Transcription
[Music] I'm giving you a choice. Either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can. I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within [Music] ideology. [Music]
They Live from 1988 is definitely one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left. It tells the story of John Nada. Nada, of course, in Spanish means nothing. A pure subject deprived of all substantial content. A homeless worker in LA who, drifting around, one day enters into an abandoned church and finds there a strange box full of sunglasses. And when he put one of them on, walking along the LA streets, he discovered something weird. That these glasses function like critique of ideology glasses. They allow you to see the real message beneath all the propaganda, publicity, glitch posters, and so on. You see a large publicity billboard telling you, "Have your holiday of a lifetime." And when you put the glasses on, you see just on the white background a gray inscription: "We live."
So we are told in a post-ideological society. We are interpolated, that is to say, addressed by social authority, not as subjects who should do their duty, sacrifice themselves, but subjects of pleasure. "Me, I realize your true potential. Be yourself. Lead a satisfying life." When you put the glasses on, you see "Dictatorship in democracy." It's the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom. The explanation for the existence of this strange ideology glasses is the standard story of the invasion of the body snatchers. Humanity is already under the control of aliens. "Hey buddy, you going to pay for that or what?" "Look, buddy, I don't want no hassle today. Either pay for it or put it back."
According to our common sense, we think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our straight view. Ideology should be glasses which distort our view, and the critique of ideology should be the opposite, like you take off the glasses so that you can finally see the way things really are. This precisely, and here the pessimism of the film of They Live is well justified. This precisely is the ultimate illusion. Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world, how we perceive its meaning, and so on and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology. All right, to step out of ideology, it hurts. It's a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it.
This is rendered in a wonderful way with a further scene in the film where John Nada tries to force his best friend, John Armitage, to also put the glasses on. "I don't want to fight you." "Come on, I don't want to fight you." "Stop it!" "No!" And it's the weirdest scene in the film. The fight takes eight, nine minutes. It may appear irrational because why does this guy reject so violently to put the glasses on? It is as if he is well aware that spontaneously he lives in a lie, that the glasses will make him see the truth, but that this truth can be painful, can shatter many of your illusions. This is a paradox. We have to accept the glasses, the extreme violence of liberation. You must be forced to be free. If you trust simply your spontaneous sense of well-being or whatever, you will never get free. What freedom? [Music] Hurts.
The basic insight of psychoanalysis is to distinguish between enjoyment and simple pleasures. They are not the same. Enjoyment is precisely enjoyment in disturbed pleasure, even enjoyment in pain. And this excessive factor disturbs the apparently simple relationship between duty and pleasures. This is also a space where ideology, up to and especially religious ideology, operates. This brings me to maybe my favorite example, the great classical Hollywood film, The Sound of Music. We all know it's the story of an nun who is too alive, with too much energy, ultimately sexual energy, to be constrained to the role of an nun. "Oh, oh, Reverend Mother, I'm so sorry. I just couldn't help myself. The gates were open and the hills were beckoning and before I..." "Here, I haven't summoned you here for apologies." "Oh, please, Mother, do let me ask for forgiveness." "One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. Step together now." Mother Superior sends her to the Von Trapp family where she takes care of the children. "Good. We'll have to practice." "Do allow me." "Mm-hmm." And at the same time, of course, falls in love with the Baron Von Trapp. And Maria gets too disturbed by it, cannot control it, returns to the convent. "Oh, there were times when we would look at each other." "Oh, Mother, I could hardly breathe." "Did you let him see how you felt?" "If I did, I didn't know it. That's what's been torturing me. I was there on God's errand." No wonder that in old communist Yugoslavia, where I saw this film for the first time, exactly this scene, or more precisely, the song which follows this strange hedonist, if you want, advice from the Mother Superior, "Go back, seduce the guy, follow this path, do not betray your desire," namely the song which begins with "Climb Every Mountain." The song which is an almost embarrassing display and affirmation of desire. These three minutes were censored. Every search, high and low, for every byway, every... you know, I think the censor was a very intelligent man. He knew, as probably an atheist communist, where the power of attraction of Catholic religion [Music] resides.
If you read intelligent Catholic propagandists and if you really try to discern what deal are they offering you, it's not to prohibit, in this case, sexual pleasures. It's a much more cynical contract, as it were, between the church as an institution and the believer troubled with, in this case, sexual desires. It is this hidden, obscene permission that you get. You are covered by the divine big. You can do whatever you want. [Music] Enjoy. This obscene contract does not belong to Christianity as such. It belongs to the Catholic Church as an institution. It is the logic of institution at its purest. This is again a key to the functioning of ideology, not only the explicit message: renounce, suffer, and so on, but the true hidden message: pretend to renounce, and you can get it all.
My psychoanalytic friends are telling me that typically today, patients who come, come to the analyst to resolve their problems. Feel guilty not because of excessive pleasures, not because they indulged in pleasures which go against their sense of duty or morality or whatsoever. On the contrary, they feel guilty for not enjoying enough, for not being able to enjoy. "Oh my God, one is thirsty in the desert and what to drink but Coke?" The perfect commodity. Why? It was already Marx who long ago emphasized that a commodity is never just a simple object that we buy and consume. A commodity is an object full of theological, even metaphysical, niceties. Its presence is always reflects an invisible transcendence. And the classical publicity for Coke quite openly refers to this absent, invisible quality. "Coke is the real thing." Or "Coke, that's it." What is that "it"? The real thing. It's not just another positive property of Coke, something that can be described or pinpointed through chemical analysis. Is that mysterious something more, the indescribable excess which is the object cause of my desire? In our postmodern, however we call them, societies, we are obliged to enjoy. Enjoyment becomes a kind of a weird, perverted duty. The paradox of Coke is that you are thirsty, you drink it, but as everyone knows, the more you drink it, the more thirsty you get. A desire is never simply the desire for a certain thing. It's always also a desire for desire itself, a desire to continue to desire. Perhaps the ultimate horror of a desire is to be fully filled, met, so that I desire no longer. The ultimate melancholic experience is the experience of a loss of desire itself. It's not that in some return to a previous era of natural consummation where we got rid of this excess and were only consuming for actual needs, like you were thirsty, you drank water and so on. We cannot return to that. The excess is with us forever. So let's have a drink of Coke. It's getting warm. It's no longer the real Coke, and that's the problem. You know, this passage from sublime to excremental dimension. When it's cold, properly served, it has a certain traction. All of a sudden, this can change into [ __ ]. It's the elementary dialectics of commodities. We are not talking about objective, factual properties of a commodity. We are talking only here about that elusive [Music] surplus.
