The Reality of the Virtual
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2004 · 1:13:15 · 9,003 words
psychoanalysishegel-dialecticsideologyphilosophy-generalcapitalismfascism-populismsubjectivityeveryday-lifescience-physicscinema-art-cultureethicscommunism-socialismrace-antisemitism
Žižek delivers a lecture on the 'reality of the virtual' using Lacan's imaginary-symbolic-real triad to argue that what is most real is not brute material presence but a purely formal gap or antagonism. He moves from examples of imaginary and symbolic virtuality (body-image idealization, authority as threat, belief attributed to others) through the 'real virtual' as attractor-like absent cause, illustrated by film texture, Rumsfeld's epistemology, the psychoanalytic revision of trauma, anti-Semitism, and the critique of 'alternate modernity'. The second half analyzes the contemporary ethics of enjoyment, the 'chocolate laxative' structure of permissive injunctions, and concludes with a call to reinvent and enact radical utopia against capitalist realism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 30
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “reality of the virtual”
Žižek opposes 'virtual reality' (digital reproduction of experience) with 'the reality of the virtual': the efficacy and real effects produced by something not yet fully actualized, a purely formal gap or absent cause that structures what exists.
as “objet petit a / the Real”
Lacanian terms implicitly at play throughout as the absent formal cause and the traumatic remainder that resists symbolization, underlying Žižek's account of virtual reality and the real.
Authority and belief that function precisely as unactualized threats or presuppositions: paternal authority is real only as the unexecuted threat, and belief circulates as a purely attributed presupposition ('the subject supposed to believe') rather than anyone's actual conviction.
as “real real”
The innermost kernel of the Lacanian Real: not a traumatic brute presence but a purely formal attractor-like void, an absent structural cause (e.g. the virtual shape organizing iron filings in a magnetic field) that has real effects without itself existing as a positive entity.
An anonymous virtual other to whom belief is attributed so that ideological functioning can continue even when no individual actually believes, the social mechanism sustaining ideology in a cynical era.
Scientific formulas (especially quantum physics) that work experimentally and are purely symbolic/signifying machines, yet resist translation into experiential meaning, real in the Lacanian sense of resisting symbolization.
as “borromean knot”
Lacan's topological figure for the interweaving of imaginary, symbolic, and real, Žižek invokes it to show each term of the triad is itself re-split into the triad, yielding nine categories.
Images so traumatically strong they cannot be directly confronted, monstrous creatures, The Thing, which remain at the imaginary level despite their overwhelming force.
as “obscene shadowy virtual”
The unofficial, perverse underside (e.g. military marching chants with sexual obscenities) that necessarily accompanies and sustains the official symbolic order.
Žižek adds a fourth category to Rumsfeld's epistemological grid: things we know but don't know that we know, unconscious fantasies, prejudices, and ideological investments that control us without our awareness.
Žižek uses the mathematical/physical notion of an attractor (a virtual shape organizing actually-existing dispersed elements) as a model for the Real as absent formal cause that has real effects without existing as a positive entity.
Žižek applies Einstein's reversal (matter does not curve space; curvature is primordial) to Freudian trauma: the symbolic space is primarily curved/antagonistic, and 'traumatic events' are retroactively produced to account for a pre-existing formal imbalance.
as “trauma as virtual”
Reframing Freud's Wolfman case: the traumatic scene was not traumatic when perceived; it became trauma retroactively when the symbolic space was already curved by a gap in infantile sexual theory, trauma is the effect, not the cause, of formal imbalance.
Post-colonial notion that antagonism and exploitation belong only to Anglo-Saxon/Western modernity, leaving open the possibility of other (African, Latin American, Asian) modernities without these negative effects, Žižek treats this as deeply ideological.
A difference prior to the two terms it differentiates, the positive terms (left/right, masculine/feminine) are secondary attempts to master or cover over this primordial gap.
Žižek's preferred materialism: not the inert density/presence of matter but the primacy of pure difference, a formal crack or antagonism within the One, as opposed to spiritual/Tarkovskian materialism of density and decay.
Kant's distinction between negating a predicate ('you are not-human') and affirming a non-predicate ('you are inhuman'): the latter names an excess internal to the term, used by Žižek to characterize radical human freedom as an inhuman excess inherent to humanity.
as “extimate”
Lacan's portmanteau (exterior-intimate): the inhuman kernel of radical freedom that is most intimate to the subject yet experienced as externally alien, the monstrous excess at the core of humanity itself.
Žižek's proposed alternative to identity politics: not recognizing and tolerating differences but grasping the antagonism that is primordial and universal, a politics of engaged struggle rather than multicultural openness.
as “universal truth accessible only from a partial position”
There is a universal truth of a situation, but it is accessible only through engaged partisan struggle, not by abstracting to a neutral standpoint, the Marxist-Lacanian paradox of engaged universalism.
Contemporary ethics has shifted from the imperative to moderate enjoyment to the imperative to enjoy fully, producing guilt not from transgression but from failure to enjoy, the superego commands jouissance.
as “decaf coffee / beer without alcohol / sugar without sugar”
Series of products deprived of their dangerous/enjoyable substance, illustrating the contemporary ethical injunction to enjoy without risk, the object minus its excess.
as “Aufhebung / dialectical reversal”
Hegelian cancellation-and-preservation; Žižek uses Hegelian reversal logic throughout (e.g. matter as reified curvature of space, the chocolate laxative as coincidence of opposites).
Žižek's signature example for a product that is simultaneously its own opposite/remedy: the structure whereby a permissive injunction (enjoy! consume!) already contains its own counter-effect (decaffeination, health regulation, humanitarian war), used to diagnose the contemporary logic of ideology.
Multicultural tolerance today means 'don't come too close, don't harass me', a defense against over-proximity of the other's enjoyment that is structurally a form of intolerance.
as “militarist pacifism / humanitarian militarism”
Ulrich Beck's term adopted by Žižek: wars declared as operations for peace, where military action structurally resembles humanitarian intervention, the chocolate laxative applied to warfare.
Lacanian enjoyment/jouissance, Žižek uses it throughout as what the superego commands, what products are deprived of (decaf), and what triggers harassment anxiety when the other's jouissance comes too close.
The unbridled solicitation of ever-new desires taken to extremes (including necrophiliac provision), which Žižek contrasts with both classical utopia and genuine radical utopia, 'radically benign' because nothing really changes.
as “real utopia”
Utopia not as imagining an ideal alternative world but as enacting what appears impossible within existing symbolic coordinates, doing the impossible when there is no other way.
as “post-political politics”
The hegemonic claim that ideological times are over and only realistic administration of existing trends is possible, what Žižek urges us to resist by reinventing utopia.
Stories he reaches for 10
Rumsfeld articulated three epistemological categories before the Iraq war (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns); Žižek argues he missed the crucial fourth, 'unknown knowns' (unconscious fantasies), which is what the U.S. lacked awareness of, making the Iraqi Minister of Information's quip ('Americans don't control even themselves') accidentally true.
“things we don't know that we know them... This is what in psychoanalysis of course is called unconscious”
Parents pretend to believe in Santa for the children's sake; children pretend to believe to please parents and ensure gifts, nobody actually believes, yet the belief functions because each attributes it to the other.
“we just play that we are naive not to disappoint our parents and to make sure that we get the presents”
In Tarkovsky's films, heroes praying immerse their heads in mud rather than looking upward, exemplifying a spiritualism that clings obsessively to the density and inertia of matter, which Žižek identifies as the true idealism today (opposed to his formal materialism).
“when heroes are praying they don't pray looking upwards, they pray by sometimes literally immersing their heads into mud”
In Allen's parody of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky is conspicuously absent as the expected binary counterpart; this absence returns as a 'symptom' in a brief scene where every Dostoevsky title is crammed into one conversation about Tolstoy characters. Illustrates that the missing binary element generates a symptomatic explosion of the repressed.
“do you know what happened with that Idiot, ah you mean one of the Karamazov brothers, yes he did his crime it was punished, then he went underground turned into a gambler”
In the shift from special to general relativity, Einstein reversed the assumption that matter curves space: curvature is primordial, and matter is a reified misperception of formal curvature. Žižek uses this as a structural homology for the psychoanalytic and Marxist reversals he performs.
“what we perceive as matter is just a kind of a reified fetishist misperception of a purely formal curvature of the space”
Officially a film about anti-fascist Austrian resistance to Nazi occupation; but at the level of cinematic texture (micro-signs, dress, manner), Austrians are depicted as provincial fascists while Nazis look like cosmopolitan decadent Jews. The film's popularity partly rests on this secret fascist message beneath the democratic surface.
“at the level of virtual texture... we get practically the opposite message, which is honest fascists resisting decadent Jewish cosmopolitan takeover”
Soros spends the first half of the day in ruthless financial speculation ruining millions of lives, the second half giving some of it back through humanitarian programs, the chocolate/laxative structure applied to global capital: the remedy is built into the very operation that produces the harm.
“the morning is chocolate, the afternoon it's laxative”
Iron filings dispersed around a magnetic field organize into a shape that does not itself exist as a thing, an abstract virtual form that structures actual elements without being present as a positive entity. Used as the model for trauma, antagonism, and the Real.
“this shape of course is not existing in itself. It's just something that you can abstract, isolate from the dispersion of the small pieces of iron”
Nixon visiting China, doing what appeared politically impossible given China's status as ultimate evil superpower, is cited as a modest example of enacting utopia: an act that changed the entire symbolic coordinates by doing the impossible.
“he did what appeared as impossible. China was portrayed as the ultimate evil superpower... That act changed the entire coordinates, it did the impossible.”
As a toddler, the Wolfman witnessed parental intercourse without finding it traumatic; years later, when his infantile sexual theories developed a gap (curved symbolic space), he retroactively retrieved the scene as 'traumatic.' Trauma is an effect of the prior formal imbalance, not its cause.
“it is only at this point that he resuscitated the traumatic scene”
Works invoked 8
The Sound of Music film
Used as a key example of the real virtual: the official narrative (anti-fascist Austrian resistance) is contradicted by the film's micro-textural virtual reality (honest fascists resisting Jewish cosmopolitan takeover), illustrating unknown knowns and the real beneath the symbolic.
The Republic book
Cited as the paradigm case of classical utopia: imagining an ideal world not meant to be actually realized.
Short Cuts film
Altman's 'masterpiece': officially a critical portrait of L.A. alienation, but its virtual cinematic texture is a celebration of contingent encounters, the real virtual operating against the stated narrative meaning.
Source of the Marine marching chant example ('Eskimo pussies are rather cold'), illustrating the obscene shadowy virtual underside of military symbolic order.
Alien film
Cited as an example of 'imaginary real': a monstrous creature too traumatically strong to confront directly, overwhelming image that still operates at the imaginary level.
Love and Death film
Woody Allen's Tolstoy parody used to illustrate the ontological logic of the primordially repressed binary: Dostoevsky's conspicuous absence returns symptomatically, showing that the missing second term generates multiplicity.
Listed alongside Plato's Republic and More's Utopia as a canonical classical utopia, a provocative inclusion in the list.
Utopia book
Thomas More's Utopia cited alongside Plato and de Sade as a model of classical utopia.
People invoked 28
Richard Nixon positive
His trip to China is cited as a modest historical example of enacting the impossible, a utopian act that changed the entire symbolic coordinates.
Philosophy in the Boudoir cited as a (provocative) third example of classical utopia in the company of Plato's Republic and More's Utopia.
Held up as the exemplary figure of the chocolate laxative logic in global capitalism: ruthless speculation in the morning, humanitarian philanthropy in the afternoon, the system produces its own apparent antidote.
Mentioned as the context for Rumsfeld's epistemological statements about known and unknown unknowns before the Iraq war.
Osama bin Laden negative
Cited alongside Bush as sharing the same ideological structure: direct communication with God licenses whatever acts follow.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical framework for the entire lecture: Lacanian triad of imaginary/symbolic/real, the borromean knot, the subject supposed to believe, the extimate, the reversal of the Dostoevsky motto.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Criticized for asserting primordial multitude as the ultimate ontological fact; Žižek argues multitude is secondary to the self-difference and inconsistency of the One.
Donald Rumsfeld positive
His known/unknown grid is taken seriously as an epistemological contribution despite its political context; Žižek extends it by adding the missing fourth category (unknown knowns) that Rumsfeld, representing American ideology, conspicuously omits.
Francis Fukuyama negative
His 'end of history' thesis, liberal capitalist democracy as the final social form, is identified as the true utopia of the 1990s, destroyed by September 11.
George W. Bush negative
Cited alongside Osama bin Laden as sharing the same structure: both claim to hear directly from God, which licenses total permissiveness, 'if God exists, everything is permitted.'
Woody Allen positive
Love and Death is deployed to illustrate the ontological logic of pure difference: the missing binary counterpart (Dostoevsky) returns as symptomatic excess.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for the formulation that psychoanalysis teaches you to 'become a pitiless censor of yourself,' used to articulate the new function of psychoanalysis under the injunction to enjoy.
