Slavoj Zizek: How To Find Sanity (Part 2)

[Music] it's it's interesting you say there's perhaps something naive in in what you say there um there's a fascinating uh passage in your book i think it's uh when you're talking about heidegger or one of the places when you were talking about heidegger and um you're talking about the end of philosophy there's a quote here you say are we philosophers not bombarded by all sides by the notion that the era of philosophy is over right and it's interesting for me in this in this connection because it's as if you're saying to to me to us today that look there is a drift towards a loss of freedom and a loss of agency and a loss of the subjectivity which is the platform for that agency and that uh as a way of arresting that flow or compensating for it or even reversing that flow there is there are clues perhaps in heidegger which is perhaps surprising from you but anyway there are clues in heidegger when he talks about uh the beginning of thinking rather than philosophy that thinking itself might be this zone in which from a heideggerian point of view at least we rediscover our thinking of our freedom in some way so let me let me put that back to you you said you're not a pessimist so i'm trying to as it will winkle out little bit of the optimism in what i see in your book there in what you say about heidegger and heidegger's opposition between philosophy on the one hand and thinking in the other and what i hear you saying or read you are saying that actually if we start more thinking and less philosophizing we will begin to rediscover some of that subjective freedom or agency that otherwise is becoming attenuated through all the forms that you talked about like surveillance capitalism and so on is that right is there a clue in heidegger about that about agency and freedom and thinking or am i am i getting that wrong no no no no you are not getting it wrong the first thing i would have said is that what makes today the situation dangerous is that another thing that i repeat again and again that the danger of these new limits of our freedom surveillance capitalism and so on is that we do not in our daily interaction experience this is unfree we experience it as our full frequently more freedom searching the web buying what you want and so on and so on so that's one of my eternal phrases the freedom the non-freedom that you experience it as freedom is perhaps the most dangerous uh non-freedom like i spoke with some chinese friends and they told me they almost missed those times 10 years ago when state control meant you look back you see a suspicious guy following you that is no longer needed when you mentioned heidegger here is maybe and if you ask me which is my favorite part of the book to take a narcissistic look at my own book it would be precisely the first part of finale when i deal with heidegger and go on my point is uh and i would maybe later if there will be time like to ask you a question about darida here my point is that what [Music] the situation we were in here a couple of years ago still is that on the one hand traditional philosophical questions were taken over by science if you ask a guy today do we have a free will or not the usual answer is let's look at brain sciences and cognitive sciences and so on if you ask the mega question was the world created is it eternal does it have limit they say look at quantum cosmology and so on this is the position of stephen hawking no philosophy is over on the other hand here the rhythm deconstruction for me and heidegger enter i know about their differences but they are for me in a good sense of the term not in the bad sense the ultimate transcendental philosophers by transcendental i don't mean cantians i mean this idea of what heidegger tries to capture with you talk about the transcendental and just for the sake of our audience here because it's one of those words that has all sorts of associations yeah first of all we're not talking about transcendental as in transcendental meditation or levitation so let's get that off the table number two we're not really talking about kent as in transcendental critique and so on i think what you're talking about here is transcendental as human beings sitting within a horizon of judgment and perception being grounded in the world from which they can make judgments and is interpretations non-transparent and i think that this is what would you agree this is the leader this is what for me derek at his best is doing when you uh when there dies analyzing a text which claims for example stupid example we have an immortal immortal soul darida would not engage in the thing directly and trying to prove that we don't have an immortal soul you just said wait a minute when you claim we have an immortal soul are you aware what kind of implicit presuppositions about the notion of soul mortality and so on you already mobilized here and i think that heidegger's great achievement is that in this sense he historicized the notion of transcendental horizon he has shown that yes we are always thrown in a universe of meaning but there are cuts here cuts in the sense of this horizon yeah meaning what we take as in a good strategy is historically determined okay well let me try and bring it back to those bits of your book at least which are which i read at least as analysis of the world today for once of a better phrase yeah now there's a there is a sentence you you write i've quoted it here i've written it down here where you talk about the the emancipatory potential of capitalist madness and i wanted to ask you whether that's what we're talking about today whether the whether there is some strange equivalence between the kind of freedom that you're describing through being posited through being determined through the agency we might have on the one hand and this capitalist madness on the other hand in other words is there any sense in which that capitalist madness that we see around us is a source of freedom as you seem to be suggesting there all right very very nasty but nasty is for me good good and i would say shamelessly yes what i was thinking about were precisely all those apparent excesses were things as it were go crazy in capitalism no for example the way money functions today not just bitcoins and so on but also are we aware in what strange world we live are we aware that two years ago at the beginning of the pandemic the states were doing something with from the street monetary standpoint should have give birth to a glo [Music] global catastrophe they were printing money like crazy distributing money outside the laws of the market and so on and so on and at least till now the catastrophe didn't happen so my idea is here i agree because i'm often critical of him with my friend janice varuvakis that capitalism is radically changing today it is no longer the old capitalism that we knew for example things like bitcoin for example what is happening now with big companies mega corporations and so on the bad thing is of course that this is a form of neo-feudalism although i don't like this term but the good thing is