Welcome to the Desert of Post-Ideology
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012-08-23 · 1:00:34 · 7,404 words
ideologypsychoanalysiscapitalismreligion-theologyhegel-dialecticsconsciousness-mindtechnology-ai-cyberspacephilosophy-generalhistory
Žižek delivers a lecture titled 'Welcome to the Desert of Post-Ideology' at the European University in Saint Petersburg, organized by the collective Chto Delat. He argues against the liberal claim that we live in a post-ideological era, contending instead that the 1990s Fukuyamaist moment was the true utopia, and that ideology today operates not symptomatically but fetishistically, a small lie that enables us to endure reality. He develops this through a wide-ranging discussion touching on biogenetics and the question of human nature, neurobiological free will debates (Libet, Metzinger, the Churchlands, Habermas), the ideological function of Western Buddhism as capitalism's perfect spiritual supplement, and the use of motifs such as the 'hamster fetish' and Suzuki's militarist Zen to illustrate the gap between inner spiritual experience and moral-political responsibility.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek jokingly recommends this Leninist organizational principle to Chto Delat after noticing internal friction in the group.
Žižek's term for the 1990s liberal-democratic consensus after the fall of the Soviet Union, not a post-utopian realism but itself the purest form of utopian thinking (belief in the formula of liberal democracy + market).
Žižek redefines utopia not as belief in human goodness but as belief in a total mechanism: the utopian is one who claims to have found the formula that, if applied, will make everything function, including brutal market mechanisms.
Hobsbawm's concept cited by Žižek to illustrate how ideology recreates the past, e.g. Slovenian 'ancient' folk customs fabricated in the 19th century by imitating Tyrolean Austrian models.
Referenced as 'Object A' from Mladen Dolar's prior talk, an entity with no positive existence, merely the positivization of nothing, illustrated by the Hershey bar tendency toward zero.
as “Intellectuelle Anschauung”
Kant's concept of intellectual intuition, the divine capacity where thinking is immediately also physical causality; Žižek invokes it to describe the uncanny near-divine power of brain-computer interfaces for paralyzed people.
The neuroscientific reductionist description of subjective freedom, the sense of being a free agent is merely a 'user's illusion' generated by underlying neuronal mechanisms, a position Žižek engages but ultimately rejects.
as “negative freedom”
Žižek invokes Libet's finding that freedom resides not in positive choice (already neurally determined) but in the capacity to veto/sabotage an impulse in the split second before acting, freedom as negation.
A phrase Žižek attributes to Buddhist meditation (Satori/Nirvana) where one still thinks but no longer experiences oneself as a self who thinks, described as the only point where subjective self-experience matches neuroscientific reductionism.
as “compassionate killing”
Žižek attributes this concept to Suzuki's wartime writings, the Buddhist-inflected notion that killing in war can be an act of compassion once the illusion of a substantial self is overcome, used to demonstrate the gap between enlightenment and ethics.
as “fall in love”
Žižek distinguishes being in love (manageable, safe) from falling in love, the latter displacing all coordinates of one's life, which he defends as the authentic form of attachment against the Buddhist-capitalist injunction to keep distance.
as “fetishist ideology”
Ideology operating not as symptomatic distortion (truth returning within a lie) but as a fetish, a small lie that enables one to accept and function within a harsh truth, as opposed to the symptom which is a moment of truth within a lie.
as “symptomatic ideology”
The older mode of ideology in which one lives a fundamental lie but truth returns and disturbs it, the return of the repressed in the Freudian sense, a moment of truth within the field of a lie.
A small lie or object-substitute that enables the subject to endure a traumatic truth by blocking its subjective-emotional consequences, while leaving rational acknowledgment intact, illustrated by the hamster story.
A moment of truth that erupts within and disturbs a field of ideological lie; the return of the repressed in Freudian terms, contrasted with the fetish.
Freud's term for isolation/neutralization, the psychic mechanism by which a subject rationally accepts a traumatic fact while blocking its full emotional-subjective impact, operative in the hamster fetish example.
as “Western Buddhism as hamster”
Žižek's formulation that Western Buddhism functions as ideology's perfect fetish for global capitalism, participants fully engage in cruel capitalist reality while telling themselves their true self remains elsewhere, in inner detachment.
as “big Other”
Implicitly present in Žižek's account of symbolic reality and the subject's relation to it, though not named explicitly in this talk.
as “post-ideology”
Žižek uses 'post-ideology' ironically: the claim that we have left ideology behind is itself the dominant ideological gesture today, rendering critique invisible by presenting pragmatic consensus as natural reality.
Stories he reaches for 9
Researchers in New York attached a rat to a computer via neural signals and could steer it like a remote-controlled car; the subject reportedly doesn't notice the external control and still experiences itself as freely moving, used to illustrate the stakes of biogenetic control over inner life.
“you can literally direct a living rat as if it's a car... The first results they hinted at me is that you don't even know it, that you still think you're just freely walking around.”
D.T. Suzuki, the 1960s hippie icon of Zen, was a propagator of Japanese militarism in the 1930s–40s, arguing that when Japan's sword killed Chinese resisters it was 'the sword of love'; he advocated Buddhist meditation for soldiers because overcoming the illusion of self makes one a pure observer of the cosmic dance, not a responsible agent of killing.
“It's no longer me killing you. It is: there is this crazy impersonal dance of phenomena, my knife dances and somehow in this cosmic dance your body or eye falls on my knife and I'm just a pure observer.”
Dating agency advertisements promise 'love without the fall', exploiting the French/English verb 'to fall in love', offering managed attachment without the traumatic displacement of one's life coordinates, which Žižek takes as the emblem of contemporary managed desire.
“They say we will enable you to be in love without the fall. That's horror for me if you ask me you know that's total horror.”
Reinhard Heydrich, organizer of the Holocaust, would gather with SS officers in the evenings to play Beethoven's late string quartets, Žižek insists they were probably genuinely moved by the music, demonstrating the gap between aesthetic cultivation and moral monstrosity.
“Do you know that in the evenings he often gathered with his SS officer friends and they were playing what is maybe one of the most beautiful cases of Western classical music: late Beethoven's string quartets.”
Lenin heard Beethoven's Appassionata at a friend's apartment and was almost moved to tears, but then pulled back, saying he must not listen to it too much or he will become too gentle to beat the enemies, Žižek praises Lenin's honest acknowledgment of the contradiction between beauty and revolutionary violence.
“Lenin at least experienced the contradiction. The true horror for me is the someone who tortures you while listening to passionata, to Appassionata.”
Benjamin Libet showed that the brain initiates action before the subject is consciously aware of deciding; rather than concluding free will is illusory, Libet locates freedom in the capacity to sabotage/veto the neural process in the split second before action, a move Žižek calls 'a wonderful Hegelian move'.
“the zero level of freedom is that in that split of a second you can say stop it and sabotage the process”
A Slovenian friend's wife died of cancer; he could discuss her death calmly while stroking his wife's pet hamster. When the hamster died a year later, the friend immediately broke down and attempted suicide, revealing the hamster as the fetish object that had blocked the full subjective impact of the loss.
“To put it in poetic terms they all have a hamster. The beginning of critique of ideology here is: okay you are brutal but where is your hamster?”
A Chinese Academy of Sciences biogenetics program document Žižek saw stated its goal as 'to regulate the physical and psychic wellbeing of the Chinese people', used to illustrate how biogenetic power openly aims at transforming human nature without Western humanitarian euphemism.
“the goal of the development of biogenetics in China is to regulate the physical and psychic wellbeing of the Chinese people”
Žižek expresses his 'Stalinist dream' of remaking Star Wars with Darth Vader and the Emperor as progressive centralizers and the Jedi as reactionary feudal resisters, using it to mock the Buddhist-inflected ideology of non-attachment to outcomes ('don't get too attached to things').
“my Stalinist almost dream with billions of dollars would be to remake Star Wars but with Darth Vader and Emperor as the good guys... and all those Jedi are reactionary feudals who resist people.”
Works invoked 6
Star Wars film
Žižek cites Star Wars ideology (the evil of over-attachment to things; the Jedi as good) as an expression of Buddhist-capitalist distance; proposes satirically remaking it with Darth Vader as the progressive centralizer.
Being No One book
Thomas Metzinger's book; Žižek recommends it and engages seriously with its argument that self-perception as a free agent is an impossible knowledge to fully abandon.
Our Posthuman Future book
Fukuyama's book on biogenetics; Žižek credits Fukuyama for being 'honest enough' to recognize that liberal democracy is insufficient to handle the terrifying perspectives biogenetics opens up.
Fukuyama's central work; treated as the paradigm of the 1990s utopian liberal consensus Žižek opposes, the 'Fukuyamaist utopia.'
Invented Traditions book
Hobsbawm's edited volume; Žižek recommends it to illustrate how nations fabricate ancient customs, Slovenian 'medieval' folk traditions created in the 19th century by imitating Austrian Tyrolean models.
Rebecca book
Daphne du Maurier's novel; mentioned as evidence that du Maurier is a better writer than Virginia Woolf.
People invoked 32
Virginia Woolf positive
Žižek calls her 'a frigid bitch' (personal negative) but credits her statement that human nature changed on a certain date in 1910 as 'something beautiful' that anticipates his point about biogenetic transformation of human nature.
Cited as trying to strike a compromise between the image of man and the scientific image, attempting to reconcile Habermas-style transcendentalism with naturalist determinism.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Praised for his honest reaction to the Appassionata, fearing it would make him too gentle, as proof he experienced the contradiction between aesthetic beauty and revolutionary politics; defended against Fukuyama's objection as the indispensable 'God' without whom the theoretical miracles collapse.
Theodor W. Adorno negative
Mentioned alongside Heidegger as representatives of a 'stupid pessimist' position, lamenting that biogenetics will obliterate the very humanness of human being, against which Žižek wants to keep the question open.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for objet petit a (Object A) as the positivization of nothing; Stephen Jay Gould's Hershey bar analysis is described as 'spontaneously Lacanian.'
Cited as an example of a disabled person who communicates through minimal motor signals, used to illustrate the same brain-computer interface technology.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Called 'the great Darwinian' who died a couple of years ago; Mladen first introduced Žižek to him; Žižek draws on his essays about theology/Darwinism (fossils) and the Hershey bar price-quantity analysis to illustrate ideology and objet petit a.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek has met him two or three times and credits him as 'not an idiot' and an honest conservative; recounts a BBC round table where Fukuyama asked why Žižek insists on Lenin; notes Fukuyama now partially agrees that the end-of-history thesis failed, citing biogenetics and ecology as reasons.