Giorgio Agamben positive
His claim that the concentration camp is the paradigm of the 20th-century collective is cited to extend the chocolate laxative analysis to Guantanamo and humanitarian war.
Stephen King positive
His horror novels' category of 'the undead' is used to illustrate Kant's infinite judgment, 'undead' as an excess inherent to life rather than its simple negation.
Utopia cited as another instance of classical utopia alongside Plato and de Sade.
Joyce's wife, mentioned in the context of their famous explicit letters as an example of non-idealized bodily acceptance.
Robert Altman positive
Short Cuts is cited as a masterpiece whose virtual cinematic texture reveals a more optimistic life-affirming dimension beneath its ostensible social criticism.
James Joyce positive
The letters with Nora Barnacle, accepting the full bodily reality of the other including unpleasant details, are cited admiringly as a rare suspension of imaginary virtual idealization.
The subject of Allen's Love and Death parody; used as the example around which Dostoevsky's absence is structured.
Jürgen Habermas negative
His notion of modernity as 'an unfinished project' is cited as an insufficient framework that cannot grasp how violence and catastrophe are inherent to modernity rather than mere regressions.
Ulrich Beck positive
Credited with coining 'militarist pacifism' or 'humanitarian militarism' to describe wars declared as operations for peace.
Andrei Tarkovsky negative
Used as the exemplar of 'spiritual materialism', an obsession with the inertia and density of matter (heroes praying by immersing their heads in mud) that Žižek argues is actually idealism, opposed to his formal materialism.
The Republic is cited as a model of classical utopia, an imagined ideal world not meant to be realized.
Karl Marx positive
The Marxist reversal ('turn things around') is invoked to reject anti-Semitism's scapegoating logic and to name social antagonism/class struggle as primordial.
Sigmund Freud positive
Used for his theory of trauma (shift from first to second approach) and the Wolfman case, which Žižek reads as parallel to Einstein's shift to general relativity.
Immanuel Kant positive
His distinction between negative judgment ('you are not human') and infinite judgment ('you are inhuman') is used to articulate the extimate inhuman kernel of radical freedom.
Albert Einstein positive
The shift from special to general relativity (matter curves space → curvature is primordial, matter is its effect) is used as a structural model for the Lacanian-Freudian reversal on trauma.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
His motto 'if God doesn't exist everything is permitted' is invoked via Lacan's reversal, and his absence from Allen's Love and Death is the key example of the missing binary signifier.
What it argues
reality of the virtual vs. virtual realityLacanian triad (imaginary/symbolic/real) as nested structuretrauma as formal curvature rather than brute intrusionchocolate laxative — product as its own counter-effectsuperego injunction to enjoy and new ethics of non-enjoymentuniversal antagonism vs. politics of difference / multiculturalismutopia as enacting the impossible rather than imagining alternative worlds
Dialectical moves 14
“Not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual — not digital reproduction of experience but the real effects produced by what does not yet fully exist.”
Inverts the common digital-era interest in VR to point to a more fundamental philosophical concept: the efficacy of the not-yet-actualized.
“Authority is actual only as virtual; if it is fully actualized, it is self-destructive and undermines itself as authority.”
Reverses the common assumption that actualized force is more real than threat: the threat is the fullness of authority, its enactment is its collapse.
“It is not that belief which is virtual is already actual — many beliefs have to remain virtual in order to function socially as beliefs; if believed too immediately, they become self-destructive.”
Shows that ideology requires the gap between stated belief and actual conviction; direct identification with ideology destroys it.
“It was not the presence of matter that curves space; curvature is primordial and what we perceive as matter is a reified fetishist misperception of a purely formal curvature.”
Einstein's reversal (special to general relativity) is used as a model for the Lacanian Real: form precedes substance.
“The primordial fact is not some brutal intrusion of the traumatic Real; the primordial real is a purely formal imbalance, and the traumatic event is what we produce to account for it.”
Reverses the Freudian first approach to trauma: the gap comes first, the trauma is its retroactive filling.
“It's not disorder because of the Jews; class struggle and social antagonism come first, and the figure of the Jew is invented to imaginarily account for it.”
Standard Marxist-Lacanian reversal applied to anti-Semitism: the scapegoat is the effect of antagonism, not its cause.
“Particular species of modernity are not examples of the universal genus; they are reactions to the universal deadlock, attempts to resolve it — the site of antagonism is universality itself.”
Reverses the relation of universal and particular in dialectics: universality is the site of struggle, particulars are its reactive solutions.
“Difference comes first — it is not that we have two terms and then a difference between them; the positive terms appear afterwards as attempts to dominate the tension of this primary difference.”
The Lacanian-Hegelian point that the One is primordially split: self-difference precedes all pairs of opposites.
“Today it is idealism which is materialist — spiritual materialism clings to the inertia and density of matter, while true radical materialism is pure formalism.”
Inverts the usual alignment: the spiritualist/Tarkovskian obsession with material density is idealism; the formal void is genuine materialism.
“Tolerance today means its opposite: tolerate me = don't come too close = keep distance = the fundamental form of intolerance.”
Multicultural tolerance is shown to be structurally equivalent to an injunction against proximity, a form of anti-social exclusion in liberal dress.
“We consume less than ever: true consumers are drug addicts and chain smokers, who are figures of horror today, while the permissive society is actually anti-consumption.”
Inverts the diagnosis of consumer society: unlimited permissiveness produces less real consumption, not more.
“The role of psychoanalysis today is not to enable you to enjoy but to open a space in which you are allowed not to enjoy.”
Reverses the popular image of psychoanalysis as liberation of repressed desire: in the era of the superego injunction to enjoy, the therapeutic act is permission not to.
“If God doesn't exist, everything is prohibited (the hedonist yuppie); if God does exist, everything is permitted (Bush, bin Laden).”
Double reversal of the Dostoevsky-Lacan motto: both theism and atheism produce their apparent opposite in the contemporary configuration.
“The true utopia today is not communism which disintegrated in '89 but the 1990s idea that liberal capitalist democracy is the final social form.”
Relocates utopianism from the left to triumphant liberalism, making Fukuyama's 'end of history' the real utopia that September 11 destroyed.
Claims 20
asserts
The reality of the virtual — effects produced by something not fully actualized — is a more important concept for understanding contemporary life than 'virtual reality' (digital simulation of experience).virtual reality vs. reality of the virtual
asserts
Symbolic authority is operative precisely as a virtual, unactualized threat; if it is fully actualized (father actually beats you), it becomes self-undermining and ridiculous.authority and its symbolic functioning
asserts
In a cynical era, belief is sustained not by anyone actually believing but by everyone presupposing that someone else believes — the 'subject supposed to believe' is the mechanism of ideology.ideology, belief, cynicism
asserts
Quantum physics is the paradigm case of 'symbolic real': formulas that work but cannot be translated into experiential meaning, thus resisting symbolization in the Lacanian sense.quantum physics, the symbolic real
asserts
Rumsfeld's epistemological grid (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns) is incomplete: the crucial fourth category is 'unknown knowns' — unconscious fantasies and prejudices that control us.epistemology, the unconscious, American politics
reframes
Trauma is not a brute intrusion that curves symbolic space; rather, a primordial formal curvature/antagonism of symbolic space is what necessitates the retroactive production of a 'traumatic event' to account for it.psychoanalytic theory of trauma
asserts
The figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism is not the cause of social antagonism but a retroactive imaginary solution projected to account for a pre-existing class struggle and social imbalance.anti-Semitism, ideology
rejects
The post-colonial concept of 'alternate modernity' is ideological because it displaces antagonism from the universal notion of (capitalist) modernity onto one particular form, thereby preserving modernity as such from critique.alternate modernity, post-colonial theory
asserts
Fascism was the first major project of 'alternate modernity' — industrialization without its alienating effects — which exposes the danger of the post-colonial alternate-modernity concept.fascism, modernity
asserts
Universal antagonism is primary; all particular existing forms of modernity (liberal, fascist, Latin American, etc.) are attempts to resolve or cover up this universal deadlock, not examples of a neutral genus.universality, particular modernities, antagonism
asserts
True materialism today is not the materialism of inert matter/density but purely formal materialism: the primacy of difference, the crack within the One, the self-difference of the one that generates multiplicity.materialism, formalism, Lacan vs. Deleuze
rejects
Multiculturalist identity politics, with tolerance as its ethical horizon, is insufficient because it cannot think class struggle, which has the structure of antagonistic annihilation of the enemy, not mutual recognition.identity politics, multiculturalism, class struggle
asserts
Universal truth exists and is accessible only from a partial, engaged, struggling standpoint — not by abstracting to a neutral overview.truth, universality, political engagement
asserts
The contemporary ethical injunction has shifted from 'moderate your enjoyment' to 'you must enjoy,' producing a new guilt: you feel guilty not for transgressing prohibitions but for failing to enjoy.ethics, superego, enjoyment
asserts
Tolerance today structurally functions as intolerance: 'tolerate me' means 'don't come too close,' which is fear of the other's over-proximity — harassment anxiety is the fundamental form of intolerance.tolerance, multiculturalism, enjoyment
reframes
The role of psychoanalysis today is not to liberate enjoyment (releasing repression) but to open a space in which one is allowed not to enjoy — 'you are not obliged to enjoy.'psychoanalysis, contemporary ethics
asserts
Contemporary fundamentalism does not restore ethical stability but, by positioning oneself as instrument of divine will, opens a false space of total permission — if God exists, everything is permitted.fundamentalism, religion, permissiveness
asserts
The true utopia of our era was not communism but the 1990s Fukuyama-ist belief that liberal capitalist democracy is the final and permanent social form.utopia, capitalism, liberalism
asserts
Radical utopia is not imagining an ideal alternative world but enacting what appears impossible within existing coordinates — doing what must be done when there is no other way.utopia, political action
asserts
The future will be utopian or there will be none — reinventing utopia is a matter of survival, not merely a political choice.utopia, survival, political urgency
Quotes 19
“Not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual — reality, by this I mean efficacy, effectiveness, real effects produced generated by something which does not yet fully exist, which is not yet fully actual.”Slavoj Žižek · reality of the virtual — definition
“Authority in order to be operative... has to remain virtual, virtual in the sense of a threat. It's not just it is actual already as virtual — it's actual only as virtual.”Slavoj Žižek · symbolic authority as unactualized threat
“It is enough that everybody presupposes somebody, someone else to believe and the belief is actual, it structures reality, it functions.”Slavoj Žižek · subject supposed to believe — mechanism of ideology
“Americans don't control even themselves. Perfect truth. Because they don't know what they know. And this what you don't know that you know controls you but you don't control it.”Slavoj Žižek · unknown knowns — the unconscious controls
“What we perceive as matter is just a kind of a reified fetishist misperception of a purely formal curvature of the space.”Slavoj Žižek · formal curvature precedes matter — Einstein/Lacan reversal
“The primordial fact is not some brutal intrusion of the real. The primordial fact and also the primordial real is a purely formal imbalance.”Slavoj Žižek · the Real as formal gap, not brute intrusion
“The category of the real is ultimately a purely formal category... a pure difference. A pure difference in the sense that it's a difference which is paradoxically prior to what it is the difference between.”Slavoj Žižek · the Real as pure difference prior to its terms
“Today it is rather idealism which is materialist. Today's idealism or rather spiritualism clings to this famous density, inertia of experience of matter, of earth, of the stuff.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of materialism/idealism — formal materialism
“Still constipated? Not a problem, eat more of our chocolate.”Slavoj Žižek · chocolate laxative — product as its own counter-effect
“Tolerance means tolerate me means don't harass me. What does it mean don't harass me? It means precisely don't come too close to me.”Slavoj Žižek · tolerance as intolerance — distance from the other's enjoyment
“The morning is chocolate, the afternoon it's laxative.”Slavoj Žižek · Soros — speculative capitalism and humanitarian philanthropy as one circuit
“You feel guilty if you cannot make it, if you cannot enjoy.”Slavoj Žižek · superego injunction to enjoy — contemporary guilt
“The role of psychoanalysis today is not to enable you to enjoy, but to open up a space in which you are allowed not to enjoy. You are not obliged to enjoy, you are allowed not to enjoy.”Slavoj Žižek · psychoanalysis today — permission not to enjoy
“It is not that if God doesn't exist everything is permitted, but if God doesn't exist everything is prohibited... if God exists then everything is permitted.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's reversal of Dostoevsky — theism/atheism both produce their opposite
“The true utopia today is not a different order, it's the idea that the existing order can function indefinitely.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal capitalism as the real utopia
“The future will be utopian or there will be none.”Slavoj Žižek · utopia as survival imperative
“If you say you are inhuman, it means non-humanity, an excess over humanity but an excess which is inherent to humanity itself.”Slavoj Žižek · infinite judgment — inhuman excess as the kernel of humanity
“Multitude already is an effect of the inconsistency of the one with itself, of the fact that the one cannot coincide with itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Deleuze critique — multiplicity as secondary to self-difference of the One
“True utopia for me is not a matter of the future, is something to be immediately enacted when there is no other way. Utopia in this sense simply means do what appears within the given symbolic coordinates as impossible.”Slavoj Žižek · real utopia — enacting the impossible now
