What Is to Be Done with Sex? · žižek archive

The ideas in it 18

in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here

Stories he reaches for 3

Machines having sex / stamina training unit

Žižek imagines a date where both partners bring their respective sex machines (a stamina training unit and a dildo), connect them, let the machines perform the act while they drink tea, discharging the super-ego duty to enjoy. By chance their hands meet and if they end up in bed it would be 'true sex' as pure surplus, without obligation.

“our super-ego duty to enjoy is out there being it... that would be the true sex... Because it would be without any... This would be the pure surplus.”

Stalin and H.G. Wells on self-criticism

H.G. Wells visits Stalin in 1934-35 and tries to embarrass him by suggesting the Soviet Union lacks freedom of criticism; Stalin immediately responds that they have it even more, they just call it 'self-criticism' (autocritique), and offers to send cadres to teach Wells about it.

“we have this even more developed than you, we just call it here self-criticism or autocritique... we can send you some cadres who will teach you about autocritique.”

Time-distortion drugs imagined as prison sentences

Scientists are developing pills that dilate subjective time so that one minute feels like a day; the thought experiment proposes letting a valuable criminal experience ten years of prison in one actual day, preserving social productivity.

“in reality society loses me for one day but I experience it as ten years.”

Works invoked 12

To Be or Not to Be film

Lubitsch film cited as evidence that 'as we all know from Lubitsch, hell is quite a nice place', used in the thought experiment about hell performing suffering for heaven's observation.

Civilization and Its Discontents book

Freud's text cited for the concept of the prosthetic God, artificial enhancement of human capacities that produces more anxiety than satisfaction.

Ethics of Psychoanalysis book

Lacan's seminar cited for the apocalyptic vision of the saturation of the symbolic by the real of jouissance, and the claim that 'the possibility of the death of the symbolic has become a tangible reality.'

Chevengur book

Platonov's major novel, interpreted alongside The Foundation Pit as depicting Gnostic-materialist utopia of the 1920s rather than Stalinist communism.

The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan) book

Platonov's novel read as staging the nihilism of the Bolshevik passion, a gigantic mobilization that produces only a hole, and as a depiction of the pre-Stalinist Gnostic utopia, not Stalinist communism.

The Soul book

Žižek calls it 'maybe his best piece' and defends it against dismissal as a Stalinist compromise; reads it as an immanent continuation of Platonov's utopian dialogue under changed coordinates.

October film

Eisenstein's film, mentioned alongside Potemkin as a commercially failed avant-garde masterpiece, playing one or two weeks in a suburban cinema.

We book

Zamyatin's novel reread by Žižek as a critique of the pre-Stalinist Biocosmist utopia rather than of Stalinism.

Battleship Potemkin film

Mentioned to illustrate that Soviet avant-garde masterpieces were commercially unpopular, Potemkin played only a few Moscow theaters for a month, which explains the genuine popularity of Stalinist cultural counter-revolution.

Man of Steel (Superman film) film

The Superman film whose title ('Man of Steel') is the literal English translation of 'Stalin', cited ironically to point to the libidinal investment in superhero fantasies of enhanced humanity.

Anti-Sexus essay

Platonov's essay imagining a masturbatory gadget that brings together Gnostic spiritualism, Soviet regulation, and capitalist commodification of orgasm, the central text of the lecture.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich book

Cited via Lukács as formally exemplifying all criteria of socialist realism, including the celebration of work, used to argue that Solzhenitsyn remains within the Stalinist cultural legacy in the very form of his anti-Stalinist critique.

People invoked 25

François Balmès positive

Described as 'a Slovenian who unfortunately died'; cited at length for a passage arguing that biogenetics radically disconnects reproduction from the encounter of the sexes and constitutes a historical mutation as radical as nuclear fission.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive

Žižek calls him 'the guy whom I really appreciate' and the French theorist of catastrophe; cited at length for detecting the reversal in contemporary technology from Cartesian mastery to non-mastery.

Ang Lee Seifert

Told Žižek the story of the Chinese Buddhist monk who vowed Bodhisattva universally but added Mao as the lone exception; Žižek uses the story to expose the limits of Buddhist universal compassion.

Alenka Zupančič positive

Briefly mentioned alongside Lacan as having already developed the point about child sexuality and how adult sexuality never escapes the need for fantasy.

Vladimir Lenin

Mentioned as one of the few Bolshevik leaders who remained skeptical of Biocosmism.

Georg Lukács positive

Žižek says he 'more and more admires' him; cited for the observation that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich meets all criteria of socialist realism including the celebration of work.

Jacques Lacan positive

Repeatedly invoked: for lathouse, lamella, the death of the symbolic, the Ethics seminar on jouissance and apocalypse, and the observation that science produces objects that did not previously exist at the level of perception.

Stephen Hawking

Cited as an early example of brain-machine interface, no longer needing to type with a finger, able to directly wire brain to machine at a primitive level.

Louis Althusser positive

Cited approvingly for the claim that Stalinism was a form of humanism; also referenced for the theory of ideology as necessary illusion, in the context of cognitivism's limits.

Osip Mandelstam

Cited as an example of a genuine poet whom Stalin paradoxically spared from immediate liquidation despite the brutal satirical poem against him.

Yevgeny Zamyatin positive

Author of We, which Žižek reframes as a critique of the pre-Stalinist Biocosmist utopia rather than of Stalinism.

Nicolas Malebranche positive

His occasionalism cited as the theological precedent for the Biocosmist idea: in paradise, Adam was not directly engaged by Eve's naked body, the Fall occurred when he was immediately affected rather than treating sensation as mere information.

Andrei Platonov positive

Central figure of the lecture; Žižek reads him as the unique thinker who exposed the nihilistic core of Bolshevism from within, without retreating to liberal humanism, far superior to Western liberal critics of communism.

Leon Trotsky

Cited for his Biocosmist passage advocating saying goodbye to Homo Sapiens; also judged to have deserved to lose to Stalin due to arrogance and political incompetence in the early 1920s.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn negative

Žižek argues, following Lukács, that Solzhenitsyn remains within the Stalinist legacy in the very form of his critique, his most celebrated work formally exemplifies socialist realism.

Boris Pasternak

Cited as another poet Stalin refused to have liquidated, writing that he 'walks on the clouds' and should be left alone, further evidence of Stalin's ambiguous cultural politics.

H. G. Wells negative

Ridiculed as a naive liberal who visited Stalin in 1934-35 and thought he could catch Stalin out with questions about freedom of criticism, only to be effortlessly outmaneuvered.

Rowan Williams positive

The Archbishop of Canterbury, with whom Žižek debated the Aquinas heaven/hell problem two days prior to the lecture; Žižek says Williams agreed with his solution.

Ernst Bloch positive

Cited for an interesting idea about the Aquinas problem of heaven observing hell and the nature of suffering.

Thomas Metzinger negative

Radical cognitivist who claims we can integrate biological determinism into subjective experience; Žižek argues he cheats by still writing as if a free subject is present, though credits him for pointing to Buddhist enlightenment as the only genuine integration.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Discussed as the composer Stalinism selected as its canonical Russian classic, paradoxically conservative, homosexual, and brutally anti-Semitic, with letters heavily censored in Stalinist reprints.

