology of government as a market contractor and with relevant passages on liberation of sexuality ending in liberation from sexuality.
Steven Pinker negative
Žižek calls him 'a total idiot,' citing as proof that Pinker attacked him twice; he contrasts Pinker unfavorably with Dennett and other evolutionary biologists.
Daniel Dennett negative
Dennett dismisses 'real appearance' as a third level between appearance and reality as a stupidity (Schimpfwort); Žižek inverts this, claiming it is precisely what Freud and Marx identify as the unconscious/ideological level.
Appears in a personal anecdote: Žižek apologized to her for rude behavior; she said he didn't need to apologize, used to illustrate the retroactive logic of symbolic gestures, not to comment on her ideas.
Donald Trump negative
Called 'a scandal'; Žižek denies being for Trump despite media misrepresentation; his Slovenia connection is made into a joke ('so stupid to marry a Slovene woman').
B. R. Ambedkar positive
Žižek declares himself 'for Ambedkar against Gandhi,' endorsing Ambedkar's universalist rejection of caste hierarchy over Gandhi's politics of tradition and authenticity.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Representative of 'crazy optimism' about AI/singularity ('we will all be one mind'); Žižek explicitly rejects this position alongside European cultural conservatism as both extremes to avoid.
Nicolas Malebranche positive
Cited for the theory (following Augustine) that in paradise humans related to their bodies as neutral instruments; God's punishment for the Fall was erection as the uncontrollable organ, deployed to illuminate surplus-enjoyment and the non-identity between body and subject.
Antonio Negri negative
Negri loved V for Vendetta for its Negrian 'multitude' storming parliament; Žižek uses this as evidence of the Western left's failure to think beyond the revolutionary moment to concrete post-revolutionary measures.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited for the observation that in each historical epoch there is a specific image of the working class that symbolizes the universal concept (e.g., coal miners in classical Europe).
Fredric Jameson positive
Žižek is 'tempted to follow Jameson' in extending the concept of proletariat to include 'all those excluded' from rogue states to the unemployed.
Bernie Sanders positive
Called 'the only authentic moment' of the US election; the Democratic Party's brutal elimination of Sanders is identified as the key event that caused Clinton's loss.
Yanis Varoufakis negative
Described as 'my otherwise good friend' but Žižek challenges his DiEM25 movement's goal of democratizing Europe, arguing that more transparency would lead to refugees being expelled because majorities in each country oppose them.
Mladen Dolar positive
Friend and collaborator who provided Žižek with the formulation 'pragmatism is good enough for theory but not good enough for practice' from an unnamed American/British philosopher.
Malcolm X positive
Žižek calls him 'a great guy for me': his idea of using the loss of African roots as a starting point for a new free universality (rather than searching for origins) is endorsed as the correct emancipatory strategy, and his turn to Islam as a religion of orphans/Umma is praised.
Grouped with Paul Mason as naively optimistic about digital cooperative commons, yet pointing to a real tendency within capitalism.
Bill Gates positive
Used as the model of the rentier not the capitalist: his profit comes from privatizing intellectual commons (Windows pricing unrelated to production costs); his philanthropy is attacked as the image of today's capitalism, accumulate billions then play charity.
Cited as evidence that even a moderate refugee policy (inviting 'at least some') cost Merkel popularity and will likely cost her elections, illustrating the anti-refugee majority in democracies.
Walter Benjamin positive
Invoked for the metaphor of a work of art as a photograph for which the developer was not yet available, used to argue that returning to Marx means retroactively discovering what he really meant.
Mentioned as being 'in panic for years' about the justice implications of biogenetic manipulation (e.g., competitive advantage from cognitive enhancement pills), without endorsement or strong critique.
Augustine of Hippo positive
Cited for the claim that Adam and Eve had sex in paradise but without sexual pleasure (instrumentally, like plowing); and for the idea that humans are not simply their bodies, elaborated by Malebranche.
Nelson Mandela positive
'With all his limitations,' Žižek credits Mandela for warning against Africanness / authentic African roots as a resistance strategy, understanding that capitalism is immanently multicultural.
Hugo Chávez negative
Žižek says he never trusted Venezuelan populism and warned for ten years something would go wrong; Chávez was 'Fidel Castro with oil money,' pacifying problems by throwing money at them rather than solving them structurally.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek reads Marx through Hegel, commodity fetishism, surplus-value, and Capital's formula C-M-C/M-C-M'/M-M' are central; he argues Marx is more actual than ever but also requires rethinking (limits of labor theory of value, redefining the proletariat).
Sigmund Freud positive
Freud's Lustgewinn and the insight that the secret of dreams is their form rather than their hidden content are used to parallel Marx's fetishism analysis; the unconscious form carries what is repressed from content.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek repeatedly uses Hegelian categories (substance to subject, determinate negation, Aufhebung) to read both Marx and contemporary capitalism; he notes that Hegel himself did not see the Hegelian dimension of capital, only Marx did.
Martin Luther positive
Used as an example of revolutionary return: the Reformation was the biggest revolution in Christianity yet assumed the form of going back to original Christianity, illustrating the retroactive structure of revolutionary novelty.
What it argues
augmented reality as the structure of ideologysurplus-enjoyment and the Lacan-Marx connectioncommodity fetishism as objective illusion / theological dimension of capitalpostmodern permissive authority versus old authoritarian masterthe problem of the day after revolution: the left's lack of concrete programredefining the proletariat and Marx's limits todayuniversalism versus local traditions in anti-colonial politics
Dialectical moves 10
“Ideology is not illusion opposed to reality; ideology is the primordial augmented reality—the fantasmatic frame that makes reality itself meaningful.”
Inverts the standard picture of ideology as superstructure over a real base: ideology is already at the level of how we perceive reality, not a distortion added on top.
“Cynics are not cynical enough: they are in a perverted way more moral and religious than they care to admit.”
The apparent sophistication of cynicism conceals a deeper ideological investment; cynicism does not escape ideology but enacts it at a more fundamental level.
“Marx's critique is not that capitalists preach higher values but are really egotists—it's exactly the opposite: capitalists think they are egotists but they are perverted theologians.”
Reverses the common understanding of Marxist ideology critique: the illusion is not hypocrisy but a genuine metaphysical commitment that the capitalist himself disavows.
“Fetishism is not in the hidden content but in the form itself; what is repressed from the content articulates itself in the surplus of the form.”
Both Marx on commodities and Freud on dreams share the same structural insight: the secret is not the hidden meaning but the form of the presentation, which carries the unconscious remainder.
“My apology did work, but the proof that it worked is that it was retroactively proclaimed unnecessary—as superfluous, it was necessary.”
Illustrates the logic of surplus and determinate negation: the efficacy of a symbolic gesture is confirmed by its apparent cancellation, which is the only way the gesture can be fully accepted.
“The postmodern permissive father gives a much harsher order than the authoritarian father: not only 'you must go' but 'you must go freely, you must really want to visit your grandmother.'”
Apparent freedom of choice conceals a more totalizing injunction that colonizes inner desire, making the permissive master more oppressive than the openly authoritarian one.
“Liberation of sexuality ends up with liberation from sexuality—the Hegelian reversal of the Soviet program.”
The drive to liberate sexuality from bourgeois repression culminated in its opposite: the project of creating an asexual communist subject, because radical liberation pushes through to the elimination of what was 'liberated.'
“When a notion becomes fully actual, it is also the moment of its decay—Marx's victory is at some point also his defeat.”
The Hegelian law that full actualization coincides with obsolescence: capitalism's becoming fully what Marx described (abstract financial circulation) is also the moment at which his analysis requires renewal.
“It's not only that it was prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to announce publicly this prohibition.”
The structure of totalitarian power: the meta-prohibition (prohibiting the prohibition) is more fundamental than the first-order prohibition, illustrating the permissive-repressive paradox.
“The unconscious is not somewhere deep in ourselves how things really are; the unconscious is how things appear to us, but we are not aware of how they appear to us.”
Relocates the unconscious from hidden depth to the surface of appearance itself, the 'real appearance' that is operative but unacknowledged.
Claims 19
asserts
Pokémon GO externalizes the basic mechanism of ideology: ideology is the primordial augmented reality that supplements bare reality with a fantasmatic entity to make it meaningful.ideology / augmented reality
asserts
You cannot make a Marxist Pokémon game because Marxism's secret of social life is not an individual personalized agent (like a fat banker Pokémon) but structural social antagonism—personalization is itself ideology.Marxism vs. ideology / personalization
asserts
Commodity fetishism is not false consciousness but an objective illusion inscribed in the social form itself: participants may know what they do yet still follow the illusion in their practical activity.commodity fetishism / Marxist theory of ideology
asserts
Capitalism is not egotism but a perverted theology: the average capitalist thinks himself a pragmatic egotist but in practice is a fanatical theologian devoted to the multiplication of value even at the cost of his own survival.capitalism as theology vs. capitalism as egotism
asserts
Marx's biggest achievement was to describe the functioning of capital at the level of Hegel's logic; ironically, Hegel himself did not see the Hegelian dimension of capital.Marx / Hegel / capital
rejects
The neo-Keynesian solution of grounding capital in 'real needs and real production' is the greatest illusion: for Marx, the capitalist excess of productivity is not a mystification to be reversed but an irreducible surplus to be transformed.neo-Keynesian / productivist response to capitalism
asserts
The postmodern permissive master is more dominating than the old authoritarian master, because he colonizes inner freedom by demanding that you not only obey but genuinely want to obey.postmodern authority / permissive master
asserts
Non-voting can in certain situations be an authentic political act, as when both options (e.g., Le Pen vs. Fillon, or Clinton vs. Trump) are unacceptable and the key event was the exclusion of a genuine alternative (Sanders).electoral abstention / authentic political act
asserts
The left's resort to moralization and political correctness is a symptom of its lack of concrete political program—moralization always enters when concrete politics is absent.the left / political correctness / moralization
rejects
Making democratic systems more transparent would not help refugees; in each European country the majority is against refugees, so more democratic transparency would lead to their brutal expulsion.Varoufakis / democratize Europe movement
asserts
Global capitalism is immanently multicultural and works perfectly with local traditions; therefore, resisting capitalism by appealing to authentic local roots is not a genuine alternative but plays into capitalism's own logic.postcolonialism / local traditions vs. global capitalism
asserts
Malcolm X's idea—using the dispossession of roots as a chance to build a new free universality rather than searching for African origins—is the correct emancipatory strategy, analogous to Ambedkar over Gandhi.Malcolm X / universalism vs. identity politics
asserts
Bill Gates is not a capitalist but a rentier who privatized part of the intellectual commons; intellectual property resists full commodification because unlike material goods, sharing it makes it more rather than less valuable.intellectual property / capitalism's limits
asserts
Surplus-enjoyment is not simply more pleasure but the enjoyment produced precisely by renunciation and formal detour; Goebbels' total war speech—where people ecstatically consent to maximum suffering—is surplus-enjoyment at its purest.surplus-enjoyment / Lacanian jouissance
asserts
There is no zero-level of direct unmediated enjoyment; surplus (the formal detour, the indirect approach) is there from the beginning—eroticization requires the symbolic obstacle, not the absence of it.surplus-enjoyment / eroticization / language
asserts
Brain-computer interfaces that allow direct thought-transmission would abolish eroticism and unconscious desire, because eroticism depends on the capacity to lie and to not directly reveal one's thoughts.technology / AI / human identity / eroticism
reframes
Returning to Marx means rethinking Marx's limits—most urgently, redefining who counts as the proletariat today (from classical factory workers to precarious workers, the excluded, and the unemployed).Marx / proletariat / contemporary capitalism
asserts
The true measure of revolutionary change is not the pathetic moment of mass protest but what happens the day after: the left has no credible answer to that question.revolution / the left's program
rejects
Charity (e.g., Bill Gates's philanthropy) is not a solution to capitalism; the solution is ruthlessly confronting capitalism's new limits (intellectual property, ecology, biogenetics) rather than performing guilt-based solidarity.philanthropy / charity as solution to capitalism
Quotes 17
“At its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of augmented reality.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as augmented reality
“You always need something: the enemy, fantasmatic witches, God, whatever, a virtual entity added to reality which makes it meaningful.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological supplement / augmented reality
“Fetishism is part of reality itself. Fetishism is in the very social form, in the very social form of what you are doing.”Slavoj Žižek · commodity fetishism as objective illusion
“Capitalists think that they are egotists, but they are not. They are perverted theologians, metaphysicians who totally pervert their life for their absolute capital.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism as perverted theology
“Moralization, as already Lenin knew it, always enters when you lack concrete politics.”Slavoj Žižek · political correctness / moralization as symptom
“Surplus is there from the beginning. Surplus is there from the beginning.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus-enjoyment as constitutive
“The true measure of a social change revolution is not this pathetic moment of hundreds of thousands of us on the street, it's the day after.”Slavoj Žižek · the day-after problem / left's program
“Cynics are precisely not cynical enough. Cynics are in a perverted way much more moral, even religious, than they care to admit.”Slavoj Žižek · cynicism as ideology
“If you understand this joke, you understand Hegel. Because this is what Hegel means by determinate negation.”Slavoj Žižek · determinate negation / Ninotchka joke
“It's as if apart from appearance and reality, there is a third level of real appearance, of how things really appear. And for him this is a stupidity. But for Freud and Marx this is the crucial thing.”Slavoj Žižek · real appearance / objective illusion / the unconscious
“Pragmatism is good enough for theory, but not good enough for practice.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's practical metaphysics vs. pragmatist self-image
“The spectre of capital is a kind of Pokémon figure which lurks behind the frantic activity it sets in motion.”Slavoj Žižek · capital as spectral Pokémon / ideology
“Only through language, sex itself gets sexualized. Because sexualization doesn't simply concern the subject matter directly, what you are doing.”Slavoj Žižek · sexualization through language
“Language was created to lie. Language is by definition unilateral, reductionist. And that's what's the strength of language.”Slavoj Žižek · language / lying / human identity
“Thinking always means thinking against the language. This is a very deep insight of all true philosophers, that language by itself is lying, embodies all the prejudices.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel on language / philosophy against language
“Bill Gates is not a capitalist, he is a rentier, rent. His money comes from the fact that Bill Gates privatized part of our intellectual commons.”Slavoj Žižek · Bill Gates as rentier / intellectual commons
“We don't exist as humans without the ability to cheat, to create the wrong impression in very complex ways.”Slavoj Žižek · language / deception / human identity
Transcript 45 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you. I hope you didn’t think that I did something horrible to your parents or what, so that you insulted me with all those titles, big titles. I’m very grateful, thank you. First I will brutally use my privilege in a totally unfair way to answer, to first connect with the debate, no? I have you now in a totally impotent position: I can talk, you cannot answer. I like this, you know. Because I like dialogues, but as an arrogant philosopher, my preferred dialogues are, you know Plato, Platon? You know late Plato’s dialogues, how they look? One guy talks all the time, and the other guy just says every ten minutes: "By Zeus, yes Socrates, so it is," and so on. That’s the dialogue that I like, you know. So just to go back. First, elections, and you remember that short debate about—I think you, sir, started it—voting, no voting and so on, no? I think that, but don’t you think that in certain situations, non-voting can be—in certain situations only—an authentic act. For example, this caused me such trouble in United States when media misrepresented my position as if I’m for Trump. I’m not crazy. The guy was so stupid to marry a Slovene woman, I cannot... no, but seriously, Trump is a scandal. I just claim that the key event of the elections was how brutally Democratic Party got rid of Bernie Sanders, who was the only authentic moment. And they paid the price for it in losing the election. In that situation, no, and it’s even worse—let’s look at what now it seems will be the final confrontation in the French presidential elections: Marine Le Pen, anti-immigrant racist, versus François Fillon, who looks almost, with some respects, almost worse than her. In such a situation, that’s for me the big problem. Would you agree, I don’t know how this works in India, but in Slovenia, we who still remain want to be radical leftists, the liberal official left likes to blackmail us with this moral, pseudo-moral argument: "Yes, I know we have differences, but when we have this neo-fascist threat, we should all stand together," like in United States: "You should vote for Hillary," and so on. I think that this blackmail has some limits. You know, we should think very well to what extent we succumb to it. Second point, catastrophe. I thought about another example which would nicely illustrate what you, Alenka, said. First, this I think is what is false about all those apparently Hollywood Marxism leftist movies which paint a new class society after the catastrophe: *Hunger Games*, *Elysium*, and so on. Although in a way, in some vague way, they are progressive. They paint a clear picture where we are going if nothing will be done: a new apartheid openly racist society. But nonetheless, there is something precisely in the way Alenka described it wrong about them. But unfortunately we, at least the European left, should be self-critical here. We—it’s not only the existing ruling ideology that paints this picture of catastrophe, the end of the world is the only alternative—in a way much of the left follows it. For example, a film, I hope you saw it also, I mean that it was well known enough in India, a couple of years ago: *V for Vendetta* with Natalie Portman and so on, to evoke human persons who appear there. You know, I think this film is a symbol of what is wrong with today’s left. It ended up, you remember, with a triumph. The crowd, multitude, Negri, Negri multitude, Negri loved the movie, penetrates the police barricade, enters the parliament, people take over, and the end. As I like to say, I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery—and it’s a safe bet because she is already dead—for seeing simply a movie called *V for Vendetta* part two. Okay, but what happens the day after? What measures does the new government take? Do they nationalize, do they what? Here I see the utter misery at least of the Western European left. If you look at it closely, they have some vague ideas, which any fascist would agree with, about end the rule of financial capital, take care of people’s needs, whatever, and some vague ideas of respecting democracy, making the system more transparent. And I’m more and more openly opposed to it. Listen, I had here a debate with my otherwise good friend Janis Varoufakis, who started this movement Democratise Europe. And I asked him a simple question to which I didn’t get a good answer. I asked him, "Okay, but are you aware that when in Europe there was this big debate what to do with refugees flooding Europe—sorry, I’m for refugees, sorry for using this offensive term—I told him, "Are you aware that if the European system were to be more transparent, democratic, refugees would be thrown out brutally?" Let’s be very clear: in each country, undoubtedly—we can only quarrel about percentage—the majority of the population is against refugees. In Germany, Angela Merkel, when she invited at least some of them, lost popularity, she will probably lose next elections, and so on and so on. So you know, it’s not as simple as that—let’s make the system more transparent. What if—I’m saying something quite horrible—what if the people are wrong? However we interpret this being wrong, manipulated and so on. But I doubt if they are simply manipulated and so on. So things are not so simple. The fact is that, at least in Western Europe, the left simply does not, cannot offer—and I’m not talking about legal details but generally—a viable alternative, like what to do. I think that this is the reason for political correctness and all this moralizing madness. Moralization, as already Lenin knew it, always enters when you lack concrete politics. The last point I wanted to make, introductory point, is about all those manners, politeness and so on. You know what was the crucial point that interests me in what I was trying to make? Not only do we have prohibitions and regulations, but as Derrida, with whom I otherwise often don't agree, developed nicely in his reading of Kafka, *The Trial*, *Prozess*, we have also prohibitions which are themselves prohibited. And that’s for me the horror of our permissive times. We have maybe even more prohibitions than ever, but they are prohibitions which are themselves prohibited. Let’s give you a simple example that I often use. Let's imagine, what a nice dream, that we are in in Moscow. It’s Central Committee. I sacrifice myself to the role of Stalin; I am Stalin. I give a speech. Of course, you don’t have a choice; you applaud frenetically at the end. Then there is a debate. Okay, one of you raises hand and attacks me. Okay, it’s clear what will happen: the next day the big question will be who has seen that guy alive the last, no? Okay, but let’s then say that another one of you stands up and shouts at that guy who criticized me, Stalin, telling him something like, "But are you crazy to criticize Comrade Stalin? Aren’t you aware that this is prohibited, that we don’t do this in Soviet Union?" I guarantee you this second guy would have disappeared even faster than the first one. So you see the point? It’s not only that it was prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to announce publicly this prohibition. And it’s the same with the wonderful example that you, Alenka, already used, this postmodern authority. Alenka wrote a wonderful text—did you already publish it in English?