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Today everybody's talking about virtual reality. But I think frankly that virtual reality is a rather miserable idea. It simply means let us reproduce in an artificial digital medium our experience of reality. I think that a much more interesting notion, crucial to understand what goes on today, is the opposite, not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual. That is to say reality, by this I mean efficacy, effectiveness, real effects produced generated by something which does not yet fully exist, which is not yet fully actual. In what sense can we talk about this? Oh, in many, maybe even too many senses. At least in three senses, if we take as the starting point the well-known Lacanian triad of imaginary, symbolic and real. We have, to put it in simple terms, an imaginary virtual, symbolic virtual and real virtual. First a little bit about the first two of them, less important and then of course the big topic, the real. Imaginary virtual, what it is? Isn't it clear if we look at our most common daily experience of ourselves and of others, that how when we deal with another person, phenomenologically, that is to say the way we immediately experience them, we erase, abstract from the image of the other person, our partner, certain features which are simply too embarrassing to be kept in mind all the time. Like I talk to you, of course rationally I know you are defecating, you are sweating, not to mention other things, but quite literally when I interact with you, this is not part of the image I have of you. So when I deal with you, I'm basically not dealing with the real you, I'm dealing with a virtual image of you. And this image has reality in the sense that it nonetheless structures the way I am dealing with you. And again this idealization is crucial. The negative proof, a wonderful one, would have been letters between James Joyce and his wife Nora, where as far as I know, they went very very far, almost to the end, into accepting each other in the vulgar reality of bodies, like all the sounds, the bad smells and so on, that was even part of their sexual interaction. It's incredible, I admire this in Joyce. So okay, this would be the first elementary level, imaginary virtual, in the sense of the virtual image which determines how we interact with other people. Virtual image in the sense of although we interact with real people, we erase, we behave as if whole strata of the other person are not there. Second level, already a more complex one, symbolic virtual. Oh, it's elementary, let's think about an experience known well to all of us of experiencing authority, let us say paternal authority. Isn't it clear that this authority in order to be operative, in order to be experienced precisely, that's the nice paradox, in order to be experienced as actual, effective authority, it has to remain virtual, virtual in the sense of a threat? If authority is enacted too directly, it is paradoxically experienced as a sign of impotence. Concretely, father who truly is an authority doesn't have to beat you or to shout at you and so on. It's just this look, a threatening look and you obey. If your father loses his nerves and slaps you, starts to shout and so on, it can be physically painful, but let's admit it, there is always an aspect of something ridiculous, impotent, there is something of a furious outburst of a puppet, of a clown in it. Again, this is then one clear example of how symbolic authority in order to be operative, that's the paradox I want to emphasize, has to remain virtual. So it's not just it is actual already as virtual, no, it's actual only as virtual. If it's fully actualized as a realized threat, father beats you, shouts at you, it's self-destructive, it undermines itself as authority. Another example of how the virtual dimension is operative at the symbolic level would have been beliefs. Are we aware to what extent our beliefs today are virtual? By virtual I mean in this case attributed to others, presupposed. They don't actually exist, they are virtual in the sense that nobody really has to believe, we only have to presuppose another person to believe. Elementary example which I am almost embarrassed to mention, if you are a father, a mother, small children, Christmas. Of course if somebody asks you do you really believe in Santa Claus, Christmas, you would say no, I just pretend because of the children, it's not to disappoint them. But then we know how the game goes on and on. If you ask the children they say no, we just play that we are naive not to disappoint our parents and to make sure that we get the presents and so on and so on. But it's not only with children, it's even with our political life, I'm tempted to claim. Now in our so-called, wrongly so-called I claim because we believe more than ever, in our so-called cynical era, for example I don't think anyone believes in democracy but nonetheless we want to maintain appearances. That is to say there is some purely virtual entity whom we do not want to disappoint, who has to be kept innocent, ignorant, because of whom we have to pretend. So the paradox is that although nobody effectively believes, it is enough that everybody presupposes somebody, someone else to believe and the belief is actual, it structures reality, it functions. Again the paradox is here then similar as the one of authority. It's not only that a belief which is a virtual belief, not belief of an actual person but always attributed to other, let's call it along Lacanian lines the subject supposed to believe, it's not only that a belief already as virtual, as merely presupposed already is actual, I'm tempted to claim that many of our daily beliefs in order to function socially as beliefs have to remain virtual in this sense. Because if we believe too immediately, then I think it's again self-destructive for an ideology. We no longer appear normal subjects, we appear idiots. Like we all know how it is when we encounter somebody who takes too directly his or her religious beliefs or political beliefs, there is something monstrous about somebody who directly identifies with it. It is as if he or she is no longer a real person, it is as if he or she turns into a kind of a puppet. So I hope now these two levels are relatively clear, the first two levels of virtuality, imaginary virtuality, symbolic virtuality. But now of course the true treasure is waiting for us, real virtuality. So the real virtual. Well, the problem here, the catch of course is the notion of the real. So this may appear boring but we have to go again through the triad imaginary, symbolic, real. Because when Lacan defines this triad as the triad of a knot, borromean knot, it means that they are literally interwoven in the sense that the entire triad is reflected into each of the three terms. Which means to put it bluntly that there is again imaginary real, symbolic real and real real. What would be the imaginary real? Images, but images which are so strong, so traumatic, that they are real, too strong to be perceived but still images. Simply think about incredible breathtaking catastrophes, think about monsters, think about precisely what in science fiction or horror is called The Thing. Think about movies like Alien, this terrifying creatures, too strong to be directly confronted. But nonetheless it's imaginary because it's an image which is too strong to be confronted. Even if you cannot confront it we are still moving at the imaginary level. That would be the imaginary real. Then the symbolic real. It's simply for example scientific discourse, scientific formulas like quantum physics. Why is this real? For a simple reason, the minimum definition of the real for Lacan is that which resists symbolization, inclusion into our universe of meaning. And isn't it that precisely which happens for example with quantum physics? What is quantum physics? Formulas which work, experimentally confirmed and so on and so on. But we cannot translate them into our daily experience of ordinary reality. As we all know this is what is so traumatic about quantum physics, we literally cannot understand it. Not in the sense that we common people idiots cannot understand it, only a couple of scientists can, even they cannot. In what sense? In the sense that it just works, but if you try to build a consistent ontology out of it, again you get meaningless results, you get time running backwards, you get parallel universes or whatever. In other words you get things which simply are meaningless with regard to our ordinary notion of reality. So this would be symbolic real. Symbolic, obviously it is symbolic, formulas, pure signifiers, they function, it's a functioning machine, but meaningless. We cannot make any sense out of it. We cannot relate it to our experience. Which is why we try so desperately to do it, which is why we try to invent metaphors to imagine quantum universe, but it cannot be done. Then finally we are coming to the real real, which is precisely not what is usually identified as the real. This would have been the first real, the imaginary real, a too traumatic image. What then is this famous real real, the very core of the real? Let me approach it at two levels. The first level is still relatively close to the symbolic order. It would have been all that accompanies the symbolic level as its obscene shadow. Think about army units, how they function. You have discipline, symbolic machine, symbolic order, drill and so on. But as we all know this is sustained by a kind of obscene shadowy reality of among other things so-called marching chants. In every movie about the Marines you hear them, these songs which are extremely interesting songs that soldiers sing by their training, marching, because they are characterized by meaningless rhymes combined with sadistic or sexually perverse obscenities. One example that I remember, I think it is from From An Officer and a Gentleman the movie, where Marines are singing something like "I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold." The enigma is again why does the military discourse need this? So this would be one level, this shadowy virtual reality of affects which has to accompany the official discourse. But let's move a little bit deeper. Let's think about well, one of the great achievements of Western civilization, a movie like The Sound of Music. Officially as we all know it's a story about small anti-fascist democratic Austrians, at the political level that is to say, I will leave out all the singing aspect, small honest democratic Austrians fighting, resisting the Nazi occupation of Austria in '38. But, but, look at the movie really closely, look at its texture and you will discover a quite different reality, a kind of a virtual reality of the officially depicted narrative reality. If you look at how Austrians are depicted in the movie, you will discover to cut a long story short that they are precisely depicted as a kind of a smallish beautiful provincial fascists. Their idiocy is emphasized, local folkloric dresses and so on. They are presented directly as anti-intellectual, rooted in narrow lifeworld and so on. Now look at how the occupying invading Nazis are presented. They are not mostly soldiers but managers, bureaucrats, exquisitely dressed, with short mustaches, smoking expensive cigarettes and so on. In other words almost a caricature of cosmopolitan decadent corrupted Jew. So that's my point, at the level of simple narrative reality we get one message, democratic resistance to Nazism. But at the level of let's call it virtual texture, all this micro-micro-signs, maybe we could even call it writing, we get practically the opposite message, which is honest fascists resisting decadent Jewish cosmopolitan takeover. And incidentally maybe this is at least one of the reasons why this movie was so extremely popular. While officially agreeing with our democratic ideology, it at the same time addressed our secret fascist dreams. But let's take a more serious example, Robert Altman masterpiece Short Cuts. Again at the narrative level we get a simple story or rather nine, ten stories, parallel stories depicting desperate everyday life of Los Angeles, L.A. middle classes. It's a portrait of today's alienation, solitude and so on. But again the very texture of the film I claim is a much more optimistic one. It's a kind of celebration of this magic of contingent encounters generating unexpected effects of meaning. So I think that in a similar way to how we should read Sound of Music, it is wrong to read Short Cuts simply as a kind of a social critical piece. There is another much more optimistic life-asserting even level. So to provide the formula of this real virtual, let me refer to a recent paradoxical statement by none other than Donald Rumsfeld. I think that this statement was an important contribution to contemporary American philosophical debate. This happened in March just before the war on Iraq where Rumsfeld elaborated the relationship between known and unknown. First he said there are known knowns, there are things we know that we know. Like we knew at that point that Saddam was the president of Iraq. Okay, everything clear. Then he went on there are known unknowns, there are things that we know that we don't know. The idea was for example we know that we don't know how many weapons of mass destruction Saddam has. Okay, now we know he had none, doesn't matter, at that point it appeared like this. Then there is the unknown unknown, things we don't know that we don't know. Things which are so foreign, so unimaginable that we even don't know that we don't know. For example maybe Saddam had some unimaginable totally unexpected weapon. And here unfortunately Rumsfeld stopped because I think he should have gone on, making the next step to the fourth category, fourth variation which is missing, which is not the known unknown but the unknown knowns. Things we don't know we know them. We know them, they are part of our identity, they determine our activity, but we don't know that we know them. This is what in psychoanalysis of course is called unconscious, unconscious fantasies, unconscious prejudices and so on and so on. And I think that this level is crucial. To refer to previous two examples from movies, in The Sound of Music, what we directly know is that it's a movie about anti-fascist resistance of modest honest Austrians. What we don't know that we know is that it's also the opposite, that is the movie about fascists resisting the Jewish takeover. And the tragedy of today's American politics I think is that precisely they are not aware of this unknown knowns. Which is why there was a deep truth in one of the statements of that unfortunate Iraqi Minister of Information. We were all laughing at him during the last Iraqi war because of his ridiculous statements denying the obvious. But at one point I claim what he told was absolutely true. When towards the end of the war he was asked is it true that Americans already control, American forces, part of the Baghdad airport, he said not true, Americans don't control even themselves. Perfect truth. Why? Because they don't know what they know. And this what you don't know that you know controls you but you don't control it. Okay, so now we come to the really real, real core of the real, much more fundamental than this purely symbolic real but which paradoxically is at the same time the most virtual real. It is what? Let us think about attractors in mathematics or in physics. For example you have small pieces of of iron and you throw them around a magnetic field. They are dispersed following a certain shape, infinitely approaching this shape but this shape of course is not existing in itself. It's just something that you can abstract, isolate from the from the dispersion of the small pieces of iron. That's the idea of virtual real. It's a shape, this is the real of this field, but it's not, it doesn't exist in itself. It's just an abstract form which structures the disposition of actually existing elements around it. Now what has this to do with psychoanalytic problematic or even more with political problematic? My idea is a lot. Let's think about the precise status of trauma in psychoanalysis. It is similar to this non-existing attractor. That is to say, more closely, Freud shifted his position as we all know with regard to trauma. He shifted his position in an in a way which is strangely enough parallel to the shift in Einstein's theory of relativity, the shift from special to general theory of relativity. This shift in theory of relativity concerns the reference to the curved space, curvature of space. As most of us I hope know, for Einstein first, in a first approach, it was the presence of the density of matter, of stuff, which curved the space. Space was originally perceived as empty space, abstractly, was symmetrical, non-curved, then the presence of stuff curves it. But then in a second step Einstein accomplished a wonderful reversal. He just turned the terms around. It was not the presence of matter of stuff which curves the space, it was on the contrary the curvature of the space which was primordial. And what we perceive as matter is just a kind of a reified fetishist misperception of a purely formal curvature of the space. And I claim it's exactly like this in the psychoanalytic notion of trauma. In the first approach Freud imagined trauma as some kind of dense raw presence, presence of some real which brutally intrudes into our symbolic space and curves it. Quite literally, let's imagine that I have my well-balanced symbolic space then something traumatic happens to me, I am raped, I witness a terrifying event, I'm tortured, whatever. And because of the traumatic impact of this event my symbolic space gets curved. Some things can no longer be symbolized, the function of those symbol has to be taken over with other symbols. There is a kind of imbalance, there is a gap in my symbolic space. This would be the first approach. But