Jürgen Habermas negative

Cited for the transcendental argument that the intersubjective scientific community cannot itself be reduced to neurology; Žižek dismisses this as not working.

Joseph Stalin

Analyzed dialectically: paradoxically portrayed as a 'humanist' who reintroduced categories of guilt against Biocosmist dehumanization, yet also an extremely brutal dictator; shown as a shrewd political operator who outwitted both his enemies and Western liberal critics.

Sigmund Freud positive

Cited for 'Civilization and Its Discontents' and the concept of the prosthetic God, Freud saw that technological enhancement of human capacities produces more anxiety and discontent.

Thomas Aquinas negative

Cited for the argument that the blessed in heaven may observe the damned suffering in hell to increase their own pleasure; Žižek dismisses his two-level pleasure distinction as 'typical scholastic sophistry' and 'bullshit'.

What it argues

Platonov and the pre-Stalinist Gnostic-materialist utopiaBiocosmism and the technological abolition of sexualityStalinism as humanist reaction to radical post-humanismContemporary biogenetics, DARPA, and the post-humanLathouse, gadgets, and surplus enjoymentBuddhist ethics and its internal contradictionsSex machines and the super-ego duty to enjoy

Dialectical moves 10

“The utopia Platonov stages is not that of Stalinist Communism, but the Gnostic-materialist utopia against which mature Stalinism reacted.”

Reverses the standard reading: Platonov's dystopia is not anti-Stalinist but depicts the more radical pre-Stalinist nightmare that Stalinism itself had to suppress.

“Far from being the extreme, Stalinism was a humanist reaction — the true extreme was the Gnostic-utopian post-humanism of the 1920s.”

Inverts the standard hierarchy of horrors: Stalinism reintroduced humanity (guilt, repentance) against the more total dehumanization of Biocosmism.

“We can imagine something worse than Stalinism — if that utopia of the 20s would have become reality.”

Dialectical escalation: the suppressed possibility is more terrifying than the historical actuality.

“The Bolsheviks didn't execute: it was 'just a sanitary measure' — not death penalty but a purely clinical sanitary operation.”

Shows how the techno-Gnostic framework eliminates moral categories entirely, killing becomes maintenance, not punishment.

“Technology no longer aims at mastery of nature but at non-mastery — the goal is that your own creations surprise you.”

Reverses the Cartesian interpretation of modern science: the dream is not domination but the creation of something that escapes control.

“Far from simply supplementing human organs, gadgets introduce a logic that differs from the normal libidinal economy — they are potentially undead.”

Inverts the prosthetic supplement narrative: rather than extending the human, gadgets impose an alien, repetitive rhythm that colonizes the subject.

“If we delegate the super-ego duty to enjoy to the machines, what remains — an accidental encounter, hands touching — would be the true sex, sex as pure surplus.”

Reversal of the logic of authenticity: removing the compulsion is what produces genuine desire, not fulfilling it directly.

“The enlightened Buddhist, having exited karma, can do whatever they want — including kill — and this is precisely the ethical catastrophe of Buddhism.”

Turns Buddhist liberation against itself: the very achievement of enlightenment annuls the ethical constraints that justified the spiritual path.

“By killing you to prevent you from acquiring bad karma through future killings, I save you — my bad karma turns into profit.”

Exposes a reductio in Buddhist war-ethics: compassionate killing is justified as karma management, licensing any violence.

“Solzhenitsyn remains Stalinist in the very way he criticizes Stalinism — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich fits all criteria of socialist realism.”

Immanent critique: the most celebrated anti-Stalinist literary work reproduces the formal and ideological structure it purports to oppose.

Claims 16

reframes Platonov's major novels depict not Stalinist Communism but the pre-Stalinist Gnostic-materialist utopia of the 1920s, against which Stalinism itself reacted.standard interpretation of Platonov as anti-Stalinist

reframes Zamyatin's We is a critique of the pre-Stalinist Biocosmist utopia of the 1920s, not a critique of Stalinism.Zamyatin's We

asserts Stalinist socialist realism was genuinely popular because it promised a return to ordinary human passions and sentiments against the alienating avant-garde.Stalinist cultural policy and socialist realism

asserts Althusser was right that Stalinism was a form of humanism, because it reintroduced the categories of guilt and repentance that the techno-Gnostic 1920s had abolished.Stalinism as humanism

asserts The pre-Stalinist utopia of the 1920s was potentially worse than Stalinism, since its complete realization would have meant total post-human self-objectivization without categories of guilt or culpability.comparative evaluation of Stalinist vs. Biocosmist terror

asserts Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich meets all the criteria of socialist realism, including the Stalinist celebration of work — which means Solzhenitsyn remains within the Stalinist legacy even in criticizing it.Solzhenitsyn and the Stalinist legacy

reframes Contemporary technoscience does not aim at Cartesian mastery of nature but at generating processes that will surprise and surpass their creators — a desire to create a monster.the goal of modern science and technology

asserts DARPA's narrative-influence program represents a direct continuity with the 1920s Biocosmist dream: the shift from political persuasion to direct neurological intervention.DARPA and the techno-Gnostic tradition

asserts Technological gadgets are potentially undead — they function as parasitic organs without bodies that impose their repetitive rhythm on the beings they supposedly serve.gadgets and libidinal economy

rejects Buddhist ethics fails because it cannot consistently distinguish good from evil action: the logic of enlightenment (karma-exit) licenses any act, including the most criminal.Buddhist ethics

asserts The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition of total externalization of ethics — rules without inner sincerity — is superior to Buddhist introspective ethics.comparative religious ethics

asserts Inner life is not the truth of the subject but the master fantasy fabricated to escape the consequences of one's acts.interiority and ethics

rejects If biogenetics can produce states neurologically identical to Buddhist enlightenment, then the Buddhist distinction between deserved and undeserved enlightenment is incoherent and contrary to Buddhist logic.Buddhist response to enlightenment pills

asserts Platonov remains entirely unlike liberal humanist dissidents — he pushes communist logic to its nihilistic limit from within, without withdrawing to liberal individualism.Platonov's political-aesthetic position

asserts Trotsky deserved to lose to Stalin because of his arrogance and failure to take seriously the cadre politics through which Stalin built power.the Trotsky-Stalin succession

asserts Sex displaced onto machines (the 'machines buzzing' scenario) would paradoxically liberate authentic sexuality as pure surplus, freed from super-ego duty.sexuality and the super-ego

Quotes 14

“Sexuality is the last parade of bourgeois counter-revolution.”
Slavoj Žižek · Biocosmist view of sexuality as political obstacle

“The goal of Communism is to say to Homo Sapiens goodbye, your job is done, you were a half-mistake of nature, let's reconstruct it, we will create a better man.”
Slavoj Žižek · Trotsky's post-humanist Biocosmism

“This was not death penalty, it was just a sanitary measure. Purely clinical sanitary operation.”
Slavoj Žižek · Bolshevik techno-clinical abolition of moral categories

“The measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him than the conformity of his realization to the list of pre-established tasks.”
Slavoj Žižek · non-mastery as the true goal of modern technoscience