Kinder Surprise egg. A quite astonishing commodity. The surprise of the Kinder Surprise egg is that this excessive object, the cause of your desire, is here materialized in the guise of an object, a plastic toy, which fills in the inner void of the chocolate egg. The whole delicate balance is between these two dimensions: what you bought, the chocolate egg, and the surplus, probably made in some Chinese gulag or whatever. The surplus that you get for free. I don't think that the chocolate frame is here just to send you on a deeper voyage towards the inner treasure, the what Plato calls the agalma, which makes you a worthy person, which makes a commodity, the desirable commodity. I think it's the other way around. We should aim at the higher goal, the gold in the middle of an object, precisely in order to be able to enjoy the surface. This is what is the anti-metaphysical lesson which is difficult to accept. [Music]
What does this famous "Ode to Joy" stand for? It's usually perceived as a kind of ode to humanity as such, to the brotherhood and freedom of all people. And what strikes the eye here is the universal adaptability of this well-known melody. It can be used by political movements which are totally opposed to each other. In Nazi Germany, it was widely used to celebrate great public events. In the Soviet Union, Beethoven was lionized, and the "Ode to Joy" was performed almost as a kind of a communist [Music] song. In China, during the time of the Great Cultural Revolution, when almost all Western music was prohibited, the Ninth Symphony was accepted. It was allowed to play it as a piece of progressive bourgeois [Applause] music. At the extreme right, in South Rhodesia, before it became Zimbabwe, it proclaimed independence to be able to postpone the abolishment of apartheid there for those couple of years of independence. Out Rhodesia, again, the melody of the "Ode to Joy," with changed lyrics, of course, was the anthem of the [Music] [Applause] country. At the opposite end, when Abimael Guzmán, Presidente Gonzalo, the leader of Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, the extreme leftist guerrilla in Peru, when he was asked by a journalist which piece of music is his favorite, he claimed again, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, "Ode to Joy." When Germans were still divided and their team was appearing together at the Olympics, when one of the Germans won a golden medal, again "Ode to Joy" was played instead of either East or West German national anthem. And even now today, "Ode to Joy" is the unofficial anthem of the European Union. So it's truly that we can imagine a kind of a perverse scene of universal fraternity where Osama Bin Laden is embracing President Bush, Saddam is embracing Fidel Castro, white racist is embracing Mao Zedong, and all together they sing "Ode to Joy." It works. And this is how every ideology has to work. It's never just meaning. It always has to also work as an empty container, open to all possible meanings. It's, you know, that gut feeling that we feel when we experience something pathetic and we say, "Oh my God, I'm so moved. There is something so deep." But you never know what this depth is. It's a void. Uh, now, of course, there is a catch here. The catch is that, of course, this neutrality of a frame is never as neutral as it [Music] appears. Here, I think the perspective of Alex from A Clockwork Orange enters. "We were all feeling a bit shagged and [ __ ] and fashed it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure. Oh, my brothers, so we got rid of the auto and stopped off at the Korova for a nightcap." Why is Alex, this ultimate cynical delinquent, the hero of A Clockwork Orange? Why is he so fascinated, overwhelmed, when he sees the lady singing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"? "And it was like, for a moment, oh my brothers, some great bird had flown into the milk bar and I felt all the malany little hairs on my plot standing endwise and the shivers crawling up like slow malany lizards and then down again, because I knew what she sang. It was a bit from the glorious Ninth by Ludwig Van." Whenever an ideological text says, "All humanity, unite in brotherhood, joy, and so on," you should always ask, "Okay, okay, okay, but are this all really all? Or is someone excluded?" I think Alex, the delinquent from A Clockwork Orange, identifies with this place of exclusion. And the great genius of Beethoven is that he literally staged this exclusion. All of a sudden, the whole tone changes into a kind of a carnivalesque rhythm. It's no longer this sublime beauty. "Excuse me, brother, I ordered this two weeks ago. Can you see if it's arrived yet, please?" "Just a minute." We hear this vulgar music precisely when Alex enters a shopping arcade, and we can see from his movements that now he feels at home. He's like fish in the [Music] water. "Pardon me, ladies." Beethoven is not a cheap celebrator of the Brotherhood of humanity and so on. "We are one big happy family enjoying freedom, dignity, and so on." "Enjoying that are you, my darling?" The first part, which is falsely celebrated today, you hear it in all official events, is clearly identified with Beethoven as ideology. And then the second part tells the true story of that which disturbs the official ideology and of the failure of the official ideology to constrain it, to tame it. This is why Beethoven was doing something which may appear difficult to do. He was already in a purely musical work, practicing critique of ideology. If the classical ideology functioned in the way designated by Marx in his nice formula from Capital, Volume One: "They don't know what they are doing, but they are nonetheless doing it." Cynical ideology functions in the mode of: "I know very well what I'm doing, but I'm still nonetheless doing it." [Music]
This paradoxical constellation is staged in a beautiful way in the famous song "Officer Krupke" in Bernstein's. And they never, what they appear to be, cynical, brutal delinquents. They always have a tiny private dream. This dream can be many things. It can even be something quite ordinary. Let's take the English riots of August 2011. The standard liberal explanation really sounds like a repetition of "Officer Krupke" song. "We cannot just condemn these riots as delinquent vandalism. You have to see how these people live in practically ghettos, isolated communities, no proper family life, no proper education. They don't even have a prospect of a regular employment." But this is not enough, because man is not simply a product of objective [Music] circumstances. We all have this margin of freedom in deciding how we subjectivize circumstances which, of course, determine us, how we react to them, by constructing our own universe. The conservative solution is: "We need more police. We need courts which pass severe judgments." I think this solution is too simple. If one listens closely to some of David Cameron's statements, it looked as if, "Okay, they are beating people, burning houses, but the truly horrible thing is that they were taking objects without paying for them." No. The ultimate... that we can imagine in a very limited way. Cameron was right. There was no ideological justification. It is the reaction of people who are totally caught into the predominant ideology but have no ways to realize what this ideology demands of them. So it's a kind of a wild acting out within this ideological space of consumerism. Even if we are dealing with apparently totally non-ideological brutality, "I just want to burn houses to get objects," it is the result of a very specific social and ideological constellation where big ideology, striving for justice, equality, etc., disintegrates. The only functioning ideology is pure consumerism. And then, no wonder, under what you get as a form of protest. Every violent acting out is a sign that there is something you are not able to put into works. Even the most brutal violence is the enacting of a certain symbolic deadlock.