then Freud noticed some strange things. What things? Let's recall his best known analysis of Wolfman. The traumatic scene there of course is the small child Wolfman witnessing the parental *coitus a tergo*. But let's look at it in a much more precise way. What effectively happens there? It's not that this was simply a trauma. As a small one year and a half old child, Wolfman did not find anything traumatic in this scene. He just perceived it and stored it. It was three-four years later when Wolfman started to develop his theories, infantile theories of sexuality and because he was not able to account for sexuality, in other words because the symbolic space of his sexual theories was curved, it is only at this point that he resuscitated the traumatic scene. So I think in clear parallel to Einstein we can see how here it's the other way around. The primordial fact is not some brutal intrusion of the real, of a traumatic real. The primordial fact and also the primordial real is a purely formal imbalance. The symbolic space is curved, it's cut across by an antagonism, imbalanced and so on. And to account for this you need a reference to some real. Which is of course the real, the real in the sense of the traumatic appearance. It's an allure here, a trap. So what does this notion of the virtual real as trauma, trauma as virtual, what does this notion mean for politics? Can this serve us in order to analyze political ideological phenomena? Of course. Let's just recall how anti-Semitism functions. In its fascist version anti-Semitism or rather the figure of the Jew, the Jewish plot is precisely an external trauma which brutally intrudes disturbing social balance, curving as it were the social space. Society was supposed to be harmonious, balanced, then Jews intervened, distorted its as it were natural order. But of course here at least we should be Marxist and turn things around. It's not that there is disorder, antagonism, disintegration, class struggle because of the Jews. Class struggle or more generally social antagonism comes first. That is to say social space is in itself already curved, imbalanced and in order to imaginarily, in an imaginary way account for it, we invent the figure of the Jew. That is to say we project the cause of it into the figure of the Jew. Even at a more fundamental level of today's economic constellation, I think that this notion of real as virtual can help us to critically reject a category which is more and more popular with politically correct post-colonial authors, the notion of so-called alternate or alternative modernity. The idea is to put it simply the following one: of course there are inconsistencies, antagonisms, repressive potentials in the notion of modernity, which ultimately means of course capitalism as the force of modernity. But, so the story goes, these antagonistic repressive elements are not part of the very concept of modernity but are only limited to the Anglo-Saxon, West European model of modernization. Why then should there not be other alternate modernities where you can have modernization but without this alienating effects which characterize Western European process of modernization? Without socially disruptive processes, without alienation, without exploitation, without ecological catastrophes and so on and so on. And then of course it's free for grab, anybody can have his or her own modernity. You can say we can have then Latin American modernity as alternate modernity, we can have African modernity, we can have Asian modernity, whatever. So what is the problem with this approach, which is basically an approach of historicist nominalism? Because the underlying logic is that in famous pseudo-deconstructionist logic of there is no modernity as such, there are only particular modernities like West European, African, Latin American and so on and so on. Of course this is true. The problem is elsewhere. The problem is that through this nominalist reduction, again by claiming that only particular modernities effectively exist, the site of antagonism is reduced to only one particular modernity. It is no longer modernity as such which is characterized by antagonism, imbalance. Imbalance is dismissed as just pertaining to a certain species of particular species of modernity. And what is problematic with this? Well, to put it very simply, did we not have already in the early 20th century, in the first part of the 20th century, one big well-known project of alternate modernity? It was called fascism. Fascism was precisely the first big attempt to build an alternate modernity. That is to say to have the process of modernization, industrial development and so on, but without paying the price of alienation, social disintegration and so on and so on. What should we then oppose to this model? We should oppose to it the idea that some antagonism, we can call it by different names, Marxist would have called traditional Marxist would have called class struggle, Frankfurt School would have called it dialectic of enlightenment, but the idea being that there is some antagonistic potential in the very project of capitalist modernity. That is to say that all this phenomena that we deplore, wars, violences, concentration camps, new fundamentalism, you name it, that all this is not simply a regression or as Habermas would have put it a sign of modernity as an unfinished project, but is part of the very project of modernity. This is what gets lost. Which is why I think that although it wants to be historicist, critical, this idea of reducing the antagonistic aspects of modernity to just one particular form of modernity is deeply ideological. Because it saves unblemished the general notion of modernization. What we should insist on is on the contrary as I've just said that there is an antagonism inherent to the very universal notion of modernity. And now I'm coming to my point, so that the particular species of modernity are not just examples or exemplifications of their universal genus, of their universal notion, but they are in a way reactions to it, they fight it. Modernity as a universal notion names a certain deadlock, a certain antagonism and particular really existing forms of modernity are attempts to resolve this deadlock, to solve the problem. Liberal capitalism as one form of modernity wants to solve the deadlock of modernity in a certain way through market freedoms and so on. Fascist modernization in a different way, Latin American modernization in a different way. So what's properly dialectical here? It's again this very reversal of the usual constellation. It's not that struggle is at the level of the particular content while universality is just some kind of neutral empty container, so that universal means some encompassing global notion and then within this notion particular forms struggle like fascist modernization against liberal modernization and so on and so on. No, the site of the struggle is universal antagonism itself and all particular actually existing modernisms are attempts to cover up, resolve this problem. So again we should remember this that the site of antagonism is universality. What has this to do with virtual as real? Precisely this site of universality as the site of antagonism is virtual. In what sense? In the sense that there is no universal modernization, it's just a certain virtual constellation of a certain antagonism. All that exists, nominalists are here right, all that effectively exist are just particular forms of modernization. There is no modernization as such, there only is Anglo-Saxon, Latin American, African and so on, fascist modernization. But in order to grasp the very dynamic of these particular forms one has to refer them to this their absent cause, to the big antagonism to which they react. So again this would have been another example of how the notion of virtual as real is operative, of how it is a necessary notion if we are to grasp the concrete social dynamic, especially of today's global capitalism. So the conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the category of the real is ultimately a purely formal category. It's not a category of some formless content disturbing order, it's a pure structural gap. It's an entirely non-substantial category. It's if we may put it in this terms, it's a difference but a pure difference. A pure difference in the sense that it's a difference which is paradoxically prior to what it is the difference between. So it's not that we have two terms and there is a difference between the two terms. Paradoxically the two positive terms appear afterwards as attempts to to dominate, cover up the tension and so on of this difference. Again, how can this be? Another simple example just to illustrate this logic. The political distinction, I know it's half forgotten today, nobody wants to hear about it but nonetheless, the distinction between Left and Right. The first thing that strikes the eye about this distinction if we take it seriously is that it's not just a distinction within a certain social whole. It's not that in a certain society if we take into account all political forces we can say these are Right-wing forces, these are Left-wing forces and then all the intermediate phenomena in between, Center, Center-Left, Center-Right, whatever you want. It's different. It is that if you ask a Right-winger how is the entire social field structured, you will get a totally different answer than if you ask a Left-winger or for that matter if you ask a Centrist. To simplify it, a Right-winger will tell you that society is an organic harmonious unity, at least the traditional Right-winger, and that Left radicals are external intruders. What is anathema for radical conservative is the idea that there is an antagonism, an imbalance inscribed into the very heart of the social edifice. For a Left-winger the struggle is admitted as central. So again the point is that there is no neutral way to define the difference between Left and Right. In itself it's a void, it's just that you can approach it either from the Leftist or from the Rightist point of view. And incidentally for Lacan it's exactly in the same way that also sexual difference functions. Sexual difference is not a difference between the two species of humanity in general but it's the within from the male perspective sexual difference itself appears in a different way than from the feminine perspective. So again difference paradoxically comes first. Crucial philosophically is this let's call it pure formalism. And against the reproach that we are dealing here with some kind of idealism, isn't matter in its positive inert presence primordial, I think that we should reject this reproach and precisely insist on this notion of how should I call it purely formal materialism, materialism as materialism of the difference. The minimal feature of materialism being that there is a pure difference, that there is a crack, an antagonism in within the order of the one. That the primordial fact is pure self-difference. I'm very precise here, self-difference and not any kind of this mythological polar opposites, feminine-masculine, light-darkness, Yin-Yang and so on. I think that here radical materialism should be even critical towards Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze who likes to assert some kind of primordial multitude as the ultimate ontological fact. From the radical perspective that I am advocating, multitude already is an effect of the inconsistency of the one with itself, of the fact that the one cannot coincide with itself. Or to put it in a slightly different way, we do not have some primordial polarity like masculine-feminine, light-darkness and then we can play all this New Age agnostic games of how in our era we put too much accent on one pole and we have to re-establish the balance, like we are too rational-masculine, let's put more accent on the feminine-emotional side, whatever. No, it's more radical. It's as if as Lacan puts it the binary signifier is primordially repressed, which means the second element is always missing and this lack of the counter-point, we have one but we don't have the accompanying other, and this original imbalance then sets in motion the generation of multiplicity. Again an extremely simple example from one of the early movies by Woody Allen, I think it's Love and Death, a kind of a parody on Tolstoy, where again the whole movie topic focuses on topic of Tolstoy. So of course our first enigma is here where is Dostoevsky? The other natural supplement to Tolstoy. There is no Dostoevsky, so what happens in the movie as a kind of a return of the repressed is that in one wonderful short scene when two main characters talk with each other all the big titles of Dostoevsky novels emerge, like do you know what happened with that Idiot, ah you mean the one of the Karamazov brothers, yes he did his crime it was punished, then he went underground turned into a gambler and so on and so on. So the lesson of this is ontological lesson is one cannot coincide with itself, pure difference, because of this pure difference as a secondary effect the multitude explodes. So again against the usual reproach is this not idealism, I would say that today it is rather idealism which is materialist. Today's opposition I'm tempted to claim between materialism and idealism is that today's idealism or rather spiritualism clings to this famous density, inertia of experience of matter, of earth, of the stuff. No wonder that the greatest arguably spiritual movie director, the Russian Tarkovsky was at the same time practically obsessed by the topic of inertia of matter, density of matter, matter in decay. In his films when heroes are praying they don't pray looking upwards, they pray by sometimes literally immersing their heads into mud, close contact with earth. So I think the thing to do today is to oppose to this kind of spiritual materialist, spiritual materialism, the pure formalism of true radical materialism. Which is why for me quantum physics is ultimately a deeply materialist theory, where you don't need any positivity of matter, you can do everything with purely formal oscillations and so on. So again back to this central insight that difference comes first, difference, how to think a difference which is prior to the elements it is the difference of. Immanuel Kant in his already in his early writings introduces here a crucial distinction, a very strange but clear distinction, a distinction between negative judgment and infinite judgment. That is to say as Kant puts it it is not the same thing to say you aren't human and to say you are inhuman. If we I say you aren't human, it simply means you are external to humanity, you are animal, divine whatever, it's outside. But if I say, not if I as Kant puts it, if I do not simply negate a predicate but if I affirm a non-predicate, so again if I don't say simply you aren't human but if I say you are inhuman, it means non-humanity, an excess over humanity but an excess which is inherent to humanity itself. To give you another example which will make it clear, let's just think about Stephen King horror novels, the well-known category of the undead. We can feel the difference, if I say you aren't dead, it's not the same as saying you are undead. If I say you aren't dead it simply means you are alive and nothing more, nothing mysterious. But as every reader of horror novels knows, if I say you are undead it means you are the living dead, you are alive precisely as dead. Immanuel Kant's point is that human freedom has exactly such a status. It's something which is neither nature, animals are not free, they are enslaved to their instincts, nor culture. Culture is already symbolic law, symbolic regulation. But the conclusion to be drawn from Kant and consequently from Freud and Lacan is that what cultural symbolic prohibitions try to regulate, to master, to dominate, to domesticate whatever you want, is not directly nature, natural instincts, but it's this zero-level inhuman excess, to use Lacan's pun, the extimate kernel of humanity, the inhuman dimension in exactly the same sense in which we talk about the undead. Not inhuman as external to humanity but a monstrous excess of some radical wild freedom which is inherent to humanity itself. So again we have this paradox that the difference between nature and culture is a level of its own, is neither nature nor culture, it's some kind of crazy excess. So what would then a politics of pure difference be? Well, first per negationem, what it would not be. It would definitely not be what emerges today more and more as the ultimate horizon of the political, the so-called identity politics or more broadly the politics of recognizing the differences, of tolerating differences. What is for me problematic in this multiculturalist tolerant politics and so on, it's not just the vulgar fact that they effectively even if they deny it neglect economic struggle, it's the very logic of the struggle. The logic of multiculturalist struggle, of anti-racist struggle, of sexist struggle, struggle against