- So, to begin.
I'll propose a topic of
conditions of possibility.
My intervention here is, broadly speaking,
concerned with the relationship
between materialism
and naturalism.
One of my core guiding
convictions in what follows
is that any contemporary
materialist approach
supported by the historical
riches of post-Kantian
European intellectual
traditions cannot afford
continued reliance upon
increasingly contentious
anti-naturalist presumptions
and the corresponding neglect
of the rapidly developing
life sciences in particular.
More specifically, I am convinced of
the ultimate unavoidability
of a precise delineation
of the natural and material
possibility conditions
for what comes to exist in the
forms of more-than-natural,
dematerialized
transcendental subjectivity.
With transcendental materialism,
the position I defend,
being an effort to
synthesize anti-naturalism,
a la transcendental idealism,
with historical and
dialectical materialisms
in their varying engagements
with the sciences of nature.
Furthermore, I am interested
in working towards
a materialism that is
stringently atheistic
as well as responsive to
modern natural science,
while remaining nevertheless
steadfastly opposed
to mechanistic, reductive
and/or eliminative worldviews.
Today, my sketch of select
aspects of this endeavor
will involve a winding
tour through certain ideas
drawn from Hegel, Lacan,
the history of continental philosophy,
and recent biology and its
branches among other sources.
This is an attempt to condense into
a 30-minute presentation
some of what is crucial
to a project in process entitled
Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism.
To begin with Lacan,
despite his reputation as
a avid anti-naturalist,
he has no qualms whatsoever
about leaning upon
certain ideas of nature as components of
his theoretical apparatus.
Although adamantly opposed
to the introduction
of a crudely reductive biologism
as a grounding paradigm
for psychoanalysis, he is not for all that
categorically dismissive
of the life sciences.
Once in a while, he even
permits himself, like Freud,
to voice hopes of eventual
biological corroborations
of analytic theories.
To take just one illustration of this,
known to anyone familiar with Lacanianism,
Lacan's concept of need,
as per the need-demand-desire triad,
is bound up with the biological facticity
of protracted infantile helplessness,
an anatomical and physiological
fact of immense import
for psychical ontogeny in the
eyes of both Freud and Lacan.
Arising immediately from the very start
of the human organism's
existence as a bodily being,
need is the contingent yet a priori base
of the Lacanian libidinal economy,
a crucial impetus necessary
for propelling the neonate
into the combined arms of
imaginary and symbolic others.
Only thereby, thanks to helpless neediness
as a natural condition of possibility,
is the transition to the
complex dialectical mediations
of demand and desire prompted.
Even though imaginary symbolic
imprinting and overwriting
partially denaturalizes need,
Lacan's talk of quote-unquote
de-naturalization
automatically implies the prior existence
of certain natural things
as origins or grounds.
The resulting denaturalized
subjectivity remains,
to phrase this in a Lacanian style,
not without a rapport
with nature in the guise
of its biomaterial body.
Or, in alternate phrasing, the
never-successfully-denaturalized subject
is stuck perpetually struggling with
stubbornly indigestible
fragments of an incompletely
and unevenly domesticated corpo-real.
In a companion piece to the present text,
I highlight the numerous
instances in which Lacan,
with however many caveats
and qualifications,
utilizes the notion of the
organic in its biological sense.
Therein, I argue that Lacan's
references to this notion,
these cluster around
recurrent embellishments
on the mirror stage, Lacan's
references to this notion
suggest the concept of a non-organicity
that would be different
from the merely inorganic
as dealt with by the physics and chemistry
of the non-living.
On the basis of this reading of Lacan,
I hence distinguish between the inorganic
and the quote-unquote anorganic,
with the latter being a
Hegelian-type negation
of the organic as itself,
according to Hegel's
philosophy of nature, a
negation als aufhebung
of the inorganic, that is
a dialectic speculative
negation of negation, disobeying
the rule of double negation
in classical bivalent logic.
In terms of the Hegelian
Realphilosophie of Natur und Geist,
I would contend that
Lacanian anorganicity,
in the organic more
than the organic itself,
as the Lacan of the 11th
Seminar might put it,
Lacanian furnishes a link missing
between the end of Hegel's
philosophy of nature,
with its organics culminating
with the animal organism,
and the beginning of
his philosophy of mind
with its anthropology
starting with the soul
of human nature in its
most rudimentary states.
Prior to his mature encyclopedia of the
philosophical sciences,
Hegel in his 1805 to 1806
Jena Realphilosophie,
famously describes humans
as quote-unquote the night of the world.
After passing through
delineation of the organic
and the anorganic a Lacan,
a delineation I skip over this evening,
I will circumnavigate back to these claims
by showing how anorganicity,
as a more-than-organic
transcendence nonetheless
immanent to the organic,
simultaneously conjoins and disjoins
the natural kingdoms of animal organisms
and the spiritual/minded
regions of human subjects.
If the latter are the night of the world,
unnatural perversions of nature,
the darkness of this
negativity is made possible
by a pre- or non-human
night of the living world,
internal to inhuman nature itself.
That is to say, Hegel's night of the world
extends beyond the exclusively human.
In terms of an anorganicist insertion
of a certain Lacan back into
Hegel's Realphilosophie,
Lacan himself, in his 1955 ecrit,
Variations of the Standard Treatment,
fortuitously hints at this.
Elaborating on the
quote-unquote experiences
transpiring in the mirror stage,
including those of a
kind already described
in Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit
in connection with the
master-slave dialectic,
he maintains quote "but
if these experiences,
"which can be seen in animals too,
"at many moments in
their instinctual cycles,
"and especially in the
preliminary displays
"of the reproductive cycle,
"with all the lures and aberrations
"these experiences involve,
"in fact open onto this signification
"in order to durably
structure the human subject.
"It is because they
receive this signification
"from the tension stemming
from the impotence proper
"to the prematurity of birth,
"by which naturalists
characterize the specificity
"of man's anatomical development,
"a fact that helps us grasp the dehiscence
"from natural harmony required by Hegel
"to serve as the fruitful
illness, life's happy fault,
"in which man, distinguishing
himself from his essence,
"discovers his existence." End quote.
Characteristically, Lacan does not bother
to furnish his readers
with specific citations
from Hegel's works,
but considering his reliance
upon Kojeve's version
of the Phenomenology for
his understanding of Hegel,
and his explicit mention of the dialectic
between master and slave on the
very same page of the ecrit,
Lacan probably is thinking
here of the portions
of this 1807 text section
on self-consciousness
preceding the subsection
addressing lordship
and bondage proper.
In the opening pages of this section,
Hegel portrays natural desiring life
as plagued by monotonous dissatisfactions
and futile struggles.
That noted, Lacan's choice of the noun
quote-unquote impotence,
serendipitously echoes
Hegel's motif of the
impotence, ohnmacht, of nature.
For both authors, a natural
clearing is held open
for the arising of
more-than-natural transcendences
and immanence thanks to material nature's
quote-unquote weakness, Hegel,
and quote-unquote rottenness,
Lacan in Seminar 24.
At the end of the above 1955 quotation,
Lacan's allusion to
Sartrian existentialism,
itself influenced by the Kojevian Hegel,
indicates that from a
Lacanian perspective,
there indeed is an essence
that precedes existence,
to contradict Sartre.
But this essential nature
is not all that natural
in any standard naturalist
or positivist senses,
the senses Sartre presumes
as regards talk of essences
in conjunction with the natural sciences.
In fact, it is pervaded by negativities,
both materially real and
experientially palpable.
Hence driving the initially biology being
beyond a biology it finds unbearable.
Despite my solidarity with
the facets of Lacan's thinking
I have unpacked guided by
the idea of the inorganic,
I consider his accounts of the
emergences of ego and subject
to suffer from a major shortcoming:
their exclusively ontogenetic status.
As I illustrate and criticize
on another occasion,
Lacan, inconsistently wavering
between epistemological
and ontological justifications,
strictly prohibits phylogenetic hypotheses
and investigations as
illegitimate and out of balance,
at least within the limits
of psychoanalysis proper
as he conceives it.
In my critique of Lacan's
forbidding of inquiries
into phylogeny, I point out
how this highly contentious
circumscription of the
scope of analytic thought
leads Lacan into having direct recourse
to Biblical and Christian references.
More specifically, in line
with his ban on raising queries
regarding the historical
origins of language
and connected social structures,
he permits himself an
affirmation of the statement,
in the beginning was the word,
and overtly portrays the
advent of the symbolic order,
a creative genesis
obfuscated and mystified
by the Lacanian law against
all things phylogenetic,
as the descent of the
quote-unquote holy spirit
down to the world.
For any atheist
materialist, Lacan included,
this should be deeply troubling.
Dovetailing with this
side of the Lacanianism
with which I take issue,
Jacques-Alain Miller proclaims
that quote "nothingness enters
reality through language,"
end quote.
Such a thesis does not actually
fit Lacan himself overall,
especially considering the
latter's realist and materialist
depictions of negativities,
manifest in core concepts of his
like the body in pieces.
However, this stated,
Miller's proclamation indeed
is able to prop itself
up against select sides
of Lacan's teachings.
What Miller and the version
of Lacan he relies on
represent is, I contend, a
dogma particularly widespread
in continental European
philosophy and its offshoots,
infected as these intellectual
traditions have been
and still remain with
various idealist, romanticist
and negative theological tendencies,
both avowed and disavowed.
Modifying a turn of phrase from
American analytic
philosopher Wilfrid Sellar's
seminal 1956 essay Empiricism
and the Philosophy of Mind,
I consider the most suitable
label for this dogma
the myth of the non-given.
This myth lurks at the basis
of each and every appeal
to an unexplained
givenness of the non-given,
with the non-givenness
referring here to absence,
lack, negativity and so on.
Hence, the myth of the
non-given assumes the
factical thereness of nothingness,
non-presence et cetera.
