Towards a Materialist Theory of Subjectivity
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2014-05-22 · 1:56:16 · 14,860 words
hegel-dialecticsideologycommunism-socialismphilosophy-generalpsychoanalysisreligion-theologyscience-physicslanguagecapitalismsubjectivityhistory
Žižek delivers a lecture titled 'Towards a Materialist Theory of Subject,' surveying and critiquing four or five contemporary versions of materialism: reductionist scientific materialism, aggressive atheism, discursive/Foucauldian materialism, and Deleuzian New Materialism. He argues that each fails in different ways to be truly materialist, and develops his own position through engagements with Hegel, Marx, Althusser, Lacan, Habermas, Benjamin, and Kant, arguing that genuine materialism must include the spectral/virtual dimension of ideology, the 'materiality' of language beyond mere words, and must be historically grounded in the post-communist condition of remaining faithful to revolution after its fiasco.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Althusser's term for the institutional materiality of ideology (schools, church, family, media); Žižek invokes it to argue that Althusser's materialism still misses the spectral/virtual dimension of power.
Early Soviet philosophical-political movement combining vulgar materialism with Gnostic spirituality, advocating technological reshaping of human nature, elimination of sexuality, and eventual post-human collective intelligence; Žižek uses it to trace the genealogy of today's post-humanism.
Günther Anders's concept: the shame that emerges in a post-human horizon from the fact that we were born (and thus biologically limited and mortal) rather than manufactured and perfected.
Jane Bennett's notion, criticized by Žižek, that matter possesses an immanent life force or soul (in the Aristotelian sense), effectively a weak pan-psychism or terrestrial animism that re-enchants the world.
as “the Real as impossible”
Lacan's concept, applied here to modern science: the scientific real (e.g., Newton's free fall in absolute vacuum, the principle of inertia) refers to a pure impossible situation that never occurs in empirical reality yet must be postulated to explain what actually happens.
Žižek's proto-ontological formula (from his book of the same name) that posits an abyssal multiplicity against the background of void, opposed to any assertion of the One; here referenced as his own materialist ontology under critique from Osborne.
Implicit in Žižek's reading of Marx's value-form: that abstract universality (e.g., value, the Hegelian Idea) is not merely a mental construct but actively realized in the material process of commodity exchange.
as “substanzlose Subjektivität”
Marx's term, 'subjectivity deprived of all substance', used to describe the proletariat as pure abstract labor, stripped of all particular determinations under capitalism.
as “passage from substance to subject”
The Hegelian movement, which Žižek identifies in Marx's analysis of capital: universality of value first as passive substantial universality (in simple commodity exchange) becoming active self-reproducing agent (capital).
as “painting grey on grey”
Hegel's own phrase from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, philosophy always arrives too late to change the world; used by Žižek to argue that Hegel's vision of the rational state is itself a sign that its time is already past.
Foucault's formulation that every philosophical analysis, even of the ancient past, is conditioned by and responds to the deadlocks of the thinker's own historical moment.
Žižek's (Hegelian) pejorative for imagining one isolated change (e.g., higher redistribution taxes) while assuming everything else remains constant, the very gesture that makes modest reformism the true utopianism.
as “immanent utopia”
Every historical situation contains an internal ideal vision of what it could be with minimal changes; Žižek argues that revolutionary attempts always first try to actualize this immanent utopia and thereby necessarily fail.
Lacan's symbolic order; Žižek here stresses that it is not merely an ideal system but has a weird materiality, a mechanical, non-sensical force within the symbolic order itself, distinct from physical matter.
The Hegelian logical structure Žižek identifies in Althusser's three levels of state force: direct use of force, then show of force negating its use, then hiding the show, negating the negation into pure spectral presence.
as “spectral authority / virtual threat”
Žižek's claim that state power and authority work only as a virtual/spectral threat, the moment force is actually deployed it risks catastrophic backlash; genuine authority must remain unrealized.
Term Žižek reclaims ironically and seriously: a true materialism that includes the spectral/virtual dimension of power and the materiality of language beyond mere physical words, distinct from Soviet diamat.
Habermas's thesis that the very act of participating in dialogue commits speakers to norms of truth and sincerity; Žižek argues this misses the constitutive role of lying, hypocrisy, and faking in human language.
as “weak messianism”
Benjamin's notion of revolution as retroactive redemption of the past; Žižek appreciates it but questions whether it is the only model for imagining revolution.
Benjamin's concept, defended by Žižek against liberal-humanist dilutions: a violence that is its own aim (means without end), not instrumental toward a goal, and for this reason not totalitarian violence.
Stories he reaches for 2
A Srebrenica survivor who emigrated to Germany returns and asks about land prices near Srebrenica; his friends reply 'it depends, do you want land with or without bones?' Žižek presents this as an example of dignity-through-obscenity: the survivors' own jokes that acknowledge the horror without false pathos.
“a guy from Srebrenica who escaped Serbs, immigrated to Germany, returns... asks 'what are the prices now of land in Srebrenica?' And the answer is 'Well it depends, do you want land with or without bones?'”
The most spiritually immersive scene in Tarkovsky is not a hero looking up to the sky but down at the earth, head in humid water or mud. Žižek uses this to show that today's spiritualists (not materialists) are obsessed with earthly, bodily finitude.
“the ultimate Tarkovsky's scene of spiritual immersion? Precisely a hero not looking up towards the sky but down on the earth with his head in humid water, even mud”
Works invoked 18
Capital book
Marx's Capital; Žižek reads its analysis of the value-form (passage from commodity to capital) as a Hegelian passage from substance to subject, and the 'Inversion' passage on abstract universal as central to his argument about the limits of simple reversal logic.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own book, referenced as the target of Osborne's critique for proposing an abstract materialist proto-ontology without sufficient historical grounding; Žižek defends it by meeting Osborne on his own terms.
Philosophy of Right book
Hegel's work; quoted for 'painting grey on grey' and the owl of Minerva passage; Žižek (following Pippin) argues the vision of the corporate state in it should be read as itself a sign that that form of life was already passing.
Grundrisse book
Marx's notebooks; the text on pre-capitalist modes of production is cited as exemplifying the Lukácsian reading of Hegel, alienation and reappropriation as model for historical development toward proletarian revolution.
Lukács' work; cited as the exemplary case of direct revolutionary Marxist subjectivity, but also as representing a moment (the moment of highest tension when teleological resolution seems near) that is no longer ours.
Piketty's book; Žižek acknowledges its historical value and envies its sales but argues it is 'utopian at its purest', imagining radical redistribution while leaving the capitalist mode of production intact.
Vibrant Matter book
Jane Bennett's book on New Materialism; Žižek quotes its 'Nicene Creed for would-be materialists' at length as evidence that New Materialism is effectively a re-enchanted spiritualism, an Aristotelian regression disguised as materialism.
Critique of Violence essay
Benjamin's essay; the concept of divine violence is central; Žižek defends the genuine, non-symbolic violence Benjamin describes against liberal humanist dilutions.
Harry Potter book
Referenced for the figure of 'Voldemort, the one whose name should not be mentioned,' which Žižek applies to Simon Critchley.
Benjamin's text; Žižek says he loves it and immensely admires it; discusses revolution as retroactive redemption and the compulsion to repeat (read together with Freud), while questioning whether this is the only model of revolution.
Negative Dialectics book
Adorno's work; cited for making trans-historical ontological claims (priority of the objective, the non-identical) that exceed any particular historical situation, evidence against pure historicism.
Young Marx's manuscripts; Žižek argues these contain the 'simple reversal' logic at its most dangerous ('the more the worker produces the less he has'), which he thinks anticipates the trap of immanent utopianism in communist practice.
Either/Or book
Kierkegaard's work; quoted for the passage presenting boredom as the driver of all creation, God's boredom creating the world, Adam, Eve, etc.; Žižek uses this to rehabilitate sloth/boredom as a necessary stage.
Althusser's late work; quoted at length on the three levels of state force (direct use, show of force, hiding of force) and the role of army tanks in the May 1968 events.
Marx's early work; cited for the observation that commodities themselves speak Hegelian language and behave in a Hegelian way, supporting the Hegel-Capital School's historical grounding of Hegelian speculation.
Lenin and Philosophy essay
Althusser's essay; cited for the formulation 'philosophy is class struggle in theory', the insight that practical engagement and universal validity are not mutually exclusive.
Benjamin's essay; Žižek says the title is 'the most beautiful of Walter Benjamin's titles' and that he would 'sell his mother into slavery' to have authored it; uses it to distinguish 'language as such' (Habermasian normativity) from 'human language' (constituted by lying, hypocrisy, obscenity).
Marx's methodological preface; the 'guiding principle' summary ('In the social production of their existence...') is cited as an example of trans-historical social-ontological universals that even Osborne's radical historicism cannot fully historicize.
People invoked 44
Frantz Fanon positive
Grouped with Benjamin as a thinker whose advocates are embarrassed by the genuine violence in his texts and try to soften it into symbolic or minimal violence, Žižek defends both against such dilution.
Udi Aloni positive
Described as 'my Jewish friend whom I mock all the time'; Žižek mentions collaborating with him on a Benjamin conference planned in Ramallah to coincide with the Jerusalem Benjamin conference.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte positive
Cited as the precursor whose speculative notion of the self-positing I is being reactualized by biogenetic post-humanism and technoscientific dreams of reshaping human nature.
Jane Bennett negative
Author of Vibrant Matter; Žižek quotes her 'Nicene Creed for would-be materialists' at length to demonstrate that New Materialism is effectively a spiritualist re-enchantment of the world, an Aristotelian regression, and not genuinely materialist.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
French philosopher of catastrophes, quoted at length on the reversal within modern technoscience from mastery to deliberately cultivated non-mastery; used to develop the paradox of post-human technoscience.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as 'my Lacanian colleague'; told Žižek about a linguist from Sarajevo who researched the Srebrenica jokes told by survivors themselves.
Robert Pippin positive
Described as 'a truly authentic great American Hegelian' whom Žižek disagrees with but appreciates and envies for making a simple but crucial remark: that Hegel's own insight should be applied against his Philosophy of Right, showing it too to be a painting of grey on grey.
Blaise Pascal positive
Invoked through Althusser's use of Pascal's 'fake it and you will believe'; Žižek argues both got ritual's function backwards, it relieves rather than generates belief.
Georg Lukács positive
Invoked for History and Class Consciousness as the exemplary case of direct revolutionary Marxist subjectivity and the Lukácsian reading of Hegel (dialectics as mystified liberation). Žižek sees this as one horn of the Marxist ambiguity on Hegel.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for the opposing reading of Hegel: dialectics as mystified expression of capitalist self-reproduction (Negative Dialectics); also noted for making trans-historical ontological claims despite his radical historicism.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the concept of the Real as impossible (applied to modern science), the Big Other's spectral materiality, the formula 'omnipotence reverts to impotence,' and the idea that the Big Other (capital) is also powerless and contradictory.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Mentioned as Žižek's guide on reading Christianity materialistically; referenced for the idea that even Jesus Christ on the cross experiences something like boredom or abandonment.
Louis Althusser positive
Žižek engages seriously with Althusser's theory of ideological and repressive state apparatuses, and his Pascalian account of ritual, but argues Althusser is 'too directly materialist' and misses the spectral/virtual dimension of power, as well as the positive role of lying in ideology.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Žižek agrees with Fredric Jameson that Deleuzianism is today the predominant form of idealism; New Materialism is characterized as post-Deleuzian and therefore idealist.
Jean-Michel Besnier positive
French author cited for drawing attention to how today's scientific naturalism reactualizes the most radical idealist program of Fichte and Hegel, biogenetics as the realization of Fichte's self-positing I.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Mentioned as a popularizer of the idea of technological singularity, grouped with other historical optimists whose techno-utopian claims Žižek is skeptical of.
Peter Mandelson negative
Called 'Dark Prince of Blair,' cited for the Blairite formulation 'In economy we are all Thatcherites', used as a foil to characterize the capitulation of social democracy to capitalist logic.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as a 'good friend' with whom Žižek has slight differences; Žižek disagrees with Badiou's constructivist account where evil is merely the failure to do good, preferring a Hegelian view where boredom/negativity is a necessary intermediate stage before authentic event.
Graham Harman negative
Named as a representative of New Materialism / object-oriented ontology, grouped with Jane Bennett as examples of post-Deleuzian new materialism that Žižek is 'totally opposed to.'
Andrei Platonov positive
Žižek calls him 'arguably the greatest Russian writer of the 20th century,' grouping him with Beckett and Kafka; his 1920s short stories present sexuality as theological fall and the problem as how to get rid of it, illustrating Soviet Biocosmist anti-sexuality.
Mentioned ironically at the opening as someone Žižek met at a news program ('Nightnews'), described with sarcastic courtesy as 'good friend' before Žižek says 'let's be serious.'
Alexandre Koyré positive
Cited for pointing out how modern physics approaches the real by means of the impossible, the wager of constructing ideal cases never encountered in reality.
Quoted on the Bolshevik project to reshape human nature ('Goodbye Homo Sapiens') and on the goal of transforming humanity through new technological advances, used as evidence of Soviet Biocosmism's reach.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited approvingly for the claim that Deleuzianism is today the predominant form of idealism.
Bruno Latour negative
Term 'actants' cited as part of the New Materialist assemblage theory that Žižek critiques as re-enchanted idealism.
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as 'good friend' in a debate with whom Žižek developed the paradox about Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.
Mentioned as connected with Soviet Biocosmists who promoted the techno-gnostic vision of post-human existence and the elimination of sensation/sexuality.
Michel Foucault positive
Credited for the phrase 'ontology of the present' and for understanding that even analysis of the ancient past is conditioned by the deadlocks of the present moment; his discursive materialism is also noted as closer to genuine materialism than New Materialism.
Richard Dawkins negative
Grouped with Hitchens as representative of aggressive atheism ('God is Not Great' type), criticized for not being materialist enough, failing to analyze religion in its social-political context.
Mentioned in passing as having replaced Habermas as the 'official European Union Staatsphilosoph.'
Christopher Hitchens negative
Grouped with Dawkins as representative of aggressive atheism, criticized for abstract denunciation of religion without social-political analysis.
Rowan Williams positive
Mentioned as scheduled to co-participate in a Saturday afternoon event on theology and materialism with Žižek; Žižek notes he had to move to the morning due to a marriage ceremony.
Eric Santner positive
Described as 'good friend' present in the audience; Žižek notes that Santner's books speak to the spectral materiality that is not physical but operates within ideological structures, with slight differences between them.
Günther Anders positive
Cited for the concept of 'Promethean shame', the shame that we were born and not manufactured, used to characterize the post-human horizon of techno-scientific anti-humanism.
Walter Benjamin positive
Žižek expresses admiration ('immensely admire') for Benjamin's Theses on History and distinction between language as such and human language; defends Benjamin's concept of divine violence against liberal humanist dilutions; questions whether retroactive redemption is the only model of revolution.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited for the passage in Either/Or on boredom as the explanation of all human history, God's boredom generating creation, which Žižek uses to rehabilitate sloth/boredom as a necessary stage before authentic event.
Peter Osborne negative
Criticized Žižek's Less Than Nothing for proposing abstract proto-ontology without historical grounding; Žižek engages the critique seriously (representing the Hegel-Capital School position) but ultimately rejects it as insufficient.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek is politely respectful ('very respectful philosopher') but argues his theory of immanent normativity of speech misses the constitutive role of lying and hypocrisy in human language; notes Habermas is being displaced as EU Staatsphilosoph by Sloterdijk.
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
Described as 'the most spiritual of 20th-century filmmakers,' used to illustrate the paradox that contemporary spirituality is obsessed with earthly finitude, Tarkovsky's most spiritual scenes show heroes with their heads in mud.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek engages Marx extensively but critically: he argues that the early Marx's 'simple reversal' logic in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is a dangerous trap, that Marxism is ambiguous between a Lukácsian and Adornoian reading of Hegel, and that we should return from Marx to Hegel. Nonetheless remains broadly committed to a Marxist emancipatory project.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek's primary philosophical touchstone for the whole lecture; argues Hegel is more genuinely materialist than Marx, and that the 'owl of Minerva' passage, properly applied, shows even Hegel's own political philosophy to be historically superseded. Credits Hegel with understanding the function of ritual as relief from intense belief.
Simon Critchley negative
Referred to as 'Voldemort, the one whose name should not be mentioned'; criticized for offering a liberal humanist reading of Benjamin's divine violence that reduces it to a symbolic gesture with minimal blood, which Žižek argues flatly misreads Benjamin.
Immanuel Kant positive
Žižek draws on the late Kant's Anthropological writings (a 'Pascalian Althusserian Kant') to show that Kant himself celebrated hypocrisy, lying, and faking as constitutive of social life, in tension with the official Kantian moral philosophy.
Thomas Piketty negative
Žižek envies his book sales but argues that Capital in the Twenty-First Century is 'utopian at its purest' because it imagines radical redistribution while leaving the capitalist mode of production unchanged, a classic case of abstract thinking.
What it argues
Competing versions of materialism and their failuresDialectical materialism vs. New Materialism and Deleuzian vitalismSpectral/virtual dimension of state power and ideologyHistorical grounding of ontology: the post-communist Hegelian momentImmanent utopianism and the trap of simple reversal logicLanguage, hypocrisy, and the materiality of human speech beyond HabermasReturning from Marx to Hegel after the failure of 20th-century communism
Dialectical moves 10
“It is idealism which today emphasizes bodily finitude and spirituality, while materialism keeps alive the dream of immortality and escaping the body—the positions are inverted from what we would expect.”
The standard association of materialism with the body and idealism with transcendence is reversed in contemporary discourse: spiritualists obsess over finitude, materialists over immortality.
“The desire for complete mastery turns into the desire to produce something over which we will have no mastery—the measure of the engineer's success is the extent to which his creations surprise him.”
The post-human technoscientific drive for total control over nature inverts into the deliberate cultivation of uncontrollable emergence.
“Hegel's vision of the rational state in the Philosophy of Right is itself, by Hegel's own logic of 'painting grey on grey,' a sign that the shades of night are already gathering on that form of life.”
Applying Hegel's own thesis, that philosophy arrives only when a form of life is already dying, against Hegel's political philosophy shows it to be historically superseded.
“The true utopians today are the modest social-democrats—not the radicals who want total change—because they imagine one measure (redistribution) while assuming everything else stays the same.”
Reformist modesty is the greater utopianism: abstract thinking isolates one variable while leaving the totality untouched, which is precisely the idealist-utopian gesture.
“Authority works only as a virtual/spectral threat; the moment you actually realize it, you risk triggering far greater resistance—omnipotence necessarily reverts into all-impotence.”
The effectiveness of state force is inversely proportional to its actualization: power is most real when most virtual.
“To be really materialist, you have to include into materialism the strange virtual threat which is not symbolic because it is a threat of violence but is a purely virtual threat that functions only as virtual.”
True materialism must account for the spectral/virtual as itself a material force, not reduce materialism to the presence of physical bodies or brute force.
“The only philosopher who explicitly rejected changing the world and said 'I just want to interpret it' is Hegel—the main source of Marx, who accused philosophers of only interpreting the world.”
Marx's critique of contemplative philosophy is undermined by the fact that its main target, Hegel, is the very thinker who most consistently refused prescriptive futurism.
“Far from being a totalitarian form of violence, divine violence is not totalitarian precisely because it is violence without a goal—totalitarian violence always has a precise goal.”
Non-instrumental, non-teleological violence (Benjamin's 'divine violence') is distinguished from and opposed to totalitarian violence, which is always purposive.
