Utopias
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-06-15 · 1:21:36 · 11,455 words
communism-socialismideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsreligion-theologycinema-art-culturehistoryphilosophy-generaleveryday-lifefascism-populismscience-physicssubjectivity
Žižek delivers the opening lecture of a multi-day seminar on communism and everyday life, exploring utopian desire through a series of figures: the animal-kingdom fantasy on nature TV channels, racist historiographic dreams about the fall of Rome and the 'Dark Ages,' Kafka's short story 'Josefine the Singer' as a model of communist egalitarianism, and the Third Wave social experiment. He argues that proper communist culture involves collective immersion that paradoxically liberates individual idiosyncrasy, and that contemporary pseudo-collective spaces (Starbucks, arts venues) are ideological substitutes for genuine community. The talk previews a week-long series covering architecture, Wagner, multiculturalism/ethnicity, and apocalypse.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 22
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Architecture designed primarily to be written about (the two-to-three percent produced by star architects like Gehry, Koolhaas, Libeskind) is described as pure ideology, creating symbolic spaces that 'revitalize the city' while serving capital.
as “liberal communist”
Extremely rich but progressive individuals who advocate correct leftist politics from a position of economic privilege, e.g., attending conferences funded by George Soros.
Implicitly referenced in the discussion of ideology: the 'background noise' or common-sensical wisdom that gives density to abstract ideological statements is the register of this position.
The thick common-sensical, contextual texture that gives specific density to abstract ideological statements; ideology operates by violently reducing or leaving out this background noise.
The fundamental subjective position of witnessing the world from the standpoint of one's own absence, as in dreams of one's own death or a world without humans.
The excessive enjoyment attributed to the other in structures of political jealousy, antisemitic fantasies, homophobic fantasies, fantasies about Arab practices, from which the subject imagines itself excluded.
as “political jealousy”
The political analogue of erotic jealousy: the subject imagines a paradise of full jouissance enjoyed by the other (Jews, gays, Arabs) from which the subject is excluded, generating ideological fantasy.
The position assumed in utopian fantasy: the subject reduces itself to a pure, incorporeal gaze that observes a scene without disturbing it, as if invisible to the objects of the gaze.
Phrase borrowed approvingly from Wajcman to describe the human condition: humans are denatured animals whose language prevents them from the spontaneous, ahistorical social harmony they project onto the animal kingdom.
Term borrowed approvingly from Wajcman: humanity's nostalgic fascination with animal life documentaries as a longing for a world untamed by language, a cure for being 'sick with language.'
Phrase borrowed approvingly from Wajcman: the fantasy attributed to animal sexuality, sex without backstory, history, manuals, or dating services, which humans jealously project onto animals.
The object-cause of desire whose 'twists and loops' structure desire; Žižek argues utopian fantasy is a vision of desire functioning without objet a, i.e., a 'perfectly functioning machinery' without the constitutive obstacle/excess.
Mentioned in the context of Marx's analysis of capitalism: capitalism requires an excess, surplus profit, and Marx's utopian dream is a society that gets rid of this excess while remaining equally productive.
as “teleological reason”
Aristotelian reason that operates in continuity with common sense and posits a well-ordered teleological universe; Žižek argues this had to be broken by the Dark Ages to create the conditions for modern science.
as “credo quia absurdum / certum est quia impossibile”
Tertullian's actual formula ('it is certain because it is impossible') reread by Žižek not as irrationalism but as alignment with modern science and the Lacanian Real: one must trust reason over sensory evidence, as science does.
Invoked via Meillassoux's formula 'it is certain because it is impossible,' which Žižek reads as aligned with the Lacanian Real, that which is impossible yet certain.
as “virtuality vs. chance”
Distinction from Meillassoux that Žižek endorses: chance is one of pre-given possible outcomes; virtuality is the emergence of something genuinely new that was not in the pre-existing matrix of possibilities, what is perceived as miracle.
as “two types of stupidity”
First stupidity: hyper-intelligent subjects who miss the background common sense by taking things too literally (Švejk, Alan Turing); second stupidity: subjects so embedded in common-sensical background that they cannot distance from it (Watson, Hastings). Creative invention requires the first type.
as “big Other”
Implicitly at stake in the 'stupidity of the big Other', the second type of stupidity of subjects so embedded in common-sensical background wisdom that they cannot distance from it.
Žižek's ironic retitling of Kafka's story to underscore its communist dimension: the artist as mere vehicle of collective gathering, not a privileged genius, egalitarian to the point of total anonymity.
Žižek's preferred figure for communist community: a collective in which discipline and immersion coexist with the full expression of individual idiosyncrasy, modelled on science fiction mutant groups and programmer communes.
Badiou's notion, here accepted by Žižek in a specific sense: create collective spaces that withdraw from the dominant order, combining collective immersion with tolerance for individual freakishness.
Stories he reaches for 5
In 1967 a Palo Alto teacher launched a student movement with totalitarian discipline to show how Germans could have obeyed Hitler; the experiment spiralled out of control with students denouncing each other. Žižek rejects the liberal moral (we're all latent fascists) and argues the mottoes equally describe emancipatory communist community.
“Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride. I'm sorry to tell you but if this describes an emancipatory revolutionary community I totally subscribe to it.”
While approaching his computer to decline an architectural conference invitation, a colleague's gift of an architecture book arrived by bell, Žižek interprets this coincidence as almost proving God exists as a 'secret master.'
“Details like this make you believe that maybe God exists because at the very point... a bell rang in my apartment and somebody brought me a present from a colleague, a book on architecture.”
An architect friend told Žižek that the Guggenheim Museum is the realization of Benjamin's insight about the Paris Opera, the building is essentially one big staircase, and paintings are mere secondary decoration for a place to walk and talk.
“The proper way to perceive Guggenheim is to reduce paintings there just to a secondary decoration. It's a place where you go up to slowly walk down and talk.”
Tom Sawyer fantasises about attending his own funeral and watching how others react to his death, the classic Lacanian example of being present at the scene of one's own absence.
“The fantasy of witnessing one's own funeral like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”
At the New York Public Library Žižek debated BHL on liberal tolerance vs. communism; their formulations were so abstract that BHL declared himself a communist, proving ideology works through abstraction.
“When I described communism in such a way that Bernard-Henri Lévy agrees with it, then something is wrong.”
Works invoked 21
Co-authored by Žižek; mentioned in passing when describing the Milbank-style Aristotelian Christian universe that would have resulted without modernity.
Chevengur book
Platonov's novel; cited via Jameson's reading as demonstrating how collective immersion produces not uniformity but a community of idiosyncratic freaks.
Hašek's Czech novel; called 'maybe the greatest anti-military novel'; Švejk's literal-minded stupidity is Žižek's prime example of the first type of creative stupidity.
Tsahal film
Claude Lanzmann's 5-hour documentary on the Israeli Defence Forces; recommended as a 'counter-poison' to Grossman's humanist ideology because it presents the IDF as highly efficient professionals rather than 'people like us.'
Götterdämmerung opera
Wagner's Twilight of the Gods; previewed as the subject of Wednesday's lecture where Žižek will argue that Wagner was working on a communist project.
The World Without Us book
Alan Weisman's book on a world without humanity; called 'one of the beautiful books written recently'; used as the opening figure for the analysis of utopian fantasy as pure desubstantialized gaze.
Blindness film
Film adaptation of Saramago's novel; Žižek defends against its bad reputation and praises how it shows a communist community slowly emerging from extreme animal egotism.
Kafka's last story; read as 'one of the most beautiful communist utopias' and a model of radically egalitarian anonymous collectivity where art functions to create collective silence.
Lacanian Ink journal
The New York Lacanian journal; Wajcman's essay 'The Animals That Treat Us Badly' is quoted extensively from its last issue.
Stella Dallas film
Hollywood melodrama used as the paradigm case of utopian pure-gaze fantasy: the self-sacrificing mother reduced to observing her daughter's perfect wedding through glass.
Charles Freeman's liberal Enlightenment history; dismissed as 'classical naive' and shown to converge on the same racist utopian fantasy as Ward-Perkins.
Bryan Ward-Perkins's archaeological study; used to demonstrate how a neutral empirical argument slides into racist-utopian fantasy about the Dark Ages.
David Grossman's novella on jealousy; praised as 'a masterpiece' that displays the basic fantasmatic coordinates of jealousy as the imagination of a paradise of full jouissance from which the subject is excluded.
Heroes tv
TV series cited as an echo of the Sturgeon mutant-community theme; Žižek qualifies ('I'm not saying it's such a great series, I couldn't watch all of it') but recommends it as an image of communist community of freaks.
Žižek says 'I don't like it' but groups it with Heroes and X-Men as an instance of the outcast-community motif.
Lest Darkness Fall book
L. Sprague de Camp's science-fiction novel in which a time traveller advises Theoderic and saves Western civilization; cited as an example of racist-utopian Dark Ages fantasy.
More Than Human book
Theodore Sturgeon's novel (1953); cited as 'still the best' example of the science-fiction mutant-community narrative that Žižek uses as a figure for communist community of freaks.
National Geographic journal
Used as the exemplary ideological case: treats exotic human communities with the same gaze as animal communities, projecting onto them a fantasy of harmonious belonging.
Tertullian's text containing the actual certum est quia impossibile passage, used by Žižek to rehabilitate Tertullian as a proto-scientific thinker.
Felix Dahn's popular German boys' novel depicting Visigoths with Nibelung-tragic greatness; later reprinted throughout Nazi Germany; cited as a key text of right-wing culture's racist Dark Ages utopia.
X-Men film
Cited as another echo of the Sturgeon mutant-community motif used to figure communist collective of freaks.
People invoked 38
Franz Kafka positive
Argues Kafka was stupid in the first sense (creative literal stupidity); reads 'Josefine the Singer' as one of the most beautiful communist utopias, a model of egalitarian anonymous collectivity.
Tertullian positive
Proposes rehabilitating Tertullian as a major leftist/progressive figure; reads certum est quia impossibile not as irrationalism but as the structure of modern science and the Lacanian Real.
Theodore Sturgeon positive
Author of More Than Human (still 'the best' in its genre); the mutant-collective narrative is Žižek's prime literary figure for communist community of freaks.
Described as a 'boring snob'; Žižek prefers du Maurier.
Visigoth king cited as the pivot of the racist historiographic utopia: had he prevailed against Byzantine reconquest, some argue Dark Ages would have been avoided.
Charles Freeman negative
Author of The Closing of the Western Mind; Žižek dismisses it as 'classical naive liberal enlightenment' that falls into the same racist utopian fantasy as Ward-Perkins.
George Soros negative
Mentioned as the archetypal sponsor of liberal-communist conferences that allow wealthy progressives to attend without paying fees.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
His 'authoritarian personality' study is cited as providing the binary (authoritarian vs. liberal) that the Third Wave experiment unjustifiably collapses into, erasing the emancipatory collective option.
Daniel Libeskind negative
Grouped with Gehry and Koolhaas as practitioners of architecture as pure ideology.
Gianni Vattimo negative
Only agrees with Vattimo's move toward apocalyptic language; rejects 'weak thought' and 'weak communism'; jokes that weak communism would need a very strong secret police.
David Grossman positive
Praises Grossman's novella 'Frenzy' as a masterpiece on jealousy; but critiques his humanitarian Israeli-novelist stance as an ideology of 'we are humans like you' that normalises Israeli militarism.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the notion that fantasy involves being a disembodied gaze at the scene of one's own absence; the notion of objet petit a and the Real are central to Žižek's analysis of utopia.
Frank Gehry negative
Star architect whose work Žižek dismisses as 'architecture as pure ideology', symbolic spaces built to be written about, claiming to revitalize cities.
Duns Scotus positive
Argues Scotus's voluntarism ('if God wanted it, two and two would be five') is closer to the actual origin of modern science than Thomist rationalism.
Daphne du Maurier positive
Žižek prefers her to Virginia Woolf; Darian Leader convinced him she is the greater writer.
Marcion of Sinope negative
Early Christian heretic whose dismissal of Christ's bodily incarnation as phantasm is the target of Tertullian's certum est quia impossibile.
Bosnian Slav who became Ottoman Grand Vizier; Žižek invokes him with ironic pride as evidence of Slavic integration into Ottoman power structures.
Rem Koolhaas negative
Grouped with Gehry and Libeskind as practitioners of architecture as pure ideology.
Benedict XVI negative
Rejects the reputation of Benedict as a great theologian; finds his book on Jesus Christ 'so stupid'; criticises his attack on Islam for appealing to Aristotelian teleological reason rather than modern scientific reason.
Bryan Ward-Perkins negative
His book The Fall of Rome is used to demonstrate how a seemingly neutral archaeological argument slides into racist utopian fantasy about what would have happened without Byzantine-Slavic intervention.
Jaroslav Hašek positive
Author of The Good Soldier Švejk; cited as perhaps the greatest exemplar of the first type of stupidity, creative literal-mindedness that ignores background common sense.
Alain Badiou positive
Accepts Badiou's notion of subtraction in a specific sense (creating collective spaces of withdrawal); but offers a 'slight friendly critical remark' that Badiou's identification of science with mathematics loses science's essential exposure to contingency.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Žižek debated him at NYPL on liberal tolerance vs. communism; argues BHL's liberal anti-communism is empty abstraction, proved when BHL agreed with Žižek's equally abstract communist description.
John Milbank negative
Cited as the exemplar of what the uninterrupted Aristotelian-Christian universe would have produced without modernity, a Radical Orthodox static worldview.
Philippe Sollers negative
Mentioned dismissively ('whom I don't like') as one of those who claimed Benedict XVI is a great theologian.
Fredric Jameson positive
Referred to as 'my good friend Fred Jameson'; agrees with Jameson's reading of Kafka's Josefine as communist utopia and his analysis of Platonov's Chevengur on collective immersion and idiosyncrasy; parts from him on Gehry's architecture.
Darian Leader positive
Convinced Žižek that Daphne du Maurier is a greater writer than Virginia Woolf.
His documentary Tsahal is recommended as a counter-poison to Grossman's humanist ideology: it shows the Israeli army as highly capable military professionals rather than 'humans like us.'
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited approvingly for his passage describing the grand staircase of the Garnier Opera in Paris as its true focus rather than the performances.
Quentin Meillassoux positive
Praises his distinction between chance and virtuality and his theory of miracle as proof of the non-existence of God; endorses his notion of radical contingency of natural laws.
Alan Weisman positive
Praises The World Without Us as one of the most beautiful recent books; uses it as the launching pad for his analysis of utopian fantasy.