sexism is again the logic of recognizing differences. For example in anti-sexist struggle, the goal of course is not even for radical feminists, I don't know, to kill to annihilate men, it's to establish an open field within which both sexes, all different sexual positions, sexual identities, cultural identities inclusive, will be allowed to thrive freely, so that one will not articulate itself at the expense of others. Again, again, in the anti-racist struggle the ultimate horizon is that of opening up the space for differences. Each ethnic group, religious group, cultural group, way of life group should have the freedom to freely deploy, articulate its potentials, its positions. But this conceptual field, the field of openness towards the other, of tolerating, allowing for differences as the ultimate ethical horizon, this I claim should not, cannot be our ultimate horizon. Because we can immediately see that, to use the simplified example, class struggle. My God, the ultimate goal of the class struggle is not for proletarians to allow the bourgeois and bourgeois to allow proletarians to freely deploy their own their own potentials and so on and so on. It's an antagonistic struggle, the goal is not to let the the multitude be, the goal is to annihilate the enemy. It's an it's a totally different logic. It's the logic of animosity, it's the logic of antagonistic struggle, which also involves a totally different notion of universality. The notion of universality here is no longer universality as the encompassing medium, container of the plurality of positions, sexual positions, cultural positions or whatever. No, universality is here the universality of struggle itself. There is also a central paradox to this struggling position. The position of struggle does not mean the position of a particular identity and the abandonment of the universal notion of truth. The abandonment of universal notion of truth goes very well with multiculturalist politics where we can say everybody has the right to narrate its own version of truth, there is no global truth. No, our position should be there is universal truth, there always is one universal truth of a certain situation. But this truth is accessible only from a specific partial engaged, engaged in the struggle, standpoint. So it's not that we arrive at universal truth by abstracting from our particular engagement, from our particular interests, the idea being each of us has its own interests, positions, but the truth of a situation emerges when we can step as it were outside ourselves and look at the situation more objectively the way it really is. No, on the contrary we should fully assume the paradox of universal truth being accessible only through a partial engaged position. This I think is more precious than ever to maintain today. And this is the reason why at the social level I think we should cling to the notion of collective as it was till now practiced in three forms: messianic religious collectives, revolutionary parties and psychoanalytic communities. They both share, sorry, all three of them, they share precisely this same notion of universality accessible only through an engaged, struggling subjective position. This politics of pure difference is opposed today by another I would call it politics of the real, but the real of the superego in precisely the sense I already talked about, that is to say superego injunction, the obscene virtual superego injunction to enjoy. So how does this superego injunction function today in the hegemonic mode of of of a social identification? To put it in extremely simplified terms, the old functioning of ethics was that of moderation. The ultimate task of ethics was to moderate it, like do it but not excessively. Eat, drink, not too much, sex, not too much, it was the ethics of the proper measure. Today I claim a different kind of ethics is emerging. An ethics which on the one hand allows you limitless consumption, no moderation, go to the end, but why? Because the object in itself is already deprived of its dangerous substance as it were. The whole series of products that we find today on the market, decaf coffee, beer without alcohol, sugar without sugar, that is to say the product where you get the effect but deprived of its potentially dangerous substance. So that today the injunction is no longer drink coffee but moderately, it is have as much coffee as you want because coffee is already in itself decaffeinated coffee. Maybe the best, slightly tasteless, but what the hell why not, the best metaphor for this product is something that I saw two-three years ago in Los Angeles, it's the paradox of a chocolate laxative. Of course chocolate being that which gives you constipation, with the publicity I remember it, "Still constipated? Not a problem, eat more of our chocolate." So that's the paradox, that the chocolate is already its own remedy in a kind of almost Hegelian direct coincidence of the of the opposites. So why is this interesting? Precisely because I claim it's not limited only to phenomena of commodities. What interests me is how we can locate the same logic, also the same paradoxical logic of an a product being its own counter-effect, already and also at within the social field. For example, let's take the big topic of tolerance. What does it mean? I claim it has precisely the structure of chocolate laxative. That is to say tolerance is a mode of appearance of its own opposite, of intolerance. Because what does it mean tolerance today? It means tolerate the differences which again means don't harass me. Tolerance means tolerate me means don't harass me. What does it mean don't harass me? It means precisely don't come too close to me. If you come too close to me with your excessive enjoyment, you disturb me, you harass. So we have then this idea that practically everything can be a form of harassment. I look at you, it's potential sexual harassment, I speak too loudly, it's verbal harassment whatever. Every every over-proximity of another human being can be potentially a form of harassment. And I think that this fear of harassment is precisely fundamental form of intolerance today. And so again I claim that when we talk about tolerance today, it means precisely tolerance as avoiding harassment which means intolerance. It means let's tolerate each other, again which means let's keep from each other at a proper distance from each other. Yet another chocolate laxative phenomenon. Isn't it the way we deal with wealth today? The exemplary figure today for me here is somebody like George Soros. Half the day he engages in the most ruthless financial exploitations ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands even millions. The other half he just gives part of it back. So the morning is chocolate, the afternoon it's laxative. Like, you know, involving all these human aid programs and so on, political democratization and so on and so on. So again, instead of simply not engage in ruthless speculation, he does it but then includes counteraction. And even more radically, is it not exactly the same with war today? I think that Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist, was well justified in inventing the term the term militarist pacifism or humanitarian militarism for what goes on today where all the wars are declared as wars for peace. It's not only that their ultimate goal is defined as to bring peace into Iraq, to remove the threat of war and so on and so on. It's even more radically it is that the war operation itself resembles more and more a kind of a humanitarian intervention to help the people there. If you read for example the recent justification of attack on Iraq, it's not so much that Iraq was attacked in order to remove the threat to the Western nation of Saddam, it was in order to help the Iraqi people and so on and so on. No wonder then that the ultimate chocolate laxative, no wonder that the concentration camps the as Giorgio Agamben claims the typical exemplary case of a 20th century collective, has precisely this both aspects, again chocolate laxative structure. The aspect of isolating the enemy, Guantanamo or whatever, and the aspect of concentrating people for in order to give them, to provide them with humanitarian aid. So what this means are two things. First, I don't think that it is justified to talk today about consumption, we live in a society of consumption and so on. On the contrary I claim we consume less than ever if consuming means taking the risk, really opening yourself. Which is why incidentally we are so afraid of of smoking. I claim it's not simply medical results and so on. What is so terrifying in smoking is somebody really consuming the smoke with all the dangers this involves. I think that the true consumers today are drug addicts, chain smokers and so on. And they are the figures of horror today if anything. Again the structure is that of chocolate laxative, which is why we are all looking even at this level for products which would be already a kind of decaf coffee. Which is why I think marijuana is so popular, because it's kind of decaf opium, de facto no opium without opium, you can have it but deprived of its a dangerous substance. So to conclude this brief reflection, I would say that today the fundamental as it were ethical injunction, the injunction society bombards us with, is no longer the injunction to control yourself, to repress your strivings or whatever. It's on the contrary the injunction to enjoy it, to go to the end. This is what we feel guilty about today. And this I think also changes fundamentally the role of psychoanalysis. It does not make it outdated, it's more actual than ever, only its its function fundamentally changed. In the good old days or so it appeared, now it's clear that it never was simply like that, the idea was the following one. Let's say you are sexually frustrated because you internalized some paternal or other prohibitions, you cannot enjoy sex and the function of psychoanalysis is to to relieve you, release you of the pressure of this internalized prohibitions so you can let yourself go, you can enjoy. And in other words you feel guilty if you transgress social prohibitions in order to enjoy. Today it's almost the opposite. You feel guilty if you cannot make it, if you cannot enjoy. And we shouldn't take here enjoyment just in the immediate sense of sex, sensual pleasure of drinking whatever. It can be enjoyment of power, social success, professional success, it can be even spiritual enjoyment in the New Age sense, agnostic sense of realizing your ego and so on and so on. What we are getting today is that you feel guilty if in this sense you cannot enjoy yourself. So this brings us I claim to a double function of psychoanalysis today. A, its message is not relax get rid of prohibitions. Its message is as Alain Badiou put it in wonderful terms, you should learn to become a pitiless censor of yourself. The role of psychoanalysis today is not to enable you to enjoy, but to open up a space in which you are allowed not to enjoy. That's the fundamental message of psychoanalysis today. You are not obliged to enjoy, you are allowed not to enjoy. Which of course is not the same as saying you are prohibited to enjoy. Just you are allowed not to enjoy. This confronts us furthermore with the paradoxes of today's superego, which is how on the one hand permissivity ends up in its opposite. Like today the injunction is enjoy, the result is more prohibitions, regulations than ever. You can enjoy yourself but in order to enjoy yourself properly you are ordered to what? Not to eat too much, to engage in jogging, to take care of your fitness, not to smoke and so on and so on. Just look around and I think there is nothing more miserable today than those younger couples or people who organize their life in order to enjoy themselves, the regulation is total. On the other hand we have the opposite paradox which is that the so-called newly emerging fundamentalism is not here in order to introduce some new stability, to give you firm ethical foundation in today's world where there are no firm stable values and so on, but on the contrary I claim it is here to open up as a kind of a false space of freedom. I'm referring here of course implicitly to Lacan's famous reversal of the Dostoevsky motto. According to Lacan it is not that if God doesn't exist everything is permitted, but if God doesn't exist everything is prohibited. This is the lesson of the hedonistic yuppies. And the opposite lesson, no less crucial: if God exists then everything is permitted, which means if you can justify your role as that of being the instrument of the divine will, in other words you hear voices you have the contact with the guy up there, either George Bush or Osama bin Laden, as many people noticed this is what they have in common, they both hear directly from up there, then you can do whatever you want. You can do terrorist acts, bomb countries and so on. So here we see how difficult it is to orient ourselves in today's constellation where there is a certain urge to false freedom inherent to the system itself. Which is why I claim the main task today is to reinvent utopia, a space of utopia. What do I mean by this? It's not of course the old-fashioned utopia which is the utopia of imagining ideal world about which we know in advance that it will never be realized. The big models here are of course Plato's Republic, Thomas More utopia and we should not forget Marquis de Sade Philosophy in the Boudoir. That's the classical utopia. Then we have what I'm tempted to call the capitalist utopia, this unbridled solicitation of new and new desires which can go pretty far, like today I learned that in United States they are in some communities seriously considering the idea that necrophiliacs, those who want to play sexual games with corpses dead bodies, are seriously deprived, so isn't it the duty of our society to provide them with corpses? Can it be done in some way so that people sign voluntarily in the same way that you sign that that if you die your heart your organs can be used, that your body can be used to be delivered to necrophiliacs and so on and so on? The problem here is that radical as this may appear there is something ridiculously benign about it, about this capitalist utopia. You can go to the end, basically nothing happens. But we have a third utopia which is again neither this classical utopia of imagining an alternative universe not even dreaming about really realizing it, then the capitalist utopia of ever new desires, extreme forms of satisfying your desires. There is a third mode which I would say is precisely the real, the the real core of utopia. I think a truly radical utopia is not an exercise in free imagination, like you sit down don't have anything wiser to do than to imagine possible ideal worlds. It's something that you do literally as out of an inner urge. You have to invent something new when you cannot do it otherwise. True utopia for me is not a matter of the future, is something to be immediately enacted when there is no other way. Utopia in this sense simply means do what appears within the given symbolic coordinates as impossible. Take the risk, change the very coordinates. And I'm not talking here about something crazy, even big classical well-known even sometimes conservative acts have this utopian dimension. Like to take a ridiculous example, years ago remember Richard Nixon's trip to China. There was almost a utopian dimension to it. Why? Because he did what appeared as impossible. China was portrayed as the ultimate evil superpower, with Soviet Union there was detente not with China. That act changed the entire coordinates, it did the impossible. This is what we need more than ever today. Because ultimately I claim the true utopia today is not a different order, it's the idea that the existing order can function indefinitely. The true utopia I claim was not communism which disintegrated in '89, it was the utopia of the nineties, the idea elaborated among others by Francis Fukuyama that we discovered the final social form, liberal capitalist democracy, that we cannot go further, that it's just a question of making it bit by bit more tolerant, spread it all around the world, but that we have the formula. And I think that if there is a symbolic meaning to September 11th is that the time of that utopia is over, the real of history is back. Which is why today the urge is not to be terrorized by the so-called post-political politics, which tells us ideological times are over, all you can do is just to play the realistic game of accepting the trends and so on and so on. We should dare to to enact the impossible. We should rediscover how to how to not imagine but enact utopia. The point is not again about planning utopias, the the point is about practicing them. And I think this is not a question of of should we do it or should we simply persist in the in the existing order, it's much more radical. It's a matter for survival. The future will be utopian or there will be none.