Žižek says du Maurier (author of Rebecca) is a better writer than Virginia Woolf.
Cited as an example of corporate leaders whose spiritual orientation is Buddhism.
Patricia Churchland negative
Co-described with Paul Churchland as radical reductionists from California who propose an ethics without free will, and also mentioned at the very end as perhaps the greatest 20th-century detective story writer (likely a different Patricia Churchland vs Patricia Highsmith, the transcript ends saying Patricia Highsmith).
Patricia Highsmith positive
Named at the very end as 'the absolute writer of detective stories for me in the 20th century', the talk ends there.
Alain Badiou positive
Mentioned as a fellow who, together with Žižek, made the courageous step to overcome the anarchist consensus among European/American intelligentsia after 1989; also drew Žižek's attention to the dating-agency 'love without the fall' advertisements.
Cited via Boris Groys's volumes as an example of 1920s techno-utopian thinking: Trotsky explicitly called for genetically creating a new man to replace homo sapiens, Žižek presents this as interesting but not simply endorsed.
Eric Hobsbawm positive
Called 'the great British historian'; Žižek recommends his edited volume Invented Traditions to explain how nations fabricate ancient customs.
Mladen Dolar positive
Present at the event; introduced Žižek to Stephen Jay Gould; discussed objet petit a at a prior Moscow talk; the talk is in dialogue with Dolar's preceding lecture.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Hero of the 1960s hippie movement for spreading Zen in the West; Žižek reveals he was also a propagator of Japanese militarism in the late 1930s–40s, providing Buddhist justifications for killing, used to demonstrate the gap between enlightenment and ethics.
Martin Heidegger negative
Mentioned alongside Adorno as a pessimist about technology and the end of humanity, a position Žižek rejects.
Cited alongside Steve Jobs as an example of corporate managers drawn to Buddhism.
Organizer of the Holocaust who played Beethoven's late string quartets in the evenings, cited as evidence that aesthetic cultivation and moral monstrosity can genuinely coexist, not merely as pretense.
Quentin Meillassoux positive
Described as 'the great critic of transcendental position'; Žižek invokes his argument that transcendentalism cannot avoid the ontological question, if one accepts Darwinian materialism, reason itself must be explained naturalistically.
Thomas Metzinger positive
German cognitivist, author of Being No One; his position, that we cannot subjectively accept neurobiological reductionism even if we rationally know it, is cited as correct but reinterpreted by Žižek in a more Marxist-cynical sense.
Boris Groys positive
Russian-German intellectual, described as a 'compatriot' of the Chto Delat audience; Žižek says he has 'some problems' with him ('will get re-education camp when we take power') but credits his Suhrkamp volumes collecting 1920s Soviet gnostic avant-garde texts as a genuinely good contribution.
Paul Churchland negative
Described with Patricia Churchland as 'the most crazy reductionists' who believe we can fully internalize neurobiological determinism and do without concepts of subjective freedom and responsibility.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Criticized for his transcendental position, claiming the space of communicative reason cannot be undermined by naturalist ontology, which Žižek rejects as epistemological-ontological dualism that collapses into agnosticism when pressed by materialist objections.
Benjamin Libet positive
Neuroscientist at Berkeley/San Francisco who demonstrated that brain activity precedes conscious awareness of a decision; Žižek praises Libet's own interpretation, locating freedom in the negative veto capacity, as 'a wonderful Hegelian move'.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for his observation apropos Balzac that revolutionaries learn more from honest conservatives than from liberals or naive leftists.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked for the concept of isolierung (isolation/neutralization), for the formulation of symptom as the return of the repressed, and for the contrast between symptom and fetish.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked as having an answer to the epistemology/ontology debate that Habermas cannot resolve; Libet's negative freedom interpretation is called 'a wonderful Hegelian move'; also referenced in the phrase 'you will have to read Hegel a little bit.'
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the concept of Intellectuelle Anschauung (intellectual intuition), only God thinks and thereby creates; brain-computer interfaces give humans a taste of this divine capacity.
Briefly mentioned in connection with Trotsky's call for a 'new man', Žižek notes that Nietzsche's new man would probably still be what Nietzsche calls the 'last man.'
Honoré de Balzac positive
Mentioned in passing as the subject of Marx's observation about learning from honest conservatives.
What it argues
the fetishist structure of contemporary ideologypost-ideology as ideology's most effective formBuddhism as the spiritual supplement of global capitalismbiogenetics and the transformation of human natureneurobiological free will and the subjectthe gap between inner enlightenment and moral responsibilityutopia redefined as belief in a total mechanism
Dialectical moves 9
“The true utopia is not the socialist dream but the 90s Fukuyamaist consensus — the alleged end of utopia was itself the purest utopia.”
Žižek inverts the post-Cold-War narrative: what presented itself as sober realism (end of ideology) was the most utopian moment, belief in the market as total mechanism.
“A fetish is not a big lie but a small lie that enables you to live in truth — almost the opposite of a symptom.”
Žižek reverses the expected relation: ideology today works not by distorting reality away from truth but by providing the minimal fiction that lets subjects bear the truth of their situation.
“The cynical realist who claims to accept brutal reality without illusions is the most ideological subject of all — because everyone has a hamster.”
The claim to have no ideology is the fetishist's position; cynicism is not the overcoming of ideology but its highest form.
“Far from freedom being located in the positive act of decision, the zero level of freedom is the negative capacity to say stop — to veto.”
Žižek follows Libet in relocating freedom from positive will to negative sabotage, making freedom essentially a power of negation.
“Buddhism, far from being the inner alternative to capitalism, is capitalism's ideal spiritual supplement — it is ideology appearing as post-ideology.”
What presents itself as spiritual withdrawal from the capitalist game is precisely what makes full participation in it psychically bearable.
“The sword that kills you is the sword of love — Suzuki's Buddhist militarism reveals that enlightenment and murderous violence are not opposites but can perfectly coincide.”
Žižek uses Suzuki to show that the gap between inner spiritual state and external ethical action is absolute, enlightenment provides no moral guarantee.
“Lenin's fear of Beethoven is not a horror but a virtue — the true horror is the torturer who listens without contradiction.”
Žižek inverts the usual reading: Lenin's paranoid self-policing around beauty is praiseworthy because it acknowledges the contradiction that the aesthetically cultivated Nazi denies.
“You can have all of Fukuyama's nice analyses — but without Lenin, it is like wanting divine miracles without God.”
Lenin is the unacceptable remainder that makes the whole critical theoretical edifice hold together; removing him destroys the logic.
“I don't want to be in love — I want to fall in love: the fall is not the accident but the essence.”
Authentic love is constituted by the displacement of one's coordinates, not by safe attachment; the dating-agency promise of love without the fall is love's negation.
Claims 15
asserts
The 1990s post-Cold-War liberal consensus was not the end of utopia but itself the purest form of utopia — the Fukuyamaist belief in the market formula as the total mechanism.end of ideology / Fukuyama / liberal utopia
asserts
A true utopian is not someone who believes in human goodness but someone who claims to have found a mechanism that, once applied, will make everything function.definition of utopia
asserts
Today ideology functions less and less symptomatically and more and more fetishistically.the structure of contemporary ideology
asserts
Western Buddhism is the ideal ideological form for global capitalism because it combines scientific reductionism (no-self) with inner detachment that allows full participation in cruel market reality.Buddhism and capitalism
asserts
There is an irreducible gap between spiritual/mystical authenticity and moral-political responsibility — you can be a fully authentic mystic and still be a torturer.enlightenment and ethics
asserts
Biogenetics represents a genuine change in human nature because it transgresses the elementary inner/outer distinction that grounds our experience of freedom of thought.biogenetics and human nature
reframes
Libet's experiment does not prove the absence of free will but rather relocates freedom in the negative capacity to veto or sabotage a neurally-initiated action.free will and neuroscience / Libet
rejects
Habermas's transcendental argument for the irreducibility of communicative reason fails because a determinist can explain the very procedure of rational argumentation through evolutionary naturalism.Habermas's transcendental position / epistemology vs ontology
reframes
Metzinger is right that ideology is inescapable — we cannot fully subjectively accept neurobiological reductionism — but for Marxist-cynical reasons, not the cognitive ones he gives.Metzinger / necessary ideology
asserts
The cynical realist position ('I know life is just business and power') is impossible — every cynic has a fetish (a 'hamster') that lets them endure the reality they claim to accept.cynicism and fetishism
asserts
One can learn more from honest conservatives — who describe deadlocks without false optimism — than from liberals or naive leftists who believe in progress.honest conservatives vs liberals
asserts
The Creationist fossils-planted-by-God theory is a perfect metaphor for ideology: every epoch recreates its past rather than discovering it.ideology and the construction of the past
rejects
The dating-agency promise of 'love without the fall' epitomizes the contemporary horror of managed, risk-free desire — the fall is constitutive of authentic love.managed desire / dating agencies / Buddhist detachment
asserts
Lenin's reaction to the Appassionata — fear that beauty would make him too gentle to fight — is honest and admirable; the true horror is the torturer who listens to Beethoven without contradiction.Lenin, aesthetic experience, and political violence
asserts
Ontology has priority over epistemology: any consistent materialism must accept that even our rational procedures emerged from nature, against Habermas's epistemological dualism.ontology vs epistemology / materialism
Quotes 12
“The true utopia were the 90s... A true utopian is the one who says I found the mechanism, so we just have to apply this mechanism and everything will function.”Slavoj Žižek · utopia redefined as mechanism-belief
“They all have a hamster. The beginning of critique of ideology here is: okay you are brutal but where is your hamster?”Slavoj Žižek · cynicism's fetish object
“Fetish is a small lie which enables us to live in truth.”Slavoj Žižek · fetishist ideology
“Western Buddhism is one big fat hamster.”Slavoj Žižek · Buddhism as capitalism's ideological supplement
“You can be an absolutely authentic mystic, really there in the enlightenment and you can still be a torturer, a murderer, whatever you want.”Slavoj Žižek · gap between enlightenment and ethics
“Lenin at least experienced the contradiction. The true horror for me is the someone who tortures you while listening to passionata, to Appassionata.”Slavoj Žižek · Lenin's honest contradiction vs the aestheticized torturer
“I don't want just to be in love, I want to fall in love. You know precisely in this sense of you fall into it. All the coordinates of your life are displaced.”Slavoj Žižek · authentic love as total displacement
“This is like you want to have all the divine miracles but without the divine God, because God is just too God.”Slavoj Žižek · Lenin's indispensability to radical analysis
“The zero level of freedom is that in that split of a second you can say stop it and sabotage the process.”Slavoj Žižek · negative freedom as veto
“Symptom is a moment of truth within the field of a lie. Fetish is almost not quite the opposite. Fetish is a small lie which enables us to live in truth.”Slavoj Žižek · symptom vs fetish in ideology
“We will enable you to be in love without the fall. That's horror for me if you ask me you know that's total horror.”Slavoj Žižek · managed desire / love without the fall
“The goal of the development of biogenetics in China is to regulate the physical and psychic wellbeing of the Chinese people.”Slavoj Žižek · biopolitical openness of Chinese state
Transcript 7 turns
unknown
It's a great pleasure to welcome Slavoj Žižek who doesn't really need an introduction, but as you know he is a very interesting,
It's a great pleasure to welcome Slavoj Žižek who doesn't really need an introduction, but as you know he is a very interesting,
unknown
very influential contemporary
very influential contemporary
Slavoj Žižek
philosopher, our well ally, our former ally from the central Europe but now an ally in the ideological struggle. And again as you know Slavoj after the fall of the Soviet Empire, Slavoj was among the first intellectuals who together maybe with Alain Badiou really made a very courageous step to overcome the anarchist, what I would call the anarchist consensus among the European intelligentsia and the American intelligentsia, and although this was very controversial and dramatic, this position finally became if not dominant unfortunately then influential. And I must say that for me personally Slavoj was an absolute initiating experience at some point when his
