Slavoj Zizek: "We Are In An Apocalypse" (Part 1)

[Music] good evening good afternoon good morning to all of you tuning in from around the world and everyone watching on the replay i hope you're staying happy and healthy my name is luke i'm a producer here at howto academy and welcome to what i'm sure is going to be a thought-provoking event today we are very lucky to be joined by hegelian philosopher psychoanalyst and communist schwab ushizek slavoy is international director at the birkbeck institute for humanities a visiting professor at the new york university and a senior researcher at the department of philosophy university of ljubljana slavoy's new book surplus enjoyment a guide for the non-perplexed was published today um so congratulations happy publication day and you can pick it up of course today will be in conversation with philosopher robert roland smith his seven books include breakfast with socrates death drive the reality test and autobio philosophy robert is a quantum fellow of all souls college oxford and he sits on the boards of the tavistock institute of medical psychology and of the institute of art and ideas so after a 45 minute or so conversation slavoy would take two questions from you so please please audience type any you have in the little q a function wherever it is on your screen well that's more than enough from me so without further ado it is my absolute pleasure to welcome slavoy zijek and robert roland smith robert over to you thank you very much indeed uh luke and welcome to everybody's pleasure to be here with you and of course with with slavoy welcome shlavaway um as luke says we are going to have about 40 45 minutes of discussion between the two of us and then we'll open it out to to people on the call and you can write your questions or comments in the chat box and um we'll look at those towards the end of end of our session today but as as luke says today is happy publication day of uh schlavoy's new book my copy the english version i don't know if you've seen this lovely it's done in a beautiful kind of uh lurid pink color which i congratulate but i wanted to ask you i mean i was looking in my calendar and it's it's only about a year since you and i last had a dialogue through the how to con academy on your last book hegel in a wired brain and i just wanted to ask you as a writer myself how you do it what's your writing process how do you manage to knock them out so fast i don't know if i already told publicly this story but you touched a very traumatic point for me i write so much it's not a joke i will very briefly explain it because i really intimately hate writing so the only way for me to do it maybe now you can critically say it's easy to find traces of this in my published work is to avoid this horrible moment when you sit in front of a screen and tell yourself now i am writing up to a certain point i'm telling to myself i just elaborate ideas these are all drafts and so on and then at a certain point i say okay everything is there now it's just a question of restructuring montage and so on and so on it's too traumatic for me to do it what's true that's how i mean what is traumatic about it this idea of uh of literally telling to yourself now i'm writing a text it should never happen so again i tell to myself oh the i'm just putting down ideas elaborating them a little bit and then at a certain point i tell myself i did it it's done now it's just how you recompose it or whatever it should never be the act itself maybe this has something to do with the title of the book surplus enjoyment because you see everything is a surplus too many notes and then at the end just uh just the the editing or whatever never the thing itself absolutely it struck me as a very good title for you but perhaps for some of our audience we should just remind them or you should just remind them that this word surplus i mean the phrase surplus enjoyment is not an everyday phrase obviously and it has roots in certainly in marx and a little bit in hegel a little bit in la con even a little bit in derrida and you know my interest in derrida perhaps you could just help the the people on the call by just reminding them of your uh of some of the associations of this phrase surplus enjoyment what it is why you chose it what you're getting at with it just so we can ground the discussion going forward the basic idea is in the matter of matters of enjoyment sexuality and so on there is no basic zero level enjoyment without a surplus attached to it okay i'll give a simple example so that i don't lose time from movies and i think i found you probably know better than me something similar in the reda namely uh you know the reduced reading of uh kaska he points out that referring to kafka that things are not never in a legal system simply prohibited at some deepest level prohibition itself gets prohibited and i will not bore our listeners now with wonderful examples from kafka himself but also in today's china maybe i quote this in this book or another book how somebody was disclosing public secrets he was accused and then he asked but what law did i break and the answer of the court was sorry this is also a state secret you know yeah like this is the the idea of a surplus or another simply example from movies you never simply hate or love a star we always have a kind of a reflexive republication a bad guy must be a guy whom you love to hate yeah or some fatal in film noir is a lady whom you love or at least want to have sex with her irresistibly but you hate yourself for loving her and the idea is that there is the word surplus itself is a bit of a paradox because the surplus is never surplus it's always intrinsic to whatever it is it's supposed to be surplus too there's nothing without the server and here also comes my reference maybe two pretentious i'm not sure about it to quantum physics where i think you find this a very general parallels something similar all these quantum wave oscillations and so on they are in a way a surplus but without the zero level normality or whatever and again oh yes yeah and as i understand it what you're one of the many things you're trying to convey with this book and other work is that this notion of surplus or surplus value surplus enjoyment here is built into culture as well as some of the texts that you're describing it's not simply uh a phenomenon that we'll find reading hegel or le con or looking at the films of hitchcock or whatever there's something going on at the moment in what you call our topsy-turvy world at the moment that you'd say follows this logic of paradox of surplus enjoyment and so on is that is that right it's an analysis that can be applied to the the current moment absolutely if there is an accusation that can be made against my book it's precisely i hope it works but i will describe right now but i'm not sure that i it gets more and more crazy i say this in the introduction in the sense that i jump like a true madman from philosophical anthropological even theological generalities into quite concrete examples but here i think let's mention my guys