A propos a theory of subjectivity,
its supporting background
presence is born witness to
by dogmatic invocations of an irreducible,
unanalyzable nothingness as
the primordial primitive cause
of the subject, or even
as the subject itself.
No matter how seemingly
sophisticated and intricate
the jargonistic gesticulating,
these invocations boil down,
when all is said and done,
to vulgar foot-stamping and fist-banging.
As regards the myth of
the non-given in relation
to certain theories of subjectivity,
a bond of complicity is
established between them
at the dawn of renaissance humanism,
with its founding document,
Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola's 1486 oration
on the dignity of man.
Therein, Pico della Mirandola
describes human beings
as distinct from all other
creatures and creations,
especially endowed by God with a strange,
peculiar, natureless nature,
and inner absence of form,
unlike that to be found
anywhere else in the abundant,
overflowing fullness of the
rest of the formed world.
Through top-down divine fiat alone,
an abyssal groundlessness
of pure negativity
becomes the metaphysical spark of humans
in their crown of creation dignity.
A rock-bottom emptiness
of otherworldly provenance
is the primitive ur-cause of
humanity's distinctiveness.
Jumping ahead to the past century,
ostensibly irreligious
minds continue to propagate,
without critical
modifications, variants of
Pico della Mirandola's
mythical theological story
of uniquely human voidedness.
In the continental Europe of
the previous 100 years generally,
and in France particularly,
atheists and non-atheists,
humanists and non-humanists,
and partisans of a range
of other apparently incompatible
theoretical orientations
faithfully reproduce this
narrative with differing degrees
of self-awareness.
Even when decoupled from
the Christian framework
of On The Dignity of Man,
assertions of an ex-nihilo,
always-already-there
absence, lack, nothingness,
void et cetera, at and as
the heart of subjectivity
perpetuate the vices of dogmatism,
mystification and obscurantism.
Through dependence on the
myth of the non-given,
those putting forward these
assertions either rest on
positings of a priori metaphysical
unexplained explainers,
or capriciously balk at
thinking their way through
to the underlying foundations
of their positions.
Lacan and Lacanians, insofar
as they staunchly refuse
to contemplate the
lengthier stretches of human
and natural histories anyone with
sound scientific sensibilities
presumes gave rise
to present-day humanity,
evince belief in the
mythical givenness of negativity
as itself non-givenness.
Apart from the idealist and
anti-naturalist variants
of Lacanianism against which
I have argued in the past,
even on the most sympathetic materialist,
quasi-naturalist reading of Lacan,
which I try to offer elsewhere,
he continues to be guilty
of investment in this myth.
Within his purely ontogenetic picture,
the infant's corp morcelé is referred to
as if it were the ultimate thereness
of a ground zero origin
incapable of further explanation.
Say, for ahistorical idealist
talk about big others,
as eternally pre-existing,
phylogenetically inexplicable
symbolic orders into
which conception and birth
throws children.
Severed from its natural connections
with phylogenetic and
evolutionary histories,
the pre-maturationally
helpless body in pieces
of ontogeny darkens into
being an opaque bedrock
of false fictional absoluteness.
The myth of the non-given
hides itself poorly
in the cracks and gaps
of this barred copo-real.
If these specters of
negativities are not to be
exorcized completely
after being flushed out
of the nooks and crannies within bodies,
what is to be done with them?
How are they to be rightly situated?
To be crystal clear, I do
not intend to repudiate
Lacan's rich dissections of embodiment.
Instead, I merely aim to demonstrate that
his reflections on these matters
are indefensibly incomplete
and in need of substantial
supplementary supports
of sorts with which he likely
would not be comfortable,
about which I will say more shortly.
Other figures culpable of
providing philosophical refuge
and cover for a mysticism of negativity
are not hard to identify.
Apart from Lacan, his
existentialist contemporaries
Heidegger, with his unfathomable sendings
and ecstatic clearings
of being as no-thing,
and Sartre with his unnaturally
essenceless existences
are obvious examples.
As an aside, I do not
consider Hegel and Marx,
despite possible
appearances to the contrary,
guilty of repeating or
resting upon appeals
to mystical negativities in
the manners I'm objecting to
in this setting.
Flashing forward to today,
Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben
are two living philosophers
influenced by these predecessors
and under such influences
embellishing upon
the myth of the non-given.
Agamben's human being is a quote-unquote
"man without content", a
de-essentialized openness,
as first glimpsed by Pico della Mirandola,
to whom Agamben waves.
A de-essentialized openness
whose always second
quote-unquote nature is
continually subjected
to ongoing constructions
and reconstructions,
putting to work its unworkable,
inexhaustible potentialities.
Similarly, Badiou's human
being is a quote-unquote
"voided animal," to be
thought by a new quote-unquote
"inhumanism", combining Sartre's humanism
and the anti-humanism of
Lacan, Althusser and Foucault.
Badiou equally praises these
four French fore-runners of his
for their unflinching
opposition to quote-unquote
"a bad Darwin", although
he has yet to indicate
whether for him there is such
a thing as a good Darwin,
and if so, what he would look like,
and what relevance, if any, he would have
for Badiouian philosophy.
In short, unlike all other animals,
Badiou's voided animal cannot
be addressed by naturalism,
purportedly calling instead
for anti-naturalist,
one might be tempted to say
super-naturalist, engagements.
The surfacing of Darwin's
name at this juncture
is fortuitous and fitting.
Apart from Kant and Hegel
as its twin fountainheads,
the vast bulk of what has come to be known
as continental philosophy
springs from the unholy trinity
of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
In my estimation, the almost
blanket neglect of Darwin
by these philosophical orientations,
leveraged to the authority
of this triumvirate
of his approximate contemporaries,
is symptomatic of a swarm of
intellectual and ideological
problems plaguing various
strains of continental philosophy
and its permutations.
Ironically, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud,
unlike so many of their
self-proclaimed successors,
do not downplay or ignore
Darwin's immense significance.
Whereas the majority of the
continental philosophers
of the past century
underestimate the far-reaching
radicality of the Darwinian revolution,
a sizeable number of analytic philosophers
tend to the opposite extreme
of overestimating it.
Along with Hegel, the figure
of Darwin marks a fork
of fundamental divergence
between the continental
and analytic traditions, broadly speaking.
Although I have
reservations about hyperbole
in Daniel Dennett's
trumpeting of Darwinian
evolutionary theory as a
quote-unquote "universal acid,"
I readily acknowledge the
incredible potency and magnitude
of the Darwin event.
To employ Badiou's language
in a fashion he himself
probably would not.
My wager is that dispelling
the myth of the non-given,
while nonetheless
preserving its insistence
on an intimate rapport between
subjectivity and negativity,
as should be obvious by
now, my antipathy toward
mystical varieties of lacks by
no means entails my sympathy
toward lack-denying
positivisms or organicisms,
or anything else in
these scientistic veins.
This demands evolutionary
phylogenetic explanations
of the natural emergences
of the de-naturalized,
more-than-natural negativities
inherent to real subjects
qua subjectivity proper.
That is, as irreducible to garden-variety
pseudo-scientific naturalisms.
For any philosophical
or psychoanalytic system
reconciled with the
natural sciences and allied
with historical and
dialectical materialisms,
a rapprochement with
Darwin's ideas is requisite.
With respect to the
Lacan discussed earlier
in this intervention, a non-mystical,
thoroughly materialist account
of the historical genesis
of the ontogenetic ground
zero of the biomaterial
body in pieces needs the help of Darwin
and his evolutionary-theoretic heirs.
Without accepting such assistance,
Lacanianism leaves itself
divided from within
by an unsustainable self-contradiction,
in which it is split
between ontogenetic atheism
and phylogenetic theism.
On this matter, a choice
formally configured
as a Badiouian point,
that is a decision between
two irreconcilable alternatives
with no third way available,
thrusts itself forward.
In the terms of heavy-handed
American bumper-sticker
sloganeering, this is a
choice between the Jesus fish
and the Darwin amphibian.
Also related to the concocted controversy
surrounding evolution in
America's culture wars,
neuroscientist David Linden
lays out an elegantly simple
and utterly devastating
argument against anti-Darwinian
proponents of so-called
intelligent design.
In his 2007 book, The Accidental Mind,
how brain evolution has
given us love, memory,
dreams and god, he represents the human
central nervous system as
a quote-unquote "kluge".
Quote: "The brain is a kluge,
a design that is inefficient,
"inelegant and unfathomable,
but that nevertheless works."
End quote.
Linden stresses that the
human brain is in fact
unintelligently designed,
insofar as it is the
contingent byproduct of
countless uncoordinated
evolutionary accidents,
in which again and again
the relatively newer is
tossed into an intricate
but sloppy mix with the
comparatively older.
Hence, this organ of
organs is quote-unquote
"poorly organized," a quote-unquote
"cobbled-together mess."
Aficionados of American
television can think of this
as the Macguyver picture of the brain.
The human central nervous
system would have to be
Exhibit A for those of
America's culture warriors
who still to this day
desire to re-prosecute
the 1925 Scopes trial.
As is common knowledge, the
anti-evolution advocates
of intelligent design rest
their case on the move
of emphasizing the
complexity of organic beings
and maintaining that such
complexity is inexplicable
on the basis of the
blind, random mechanisms
proposed by Darwinian models
of evolutionary processes.
They believe Darwin and his
followers to be fatally unable
to answer questions as
to how highly functional
and seamlessly organized
organisms could arise
from the unguided chaos
of a physical universe
of contingencies without teleologies.
The human brain, if anything,
would be the pinnacle
of such stunning sophistication
in the natural world.
Its networked assemblies
of astronomical numbers
of neurons and synapses
come together to generate
and sustain seemingly
miraculous mindedness
and everything this brings with it.
Linden's concise
neuroscientific refutation
of intelligent design
consists of an additional move
beyond just establishing
the anorganic klugeyness
of the anatomy and physiology
of the central nervous system.