philosopher, our well ally, our former ally from the central Europe but now an ally in the ideological struggle. And again as you know Slavoj after the fall of the Soviet Empire, Slavoj was among the first intellectuals who together maybe with Alain Badiou really made a very courageous step to overcome the anarchist, what I would call the anarchist consensus among the European intelligentsia and the American intelligentsia, and although this was very controversial and dramatic, this position finally became if not dominant unfortunately then influential. And I must say that for me personally Slavoj was an absolute initiating experience at some point when his
unknown
books and his personal resonance was for me a factor that maybe a crucial factor for making and becoming philosopher myself and taking my ideological duty. You before you met me you were just like [unintelligible] you were a member of the anarchist intelligentsia. So again it's great pleasure and Slavoj Žižek is a guest of the European University in Saint Petersburg, his visit became possible due to the Chair in Democratic Theory and he and Mladen Dolar are here in the framework of a large program of talks and discussions organized by the collective Chto Delat from Saint Petersburg and Moscow. So without further ado I give the floor to Slavoj Žižek with the talk Welcome to the Desert of Post-Ideology. Thank you very much, I hope this works now, and I'm really, really glad to be here. My gratitude to the group Chto Delat, and I must say we discovered them even you see I knew about you even before you met me, so with your activity here, especially I think a wonderful piece which I already mentioned in Moscow of intervention apropos of that proto-fascist whatever painter who got nationalist [unintelligible] yeah who got who got the Kandinsky prize which I think probably Kandinsky should be turning in his grave. So and I and I really feel at home here although I must say that yesterday evening when we had a debate, no, I saw there is functional, a little bit of functional struggle in your group. You need more democratic centralism I think this kind of friendly
books and his personal resonance was for me a factor that maybe a crucial factor for making and becoming philosopher myself and taking my ideological duty. You before you met me you were just like [unintelligible] you were a member of the anarchist intelligentsia. So again it's great pleasure and Slavoj Žižek is a guest of the European University in Saint Petersburg, his visit became possible due to the Chair in Democratic Theory and he and Mladen Dolar are here in the framework of a large program of talks and discussions organized by the collective Chto Delat from Saint Petersburg and Moscow. So without further ado I give the floor to Slavoj Žižek with the talk Welcome to the Desert of Post-Ideology. Thank you very much, I hope this works now, and I'm really, really glad to be here. My gratitude to the group Chto Delat, and I must say we discovered them even you see I knew about you even before you met me, so with your activity here, especially I think a wonderful piece which I already mentioned in Moscow of intervention apropos of that proto-fascist whatever painter who got nationalist [unintelligible] yeah who got who got the Kandinsky prize which I think probably Kandinsky should be turning in his grave. So and I and I really feel at home here although I must say that yesterday evening when we had a debate, no, I saw there is functional, a little bit of functional struggle in your group. You need more democratic centralism I think this kind of friendly
Slavoj Žižek
criticism. Sorry, let me start.
criticism. Sorry, let me start.
unknown
Just second point before I begin properly as Mladen Dolar already said in Moscow I would like to repeat it here: we both have a fear that somehow you expect from us somehow to give you a guidance you know, to tell you precisely Chto delat, no, what to do. Well as Mladen said, from two poor Slovene intellectuals you will not get it I think, so don't expect what you cannot get. But the title of my talk Welcome to the Desert of Post-Ideology I mean it quite seriously because as you probably know one of the popular liberal commonplaces, ah thank you very much, is that in with the fall of Soviet Empire and so on, a certain epoch went to the end, many people even claimed that it was kind of a high- ironic historical coincidence that it fell down okay exactly years after the French Revolution. No,
Just second point before I begin properly as Mladen Dolar already said in Moscow I would like to repeat it here: we both have a fear that somehow you expect from us somehow to give you a guidance you know, to tell you precisely Chto delat, no, what to do. Well as Mladen said, from two poor Slovene intellectuals you will not get it I think, so don't expect what you cannot get. But the title of my talk Welcome to the Desert of Post-Ideology I mean it quite seriously because as you probably know one of the popular liberal commonplaces, ah thank you very much, is that in with the fall of Soviet Empire and so on, a certain epoch went to the end, many people even claimed that it was kind of a high- ironic historical coincidence that it fell down okay exactly years after the French Revolution. No,
Slavoj Žižek
that that epoch which began with Jacobins, Yakobins, came to an end and with it the end of ideology. Ideology is then defined as a you know is a brutal violent attempt to enforce the reality, to impose on it some abstract intellectual preconceptions. So the idea is we got rid of that, today we live in a rational world where instead of imposing on each other our totalitarian visions, we do pragmatically negotiate, allow each other his her their way of life and so on and so on. Of course I oppose it. I think that not only was not a period of the end of utopias but that the true utopia were the 90s, you know, the let's call it Fukuyamaist utopia where for a brief moment it seemed that we found, we humanity, the formula. And remember, this is I think the best definition, formal definition of utopia. Utopians are usually accused of believing in human goodness or whatever. No, no, utopians are more crazy, true utopians. They think they found a formula, you know. A true utopian is the one who says I found the mechanism, so we just have to apply this mechanism and everything will function. And these mechanisms can also be very brutal, imply human evil and so on. Like this for me the market utopia, that if you impose market on the right way the very human egotism, the fact that every everyone will work for himself will contribute to common good and so on and so on. Now I met two-three times Francis Fukuyama and I'll tell you something surprising: he is not an idiot. He is one of these conservatives with whom I like to speak. You know why? Already Marx said apropos Balzac that a true radical that is a revolutionary can learn much more from honest conservatives than from liberals because liberals, reactionaries, and also naive leftists, they think like we have a plan, things will be better and so on and so on. There is progress. But honest conservatives usually are again honest enough just to describe a deadlock. You know they say no, we see a deadlock, there is no easy way out. And this is now the last time I spoke with him, Fukuyama's position. He told me he no longer believes in the end of history. He agrees partially with me, okay, I must tell you the story, it's wonderful. I was with him on a round table already ten years ago just BBC one hour radio-not TV-it was on books and his book was that book of Lenin, no, which is translated here, the short one. And he told me something crazy. He told me you have so many nice analyses but why Lenin? Why erase Lenin and I buy everything else? you know. I told him this is like you want to have all the divine miracles but without the divine God, because God is just too God... seriously! And he told me that he sees two reasons at least for the end of Fukuyama utopia. The first one is biogenetics. You remember he wrote a book on post-human future whatever. He's honest enough here. He thinks that with biogenetics, which opens up terrifying perspectives, potentially terrifying-I'm not this pessimist-but perspectives of direct regulation of our even psychic properties, that this liberal model simply is not strong enough, that we will need much and ecology then and others, that we will need much stronger social regulation. And if you allow me to improvise a little bit, this I think is a phenomenon which really interests me. You know that Virginia Woolf, you know her? I also I hate her, I think Daphne du Maurier, you know Rebecca, is better writer. Virginia Woolf is a frigid bitch for me, sorry. But nonetheless she said something beautiful. I don't know apropos which event, didn't she say like something like on the 4th of October 1910-I'm not sure about the date-human nature has changed you know. And you pro- maybe you know that there is a long tradition in England of these crazy dates, like do you know that and the beauty-only British people can do this-the beauty is that this was not meant as a joke. Do you know that a British theologian, Christian, in 19th century I forgot but calculated from the Bible backwards and said God created the world on I think it's at in the morning. No, you know God had a breakfast then, English breakfast probably, let's create the world. Why is this important for ideology? Ah, I did it, people accuse me is senile that I will lose my thread. I did. Because precisely concerning biology creation, I can offer you a wonderful example, I hope you know it, if don't please read it, a wonderful example of how things which are scientifically obviously a nonsense can provide a wonderful formal structure which enlightens many things in how ideology works. For example, and this was elaborated among others by the biologist whom Mladen first introduced him to me and we both love him, the one who died couple of years ago, Stephen Jay Gould, the great Darwinian. He has a wonderful article on theology and Darwinism. Maybe you know how, this is for me the most intelligent beautiful reaction of theology to Darwinism. There was a British theologian who was also a serious biologist, a friend of Darwin and he knew well this is real, there are fossils and so on, so Darwin is right. But then he was also intensely religious so he asked himself how can we unite this, the obvious factual truth of Darwinism, with-and he was a religious fundamentalist at the same time-with the idea that nonetheless you know again if you count generations the world, universe should be only about four maximum years. It's ingenious, I hope you know the solution. It's truly ideological mechanism at its purest. His idea was that, my God, Bible cannot be wrong, it's the word of God, so God really created the world whatever years ago, but in order not to make the universe for us too claustrophobic, he directly created fossils, you know like a movie set where it looks the infinite background but is just painted to make us feel more like open, believe in an endless open universe. Now I think that, okay I'm not sure, probably this theory is wrong you know. But it's a beautiful metaphor for ideology. How ideology is precisely how every epoch literally recreates its past. I don't know how this is done with you, but with my small nation Slovenians we are a clinical example. We have old medieval national customs which were created all in the late 19th century, so that our forefathers looked at the Tyrolean, Austrian, all this yodeling, their national dresses and changed them a little bit. Okay, you want to know more about this, Eric Hobsbawm, Eric Hobsbawm, the great British historian wrote or rather edited a nice collective volume Invented Traditions. So another example, since Mladen was yesterday talking about Object A, this entity which doesn't have positive existence but is just a positivization of nothing. The best example that I remember of this is from one of the books again one short essay I don't know which part of again Stephen Jay Gould where to make a point about how evolution functions he uses as an example, you know them-for our European tastes we have better chocolates. I like to try them even here in Russia but okay I'm a bigot so I just justify eating chocolate as saying that this is the homeopathic approach to diabetes, you know that you cure the illness with the very poison and so on. So seriously, he takes the disgusting American that I don't like Hershey chocolate bars and he discovered a certain tendency. Like let's say at a certain point you have a certain price of chocolate and for this price you get certain quantity like I don't know this one the old prices: cents, grams. Then he says that if you compare quantity and price with inflation and so on, the value development goes like this: for some time price remains the same, you cannot change it all the time. But they gradually diminish the quantity, you know so it's I don't know how many grams. Then at a certain point they have to, they raise the price. And the quantity also goes up but not to the starting point. Like it's not like grams let's say cents. Then you have cents, then you get let's say to grams and or cents. But it's quite nice beautiful. He was spontaneously Lacanian. He said that if you bring this tendency to the end you can not only precisely determine of course it's a senseless extrapolation but beautiful when you will get nothing but here comes the Lacanian moment: you can exactly tell how much this nothing will cost. This would be made the best metaphor for you know the Lacan where yesterday high theory, I give a concrete example you know in the Leninist sense of concrete analysis of concrete situation and so on. So okay let me go on back to ideology. So you know again this idea we live at the end of the ideology and so on and so on. There is a confusion today because I'm going now back to ecology sorry, biogenetics, why is this so important also for our ideological misunderstanding or misunderstanding. I mentioned Virginia Woolf. I think that in a way this effectively is happening today. Now I'm neither this kind of a techno-gnostic, technological gnosticism optimist and I think this is what interests me in your tradition: your compatriot Boris Groys, I have some problems he will get re-education camp when we take power but he did a good thing: he published with a German publisher Suhrkamp three thick volumes of all those you know gnostic avant-garde texts from the 1920s. And it's incredible how you know what he demonstrates is that it wasn't just a minority like some crazy people. These were hundreds of thousands of intellectuals up to Trotsky. For example he quotes and I quote it in one of my books a passage from Trotsky's text from or when he still was writing and publishing here, where he says that now that working class has political economic power, when the economic situation will stabilize the next task will be to create a new man. And he didn't mean this Stalinist poetic bullshit. He really meant it. He said through biology, psychology, we will have to genetically and so on analyze what is a man and change it. Because he said homo sapiens was not well created by nature. We should literally genetically create a new man and then he has Trotsky this wonderful ending. He says so that then we Bolsheviks will be able to say farewell homo sapiens, your time is past, now it's our time. Sorry, it's Nietzsche I mean it's... yeah but there is a problem here because it's absolutely clear that for Nietzsche this new man would nonetheless I think remain what Nietzsche calls the last man. At least this would be my-I'm not sure. You maybe also need re-education camp, sorry. Okay let's go on here. No but are you aware how many things are already happening? They are no longer a utopia. For example when I was in New York I met some guys and then some others who are already doing you know what: we already can through genetical analysis, computerization and so on, identify the most elementary signals that you give to your limbs when you walk. So what they did is they in this way attached a rat to a computer and I saw the movie, I have four-five copies from this scientific laboratories, it's quite shocking. You see a rat freely jumping around. Then you have really like a remote controller for toys for cars you know. You press a button, the rat is connected, and then you can literally direct a living rat as if it's a car. Now why is this so fascinating? You will say so what, no big deal. Ah! They told me and I suspect this what really interest them. Secretly they are afraid to put this in public, they are of course trying to do this also on humans. And with their good naive but nonetheless good philosophical sense, they are bothered by question by the question which also immediately emerged in me when I listened to this. How would a human or how will a human being experience this? Will it be let's say you are the bad doctor you look at me with this Dostoevsky crazy gaze, sorry, will it be that when you control me I will be free and then all of a sudden I will experience like as if you know oh my God, some foreign power is controlling me? Or will it be that I will think I'm still free? Of course it's the first. No, okay your sentence is diminished, you're absolutely... No seriously, there's quite a lot of anxiety you know. The first results they hinted at me is that you don't even know it, that you still think you're just freely walking around. Or for example they are trying to sell us this as a great help towards crippled people and for them it is. You know that with the same mechanism like if you are totally crippled you no longer need what even Stephen Hawking says you know that finger he communicates even Hawking. No, at least for elementary orders they already have wheelchairs with motor for crippled people where you just think strongly forward, it moves. You think left, it goes left. Now you will say this is wonderful, we are becoming like gods, literally. Because if you know Kant, this is what Kant called Intellectuelle Anschauung, intellectual intuition. We humans as finite endless beings, we think reality is out there that we intuit it. But Kant says only for God thinking is creating you know like thinking is immediately also physical causality. Here we get almost a taste of that. But as my friends told me like don't jump too quickly to intellectual orgasm you know. Because they told me nicely what goes out also goes in. That is to say if you can influence in this way the outside, they can also go in. And I was shocked to learn how-I'm not blaming you here Putin bad secret services-they are all doing it I'm almost told especially United States and China. They are like crazy, this will be maybe the next stage of warfare you know developing different techniques of literally biogenetic warfare. For example spreading something around or into food which literally for some time changes you or whatever. And I claim this really is a change in human nature because our most elementary perception of inner of freedom is the freedom of thought. I mean in this purely formal sense you can beat me whatever but I think what I want to think. It's the elementary distance between inside and outside. And my God, what will happen if this distance not okay maybe not totally falls away but is somehow transgressed. Now I want to be clear here. I'm neither the stupid optimist like those techno-gnostics from the 20s, nor am I a stupid pessimist in some Adorno, Heidegger way oh the end of humanity, the very humanness of human being will be obliterated. We should keep it open, I don't know enough. But what I do know is that it's effectively as Virginia Woolf with would have put it something will... it's a change in our most fundamental functioning as humans. And when I visited China the first time ten years ago I was quite shocked how open the Chinese are about this. By chance I met, because I met him before in Frankfurt at some debate about impact of technology, one of the heads of Chinese Academy of Sciences department for biogenetics, and he showed me their the program of their biogenetic department. And you know with Chinese you get it, no humanitarian bullshit, directly no. It says there the goal of the development of biogenetics in China is to regulate the physical and psychic wellbeing of the Chinese people. They directly say it, no. So with all this then brain sciences and so on here things get really interesting. Namely if and it's a big if, I-my answer is no here, but I don't have time to develop it. But if we accept and the problem is that most of us nonetheless accept it, I don't, but not out of religious reasons. If we accept the fact that biogenetic description of us humans as just let's say neuronal mechanisms where freedom is just as they call it users illusion and so on. Although here also, my God you should follow this debate, you know who is Benjamin Libet, a scientist in at Berkeley I think San Francisco who did the most interesting experiment in this. He you probably heard about this, it's wonderful already years ago. He proved, demonstrated positively that let's say he asked a person as part of experiment to decide something like when I will pick up this pen or something like that quickly, and to act immediately like now I decided. Okay. He demonstrated that part of a second before you are aware of your decision your brain already knows it and sends the signal and so on. Now this seems to be an obvious proof that our free decision is not really a decision, that you just take cognizance how do they put it, become aware of some objective neuronal process which already took place. But now things get complicated. Libet himself doesn't draw this conclusion. He claims and it's a wonderful Hegelian move, he claims that we are looking for freedom at the wrong place. That the primordial form of freedom is negative not positive. Yes whatever you positively decide it's already in your body blah blah blah. But he claims you can sabotage it, block it. That the zero level of freedom is that in that split of a second you can say stop it and sabotage the process. Now I know that now again you can ask the question but wait a minute this negative sabotaging decision also has to have some neuronal ground so the debate gets much more complex and so on. But okay I will not get lost in this because these are nonetheless wonderful debates. Most of neurobiologists I claim are philosophically idiots. They think in this simplistic way of objective. But not all of them, some of them ask very intelligent questions. So let me go on where things become interesting is what Mladen was talking yesterday: subject in all of this. Namely let's ask a question more radically. Which would have been the subjective awareness how we look at ourselves that would have been appropriate to this knowledge. No like can we live our daily lives while not just rationally know that there is no free will and so on but somehow even emotionally, subjectively fully accepting that we are just neuronal mechanisms and so on. It's very interesting because there are four main positions here, three four. One is the naive-sorry the common sense one, it's by far predominant. The idea is that even if we rationally know that there is no free will and so on, we can-as the German pretty intelligent cognitivist Thomas Metzinger, you should translate his book Being No One, it's a wonderful book-he claims that even if we rationally know this we cannot really accept it and believe in it, that it's an impossible knowledge. In other words you can rationally know, but you cannot get out of your automatic self-perception as a free and responsible agent. So this is a kind of a position of necessary eternal ideology to put it very simply. Like we can know it but we cannot step out-no sorry we cannot nonetheless step out of our everyday illusions where we understand ourselves as free-willing and so on and so on. Then we have the second position opposite which is that of some radical brain scientists especially that California couple of the most crazy reductionists Paul and Patricia Churchland. Their idea is we can do it and they tried to propose an ethics which would be they claim much more understanding for our failures, not so terrorist, which would like try to do without subjective freedom responsibility and so on. Then we get a third position here which is that of the last transcendental philosophers like Habermas. They play here a typical transcendental trick which I think doesn't work here. Their idea is this one: we as humans move, dwell, live in a world of pragmatic responsibility, reasoning, we pursue rational goals following certain linguistic rules and so on and certain norms. Like for something to be accepted it must be rationally grounded and so on. And he claims that even if the result of our research of nature is there is no free will and so on and so on, you cannot really erase the fact that this insight emerged as part of a certain scientific procedure which in itself presupposes responsibility, reasoning and so on. In other words, the very result is possible only within the space of free reasoning and so on. I think it's a nice traditional philosophical argument but it doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? No no no because I think because you will have to read Hegel a little bit... no because Hegel would have shown you because you know it's I mean-okay I'm already getting lost, not enough time but there is a great debate in this like the one who tries to strike compromise course is the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars who tries to bring the two together because Habermas basically ends up in epistemological-ontological dualism. Ontologically yes we are animals, but this ontology remains rooted in certain epistemological transcendental horizon. Now it doesn't work I think because a radical-what call them-determinist will tell you but wait a minute, through a detailed evolutionary account I can deduce or explain the very way your rational procedure of argumentation arose. Or the other way around: you have this very naive problem. If you simply accept Habermas then you should avoid ontological question. You know in what sense? Like here I think can turn-Meillassoux the great critic of transcendental point position-here I think he has a point where he says that like you when I would simply ask Habermas: okay, do you believe that Darwin is basically right, that humans developed out of nature? If yes, then you must somehow accept that our reasoning also developed out of nature. So simple: if you are a materialist you have to somehow even if you say we cannot explain it, at least presuppose hypothetically that somehow even if it is inaccessible to us, somehow ontology has priority over epistemology. In the and it's typical how Habermas when asked on this he escapes into agnosticism. He says no we cannot step behind, but I know this is like a hole a gap in our knowledge but I'm agnostic here. I think Hegel has an answer but that's another story no. Okay back to Metzinger. Metzinger does something which I think mostly is just fashion, but in a way he does it so beautifully that him I will bit. He claims that if you go to the end in Buddhist meditation this radical Satori, Nirvana, however it's called, aware as you know you reach the stage of-that's one of the phrases-thoughts without thinker. That you still think but you no longer experience yourself as a self who thinks. That with this radical, you know what they call Anātman in Buddhism, reaching the position of no-self, that there you reach a point, the only point very rare where in your subjective self-experience as it were you are at the level of brain sciences, you know. Okay I don't accept it to be very clear. Why not? Because now if you allow me to go further a little bit. Okay this would have been too much to go into it in detail why I also think that freedom can be saved, not in an idealist way, not because there is some immortal soul and so on and so on, but what interests me about the Buddhist position is the following thing and now this concerns directly ideology. In our post-ideological times when no one here at least Metzinger was right but in much more Marxist and cynical sense than he thought. Namely I was shocked to discover that, you know that in United States I read in one of these stupid magazines, Forbes or whatever, business. What is the predominating spiritual orientation if I may use this horrible word of big managers and so