“What we want is again an artificial intelligence that will start to reproduce itself, to become more, we want to be surprised.”
Slavoj Žižek · the libidinal desire behind AI and technoscience

“Techno-gadgets are potentially undead. They function as parasitic organs without bodies which impose their repetitive rhythm on the beings that they are supposed to serve.”
Slavoj Žižek · lathouse objects and the undead libidinal economy

“Our super-ego duty to enjoy is out there being it. It's wonderful! You are there, super-ego is satisfied, what is happening, enjoyment or whatever, but you know, super-ego duty is out there fulfilled.”
Slavoj Žižek · delegating jouissance to machines frees the subject

“That would be the true sex, you know why? Because it would be without any, we already did it for the big other, the super-ego duty, no? This would be the pure surplus.”
Slavoj Žižek · pure surplus sex after machine-delegation of duty

“Inner life is precisely the master fantasy that we fabricate to escape the consequences of our acts.”
Slavoj Žižek · critique of interiority as ethical alibi

“The possibility of the death of the symbolic has become a tangible reality.”
Slavoj Žižek · Lacan on the apocalyptic saturation of the symbolic by the real

“Science... made emerge into the world things that did not exist in it in any way at the level of our perception.”
Slavoj Žižek · science as production of ontological novelty, not knowledge of the given

“If there was anyone who saw the destructive core, the abyss present there, it was Platonov. And he saw it much better than Western liberals.”
Slavoj Žižek · Platonov's unique vantage point on communism's nihilistic core

“Trotsky deserved to lose. He was so arrogant and stupid in the early 20s.”
Slavoj Žižek · Trotsky's political failure as self-inflicted

“Buddhism cheats. They like to claim that before doing the high spiritual exercises you have to begin with modest slow just be kind... But then the obvious question arises: why then?”
Slavoj Žižek · Buddhist ethics cannot ground its own preliminary moral rules

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Transcript 2 turns

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It is the profound distrust of sexual love which is the main feature of Platonov’s work throughout the 1920s. In what sense? Platonov’s great novels from the late 20s, Chevengur and especially The Pit, The Foundation Pit, as it is usually translated, are usually interpreted as the critical depiction of the Stalinist utopia and its disastrous consequences. Here already I violently disagree. The utopia Platonov stages in these two works is not that of Stalinist Communism, but the Gnostic-materialist utopia against which the mature