—about Lars von Trier and so on. Yes, in *Umbr(a)*. Okay, you will tell them where if they want. And namely, describing the contemporary permissive master. I don’t know again how is it with you here in India, but in Europe and United States, we have more and more these postmodern permissive masters. It’s no longer a guy with a tight tie and you know you have to address him formally. He pretends to be your friend, you know, like Monday morning he comes to you: "Uh, did you have a good sex the last evening? How was it? Let’s take a drink." But nonetheless, he keeps all the power. But you know, it’s a master which dominates even more, exerts his or her domination, but it’s strictly prohibited to call him, to treat him as a master. You have to treat him as a colleague. And usually they don’t even like to be called masters; the popular term is "coordinator," they tell you: "I’m just here to coordinate things here." And to repeat you a story from one of my earlier books where I think I found the perfect example for this. Alenka already used a similar example with this parental authority, no? Imagine you are a small girl or boy of let’s say eight years. It’s Sunday afternoon and your father wants you to visit your old grandmother. You of course detest it, she is old, senile, whatever. But then if you have an old authoritarian father, he will tell you what? He will tell you something like—and this would be as Alenka put it, a good thing to do—he will tell you: "Listen, I don’t care how you feel, just do your duty. Go to your grandmother and behave there properly." That’s perfect, I claim, because you will retain your, let’s call it inner freedom, you will be furious at your father, but that’s good for your long-term freedom and so on. Now what would a monster called postmodern permissive father do? He would not give you an order, but he would have told you something like this: "You only go to visit your grandmother if you really want it. Just remember how much your grandmother loves you." Now a child is not an idiot, and he or she will know perfectly what this order means. Beneath the appearance of a free choice, it gives you a much harsher order. The order is not only "You must go and visit your grandmother," but "You must do it freely. You must really wish to visit your grandmother." So you see this nice example of how—and this is basically what also Alenka described as that situation—do whatever you want, etc., etc. Where the apparent freedom of choice masks a much harsher, masks a much harsher choice. So much for the introduction where I brutally used freedom. Now I hope you will be not too bored because the—my paper goes more and more difficult towards the end. So I will begin in an easier way with our contemporaneity at its most stupid: *Pokémon GO*. You know it. *Pokémon GO*, as you know, is a location-based augmented reality game for mobile devices, typically played on mobile phones. Players use the device's GPS and camera to capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, Pokémon, who appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the players. As players travel in the real world, their avatar moves along the game's map. This augmented reality mode is what makes *Pokémon GO* different from other PC games. Instead of taking us out of the real world and drawing us into the artificial virtual space where you just stare into a screen, *Pokémon GO* combines the two. We look at reality and interact with it through the fantasy frame of the digital screen, and this intermediary frame supplements reality with virtual elements which sustain our desire to participate in the game, pushing us to look for them, for the virtual creatures, in a reality which without this frame would leave us indifferent. Does this sound familiar? Of course it does. What the technology of *Pokémon GO* externalizes is simply the basic mechanism of ideology. At its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of augmented reality. To simplify things to the utmost: did Hitler not offer the Germans the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology, which made them to see a specific Pokémon, the Jew, popping up all around and providing the clue to what one has to fight against? And does not the same hold for all other ideological pseudo-entities which have to be added to reality in order to make it meaningful? Like, you see a lot of suffering, if you are religious, pop-pop-Pokémon God and you dialogue with him and everything becomes clear. So one can even easily imagine a contemporary anti-immigrant version of *Pokémon GO*, where the player wanders around a German city and is threatened by Muslim immigrant rapists or thieves lurking everywhere and so on. But are we not generalizing here too quickly? Is the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which makes us see the Jewish plot as the source of our troubles, not radically different from let’s say the Marxist approach, which observes social life as a battleground of economic power struggles? In Marxism, the secret beneath all the confusion of social life are social antagonisms and not individual agents which can be personalized in the guise of Pokémon figures. That’s why I think you cannot make a Marxist Pokémon game. Because some of my German leftists told me, "But this is not only Nazism. Why don’t we play a Marxist Pokémon game? Like, you walk along the street, you see poor people and you see Pokémon which is a big fat banker." And then my answer to them was: "Yes, and this big fat banker looks like a Jew or whatever," you know. Like, you know, ideology is already in this very personalization. So again, to cut the story short, this is why I think *Pokémon GO* game is such a success. Of course, its first attractive feature, as I already pointed out, is that we do not have on the one side reality and on the other side the screen. Like when you play all these big PC games, you as we say escape out of reality. No, you remain within reality. But reality is just supplemented by some features like your search for Pokémon figures, which triggers your desire. But my claim is that this structure again is the very structure of ideology. For almost I’m tempted to say thousands of years, our reality, the way we dwell in our social world, was structured like a *Pokémon GO* game. You always need something: the enemy, fantasmatic witches, God, whatever, a virtual entity added to reality which makes it meaningful. And that’s why again so this is for me—this is why this structure of *Pokémon GO* or structure of augmented reality is our future. It’s our future because it was already our past. You know often what we celebrate as the latest technology just brings out what was active already for a long time. So what has all this to do with capitalism? Of course, again, this *Pokémon GO* frame, the frame through which through the screen you look at reality, this frame of course is precisely what in psychoanalysis we would have called the frame of fantasy. And it’s crucial to use here the term augmented reality, because in Lacanian psychoanalysis, fantasy is not opposed to reality. Fantasy is part of our everyday experience, ideological fantasy. Fantasy is how every day we perceive reality. One of you—by "you" I mean Indians, and I would be proud of that—Mistry something, sorry I’m bad with names, maybe you heard it, developed a wonderful program at MIT called "SixthSense," which basically actualizes the same mechanism. It’s relatively simple, but it already half works. All you need is a digital camera, small projector, and through your cell phone connection with some computer cloud, whatever. And it works like this: you look at something and your camera also looks at it. It recognizes the object and it immediately projects onto any flat screen, even onto object itself, the basic data about it. Like you hold in your hands a book and again the mechanism works like this: the camera perceives it, sends the data to the digital cloud, gets the information go back and you read it immediately in split of a second: the storyline of the book, the latest reviews of the book and so on and so on. Why is this so ideology at its purest? Because again, it’s not: here is the real world, there is spectral digital dreams. But reality itself behaves as a magic entity which announces, tells the truth about itself. And since many of our fantasies are sexual fantasies, of course in my dirty old mind I immediately imagined the vulgar ways this might act with a "SixthSense" machine which is adapted to sexual life. Like, no I’m afraid to look at any of you because I will—like, I look at any of you girls and then immediately it’s projected onto her: she doesn’t like Chinese food but she likes Indian food, especially mango lassi; she likes fellatio but not cunnilingus, and I know everything, you know, immediately. So you see, this is ideology, this idea of how—no, I wasn’t looking at any of you—the idea of how you see this supplemented reality which is part of our immediate part of our immediate experience. So we can also say in a very general way that the spectre of capital is a kind of Pokémon figure which lurks behind the frantic activity it sets in motion. The activity reality, the way we see it, when we are subject of capitalism, is always the augmented reality, the reality augmented by the capitalist fantasy. But we have to be much more specific here. Lacan’s formula of fantasy is subject confronted with what Lacan calls *objet a*, the object small *a*, the object-cause of desire or surplus-enjoyment. And here the link with Marx is crucial. Lacan begins his—the eleventh week of his seminar *Les non-dupes errent*, which is a wonderful ambiguous phrase in French. It can be read as "*les non-dupes errent*," those who are not deceived, caught into an illusion, are wrong—and it’s a beautiful dialectical thought of how sometimes truth is accessible only through an illusion, through a lie. Like if you look directly at things the way they are, you miss it. And the other reading, "*les noms du père*," Names of the Father. Okay. At the beginning, in his typical arrogant way, Lacan asks the question: "What—what was it that Lacan, who is here present, invented?" He talks like this, typical Lacanian arrogance. And he answers like that to get things going: "*objet a*," object *a*. So it’s very important. It’s not all those phrases well known of Lacan—unconscious is the desire of the Other, the unconscious is structured like a language. He says, "Lacan’s my great invention is object *a*." Object *a* has a long history in Lacan’s teaching. But it is Lacan’s reference to Marx, especially to Marx’s notion of surplus-value, *Mehrwert*, that enables Lacan to deploy his definite notion of object *a* as *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrlust*, surplus-enjoyment. And I think it’s clear in what way Lacan developed his absolutely crucial notion of surplus-enjoyment with reference to Marx. So what is surplus-enjoyment? Or we can also use here Freud’s term, *Lustgewinn*, a gain of pleasure. What does Lacan mean by it? It’s not simply stepping up of pleasure, more pleasure, but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours in the subject’s effort to attain pleasure. Think about how much a process of seduction gains with its intricate innuendos, false denials, and so on. These detours are not just cultural complications or sublimations circulating about some hard-core real. This hard-core real is retrospectively constituted through these detours. What do I mean by this? Let me quote one example which is almost my favorite one. I’m sorry if some of you know it, I used it once I think only till now in my books. Did you see another movie which is a very modest movie but this detail is ingenious? From fifteen years ago, an English working-class melodrama, even relatively progressive, called *Brassed Off* with Ewan McGregor when he was still a working-class hero before he became a Jedi Knight and all those stupidities. Okay, it’s workers on strike in and—Ewan McGregor is an unemployed worker who falls in love with a girl who works for the enemies, who are trying to fire the workers, but then they fell in love and so on. But the point is this one. Once they have a date, then they flirt, and at the end he accompanies her—he, Ewan McGregor character, ordinary miner, the girl, the wealthier accountant in the company—up to her apartment block where she lives. And there she, of course it’s a sexual invitation, but listen carefully what she says. She tells him: "Do you—would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?" And he answers: "I would love to, but I don’t drink coffee." And she answers: "No problem, I don’t have any." I cannot imagine a more erotic exchange. Because, you know, apparently nothing happens. Coffee, do you want coffee? No. I don’t have coffee. No problem, I don’t have any. I don’t drink coffee, no. But the effect is an almost obscene direct erotic invitation. But you see the difference. It’s wrong to say that in reality she basically told him, "Would you like to come up and fuck me?" Of course in some way this was it, but if she were to say it directly, everything would have been ruined. And I claim it’s not just a question of politeness. I claim that this zero level never existed. Maybe, maybe, even there I doubt, they have their own rituals of seduction. Maybe with animals it would have been like that. But you always need this. Why? Because—I will tell you now another story, the last one, then I follow the line, which was introduced into our circles by Alenka in some of her books and now we always use it. This type of double denial which nonetheless—that’s the miracle—you do something, like she offered coffee, and then everything goes wrong. The guy doesn’t want coffee, you don’t have coffee, but in this way through the failure, you reach your goal even more directly. Or rather in the only way. This is how reality is eroticized and so on, and not through direct reference. Okay, this other example—I’m sorry if you know it, we use it so often I’m already embarrassed to mention it—in Ernst Lubitsch’s excellent comedy *Ninotchka*. Okay, it’s more complex, but there is a scene when the guy enters a restaurant and asks: "Can I have a coffee, coffee, but please just plain coffee, can I get coffee without cream, please?" And you know what the waiter answers? He says, "Sorry sir, we don’t have cream, we only have milk. So I cannot give you coffee without cream, I can only give you coffee without milk." Now if you don’t understand Hegel, what Hegel means by determinate negation—if you understand this joke, you understand Hegel. Because this is what Hegel means by determinate negation. Although it’s empirically the same coffee—it doesn’t matter if it’s without milk or without cream, it’s plain coffee—but it’s at the symbolic level of its meaning, it’s not the same. The coffee without cream is not the same as the coffee without milk. Negation is part of its identity. And I even know from my own communist past a wonderful anti-communist but modest joke about this, because you know under communism, although it was not so bad but often, okay, they didn’t have things that you wanted to buy in a store. And it happened to me exactly the same thing as this joke. I entered a store, my mother sent me for toilet paper, and I entered a joke, says, and I suspected that they don’t have, that they don’t have toilet paper. So I said, "Are you the store you still don’t have the toilet paper?" You know what the lady selling there stuff told me: "No, sorry, you’re in a wrong store. We are the store which doesn’t have soap. The store which doesn’t have toilet paper is across the street," and so on. Like, like—but I claim that only in this way through what Hegel would have called determinate negation, can you in a way eroticize the situation. And I cannot resist another reference to the previous debate, politeness and so on. What—politeness functions in the same way. You need it, but often, but it is superfluous. Like it happened to me—I’m ashamed to mention it, but I was the bad guy—once I was together with Judith Butler and I behaved badly, I used some "lesbian bitch" dirty, okay, I was incorrect, I’m sorry, I was guilty. So I felt bad and later I called her into her hotel room and said, "Listen, Judith, I am very sorry, I just blah-blah." I apologized. And she told me, "Listen Slavoj, I know how you are, no offense, please, you don't need to apologize." But you know what then came to me? But her saying "You don't need to apologize, everything is okay," was the only way for her to really accept my apology. If she were to say, "Yes, you really offended me, I really need the apology," this would really have meant that I was so rude that she is not able to get over it. So you see the paradox. My apology did work, but the proof that it worked is that it was retroactively proclaimed unnecessary. But as such, as superfluous, it was necessary. Which is why you can imagine with my dirty mind my reaction was immediately to tell her—but I didn't: "Oh, if it's not needed then I take it back," no. But you see, and again my point is that eroticization works like that. There is no zero level. Surplus is there from the beginning. Surplus is there from the beginning. So again, now things will gradually get a little bit more complicated. What is this surplus about? It’s a very precise paradox. Surplus—we have many surpluses with Lacan: surplus-enjoyment, surplus-knowledge even, surplus-value in Marx. I think we even have surplus-power in politics. What do I mean by surplus-power? Listen, when we live in democratic state, especially the one grounded in neoliberal ideology the way it was described by Aaron [Bastani] this today in the morning, the idea is that government is just another contractor that we deal with on the market. Like, elections are like buying the best government, your votes are your money, and you select one group to govern you with precise rules what they are allowed to do. It’s a limited contract. But I claim no public authority really works in this way. No matter how democratically self-constrained is. Every power edifice, in order to function, has to include an obscene surplus. Like officially we are limited, but the message between the lines is always: "But you know basically fuck off, we can do whatever we want with you." And I claim that this is not just some kind of a totalitarian distortion or whatever. This surplus, hinted at between the lines, is a necessary part of it. So what Freud aims at with his notion of gain of pleasure, *Lustgewinn*, or what Lacan aims at with surplus-enjoyment is precisely a surplus which is—[audio cut]—Okay, in India when I was here the previous time, you are not so bad in this type of bureaucracy. No, my experience at the border and so on was that you pretty much like your bureaucrats, all these formalities and so on. This is all the mystery of bureaucracy, no? Its goal is not to solve problems, but to keep the problems alive in order to reproduce itself. And basically, it’s this type of structure which I claim no matter how efficient bureaucracy pretends to be, you always have this surplus-enjoyment of enjoying the process itself. And we can go here, I’m sorry, this will be the last one, just put the next one. Now comes a much tougher example. I’m sorry for the images at the beginning. This is Joseph Goebbels and his famous total war speech from February after Stalingrad defeat. Goebbels organized a big meeting in Berlin to mobilize people for the war effort. And just listen... I’m sorry for this, it’s a bad version, I didn’t get a better version, but wait till you see Goebbels himself... Okay, let’s stop. Okay, this is maybe one of the most successful speeches in history.