This by itself already would be enough,
since a demonstrable lack
of the organicist features
of functionality, organization and so on
is sufficient to cast reasonable doubts
on the claim that an intelligent designer
intentionally built a
marvelously elaborate
and synchronized material seat
suited for his human subjects.
The further step Linden takes
in driving home his critique
is to assert, on the basis
of ample supporting evidence,
that the brain is endowed
with its wondrous mind-making powers,
celebrated by proponents and
critics of evolution alike,
specifically by virtue of its klugeyness,
resulting from an absence
of intelligent design.
In Linden's hands,
the kluge model of the
central nervous system,
this is equivalent to, in my terms,
an anorganic barring of the corpo-real
of the brain in particular,
this model elevates the
deficit of overarching harmony
or synthesis therein to
the ontological status
of a primitive cause at the
level of biomaterial being
in and of itself.
This perspicuous line of
thought transforms the example
of the human brain into a Trojan horse
in relation to advocates
of intelligent design.
Linden turns the star piece
of evidence appealed to
in their case into the
very thing refuting it
most decisively.
Furthermore, Linden's
argument subtly hints
at an implication of even great import.
The absence of God is the
ultimate negative ur-cause
in a physical universe
internally producing
and containing human beings
and their subjectivities.
The key principle behind anorganicity,
with klugeyness being one
of its manifestations,
can be stated through an
inversion of a cliche,
more is less, rather than as
the saying goes, less is more.
For instance, the klugey corp morcelé,
shot through and permeated
with antagonisms, conflicts,
deficiencies, fissures,
gaps, splits and the like,
is not a materialization
of the factical givenness
of a mysterious void.
The myth of the non-given,
with its mystical, metaphysical
version of negativity,
proceeds on the basis
of a less-is-more logic,
with less of a primal nothingness
giving rise to the more
of really-existing subjects.
By contrast, my anorganic approach,
substituting for this type
of myth a non-mystical
physical version of negativity,
proceeds on the basis
of a more-is-less logic,
with the more of a contingent,
non-teleological accumulation
of material bits and pieces
giving rise to the less
of discrepancies and
discordances within and between
these fragments.
As per the more-is-less
principle of the anorganic,
surplus is a positivity, as unplanned,
uncoordinated agglomerations
of mute, idiotic entities
and events dialectically tip over into
deficits of negativity.
Put in terms familiar to
government bureaucrats,
computer programmers and tax lawyers,
with the increasing
complexity of organic systems,
as with all systems, such
as political institutions,
software codes and bodies of laws,
with the increasing
complexity of organic systems
comes a proportional increase
in the number of bugs
and loopholes immanently
generated within and through
systemic complexity itself.
In Lacanian parlance, both
symbolic and real systems
can and do succumb to self-barring.
Lacan's crucial concept
of the body in pieces,
and other ideas of his
related to this concept,
once plugged into the
theoretical framework
of transcendental materialism
and its anorganicism,
go from being dogmatically
asserted givens,
always already there out of thin air,
to becoming psychoanalytic
and philosophical touchstones
anchored in solid science-consistent
materialist thinking.
Likewise, as regards the threshold between
philosophy of nature
and philosophy of mind
in the more than logic Realphilosophie
of Hegel's Encyclopedia,
the dialectical dynamics of
anorganicism permit speculating
that the movement from
animal to human organisms
transpires when growth
in the natural complexity
of the animal organism crosses
a certain tipping point.
Past this point, animal anorganicism,
qua harmonious organization,
short-circuits itself
in acquiring a critical mass
of inner incompatibilities
between its parts, thereby
igniting the bursting forth
of anorganic structures and phenomena.
The more of animal
complexity leads to the less
of the negativities lying
at the base of human being,
qua minded spiritual humanity.
The plus of positive natural
additions transitions
to the minus of
de-naturalizing subtractions.
The French biologist and
Nobel laureate Jacques Monod,
in his 1970 book Chance and Necessity,
an essay on the natural
philosophy of modern biology,
provides an indispensable refutation of an
all-too-widespread misconstrual
of evolution in biology.
Therein he incisively observes that quote
"evolution is not a
property of living beings,
"since it stems from
the very imperfections
"of the conservative mechanism
which indeed constitutes
"their unique privilege." End quote.
In other words, evolution does not unfold
as a smooth, continuous
succession of fluid flowerings
in which unbroken sequences
of clockwork living spheres
blossom out of one another
with placid balanced beauty,
as imagined in the fantasies
of organicist holism.
Instead, evolutionary
changes happen if and when
any number of things go
terribly wrong for organisms
in relation to their bottom-line strivings
to perpetuate themselves
as individuals and species,
as in genetic mutations,
environmental catastrophes,
and so on.
Instances on the scale of
phylogeny, of what Lacan,
citing Hegel, calls quote
"the fruitful illness,
"life's happy fault," end
quote, on the scale of ontogeny.
Hence, Monod justifiably
concludes that evolution
is antithetic to life, insofar
as occurrences of evolution
are moments when life as
it is gets traumatically
disorganixed and truncated.
He also later states that quote,
"the accelerating pace
of cultural evolution
"was to split completely away
from that of the genome."
End quote.
However, the anti-natural revolution
of the immanent material genesis
of, in Hegelian locution,
Geist out of Natur, is
nevertheless a trajectory
internal to evolution in
Monod's broadened sense.
What is more, a precise
parallel can be drawn
between Hegel's treatment
of war as a spiritual event
with Monod's treatment of
evolution as a natural event.
For Hegel, periods of
pleasing tranquility are
historical quote-unquote "blank pages"
of socio-cultural stagnation,
punctuated by bracing,
make-or-break episodes
of disruption in the form
of violent conflagrations.
For Monod, evolution is to life
what war is to peace for Hegel.
If human beings or animal
organisms sicken to death,
this fateful derailment
of the natural into the
more-than-natural, occurs
by virtue of the real
dialectical dynamics of the anorganic,
as a self-induced
sickening of nature itself,
a nature already weak
and rotten on its own,
prior to its further
decompleting of itself
through belching out humanity.
Avatars of the myth of the
non-given instantiate the gesture
of adding a supernatural nothing,
so as to explain away this enigmatic,
de-naturalized transcendence
that is nonetheless
puzzlingly immanent to the natural world.
An advocate of transcendental
materialist inorganicism
risks the step of subtracting
from the natural world
what these worshipers
of mystical negativity
presumptively attribute to it,
such that they then feel
compelled to have faith
in a rigid, brittle anti-naturalism,
threatened by the advances
of the natural sciences.
Interfacing the anorganic logic of
the more-is-less principle
with the life sciences
and evolutionary theory
is the key to a material
rather than mystical negativity.
This key opens the door
to an ontological vision
of human subjects as
entirely contained within,
but not fully constrained by,
the lone physical universe
within which they arise.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Slavoj Zizek.
- Okay.
First, as both of my
colleagues already said,
I also would like to
give my sincere thanks
to all of you who are
here, to Claire, Todd,
and to Stanley,
I hope you saw that shitty
film, I didn't like it,
I Am Legend. (audience laughs)
Very reactionary third version,
I think you are one of
the few guys in Manhattan
who has the right to say,
at least for us leftists,
I am legend.
(applause)
Let me begin with, because
we are at the level
of this crucial debate,
what is materialism today,
although I think that Lenin's
Materialism and Empiriocriticism
is one of the worst books
of all times, but he
was right when he said
with every new scientific
discovery and so on,
materialism has to be reinvented.
And I think this task awaits us.
Because, just to give you a
hint where I want to move,
did you notice a very strange thing?
Till, I would say very
approximately, it doesn't matter,
1920s, idealism or spiritualism,
versus materialism,
was infinite versus finite.
You know, throughout 19th century,
materialists were saying we
are just bodies, limited,
idealists were saying,
no no, we have an inner
eternal soul, infinite above.
But did you notice how,
somewhere, I would say,
Sein Und Zeit, Heidegger's, on,
but maybe, just maybe, I
don't have time to go into it,
although I would love to,
in a much more subtle way,
from Kant already,
the finitude, in the sense
of us being constrained,
irreducibly embodied to
our bodily existence,
far from limiting us from the contact
to the supra-sensible, however we word it,
becomes the very space
which opens up, sustains our
contact with another dimension.
You know how the story
goes, the typical so-called,
yes and I have Goebbels reaction,
I draw my gun when I hear this
word, post-secular thought.
How do they go? The say no no of course,
God doesn't exist as the highest entity,
but, as they say, we are constrained
to our irreducible finitude.
Which means we will
never be masters of life.
We are limited, when we think to the edge,
we encounter the void.
And then, take your path.
On is in that void, not
God is the highest entity,
but the void itself calls us, as whatever,
ethical address in Levinas
and so on and so on.
And if you don't believe me,
just think about a strange fact.
One of the top, I admit
it, cinema directors,
Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian.
Did you notice how he's at the same time
the ultimate, maybe not New Age,
but nonetheless spiritualist,
and the ultimate director
of immersion into earth.
You remember those legendary
shots from Stalker and so on,
a typically Tarkovskyan spiritual
experience is not up up,
but literally, you even put
your hand into mud, into water,
there is the spirit.
And maybe you will not agree with me,
my solution here is a
crazy and radical one.
Yes, bodily materiality, with
all that bullshit, you know,
life world, what Marxists
who like early Marx,
the worst one for me, like
the bodily concrete existence,
not abstract scientific materialism,
but the way we are embedded
in concrete context.
This is idealism today
and notions like eternity,
immortality, abstract disembodied reason,
this what we should accept.
I'm for total turning around here.
Let's not be, the way to be
really materialist today,
means to accept a much more
abstract level of matter,
where, now I will be very
spiritually aggressive,
you know I'm tired of
materialists who think,
like in Tarkovsky's films,
no that to be a materialist
you must get dirty and put
your hat into mud or whatever.
Now okay, let me begin how I would like
to complicate things.