Alan Turing positive
Cited as another example of the first, creative type of stupidity: social idiocy combined with extraordinary rational intelligence.
Referenced via Wajcman's 'Cousteau syndrome', humanity's fascination with underwater/animal life documentaries as nostalgia for a world without language.
Karl Marx positive
Takes seriously Marx's directive to look for germs of new society in existing society; but critically notes that Marx falls into the utopian trap of imagining surplus-free capitalism-level productivity.
Ron Jones negative
The teacher who ran the Third Wave experiment; Žižek is 'totally opposed to the lesson from this experiment,' arguing it mystifies by erasing the third option of emancipatory collective discipline.
Gérard Wajcman positive
Disagrees with him politically but praises his analysis in Lacanian Ink ('The Animals That Treat Us Badly') on the ideological function of human fascination with the animal kingdom.
Thomas Aquinas negative
Freeman presents Aquinas as the return of reason; Žižek argues Aquinas represents the wrong kind of reason, Aristotelian teleological common-sense, not the radical contingency that grounds modern science.
John Paul II negative
Mentions his theater pieces as 'so bad' that even Poland avoids the topic; delays to sainthood after discovery of letters to a female companion.
What it argues
utopian fantasy and the gaze of pure absenceanimal kingdom as ideological substitute for communitythe fall of Rome and racist historiographic utopiaDark Ages as necessary precondition for modern scienceKafka's Josefine as communist egalitarian utopiathe community of freaks as post-liberal collective formpseudo-collective spaces as ideological mystification
Dialectical moves 9
“The most prominent example of nature blooming in the absence of humanity is Chernobyl—a dialectical paradox where the site of catastrophe becomes the site of natural utopia.”
The human-caused disaster zone is the best empirical realisation of the fantasy of a world without humans, inverting the expected relation between utopia and catastrophe.
“Far from being an irrationalist, Tertullian's credo quia absurdum is on the side of modern science: it is certain because it is impossible.”
What appears as the height of religious irrationalism (believing because absurd) is actually the structure of scientific reason, which trusts theory over sensory evidence.
“Without the so-called Dark Ages there would have been no modern science; the Dark Ages were a necessary condition for modernity, not its negation.”
What appears as a catastrophic interruption of reason was its necessary precondition: the destruction of Aristotelian teleological common-sense cleared space for modern scientific contingency.
“Every miracle is a proof that there is no God—quite on the contrary to what Christians think.”
Miracles, far from confirming divine order, demonstrate that the rational order guaranteed by God does not cover reality and something radically new can emerge outside any pre-given matrix.
“When I described communism in such a way that Bernard-Henri Lévy agrees with it, then something is wrong.”
An argument for communism that wins liberal assent is thereby revealed as ideologically empty, the measure of ideological distortion is precisely that the opponent agrees.
“The strength of Josephine's singing lies not in her voice but in the solemn stillness it creates—the silence is the art.”
The apparently secondary effect (collective silence) is the real substance of the artistic event; the positive content (the voice) is merely its vehicle.
“The Third Wave mottoes—strength through discipline, community, action, pride—describe not totalitarianism but an emancipatory revolutionary community; I totally subscribe to them.”
What the liberal experiment presents as proof of fascist potential is shown to be equally (and more properly) the description of communist collective discipline, exposing the experiment's false binary.
“What we emerge as after drowning in the collective is not zombies but freaks—collective immersion liberates individual idiosyncrasy rather than extinguishing it.”
The expected result of collective immersion (loss of self, homogenisation) is inverted: it is precisely collective experience that frees the individual's idiosyncrasy.
“The utopia of a world without the Dark Ages, with continuous Graeco-Roman reason, would have produced not modernity but a Milbank-style Aristotelian organic Christianity—no modernity at all.”
The historiographic utopia of uninterrupted reason paradoxically leads to its opposite: the stagnation of Aristotelian teleology, not the dynamism of modern science.
Claims 18
asserts
Ideology operates by violently reducing or leaving out the 'background noise' that gives specific density to abstract statements, making agreement seem compelled.ideology
asserts
Utopian fantasy always involves an impossible gaze by which the subject is present at the scene of its own absence, and a vision of desire functioning without objet petit a.utopia and Lacanian fantasy
asserts
Fascination with animal-kingdom TV channels is ideologically driven: it projects onto animals the fantasy of a harmonious society where everyone spontaneously knows their role without language, coaching, or history.nature documentaries and ideology
asserts
The fall of Rome did constitute a genuine catastrophe and civilizational fall, and the multiculturalist celebration of Rome's peaceful dissolution is false and politically motivated.fall of Rome historiography
rejects
The racist-utopian dream that without Byzantine/Slavic-Greek intervention Western civilization would have flourished without a Dark Age is ideologically driven and historically mistaken.Eurocentric-racist historiographic utopia
asserts
The so-called Dark Ages were a necessary precondition for modern science because they destroyed the Aristotelian teleological common-sense ontology that was incompatible with modern scientific contingency.history of science and the Dark Ages
asserts
Tertullian was not an irrationalist; his 'certum est quia impossibile' aligns with the logic of modern science and the Lacanian Real, not with fideist irrationalism.Tertullian and reason
asserts
Kafka's 'Josefine the Singer' is one of the most beautiful communist utopias ever written, depicting a radically egalitarian, anonymous community where the artist is a mere vehicle for collective gathering.Kafka and communist utopia
asserts
The proper communist utopia is not an efficient productive society without surplus but an egalitarian anonymous community of idiosyncratic individuals, as in Kafka's mouse people.communist utopia
rejects
The Third Wave experiment is a liberal mystification that erases a third term—emancipatory collective discipline—by falsely presenting only liberal individualism and totalitarian discipline as options.the Third Wave experiment and liberalism
asserts
A genuine communist culture requires collective immersion that paradoxically liberates individual idiosyncrasy, combining discipline with tolerance for freakishness.communist culture and community
asserts
Contemporary pseudo-collective spaces like Starbucks and arts-venue cafeterias are ideological substitutes for genuine communist collective experience and should be resisted.pseudo-collective spaces and ideology
rejects
Political jealousy—fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Other (Jews, gays, Arabs)—is not mere projection; the Other really does have its practices, which is what makes jealousy traumatic.traditional Marxist psychology of ideological projection
asserts
Marx himself falls into the utopian trap of imagining a society that retains capitalism's productive energy while eliminating surplus profit, which mirrors the animal-kingdom fantasy.Marx's utopian limitations
asserts
Architecture by star architects (Gehry, Koolhaas, Libeskind) is pure ideology; the more politically interesting architecture is in anonymous buildings and in favelas.architecture and ideology
rejects
Badiou's identification of science with mathematics and formal ontology misses science's essential exposure to radical contingency in the moment of measurement.Badiou's philosophy of science
asserts
Meillassoux's distinction between chance and virtuality correctly identifies what miracles are: the emergence of the genuinely new outside any pre-given matrix of possibilities, which proves there is no God guaranteeing rational order.Meillassoux, miracle, and God
asserts
Bernard-Henri Lévy's liberal anti-communist defence of the West and Žižek's communist alternative were formulated so abstractly that they ended up in full agreement—proving ideology works through abstraction.ideology and abstraction
Quotes 15
“Ideology is precisely this violent reduction. When you say 'wouldn't you like to live in a society...' this is how ideology blackmails you. Of course who would say no to this?”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as abstraction and blackmail
“When I described communism in such a way that Bernard-Henri Lévy agrees with it, then something is wrong.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology operates through abstraction
“We humans are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence. And as Lacan pointed out this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy.”Slavoj Žižek · fantasy as witnessing one's own absence
“It is certain because it is impossible. Certum est quia impossibile. Replace impossible with real—Lacan says impossible real—it is certain because it's real. Oh, our guy.”Slavoj Žižek · Tertullian aligned with Lacan's Real
“Man's a denatured animal. We are animals sick with language and how sometimes we long for a cure. But just shutting up won't do it.”Slavoj Žižek · language as human disease, animal fantasy as cure
“Science is this—you don't believe your eyes. Your eyes tell you objects move like this, quantum physics tells you something totally different.”Slavoj Žižek · modern science as Groucho Marx epistemology
“Utopia is precisely the elevation from which this species escape forgetfulness and oblivion. It is anonymity as an intensely positive force, as the most fundamental fact of life of the democratic community.”Slavoj Žižek · anonymity as communist utopia
“It is anonymity that in our non-utopian world goes under the name and characterization of death.”Slavoj Žižek · anonymity as the utopian name for what we call death
“Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride. I'm sorry to tell you but if this describes an emancipatory revolutionary community I totally subscribe to it.”Slavoj Žižek · Third Wave mottoes as communist programme
“What such gathering does to our lives is not some kind of 'we are all like the same zombies.' What we emerge as afterwards is freaks—each with their own idiosyncrasy.”Slavoj Žižek · collective immersion liberates idiosyncrasy
“Quite on the contrary to what Christians think, every miracle is a proof that there is no God.”Slavoj Žižek · Meillassoux: miracle disproves God
“Architecture, let's not forget, this is where they screw us up. They construct, they form the very space where we spend all the time.”Slavoj Žižek · architecture as ideological formation of lived space
“If you go to a theater performance to Queen Elizabeth Hall and browse in a bookstore and take a coffee there—this is not a communist experience. This is the worst.”Slavoj Žižek · arts-venue pseudo-collectivity as ideological substitute
“Josephine causes the people to assemble in silence. Her art makes us feel happy and when we are happy we pipe. But her audience never pipes.”Slavoj Žižek · Kafka's Josefine: silence as the true content of art
“The most beautiful part of these apocalyptic films for me is how a narrow but authentic new community—almost a communist community—is born.”Slavoj Žižek · apocalyptic film as site of communist dream
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I like it that it's not so sincerely so crowded because I hope you will not be disappointed. This time I really want to do in a very naive way what the title says. Some very naive reflections on where we maybe find utopian non-utopian whatever traces of what retroactively may be we have been the beginning of a communist culture. So just if some of you want to skip some of the talks, I want to be honest and tell you of some changes of course. So forget about what you read on the web. Yeah but nonetheless I want to be fair and like okay. Today I will focus on different utopian visions from everyday life of communism starting with maybe this will moderately amuse you at least it amuses me. I read a good text on you know this for me extremely boring TV channels like National Geographic, Animal Kingdom and so on. Why this fascination with animal community? And then going further in the usual way, okay, I end with of course praising totalitarian discipline. That's my [unintelligible]. Tomorrow I will do and this is a new domain in my bluffing, how should I put it, tomorrow I will do architecture. It's quite by chance I was invited to an architectural convention and I wanted to decline but then I mean details like this make you believe that maybe God exists because at the very point, literally, I'm not kidding, it really made me afraid like what there is secret master running. Literally, when I was approaching my table with my computer on to say no, a bell rang in my apartment and somebody brought me a present from a colleague, a book on architecture and I immediately saw that's where I can steal all the ideas because no it's a good book, no it's purely just descriptive. It's about this how do you call them usually like Queen Elizabeth Hall here, these performance arts venues. Places where as they put it they should be anti-elitist, not only the concert hall but also a cafeteria, a bookstore and so on. And I discovered that there are so many interesting but everything that is false in our society almost can be located there. It's supposed to be a public space but it's always in a way redoubled. There is another like shelter, you as they put it in their jargon skin detached from the body and so on. And also this absurdity of for example my dream is to have a building which would exist just of these secondary approach spaces like the idea came to me from reading you know that famous Benjamin passage where he describes the Garnier Opera in Paris and claims that the stair, the big stair is the true focus. Who cares about performance there? Ladies display there their dresses, gentlemen meet for a cigar, drink whatever. That's the... and then an architect friend gave me a wonderful idea. He said what's the big fuss in New York? We have a big building which is exactly this. It's Guggenheim. If you are there it's just one big stair down. And I claim that the proper way to perceive Guggenheim is to reduce paintings there just to a secondary decoration. It's a place where you go up to slowly walk down and talk and so on. So again what's the ideology there? I think again it is quite incredible. I will show you some pictures why this interests me because this is I claim ideology at its purest today. It's interesting. I got interested in what goes on in architecture because architecture, let's not forget, this is where they screw us up. I mean my God, they construct, they form the very space where we spend all the time. And it's interesting how the architecture which is architecture how should I put it for the media to be reflected, architecture which is built but it's built so that later books are written about it. This is maybe two-three percent but this is what everyone talks about like the big name but there are others, name them, even I learned some of these names: Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Libeskind and so on. But I claim this is architecture as pure ideology and here I part even from my good friend Fred Jameson who thinks that for example Gehry can be redeemed. I think no. I think the first communist move here would be forget about these guys who do these symbolic places which should revitalize the city. What interests me are two things. First, what about those ninety-five percent even more anonymous architects who just do it, nobody even notices it? And even more interesting, and now I asked my friends, I was told that some studies are made about architecture in favelas, in slums. Because contrary to what you think, it's not pure utilitarianism there. It's not you just grab what you have, some old corroded metal or whatever. No, it's what makes it so interesting. And if there was a almost transcendental experience that I had in this in Melbourne in Australia at this architectural conference, it was how I got engaged in a debate with a guy who wanted to be a leftist but turned out to be what I call a liberal communist leftist. These extremely rich but progressive you know like if I may be a little bit nasty probably similar as the guys I was told, I don't know their name, that when we had a couple of months ago the communism conference, some group of architects protested: no, how can you charge so much? And then we did a little bit KGB inquiry and discovered I mean of course extra rich and so on and so on they can well they can afford to protest no because they are used to conferences where you have good George Soros and other sponsors so they don't need the participants to pay. Okay, so one of the other he wanted to do the politically correct proper thing so he presented two images as extreme good extreme bad: a simple a simple water pump, simple just utilitarian, and an extremely kitschy golden gold water pipe. And he said you see we should move as far away as possible from this. And then I exploded. I told him wait a minute, were you ever in a favela? The moment they love this extremely vulgar kitsch in favelas if they can get it. On the contrary, it's rich people who like to play this simple functionality and so on and so on. So again it's full of ideology. This is tomorrow. Then yeah then on Wednesday we will do something for which I hope you will have some patience but it's my favorite part like my all my love is there: Wagner. To convince you that Wagner was struggling with a communist project. Of course it's a total rehabilitation of Wagner. I will show you some clips and so on. I will simply focus on a big problem. Like if you are not a little bit a Wagnerian, skip it. It's what really happens at the end of Götterdämmerung, of the Twilight of the Gods no because forget about all these usual stories that Wagner passed from Feuerbach and Bakunin from some kind of naive revolutionary position to conservative Schopenhauerian position. It's not true. One should read Wagner maybe what really happens here. I will try to answer this. Then the last two days Thursday Friday first I will try to approach this traumatic topic for which I am often