The great thing about Taxi Driver is that it brings this brutal outburst of violence to its radical, suicidal dimension. We are not dealing here with something which simply concerns the fragile psychology of a distorted person. What Travis in Taxi Driver is, it has something to do with ideology. "Listen, you [ __ ] you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. Who would not let..." "Listen, you [ __ ] you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the [ __ ], the dogs, the filth, the [ __ ]. Here is someone who stood up." In Taxi Driver, Travis, the hero, is bothered by the young prostitute played by Jodie Foster. What bothers him are, of course, as is always the case, precisely his fantasies. Fantasies of her victimhood, of her hidden pleasures. And fantasies are not just a private matter of individuals. Fantasies are the central stuff our ideologies are made of. Don't look at fantasy is in a psychoanalytic perspective, fundamentally a lie. Not a lie in the sense that it's just a fantasy but not a reality, but a lie in the sense that fantasy covers up a certain gap in consistency. When things are blurred, when we cannot really get to know things, fantasy provides an easy answer. The usual mode of fantasy is to construct a scene, not a scene where I get what I desire, but a scene in which I imagine myself as desired by others. Taxi Driver is an unacknowledged remake of perhaps the greatest of John Ford's westerns, his late classic, The Searchers. I take many [Music] scouts. In both films, the hero tries to save a young woman who is perceived as a victim of brutal [Music] abuse. In The Searchers, the young Natalie Wood was kidnapped and lived for a couple of years as the wife of an Indian chief. In Taxi Driver, the young Jodie Foster is controlled by a ruthless pimp. "You, you walk out with those [ __ ] creeps and low life and degenerates out on the street and you sell your sell your little [ __ ] for nothing, man, for some low life pimp." "Stands in a hall." "I'm the I'm square, you're the one that's square, man. I don't go screw and [ __ ] with a bunch of killers and junkies the way you do." The task is always to save the perceived victim. But but what really drives this violence of the hero is a deep suspicion that the victim is not simply a victim, that the victim effectively, in a perverted way, enjoys or participates in what appears as her victimhood. So that, to put it very simply, she doesn't want to be redeemed. She resists it. And this is the big problem. If I make an immediate jump to the political dimension, the big problem of American military interventions, especially so-called humanitarian interventions, from Iraq to already Vietnam, half a century ago. We try to help them, but what if they really did not want our help? The result of this debilitating deadlock can only be an outburst of violence. We do get towards the end of the film, Travis exploding in a killing spree, killing the pimps, all the people around the young girl. Violence is never just abstract violence. It's a kind of brutal intervention in the real to cover up a certain impotence concerning what we may call cognitive mapping. You lack a clear picture of what's going on. Where are we exactly? The same holds for the terrifying outburst of violence Anders Breivik's murderous spree in Oslo, exploding a bomb in front of the government building and then killing dozens of young members of the Social Democratic party on an island close to Oslo. Many commentators try to dismiss this as a clear case of personal insanity. But I think Breivik's manifesto is well worth reading. It is palpably clear there how this violence that Breivik not only theorized about but also enacted is a reaction to the impenetrability and confusion of global capital. It's exactly like Travis Bickle's killing spree at the end of Taxi Driver. When he is there, barely alive, he symbolically, with his fingers, points a gun at his own head. Clear sign that all this violence was basically suicidal. He was on the right path, in a way. Travis in Taxi Driver, you should have the outburst of violence, and you should direct it at yourself. But in a very specific way, at what in yourself chains you, ties you to the ruling [Music] ideology.
Oh, do you know the shark in Steven Spielberg's Jaws? The shark starts to attack people on the beach. What does this attack mean? What does the shark [Music] stand for? There were different, even mutually exclusive, answers to this question. On the one hand, some critics claim that obviously the shark stands for the foreign threat to ordinary Americans. The shark is a metaphor for either natural disaster, storms, or immigrants threatening United States citizens and so on. On the other hand, it's interesting to note that Fidel Castro, who loves the film, once said that for him, it was obvious that Jaws is kind of a leftist Marxist film, and that the shark is a metaphor for brutal big capital exploiting ordinary Americans. Okay, so which is the right answer? I claim ahead, none of them, and at the same time, all of them. Ordinary Americans, as ordinary people in all countries, have a multitude of fears. We fear all kind of things. We fear maybe immigrants or people whom we perceive as lower than ourselves attacking us, robbing us. We fear people raping our children. We fear natural disasters, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis. We fear corrupted politicians. We fear big companies which can basically do with us whatever they want. [Music] The function of the shark is to unite all these fears so that we can, in a way, trade all these fears for one fear alone. "Smile, you son of a [ __ ]." In this way, our experience of reality gets much simpler. Why am I mentioning this? Because isn't it that, for example, the most extreme case of ideology, maybe in the history of humanity, the Nazi fascist anti-Semitism, worked precisely in the same way? Imagine an ordinary German citizen in the late '20s, early '30s. His situation is, in an abstract way, the same as that of a small child. He's totally perplexed. Social authority, symbolic order is telling him, "You are a German worker, banker, whatever, but nothing functions." What does society want from him? Why is everything going wrong? The way he perceives the situation is that newspapers lie to him, he lost his work because of inflation, he lost all his money in the bank, his moral degradation, and so on. So what's the meaning of all this? The original fascist dream is to, of course, as a dream of every ideology, to have a cake and to eat it. As it was often pointed out, fascism is at its most elemental, a conservative revolution. Revolution? Economic development, modern industry, yes, but a revolution which would nonetheless maintain or even reassert a traditional hierarchical society. A society which is modern, efficient, but at the same time controlled by hierarchical values, with no class or other antagonisms. Now, they have a problem here, the fascists. But antagonism, class struggle, and other tensions is something inherent to capitalism. Modernization, industrialization, as we know from the history of capitalism, means disintegration of old stable relations. It means social conflicts. Instability is the way capitalism functions. So how to solve this problem? Simple. You need to generate an ideological narrative which explains how things went wrong in a society, not as the result of the inherent tensions in the development of this society, but as the result of a foreign [Music] intruder. "Things were okay till Jews penetrated our social body." The way to restore the health of our social body is to eliminate the Jews. It's the same operation as with the shark in Jaws. You have a multitude of fears, and this multiplicity of fears confuses you, like you don't, you simply don't know what's the meaning of all this confusion. And you replace this confused multitude with one clear figure: the Jew. And everything becomes clear.
The search for cuts in the Social Security provision to lone parent families, in part spurred this report. The Social Security Department fears that the accelerating budget for single mothers on benefits could reach nearly £5 billion by the end of the decade. But the issue of the lone parent has increasingly been seen as the heart of John Major's "Back to Basics" crusade. Remember, I think around two, three decades ago, when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was John Major, there was a kind of ideological campaign to return to morality and so on. And all the evils of society were embodied in the conservative narrative, in the figure of the unemployed single mother. Like there is violence in our suburbs, of course, because single unemployed mothers cannot take care of their children, don't properly educate them, and so on. Uh, uh, we have lack in our budget, not enough money, of course, because we have to support unwed, unwed single mothers, and so on, and so on. Although the government may be embarrassed, in an ideological edifice, you need some pseudo-concrete image like this to fixate your imagination. And then this image can mobilize us. Imagine ideology as a kind of a filter, a frame, so that if you look at the same ordinary reality through that frame, everything changes. In what sense? It's not that the frame actually adds anything. It's just that the frame opens the abyss of suspicion. If we look at the anti-Semitic image of the Jew, it's crucial to notice how contradictory this figure of the Jew is. [Music] Jews are at the same time extra intellectual, like mathematicians, whatever, and vulgar, not washing regularly, us seeing innocent girls all the time, and so on. [Applause] [Music] [Music] On. [Music] For this is typical for racism. You try to imagine how the other enjoys all the secret orgies or whatever, because in racism, the other is not simply an enemy. Usually, it is also invested with some specific perverse enjoyments. Or, in an inverted way, the other can be someone who tries to steal from us our our enjoyments, our, to disturb, as we usually put it, our way of life. We should be here very precise not to fall into the usual trap of disqualifying all elements out of which the Nazi ideological edifice is composed, to disqualify all of them as proto-fascist. We should never forget that the large majority of these elements which we today associate with fascism were taken from the workers' movement. This idea of large numbers of people marching together, this idea of strict bodily discipline as our duty. The Nazis directly took this over from social democracy, from the left. Let me just take some other central concepts of the Nazi worldview. The solidarity of the people. My God, there is nothing bad in this notion as such. The problem is solidarity to what kind of people? If by people you mean false mft, the organic community of people, where then the enemy is automatically the foreign intruder. In this case, we are in Nazism. The crucial thing is to locate ideology where it belongs. Let's take a clear example. The well-known song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from the film [Music] Cabaret. "The stag in the forest runs free." Some of my friends, after seeing the film Bob Fosse's Cabaret, thought that after they heard this song, they finally understood what, at its deepest, as to its emotional impact, what fascism is. But I think this precisely is the mistake to be avoided. This song is a rather ordinary popular song. Incidentally, it was composed, po, while they were shooting the movie, by a Jewish couple. Nice irony. If you look not only at the music, at the way it is sung, but even at the words: "Awakening of a nation, tomorrow belongs to me." One can well imagine, with a slight change of words, a radically leftist communist song. But soon say w. [Music]
The German hard rock band Rammstein are often accused of flirting, playing with the Nazi militaristic iconography. But if one observes closely their show, one can see very nicely what they are doing. Exemplarily, in one of their best-known songs, [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the minimal elements of the Nazi ideology enacted by Rammstein are something like pure elements of libidinal [Music] investment. Enjoyment has to be, as it were, condensed in some minimal ticks, gestures which do not have any precise ideological meaning. What Rammstein does is it liberates these elements from their Nazi articulation. It allows us to enjoy them in their pre-ideological [Music] state. The way to fight Nazism is to enjoy these elements, ridiculous as they may appear, by suspending the Nazi horizon of meaning. This way you undermine Nazism from [Music] within. So how does nonetheless ideology do this? How does it articulate pre-ideological elements? These elements can also be seen as a kind of a bribe, the way ideology pays us to seduce us into its edifice. These bribes can be purely libidinal bribes, all those ticks which are condensed enjoyment, or they can be explicit discursive elements like notions of solidarity, uh, uh, of collectives, discipline, struggle for one's destiny, and so on, and so on. All these, in themselves, are free-floating elements which open themselves to different ideological fields.