Because I would like to
begin with a question to you,
which is a rhetorical question,
I don't allow you to answer it now.
(audience laughs)
You used a couple of times the term
transcendental materialism.
I agree, but did you get it, I didn't,
what the fuck did you exactly mean by it?
Answer prohibited, you do afterwards.
(audience laughs)
Let me see where I see the problem.
I would like to begin, and
you Martin also began with it,
I agree, with certain critical
distance towards Heidegger.
Okay, we all know, among other things,
conditions of possibility is formula of
transcendental approach.
When you see, think, you should step back
in a reflexive way and not be
like fetishistically
fascinated by the task.
What horizon should be here
that we perceive the thing,
like blah blah blah.
Okay, I claim Heidegger is the ultimate
transcendental philosopher.
I know he would reject this claim,
but by transcendental
philosopher I mean simply this.
Of course, radically historicized
transcendental philosopher.
You know Germans have this
wonderful word, unhintergehbar,
you cannot step behind,
the ultimate horizon.
And for Heidegger, what
I call nonetheless,
a transcendental disclosure of being,
the way things, the horizon of meaning,
within each historical epoch differently,
things appear to us is unhintergehbar,
you cannot step behind.
What Heidegger calls Ereignis,
here I agree with Heideggerians,
is not some higher entity,
God up there who pulls the string,
now being is disclosed to you
as absolute Hegelian subject,
then God says enough of this,
now full technology or whatever.
It's just il y a, es gibt.
A totally like impersonal
spiel, transcendental game.
It's not the name of a,
here those stupid critics
who think, ooh, Ereignis,
or Sein is Heidegger's
name for God, are wrong.
So which problem do I see here?
First, this approach, and for example,
you know how you recognize
this approach in Heidegger?
As a rule, he likes to
emphasize, whenever,
this is almost one of
Heidegger's which could be
even computer-generated,
in the sense that,
I always like to think about Heidegger as
the ultimate philosopher of technology,
in the sense that
sometimes his formulas are
so predictable, that you can imagine a,
like you know, ask me what
is the essence of anything,
and Heidegger would answer
like the essence of lightness
is the lightness of the essence itself.
(audience laughs)
In my book on Kiewslowski,
I went to the end,
moment of obscenity, and
wrote a Heideggerian,
like he likes to say the
essence of technology
is nothing technological,
that the essence of fucking
is nothing about fuck,
it's the being fucked up,
verborgen, of the essence itself.
You know, it's absolutely correct.
(audience laughs)
But let me be very serious here.
On tendency of Heidegger here,
you can recognize this,
to move towards, let's call it naively,
indifference, irrelevance of the ontic.
Like you know, Heidegger's
answer to, for example,
ooh ooh ooh, Holocaust, this
is not to mock Holocaust,
but the ultimate horror, would have been,
horrible as it is, but
the true catastrophe
is not Holocaust, the true
catastrophe is the Gestell,
and framing, technological
enclosure of mind,
which enabled industrial
production of corpses
that we call Holocaust.
Or even, Heidegger says this directly,
let's say we will all die
with atomic explosion, war.
Heidegger said, already in the late 50s,
when we had that scare,
that no, the true danger
is not the danger of self-destruction.
The true catastrophe already occurred.
The moment we adopted
the disclosure of being
as something at our disposal
for technological exploitation
and so on and so on.
What's my problem here?
First, it's too a too easy
way, I don't agree with it.
The standard way is to
claim that Heidegger plays
this game to cover up the
traces of his catastrophic
ontic engagement, like if
you tell him you were a Nazi,
he will say, ah Nazis,
Communists, liberals,
metaphysically they are all
the same, it doesn't matter.
This is why on the very day of
the capitulation of Germany,
with obvious pleasure
Heidegger wrote, in one of his,
I don't know which text, I
remember on that day he said,
don't we see, nothing
was decided with this,
ontologically unimportant
that Hitler lost, and so on.
This is too simple, I have another,
and here I approach your topic,
totally naive problem with Heidegger here.
First it will appear naive,
then I will tell you,
it returns from
late 1920s, already even there
are traces in Sein und Zeit,
up till some of his last,
I wouldn't say texts,
seminars like this seminar on
Heraclitus, with Eugen Fink.
This very naive problem.
Okay, what is unhintgehbar
is, what we go behind,
because Heidegger's reply,
I don't agree with him,
to you for example would have been,
okay Darwinism blah blah.
But isn't it that as a Darwinist,
you already approach nature
with a certain a priori
horizon of understanding.
Nature is something, evolution
which can be described
through scientific way, and you know,
this horizon is already here.
The problem I see is extremely naive,
and you find touching moments,
some of them were pointed out
in his seminar on the animal,
no sorry, lectures by
Heidegger which I think is
one of the most beautiful Derridan texts,
namely, that Heidegger is not an idiot.
He knows very well that
very disclosure of being,
the event of certain
epochal disclosure of being,
is not ontic creation.
That's crucial, no?
Heidegger doesn't say
Ereignis creates entities.
Yes, but fuck you, what does this mean?
And Heidegger asks the obvious question.
First quote, from '29/'30,
a letter from that period.
"I often ask myself,
that has for a long time
"been a fundamental question for me,
"what nature would be without man?
"Must it not resonate through him in order
"to obtain its own potence."
You notice how Heidegger here,
the question here clearly oversteps
the transcendental horizon
of how nature is disclosed.
Heidegger directly asks,
but how is nature precisely,
to put it very brutally,
naively, outside Ereignis.
If we don't believe this,
even in Sein und Zeit,
with all that ontology and ontology,
he says at some point,
of course things exist independently,
no not exist, that's the point.
Things are out there independently
of dasein, even sein,
but they don't exist in the ecstatic sense
that you, Martin, disclosed.
They are, not even are, just out there,
they don't exist.
So its interesting how Heidegger,
who is supposed to be the philosopher who
returned, or reaffirmed
the ontological approach,
admits his impossibility
blindness to going this direction.
And I would still say that,
it's maybe paradoxical,
that the same ambiguity that you, Adrian,
detected in Lacan, I agree with you there,
you find it even with Heidegger.
You know, in his seminar
on fundamental concepts
of metaphysics, one of
the most interesting ones,
I think '29, '30.
You know, that famous definition,
Derrida has a wonderful
detailed analysis of it
as objects, dead objects,
whatever this means,
in the world, like a stone,
are weltlos, without world,
an animal is weltarm, poor in the world,
we humans are beings in the world,
a world in the sense of
horizon of disclosure of being,
the world opens up to us.
Now, of course the obvious
question to Heidegger here
would have been, is it not
that the moment you call
an animal as weltarm, by what
do you measure the animal?
By humans who are fully in the world?
So, what does this mean?
Now the standard transcendental
answer would have been,
you're asking a traditional metaphysical,
phylogenetic, whatever, question.
The fact is that we as human beings,
are irreducibly within the world.
We cannot step on our
head and ask how animals,
ask how whatever is outside
the horizon of being.
So of course he would
say animals are weltarm,
with comparison to us.
But we cannot think outside this.
It's 100% reason because
it's being, Ereignis,
but being discloses itself
only through dasein,
being there.
But this is not all.
For example, and again
here we have here and there
this topic which moves to a
totally different terrain,
and you Martin who
probably knows much more
about Heidegger than me, I wonder how you
would react to this.
Namely to a terrain which I
think moves much more to a,
although this is maybe not the right term,
here I concede, to something like typical
German romantic tradition,
selling some mystics,
the tradition of so-called,
and Heidegger refers to it,
sorrow in nature.
Benjamin takes over this
tradition when he says
nature is mute suffering.
It's terrible suffering, which
cannot articulate itself,
and the fact that we
humans started to speak,
it's not just us,
nature arrived to, worked to release
its pain through us.
A quote, again, from the same
Heidegger seminar, '29/'30.
"If the privation in certain
forms is a kind of suffering,
"and poverty and
deprivation of world belongs
"to the animals being, then
a kind of pain and suffering
"would have to permeate
the whole animal realm,
"and the realm of life in general."
You see, this is no longer the
claim we are always already
in transcendental horizon.
This is a claim that,
to put it very naively,
there is a certain pain, poverty,
deprivation, already in nature itself.
Or another quote.
"It is in the hope of
requiting the great sorrow
"of nature, of redemption
from that suffering
"that humans live and speak in nature."
So I claim that Heidegger,
the way I see it,
that this remains kind
of a shadowy undertone,
but I don't see Heidegger
really resolving,
or even fully confronting this deadlock.
And I agree with both of you,
here our analysis should begin.
My solution, I wonder
it's the same as yours,
would have been, first I
totally agree with you, Adrian,
that all that poetry
of negativity, it's even worse in Lacan.
You know like Lacan
totally without question
accepts certain definitions,
even some of them
which seem sympathetic to me.
For example, animals can cheat,
but they cannot cheat to cheat.
They cannot lie in the guise of truth.
You know when I suspect you to me,
you that famous, why are you telling me
you are going to Krakow when
you are really going to Krakow?
You know, horror.
The truth immortalized the logic in Marx's
A Night At The Opera, you
know that all-the-time quote
that Groucho Marx, defending
a client in a courtroom.
You know this guy looks as
an idiot, talks as and idiot,
this shouldn't deceive
you, this guy is an idiot.
You now, like this type of
cheating, you don't find.
Not to mention what you said.
Like always this bad nature, not bad,
nature which is stupid,
circular, whatever.
And then even if you
apparently denigrate man,
like you know the man is
the illness of nature,
nature gone crazy, whatever.
Somehow, as you said, this opening void.
Yeah, but you know where
I find here the solution?
And incidentally, Lacan,
it's not as simple as you,
I think that he oscillated
between two extremes,
like Heidegger.
On the one hand, you
have this shitty poetry
of the big other.
We are stupid human animals,
just we want to eat,
to screw, whatever you
want, and then oh my god,
the big other, and then you
have all this terminology
of colonization.