criticized about let's call it very naively communism and ethnicity, universality, multiculturalism and so on. All this problem to which obviously I always have again and again have to return. Sorry, of multiculturalism rather ethnicity, capitalism and universality. And then quite appropriately the last session I propose to do it on apocalypse. On versions of apocalypse today and on how I am more and more convinced the radical left should adopt apocalyptic language. Of course how should I put it here this is practically the only thing where I agree with Vattimo. I don't agree with his idea of first it was weak thought then it was weak communism. I don't buy that. And maybe you know the joke I told him when you remember at the communism conference no he presented a talk weak communism. I told him the only way I am ready to accept that is that if he admits that because communism is weak it need it needs an especially strong secret police and so on to protect it no because you know but I am for weak apocalypticism how should I put it. I am not saying tomorrow doomsday or whatever. I am what I am saying is the is that how should I put it the only way to I see to revitalize radical thought is to simply at different levels as many as possible in our social development to to isolate some at different level some kind of apocalyptic zero point. It can be ecological catastrophe or whatever which we are approaching and then how to counteract it. And here I I even noticed this is why I still like those apocalyptic films. I'm quite serious I've already written about this years ago. The most beautiful part of these films for me is how maybe you noticed it if you look at them carefully how and this is for me the proper charm not those spectacular images of destruction but how then usually a narrow but authentic new community almost a communist community is born. Like I've seen the one and I've heard so many bad things about the film that I was quite surprised how good is the film. Maybe you also skipped it because again the rumor how do you call mouth by ear I always say it wrongly mouth by mouth or whatever. The rumor is that it's a failure but you know based on Saramago novel Blindness. I think it's quite a nice film and very nice how from all that it's as if they go through this extreme almost animal egotism and then slowly a community is built. I think that here we should look for communist dreams. So now you know when to come. I repeat it: today utopia, tomorrow architecture, Wednesday Wagner, the problem of ethnicity, universality, multiculturalism Thursday, also it will be the last two will be then more directly political, and apocalypse and a communist dream on Friday. So okay let me begin. During a public debate with and this is one of the unfortunate events where I had to participate during a public debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy last fall I think at New York Public Library I debated with him. He made a perfect case for liberal tolerance: something like would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose a man they love, the usual anti-Islamic line of thought. While I made a similarly pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis, uncertainty how to deal with intellectual property and biogenetics and so on is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market activity as well as from state administration? And I noticed as you probably already noticed that something was terribly wrong here. We both put it in such abstract simplified way that we ended up totally agreeing with each other. I mean what could I say? No I don't want women to dress the way they dress. No you shouldn't make fun of religion or what. And even he, you can check it I think it's available that part I never I got into a one week depression if I see myself on screen but on YouTube somebody told me this part is when he even he said Bernard-Henri Lévy he the liberal anti-communist proponent or theorist he said wait a minute if this is a communism I am a communist no so when I said when I described communism in such a way that Bernard-Henri Lévy agrees with it no then something is wrong. What is wrong? Here I think we find ideology. Ideology is precisely this leaving out of how should I call it background noise which gives a specific density to these abstract statements. You know ideology is precisely this violent reduction. When you say wouldn't for example when you defend the West against the Third World primitive fundamentalist and you simplify it in this way when you say but wouldn't you like to live in a society and so on and so on you know this is how ideology blackmails you. Of course who would say no to this? So this is what I want to focus on because I think that this leaving out of the background noise which gives a provides the specific taste as it were of what is communism much more than just what I said what is liberal tolerance much more than when than this pathetic description by Bernard-Henri Lévy. This I think is maybe utopia at its most elementary. How? Let me begin with a book maybe I already mentioned it here but it's worth living. I think it's a reading. I think it's one of the beautiful books written recently. Alan Weisman The World Without Us published last year by Picador. It offers this book a vision of what would have happened if humanity and only humanity were suddenly to disappear from the earth. Natural diversity blooming again nature gradually regaining human artifacts and so on. We humans are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence. And as Lacan pointed out this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze which observes the world in the condition of the subject's non-existence. Like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one's own conception the parental copulation or the act of witnessing one's own funeral like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Along the same lines a jealous child likes to indulge in the fantasy of imagining how his parents would react to his own death putting at stake his own absence. This is isn't this the most elementary sadistic fantasy you dream about how ah but when I disappear and then you imagine them crying or whatever. The world without us is thus a fantasy at its purest. Witnessing the world itself retaining its let's call it naively pre-castrated state of innocence before we humans spoil it with our hubris. The irony is that the most prominent example of in this book comes from and I like this dialectical paradox. You know what is his example where he describes this blooming of nature in the absence of humanity? Chernobyl. He went there and like because there we can really see for what's now almost I think years a little bit more what happened there without human without human presence. We find exactly the same structure I claim in the very heart of utopia. In Frenzy, the first novella short novel of the volume Her Body Knows, David Grossman talks about jealousy. He I think produces a masterpiece which displays the basic fantasmatic coordinates of this notion. I will talk later if I will have time not today on the other ideological side of Grossman. He is this humanitarian against war Israeli. I respect him for this but there is a limitation: the point of his writing stories about private troubles, love relations and so on in today's Israel is of course can't you see we Israelis are people like others, we dream about peace, we are not military and so on and so on. And I claim that this ideology of we are humans like you is maybe the form of ideology today. I don't know if you saw it you should see it this is a good counter-poison as it were to Tsahal, Claude Lanzmann's Tsahal his five hour okay it's not seven this time only five hour documentary on Israeli defense forces. And it's all one big variation of no the Jew the Israeli army is not a military perfect military machine, they are people like us, they cry, they urinate in their pants when under attack, they are human as one hero repeats again and again war is not in our dreams and so on. So that's the other side of Grossman. But here I think he does propose a masterpiece on jealousy. In jealousy that's his thesis the subject creates or imagines a paradise a utopia of full jouissance from which he or she is excluded. And I think the same applies to what we can call political jealousy. From antisemitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews to the Christian fundamentalist fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians to the fantasies about what Arabs are doing in their close circles and so on and so on. And we should also be very precise here it's too easy to say we just project into it our own fantasies. No no no you know the slightly more traumatic unpleasant thing is that people we don't project it, people really doing all that how should I put it. No I think it's way too simple this traditional Marxist of some kind of Marxist psychology idea we just project our trauma. No the point is that it's real. Does this this also tells us a lot I think about the position of the spectator in cinema. We are by definition there jealous subjects, jealous spectator excluded from the scene we are watching. And now I come to my first point which I announced. I think this notion of jealousy plays a crucial role in our relationship to what we bombastically tend to call animal kingdom. I would like to give you a couple of quotes from a guy who is an old Lacanian, Gerard Wajcman. I totally disagree with him politically but here he made a nice analysis. It's from the last issue of Lacanian Ink this small New York Lacanian journal: The Animals That Treat Us Badly. Here is a quote from his own referring to his own personal experience. Sorry for this long word. A whole team of tourists traverses the savanna back and forth, arrives on the scene with an engine backfiring and a dust cloud looming to plant themselves meters from three big bad lions. And nothing. As if we didn't exist. Such was my definitive experience with the animal world: a thorough disenchantment, an encounter of the zero type. We do not share animal space. We invade their territory or we cross over it but we never meet them. The zoo, the circus, state parks, hunting grounds, television channels consecrated to animals, protectionist societies, nature museums, animal houses. We multiply the places, the occasions of the modes of encounter but without a doubt there is no real relationship between man and animal. We come upon them and we watch them pass. That's all that's left for us to do: watch and look. Of course we watch them with eyes wide open. Humanity passes its time watching the animals. We have invented all kinds of devices expressly for the purpose. We never grow tired of it. No doubt they represent for us a perfect world, something strange different from our own from our uncertain screwed up chaotic mess of a world, all of which makes the animal world look that much better. Sometimes it seems so foreign that we stand before their perfection perfection and we are stupefied and mute stricken. And despite our sincere wishes we wonder whether we could ever be like them. Ever become so marvelous a society as have the ants and the penguins where everyone has his place, where everyone is in his place and where everyone knows and does exactly as he must so that everything can keep on in its proper place. So that society can perpetuate itself unchanged indefinitely the same and infinitely perfect. We've had a hard time of it finding our places. After the disasters of the 20th century the animal societies seem to have become the ideal. End of quote. So the fact that the wild park animals ignore the intruding tourists is crucial. It points towards a double movement of de-realization which characterizes utopian fantasies. The scene presented is a fantasy even if it really happens as is the case here and we the participants de-realize ourselves. We reduce ourselves to pure desubstantialized gaze ignored by the objects of the gaze. As if we are not part of the reality we observe disturbing the wildlife park run of things with our vehicle. As if we are mere spectral presence unseen by the living beings in the park. An external observers of the paradise barred to us, we assume the same position as the unfortunate Stella Dallas in the final scene of the Hollywood melodrama of the same name. From you remember this is the bad mother who sacrifices herself for the daughter, the daughter wants to marry a rich guy, she is so good that she knows that the daughter will find this difficult if she will feel that she is abandoning her mother. So the mother just to make herself disgusting to her daughter behaves disgustingly socially sexually promiscuous and so on so that the she makes her daughter hate her so that the daughter can marry and abandon her lower class origins and then the famous final scene of the film the marriage goes on in a big building with a big glass door and from the outside mother just observes the scene. I think this is a utopia at its perfect: perfect family is created the observer is reduced to a pure gaze. Which is why the horrible thing the most anti-utopian thing is when we become aware that the scene there is staged only for our gaze. You remember two year some two years ago I think there was one of these famous photos of some tribe in the Brazil jungle which allegedly didn't yet meet developed so and you have this famous photo of their painted skin and just shouting looking up at the camera. This is the paradise disturbed. That's what's horrible for us. This utopia accounts for two further phenomena of our recent culture. First why is the Darwinist reduction of human societies to animal ones? The explanation of our human achievements in the terms of evolutionary adaptation why is it getting so popular? Pop scientific texts abound in journals and reviews reporting on how scientists succeeded in explaining apparently crazy or useless human practices as grounded in adaptive strategies: why useless luxury, to impress the potential sexual partner with our ability to afford such useless excessive luxury and so on and so on. In this way scientists suggest that again a quote from Wajcman that we might yet have a chance to orient ourselves to be let over and above our animality. If the subject has a nasty habit of fooling himself all the time we must bear in mind that nature is never mistaken. Salvation will come in our being in our being animal body, genes, neurons and all the rest of it. So whispers the cognitivist in the in the politician's ears to help them find their way. Follow the body more monkey business. End of quote. Such reports are thus dreams of how to counteract the growing disfunctionalization and reflexivity of our so-called postmodern societies where we can less and less unthinkingly rely on inherited traditions to provide models for our behavior. Animals don't need any coaching. They just do it. Second this fantasy explains why we obviously find it so pleasurable to watch endlessly the specialized TV channels the animal life documentaries on these channels like Nature, Animal Kingdom and so on. They provide a glimpse into a utopian world where no language and training are needed. A harmonious society in which everyone spontaneously knows his her their roles. Another quote from Wajcman: man's a denatured animal. We are animals sick with language and how sometimes we long for a cure. But just shutting up won't do it. We can't just wish our way into animality. So it is then as a matter of consolation that we watch the animal channels and marvel at a world untamed by language. The animals get us to hear a voice of pure silence. Nostalgia for the fish life. Humanity seems to have been hit by Cousteau syndrome. Reference to Jacques Cousteau. This is why the case of National Geographic, the journal even more than the TV channel I think is so interesting. Although National Geographic combines reports on nature with and human societies, the trick is that it basically treats a human society, usually some exotic community, a tribe in the midst of Sahara or even a small town in the United States as an animal community. A community in which things somehow work, where again everyone has his place and is in his place. And since the basic inconsistency of human being is the discord of sexual relationship, no wonder that one of the key elements of our fascination with the animal kingdom concerns the perfectly regulated rituals of mating. Animals don't have to worry about all the complex fantasies and stimulants to sustain our sexual lust. They are able to, here Wajcman produces a wonderful place, animals can have sex ahistorically as it were. The last quote. Between men and women it's pretty messy. The big disorder. Not at all as it is with animals where everybody seems to know perfectly well how to do it, how and with whom and when. And that's without the manuals, without the dating services, without any of it. It's enough to make us jealous. The animal world has realized that human dream of sex without a backstory, sex without history. We would be happy to put down our books and get straight to the point of what exactly it is to have sex ahistorically. End of quote. Examples like this indicate that an approach to utopias which leaves behind the usual focus on content on the structure of a society proposed in a utopian vision. Perhaps it is time to step back from the fascination with content and again reflect on the subjective position from which such a content appears as utopian. The fantasmatic narrative always involves an impossible gaze. A gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence. The catch is that when the subject directly identifies his her own gaze with this object gaze, the paradoxical implication of this identification is that the gaze as object the stain in the picture disappears from the field of vision. And this would be I think the Lacanian notion of utopia: a vision of desire which functions without what Lacan calls objet small a the object cause of desire with its twists and loops and so on and so on. This here if I may be a little bit critical, I think even Marx basically gets caught into this trap. He admires capitalism but is aware that there has to be an excess, surplus profit whatever and again his dream is a society where we get rid of the excess profit but how should I put it things function explode even more even more productively. So that's first idea of a utopia. And of course it's a critical point. If anything when we imagine capitalism and the end of capitalism going over to communism we must be very careful not to fall into this trap into you know implicitly adopting the position of this pure gaze where the price we pay for this position of the pure gaze is that again the the