lacong derida they all care precisely this for me an interesting dialectical theory means that you don't have simply examples of a neutral universal notion you have an example which is in itself exemplary an example something appears which even works as an exception but it provides the key to all that failure is the key to normality okay well you talked about moving between the theoretical and the practical there let's take you you use these two terms apocalypse and catastrophe for example and at the moment in the current condition that we're in we have a war in ukraine we have uh climate change we have pressures on energy prices we have what many people currently call an omni crisis how does these terms of apocalypse and catastrophe help us to understand what's going on at the moment is are we in one or the other are we currently in an apocalypse are we in a catastrophe neither both what's the difference as i try to elaborate and this is the first of my book where i am not even fully convinced no i mean it seriously i'm not joking in the book but you know you can find traces of uncertainty but what i try to do is precisely draw a subtle difference between catastrophe and apocalypse because apocalypse is already the moment of truth as we all know in the bible and so on apocalypse is not just a bad thing horrible thing it's the thing when masks fall down when you have to confront things the way they really are and so on and so on mostly we can say that sorry sometimes even translated revelation yes but already i think he was one of the husbands of hannah arendt guinta anders he i quote him i think proposes a beautiful notion of like apocalypse apocalypse or other catastrophe without this apocalyptic moment of truth because you know this would be a nice example of what lacong calls the big other when we imagine a catastrophe even if it's a mega catastrophe the end of the world and so on we always somehow include an imagined observer to it who will witness it uh draw the lesson from it and the lesson can be very pessimistic like oh my god we exploited nature too much and so on but i think that precisely what we are witnessing today is at least that apocalyptic moment of truth and just to supplement what you said i agree with you i i'm not sure if it's in this book or in a later text i think again with my beloved religious reference although i'm a full atheist precisely we are dealing today of the apocalypse on the one hand plague plague as the name for all viral and so on diseases and we just learn to live with it it's not over the pandemic on the then we get war obviously ukraine but not only there i think it will expand hunger hunger is for me now not just the threat of hunger but also what all the global warming and logical catastrophes amounts to and finally most interesting may be death but by death i do not understand death in the ordinary biological sense death in this sense of sorry yes well let me just let i do want to talk about death why not who wouldn't but let me just get clear on a couple of things just so we don't lose the threat i think what i think i'm hearing from you is that we can talk about the world as it is at the moment in terms of catastrophe and apocalypse but there is a difference between these two and historically apocalypse might have been thought of something that reveals a new truth or a new future or a new dawn in some way but at the moment we don't necessarily have that so we have an apocalypse that is more like a catastrophe that's more like an end in itself without redemption without being saved in some way is that am i getting along the right time yeah yeah okay yeah so when you talk about it so when you talk about death now which you're going on to do you're you're referring to a death without resurrection as it were to refer back to your religious references is that where you're heading not only death without resurrection here in life without irony everything is reading of christianity resurrection and schedule says this explicitly resurrection already happens in what protestants called the mind in the new community of believers hegel explicitly said resurrection doesn't mean less patiently wait some at some point a guy will appear who will say hi guys remember me and jesus christ no resurrection already happens here but what i mean by death is the threat of and this threat moves at three levels here i will i would like to supplement a little bit my book what we generally call digitalization of our life first it is the external control we know how all these machines work every of our steps every step is registered google is connected with nsa it's what is called surveillance capitalism but there are three levels here the second level is if surveillance comes from outside it's from inside in the sense of changing our dna you know that i visited china some 10 years ago and met a guy who worked for the chinese biogenetic big part of their academy of sciences and she gave me the program which scared me to sit sorry for the word the program where he says that the goal of the biogenetics in chinese people's republic is the physical and psychic welfare of the chinese people so they hopefully put it we will begin changing the dna regulating our genetic background also intervening into that and that's death in your interpretation what death enters i mean i think if the third element will arise which is what i wrote about in a book we discussed a year ago wired brain the direct connection between our brain and some machine which means that in the sense i'm talking quite naively our sense of freedom is free at least in my head i think whatever i want and so on and so on and i'm here reality is out there i say i think that this distance is something which is key element of our freedom it means i can imagine things i can make experiments and so on and so on if this distance falls we are not yet there but we are approaching it then the question is legitimate asking right so to cut it in a bit or to help uh my understanding at least maybe that of people on the call too yeah one aspect of death for you in the current cultural climate the better phrase is the death of freedom or the death of freedom considered as what should we say subjective agency the ability to be in command of one's thoughts as separate from controls by digital political other ideological forces is that right it's just you agree or not i yes i think that this notion of freedom is such a strong component of our self-understanding as human beings that i don't want to be simply a pessimist but i think the question is legitimate with being controlled from outside surveillance capitalism from inside dna manipulated by parents or the state plus the flow of our constitutive mind being accessible to machines are we still humans how do we have i'm not a priori a pessimist i just think that this raises a serious question are we still human how will we be forced if this happens to redefine the very notion of what is human you

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Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022