Thank you. I hope you didn’t think that I did something horrible to your parents or what, so that you insulted me with all those titles, big titles. I’m very grateful, thank you. First I will brutally use my privilege in a totally unfair way to answer, to first connect with the debate, no? I have you now in a totally impotent position: I can talk, you cannot answer. I like this, you know. Because I like dialogues, but as an arrogant philosopher, my preferred dialogues are, you know Plato, Platon? You know late Plato’s dialogues, how they look? One guy talks all the time, and the other guy just says every ten minutes: "By Zeus, yes Socrates, so it is," and so on. That’s the dialogue that I like, you know. So just to go back. First, elections, and you remember that short debate about—I think you, sir, started it—voting, no voting and so on, no? I think that, but don’t you think that in certain situations, non-voting can be—in certain situations only—an authentic act. For example, this caused me such trouble in United States when media misrepresented my position as if I’m for Trump. I’m not crazy. The guy was so stupid to marry a Slovene woman, I cannot... no, but seriously, Trump is a scandal. I just claim that the key event of the elections was how brutally Democratic Party got rid of Bernie Sanders, who was the only authentic moment. And they paid the price for it in losing the election. In that situation, no, and it’s even worse—let’s look at what now it seems will be the final confrontation in the French presidential elections: Marine Le Pen, anti-immigrant racist, versus François Fillon, who looks almost, with some respects, almost worse than her. In such a situation, that’s for me the big problem. Would you agree, I don’t know how this works in India, but in Slovenia, we who still remain want to be radical leftists, the liberal official left likes to blackmail us with this moral, pseudo-moral argument: "Yes, I know we have differences, but when we have this neo-fascist threat, we should all stand together," like in United States: "You should vote for Hillary," and so on. I think that this blackmail has some limits. You know, we should think very well to what extent we succumb to it. Second point, catastrophe. I thought about another example which would nicely illustrate what you, Alenka, said. First, this I think is what is false about all those apparently Hollywood Marxism leftist movies which paint a new class society after the catastrophe: *Hunger Games*, *Elysium*, and so on. Although in a way, in some vague way, they are progressive. They paint a clear picture where we are going if nothing will be done: a new apartheid openly racist society. But nonetheless, there is something precisely in the way Alenka described it wrong about them. But unfortunately we, at least the European left, should be self-critical here. We—it’s not only the existing ruling ideology that paints this picture of catastrophe, the end of the world is the only alternative—in a way much of the left follows it. For example, a film, I hope you saw it also, I mean that it was well known enough in India, a couple of years ago: *V for Vendetta* with Natalie Portman and so on, to evoke human persons who appear there. You know, I think this film is a symbol of what is wrong with today’s left. It ended up, you remember, with a triumph. The crowd, multitude, Negri, Negri multitude, Negri loved the movie, penetrates the police barricade, enters the parliament, people take over, and the end. As I like to say, I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery—and it’s a safe bet because she is already dead—for seeing simply a movie called *V for Vendetta* part two. Okay, but what happens the day after? What measures does the new government take? Do they nationalize, do they what? Here I see the utter misery at least of the Western European left. If you look at it closely, they have some vague ideas, which any fascist would agree with, about end the rule of financial capital, take care of people’s needs, whatever, and some vague ideas of respecting democracy, making the system more transparent. And I’m more and more openly opposed to it. Listen, I had here a debate with my otherwise good friend Janis Varoufakis, who started this movement Democratise Europe. And I asked him a simple question to which I didn’t get a good answer. I asked him, "Okay, but are you aware that when in Europe there was this big debate what to do with refugees flooding Europe—sorry, I’m for refugees, sorry for using this offensive term—I told him, "Are you aware that if the European system were to be more transparent, democratic, refugees would be thrown out brutally?" Let’s be very clear: in each country, undoubtedly—we can only quarrel about percentage—the majority of the population is against refugees. In Germany, Angela Merkel, when she invited at least some of them, lost popularity, she will probably lose next elections, and so on and so on. So you know, it’s not as simple as that—let’s make the system more transparent. What if—I’m saying something quite horrible—what if the people are wrong? However we interpret this being wrong, manipulated and so on. But I doubt if they are simply manipulated and so on. So things are not so simple. The fact is that, at least in Western Europe, the left simply does not, cannot offer—and I’m not talking about legal details but generally—a viable alternative, like what to do. I think that this is the reason for political correctness and all this moralizing madness. Moralization, as already Lenin knew it, always enters when you lack concrete politics. The last point I wanted to make, introductory point, is about all those manners, politeness and so on. You know what was the crucial point that interests me in what I was trying to make? Not only do we have prohibitions and regulations, but as Derrida, with whom I otherwise often don't agree, developed nicely in his reading of Kafka, *The Trial*, *Prozess*, we have also prohibitions which are themselves prohibited. And that’s for me the horror of our permissive times. We have maybe even more prohibitions than ever, but they are prohibitions which are themselves prohibited. Let’s give you a simple example that I often use. Let's imagine, what a nice dream, that we are in in Moscow. It’s Central Committee. I sacrifice myself to the role of Stalin; I am Stalin. I give a speech. Of course, you don’t have a choice; you applaud frenetically at the end. Then there is a debate. Okay, one of you raises hand and attacks me. Okay, it’s clear what will happen: the next day the big question will be who has seen that guy alive the last, no? Okay, but let’s then say that another one of you stands up and shouts at that guy who criticized me, Stalin, telling him something like, "But are you crazy to criticize Comrade Stalin? Aren’t you aware that this is prohibited, that we don’t do this in Soviet Union?" I guarantee you this second guy would have disappeared even faster than the first one. So you see the point? It’s not only that it was prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to announce publicly this prohibition. And it’s the same with the wonderful example that you, Alenka, already used, this postmodern authority. Alenka wrote a wonderful text—did you already publish it in English?—about Lars von Trier and so on. Yes, in *Umbr(a)*. Okay, you will tell them where if they want. And namely, describing the contemporary permissive master. I don’t know again how is it with you here in India, but in Europe and United States, we have more and more these postmodern permissive masters. It’s no longer a guy with a tight tie and you know you have to address him formally. He pretends to be your friend, you know, like Monday morning he comes to you: "Uh, did you have a good sex the last evening? How was it? Let’s take a drink." But nonetheless, he keeps all the power. But you know, it’s a master which dominates even more, exerts his or her domination, but it’s strictly prohibited to call him, to treat him as a master. You have to treat him as a colleague. And usually they don’t even like to be called masters; the popular term is "coordinator," they tell you: "I’m just here to coordinate things here." And to repeat you a story from one of my earlier books where I think I found the perfect example for this. Alenka already used a similar example with this parental authority, no? Imagine you are a small girl or boy of let’s say eight years. It’s Sunday afternoon and your father wants you to visit your old grandmother. You of course detest it, she is old, senile, whatever. But then if you have an old authoritarian father, he will tell you what? He will tell you something like—and this would be as Alenka put it, a good thing to do—he will tell you: "Listen, I don’t care how you feel, just do your duty. Go to your grandmother and behave there properly." That’s perfect, I claim, because you will retain your, let’s call it inner freedom, you will be furious at your father, but that’s good for your long-term freedom and so on. Now what would a monster called postmodern permissive father do? He would not give you an order, but he would have told you something like this: "You only go to visit your grandmother if you really want it. Just remember how much your grandmother loves you." Now a child is not an idiot, and he or she will know perfectly what this order means. Beneath the appearance of a free choice, it gives you a much harsher order. The order is not only "You must go and visit your grandmother," but "You must do it freely. You must really wish to visit your grandmother." So you see this nice example of how—and this is basically what also Alenka described as that situation—do whatever you want, etc., etc. Where the apparent freedom of choice masks a much harsher, masks a much harsher choice. So much for the introduction where I brutally used freedom. Now I hope you will be not too bored because the—my paper goes more and more difficult towards the end. So I will begin in an easier way with our contemporaneity at its most stupid: *Pokémon GO*. You know it. *Pokémon GO*, as you know, is a location-based augmented reality game for mobile devices, typically played on mobile phones. Players use the device's GPS and camera to capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, Pokémon, who appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the players. As players travel in the real world, their avatar moves along the game's map. This augmented reality mode is what makes *Pokémon GO* different from other PC games. Instead of taking us out of the real world and drawing us into the artificial virtual space where you just stare into a screen, *Pokémon GO* combines the two. We look at reality and interact with it through the fantasy frame of the digital screen, and this intermediary frame supplements reality with virtual elements which sustain our desire to participate in the game, pushing us to look for them, for the virtual creatures, in a reality which without this frame would leave us indifferent. Does this sound familiar? Of course it does. What the technology of *Pokémon GO* externalizes is simply the basic mechanism of ideology. At its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of augmented reality. To simplify things to the utmost: did Hitler not offer the Germans the fantasy frame of Nazi ideology, which made them to see a specific Pokémon, the Jew, popping up all around and providing the clue to what one has to fight against? And does not the same hold for all other ideological pseudo-entities which have to be added to reality in order to make it meaningful? Like, you see a lot of suffering, if you are religious, pop-pop-Pokémon God and you dialogue with him and everything becomes clear. So one can even easily imagine a contemporary anti-immigrant version of *Pokémon GO*, where the player wanders around a German city and is threatened by Muslim immigrant rapists or thieves lurking everywhere and so on. But are we not generalizing here too quickly? Is the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which makes us see the Jewish plot as the source of our troubles, not radically different from let’s say the Marxist approach, which observes social life as a battleground of economic power struggles? In Marxism, the secret beneath all the confusion of social life are social antagonisms and not individual agents which can be personalized in the guise of Pokémon figures. That’s why I think you cannot make a Marxist Pokémon game. Because some of my German leftists told me, "But this is not only Nazism. Why don’t we play a Marxist Pokémon game? Like, you walk along the street, you see poor people and you see Pokémon which is a big fat banker." And then my answer to them was: "Yes, and this big fat banker looks like a Jew or whatever," you know. Like, you know, ideology is already in this very personalization. So again, to cut the story short, this is why I think *Pokémon GO* game is such a success. Of course, its first attractive feature, as I already pointed out, is that we do not have on the one side reality and on the other side the screen. Like when you play all these big PC games, you as we say escape out of reality. No, you remain within reality. But reality is just supplemented by some features like your search for Pokémon figures, which triggers your desire. But my claim is that this structure again is the very structure of ideology. For almost I’m tempted to say thousands of years, our reality, the way we dwell in our social world, was structured like a *Pokémon GO* game. You always need something: the enemy, fantasmatic witches, God, whatever, a virtual entity added to reality which makes it meaningful. And that’s why again so this is for me—this is why this structure of *Pokémon GO* or structure of augmented reality is our future. It’s our future because it was already our past. You know often what we celebrate as the latest technology just brings out what was active already for a long time. So what has all this to do with capitalism? Of course, again, this *Pokémon GO* frame, the frame through which through the screen you look at reality, this frame of course is precisely what in psychoanalysis we would have called the frame of fantasy. And it’s crucial to use here the term augmented reality, because in Lacanian psychoanalysis, fantasy is not opposed to reality. Fantasy is part of our everyday experience, ideological fantasy. Fantasy is how every day we perceive reality. One of you—by "you" I mean Indians, and I would be proud of that—Mistry something, sorry I’m bad with names, maybe you heard it, developed a wonderful program at MIT called "SixthSense," which basically actualizes the same mechanism. It’s relatively simple, but it already half works. All you need is a digital camera, small projector, and through your cell phone connection with some computer cloud, whatever. And it works like this: you look at something and your camera also looks at it. It recognizes the object and it immediately projects onto any flat screen, even onto object itself, the basic data about it. Like you hold in your hands a book and again the mechanism works like this: the camera perceives it, sends the data to the digital cloud, gets the information go back and you read it immediately in split of a second: the storyline of the book, the latest reviews of the book and so on and so on. Why is this so ideology at its purest? Because again, it’s not: here is the real world, there is spectral digital dreams. But reality itself behaves as a magic entity which announces, tells the truth about itself. And since many of our fantasies are sexual fantasies, of course in my dirty old mind I immediately imagined the vulgar ways this might act with a "SixthSense" machine which is adapted to sexual life. Like, no I’m afraid to look at any of you because I will—like, I look at any of you girls and then immediately it’s projected onto her: she doesn’t like Chinese food but she likes Indian food, especially mango lassi; she likes fellatio but not cunnilingus, and I know everything, you know, immediately. So you see, this is ideology, this idea of how—no, I wasn’t looking at any of you—the idea of how you see this supplemented reality which is part of our immediate part of our immediate experience. So we can also say in a very general way that the spectre of capital is a kind of Pokémon figure which lurks behind the frantic activity it sets in motion. The activity reality, the way we see it, when we are subject of capitalism, is always the augmented reality, the reality augmented by the capitalist fantasy. But we have to be much more specific here. Lacan’s formula of fantasy is subject confronted with what Lacan calls *objet a*, the object small *a*, the object-cause of desire or surplus-enjoyment. And here the link with Marx is crucial. Lacan begins his—the eleventh week of his seminar *Les non-dupes errent*, which is a wonderful ambiguous phrase in French. It can be read as "*les non-dupes errent*," those who are not deceived, caught into an illusion, are wrong—and it’s a beautiful dialectical thought of how sometimes truth is accessible only through an illusion, through a lie. Like if you look directly at things the way they are, you miss it. And the other reading, "*les noms du père*," Names of the Father. Okay. At the beginning, in his typical arrogant way, Lacan asks the question: "What—what was it that Lacan, who is here present, invented?" He talks like this, typical Lacanian arrogance. And he answers like that to get things going: "*objet a*," object *a*. So it’s very important. It’s not all those phrases well known of Lacan—unconscious is the desire of the Other, the unconscious is structured like a language. He says, "Lacan’s my great invention is object *a*." Object *a* has a long history in Lacan’s teaching. But it is Lacan’s reference to Marx, especially to Marx’s notion of surplus-value, *Mehrwert*, that enables Lacan to deploy his definite notion of object *a* as *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrlust*, surplus-enjoyment. And I think it’s clear in what way Lacan developed his absolutely crucial notion of surplus-enjoyment with reference to Marx. So what is surplus-enjoyment? Or we can also use here Freud’s term, *Lustgewinn*, a gain of pleasure. What does Lacan mean by it? It’s not simply stepping up of pleasure, more pleasure, but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours in the subject’s effort to attain pleasure. Think about how much a process of seduction gains with its intricate innuendos, false denials, and so on. These detours are not just cultural complications or sublimations circulating about some hard-core real. This hard-core real is retrospectively constituted through these detours. What do I mean by this? Let me quote one example which is almost my favorite one. I’m sorry if some of you know it, I used it once I think only till now in my books. Did you see another movie which is a very modest movie but this detail is ingenious? From fifteen years ago, an English working-class melodrama, even relatively progressive, called *Brassed Off* with Ewan McGregor when he was still a working-class hero before he became a Jedi Knight and all those stupidities. Okay, it’s workers on strike in and—Ewan McGregor is an unemployed worker who falls in love with a girl who works for the enemies, who are trying to fire the workers, but then they fell in love and so on. But the point is this one. Once they have a date, then they flirt, and at the end he accompanies her—he, Ewan McGregor character, ordinary miner, the girl, the wealthier accountant in the company—up to her apartment block where she lives. And there she, of course it’s a sexual invitation, but listen carefully what she says. She tells him: "Do you—would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?" And he answers: "I would love to, but I don’t drink coffee." And she answers: "No problem, I don’t have any." I cannot imagine a more erotic exchange. Because, you know, apparently nothing happens. Coffee, do you want coffee? No. I don’t have coffee. No problem, I don’t have any. I don’t drink coffee, no. But the effect is an almost obscene direct erotic invitation. But you see the difference. It’s wrong to say that in reality she basically told him, "Would you like to come up and fuck me?" Of course in some way this was it, but if she were to say it directly, everything would have been ruined. And I claim it’s not just a question of politeness. I claim that this zero level never existed. Maybe, maybe, even there I doubt, they have their own rituals of seduction. Maybe with animals it would have been like that. But you always need this. Why? Because—I will tell you now another story, the last one, then I follow the line, which was introduced into our circles by Alenka in some of her books and now we always use it. This type of double denial which nonetheless—that’s the miracle—you do something, like she offered coffee, and then everything goes wrong. The guy doesn’t want coffee, you don’t have coffee, but in this way through the failure, you reach your goal even more directly. Or rather in the only way. This is how reality is eroticized and so on, and not through direct reference. Okay, this other example—I’m sorry if you know it, we use it so often I’m already embarrassed to mention it—in Ernst Lubitsch’s excellent comedy *Ninotchka*. Okay, it’s more complex, but there is a scene when the guy enters a restaurant and asks: "Can I have a coffee, coffee, but please just plain coffee, can I get coffee without cream, please?" And you know what the waiter answers? He says, "Sorry sir, we don’t have cream, we only have milk. So I cannot give you coffee without cream, I can only give you coffee without milk." Now if you don’t understand Hegel, what Hegel means by determinate negation—if you understand this joke, you understand Hegel. Because this is what Hegel means by determinate negation. Although it’s empirically the same coffee—it doesn’t matter if it’s without milk or without cream, it’s plain coffee—but it’s at the symbolic level of its meaning, it’s not the same. The coffee without cream is not the same as the coffee without milk. Negation is part of its identity. And I even know from my own communist past a wonderful anti-communist but modest joke about this, because you know under communism, although it was not so bad but often, okay, they didn’t have things that you wanted to buy in a store. And it happened to me exactly the same thing as this joke. I entered a store, my mother sent me for toilet paper, and I entered a joke, says, and I suspected that they don’t have, that they don’t have toilet paper. So I said, "Are you the store you still don’t have the toilet paper?" You know what the lady selling there stuff told me: "No, sorry, you’re in a wrong store. We are the store which doesn’t have soap. The store which doesn’t have toilet paper is across the street," and so on. Like, like—but I claim that only in this way through what Hegel would have called determinate negation, can you in a way eroticize the situation. And I cannot resist another reference to the previous debate, politeness and so on. What—politeness functions in the same way. You need it, but often, but it is superfluous. Like it happened to me—I’m ashamed to mention it, but I was the bad guy—once I was together with Judith Butler and I behaved badly, I used some "lesbian bitch" dirty, okay, I was incorrect, I’m sorry, I was guilty. So I felt bad and later I called her into her hotel room and said, "Listen, Judith, I am very sorry, I just blah-blah." I apologized. And she told me, "Listen Slavoj, I know how you are, no offense, please, you don't need to apologize." But you know what then came to me? But her saying "You don't need to apologize, everything is okay," was the only way for her to really accept my apology. If she were to say, "Yes, you really offended me, I really need the apology," this would really have meant that I was so rude that she is not able to get over it. So you see the paradox. My apology did work, but the proof that it worked is that it was retroactively proclaimed unnecessary. But as such, as superfluous, it was necessary. Which is why you can imagine with my dirty mind my reaction was immediately to tell her—but I didn't: "Oh, if it's not needed then I take it back," no. But you see, and again my point is that eroticization works like that. There is no zero level. Surplus is there from the beginning. Surplus is there from the beginning. So again, now things will gradually get a little bit more complicated. What is this surplus about? It’s a very precise paradox. Surplus—we have many surpluses with Lacan: surplus-enjoyment, surplus-knowledge even, surplus-value in Marx. I think we even have surplus-power in politics. What do I mean by surplus-power? Listen, when we live in democratic state, especially the one grounded in neoliberal ideology the way it was described by Aaron [Bastani] this today in the morning, the idea is that government is just another contractor that we deal with on the market. Like, elections are like buying the best government, your votes are your money, and you select one group to govern you with precise rules what they are allowed to do. It’s a limited contract. But I claim no public authority really works in this way. No matter how democratically self-constrained is. Every power edifice, in order to function, has to include an obscene surplus. Like officially we are limited, but the message between the lines is always: "But you know basically fuck off, we can do whatever we want with you." And I claim that this is not just some kind of a totalitarian distortion or whatever. This surplus, hinted at between the lines, is a necessary part of it. So what Freud aims at with his notion of gain of pleasure, *Lustgewinn*, or what Lacan aims at with surplus-enjoyment is precisely a surplus which is—[audio cut]—Okay, in India when I was here the previous time, you are not so bad in this type of bureaucracy. No, my experience at the border and so on was that you pretty much like your bureaucrats, all these formalities and so on. This is all the mystery of bureaucracy, no? Its goal is not to solve problems, but to keep the problems alive in order to reproduce itself. And basically, it’s this type of structure which I claim no matter how efficient bureaucracy pretends to be, you always have this surplus-enjoyment of enjoying the process itself. And we can go here, I’m sorry, this will be the last one, just put the next one. Now comes a much tougher example. I’m sorry for the images at the beginning. This is Joseph Goebbels and his famous total war speech from February after Stalingrad defeat. Goebbels organized a big meeting in Berlin to mobilize people for the war effort. And just listen... I’m sorry for this, it’s a bad version, I didn’t get a better version, but wait till you see Goebbels himself... Okay, let’s stop. Okay, this is maybe one of the most successful speeches in history.