obstacle the paradoxical element which is at the same time obstacle and excess in the object of our gaze, the objet small a, disappears. And we have this myth of a perfectly functioning machinery. Again like exemplified in the animal kingdom. Now I want to pass to a next figure of utopia which I like even more or not even more, more because again if you ask me I hate these channels these animal kingdom channels. I think they should be prohibited. They are they are obscene how should I put it they are they are... but you know what historical utopias I think it's very interesting into how much energy is invested in them. Historical utopias about possible alternative alternatives. Recently I read some two three books I became fascinated with the topic of the fall of Rome. Not the big epoch of Rome it's typical how this also reflects our historical moment because you are not but if some of you are old enough you may remember that after the end of the Cold War America as the new Roman Empire what was popular was the great era of Roman Empire, Caesar, you know all those series even Caesar Rome and so on Caesar Augustus and and so on. Now typically with a little bit more complex situation American empire in danger the the historical interest has shifted onto that strange weird era of the of the late 4th or even 5th to 7th century. And it's interesting how all our dilemmas are projected into it. Like you have the pseudo-leftist I claim multiculturalist version which celebrates the disintegration of Roman Empire which tries to downplay a the violence of attacks on Roman way of life and the let's call it in a maybe Western Eurocentric way the fall in the level of civilization. And I think one should be honest here and don't play this game how it was just a peaceful transition into more pluralistic multiplicity of kingdom. No it was a total catastrophe. I mean you can you can demonstrate it by very simple archaeological data. For example if you look at the structure of a not even in the center even in the province of a typical from second third century Roman house ancient Roman house first most of the roofs were already with how do you call it with tiles. Not just straw. And point two you always find scratch some kind of letters and so on so some elementary literacy was present even with the lower classes. Point three most interesting you find relatively high quality compared with earlier and later times pottery amphoras and so on. What's even more important and we can determine it because they were all marked with signs where they were reproduced from totally different parts of the empire like it was normal for a farmer in North Africa to have a pottery from from Marseille and so on. They were high quality mass-produced things. If you go to the 6th century a all traces of literacy among lower classes disappear. I mean these are interesting things for example you know that one bordello was also frozen in time in Pompeii. What's interesting is what they found on the wall numerous obscene drawings of the best fuck of my life stupidity pieces like this written obviously by ordinary customers prostitutes themselves and so on. This proves that literacy was something commonly shared also for totally secular obscene reasons. You find nothing like that in the 5th 6th 7th century. Literacy was strictly limited to not not even to high classes my God you probably know that Charlemagne Charles the Great himself was illiterate. He tried to but it was strictly limited to church. Point two all exclusively farm farmer's houses 5th 6th 7th century thatched roofs or whatever no tiles. B: extremely low quality pottery locally produced so but where comes the dream. I noticed it shocked me so much how for example if you want to study ideology in historiography at its purest read a book by Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome. It can seduce you because almost the entire book is about pottery archaeology and so on. It just tries to make it just tries to make the point of how this was really a tremendous fall in civilization. Okay what's the point? Ah the point gets incredible because it focuses on and then I started to read other things and discovered that this is the focal point of Western Eurocentric racist anti-oriental imagination. This idea they they try to locate precisely exactly the point when things may have gotten wrong. It's you. No you I mean the Greeks Byzantium is the guilt of everything. You know what was the situation in the late 5th early 6th century? Ostro sorry Visigoths ruled Rome. Visigothic kingdom. They united Rome and even held part of Southern France and so on southern Gaul and so on. That great figure was Theoderic their king. Then he ruled all this like from for a couple of years on and what what happened then is that Justinian army Byzant invaded threw out the Visigoths and that's within this racist scenario that's the ultimate catastrophe because you brought in the Slavs you brought in you guys. Ah no I'm proud to no no no I'm proud to admit this my God not only this I mean for example Turkish Empire no everybody knows what was the problem with Turkish Empire. It was very efficient in the late 15th century it was the most modern everything then they were too tolerant. They really played played played the game properly. If you join them become a Muslim all the high places were open to you so something happened I think in the late 6th or early 7th century one of us a Bosnian Slav Mehmed Paša Sokolović became the great vizier. The end. Yes that's no I totally admit no but what I want to say that how so the idea you know what's the dream here? It's a wonderful it has its beauty racist dream that without the with the Orientals Greeks without with Balkan to cut a long story short without we invading and ruining it Charles the Great would have happened already in the 6th century there would have been no Dark Ages. Because it is true that Visigoths were so fascinated by Roman culture that they didn't try to ruin it they tried just to incorporate themselves into it at the same time they were much more aggressive vital as they put it I don't know what this means but whatever so the dream is the following one and incidentally this was the original axis Berlin Rome this was Hitler's great dream also historical that we would have had this reunion of Roman civilization which was still alive with German vitality which would bring it out of this lethargy and so on so we will have a resuscitated German Aryan. The nice thing is that even the name Aryan fits here because not in the sense of the Aryan race but in the sense of you know Arius that Arianism as the early Christian heresy Visigoths were Arians. It sounds nice nonetheless to a Nazi no. So you see the idea is that's where things went wrong. And then I discovered you know that this is a big obsession of right-wing culture already already at least from the middle of 19th century. The key text is here one of the most popular German novels for boys this kind of a the German James Fenimore Cooper called Felix Dahn Struggle for Rome. It depicts these Visigoths as a kind of a Nibelung tragic greatness they knew they can save Rome but then they are defeated but they heroically take their defeat and so on this all this German fatality and so on. Then I then I discovered that there are even a couple of a couple of science fiction novels like if you are interested Sprague de Camp Lest Darkness Falls from The story here is that the time traveler from our time goes back to Theodericus gives him good advices he wins over decadent us Balkan types Greeks Slavs and Western civilization is saved totally different flourishing Western civilization and so on. So what I find so fascinating here is that how a book basically on the decadence of Rome on how everything was wrong purely archaeological book towards the end all of a sudden this dream explodes how things might and of course Felix Dahn was then celebrated his high point his books were reprinted all the time during Nazi Germany and so on and so on. Why is this a utopia now? Now you will say okay but maybe it would have worked maybe we Graeco-Slavic Balkans were primitive. No now comes the what is why is this vision utopian. You find the same utopian mistake in another book that I was reading which is more simplistic liberal anti-theological. Charles Freeman The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. Again it goes into it's this classical naive liberal enlightenment book. Greeks and Romans good guys even if they were religious they didn't take it too literally they allowed reason you could criticize God empirical empirically test hypotheses then the crazy dirty Christian comes Christians come and ruin everything. Again and again it's incredible how even in this book then I was so shocked towards the end in a footnote he squeezes in the same utopia. He says maybe if the Visigoths were to remain to rule Rome maybe maybe we would the reason the Western reason would survive. Why is this a utopia? It misses a point which now I will try to convince you of. Without Dark Middle Ages no modern science. Why? Let me very precise here. The thesis of this guy Freeman is that again in late antiquity Aristotelian secular empirical reasoning disappears we have this fanatic obscurantist Middle Age anti-irrationalist theology and then reason makes a return with Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas is the guy's hero. For him Aquinas is the return of reason. But my God if you know a little bit about about origins of modern science you know that it wasn't Aquinas it was the Platonic returns precisely with people whom we know as usually as voluntarist decisionist and so on. The origin of science is not this rational vision of ordered universe it's Duns Scotus you know this voluntarism when you say if God wanted it even for and two and two would be five and so on. Why? Because we have to be very careful what kind of reason really returns with Thomas Aquinas. It's this Aristotelian reason which and this we should never forget which is the reason which is let's call it in continuity a teleological reason in continuity with our everyday common sense. It's the notion of a close well-ordered universe from lower to higher teleological order and so on and so on. Precisely in this kind of reasonable universe there is no place for modern science which is why incidentally the Pope which greatly disappointed me the Benedict the recent one I don't know where does the rumor come even some of French guys like Philippe Sollers whom I don't like claim the rumor is here that he is a great theologian. I was so stupid and read his book on on Jesus Christ. It's so stupid no he is not a great theologian. He is his theology reads like a like the other one the Polish guy John Paul II theater pieces. I mean they are so bad that even in Poland I was told where they celebrate him they graciously avoided the topic of of his plays no. But maybe maybe maybe there is hope for maybe he wasn't totally bad because did you read that one wonderful note that now his sainthood is delayed because they discovered that throughout his life up to his death he wrote letters to and regularly visited and she was visiting him an old flame love from Poland from when he was young and now this is so obscene of course the Vatican committee said they will have to inspect all the letters if there are any traces of sin there only then he can... okay but let me go more serious so what I'm saying is that Benedict you know in that well-known attack on Islam when he tried to present Islam as irrational decisionist whatever God's will religion against more reasonable Christianity but no wonder then you should just read him closely. For him Darwinism is irrational. Why? Because thing just happened in a totally contingent way with no purpose. When when he speaks the Pope about reason he speaks about this Aristotelian Aristotelian teleological reason. So again the paradox is that in order to create the conditions for modern science this how should they call it spontaneous Aristotelian teleological reason our world is a meaningful well-ordered totality you know gradually from lower to higher and so on and so on this has to be destroyed and for this the so-called Dark Ages were needed. Which is why now comes my little bit of theological historiography which is why I think we should absolutely rehabilitate I hope they will accept it I propose now to Verso you know that revolution series where they were crazy enough to publish my Robespierre Mao and Trotsky I propose them to do Tertullian as a big leftist figure progressive. You know what is Tertullian known even if you don't you've heard it some point. The idea is that he was the most crazy of irrational that he said that in famous credo quia absurdum I believe it because it is absurd. Now people usually read this as the assertion of this total madness true faith just sticks to it even if it's totally irrational and so on and so on. But wait a minute I looked into this famous passage it's from his it's from his On the Flesh of Christ. And you discover first as it is usual with these well-known quotes that of course Tertullian never said this no. He said something much more interesting he said he wrote it is certain because it is impossible. And replace impossible with real Lacan says impossible real it is certain because it's real oh our guy. But okay here is the whole the entire quote. The Son of God was crucified. I am not ashamed because it is shameful. The Son of God died. It is immediately credible because it is silly. He was buried and rose again. It is certain because it is impossible. In it's certum est quia impossibile in Latin this last bit. The first thing to bear in mind here is that Tertullian was absolutely not an opponent on reason. In his On Repentance he emphasized that all things are to be understood by reason. Quote reason in fact is a thing of God inasmuch as there is nothing which God the maker of all has not provided disposed ordained by reason. Nothing which he has willed should not be handled and understood by reason. So he was absolutely not in this sense an irrationalist. He even showed a deep respect for great pagan philosophers. Another quote from De Anima: Of course we shall not deny that philosophers have sometimes thought the same things as ourselves. Tertullian even called Seneca saepe noster almost one of us. So one should reject the popular reading according to which Tertullian advocated a crazy irrational belief into something obviously absurd something that runs against our reason and the evidence of senses. The quoted passage from On the Flesh of Christ is part of a polemics against Marcion who dismissing as absurd the notion that Christ can be embodied in a human flesh reduced Christ's incarnation to a mere phantasm. Christ didn't have a real body he didn't really suffer. The measure which makes the belief in full reincarnation appear absurd is thus not logic but custom convention not reason as such but common wisdom the space of what is conventionally acceptable. It is when measured by this standard that the death and resurrection of Christ appear impossible. Impossible is here meant rather in the sense of how can you do a horrible thing like that it's impossible aren't you ashamed. The idea that God himself can die in pain on a cross humiliated punished as a common criminal this is impossible dangerous shameful absurd and so on. Now you will say but nonetheless Christ's resurrection is impossible in a much stronger sense not logically impossible but it breaks the basic laws of what we perceive as our material reality. But here I think we should say that this is what science is doing all the time. All modern science is on the side of this it is certain because it's impossible. You see what's my point you must have this attitude like science is on the side of on the side of Groucho Marx who says you know in one of his films he's caught lying and says I give you my word it's true then the person said but I see it and Groucho Marx says okay whom do you believe your eyes or my word. I mean science is this you don't believe your eyes your eyes tell you objects move like this quantum physics tells you something totally different you must this basic ontology of modernity which here I greatly appreciate of course a figure like a figure like Quentin Meillassoux you know that follower of Badiou who I think developed very nicely this idea of radical contingency of natural laws not only contingency in the sense that they allow for contingency that they are not totally deterministic but also contingency in the sense that they are contingent. Natural laws are like this like why does an object fall with this with this speed and so on it could you know it's always some totally contingent element it could have been otherwise it could it can be totally turned around or whatever you cannot do a kind of a rational deduction of natural laws. Here if I may give a slight friendly critical remark to Alain Badiou here I don't quite agree with his notion of mathematics as ontology maybe ontology but not science. I think that what disappears in Badiou's vision of science as mathematical formalized is that in science you always in modern science you always have to have this minimal exposure to the contingency. Let's take science like quantum physics which apparently you know denies objectivity our very measure creates the result but nonetheless you need a moment of measure where you don't know for sure what what will appear and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that again in order to get at the modern science we needed the Dark Ages so-called Dark Ages were needed to as it were clear the table from this common-sensical ontology. And again this disappears in that utopian vision of oh without the Balkan-Greek-Slavic alliance we would have no we wouldn't we would have some very stupid Aristotelian conservative world we would have if you already have this pornographic book there my monstrosity of Christ we would have some kind of a John Milbank universe there I would say. Some kind of this kind of a Aristotelian organic slightly modernized Christianity we wouldn't have modernity. Modernity means this radical contingency and here Meillassoux does something wonderful which also brings in the topic of miracle. That's how Meillassoux as miracle should be read his theory. Namely he says that he proposes Meillassoux a wonderful distinction between between between between chance and virtuality. Chance is something which is not wholly determined but it's nonetheless options one of the options within the space of previously determined possibilities no. Chance is like take the elementary example you have a a die dice you throw it and chance is one of the six numbers even if we if