The big other is like a
foreign parasite who colonize,
derails human beings and so on.
But at the same time,
especially in late Lacan,
you find the opposite story,
which is for me more sympathetic,
that something went terribly
wrong in nature itself.
Some excess, not the
big theological thing,
simply some catastrophe.
And then language, far
from being something
de-naturalized is rather
an attempt to restore
some kind of balance.
It's exactly the opposite theory.
Language is not that
intruder who destabilizes us,
it's precisely an attempt
to find stability and so on.
So again, here my solution is
a little bit different one, maybe.
First, I agree with you,
Badiou, his notion of the human animal
who is then disturbed from
time to time by the event,
the problem is, but here comes the catch,
would you agree with it or not?
The problem for me is not the way that
Badiou is usually criticized.
No, like we are all
human animals and then,
from no one knows where,
another basically idealist
whatever divine side, the
call to the event comes.
I claim, Badiou's basic meat
is the human animal itself.
His description of the
non-evental human being
is this simple utilitarian human.
We are utilitarians, we just
want pleasures and so on.
If there is any meaning in Freud,
it's that we humans are not human animals.
In the sense that, you
know, the distortion
is already in our nature.
So, my god, I don't want
to eat time of the others,
at least not more than you,
so I will condense it now.
My solution would have
been, just to hint it,
you know which one.
Not just naturalize all this
transcendental dimension,
but de-naturalize nature itself.
The true question is, how
are we to think nature,
or whatever it was, so
that something like this,
human disclosure event is possible?
And here I find the interest,
although I'm amateur in them,
in things like quantum physics and so on.
I think, and of course
don't misunderstand me,
I become Goebbels and draw my gun,
when somebody says oh quantum physics,
you know our mind creates
reality and all that bullshit.
No, it's the most materialist
theory that you can imagine.
But difficult to think.
So I would say first, how we
have to change the concept
of nature itself, and
here, when you put Marx
into the line of those who
are not these bad poets
of mystical negativity.
But it's nonetheless, you know
I agree with Robert Pippin,
the great American
Hegelian, bourgeois liberal,
yeah yeah, but nonetheless (they laugh),
who nonetheless made a nice remark that
the young Marx, in his
assertion of positivity,
of concrete human being,
becomes too Aristotelian.
He wants to avoid this
theological negativity,
but his is why I hate that
young Marx of, you know,
asserting life powers,
it's Aristotelianism.
We have our certain basic
positive passions and so on,
it's not radical enough.
This is just my problem here.
And I here remind, although I
don't totally follow Derrida,
but what I like in Derrida,
I agree with all of you that
the problem is how to go
beyond the transcendental
without, to be cynical as a joke,
without becoming Quentin Meillassoux,
no how should I put it?
No, to say, without this new realism.
Incidentally, they are not the worst,
I hate much more
so-called new materialism,
you know, I will not go into that.
But okay, and I think that,
I'm tempted to say, it's
not direct naturalism.
I'm more sympathetic, although I wouldn't
follow him concretely, into
what Derrida tries to do,
this idea of a, how
should I call it, meta,
you know of pushing
transcendental reflection
beyond itself.
Not of directly supplementing
transcendental reflection
with some materialist foundation.
You know, it's a very complex
topic, so let me stop now.
The second point, and here
I wonder if you would agree.
I'm now jumping to the second point,
conditions of possibility.
Maybe I don't understand
it in Derridean sense,
but I like this idea of
conditions of possibility
are simultaneously
conditions of impossibility.
Derrida likes to say that often.
I explain this, I understand
this, in the sense of,
for me, one of the most
radical theses of Hegel,
at the beginning of Part Two of Logic,
of Logic of Essence, Logic of Reflection,
where Hegel introduces a
unique category, I love it:
absoluter Gegenstoss,
counterpunch, counter-thrust,
yes, counterpunch, counter-push.
The idea is what?
It is, I think Hegel does
here what Derrida wants to do
and sometimes claims Hegel cannot do it,
but quite often he admits Hegel can do it.
You know, Derrida is, did you notice this,
Derrida was not an idiot,
he was very ambiguous
with regard to Hegel.
Remember always, when
Derrida was once asked,
but which of the philosophers,
in all metaphysical tradition,
is closest to difference?
Fuck it, he said Hegel.
So again, here is the quote,
listen to it, wonderful.
And now I come the
concluding part to politics.
Don't be afraid, it's a difficult quote,
but life is difficult trip,
so you have to suffer it.
"Reflection, therefore,
finds before it an immediate
"which it transcends and
from which it is the return.
"But this return is only
the presupposing of what
"reflection finds before it.
"What is thus found," listen the beauty,
"what is thus found only comes to be
"through being left behind.
"This reflective moment is to be taken
"as an absolute recoil,"
Gegenstoss, "upon itself.
"For the presupposition
of the return into self
"is only in the return itself."
What Hegel says here
is, I claim, wonderful.
It's that the process, and
I think you can detect here
also a temporal dimension,
is that where effectively the
present loses its primacy.
It's a process where something is lost
but doesn't pre-exist the loss.
You know, even in theological
terms you can say this, that.
And Hegel reached like this, the Bible.
There is fall, but what
is this the fall from?
Not from paradise, Hegel says
paradise is animal kingdom,
stupid animals, no?
The fall is fall from goodness.
Yes but, goodness opened
up, when you fall,
you know fall itself constitutes
what it is the fall from.
And let me give you now,
first very problematic,
consciously politics, an example
which I proposed in India,
and typically those
Brahmin cultural critics
didn't like it, the untouchables,
my true friends there,
liked this example, so
class struggle in theory.
You know, I was there at
some meeting when all these
Brahmin cultural critics,
you know who are they,
they are the guys who
if you mention equality,
they say don't force upon us
those imperialist notions.
When you say why don't you abolish castes,
they say no, you want to erase
our unique cultural identity
and so on.
So these guys said something like that.
They complained that the
fact that they are compelled
to use English language in their theory,
is already a form of cultural colonialism,
censoring their true identity.
Their argument was something like this.
We have to speak in an
imposed foreign language
to express our innermost identity.
So even our resistance to our colonization
has to be formulated in the
language of the colonized.
Here I would apply that Hegel.
That is to say, yes, the English
language is imposed on them
and this makes us feel like
we are alienated from our,
but the dimension that
they feel deprived of,
emerged only through this
imposition of English language.
What really was before,
was not any bullshit
of true Indian identity,
was just a bunch of confused
traditions and so on.
You know who knew this, let
me give you another example
that I like.
Malcolm X, no no, I'm really for him,
not just for some stupid patronizing,
secretly racist respect,
he explained very
beautifully X, why Malcolm X.
He said, cut the bullshit
about African roots.
The enslavement made us an X,
and we should be faithful to this X
and find freedom precisely
in this lack of roots.
Cut the bullshit of
returning to African roots,
and so on and so on.
So you see, we get here
a different image of
Hegelian dialectic process.
It's no longer simply, we
get some immediate fullness,
which alienates itself and gets bad.
We have, of course, something is before.
But this is simply a kind of
an inconsistent plurality,
and then you fall, but this fall itself
creates the other dimension
from which you fall.
Slowly to the end.
First, just my third moment.
What I would like also
to emphasize is how,
and here I agree with Badiou,
how the conditions of
possibility are precisely
something which cannot be
used to adequately describe
what even Derrida uses sometimes the term,
encounter, or act, the new.
The best formal definition,
for me, of radically,
historically new phenomenon,
revolutionary and so on,
is precisely, and different philosophers
put this very nicely,
something which appears, till it happens,
as impossible, and then once it happens,
it retroactively creates its
conditions of possibility.
Now you will say I'm
bullshitting postmodern games.
No, I will refer to most
immediate metaphysic,
sentimental experience you may have.
You fall in love.
But you cannot say, I have fallen in love
because of this and that and that.
If you do this, I claim
it's not true love,
it's mental accountancy.
Like there are, I don't want to be sexist,
there are three girls here,
one has beautiful legs,
the other breasts and eyes, the
third one I don't know what,
and I make you know,
legs, ah this has three,
three to one actually
means I fall in love.
(audience laughs)
No, love is like a religion here.
You know, true theological statement is,
if you become religious
because you were convinced
by the arguments for this
religion, this is a blasphemy.
Now you will say this
is religious bullshit.
I'm sorry to tell you, Marx
says exactly the same thing,
when he says that Marxism
is not an objective theory.
Leftists, we are not
like, you study history,
hey hey, there is a
tendency workers will win,
so let's jump onto the
winning horse, you know.
(audience laughs)
No, you must be, there are arguments for,
but you must be engaged to see the powers
of this argument.
And isn't it that true
acts, political even,
always have this magical aspect.
Like even a well-known ordinary
one, like Tahrir Square.
My god, who expected that?
All of a sudden it was possible.
And of course, all reactionary
liberal sociologists
are trying to convince us that
it wasn't really an event,
it was just you know, in
Egypt, a confused, frustrated,
educated people, it's to de-eventalize it.
My last two or three minutes,
if you'll just allow me.
Example here will be a very sad one.
But here I see a use of the
term conditions of possibility.
And here we have a kind of
a materialist transcendental approach.
You know, true critical mind does what?
When you encounter something terrifying,
and we live in such times, unfortunately.
By terrifying I don't
mean anything moralistic.
At least now I talk about Europe.
I don't want to practice
the eternal America-bashing.
In Europe we are more
and more losing reasons
to be arrogant towards.
You know what's so horrible in Europe?
Things which were simply
unimaginable to be
taken seriously in the public,
like anti-immigrant topics,
you know, 20 years ago you
didn't talk like this in public,
are now acceptable.
People simply don't notice
it, how problematic it is.
And this is the saddest thing,
that even the so-called
left, social democrats,
often accept this.
In the same way as Margaret Thatcher
said something very true.
I'm not a Thatcherite.
She was asked recently, what do you think
is your greatest achievement.