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Why? You know after the Stalingrad defeat, the idea was let’s cover the seriousness of it from the people, let’s offer them hope and so on. And this was quite an ingenious idea by the horrible criminal Goebbels. He said: "No, let’s just confront them with full horror. No false hopes, no," because did you—if you listen to this speech, you know the questions that Goebbels is demanding from the public? It’s basically "Do you want to suffer more? Do you want to suffer to—" you saw that beautiful Kantian almost formulation: "Do you want a war so total that you cannot even imagine how total it will be?" And then if you listen—you can get it easily on YouTube to the whole speech—it even enumerates: "Do you want to have not enough food?" people cry "Yeah!" "Do you want to work hours per day?" "Yes!" and so on. And there is no hope, nothing of: "Oh, then we can be sure at the end it will get better." No. When people applaud, "Yes, yes," Goebbels, whose expression of his face during the speech is one of agency, you know, like war fury and so on, at that point it’s perversion at its purest. The expression of his face is one of the strange passivity, kind of a perverted satisfaction. Not joy, but joy in utter pain. This is again surplus-enjoyment at its purest. If you want to understand what is Lacanian enjoyment as surplus over pleasure, it’s this gesture. It’s a pure gesture of enjoyment. This excessive enjoyment provided by nothing but nothing but renunciation itself. So okay, I talk too much and I know I’m approaching the end, so now when comes the crucial part I will try to condense it. So where—where do we—capitalism of course is the greatest machine of surplus-enjoyment: always more, the more you renounce, the more you have it and so on. Of course, this dimension of suffering, pleasure in pain, renunciation is covered up. It’s not open. Openly, publicly, capitalism is of course a discourse of egotism, you follow your interests and so on. But, but I claim that and this now brings us to the greatness of Marx. Marx saw this clearly. He saw this clearly where? Listen, I will just—I will really cut it short now. Just read the first sentence of the famous supplement to the first chapter of *Capital*, "The Fetishism of Commodities." I quote Marx: "A commodity appears at first sight a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Are you aware what a strange thing Marx is saying here? It’s exactly the opposite of what we usually perceive as Marxist critique of ideology. We think that ideology are some metaphysical illusions, blah-blah-blah, but that a Marxist analysis should reduce them to our practical reality, real life production process and so on. Marx is saying here something quite different. He’s saying that no, commodity appears as an ordinary object. What is mysterious about it? I produce commodities, I sell them to gain other commodities, or for money. It’s all part of ordinary reality. But for Marx, the first task of critical analysis is to bring out, as he calls it, "metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." And this dimension, which Marx in *Capital* describes precisely in Hegelian terms, in the terms of speculative dialectics. Like, you cannot really understand *Capital* without references to Hegel. When Marx, for example, speaks about the passage from money to capital, he uses Hegelian terminology. It’s the passage from substance to subject. Money, value in the form of money, is a substance, a neutral measure. Or just an intermediary instrument. Like I sell something, I buy it, money intermediates. But with capital, money becomes the subject, as Marx put it. Capital is money which, as Marx put it again in a wonderful Hegelian way, with capital, money—money’s relation to other commodities becomes self-relationship. Capital is caught in a circular movement with itself. So yes, okay, let’s go faster. I’m losing time, I know. So the—the Marxist point is that we—that’s crucial point—we don’t simply have on the one level reality the way it really is, and at another level ideological illusions in which we live. No. We have of course social reality where workers produce and so on, whatever. And we have our self-awareness, which can be even very realistic. But the true ideological illusion, fantasy, is in between the two. It’s this fantasy of capital as self-circulating monster, which is precisely not what participants in capitalism are aware of. Look what Marx says. Crucial quote: "If now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding value successively assumes in the
Why? You know after the Stalingrad defeat, the idea was let’s cover the seriousness of it from the people, let’s offer them hope and so on. And this was quite an ingenious idea by the horrible criminal Goebbels. He said: "No, let’s just confront them with full horror. No false hopes, no," because did you—if you listen to this speech, you know the questions that Goebbels is demanding from the public? It’s basically "Do you want to suffer more? Do you want to suffer to—" you saw that beautiful Kantian almost formulation: "Do you want a war so total that you cannot even imagine how total it will be?" And then if you listen—you can get it easily on YouTube to the whole speech—it even enumerates: "Do you want to have not enough food?" people cry "Yeah!" "Do you want to work hours per day?" "Yes!" and so on. And there is no hope, nothing of: "Oh, then we can be sure at the end it will get better." No. When people applaud, "Yes, yes," Goebbels, whose expression of his face during the speech is one of agency, you know, like war fury and so on, at that point it’s perversion at its purest. The expression of his face is one of the strange passivity, kind of a perverted satisfaction. Not joy, but joy in utter pain. This is again surplus-enjoyment at its purest. If you want to understand what is Lacanian enjoyment as surplus over pleasure, it’s this gesture. It’s a pure gesture of enjoyment. This excessive enjoyment provided by nothing but nothing but renunciation itself. So okay, I talk too much and I know I’m approaching the end, so now when comes the crucial part I will try to condense it. So where—where do we—capitalism of course is the greatest machine of surplus-enjoyment: always more, the more you renounce, the more you have it and so on. Of course, this dimension of suffering, pleasure in pain, renunciation is covered up. It’s not open. Openly, publicly, capitalism is of course a discourse of egotism, you follow your interests and so on. But, but I claim that and this now brings us to the greatness of Marx. Marx saw this clearly. He saw this clearly where? Listen, I will just—I will really cut it short now. Just read the first sentence of the famous supplement to the first chapter of *Capital*, "The Fetishism of Commodities." I quote Marx: "A commodity appears at first sight a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Are you aware what a strange thing Marx is saying here? It’s exactly the opposite of what we usually perceive as Marxist critique of ideology. We think that ideology are some metaphysical illusions, blah-blah-blah, but that a Marxist analysis should reduce them to our practical reality, real life production process and so on. Marx is saying here something quite different. He’s saying that no, commodity appears as an ordinary object. What is mysterious about it? I produce commodities, I sell them to gain other commodities, or for money. It’s all part of ordinary reality. But for Marx, the first task of critical analysis is to bring out, as he calls it, "metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." And this dimension, which Marx in *Capital* describes precisely in Hegelian terms, in the terms of speculative dialectics. Like, you cannot really understand *Capital* without references to Hegel. When Marx, for example, speaks about the passage from money to capital, he uses Hegelian terminology. It’s the passage from substance to subject. Money, value in the form of money, is a substance, a neutral measure. Or just an intermediary instrument. Like I sell something, I buy it, money intermediates. But with capital, money becomes the subject, as Marx put it. Capital is money which, as Marx put it again in a wonderful Hegelian way, with capital, money—money’s relation to other commodities becomes self-relationship. Capital is caught in a circular movement with itself. So yes, okay, let’s go faster. I’m losing time, I know. So the—the Marxist point is that we—that’s crucial point—we don’t simply have on the one level reality the way it really is, and at another level ideological illusions in which we live. No. We have of course social reality where workers produce and so on, whatever. And we have our self-awareness, which can be even very realistic. But the true ideological illusion, fantasy, is in between the two. It’s this fantasy of capital as self-circulating monster, which is precisely not what participants in capitalism are aware of. Look what Marx says. Crucial quote: "If now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding value successively assumes in the
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course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is money,
course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is money,
Slavoj Žižek
Capital is commodities. In truth, *in der Tat*—rather actually—however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself, the original value in other words expands spontaneously," and so on and so on. These are the theological subtleties Marx is describing. But you know why this is such a crucial passage? Because again, when Marx speaks about fetishist perversion or reversal of commodities, he is not describing wrong consciousness. No, he is describing the ideological fantasy. In other words, commodity fetishism is an illusion, but it’s in a way—Marx uses this beautiful term—an objective illusion. It’s not an illusion of how things appear to you. We have three levels: how things appear to you, reality—which is simply working class, workers produce—but in between we have the objective illusion. We have the fantasmatic structure of reality itself. So be very careful here. When Marx says in his elementary definition of ideology that in capitalism, "*Sie tun es, aber sie wissen das nicht*"—they are doing it, but they don’t know what they are doing. It’s
Capital is commodities. In truth, *in der Tat*—rather actually—however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself, the original value in other words expands spontaneously," and so on and so on. These are the theological subtleties Marx is describing. But you know why this is such a crucial passage? Because again, when Marx speaks about fetishist perversion or reversal of commodities, he is not describing wrong consciousness. No, he is describing the ideological fantasy. In other words, commodity fetishism is an illusion, but it’s in a way—Marx uses this beautiful term—an objective illusion. It’s not an illusion of how things appear to you. We have three levels: how things appear to you, reality—which is simply working class, workers produce—but in between we have the objective illusion. We have the fantasmatic structure of reality itself. So be very careful here. When Marx says in his elementary definition of ideology that in capitalism, "*Sie tun es, aber sie wissen das nicht*"—they are doing it, but they don’t know what they are doing. It’s
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not the common sense stupidity that capitalists are doing something and, idiots caught in ideological illusions, they don’t know what they are doing.
not the common sense stupidity that capitalists are doing something and, idiots caught in ideological illusions, they don’t know what they are doing.
Slavoj Žižek
No. "They
No. "They
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don’t know what they are doing" means that they don’t know what illusions they are following in their activity. Like, to bring the paradox to the end, you are doing something and you can be well aware what you are doing, even in a Marxist way, but you are still caught in an illusion, because in your practical activity itself, you follow, obey an illusion. You see the paradox of Marx: fetishism is part of reality itself. Fetishism is in the very social form, in the very social form of what you are doing. There it is what Marx called the theological dimension of capital. Which is why, to return to a
don’t know what they are doing" means that they don’t know what illusions they are following in their activity. Like, to bring the paradox to the end, you are doing something and you can be well aware what you are doing, even in a Marxist way, but you are still caught in an illusion, because in your practical activity itself, you follow, obey an illusion. You see the paradox of Marx: fetishism is part of reality itself. Fetishism is in the very social form, in the very social form of what you are doing. There it is what Marx called the theological dimension of capital. Which is why, to return to a
Slavoj Žižek
very sensitive topic, I was always surprised and I disagreed with this stupidity of, you know, how today we live in the era of egotism, we need more awareness of higher values and so on. Yes, okay, but this is not capitalism. An average capitalist, he is not an egotist caring just for his interests. Every ecologist will tell you that our neglect of ecology is irrational precisely from the standpoint of let’s call it natural egotism, take for the survival of life. No, take care of the survival of humanity. No, capitalism is religious, metaphysical in the sense of: you are following a certain path of fanatically dedicating your life to the multiplication of value and so on, even if you suspect that it will mean
very sensitive topic, I was always surprised and I disagreed with this stupidity of, you know, how today we live in the era of egotism, we need more awareness of higher values and so on. Yes, okay, but this is not capitalism. An average capitalist, he is not an egotist caring just for his interests. Every ecologist will tell you that our neglect of ecology is irrational precisely from the standpoint of let’s call it natural egotism, take for the survival of life. No, take care of the survival of humanity. No, capitalism is religious, metaphysical in the sense of: you are following a certain path of fanatically dedicating your life to the multiplication of value and so on, even if you suspect that it will mean
unknown
catastrophe
catastrophe
Slavoj Žižek
for you even. You know, so Marx’s
for you even. You know, so Marx’s
unknown
thesis
thesis
Slavoj Žižek
is not of critique of ideology—that’s the beauty—is not that capitalists preach about humanity, higher values, but in reality they are egotists and so on.
is not of critique of ideology—that’s the beauty—is not that capitalists preach about humanity, higher values, but in reality they are egotists and so on.