Slavoj Žižek
Stalinism reacted in the early 1930s. Dualist Gnostic motives prevail in this utopia. It is the so-called Biocosmism which really acts as the forerunner of today’s so-called tech-Gnostic, technological Gnosis. And it’s interesting how widespread this idea was. From Trotsky to hundreds of thousands of people were engaged in this movement. Lenin himself was one of the few who remained skeptical towards it. The idea was that after winning political-economic power, the only way really to win it for the working class is to remodel human being in a literal genetic, physical, biological way. For them to create a new man didn’t mean just the Stalinist education. It meant literally through biogenetics and so on interventions to change it. In what sense? Here, almost I have to say, theology enters. The idea was that again, after the working class took over political and economic power, the only domain that remained out of control is sexuality. Sexuality is the last parade of bourgeois counter-revolution. And the plan was, often mentioned openly although not by Stalin, that this new socialist man will no longer need sexuality. In what sense? Not only that reproduction will be through direct biogenetic means, no longer sexual copulation, but the idea is almost that of Malebranche. It’s very radical one. The idea is that in our ordinary lives, we are immediately caught into our bodies. For example, you feel pain and you immediately feel it. But the idea was that for the new Communist man, pain should be just an information. It lets you know. You know, the same as in a let’s say machine, steam, whatever steam machine, if it gets too warm you have some measuring apparatus which tells you too hot and so on. But you don’t have to feel it. It’s just an information. So the idea is that the new man should no longer be directly engaged into feelings. The idea is that he will treat emotions, pain and so on, even the most physical emotion, as just a sign. Information, not engage in it. You probably know that already Malebranche in his occasionalism defined fall precisely in this way. Fall happened when Adam, by looking at Eve’s naked body, was immediately affected by it. He thought this is it, direct interaction of bodies. In paradise, people were like in this dream of utopianism. They made love but they were not directly engaged in it. So not only this techno-utopia, but again I often quote a passage from Trotsky where he also subscribed to it. He said that somewhere that the goal of Communism is to say to Homo Sapiens goodbye, your job is done, you were a half-mistake of nature, let’s reconstruct it, we will create a better man. This is why I think people are also wrong when they see the other better known early Soviet dystopia, Zamyatin’s We, as a critique of Stalinism. No, it’s the critique of this pre-Stalinist utopia, the abstract extrapolation of the Gnostic-utopian legacy of the revolutionary 1920s against which Stalinism precisely reacted. And I think that in this way one should of course not rehabilitate Stalinism but see it as what it was. It’s, this is why incidentally these people rather prefer to forget today. This is why Stalinist intervention into culture in the late 20s, early 30s which culminated in the in the in the insuration of socialist realism was immensely popular. Genuinely. Because, you know, what was the situation before? During all these crazy groups, futurists, constructivists, etcetera, doing some bullshit, it was extremely unpopular. For example, all these masterpieces, it’s good to see at the commercial status of Eisenstein’s Potemkin and October films. Potemkin was so-so. It even played in two or three Moscow theaters for almost one month. October played I think for one or two weeks in a suburban cinema and so on. People, what Stalin promised them is enough of these stupid avant-garde dreams, I will bring you back ordinary people with their love, passions, sentiments and so on. And I claim that even at the level of of guilt criminal system Stalinism reintroduced humanism because what do these Stalinist monster trials mean? They introduced terms like guilt, culpability, repentance, which formally, I know how horror in reality it was, but formally treat the victims as in some sense human beings. I mean while this techno-Gnostic vision was more total self-objectivization. Like, they said no, counter-revolutionaries are not in any meaningful sense guilty, they are like machines which work in a wrong way and they should be corrected genetically or whatever. The categories of guilt and so on simply didn’t exist. And they were consistent. For example, one of the first things that Bolsheviks did was to abolish death, death sentence. Then of course when they had some prisoners in civil war, ha-ha, they did what they had to do, they shot them immediately, no? And then Western liberals protested already in oh but didn’t you violate your own proclamation? And they got the answer that they deserved, no? The answer was but this was not death penalty, it was just just a sanitary measure. You know. Purely clinical sanitary operation and so on and so on. In this sense, Althusser was right when he insisted that Stalinism was a form of humanism. I mean the true extreme was this Gnostic utopian post-humanist 1920s. I claim that Platonov was in a permanent dialogue with this pre-Stalinist utopian core. With the rise of high Stalinism, its sudden cultural counter-revolution, the coordinates of the dialogue changed. Platonov turns towards what cannot but appear a more orthodox socialist realist writing, his novels, stories of the 1930s. And here comes the problem because some idiots dismiss his late novels, like the one which is usually translated as The Soul from '35, maybe his best piece, as his compromise with Stalinism. No, I think it’s not, it’s it’s immanent. We still have in this novel, which is translated into Slovene, the utopian group, the nation, a desert community of marginals who lost the will to live, but the coordinates have totally changed. The hero of the novel is a Stalinist educator, schooled in Moscow. He returns to the desert to introduce the nation, this group, to scientific and cultural progress and to restore their will to live. But at the novel's end, the hero has to accept that he cannot teach others anything. And this shift is signaled by radically changed role of sexuality. What we find here in this late Platonov I claim is almost the Hollywood formula. Basically, the nation disappears, they enable the construction of the couple. This brings me back to Anti-Sexus. What happened there? There we have three orientations which are independent of each other, sometimes even antagonistic and I claim which provide the background. First, the Gnostic equation of sex with the fall. For example, there was I think from Bulgaria up to Russia at that time the sect of so-called Skoptsy, the ones who voluntarily castrated themselves. And incidentally this sect is said deeply impressed Platonov. So we have Gnostic approach, we have the biotechnical prospect of total regulation, even abolition of sex, and we have capitalist consumerism. Modern biotechnology provides the new way to realize the old Gnostic dream of getting rid of sex. However, the gadget which does it comes from capitalism and presents itself as the ultimate commodity. Therein precisely the subterranean tension of Platonov’s essay. The new masturbatory gadget brings together three or even four tendencies: Gnostic spiritualism in the reign of modern science, Soviet total regulation of life, and capitalist universe of profit-making commodities. Multiple relations are possible here. The tech-Gnostic vision of combining the first two, a technologically regulated spiritual withdrawal of post-humans. Then, the capitalist commodification of our innermost experience, orgasm. Then, the spiritualized hedonism which tends towards post-human overcoming of sexuality and so on and so on. What makes Platonov's essay Anti-Sexus so rich, in spite of its apparent narrative simplicity, is the lack of a general cognitive map. Where precisely the masturbatory machine belong within the space of these four coordinates? It is interesting to note that a similar celebration of desexualized vitality abounds even in Stalinism. Although the Stalinist total mobilization during the first five years plan tended to fight sexuality as the last domain of bourgeois resistance, this did not prevent it to try to recuperate sexual energy in order to re-reinvigorate the struggle for socialism. In the early 1930s, a variety of tonics were advertised in Soviet media and sold in pharmacies with names like, I like them, Spermopharm, Spermol, Sekad fluid, Extractum Testiculorum and so on and so on. From today’s insight, of course, the gadget imagined by Platonov neatly fits the ongoing shift in the predominant libidinal economy today, in the course of which the relationship to the other is gradually replaced by the captivation of individuals by what Lacan baptized with the neologism lathouse, consumerist objects, gadgets. But sorry, before I go into this direction, I want to emphasize that how what early Platonov does in his so-called dystopia novels is something absolutely unique. It is a devastating, if you want, if not critique, but rendering open display of the nihilism of the Bolshevik passion. Like most clearly in The Pit where again the great mobilization is staged, you know building the foundation for some big gigantic thing that would would be the house of communism and nothing, just a hole is dug up. But at the same time it is absolutely wrong to consider Platonov a dissident in the liberal sense. He remains within, he pushes the logic of communism, early communism or Leninism if you want, to its catastrophic nihilistic consequences, but not providing any withdrawal into more comfortable traditional liberal subjects or whatever or whatever. He strangely remains within it. In this sense, I claim he is totally different from late humanists, let’s call them humanist dissidents. They are a total reaction to Stalinism but in an immanent way. You know some new historians I think pointed out in a wonderful way how, although Stalinism was what it was, extremely brutal and so on, at the level of culture it rejects modernism and stages a big return to Russian popular humanist tradition. For example, one cannot dismiss this just as a manipulation. In I don’t know when, '36 or when, when they celebrated I don’t know