Today everybody's talking about virtual reality. But I think frankly that virtual reality is a rather miserable idea. It simply means let us reproduce in an artificial digital medium our experience of reality. I think that a much more interesting notion, crucial to understand what goes on today, is the opposite, not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual. That is to say reality, by this I mean efficacy, effectiveness, real effects produced generated by something which does not yet fully exist, which is not yet fully actual. In what sense can we talk about this? Oh, in many, maybe even too many senses. At least in three senses, if we take as the starting point the well-known Lacanian triad of imaginary, symbolic and real. We have, to put it in simple terms, an imaginary virtual, symbolic virtual and real virtual. First a little bit about the first two of them, less important and then of course the big topic, the real. Imaginary virtual, what it is? Isn't it clear if we look at our most common daily experience of ourselves and of others, that how when we deal with another person, phenomenologically, that is to say the way we immediately experience them, we erase, abstract from the image of the other person, our partner, certain features which are simply too embarrassing to be kept in mind all the time. Like I talk to you, of course rationally I know you are defecating, you are sweating, not to mention other things, but quite literally when I interact with you, this is not part of the image I have of you. So when I deal with you, I'm basically not dealing with the real you, I'm dealing with a virtual image of you. And this image has reality in the sense that it nonetheless structures the way I am dealing with you. And again this idealization is crucial. The negative proof, a wonderful one, would have been letters between James Joyce and his wife Nora, where as far as I know, they went very very far, almost to the end, into accepting each other in the vulgar reality of bodies, like all the sounds, the bad smells and so on, that was even part of their sexual interaction. It's incredible, I admire this in Joyce. So okay, this would be the first elementary level, imaginary virtual, in the sense of the virtual image which determines how we interact with other people. Virtual image in the sense of although we interact with real people, we erase, we behave as if whole strata of the other person are not there. Second level, already a more complex one, symbolic virtual. Oh, it's elementary, let's think about an experience known well to all of us of experiencing authority, let us say paternal authority. Isn't it clear that this authority in order to be operative, in order to be experienced precisely, that's the nice paradox, in order to be experienced as actual, effective authority, it has to remain virtual, virtual in the sense of a threat? If authority is enacted too directly, it is paradoxically experienced as a sign of impotence. Concretely, father who truly is an authority doesn't have to beat you or to shout at you and so on. It's just this look, a threatening look and you obey. If your father loses his nerves and slaps you, starts to shout and so on, it can be physically painful, but let's admit it, there is always an aspect of something ridiculous, impotent, there is something of a furious outburst of a puppet, of a clown in it. Again, this is then one clear example of how symbolic authority in order to be operative, that's the paradox I want to emphasize, has to remain virtual. So it's not just it is actual already as virtual, no, it's actual only as virtual. If it's fully actualized as a realized threat, father beats you, shouts at you, it's self-destructive, it undermines itself as authority. Another example of how the virtual dimension is operative at the symbolic level would have been beliefs. Are we aware to what extent our beliefs today are virtual? By virtual I mean in this case attributed to others, presupposed. They don't actually exist, they are virtual in the sense that nobody really has to believe, we only have to presuppose another person to believe. Elementary example which I am almost embarrassed to mention, if you are a father, a mother, small children, Christmas. Of course if somebody asks you do you really believe in Santa Claus, Christmas, you would say no, I just pretend because of the children, it's not to disappoint them. But then we know how the game goes on and on. If you ask the children they say no, we just play that we are naive not to disappoint our parents and to make sure that we get the presents and so on and so on. But it's not only with children, it's even with our political life, I'm tempted to claim. Now in our so-called, wrongly so-called I claim because we believe more than ever, in our so-called cynical era, for example I don't think anyone believes in democracy but nonetheless we want to maintain appearances. That is to say there is some purely virtual entity whom we do not want to disappoint, who has to be kept innocent, ignorant, because of whom we have to pretend. So the paradox is that although nobody effectively believes, it is enough that everybody presupposes somebody, someone else to believe and the belief is actual, it structures reality, it functions. Again the paradox is here then similar as the one of authority. It's not only that a belief which is a virtual belief, not belief of an actual person but always attributed to other, let's call it along Lacanian lines the subject supposed to believe, it's not only that a belief already as virtual, as merely presupposed already is actual, I'm tempted to claim that many of our daily beliefs in order to function socially as beliefs have to remain virtual in this sense. Because if we believe too immediately, then I think it's again self-destructive for an ideology. We no longer appear normal subjects, we appear idiots. Like we all know how it is when we encounter somebody who takes too directly his or her religious beliefs or political beliefs, there is something monstrous about somebody who directly identifies with it. It is as if he or she is no longer a real person, it is as if he or she turns into a kind of a puppet. So I hope now these two levels are relatively clear, the first two levels of virtuality, imaginary virtuality, symbolic virtuality. But now of course the true treasure is waiting for us, real virtuality. So the real virtual. Well, the problem here, the catch of course is the notion of the real. So this may appear boring but we have to go again through the triad imaginary, symbolic, real. Because when Lacan defines this triad as the triad of a knot, borromean knot, it means that they are literally interwoven in the sense that the entire triad is reflected into each of the three terms. Which means to put it bluntly that there is again imaginary real, symbolic real and real real. What would be the imaginary real? Images, but images which are so strong, so traumatic, that they are real, too strong to be perceived but still images. Simply think about incredible breathtaking catastrophes, think about monsters, think about precisely what in science fiction or horror is called The Thing. Think about movies like Alien, this terrifying creatures, too strong to be directly confronted. But nonetheless it's imaginary because it's an image which is too strong to be confronted. Even if you cannot confront it we are still moving at the imaginary level. That would be the imaginary real. Then the symbolic real. It's simply for example scientific discourse, scientific formulas like quantum physics. Why is this real? For a simple reason, the minimum definition of the real for Lacan is that which resists symbolization, inclusion into our universe of meaning. And isn't it that precisely which happens for example with quantum physics? What is quantum physics? Formulas which work, experimentally confirmed and so on and so on. But we cannot translate them into our daily experience of ordinary reality. As we all know this is what is so traumatic about quantum physics, we literally cannot understand it. Not in the sense that we common people idiots cannot understand it, only a couple of scientists can, even they cannot. In what sense? In the sense that it just works, but if you try to build a consistent ontology out of it, again you get meaningless results, you get time running backwards, you get parallel universes or whatever. In other words you get things which simply are meaningless with regard to our ordinary notion of reality. So this would be symbolic real. Symbolic, obviously it is symbolic, formulas, pure signifiers, they function, it's a functioning machine, but meaningless. We cannot make any sense out of it. We cannot relate it to our experience. Which is why we try so desperately to do it, which is why we try to invent metaphors to imagine quantum universe, but it cannot be done. Then finally we are coming to the real real, which is precisely not what is usually identified as the real. This would have been the first real, the imaginary real, a too traumatic image. What then is this famous real real, the very core of the real? Let me approach it at two levels. The first level is still relatively close to the symbolic order. It would have been all that accompanies the symbolic level as its obscene shadow. Think about army units, how they function. You have discipline, symbolic machine, symbolic order, drill and so on. But as we all know this is sustained by a kind of obscene shadowy reality of among other things so-called marching chants. In every movie about the Marines you hear them, these songs which are extremely interesting songs that soldiers sing by their training, marching, because they are characterized by meaningless rhymes combined with sadistic or sexually perverse obscenities. One example that I remember, I think it is from From An Officer and a Gentleman the movie, where Marines are singing something like "I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold." The enigma is again why does the military discourse need this? So this would be one level, this shadowy virtual reality of affects which has to accompany the official discourse. But let's move a little bit deeper. Let's think about well, one of the great achievements of Western civilization, a movie like The Sound of Music. Officially as we all know it's a story about small anti-fascist democratic Austrians, at the political level that is to say, I will leave out all the singing aspect, small honest democratic Austrians fighting, resisting the Nazi occupation of Austria in '38. But, but, look at the movie really closely, look at its texture and you will discover a quite different reality, a kind of a virtual reality of the officially depicted narrative reality. If you look at how Austrians are depicted in the movie, you will discover to cut a long story short that they are precisely depicted as a kind of a smallish beautiful provincial fascists. Their idiocy is emphasized, local folkloric dresses and so on. They are presented directly as anti-intellectual, rooted in narrow lifeworld and so on. Now look at how the occupying invading Nazis are presented. They are not mostly soldiers but managers, bureaucrats, exquisitely dressed, with short mustaches, smoking expensive cigarettes and so on. In other words almost a caricature of cosmopolitan decadent corrupted Jew. So that's my point, at the level of simple narrative reality we get one message, democratic resistance to Nazism. But at the level of let's call it virtual texture, all this micro-micro-signs, maybe we could even call it writing, we get practically the opposite message, which is honest fascists resisting decadent Jewish cosmopolitan takeover. And incidentally maybe this is at least one of the reasons why this movie was so extremely popular. While officially agreeing with our democratic ideology, it at the same time addressed our secret fascist dreams. But let's take a more serious example, Robert Altman masterpiece Short Cuts. Again at the narrative level we get a simple story or rather nine, ten stories, parallel stories depicting desperate everyday life of Los Angeles, L.A. middle classes. It's a portrait of today's alienation, solitude and so on. But again the very texture of the film I claim is a much more optimistic one. It's a kind of celebration of this magic of contingent encounters generating unexpected effects of meaning. So I think that in a similar way to how we should read Sound of Music, it is wrong to read Short Cuts simply as a kind of a social critical piece. There is another much more optimistic life-asserting even level. So to provide the formula of this real virtual, let me refer to a recent paradoxical statement by none other than Donald Rumsfeld. I think that this statement was an important contribution to contemporary American philosophical debate. This happened in March just before the war on Iraq where Rumsfeld elaborated the relationship between known and unknown. First he said there are known knowns, there are things we know that we know. Like we knew at that point that Saddam was the president of Iraq. Okay, everything clear. Then he went on there are known unknowns, there are things that we know that we don't know. The idea was for example we know that we don't know how many weapons of mass destruction Saddam has. Okay, now we know he had none, doesn't matter, at that point it appeared like this. Then there is the unknown unknown, things we don't know that we don't know. Things which are so foreign, so unimaginable that we even don't know that we don't know. For example maybe Saddam had some unimaginable totally unexpected weapon. And here unfortunately Rumsfeld stopped because I think he should have gone on, making the next step to the fourth category, fourth variation which is missing, which is not the known unknown but the unknown knowns. Things we don't know we know them. We know them, they are part of our identity, they determine our activity, but we don't know that we know them. This is what in psychoanalysis of course is called unconscious, unconscious fantasies, unconscious prejudices and so on and so on. And I think that this level is crucial. To refer to previous two examples from movies, in The Sound of Music, what we directly know is that it's a movie about anti-fascist resistance of modest honest Austrians. What we don't know that we know is that it's also the opposite, that is the movie about fascists resisting the Jewish takeover. And the tragedy of today's American politics I think is that precisely they are not aware of this unknown knowns. Which is why there was a deep truth in one of the statements of that unfortunate Iraqi Minister of Information. We were all laughing at him during the last Iraqi war because of his ridiculous statements denying the obvious. But at one point I claim what he told was absolutely true. When towards the end of the war he was asked is it true that Americans already control, American forces, part of the Baghdad airport, he said not true, Americans don't control even themselves. Perfect truth. Why? Because they don't know what they know. And this what you don't know that you know controls you but you don't control it. Okay, so now we come to the really real, real core of the real, much more fundamental than this purely symbolic real but which paradoxically is at the same time the most virtual real. It is what? Let us think about attractors in mathematics or in physics. For example you have small pieces of of iron and you throw them around a magnetic field. They are dispersed following a certain shape, infinitely approaching this shape but this shape of course is not existing in itself. It's just something that you can abstract, isolate from the from the dispersion of the small pieces of iron. That's the idea of virtual real. It's a shape, this is the real of this field, but it's not, it doesn't exist in itself. It's just an abstract form which structures the disposition of actually existing elements around it. Now what has this to do with psychoanalytic problematic or even more with political problematic? My idea is a lot. Let's think about the precise status of trauma in psychoanalysis. It is similar to this non-existing attractor. That is to say, more closely, Freud shifted his position as we all know with regard to trauma. He shifted his position in an in a way which is strangely enough parallel to the shift in Einstein's theory of relativity, the shift from special to general theory of relativity. This shift in theory of relativity concerns the reference to the curved space, curvature of space. As most of us I hope know, for Einstein first, in a first approach, it was the presence of the density of matter, of stuff, which curved the space. Space was originally perceived as empty space, abstractly, was symmetrical, non-curved, then the presence of stuff curves it. But then in a second step Einstein accomplished a wonderful reversal. He just turned the terms around. It was not the presence of matter of stuff which curves the space, it was on the contrary the curvature of the space which was primordial. And what we perceive as matter is just a kind of a reified fetishist misperception of a purely formal curvature of the space. And I claim it's exactly like this in the psychoanalytic notion of trauma. In the first approach Freud imagined