unknown
But exactly the opposite: capitalists think that they are egotists, but they are not. They are perverted theologians, metaphysicians who totally pervert their life for their absolute capital and so
But exactly the opposite: capitalists think that they are egotists, but they are not. They are perverted theologians, metaphysicians who totally pervert their life for their absolute capital and so
Slavoj Žižek
on and so on. So this—this is why again Marx—this is why again that phrase that I quoted: "But *in der Tat*, actually, things work like that." What Marx
on and so on. So this—this is why again Marx—this is why again that phrase that I quoted: "But *in der Tat*, actually, things work like that." What Marx
unknown
describes as happening *in der Tat*, actually, again, is not as you would have expected, is not reality, but the fantasy. Because which fantasy? The fantasy of capital as Hegelian substance-subject, capital self-reproducing itself and so on and so on. And here I think Marx is more actual than ever today. Because today we live in an era of cynicism. And the paradox of cynicism is that cynics are precisely not cynical enough. Cynics are not aware of their—cynics are in a perverted way much more moral, even religious, than they care to admit. And now okay, just two points to conclude. First thing, so again fetishism as Marx—another crucial point of Marx—fetishism is not for Marx in the hidden content, fetishism is in the form itself. And here, I don’t have time to elaborate it, here there is an extraordinary parallel between Marx and Freud. Because in a not often noted, but absolutely crucial paragraph in Freud’s introduction to psychoanalysis, but also his *Traumdeutung*, *Interpretation of Dreams*, he emphasized that the secret of dreams is not their hidden content, but their form. That is to say, the secret of a dream is not the thought that was enveloped then in the dream form. No. We have a certain content, the dream thought. Then this dream thought is translated into this magic language of dreams, but in this very translation, another unconscious desire is inscribed into it. So deciphering the dream doesn’t mean translating it back into its content, but seeing the surplus content brought in by the form itself. And that’s the minimal formula of dialectical analysis. It’s never just a certain content expresses itself in a certain form. There is always more in a form than in a content, because what is repressed, excluded from the content, articulates itself in the surplus of the form. So to get at the content, at what is the innermost core of the content, you have to look into the form. Freud gives—I don’t have time—Freud gives a wonderful example of a dream where a lady talks about some her maternity and so on, relations with father, and the dream gets blurred, unclear. And Freud gives a wonderful
describes as happening *in der Tat*, actually, again, is not as you would have expected, is not reality, but the fantasy. Because which fantasy? The fantasy of capital as Hegelian substance-subject, capital self-reproducing itself and so on and so on. And here I think Marx is more actual than ever today. Because today we live in an era of cynicism. And the paradox of cynicism is that cynics are precisely not cynical enough. Cynics are not aware of their—cynics are in a perverted way much more moral, even religious, than they care to admit. And now okay, just two points to conclude. First thing, so again fetishism as Marx—another crucial point of Marx—fetishism is not for Marx in the hidden content, fetishism is in the form itself. And here, I don’t have time to elaborate it, here there is an extraordinary parallel between Marx and Freud. Because in a not often noted, but absolutely crucial paragraph in Freud’s introduction to psychoanalysis, but also his *Traumdeutung*, *Interpretation of Dreams*, he emphasized that the secret of dreams is not their hidden content, but their form. That is to say, the secret of a dream is not the thought that was enveloped then in the dream form. No. We have a certain content, the dream thought. Then this dream thought is translated into this magic language of dreams, but in this very translation, another unconscious desire is inscribed into it. So deciphering the dream doesn’t mean translating it back into its content, but seeing the surplus content brought in by the form itself. And that’s the minimal formula of dialectical analysis. It’s never just a certain content expresses itself in a certain form. There is always more in a form than in a content, because what is repressed, excluded from the content, articulates itself in the surplus of the form. So to get at the content, at what is the innermost core of the content, you have to look into the form. Freud gives—I don’t have time—Freud gives a wonderful example of a dream where a lady talks about some her maternity and so on, relations with father, and the dream gets blurred, unclear. And Freud gives a wonderful
Slavoj Žižek
reading when he says that this purely formal character, the images get unclear, confused, is part of what she repressed from her content, which was: she was screwing around, she didn’t know who is the father, no? And this non-clarity, confusion is of course too traumatic for her, cannot be expressed in content, so you get it in the form, in the very blurred form and so on and so on. So this point I want to make and then my last point, my very last point, which would have been that—so again, this unconscious, which is the unconscious of the social form, where to put it in cognitive science forums, I took this expression for Daniel Dennett, who means it as a, as the Germans put it, *Schimpfwort*, as a bad word. He says, criticizing some psychologists, that it is as if apart from appearance and reality, there is a third level of real appearance, of how things really appear. And for him this is a stupidity. But for Freud and Marx this is the crucial thing. Unconscious is not somewhere deep in ourselves how things really are, unconscious is how things appear to us, but we are not aware how they appear to us. Because for example, if you say, you know Marx claims that in capitalism things are mystified, capital has a life of its own. But wait a minute, it’s clear that no capitalist thinks like this. If you ask a typical capitalist, he will say: "But where is the mystery? We produce objects, money is an instrument to facilitate the exchange of objects, and it’s natural to want more money, we are all egotists," and so on and so on. There is nothing, no theological mysticism here. Capitalist is usually a good old pragmatic utilitarian. His unconscious is speculative Hegelian. So Marxist answer—and I took this phrase, Mladen [Dolar] told me about this, Mladen do you know with some American philosopher or British—gave the most profound that I can imagine critique of pragmatism, when he said that pragmatism is good enough for theory, but not good enough for practice. Because in theory it works nice, we be pragmatic, but in practice, capitalist is not pragmatic in practice. In practice, he is a very dogmatic theologian. So now I wanted to conclude—if you allow me two, three minutes—you know, I feel so bad that I proposed this. Are you on some mysterious email list here? Then the only way to pay for my debt and guilt, all that bullshit that we heard before, I really feel the only way is if I send this text and you can distribute it. But okay, my final point is this one. Which is why the conclusion of all this is that—you have to be very careful when Marx describes this gradual mystification of capitalist production. First you have C-M-C: commodity-money-commodity, where you sell something that you produce to buy another thing that you need. Then you have M-C-M', money-commodity-more-money, the capitalist circulation. And then the utter mystification, M-M': more M. For Marx this is the ultimate theological miracle where material production disappears and it is as if all you get is money begetting, giving birth to more money. But okay, but it’s totally wrong to read Marx as if he is saying that we should somehow touch the base, return to the zero level, it’s all... no. For Marx, we don’t have this elementary truth we just produce objects, but in this capitalist excess, a certain more fundamental excess—and this is what Aaron was talking about—the excess of business, of productivity and so on, is inscribed into it. Because for Marx, the fact that in—he makes this very clear explicitly—the fact that in capitalism we do not produce to satisfy our needs, but we produce in order to produce profit for capital and so on, is not simply a reversal which we should bring back into let’s call it natural state and produce just for our needs and so on. No, for Marx the model of non-alienated production is that you produce just for the sake of itself, for the pure satisfaction of itself. And Marx’s point is that this capitalist mystification is a mystified expression of this excess of productivity. So Marx is not a nominalist here. Marx is not a pragmatic realist. The whole point of Marx is to be in a way more idealist than Hegel. Of course, in a materialist way. More idealist in the sense that for Marx, Hegel, although he wrote wonderful passages in his reading of Adam Smith and so on, Hegel didn’t see the Hegelian dimension of capital, as it were. It was only Marx who saw it. In his theory of economy, Hegel was at a relatively primitive artisanal level, you know, Adam Smith, exchange and so on. Only Marx’s biggest achievement was to bring the functioning of capital to the level of Hegel’s logic, to describe it in Hegelian terms. Again, it’s an illusion, but an objective illusion. And that’s very important today when, in reaction to our ongoing crisis, the crisis of capitalism, we think about that the solution is—usually it’s colored in neo-Keynesian colors—some kind of return to: "We shouldn’t just speculate, we need to, our production should be rooted in real production," and so on and so on. No, that’s the greatest illusion. If Marx is not claiming capitalist circulation is caught in its own circle, we must ground it in real needs production for real needs of real people. This precisely is the illusion of capitalism: that it ultimately serves real needs, real people, and so on and so on. Marx is much more, again, idealist, not in the primitive theological way, but idealist in the sense that—I’m returning to Pokémon now—he saw very well how reality, capitalist reality and even reality as such, has this—this is what he saw with *Grundrisse* after when he returned to reading Hegel seriously—that reality itself needs a fantasy to function. And that this excess is irreducible. Okay, it’s unclear how much Marx was aware of this, but I think that precisely today when, as I’m so confused there were so many, without any irony, important thoughts today, was it Aaron or Alenka or somebody else, said how in a way it’s only today that Marx’s analysis of capital as it were encounters, becomes fully valuable. We have today capitalism at its purest. Yes, but I think that’s one side of the story. At the same time that Marx is fully actual, it’s as if sometimes you have this—when he speaks about the abstract circulation of capital—sometimes you think it’s only today with all these future speculations and so on that reality is at the level of Marx’s description. Yes, but at the same time, as Hegel knew it well, when certain notion becomes fully actual, it’s also the moment of its decay or of its—Marx’s victory is at some point also his defeat. Which means we need also a return to Marx. To keep Marx alive today, we have to rethink it. What were his limits and so on. This is the only true fidelity to Marx. I’m sorry that I spoke too long. Here am I, that’s what I was able to do. Thank you very much. [Applause] Thank you, Dr. Zizek. That was a very fascinating paper. I—You know, in my country, sorry to interrupt you but it would be funny, "fascinating" is one of the polite ways—we are back at—you know when somebody asks you, "How was my speech?" and if you want to say it was bad without offending him, you say either "it was interesting" or "it was fascinating." Sorry, I have evil... sorry. No, no, I wouldn't agree with that projection. But Dr. Zizek, I wanted to ask you about a little bit more about this fatal attraction to surplus-enjoyment and this pursuit of object *a* in the neoliberal zeitgeist and how does this inform the indeterminate structures of subjectivity? What do you—sorry, you jumped a little bit too fast for me. How does the pursuit of surplus-enjoyment inform subjectivity today in the neoliberal... you asked a very good question here, you know why? But the answer would have been a serious answer, very complex. Because you know by indeterminate subjectivity, as a professionally deformed philosopher, I would immediately say this is the Cartesian subject, no? And already here we have again a unity of Lacan and Marx. A, for Lacan, he says something very surprising. He says that the subject of psychoanalysis, the Freudian subject, is the Cartesian *cogito*. So it’s not some kind of a deep living substance with all my secret traumas or whatever. It’s pure empty Cartesian subject. And the same goes for Marx. Descartes' *cogito*, its social reality is maybe today’s precarious workers only. It's precisely a subject deprived of all its substantial roots, links, and so on and so on. And incidentally, I will make now a critical point at some of the postcolonial guys. The big question is: do we remain Marxists in the sense that we see with all its horrors this passage through the zero point of Cartesian subjectivity, which means this subject reduced to poor—as Marx said, capacity to work—is this a necessary step towards some new freedom, as Marx put it, or can we play a certain anti-colonial game and claim that no, the way to resist global capitalism is to refer to, remain rooted in local traditions, which are again the last point of resistance towards global capitalism? I remain a Marxist here. In what sense? I think that it’s totally wrong to perceive global capitalism as some kind of abstract universality threatening particular ways of life. And then if we stick to our local traditions we somehow subvert it. I think that again, I already mentioned him, your big boss, Modi or other. First, I claim global—he is the guy for today. If there is a proof of anything in last decades, it’s that capitalism is immanently multicultural. It works perfectly with different traditions. That’s why I think all the—and you know who knew this? All true authentic fighters for liberation knew this. In South Africa, Mandela with all his limitations warned all the time against this idea of some Africanness, authentic African roots, and so on. No, he—and it’s interesting, there was only one political figure in South Africa who did follow this way of black authentic roots: it was Buthelezi, the one who was paid and corrupted by the white apartheid. Listen, one of my most horrible readings was a brochure when I was young from South African apartheid government, which is the most disgusting multiculturalism I ever read. They said: "We could give blacks the freedom to vote, but this would be horrible. Blacks have"—it’s disgusting what I will say now—they write, "Blacks have such wonderful local culture, Bushman, Hottentot, and so on. And if we simply give them the same freedoms as us, we will lose all those authentic cultures," and so on and so on. I mean, that’s today’s global capitalism. They love local traditions and so on and so on. Capitalism works perfectly with that. Which is why I think this is what is happening today. That’s why anti-Eurocentrism is so popular. Because today capitalism no longer needs even democracy and so on. The capitalism which works better and better is like China, for example. I love China in a terrified way. Why? Because you know once I had a debate with Fukuyama and I told him: "Okay, you won, capitalism, but you have to admit one thing," and laughingly he admitted it. He told me—I told him: "You have to admit that but communists where they survived are today the best managers of capitalism." And it’s true. Who can do it as good as I don’t know Vietnam today, China, and so on. So again, I claim that this is for me again the big—the big choice. I don’t think again that this idea of local traditions resisting and so on. Mandela knew this. My other hero, how is he called—sorry, Malcolm X, you know, Denzel Washington in the film to speak in common Hollywood language. He was a great guy for me. You know why? Because you know what does it mean Malcolm X? X stands for the lost roots, no? They were stolen from—sorry, kidnapped—from Africa like slaves. But Malcolm so we have no roots. We were torn out. But Malcolm X’s ingenious idea was, I paraphrase it of course: "Let’s not get caught in that stupid game of"—did you see *Roots*, Alex Haley, the TV series?—"let’s go back, search for our African roots. No. Why don’t we use the fact that we are deprived of our roots as a unique chance to build a new free universality much more free and emancipatory as that of the white people?" And he was—that’s why, maybe he was wrong, but that’s why he became a Muslim. Because with all my criticism and I don’t have any problem to offend all religions, but I always liked one thing in Islam, this idea of Umma, community. You know what it means originally? Look at it, it’s very interesting. The other two religions of the Book, that is to say Judaism and Christianity, are more or less religions of the family, social hierarchy, you know, family links. Muslim, Islam is fundamentally, originally a religion of orphans. You know all this, you know how Muhammad himself before he became blah-blah-blah he was an orphan. You already have this story how—it is Sarah the wife of Abraham when no she wasn't able to get a child, so you know that story, then Abraham screwed a slave, and then he was thrown out, escaped, so that orphan is the original zero-level Arab or whatever, no? So what I’m saying is that Malcolm X got this, that for him he wanted a new starting point, a community built from zero without any traditional roots. And that’s why, I’m not a Muslim, I’m an atheist and so on and I’m often quite critical of Islam. But what I’m saying is that this is the reason why—and now I will enter and with this I will finish the prohibited territory. Ah, it’s prohibited but I’m here to offend you, sorry. That’s if you ask God "Why did you, God, why did you create me?" "Ah, to offend you." That’s why I’m here for Ambedkar against Gandhi. I’m sorry to tell you. Because I read a lot of stuff, and listen, they convinced me. For example, do you know that Gandhi in South Africa before he fought for, he fought against British domination. But my god, read his texts, I did it, how he fought. His idea was not "We are all equal." He just wanted the Indians to be admitted into the white section. He explicitly posited black people as outsiders and so on. And that’s why, I don’t know if this is true, but when I was here three, four years ago, I met some really the lowest ones, the ones who are cleansing toilets here, the lowest of untouchables. And they told me a wonderful thing. They told me "We prefer English." I asked them why. They told me not because of colonization, but because they told me the languages that we have here have all these social hierarchies that you mentioned before are so much inscribed into them, that for us it’s much easier to assert equality by speaking in English. Now you will say but this is the language of colonization. Well, it is up to you to decide here. My—my point would be I always, I mean I betrayed my nation in the same way. My natural language is Slovene. I only speak about private things like food and cheating and toilets in Slovene. Theory is in English. And I think that it’s very ambiguous here things. I think that—okay, it would be a typical pseudo-philosophical thing to say to think clearly you have to think in your maternal tongue. But let's say maybe, but maybe not. Maybe to really think, as Hegel knew it very intelligently, thinking always means thinking against the language. This is a very deep insight of all true philosophers, that language by itself is lying, embodies all the prejudices. That’s why Hegel, as pure rational philosopher, you must notice this if you know him, likes so much these plays with words, ambiguities, because you must somehow use language against—against itself, no? That’s why again, okay, I talk too much. Okay, great. All right. I’d like to open up to the audience if somebody would like to ask a question. If they have still the energy, I like this. Yeah, we have a few minutes left, so we have time for one or two short questions. Ah, and you want to give me this shitty pseudo-Buddhist answers, no like, you answer me a complex answer, my answer will be clap with one hand or whatever, listen to silence, sorry, please yes. I have a very short question. You were talking—you said at the end of your lecture about going back to Marx, and most of us in this room are either capitalists or very complicated capitalists because we have all been corrupted by the system of capitalism and is there ever a way of going back? So what would Marxism in the future look like for you if we, I mean, it’s not—I can't imagine it’s possible to go back. No, no, I meant going back—you know that there is a nice irony you noticed it probably there, all the biggest revolution usually assume the form of going back. Look, the biggest revolution in Christianity is Martin Luther, Protestantism. And he thought that what is he doing is just returning to original Christianity. So I would have to go again into deep theory here, but you know, I don’t think that there was a Marx back there who deep in himself really knew what he wants. I like here Walter Benjamin who says, you know those wonderful metaphors that a true work of art—and I think the same goes for philosophy—is like a photograph film for which developers were not yet developed at the time shots were made. So it’s only retroactively, afterwards, that you can say what it really meant. We can only, we can understand today Shakespeare better than he understood himself, because works of art, even great theory, they are open. I claim we can only today say what Hegel wanted. And in this sense, returning to Marx doesn’t mean returning to Marx the way he was. For example, the first problem, already the problem of working-class proletarian. At least in Europe, to be a classical Marxist proletarian: you are permanently employed with a big company, okay you are exploited, but at least you have your retirement settled, health insurance and so on. It’s almost a privileged position, my God. We have—the first thing to do is we have to radically redefine who is a proletarian today. From precarious workers to, I don’t know, even—I’m tempted to follow here Fredric Jameson—all those excluded, from those from
