Slavoj Zizek We Are In An Apocalypse Part 1

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 HowToAcademy 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 Slavoj Zizek. Slavoj 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. Slavoj's new book, Surplus Enjoyment, A Guide for the Non-Perplexed, was published today. So congratulations Slavoj, happy publication day and you can pick it up of course. Today Slavoj will be in conversation with philosopher Robert Roland Smith. His seven books include Breakfast with Socrates, Death Drive, The Reality Test and Autobiophilosophy. 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 Slavoj would take 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 and Robert Roland Smith. Robert over to you. Thank you very much indeed Luke and welcome to everybody. It's a pleasure to be here with you and of course with Slavoj. Welcome Slavoj. 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 people on the call and you can write your questions or comments in and we'll look at those towards the end of our session today. But as Luke says today is happy publication day of Slavoj's new book. My copy, the English version, I don't know if you've seen this Slavoj, it's done in a beautiful kind of lurid pink colour which I congratulate you on. But I wanted to ask you, I mean I was looking in my calendar and it's only about a year since you and I last had a dialogue through the How-To 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 to 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. That's how I manage it. What is traumatic about it? This idea of literally telling to yourself now I am writing a text, it should never happen. So again I tell to myself 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 that everything is a surplus. Too many notes and then at the end just 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 Lacan, even a little bit in Derrida and you know my interest in Derrida. Perhaps you could just help the people on the call by just reminding them 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 matters of enjoyment, sexuality and so on, there is no basic zero-level enjoyment without a surplus attached to it. I will 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 Derrida. Namely, you know Derrida's reading of Kafka, he points out that, referring to Kafka, that things are never in a legal system, simply prohibited. At some deepest level, prohibition itself gets prohibited and I will 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. This is the idea of a surplus or another simple example from movies. You never simply hate or love a star. We always have a kind of a reflexive re-duplication. A bad guy must be a guy whom you love to hate. Or femme fatale 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, sorry. So in a way, the word surplus itself is a bit of a paradox because a surplus is never surplus. It's always intrinsic to whatever it is it's supposed to be surplus to. There's nothing without the surplus. Precisely. And here also comes my reference, maybe too pretentious, I'm not sure about it, to quantum physics where I think you find these are 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 as I understand it, one of the many things you're trying to convey with this book and 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 a phenomenon that we'll find reading Hegel or Lacan 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 right? It's an analysis that can be applied to the current moment. Absolutely. If there is an accusation that can be made against my book, it's precisely, I hope it works what I will describe right now, but I'm not sure that 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, Lacan, Derrida, they all share 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 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 climate change, we have pressures on energy prices, we have what many people currently call an omnicrisis. How does these terms of apocalypse and catastrophe help us to understand what's going on at the moment? 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, a 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. And mostly we can say that, he sometimes even translated revelation, yes. But already, I think he was one of the husbands of Hannah Arendt, Ginter Anders. He, I quote him, I think, proposes a beautiful notion of like apocalypse, or rather catastrophe, without this apocalyptic moment of truth. Because, you know, this would be a nice example of what Lacan 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, 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'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 with the apocalypse. On the one hand, plague. Plague is the name for all viral and so on diseases. And we just learn to live with it. It's not over the pandemic. Then we get war, obviously. Ukraine, but not only there. I think it will expand. I'm a pessimist. Then we get hunger. Hunger is for me now not just the threat of hunger, but also what all the global warming, ecological catastrophes amount to. And finally, most interesting may be death. But by death, I do not understand death in the ordinary biological sense. But death in this sense of... Sorry. Yes. Well, let me just... 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 thread here. 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 lines? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So when you talk about death now, which you're going on to do, 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 my, without irony, atheist reading of Christianity, resurrection, and Hegel says this explicitly, resurrection already happens in what Protestants call Gemeinde, in the new community of believers. Hegel explicitly said, resurrection doesn't mean let's patiently wait, at some point a guy will appear who will say, hi guys, remember me, I'm 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 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 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 Biogenetics, a big part of their Academy of Sciences, and he gave me the program which scared me to ----, 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 openly put it, we will begin changing the DNA, regulating our genetic background, also intervening into death. What death enters, I mean, I think, is 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 here, reality is out there. I think that this distance is something which is a 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. So to cut in a bit, or to help my understanding at least, maybe that of people on the call too, one aspect of death for you in the current cultural climate, for 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? Do you agree or not? 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 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?