that even here within capitalism itself a new social space emerging the space for example of the internet and so on and that it opens up a new dimension of freedom but at the same time it poses an incredible danger and this tends to interest me for example do you remember when elon musk wanted to buy was it twitter or whatever yes and then and then he said in a moment of metaphysical madness that the future of our civilization depends on this because if i own it i will keep it free if another a big company or state only it will encroach upon our freedom but this art if i may put it like this signs of the system falling apart in some sense in itself that's what gives yeah well let me let me pursue that i mean you i think used the word earlier naive i wonder if some people listening into this might wonder if that's a little bit naive to think that there is that benign side to capitalism i mean setting aside the oddities of elon musk's personality yes say okay let's say elon musk had bought twitter and part of his purpose beyond the profit that you might make was to secure a space for free speech and so on you know and in that to that extent something that you would endorse because you you know you're a progressive maybe communist whatever philosopher you believe in freedom of speech yeah yeah yeah of course i think the criticism some people might level out you as well that's fine but it's still owned by elon musk and he could still shape censor limit control influence the dialogue that's supposedly free on twitter should he wish to and in any case what about all the advertising and all the rest of it that's that's creating the context in which those supposedly free discussions and thoughts are are happening so just just help help the skeptics with that criticism i mean are you being a little bit naive about that okay i have a double answer here first i like the word naivety because quite often don't you agree our first naive impression is more proofful in what sense look at the ukraine i hate people who say it's not so simple that russia attacked the situation is more complex yeah yeah yeah but we shouldn't forget the basic fact that russia brutally attacked another independent country but what i want to say is that i am not here naively optimist i at the same time i would say that i am okay let's take elon musk twitter but don't you think that at the same time in what sense does he open a new potential space of freedom he centralizes the field but what if then we not literally but cooperatively institutionally cut off his head and impose some kind of very transparent social control he didn't he in reality make this business pretty easy you know the machine is here it's just it shouldn't be controlled by a single individual but the point is not individual or not the point is that it should be in some sense publicly controlled not in this mystifying communist sense that the party stands for the public but in the sense that control itself should be publicly clear yes we have to be controlled today because of the pandemic global warming will impose tremendous new levels of control what we've spent and so on but this but it should be absolutely clear what is controlled so i'm not naive in the sense of oh look freedom there i think we live in an extremely dangerous time and i precisely want to avoid reading today's time uh today's constellation either in a too much pessimistic way we are lost we will become just wheels and cogs in some mega machine or in a naive optimist way i i hear i return to heidegger sorry just once and to heidegger and derrida what lacong i'm mixing them together now you know this is crazy so clearly is that don't forget that what lacon called the big other what heidegger called being thrown into all this remains here and what i my approach to classical marxism i think you find it in the first chapter of the book is that marx was here still too confident that in communism this or park dimension of the piccada will somehow disappear there you know i'm proud of that how i little bit how i point out that marx all of a sudden then doesn't speak about workers as if there is a single worker which will do planning and so on and on hopefully for us we will never arrive okay that's what that gives me i think uh maybe in quite a nice segue to maybe the last topic before we go back to questions from the audience yeah because yes you talk you know you're pleased with that that part of the book where you talk about marx at the beginning of classical marxism and you talked about the the opacity of capitalism in marx gradually disappearing or him being optimistic that it might gradually disappear or the the mystifications of capitalism might might ever weigh over time that sort of yeah marx's belief based a little bit on hegel but um the question i want to finish with actually because it's it crops up not just in this book but in your last book and i remember as a student reading some of your very first book you know sublime objects of ideology you know one of your early early hits i remember reading that and even then yeah the word madness unfortunately it's still the biggest hit is it really okay that was your your sort of lennon mccartney yesterday was it um i have noticed and i have i've not read everything by you by any stretch but i do notice the word madness come up again and again in different forms and i wanted to ask you about madness obviously you've written about la carte you don't really write about foucault particularly you touched on him but obviously he writes about that lack on who's probably the closest you come i imagine to a sort of uh critic of madness but anyway the point i want to get to here is is there any sanity where is the sanity if anywhere when you look out at the world i will try to give very good questions sir let me make a move towards yourself in one of my earlier books i have a whole chapter on the legendary debate between foucault and derrida yeah foucault accusing deridad that he overestimates the moment of cartesian madness while darida insists that the cartesian moment is this zero level of radical madness which every thinking has to presuppose i'm here on the redash side i linked crucial point in heading to another person's eye you see this absolute abyss night of the world and so on as it were the world the abyss before the world is constituted and my point is here the one which you already find in hegel in his in the beginning of part three of his encyclopedia in a very very different way where he says that the in the passage to put it naively from animals to humans the first step is madness and then our discourse is an attempt to control this madness but the threat of madness hegel points out remains all the time our sanity can only be understood as [Music] as a retroactive attempt to control our founding madness kegel says this i think i simply find out very much that there is something similar in in uh in the reda's counter counter attack okay very high quality debate you

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Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2022