on, people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates... Buddhism, strictly. Or some kind of oriental meditation. And here my problems begin, not against Buddhism, much more. You know what was so difficult for me to accept? And this is for me a sad lesson but a true materialist has to accept it I claim. That there is and intelligent really bright Buddhists admit this. I've spoken with them. Namely our automatic presupposition is that inner enlightenment, reaching the last stage of whatever spiritual mystical experience is somehow on the same side as morality. You know. But I think there is a gap. Or to put it in brutal terms: you can be an absolutely authentic mystic, really there in the enlightenment and you can still be a torturer, a murderer, whatever you want. You know who is my proof here? Is his text translated here in United States? This still is the hero of the 60s of the hippie movement, the propagator of Zen there, Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. But you know what's not so well known about Suzuki is that ah! in the late 30s and early 1940s he was a great propagator of Japanese militarism. And he did something very interesting, he is so evil I'm like a good democratic KGB agent who puts all in his book you know to have-not only did he with all that tragedy, he didn't just support Japanese militarism as a citizen but grounded in Buddhist thought. For example when Japan attacked China, mid 30s I think, and then Chinese resisted, Suzuki wrote something like: the Chinese don't get it that the sword which is killing them is really the sword of love, or all that stuff. And you know how Buddhists use the term of compassion, compassion for all living beings no. And then Suzuki proposed the notion of a compassionate killing and so on and so on. Of course, and so on. But even nicer, I think I developed this briefly already in Moscow but then I research much more along to repeat it. He even, isn't this historical, gives a Buddhist advice to military of why Buddhist meditation is good for war. He says that you are my enemy, let's say you are my enemy, we are on the battlefield, I have to kill you with my knife. Okay. If I remain caught within the illusion of false substantial reality I will have problems killing you because you know I will experience myself as a responsible agent. Like... but and it's a beautiful, I quote it in my books, description. But says Suzuki if you go through this Buddhist position of overcoming your false self, then-and I would love to do this with you-then the whole situation appears totally different. It's no longer me killing you. It is: there is this crazy impersonal dance of phenomena, my knife dances and somehow in this cosmic dance your body or eye falls on my knife and I'm just a pure observer. You know what I find here so horrible? Not Buddhism, my God, let's avoid the misunderstanding. My point is not Buddhism, it is just really military propaganda no which is absolutely authentic. But we have to, isn't it that something horrible in this? That we have to accept this gap. It's for example I have many examples this same gap like you know who was Heydrich, Reinhard Heydrich, the one who organized Holocaust. Do you know that in the evenings he often gathered with his SS officer friends and they were playing what is maybe one of the most beautiful cases of Western classical music: late Beethoven's string quartets. And I it always did strike me my God how could such a horror do it? But I think it's too easy to say no no it must have been false they just pretend it. What if they did not pretend? What if they were really able to you know to fully enjoy? This is why I appreciate Lenin. In what sense? Do you remember that often-ridiculous story told by enemies even as the result of Lenin's paranoia when Lenin visited a friend when he was still before revolution, heard how somebody in the apartment played I think it was Beethoven's Appassionata and then Lenin almost cried lightly but then got agitated Lenin, my God, I shouldn't listen to this too much, I will become too gentle and instead of beating the enemies I will start to to caress them. But I think this is honest and great because at least Lenin-where people say this was Lenin's horror-no, this is beautiful. You know why? Lenin at least experienced the contradiction. The true horror for me is the someone who tortures you while listening to passionata, to Appassionata. You know what I mean? I like this aspect of Lenin, he was aware of it. Okay so I'm so sad because this is almost the predominant form of ideology today that we don't have more time to go into this, into... Feel free. Sorry? Feel free. You are talking to a madman. If you say feel free you will get Fidel Castro eight hours no. No seriously because no I have to stop and let's go on. All I wanted to tell you is that there are effectively good reasons, immanent, for considering some kind of a oriental Buddhist spirituality as the ideal ideological form for today's global situation because on the one hand it fits perfectly as Metzinger claims this latest at least officially recognized scientific insight end of man we are just mechanisms. At the same time do you know that many businessmen or those who school managers have a quite a rational maybe it's even true explanation of why Buddhist ontology is the best for today's capitalism. They claim that today's capitalism, especially in its most developed aspect you know like all these speculations on futures on futures, is so penetrated with virtuality you know like somebody invests something there whole economy of a whole country falls apart like you get literal sense of the utter let's call it fragility of existence. You know. And they claim that Buddhism can render this, this is Buddhist ontology you know all the time aware of how there is no substantial reality, everything is fragile and so on and so on. Which and also I got another nice explanation from one who told me that today's capitalist rhythm is so crazy that if you fully identify with it you go crazy. So what you need is some kind of a reflective distance, you know the only way to survive is to say no don't take the game too seriously, this is just a game of appearances, my true self is just the void when I will withdraw from it which is why I'm so evil that whenever I see some propaganda for transcendental meditation. Did you notice-at least I don't know if it's here also-how it's always two-level propaganda. First they tell you we live in a crazy world, we are alienated, we care only about things, profit, you should discover that your true wealth is within you, withdraw. But I discovered that always this is the first part. Then the second part is always and in this way you will be even more successful on the market you know. No no I'm not blaming Buddhism here. I'm saying that it tells us a lot why this type of attitude of as they say in a vulgar way in Star Wars you know the origin of evil is to get too attached to things. Keep a distance, don't become too attached. Here I am still Western Christian, no I'm total atheist don't be afraid but Christian in the sense of I like to be overattached to things. I like precisely to fall into it. What I like is precisely love, a theory, a politics, but to say no I will precisely totally fall like as I already improvised in Moscow I don't want just to be in love, I want to fall in love. You know precisely in this sense of you fall into it. All the coordinates of your life are displaced and so on. And what is happening today with all this easy sex or sex through dating agencies is precisely that nobody wants the fall. Again maybe you know the story Alain Badiou drew my attention to this and I found some other namely publicitys for dating agencies where they say-it works in French and English I'm not sure it works in Russian in Slovene it doesn't-where the expression is the verb fall to fall, tomber, in love. And they repeat regularly this joke. They say we will enable you to be in love without the fall. That's horror for me if you ask me you know that's total horror. Which is why incidentally my Stalinist almost dream with billions of dollars would be to remake Star Wars but with Darth Vader and Emperor as the good guys. That they are this progressive centralizer who wants kind of a slightly authoritarian [unintelligible] give you billions of dollars. Yeah yeah people's democracy and all those Jedi are reactionary feudals who resist people. Okay let's go nonetheless seriously on. Now let's go a step forward. Why does then Buddhism in this case function as ideology? I will now come next point of theory. I develop this in some of my books but in a confused way I will try now to make a shorter resume. I think what is crucial is that today, this is my general theory I don't have time to develop it in detail, ideology functions less and less in a symptomatic way and more and more in a fetishist way. Was you who mentioned fetish yesterday? Yes, here I agree with you but in what sense? What is a symptom what is a fetish? Symptom is let's say a moment of truth within the field of a lie. You know like you live a lie your universe is structured as a lie but of course truth returns here and there disturbs it. You know a ridiculous example would have been let's say you are or I am-but I am unfortunately not-an adolescent traumatized by sex. And then I try to escape into as far as possible let's say into physics, mathematics. But you know whatever I do there somehow it returns, like I say oh I am free from sex then my God I get a task: how much energy is released when two bodies hit each other you know. You know this idea of you cannot totally lie, it has to return. So it's again the moment of truth within the field of a lie. This would also have been that's why it's symptom you know the Freudian symptom. You live a lie truth return or as Freud would have put it symptom as the return of the repressed. Fetish is something much more interesting I claim. Fetish is almost not quite the opposite. Fetish is a small lie which enables us to live in truth. Now truth in any authentic sense but truth in the sense of accepting realistically the situation the way it is. What do I mean by this? Fetishists are not idiots as we often think, you know people who think just about the foot or whatever. No no they are realists. Why? Because they have a fetish to endure it. Now I will give you an example, didn't I mention it also yesterday in the film? Hamster. Wasn't there talk of hamster? Oh yeah. Hamster is my great example. Namely a totally ridiculous story happened to a friend of mine some years ago in Slovenia. It's real sad story. He was married to a beautiful woman blah blah blah then you know the universal story woman goes to a doctor up breast cancer in two-three month she was dead. Okay. Then something strange happened or precisely to put it in Sherlock Holmes terms nothing strange happened and that was the strange thing. You know in a sense that this friend of ours you know after the wife died we didn't have to walk around him silently oh don't mention the wife it's too traumatic. He also didn't do it like the symptomatic reaction would have been for him to escape into some I want to go for a mission to Africa become a humanitarian this that but you know no matter how far away you run the trauma will catch with you. No he did the exact opposite. He was ready to talk with us all the time-not all the time but often-about most painful moments of his wife dying and so on. We were quite shocked you know calmly you know all the details and then we asked ourselves did he love her at all how can he? And then okay so ridiculous but we noticed that every time when he was talking about his wife he was playing with a hamster. Hamster was his fetish. It was stood because it was the favorite pet of his wife. It is as if sticking to hamster enabled him to you know Freud has this beautiful term isolierung, isolierung or neutralizing how when somebody tells you for example your wife or child favorite died. You know often you rationally accept it but in your symbolic universe of meaning or the wrong traditional word emotionally you really don't accept it you know. You accept it as a rational fact but not subjectively. This is I think here the function of fetish. He you know fetish embodied the denial of okay castration in this case the death of the wife so that he was able rationally to talk about it but blocking all let's call them naively emotional subjective consequences. Now you will say how do I know this? This is your stupid primitive psychoanalysis. Ah! After a year and you know that hamsters don't live a long time no. After a year the hamster died and the guy immediately had a breakdown and tried seriously suicide had to be hospitalized and so on and so on. So my lesson from this is precisely you got it probably the following one: when somebody claims I'm a brutal realist I don't care I know life is just business, power, sex, I don't know you know this cynical position. It's an impossible position. To put it in poetic terms they all have a hamster. The beginning of critique of ideology here is: okay you are brutal but where is your hamster? You know. And I think that like Western Buddhism is one big fat hamster. You know like they participate wholly in cruel reality but it's like hamster you know they can tell to themselves but it's just a game I'm not really there my true self is elsewhere and so on and so on. You see, this is the-this is the minimum function of of ideology here. You know, precisely again appearing as that's the beauty as post-ideology. It's because you know it's precisely the distance from. And this is what always interested me. And here I would like to have more time life is shit I don't have to learn more from you not because you are a specially perverted nation each nation is in its own ways a perverted nation but how this functions with you. Namely it's my own theory based on my experience in ex-Yugoslavia but I think this was a universal fact just there in a plastic way I experience it: how and that's the lesson of this ah another example I think I quoted but I'm not sure somewhere the most beautiful of hamster logic of fetish. You know who is maybe the absolute writer of detective stories for me in the 20th century: Patricia Highsmith.