of course we know that really it's not chance with infinite calculations we could have done it but even if we assert that it is chance it is still a chance one of the six numbers. A chance exists just which of the six but the set the matrix of possibilities is predetermined. For Meillassoux virtuality means that something new emerges which was not even in the this how should I put it atemporal eternal structure of what may of what can happen. And Meillassoux claims that this is what we perceive as miracle. And insofar as for Meillassoux God is the another name for the highest being which guarantees this logic of the principle of the sufficient ground, for Meillassoux insofar as when something radically new happens it's perceived as a miracle miracle which means outside the rational order guaranteed by God which means and that's a beautiful conclusion that quite on the contrary to what Christian think Christians think every miracle is a proof that there is no God. That it's exactly the opposite. Miracle means the order of whatever transcendent big other rational order doesn't cover reality, something radically new can emerge. So again it is against this background that we should read this so-called Dark Middle Ages tradition. Let me go on. Maybe we should relate this to two types of stupidity. We have maybe already said this so I will be very brief some times two years ago you know we have two types of stupidity. One stupidity is the stupidity of usually hyper-intelligent subjects who don't get it because they take things too literally. Like it's I don't know sometimes but I'm not saying that I am because of this hyper-intelligent you know like when somebody asks you how was your day, you are stupid if you take it literally. You are supposed to say oh well and then go on. And sometimes you have wonderful results with this literal stupidity where you miss the background common sense. For example the greatest maybe anti-military novel the Czech classic Jaroslav Hašek The Good Soldier Švejk. Isn't this the most wonderful stupidity in the sense that you abstract the background common sense? You know he was sent to the front and when the Austrians started to shoot you know what he did he ran between the trenches and started to shout don't shoot there are people on the other side don't shoot you know this stupidity of you take things seriously and it's wonderful how I read that so you can see that Alan Turing you know the Enigma guy he was extreme an extreme idiot I read somewhere in this sense. He simply didn't get it all this custom background. Then we have the opposite stupidity which is precisely this stupidity of the big other. The stupidity of people who are so much in this embedded in this common-sensical thick background that they simply cannot distance themselves from it. The example of this stupidity would have been in detective novels the companion of the big detective, Hastings, Watson and so on. He is this kind of common-sense stupidity. My point is that that this is what happened in the Dark Middle Ages. The rule of this second stupidity this common-sense stupidity was broken so that the space for this creative stupidity where you are really too stupid to get the to get the background and in this way missing the background can invent something new. Okay now if you allow me just a little bit more now comes at least the part which is for me the most beautiful I think that if there is a writer who was stupid also in this first sense it is Franz Kafka. What he does is that he precisely how should I put it he presents the first type of stupidity which is a very logical stupidity as something customary as the second type of stupidity. He knows how to present as the most common thing this purely logical but crazy universe which ignores all the rules. So no wonder I will do it now you can find the whole text in a short essay published by me on Lacan.com on on Kafka and his last poem sorry his last short story Josefine the Singer. I think no wonder that I agree here with Fred Jameson Franz Kafka was the one who gave us one of the most beautiful communist utopias. It's again about animal kingdom but slightly different. It's not it's not animal kingdom it's not National Geographic. It's his very last story Josefine the Singer or the Mouse Folk. Incidentally already the translation I claim is false. Folk is German folk but in German folk is people. It's typical how the translation they wanted somehow to to render it more populist and so on. It's not it's mouse people. They're people. It's People's Republic. It's a communist society my God. What is so beautiful about this story is that A: it's the last story by Kafka. He knew he was done. He knew this is his last thing. Point two it's the allegory of an artist, the role of an artist in society. But what's so interesting is that there is none of the usual Kafka stuff no no existential nightmare obscenity and so on. It's a very modest story about a poor people of mice and Josephine their hero, a singer who even doesn't sing very well. She is just piping. But what's the role of this piping? Just to gather the people. A short quote: Since piping is one of our thoughtless habits says the mice mouse the narrator, one might think that people would pipe up in Josephine's audience too. Her art makes us feel happy and when we are happy we pipe. But her audience never pipes. It sits in mouse-like stillness. As if we had become partakers in the peace we long for for which our own piping at the very least holds us back. We make no sound. It is her singing that enchants us or is it not rather the solemn stillness enclosing her her frail little voice. End of quote from Kafka. So this last line makes the key point. What matters is not her voice as such but the solemn stillness, the moment of peace of withdrawal from hard work that the listening to her voice brings about. Here the sociopolitical context is crucial I think. The mice people lead harsh and tense lives, difficult to bear, their existence is always precarious, threatened and the very precarious character of Josephine's piping functions as a stand-in for the precarious existence of the mice people. So I quote here Fred Jameson: Josephine is the vehicle for the collectivity's affirmation of itself. She reflects their collective identity back to them. She is needed because only the intervention of art and the theme of the great artist could make it possible to grasp the essential anonymity of the people who have no feeling for art no reverence for the artist. In other words as Jameson concludes Josephine causes the people to assemble in silence. And here the story becomes beautifully properly communist. So again you have a bad artist, no specificity, just her voice she sings gathers the collective but the point is that the silence her voice creates and for this reason she is not charismatic the central comical part of the story if you read it you remember it is how Josephine took takes herself too seriously and she wants some special privileges, greater food ration and so on but she doesn't get it. She is treated totally as a totally as an ordinary totally as an ordinary person. When at the end she disappears, no problem. Her disappearance is unnoticed. And this I think is a beautiful vision of some kind of communist utopia. Of a radically egalitarian communist society. Which is why Kafka for him we humans were too much marked by superego so she had to imagine this society as animal society. Here is now the final quote from Jameson: It is perhaps the high point of Kafka's tale and nowhere is the icy indifference of the utopia of democracy more astonishingly revealed than in the refusal of the people to grant her this form of individual difference. Insofar as Josephine causes the essence of the people to appear she also causes this essential indifference of the anonymous and the radically democratic equality to emerge. Utopia is precisely the elevation from which this species escape forgetfulness and oblivion. It is anonymity as an intensely positive force, as the most fundamental fact of life of the democratic community. And it is this anonymity that in our non-utopian world goes under the name and characterization of death. So again I think that this is crucial if you want to have any presentiment of what a communist utopia would have been. And it's again it's not the story about rich people it's poor desperate group of people gathering in anonymity and the the artist is not the great genius it's just something totally arbitrary who through her sound creates the silence as it were, the silence of this anonymous egalitarian gathering. And I think we have our own as I entitled my text on Josefina is that Josefina if Kafka's text were to be written in another country years later in Soviet Union the title should have been Josefina the People's Artist of the Soviet Mice Republic. That is to say it's just this gathering together in a ritual. Now I know what I'm talking here. I think that the first important element of communist culture here we should drop radically all liberal liberal liberal constraints is that such a gathering where precisely you lose your identity you just immerse yourself in a collective and so on such a if you want pagan gathering with its inextricable mixture of sacred and obscene where individuals should be fully immersed into a crowd joyfully abandoning their individual critical minds where passion should obliterate reasoning and so on and so on. This is something that should be done. We shouldn't be afraid of it. Which is why far from thinking that what we find in rock concerts is somehow reactionary that we are manipulated we are manipulated but that's not all. This kind of collective gathering should be here. Why? Because now I come to my second point. What such gathering does to our lives is not really and this is what Jameson develops wonderfully apropos of that Platonov utopia Chevengur that what we what this kind of a drowning in collective produces when the show is over is not some kind of oh we are all like the same zombies. No what we emerge as afterwards is some kind of a how should I put it freaks with each with each of us his or her own idiosyncrasy and it is here that that Jameson proposed his idea of how communism would look as a society. It's it's like the imagine people were you know maybe you have a little bit of this dream if you saw that you can take it with you Frank Capra. You know this idea of maybe even in Dickens of these crazy large families when you know one is a madman thinks in Napoleon the other one is cutting himself the third one is dancing clumsily. They are all total madmen crazy men but somehow each enacts his her madness but they but they sometimes they sometimes they sometimes function together. And I think that's the other thing that in a communist society like you can have your own idiosyncrasies. You can mix red wine with coke that's my private scene. I like it in Germany this is the most tasteless thing you can do no. You can prefer Daphne du Maurier to Virginia Woolf which I do and incidentally Darian Leader convinced me I think Daphne du Maurier is a greater writer than that boring snob Virginia Woolf. You can I don't know you can only have sex on a hot radiator I have a friend who likes to do this don't ask me why. Do whatever you want. So we have we have these three element and but the third element which fits perfectly is that when you when you play out this collectivity when you enact your idiosyncrasy this doesn't drown this liberates your free mind your universal cold reasoning. This is why it always attracted me I know how manipulated this is but there is something in it you know this famous famous communities of half-crazy geeks computer programmers how the idea is their mind works perfectly but he is often an idiot with his own her own idiosyncrasy and so on and so on. So my final example would have been and this is I think where at least I always fall for fall for it there is something the most beautiful almost communist utopias for me is this science fiction films or not even science fiction films but the origin is the novel Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human from still the best but even today you find echoes from Heroes the ongoing TV series to X-Men to the lowest one I don't like it The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen this idea of a group of outcasts of freaks. You know each has a certain I don't know one can move in space the other can read the mind the third one and somehow how these outcasts form a community. And the community formed by these outcasts I think is a wonderful would be a wonderful example this this coming together of individuals precisely where you don't have to abandon any of your personal personal freakishness and so on and so on. So again I think that if you are looking for kind of a communist dream although I'm not saying it's such a great series I couldn't watch all of it look look at Heroes. So to really conclude if you give me just two-three minutes the conclusion of all this would have been that this has consequences for our innermost subjective attitude. Let me conclude with I don't know if you know what this is The Third Wave. The Third Wave was a famous social experiment at Palo Alto in the high school there where some teacher called Ron Jones made this experiment in April He wanted to explain to his students how could it have happened that Germans obeyed Hitler and ignored Holocaust. So this he Ron Jones started with his students a movement called The Third Wave. He convinced his students that the movement should have as a goal to eliminate democracy. He emphasized this main point of the movement in its motto strength through discipline strength through community strength through action strength through pride. However after four days Jones the professor decided to terminate the experiment because students became so much involved in the project that they started to denounce their colleagues that they don't really believe in the project it got it got crazy. So Jones ordered them to attend a rally the next day and explained to them what really happened that it was really an experiment and that now they can understand if even they could have been so easily seduced into totalitarian discipline how was it that Germans were seduced by Hitler. To cut a long story short I'm totally opposed to the lesson from this experiment. I think it's a big liberal mystification. The thesis that we get here is this boring liberal Lord of the Flies point how beneath the civilized surface we are all potentially fascists the barbarian beast is lurking in all of us and so on and so on. But I think that what the the reason I disagree with this experiment is that it constructs a certain opposition to put it very simply in the terms of that old Adorno in which Adorno participated study authoritarian personality versus liberal personality. I think that precisely I think that the trick of this experiment is that they blur a certain crucial line. There is a third type of discipline which is not liberal society it is a collective discipline but for that reason is not a totalitarian discipline. And I think that this is why all liberals like so much such experiments. I think the experiment itself was a mystification because where is the third term? Something is missing. What is missing? Look let me read this mottoes again strength through discipline strength through community strength through action strength through pride. I'm sorry to tell you but if this describes an emancipatory revolutionary community I'm sorry to tell you I totally subscribe to it. What is wrong with this? Strength through discipline. My God if you are poor and don't have time don't have money to buy arms of course you need discipline. Strength through community. Of course my God workers unite. Strength through action. Of course. Strength through pride. Of course we should be proud. You see the mystification the mystification is that it pretends to cover the entire field. It mystifies in the sense that it renders invisible a third option. A type of intersubjectivity which precisely breaks out of this alternative fundamentalist and so on and liberal liberal individualist. And this is why I think that we should start dreaming now about such communities. First they already exist. I take quite seriously when Marx says how we should look for the germs for the beginnings first signs of a new society in our society. Yes precisely in this kind of emergency state small communities communities where freaks gather and so on. These are there is something unique in these communities. They are disciplined collective but at the same time your idiosyncrasies are allowed you have discipline but without fundamentalism and so on and so on. So I think that and again they can be even very naive like again imagine when a group gets together on certain artistic project certain creative project and so on how things function there. Again this community of freaks. I think that we should start imagining practicing this kind of communities this kind of communities today. I think that maybe this would have been a true cultural revolution to develop and it can be done. This is what when people ask me but what can we do together sorry what can we do today already for communism? Well okay we cannot yet make the revolution but I think so and incidentally it's even clear I think with now I think now it's clear that capitalism will manage very well this crisis and in half a year they will say okay okay the worst is over and so on but but this is how I am ready to accept Badiou's notion of subtraction. If it's subtraction means create this kind of collective space which is the space which paradoxically combines collective immersion with with allowing for freakishness and so on and so on. This kind of spaces wherever we can create them they are necessary because I think that again at the level of collective life it's crucial to create communities which are neither this liberal individualist throwing people together nor this kind of so-called fundamentalist commitments and so on and so on. All I wanted to tell you is that spaces like that are possible. We can start. The problem is that and with this I will deal tomorrow and don't be afraid I will not repeat all jokes about Starbucks, the problem is that more and more we are getting pseudo-candidates for this collectivity like precisely Starbucks and so on these pseudo-collective spaces offering ourselves. Which is why I think that if you go to a to a theater performance to Queen Elizabeth Hall and there browse a little bit in a bookstore and take a coffee there no this is not this is not a communist experience. This is this is the worst this is the worst. So more on this tomorrow. Thanks very much."