“The solution to alienation is not that we collective humanity will be master instead of capital, but that no one will be master—the Big Other, capital, is also powerless and contradictory in itself.”
Emancipation is not the collective subject reappropriating what was alienated, but the revelation that the alienating 'master' (capital, God) was never fully consistent or omnipotent either.
“Ritual does not produce belief (Pascal/Althusser)—it releases you from the pressure of too intense belief: follow the ritual and you will no longer have to believe, you will feel free.”
Ritual's ideological function is the inverse of what Althusser took from Pascal: it manages and relieves belief rather than generating it.
Claims 19
reframes
Today it is idealism—not materialism—that emphasizes bodily finitude and uses it to open toward spiritual transcendence, while scientific materialism keeps alive the techno-utopian dream of immortality and escaping bodily constraints.the relation between materialism and idealism regarding the body
rejects
New Materialism (Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, etc.) is a form of idealism and represents a regression to pre-modern Aristotelian naivety, re-enchanting the world rather than confronting the traumatic consequences of modern science.Deleuzian/New Materialist philosophy
rejects
Aggressive atheism (Dawkins, Hitchens) is not materialist enough because it fails to ask how religion functions in its concrete social-political context.new atheism as a form of materialism
asserts
Hegel is more genuinely materialist than Marx, not the other way around; the true materialist reversal goes from Marx back to Hegel.the relationship between Hegel and Marx on materialism
asserts
Marxism is irreducibly ambiguous about whether Hegelian dialectics is the mystified expression of the process of liberation (Lukács) or of capitalist self-reproduction (Adorno), and this ambiguity is already present in Marx himself.the Hegel-Capital School debate
rejects
Even the most radical historicists (Marx, Lukács, Adorno) still make trans-historical universal ontological claims; pure historicism collapses into incoherence.Peter Osborne's demand for full historicization of philosophical categories
asserts
Truth in its very universality has to be partial: only from an engaged, partisan position can one formulate universal social truth—as in the case of anti-semitism, where only full identification with Jewish victims yields the social truth.the relationship between partisanship and universal truth
asserts
Our historical moment is a Hegelian one—the moment after the first attempt at revolution has failed and turned into a nightmare—which is why we should return from Marx to Hegel.the political-philosophical task of the present
asserts
The 20th-century failure of communism should be for us what the French Revolution (and its Terror) was for Hegel: not a reason to renounce the revolutionary goal, but to remain faithful to it through the fiasco.how to relate to the failure of 20th-century communism
rejects
Piketty's proposal for radical redistribution via higher taxes while keeping the capitalist mode of production intact is the true utopianism—not because it is too radical, but because it is deceptively modest and practically impossible without already having solved the deeper political problem.Piketty's reformist program in Capital in the Twenty-First Century
asserts
Revolts and revolutions do not explode when things are at their worst but when things have improved and expectations have outrun reality.the sociology of revolution and revolt
asserts
State authority and power work only as a virtual/spectral threat; the moment force is actually deployed, it risks becoming counterproductive—the true materialism of power is this spectral dimension, which Althusser misses.Althusser's theory of ideological and repressive state apparatuses
rejects
Marx's 'simple reversal' logic—the more the worker produces the less he has, therefore in true communism it would be reversed—is a dangerous trap; the mature Marx partially overcomes it, but the early Manuscripts remain its purest expression.Marx's early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and their reversal logic
asserts
The solution to alienation is not to replace capital as master with collective humanity as master, but to realize that no one will be master—a further Lacanian decentering in which the Big Other (capital) is also shown to be powerless and contradictory.the communist project beyond simple reappropriation
rejects
Habermas's immanent normativity of speech misses the constitutive role of lying, hypocrisy, and faking in human language, a dimension that Kant's late Anthropology—and Benjamin's distinction between language as such and human language—captures.Habermas's communicative rationality
rejects
Althusser's reading of Pascal ('fake it and you will believe') gets ritual backwards: ritual more often functions to relieve the pressure of too intense belief—as Hegel understood—rather than to generate belief.Althusser's Pascalian account of ideological ritual
asserts
Modern science is more Platonic than Aristotelian: it explains empirical reality by reference to an impossible ideal order (inertia, free fall in vacuum) that is never encountered in reality.the epistemology of modern science versus Aristotelian naturalism
asserts
Benjamin's divine violence is genuinely violent and radically non-instrumental (means without end/goal); liberal humanist readings that soften it into symbolic or minimal violence are simply wrong.Benjamin's concept of divine violence
reframes
Philosophy has never been purely contemplative—every major philosopher from Plato to Kant tried to change the world—but ironically Hegel, Marx's main source, is the one who explicitly refused to project a future and limited himself to interpreting what is.Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach ('philosophers have only interpreted the world')
Quotes 20
“It is idealism which emphasizes our bodily finitude and which tries to demonstrate how this very finitude opens up the abyss of a transcendent divine otherness out of reach.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion: idealism obsessed with the body, materialism with transcendence
“The only people who today speak about immortality, getting rid of the body, turning yourself to a kind of a virtual entity, not being constrained by your finite body, are materialists.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of materialism and idealism on immortality
“New Materialism can be still considered a variant of materialism in the sense in which Tolkien's Middle-earth is materialist.”Slavoj Žižek · New Materialism as enchanted pseudo-materialism
“Fredric Jameson was right with his claim that Deleuzianism is today the predominant form of idealism.”Slavoj Žižek · Deleuzianism = idealism
“The wager of modern physics is to approach the real by means of the impossible.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian Real applied to modern science
“For modern science we have to begin with an impossible real to account for the possible.”Slavoj Žižek · modern science proceeds via the impossible real
“Hegel is more materialist than Marx, that the true materialist reversal is from Marx to Hegel.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal: Hegel more materialist than Marx
“Truth in its very universality has to be partial.”Slavoj Žižek · partisan position as condition of universal truth
“Show me one traditional philosopher who did not try to change the world.”Slavoj Žižek · all philosophers tried to change the world—except Hegel
“20th-century communism should be for us what French Revolution was for Hegel. A big attempt, it went wrong. But again, we shouldn't for that reason denounce.”Slavoj Žižek · faithful to revolution after its failure
“To be modest in a false way is maybe the greatest utopia, you know, to be a realist.”Slavoj Žižek · false modesty as true utopianism
“The occupier is by definition always for peace, you know, because you occupy a land, of course you want to have it peacefully.”Slavoj Žižek · occupier's claim to peace as structural necessity, not sincerity
“It works not only that there has to be a physical threat in the background. But the status of this threat is spectral. The moment you... it works only as a threat.”Slavoj Žižek · spectral materiality of state power
“Omnipotence, tout-puissance, necessarily reverts into all-impotence, tout un puissance.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan on the self-defeat of omnipotence
“To really be a materialist, it's not enough to insist on immediate materiality as the last resort... The real materiality, materialism should include into materialism also this strange virtual threat.”Slavoj Žižek · true materialism includes the virtual/spectral
“It's difficult to be a materialist but it is here where we should be materialists.”Slavoj Žižek · the difficulty and urgency of true materialism
“You tell the truth in the guise of a lie.”Slavoj Žižek · truth through lying; the constitutive role of deception
“Beneath these jokes it's basically a desperate acknowledging of impotence. It's too horrible to speak with this... pathetic victimization... The only thing we can do in this is this. It's an obscenity but it's the only thing that one can do with a certain dignity.”Slavoj Žižek · obscene jokes as dignity in the face of horror
“Divine violence is means without goal, without aim. It's not 'you want a certain goal to achieve, when there is no other way, okay, let's do it.' No, it's precisely violence which is its own aim.”Slavoj Žižek · Benjamin's divine violence as non-instrumental
“Philosophy as the thought of the world does not appear until reality has completed its formative process and made itself ready. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's owl of Minerva—philosophy always too late
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Okay, let's do voting. You know, I said I will not vote, but I meant in Slovenia, which was there... there is a small so-called radical left. I totally don’t trust them and so on. I think they are manipulated by old corrupted ex-communists and so on. I think in Slovenia one should not vote. I was very specific, although at that Nightnews that you mention, I had a great honor of meeting and having quite a nice chat with Nigel Farage. No, good friend of mine, you know. Okay, let's be serious and let’s do the job. Again, it’s usual for me to say, but this time again I really mean it, that I hope you will not be disappointed. What I will do today is literally what the title, I think, promises: Towards a Materialist Theory of Subject, Subjectivity, which means it’s "towards." I just want to address in a very naive way this question, which is far from... far from promising a self-evident answer. What is it to be a materialist today? What types of materialism are we confronting today? So I will just go through a couple of them and try to clarify some things. I think there are vaguely four or five versions of materialism today. First, the so-called reductionist scientific materialism: cognitivism, Darwinism, and so on. Then, the new wave of atheism, which aggressively denounces religion: Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and so on and so on. My reproach—I will not deal with it here—to this materialism, you know, God is not great and so on, is precisely that it’s not materialist enough. If by materialism we mean in a very traditional Marxist way to locate an ideological edifice in its social-political contexts and ask not only the question abstractly, "Is it true? Is there God or not?" but, "How does an edifice function in its..."—I'm sorry to use this vulgar term—"social context?" This question is, apart from this generalized Enlightenment idea, you know, like "religion confuses people, enables evil," or whatever you want, they don't approach this question. Then we have a third version, whatever remains of so-called discursive materialism: Foucauldian analysis of discursive material practices, Althusserian notion of ideological state apparatuses where, again, this orientation does precisely what is missing in this aggressive atheism. They question... they observe an ideology in its material practice. But again, I claim they are not materialist enough. And then we have the last wave, to which I am—although they are not idiots, they are very interesting some of them—but I'm totally opposed to this last orientation, which is the Deleuzian or, if you want to play with it, post-Deleuzian so-called new materialism in all its guises, from Graham Harman to... to Jane Bennett and so on and so on. So let me begin with a simple observation. The paradox is that today it is—it's an old point that I often make in my books—it is idealism which emphasizes our bodily finitude and which tries to demonstrate how this very finitude opens up the abyss of a transcendent divine otherness out of reach. You know, when somebody today talks about how we are thrown into our finitude, how our bodily constraints are irreducible, a positive condition of our spirituality and so on—far from being a materialist attitude, this is today almost, I'm tempted to say, an exclusive spiritualist domain. Whoever begins by this, you can be sure that he will turn spiritualist. And again, as I often emphasize, no wonder that the most spiritual of 20th-century filmmakers, Andrei Tarkovsky, is simultaneously the one who was most obsessed with the impenetrable humid inertia on Earth. You know which is the ultimate Tarkovsky's scene of spiritual immersion? Precisely a hero not looking up towards the sky but down on the earth with his head in humid water, even mud, and so on and so on. While, on the other hand, so today's spiritualists emphasize finitude, our bodily existence as something beyond which we cannot reach and so on and so on; while, on the other hand, scientific materialists keep alive the techno-utopian dream about immortality, about getting rid of bodily constraints and so on and so on. It’s nice that the only people who today speak about immortality, getting rid of the body, turning yourself to a kind of a virtual entity, not being constrained by your finite body, are materialists. Along these lines, a French author, Jean-Michel Besnier, drew attention to the fact that today’s scientific naturalism seems to reactualize the most radical idealist program of Fichte and Hegel, the idea that reason can make nature totally transparent. Namely, does the biogenetic perspective of producing humans scientifically through biogenetic procedures—does it not change humanity into a self-made entity and does it not thus realize Fichte’s speculative notion of a self-positing I? This orientation stands for the fourth stage in the development of anti-humanism. We have first, the old theocentric anti-humanism—you know where you find this use of the term humanism today? In... with US religious fundamentalists who use the term humanism as synonymous with secular culture and so on. So here anti-humanism means "No, beyond the scope of humanity, we need a reference to some transcendent authority, to God." Then the other form of anti-humanism is the French theoretical anti-humanism, which accompanied the structuralist revolution of the 1960s: Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, and so on. There we know—I will not go into it—how anti-humanism worked. Then we have the deep ecological anti-humanist reduction of humanity to just one of the animal species on our Earth—the species which derailed the balance of life on Earth through its hubris and is now facing extinction, the justified revenge of Mother Earth. This is another form of anti-humanism. Then we have, again, the fourth form of anti-humanism. Usually they use the term "post," like post-human existence. The idea is that through mostly technological advances we are approaching a new level where literally we will no longer be humans in the sense of what this word means today, but whatever, some kind of a collective reason and so on. What is... what one should first note here is that this is not a new phenomenon, although today different cognitivists or computer scientists or popularizers like Ray Kurzweil et cetera preach about this, that we are approaching the point of singularity. In the first decades of the Soviet Union, we already had the so-called Biocosmism, which enjoyed extraordinary popularity at that time. A strange combination of vulgar materialism and Gnostic spirituality. The idea was—and again I quote it in my books—the idea was that with new technological advances it will be possible to refashion directly human nature itself. As Trotsky put it in one of his texts: the next big task of Bolshevik party is to reshape human nature. Like the idea is that nature did a bad job with humans, we are too imperfect beings and so on, so our message should be "Goodbye"—I'm quoting Trotsky—"Goodbye Homo Sapiens. You did your job," and so on. What is again so interesting here is how extreme techno-scientism mixes with a certain anti-sexual pseudo-spirituality. Because if you read these Soviet biocosmic speculative philosophers, you can see that one of their at least obsessions is sex. And what they focus on is a post-human collective entity which would no longer—not only no longer it would need sexuality to reproduce itself, but even more, the whole functioning of us humans as sensual beings will change. How? One of the metaphors they use is that the way we use today feelings, sentiments, or being affected by senses, hearing, and so on, that we should become literally like machines. In what sense? For example, you have a certain, I don't know, electric machine, and then you have there a measuring apparatus which shows you when heat grows too strong. But for this, you as a human guy who regulates the machine, you don’t have to feel the heat. It’s just the measuring apparatus which tells you it’s too much. And the idea is that when we humans, in the happy post-human future, when we will feel something, it will be at the same level, you know, like pain—it will just be, we will be informed by our senses that something is wrong. But we will no longer feel pain. we will have a distance from our embodiment. And of course, the point of this is then getting rid of sexuality. And this was quite an interesting situation in the 1920s where these techno-gnosticists got together, connected with Ivan Pavlov, the great, you know, conditional reflex guy and so on, proclaiming—it’s very interesting to read this, to look at the sexual politics of Soviet Union in the 1920s—the idea was that—this was the minority and I think Lenin was right to oppose it—the idea was that sexuality is the last field of bourgeois capitalist ideological counter-attack. The idea is now we won political-economic battle, here working class in power, and which is why... because they lost political-economic battle, bourgeoisie is now using sexuality. So the idea is not "have a progressive sexuality" but the ultimate goal is getting rid of sexuality as an unnecessary detour, a sign of human imperfection. And if you will think that I am just exaggerating this, look at the one who is, I think, arguably the greatest, for me at least, Russian writer of the 20th century, Andrei Platonov. He is really, I think, together with Beckett, Kafka, Platonov—these are the three great ones. In his wonderful short stories from the 20s, sexuality is always presented as kind of a... really as, almost in theological sense, fall into corruption and so on. The problem is how to get rid of sexuality. But back to my main line. So the spectacular development of biogenetics with its scientific practices—that's the idea of this fourth form of anti-humanism—is gradually dissolving frontiers between humans and animals on the one side, as well as between humans and machines on the other side. It gives rise to the idea that we are on the threshold of a new form of intelligence, a more than human singularity in which mind will no longer be submitted to bodily constraints inclusive of sexual reproduction. Out of this prospect, a weird shame emerges: the shame about our biological limitations, our mortality, the ridiculous way we reproduce ourselves. What Günther Anders called the "Promethean shame," ultimately simply the shame that we were born and not manufactured. However, I think that we should not reduce this post-human stance to the paradigmatically modern belief in the possibility of total technological domination over nature. What we are witnessing today is also an immanent reversal of this scientific post-humanism. The slogan of today's post-human sciences is no longer domination but surprise, contingent non-planned emergence. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, French philosopher, theoretician of catastrophes, detected a weird reversal of the traditional Cartesian anthropocentric arrogance which grounded human technology. The reversal clearly discernible in today’s robotics, genetics, nanotechnology, artificial life practices, and so on. Quote from Dupuy: "How are we to explain that science became such a risky activity that according to some top scientists it poses today the principal threat to the survival of humanity? Some philosophers reply to this question by saying that Descartes’ dream to become master and possessor of nature has turned wrong and that we should urgently return to the mastery of mastery. They understand nothing. They don’t see that the technology profiling itself at our horizon through convergence of all disciplines aims precisely at non-mastery. The engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer's apprentice because of his negligence or ignorance, but by choice. He will give himself complex structures or organizations and he will try to learn what they are able of by way of exploring their functional properties. He will be an explorer and experimenter at least as much as an executor. The measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him more than the conformity of his realization to the list of pre-established tasks." So I think that this is the first wonderful tension in these new post-human sciences and so on. You know how what they want is to trigger a process with no return. It’s not only "we have to have perfect computers," we have to have computers which will, as it were, start to self-regulate themselves and overcome us humans themselves. That’s the measure of success. It’s a very nice paradox again of how the desire for complete mastery turns into the desire to produce something over which we precisely will have no mastery. This is one perspective of materialism today. Now I move to the next one, the so-called New Materialism focused on the notion proposed by Jane Bennett of "vibrant matter." What is this vibrant matter? I think that Fredric Jameson was right with his claim that Deleuzianism is today the predominant form of idealism. As in Deleuze, New Materialism relies on the implicit equation: Matter Life Awareness the stream of agential self-awareness. So no wonder New Materialism is often characterized as weak pan-psychism or terrestrial animism. When New Materialists oppose the reduction of matter to passive mixture of mechanic parts, they are of course not asserting the old-fashioned direct teleology. What they assert is the aleatory dynamics immanent to matter. Emergent properties arise out of unpredictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants. The agency for any particular act is distributed across a variety of kinds of bodies and so on. Agency thereby becomes a social phenomenon where the limits of sociality are expanded to include all material bodies participating in the relevant assemblage. Say an ecological public is a group of bodies, some human, mostly non-human, that are subjected to harm defined as a diminished capacity for action. And in an extremely evil line of thought, I tried to imagine what it would have been to think Auschwitz as an assemblage in this New Materialist way. Not just the Nazi executioners were involved as its agent, but also Jews, the complex network of trains, gas ovens, the logistic of feeding the prisoners, of separating, distributing clothes, hair, ashes, and so on and so on. The ethical implication of such a stance is that we should recognize our entanglement within larger assemblages. We should become more sensitive to the demands of these publics and the reformulated sense of self-interest which calls upon us to respond to their plight. Materiality, usually conceived as inert substance, should be rethought as a plethora of things that form an assemblage of human and non-human actors, or actants, to use Bruno Latour's term. Humans are but one force in a potentially unbounded network of forces. We thereby move back to the enchanted world. This is the proper term, because I think that the deepest aspiration of this New Materialism is precisely to return to enchantment, to re-enchant the world. No wonder Bennett's earlier work was on enchantment of everyday life. She concludes her book *Vibrant Matter* with what she calls, in no way only with irony, her "Nicene Creed for would-be materialists." Just a passage worth quoting: "I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to non-human bodies, forces, and forms and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal this vitality even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests." End of quote. So what vibrates in vibrant matter is its immanent life force or its soul. Soul in the precise Aristotelian sense of the active principle immanent to matter. Vibrant life force, soul, not subjectivity. New Materialism thus refuses the radical divide matter-life and life-thought. Selves