And she said New Labour.
In the sense of, you know, even the enemy
adopted my basic economic approach.
But you know that Jean-Marie
Le Pen said the same.
When he lost elections, years ago,
he said that's my victory.
I lost because all other
parties accepted the topic.
You know, they said, okay Le Pen,
he does it in a wild way, barbaric,
but there is a problem of
immigrants threatening, blah blah.
So if you'll just allow
me quickly to conclude.
I want to tell you, I repeat this,
I hope you didn't already heard them,
two examples of things where really,
we should ask this
transcendental question.
Not be fascinated by the horror,
but what is changing in our,
what Hegel would have called,
sittliche Substanz,
in our ethical collective substance,
that such things are possible?
First is a wonderful
documentary, Act of Killing,
by Joshua Oppenheimer, it's
a story about Indonesian gang
who were doing massive killings in '66,
or when Suharto took over.
You know 2 million Chinese
mostly pretended to be communist
were killed.
These guys shot a movie,
and went into public,
and what is so terrifying
is that they don't even
respect this minimal Nazi constraint of,
you know let's do it discreetly,
kill the Jews or whatever.
In this film, you should see
it, when it will be released,
documentary.
For example, you have a scene, it's real,
it's impossible happens.
You have to see it to believe it.
The film shows a public TV show debate
in some, I forgot which one, yes Medan,
the big city in Indonesia, where,
in front of a public live transmission,
on a big not marginal TV station,
and there is a nice
young woman, a moderator,
who asks one of them, Anwar
Congo is the name of this guy.
Can you please tell us
how did you discover
the most efficient way to rape women?
And then he goes, yes we made experiments,
and we discovered that
one practical way is that
you bring her husband or son and threaten
to cut off his balls if she doesn't,
or that you put wire around
her face, and you hold her,
it's nightmare.
And then the moderator,
I couldn't believe it,
says oh my god, a big round of applause
for Mr Congo's creative
approach, and so on and so on.
You just don't, this is the
naive question, you know.
Don't moralize, but.
I don't blame the Indonesians, you know,
I'm not saying they are barbarians.
No, I claim it's a certain
ethical disintegration
as the result of global capitalism.
My last example, in a way even saddest.
And with this I really conclude.
In Nanjing, a couple of years ago
happened something
unthinkable, to me at least.
An old lady descended from local bus,
and fell down, breaking her hip.
A young guy standing on the bus behind her
who was minimally decent,
sympathized with her
and also stepped down,
although it wasn't his stop,
helped her to stand up, when
he saw that she broker her hip,
he took her to the hospital,
even gave her some money and so on.
Two weeks later, he got
a letter from police,
the woman was prosecuting him.
Claiming that he must have helped her
because he was guilty of pushing her down.
And now comes the horror,
I will try if I will find it, yeah.
This is the horror.
The court gave her right.
The guy went two months
to prison and had to pay,
with following argumentation:
according to common sense,
Bang Yu, that's the guy's name,
had to knock over the woman,
because no normal person would be as kind
as Bang Yu claimed he was.
Yes, the guy got through.
Now, let's not moralize.
I'm not saying Chinese are
like this, or capitalism.
You know, if you ask about
conditions of possibility,
you discover something much deeper.
A friend of mine from China told me this.
Did you notice how in our global
capitalist market society,
the very line between what is public
and private is shifting.
Even places which appear public,
if we are not directly connected,
more and more function like private places
where you are not
responsible for what you see.
Because typically, many
young people in China
when they were asked how they would react,
like if they were to
see an old woman or man
dying there or wounded,
87% said I would ignore it.
But then when asked why, they specified.
They said I would quickly look around.
If there is there CCTV camera,
then I would help him or her,
otherwise not.
I would like to really
conclude with an obscenity,
that's my nature,
link this to another phenomenon.
It may sound more attractive,
but it's even more depressing.
My friend, I don't do such things,
told me that the latest
fashion in hardcore pornography
is so-called public sex.
And very strange phenomenon,
most popular it is
in Hungary, Poland and
post-communist countries.
And, well you can check
it up, go to DNAflicks.
You know what's so shocking,
recently I admit it.
I wanted to check it, I saw one, I opened,
and yes I am now paying the price,
every day I get five messages
like guaranteed in two weeks
three inches longer, you know them.
Okay, but what's so terrifying
is that you have for example
a couple making love in
public, but really in public.
Not in the discreet park or whatever,
like in a bus, on a streetcar.
And how people look, if you look around,
most of the people first are surprised,
then they continue, like they
are in the private space,
ignore it.
And this would be my answer
if you ask the right question.
It's totally wrong,
ideological, when we claim,
oh my god, with all this public control,
digital media, we are losing privacy.
No, public space proper is disappearing.
The tragedy today is that,
even you sit behind you PC,
even if you are connected
with thousands, you are
still in private space.
And this is what, in a way, Kant knew
when he distinguished private
and public use of reason.
Here, as both of you put it,
we cannot bypass philosophy.
Philosophy still provides
the categories to translate
our authentic, and we
shouldn't underestimate it,
this authentic ethical surprise.
My god, how can this happen,
you know to conceptualize it.
(applause)
- I would like to remind
everybody that by eight o'clock,
Zizek has to leave to
go to the JFK airport.
- And I will be so hypocritical,
I would like to stay with you till one.
(audience laughs)
- But I'm gonna therefore
constrict the conversation
among the panelists to a few questions.
Either of you have any
questions for Slavoj,
or either one of you to each other.
- I already asked them questions.
- Would you like to answer his questions?
- Yeah, I renounce.
- Okay.
Well I will start with
the mention that you made
of Lenin's Materialism
and Imperiocriticism.
And one of the things that we've been
debating back and forth about
in terms of the relationship
between materialism and
the natural sciences
has to do with which natural
sciences enjoy pride of place,
and you've been quite adamantly
defending the priority
of quantum physics over anything else,
and you tell me sometimes,
cut the Darwinian crap.
- This is bourgeois propaganda.
- Why don't you speak into
the microphone so people
can hear you?
- Oh sorry.
So will say that I don't see there being
any mutual exclusivity between
contemporary materialism
that faces up to the challenges
posed by quantum physics,
and at the same time also
engages with what is happening
in the life sciences in terms
of both evolutionary theory,
neuroscience, and even genetics too.
So I think there's no problem there.
- The transcendental materialists.
- Yes, transcendental materialism.
Now there are three answers
I'm tempted to fall back on,
that I'll briefly
mention but I don't think
they're the real answers.
First, I think you yourself
provide a lovely definition
of this in Less Than Nothing.
You have the section in the
ontology of quantum physics
where you use the very
phrase, and you say here's
essentially what it means,
it terms of thinking
the immanence of
transcendental subjectivity
to the ontological level of substance,
and how that forces a change
in how we conceptualize
substance or nature itself.
But of course, using a
different phrase brings out
sides of Hegel that
have been fully eclipsed
by the history of his reception,
including thanks to Pippin and others
who don't have any trouble with
this side of him whatsoever.
So in a certain sense,
it's talking about what
a particular version of
Hegel modified in response
to post-Hegelian developments,
especially in other fields,
would look like.
So there's that answer.
The second answer would
be that this perhaps
come up with a phrase,
and it starts to function
a bit like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction,
or Hitchcock's MacGuffin,
where it signals a sense
of how things come together
in terms of a number
of different argumentative
strands that you can't quite
put your finger on, and that
it has a certain mystery to it
that of course requires you
to revisit it again and again.
I think I can make it very precise though.
And the really precise
version is to say that this is
a matter of thinking, reflective
subjectivity is itself
fully immanent to the
ontological level of substance,
and that would involve
reactivating the program
of German idealism, especially
a la Schilling and Hegel.
But in doing so, to say
that if this is done
in a materialist way, that
one has to look at the link
between subjectivity and
substance in specific areas,
and in particular I think,
biology enjoys a certain
pride of place there that
quantum physics would not have.
And so I think if you're
going to account for
the manner in which you might say
nature de-naturalizes itself,
becomes self-reflective, etc,
that there I think that certain
sciences rather than others
are the ones that have to be turned to,
and that's why I would
say there is a priority
of the life sciences as dealing
with the mid-scale objects
that human beings are, that
has to be taken very seriously.
But this ends up, though,
with a materialism
that looks very similar,
though, to what you were
pleading for at the start,
which is one that holds to
the reality of things like
infinity et cetera, but
can explain them in a way
that requires no recourse
to dualism, idealism,
theisms et cetera.
And in that way it's
close to your own project,
which of course I invented
the phrase to describe
in my book on your ontology,
and to certain aspects of
Badiou's Logic of Worlds
when he talks about
materialist dialectics.
- Thanks. Basically you
are throwing my own shit
back to my face. (they laugh)
- Yeah, in response to Slavoj's remarks,
I would just like to first of all make
a methodological distinction
that I think is instructive
for parsing someone's
differences in approach.
So I specified four main
philosophical provocations
of the four basic
implications of Darwinism,
and those four were the following.
The living is essentially
dependent on the non-living,
there can be no essential
demarcations of humans
from other animals, that
animated intention is impossible
without mindless inanimate repetition,
and that life is an utterly contingent
and destructible phenomenon.
So if one accepts those four things
as philosophical implications
of the notion of evolution,
and you want a philosophical account to be
responsive to those, I
mean I think there are two
very different routes one can take.
One is to mobilize the empirical sciences
in order to debunk certain
philosophical presuppositions,
and that's part of Adrian's strategy.
What I was trying to do was
something very different,
namely work from within
philosophical concepts
to construct a notion of, say,
temporality, living and so on,
that is responsive to those implications
but doesn't authorize itself
in the name of the sciences,
but rather produces a
philosophical account
that is compatible with
and consistent with that.
And that speaks to, I
think, Slavoj's observation
about what Derrida does
in his work on animality,
when he treats philosophers'
treatment of animals,
he does precisely this.