Let's turn to the high point of our consumerism. Let me take a drink. Still some of it. Starbucks coffee. I'm regularly drinking it, I must admit. But are we aware that when we buy a cappuccino from Starbucks, we also buy quite a lot of ideology? Which ideology? You know, when you enter a Starbucks store, it's usually always displaced in some posters there. Their message, which is, "Yes, our cappuccino is more expensive than others, but..." and then comes the story, "We give 1% of all our income to some Guatemala children to keep them healthy, for the water supply, for some Sahara farmers, or to save the forests, to enable organic growing on coffee, whatever, whatever." Now, I admire the ingenuity of this solution. In the old days of pure, simple consumerism, you bought a product and then you felt bad. "My God, I'm just a consumerist while people are starving in Africa." So the idea was you had to do something to counteract your pure destructive consumerism. For example, I don't know, you contribute to charity and so on. What Starbucks enables you is to be a consumerist and be a consumerist without any bad conscience, because the price for the countermeasure, for fighting consumerism, is already included into the price of a commodity. Like you pay a little bit more, and you are not just a consumerist, but you do also your duty towards the environment, the poor, starving people in Africa, and so on, and so on. It's, I think, the ultimate form of consumerism.
We should not simply oppose a principle life dedicated to duty and enjoying our small pleasures. Let's take today's capitalism. We have on the one hand the demands of the circulation of capital which push us towards profit-making, expansion, exploitation, and destruction of nature. And on the other hand, ecological demands. Let's think about our posterity and about our own survival. Let's take care of nature and so on. In this opposition between ruthless pursuit of capitalist expansion and ecological awareness, duty. A strange, perverted duty, of course. Duty is on the side of capitalism. As many perspicuous analysts noted, capitalism has a strange religious structure. It is propelled by this absolute demand: capital has to circulate, to reproduce itself, to expand, to multiply itself. And for this goal, anything can be sacrificed, up to our lives, up to nature, and so on. Here we have a strange, unconditional injunction. And a true capitalist is a miser who is ready to sacrifice everything for this perverted duty. What we see here in Mojave Desert, at this resting place for abandoned planes, is the other side of capitalist dynamics. Capitalism is all the time in crisis. This is precisely why it appears almost indestructible. Crisis is not its obstacle; it is what pushes it forwards towards permanent self-revolutionizing, permanent extended self-reproduction, always new products. The other invisible side of it is waste. Tremendous amount of waste. We shouldn't react to this heaps of waste by trying to somehow get rid of it. Maybe the first thing to do is to accept this waste, to accept that there are things out there which serve nothing, to break out of this eternal cycle of functioning. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin said something very deep. He said that we experience history. What does it mean for us to be historical beings? Not when when we are engaged in things, when things move, only when we see this again, rest, waste of culture, being half retaken by nature. At that point, we get an intuition of what history means. Maybe this also accounts for the redemptive value of post-catastrophic movies like I Am Legend and so on. We see the devastated human environment, half-empty factories, machines falling apart, half-empty stores. What we experience at this moment, the psychoanalytic term for it would have been the inertia of the real, this mute presence beyond meaning. What moments like confronting planes here in Mojave Desert bring to us is maybe a chance for an authentic passive experience. Maybe without this properly artistic moment of authentic passivity, nothing new can emerge. Maybe something new only emerges through the failure, the suspension of proper functioning of the existing network of our life work. Where we are, maybe this is what we need more than ever today.
What does the wreck of the Titanic stand for? We all know the standard reading of the impact of the sinking of the Titanic, not only the film but the real accident. This sinking had such an impact because it happened in a society, at that point, still in all its glitch and glory, unaware of the decay that awaited it in the near future, the World Wars and so on. But there is something in excess of this entire field of meanings, which is the very fascinating presence of the ruin of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean. Okay, when James Cameron organized a trip to the real wreck of Titanic, he also made a similar remark. When the explorers approached the wreck, they had this almost metaphysical experience that they are approaching a forbidden territory in which the sacred and the obscene overlap. "Yeah, Roger that. Okay, drop down and go into the first-class gangway door. I want you guys working the deck." Every effective political ideological symbol or symptom has to rely on this dimension of petrified enjoyment, of the frozen grimace of an excessive pleasure in [Music] pain. [Music]
What am I doing here in the middle of the ocean, alone in a boat, surrounded by frozen corpses? "Jack, I'm in a scene from James Cameron's Titanic." Jack, which is the supreme case of ideology in recent Hollywood, why? Because of the imminent tension to the story of the film. "I don't know the steps." "Neither do I. Just go." "Don't think." We have at least three levels. First, there is what people ironically refer to as "Cameron's Hollywood Marxism." This ridiculous fake sympathy with lower classes. Up there, first passengers, they are mostly all evil, egotistic, cowardly. You know, I don't like that. Rose, embodied in Kate Winslet, fiancé played by Billy Zane, knows this whole narrative is sustained by a much more reactionary myth. Did you see those guys' faces? We should ask, what role does the iceberg hitting the ship play in the development of the love story? "When the ship docks, I'm getting off with you." "This is crazy." "I know." My claim is here, a slightly cynical one. This would have been the true catastrophe. We can imagine how, maybe after two, three weeks of intense sex in New York, the LA affair would somehow fade away. As a paying customer, I expect to get what I want. Kate Winslet is an upper-class girl in psychological distress, confused, her ego is in shatters. And the function of Leonardo DiCaprio, over the bed, the couch, is simply that he helps her to reconstitute her ego. "Come, lie down." Her self-image, literally. He draws her image. "Tell me when it looks..." "Put your arm back the way it was." It's really a new version of one of the old favorite imperialist myths. The idea being that when the upper-class people lose their vitality, they need a contact with lower classes, basically ruthlessly exploiting them, in a vampire-like way, as it were, sucking from them the life energy. Revitalized, they can join their secluded upper-class life. "My heart was pounding the whole time. It was the most erotic moment of my life up until then, at least." The ship hits the iceberg, not immediately after sex, but when the couple goes up to the open space and decide to stay together. "Oh, yes." "Yeah." "Look at this." You know, often in history, the event which may appear as a catastrophe saves persons or an idea, elevating it into a myth. Remember the intervention of the Soviet Army and other Warsaw Pact armies in 1968 in Czechoslovakia to strangle the so-called Prague Spring, the attempt of the Czech democratic communists to introduce a more human face socialism. Usually, we perceive this brutal Soviet intervention as something that destroyed