trauma as some kind of dense raw presence, presence of some real which brutally intrudes into our symbolic space and curves it. Quite literally, let's imagine that I have my well-balanced symbolic space then something traumatic happens to me, I am raped, I witness a terrifying event, I'm tortured, whatever. And because of the traumatic impact of this event my symbolic space gets curved. Some things can no longer be symbolized, the function of those symbol has to be taken over with other symbols. There is a kind of imbalance, there is a gap in my symbolic space. This would be the first approach. But then Freud noticed some strange things. What things? Let's recall his best known analysis of Wolfman. The traumatic scene there of course is the small child Wolfman witnessing the parental *coitus a tergo*. But let's look at it in a much more precise way. What effectively happens there? It's not that this was simply a trauma. As a small one year and a half old child, Wolfman did not find anything traumatic in this scene. He just perceived it and stored it. It was three-four years later when Wolfman started to develop his theories, infantile theories of sexuality and because he was not able to account for sexuality, in other words because the symbolic space of his sexual theories was curved, it is only at this point that he resuscitated the traumatic scene. So I think in clear parallel to Einstein we can see how here it's the other way around. The primordial fact is not some brutal intrusion of the real, of a traumatic real. The primordial fact and also the primordial real is a purely formal imbalance. The symbolic space is curved, it's cut across by an antagonism, imbalanced and so on. And to account for this you need a reference to some real. Which is of course the real, the real in the sense of the traumatic appearance. It's an allure here, a trap. So what does this notion of the virtual real as trauma, trauma as virtual, what does this notion mean for politics? Can this serve us in order to analyze political ideological phenomena? Of course. Let's just recall how anti-Semitism functions. In its fascist version anti-Semitism or rather the figure of the Jew, the Jewish plot is precisely an external trauma which brutally intrudes disturbing social balance, curving as it were the social space. Society was supposed to be harmonious, balanced, then Jews intervened, distorted its as it were natural order. But of course here at least we should be Marxist and turn things around. It's not that there is disorder, antagonism, disintegration, class struggle because of the Jews. Class struggle or more generally social antagonism comes first. That is to say social space is in itself already curved, imbalanced and in order to imaginarily, in an imaginary way account for it, we invent the figure of the Jew. That is to say we project the cause of it into the figure of the Jew. Even at a more fundamental level of today's economic constellation, I think that this notion of real as virtual can help us to critically reject a category which is more and more popular with politically correct post-colonial authors, the notion of so-called alternate or alternative modernity. The idea is to put it simply the following one: of course there are inconsistencies, antagonisms, repressive potentials in the notion of modernity, which ultimately means of course capitalism as the force of modernity. But, so the story goes, these antagonistic repressive elements are not part of the very concept of modernity but are only limited to the Anglo-Saxon, West European model of modernization. Why then should there not be other alternate modernities where you can have modernization but without this alienating effects which characterize Western European process of modernization? Without socially disruptive processes, without alienation, without exploitation, without ecological catastrophes and so on and so on. And then of course it's free for grab, anybody can have his or her own modernity. You can say we can have then Latin American modernity as alternate modernity, we can have African modernity, we can have Asian modernity, whatever. So what is the problem with this approach, which is basically an approach of historicist nominalism? Because the underlying logic is that in famous pseudo-deconstructionist logic of there is no modernity as such, there are only particular modernities like West European, African, Latin American and so on and so on. Of course this is true. The problem is elsewhere. The problem is that through this nominalist reduction, again by claiming that only particular modernities effectively exist, the site of antagonism is reduced to only one particular modernity. It is no longer modernity as such which is characterized by antagonism, imbalance. Imbalance is dismissed as just pertaining to a certain species of particular species of modernity. And what is problematic with this? Well, to put it very simply, did we not have already in the early 20th century, in the first part of the 20th century, one big well-known project of alternate modernity? It was called fascism. Fascism was precisely the first big attempt to build an alternate modernity. That is to say to have the process of modernization, industrial development and so on, but without paying the price of alienation, social disintegration and so on and so on. What should we then oppose to this model? We should oppose to it the idea that some antagonism, we can call it by different names, Marxist would have called traditional Marxist would have called class struggle, Frankfurt School would have called it dialectic of enlightenment, but the idea being that there is some antagonistic potential in the very project of capitalist modernity. That is to say that all this phenomena that we deplore, wars, violences, concentration camps, new fundamentalism, you name it, that all this is not simply a regression or as Habermas would have put it a sign of modernity as an unfinished project, but is part of the very project of modernity. This is what gets lost. Which is why I think that although it wants to be historicist, critical, this idea of reducing the antagonistic aspects of modernity to just one particular form of modernity is deeply ideological. Because it saves unblemished the general notion of modernization. What we should insist on is on the contrary as I've just said that there is an antagonism inherent to the very universal notion of modernity. And now I'm coming to my point, so that the particular species of modernity are not just examples or exemplifications of their universal genus, of their universal notion, but they are in a way reactions to it, they fight it. Modernity as a universal notion names a certain deadlock, a certain antagonism and particular really existing forms of modernity are attempts to resolve this deadlock, to solve the problem. Liberal capitalism as one form of modernity wants to solve the deadlock of modernity in a certain way through market freedoms and so on. Fascist modernization in a different way, Latin American modernization in a different way. So what's properly dialectical here? It's again this very reversal of the usual constellation. It's not that struggle is at the level of the particular content while universality is just some kind of neutral empty container, so that universal means some encompassing global notion and then within this notion particular forms struggle like fascist modernization against liberal modernization and so on and so on. No, the site of the struggle is universal antagonism itself and all particular actually existing modernisms are attempts to cover up, resolve this problem. So again we should remember this that the site of antagonism is universality. What has this to do with virtual as real? Precisely this site of universality as the site of antagonism is virtual. In what sense? In the sense that there is no universal modernization, it's just a certain virtual constellation of a certain antagonism. All that exists, nominalists are here right, all that effectively exist are just particular forms of modernization. There is no modernization as such, there only is Anglo-Saxon, Latin American, African and so on, fascist modernization. But in order to grasp the very dynamic of these particular forms one has to refer them to this their absent cause, to the big antagonism to which they react. So again this would have been another example of how the notion of virtual as real is operative, of how it is a necessary notion if we are to grasp the concrete social dynamic, especially of today's global capitalism. So the conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the category of the real is ultimately a purely formal category. It's not a category of some formless content disturbing order, it's a pure structural gap. It's an entirely non-substantial category. It's if we may put it in this terms, it's a difference but a pure difference. A pure difference in the sense that it's a difference which is paradoxically prior to what it is the difference between. So it's not that we have two terms and there is a difference between the two terms. Paradoxically the two positive terms appear afterwards as attempts to to dominate, cover up the tension and so on of this difference. Again, how can this be? Another simple example just to illustrate this logic. The political distinction, I know it's half forgotten today, nobody wants to hear about it but nonetheless, the distinction between Left and Right. The first thing that strikes the eye about this distinction if we take it seriously is that it's not just a distinction within a certain social whole. It's not that in a certain society if we take into account all political forces we can say these are Right-wing forces, these are Left-wing forces and then all the intermediate phenomena in between, Center, Center-Left, Center-Right, whatever you want. It's different. It is that if you ask a Right-winger how is the entire social field structured, you will get a totally different answer than if you ask a Left-winger or for that matter if you ask a Centrist. To simplify it, a Right-winger will tell you that society is an organic harmonious unity, at least the traditional Right-winger, and that Left radicals are external intruders. What is anathema for radical conservative is the idea that there is an antagonism, an imbalance inscribed into the very heart of the social edifice. For a Left-winger the struggle is admitted as central. So again the point is that there is no neutral way to define the difference between Left and Right. In itself it's a void, it's just that you can approach it either from the Leftist or from the Rightist point of view. And incidentally for Lacan it's exactly in the same way that also sexual difference functions. Sexual difference is not a difference between the two species of humanity in general but it's the within from the male perspective sexual difference itself appears in a different way than from the feminine perspective. So again difference paradoxically comes first. Crucial philosophically is this let's call it pure formalism. And against the reproach that we are dealing here with some kind of idealism, isn't matter in its positive inert presence primordial, I think that we should reject this reproach and precisely insist on this notion of how should I call it purely formal materialism, materialism as materialism of the difference. The minimal feature of materialism being that there is a pure difference, that there is a crack, an antagonism in within the order of the one. That the primordial fact is pure self-difference. I'm very precise here, self-difference and not any kind of this mythological polar opposites, feminine-masculine, light-darkness, Yin-Yang and so on. I think that here radical materialism should be even critical towards Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze who likes to assert some kind of primordial multitude as the ultimate ontological fact. From the radical perspective that I am advocating, multitude already is an effect of the inconsistency of the one with itself, of the fact that the one cannot coincide with itself. Or to put it in a slightly different way, we do not have some primordial polarity like masculine-feminine, light-darkness and then we can play all this New Age agnostic games of how in our era we put too much accent on one pole and we have to re-establish the balance, like we are too rational-masculine, let's put more accent on the feminine-emotional side, whatever. No, it's more radical. It's as if as Lacan puts it the binary signifier is primordially repressed, which means the second element is always missing and this lack of the counter-point, we have one but we don't have the accompanying other, and this original imbalance then sets in motion the generation of multiplicity. Again an extremely simple example from one of the early movies by Woody Allen, I think it's Love and Death, a kind of a parody on Tolstoy, where again the whole movie topic focuses on topic of Tolstoy. So of course our first enigma is here where is Dostoevsky? The other natural supplement to Tolstoy. There is no Dostoevsky, so what happens in the movie as a kind of a return of the repressed is that in one wonderful short scene when two main characters talk with each other all the big titles of Dostoevsky novels emerge, like do you know what happened with that Idiot, ah you mean the one of the Karamazov brothers, yes he did his crime it was punished, then he went underground turned into a gambler and so on and so on. So the lesson of this is ontological lesson is one cannot coincide with itself, pure difference, because of this pure difference as a secondary effect the multitude explodes. So again against the usual reproach is this not idealism, I would say that today it is rather idealism which is materialist. Today's opposition I'm tempted to claim between materialism and idealism is that today's idealism or rather spiritualism clings to this famous density, inertia of experience of matter, of earth, of the stuff. No wonder that the greatest arguably spiritual movie director, the Russian Tarkovsky was at the same time practically obsessed by the topic of inertia of matter, density of matter, matter in decay. In his films when heroes are praying they don't pray looking upwards, they pray by sometimes literally immersing their heads into mud, close contact with earth. So I think the thing to do today is to oppose to this kind of spiritual materialist, spiritual materialism, the pure formalism of true radical materialism. Which is why for me quantum physics is ultimately a deeply materialist theory, where you don't need any positivity of matter, you can do everything with purely formal oscillations and so on. So again back to this central insight that difference comes first, difference, how to think a difference which is prior to the elements it is the difference of. Immanuel Kant in his already in his early writings introduces here a crucial distinction, a very strange but clear distinction, a distinction between negative judgment and infinite judgment. That is to say as Kant puts it it is not the same thing to say you aren't human and to say you are inhuman. If we I say you aren't human, it simply means you are external to humanity, you are animal, divine whatever, it's outside. But if I say, not if I as Kant puts it, if I do not simply negate a predicate but if I affirm a non-predicate, so again if I don't say simply you aren't human but if I say you are inhuman, it means non-humanity, an excess over humanity but an excess which is inherent to humanity itself. To give you another example which will make it clear, let's just think about Stephen King horror novels, the well-known category of the undead. We can feel the difference, if I say you aren't dead, it's not the same as saying you are undead. If I say you aren't dead it simply means you are alive and nothing more, nothing mysterious. But as every reader of horror novels knows, if I say you are undead it means you are the living dead, you are alive precisely as dead. Immanuel Kant's point is that human freedom has exactly such a status. It's something which is neither nature, animals are not free, they are enslaved to their instincts, nor culture. Culture is already symbolic law, symbolic regulation. But the conclusion to be drawn from Kant and consequently from Freud and Lacan is that what cultural symbolic prohibitions try to regulate, to master, to dominate, to domesticate whatever you want, is not directly nature, natural instincts, but it's this zero-level inhuman excess, to use Lacan's pun, the extimate kernel of humanity, the inhuman dimension in exactly the same sense in which we talk about the undead. Not inhuman as external to humanity but a monstrous excess of some radical wild freedom which is inherent to humanity itself. So again we have this paradox that the difference between nature and culture is a level of its own, is neither nature nor culture, it's some kind of crazy excess. So what would then a politics of pure difference be? Well, first per negationem, what it would not be. It would definitely not be what emerges today more and more as the ultimate horizon of the political, the so-called identity politics or more broadly the politics of recognizing the differences, of tolerating differences. What is for