what, some years of death I don’t know what of Pushkin, you know that they printed Pushkin’s collected works in some crazy number, ten million copies or whatever. They were with some exceptions I must say, they were constantly reprinting the entire Russian classic. Or even in music, it’s interesting that the the composer who was selected as the classic for in the Stalinist period, Russian composer, was not Mussorgsky or Rimsky-Korsakov who could be somehow in a manipulative reading proclaimed more left, Rimsky-Korsakov when he was old we all know even lost his post at the university because he was on the side of revolutionaries and so on. No, it was Tchaikovsky. And which was proclaimed untouchable with all the consequences. Which meant when they were reprinting in Stalinist period Tchaikovsky's letters, they were heavily censored. Because if nothing else he was purely brutally anti-Semitic. Not to mention other things like you know he was homosexual, but this paradoxically made him conservative. Because he discovered the only homosexual circle at that period late mid-19th century in Russia were rich decadent noblemen and so on, close to Tsar. And Tchaikovsky was here extremely cautious in his conservatism. For example, when some revolutionaries staged some I don't know, some terrorist act, and then the the Tsar the Tsar stopped death penalty, [unintelligible] pardoned, not totally pardoned them but just changed into prison. Tchaikovsky wrote to the Tsar a curious letter like are you crazy, they should be shot and so on, don’t show them mercy or whatever. So it’s interesting that this in other words, you know Stalinism nonetheless for the mass of the people meant the return to this great popular Russian tradition against avant-garde. And in this sense, even authors like Solzhenitsyn are remain Stalinist, part of Stalinist legacy, in the very way they criticize Stalinism. Georg Lukács, whom I more and more admire I must say, said somewhere a simple note that you know, the the work which makes the experience which marks the explosion to fame of Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, do you know that that work fits as Lukács noted fits all the criteria of of socialist realism. It’s focused on a positive view of how even there you can survive. Lukács pointed out a typical Stalinist motive of celebration of work, how towards the end of this one day of the prisoner, the work is over, the guard calls him back to to walk towards, but he he was building some cottage there, he said no but I didn’t finish my cottage, and he stays there even if he is in danger and the guards will punish him just to finish the work and so on and so on. So again I think this should be noted, this this this is what is so embarrassing I think for Western critics of communism. Where do you put someone like Platonov? You cannot say he was a naive a naive guy manipulated, blinded by communism. No, if there was anyone who saw the destructive core, the abyss present there, it was Platonov. And he saw it much better than Western liberals. Recently, I saw a rare impression of dialogue between Stalin and H. G. Wells, who visited Russia I think '34, '35. And I had to laugh it’s so wonderful at place where it was published in New Statesman, '35, H. G. Wells was so proud to return after celebrating great things Stalin blah-blah. H. G. Wells tries a little bit of a critique and says that you know, but isn’t the essence of today’s freedom that people are allowed to criticize, that we see divergent voices and so on. And H. G. Wells said that I admit that we in Britain don’t have enough of it, but isn’t it that maybe also you in the Soviet Union don’t get enough of it? How stupid, he thought he would embarrass Stalin who is the big man. No, Stalin immediately answered oh no no you didn’t get, we have this even more developed than you, we just call it here self-criticism or autocritique. And Stalin said if you think you don’t have enough of it in England, we can send you some cadres who will teach you about autocritique. You thought you can embarrass Stalin, you cannot. You know, when Western liberals also accused Stalin, when Stalin in the early 30s stopped, I mean introduced lower the level of death penalty to or years, no? Then they protested genuinely oh but this is socialist humanism blah-blah. My God they thought they would catch Stalin. Stalin had a perfect answer, he said this is the sign of the great triumph of our socialist education, our country is so developed that people of or already have the maturity of grown-up men and okay, but then they have to pay the price, same death penalty for grown-grown-up men, no? So again, don’t ever remember this. I don’t have any dreams that some stupid leftists have, you know that, oh if only, I don’t know, the dream is this one is the worst stupid utopia that you can hear: if only through Lenin who would have survived three, four years, made a pact with Trotsky, they would get rid of Stalin and we would have a wonderful flourishing democratic Soviet Union with freedom, with Eisenstein, futurists, avant-garde art popular with the people and so on and so on. No, I think after reading detailed histories that Trotsky deserved to lose. He was so arrogant and stupid in the early 20s. I mean, it was incredible how Stalin was nominating people all the time to posts, doing cadres, cadres politics. Trotsky was arrogantly just refusing even to take Stalin seriously, he thought I am the big Trotsky founder of Red Army, let this small guy do his stupid intrigues, I need one big speech in Politburo and I will make it and people will be over by Stalin. So, he is incredible how he miscalculated. So again, the first point to say is this uniqueness of Platonov. This is the true core of communism. And I agree here that maybe, you know we think it’s easy, it’s difficult to imagine anything worse than Stalinist terror. Well, I’m almost tempted to say we can, if that utopia of the 20s would become reality. No, I think again, I don’t know this is irony or maybe cynical stupidity to say we can imagine much worse thing than Stalinism. Yes, we can, which Stalinism didn’t go to the end here. So, that’s the first point. That if you really want to understand Stalinism, you have to understand the previous dream and how Stalinism is the reaction to this preceding radical project of the 20s. The 20s in Soviet Union I think were much more ambiguous. It’s not some golden era and so on and so on. Platonov is much deeper. Of course no wonder that Stalin hated. I think it’s well known that on one he found on one manuscript of Platonov with Stalin’s notes and I think it just says something, filth, scum or whatever, I think just something like that. Although you know, if you talk about no, Stalin knew where the talent is, because with the great poets who are today celebrated as mega-heroes and so on, the relationship of Stalin towards them was much more ambiguous. Stalin almost feared and respected them. For example, you know when around '30, '31, Osip Mandelstam wrote a pretty brutal satire poem against Stalin as a, you know his hair protruding out of his nose, greasy fingers and so on. KGB of course already prepared immediately the plan for Mandelstam’s liquidation. Stalin himself wrote, no, leave him, a couple of years of exile will be enough. And it’s only later in '38 when it was too late for Stalin’s humanist interventions when the purges were universal, he was arrested again. Also the same with Pasternak. Pasternak was already on the list of KGB for liquidation and then Stalin wrote, refused, he wrote he is a poet, he walks in the on the clouds, let him alone there to walk on his clouds and so on and so on. Okay, so again, this is the first big lesson of Platonov. This pre-Bolshevik nihilist utopia. Sorry, pre-Stalinist to which, yes. The second, how is it with this and this I want to talk now, where are we today with regard to the process discussed by Platonov of this technological manipulation of our bodily experience reality and so on and so on. I think that the ongoing progress in biogenetics is effectively as it were changing human nature. Let me quote here a Slovenian who unfortunately died, François Balmès, who wrote that this progress in biogenetics disrupts, quote, "disrupts the conditions of human reproduction and radically disconnects it from the encounter of the two sexes, thus opening the possibility of generalized eugenics, of the fabrication of clones, monsters and hybrids which shatter the limits of a species. The limits of the biological real are effectively displaced and the most secure constraints of what is to be symbolized, life, death, filiation, bodily identity and so on are rendered fragile. Cloning allows in principle to get rid of a partner and thereby of the other sex or of the alterity as such. One perpetuates oneself without alteration. There is a historical mutation in this which is at least as radical as the death of the human species made possible by nuclear fission," end of quote. Indeed I claim the neuro-discourse also, in which a person is equated to his brain, has penetrated all aspects of our lives from law to politics. As part of this neuro-revolution, huge military funds are invested in neuroscientific research. Just try and check it out on the net if you don’t know about it. The case of the famous DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an American military agency which coordinates three types of researches: narrative analysis, augmented cognition, propos the lines of the Iron Man and so on, let’s say attempts to create soldiers with enhanced cognitive capacities and autonomous robots, the idea they might fight our wars instead of us. And so, the basic idea of DARPA is to protect the citizens of the United States from foreign bad guys by figuring out how vulnerable some people are to terrorist narratives. So in a first step, it seems just kind of military semiotics. The idea is how someone becomes a terrorist, narrative analysis and so on. But then here there is a catch. DARPA would like to revolutionize the study of narrative influence by, I quote from their program, "by advancing narrative analysis and neuroscience to create new narrative influence sensors." This means that we pass from discourse analysis to direct intervention into the brain. The goal is not to brainwash the potential terrorist through rhetoric or blind indoctrination but to directly intervene into his brain to make him change his mind. And