that that epoch which began with Jacobins, Yakobins, came to an end and with it the end of ideology. Ideology is then defined as a you know is a brutal violent attempt to enforce the reality, to impose on it some abstract intellectual preconceptions. So the idea is we got rid of that, today we live in a rational world where instead of imposing on each other our totalitarian visions, we do pragmatically negotiate, allow each other his her their way of life and so on and so on. Of course I oppose it. I think that not only was not a period of the end of utopias but that the true utopia were the 90s, you know, the let's call it Fukuyamaist utopia where for a brief moment it seemed that we found, we humanity, the formula. And remember, this is I think the best definition, formal definition of utopia. Utopians are usually accused of believing in human goodness or whatever. No, no, utopians are more crazy, true utopians. They think they found a formula, you know. A true utopian is the one who says I found the mechanism, so we just have to apply this mechanism and everything will function. And these mechanisms can also be very brutal, imply human evil and so on. Like this for me the market utopia, that if you impose market on the right way the very human egotism, the fact that every everyone will work for himself will contribute to common good and so on and so on. Now I met two-three times Francis Fukuyama and I'll tell you something surprising: he is not an idiot. He is one of these conservatives with whom I like to speak. You know why? Already Marx said apropos Balzac that a true radical that is a revolutionary can learn much more from honest conservatives than from liberals because liberals, reactionaries, and also naive leftists, they think like we have a plan, things will be better and so on and so on. There is progress. But honest conservatives usually are again honest enough just to describe a deadlock. You know they say no, we see a deadlock, there is no easy way out. And this is now the last time I spoke with him, Fukuyama's position. He told me he no longer believes in the end of history. He agrees partially with me, okay, I must tell you the story, it's wonderful. I was with him on a round table already ten years ago just BBC one hour radio-not TV-it was on books and his book was that book of Lenin, no, which is translated here, the short one. And he told me something crazy. He told me you have so many nice analyses but why Lenin? Why erase Lenin and I buy everything else? you know. I told him this is like you want to have all the divine miracles but without the divine God, because God is just too God... seriously! And he told me that he sees two reasons at least for the end of Fukuyama utopia. The first one is biogenetics. You remember he wrote a book on post-human future whatever. He's honest enough here. He thinks that with biogenetics, which opens up terrifying perspectives, potentially terrifying-I'm not this pessimist-but perspectives of direct regulation of our even psychic properties, that this liberal model simply is not strong enough, that we will need much and ecology then and others, that we will need much stronger social regulation. And if you allow me to improvise a little bit, this I think is a phenomenon which really interests me. You know that Virginia Woolf, you know her? I also I hate her, I think Daphne du Maurier, you know Rebecca, is better writer. Virginia Woolf is a frigid bitch for me, sorry. But nonetheless she said something beautiful. I don't know apropos which event, didn't she say like something like on the 4th of October 1910-I'm not sure about the date-human nature has changed you know. And you pro- maybe you know that there is a long tradition in England of these crazy dates, like do you know that and the beauty-only British people can do this-the beauty is that this was not meant as a joke. Do you know that a British theologian, Christian, in 19th century I forgot but calculated from the Bible backwards and said God created the world on I think it's at in the morning. No, you know God had a breakfast then, English breakfast probably, let's create the world. Why is this important for ideology? Ah, I did it, people accuse me is senile that I will lose my thread. I did. Because precisely concerning biology creation, I can offer you a wonderful example, I hope you know it, if don't please read it, a wonderful example of how things which are scientifically obviously a nonsense can provide a wonderful formal structure which enlightens many things in how ideology works. For example, and this was elaborated among others by the biologist whom Mladen first introduced him to me and we both love him, the one who died couple of years ago, Stephen Jay Gould, the great Darwinian. He has a wonderful article on theology and Darwinism. Maybe you know how, this is for me the most intelligent beautiful reaction of theology to Darwinism. There was a British theologian who was also a serious biologist, a friend of Darwin and he knew well this is real, there are fossils and so on, so Darwin is right. But then he was also intensely religious so he asked himself how can we unite this, the obvious factual truth of Darwinism, with-and he was a religious fundamentalist at the same time-with the idea that nonetheless you know again if you count generations the world, universe should be only about four maximum years. It's ingenious, I hope you know the solution. It's truly ideological mechanism at its purest. His idea was that, my God, Bible cannot be wrong, it's the word of God, so God really created the world whatever years ago, but in order not to make the universe for us too claustrophobic, he directly created fossils, you know like a movie set where it looks the infinite background but is just painted to make us feel more like open, believe in an endless open universe. Now I think that, okay I'm not sure, probably this theory is wrong you know. But it's a beautiful metaphor for ideology. How ideology is precisely how every epoch literally recreates its past. I don't know how this is done with you, but with my small nation Slovenians we are a clinical example. We have old medieval national customs which were created all in the late 19th century, so that our forefathers looked at the Tyrolean, Austrian, all this yodeling, their national dresses and changed them a little bit. Okay, you want to know more about this, Eric Hobsbawm, Eric Hobsbawm, the great British historian wrote or rather edited a nice collective volume Invented Traditions. So another example, since Mladen was yesterday talking about Object A, this entity which doesn't have positive existence but is just a positivization of nothing. The best example that I remember of this is from one of the books again one short essay I don't know which part of again Stephen Jay Gould where to make a point about how evolution functions he uses as an example, you know them-for our European tastes we have better chocolates. I like to try them even here in Russia but okay I'm a bigot so I just justify eating chocolate as saying that this is the homeopathic approach to diabetes, you know that you cure the illness with the very poison and so on. So seriously, he takes the disgusting American that I don't like Hershey chocolate bars and he discovered a certain tendency. Like let's say at a certain point you have a certain price of chocolate and for this price you get certain quantity like I don't know this one the old prices: cents, grams. Then he says that if you compare quantity and price with inflation and so on, the value development goes like this: for some time price remains the same, you cannot change it all the time. But they gradually diminish the quantity, you know so it's I don't know how many grams. Then at a certain point they have to, they raise the price. And the quantity also goes up but not to the starting point. Like it's not like grams let's say cents. Then you have cents, then you get let's say to grams and or cents. But it's quite nice beautiful. He was spontaneously Lacanian. He said that if you bring this tendency to the end you can not only precisely determine of course it's a senseless extrapolation but beautiful when you will get nothing but here comes the Lacanian moment: you can exactly tell how much this nothing will cost. This would be made the best metaphor for you know the Lacan where yesterday high theory, I give a concrete example you know in the Leninist sense of concrete analysis of concrete situation and so on. So okay let me go on back to ideology. So you know again this idea we live at the end of the ideology and so on and so on. There is a confusion today because I'm going now back to ecology sorry, biogenetics, why is this so important also for our ideological misunderstanding or misunderstanding. I mentioned Virginia Woolf. I think that in a way this effectively is happening today. Now I'm neither this kind of a techno-gnostic, technological gnosticism optimist and I think this is what interests me in your tradition: your compatriot Boris Groys, I have some problems he will get re-education camp when we take power but he did a good thing: he published with a German publisher Suhrkamp three thick volumes of all those you know gnostic avant-garde texts from the 1920s. And it's incredible how you know what he demonstrates is that it wasn't just a minority like some crazy people. These were hundreds of thousands of intellectuals up to Trotsky. For example he quotes and I quote it in one of my books a passage from Trotsky's text from or when he still was writing and publishing here, where he says that now that working class has political economic power, when the economic situation will stabilize the next task will be to create a new man. And he didn't mean this Stalinist poetic bullshit. He really meant it. He said through biology, psychology, we will have to genetically and so on analyze what is a man and change it. Because he said homo sapiens was not well created by nature. We should literally genetically create a new man and then he has Trotsky this wonderful ending. He says so that then we Bolsheviks will be able to say farewell homo sapiens, your time is past, now it's our time. Sorry, it's Nietzsche I mean it's... yeah but there is a problem here because it's absolutely clear that for Nietzsche this new man would nonetheless I think remain what Nietzsche calls the last man. At least this would be my-I'm not sure. You maybe also need re-education camp, sorry. Okay let's go on here. No but are you aware how many things are already happening? They are no longer a utopia. For example when I was in New York I met some guys and then some others who are already doing you know what: we already can through genetical analysis, computerization and so on, identify the most elementary signals that you give to your limbs when you walk. So what they did is they in this way attached a rat to a computer and I saw the movie, I have four-five copies from this scientific laboratories, it's quite shocking. You see a rat freely jumping around. Then you have really like a remote controller for toys for cars you know. You press a button, the rat is connected, and then you can literally direct a living rat as if it's a car. Now why is this so fascinating? You will say so what, no big deal. Ah! They told me and I suspect this what really interest them. Secretly they are afraid to put this in public, they are of course trying to do this also on humans. And with their good naive but nonetheless good philosophical sense, they are bothered by question by the question which also immediately emerged in me when I listened to this. How would a human or how will a human being experience this? Will it be let's say you are the bad doctor you look at me with this Dostoevsky crazy gaze, sorry, will it be that when you control me I will be free and then all of a sudden I will experience like as if you know oh my God, some foreign power is controlling me? Or will it be that I will think I'm still free? Of course it's the first. No, okay your sentence is diminished, you're absolutely... No seriously, there's quite a lot of anxiety you know. The first results they hinted at me is that you don't even know it, that you still think you're just freely walking around. Or for example they are trying to sell us this as a great help towards crippled people and for them it is. You know that with the same mechanism like if you are totally crippled you no longer need what even Stephen Hawking says you know that finger he communicates even Hawking. No, at