are multiple agents, they are everywhere in different guises. But a basic ambiguity nonetheless persists here. Are these vital qualities of material bodies the result of our (human observers) benign anthropomorphism so that the vitality of matter means that everything is in a sense alive, or are we effectively dealing with the strong ontological claim asserting a kind of spiritualism without gods, an attempt to restore sacredness to the world, to the universe? So if, quote from Bennett, "a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality," end of quote, it is not clear whether the vitality of material bodies is result of our perception being animistic or of an actual non-subjective or non-human vital power. An ambiguity which I claim is deeply Kantian. The gap—here we should, I think, return to the gap that separates modern science from Aristotelian descriptions of nature. This gap concerns the status of the real as impossible. The common-sense realist ontology opposes appearance and reality: the way things merely appear to us and the way they are in themselves, independently and outside of our relating to them. However, are things not already in themselves embedded in an environment related to us? Is not their "in-itself" the ultimate abstraction of our mind, the result of tearing things out of their network of relations? What science distills as objective reality is becoming more and more an abstract formal structure relying on complex scientific and experimental work. Does however this mean that scientific objective reality is just a subjective abstraction? No, since it is here, I think, that one should mobilize the distinction between reality as we experience it and the real. Alexandre Koyré pointed out how the wager of modern physics is to approach the real by means of the impossible. The scientific real, articulated in letters and mathematical formulas, is impossible also in the sense that it refers to something which we cannot ever encounter in reality within which we dwell. For example, based on experiments, Newton posited how... how fast, with how much acceleration, an object moves in free fall in absolute vacuum if no obstacles slow down its movement. We of course never encounter such a pure situation in our reality, where tiny particles in the air always slow down the free fall of any object, which is why a nail falls down much faster than a feather, while in a vacuum their velocity... the velocity of their fall would have been identical. This is why for modern science we have to begin with an impossible real to account for the possible. We have to imagine first a pure situation in which stones and feathers fall with the same velocity, and only thereafter we can explain the velocity of actual objects falling... explain this as deviations due to empirical conditions. Or another example: to explain the attenuation of the movement of objects in our ordinary material reality, physics takes as its starting point the principle of inertia, which postulates that an object which is not subjected to any external force moves at a constant velocity. An object will continue moving at its current velocity until some force causes its speed or direction to change. On the surface of the Earth, inertia is as a rule masked by the effects of friction and air resistance, which attenuate the speed of moving objects, usually to the point of rest. And this observable fact misled classical theorists such as Aristotle into assuming that objects move only as long as force is applied to them. Lacan's notion of the real as impossible should be applied here. The principle of inertia—an object not subject to any external force moves at a constant velocity—refers to an impossible real: something that never happens in reality but has nonetheless to be postulated to account for what goes on in reality. It is in this sense that I think modern science is more Platonic than Aristotelian. Aristotelian approach begins with empirical reality, with what is possible. While modern science explains this reality through the reference to an ideal order which is found nowhere in reality. And here, I think, New Materialism makes the step back into pre-modern Aristotelian naivety. It covers up the gap that defines modernity; it reasserts nature in its purposeful vitality. What... as again I quote again Bennett, "the careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp," end of quote. Note the uncertainty of this statement. Bennett is not simply filling in the gap. She remains modern enough to register the naivety of her gesture, admitting that the notion of the vitality of nature is beyond our comprehension, that we are admitting that we are moving in an obscure area. If then New Materialism can be still considered a variant of materialism, it is materialist in the sense in which Tolkien’s Middle-earth is materialist. Namely, my son even, who is an avid reader of Tolkien, drew my attention to this simple fact: that the Middle-earth universe is in a sense materialist. It is an enchanted world full of magic forces, evil and good spirits, and so on. But strangely—did you notice this?—without gods. There is no other domain of gods or whatever. There are no transcendent divine entities in Tolkien’s universe; all magic is immanent to matter. All spirituality is spiritual power that is immanent to, that dwells in our terrestrial world. So here it’s the first choice to be made. I think that this New Materialism, for reasons that of course I cannot go into them now, is precisely an ideological regression in the sense of avoiding to confront the truly traumatic consequences of what is modern science. Then the second aspect of materialism, what we... I want to go on now to another image of materialism which is the idea that it’s not just a point of claiming in an abstract way what is materialism—only matter exists or whatever you want—but in a more Marxist social-critical way to be a materialist means that every apparently formal model is always mediated by concrete historical content. It expresses a certain historical matrix. Along these lines, Peter Osborne criticized my book *Less Than Nothing*, claiming that I am not materialist in this sense. That what I propose as the basic feature of materialism—you know, all that stuff which begins with Democritus, then "less than nothing," that basically I just proposed an abstract formula of materialism without historically grounding it in a specific experience. Let me quote to you Peter Osborne’s critique: "As for the materialist reversal from Marx back to Hegel"—that's my claim, that Hegel was more materialist than Marx, that the true materialist reversal is from Marx to Hegel—"it actually happens within Marx’s own texts, specifically in *Capital*, where the ontological peculiarity of the value-form is shown to enact just such a process." The idea being of course that when Marx analyzes the value-form in Hegelian categories, he shows how again Hegel was not just speculating but how, as Marx put it I think already in his *Poverty of Philosophy*, that commodities themselves speak Hegelian language, behave in a Hegelian way. And again, the idea is one should not... a true materialist critique of Hegel is not just to show, "Ooh, Hegel is an idealist, in reality there is a social process blah blah blah," one has to show self-reflexively how the Hegelian philosophical edifice itself is grounded in a particular social-historical experience of commodities exchange and so on and so on. Because here I continue with the quote from Peter Osborne’s critique: "However, it is ontologically particular to *Capital*, Hegelian speculative process. That is its materialism. In Zizek’s terms, the contingent historical specificity of its necessity. Such dialectical logical necessity cannot be a feature of a general metaphysics without being precisely what it is in Hegel: idealism, because it lacks the capacity for sufficiently determinate significant, that is practically relevant differentiation. Simply calling it materialism on the basis of its difference from an ancient philosophical logic of the one does not stop it being idealism in a broader sense." So again, even if I try to define materialism, to advocate materialism, I still defined it as an abstract theoretical stance—less than nothing, there is no one, one is always self-undermined, whatever. But this is not enough. To be a materialist, you have to again locate your own position and the opponent's position in a concrete practical historical process. End of reference to Osborne. Now, what Osborne proposes here is the old thesis of the so-called Hegel-Capital School: Helmut Reichelt and some others in Germany back in the 60s, some very good scientists in Latin America, in Brazil or in Japan even. The idea that the Marxist, Marxist rather, logic of commodities provides the contingent historical secret or basis of the Hegelian speculation. However, I think that it is not enough to say this. First, there is the fundamental ambiguity of the Marxist reference to Hegel which begins already in Marx himself and goes on in Lukács, Adorno, and other Marxists. Namely, I ask you a very simple question. Sorry. Is the Hegelian dialectical process a mystified idealist expression of the historical process of liberation, or is it the mystified idealist expression of the capitalist self-reproduction? I developed this already in some of my books, that this is always what strikes me. Those who want to historicize Hegel’s logic, they always oscillate between two totally opposite versions. One, exemplarily deployed by young Lukács, is to claim Hegel’s logic—let’s call it naively the basic form of the Hegelian process: subject alienates itself, experiences itself as determined by alienated substance, foreign gods, fate, capital, whatever, and then the process of emancipation where subject reconciles itself with substance. This is for young Lukács, as he put it, the mystified form of the actual liberation process of the working class. The true reconciliation between subject and substance is the collective working class reappropriating its own alienated product, capital. So again, Hegel’s dialectical process: mystified expression of actual liberation movement. Then you have, partially already in Lukács, but especially in Adorno, the opposite reading: that Hegel’s dialectical process is a speculative expression not of the process of liberation but quite the opposite, of the alienation itself. That the self-reproduction of capital is the real base of Hegelian circular self-reproduction of idea. It’s so interesting is that you find the same ambiguity already in Marx himself. In *Grundrisse*, the famous text about pre-capitalist mode of production, there it’s more on Lukács’ side. That is to say, this Hegelian process of utter alienation and then reappropriation of the alienated substance is used as a model for historical development. It begins with substantial unity between producers and objective conditions of production in so-called primitive societies, then you go through radical alienation which, of course, reaches its highest point in capitalism where the producer is reduced to pure abstraction of working class, workers as, as Marx put it, *substanzlose Subjektivität*, subjects deprived of all their substance, and then proletarian revolution as the reappropriation of alienated substantial subject. But then in *Capital*, he is more at the level of Adorno, whose idea is much more that Hegelian speculation is a mystified expression of the very movement of the capital. It’s clear, for example, if you read in *Capital* how Marx conceptualizes the passage from commodity to capital. In ordinary commodity exchange, the universality of value is a passive substantial universality. With capital, as Marx put it, universality of value becomes active agent and is the active agent of reproducing itself. It’s absolutely clear that Marx here—we all know that he was in the 50s reading intensely Hegel’s logic—that it’s the Hegelian passage from substance to subject and so on and so on. So this would be my first point, that Marxism is extremely ambiguous here. Second, Marx is not only historicizing universals. He doesn’t only analyze how a universality is always colored by a specific historical context, like the true secret of Hegelian speculation is self-movement of capital. He also develops how there is a specific epoch in which a universality which is formally valid for all epochs appears as such. For example, again in the already mentioned text on pre-capitalist modes of production, Marx describes how the universality of labor only appears, come to exist in capitalist reality. Then, a third point: there is from Marx to Adorno always a set of propositions which are presented as trans-historical universals. For example, when Osborne triumphantly claims "Oh, the true Hegelian materialist, sorry, approach is to historicized every statement"—okay, how do we deal with Marx’s from Preface to the *Critique of Political Economy* where Marx summarizes "the guiding principle of my studies," he says? A brief quote: "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production," and so on and so on. I'm asking you a simple question: What is the status of these propositions by Marx? Clearly, they are meant as trans-historical social-ontological universals. Clearly Marx is not saying this holds only for... the most for capitalist society. What Marx would have probably said, the only way to historicize this is to say that "but it’s only from the experience of the position of working class in developed capitalism that we can develop this theory." But nonetheless it remains universal theory. Then let’s make another example, another philosopher much beloved by Osborne, Adorno. When Adorno in *Negative Dialectics* talks about the priority of the objective, where he asserts the non-identical and so on, such statements are definitely meant as universal ontological principles whose truth is not constrained to specific historical conditions. So again, I claim that even in their most radical historicism, Marx, Lukács, and others, they nonetheless claim... make very strong universally valid trans-historical statements. They only claim in the Hegelian vein—although it’s more complex—that it’s the privilege of certain epoch and within a certain epoch of certain historical experience of certain agent to gain access to this universally valid thesis. Then let me go on with this critique. There is another properly Marxist aspect: not only the historical mediation of universal philosophical categories, not only the embeddedness of universal philosophical categories in concrete contingent historical context, but a different practical status of philosophy itself. As Althusser put it in his short essay "Lenin and Philosophy," philosophy is class struggle in theory. It by definition involves taking sides, practical engagement. The young Lukács said the same thing in a different way when he emphasized that historical materialism is not a worldview but a practically engaged stance. Of course this is a great insight to which we should cling, namely that universal validity and practical engagement are not mutually exclusive. It’s not that there are different way to take sides but the only access to objective truth is if you adopt a position outside the struggle. No, the beautiful properly dialectical paradox is that precisely only from an engaged position can you see the universal truth. And I think this goes even for a concrete historical experience. For example, my eternal experience, I'm sorry for repeating myself, take anti-semitic pogroms in Hitler’s Germany. I claim that only from the deep identification with Jewish victims can you formulate, let’s say, the social truth of anti-semitism. It’s totally wrong to say "Okay, Nazis are blinded by their ideology, the Jews they are too identified by their suffering, so we should step back and from a neutral view see it." No, truth in its very universality has to be partial. But again, back to Osborne’s approach, is this dimension of practical engagement not lost when I define materialism as just formally opposed to the idealist assertion of the one, as the assertion of some abyssal multiplicity against the background of the void? That is to say, when I propose my elementary, let’s call it proto-ontology of "less than nothing" against the background of void and so on and so on, am I nonetheless proposing a contemplative worldview there? My first counterpoint here would have been a beautiful paradox—I developed it in a debate with my good friend Mladen Dolar—namely, you know it’s a critical point about Marx, you know about his thesis: "philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it." Yes, in a deeper sense I know what Marx meant, it’s true, this reproach. But nonetheless one should ask a totally naive question: did philosophers before Marx really only interpret the world instead of changing it? Did they all, starting from Plato, not propose a project for radically changing the world? I would say show me one traditional philosopher who did not try to change the world. Plato, you know his miserable excursion to Syracuse trying to convince the tyrant... up to Fichte and so on, Kant, project for eternal peace, and so on and so on. Now I come to my paradox. There is probably only one philosopher who explicitly rejected to change the world, he said "I just want to interpret it": it’s Hegel, the main source of Marx. So it’s a beautiful paradox: where are these stupid philosophers who didn’t want to change the world, just interpret it? No. I think that and I think there is a deep truth in this. Hegel, as we know, was a truly contemplative philosopher, renouncing all project for a future, limiting his thought to paint grey on grey. You know—I will maybe quote it later, maybe I should do it now—you know when in the... in the preface to his *Philosophy of Right*, when Hegel confronts the demands that the world should be made better and so on, here is the famous quote: "For such a purpose, philosophy always comes too late. Philosophy as the thought of the world does not appear until reality has completed its formative process and made itself ready. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known." Then, the mega-quote, the big hit: "The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering." Robert Pippin, with whom I disagree but still appreciate him as a truly authentic great American Hegelian—Robert Pippin, I envy him for this, made a note here to which I think he doesn’t respect it enough, a wonderful note, remark, so simple and evident. Usually Hegel’s *Philosophy of Right*, you know, the vision of the corporate state there, you know, is taken as Hegel’s model: that’s how today a rational state should be. But fuck it, should we not apply Hegel himself, his insight? Does this not mean that Hegel also is painting grey on grey, that the shades of night are already gathering on that? Isn't the very fact that Hegel develops his vision of state the sign that its time is over? So I think in this sense again, Hegel is much more surprisingly open to change and so on and so on. So now I will try, being a materialist, to meet Osborne's critique on its own terms and to claim that I do what he demands from me, that I do provide a very specific historical experience on which I ground my ontological insights. Namely, where are we today in this regard? Radical historical self-reflection—a philosophy has to account for its own possibility, that is to say how it fits its own historical constellation—remains a full necessity. I claim that in some sense, even if we have to move further, something was achieved with German idealism, this necessity of self-reflection. You cannot simply develop an ontology. You have to account for how, why exactly at this moment such a philosophy is possible or even necessary. Of all the people, even the late Michel Foucault knew it. Probably you know how apropos his history of sexuality, he pointed out how every thought, even a reflection on the ancient past—like his own analysis of the ancient Greek ethics, care of the self, and so on—is ultimately, a very beautiful Foucault expression, "an ontology of the present." He is well aware that it’s the deadlock of what he, Foucault, sees as this confessional ethics which covers the span from Christianity to psychoanalysis—it’s the very deadlock of this ethics which conditions his return to pre-Christian ancient Greek ethics. However, I claim today our self-reflection can no longer be the one of direct revolutionary Marxist subjectivity whose exemplary case is again *History and Class Consciousness* by Lukács. Our moment, I claim, is a Hegelian one. Not the moment of the highest tension when the teleological resolution seems near, but the moment after, when the resolution is accomplished but misses its goal and turns into a nightmare. And I claim this is why also we should return from Marx to Hegel. This is the Hegelian problem. Hegel's basic problem is how to remain faithful to the original goal of resolution—in this case of Enlightenment, French Revolution—how not to turn towards a conservative position, how to learn to discern the resolution, how to keep it alive in the very failure of its of the first attempt to actualize it. Hegel of course refers here to French Revolution. Its attempt to realize freedom and reason ended in revolutionary terror, which for Hegel—not for me, and Hegel's entire—it ended in fiasco. But you know, Hegel's entire effort goes into demonstrating how through this very failure a new order emerged in which revolutionary ideas become actuality. So again, Hegel's point is "let’s admit the fiasco of the first attempt at a revolution." But his problem is not a conservative one: "ooh, we went too far, let’s have some organic order." No, his point is precisely how fully to admit, to take into account this fiasco but nonetheless remain faithful to the original insight. Hegel emphasizes this to the end: French Revolution was the greatest event, and one should say this for Hegel, he even mentions very positively Haiti as... the Haiti revolution in this context and so on and so on. I think frankly, isn't this our situation today? How to actualize the communist project after the failure of its first attempt at realization in the 20th century? I think this is why also, the same as with Hegel, our task today is how to repeat it, how to do it again, how to remain faithful to it but nonetheless how not to, what should I call it, wash away the fiasco, how to see the fiasco in its even up to a certain point tragic necessity but nonetheless not to renounce the revolutionary goal. Isn't this our position today? 