again, it’s not a dream. Agencies are already doing this seriously. The idea is to look at becoming a terrorist as a process, biological process in your brain and to see how one can directly intervene into it. Incredible experiments I met recently in America told me they have incredible experiments ongoing there, I love them. One of them is they already developed still at a very primitive level some pill which changes your perception of time. So that you know it’s one minute but in your experience it’s protracted, you experience one minute as one day and so on. And then there are already ideas, I love them, how to profit from this, like let’s say I do a couple of murders and similar things and I’m condemned to five years. But let’s say that I’m, I don’t know, a big scientist of profit to the humanity so it would be sad to lose me for five or ten years. So the idea is that I act in prison for five or ten years but I get that pill so that in reality society loses me for one day but I experience it as ten years and so on. Okay, my immediate dirty association would be why not punishment, why not sex, no? Like you are really doing it one minute but it’s for you like one week and so on and whatever. But so again, what I want to emphasize here is that we are not talking here about some dreams and so on and so on. This what DARPA is also doing is, well basically they are really producing Spider-Man, Iron Man and so on. They are very far in experiments through different ways of changing your genes to produce different versions of supermen. One idea is literally that of Iron Man, to directly wire your brain to some kind of a robot machinery in which your small body, to make you extra strong and so on and so on. But here nonetheless we should not reduce this post-human stance with the modern we should not reduce it to the modern belief in the possibility of total technological domination over nature. It’s wrong to claim that, and that’s what makes this tendency so interesting. People usually claim oh this is the ultimate Cartesian arrogance, like even human nature will become totally disposable, we will create people whose emotions will be controlled at the same time their abilities, intelligence, etc. will be immense. No, at the same time and this is absolutely crucial as the guy whom I really appreciate, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the French theorist of catastrophe, he detected this tendency, namely a weird reversal of the traditional Cartesian anthropological arrogance. Quote from Dupuy: "How are we to explain that science became such a risky activity that according to some top scientists, it poses today the principal threat to the survival of humanity? Some philosophers reply to this question by saying that Descartes' dream to become master and possessor of nature has turned wrong and that we should urgently return to the mastery of mastery. They understand nothing. They don’t see that the technology profiling itself today on the horizon through convergence of all disciplines aims precisely at non-mastery. The engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer's apprentice, that is to say a creator whose products will run out of his hands because of his negligence or ignorance, but by choice. He will give himself complex structures or organizations and he will try to learn what they are capable of by way of exploring their functional properties. The measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him than the conformity of his realization to the list of pre-established tasks." I think Dupuy is right here that beneath this broad Cartesian idea, traditional interpretation of modern science as to now we will totally dominate everything, is a much more obscure desire to create a monster that will surpass us. What we want is again an artificial intelligence that will start to reproduce itself, to become more, we want to be surprised. And so I think that instead of instead of seeing in it as a danger, I think that the first, okay let me just I’m sorry that I don’t... instead of just dismissing this as a danger, I think that it’s we should see in it an extremely interesting although dangerous new constellation where we simply don’t know where we are going. I think that on the one hand, yes, why not? In some sense humanity is at its end. By which I mean, for example, the very basic fact of our being human, that you distinguish between inner and outer life, no? My thoughts are here, reality is out there. Without this minimal distance, we are not human. This is being transgressed already. You know the old stories and you can even read in the media how what’s his guy, my God the physicist, even Stephen Hawking does no longer need to type with his finger, he can already still in a very primitive way but nonetheless directly wire your brain to a machine. And what’s the problem? The problem is that on the one hand you become like a God, you think about something, it happens. I’ve seen them already, wheelchairs for crippled people or how do you say in the correct way, movement challenged, whatever, sorry, no, how? A disabled, yeah but what about are they not Gods, in their, you know you just think on, machine moves, to think left, machine moves left. So you can do this. So what’s the problem? Well the problem is it looks like what German idealists called intellectual intuition, no? Your inner intuition immediately coincides with the real, has creative power. The problem is to be vulgar that what goes in also, I mean what goes out also goes in, you know? If you can influence outward in this direct way then you can also do it the other way around, control. So I think this is the one development connected with the possibilities of biogenetics which are all pretty pretty primitive, but nonetheless something is emerging here. We don’t know what it will mean. But Freud in his Unbehagen in der Kultur already anticipated this development when he spoke about so-called prosthetic God, enhancement in a artificial enhancement of our capacities and Freud saw very well how this causes even more of anxiety and discontent. I think this is what all these ridiculous mostly boring for me films about superheroes like Batman, Spider-Man, Superman indicate. And I find such a nice ironic point the fact that the title of the last Superman film, The Man of Steel, is literally English translation of Stalin. So here we are, no? So what I want to emphasize here is that again Lacan saw this tendency. For example, in the Ethics seminar, Lacan invokes the point of the apocalypse, the impossible saturation of the symbolic by the real of jouissance, the full immersion into mass-jouissance. When in the Heideggerian way he asks, "Have we crossed the line in the world in which we live?", he hints at the fact that quote, "The possibility of the death of the symbolic has become a tangible reality." Lacan mentions the threat of atomic holocaust. However today again we have other versions of the death of the symbolic. And Lacan already at that point made it very clear how how the problem is not so much that we will be warred by the machines, but I think we are already entering a new stage where these technological supplements supplements will no longer be out there big machines, it will be just tiny pieces implanted into us. So we will not even be able to experience them as such as an external machine, you know? It will not be a universalized let’s call it dialysis, dialysis effect. And I spoke with some patients they told me there is something traumatically humiliating in seeing the machine out there and you know your very life reproduction depends on it. No, these implants will become invisible doing their job at the level well below the threshold of our perception. What makes nanotechnology so tricky is the prospect of again constructing objects in such a small dimension that all correlation with our ordinary life world is lost, so that it is effectively as if we are dealing with an alternate reality. But of course an alternate reality which for our daily experience is opaque, we are not even aware of it but it can be manipulated. And Lacan also implies again how Lacan almost heralded the changed status of science implied by the profusion of objects entirely forged by science. Here is another quote from late Lacan: "What is involved in science, in science as we are now, as I might say, lumber with it, I mean having it present in our world in a manner that goes well beyond anything that might be speculated on as a result of knowledge. In effect we should not forget that the characteristic of our science is not that it introduced a better, more extensive knowledge of the world but that it made emerge into the world things that did not exist in it in any way at the level of our perception," end of quote. So science and technology today no longer aim only at understanding and reproducing natural processes, but at generating new forms of life that will surprise us. The goal is no longer just to dominate nature the way it is, but to generate something new, stronger, greater than ordinary nature, including inclusive including our ourselves. The dream that sustains the scientific technological endeavor is to trigger a process with no return, a process that would exponentially reproduce itself. One can even imagine what can be the unforeseen results of this experiment. New life forms reproducing themselves out of control in a cancer-like way. Here is a standard description of this fear. Quote from Artificial Life Becoming Evolution, a manifesto by Robert Ray and Al-Haj Abedi: "Within to years, a new class of organisms is expected to emerge. These organisms will be artificial in the sense that they will originally be designed by humans. However, they will reproduce and they will evolve into some other than their original form. They will be alive under any reasonable definition of the word. The pace of evolutionary change will be extremely rapid. The impact on humanity and the biosphere could be enormous, larger than the industrial revolution, nuclear weapons or environmental pollution," end of quote. This fear has its clear libidinal dimension. It is the fear of the asexual reproduction of life, the fear of an undead life that is indestructible, constantly expanding, reproducing itself through self-definition. In short, the fear of the mini-creature called by Lacan lamella. Libido as an organ, the inhuman undead organ without a body, the mythic pre-subjective undead life