least for elementary orders they already have wheelchairs with motor for crippled people where you just think strongly forward, it moves. You think left, it goes left. Now you will say this is wonderful, we are becoming like gods, literally. Because if you know Kant, this is what Kant called Intellectuelle Anschauung, intellectual intuition. We humans as finite endless beings, we think reality is out there that we intuit it. But Kant says only for God thinking is creating you know like thinking is immediately also physical causality. Here we get almost a taste of that. But as my friends told me like don't jump too quickly to intellectual orgasm you know. Because they told me nicely what goes out also goes in. That is to say if you can influence in this way the outside, they can also go in. And I was shocked to learn how-I'm not blaming you here Putin bad secret services-they are all doing it I'm almost told especially United States and China. They are like crazy, this will be maybe the next stage of warfare you know developing different techniques of literally biogenetic warfare. For example spreading something around or into food which literally for some time changes you or whatever. And I claim this really is a change in human nature because our most elementary perception of inner of freedom is the freedom of thought. I mean in this purely formal sense you can beat me whatever but I think what I want to think. It's the elementary distance between inside and outside. And my God, what will happen if this distance not okay maybe not totally falls away but is somehow transgressed. Now I want to be clear here. I'm neither the stupid optimist like those techno-gnostics from the 20s, nor am I a stupid pessimist in some Adorno, Heidegger way oh the end of humanity, the very humanness of human being will be obliterated. We should keep it open, I don't know enough. But what I do know is that it's effectively as Virginia Woolf with would have put it something will... it's a change in our most fundamental functioning as humans. And when I visited China the first time ten years ago I was quite shocked how open the Chinese are about this. By chance I met, because I met him before in Frankfurt at some debate about impact of technology, one of the heads of Chinese Academy of Sciences department for biogenetics, and he showed me their the program of their biogenetic department. And you know with Chinese you get it, no humanitarian bullshit, directly no. It says there the goal of the development of biogenetics in China is to regulate the physical and psychic wellbeing of the Chinese people. They directly say it, no. So with all this then brain sciences and so on here things get really interesting. Namely if and it's a big if, I-my answer is no here, but I don't have time to develop it. But if we accept and the problem is that most of us nonetheless accept it, I don't, but not out of religious reasons. If we accept the fact that biogenetic description of us humans as just let's say neuronal mechanisms where freedom is just as they call it users illusion and so on. Although here also, my God you should follow this debate, you know who is Benjamin Libet, a scientist in at Berkeley I think San Francisco who did the most interesting experiment in this. He you probably heard about this, it's wonderful already years ago. He proved, demonstrated positively that let's say he asked a person as part of experiment to decide something like when I will pick up this pen or something like that quickly, and to act immediately like now I decided. Okay. He demonstrated that part of a second before you are aware of your decision your brain already knows it and sends the signal and so on. Now this seems to be an obvious proof that our free decision is not really a decision, that you just take cognizance how do they put it, become aware of some objective neuronal process which already took place. But now things get complicated. Libet himself doesn't draw this conclusion. He claims and it's a wonderful Hegelian move, he claims that we are looking for freedom at the wrong place. That the primordial form of freedom is negative not positive. Yes whatever you positively decide it's already in your body blah blah blah. But he claims you can sabotage it, block it. That the zero level of freedom is that in that split of a second you can say stop it and sabotage the process. Now I know that now again you can ask the question but wait a minute this negative sabotaging decision also has to have some neuronal ground so the debate gets much more complex and so on. But okay I will not get lost in this because these are nonetheless wonderful debates. Most of neurobiologists I claim are philosophically idiots. They think in this simplistic way of objective. But not all of them, some of them ask very intelligent questions. So let me go on where things become interesting is what Mladen was talking yesterday: subject in all of this. Namely let's ask a question more radically. Which would have been the subjective awareness how we look at ourselves that would have been appropriate to this knowledge. No like can we live our daily lives while not just rationally know that there is no free will and so on but somehow even emotionally, subjectively fully accepting that we are just neuronal mechanisms and so on. It's very interesting because there are four main positions here, three four. One is the naive-sorry the common sense one, it's by far predominant. The idea is that even if we rationally know that there is no free will and so on, we can-as the German pretty intelligent cognitivist Thomas Metzinger, you should translate his book Being No One, it's a wonderful book-he claims that even if we rationally know this we cannot really accept it and believe in it, that it's an impossible knowledge. In other words you can rationally know, but you cannot get out of your automatic self-perception as a free and responsible agent. So this is a kind of a position of necessary eternal ideology to put it very simply. Like we can know it but we cannot step out-no sorry we cannot nonetheless step out of our everyday illusions where we understand ourselves as free-willing and so on and so on. Then we have the second position opposite which is that of some radical brain scientists especially that California couple of the most crazy reductionists Paul and Patricia Churchland. Their idea is we can do it and they tried to propose an ethics which would be they claim much more understanding for our failures, not so terrorist, which would like try to do without subjective freedom responsibility and so on. Then we get a third position here which is that of the last transcendental philosophers like Habermas. They play here a typical transcendental trick which I think doesn't work here. Their idea is this one: we as humans move, dwell, live in a world of pragmatic responsibility, reasoning, we pursue rational goals following certain linguistic rules and so on and certain norms. Like for something to be accepted it must be rationally grounded and so on. And he claims that even if the result of our research of nature is there is no free will and so on and so on, you cannot really erase the fact that this insight emerged as part of a certain scientific procedure which in itself presupposes responsibility, reasoning and so on. In other words, the very result is possible only within the space of free reasoning and so on. I think it's a nice traditional philosophical argument but it doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? No no no because I think because you will have to read Hegel a little bit... no because Hegel would have shown you because you know it's I mean-okay I'm already getting lost, not enough time but there is a great debate in this like the one who tries to strike compromise course is the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars who tries to bring the two together because Habermas basically ends up in epistemological-ontological dualism. Ontologically yes we are animals, but this ontology remains rooted in certain epistemological transcendental horizon. Now it doesn't work I think because a radical-what call them-determinist will tell you but wait a minute, through a detailed evolutionary account I can deduce or explain the very way your rational procedure of argumentation arose. Or the other way around: you have this very naive problem. If you simply accept Habermas then you should avoid ontological question. You know in what sense? Like here I think can turn-Meillassoux the great critic of transcendental point position-here I think he has a point where he says that like you when I would simply ask Habermas: okay, do you believe that Darwin is basically right, that humans developed out of nature? If yes, then you must somehow accept that our reasoning also developed out of nature. So simple: if you are a materialist you have to somehow even if you say we cannot explain it, at least presuppose hypothetically that somehow even if it is inaccessible to us, somehow ontology has priority over epistemology. In the and it's typical how Habermas when asked on this he escapes into agnosticism. He says no we cannot step behind, but I know this is like a hole a gap in our knowledge but I'm agnostic here. I think Hegel has an answer but that's another story no. Okay back to Metzinger. Metzinger does something which I think mostly is just fashion, but in a way he does it so beautifully that him I will bit. He claims that if you go to the end in Buddhist meditation this radical Satori, Nirvana, however it's called, aware as you know you reach the stage of-that's one of the phrases-thoughts without thinker. That you still think but you no longer experience yourself as a self who thinks. That with this radical, you know what they call Anātman in Buddhism, reaching the position of no-self, that there you reach a point, the only point very rare where in your subjective self-experience as it were you are at the level of brain sciences, you know. Okay I don't accept it to be very clear. Why not? Because now if you allow me to go further a little bit. Okay this would have been too much to go into it in detail why I also think that freedom can be saved, not in an idealist way, not because there is some immortal soul and so on and so on, but what interests me about the Buddhist position is the following thing and now this concerns directly ideology. In our post-ideological times when no one here at least Metzinger was right but in much more Marxist and cynical sense than he thought. Namely I was shocked to discover that, you know that in United States I read in one of these stupid magazines, Forbes or whatever, business. What is the predominating spiritual orientation if I may use this horrible word of big managers and so on, people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates... Buddhism, strictly. Or some kind of oriental meditation. And here my problems begin, not against Buddhism, much more. You know what was so difficult for me to accept? And this is for me a sad lesson but a true materialist has to accept it I claim. That there is and intelligent really bright Buddhists admit this. I've spoken with them. Namely our automatic presupposition is that inner enlightenment, reaching the last stage of whatever spiritual mystical experience is somehow on the same side as morality. You know. But I think there is a gap. Or to put it in brutal terms: you can be an absolutely authentic mystic, really there in the enlightenment and you can still be a torturer, a murderer, whatever you want. You know who is my proof here? Is his text translated here in United States? This still is the hero of the 60s of the hippie movement, the propagator of Zen there, Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. But you know what's not so well known about Suzuki is that ah! in the late 30s and early 1940s he was a great propagator of Japanese militarism. And he did something very interesting, he is so evil I'm like a good democratic KGB agent who puts all in his book you know to have-not only did he with all that tragedy, he didn't just support Japanese militarism as a citizen but grounded in Buddhist thought. For example when Japan attacked China, mid 30s I think, and then Chinese resisted, Suzuki wrote something like: the Chinese don't get it that the sword which is killing them is really the sword of love, or all that stuff. And you know how Buddhists use the term of compassion, compassion for all living beings no. And then Suzuki proposed the notion of a compassionate