Instead of amassing,
say, empirical evidence
that there's no essential separation
between humans and other animals,
he looks at how this
distinction is articulated
philosophically, and he
tries to show internally
the contradictions of that approach.
And thereby bringing out
the philosophical stakes
of the question.
And when you put through that route,
then you're no longer authorizing yourself
in the classical materialist way with
references to the sciences.
You're rather doing internal,
conceptual philosophical work,
and that's what I was trying to spell out.
- I just wanna intervene
a little bit here.
In the first place,
one of the things that
may have been a little,
if not obscure, a little bit unexplained,
as to why Lenin's Materialism
and Imperiocriticism
is considered by Zizek to be a lousy book.
It is an example of
mechanical materialism.
I mean, I just wanted to
explain to the audience.
Lenin, before he is sitting
in Switzerland in 1916,
and he reads Hegel's logic,
is a follower of his master,
his master in philosophy was Plekhanov.
And Plekhanov was a
mechanical materialist.
I mean his understanding of the dialectic,
and his understanding of Hegel,
was at the very least, minimal.
And his work deeply influenced Lenin.
One of the things that
people don't realize
is that we have a famous
scientist, you've heard of him,
Albert Einstein.
He read from Ernst Mach,
a very interesting speculation,
and I'm gonna get to
the point in a minute.
But that speculation was
the theory of relativity.
And what he set about to do for Mach
was to actually give
it a mathematical form
and to refine it.
Now one of the most interesting aspects
of this kind of thinking,
is that if you depend
on the natural sciences,
physics, chemistry, biology,
as they presently exist,
and do not take the European 19th century
conception of science,
which includes philosophy,
then what you do is you
rigorously exclude speculation.
And if you rigorously exclude speculation,
what you have done is you
have sunk into a version
of mechanical materialism.
Further questions.
- Can I jump in.
So, to avoid misunderstanding,
I hope we are on the same level here.
My god, I wrote a book, a
selection of texts of Lenin,
so it's not a question of dismissing--
- No no, I'm not
dismissing Lenin entirely.
- Lenin. But you know, I
totally agree with you.
You know where I would
also see Lenin's limit.
Like you know Lenin is obsessed
by this typically Kantian,
but in a bad sense, approach,
like we are here caught
in our representations,
and is there reality
independently out there?
But no, my answer is not the idealist one.
It's not out there, it's just in my mind.
It is out there, but we are
also out there, part of it.
You know, the problem of
Lenin is he isn't aware,
the way he talks, he reproduces
this mechanical dualism,
as if we are here, reality is out there,
we basically reflect it,
and then this oh my god,
can we jump over our shadow?
We don't have to jump, we are out there.
- All we have to do, by they way, is read
Hegel's phenomenology
differently than has been read
even by Marx, early, and we
begin to get an understanding
of what you just said.
Hegel does argue that
consciousness and its object
are really in many ways
dialectically linked.
And while it may be
considered a version of
absolute idealism, which
I think is external
to Hegel's thinking,
and it gets its apogee
in the Philosophy of Right,
what is true is that the world,
I mean we're talking about nature,
the world and us are not different.
We are not different.
Which is not to say that we're identical,
but we're variations of the same thing.
Adorno says, for example,
that he is a product of natural history,
he always said that.
Which is a rejection of
the Kantian mind-body,
mind-nature distinction,
but at the same time it doesn't mean
that there are no differences.
And that those differences are significant
but they're significant within the content
of the natural world, the
concept is not one of antinomy.
That's really a very
important distinction,
and most people aren't up
to that yet, unfortunately.
Any further questions between you?
- I actually wanted to
respond to one other point,
which had to do with,
when Slavoj you signaled
your agreement with
Pippin about Marx is being
to Aristotelian in an early period.
- Just that specific point.
- Yes, I know that.
- When we take over, Pippin goes to gulag,
we agree here, just that specific point.
- Well, first of all, I
think that Marx's appeal
to Gattungswesen, you in
this Feuerbachian vein
prior to 1845,
I think that that already in its own terms
is formulated in those 1844
manuscripts can be salvaged.
- Can be?
- Yes.
- Okay, here we have a small difference.
- Yeah, can be salvaged,
but in addition I think that
one has to keep in mind, contra Althusser,
I don't agree with the Althusserian thesis
of the 1845 break, that what happens is
that you see when Marx and
Engels get very excited
with Darwin after Origin
of Species comes out.
- Did you know that
Marx wanted to dedicate
Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin
privately conservative.
- Yes, and then have Engel's
speech at Marx's grave--
- Yeah, gentlemen, we've
got to get to the audience.
- I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
- We are your audience, we
are like communist leaders,
we know better than you
what is good for you.
(audience laughs)
- I take my direction from
the central committee.
(audience laughs)
- [Audience Member] I have
this question to Zizek.
So whether it's transcendental materialism
or some other form of materialism
that Lacan introduces,
how should we start the
dialogue with sciences,
with politics, about this new materialism,
and introduce this idea.
I mean, I think Lacan
made the most public,
but if you could say how
this dialog or this discourse
could be started about
reinventing the materialism
based on his existentialism.
- This is a very difficult question,
and I would prefer not to bluff too much,
and confess publicly that
I cannot give you now,
I admit it openly, I cannot
give you a clear blueprint.
The only way, and I
think we all agree here,
literally all, sincerely,
is that although the
thesis is recently popular
with some vulgar, not good, Darwinists,
or even quantum people
like Stephen Hawking,
in his last bestseller, I forgot the name,
he says at the very beginning,
now science, so-called,
science is able to formulate
questions which were once
the privilege of philosophy,
metaphysics, the origin of the universe,
what is thinking, so philosophy is dead.
I agree here, no.
I claim that Hawking
himself is a proof of it.
After these disparaging remarks,
who needs philosophy it's dead,
then when he defines his own approach,
he does it, what he
proposes, a couple of lines,
I quote this in the
chapter on quantum physics,
I think in my Less Than Nothing,
it's such vulgar
instrumental utilitarianism
that it's absolutely not
strong enough even to recapture
the ontological,
epistemological consequences
of what he himself is
doing later in the book.
So, I'm afraid if I disappoint you,
but I'm not talking about any
patronization of sciences.
They are, some of them at
least, very bright guys.
There are guys who are not
bright, like Steven Pinker,
we agree?
He really simplifies so much.
But there are guys who are very bright,
so it's not a question of we know more.
But, philosophical dimension
is absolutely needed,
science will not do the entire job.
That's all I can say now,
reasonably, I'm sorry.
- [Audience Member]
Yeah, I've got a question
for Adrian Johnson, actually.
In terms of nothing qua being
being dependent on language,
I'm curious if negativity
is something that's,
does it signify that something's
missing ontologically,
or phylogenetically, or
both, and which comes first?
Because in certain places you seem to say
that being is exiled because of language,
but yet it seems that, in
transcendental materialism
it's the rupture within the
biological that occurs first.
- Yes, that ultimately on
the evolutionary scale,
I would say it's that
something goes wrong,
there's a rupture, a break
that happens at the level
of the quote-unquote natural,
that then gives rise to
what subsequently achieves
a degree of independence
from its natural origins
or grounds, and we can
think of as the phylogenetic
and ontogenetic dimensions
of specifically human history
as irreducible to, yet not ontologically
different in kind from,
nature in this altered sense.
Now Slavoj and I are both on
the same page with the idea
that in a so-to-speak, the
gesture of naturalization
is a sword that slices in
two directions, not just one.
It isn't simply a matter
of a kind of mechanical
or eliminative move, in
which you reduce down
in one way only, but
that of course to have
a science and a vision
of nature that includes
the weird sorts of subjects that we are
requires actually altering
the very image of nature
that the sciences
perhaps were presupposing
over the course of their
history up through the present.
And so Lacan himself
formulates the question
in the time of his 11th seminar,
as well, what would a science be like
that included psychoanalysis,
and the sorts of
strange subjects that
are of course the foci
of analytic concerns, both
clinical and theoretical?
So in that sense you
could think of this move
as almost like, I used the
term Trojan horse in the paper,
that by rendering all
this immanent to nature,
by naturalizing it in that sense,
there's a reciprocal
demand that the very notion
of nature be transformed
so as to accommodate this.
Now as far as negativity or
nothingness being introduced
by language, I don't think
that's Lacan's position even.
Lacan says certain things
that Miller is latching on to
when he issues that statement.
But if you look at, whether it be the idea
of the disharmonies that are
involved in the body in pieces,
whether you look at it
in terms of the triad
of castration, privation and frustration
that is first introduced
in his fourth seminar
on the object relation,
you'll see that Lacan
is trying to develop a notion at the level
of a realist materialism,
of what if you go back to,
for instance, already Locke's
Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
he refers to his primitive causality,
and then you have of course
Kant famously treat this
in his early essay on
his pre-critical piece
from 1763 on negative magnitudes.
And then of course this
comes up in the amphiboly
of the concepts of reflection,
closing the transcendental analytic.
And there's this whole
history behind the idea
of what would a science be
that wasn't positivistic
in the sense of only thinking in terms
of present, incarnate, here and now,
bodies governed by laws
of mechanical motion
in terms of efficient causality.
And a reference that you'll
find interesting here,
and this is the last thing I'll say.
A recently-published book by
a biological anthropologist
at Berkeley, this fellow Terrence Deacon,
he released this book
entitled Incomplete Nature,
How Mind Emerged From Matter.
And he likewise, in a way
that I think can be linked up
with Lacan's question,
what would a science be
that included psychoanalysis, he asked
well how do we account for a causal role
of absence, lack et cetera,
that modern science,
tracing back to Bacon and Galileo,
doesn't really seem to leave room for?
And so he wants to, in a
way, reactivate at the level
of sciences and their ontology,
something along the lines
of primitive causality
and its history in philosophy.
And that is I think
something that should be
borne in mind here in
terms of how I'm operating.