reading when he says that this purely formal character, the images get unclear, confused, is part of what she repressed from her content, which was: she was screwing around, she didn’t know who is the father, no? And this non-clarity, confusion is of course too traumatic for her, cannot be expressed in content, so you get it in the form, in the very blurred form and so on and so on. So this point I want to make and then my last point, my very last point, which would have been that—so again, this unconscious, which is the unconscious of the social form, where to put it in cognitive science forums, I took this expression for Daniel Dennett, who means it as a, as the Germans put it, *Schimpfwort*, as a bad word. He says, criticizing some psychologists, that it is as if apart from appearance and reality, there is a third level of real appearance, of how things really appear. And for him this is a stupidity. But for Freud and Marx this is the crucial thing. Unconscious is not somewhere deep in ourselves how things really are, unconscious is how things appear to us, but we are not aware how they appear to us. Because for example, if you say, you know Marx claims that in capitalism things are mystified, capital has a life of its own. But wait a minute, it’s clear that no capitalist thinks like this. If you ask a typical capitalist, he will say: "But where is the mystery? We produce objects, money is an instrument to facilitate the exchange of objects, and it’s natural to want more money, we are all egotists," and so on and so on. There is nothing, no theological mysticism here. Capitalist is usually a good old pragmatic utilitarian. His unconscious is speculative Hegelian. So Marxist answer—and I took this phrase, Mladen [Dolar] told me about this, Mladen do you know with some American philosopher or British—gave the most profound that I can imagine critique of pragmatism, when he said that pragmatism is good enough for theory, but not good enough for practice. Because in theory it works nice, we be pragmatic, but in practice, capitalist is not pragmatic in practice. In practice, he is a very dogmatic theologian. So now I wanted to conclude—if you allow me two, three minutes—you know, I feel so bad that I proposed this. Are you on some mysterious email list here? Then the only way to pay for my debt and guilt, all that bullshit that we heard before, I really feel the only way is if I send this text and you can distribute it. But okay, my final point is this one. Which is why the conclusion of all this is that—you have to be very careful when Marx describes this gradual mystification of capitalist production. First you have C-M-C: commodity-money-commodity, where you sell something that you produce to buy another thing that you need. Then you have M-C-M', money-commodity-more-money, the capitalist circulation. And then the utter mystification, M-M': more M. For Marx this is the ultimate theological miracle where material production disappears and it is as if all you get is money begetting, giving birth to more money. But okay, but it’s totally wrong to read Marx as if he is saying that we should somehow touch the base, return to the zero level, it’s all... no. For Marx, we don’t have this elementary truth we just produce objects, but in this capitalist excess, a certain more fundamental excess—and this is what Aaron was talking about—the excess of business, of productivity and so on, is inscribed into it. Because for Marx, the fact that in—he makes this very clear explicitly—the fact that in capitalism we do not produce to satisfy our needs, but we produce in order to produce profit for capital and so on, is not simply a reversal which we should bring back into let’s call it natural state and produce just for our needs and so on. No, for Marx the model of non-alienated production is that you produce just for the sake of itself, for the pure satisfaction of itself. And Marx’s point is that this capitalist mystification is a mystified expression of this excess of productivity. So Marx is not a nominalist here. Marx is not a pragmatic realist. The whole point of Marx is to be in a way more idealist than Hegel. Of course, in a materialist way. More idealist in the sense that for Marx, Hegel, although he wrote wonderful passages in his reading of Adam Smith and so on, Hegel didn’t see the Hegelian dimension of capital, as it were. It was only Marx who saw it. In his theory of economy, Hegel was at a relatively primitive artisanal level, you know, Adam Smith, exchange and so on. Only Marx’s biggest achievement was to bring the functioning of capital to the level of Hegel’s logic, to describe it in Hegelian terms. Again, it’s an illusion, but an objective illusion. And that’s very important today when, in reaction to our ongoing crisis, the crisis of capitalism, we think about that the solution is—usually it’s colored in neo-Keynesian colors—some kind of return to: "We shouldn’t just speculate, we need to, our production should be rooted in real production," and so on and so on. No, that’s the greatest illusion. If Marx is not claiming capitalist circulation is caught in its own circle, we must ground it in real needs production for real needs of real people. This precisely is the illusion of capitalism: that it ultimately serves real needs, real people, and so on and so on. Marx is much more, again, idealist, not in the primitive theological way, but idealist in the sense that—I’m returning to Pokémon now—he saw very well how reality, capitalist reality and even reality as such, has this—this is what he saw with *Grundrisse* after when he returned to reading Hegel seriously—that reality itself needs a fantasy to function. And that this excess is irreducible. Okay, it’s unclear how much Marx was aware of this, but I think that precisely today when, as I’m so confused there were so many, without any irony, important thoughts today, was it Aaron or Alenka or somebody else, said how in a way it’s only today that Marx’s analysis of capital as it were encounters, becomes fully valuable. We have today capitalism at its purest. Yes, but I think that’s one side of the story. At the same time that Marx is fully actual, it’s as if sometimes you have this—when he speaks about the abstract circulation of capital—sometimes you think it’s only today with all these future speculations and so on that reality is at the level of Marx’s description. Yes, but at the same time, as Hegel knew it well, when certain notion becomes fully actual, it’s also the moment of its decay or of its—Marx’s victory is at some point also his defeat. Which means we need also a return to Marx. To keep Marx alive today, we have to rethink it. What were his limits and so on. This is the only true fidelity to Marx. I’m sorry that I spoke too long. Here am I, that’s what I was able to do. Thank you very much. [Applause] Thank you, Dr. Zizek. That was a very fascinating paper. I—You know, in my country, sorry to interrupt you but it would be funny, "fascinating" is one of the polite ways—we are back at—you know when somebody asks you, "How was my speech?" and if you want to say it was bad without offending him, you say either "it was interesting" or "it was fascinating." Sorry, I have evil... sorry. No, no, I wouldn't agree with that projection. But Dr. Zizek, I wanted to ask you about a little bit more about this fatal attraction to surplus-enjoyment and this pursuit of object *a* in the neoliberal zeitgeist and how does this inform the indeterminate structures of subjectivity? What do you—sorry, you jumped a little bit too fast for me. How does the pursuit of surplus-enjoyment inform subjectivity today in the neoliberal... you asked a very good question here, you know why? But the answer would have been a serious answer, very complex. Because you know by indeterminate subjectivity, as a professionally deformed philosopher, I would immediately say this is the Cartesian subject, no? And already here we have again a unity of Lacan and Marx. A, for Lacan, he says something very surprising. He says that the subject of psychoanalysis, the Freudian subject, is the Cartesian *cogito*. So it’s not some kind of a deep living substance with all my secret traumas or whatever. It’s pure empty Cartesian subject. And the same goes for Marx. Descartes' *cogito*, its social reality is maybe today’s precarious workers only. It's precisely a subject deprived of all its substantial roots, links, and so on and so on. And incidentally, I will make now a critical point at some of the postcolonial guys. The big question is: do we remain Marxists in the sense that we see with all its horrors this passage through the zero point of Cartesian subjectivity, which means this subject reduced to poor—as Marx said, capacity to work—is this a necessary step towards some new freedom, as Marx put it, or can we play a certain anti-colonial game and claim that no, the way to resist global capitalism is to refer to, remain rooted in local traditions, which are again the last point of resistance towards global capitalism? I remain a Marxist here. In what sense? I think that it’s totally wrong to perceive global capitalism as some kind of abstract universality threatening particular ways of life. And then if we stick to our local traditions we somehow subvert it. I think that again, I already mentioned him, your big boss, Modi or other. First, I claim global—he is the guy for today. If there is a proof of anything in last decades, it’s that capitalism is immanently multicultural. It works perfectly with different traditions. That’s why I think all the—and you know who knew this? All true authentic fighters for liberation knew this. In South Africa, Mandela with all his limitations warned all the time against this idea of some Africanness, authentic African roots, and so on. No, he—and it’s interesting, there was only one political figure in South Africa who did follow this way of black authentic roots: it was Buthelezi, the one who was paid and corrupted by the white apartheid. Listen, one of my most horrible readings was a brochure when I was young from South African apartheid government, which is the most disgusting multiculturalism I ever read. They said: "We could give blacks the freedom to vote, but this would be horrible. Blacks have"—it’s disgusting what I will say now—they write, "Blacks have such wonderful local culture, Bushman, Hottentot, and so on. And if we simply give them the same freedoms as us, we will lose all those authentic cultures," and so on and so on. I mean, that’s today’s global capitalism. They love local traditions and so on and so on. Capitalism works perfectly with that. Which is why I think this is what is happening today. That’s why anti-Eurocentrism is so popular. Because today capitalism no longer needs even democracy and so on. The capitalism which works better and better is like China, for example. I love China in a terrified way. Why? Because you know once I had a debate with Fukuyama and I told him: "Okay, you won, capitalism, but you have to admit one thing," and laughingly he admitted it. He told me—I told him: "You have to admit that but communists where they survived are today the best managers of capitalism." And it’s true. Who can do it as good as I don’t know Vietnam today, China, and so on. So again, I claim that this is for me again the big—the big choice. I don’t think again that this idea of local traditions resisting and so on. Mandela knew this. My other hero, how is he called—sorry, Malcolm X, you know, Denzel Washington in the film to speak in common Hollywood language. He was a great guy for me. You know why? Because you know what does it mean Malcolm X? X stands for the lost roots, no? They were stolen from—sorry, kidnapped—from Africa like slaves. But Malcolm so we have no roots. We were torn out. But Malcolm X’s ingenious idea was, I paraphrase it of course: "Let’s not get caught in that stupid game of"—did you see *Roots*, Alex Haley, the TV series?—"let’s go back, search for our African roots. No. Why don’t we use the fact that we are deprived of our roots as a unique chance to build a new free universality much more free and emancipatory as that of the white people?" And he was—that’s why, maybe he was wrong, but that’s why he became a Muslim. Because with all my criticism and I don’t have any problem to offend all religions, but I always liked one thing in Islam, this idea of Umma, community. You know what it means originally? Look at it, it’s very interesting. The other two religions of the Book, that is to say Judaism and Christianity, are more or less religions of the family, social hierarchy, you know, family links. Muslim, Islam is fundamentally, originally a religion of orphans. You know all this, you know how Muhammad himself before he became blah-blah-blah he was an orphan. You already have this story how—it is Sarah the wife of Abraham when no she wasn't able to get a child, so you know that story, then Abraham screwed a slave, and then he was thrown out, escaped, so that orphan is the original zero-level Arab or whatever, no? So what I’m saying is that Malcolm X got this, that for him he wanted a new starting point, a community built from zero without any traditional roots. And that’s why, I’m not a Muslim, I’m an atheist and so on and I’m often quite critical of Islam. But what I’m saying is that this is the reason why—and now I will enter and with this I will finish the prohibited territory. Ah, it’s prohibited but I’m here to offend you, sorry. That’s if you ask God "Why did you, God, why did you create me?" "Ah, to offend you." That’s why I’m here for Ambedkar against Gandhi. I’m sorry to tell you. Because I read a lot of stuff, and listen, they convinced me. For example, do you know that Gandhi in South Africa before he fought for, he fought against British domination. But my god, read his texts, I did it, how he fought. His idea was not "We are all equal." He just wanted the Indians to be admitted into the white section. He explicitly posited black people as outsiders and so on. And that’s why, I don’t know if this is true, but when I was here three, four years ago, I met some really the lowest ones, the ones who are cleansing toilets here, the lowest of untouchables. And they told me a wonderful thing. They told me "We prefer English." I asked them why. They told me not because of colonization, but because they told me the languages that we have here have all these social hierarchies that you mentioned before are so much inscribed into them, that for us it’s much easier to assert equality by speaking in English. Now you will say but this is the language of colonization. Well, it is up to you to decide here. My—my point would be I always, I mean I betrayed my nation in the same way. My natural language is Slovene. I only speak about private things like food and cheating and toilets in Slovene. Theory is in English. And I think that it’s very ambiguous here things. I think that—okay, it would be a typical pseudo-philosophical thing to say to think clearly you have to think in your maternal tongue. But let's say maybe, but maybe not. Maybe to really think, as Hegel knew it very intelligently, thinking always means thinking against the language. This is a very deep insight of all true philosophers, that language by itself is lying, embodies all the prejudices. That’s why Hegel, as pure rational philosopher, you must notice this if you know him, likes so much these plays with words, ambiguities, because you must somehow use language against—against itself, no? That’s why again, okay, I talk too much. Okay, great. All right. I’d like to open up to the audience if somebody would like to ask a question. If they have still the energy, I like this. Yeah, we have a few minutes left, so we have time for one or two short questions. Ah, and you want to give me this shitty pseudo-Buddhist answers, no like, you answer me a complex answer, my answer will be clap with one hand or whatever, listen to silence, sorry, please yes. I have a very short question. You were talking—you said at the end of your lecture about going back to Marx, and most of us in this room are either capitalists or very complicated capitalists because we have all been corrupted by the system of capitalism and is there ever a way of going back? So what would Marxism in the future look like for you if we, I mean, it’s not—I can't imagine it’s possible to go back. No, no, I meant going back—you know that there is a nice irony you noticed it probably there, all the biggest revolution usually assume the form of going back. Look, the biggest revolution in Christianity is Martin Luther, Protestantism. And he thought that what is he doing is just returning to original Christianity. So I would have to go again into deep theory here, but you know, I don’t think that there was a Marx back there who deep in himself really knew what he wants. I like here Walter Benjamin who says, you know those wonderful metaphors that a true work of art—and I think the same goes for philosophy—is like a photograph film for which developers were not yet developed at the time shots were made. So it’s only retroactively, afterwards, that you can say what it really meant. We can only, we can understand today Shakespeare better than he understood himself, because works of art, even great theory, they are open. I claim we can only today say what Hegel wanted. And in this sense, returning to Marx doesn’t mean returning to Marx the way he was. For example, the first problem, already the problem of working-class proletarian. At least in Europe, to be a classical Marxist proletarian: you are permanently employed with a big company, okay you are exploited, but at least you have your retirement settled, health insurance and so on. It’s almost a privileged position, my God. We have—the first thing to do is we have to radically redefine who is a proletarian today. From precarious workers to, I don’t know, even—I’m tempted to follow here Fredric Jameson—all those excluded, from those from
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so-called rogue nations, failed states,
so-called rogue nations, failed states,
Slavoj Žižek
to unemployed and so on. We have to redefine it. Exploitation no longer works in Marx’s sense. A proof that I always like to enumerate: take a country like Venezuela, where they successfully screwed it up and so on, but nonetheless. If you apply dogmatically Marxist analysis, then you are forced
to unemployed and so on. We have to redefine it. Exploitation no longer works in Marx’s sense. A proof that I always like to enumerate: take a country like Venezuela, where they successfully screwed it up and so on, but nonetheless. If you apply dogmatically Marxist analysis, then you are forced
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to say that under Chavez, Venezuela was exploiting American and European working class. Why? Because the bulk of the wealth of Venezuela came from exporting oil. And when Marx tries to prove in *Capital* that natural resources are
to say that under Chavez, Venezuela was exploiting American and European working class. Why? Because the bulk of the wealth of Venezuela came from exporting oil. And when Marx tries to prove in *Capital* that natural resources are
Slavoj Žižek
not a source of value, the example he needs is he mentions is precisely oil. So no, I’m not
not a source of value, the example he needs is he mentions is precisely oil. So no, I’m not
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making this crazy conclusion. I’m just saying that
making this crazy conclusion. I’m just saying that
Slavoj Žižek