the brief dream of Prague Spring. I think it saved the dream. Either Czechoslovakia would have turned into an ordinary liberal capitalist state, or at a certain point, which was usually the fate of reformist communists, the communist power would be obliged to set a certain limit. Okay, you had your fun, your freedom, that's enough. Now we again define the limits. Again, the paradox is that precisely the Soviet intervention saved the dream of the possibility of another communism and so on and so on. So here again, through the temporal catastrophe, we have a love story which is, as it were, redeemed in its idea, saved for eternity. We can ultimately read the catastrophe as a desperate manual to save the illusion of eternal love. We can see how ideology works effectively here. We have two superficial levels: all the fascination of the accident, then the love story. But all this, which is quite acceptable for our liberal progressive minds, all this is just a trap, something to lower our attention threshold, as it were, to open us up to be ready to accept the true conservative message of rich people having the right to revitalize themselves by ruthlessly appropriating the vitality of the poor people. There's nothing else. There is a wonderful detail which tells everything. Come back. When Kate Winslet notices that Leonardo DiCaprio is dead, she of course starts to shout, "I will never let go! I will never let go!" While at the same moment, "Never let go, I promise." She pushes him off. She is what we may call, ironically, a vanishing mediator. This logic of the production of a couple has a long history in Hollywood. Whatever the story is about, it may be about the end of the world, an asteroid threatening the very survival of humanity, or a great war, whatever. As a rule, we always have a couple whose link is threatened and who, somehow, through this ordeal, at the end, happily gets together. This logic does not hold only for Hollywood films. Great St. In the late '40s, in the Soviet Union, they produced arguably one of the most expensive films of all times, The Fall of Berlin. The chronicle of the Second World War from the Soviet standpoint. And it's incredible how closely this film also follows the logic of the production of a couple. The story begins just before the German attack on Soviet Union, when a model worker who is in love with the local girl but is too shy to propose to her, is called to Moscow to get a medal from Comrade Stalin. There, Stalin notices his confusion, distress, and Stalin gives him some advice, which poetry to quote and so on. This part, unfortunately, was lost because in the background of this scene, there was Beria, a Soviet politician who after Stalin's death became a non-person, was shot as a traitor. But we know from the screenplay what was there. If Stalin gives you a love advice, it has to succeed. So the couple [Music] embraces. He carries her, probably to make [Music] love. At that very moment, there is the tragic, violent entrance of the obstacle: German planes come dropping [Music] bombs. The girl is taken prisoner. The boy, of course, joins the Red Army, and we follow him through all the great battles. The idea being that in a deeper logic of the film, what these battles were about was really to recreate the couple. The boy has to get his girl. This is what happens at the end, but in a very strange way, which reconfirms Stalin's role as the supreme, divine [Applause] matchmaker. The scene itself, Stalin immersing himself into a crowd of ordinary people, never happened. Stalin was totally paranoiac about flying, about taking planes. But nonetheless, when he saw this scene, he [Applause] cried. Of course, he himself has been wrote the lines. When the couple encounters each other, the girl first sees Stalin, then she turns around and, surprised, sees her lover for whom she was waiting all the time of the war. So it's only through the presence of Stalin that the couple get reunited. Ala Adha. This is how ideology works. Not the explicit ideology of the film, which we hear at the end: "Stalin saying, 'Now all the free people will enjoy peace,' and so on, and so on." But precisely ideology at its more fundamental. This apparently totally subordinated mode, unimportant in itself, the story of a couple. This is what is the key element which holds the entire film together. That small surplus element which attracts us, which maintains our attention. This is how ideology works. Nice. Everything clean, oiled, so that your action is beautiful, really shining.
We usually think that military discipline is just a matter of mindlessly following orders, obeying the rules. You don't think, you do what is your duty. It's not a simple as that. If we do this, we just become machines. There has to be something more. This more can have two basic forms. The first, more benign form, is an ironic distance, best epitomized by the well-known movie and TV series M*A*S*H. Hawkeye, where the military doctors are involved in sexual escapades, say, "You better make jokes all the time." Some people took Robert Altman's movie M*A*S*H even as a kind of anti-militaristic, satiric product, but it's not. We should always bear in mind that these soldiers, with all their practical jokes, making fun of their superiors and so on, operated perfectly as soldiers. They did their duty. "Papa, this one's for you, babe." Much more ominous is a kind of obscene supplement to pure military discipline. In practically all movies about the US Marines, the best-known embodiment of this obscenity are marching chants, a mixture of nonsense and vulgarity. This is not undermining, making fun of military discipline. It is its inner, constituent. For me, you take this obscene supplement away, and the military machine stops working. Well, no [ __ ]. What have we got here? A [ __ ] comedian, Private Joker. I admire your honesty. Hell, I like you. You can come over to my house and [ __ ] my sister. You little scumbag. I got your name, I got your ass. You will not laugh. You will not cry. You will learn by the numbers. I will teach you. Now get up. Get on your feet. You had best unfuck yourself, or I will unscrew your head and shut down your neck, sir. Yes, sir. Private Joker, why did you join my beloved? I think that the drill sergeant, the way it is played in an exemplary way in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, that the drill sergeant is rather a tragic figure. I always like to imagine him as a person who, after his work, returns home, is quite decent and so on. My is my... All his obscene shouting is just a show put on, not so much to impress ordinary soldiers whom he is training, as to bribe them with bits of enjoyment. It's not just a question of this obscenities which sustains the military machinery. It's another, more general rule which holds for military communities, but even more, I would say, for all human communities, from the largest nations, ethnic groups, up to small university departments and so on. You don't only have explicit rules. You always, in order to become part of a community, need some implicit, unwritten rules which are never publicly recognized, but are absolutely crucial as the point of the identification of a group. In the UK, everyone knows about the obscene unwritten rituals which regulate life in public schools. "Thank you, Finn. I want to see your whip in my study after break. Bright." "Oh, how is India? Enjoy it, Char." "Good bridge. I'll la night." And just think about Lindsay Anderson's classic If. The public life is democratic. We have professors who interact with their pupils, nice atmosphere, teaching, friendship, spirit of cooperation. But then, we all know what happens beneath the surface. Older pupils torturing, sexually abusing the younger. Same mixture of obscenity and sadistic violence. And again, what is crucial here is we should not simply put all the blame or all the enjoyment on the older pupils. The victims, even, are part of this infernal cycle of obscenity.