Thank you very much. I like it that it's not so sincerely so crowded because I hope you will not be disappointed. This time I really want to do in a very naive way what the title says. Some very naive reflections on where we maybe find utopian non-utopian whatever traces of what retroactively may be we have been the beginning of a communist culture. So just if some of you want to skip some of the talks, I want to be honest and tell you of some changes of course. So forget about what you read on the web. Yeah but nonetheless I want to be fair and like okay. Today I will focus on different utopian visions from everyday life of communism starting with maybe this will moderately amuse you at least it amuses me. I read a good text on you know this for me extremely boring TV channels like National Geographic, Animal Kingdom and so on. Why this fascination with animal community? And then going further in the usual way, okay, I end with of course praising totalitarian discipline. That's my [unintelligible]. Tomorrow I will do and this is a new domain in my bluffing, how should I put it, tomorrow I will do architecture. It's quite by chance I was invited to an architectural convention and I wanted to decline but then I mean details like this make you believe that maybe God exists because at the very point, literally, I'm not kidding, it really made me afraid like what there is secret master running. Literally, when I was approaching my table with my computer on to say no, a bell rang in my apartment and somebody brought me a present from a colleague, a book on architecture and I immediately saw that's where I can steal all the ideas because no it's a good book, no it's purely just descriptive. It's about this how do you call them usually like Queen Elizabeth Hall here, these performance arts venues. Places where as they put it they should be anti-elitist, not only the concert hall but also a cafeteria, a bookstore and so on. And I discovered that there are so many interesting but everything that is false in our society almost can be located there. It's supposed to be a public space but it's always in a way redoubled. There is another like shelter, you as they put it in their jargon skin detached from the body and so on. And also this absurdity of for example my dream is to have a building which would exist just of these secondary approach spaces like the idea came to me from reading you know that famous Benjamin passage where he describes the Garnier Opera in Paris and claims that the stair, the big stair is the true focus. Who cares about performance there? Ladies display there their dresses, gentlemen meet for a cigar, drink whatever. That's the... and then an architect friend gave me a wonderful idea. He said what's the big fuss in New York? We have a big building which is exactly this. It's Guggenheim. If you are there it's just one big stair down. And I claim that the proper way to perceive Guggenheim is to reduce paintings there just to a secondary decoration. It's a place where you go up to slowly walk down and talk and so on. So again what's the ideology there? I think again it is quite incredible. I will show you some pictures why this interests me because this is I claim ideology at its purest today. It's interesting. I got interested in what goes on in architecture because architecture, let's not forget, this is where they screw us up. I mean my God, they construct, they form the very space where we spend all the time. And it's interesting how the architecture which is architecture how should I put it for the media to be reflected, architecture which is built but it's built so that later books are written about it. This is maybe two-three percent but this is what everyone talks about like the big name but there are others, name them, even I learned some of these names: Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Libeskind and so on. But I claim this is architecture as pure ideology and here I part even from my good friend Fred Jameson who thinks that for example Gehry can be redeemed. I think no. I think the first communist move here would be forget about these guys who do these symbolic places which should revitalize the city. What interests me are two things. First, what about those ninety-five percent even more anonymous architects who just do it, nobody even notices it? And even more interesting, and now I asked my friends, I was told that some studies are made about architecture in favelas, in slums. Because contrary to what you think, it's not pure utilitarianism there. It's not you just grab what you have, some old corroded metal or whatever. No, it's what makes it so interesting. And if there was a almost transcendental experience that I had in this in Melbourne in Australia at this architectural conference, it was how I got engaged in a debate with a guy who wanted to be a leftist but turned out to be what I call a liberal communist leftist. These extremely rich but progressive you know like if I may be a little bit nasty probably similar as the guys I was told, I don't know their name, that when we had a couple of months ago the communism conference, some group of architects protested: no, how can you charge so much? And then we did a little bit KGB inquiry and discovered I mean of course extra rich and so on and so on they can well they can afford to protest no because they are used to conferences where you have good George Soros and other sponsors so they don't need the participants to pay. Okay, so one of the other he wanted to do the politically correct proper thing so he presented two images as extreme good extreme bad: a simple a simple water pump, simple just utilitarian, and an extremely kitschy golden gold water pipe. And he said you see we should move as far away as possible from this. And then I exploded. I told him wait a minute, were you ever in a favela? The moment they love this extremely vulgar kitsch in favelas if they can get it. On the contrary, it's rich people who like to play this simple functionality and so on and so on. So again it's full of ideology. This is tomorrow. Then yeah then on Wednesday we will do something for which I hope you will have some patience but it's my favorite part like my all my love is there: Wagner. To convince you that Wagner was struggling with a communist project. Of course it's a total rehabilitation of Wagner. I will show you some clips and so on. I will simply focus on a big problem. Like if you are not a little bit a Wagnerian, skip it. It's what really happens at the end of Götterdämmerung, of the Twilight of the Gods no because forget about all these usual stories that Wagner passed from Feuerbach and Bakunin from some kind of naive revolutionary position to conservative Schopenhauerian position. It's not true. One should read Wagner maybe what really happens here. I will try to answer this. Then the last two days Thursday Friday first I will try to approach this traumatic topic for which I am often criticized about let's call it very naively communism and ethnicity, universality, multiculturalism and so on. All this problem to which obviously I always have again and again have to return. Sorry, of multiculturalism rather ethnicity, capitalism and universality. And then quite appropriately the last session I propose to do it on apocalypse. On versions of apocalypse today and on how I am more and more convinced the radical left should adopt apocalyptic language. Of course how should I put it here this is practically the only thing where I agree with Vattimo. I don't agree with his idea of first it was weak thought then it was weak communism. I don't buy that. And maybe you know the joke I told him when you remember at the communism conference no he presented a talk weak communism. I told him the only way I am ready to accept that is that if he admits that because communism is weak it need it needs an especially strong secret police and so on to protect it no because you know but I am for weak apocalypticism how should I put it. I am not saying tomorrow doomsday or whatever. I am what I am saying is the is that how should I put it the only way to I see to revitalize radical thought is to simply at different levels as many as possible in our social development to to isolate some at different level some kind of apocalyptic zero point. It can be ecological catastrophe or whatever which we are approaching and then how to counteract it. And here I I even noticed this is why I still like those apocalyptic films. I'm quite serious I've already written about this years ago. The most beautiful part of these films for me is how maybe you noticed it if you look at them carefully how and this is for me the proper charm not those spectacular images of destruction but how then usually a narrow but authentic new community almost a communist community is born. Like I've seen the one and I've heard so many bad things about the film that I was quite surprised how good is the film. Maybe you also skipped it because again the rumor how do you call mouth by ear I always say it wrongly mouth by mouth or whatever. The rumor is that it's a failure but you know based on Saramago novel Blindness. I think it's quite a nice film and very nice how from all that it's as if they go through this extreme almost animal egotism and then slowly a community is built. I think that here we should look for communist dreams. So now you know when to come. I repeat it: today utopia, tomorrow architecture, Wednesday Wagner, the problem of ethnicity, universality, multiculturalism Thursday, also it will be the last two will be then more directly political, and apocalypse and a communist dream on Friday. So okay let me begin. During a public debate with and this is one of the unfortunate events where I had to participate during a public debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy last fall I think at New York Public Library I debated with him. He made a perfect case for liberal tolerance: something like would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose a man they love, the usual anti-Islamic line of thought. While I made a similarly pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis, uncertainty how to deal with intellectual property and biogenetics and so on is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market activity as well as from state administration? And I noticed as you probably already noticed that something was terribly wrong here. We both put it in such abstract simplified way that we ended up totally agreeing with each other. I mean what could I say? No I don't want women to dress the way they dress. No you shouldn't make fun of religion or what. And even he, you can check it I think it's available that part I never I got into a one week depression if I see myself on screen but on YouTube somebody told me this part is when he even he said Bernard-Henri Lévy he the liberal anti-communist proponent or theorist he said wait a minute if this is a communism I am a communist no so when I said when I described communism in such a way that Bernard-Henri Lévy agrees with it no then something is wrong. What is wrong? Here I think we find ideology. Ideology is precisely this leaving out of how should I call it background noise which gives a specific density to these abstract statements. You know ideology is precisely this violent reduction. When you say wouldn't for example when you defend the West against the Third World primitive fundamentalist and you simplify it in this way when you say but wouldn't you like to live in a society and so on and so on you know this is how ideology blackmails you. Of course who would say no to this? So this is what I want to focus on because I think that this leaving out of the background noise which gives a provides the specific taste as it were of what is communism much more than just what I said what is liberal tolerance much more than when than this pathetic description by Bernard-Henri Lévy. This I think is maybe utopia at its most elementary. How? Let me begin with a book maybe I already mentioned it here but it's worth living. I think it's a reading. I think it's one of the beautiful books written recently. Alan Weisman The World Without Us published last year by Picador. It offers this book a vision of what would have happened if humanity and only humanity were suddenly to disappear from the earth. Natural diversity blooming again nature gradually regaining human artifacts and so on. We humans are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence. And as Lacan pointed out this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze which observes the world in the condition of the subject's non-existence. Like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one's own conception the parental copulation or the act of witnessing one's own funeral like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Along the same lines a jealous child likes to indulge in the fantasy of imagining how his parents would react to his own death putting at stake his own absence. This is isn't this the most elementary sadistic fantasy you dream about how ah but when I disappear and then you imagine them crying or whatever. The world without us is thus a fantasy at its purest. Witnessing the world itself retaining its let's call it naively pre-castrated state of innocence before we humans spoil it with our hubris. The irony is that the most prominent example of in this book comes from and I like this dialectical paradox. You know what is his example where he describes this blooming of nature in the absence of humanity? Chernobyl. He went there and like because there we can really see for what's now almost I think years a little bit more what happened there without human without human presence. We find exactly the same structure I claim in the very heart of utopia. In Frenzy, the first novella short novel of the volume Her Body Knows, David Grossman talks about jealousy. He I think produces a masterpiece which displays the basic fantasmatic coordinates of this notion. I will talk later if I will have time not today on the other ideological side of Grossman. He is this humanitarian against war Israeli. I respect him for this but there is a limitation: the point of his writing stories about private troubles, love relations and so on in today's Israel is of course can't you see we Israelis are people like others, we dream about peace, we are not military and so on and so on. And I claim that this ideology of we are humans like you is maybe the form of ideology today. I don't know if you saw it you should see it this is a good counter-poison as it were to Tsahal, Claude Lanzmann's Tsahal his five hour okay it's not seven this time only five hour documentary on Israeli defense forces. And it's all one big variation of no the Jew the Israeli army is not a military perfect military machine, they are people like us, they cry, they urinate in their pants when under attack, they are human as one hero repeats again and again war is not in our dreams and so on. So that's the other side of Grossman. But here I think he does propose a masterpiece on jealousy. In jealousy that's his thesis the subject creates or imagines a paradise a utopia of full jouissance from which he or she is excluded. And I think the same applies to what we can call political jealousy. From antisemitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews to the Christian fundamentalist fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians to the fantasies about what Arabs are doing in their close circles and so on and so on. And we should also be very precise here it's too easy to say we just project into it our own fantasies. No no no you know the slightly more traumatic unpleasant thing is that people we don't project it, people really doing all that how should I put it. No I think it's way too simple this traditional Marxist of some kind of Marxist psychology idea we just project our trauma. No the point is that it's real. Does this this also tells us a lot I think about the position of the spectator in cinema. We are by definition there jealous subjects, jealous spectator excluded from the scene we are watching. And now I come to my first point which I announced. I think this notion of jealousy plays a crucial role in our relationship to what we bombastically tend to call animal kingdom. I would like to give you a couple of quotes from a guy who is an old Lacanian, Gerard Wajcman. I totally disagree with him politically but here he made a nice analysis. It's from the last issue of Lacanian Ink this small New York Lacanian journal: The Animals That Treat Us Badly. Here is a quote from his own referring to his own personal experience. Sorry for this long word. A whole team of tourists traverses the savanna back and forth, arrives on the scene with an engine backfiring and a dust cloud looming to plant themselves meters from three big bad lions. And nothing. As if we didn't exist. Such was my definitive experience with the animal world: a thorough disenchantment, an encounter of the zero type. We do not share animal space. We invade their territory or we cross over it but we never meet them. The zoo, the circus, state parks, hunting grounds, television channels consecrated to animals, protectionist societies, nature museums, animal houses. We multiply the places, the occasions of the modes of encounter but without a doubt there is no real relationship between man and animal. We come upon them and we watch them pass. That's all that's left for us to do: watch and look. Of course we watch them with eyes wide open. Humanity passes its time watching the animals. We have invented all kinds of devices expressly for the purpose. We never grow tired of it. No doubt they represent for us a perfect world, something strange different from our own from our uncertain screwed up chaotic mess of a world, all of which makes the animal world look that much better. Sometimes it seems so foreign that we stand before their perfection perfection and we are stupefied and mute stricken. And despite our sincere wishes we wonder whether we could ever be like them. Ever become so marvelous a society as have the ants and the penguins where everyone has his place, where everyone is in his place and where everyone knows and does exactly as he must so that everything can keep on in its proper place. So that society can perpetuate itself unchanged indefinitely the same and infinitely perfect. We've had a hard time of it finding our places. After the disasters of the 20th century the animal societies seem to have become the ideal. End of quote. So the fact that the wild park animals ignore the intruding tourists is crucial. It points towards a double movement of de-realization which characterizes utopian fantasies. The scene presented is a fantasy even if it really happens as is the case here and we the participants de-realize ourselves. We reduce ourselves to pure desubstantialized gaze ignored by the objects of the gaze. As if we are not part of the reality we observe disturbing the wildlife park run of things with our vehicle. As if we are mere spectral presence unseen by the living beings in the park. An external observers of the paradise barred to us, we assume the same position as the unfortunate Stella Dallas in the final scene of the Hollywood melodrama of the same name. From you remember this is the bad mother who sacrifices herself for the daughter, the daughter wants to marry a rich guy, she is so good that she knows that the daughter will find this difficult if she will feel that she is abandoning her mother. So the mother just to make herself disgusting to her daughter behaves disgustingly socially sexually promiscuous and so on so that the she makes her daughter hate her so that the daughter can marry and abandon her lower class origins and then the famous final scene of the film the marriage goes on in a big building with a big glass door and from the outside mother just observes the scene. I think this is a utopia at its perfect: perfect family is created the observer is reduced to a pure gaze. Which is why the horrible thing the most anti-utopian thing is when we become aware that the scene there is staged only for our gaze. You remember two year some two years ago I think there was one of these famous photos of some tribe in the Brazil jungle which allegedly didn't yet meet developed so and you have this famous photo of their painted skin and just shouting looking up at the camera. This is the paradise disturbed. That's what's horrible for us. This utopia accounts for two further phenomena of our recent culture. First why is the Darwinist reduction of human societies to animal ones? The explanation of our human achievements in the terms of evolutionary adaptation why is it getting so popular? Pop scientific texts abound in journals and reviews reporting on how scientists succeeded in explaining apparently crazy or useless human practices as grounded in adaptive strategies: why useless luxury, to impress the potential sexual partner with our ability to afford such useless excessive luxury and so on and so on. In this way