already at this elementary level, I think it can be saved, but how? Marx’s so-called labor theory of value. It’s a very complex question, we have to renovate all this: who is the working class today? Because you know, as Alain Badiou once mentioned to me, in every historical epoch there is usually one specific image of working class which somehow symbolizes the universal concept. In classical Europe, even more than metal workers, maybe—how do you call them, the idiots who go underground to mines—coal miners, miners were maybe the symbol, you know. And it’s a big question what is today. So all I would tell you is: no, don’t feel bad and, you know, the worst thing to do for an honest capitalist, if such things exist, the worst thing is to go into, "Oh my God, I feel guilty," and so on. You will not help any workers in this way. You should just be attentive to what is happening today in capitalism itself. I simply believe following different analysis that capitalism in itself with intellectual property, ecology, who will control biogenetics and so on, is approaching certain limits. And I don’t think it will be able to cope with them. At the same time, although they are too naive—who they? people like Paul Mason and all those, Jeremy Rifkin, you know. But they are onto something when they talk about cooperative commons and so on, digitalization, something new is emerging there which, of course, capitalism desperately tried to re-appropriate it. That’s the whole point of Bill Gates. Bill Gates is not a capitalist, he is a rentier, rent. His profit is not—Bill Gates is meaningless to say that he is exploiting his workers. His money comes from the fact that Bill Gates privatized part of our intellectual commons and we are paying a rent to him. Which is why, did you notice this, the price of Windows have nothing to do with production costs. They are minimal. It’s simply the question of market relation, how many... So all these phenomena show how capitalism, I think sincerely, is approaching some kind of a crisis, not maybe the classical crisis but simply the model works less and less. I already think that for example what is happening with financial capital today, it’s more and more irrational. Or point two, what is happening with intellectual property, all the problems, copyrights and so on. It’s clear that capitalism will in the long term will not be able to commodify fully so-called intellectual property for the simple reason that the logic is totally different. If you have a material object like water, then if I drink it, ha-ha, you will not drink it, you know. But with intellectual property, if I drink it and you drink it, the more wealthy it gets. It’s a totally different logic where at a certain level intellectual—so okay, I will not improvise it, but you see what—what I mean. I mean that no, don’t play this—this is for me the most disgusting thing, to play this charity. This is the image of today’s capitalism. I’m not—you know, like Bill Gates is for me the model. You get billion, then you get maybe billion back, playing charity, and then you are the greatest humanitarian in the world and so on and so on. No, we should step out, the—the solution is not charity. The solution is to ruthlessly confront new challenges for capitalism. And so it’s stupid to feel—to feel guilty and so on, I think. Because I—I don’t think that the revolution—and I don’t mean it in this pathetic Leninist sense, but the necessary change—that it will be the old change of, you know, hundreds of thousands on the street. It will be also that. But you know, if we have just that, then we have the problem *V for Vendetta* that I mentioned, but what happens then? I mean, the big—you know, or I’ll put it in this way, don’t you—I hope you will agree with me. It’s easy to organize a big demonstration, ooh we all cry, one million people there, we are all solidary, but again what happens the day after? What to do and so on. For me, the true measure of a social change revolution is not this pathetic moment of hundreds of thousands of us on the street, it’s the day after. When things return to normal, how will ordinary people feel the change? And there things don’t look too good for the left, to put it mildly. You know, we get from one to another screwed option. Venezuela I never trusted them, frankly. I—no, here my conscience is clear, for ten years I’m warning that something will turn out bad. I never believed in this Latino-American populism. Listen, Chavez was Fidel Castro with money from oil, you know. As his friends, I had some friends in Venezuela told me, Chavez wasn't really solving problems; he was pacifying problems by throwing money at them. What do we have as a new model? I don't know, and here I’m trying to buy help from anyone, even from capitalists like you, you know. I’m not a rabid capitalist by any stretch of the imagination. No, no, I have no problem again. You know, also when people tell me like, "But how can you go to that hotel?" and so on. This—I explode, I said, "You know that this is typical middle-class attitude." If you talk with really poor people, they say: "You have money? Enjoy it, spend it," and so on. It’s typical middle-class guilt that to show some totally irrational solidarity with poor people, you are not allowed to enjoy life, you know. You must suffer to feel more authentic and so on and so on. I find this solid—this solidarity total fake. Uh, please. I have two questions. One is that the sciences have been enormously successful—I don’t mean only physics but also the life sciences and various other sciences—and they all rely on a variants of classical logic, except for quantum logic which is non-distributive. But other than that, it’s all classical. So why do you expect to get better results and insights by using a non-classical dialectical logic and a non-classical Lacanian logic, if you do—but from some of the earlier talks I felt that that’s the kind of... so why non-classical? So that’s one question. And the second question is how do you see the future of automation unfolding with artificial intelligence, biogenetics, and all of these kinds of things which alter the—the human situation in quite radical ways if they do unfold. This is a nice question. First the second one. You know, I’m—I was just reading some books on it, and you know there are two, three positions that I totally reject. The first one is this typical European cultural conservatism, "Oh my God, we will all be automats, end of humanity," and so on. Then there is the crazy optimism, people like Ray Kurzweil and so on, "Oh, happy era, singularity, we will all be one mind," and so on and so on. I try to avoid these extremes. So my answer is—my—my first position is I agree with you here, I have no problem and my Lacanian Hegelian orientation poses no obstacle here, that with what is happening today with cognitive sciences, biogenetics, and so on, is something that affects deeply our being human. Literally, human nature is changing. In what sense? In the sense of what till now we perceived as our spontaneous natural properties, we can—we can
already at this elementary level, I think it can be saved, but how? Marx’s so-called labor theory of value. It’s a very complex question, we have to renovate all this: who is the working class today? Because you know, as Alain Badiou once mentioned to me, in every historical epoch there is usually one specific image of working class which somehow symbolizes the universal concept. In classical Europe, even more than metal workers, maybe—how do you call them, the idiots who go underground to mines—coal miners, miners were maybe the symbol, you know. And it’s a big question what is today. So all I would tell you is: no, don’t feel bad and, you know, the worst thing to do for an honest capitalist, if such things exist, the worst thing is to go into, "Oh my God, I feel guilty," and so on. You will not help any workers in this way. You should just be attentive to what is happening today in capitalism itself. I simply believe following different analysis that capitalism in itself with intellectual property, ecology, who will control biogenetics and so on, is approaching certain limits. And I don’t think it will be able to cope with them. At the same time, although they are too naive—who they? people like Paul Mason and all those, Jeremy Rifkin, you know. But they are onto something when they talk about cooperative commons and so on, digitalization, something new is emerging there which, of course, capitalism desperately tried to re-appropriate it. That’s the whole point of Bill Gates. Bill Gates is not a capitalist, he is a rentier, rent. His profit is not—Bill Gates is meaningless to say that he is exploiting his workers. His money comes from the fact that Bill Gates privatized part of our intellectual commons and we are paying a rent to him. Which is why, did you notice this, the price of Windows have nothing to do with production costs. They are minimal. It’s simply the question of market relation, how many... So all these phenomena show how capitalism, I think sincerely, is approaching some kind of a crisis, not maybe the classical crisis but simply the model works less and less. I already think that for example what is happening with financial capital today, it’s more and more irrational. Or point two, what is happening with intellectual property, all the problems, copyrights and so on. It’s clear that capitalism will in the long term will not be able to commodify fully so-called intellectual property for the simple reason that the logic is totally different. If you have a material object like water, then if I drink it, ha-ha, you will not drink it, you know. But with intellectual property, if I drink it and you drink it, the more wealthy it gets. It’s a totally different logic where at a certain level intellectual—so okay, I will not improvise it, but you see what—what I mean. I mean that no, don’t play this—this is for me the most disgusting thing, to play this charity. This is the image of today’s capitalism. I’m not—you know, like Bill Gates is for me the model. You get billion, then you get maybe billion back, playing charity, and then you are the greatest humanitarian in the world and so on and so on. No, we should step out, the—the solution is not charity. The solution is to ruthlessly confront new challenges for capitalism. And so it’s stupid to feel—to feel guilty and so on, I think. Because I—I don’t think that the revolution—and I don’t mean it in this pathetic Leninist sense, but the necessary change—that it will be the old change of, you know, hundreds of thousands on the street. It will be also that. But you know, if we have just that, then we have the problem *V for Vendetta* that I mentioned, but what happens then? I mean, the big—you know, or I’ll put it in this way, don’t you—I hope you will agree with me. It’s easy to organize a big demonstration, ooh we all cry, one million people there, we are all solidary, but again what happens the day after? What to do and so on. For me, the true measure of a social change revolution is not this pathetic moment of hundreds of thousands of us on the street, it’s the day after. When things return to normal, how will ordinary people feel the change? And there things don’t look too good for the left, to put it mildly. You know, we get from one to another screwed option. Venezuela I never trusted them, frankly. I—no, here my conscience is clear, for ten years I’m warning that something will turn out bad. I never believed in this Latino-American populism. Listen, Chavez was Fidel Castro with money from oil, you know. As his friends, I had some friends in Venezuela told me, Chavez wasn't really solving problems; he was pacifying problems by throwing money at them. What do we have as a new model? I don't know, and here I’m trying to buy help from anyone, even from capitalists like you, you know. I’m not a rabid capitalist by any stretch of the imagination. No, no, I have no problem again. You know, also when people tell me like, "But how can you go to that hotel?" and so on. This—I explode, I said, "You know that this is typical middle-class attitude." If you talk with really poor people, they say: "You have money? Enjoy it, spend it," and so on. It’s typical middle-class guilt that to show some totally irrational solidarity with poor people, you are not allowed to enjoy life, you know. You must suffer to feel more authentic and so on and so on. I find this solid—this solidarity total fake. Uh, please. I have two questions. One is that the sciences have been enormously successful—I don’t mean only physics but also the life sciences and various other sciences—and they all rely on a variants of classical logic, except for quantum logic which is non-distributive. But other than that, it’s all classical. So why do you expect to get better results and insights by using a non-classical dialectical logic and a non-classical Lacanian logic, if you do—but from some of the earlier talks I felt that that’s the kind of... so why non-classical? So that’s one question. And the second question is how do you see the future of automation unfolding with artificial intelligence, biogenetics, and all of these kinds of things which alter the—the human situation in quite radical ways if they do unfold. This is a nice question. First the second one. You know, I’m—I was just reading some books on it, and you know there are two, three positions that I totally reject. The first one is this typical European cultural conservatism, "Oh my God, we will all be automats, end of humanity," and so on. Then there is the crazy optimism, people like Ray Kurzweil and so on, "Oh, happy era, singularity, we will all be one mind," and so on and so on. I try to avoid these extremes. So my answer is—my—my first position is I agree with you here, I have no problem and my Lacanian Hegelian orientation poses no obstacle here, that with what is happening today with cognitive sciences, biogenetics, and so on, is something that affects deeply our being human. Literally, human nature is changing. In what sense? In the sense of what till now we perceived as our spontaneous natural properties, we can—we can
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manipulate them, and also the way our mind connects
manipulate them, and also the way our mind connects
Slavoj Žižek
with external reality. For example, one
with external reality. For example, one
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mega important point of research is
mega important point of research is
Slavoj Žižek
that we are more and more able to directly wire, connect our brains to the computer without any language symbolic interaction. I even heard—I don’t know if it’s true—that
that we are more and more able to directly wire, connect our brains to the computer without any language symbolic interaction. I even heard—I don’t know if it’s true—that
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Stephen Hawking no longer needs that one finger that he was able to use. He didn't use it. I know, it’s there, it’s I have some German friends who—the good German Nazi totalitarians, you know, they know everything—they informed me on it. So this I think totally changes
Stephen Hawking no longer needs that one finger that he was able to use. He didn't use it. I know, it’s there, it’s I have some German friends who—the good German Nazi totalitarians, you know, they know everything—they informed me on it. So this I think totally changes
Slavoj Žižek
our human identity, which is based on: reality is out there, here I am, free at least in my thought, in my mind. Now on the one hand, we are ready with our mere thinking to affect reality. I think about something, it happens. But you know, what goes out also goes in. That is to say, it also means that I can be up to a certain point controlled, and it’s very seriously developed. For example, I’m sorry if some of you know it, but this story, I used it two times but at NYU and some other places they are making this experiments they already work with rats. You take a rat, they can connect with a computer, very—it’s very limited but it already works, their neurons which give orders to their legs how to move. So you can literally—I was shocked, they showed me a video recording—you can direct a rat, play with it as with a remote control toy car. So a rat is running around, you click, connect it, and then you can direct the rat how it runs. And now comes the most beautiful thing: my friends told me that they also—that they also did, but they don’t want yet to make it public and so on, the same experiment on humans. And the result is pretty horrifying. Why? Because they were interested in this problem: if we do the same with a human, how will the human being experience that moment of "now I am connected"? Will it be, "Oh my God, I don’t control myself, some foreign power," to... no. The horror is that when they asked the human person—you know, they let, they told him: "Just walk around." And then without telling him, click-click, they directed—it's very elementary, just vaguely the direction where he was running. He thought he was free, he didn’t feel anything. Isn’t this pretty scary, I mean, you know? No, but I’m not a panicist. I just saying this is one thing that is changing. Then the change, although it’s very primitive then, the genetic manipulation change, changes of our pro—like, is it not, that’s why Jürgen Habermas is in panic for years. Is it not that our whole conception of pedagogy is... let’s say we compete, you and me—it’s not—it will not be that stupid, then—then I have to invite you for dinner or whatever I say. It’s simply that we compete for a certain exam. Let’s say that you work like crazy, honestly, and I just take a certain pill or some biogenetic manipulation and I do almost nothing, but through some direct way I learn it immediately. And I win. But in a way it’s totally unjust. So, you know, how—like, and what happens with our free will and so on? I think, I’m here a crazy optimist, that it’s not as simple as that, that even free will can be changed. I don’t believe in all those experiments that now it’s proven that we humans don’t have the free will. All I’m saying is that it will affect deeply our identity. You know why? Because the entire human creativity is based on our symbolization and as all intelligent evolutionary biologists from Daniel Dennett onwards—but also there are other better, just don’t read Steven Pinker, he is a total idiot. The proof is that he attacked me two times, but that’s another thing. Will tell you, you know that language was created to lie. Language is by definition unilateral, reductionist. And that’s what’s the strength of language. So all those ideas—I read now, is it translated here? It’s ingenious. Liu Cixin, *The Three-Body Problem*, a mega—you should read it—a Chinese mega-hit now science-fiction story about our contact with another civilization, which—the idea is this, that they have such strong electromagnetic waves that they don’t need language. Like, the waves radiate. This is why they don’t understand what does it mean—this is the first communication when they come to Earth disagreement—because they don’t see the distinction between thinking and speaking. They say, "But I think and my thoughts are immediately emitted out." But I wonder what this means, because then I wonder if even science can exist like that. Because again, our whole thinking is possible only in this, I claim, eroticized universe where you can lie, where you don’t tell. We don't exist as humans without the ability—without the ability to cheat, to create the wrong impression in very complex ways and so on and so on. So again, I wonder—I don’t know, but we should be genuinely open here—if our thoughts will become immediately—we are far from there. Although we are not as far as you can see, I read that they already can detect your basic attitudes, fear, hatred, whatever, and they are getting further and further, they're already at the edge of directly identifying some contents of your mind. What happens if we in this sense become transparent? And the especially interesting thing is: what happens when we—uh, when through this identification, when for example, if we are dealing with a Freudian subject, a subject who is divided, who has an unconscious, and so on and so on. And to return to my previous joke about coffee which is without cream or without milk. I wonder if in this, how do you call it, emitted, directly emitted through wave thoughts without language, can you distinguish the two? I—you can emit the thought "coffee," but can you emit differentiality? Can you emit the difference between coffee without cream and coffee without milk, which is physically the same coffee and so on? One thing it’s clear: that the moment we have this transparence of thoughts, eroticism is out. And that is the clear dream—you have it already in the 1920s in Soviet Union. You know that the first Gnostics were the Bolsheviks? There was a whole movement in Russia in 1920s where they claimed, even Trotsky
our human identity, which is based on: reality is out there, here I am, free at least in my thought, in my mind. Now on the one hand, we are ready with our mere thinking to affect reality. I think about something, it happens. But you know, what goes out also goes in. That is to say, it also means that I can be up to a certain point controlled, and it’s very seriously developed. For example, I’m sorry if some of you know it, but this story, I used it two times but at NYU and some other places they are making this experiments they already work with rats. You take a rat, they can connect with a computer, very—it’s very limited but it already works, their neurons which give orders to their legs how to move. So you can literally—I was shocked, they showed me a video recording—you can direct a rat, play with it as with a remote control toy car. So a rat is running around, you click, connect it, and then you can direct the rat how it runs. And now comes the most beautiful thing: my friends told me that they also—that they also did, but they don’t want yet to make it public and so on, the same experiment on humans. And the result is pretty horrifying. Why? Because they were interested in this problem: if we do the same with a human, how will the human being experience that moment of "now I am connected"? Will it be, "Oh my God, I don’t control myself, some foreign power," to... no. The horror is that when they asked the human person—you know, they let, they told him: "Just walk around." And then without telling him, click-click, they directed—it's very elementary, just vaguely the direction where he was running. He thought he was free, he didn’t feel anything. Isn’t this pretty scary, I mean, you know? No, but I’m not a panicist. I just saying this is one thing that is changing. Then the change, although it’s very primitive then, the genetic manipulation change, changes of our pro—like, is it not, that’s why Jürgen Habermas is in panic for years. Is it not that our whole conception of pedagogy is... let’s say we compete, you and me—it’s not—it will not be that stupid, then—then I have to invite you for dinner or whatever I say. It’s simply that we compete for a certain exam. Let’s say that you work like crazy, honestly, and I just take a certain pill or some biogenetic manipulation and I do almost nothing, but through some direct way I learn it immediately. And I win. But in a way it’s totally unjust. So, you know, how—like, and what happens with our free will and so on? I think, I’m here a crazy optimist, that it’s not as simple as that, that even free will can be changed. I don’t believe in all those experiments that now it’s proven that we humans don’t have the free will. All I’m saying is that it will affect deeply our identity. You know why? Because the entire human creativity is based on our symbolization and as all intelligent evolutionary biologists from Daniel Dennett onwards—but also there are other better, just don’t read Steven Pinker, he is a total idiot. The proof is that he attacked me two times, but that’s another thing. Will tell you, you know that language was created to lie. Language is by definition unilateral, reductionist. And that’s what’s the strength of language. So all those ideas—I read now, is it translated here? It’s ingenious. Liu Cixin, *The Three-Body Problem*, a mega—you should read it—a Chinese mega-hit now science-fiction story about our contact with another civilization, which—the idea is this, that they have such strong electromagnetic waves that they don’t need language. Like, the waves radiate. This is why they don’t understand what does it mean—this is the first communication when they come to Earth disagreement—because they don’t see the distinction between thinking and speaking. They say, "But I think and my thoughts are immediately emitted out." But I wonder what this means, because then I wonder if even science can exist like that. Because again, our whole thinking is possible only in this, I claim, eroticized universe where you can lie, where you don’t tell. We don't exist as humans without the ability—without the ability to cheat, to create the wrong impression in very complex ways and so on and so on. So again, I wonder—I don’t know, but we should be genuinely open here—if our thoughts will become immediately—we are far from there. Although we are not as far as you can see, I read that they already can detect your basic attitudes, fear, hatred, whatever, and they are getting further and further, they're already at the edge of directly identifying some contents of your mind. What happens if we in this sense become transparent? And the especially interesting thing is: what happens when we—uh, when through this identification, when for example, if we are dealing with a Freudian subject, a subject who is divided, who has an unconscious, and so on and so on. And to return to my previous joke about coffee which is without cream or without milk. I wonder if in this, how do you call it, emitted, directly emitted through wave thoughts without language, can you distinguish the two? I—you can emit the thought "coffee," but can you emit differentiality? Can you emit the difference between coffee without cream and coffee without milk, which is physically the same coffee and so on? One thing it’s clear: that the moment we have this transparence of thoughts, eroticism is out. And that is the clear dream—you have it already in the 1920s in Soviet Union. You know that the first Gnostics were the Bolsheviks? There was a whole movement in Russia in 1920s where they claimed, even Trotsky