- May I just, very short.
About this phylogenetic
approach, evolution.
But nonetheless, you
know, there is a problem
with phylogenetic approach,
in that when you say a smooth story about
how something emerges, you can reintroduce
a secret teleology, which both
of you already emphasized,
which is why it has to emphasize,
as Stephen Jay Gould does that.
Darwin is not a kind of an
evolutionary progressist,
or whatever.
You know what I want to
say here, the following,
remember that this is the
failure, the limitation
of traditional phylogenetic,
where you tell the smooth story.
Marx himself, you remember,
at the end of Chapter One
of Kapital and elsewhere,
when he provides this
primal accumulation, he
openly says, this is a myth,
continuous myth.
And remember what Marx says
in introduction to Grundrisse.
It may appear as shocking
to those who believe
in phylogenesis in this
cheap evolutionary sense
as to understand something,
you must tell its genesis.
Are you aware that Marx
says exactly the opposite.
In his famous statement,
the anatomy of a man
is a key to the anatomy of the ape.
It's not teleology.
It just means that man emerged out of ape,
not out of some secret
teleology, but contingently.
Which is why you cannot deploy in an
immanent evolutionary way some
kind of progress of nature.
That's my only reserve
towards phylogenetic approach.
Don't confuse it with these
secretly teleological evolution.
- Yes, go ahead.
- Sadly we--
- No excuse me, I'm sorry.
We have a lot of people waiting.
I appreciate your comments, but I think
we need to hear from some
more people. Go ahead.
- [Audience Member] Thank
you for the great talk,
three questions, one to each of you.
Zizek, I'll be quick though.
Zizek, I wanted to know
why you put Tahrir Square
with the public bus as
two ways of thinking about
public space, because
it seems like impossible
becoming possible and
Tahrir Square was possible
because of the conditions of possibility
of the oppression of the
people being represented
in such a way that they would
be able to come together
and start a public space.
It wasn't based on nothing,
it was based on the
possibility of the
oppression being handled
in a public manner.
Where it seems that in the public bus,
what we're seeing is, yes we're seeing the
conditions of oppression,
namely the possibility
of human relations suffering because they
don't know how to
interact with one another,
and of course we would
then go back to ourselves,
because we wouldn't have the possibility
of beginning to form
ourselves on a public space
where we saw the
possibility of our suffering
being made sense of.
Adrian, I wanted to
understand why it is that you
saw in the relation of the
non-given, the lack of,
may I just throw three
questions out, and that's it,
the lack of the non-given,
why you don't see
a critique of materiality
needing to be necessary there,
why you leave it on a mystical ground.
Why don't you show the
mystical as a certain way
of taking up materiality
instead of it just being
a mystical critique of the mystical?
Martin.
- No, no, wait a minute, no no no.
I'm sorry. Two questions is one too many,
but it's perfectly fine, because
we have five more minutes.
- You first, I talked too much.
- Well, the short answer is,
I think that what I laid out
in terms of my presentation,
the myth of the non-given
would still allow room for
being able to come up with,
if I understand your question correctly,
come up with an account of
these, what I'm labeling
obviously in a provocative
pejorative fashion,
mystical versions of negativity.
Certainly, my position would
not require dismissing those
as utterly negligible, in fact
part of what I wanted to do
is to show that you can
capture so much of what is
enshrined in religious,
spiritualist, idealist et cetera
traditions, but without
having to subscribe to
any kind of what I think
philosophically and scientifically
problematic sort of ground zero axioms
underpinning your position
that would involve
in some way or another being a dualist,
an outright idealist, et cetera.
That you can account for the
immanent material genesis
of what previously seemed
only accountable for
in a way that would require
a non-materialist approach.
And in this I'm faithful to
the Marx of the 11 theses
on Feuerbach, specifically
the first thesis,
where he talks about
the difference between
contemplative materialism, up
to and including Feuerbach,
and then the new sort of
materialism that he is
struggling to articulate,
that would not just dismiss
all of what came before
as illusion et cetera,
but would show why the
idealist temptation exists
and be able to account for
it without reducing away
in an unsatisfactory fashion those things
that we want to hold
onto, that are reflected
in religion, et cetera.
- Two phrases, really.
First, when you spoke about
mystic, yeah we should,
I agree with you.
But also, in a critical sense,
namely in the sense that,
and I think this is crucial today,
we should recognize and
not even necessarily
some kind of fallen,
non-authentic form of the sacred,
mystical experience, in
phenomena which can be quite low.
I think that there is not
necessarily anything great
in spiritual, like two
provocative examples.
Did you see that shitty movie, Project X?
Young nurse organizing an
orgy, I mean a party that goes,
that's sorry the
experience of sacred today.
Let me go even more further.
Did you, were you affected
by that ultimate madness,
the song which is now a
mega-hit, Gangnam Style?
I'm sorry, this is sacred today.
Public space, I don't
have time to go into this,
just this that I hope my point was clear.
Public sex for me works
in a Budapest streetcar,
precisely because it
remains private space.
Stop, I don't have time now.
- [Audience Member] First
of all, thank you so much.
I have a question for Adrian Johnson.
I'm curious what you make
of Julia Kristeva's theory
of semiotic and the
somatic biological origin
of psychic urges which
inform our language,
where that fits into your ...
- The short answer, and
I think we're constrained
to short answers at this point.
The short answer is that I
consider Kristeva's version
of the semiotic-symbolic
distinction as introduced
in for example, Revolution
in Poetic Language,
to be basically a new-fangled
version of Bergsonism.
And if you go back and
you read the Bergson
of say Time and Freewill, or
Creative Evolution et cetera,
you'll see that basically
all of the conceptual
machinery is in place for a
lot of what Kristeva is after.
And I consider her treatment of,
and I think this is a problem of those
continental philosophers, many of whom
talk about embodiment, that
they don't want to get down
to actually grappling with
how the body is dealt with
at the level of biology,
and they have various moves
for avoiding that, whether
it's to appeal to a distinction
between oh the lived phenomenal body,
and then there's just the
inert stuff studied by biology,
that's of course a caricature
of the natural sciences
then and even more so now.
And so for me, in a
sense, since I consider
the Bergsonian model
to be very problematic,
I have great difficulty
going along with Kristeva,
and I think also that there
are certain weaknesses
in her account of embodiment
that are shared with,
for instance, the Merleau-Pontian
phenomenological embodiment tradition
and other variations
on this idea of a body
that somehow nonetheless can't
be captured by the sciences.
- You've got the last word.
- [Audience Member] Hi.
So I'll just lay my cards
on the table right away,
I'm not an academic and
I'm not a philosopher,
I'm an artist.
- We are also not academics.
- We're spontaneous philosophers,
as somebody once said.
- So that's the domain that interests me
as far as asking this question of Zizek.
I was talking to a friend of mine about
something that you had
said, I wasn't there,
but you said something
at Zucotti Park about
kind of like nostalgia
and about the danger of,
as he described it to
me, of looking at things
that have happened in
the past, for example,
political movements and
whatnot, like oh the 20s,
and we were young then, or
the 60s or whatever it is.
Or even like last year, or two years ago,
or whatever it is instead
of being in the present.
And so I was just
wondering if you could say
something about that, about nostalgia.
- It seems like I have
minus half a minute,
and I would have to run
back in time to answer.
I will be really very brief.
You know, it all amounts to this.
Whenever you have this ecstatic movement,
half a million people on the street,
yeah it's nice.
But I am obsessed by, with
all alcoholic connotations,
the morning after.
You know, like it's easy
to organize a big orgy,
we cry, wonderful and so on.
But you know for me a true political event
is measured by later, when
things return to normal,
how does it really affect everyday life.
For example, in this
sense, I'm not a pessimist.
With all the shit, I know
how '68 was re-appropriated
in this new dynamic capitalism and so on,
but wait a minute.
The way we treat women now,
the way we treat minorities
and so on, there is some achievement.
You simply cannot publicly
talk, dismiss you know.
Till '68, it was, I remember,
I was young then, not now,
it was quite possible
to talk publicly about,
you know, oh rape, it's
ambiguous, who knows,
maybe women secretly enjoy
it, all that bullshit.
But what I'm saying is that
this is what interests me,
and that was my point of critique.
My nightmare was this one.
There was Zucotti Park, it goes away,
and then you know we will
meet every five years
in a cafeteria, my god it was nice there,
and then while we are talking,
my cellphone will ring up,
sorry guys I have to run
to the bank to my job.
You know, and this is
for me the key problem
of the left today, in this sense that,
look, it's a crisis going on,
and I'm not talking
about detailed answers,
but does the left really know,
a very general level, I want
to end with a provocation,
what does it want?
That's why we have this moralism,
like ooh financial
capital, greedy bankers.
Bankers were always greedy,
this doesn't interest me.
The point is, what change in the system,
you know what I mean, like
this idea of what do we want?
Do we want a little bit
more Keynesian capitalism,
a little bit more healthcare,
blah blah, whatever.
Is this enough, or?
Because you know, the
20th century is over,
in all its tragedy and greatness.
Stalinist communism doesn't work,
even the old-fashioned social
democratic welfare state
doesn't work and so on and so on.
It's a serious problem,
and people confront it.
Like in Greece, I was with
Syriza a week before elections.
And after talking to them,
I'm almost tempted to say,
it's horrible, maybe it
was good that they lost.
They really didn't have
an idea what to do.
(audience laughs)
I was a bad influence on
them, because I told them,
screw enthusiasm, think
about secret police,
financial terror and so on.
If Syriza were to take power,
you know capital would start
running around and so on,
they would have needed tremendous
repressive apparatuses,
and I was not calling for police terror,
I was saying if we don't
invent a way how to deal
with this, then either we or someone else
will really have to do it in
Stalinist or totalitarian way.
I stop, I'm sorry.
- I would like to thank our panelists.
(applause)
And the audience.
(applause)
Thanks very much, folks.