scientists suggest that again a quote from Wajcman that we might yet have a chance to orient ourselves to be let over and above our animality. If the subject has a nasty habit of fooling himself all the time we must bear in mind that nature is never mistaken. Salvation will come in our being in our being animal body, genes, neurons and all the rest of it. So whispers the cognitivist in the in the politician's ears to help them find their way. Follow the body more monkey business. End of quote. Such reports are thus dreams of how to counteract the growing disfunctionalization and reflexivity of our so-called postmodern societies where we can less and less unthinkingly rely on inherited traditions to provide models for our behavior. Animals don't need any coaching. They just do it. Second this fantasy explains why we obviously find it so pleasurable to watch endlessly the specialized TV channels the animal life documentaries on these channels like Nature, Animal Kingdom and so on. They provide a glimpse into a utopian world where no language and training are needed. A harmonious society in which everyone spontaneously knows his her their roles. Another quote from Wajcman: man's a denatured animal. We are animals sick with language and how sometimes we long for a cure. But just shutting up won't do it. We can't just wish our way into animality. So it is then as a matter of consolation that we watch the animal channels and marvel at a world untamed by language. The animals get us to hear a voice of pure silence. Nostalgia for the fish life. Humanity seems to have been hit by Cousteau syndrome. Reference to Jacques Cousteau. This is why the case of National Geographic, the journal even more than the TV channel I think is so interesting. Although National Geographic combines reports on nature with and human societies, the trick is that it basically treats a human society, usually some exotic community, a tribe in the midst of Sahara or even a small town in the United States as an animal community. A community in which things somehow work, where again everyone has his place and is in his place. And since the basic inconsistency of human being is the discord of sexual relationship, no wonder that one of the key elements of our fascination with the animal kingdom concerns the perfectly regulated rituals of mating. Animals don't have to worry about all the complex fantasies and stimulants to sustain our sexual lust. They are able to, here Wajcman produces a wonderful place, animals can have sex ahistorically as it were. The last quote. Between men and women it's pretty messy. The big disorder. Not at all as it is with animals where everybody seems to know perfectly well how to do it, how and with whom and when. And that's without the manuals, without the dating services, without any of it. It's enough to make us jealous. The animal world has realized that human dream of sex without a backstory, sex without history. We would be happy to put down our books and get straight to the point of what exactly it is to have sex ahistorically. End of quote. Examples like this indicate that an approach to utopias which leaves behind the usual focus on content on the structure of a society proposed in a utopian vision. Perhaps it is time to step back from the fascination with content and again reflect on the subjective position from which such a content appears as utopian. The fantasmatic narrative always involves an impossible gaze. A gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence. The catch is that when the subject directly identifies his her own gaze with this object gaze, the paradoxical implication of this identification is that the gaze as object the stain in the picture disappears from the field of vision. And this would be I think the Lacanian notion of utopia: a vision of desire which functions without what Lacan calls objet small a the object cause of desire with its twists and loops and so on and so on. This here if I may be a little bit critical, I think even Marx basically gets caught into this trap. He admires capitalism but is aware that there has to be an excess, surplus profit whatever and again his dream is a society where we get rid of the excess profit but how should I put it things function explode even more even more productively. So that's first idea of a utopia. And of course it's a critical point. If anything when we imagine capitalism and the end of capitalism going over to communism we must be very careful not to fall into this trap into you know implicitly adopting the position of this pure gaze where the price we pay for this position of the pure gaze is that again the the obstacle the paradoxical element which is at the same time obstacle and excess in the object of our gaze, the objet small a, disappears. And we have this myth of a perfectly functioning machinery. Again like exemplified in the animal kingdom. Now I want to pass to a next figure of utopia which I like even more or not even more, more because again if you ask me I hate these channels these animal kingdom channels. I think they should be prohibited. They are they are obscene how should I put it they are they are... but you know what historical utopias I think it's very interesting into how much energy is invested in them. Historical utopias about possible alternative alternatives. Recently I read some two three books I became fascinated with the topic of the fall of Rome. Not the big epoch of Rome it's typical how this also reflects our historical moment because you are not but if some of you are old enough you may remember that after the end of the Cold War America as the new Roman Empire what was popular was the great era of Roman Empire, Caesar, you know all those series even Caesar Rome and so on Caesar Augustus and and so on. Now typically with a little bit more complex situation American empire in danger the the historical interest has shifted onto that strange weird era of the of the late 4th or even 5th to 7th century. And it's interesting how all our dilemmas are projected into it. Like you have the pseudo-leftist I claim multiculturalist version which celebrates the disintegration of Roman Empire which tries to downplay a the violence of attacks on Roman way of life and the let's call it in a maybe Western Eurocentric way the fall in the level of civilization. And I think one should be honest here and don't play this game how it was just a peaceful transition into more pluralistic multiplicity of kingdom. No it was a total catastrophe. I mean you can you can demonstrate it by very simple archaeological data. For example if you look at the structure of a not even in the center even in the province of a typical from second third century Roman house ancient Roman house first most of the roofs were already with how do you call it with tiles. Not just straw. And point two you always find scratch some kind of letters and so on so some elementary literacy was present even with the lower classes. Point three most interesting you find relatively high quality compared with earlier and later times pottery amphoras and so on. What's even more important and we can determine it because they were all marked with signs where they were reproduced from totally different parts of the empire like it was normal for a farmer in North Africa to have a pottery from from Marseille and so on. They were high quality mass-produced things. If you go to the 6th century a all traces of literacy among lower classes disappear. I mean these are interesting things for example you know that one bordello was also frozen in time in Pompeii. What's interesting is what they found on the wall numerous obscene drawings of the best fuck of my life stupidity pieces like this written obviously by ordinary customers prostitutes themselves and so on. This proves that literacy was something commonly shared also for totally secular obscene reasons. You find nothing like that in the 5th 6th 7th century. Literacy was strictly limited to not not even to high classes my God you probably know that Charlemagne Charles the Great himself was illiterate. He tried to but it was strictly limited to church. Point two all exclusively farm farmer's houses 5th 6th 7th century thatched roofs or whatever no tiles. B: extremely low quality pottery locally produced so but where comes the dream. I noticed it shocked me so much how for example if you want to study ideology in historiography at its purest read a book by Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome. It can seduce you because almost the entire book is about pottery archaeology and so on. It just tries to make it just tries to make the point of how this was really a tremendous fall in civilization. Okay what's the point? Ah the point gets incredible because it focuses on and then I started to read other things and discovered that this is the focal point of Western Eurocentric racist anti-oriental imagination. This idea they they try to locate precisely exactly the point when things may have gotten wrong. It's you. No you I mean the Greeks Byzantium is the guilt of everything. You know what was the situation in the late 5th early 6th century? Ostro sorry Visigoths ruled Rome. Visigothic kingdom. They united Rome and even held part of Southern France and so on southern Gaul and so on. That great figure was Theoderic their king. Then he ruled all this like from for a couple of years on and what what happened then is that Justinian army Byzant invaded threw out the Visigoths and that's within this racist scenario that's the ultimate catastrophe because you brought in the Slavs you brought in you guys. Ah no I'm proud to no no no I'm proud to admit this my God not only this I mean for example Turkish Empire no everybody knows what was the problem with Turkish Empire. It was very efficient in the late 15th century it was the most modern everything then they were too tolerant. They really played played played the game properly. If you join them become a Muslim all the high places were open to you so something happened I think in the late 6th or early 7th century one of us a Bosnian Slav Mehmed Paša Sokolović became the great vizier. The end. Yes that's no I totally admit no but what I want to say that how so the idea you know what's the dream here? It's a wonderful it has its beauty racist dream that without the with the Orientals Greeks without with Balkan to cut a long story short without we invading and ruining it Charles the Great would have happened already in the 6th century there would have been no Dark Ages. Because it is true that Visigoths were so fascinated by Roman culture that they didn't try to ruin it they tried just to incorporate themselves into it at the same time they were much more aggressive vital as they put it I don't know what this means but whatever so the dream is the following one and incidentally this was the original axis Berlin Rome this was Hitler's great dream also historical that we would have had this reunion of Roman civilization which was still alive with German vitality which would bring it out of this lethargy and so on so we will have a resuscitated German Aryan. The nice thing is that even the name Aryan fits here because not in the sense of the Aryan race but in the sense of you know Arius that Arianism as the early Christian heresy Visigoths were Arians. It sounds nice nonetheless to a Nazi no. So you see the idea is that's where things went wrong. And then I discovered you know that this is a big obsession of right-wing culture already already at least from the middle of 19th century. The key text is here one of the most popular German novels for boys this kind of a the German James Fenimore Cooper called Felix Dahn Struggle for Rome. It depicts these Visigoths as a kind of a Nibelung tragic greatness they knew they can save Rome but then they are defeated but they heroically take their defeat and so on this all this German fatality and so on. Then I then I discovered that there are even a couple of a couple of science fiction novels like if you are interested Sprague de Camp Lest Darkness Falls from The story here is that the time traveler from our time goes back to Theodericus gives him good advices he wins over decadent us Balkan types Greeks Slavs and Western civilization is saved totally different flourishing Western civilization and so on. So what I find so fascinating here is that how a book basically on the decadence of Rome on how everything was wrong purely archaeological book towards the end all of a sudden this dream explodes how things might and of course Felix Dahn was then celebrated his high point his books were reprinted all the time during Nazi Germany and so on and so on. Why is this a utopia now? Now you will say okay but maybe it would have worked maybe we Graeco-Slavic Balkans were primitive. No now comes the what is why is this vision utopian. You find the same utopian mistake in another book that I was reading which is more simplistic liberal anti-theological. Charles Freeman The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. Again it goes into it's this classical naive liberal enlightenment book. Greeks and Romans good guys even if they were religious they didn't take it too literally they allowed reason you could criticize God empirical empirically test hypotheses then the crazy dirty Christian comes Christians come and ruin everything. Again and again it's incredible how even in this book then I was so shocked towards the end in a footnote he squeezes in the same utopia. He says maybe if the Visigoths were to remain to rule Rome maybe maybe we would the reason the Western reason would survive. Why is this a utopia? It misses a point which now I will try to convince you of. Without Dark Middle Ages no modern science. Why? Let me very precise here. The thesis of this guy Freeman is that again in late antiquity Aristotelian secular empirical reasoning disappears we have this fanatic obscurantist Middle Age anti-irrationalist theology and then reason makes a return with Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas is the guy's hero. For him Aquinas is the return of reason. But my God if you know a little bit about about origins of modern science you know that it wasn't Aquinas it was the Platonic returns precisely with people whom we know as usually as voluntarist decisionist and so on. The origin of science is not this rational vision of ordered universe it's Duns Scotus you know this voluntarism when you say if God wanted it even for and two and two would be five and so on. Why? Because we have to be very careful what kind of reason really returns with Thomas Aquinas. It's this Aristotelian reason which and this we should never forget which is the reason which is let's call it in continuity a teleological reason in continuity with our everyday common sense. It's the notion of a close well-ordered universe from lower to higher teleological order and so on and so on. Precisely in this kind of reasonable universe there is no place for modern science which is why incidentally the Pope which greatly disappointed me the Benedict the recent one I don't know where does the rumor come even some of French guys like Philippe Sollers whom I don't like claim the rumor is here that he is a great theologian. I was so stupid and read his book on on Jesus Christ. It's so stupid no he is not a great theologian. He is his theology reads like a like the other one the Polish guy John Paul II theater pieces. I mean they are so bad that even in Poland I was told where they celebrate him they graciously avoided the topic of of his plays no. But maybe maybe maybe there is hope for maybe he wasn't totally bad because did you read that one wonderful note that now his sainthood is delayed because they discovered that throughout his life up to his death he wrote letters to and regularly visited and she was visiting him an old flame love from Poland from when he was young and now this is so obscene of course the Vatican committee said they will have to inspect all the letters if there are any traces of sin there only then he can... okay but let me go more serious so what I'm saying is that Benedict you know in that well-known attack on Islam when he tried to present Islam as irrational decisionist whatever God's will religion against more reasonable Christianity but no wonder then you should just read him closely. For him Darwinism is irrational. Why? Because thing just happened in a totally contingent way with no purpose. When when he speaks the Pope about reason he speaks about this Aristotelian Aristotelian teleological reason. So again the paradox is that in order to create the conditions for modern science this how should they call it spontaneous Aristotelian teleological reason our world is a meaningful well-ordered totality you know gradually from lower to higher and so on and so on this has to be destroyed and for this the so-called Dark Ages were needed. Which is why now comes my little bit of theological historiography which is why I think we should absolutely rehabilitate I hope they will accept it I propose now to Verso you know that revolution series where they were crazy enough to publish my Robespierre Mao and Trotsky I propose them to do Tertullian as a big leftist figure progressive. You know what is Tertullian known even if you don't you've heard it some point. The idea is that he was the most crazy of irrational that he said that in famous credo quia absurdum I believe it because it is absurd. Now people usually read this as the assertion of this total madness true faith just sticks to it even if it's totally irrational and so on and so on. But wait a minute I looked into this famous passage it's from his it's from his On the Flesh of Christ. And you discover first as it is usual with these well-known quotes that of course Tertullian never said this no. He said something much more interesting he said he wrote it is certain because it is impossible. And replace impossible with real Lacan says impossible real it is certain because it's real oh our guy. But okay here is the whole the entire quote. The Son of God was crucified. I am not ashamed because it is shameful. The Son of God died. It is immediately credible because it is silly. He was buried and rose again. It is certain because it is impossible. In it's certum est quia impossibile in Latin this last bit. The first thing to bear in mind here is that Tertullian was absolutely not an opponent on reason. In his On Repentance he emphasized that all things are to be understood by reason. Quote reason in fact is a thing of God inasmuch as there is nothing which God the maker of all has not provided disposed ordained by reason. Nothing which he has willed should not be handled and understood by reason. So he was absolutely not in this sense an irrationalist. He even showed a deep respect for great pagan philosophers. Another quote from De Anima: Of course we shall not deny that philosophers have sometimes thought the same things as ourselves. Tertullian even called Seneca saepe noster almost one of us. So one should reject the popular reading according to which Tertullian advocated a crazy irrational belief into something obviously absurd something that runs against our reason and the evidence of senses. The quoted passage from On the Flesh of Christ is part of a polemics against Marcion who dismissing as absurd the notion that Christ can be embodied in a human flesh reduced Christ's incarnation to a mere phantasm. Christ didn't have a real body he didn't really suffer. The measure which makes the belief in full reincarnation appear absurd is thus not logic but custom convention not reason as such but common wisdom the space of what is conventionally acceptable. It is when measured by this standard that the death and resurrection of Christ appear impossible. Impossible is here meant rather in the sense of how can you do a horrible thing like that it's impossible aren't you ashamed. The idea that God himself can die in pain on a cross humiliated punished as a common criminal this is impossible dangerous shameful absurd and so on. Now you will say but nonetheless Christ's resurrection is impossible in a much stronger sense not logically impossible but it breaks the basic laws of what we perceive as our material reality. But here I think we should say that this is what science is doing all the time. All modern science is on the side of this it is certain because it's impossible. You see what's my point you must have this attitude like science is on the side of on the side of Groucho Marx who says you know in one of his films he's caught lying and says I give you my word it's true then the person said but I see it and Groucho Marx says okay whom do you believe your eyes or my word. I mean science is this you don't believe your eyes your eyes tell you objects move like this quantum physics tells you something totally different you must this basic ontology of modernity which here I greatly appreciate of course a figure like a figure like Quentin Meillassoux you know that follower of Badiou who I think developed very nicely this idea of radical contingency of natural laws