It's as if in order to really be a member of a community, you have to render your hands dirty. And I think that even the Abu Ghraib scandal of American soldiers torturing and especially humiliating Iraqi prisoners is to be read in this way. It's not simply, "We, the arrogant Americans, are humiliating others." What Iraqi soldiers experience there was the staging of the obscene underside of American military culture.
In *Full Metal Jacket*, it's the character of Joker, played by Matthew Modine, who is close to what we would call a normal soldier, a mess-type of soldier. He has a proper ironic distance. He proves at the end, "Militarily the most efficient soldier."
[Music]
"Return, turning back to me. Why then will I soon shoot myself? Something went wrong there. But what? Lo, I did not just run amok. Order. This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. But I got to directly identified with this obscene rituals. I lost the distance. I took then seriously. What in the name of Jesus Christ are you animals doing?"
"If you get too close to it, if you over-identify with it, if you really immediately become the voice of this super-ego, it's self-destructive. You kill people around you. You end up killing yourself."
[Music]
"No."
[Music]
"Oh, sh—"
"So you think Batman's made Gotham a better place? Look at me. Look at me. You see this is how crazy Batman's made Gotham. You want order in Gotham? Batman must take off his mask and turn himself in. Oh, and every day he doesn't, people will die. Starting tonight. I'm a man of my word."
So who is Joker? If we're going to play games, which is the lie he is opposing? I'm going to need a cup of coffee. Ah, the good cop, bad cop routine. Not exactly. The truly disturbing thing about *The Dark Knight* is that it elevates lie into a general social principle, into the principle of organization of our social political life. As if our societies can remain stable, can function only if based on a lie. As if telling the truth, and this telling the truth is embodied in Joker, means destruction, disintegration of the social order.
"Never start with the head. The victim gets all fuzzy. He can't feel the ne—" Towards the end, it's as if lie functions as a hot potato, passing from one person's hand to another person's hand. First, there is Harvey Dent, so-called "Man into Custody," the public prosecutor, who lies. "I am the Batman," claiming that he is the real person behind Batman's mask, that he is Batman. Then we have Gordon, honest policeman, Batman's friend, who fakes, stages his own death.
[Music]
"See you later. You going back? Five dead. Two of them cops. You can't sweep them." At the end, Batman himself takes upon himself, but the Joker gets up with the crimes, murders committed by Harvey Dent, the public prosecutor turned criminal. God needs its true hero in order to maintain the trust of the public into the legal system. The idea is, if the ordinary public, public were to learn how corrupted was or is the very core of our legal system, then everything would have collapsed. So we need a lie to maintain order. A hero, not a hero we deserved, but the hero we needed. Nothing less than a knight shining.
There is nothing new in this. This is an old conservative wisdom asserted long ago by philosophers from Plato, but especially and then Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and so on and so on. This idea that the truth is too strong, that a politician should be a cynic who, although he knows what is true, tells to ordinary people, uh, what Plato called a noble fable, a lie.
"The United States knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. The UK knows that they have weapons of mass destruction. Any country on the face of the Earth with an active intelligence program knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against its own Shia population. The choice is his. And if he does not disarm, the United States of America will lead a coalition and disarm him in the name of peace."
Let's be frank. We can have a public system of power as legitimate as you want, submitted to critical press, democratic elections, and so on and so on. Apparently, it just served, serves us. But nonetheless, if you look closely into how even the most democratic state power functions, in order for it to display through authority and power needs authority, there has to be, as it were, between the lines all the time this message of, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are legalized through elections, but basically we can do with you whatever we want because that's what needs to happen because sometimes truth isn't good enough. Sometimes people deserve [Music] more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded."
One of the great platitudes which are popular today when we are confronted with acts of violence is to refer to Fyodor Dostoevsky's famous statement from *The Brothers Karamazov* of, "If there is no God, then everything is permitted." Well, the first problem with this statement is that Dostoevsky, of course, never made it. The first one who used this phrase as allegedly made by Dostoevsky was Jean-Paul Sartre in '43. But the main point is that this statement is simply wrong. Even a brief look at our predicament today clearly tells us this. It is precisely if there is God that everything is permitted to those who not only believe in God, but who perceive themselves as instruments, direct instruments of the Divine will.
If you posit or perceive or legitimize yourself as a direct instrument of the Divine will, then of course all narrow, petty moral considerations [Music] disappear. How can you even think in such narrow terms when you are a direct, direct instrument of God? This is how so-called religious fundamentalists work. But not only them. Every form of so-called totalitarianism works like that, even if it is presented or it, if it presents itself as atheist.
Let's take Stalinism. Officially, Stalinism was based on atheist Marxist theory. But if we look closely at the subjective experience of a Stalinist political agent, leader, we see that it's not a position of an arrogant master who can do whatever he wants. It's, on the contrary, the position of a perfect servant. In the Stalinist universe, there definitely is what in Lacanian theory we call the big Other.
[Music]
For [Music] this big Other in the Stalinist universe has many names. The best known of them are the necessity of historical progress towards communism, or simply history. History itself is the big Other. History, the necessary succession of historical [Music] stages.
[Music]
A communist experiences himself as simply an instrument whose function is to actualize a historical necessity. The people, the mythic people whose instrument the totalitarian leader is, are never simply the actually existing individuals, groups of people, and so on. It's some kind of imagined, idealized point of reference which works even when, for example, in rebellions against the Communist rule, like in Hungary '56, when the large majority of actually resisting people rises up, is opposed to the regime, they can still say, "No, these are just individuals. They are not the true people."
When you are accused of, "My God, how could you have been doing all these horrible things?" you could have say, and this is the standard Stalinist excuse, of course, "My heart bleeds for all the poor victims. I am not fully responsible for it. I was only acting on behalf of the big [Music] Other. As for myself, I like cats, small children, whatever." This is always part of the iconography of a Stalinist leader. Lenin in Stalinism is always presented as someone who likes small children and cats. The implication being, Lenin had to order many killings and so on, but his heart was not there. This was his duty as instrument of historical progress and so on and so on.
The way to undermine Stalinism is not simply to make fun of the leader. This can be, up to a point, even tolerated. It is to undermine this very reference, mythic reference which legitimizes the Stalinist leader, the people.
This is how I read the by far best work of Miloš Forman, his early Czech films: *Black Peter*, *Loves of a Blonde*, and *The Firemen's Ball*, where he mocks precisely the ordinary [Music] people in their daily conformism, stupidity, egotistic lust, and so on and so on. It may appear that this is something very arrogant, but no. I think that this is the way to undermine the entire structure of the Stalinist universe, to demonstrate not that leaders are not leaders. They're always ready to say, "Oh, but we are just ordinary people." Like, you know, that there is no mythic people which serves as the ultimate legitimization.
So what is the big Other? This basic element of every ideological edifice. It has two quite contradictory aspects. On the one hand, of course, the big Other is the secret of order of things, like divine reason, fate, or whatever, which is controlling our destiny. But this is maybe the least interesting aspect of the big Other as the agency which guarantees meaning of what we are doing. Much more interesting is the big Other as the order of appearances. Many things which are prohibited are not simply prohibited, but they should not happen for the big Other.
A supreme example of this agency of the big Other as the agency of appearance is the prattling busybody in David Lean's masterpiece *Brief Encounter*. At the very beginning of the film, the two lovers, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, uh, arrange for their last meeting in a cafeteria of a small train station.