20th-century communism should be for us what French Revolution was for Hegel. A big attempt, it went wrong. But again, we shouldn’t for that reason denounce. So Hegel would have been totally opposed to this bullshit, at least this you have to admit, of liberal reading of French Revolution: "Let’s have a cake and eat it," which means in historical numbers: "Let’s have without You know, let's have the first liberal phase without Jacobin terror. No, Hegel’s basic point is is a necessary consequence of You cannot have one... we have to go through this horrible point. So in what is this view grounded? Every historical situation contains its own unique utopian perspective, an immanent vision of what is wrong with it, an ideal representation of how with some changes the situation could be rendered much better. So when the desire for a radical social change emerges, it is thus logical that it first tries to actualize this immanent utopian vision, which is why it has to end in a catastrophe. And it's here, even if it appears very modest if you allow me a brief political digression, that the true utopianism today are precisely the modest social-democratic attempts. For example, I advise you to read the book, I don't have to advise it to you, everyone is buying it and I'm saying this with a certain envy, fuck it, why are not my books selling as well as Piketty’s? You know I would sell my mother into slavery to be at that level, you know, of *Capital in the Twenty-First Century*. But I think, and you should read the book, you learn so much historically and so on. But it’s a utopian book at its purest. Why? On account of its very modesty. Piketty realizes this inherent tendency of capitalism towards inequality and so on and so on, so that the threat to democracy comes from within capitalist dynamics. Okay, we agree here. Also, I hope you noticed if you read the book the wonderful tragic sad lesson of Piketty’s book. He sees the only bright point in... in... in... from the 30s till the 60s, no, when this tendency towards inequality was controlled—stronger state, welfare state. But he himself says the condition for this turn towards was Holocaust, the Two World War and Crisis, you know? It says what—and I’m tempted to agree with him—the implicit conclusion is that our only hope is a new World War or whatever. Then he... you know this is also for me the problem of some optimists. There is now a new trend of historical optimists, from Matt Ridley to... to... I think was it Richard Dawkins to some others, which claim "We are too fascinated by the present crisis. Are we aware that we live in a perfect world?" No no no, they have their point. The idea is that if you look objectively at our situation today, first, fuck it, what economic crisis? Let’s be serious: when I was a year ago in South Korea and I mentioned universal crisis, they started to laugh at me and they were right. They told me, "And you think you are universalist anti-Eurocentric?" They told me, "Who is in crisis? Latin America is progressing in the last decade has progressed more than ever. Even sub-Saharan Africa is finally still miserable but compared to what went on in previous decade it’s moving up." Not to mention the explosive development of capitalism—China, Singapore, all our Asian values friends—Asian values meaning, of course to avoid a misunderstanding, nothing racist. It’s poetic term that new masters use there to give an authentic flare, you know. Asian values has the same value as when you say "the natural servitude of women," you know, or some bullshit like that. What I want to say is that no no, that they told me, "You—only even not all of Western Europe. There are countries like Denmark, Norway which are still, Poland, which are doing very well. Part of Western Europe is in crisis. And in the worst Eurocentric way, you talk about a global crisis. No, *you* are in crisis, only there." Then... then you know they bomb you with these statistics, again never better and so on. But I think things are a little bit more complex for a series of reasons. First, you know even when things abstractly appear to be progressing, then it’s not as simple as that. Let’s take the situation of Jews today. Compared to years before, the situation of Jews is definitely much better, except in some countries which we should criticize, deplore. At least in Western countries, open anti-semitism is no longer considered respectful. And you should never forget how years ago how common and publicly acknowledged anti-semitism was. I was told by friends that in Princeton University, even years ago, they still had a... how do you call it... list, percentage of Jews allowed to enroll and so on. Jews have their own state, blah blah blah. So you can say, you see progress, let’s not lose nerves things are better. Yes, but there is a tiny problem: in between these two dates something happened, no? Holocaust. And the ultimate irony: you cannot abstract Holocaust, because there are good reasons to claim that without Holocaust there would be no State of Israel. That it's precisely as a reaction to Holocaust blah blah blah. So this is first problem. Second problem: it’s a totally wrong idea beneath this of... of... of revolt. But revolts—one has really to repeat this again and again—revolts, revolutions, protests, whatever, they don’t explode when things are really bad, you know, and people say "Oh my god we cannot survive any longer now." No. The model typical of a revolt is when things get a little bit better and then expectations explode and then... Let me take a very problematic politically example, but I think it’s true. I’ve spoken to my friends from Egypt, Tahrir Square. Let’s be frank: Mubarak was by far, I'm sorry to tell you this, he was a bad guy, corrupted, yeah yeah blah blah, but he was definitely not simply an old-style total domination. He even tolerated a small communist opposition, there were debates, and especially a new educated middle class of young people emerged and so on. And as the result of all of this, of their expectations which were frustrated, you get the revolt. It’s the same in China. Yes, they have to fear, and they know it—they know it, the Chinese authorities—they have to fear revolt now when things are developing explosively, not under Maoism. Which is why the lesson is very sad of this. Unfortunately there will not be a revolt in North Korea, you know. It... if something will happen, it will happen in this way: that gradually they will open, thinking they can control it, you know, and then it will not work and so on and so on. So let me go back to this. My... ah yes, sorry, Piketty. You know why I think he is utopian? Okay, he is in a way right. The 20th-century overcoming of capitalism didn’t work. But then he generalizes this implicitly: "Okay, he accepts it as a good Keynesian or whatever, capitalism is ultimately the only game in town. All alternatives ended up in fiasco. So we have to keep it, we..." He is almost a kind of a social-democratic Peter Mandelson, you know, the Dark Prince of Blair who said, "In economy we are all Thatcherites," you know. All we can do is at the level of redistribution: more, a little bit more for healthcare, education, blah blah. So what I’m saying is that his... I think he is utopian because he simply says the mode of production has to remain the same, let's just change the distribution by nothing very original—radically higher taxes. Now here problems begin, here the utopia enters. I'm not saying we shouldn’t do this. I’m just saying that to do this and nothing else is not possible. That's his utopia: that basically we can have today's capitalism, which basically as a machinery remains the same, just "Oh oh, when you earn your billions, oh oh, here am I, tax, give me I don't think this is feasible. I think that—imagine a government doing this. First, Piketty is himself aware it has to be done globally because if you do it in one country then, you know the story, capital moves elsewhere blah blah. But my... And this is another aspect of his utopianism. My claim here is that if you imagine a world organization where the measure proposed by Piketty can effectively be enacted, then the problems are already solved. You know, then already you have a total political reorganization, you have a global power which effectively can control capital—we already won. So I think that in this sense he cheats. The true problem is to create the conditions for his apparently modest measure to be actualized. And this is why again I claim I'm not against him—wonderful, let's tax them What I am claiming is that if you were to do this, you would very soon discover that this would lead to further changes and so on and so on. I'm saying that the true utopia again—and this is what Hegel meant by abstract thinking: that you just imagine one measure, and nothing else changes. Of course, it would be wonderful to have today’s capitalism with all its dynamics, just at the level of redistribution you change it. But this is utopia, I claim. You cannot do it because, again, a change in redistribution would affect the mode of production, capitalist economy itself—I don’t know in what way. I’m just saying that... that sometimes utopia is not anti-pragmatic in the sense of "oh, radical change," and again "no, let's be modest do this." Sometime to be modest in a false way is maybe the greatest utopia, you know, to be a... to be a realist. It’s something like a... a ridiculous example, I know, and I’m ashamed to mention it because Piketty is not this, you know, like some Nazi sympathizer who said "Basically Hitler is right, organic community blah blah, just why doesn’t Hitler get rid of this disgusting anti-semitism?" you know. There was a strong trend even among Jews, there was a minority of conservative Jews who basically addressed Hitler in this way—it’s very interesting story—like "We agree with you, national unity blah blah, but why do you hate us? We want to be with you," you know. That’s utopian thinking. This is where the old Marxist so much maligned notion of totality comes in. You know, the moment you observe phenomena in totality, it doesn’t go. So what I want to say—back to my main line—is that this is the most dangerous trap. When you to a perspective of change. As I already said, every historical situation has its own immanent utopia. In the sense of, for example, when we have today’s capitalism with its incredible productivity, it's easy to say "Can't we have all this but instead of being appropriated by capital, to be appropriated by all the people and so on and so on?" But precisely such a simple reversal logic is a dangerous utopia. And here I think Marx should be criticized: that his vision of communist is still this immanent negation. "We can have all good things of capitalism, you just drop the private property but all the capitalist dynamics and so on it stays." The rhetorical formula here is the one used by Marx in his *Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts*, which I think if we play this right-wing game of "where are the roots of Stalinism in Marx?" I was never a partisan of young Marx. I say I'm afraid of young Marx much more. Young Marx has in his economic-philosophical so-called manuscripts a whole series of passages where he uses this simple reversal instead of logic. Let me bring you some quotes which are even rhetorically beautiful, like: "So much does the labor's realization appear as a loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces, the less he can possess." You know, all the time this formula: "the more the worker produces, the less he have." Of course, this then immediately calls a... for a positive reversal. Wouldn’t it be normal for the worker that the more he produces, the more he has, and so on and so on? But so that instead of being the realization of the worker, labor appears as the loss of his realization—which means we should strive for a society where labor is the realization of the worker. Or: instead of appearing as what it is, the appropriation of the object through labor, this appropriation appears as the estrangement. Or: instead of possessing what he produces, the more the worker produces, the less he possesses. Or: instead of civilizing himself through producing civilized objects, the more civilized his objects are, the more barbarous becomes the worker. And so on and so on. But I think that precisely this reversal doesn’t work. This is the most dangerous trap. And I think that the mature Marx was aware of it, because mature Marx does sometimes look... use this reversal formula but in a much more ambiguous way. For example in *Capital*, we have the following passage: "This inversion (*Verkehrung*) by which the sensibly concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterizes the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say Roman law and German law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say law—*the* law, *das Recht*—this abstraction realizes itself in Roman law and in German law, in these concrete laws... laws, the interconnection becomes mystical." This passage from Marx is very interesting because he is not as you would have expected in claiming in alienated capitalist society the abstract universal dominates over the concrete particular objects so that concrete particular object only appear as a... only are experienced as the form of appearance of abstract universality while normally abstract universality should only be a property of really existing particular objects. No, Marx is not... Marx is not a simple nominalist. The thesis of Marx is precisely that both are the two sides of the same pathology. Marx's point is not "Let’s simply realize a society where, you know, abstract is subordinated to concrete," and so on and so on. The point of Marx is rather that this concrete experience—objects are... the only thing that exist are particular objects, universal property is just a... an abstraction—that this is precisely our ideological self-experience. And that its truth is this speculative reversal. And to get rid of the speculative reversal, you must also get rid of this simple empiricist approach. And I think that... that the problem with communism was precisely that in this sense it tried to actualize the inner utopia as if of capitalism... of capitalism itself. And we can trace the consequences of this even to later catastrophes, like the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s when Chinese communists decided that China should bypass socialism and directly enter communism. The Chinese communists referred to Marx’s famous formula of communism: "from everyone according to his abilities to everyone according to his needs." They claimed that they already enacted communism. But they gave a particular, wonderful, false of course, reading of this formula. They claim our communes are already communist. Why? Because each works according to his abilities and each one gets what he really needs. And the idea was the military leader of a commune determines what you really need—like so much food is enough, so you get what you need—and the same leader of the commune knows what you're really able of and prescribes how much you should give. And so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that maybe we should go here to the end and in a Hegelian way drop this Marxist idea of revolution as a universal subject, working class or whoever, appropriates the alienated substance. Maybe both sides of this dilemma—alienation in the sense of we are dominated by some reified estranged absolute, like fate, capital movement, and so on—but both should be dropped. This, of course, we should step out of alienated society where some absolute, again God, fate, capital is dominating us. But the solution is not simply to turn it around: we collective humanity should do it. I think that the true step should be a more something articulated by Lacan and only in Hegel: that... you should just realize that not only are we powerless, but that the Big Other, Capital and so on, is also powerless, contradictory in itself so that... to step out means not that I will be master, not the capital, but that no one will be a master. It’s a decentering still. We are still decentered, we humanity. But not in the sense that there is another center that capital rules. Okay, so I hope I didn’t lose my thread, I hope so. I hope that now I demonstrated a little bit in what sense yes we should be materialists, also in the sense that our vision—even if it's a general ontological vision—should be grounded in a concrete historical experience. But I think that what I and my friends are doing, to put it in vulgar terms, meets precisely these criteria. Again, our problem is how to remain faithful to revolution, to *a* revolution after the fiasco of its first attempt. Now if I can go a little bit more over to the last example where I would like to demonstrate what materialism is: the Althusserian theory of ideology as the model of this insisting on materiality, you know, of ideological state apparatuses and so on and so on. I think that Althusser misses something there. What? Althusser opposes, as we all know, two types of state apparatuses: ideological state apparatuses and direct physically violent oppressive state apparatuses: police, army, and so on and so on. The problem is how he... how he conceptualizes their interaction. For Althusser, what distinguishes state from other social apparatuses is that—quote from *Philosophy of the Encounter*: "Everything that operates in it, in the state, and in its name, whether the political apparatus or the ideological apparatuses, is silently buttressed by the existence and presence of the public armed physical force. That is not fully visible or actively employed, that it very often intervenes only intermittently or remains hidden and invisible—all this is simply one further form of its existence and action. One had to make a show of one’s force so as not to have to make use of it. It is sufficient to deploy one’s military force to achieve by intimidation results that would normally have been achieved by sending it into action. We may go further and say that one can also not make a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. When threats of brute force or the force of law subject the actors in a given situation to obvious pressure, there is no longer any need to make a show of this force. There may be more to be gained from hiding it. The army tanks that were stationed under the trees of Rambouillet Forest in May 1968—forest near Paris, '68 events—are an example. They played by virtue of their absence a decisive role in quelling the '68 riots in Paris." End of quote. The first thing to note here is the radically... radical change of terrain that occurs when we pass from the first to the second level of avoiding the use of direct force. So as you got it, Althusser distinguishes three levels. First level would be the direct use of brute force. The second level is you make a show of force so as not to have to make use of it. Like, you just organize in... in a city where revolt is growing a big parade, just tanks, column of tanks and guns through the main avenues, and people will be scared you don’t have to use them. Then, when people expect, are aware of this threat, it’s even more efficient not even to make a show of the force because you know precisely everyone talks about it, are arms there blah blah blah and even if nothing happens it can work. So again, what we are dealing here is a kind of negation of negation. First, we negate the direct use of force by replacing it with a mere show of force. Say, again, in a tense situation authorities decide to parade columns of tanks through popular quarters of the city. Then this negation is itself negated: there is no show of force with the authorities expecting that this absent absence will have an even more forceful deterrent effect than the open display of force. This is precisely incidentally a nice example of the difference between imaginary and symbolic. The direct display of force is imaginary, it fascinates you, the image of tanks with all their noise. The second was in pure... is purely symbolic presence/absence. But... but... and I think that it is this properly symbolic dimension that nonetheless although Althusser notices it, he ignores its status. You know what Althusser doesn’t see? He is right in saying the threat is enough, even the threat of non-showing it. But what he doesn’t see is that it’s not only that this virtual imaginary or symbolic threat can do the work. My thesis is that what he doesn’t see is that *only* such a show does the work. The paradox of authority is that it works only as a threat. Imagine precisely, let’s return to Paris '68. Imagine the authorities effectively sending into the center of Paris tanks to crush the barricades in Quartier Latin and so on. I claim it would have probably triggered a much more serious revolution or whatever. You know Lacan says this when he refers to a wonderful ambiguity, when he says that omnipotence, *tout-puissance*, necessarily reverts into all-impotence, *tout un puissance*. For example, a father, a good father authority has to remain a virtual threat. If a father beats you, loses his nerves—even if it’s physically painful, can be—but usually you lose fear. You know there is something humiliating, degrading in it. The true authority has to remain virtual. Which is why I think, for example, the Chinese were right when they make their crackdown at Tiananmen with hundreds at least of dead into a non-event. It would have been a catastrophe by them to show publicly in the media the tanks crushing the demonstrators. It had to be in a way spectralized. You know, nobody knows what happened and so on and so on and so on. So my point being is that you see here Althusser is too much of a vulgar materialist. It’s not only that there has to be a physical threat in the background. But the status of this threat is spectral. The moment you... it’s not only that it works also as only a threat. It works *only* as a threat. The moment you actually realize it, it’s a very risky... okay you may—you may kill them all but you cannot... let's say it would have been '68 a massacre in Paris. What would this have meant? Probably the whole France would have... would stand up and so on. You cannot do it. And so this... here we see how to really account, to be really a materialist, this I think is what this simple example shows. To really be a materialist, it’s not enough to insist on immediate materiality as the last resort, like, "Oh oh, we can talk, debate, but beware in the last instance I can use brutal force and... and obliterate you or whatever." No. The real materiality, materialism should include into materialism also this strange virtual threat which is not symbolic because it’s a threat of violence but it’s a weird purely virtual threat which as such has its all effectiveness and a threat which functions only as virtual. This same limitation of Althusser is shown also on another level. In a similar way, Althusser, when speaking about ideological state apparatuses, endlessly repeats in a boring way how they are ultimately material apparatuses, you know. Like, for example, religion is not just beliefs, teachings, theology—it’s the material practice of rituals of this or that and so on and so on. True. But I think Althusser here again misses something. And here for me true materialism—okay, I to annoy my friends I like to call it dialectical materialism, being well aware what total philosophical nonsense this term designated in 1940s and so on, you know. But at least I’m safe, you know, if I say I’m a dialectical materialize it means "fuck off no body will bother me," you know. Okay, so let’s go on. You know when Lacan talks about the Big Other, what he means is not just the ideal symbolic system but a weird materiality. If by materiality we mean effects outside the sphere of meaning, the certain... a certain materiality which is at work within the ideal order of language as such. And it’s not a material materiality in the sense of "language exists in words" and so on. It’s all that Lacan is aiming at with his notion of decentered subject and so on and so on. It’s a strange ideal materiality but it’s materiality in a sense of a mechanic nonsensical force at work in a symbolic system. Where can we find this materiality? Ah, now with this I will conclude. You know... language. Where is Habermas wrong? No, he is very respectful philosopher blah blah, although now he is furious because he is replaced obviously by Peter Sloterdijk as the official European Union *Staatsphilosoph*, State Philosopher, you know. But you know his idea of immanent normativity of speech, of human speech? The idea to simplify to the utmost but basically not, I claim. Habermas' solution is: "Okay, all we are sure of is we are always within a certain discursive practice. And let’s simply look at normativity inscribed immanently into this practice itself." Habermas is not saying when you speak you should speak sincerely and truthfully. No, Habermas is saying by the very act of speaking, of participating in a dialogue, you act as if or you claim to tell the truth, to... blah blah blah, so that it’s a kind of a immanent normativity involved in very intersubjective communication. Here I think things get problematic. Why? Because although Habermas perceives himself as... the great follower of Kant, he obviously didn’t do his homework in reading Kant. Only now am I discovering maybe the most—this is also self-criticism—the most interesting Kant, the late Kant of his *Anthropology*, anthropological writings. What Kant does there is precisely we really find a kind of a Pascalian Althusserian Kant there. In total contrast to what we officially perceive as Kantian philosophy, which is, you know, this inner sincerity, something counts as moral act only if you really meant it for no profit, for no personal gain and so on, only if you did it only for the sake of duty. But here we found a much more pragmatic Kant—not pragmatic in the sense of taking into account circumstances but precisely pragmatic in the sense of "how does, how do all these, how does all this normativity involved in symbolic communication work in actual life?" And Kant concludes or presents a great celebration *plaidoyer* for... for hypocrisy, insincerity and so on. It’s almost elaborated in detail the Pascalian vision. You are a hypocrite, you try to lie... well, pretend to say the truth and even if it’s insincere and you think that by... let’s say I am a liar. I pretend to you that I’m telling the truth. But Kantian wager is that I think I’m deceiving you but ultimately I will deceive myself and I mean I will starting to believe my own illusion. And then Kant goes here into such wonderful detail when you can lie, all against the big Kantian motto, you know, in under no circumstances you should lie—here you have a great celebration of lying. Of how the only way to do it is to begin by lying. A celebration of faking, of all that stuff. What does Kant know here? Something which was in an incredibly ingenious way, I claim, indicated by—my god if there is a thing for which I would be ready as I like to say to sell my mother into slavery is to be myself the author of that title, the most beautiful of Walter Benjamin’s titles I think, you know, the one "On Language as Such with Specific Considerations to Human Language," no? Because you know what does Benjamin want to say here? Not the... Benjamin is not Prince Charles who speaks with trees and all that bullshit, you know. He is not saying apart from human language we have the language of bees, all those stupid stuff, you know, "turn two steps left and on that bush you find all the honey" whatever. He is not saying that. He is not saying there are DNA animal language, maybe if one is to believe Prince Charles, trees are speaking, or in Slovenia we had a stupid mountain climber who... and he deserved, he died in Pakistan. He was such a New Age jerk. When people told him "But how can you just climb up mountain?" and he said "You know before I approach a mountain I always ask the mountain permission, and if only if I get..." no no. The point is that there is only one language: human language. But even in this case we have to distinguish between universal and particular. We have language as such which has only one species: human language. But what... so what more do we get? Well precisely, language as such is maybe Habermasian. What makes it human language is all this beneficent lies, cheating and so on, but which is the very mode of existence of language. For example this is, if you want quite an empirical example of, I think, where is Habermas wrong. When he says that... there is a normativity within language to tell the truth, so that whenever you