unknown
wrote about this, where they
wrote about this, where they
Slavoj Žižek
claimed, "Our task now is to create a new human being as"—it was again you, Aaron, you quoted that wonderful passage, no, in your book on how—this is the nice properly Hegelian reversal of how liberation of sexuality usually ends up with liberation from sexuality. And that’s the step that both some Bolsheviks, not a minority, there was a majority, already did it. Almost the predominant theory in mid-20s in Soviet Union was that sexuality is the last
claimed, "Our task now is to create a new human being as"—it was again you, Aaron, you quoted that wonderful passage, no, in your book on how—this is the nice properly Hegelian reversal of how liberation of sexuality usually ends up with liberation from sexuality. And that’s the step that both some Bolsheviks, not a minority, there was a majority, already did it. Almost the predominant theory in mid-20s in Soviet Union was that sexuality is the last
unknown
fortress of bourgeois sensitivity. Like, in economy we communists rule, in
fortress of bourgeois sensitivity. Like, in economy we communists rule, in
Slavoj Žižek
politics
politics
unknown
we rule, but bourgeoisie—you, capitalist, you defined yourself, sorry—still resists at that level. So the goal was explicitly to create an asexual being. And they provided very exact descriptions of it. They claimed—it’s beautiful as a dream, it brings us back to Cartesian philosophy, Malebranche, a follower of Descartes—who claimed—they claimed that in communism, you will not be directly identified with your body. But now we have
we rule, but bourgeoisie—you, capitalist, you defined yourself, sorry—still resists at that level. So the goal was explicitly to create an asexual being. And they provided very exact descriptions of it. They claimed—it’s beautiful as a dream, it brings us back to Cartesian philosophy, Malebranche, a follower of Descartes—who claimed—they claimed that in communism, you will not be directly identified with your body. But now we have
Slavoj Žižek
feelings. For example, if you were to pinch me, I would
feelings. For example, if you were to pinch me, I would
unknown
say, "Ah, it hurts." But for them, in communism, we would
say, "Ah, it hurts." But for them, in communism, we would
Slavoj Žižek
learn the difference so that a pain, we would not feel it. It would work as a screen, you know, when it’s too hot, you see the temperature and so on. You know that even our feelings will be treated as painless indication like the screen of a machine with numbers that something is wrong, no? And Malebranche, this follower of Descartes, claimed that this is how it was in paradise. But that, you know what was the original sin? When Adam saw naked Eve, he lost this distance. And he thought that he—that he is now directly affected by objects, not in only this differentiated way. And now comes the beauty of the theory—I love these crazy theologians. You know what was for Malebranche God’s punishment? Because Malebranche thought—you have this line find it already in Saint Augustine—he claimed that it was clear for us that we are not our bodies. But the illusion of sexuality is we are directly immersed with your body. And then already Augustine and Malebranche follows him claimed that the divine punishment is erection. God says, "Now man is too arrogant, he thinks he’s identified with his body. So I will give men, males, only an organ which he will not control: erection. It will happen when he doesn't want it and when he wants it, it will not happen." So I like this theory that sexuality with unpredictable erection is not human sin, it’s punishment for the real sin. And I think this topic will become pretty actual soon through computerized sex and so on. I talk too much, sorry. We have time for one more question. Yes, please. Could you please give her the mic? Thanks. Um, this question came to me when we saw the—the clip of the Nazi... yeah, Goebbels. Yeah, when you talked of the perverse, the expression on—on Goebbels' face... But it wasn’t so clear here. I have the photos, I wasn’t able to catch it here. where it’s kind of absolutely incredible, it’s pure excessive enjoyment. Sorry, go on. Um, recently I saw some footage on—on Modi’s campaign in Banaras. And it’s not been said very—very overtly, but his figure as a man who abstains from sex is... He’s married but he doesn’t... Sorry, who is the guy? Modi. Modi. Ah, Modi, yeah yeah yeah. So, coming from this Hindu concept of, you know, abstaining from sex, Brahmacharya... Abstain from sex... Yeah, yeah. So it’s not very—said very overtly, but as a man who is—is doesn’t live in a married state... Yeah... I was wondering if—and I’m very—I’m very wary of—I’m not directly comparing that situation because there are historical and very specific serious differences in these two situations. But I’m just—I wanted to ask if this idea of renunciation, how it can be, you know, connected to the surplus-enjoyment, you know, of the... you know, the image of Modi as somebody who doesn’t have sex and therefore renounces, and how that is connected to the idea of surplus-enjoyment if it is at all sort of... That’s a good question because there is another variation, isn’t it that some of your yogis are able to do it? Namely that you then still have sex, but in a totally dissociated way. You know, without—this is what—but don’t your yogis, maybe this is my perverse puberty education, but your yogis are supposed to be able to do three things. One is to control erection, like if you are well-trained in ten seconds up, in ten seconds down. The second thing I was able to do, I heard is that you can ejaculate inside, and then it goes to your brain and you get some super bullshit. And then the third version, that you can control your penis so that it’s—gets very plastic, you can even suck some stuff with it. And I always accuse my wife who says, "Okay, there is a stain there, suck it," like do you expect me to do it with my penis like that? So what I’m saying is, I don’t know enough, and that would sincerely interest me. How does this work? Like is it purely dissociated, you renounce enjoyment or do you get—what type of surplus-enjoyment do you get from—do you get from it? But the basic validity of this idea that renunciation... You know, this is a very unpleasant thought. For example, recently I listened a terrifying report on—how do you call that thing that even I, although I’m not a woman, don’t like to think about it—that cliterodectomy or whatever, you know. And the shock is that although it’s a minority—I mean, don’t misunderstand me, I’m totally opposed to it and so on—but a minority of women not only accept it in some so-called backward countries, not only accept it as a necessary price for being admitted into society, but even in a perverse way enjoy it. You know, this would be for me one of the radical examples of this let’s call it surplus-enjoyment. And if there is again a lesson in psychoanalysis, is that there is no direct healthy sex, that as now I use again an expression from one of her books, from Alenka Zupančič: she says that only through language, sex itself gets sexualized. Because sexualization doesn’t simply concern the subject matter directly, what you are doing. For example, again Saint Augustine claims—and he is right although there was no heaven—that he claims Adam and Eve, of course, they had sex in heaven. But he claims it was just doing an instrumental job. There was no sexual pleasure. He said for Adam it was the same thing as taking a cow, a plow, and to work at the field. It was pure instrumental activity without any of this surplus-enjoyments and so on and so on. So it’s only through human sexualization connected with language that sex itself gets sexualized. Not only sex, also other activities. I challenge you, but I will not make it, it’s too obscene to this—no with you—no I will not, it’s too obscene, although it’s very innocent. Let’s say that I shake your hand. No, no, no, you will see immediately why I don’t want to do it. Let’s say that after we shake hand, instead of me letting you go, I continue to hold your hand and just start repeatedly to squeeze it rhythmically. Won’t you accuse me of something obscene? I would think it’s a bit strange, yeah. Yeah, but strange, not just strange, like something dirty. You see how I didn’t do, I would not have done anything directly. I didn’t touch you in an indecent way. I just repeated too much the most ordinary gesture. I think this—these are for me the zero level of humanization or sexualization. Or, for example, I think the *ur*-people primordial were probably Australian natives, Aborigines. The most wonderful invention that I know is—is how do you call that you throw it it comes back—boomerang. Do you know why? Because it’s—officially you think it’s to hit the animal. No, but the whole point is to miss the animal and then I spoke some people—with
learn the difference so that a pain, we would not feel it. It would work as a screen, you know, when it’s too hot, you see the temperature and so on. You know that even our feelings will be treated as painless indication like the screen of a machine with numbers that something is wrong, no? And Malebranche, this follower of Descartes, claimed that this is how it was in paradise. But that, you know what was the original sin? When Adam saw naked Eve, he lost this distance. And he thought that he—that he is now directly affected by objects, not in only this differentiated way. And now comes the beauty of the theory—I love these crazy theologians. You know what was for Malebranche God’s punishment? Because Malebranche thought—you have this line find it already in Saint Augustine—he claimed that it was clear for us that we are not our bodies. But the illusion of sexuality is we are directly immersed with your body. And then already Augustine and Malebranche follows him claimed that the divine punishment is erection. God says, "Now man is too arrogant, he thinks he’s identified with his body. So I will give men, males, only an organ which he will not control: erection. It will happen when he doesn't want it and when he wants it, it will not happen." So I like this theory that sexuality with unpredictable erection is not human sin, it’s punishment for the real sin. And I think this topic will become pretty actual soon through computerized sex and so on. I talk too much, sorry. We have time for one more question. Yes, please. Could you please give her the mic? Thanks. Um, this question came to me when we saw the—the clip of the Nazi... yeah, Goebbels. Yeah, when you talked of the perverse, the expression on—on Goebbels' face... But it wasn’t so clear here. I have the photos, I wasn’t able to catch it here. where it’s kind of absolutely incredible, it’s pure excessive enjoyment. Sorry, go on. Um, recently I saw some footage on—on Modi’s campaign in Banaras. And it’s not been said very—very overtly, but his figure as a man who abstains from sex is... He’s married but he doesn’t... Sorry, who is the guy? Modi. Modi. Ah, Modi, yeah yeah yeah. So, coming from this Hindu concept of, you know, abstaining from sex, Brahmacharya... Abstain from sex... Yeah, yeah. So it’s not very—said very overtly, but as a man who is—is doesn’t live in a married state... Yeah... I was wondering if—and I’m very—I’m very wary of—I’m not directly comparing that situation because there are historical and very specific serious differences in these two situations. But I’m just—I wanted to ask if this idea of renunciation, how it can be, you know, connected to the surplus-enjoyment, you know, of the... you know, the image of Modi as somebody who doesn’t have sex and therefore renounces, and how that is connected to the idea of surplus-enjoyment if it is at all sort of... That’s a good question because there is another variation, isn’t it that some of your yogis are able to do it? Namely that you then still have sex, but in a totally dissociated way. You know, without—this is what—but don’t your yogis, maybe this is my perverse puberty education, but your yogis are supposed to be able to do three things. One is to control erection, like if you are well-trained in ten seconds up, in ten seconds down. The second thing I was able to do, I heard is that you can ejaculate inside, and then it goes to your brain and you get some super bullshit. And then the third version, that you can control your penis so that it’s—gets very plastic, you can even suck some stuff with it. And I always accuse my wife who says, "Okay, there is a stain there, suck it," like do you expect me to do it with my penis like that? So what I’m saying is, I don’t know enough, and that would sincerely interest me. How does this work? Like is it purely dissociated, you renounce enjoyment or do you get—what type of surplus-enjoyment do you get from—do you get from it? But the basic validity of this idea that renunciation... You know, this is a very unpleasant thought. For example, recently I listened a terrifying report on—how do you call that thing that even I, although I’m not a woman, don’t like to think about it—that cliterodectomy or whatever, you know. And the shock is that although it’s a minority—I mean, don’t misunderstand me, I’m totally opposed to it and so on—but a minority of women not only accept it in some so-called backward countries, not only accept it as a necessary price for being admitted into society, but even in a perverse way enjoy it. You know, this would be for me one of the radical examples of this let’s call it surplus-enjoyment. And if there is again a lesson in psychoanalysis, is that there is no direct healthy sex, that as now I use again an expression from one of her books, from Alenka Zupančič: she says that only through language, sex itself gets sexualized. Because sexualization doesn’t simply concern the subject matter directly, what you are doing. For example, again Saint Augustine claims—and he is right although there was no heaven—that he claims Adam and Eve, of course, they had sex in heaven. But he claims it was just doing an instrumental job. There was no sexual pleasure. He said for Adam it was the same thing as taking a cow, a plow, and to work at the field. It was pure instrumental activity without any of this surplus-enjoyments and so on and so on. So it’s only through human sexualization connected with language that sex itself gets sexualized. Not only sex, also other activities. I challenge you, but I will not make it, it’s too obscene to this—no with you—no I will not, it’s too obscene, although it’s very innocent. Let’s say that I shake your hand. No, no, no, you will see immediately why I don’t want to do it. Let’s say that after we shake hand, instead of me letting you go, I continue to hold your hand and just start repeatedly to squeeze it rhythmically. Won’t you accuse me of something obscene? I would think it’s a bit strange, yeah. Yeah, but strange, not just strange, like something dirty. You see how I didn’t do, I would not have done anything directly. I didn’t touch you in an indecent way. I just repeated too much the most ordinary gesture. I think this—these are for me the zero level of humanization or sexualization. Or, for example, I think the *ur*-people primordial were probably Australian natives, Aborigines. The most wonderful invention that I know is—is how do you call that you throw it it comes back—boomerang. Do you know why? Because it’s—officially you think it’s to hit the animal. No, but the whole point is to miss the animal and then I spoke some people—with
unknown
some people there
some people there
unknown
who know how—and they told me the greatest danger is
who know how—and they told me the greatest danger is
Slavoj Žižek
that you are not hit, you know, to catch it in the right way. This is pure surplus-enjoyment.
that you are not hit, you know, to catch it in the right way. This is pure surplus-enjoyment.
unknown
Officially it’s to hit the animal. No, no, the point is to miss animal and to catch it properly so that you can do it again and so on and so on. Um, actually when this film was going on, I was very much reminded of these campaigns that are going on right now with respect to demonetization. That we are supposed to take some hardships which are brought on because of the demonetization for the larger good, yeah for the... yeah so that—and it’s a very extensive campaign, lots of money is being spent on it
Officially it’s to hit the animal. No, no, the point is to miss animal and to catch it properly so that you can do it again and so on and so on. Um, actually when this film was going on, I was very much reminded of these campaigns that are going on right now with respect to demonetization. That we are supposed to take some hardships which are brought on because of the demonetization for the larger good, yeah for the... yeah so that—and it’s a very extensive campaign, lots of money is being spent on it
Slavoj Žižek
saying that this kind of hardship or whatever has to be borne for the nation’s good. And that and this image of the face of Modi in the recent—which I think that sort of triggered my question. It’s a larger renunciation. But here I doubt—I doubt if I’m really human because I have big problems with these repetitive games, like I never understood why should I ski, you know skiing in snow. Because my idea: you are down, you go up on a mountain and then you ski down. Fuck you, why don't you stay down and read a good book, you know? So I’m not quite human here I think, I’m a little bit confused, you know. Okay, I think we can finish. Thank you very much for your patience with a madman like me. [Applause] Thanks so much Slavoj and Alenka and Aaron. Three really, really fascinating papers. Tomorrow we continue again. will be tea, we start at with William Mazzarella, and then we’ll move to Faisal Devji’s paper in the afternoon and conclude with [unintelligible] Jones’ paper in the—in the evening. So I love it, it evokes in me the worst racist prejudices. It’s like we began, usually we began with a talk and then teas are in between, no? I had the impression, but I love it, that here basically you have here a tea session, no? And just to fill in time between one tea and the other, you have an
saying that this kind of hardship or whatever has to be borne for the nation’s good. And that and this image of the face of Modi in the recent—which I think that sort of triggered my question. It’s a larger renunciation. But here I doubt—I doubt if I’m really human because I have big problems with these repetitive games, like I never understood why should I ski, you know skiing in snow. Because my idea: you are down, you go up on a mountain and then you ski down. Fuck you, why don't you stay down and read a good book, you know? So I’m not quite human here I think, I’m a little bit confused, you know. Okay, I think we can finish. Thank you very much for your patience with a madman like me. [Applause] Thanks so much Slavoj and Alenka and Aaron. Three really, really fascinating papers. Tomorrow we continue again. will be tea, we start at with William Mazzarella, and then we’ll move to Faisal Devji’s paper in the afternoon and conclude with [unintelligible] Jones’ paper in the—in the evening. So I love it, it evokes in me the worst racist prejudices. It’s like we began, usually we began with a talk and then teas are in between, no? I had the impression, but I love it, that here basically you have here a tea session, no? And just to fill in time between one tea and the other, you have an
unknown
unfortunate
unfortunate
Slavoj Žižek
talk. And I
talk. And I
unknown
love
love
Slavoj Žižek
this, thank you.
this, thank you.