"Laura: What a lovely surprise! Dar: My dear, eyes been shopping till I'm dropping. My feet are nearly off. My throat's parched. I thought of having tea, but I was terrified of losing the train. Oh dear. This is Dr. Harvey. How, how do you do? Would you be a perfect dear and get me my cup of tea? I really don't think I could drag my poor H—"
"My practice is in Charley."
"Oh, I see. I'm a general practitioner at the moment. Dr. Harvey is going out to Africa next week. Oh, H— Really?"
Instead of the two lovers being allowed at least their final moments alone, they have to maintain the appearances that nothing is happening between them, that they are just acquaintances, and so on and so on.
"He'll have to run, or he'll miss it. He's got to get right over to the other platform."
This precisely is the function of the big Other. We need for our stability a figure of big Other for whom we maintain appearances.
"And arrived at the station with exactly half a minute spare. I— I flew."
But are things really as simple as that? The next scene, the scene of Celia Johnson, totally desperate. She knows that she will never again see her lover.
"Yes, he's a nice creature. Have you known him long?"
"No, not very long. I hardly know him at all, really."
"Well, my dear, I've always had a passion for doctors."
Then we hear the line of Celia Johnson's thought: "Wish I could trust you. I wish you were a wise, kind friend instead of a gossiping acquaintance I've known casually for years. Never particularly careful."
What is the nature of this deadlock of Celia Johnson? She is split between the two figures in the film of the big Other. On the one hand, it's her husband, the ideal listener, but it's out of the question to confess to [Music] him.
"Fred, dear Fred, there's so much that I want to say to you. You're the only one in the world with enough wisdom and gentleness to understand."
"Wild horses wouldn't drag me away from England and home and all the things I'm used to. I mean, one has one's roots, after all, hasn't one?"
"Oh yes, one has one's roots."
On the other hand, you hear this stupid person who is available as a confessor, but there is not even an elementary trust.
"I wish you'd stop talking. I wish you'd stop crying and trying to find things out. I wish you were dead."
"No, I don't mean that. That was silly and unkind. But I wish you'd stop talking."
"My all her hair came out and she said the social life was quite, quite horrid, provincial, you know, and very new-ish."
"Oh, Dar, what's m— are you feeling again?"
So that's the tragedy of our predicament. In order to fully exist as individuals, we need the fiction of a big Other. There must be an agency which, as it were, registers our predicament, an agency where the truth of ourselves will be inscribed, accepted, an agency to which to confess. But what if there is no such agency? This was the utmost despair of many women raped in the post-Yugoslav war in Bosnia in the early '90s. They survived their terrible predicament, and what kept them alive was the idea, "I must survive to tell the truth." If, when, if they survived, they made a terrible discovery: there is no one really to listen to them either. Some totally ignorant, B-social worker, or some relative who usually made obscene insinuations like, "Are you sure you were not even enjoying a little bit the rape?" and so on and so on. They discovered the truth of what Jacques Lacan claims: there is no big Other. There may be a virtual big Other to whom you cannot confess. There may be a real Other, but it's never the virtual one. We are [Music] alone.
I think, I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, non-religious man, bureaucracy, state bureaucracy, is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the [Music] divine. It is in this scene from *Brazil* that we see the intimate link between bureaucracy and enjoyment. What the impenetrable omnipotence of bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment.
"Terrorist? The rest? Definitely no. My name is L. Mr. Sam."
The intense rush of bureaucratic engagement serves [Music] nothing. It is the performance of its very purposelessness.
"You like it up here? That generates an intense enjoyment, ready to reproduce itself forever."
"Things to— don't let progress see those between you and me, Larry. This, no, no department. Tell records to get Stu is about to be upgraded."
"And here we are. Your very own number on your very own door. And behind that door, your very own office. Congratulations. DZ/015. Welcome to the team."
"Yes. No. Cancel that. Send two copies to..."
Find the obverse of this. A wonderful scene, more towards the beginning of the film. Harry Tuttle, heating engineer, at your service. The hero who has a problem in his apartment with plumbing tries to get the state agency to fix it.
"Are you from Central Services?"
"Of course."
Two guys come, they just want forms to fill in. They do nothing. I called Central Services, and the ultimate subversive figure comes, a kind of clandestine plumber played by Robert De Niro.
"Just a minute. What was that business with a gun?"
"Just a precaution, sir. Just a precaution."
Who tells him, "Just tell me what is the problem and promises quickly to fix it." This, of course, is the ultimate offense to bureaucracy.
"Are you telling me that this is illegal?"
"Thanks."
"Listen, children, we're all in it together." In the ordinary theological universe, your duty is imposed onto you by God or society, another higher authority, and your responsibility is to do it. But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, you are also responsible for deciding what is your duty. There is always in our subjectivity, in the way we experience ourselves, a minimum of hysteria. Hysteria is what? Hysteria is the way we question our social symbolic identity.
"You're sure it's God? You're sure it's not the devil?"
"I'm not sure. I'm not sure of anything. If it's the devil, the devil can be cast out. But what if it's God? You can't cast out God, can you?"
What is hysteria? At its most elementary, it's a question addressed at the authority which defines my identity. It's, "Why am I what you are telling me that I am?" In psychoanalytic theory, hysteria is much more subversive than perversion. A pervert has no uncertainties, while again, the hysterical position is that of a doubt, which is an extremely productive position. All new inventions come from hysterical questioning. And the unique character of Christianity is that it transposes this hysterical questioning onto God himself as a subject.
"Who's that? Who's following me? Is that you?"
This is the ingenious idea of *The Last Temptation of Christ*, Kazantzakis' novel and Scorsese's film, namely the idea that when Jesus Christ, in his youth, is told that he is not only the Son of God, but basically God himself, he doesn't simply accept it. This is for Jesus Christ, boy, traumatic news.
"Like, my God, why am I dead? Am I really [Applause] dead?"
How did we come to that unique point which I think makes Christianity an exception? It all began with the Book of Job, as we all know. Things turn out bad for Job. He loses everything: his house, his family, his possessions, and so on. Three friends visit him, and each of them tries to justify Job's misfortunes. The greatness of Job is that he does not accept this deeper meaning. When, towards the end of *The Book of Job*, God himself appears, God gives right to Job. He says everything that the theological friends were telling Job is false. Everything Job was saying is true. No meaning in catastrophes. Here we have the first step in the direction of delegitimizing suffering.
"Father, stay with me. Don't leave me."
The contrast between Judaism and Christianity is the contrast between anxiety and [Music] love. The idea is that the Jewish God is the God of the abyss, of the Other's desire. Terrible things happen. God is in charge, but we do not know what the big Other, God, wants from us. What is the Divine desire? To designate this traumatic experience, Lacan used the Italian phrase *che vuoi*? "What do you want?" This terrifying question: "But what do you want from me?" The idea is that Judaism persists in this anxiety, like God remains this enigmatic, terrifying Other. And then Christianity resolves the tension through love, by sacrificing his son. God demonstrates that he loves us. So it's a kind of an imaginary, sentimental, even resolution of a situation of radical anxiety.
[Music]
[Music]
"Forgive."