killing and so on and so on. Of course, and so on. But even nicer, I think I developed this briefly already in Moscow but then I research much more along to repeat it. He even, isn't this historical, gives a Buddhist advice to military of why Buddhist meditation is good for war. He says that you are my enemy, let's say you are my enemy, we are on the battlefield, I have to kill you with my knife. Okay. If I remain caught within the illusion of false substantial reality I will have problems killing you because you know I will experience myself as a responsible agent. Like... but and it's a beautiful, I quote it in my books, description. But says Suzuki if you go through this Buddhist position of overcoming your false self, then-and I would love to do this with you-then the whole situation appears totally different. It's no longer me killing you. It is: there is this crazy impersonal dance of phenomena, my knife dances and somehow in this cosmic dance your body or eye falls on my knife and I'm just a pure observer. You know what I find here so horrible? Not Buddhism, my God, let's avoid the misunderstanding. My point is not Buddhism, it is just really military propaganda no which is absolutely authentic. But we have to, isn't it that something horrible in this? That we have to accept this gap. It's for example I have many examples this same gap like you know who was Heydrich, Reinhard Heydrich, the one who organized Holocaust. Do you know that in the evenings he often gathered with his SS officer friends and they were playing what is maybe one of the most beautiful cases of Western classical music: late Beethoven's string quartets. And I it always did strike me my God how could such a horror do it? But I think it's too easy to say no no it must have been false they just pretend it. What if they did not pretend? What if they were really able to you know to fully enjoy? This is why I appreciate Lenin. In what sense? Do you remember that often-ridiculous story told by enemies even as the result of Lenin's paranoia when Lenin visited a friend when he was still before revolution, heard how somebody in the apartment played I think it was Beethoven's Appassionata and then Lenin almost cried lightly but then got agitated Lenin, my God, I shouldn't listen to this too much, I will become too gentle and instead of beating the enemies I will start to to caress them. But I think this is honest and great because at least Lenin-where people say this was Lenin's horror-no, this is beautiful. You know why? Lenin at least experienced the contradiction. The true horror for me is the someone who tortures you while listening to passionata, to Appassionata. You know what I mean? I like this aspect of Lenin, he was aware of it. Okay so I'm so sad because this is almost the predominant form of ideology today that we don't have more time to go into this, into... Feel free. Sorry? Feel free. You are talking to a madman. If you say feel free you will get Fidel Castro eight hours no. No seriously because no I have to stop and let's go on. All I wanted to tell you is that there are effectively good reasons, immanent, for considering some kind of a oriental Buddhist spirituality as the ideal ideological form for today's global situation because on the one hand it fits perfectly as Metzinger claims this latest at least officially recognized scientific insight end of man we are just mechanisms. At the same time do you know that many businessmen or those who school managers have a quite a rational maybe it's even true explanation of why Buddhist ontology is the best for today's capitalism. They claim that today's capitalism, especially in its most developed aspect you know like all these speculations on futures on futures, is so penetrated with virtuality you know like somebody invests something there whole economy of a whole country falls apart like you get literal sense of the utter let's call it fragility of existence. You know. And they claim that Buddhism can render this, this is Buddhist ontology you know all the time aware of how there is no substantial reality, everything is fragile and so on and so on. Which and also I got another nice explanation from one who told me that today's capitalist rhythm is so crazy that if you fully identify with it you go crazy. So what you need is some kind of a reflective distance, you know the only way to survive is to say no don't take the game too seriously, this is just a game of appearances, my true self is just the void when I will withdraw from it which is why I'm so evil that whenever I see some propaganda for transcendental meditation. Did you notice-at least I don't know if it's here also-how it's always two-level propaganda. First they tell you we live in a crazy world, we are alienated, we care only about things, profit, you should discover that your true wealth is within you, withdraw. But I discovered that always this is the first part. Then the second part is always and in this way you will be even more successful on the market you know. No no I'm not blaming Buddhism here. I'm saying that it tells us a lot why this type of attitude of as they say in a vulgar way in Star Wars you know the origin of evil is to get too attached to things. Keep a distance, don't become too attached. Here I am still Western Christian, no I'm total atheist don't be afraid but Christian in the sense of I like to be overattached to things. I like precisely to fall into it. What I like is precisely love, a theory, a politics, but to say no I will precisely totally fall like as I already improvised in Moscow I don't want just to be in love, I want to fall in love. You know precisely in this sense of you fall into it. All the coordinates of your life are displaced and so on. And what is happening today with all this easy sex or sex through dating agencies is precisely that nobody wants the fall. Again maybe you know the story Alain Badiou drew my attention to this and I found some other namely publicitys for dating agencies where they say-it works in French and English I'm not sure it works in Russian in Slovene it doesn't-where the expression is the verb fall to fall, tomber, in love. And they repeat regularly this joke. They say we will enable you to be in love without the fall. That's horror for me if you ask me you know that's total horror. Which is why incidentally my Stalinist almost dream with billions of dollars would be to remake Star Wars but with Darth Vader and Emperor as the good guys. That they are this progressive centralizer who wants kind of a slightly authoritarian [unintelligible] give you billions of dollars. Yeah yeah people's democracy and all those Jedi are reactionary feudals who resist people. Okay let's go nonetheless seriously on. Now let's go a step forward. Why does then Buddhism in this case function as ideology? I will now come next point of theory. I develop this in some of my books but in a confused way I will try now to make a shorter resume. I think what is crucial is that today, this is my general theory I don't have time to develop it in detail, ideology functions less and less in a symptomatic way and more and more in a fetishist way. Was you who mentioned fetish yesterday? Yes, here I agree with you but in what sense? What is a symptom what is a fetish? Symptom is let's say a moment of truth within the field of a lie. You know like you live a lie your universe is structured as a lie but of course truth returns here and there disturbs it. You know a ridiculous example would have been let's say you are or I am-but I am unfortunately not-an adolescent traumatized by sex. And then I try to escape into as far as possible let's say into physics, mathematics. But you know whatever I do there somehow it returns, like I say oh I am free from sex then my God I get a task: how much energy is released when two bodies hit each other you know. You know this idea of you cannot totally lie, it has to return. So it's again the moment of truth within the field of a lie. This would also have been that's why it's symptom you know the Freudian symptom. You live a lie truth return or as Freud would have put it symptom as the return of the repressed. Fetish is something much more interesting I claim. Fetish is almost not quite the opposite. Fetish is a small lie which enables us to live in truth. Now truth in any authentic sense but truth in the sense of accepting realistically the situation the way it is. What do I mean by this? Fetishists are not idiots as we often think, you know people who think just about the foot or whatever. No no they are realists. Why? Because they have a fetish to endure it. Now I will give you an example, didn't I mention it also yesterday in the film? Hamster. Wasn't there talk of hamster? Oh yeah. Hamster is my great example. Namely a totally ridiculous story happened to a friend of mine some years ago in Slovenia. It's real sad story. He was married to a beautiful woman blah blah blah then you know the universal story woman goes to a doctor up breast cancer in two-three month she was dead. Okay. Then something strange happened or precisely to put it in Sherlock Holmes terms nothing strange happened and that was the strange thing. You know in a sense that this friend of ours you know after the wife died we didn't have to walk around him silently oh don't mention the wife it's too traumatic. He also didn't do it like the symptomatic reaction would have been for him to escape into some I want to go for a mission to Africa become a humanitarian this that but you know no matter how far away you run the trauma will catch with you. No he did the exact opposite. He was ready to talk with us all the time-not all the time but often-about most painful moments of his wife dying and so on. We were quite shocked you know calmly you know all the details and then we asked ourselves did he love her at all how can he? And then okay so ridiculous but we noticed that every time when he was talking about his wife he was playing with a hamster. Hamster was his fetish. It was stood because it was the favorite pet of his wife. It is as if sticking to hamster enabled him to you know Freud has this beautiful term isolierung, isolierung or neutralizing how when somebody tells you for example your wife or child favorite died. You know often you rationally accept it but in your symbolic universe of meaning or the wrong traditional word emotionally you really don't accept it you know. You accept it as a rational fact but not subjectively. This is I think here the function of fetish. He you know fetish embodied the denial of okay castration in this case the death of the wife so that he was able rationally to talk about it but blocking all let's call them naively emotional subjective consequences. Now you will say how do I know this? This is your stupid primitive psychoanalysis. Ah! After a year and you know that hamsters don't live a long time no. After a year the hamster died and the guy immediately had a breakdown and tried seriously suicide had to be hospitalized and so on and so on. So my lesson from this is precisely you got it probably the following one: when somebody claims I'm a brutal realist I don't care I know life is just business, power, sex, I don't know you know this cynical position. It's an impossible position. To put it in poetic terms they all have a hamster. The beginning of critique of ideology here is: okay you are brutal but where is your hamster? You know. And I think that like Western Buddhism is one big fat hamster. You know like they participate wholly in cruel reality but it's like hamster you know they can tell to themselves but it's just a game I'm not really there my true self is elsewhere and so on and so on. You see, this is the-this is the minimum function of of ideology here. You know, precisely again appearing as that's the beauty as post-ideology. It's because you know it's precisely the distance from. And this is what always interested me. And here I would like to have more time life is shit I don't have to learn more from you not because you are a specially perverted nation each nation is in its own ways a perverted nation but how this functions with you. Namely it's my own theory based on my experience in ex-Yugoslavia but I think this was a universal fact just there in a plastic way I experience it: how and that's the lesson of this ah another example I think I quoted but I'm not sure somewhere the most beautiful of hamster logic of fetish. You know who is maybe the absolute writer of detective stories for me in the 20th century: Patricia Highsmith.