substance. Because what makes gadgets so unhappy, far from simply supplementing human organs, is that they introduce a logic which differs from the normal libidinal economy of sex, human beings as beings of language. Techno-gadgets are potentially undead. They function as parasitic organs without bodies which impose their repetitive rhythm on the beings that they are supposed to serve. And again, this is the vision Lacan sees in our world as they say increasingly populated by again what Lacan called lathouse, these undead objects. And again, the interesting point here is how propos this object, we have to include capitalism. We are dealing with a whole chain of surpluses here: scientific technology with its surplus knowledge, a knowledge beyond mere connaissance of already existing reality, then the capitalist surplus value, the commodification of this surplus knowledge in overflow of gadgets, and last but not least the surplus enjoyment, gadgets as forms of objet petit a, objects of lathouse. So what is the tendency here? If you give me just another five five minutes, maybe but in the sense of that pill, you know where weeks mean for production? First, I’m sorry if you know this story but I cannot abstain from repeating it. I claim that I see one perspective in this of nonetheless emancipating an an authentic human sex, which is the story I developed when Guardian, the newspaper, asked me for the fate of romance but I didn’t dare explain they they let me develop it till the end. The story goes like this: we have different gadgets. We have for women so-called dildo, plastic penis, but we also have, haha I saw it, something called stamina training unit, which is plastic vagina. And I love it because it’s so technologically efficient. It looks like a light electric light, no? But it’s done so discreetly that, you know, it’s like a battery light and from outside you’re just up there and then you open it and then you have different plastic parts. You can put on the top a vagina opening plastic model, anus opening or mouth. Then you have different models with more or less hair, then you can regulate the the density when you put penis in and how quickly it vibrates but, okay. Based on this can we imagine a date which I think would fully satisfy today? Let’s say I learn in the net, then we say at o’clock life is short, let’s move on, okay. But what happens then is we meet anywhere, my apartment, her place, wherever, and I come with my stamina training unit, she comes with her dildo, and what do we do? We connect both machines, we pull the plastic penis into the machine, and both machines run. And our super-ego duty to enjoy is out there being it. It’s wonderful! You are there, super-ego is satisfied, what is happening, enjoyment or whatever, but you know, super-ego duty is out there fulfilled. We we drink a tea with two more civilized things then you know. We don’t even need this primitive fantasies, which are beautiful. I recently remembered one of my youth memories of how that’s the point as Lacan and Alenka already developed, when we, you know the lesson of psychoanalysis is very paradoxical. Alenka would refer to child sexuality. This is of course where do they come from, these crazy fantasies. But it’s wrong to think that once you are mature, no, it’s real sex, you know you don’t need fantasies. No, you need the paradox of human beings is there, you need this in more developed form, these fantasies to the end. And I remember from myself, from my youth, it’s crazy but I liked it. Of course I knew this story about spring babies, no? But then I had a problem. I finally learned about sex what you do. But I still in my naivety couldn’t believe, this is almost a Catholic reaction, how could something so noble and innocent as a child come from naked sweaty bodies meeting there, and I found a solution. Yes, you need sex for making babies, definitely. But for every reasonable being nonetheless we know storks bring babies. So instead while you are making love, a stork is observing you. And if you do it well and well and politely and everything worked, no? I claim our sexuality is like that, so very short point about Platonov. Remember, I’m with the lady, the machines are buzzing, you know, and so our we don’t no longer have the duty. Like our duty for the big other is done. And then I talk with the lady and then by chance our hands meet and maybe maybe we end up in bed. But that would be the true sex, you know why? Because it would be without any, we already did it for the big other, the super-ego duty, no? This would be the pure surplus. I can only imagine having sex in these days, that is my age with machines buzzing there and then you are doing it for the for this, for this. That would be one line with which to react to to Platonov. Then if you just nonetheless now allow me very briefly my reaction to to Platonov because if we accept this that we are approaching this post-human real, of course the big problem philosophically even is how, or is it at all possible to symbolize this real, like science is telling us we are not even we are really automata biologically manipulated blah-blah, but can we live at the level, can we change our experience so that it would be appropriate to this insight? And here here it’s interesting. The standard attitude of most cognitivism is to humiliate us, something like Althusserian theory, you know how Althusser says that ideological experience is a necessary illusion. They claim that we can only know this about our biological determinism objectively but we cannot really accept, we necessarily experience ourselves as free agents and so on. Then you have the transcendental version of this, Habermas. They claim that of course sciences are true, but sciences are social practice done within a certain intersubjective community, and this is an irreducible aspect. Because you cannot say we can account for how intersubjective community came to be through neurological explanation because to do the neural explanation, the scientific community is a kind of transcendental a priori and has to be there. I don’t think this works. Then we have the third position which I must say I quite I quite appreciate, the third position is the position of radical cognitivist like Thomas Metzinger and Thomas Metzinger, who is to claim no, we can change our subjective attitude so that in our daily life we incorporate the results of cognitivism. But I think it doesn’t work. They cheat. They cheat in the sense that they simply claim that if I know that you are I don't know totally biologically, neurologically determined, I will have to change my notion of guilt, of blaming you and punishment, being less severe, whatever. I don’t I think where they cheat this radical cognitivist is that, you know, the way they talk about all these things is still as if the old free independent subject is here, they don’t do it. And here comes the interesting point, the only guy that okay, not the only, but the guy who most radically draw a different conclusion is Thomas Metzinger, the German cognitivist and a similar tradition to this, he claims that the only thing I wouldn’t use the word philosophy, which really enables us to integrate, to subjectively experience this fact that you know there is no self, we are just neurological automata, is the Buddhist enlightenment. That there in this idea of thoughts without a thinker, there when you when you approve the Buddhist enlightenment, there you really think without being a subject, there enunciation and enunciated coincide and so on and so on. I have and with this I will now really conclude, I have some problems here and I think that I’m just hint at it I don't have time to develop it, that it’s interesting how in Buddhism again and again the same deadlock repeats itself which points I claim at a persisting form of subjectivity. First, it’s interesting how Buddhism immediately confronted the problem of war. You know, well okay it’s easy to say like Tibetan Buddhists you know who don’t even hurt a worm, that’s why allegedly when they when they build a new house and they have to dig a hole you know they are so attentive they don’t kill any worm and so on and so on. Well, they have people very scared to live with me but that’s another story. What I want to say is that from the very beginning already when Buddha was old and some kings converted to Buddhism, and they had state in the middle of now no? And they find in this beautiful how the three forms again like that old story about our Anti-Sexus, Buddhism found three ways each more ominous than the preceding one to nonetheless justify killing in war. The first one is the standard one, we find it also in the West, no? Killing is allowed when you do it to prevent an even greater killing. You know, like if I see I don’t know someone pressing a button who will who tries to kill thousands, I kill him, I prevent a much greater disaster. You know. The problem is of course where do you stop, because when Japan invaded China in early 1930s and so on there the justification was strictly this one, Chinese are like spoiled people, we invade them to bring peace and so on. Then the second argument is even more interesting. It is that by when you acquire distance, you are out of the circle of karma. So your acts are no longer inscribed into karma and you can do whatever you want. You find from the very beginning this line that killing is evil but insofar as you as a person are engaged in it. If you are doing from the position of the one who is already liberated then because that’s the definition of liberation in Buddhism, something very radical. It’s that you accept yourself from this circle of life where your acts have traces, your acts leave no traces. So as they say kill, do whatever you want, it no longer affects. Then there are Buddhists who claim that yes, every killing affects you, but they provided a most sophisticated version of the first line of argument, which goes like this: yes, every killing leaves traces. Like, I kill you now, I will be reborn as a lower work instead of I don't know what, a lion or whatever. So okay, but they say if the one whom you kill, let’s say that you are purely just an illusion, I kill you, but I know that you are really evil and that you will kill people in the next days. But you didn’t yet kill anyone. In this way, if I kill you now, I prevent you from acquiring bad karma from future killings, although I got a little bit of bad karma. In this way, I saved