If this were to be the case, then Christianity would have been a kind of ideological reversal or pacification of the deep, much more shattering Jewish side. But I think one can read the Christian gesture in a much more radical way. This is what the sequence of crucifixion in Scorsese's film shows us. What dies on the cross is precisely this guarantee of the big Other. The message of Christianity is here radically atheist. It's the death of Christ is not any kind of redemption or commercial affair in the sense of Christ suffers to pay for our sins. Pay to whom? For what? And so on. It's simply the disintegration of the God which guarantees the meaning of our lives. And that's the meaning of that famous phrase: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? Father, why have you forsaken me?"
[Music]
Just before Christ's death, we get what in psychoanalytic terms we call subjective destitution, stepping out totally of the domain of symbolic identification, canceling or suspending the entire field of symbolic authority, the entire field of the big Other. Of course, we cannot know what God wants from us because there is no God. This is the Jesus Christ who says, among other things, "I bring not peace." "If you don't hate your father, your mother, you are not my follower." Of course, this doesn't mean that you should actively hate or kill your parents. I think that family relations stand here for hierarchic social relations. The message of Christ is, "I'm dying, but my death itself is good news. It means you are alone, left to your freedom. Be in the Holy Ghost." Holy Spirit, which is just the community of believers.
It's wrong to think that the second coming will be that Christ, as a figure, will return. Somehow, Christ is already here when believers form an emancipatory collective. This is why I claim that the only way really to be an atheist is to go through Christianity. Christianity is much more atheist than the usual atheism, which can claim there is no God and so on, but nonetheless, it retains a certain trust into the big Other. This big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution, or whatever. We humans are nonetheless reduced to a position within a harmonious whole of evolution, whatever. But the difficult thing to accept is again that there is no big Other, no point of reference which guarantees [Music] meaning. We are in John Frankenheimer's *Seconds*, a neglected Hollywood masterpiece from 1966, from the very heart of the hippie era, which preached unrestrained hedonism: "Realize your dreams, enjoy life fully." The film is the story of a late middle-aged businessman leading a gray, totally alienated life, and then he decides at some point that he has enough of it. Through one of his friends, he contacts a mysterious agency which offers him a deal: they will reorganize his life so that he will be [Music] reborn.
"The cost runs in the neighborhood of $30,000. I know this seems rather high, but in addition to the rather extensive cosmetic renovation by way of plastic surgery for you, CPS has to provide a fresh corpse that perfectly matches uh your physical dimensions and medical specifications."
"CPS? Oh, cadaver procurement section." They use some corpse, they change it to look like his own body, they plant this corpse, stage a pelo accident so that police thinks he is dead.
"You know, Mr. Wilson, you represent something of a milestone around here."
And then the agency organizes an alternate life in a nice villa somewhere around LA. They even organize a nice lady who conveniently stumbles upon him when he is taking a walk along the [Music] beach.
"Hello."
He is thus reborn, no longer as a boring businessman, but as a modernist painter, Tony Wilson, called Tony Wilson, played by none other than Rock Hudson. Sure. So the woman, Nora, his new love, tries to engage him in life, even takes into some uh wine orgy where people get drunk, dance naked, and so on. Everything seems okay, but Tony Wilson starts to miss his old life more and more. He is haunted by his past. Finally, he breaks down, approaches again the agency, telling them that he wants to return to his old [Music] life.
The boss of this mysterious company, a kind of kindly cruel, hello son, super-ego, maternal figure, tells him the truth. He disappointed them by not being able to adapt himself to his new life.
"Ah, you know, I sure hoped you'd make it. Find your dream come true."
"I said, I sure hoped that you'd make it. Find your dream come true."
"Oh, you can call it wishful thinking, son, but life is built on wish. It and you got to just keep plugging away at him. You can't give up. Up. And we can't let the mistakes jeopardize the dream."
So what went wrong here? The problem was that his past, in its material existence, was erased.
"Well, here's your transportation, surgery, sir."
He lived in a totally new environment, new job, uh, uh, new friends, and so on. What remained the same were his dreams. Because when the company organized his rebirth, when the company provided new existence for him, they simply followed his dreams. His dreams were wrong dreams. And this is quite a deep lesson for the theory of ideology.
"Just remember, son, we got to keep plugging away at the dream. The mistakes teach us how it wasn't wasted. Remember that on the way to the operation."
He discovers the horrible truth: he will not be reborn, but he will be used as a cadaver for another person who wants to be [Applause] reborn.
We should draw a line of distinction within the very field of our dreams. Shall keep it life, eternity, between those who are the right dreams, pointing towards a dimension effectively beyond our existing society, and the wrong dreams, the dreams which are just an idealized consumerist reflection, mirror image of our society. We are not simply submitted to our dreams. They just come from some unfathomable depths, and we can't do anything about it. This is the basic lesson of psychoanalysis. And fiction, cinema. We are responsible for our dreams. Our dreams state our desires, and our desires are not objective facts. We created them. We sustain them. We are responsible for them.
This is an area of ancient lake beds deposited 5 to 10 million years ago. The scene of mescaline orgy in *Zabriskie Point* is a nice metaphor of what went wrong with the 1960s hippie revolution. [Music] It's crucial that *Zabriskie Point* was made in 1970, when the authentic revolutionary energy of the '60s was already losing its strength. This orgy is somewhere between subversion of the existing social order and already the full aestheticized reincorporation of this allegedly transgressive activities into the hegemonic ideology. Although Antonioni meant this as a kind of transcendence of the existing constraints, we can easily imagine this scene in some publicity campaign.
The first step to freedom is not just to change reality to fit your dreams. It's to change the way you dream. And again, this hurts because all satisfactions we have come from our dreams.
A great Supreme Commander, Mao, issued a world-shaking call to us: "You should pay attention to state affairs and carry the great proletarian cultural revolution through to the end." One of the big problems of all great revolutionary movements of the 20th century, such as Russia, Cuba, or China, is that they did change the social [Applause] body, but the egalitarian communist society was never realized. The dreams remained the old dreams, and they turned into the ultimate nightmare.
Now, what remains of the radical left waits for a magical event when the true revolutionary agent will finally awaken. While the depressing lesson of the last decades is that capitalism has been the true revolutionizing force, even as it serves only itself. How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of all life on Earth, an asteroid hitting the planet, than a modest change in our economic order? Perhaps the time has come to set our possibilities straight and to become realists by way of demanding what appears as impossible in the economic [Music] domain.
The surprising explosion of Occupy Wall Street protests, the mass mobilization in Greece, the crowds on Tahrir Square, they all bear witness to the hidden potential for a different future. There is no guarantee that this future will arrive. No train of history on which we simply have to take a ride. It depends on us, on our [Music] will.
In revolutionary upheaval, some energy, or rather some utopian dreams, take place. They explode. And even if the actual result of a social upheaval is just a commercialized, uh, everyday life, this excess of energy, what's get, what gets lost in the result, persists not in reality, but as a dream, haunting us, waiting to be redeemed. In this sense, whenever we are engaged in radical emancipatory politics, we should never forget, as Walter Benjamin put it almost a century ago, that every revolution is not only, if it is an authentic revolution, not only directed towards the future, but it redeems also the past failed revolutions. All the ghosts, as if were the living dead of the past revolution, which are roaming around unsatisfied, will finally find their home in in the new [Music] freedom.
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The [Music] never [Music] my [Music] [Music] I may be freezing to death, but you will never get rid of me. All the eyes in the world cannot kill a true idea. For