not only contingency in the sense that they allow for contingency that they are not totally deterministic but also contingency in the sense that they are contingent. Natural laws are like this like why does an object fall with this with this speed and so on it could you know it's always some totally contingent element it could have been otherwise it could it can be totally turned around or whatever you cannot do a kind of a rational deduction of natural laws. Here if I may give a slight friendly critical remark to Alain Badiou here I don't quite agree with his notion of mathematics as ontology maybe ontology but not science. I think that what disappears in Badiou's vision of science as mathematical formalized is that in science you always in modern science you always have to have this minimal exposure to the contingency. Let's take science like quantum physics which apparently you know denies objectivity our very measure creates the result but nonetheless you need a moment of measure where you don't know for sure what what will appear and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that again in order to get at the modern science we needed the Dark Ages so-called Dark Ages were needed to as it were clear the table from this common-sensical ontology. And again this disappears in that utopian vision of oh without the Balkan-Greek-Slavic alliance we would have no we wouldn't we would have some very stupid Aristotelian conservative world we would have if you already have this pornographic book there my monstrosity of Christ we would have some kind of a John Milbank universe there I would say. Some kind of this kind of a Aristotelian organic slightly modernized Christianity we wouldn't have modernity. Modernity means this radical contingency and here Meillassoux does something wonderful which also brings in the topic of miracle. That's how Meillassoux as miracle should be read his theory. Namely he says that he proposes Meillassoux a wonderful distinction between between between between chance and virtuality. Chance is something which is not wholly determined but it's nonetheless options one of the options within the space of previously determined possibilities no. Chance is like take the elementary example you have a a die dice you throw it and chance is one of the six numbers even if we if of course we know that really it's not chance with infinite calculations we could have done it but even if we assert that it is chance it is still a chance one of the six numbers. A chance exists just which of the six but the set the matrix of possibilities is predetermined. For Meillassoux virtuality means that something new emerges which was not even in the this how should I put it atemporal eternal structure of what may of what can happen. And Meillassoux claims that this is what we perceive as miracle. And insofar as for Meillassoux God is the another name for the highest being which guarantees this logic of the principle of the sufficient ground, for Meillassoux insofar as when something radically new happens it's perceived as a miracle miracle which means outside the rational order guaranteed by God which means and that's a beautiful conclusion that quite on the contrary to what Christian think Christians think every miracle is a proof that there is no God. That it's exactly the opposite. Miracle means the order of whatever transcendent big other rational order doesn't cover reality, something radically new can emerge. So again it is against this background that we should read this so-called Dark Middle Ages tradition. Let me go on. Maybe we should relate this to two types of stupidity. We have maybe already said this so I will be very brief some times two years ago you know we have two types of stupidity. One stupidity is the stupidity of usually hyper-intelligent subjects who don't get it because they take things too literally. Like it's I don't know sometimes but I'm not saying that I am because of this hyper-intelligent you know like when somebody asks you how was your day, you are stupid if you take it literally. You are supposed to say oh well and then go on. And sometimes you have wonderful results with this literal stupidity where you miss the background common sense. For example the greatest maybe anti-military novel the Czech classic Jaroslav Hašek The Good Soldier Švejk. Isn't this the most wonderful stupidity in the sense that you abstract the background common sense? You know he was sent to the front and when the Austrians started to shoot you know what he did he ran between the trenches and started to shout don't shoot there are people on the other side don't shoot you know this stupidity of you take things seriously and it's wonderful how I read that so you can see that Alan Turing you know the Enigma guy he was extreme an extreme idiot I read somewhere in this sense. He simply didn't get it all this custom background. Then we have the opposite stupidity which is precisely this stupidity of the big other. The stupidity of people who are so much in this embedded in this common-sensical thick background that they simply cannot distance themselves from it. The example of this stupidity would have been in detective novels the companion of the big detective, Hastings, Watson and so on. He is this kind of common-sense stupidity. My point is that that this is what happened in the Dark Middle Ages. The rule of this second stupidity this common-sense stupidity was broken so that the space for this creative stupidity where you are really too stupid to get the to get the background and in this way missing the background can invent something new. Okay now if you allow me just a little bit more now comes at least the part which is for me the most beautiful I think that if there is a writer who was stupid also in this first sense it is Franz Kafka. What he does is that he precisely how should I put it he presents the first type of stupidity which is a very logical stupidity as something customary as the second type of stupidity. He knows how to present as the most common thing this purely logical but crazy universe which ignores all the rules. So no wonder I will do it now you can find the whole text in a short essay published by me on Lacan.com on on Kafka and his last poem sorry his last short story Josefine the Singer. I think no wonder that I agree here with Fred Jameson Franz Kafka was the one who gave us one of the most beautiful communist utopias. It's again about animal kingdom but slightly different. It's not it's not animal kingdom it's not National Geographic. It's his very last story Josefine the Singer or the Mouse Folk. Incidentally already the translation I claim is false. Folk is German folk but in German folk is people. It's typical how the translation they wanted somehow to to render it more populist and so on. It's not it's mouse people. They're people. It's People's Republic. It's a communist society my God. What is so beautiful about this story is that A: it's the last story by Kafka. He knew he was done. He knew this is his last thing. Point two it's the allegory of an artist, the role of an artist in society. But what's so interesting is that there is none of the usual Kafka stuff no no existential nightmare obscenity and so on. It's a very modest story about a poor people of mice and Josephine their hero, a singer who even doesn't sing very well. She is just piping. But what's the role of this piping? Just to gather the people. A short quote: Since piping is one of our thoughtless habits says the mice mouse the narrator, one might think that people would pipe up in Josephine's audience too. Her art makes us feel happy and when we are happy we pipe. But her audience never pipes. It sits in mouse-like stillness. As if we had become partakers in the peace we long for for which our own piping at the very least holds us back. We make no sound. It is her singing that enchants us or is it not rather the solemn stillness enclosing her her frail little voice. End of quote from Kafka. So this last line makes the key point. What matters is not her voice as such but the solemn stillness, the moment of peace of withdrawal from hard work that the listening to her voice brings about. Here the sociopolitical context is crucial I think. The mice people lead harsh and tense lives, difficult to bear, their existence is always precarious, threatened and the very precarious character of Josephine's piping functions as a stand-in for the precarious existence of the mice people. So I quote here Fred Jameson: Josephine is the vehicle for the collectivity's affirmation of itself. She reflects their collective identity back to them. She is needed because only the intervention of art and the theme of the great artist could make it possible to grasp the essential anonymity of the people who have no feeling for art no reverence for the artist. In other words as Jameson concludes Josephine causes the people to assemble in silence. And here the story becomes beautifully properly communist. So again you have a bad artist, no specificity, just her voice she sings gathers the collective but the point is that the silence her voice creates and for this reason she is not charismatic the central comical part of the story if you read it you remember it is how Josephine took takes herself too seriously and she wants some special privileges, greater food ration and so on but she doesn't get it. She is treated totally as a totally as an ordinary totally as an ordinary person. When at the end she disappears, no problem. Her disappearance is unnoticed. And this I think is a beautiful vision of some kind of communist utopia. Of a radically egalitarian communist society. Which is why Kafka for him we humans were too much marked by superego so she had to imagine this society as animal society. Here is now the final quote from Jameson: It is perhaps the high point of Kafka's tale and nowhere is the icy indifference of the utopia of democracy more astonishingly revealed than in the refusal of the people to grant her this form of individual difference. Insofar as Josephine causes the essence of the people to appear she also causes this essential indifference of the anonymous and the radically democratic equality to emerge. Utopia is precisely the elevation from which this species escape forgetfulness and oblivion. It is anonymity as an intensely positive force, as the most fundamental fact of life of the democratic community. And it is this anonymity that in our non-utopian world goes under the name and characterization of death. So again I think that this is crucial if you want to have any presentiment of what a communist utopia would have been. And it's again it's not the story about rich people it's poor desperate group of people gathering in anonymity and the the artist is not the great genius it's just something totally arbitrary who through her sound creates the silence as it were, the silence of this anonymous egalitarian gathering. And I think we have our own as I entitled my text on Josefina is that Josefina if Kafka's text were to be written in another country years later in Soviet Union the title should have been Josefina the People's Artist of the Soviet Mice Republic. That is to say it's just this gathering together in a ritual. Now I know what I'm talking here. I think that the first important element of communist culture here we should drop radically all liberal liberal liberal constraints is that such a gathering where precisely you lose your identity you just immerse yourself in a collective and so on such a if you want pagan gathering with its inextricable mixture of sacred and obscene where individuals should be fully immersed into a crowd joyfully abandoning their individual critical minds where passion should obliterate reasoning and so on and so on. This is something that should be done. We shouldn't be afraid of it. Which is why far from thinking that what we find in rock concerts is somehow reactionary that we are manipulated we are manipulated but that's not all. This kind of collective gathering should be here. Why? Because now I come to my second point. What such gathering does to our lives is not really and this is what Jameson develops wonderfully apropos of that Platonov utopia Chevengur that what we what this kind of a drowning in collective produces when the show is over is not some kind of oh we are all like the same zombies. No what we emerge as afterwards is some kind of a how should I put it freaks with each with each of us his or her own idiosyncrasy and it is here that that Jameson proposed his idea of how communism would look as a society. It's it's like the imagine people were you know maybe you have a little bit of this dream if you saw that you can take it with you Frank Capra. You know this idea of maybe even in Dickens of these crazy large families when you know one is a madman thinks in Napoleon the other one is cutting himself the third one is dancing clumsily. They are all total madmen crazy men but somehow each enacts his her madness but they but they sometimes they sometimes they sometimes function together. And I think that's the other thing that in a communist society like you can have your own idiosyncrasies. You can mix red wine with coke that's my private scene. I like it in Germany this is the most tasteless thing you can do no. You can prefer Daphne du Maurier to Virginia Woolf which I do and incidentally Darian Leader convinced me I think Daphne du Maurier is a greater writer than that boring snob Virginia Woolf. You can I don't know you can only have sex on a hot radiator I have a friend who likes to do this don't ask me why. Do whatever you want. So we have we have these three element and but the third element which fits perfectly is that when you when you play out this collectivity when you enact your idiosyncrasy this doesn't drown this liberates your free mind your universal cold reasoning. This is why it always attracted me I know how manipulated this is but there is something in it you know this famous famous communities of half-crazy geeks computer programmers how the idea is their mind works perfectly but he is often an idiot with his own her own idiosyncrasy and so on and so on. So my final example would have been and this is I think where at least I always fall for fall for it there is something the most beautiful almost communist utopias for me is this science fiction films or not even science fiction films but the origin is the novel Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human from still the best but even today you find echoes from Heroes the ongoing TV series to X-Men to the lowest one I don't like it The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen this idea of a group of outcasts of freaks. You know each has a certain I don't know one can move in space the other can read the mind the third one and somehow how these outcasts form a community. And the community formed by these outcasts I think is a wonderful would be a wonderful example this this coming together of individuals precisely where you don't have to abandon any of your personal personal freakishness and so on and so on. So again I think that if you are looking for kind of a communist dream although I'm not saying it's such a great series I couldn't watch all of it look look at Heroes. So to really conclude if you give me just two-three minutes the conclusion of all this would have been that this has consequences for our innermost subjective attitude. Let me conclude with I don't know if you know what this is The Third Wave. The Third Wave was a famous social experiment at Palo Alto in the high school there where some teacher called Ron Jones made this experiment in April He wanted to explain to his students how could it have happened that Germans obeyed Hitler and ignored Holocaust. So this he Ron Jones started with his students a movement called The Third Wave. He convinced his students that the movement should have as a goal to eliminate democracy. He emphasized this main point of the movement in its motto strength through discipline strength through community strength through action strength through pride. However after four days Jones the professor decided to terminate the experiment because students became so much involved in the project that they started to denounce their colleagues that they don't really believe in the project it got it got crazy. So Jones ordered them to attend a rally the next day and explained to them what really happened that it was really an experiment and that now they can understand if even they could have been so easily seduced into totalitarian discipline how was it that Germans were seduced by Hitler. To cut a long story short I'm totally opposed to the lesson from this experiment. I think it's a big liberal mystification. The thesis that we get here is this boring liberal Lord of the Flies point how beneath the civilized surface we are all potentially fascists the barbarian beast is lurking in all of us and so on and so on. But I think that what the the reason I disagree with this experiment is that it constructs a certain opposition to put it very simply in the terms of that old Adorno in which Adorno participated study authoritarian personality versus liberal personality. I think that precisely I think that the trick of this experiment is that they blur a certain crucial line. There is a third type of discipline which is not liberal society it is a collective discipline but for that reason is not a totalitarian discipline. And I think that this is why all liberals like so much such experiments. I think the experiment itself was a mystification because where is the third term? Something is missing. What is missing? Look let me read this mottoes again strength through discipline strength through community strength through action strength through pride. I'm sorry to tell you but if this describes an emancipatory revolutionary community I'm sorry to tell you I totally subscribe to it. What is wrong with this? Strength through discipline. My God if you are poor and don't have time don't have money to buy arms of course you need discipline. Strength through community. Of course my God workers unite. Strength through action. Of course. Strength through pride. Of course we should be proud. You see the mystification the mystification is that it pretends to cover the entire field. It mystifies in the sense that it renders invisible a third option. A type of intersubjectivity which precisely breaks out of this alternative fundamentalist and so on and liberal liberal individualist. And this is why I think that we should start dreaming now about such communities. First they already exist. I take quite seriously when Marx says how we should look for the germs for the beginnings first signs of a new society in our society. Yes precisely in this kind of emergency state small communities communities where freaks gather and so on. These are there is something unique in these communities. They are disciplined collective but at the same time your idiosyncrasies are allowed you have discipline but without fundamentalism and so on and so on. So I think that and again they can be even very naive like again imagine when a group gets together on certain artistic project certain creative project and so on how things function there. Again this community of freaks. I think that we should start imagining practicing this kind of communities this kind of communities today. I think that maybe this would have been a true cultural revolution to develop and it can be done. This is what when people ask me but what can we do together sorry what can we do today already for communism? Well okay we cannot yet make the revolution but I think so and incidentally it's even clear I think with now I think now it's clear that capitalism will manage very well this crisis and in half a year they will say okay okay the worst is over and so on but but this is how I am ready to accept Badiou's notion of subtraction. If it's subtraction means create this kind of collective space which is the space which paradoxically combines collective immersion with with allowing for freakishness and so on and so on. This kind of spaces wherever we can create them they are necessary because I think that again at the level of collective life it's crucial to create communities which are neither this liberal individualist throwing people together nor this kind of so-called fundamentalist commitments and so on and so on. All I wanted to tell you is that spaces like that are possible. We can start. The problem is that and with this I will deal tomorrow and don't be afraid I will not repeat all jokes about Starbucks, the problem is that more and more we are getting pseudo-candidates for this collectivity like precisely Starbucks and so on these pseudo-collective spaces offering ourselves. Which is why I think that if you go to a to a theater performance to Queen Elizabeth Hall and there browse a little bit in a bookstore and take a coffee there no this is not this is not a communist experience. This is this is the worst this is the worst. So more on this tomorrow. Thanks very much."