lie, speaking to another, you are involved in what we call pragmatic contradiction. A Kantian answer would be: No. Let’s say I’m evil. Let’s say that you are—ha ha, I hope it’s not true—let’s say that you are dying of cancer. Heh heh. And let’s say that I see you and I see you are half dead. Of course I will tell you "Oh my god things are doing better, you look better," and so on. Now we probably would both have known that this is a lie. But it’s wrong to say I’m pragmatically inconsistent blah blah blah. No, precisely as a lie is the only polite thing to do. The message will not be "Why are you lying to me?" The message would be you would have felt some kind of sympathy and so on. And... no, I didn’t yet... Did I already use here in London—I don’t think I did—the extreme example of this, how extremely vulgar jokes can work? Don’t be afraid it will not be a sexual joke this time. It will be—did I already tell here I don’t think—the example of Srebrenica. Srebrenica, you know, the city where Serbs massacred, blah blah the whole city. Alenka Zupancic, my Lacanian colleague, told me that she met a linguist from Sarajevo who did a detailed research of Srebrenica jokes, which are extremely brutal. But this comes the point: it’s not other Bosnians joking about Srebrenica. It’s precisely the survivors of Srebrenica. *They* are telling these jokes and just to give you one example. The only thing you have to know is that it’s about a guy who wants to buy an apart—a house, some land around Srebrenica. But the point is that you should know that in my part of the world when we were young we were still cooking at home like real soup and so on. So when you went to the butcher usually when you say I don't know one pound of beef, he often asked you "with or without bones," you know. The idea is, you know, if you want to make a consommé or what soup it’s supposed to be better with some bones, you know. That’s what you want to know, you have to know. So okay, the joke is this one: a guy from Srebrenica who escaped Serbs, immigrated to Germany, returns with some money and asks his friends there "My god I want to move back to my home, what are the prices now of land in Srebrenica?" And the answer is "Well it depends, do you want land with or without bones?" you know. Of this is... It’s vulgar. But you know what I think? This is the most respectful thing you can do. I’ve spoken with people and they told me this is not just brutally making fun. The message of this is precisely "we are afraid, we are aware the situation is so terrifying and crazy that the only way to deal with it is in this obscene way." If you play this humanitarian, you know, and say "Oh, how was it possible, a horror like Srebrenica in 20th century just one hour flights from Paris, you know, where are we, we are barbarians, we are all from Srebrenica we should be..." This, they told me, is the true obscenity. There is something very respectful in this, you know. Beneath these jokes it’s basically a desperate acknowledging of impotence. It’s too horrible to speak with this... pathetic victimization, to using these rhetorics. The only thing we can do in this is this. It’s an obscenity but it’s the only thing that one can do with a certain dignity. And this I think, maybe he would admit it abstractly, but I don’t think this would be, you know, like... this joke about Srebrenica, this happens at not at the level of language as such but at the level of human language, no? And this is what... this is for this I think there is... I don't see a space... a space in Habermas. You know, for all this obscenity, lying and so on. Not as a simple cheating, but in its positive role. And again, Kant was fully aware of it. He talks about jokes, gallantry and so on. And again, it’s a big celebration of faking. Like, and with all of course the cynicism that comes here because I developed long ago this thing: I think that nonetheless it is on another level that Pascal and Althusser should be opposed. Maybe you know the line but nonetheless briefly and then I will finish. You know Althusser likes to quote that Pascal: "you don’t believe then fake it, do as if you believe and then you will believe." No, I think he got it wrong. I think ritual is rather also, but maybe even more importantly than a way to bring you to believe, it serves a totally different opposite goal. Namely... and Hegel knew this. Hegel knew everything as we know. You know, somewhere Hegel says that religious ritual has the function to release you from the pressure of too intense belief. Like, Hegel's problem is you really believe in God. You think about it all the time. Well, follow a ritual and you will no longer have to believe. You will feel free, you know. If instead of intensely... intensely, intensely thinking about God, repeat blindly the prayer and in your mind you can think about sex whatever you want, you know, it sets you free. And Hegel's genius as I develop briefly in my *Less Than Nothing* book can be shown also in his theory of marriage which goes in the same way. Hegel's logic is to put it very brutally: you are too much in love, it obsesses you all the time, marry the girl then you will see she smells bad, bad stockings whatever you want, and it will cure you of your love. You know? That’s... this, how should I put it, positive aspect of this hypocritical lying and so on and so on. This is what I claim Althusser’s theory misses. But precisely you see my point: for being too directly materialist, it misses this what I call materialist element which is precisely, back to Benjamin, not just language in general but concrete human language, the materiality of all the vulgar interest and so on and so on. It’s difficult to be a materialist but it is here where we should be materialists. I was... this were just some introductory notes. If you want a little bit more of serious stuff, come Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately since I am a co-organizer of that event, of course brutally I wanted to manipulate it so that at the end—and this was the first timetable, no?—at the end it’s Rowan Williams and me, which means me and Rowan Williams which means me and me with in the background Rowan Williams. No, but unfortunately he let us know that... that he has some marriage ceremony in the afternoon, so he will be very here in the morning, no? But it happens. So what I want to say is that there I want to go in much with much detail into in what sense even religion can be conceived in a materialist way, especially with the notion of subjectivity. And... and now I even discovered what is really great in... I will try to rehabilitate against this Badiouian notion which is I think too naive of, you know, subjectivity is event, engagement. No, I think we should rehabilitate the mortal sin of sloth, which can also function as boredom. You know, in *Either/Or*, Kierkegaard has a wonderful passage where he says boredom as the ultimate sin is the... explanation of entire human history. God was bored, so created the world. Then he was bored just looking at the stupid creation, he wanted someone to talk to, he created Adam. Adam was bored, God created Eve. Then you have the family, then you have multiple tribes—these tribes were bored they started to deal with each other, commerce and so on. Then primitive societies made travels, larger states blah blah, and we can go on, you know. In medieval times they got bored, they started to travel to America blah blah. Today we are bored, we want to reach other planets. So the idea is all great things come out of boredom, no? And my point would be that what we find only in Judeo-Christian tradition is this very fine idea that—and here I'm even opposed to my good friend very partially, I love him, Badiou, who thinks that boredom, ethical failure and so on is a negative mode of positive achievement. Badiou now is in this constructivist term, no? First we start with good and... evil is just the failure to do good. No, I remain the Hegelian here. I think that in order to have an authentic event, you need boredom, this self-emptying as an intermediate stage. And again, in Christianity I claim, following my Chesterton, that even in Jesus Christ is basically bored at the cross, like "fuck off" and so on, you know, that even God gets bored and so on. And then I will try to develop this—I’m so sad I wasn’t able to do it today—with another absolutely ingenious, only now I discovered it but it’s well-known fragment from Benjamin on the art of translation, you know, where he uses this metaphor of broken vessel. And I think it’s again absolutely crucial from there to get the true message of Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s not simply the vessel was full then it breaks. No... like the opening to the vessel occurs in the very act of breaking. Like, God’s creation itself is in a way breaking the vessel and so on. All those paradoxes I will develop them on Saturday afternoon, after and I don’t know what Rowan Williams, but there will be some good things. I’m proud to see here my good friend Eric Santner. And when I spoke about this materiality which is not material materiality but the other spectral materiality, where all his books talk about this in a way. Although we have slight differences, but this comes later, you know. Now you are a, how do you call it, *compagnon de route*, you know, fellow traveler, no? And maybe years from now if you win, you send me to Gulag or vice versa, but let’s leave this for later, you know, now. So you will have him, you will have many interesting things. I really think—and I'm saying this with sincere surprise because first when Costas told me to do this, I thought "Okay it will be another bullshit, let's just take some fashionable topics blah blah," and then my god I was so surprised that maybe till then it will not be even total bullshit, you know, what we do. So please come. It's worth—it's worth coming, you know, because I hope Eric will agree here with me, the task is precisely this one, to put it briefly: when you talk about theologico-political from a radically left perspective, usually the idea is "Yes, in some stupid parts of the world like Latin America they are too stupid for pure Marxist theory, you should allow them religion" and so on. But I think we have to move beyond this and ask a serious question: is there, in the very heart of a radical emancipatory project, a proper theological dimension? And how to think this dimension? We have a couple of models: one is the stupid liberal-critical—"Yeah, all radical emancipatory projects are basically secularized theology." That’s bullshit. Then we have the Benjamin version, you know, weak messianism, retroactive... retroactive redemption. I wonder if that’s the last answer. I think we should go deeper, more radically. But again, the point for us materialists, whatever, communists, I think is to step beyond this cheap... you know, this cheap idea of "religion is Plan B, you know, you have to mobilize population, they are not secular enough so fuck it let’s proclaim 'Voice of God' or whatever." No, it must have been the much more serious level. We will try to do it. Thanks very much for your great patience. I hope I exhausted you so that now I can have my moment of... of hypocrisy and to say, "You know, I would like so much to debate with you for another hour, but unfortunately we are too tired," you know. [Audience]: Are you tired? Zizek: I am never tired, because like comrade Stalin said about communists, I’m made of a special matter stuff, I’m not like other people. Okay, to save the... occasion, let's take one question so that we have now debate in general but with one... please, do you have some question? [Questioner]: Yes, um, what do you make of Benjamin's critique of historical materialism in those *Theses on History*? Or *The Philosophy of History*? Zizek: You mean which one? From those *Theses on History*? [Questioner]: Yes, the one concerning history... philosophy of history. Zizek: I wonder, my... I love the text, I always refer to it, and I think it’s where precisely Benjamin can be wonderfully read together with Freud: compulsion to repeat all the time. My problem is, is this model of revolution as retroactive redemption, you know? I love this idea of retroactivity blah blah. But what I'm saying is that is it really that the only way to imagine a revolution is this total act of redemption, you know, like kind of a moment where all the past is redeemed and so on? I wonder if this is what I find problematic. Not in the sense that it’s too teleological, too idealist, but I wonder if this is the only model. Otherwise, of course, I... I immensely admire it. I mean, but it should be really read in detail. You know, it should be read in detail because the references to this weak messianic force, this that—it's the same problem as, for example, in his *Critique of Violence*. It's incredible how since everyone loves Benjamin, no? But since we live in times where we fetishize in a bad sense violence is horror, the problem is what to do with his divine violence. And it's quite comical to read—it's the same problem with Fanon, no?—that they desperately try to downplay it as if Benjamin really meant with divine violence some purely symbolic gesture: "Well, no blood is spilled, just some..." No, I'm sorry. It's absolutely clear for Benjamin from Benjamin’s description that whatever he meant with divine violence, it’s really violent, blood and so on. It's the same with Frantz Fanon, you know, everyone is embarrassed, isn't it too much and so on and so on. So I think that this is why again—it’s incredible, in his polemics against me, the one whom I call like Voldemort from *Harry Potter*, the one whose name should not be mentioned—some humans call him Simon Critchley, no? He... he tries to give his reading and he gives a pure liberal humanist reading, as if divine violence means you think about it and when... when it really is no other way, you apply a little bit of violence. No, this is violence as means. Benjamin’s big definition is that divine violence is—sorry, means—it’s means without goal, without aim. It's not "you want a certain goal to achieve, when there is no other way, okay, okay, let’s do it." No, it’s precisely violence which is its own... its own... its own aim. It’s something nonetheless much more radical there. And precisely because of this, I claim, it’s not totalitarian violence. Totalitarian violence always has a precise goal and so on. You know, this is where we should demystify violence, even in the Middle East. I am against terrorism and so on, but you know it’s a little bit critical—I mean, ironic, you know, when Israel or other occupiers claim "But we are for peace." I believe them totally, sincerely. But you know what’s the problem? The occupier is by definition always for peace, you know, because you occupy a land, of course you want to have it peacefully, no? So you know, we... it's... it's so important to be very precise here, how should I put it, you know, what do we mean with all this. For example, this would be a nice point of going into the theologico-political. What exactly does Benjamin mean with divine violence? Because again, it’s absolutely clear that it’s not this humanist idea of "Oh my god we have to shoot some people but let's really take care that, you know." This is pure instrumental minimalism: "Let’s kill as little..." Of course, we are all... But then again, the question remains, no? So in this sense yes, and I... maybe you know about it, I will tell you what we are doing: me and my friends, Udi Aloni, my Jewish friend whom I mock all the time in the most... he is the source of my anti-semitic jokes, I tell him my Balkan jokes against us. You know that we are now organizing—I think that in or when, 100th anniversary of Benjamin’s, no, it's life, death, I even don't know what—they will organize in Jerusalem a big international Benjamin Conference. And you know what we will do? One week before in Ramallah our own Benjamin Conference. And the whole point is not to do it in this cheap political way: speak only about Palestinian resistance, does Benjamin have to... No, this would be too cheap. You treat Palestinians as idiots, you know. No, we will talk precisely about pure theoretical points of Benjamin. Isn't this a nice gesture? And we count also on getting many... [Audience]: Can we come? Zizek: Sorry? [Audience]: Will you announce it? Zizek: Central committee, you write a proposal with your picture from profile in front and the central committee will decide if you have a place there, yes. But you will have to come because if Syriza wins, you will have no country, you will ruin the country there Greece, no? Oh thank you, you are for Syriza. Sorry? You’re their biggest supporter. Yeah, but as some guy said—and I love him—somebody told me that on the net there is Happy Acres, a site where somebody proposed a working group to... to reflect on, "Is Slavoj Zizek a US propaganda psy-op? I have come to the conclusion that Zizek is a charlatan posing as a Stalinist to both discredit communists and simultaneously to smuggle fascist ideas, including old-fashioned Aryan supremacy, back into public discourse," and so on and so on. You know, when he claimed I'm paid by CIA, my reaction is not to protest, but to write a public letter to CIA. So you see, I'm doing all the work for you, here is my bank account, can I finally... and then to give this money to Syriza or what, you know? You tell the truth in the guise of a lie. Sorry? You tell the truth in the guise of a lie. Well, it is—it is a lie, but fuck it, if somebody were to offer me million like, you know, fuck the lies, I would gladly... I will give million to Syriza and so on. But then nonetheless with million you can do something. No, okay, thanks very much and see you in two days. Thank you. [Applause] Zizek: Eric, Eric!
Okay, let's do voting. You know, I said I will not vote, but I meant in Slovenia, which was there... there is a small so-called radical left. I totally don’t trust them and so on. I think they are manipulated by old corrupted ex-communists and so on. I think in Slovenia one should not vote. I was very specific, although at that Nightnews that you mention, I had a great honor of meeting and having quite a nice chat with Nigel Farage. No, good friend of mine, you know. Okay, let's be serious and let’s do the job. Again, it’s usual for me to say, but this time again I really mean it, that I hope you will not be disappointed. What I will do today is literally what the title, I think, promises: Towards a Materialist Theory of Subject, Subjectivity, which means it’s "towards." I just want to address in a very naive way this question, which is far from... far from promising a self-evident answer. What is it to be a materialist today? What types of materialism are we confronting today? So I will just go through a couple of them and try to clarify some things. I think there are vaguely four or five versions of materialism today. First, the so-called reductionist scientific materialism: cognitivism, Darwinism, and so on. Then, the new wave of atheism, which aggressively denounces religion: Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and so on and so on. My reproach—I will not deal with it here—to this materialism, you know, God is not great and so on, is precisely that it’s not materialist enough. If by materialism we mean in a very traditional Marxist way to locate an ideological edifice in its social-political contexts and ask not only the question abstractly, "Is it true? Is there God or not?" but, "How does an edifice function in its..."—I'm sorry to use this vulgar term—"social context?" This question is, apart from this generalized Enlightenment idea, you know, like "religion confuses people, enables evil," or whatever you want, they don't approach this question. Then we have a third version, whatever remains of so-called discursive materialism: Foucauldian analysis of discursive material practices, Althusserian notion of ideological state apparatuses where, again, this orientation does precisely what is missing in this aggressive atheism. They question... they observe an ideology in its material practice. But again, I claim they are not materialist enough. And then we have the last wave, to which I am—although they are not idiots, they are very interesting some of them—but I'm totally opposed to this last orientation, which is the Deleuzian or, if you want to play with it, post-Deleuzian so-called new materialism in all its guises, from Graham Harman to... to Jane Bennett and so on and so on. So let me begin with a simple observation. The paradox is that today it is—it's an old point that I often make in my books—it is idealism which emphasizes our bodily finitude and which tries to demonstrate how this very finitude opens up the abyss of a transcendent divine otherness out of reach. You know, when somebody today talks about how we are thrown into our finitude, how our bodily constraints are irreducible, a positive condition of our spirituality and so on—far from being a materialist attitude, this is today almost, I'm tempted to say, an exclusive spiritualist domain. Whoever begins by this, you can be sure that he will turn spiritualist. And again, as I often emphasize, no wonder that the most spiritual of 20th-century filmmakers, Andrei Tarkovsky, is simultaneously the one who was most obsessed with the impenetrable humid inertia on Earth. You know which is the ultimate Tarkovsky's scene of spiritual immersion? Precisely a hero not looking up towards the sky but down on the earth with his head in humid water, even mud, and so on and so on. While, on the other hand, so today's spiritualists emphasize finitude, our bodily existence as something beyond which we cannot reach and so on and so on; while, on the other hand, scientific materialists keep alive the techno-utopian dream about immortality, about getting rid of bodily constraints and so on and so on. It’s nice that the only people who today speak about immortality, getting rid of the body, turning yourself to a kind of a virtual entity, not being constrained by your finite body, are materialists. Along these lines, a French author, Jean-Michel Besnier, drew attention to the fact that today’s scientific naturalism seems to reactualize the most radical idealist program of Fichte and Hegel, the idea that reason can make nature totally transparent. Namely, does the biogenetic perspective of producing humans scientifically through biogenetic procedures—does it not change humanity into a self-made entity and does it not thus realize Fichte’s speculative notion of a self-positing I? This orientation stands for the fourth stage in the development of anti-humanism. We have first, the old theocentric anti-humanism—you know where you find this use of the term humanism today? In... with US religious fundamentalists who use the term humanism as synonymous with secular culture and so on. So here anti-humanism means "No, beyond the scope of humanity, we need a reference to some transcendent authority, to God." Then the other form of anti-humanism is the French theoretical anti-humanism, which accompanied the structuralist revolution of the 1960s: Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, and so on. There we know—I will not go into it—how anti-humanism worked. Then we have the deep ecological anti-humanist reduction of humanity to just one of the animal species on our Earth—the species which derailed the balance of life on Earth through its hubris and is now facing extinction, the justified revenge of Mother Earth. This is another form of anti-humanism. Then we have, again, the fourth form of anti-humanism. Usually they use the term "post," like post-human existence. The idea is that through mostly technological advances we are approaching a new level where literally we will no longer be humans in the sense of what this word means today, but whatever, some kind of a collective reason and so on. What is... what one should first note here is that this is not a new phenomenon, although today different cognitivists or computer scientists or popularizers like Ray Kurzweil et cetera preach about this, that we are approaching the point of singularity. In the first decades of the Soviet Union, we already had the so-called Biocosmism, which enjoyed extraordinary popularity at that time. A strange combination of vulgar materialism and Gnostic spirituality. The idea was—and again I quote it in my books—the idea was that with new technological advances it will be possible to refashion directly human nature itself. As Trotsky put it in one of his texts: the next big task of Bolshevik party is to reshape human nature. Like the idea is that nature did a bad job with humans, we are too imperfect beings and so on, so our message should be "Goodbye"—I'm quoting Trotsky—"Goodbye Homo Sapiens. You did your job," and so on. What is again so interesting here is how extreme techno-scientism mixes with a certain anti-sexual pseudo-spirituality. Because if you read these Soviet biocosmic speculative philosophers, you can see that one of their at least obsessions is sex. And what they focus on is a post-human collective entity which would no longer—not only no longer it would need sexuality to reproduce itself, but even more, the whole functioning of us humans as sensual beings will change. How? One of the metaphors they use is that the way we use today feelings, sentiments, or being affected by senses, hearing, and so on, that we should become literally like machines. In what sense? For example, you have a certain, I don't know, electric machine, and then you have there a measuring apparatus which shows you when heat grows too strong. But for this, you as a human guy who regulates the machine, you don’t have to feel the heat. It’s just the measuring apparatus which tells you it’s too much. And the idea is that when we humans, in the happy post-human future, when we will feel something, it will be at the same level, you know, like pain—it will just be, we will be informed by our senses that something is wrong. But we will no longer feel pain. we will have a distance from our embodiment. And of course, the point of this is then getting rid of sexuality. And this was quite an interesting situation in the 1920s where these techno-gnosticists got together, connected with Ivan Pavlov, the great, you know, conditional reflex guy and so on, proclaiming—it’s very interesting to read this, to look at the sexual politics of Soviet Union in the 1920s—the idea was that—this was the minority and I think Lenin was right to oppose it—the idea was that sexuality is the last field of bourgeois capitalist ideological counter-attack. The idea is now we won political-economic battle, here working class in power, and which is why... because they lost political-economic battle, bourgeoisie is now using sexuality. So the idea is not "have a progressive sexuality" but the ultimate goal is getting rid of sexuality as an unnecessary detour, a sign of human imperfection. And if you will think that I am just exaggerating this, look at the one who is, I think, arguably the greatest, for me at least, Russian writer of the 20th century, Andrei Platonov. He is really, I think, together with Beckett, Kafka, Platonov—these are the three great ones. In his wonderful short stories from the 20s, sexuality is always presented as kind of a... really as, almost in theological sense, fall into corruption and so on. The problem is how to get rid of sexuality. But back to my main line. So the spectacular development of biogenetics with its scientific practices—that's the idea of this fourth form of anti-humanism—is gradually dissolving frontiers between humans and animals on the one side, as well as between humans and machines on the other side. It gives rise to the idea that we are on the threshold of a new form of intelligence, a more than human singularity in which mind will no longer be submitted to bodily constraints inclusive of sexual reproduction. Out of this prospect, a weird shame emerges: the shame about our biological limitations, our mortality, the ridiculous way we reproduce ourselves. What Günther Anders called the "Promethean shame," ultimately simply the shame that we were born and not manufactured. However, I think that we should not reduce this post-human stance to the paradigmatically modern belief in the possibility of total technological domination over nature. What we are witnessing today is also an immanent reversal of this scientific post-humanism. The slogan of today's post-human sciences is no longer domination but surprise, contingent non-planned emergence. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, French philosopher, theoretician of catastrophes, detected a weird reversal of the traditional Cartesian anthropocentric arrogance which grounded human technology. The reversal clearly discernible in today’s robotics, genetics, nanotechnology, artificial life practices, and so on. Quote from Dupuy: "How are we to explain that science became such a risky activity that according to some top scientists it poses today the principal threat to the survival of humanity? Some philosophers reply to this question by saying that Descartes’ dream to become master and possessor of nature has turned wrong and that we should urgently return to the mastery of mastery. They understand nothing. They don’t see that the technology profiling itself at our horizon through convergence of all disciplines aims precisely at non-mastery. The engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer's apprentice because of his negligence or ignorance, but by choice. He will give himself complex structures or organizations and he will try to learn what they are able of by way of exploring their functional properties. He will be an explorer and experimenter at least as much as an executor. The measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him more than the conformity of his realization to the list of pre-established tasks." So I think that this is the first wonderful tension in these new post-human sciences and so on. You know how what they want is to trigger a process with no return. It’s not only "we have to have perfect computers," we have to have computers which will, as it were, start to self-regulate themselves and overcome us humans themselves. That’s the measure of success. It’s a very nice paradox again of how the desire for complete mastery turns into the desire to produce something over which we precisely will have no mastery. This is one perspective of materialism today. Now I move to the next one, the so-called New Materialism focused on the notion proposed by Jane Bennett of "vibrant matter." What is this vibrant matter? I think that Fredric Jameson was right with his claim that Deleuzianism is today the predominant form of idealism. As in Deleuze, New Materialism relies on the implicit equation: Matter Life Awareness the stream of agential self-awareness. So no wonder New Materialism is often characterized as weak pan-psychism or terrestrial animism. When New Materialists oppose the reduction of matter to passive mixture of mechanic parts, they are of course not asserting the old-fashioned direct teleology. What they assert is the aleatory dynamics immanent to matter. Emergent properties arise out of unpredictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants. The agency for any particular act is distributed across a variety of kinds of bodies and so on. Agency thereby becomes a social phenomenon where the limits of sociality are expanded to include all material bodies participating in the relevant assemblage. Say an ecological public is a group of bodies, some human, mostly non-human, that are subjected to harm defined as a diminished capacity for action. And in an extremely evil line of thought, I tried to imagine what it would have been to think Auschwitz as an assemblage in this New Materialist way. Not just the Nazi executioners were involved as its agent, but also Jews, the complex network of trains, gas ovens, the logistic of feeding the prisoners, of separating, distributing clothes, hair, ashes, and so on and so on. The ethical implication of such a stance is that we should recognize our entanglement within larger assemblages. We should become more sensitive to the demands of these publics and the reformulated sense of self-interest which calls upon us to respond to their plight. Materiality, usually conceived as inert substance, should be rethought as a plethora of things that form an assemblage of human and non-human actors, or actants, to use Bruno Latour's term. Humans are but one force in a potentially unbounded network of forces. We thereby move back to the enchanted world. This is the proper term, because I think that the deepest aspiration of this New Materialism is precisely to return to enchantment, to re-enchant the world. No wonder Bennett's earlier work was on enchantment of everyday life. She concludes her book *Vibrant Matter* with what she calls, in no way only with irony, her "Nicene Creed for would-be materialists." Just a passage worth quoting: "I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to non-human bodies, forces, and forms and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal this vitality even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests." End of quote. So what vibrates in vibrant matter is its immanent life force or its soul. Soul in the precise Aristotelian sense of the active principle immanent to matter. Vibrant life force, soul, not subjectivity. New Materialism thus refuses the radical divide matter-life and life-thought. Selves are multiple agents, they are everywhere in different guises. But a basic ambiguity nonetheless persists here. Are these vital qualities of material bodies the result of our (human observers) benign anthropomorphism so that the vitality of matter means that everything is in a sense alive, or are we effectively dealing with the strong ontological claim asserting a kind of spiritualism without gods, an attempt to restore sacredness to the world, to the universe? So if, quote from Bennett, "a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality," end of quote, it is not clear whether the vitality of material bodies is result of our perception being animistic or of an actual non-subjective or non-human vital power. An ambiguity which I claim is deeply Kantian. The gap—here we should, I think, return to the gap that separates modern science from Aristotelian descriptions of nature. This gap concerns the status of the real as impossible. The common-sense realist ontology opposes appearance and reality: the way things merely appear to us and the way they are in themselves, independently and outside of our relating to them. However, are things not already in themselves embedded in an environment related to us? Is not their "in-itself" the ultimate abstraction of our mind, the result of tearing things out of their network of relations? What science distills as objective reality is becoming more and more an abstract formal structure relying on complex scientific and experimental work. Does however this mean that scientific objective reality is just a subjective abstraction? No, since it is here, I think, that one should mobilize the distinction between reality as we experience it and the real. Alexandre Koyré pointed out how the wager of modern physics is to approach the real by means of the impossible. The scientific real, articulated in letters and mathematical formulas, is impossible also in the sense that it refers to something which we cannot ever encounter in reality within which we dwell. For example, based on experiments, Newton posited how... how fast, with how much acceleration, an object moves in free fall in absolute vacuum if no obstacles slow down its movement. We of course never encounter such a pure situation in our reality, where tiny particles in the air always slow down the free fall of any object, which is why a nail falls down much faster than a feather, while in a vacuum their velocity... the velocity of their fall would have been identical. This is why for modern science we have to begin with an impossible real to account for the possible. We have to imagine first a pure situation in which stones and feathers fall with the same velocity, and only thereafter we can explain the velocity of actual objects falling... explain this as deviations due to empirical conditions. Or another example: to explain the attenuation of the movement of objects in our ordinary material reality, physics takes as its starting point the principle of inertia, which postulates that an object which is not subjected to any external force moves at a constant velocity. An object will continue moving at its current velocity until some force causes its speed or direction to change. On the surface of the Earth, inertia is as a rule masked by the effects of friction and air resistance, which attenuate the speed of moving objects, usually to the point of rest. And this observable fact misled classical theorists such as Aristotle into assuming that objects move only as long as force is applied to them. Lacan's notion of the real as impossible should be applied here. The principle of inertia—an object not subject to any external force moves at a constant velocity—refers to an impossible real: something that never happens in reality but has nonetheless to be postulated to account for what goes on in reality. It is in this sense that I think modern science is more Platonic than Aristotelian. Aristotelian approach begins with empirical reality, with what is possible. While modern science explains this reality through the reference to an ideal order which is found nowhere in reality. And here, I think, New Materialism makes the step back into pre-modern Aristotelian naivety. It covers up the gap that defines modernity; it reasserts nature in its purposeful vitality. What... as again I quote again Bennett, "the careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp," end of quote. Note the uncertainty of this statement. Bennett is not simply filling in the gap. She remains modern enough to register the naivety of her gesture, admitting that the notion of the vitality of nature is beyond our comprehension, that we are admitting that we are moving in an obscure area. If then New Materialism can be still considered a variant of materialism, it is materialist in the sense in which Tolkien’s Middle-earth is materialist. Namely, my son even, who is an avid reader of Tolkien, drew my attention to this simple fact: that the Middle-earth universe is in a sense materialist. It is an enchanted world full of magic forces, evil and good spirits, and so on. But strangely—did you notice this?—without gods. There is no other domain of gods or whatever. There are no transcendent divine entities in Tolkien’s universe; all magic is immanent to matter. All spirituality is spiritual power that is immanent to, that dwells in our terrestrial world. So here it’s the first choice to be made. I think that this New Materialism, for reasons that of course I cannot go into them now, is precisely an ideological regression in the sense of avoiding to confront the truly traumatic consequences of what is modern science. Then the second aspect of materialism, what we... I want to go on now to another image of materialism which is the idea that it’s not just a point of claiming in an abstract way what is materialism—only matter exists or whatever you want—but in a more Marxist social-critical way to be a materialist means that every apparently formal model is always mediated by concrete historical content. It expresses a certain historical matrix. Along these lines, Peter Osborne criticized my book *Less Than Nothing*, claiming that I am not materialist in this sense. That what I propose as the basic feature of materialism—you know, all that stuff which begins with Democritus, then "less than nothing," that basically I just proposed an abstract formula of materialism without historically grounding it in a specific experience. Let me quote to you Peter Osborne’s critique: "As for the materialist reversal from Marx back to Hegel"—that's my claim, that Hegel was more materialist than Marx, that the true materialist reversal is from Marx to Hegel—"it actually happens within Marx’s own texts, specifically in *Capital*, where the ontological peculiarity of the value-form is shown to enact just such a process." The idea being of course that when Marx analyzes the value-form in Hegelian categories, he shows how again Hegel was not just speculating but how, as Marx put it I think already in his *Poverty of Philosophy*, that commodities themselves speak Hegelian language, behave in a Hegelian way. And again, the idea is one should not... a true materialist critique of Hegel is not just to show, "Ooh, Hegel is an idealist, in reality there is a social process blah blah blah," one has to show self-reflexively how the Hegelian philosophical edifice itself is grounded in a particular social-historical experience of commodities exchange and so on and so on. Because here I continue with the quote from Peter Osborne’s critique: "However, it is ontologically particular to *Capital*, Hegelian speculative process. That is its materialism. In Zizek’s terms, the contingent historical specificity of its necessity. Such dialectical logical necessity cannot be a feature of a general metaphysics without being precisely what it is in Hegel: idealism, because it lacks the capacity for sufficiently determinate significant, that is practically relevant differentiation. Simply calling it materialism on the basis of its difference from an ancient philosophical logic of the one does not stop it being idealism in a broader sense." So again, even if I try to define materialism, to advocate materialism, I still defined it as an abstract theoretical stance—less than nothing, there is no one, one is always self-undermined, whatever. But this is not enough. To be a materialist, you have to again locate your own position and the opponent's position in a concrete practical historical process. End of reference to Osborne. Now, what Osborne proposes here is the old thesis of the so-called Hegel-Capital School: Helmut Reichelt and some others in Germany back in the 60s, some very good scientists in Latin America, in Brazil or in Japan even. The idea that the Marxist, Marxist rather, logic of commodities provides the contingent historical secret or basis of the Hegelian speculation. However, I think that it is not enough to say this. First, there is the fundamental ambiguity of the Marxist reference to Hegel which begins already in Marx himself and goes on in Lukács, Adorno, and other Marxists. Namely, I ask you a very simple question. Sorry. Is the Hegelian dialectical process a mystified idealist expression of the historical process of liberation, or is it the mystified idealist expression of the capitalist self-reproduction? I developed this already in some of my books, that this is always what strikes me. Those who want to historicize Hegel’s logic, they always oscillate between two totally opposite versions. One, exemplarily deployed by young Lukács, is to claim Hegel’s logic—let’s call it naively the basic form of the Hegelian process: subject alienates itself, experiences itself as determined by alienated substance, foreign gods, fate, capital, whatever, and then the process of emancipation where subject reconciles itself with substance. This is for young Lukács, as he put it, the mystified form of the actual liberation process of the working class. The true reconciliation between subject and substance is the collective working class reappropriating its own alienated product, capital. So again, Hegel’s dialectical process: mystified expression of actual liberation movement. Then you have, partially already in Lukács, but especially in Adorno, the opposite reading: that Hegel’s dialectical process is a speculative expression not of the process of liberation but quite the opposite, of the alienation itself. That the self-reproduction of capital is the real base of Hegelian circular self-reproduction of idea. It’s so interesting is that you find the same ambiguity already in Marx himself. In *Grundrisse*, the famous text about pre-capitalist mode of production, there it’s more on Lukács’ side. That is to say, this Hegelian process of utter alienation and then reappropriation of the alienated substance is used as a model for historical development. It begins with substantial unity between producers and objective conditions of production in so-called primitive societies, then you go through radical alienation which, of course, reaches its highest point in capitalism where the producer is reduced to pure abstraction of working class, workers as, as Marx put it, *substanzlose Subjektivität*, subjects deprived of all their substance, and then proletarian revolution as the reappropriation of alienated substantial subject. But then in *Capital*, he is more at the level of Adorno, whose idea is much more that Hegelian speculation is a mystified expression of the very movement of the capital. It’s clear, for example, if you read in *Capital* how Marx conceptualizes the passage from commodity to capital. In ordinary commodity exchange, the universality of value is a passive substantial universality. With capital, as Marx put it, universality of value becomes active agent and is the active agent of reproducing itself. It’s absolutely clear that Marx here—we all know that he was in the 50s reading intensely Hegel’s logic—that it’s the Hegelian passage from substance to subject and so on and so on. So this would be my first point, that Marxism is extremely ambiguous here. Second, Marx is not only historicizing universals. He doesn’t only analyze how a universality is always colored by a specific historical context, like the true secret of Hegelian speculation is self-movement of capital. He also develops how there is a specific epoch in which a universality which is formally valid for all epochs appears as such. For example, again in the already mentioned text on pre-capitalist modes of production, Marx describes how the universality of labor only appears, come to exist in capitalist reality. Then, a third point: there is from Marx to Adorno always a set of propositions which are presented as trans-historical universals. For example, when Osborne triumphantly claims "Oh, the true Hegelian materialist, sorry, approach is to historicized every statement"—okay, how do we deal with Marx’s from Preface to the *Critique of Political Economy* where Marx summarizes "the guiding principle of my studies," he says? A brief quote: "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production," and so on and so on. I'm asking you a simple question: What is the status of these propositions by Marx? Clearly, they are meant as trans-historical social-ontological universals. Clearly Marx is not saying this holds only for... the most for capitalist society. What Marx would have probably said, the only way to historicize this is to say that "but it’s only from the experience of the position of working class in developed capitalism that we can develop this theory." But nonetheless it remains universal theory. Then let’s make another example, another philosopher much beloved by Osborne, Adorno. When Adorno in *Negative Dialectics* talks about the priority of the objective, where he asserts the non-identical and so on, such statements are definitely meant as universal ontological principles whose truth is not constrained to specific historical conditions. So again, I claim that even in their most radical historicism, Marx, Lukács, and others, they nonetheless claim... make very strong universally valid trans-historical statements. They only claim in the Hegelian vein—although it’s more complex—that it’s the privilege of certain epoch and within a certain epoch of certain historical experience of certain agent to gain access to this universally valid thesis. Then let me go on with this critique. There is another properly Marxist aspect: not only the historical mediation of universal philosophical categories, not only the embeddedness of universal philosophical categories in concrete contingent historical context, but a different practical status of philosophy itself. As Althusser put it in his short essay "Lenin and Philosophy," philosophy is class struggle in theory. It by definition involves taking sides, practical engagement. The young Lukács said the same thing in a different way when he emphasized that historical materialism is not a worldview but a practically engaged stance. Of course this is a great insight to which we should cling, namely that universal validity and practical engagement are not mutually exclusive. It’s not that there are different way to take sides but the only access to objective truth is if you adopt a position outside the struggle. No, the beautiful properly dialectical paradox is that precisely only from an engaged position can you see the universal truth. And I think this goes even for a concrete historical experience. For example, my eternal experience, I'm sorry for repeating myself, take anti-semitic pogroms in Hitler’s Germany. I claim that only from the deep identification with Jewish victims can you formulate, let’s say, the social truth of anti-semitism. It’s totally wrong to say "Okay, Nazis are blinded by their ideology, the Jews they are too identified by their suffering, so we should step back and from a neutral view see it." No, truth in its very universality has to be partial. But again, back to Osborne’s approach, is this dimension of practical engagement not lost when I define materialism as just formally opposed to the idealist assertion of the one, as the assertion of some abyssal multiplicity against the background of the void? That is to say, when I propose my elementary, let’s call it proto-ontology of "less than nothing" against the background of void and so on and so on, am I nonetheless proposing a contemplative worldview there? My first counterpoint here would have been a beautiful paradox—I developed it in a debate with my good friend Mladen Dolar—namely, you know it’s a critical point about Marx, you know about his thesis: "philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it." Yes, in a deeper sense I know what Marx meant, it’s true, this reproach. But nonetheless one should ask a totally naive question: did philosophers before Marx really only interpret the world instead of changing it? Did they all, starting from Plato, not propose a project for radically changing the world? I would say show me one traditional philosopher who did not try to change the world. Plato, you know his miserable excursion to Syracuse trying to convince the tyrant... up to Fichte and so on, Kant, project for eternal peace, and so on and so on. Now I come to my paradox. There is probably only one philosopher who explicitly rejected to change the world, he said "I just want to interpret it": it’s Hegel, the main source of Marx. So it’s a beautiful paradox: where are these stupid philosophers who didn’t want to change the world, just interpret it? No. I think that and I think there is a deep truth in this. Hegel, as we know, was a truly contemplative philosopher, renouncing all project for a future, limiting his thought to paint grey on grey. You know—I will maybe quote it later, maybe I should do it now—you know when in the... in the preface to his *Philosophy of Right*, when Hegel confronts the demands that the world should be made better and so on, here is the famous quote: "For such a purpose, philosophy always comes too late. Philosophy as the thought of the world does not appear until reality has completed its formative process and made itself ready. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known." Then, the mega-quote, the big hit: "The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering." Robert Pippin, with whom I disagree but still appreciate him as a truly authentic great American Hegelian—Robert Pippin, I envy him for this, made a note here to which I think he doesn’t respect it enough, a wonderful note, remark, so simple and evident. Usually Hegel’s *Philosophy of Right*, you know, the vision of the corporate state there, you know, is taken as Hegel’s model: that’s how today a rational state should be. But fuck it, should we not apply Hegel himself, his insight? Does this not mean that Hegel also is painting grey on grey, that the shades of night are already gathering on that? Isn't the very fact that Hegel develops his vision of state the sign that its time is over? So I think in this sense again, Hegel is much more surprisingly open to change and so on and so on. So now I will try, being a materialist, to meet Osborne's critique on its own terms and to claim that I do what he demands from me, that I do provide a very specific historical experience on which I ground my ontological insights. Namely, where are we today in this regard? Radical historical self-reflection—a philosophy has to account for its own possibility, that is to say how it fits its own historical constellation—remains a full necessity. I claim that in some sense, even if we have to move further, something was achieved with German idealism, this necessity of self-reflection. You cannot simply develop an ontology. You have to account for how, why exactly at this moment such a philosophy is possible or even necessary. Of all the people, even the late Michel Foucault knew it. Probably you know how apropos his history of sexuality, he pointed out how every thought, even a reflection on the ancient past—like his own analysis of the ancient Greek ethics, care of the self, and so on—is ultimately, a very beautiful Foucault expression, "an ontology of the present." He is well aware that it’s the deadlock of what he, Foucault, sees as this confessional ethics which covers the span from Christianity to psychoanalysis—it’s the very deadlock of this ethics which conditions his return to pre-Christian ancient Greek ethics. However, I claim today our self-reflection can no longer be the one of direct revolutionary Marxist subjectivity whose exemplary case is again *History and Class Consciousness* by Lukács. Our moment, I claim, is a Hegelian one. Not the moment of the highest tension when the teleological resolution seems near, but the moment after, when the resolution is accomplished but misses its goal and turns into a nightmare. And I claim this is why also we should return from Marx to Hegel. This is the Hegelian problem. Hegel's basic problem is how to remain faithful to the original goal of resolution—in this case of Enlightenment, French Revolution—how not to turn towards a conservative position, how to learn to discern the resolution, how to keep it alive in the very failure of its of the first attempt to actualize it. Hegel of course refers here to French Revolution. Its attempt to realize freedom and reason ended in revolutionary terror, which for Hegel—not for me, and Hegel's entire—it ended in fiasco. But you know, Hegel's entire effort goes into demonstrating how through this very failure a new order emerged in which revolutionary ideas become actuality. So again, Hegel's point is "let’s admit the fiasco of the first attempt at a revolution." But his problem is not a conservative one: "ooh, we went too far, let’s have some organic order." No, his point is precisely how fully to admit, to take into account this fiasco but nonetheless remain faithful to the original insight. Hegel emphasizes this to the end: French Revolution was the greatest event, and one should say this for Hegel, he even mentions very positively Haiti as... the Haiti revolution in this context and so on and so on. I think frankly, isn't this our situation today? How to actualize the communist project after the failure of its first attempt at realization in the 20th century? I think this is why also, the same as with Hegel, our task today is how to repeat it, how to do it again, how to remain faithful to it but nonetheless how not to, what should I call it, wash away the fiasco, how to see the fiasco in its even up to a certain point tragic necessity but nonetheless not to renounce the revolutionary goal. Isn't this our position today? 20th-century communism should be for us what French Revolution was for Hegel. A big attempt, it went wrong. But again, we shouldn’t for that reason denounce. So Hegel would have been totally opposed to this bullshit, at least this you have to admit, of liberal reading of French Revolution: "Let’s have a cake and eat it," which means in historical numbers: "Let’s have without You know, let's have the first liberal phase without Jacobin terror. No, Hegel’s basic point is is a necessary consequence of You cannot have one... we have to go through this horrible point. So in what is this view grounded? Every historical situation contains its own unique utopian perspective, an immanent vision of what is wrong with it, an ideal representation of how with some changes the situation could be rendered much better. So when the desire for a radical social change emerges, it is thus logical that it first tries to actualize this immanent utopian vision, which is why it has to end in a catastrophe. And it's here, even if it appears very modest if you allow me a brief political digression, that the true utopianism today are precisely the modest social-democratic attempts. For example, I advise you to read the book, I don't have to advise it to you, everyone is buying it and I'm saying this with a certain envy, fuck it, why are not my books selling as well as Piketty’s? You know I would sell my mother into slavery to be at that level, you know, of *Capital in the Twenty-First Century*. But I think, and you should read the book, you learn so much historically and so on. But it’s a utopian book at its purest. Why? On account of its very modesty. Piketty realizes this inherent tendency of capitalism towards inequality and so on and so on, so that the threat to democracy comes from within capitalist dynamics. Okay, we agree here. Also, I hope you noticed if you read the book the wonderful tragic sad lesson of Piketty’s book. He sees the only bright point in... in... in... from the 30s till the 60s, no, when this tendency towards inequality was controlled—stronger state, welfare state. But he himself says the condition for this turn towards was Holocaust, the Two World War and Crisis, you know? It says what—and I’m tempted to agree with him—the implicit conclusion is that our only hope is a new World War or whatever. Then he... you know this is also for me the problem of some optimists. There is now a new trend of historical optimists, from Matt Ridley to... to... I think was it Richard Dawkins to some others, which claim "We are too fascinated by the present crisis. Are we aware that we live in a perfect world?" No no no, they have their point. The idea is that if you look objectively at our situation today, first, fuck it, what economic crisis? Let’s be serious: when I was a year ago in South Korea and I mentioned universal crisis, they started to laugh at me and they were right. They told me, "And you think you are universalist anti-Eurocentric?" They told me, "Who is in crisis? Latin America is progressing in the last decade has progressed more than ever. Even sub-Saharan Africa is finally still miserable but compared to what went on in previous decade it’s moving up." Not to mention the explosive development of capitalism—China, Singapore, all our Asian values friends—Asian values meaning, of course to avoid a misunderstanding, nothing racist. It’s poetic term that new masters use there to give an authentic flare, you know. Asian values has the same value as when you say "the natural servitude of women," you know, or some bullshit like that. What I want to say is that no no, that they told me, "You—only even not all of Western Europe. There are countries like Denmark, Norway which are still, Poland, which are doing very well. Part of Western Europe is in crisis. And in the worst Eurocentric way, you talk about a global crisis. No, *you* are in crisis, only there." Then... then you know they bomb you with these statistics, again never better and so on. But I think things are a little bit more complex for a series of reasons. First, you know even when things abstractly appear to be progressing, then it’s not as simple as that. Let’s take the situation of Jews today. Compared to years before, the situation of Jews is definitely much better, except in some countries which we should criticize, deplore. At least in Western countries, open anti-semitism is no longer considered respectful. And you should never forget how years ago how common and publicly acknowledged anti-semitism was. I was told by friends that in Princeton University, even years ago, they still had a... how do you call it... list, percentage of Jews allowed to enroll and so on. Jews have their own state, blah blah blah. So you can say, you see progress, let’s not lose nerves things are better. Yes, but there is a tiny problem: in between these two dates something happened, no? Holocaust. And the ultimate irony: you cannot abstract Holocaust, because there are good reasons to claim that without Holocaust there would be no State of Israel. That it's precisely as a reaction to Holocaust blah blah blah. So this is first problem. Second problem: it’s a totally wrong idea beneath this of... of... of revolt. But revolts—one has really to repeat this again and again—revolts, revolutions, protests, whatever, they don’t explode when things are really bad, you know, and people say "Oh my god we cannot survive any longer now." No. The model typical of a revolt is when things get a little bit better and then expectations explode and then... Let me take a very problematic politically example, but I think it’s true. I’ve spoken to my friends from Egypt, Tahrir Square. Let’s be frank: Mubarak was by far, I'm sorry to tell you this, he was a bad guy, corrupted, yeah yeah blah blah, but he was definitely not simply an old-style total domination. He even tolerated a small communist opposition, there were debates, and especially a new educated middle class of young people emerged and so on. And as the result of all of this, of their expectations which were frustrated, you get the revolt. It’s the same in China. Yes, they have to fear, and they know it—they know it, the Chinese authorities—they have to fear revolt now when things are developing explosively, not under Maoism. Which is why the lesson is very sad of this. Unfortunately there will not be a revolt in North Korea, you know. It... if something will happen, it will happen in this way: that gradually they will open, thinking they can control it, you know, and then it will not work and so on and so on. So let me go back to this. My... ah yes, sorry, Piketty. You know why I think he is utopian? Okay, he is in a way right. The 20th-century overcoming of capitalism didn’t work. But then he generalizes this implicitly: "Okay, he accepts it as a good Keynesian or whatever, capitalism is ultimately the only game in town. All alternatives ended up in fiasco. So we have to keep it, we..." He is almost a kind of a social-democratic Peter Mandelson, you know, the Dark Prince of Blair who said, "In economy we are all Thatcherites," you know. All we can do is at the level of redistribution: more, a little bit more for healthcare, education, blah blah. So what I’m saying is that his... I think he is utopian because he simply says the mode of production has to remain the same, let's just change the distribution by nothing very original—radically higher taxes. Now here problems begin, here the utopia enters. I'm not saying we shouldn’t do this. I’m just saying that to do this and nothing else is not possible. That's his utopia: that basically we can have today's capitalism, which basically as a machinery remains the same, just "Oh oh, when you earn your billions, oh oh, here am I, tax, give me I don't think this is feasible. I think that—imagine a government doing this. First, Piketty is himself aware it has to be done globally because if you do it in one country then, you know the story, capital moves elsewhere blah blah. But my... And this is another aspect of his utopianism. My claim here is that if you imagine a world organization where the measure proposed by Piketty can effectively be enacted, then the problems are already solved. You know, then already you have a total political reorganization, you have a global power which effectively can control capital—we already won. So I think that in this sense he cheats. The true problem is to create the conditions for his apparently modest measure to be actualized. And this is why again I claim I'm not against him—wonderful, let's tax them What I am claiming is that if you were to do this, you would very soon discover that this would lead to further changes and so on and so on. I'm saying that the true utopia again—and this is what Hegel meant by abstract thinking: that you just imagine one measure, and nothing else changes. Of course, it would be wonderful to have today’s capitalism with all its dynamics, just at the level of redistribution you change it. But this is utopia, I claim. You cannot do it because, again, a change in redistribution would affect the mode of production, capitalist economy itself—I don’t know in what way. I’m just saying that... that sometimes utopia is not anti-pragmatic in the sense of "oh, radical change," and again "no, let's be modest do this." Sometime to be modest in a false way is maybe the greatest utopia, you know, to be a... to be a realist. It’s something like a... a ridiculous example, I know, and I’m ashamed to mention it because Piketty is not this, you know, like some Nazi sympathizer who said "Basically Hitler is right, organic community blah blah, just why doesn’t Hitler get rid of this disgusting anti-semitism?" you know. There was a strong trend even among Jews, there was a minority of conservative Jews who basically addressed Hitler in this way—it’s very interesting story—like "We agree with you, national unity blah blah, but why do you hate us? We want to be with you," you know. That’s utopian thinking. This is where the old Marxist so much maligned notion of totality comes in. You know, the moment you observe phenomena in totality, it doesn’t go. So what I want to say—back to my main line—is that this is the most dangerous trap. When you to a perspective of change. As I already said, every historical situation has its own immanent utopia. In the sense of, for example, when we have today’s capitalism with its incredible productivity, it's easy to say "Can't we have all this but instead of being appropriated by capital, to be appropriated by all the people and so on and so on?" But precisely such a simple reversal logic is a dangerous utopia. And here I think Marx should be criticized: that his vision of communist is still this immanent negation. "We can have all good things of capitalism, you just drop the private property but all the capitalist dynamics and so on it stays." The rhetorical formula here is the one used by Marx in his *Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts*, which I think if we play this right-wing game of "where are the roots of Stalinism in Marx?" I was never a partisan of young Marx. I say I'm afraid of young Marx much more. Young Marx has in his economic-philosophical so-called manuscripts a whole series of passages where he uses this simple reversal instead of logic. Let me bring you some quotes which are even rhetorically beautiful, like: "So much does the labor's realization appear as a loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces, the less he can possess." You know, all the time this formula: "the more the worker produces, the less he have." Of course, this then immediately calls a... for a positive reversal. Wouldn’t it be normal for the worker that the more he produces, the more he has, and so on and so on? But so that instead of being the realization of the worker, labor appears as the loss of his realization—which means we should strive for a society where labor is the realization of the worker. Or: instead of appearing as what it is, the appropriation of the object through labor, this appropriation appears as the estrangement. Or: instead of possessing what he produces, the more the worker produces, the less he possesses. Or: instead of civilizing himself through producing civilized objects, the more civilized his objects are, the more barbarous becomes the worker. And so on and so on. But I think that precisely this reversal doesn’t work. This is the most dangerous trap. And I think that the mature Marx was aware of it, because mature Marx does sometimes look... use this reversal formula but in a much more ambiguous way. For example in *Capital*, we have the following passage: "This inversion (*Verkehrung*) by which the sensibly concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterizes the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say Roman law and German law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say law—*the* law, *das Recht*—this abstraction realizes itself in Roman law and in German law, in these concrete laws... laws, the interconnection becomes mystical." This passage from Marx is very interesting because he is not as you would have expected in claiming in alienated capitalist society the abstract universal dominates over the concrete particular objects so that concrete particular object only appear as a... only are experienced as the form of appearance of abstract universality while normally abstract universality should only be a property of really existing particular objects. No, Marx is not... Marx is not a simple nominalist. The thesis of Marx is precisely that both are the two sides of the same pathology. Marx's point is not "Let’s simply realize a society where, you know, abstract is subordinated to concrete," and so on and so on. The point of Marx is rather that this concrete experience—objects are... the only thing that exist are particular objects, universal property is just a... an abstraction—that this is precisely our ideological self-experience. And that its truth is this speculative reversal. And to get rid of the speculative reversal, you must also get rid of this simple empiricist approach. And I think that... that the problem with communism was precisely that in this sense it tried to actualize the inner utopia as if of capitalism... of capitalism itself. And we can trace the consequences of this even to later catastrophes, like the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s when Chinese communists decided that China should bypass socialism and directly enter communism. The Chinese communists referred to Marx’s famous formula of communism: "from everyone according to his abilities to everyone according to his needs." They claimed that they already enacted communism. But they gave a particular, wonderful, false of course, reading of this formula. They claim our communes are already communist. Why? Because each works according to his abilities and each one gets what he really needs. And the idea was the military leader of a commune determines what you really need—like so much food is enough, so you get what you need—and the same leader of the commune knows what you're really able of and prescribes how much you should give. And so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that maybe we should go here to the end and in a Hegelian way drop this Marxist idea of revolution as a universal subject, working class or whoever, appropriates the alienated substance. Maybe both sides of this dilemma—alienation in the sense of we are dominated by some reified estranged absolute, like fate, capital movement, and so on—but both should be dropped. This, of course, we should step out of alienated society where some absolute, again God, fate, capital is dominating us. But the solution is not simply to turn it around: we collective humanity should do it. I think that the true step should be a more something articulated by Lacan and only in Hegel: that... you should just realize that not only are we powerless, but that the Big Other, Capital and so on, is also powerless, contradictory in itself so that... to step out means not that I will be master, not the capital, but that no one will be a master. It’s a decentering still. We are still decentered, we humanity. But not in the sense that there is another center that capital rules. Okay, so I hope I didn’t lose my thread, I hope so. I hope that now I demonstrated a little bit in what sense yes we should be materialists, also in the sense that our vision—even if it's a general ontological vision—should be grounded in a concrete historical experience. But I think that what I and my friends are doing, to put it in vulgar terms, meets precisely these criteria. Again, our problem is how to remain faithful to revolution, to *a* revolution after the fiasco of its first attempt. Now if I can go a little bit more over to the last example where I would like to demonstrate what materialism is: the Althusserian theory of ideology as the model of this insisting on materiality, you know, of ideological state apparatuses and so on and so on. I think that Althusser misses something there. What? Althusser opposes, as we all know, two types of state apparatuses: ideological state apparatuses and direct physically violent oppressive state apparatuses: police, army, and so on and so on. The problem is how he... how he conceptualizes their interaction. For Althusser, what distinguishes state from other social apparatuses is that—quote from *Philosophy of the Encounter*: "Everything that operates in it, in the state, and in its name, whether the political apparatus or the ideological apparatuses, is silently buttressed by the existence and presence of the public armed physical force. That is not fully visible or actively employed, that it very often intervenes only intermittently or remains hidden and invisible—all this is simply one further form of its existence and action. One had to make a show of one’s force so as not to have to make use of it. It is sufficient to deploy one’s military force to achieve by intimidation results that would normally have been achieved by sending it into action. We may go further and say that one can also not make a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. When threats of brute force or the force of law subject the actors in a given situation to obvious pressure, there is no longer any need to make a show of this force. There may be more to be gained from hiding it. The army tanks that were stationed under the trees of Rambouillet Forest in May 1968—forest near Paris, '68 events—are an example. They played by virtue of their absence a decisive role in quelling the '68 riots in Paris." End of quote. The first thing to note here is the radically... radical change of terrain that occurs when we pass from the first to the second level of avoiding the use of direct force. So as you got it, Althusser distinguishes three levels. First level would be the direct use of brute force. The second level is you make a show of force so as not to have to make use of it. Like, you just organize in... in a city where revolt is growing a big parade, just tanks, column of tanks and guns through the main avenues, and people will be scared you don’t have to use them. Then, when people expect, are aware of this threat, it’s even more efficient not even to make a show of the force because you know precisely everyone talks about it, are arms there blah blah blah and even if nothing happens it can work. So again, what we are dealing here is a kind of negation of negation. First, we negate the direct use of force by replacing it with a mere show of force. Say, again, in a tense situation authorities decide to parade columns of tanks through popular quarters of the city. Then this negation is itself negated: there is no show of force with the authorities expecting that this absent absence will have an even more forceful deterrent effect than the open display of force. This is precisely incidentally a nice example of the difference between imaginary and symbolic. The direct display of force is imaginary, it fascinates you, the image of tanks with all their noise. The second was in pure... is purely symbolic presence/absence. But... but... and I think that it is this properly symbolic dimension that nonetheless although Althusser notices it, he ignores its status. You know what Althusser doesn’t see? He is right in saying the threat is enough, even the threat of non-showing it. But what he doesn’t see is that it’s not only that this virtual imaginary or symbolic threat can do the work. My thesis is that what he doesn’t see is that *only* such a show does the work. The paradox of authority is that it works only as a threat. Imagine precisely, let’s return to Paris '68. Imagine the authorities effectively sending into the center of Paris tanks to crush the barricades in Quartier Latin and so on. I claim it would have probably triggered a much more serious revolution