you and I did the ultimate heroic act of assuming myself bad karma to prevent you. Although I got a little bit of bad karma. In this way, this is the proof acquiring this is the ultimate ethical act and this is why my bad karma turns into into profit. So if I kill you, I am ready to be born even reborn lower and so on. The next problem is with this is you know I think the ethical catastrophe of Buddhism becomes with the notion of Bodhisattva, which means you know what? The one who already acquired enlightenment, but out of out of sympathy with other suffering says, comes back into this reality and says no no I will remain in this within this circle of ordinary phenomenal reality suffering till all people or even all sentient beings also will be delivered of that pain. Now this idea causes terrible conflict among Buddhists, because you know Buddhism oscillates between two extreme forms of enlightenment. On the one hand you have this let’s call it radical realist idea. Enlightenment means a universal event where all suffering will disappear and so on and so on. On the other hand you have for me much more convincing minimalist version, which says and it’s much more tempting. No, Buddha is not the one who lives in some clouds and then returns to help us. No, Buddha to be truly enlightened doesn’t mean you move somewhere else, you remain here fully interacting as a human being, but here you are already in light. What changes is just your attitude towards reality. You are still here. And of course it’s all always oscillating between these two extreme. Which is why you can have under Buddhism extreme pacifists and the most beautiful version of this was told to me by Ang Lee, director, Chinese programmer and so on, who told me once about a Chinese Buddhist monk who says that he will refuse to become Bodhisattva, it’s a really radical idea, not only to the level of when all other people will be delivered, but he said that we should include into this also all those who in hell are suffering eternal damnation. But of course Ang Lee being a nationalist I mean purely in time, no, he said I would add with that only one exception, because of the big former and cultural revolution, no, Mao should suffer forever, you know? I said we have a slight misunderstanding here and you will see when you get a letter from me when you will be in Gulag what prison you understand. But what I want to say is that on the other hand you have extreme militarists, like Japanese Buddhists whose point is, we are enlightened and whatever we do we already do it in this out of the cycle of karma way and so on and so on. And just allow me another brief introduction. The problem here is also suffering, which is such a suspicious entity. Ernst Bloch had an interesting idea here, namely recently I read how in Thomas Aquinas, Tomas Aquinasistic, you find a beautiful problem. When if let’s say we are we are good people we will be in heaven, will we be allowed in heaven to observe the suffering of those in hell? His idea is yes. And he even says that seeing the suffering in hell will strengthen our pleasure of paradise, of being in paradise. Now of course he immediately confronts the problem: how can what kind of people we are, how can we be part of heaven that you find excessive pleasure in seeing other people suffering eternal torment and so on and so on? The the job that Aquinas does here is typical scholastic sophistry. He distinguishes two levels of pleasure: the direct pleasure in the pain of others and the pleasure in divine justice imposed. He said no no, we don’t really find pleasure in the suffering of others, pleasure is just oh my God look at God’s greatness, he really suffer those who are punished and so on and so on. Of course bullshit. So what is the true solution here? And I must tell you something if I may boast with it, three days ago, two days ago with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, yes, I debated this point and of course naturally he agreed with me on my solution, which is that we should imagine it the other way around. First, a definition that heaven doesn’t work, you know? Like in modern sense, you are in heaven okay then you eat all that bullshit, nectar you drink, whatever, you get tired. And then some angel who takes care of the administration of heaven comes and says like just to give you a boost so that you don’t complain, let me remind you what the other guys are suffering, you know like to build up the morale, you know? Because it’s obvious that in heaven you get immediately depressed and so on. But then I imagine the opposite and here the honorable Archbishop agreed with me, that imagine hell which is as you know from Lubitsch film To Be or Not to Be, quite nice place, basically damn it is the benevolent God, you know? And there we have good time, as we all know from Lubitsch. No? We have sex, we drink, blah blah. But I claim that from time to time then the administrator of hell comes and says look guys we have nice time, but I learned that now for five minutes we will be observed by heaven. Please to satisfy them, pretend that you suffer a little bit so that we impress them and then we can go on with fun and so on and whatever. Totally correct theory. So you know, to go to the end, I claim that again there is one ambiguity of Buddhism. What does Nirvana mean? Is it in this minimalist sense that we are in Nirvana, we reach enlightenment, nothing changes in reality, it’s just our attitude, or is it this realist version like total change. Then Bodhisattva, yes or no? Why do we have to return back from enlightenment if we don’t and thirdly the the third problem is today it’s proven that more or less that a state which at least looks like Nirvana you can achieve it through purely biogenetic lesion or whatever, biogenetic, biochemistry, you can achieve it through pill. And some Buddhists, I read a couple of books, I spoke with them, have a great problem here because biochemistry already they are already producing what ironically is called the enlightenment pills, you know. Which means why go through that bullshit of spiritual training and so on, you take the pill and you are there. And it’s proven, Metzinger claims, proven that through all measurements of our brains and so on that our inner experience of enlightenment is exactly the same. So what to do? The desperate attempt of some Buddhists is to distinguish undeserved from deserved happiness, like that technical happiness doesn’t count because it was undeserved. But I think this is totally against the whole logic of Buddhism and so on, you know. It introduces a certain ethics which is which is totally wrong. Again, because of all this, I think I don’t have time now but I really surprisingly enough idea, I think that Buddhist ethics doesn’t work. Not in the sense that Buddhist enlightenment is not a radical authentic experience. I just claim that ethically it gets caught in a dilemma. Like it works, you you can be a super criminal, you can be the opposite, etc., you cannot consistently legitimate good and here some of them admitted it to me, the honest ones. Here Buddhism cheats. They like to claim that before doing the high spiritual exercises you have to begin with modest slow just be kind with following modest ethical rules. But then the obvious question arises and it was brought to extreme by Zen Buddhism: why then? Why all that bullshit? Why can’t I go on sorry to be so vulgar but that’s the point, why can’t I go on, which I’m not doing of course, raping women, torturing people and still have my line, why not? And it’s an embarrassing question they cannot answer. The solution is in me, the Western Judeo-Christian even Islamic one. I say Islamic one because you know there is a line which is often overlooked from Islam which is beautiful, which says I just prescribe rituals. It says in Quran or in one of the sacred texts: "What you believe, that I cannot control, that is your problem." You know. I’m for total externalization of ethics and I think that’s the lesson of of all our Judeo-Christian tradition. Total externalization. It doesn’t matter this Actors Studio religion where you should go deep into yourself and so on. It’s it’s not that the inner truth tells you something deep about you. The inner truth, of course any criminal can be revealed by I’m quite sure that if you are to ask Stalin, Hitler, whoever, they would tell their stories which would appear oh my God you see this guy has an inner life. I don’t think inner life is the truth. I think inner life is precisely the master fantasy that we fabricate to escape the consequences of our acts. So what I didn’t have time to do would was to return from here and claim that although it’s politically crazy and here even if it’s a different way, I think we are that we should absolutely not dismiss the the later so-called socialist realism in Platonov. You know it’s the same problem even at the level of painting with with how’s the guy called, with with Malevich, you know. Idiots claim he did those stupid squares, black, white, and that’s it, and then later he made a compromise. No, I claim his late paintings are incredible because although he apparently returned to some kind of realism, no, but it’s realism against the background of this radical minimalism of black square or white square or whatever, and even signals. There is this famous late self-portrait that you know himself and his hands are like this, which is the famous square. The square is still here. Which is why to conclude with a reference here to Slovenia, I was shocked that when a guy I will not pronounce his name, is among those who as they say in Harry Potter, no how do they call Voldemort, the one whose name should not be pronounced. So the one who was the longest serving Slovene Minister of Foreign Affairs, who precisely should not be pronounced, published two years ago some kind of stupid political thriller, well why not, but he used for cover illustration that portrait. That’s the proof maybe for us materialists that God doesn't exist, how if he existed like Dimitrij Rupel. So again the point would have been that Platonov went through this let’s call it techno-Gnostic stage and later Platonov, this is what is so interesting. This this is on what we should we should focus. But I’m very sorry that I abused your time and my secret hope is now that you will stand up and say my God it’s already one hour we didn’t even have time to debate. Okay, my secret. Thank you very much.