me problematic in this multiculturalist tolerant politics and so on, it's not just the vulgar fact that they effectively even if they deny it neglect economic struggle, it's the very logic of the struggle. The logic of multiculturalist struggle, of anti-racist struggle, of sexist struggle, struggle against sexism is again the logic of recognizing differences. For example in anti-sexist struggle, the goal of course is not even for radical feminists, I don't know, to kill to annihilate men, it's to establish an open field within which both sexes, all different sexual positions, sexual identities, cultural identities inclusive, will be allowed to thrive freely, so that one will not articulate itself at the expense of others. Again, again, in the anti-racist struggle the ultimate horizon is that of opening up the space for differences. Each ethnic group, religious group, cultural group, way of life group should have the freedom to freely deploy, articulate its potentials, its positions. But this conceptual field, the field of openness towards the other, of tolerating, allowing for differences as the ultimate ethical horizon, this I claim should not, cannot be our ultimate horizon. Because we can immediately see that, to use the simplified example, class struggle. My God, the ultimate goal of the class struggle is not for proletarians to allow the bourgeois and bourgeois to allow proletarians to freely deploy their own their own potentials and so on and so on. It's an antagonistic struggle, the goal is not to let the the multitude be, the goal is to annihilate the enemy. It's an it's a totally different logic. It's the logic of animosity, it's the logic of antagonistic struggle, which also involves a totally different notion of universality. The notion of universality here is no longer universality as the encompassing medium, container of the plurality of positions, sexual positions, cultural positions or whatever. No, universality is here the universality of struggle itself. There is also a central paradox to this struggling position. The position of struggle does not mean the position of a particular identity and the abandonment of the universal notion of truth. The abandonment of universal notion of truth goes very well with multiculturalist politics where we can say everybody has the right to narrate its own version of truth, there is no global truth. No, our position should be there is universal truth, there always is one universal truth of a certain situation. But this truth is accessible only from a specific partial engaged, engaged in the struggle, standpoint. So it's not that we arrive at universal truth by abstracting from our particular engagement, from our particular interests, the idea being each of us has its own interests, positions, but the truth of a situation emerges when we can step as it were outside ourselves and look at the situation more objectively the way it really is. No, on the contrary we should fully assume the paradox of universal truth being accessible only through a partial engaged position. This I think is more precious than ever to maintain today. And this is the reason why at the social level I think we should cling to the notion of collective as it was till now practiced in three forms: messianic religious collectives, revolutionary parties and psychoanalytic communities. They both share, sorry, all three of them, they share precisely this same notion of universality accessible only through an engaged, struggling subjective position. This politics of pure difference is opposed today by another I would call it politics of the real, but the real of the superego in precisely the sense I already talked about, that is to say superego injunction, the obscene virtual superego injunction to enjoy. So how does this superego injunction function today in the hegemonic mode of of of a social identification? To put it in extremely simplified terms, the old functioning of ethics was that of moderation. The ultimate task of ethics was to moderate it, like do it but not excessively. Eat, drink, not too much, sex, not too much, it was the ethics of the proper measure. Today I claim a different kind of ethics is emerging. An ethics which on the one hand allows you limitless consumption, no moderation, go to the end, but why? Because the object in itself is already deprived of its dangerous substance as it were. The whole series of products that we find today on the market, decaf coffee, beer without alcohol, sugar without sugar, that is to say the product where you get the effect but deprived of its potentially dangerous substance. So that today the injunction is no longer drink coffee but moderately, it is have as much coffee as you want because coffee is already in itself decaffeinated coffee. Maybe the best, slightly tasteless, but what the hell why not, the best metaphor for this product is something that I saw two-three years ago in Los Angeles, it's the paradox of a chocolate laxative. Of course chocolate being that which gives you constipation, with the publicity I remember it, "Still constipated? Not a problem, eat more of our chocolate." So that's the paradox, that the chocolate is already its own remedy in a kind of almost Hegelian direct coincidence of the of the opposites. So why is this interesting? Precisely because I claim it's not limited only to phenomena of commodities. What interests me is how we can locate the same logic, also the same paradoxical logic of an a product being its own counter-effect, already and also at within the social field. For example, let's take the big topic of tolerance. What does it mean? I claim it has precisely the structure of chocolate laxative. That is to say tolerance is a mode of appearance of its own opposite, of intolerance. Because what does it mean tolerance today? It means tolerate the differences which again means don't harass me. Tolerance means tolerate me means don't harass me. What does it mean don't harass me? It means precisely don't come too close to me. If you come too close to me with your excessive enjoyment, you disturb me, you harass. So we have then this idea that practically everything can be a form of harassment. I look at you, it's potential sexual harassment, I speak too loudly, it's verbal harassment whatever. Every every over-proximity of another human being can be potentially a form of harassment. And I think that this fear of harassment is precisely fundamental form of intolerance today. And so again I claim that when we talk about tolerance today, it means precisely tolerance as avoiding harassment which means intolerance. It means let's tolerate each other, again which means let's keep from each other at a proper distance from each other. Yet another chocolate laxative phenomenon. Isn't it the way we deal with wealth today? The exemplary figure today for me here is somebody like George Soros. Half the day he engages in the most ruthless financial exploitations ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands even millions. The other half he just gives part of it back. So the morning is chocolate, the afternoon it's laxative. Like, you know, involving all these human aid programs and so on, political democratization and so on and so on. So again, instead of simply not engage in ruthless speculation, he does it but then includes counteraction. And even more radically, is it not exactly the same with war today? I think that Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist, was well justified in inventing the term the term militarist pacifism or humanitarian militarism for what goes on today where all the wars are declared as wars for peace. It's not only that their ultimate goal is defined as to bring peace into Iraq, to remove the threat of war and so on and so on. It's even more radically it is that the war operation itself resembles more and more a kind of a humanitarian intervention to help the people there. If you read for example the recent justification of attack on Iraq, it's not so much that Iraq was attacked in order to remove the threat to the Western nation of Saddam, it was in order to help the Iraqi people and so on and so on. No wonder then that the ultimate chocolate laxative, no wonder that the concentration camps the as Giorgio Agamben claims the typical exemplary case of a 20th century collective, has precisely this both aspects, again chocolate laxative structure. The aspect of isolating the enemy, Guantanamo or whatever, and the aspect of concentrating people for in order to give them, to provide them with humanitarian aid. So what this means are two things. First, I don't think that it is justified to talk today about consumption, we live in a society of consumption and so on. On the contrary I claim we consume less than ever if consuming means taking the risk, really opening yourself. Which is why incidentally we are so afraid of of smoking. I claim it's not simply medical results and so on. What is so terrifying in smoking is somebody really consuming the smoke with all the dangers this involves. I think that the true consumers today are drug addicts, chain smokers and so on. And they are the figures of horror today if anything. Again the structure is that of chocolate laxative, which is why we are all looking even at this level for products which would be already a kind of decaf coffee. Which is why I think marijuana is so popular, because it's kind of decaf opium, de facto no opium without opium, you can have it but deprived of its a dangerous substance. So to conclude this brief reflection, I would say that today the fundamental as it were ethical injunction, the injunction society bombards us with, is no longer the injunction to control yourself, to repress your strivings or whatever. It's on the contrary the injunction to enjoy it, to go to the end. This is what we feel guilty about today. And this I think also changes fundamentally the role of psychoanalysis. It does not make it outdated, it's more actual than ever, only its its function fundamentally changed. In the good old days or so it appeared, now it's clear that it never was simply like that, the idea was the following one. Let's say you are sexually frustrated because you internalized some paternal or other prohibitions, you cannot enjoy sex and the function of psychoanalysis is to to relieve you, release you of the pressure of this internalized prohibitions so you can let yourself go, you can enjoy. And in other words you feel guilty if you transgress social prohibitions in order to enjoy. Today it's almost the opposite. You feel guilty if you cannot make it, if you cannot enjoy. And we shouldn't take here enjoyment just in the immediate sense of sex, sensual pleasure of drinking whatever. It can be enjoyment of power, social success, professional success, it can be even spiritual enjoyment in the New Age sense, agnostic sense of realizing your ego and so on and so on. What we are getting today is that you feel guilty if in this sense you cannot enjoy yourself. So this brings us I claim to a double function of psychoanalysis today. A, its message is not relax get rid of prohibitions. Its message is as Alain Badiou put it in wonderful terms, you should learn to become a pitiless censor of yourself. The role of psychoanalysis today is not to enable you to enjoy, but to open up a space in which you are allowed not to enjoy. That's the fundamental message of psychoanalysis today. You are not obliged to enjoy, you are allowed not to enjoy. Which of course is not the same as saying you are prohibited to enjoy. Just you are allowed not to enjoy. This confronts us furthermore with the paradoxes of today's superego, which is how on the one hand permissivity ends up in its opposite. Like today the injunction is enjoy, the result is more prohibitions, regulations than ever. You can enjoy yourself but in order to enjoy yourself properly you are ordered to what? Not to eat too much, to engage in jogging, to take care of your fitness, not to smoke and so on and so on. Just look around and I think there is nothing more miserable today than those younger couples or people who organize their life in order to enjoy themselves, the regulation is total. On the other hand we have the opposite paradox which is that the so-called newly emerging fundamentalism is not here in order to introduce some new stability, to give you firm ethical foundation in today's world where there are no firm stable values and so on, but on the contrary I claim it is here to open up as a kind of a false space of freedom. I'm referring here of course implicitly to Lacan's famous reversal of the Dostoevsky motto. According to Lacan it is not that if God doesn't exist everything is permitted, but if God doesn't exist everything is prohibited. This is the lesson of the hedonistic yuppies. And the opposite lesson, no less crucial: if God exists then everything is permitted, which means if you can justify your role as that of being the instrument of the divine will, in other words you hear voices you have the contact with the guy up there, either George Bush or Osama bin Laden, as many people noticed this is what they have in common, they both hear directly from up there, then you can do whatever you want. You can do terrorist acts, bomb countries and so on. So here we see how difficult it is to orient ourselves in today's constellation where there is a certain urge to false freedom inherent to the system itself. Which is why I claim the main task today is to reinvent utopia, a space of utopia. What do I mean by this? It's not of course the old-fashioned utopia which is the utopia of imagining ideal world about which we know in advance that it will never be realized. The big models here are of course Plato's Republic, Thomas More utopia and we should not forget Marquis de Sade Philosophy in the Boudoir. That's the classical utopia. Then we have what I'm tempted to call the capitalist utopia, this unbridled solicitation of new and new desires which can go pretty far, like today I learned that in United States they are in some communities seriously considering the idea that necrophiliacs, those who want to play sexual games with corpses dead bodies, are seriously deprived, so isn't it the duty of our society to provide them with corpses? Can it be done in some way so that people sign voluntarily in the same way that you sign that that if you die your heart your organs can be used, that your body can be used to be delivered to necrophiliacs and so on and so on? The problem here is that radical as this may appear there is something ridiculously benign about it, about this capitalist utopia. You can go to the end, basically nothing happens. But we have a third utopia which is again neither this classical utopia of imagining an alternative universe not even dreaming about really realizing it, then the capitalist utopia of ever new desires, extreme forms of satisfying your desires. There is a third mode which I would say is precisely the real, the the real core of utopia. I think a truly radical utopia is not an exercise in free imagination, like you sit down don't have anything wiser to do than to imagine possible ideal worlds. It's something that you do literally as out of an inner urge. You have to invent something new when you cannot do it otherwise. True utopia for me is not a matter of the future, is something to be immediately enacted when there is no other way. Utopia in this sense simply means do what appears within the given symbolic coordinates as impossible. Take the risk, change the very coordinates. And I'm not talking here about something crazy, even big classical well-known even sometimes conservative acts have this utopian dimension. Like to take a ridiculous example, years ago remember Richard Nixon's trip to China. There was almost a utopian dimension to it. Why? Because he did what appeared as impossible. China was portrayed as the ultimate evil superpower, with Soviet Union there was detente not with China. That act changed the entire coordinates, it did the impossible. This is what we need more than ever today. Because ultimately I claim the true utopia today is not a different order, it's the idea that the existing order can function indefinitely. The true utopia I claim was not communism which disintegrated in '89, it was the utopia of the nineties, the idea elaborated among others by Francis Fukuyama that we discovered the final social form, liberal capitalist democracy, that we cannot go further, that it's just a question of making it bit by bit more tolerant, spread it all around the world, but that we have the formula. And I think that if there is a symbolic meaning to September 11th is that the time of that utopia is over, the real of history is back. Which is why today the urge is not to be terrorized by the so-called post-political politics, which tells us ideological times are over, all you can do is just to play the realistic game of accepting the trends and so on and so on. We should dare to to enact the impossible. We should rediscover how to how to not imagine but enact utopia. The point is not again about planning utopias, the the point is about practicing them. And I think this is not a question of of should we do it or should we simply persist in the in the existing order, it's much more radical. It's a matter for survival. The future will be utopian or there will be none.