or whatever. You know Lacan says this when he refers to a wonderful ambiguity, when he says that omnipotence, *tout-puissance*, necessarily reverts into all-impotence, *tout un puissance*. For example, a father, a good father authority has to remain a virtual threat. If a father beats you, loses his nerves—even if it’s physically painful, can be—but usually you lose fear. You know there is something humiliating, degrading in it. The true authority has to remain virtual. Which is why I think, for example, the Chinese were right when they make their crackdown at Tiananmen with hundreds at least of dead into a non-event. It would have been a catastrophe by them to show publicly in the media the tanks crushing the demonstrators. It had to be in a way spectralized. You know, nobody knows what happened and so on and so on and so on. So my point being is that you see here Althusser is too much of a vulgar materialist. It’s not only that there has to be a physical threat in the background. But the status of this threat is spectral. The moment you... it’s not only that it works also as only a threat. It works *only* as a threat. The moment you actually realize it, it’s a very risky... okay you may—you may kill them all but you cannot... let's say it would have been '68 a massacre in Paris. What would this have meant? Probably the whole France would have... would stand up and so on. You cannot do it. And so this... here we see how to really account, to be really a materialist, this I think is what this simple example shows. To really be a materialist, it’s not enough to insist on immediate materiality as the last resort, like, "Oh oh, we can talk, debate, but beware in the last instance I can use brutal force and... and obliterate you or whatever." No. The real materiality, materialism should include into materialism also this strange virtual threat which is not symbolic because it’s a threat of violence but it’s a weird purely virtual threat which as such has its all effectiveness and a threat which functions only as virtual. This same limitation of Althusser is shown also on another level. In a similar way, Althusser, when speaking about ideological state apparatuses, endlessly repeats in a boring way how they are ultimately material apparatuses, you know. Like, for example, religion is not just beliefs, teachings, theology—it’s the material practice of rituals of this or that and so on and so on. True. But I think Althusser here again misses something. And here for me true materialism—okay, I to annoy my friends I like to call it dialectical materialism, being well aware what total philosophical nonsense this term designated in 1940s and so on, you know. But at least I’m safe, you know, if I say I’m a dialectical materialize it means "fuck off no body will bother me," you know. Okay, so let’s go on. You know when Lacan talks about the Big Other, what he means is not just the ideal symbolic system but a weird materiality. If by materiality we mean effects outside the sphere of meaning, the certain... a certain materiality which is at work within the ideal order of language as such. And it’s not a material materiality in the sense of "language exists in words" and so on. It’s all that Lacan is aiming at with his notion of decentered subject and so on and so on. It’s a strange ideal materiality but it’s materiality in a sense of a mechanic nonsensical force at work in a symbolic system. Where can we find this materiality? Ah, now with this I will conclude. You know... language. Where is Habermas wrong? No, he is very respectful philosopher blah blah, although now he is furious because he is replaced obviously by Peter Sloterdijk as the official European Union *Staatsphilosoph*, State Philosopher, you know. But you know his idea of immanent normativity of speech, of human speech? The idea to simplify to the utmost but basically not, I claim. Habermas' solution is: "Okay, all we are sure of is we are always within a certain discursive practice. And let’s simply look at normativity inscribed immanently into this practice itself." Habermas is not saying when you speak you should speak sincerely and truthfully. No, Habermas is saying by the very act of speaking, of participating in a dialogue, you act as if or you claim to tell the truth, to... blah blah blah, so that it’s a kind of a immanent normativity involved in very intersubjective communication. Here I think things get problematic. Why? Because although Habermas perceives himself as... the great follower of Kant, he obviously didn’t do his homework in reading Kant. Only now am I discovering maybe the most—this is also self-criticism—the most interesting Kant, the late Kant of his *Anthropology*, anthropological writings. What Kant does there is precisely we really find a kind of a Pascalian Althusserian Kant there. In total contrast to what we officially perceive as Kantian philosophy, which is, you know, this inner sincerity, something counts as moral act only if you really meant it for no profit, for no personal gain and so on, only if you did it only for the sake of duty. But here we found a much more pragmatic Kant—not pragmatic in the sense of taking into account circumstances but precisely pragmatic in the sense of "how does, how do all these, how does all this normativity involved in symbolic communication work in actual life?" And Kant concludes or presents a great celebration *plaidoyer* for... for hypocrisy, insincerity and so on. It’s almost elaborated in detail the Pascalian vision. You are a hypocrite, you try to lie... well, pretend to say the truth and even if it’s insincere and you think that by... let’s say I am a liar. I pretend to you that I’m telling the truth. But Kantian wager is that I think I’m deceiving you but ultimately I will deceive myself and I mean I will starting to believe my own illusion. And then Kant goes here into such wonderful detail when you can lie, all against the big Kantian motto, you know, in under no circumstances you should lie—here you have a great celebration of lying. Of how the only way to do it is to begin by lying. A celebration of faking, of all that stuff. What does Kant know here? Something which was in an incredibly ingenious way, I claim, indicated by—my god if there is a thing for which I would be ready as I like to say to sell my mother into slavery is to be myself the author of that title, the most beautiful of Walter Benjamin’s titles I think, you know, the one "On Language as Such with Specific Considerations to Human Language," no? Because you know what does Benjamin want to say here? Not the... Benjamin is not Prince Charles who speaks with trees and all that bullshit, you know. He is not saying apart from human language we have the language of bees, all those stupid stuff, you know, "turn two steps left and on that bush you find all the honey" whatever. He is not saying that. He is not saying there are DNA animal language, maybe if one is to believe Prince Charles, trees are speaking, or in Slovenia we had a stupid mountain climber who... and he deserved, he died in Pakistan. He was such a New Age jerk. When people told him "But how can you just climb up mountain?" and he said "You know before I approach a mountain I always ask the mountain permission, and if only if I get..." no no. The point is that there is only one language: human language. But even in this case we have to distinguish between universal and particular. We have language as such which has only one species: human language. But what... so what more do we get? Well precisely, language as such is maybe Habermasian. What makes it human language is all this beneficent lies, cheating and so on, but which is the very mode of existence of language. For example this is, if you want quite an empirical example of, I think, where is Habermas wrong. When he says that... there is a normativity within language to tell the truth, so that whenever you lie, speaking to another, you are involved in what we call pragmatic contradiction. A Kantian answer would be: No. Let’s say I’m evil. Let’s say that you are—ha ha, I hope it’s not true—let’s say that you are dying of cancer. Heh heh. And let’s say that I see you and I see you are half dead. Of course I will tell you "Oh my god things are doing better, you look better," and so on. Now we probably would both have known that this is a lie. But it’s wrong to say I’m pragmatically inconsistent blah blah blah. No, precisely as a lie is the only polite thing to do. The message will not be "Why are you lying to me?" The message would be you would have felt some kind of sympathy and so on. And... no, I didn’t yet... Did I already use here in London—I don’t think I did—the extreme example of this, how extremely vulgar jokes can work? Don’t be afraid it will not be a sexual joke this time. It will be—did I already tell here I don’t think—the example of Srebrenica. Srebrenica, you know, the city where Serbs massacred, blah blah the whole city. Alenka Zupancic, my Lacanian colleague, told me that she met a linguist from Sarajevo who did a detailed research of Srebrenica jokes, which are extremely brutal. But this comes the point: it’s not other Bosnians joking about Srebrenica. It’s precisely the survivors of Srebrenica. *They* are telling these jokes and just to give you one example. The only thing you have to know is that it’s about a guy who wants to buy an apart—a house, some land around Srebrenica. But the point is that you should know that in my part of the world when we were young we were still cooking at home like real soup and so on. So when you went to the butcher usually when you say I don't know one pound of beef, he often asked you "with or without bones," you know. The idea is, you know, if you want to make a consommé or what soup it’s supposed to be better with some bones, you know. That’s what you want to know, you have to know. So okay, the joke is this one: a guy from Srebrenica who escaped Serbs, immigrated to Germany, returns with some money and asks his friends there "My god I want to move back to my home, what are the prices now of land in Srebrenica?" And the answer is "Well it depends, do you want land with or without bones?" you know. Of this is... It’s vulgar. But you know what I think? This is the most respectful thing you can do. I’ve spoken with people and they told me this is not just brutally making fun. The message of this is precisely "we are afraid, we are aware the situation is so terrifying and crazy that the only way to deal with it is in this obscene way." If you play this humanitarian, you know, and say "Oh, how was it possible, a horror like Srebrenica in 20th century just one hour flights from Paris, you know, where are we, we are barbarians, we are all from Srebrenica we should be..." This, they told me, is the true obscenity. There is something very respectful in this, you know. Beneath these jokes it’s basically a desperate acknowledging of impotence. It’s too horrible to speak with this... pathetic victimization, to using these rhetorics. The only thing we can do in this is this. It’s an obscenity but it’s the only thing that one can do with a certain dignity. And this I think, maybe he would admit it abstractly, but I don’t think this would be, you know, like... this joke about Srebrenica, this happens at not at the level of language as such but at the level of human language, no? And this is what... this is for this I think there is... I don't see a space... a space in Habermas. You know, for all this obscenity, lying and so on. Not as a simple cheating, but in its positive role. And again, Kant was fully aware of it. He talks about jokes, gallantry and so on. And again, it’s a big celebration of faking. Like, and with all of course the cynicism that comes here because I developed long ago this thing: I think that nonetheless it is on another level that Pascal and Althusser should be opposed. Maybe you know the line but nonetheless briefly and then I will finish. You know Althusser likes to quote that Pascal: "you don’t believe then fake it, do as if you believe and then you will believe." No, I think he got it wrong. I think ritual is rather also, but maybe even more importantly than a way to bring you to believe, it serves a totally different opposite goal. Namely... and Hegel knew this. Hegel knew everything as we know. You know, somewhere Hegel says that religious ritual has the function to release you from the pressure of too intense belief. Like, Hegel's problem is you really believe in God. You think about it all the time. Well, follow a ritual and you will no longer have to believe. You will feel free, you know. If instead of intensely... intensely, intensely thinking about God, repeat blindly the prayer and in your mind you can think about sex whatever you want, you know, it sets you free. And Hegel's genius as I develop briefly in my *Less Than Nothing* book can be shown also in his theory of marriage which goes in the same way. Hegel's logic is to put it very brutally: you are too much in love, it obsesses you all the time, marry the girl then you will see she smells bad, bad stockings whatever you want, and it will cure you of your love. You know? That’s... this, how should I put it, positive aspect of this hypocritical lying and so on and so on. This is what I claim Althusser’s theory misses. But precisely you see my point: for being too directly materialist, it misses this what I call materialist element which is precisely, back to Benjamin, not just language in general but concrete human language, the materiality of all the vulgar interest and so on and so on. It’s difficult to be a materialist but it is here where we should be materialists. I was... this were just some introductory notes. If you want a little bit more of serious stuff, come Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately since I am a co-organizer of that event, of course brutally I wanted to manipulate it so that at the end—and this was the first timetable, no?—at the end it’s Rowan Williams and me, which means me and Rowan Williams which means me and me with in the background Rowan Williams. No, but unfortunately he let us know that... that he has some marriage ceremony in the afternoon, so he will be very here in the morning, no? But it happens. So what I want to say is that there I want to go in much with much detail into in what sense even religion can be conceived in a materialist way, especially with the notion of subjectivity. And... and now I even discovered what is really great in... I will try to rehabilitate against this Badiouian notion which is I think too naive of, you know, subjectivity is event, engagement. No, I think we should rehabilitate the mortal sin of sloth, which can also function as boredom. You know, in *Either/Or*, Kierkegaard has a wonderful passage where he says boredom as the ultimate sin is the... explanation of entire human history. God was bored, so created the world. Then he was bored just looking at the stupid creation, he wanted someone to talk to, he created Adam. Adam was bored, God created Eve. Then you have the family, then you have multiple tribes—these tribes were bored they started to deal with each other, commerce and so on. Then primitive societies made travels, larger states blah blah, and we can go on, you know. In medieval times they got bored, they started to travel to America blah blah. Today we are bored, we want to reach other planets. So the idea is all great things come out of boredom, no? And my point would be that what we find only in Judeo-Christian tradition is this very fine idea that—and here I'm even opposed to my good friend very partially, I love him, Badiou, who thinks that boredom, ethical failure and so on is a negative mode of positive achievement. Badiou now is in this constructivist term, no? First we start with good and... evil is just the failure to do good. No, I remain the Hegelian here. I think that in order to have an authentic event, you need boredom, this self-emptying as an intermediate stage. And again, in Christianity I claim, following my Chesterton, that even in Jesus Christ is basically bored at the cross, like "fuck off" and so on, you know, that even God gets bored and so on. And then I will try to develop this—I’m so sad I wasn’t able to do it today—with another absolutely ingenious, only now I discovered it but it’s well-known fragment from Benjamin on the art of translation, you know, where he uses this metaphor of broken vessel. And I think it’s again absolutely crucial from there to get the true message of Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s not simply the vessel was full then it breaks. No... like the opening to the vessel occurs in the very act of breaking. Like, God’s creation itself is in a way breaking the vessel and so on. All those paradoxes I will develop them on Saturday afternoon, after and I don’t know what Rowan Williams, but there will be some good things. I’m proud to see here my good friend Eric Santner. And when I spoke about this materiality which is not material materiality but the other spectral materiality, where all his books talk about this in a way. Although we have slight differences, but this comes later, you know. Now you are a, how do you call it, *compagnon de route*, you know, fellow traveler, no? And maybe years from now if you win, you send me to Gulag or vice versa, but let’s leave this for later, you know, now. So you will have him, you will have many interesting things. I really think—and I'm saying this with sincere surprise because first when Costas told me to do this, I thought "Okay it will be another bullshit, let's just take some fashionable topics blah blah," and then my god I was so surprised that maybe till then it will not be even total bullshit, you know, what we do. So please come. It's worth—it's worth coming, you know, because I hope Eric will agree here with me, the task is precisely this one, to put it briefly: when you talk about theologico-political from a radically left perspective, usually the idea is "Yes, in some stupid parts of the world like Latin America they are too stupid for pure Marxist theory, you should allow them religion" and so on. But I think we have to move beyond this and ask a serious question: is there, in the very heart of a radical emancipatory project, a proper theological dimension? And how to think this dimension? We have a couple of models: one is the stupid liberal-critical—"Yeah, all radical emancipatory projects are basically secularized theology." That’s bullshit. Then we have the Benjamin version, you know, weak messianism, retroactive... retroactive redemption. I wonder if that’s the last answer. I think we should go deeper, more radically. But again, the point for us materialists, whatever, communists, I think is to step beyond this cheap... you know, this cheap idea of "religion is Plan B, you know, you have to mobilize population, they are not secular enough so fuck it let’s proclaim 'Voice of God' or whatever." No, it must have been the much more serious level. We will try to do it. Thanks very much for your great patience. I hope I exhausted you so that now I can have my moment of... of hypocrisy and to say, "You know, I would like so much to debate with you for another hour, but unfortunately we are too tired," you know. [Audience]: Are you tired? Zizek: I am never tired, because like comrade Stalin said about communists, I’m made of a special matter stuff, I’m not like other people. Okay, to save the... occasion, let's take one question so that we have now debate in general but with one... please, do you have some question? [Questioner]: Yes, um, what do you make of Benjamin's critique of historical materialism in those *Theses on History*? Or *The Philosophy of History*? Zizek: You mean which one? From those *Theses on History*? [Questioner]: Yes, the one concerning history... philosophy of history. Zizek: I wonder, my... I love the text, I always refer to it, and I think it’s where precisely Benjamin can be wonderfully read together with Freud: compulsion to repeat all the time. My problem is, is this model of revolution as retroactive redemption, you know? I love this idea of retroactivity blah blah. But what I'm saying is that is it really that the only way to imagine a revolution is this total act of redemption, you know, like kind of a moment where all the past is redeemed and so on? I wonder if this is what I find problematic. Not in the sense that it’s too teleological, too idealist, but I wonder if this is the only model. Otherwise, of course, I... I immensely admire it. I mean, but it should be really read in detail. You know, it should be read in detail because the references to this weak messianic force, this that—it's the same problem as, for example, in his *Critique of Violence*. It's incredible how since everyone loves Benjamin, no? But since we live in times where we fetishize in a bad sense violence is horror, the problem is what to do with his divine violence. And it's quite comical to read—it's the same problem with Fanon, no?—that they desperately try to downplay it as if Benjamin really meant with divine violence some purely symbolic gesture: "Well, no blood is spilled, just some..." No, I'm sorry. It's absolutely clear for Benjamin from Benjamin’s description that whatever he meant with divine violence, it’s really violent, blood and so on. It's the same with Frantz Fanon, you know, everyone is embarrassed, isn't it too much and so on and so on. So I think that this is why again—it’s incredible, in his polemics against me, the one whom I call like Voldemort from *Harry Potter*, the one whose name should not be mentioned—some humans call him Simon Critchley, no? He... he tries to give his reading and he gives a pure liberal humanist reading, as if divine violence means you think about it and when... when it really is no other way, you apply a little bit of violence. No, this is violence as means. Benjamin’s big definition is that divine violence is—sorry, means—it’s means without goal, without aim. It's not "you want a certain goal to achieve, when there is no other way, okay, okay, let’s do it." No, it’s precisely violence which is its own... its own... its own aim. It’s something nonetheless much more radical there. And precisely because of this, I claim, it’s not totalitarian violence. Totalitarian violence always has a precise goal and so on. You know, this is where we should demystify violence, even in the Middle East. I am against terrorism and so on, but you know it’s a little bit critical—I mean, ironic, you know, when Israel or other occupiers claim "But we are for peace." I believe them totally, sincerely. But you know what’s the problem? The occupier is by definition always for peace, you know, because you occupy a land, of course you want to have it peacefully, no? So you know, we... it's... it's so important to be very precise here, how should I put it, you know, what do we mean with all this. For example, this would be a nice point of going into the theologico-political. What exactly does Benjamin mean with divine violence? Because again, it’s absolutely clear that it’s not this humanist idea of "Oh my god we have to shoot some people but let's really take care that, you know." This is pure instrumental minimalism: "Let’s kill as little..." Of course, we are all... But then again, the question remains, no? So in this sense yes, and I... maybe you know about it, I will tell you what we are doing: me and my friends, Udi Aloni, my Jewish friend whom I mock all the time in the most... he is the source of my anti-semitic jokes, I tell him my Balkan jokes against us. You know that we are now organizing—I think that in or when, 100th anniversary of Benjamin’s, no, it's life, death, I even don't know what—they will organize in Jerusalem a big international Benjamin Conference. And you know what we will do? One week before in Ramallah our own Benjamin Conference. And the whole point is not to do it in this cheap political way: speak only about Palestinian resistance, does Benjamin have to... No, this would be too cheap. You treat Palestinians as idiots, you know. No, we will talk precisely about pure theoretical points of Benjamin. Isn't this a nice gesture? And we count also on getting many... [Audience]: Can we come? Zizek: Sorry? [Audience]: Will you announce it? Zizek: Central committee, you write a proposal with your picture from profile in front and the central committee will decide if you have a place there, yes. But you will have to come because if Syriza wins, you will have no country, you will ruin the country there Greece, no? Oh thank you, you are for Syriza. Sorry? You’re their biggest supporter. Yeah, but as some guy said—and I love him—somebody told me that on the net there is Happy Acres, a site where somebody proposed a working group to... to reflect on, "Is Slavoj Zizek a US propaganda psy-op? I have come to the conclusion that Zizek is a charlatan posing as a Stalinist to both discredit communists and simultaneously to smuggle fascist ideas, including old-fashioned Aryan supremacy, back into public discourse," and so on and so on. You know, when he claimed I'm paid by CIA, my reaction is not to protest, but to write a public letter to CIA. So you see, I'm doing all the work for you, here is my bank account, can I finally... and then to give this money to Syriza or what, you know? You tell the truth in the guise of a lie. Sorry? You tell the truth in the guise of a lie. Well, it is—it is a lie, but fuck it, if somebody were to offer me million like, you know, fuck the lies, I would gladly... I will give million to Syriza and so on. But then nonetheless with million you can do something. No, okay, thanks very much and see you in two days. Thank you. [Applause] Zizek: Eric, Eric!