Where does psychoanalysis stand in relation to the opposition between religious “enchantment” and scientific “disenchantment” of the world? Science is today’s fundamental fact, while religion and psychoanalysis constitute two responses to it: the “materialist” response, operating at the level of scientific discourse itself—Lacan noted that the subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of modern science—and the “idealist” response, which re-inscribes science within a hermeneutic horizon of Meaning. We should therefore distinguish strictly between hermeneutics, the domain of meaningful speech, and scientific discourse, which articulates what Lacan calls a “knowledge in the real.”

Lacan posits a life-and-death struggle between religion and psychoanalysis, while conceding religion’s hegemonic role in that struggle. The tendency to “domesticate” the real by giving it a sense is, he suggests, part of a quasi-transcendental human disposition:

“If religion triumphs, it is because psychoanalysis will fail. … If psychoanalysis does not triumph over religion, it is because religion is tireless, incredible: it can never drop dead. Psychoanalysis will not triumph; it will survive or not. …

Religion will not only triumph over psychoanalysis; it will also triumph over many other things. One cannot even imagine how powerful religion is.

I just spoke about the real. When science deals with the real, it will extend itself, and religion will find in it many more reasons to soothe hearts. Science means new things, and it will introduce many upsetting things into the life of every one of us. But religion, above all the true Christian one, has resources one cannot even imagine. At this moment, one can only observe how it swarms. It is absolutely fabulous!

The priests take their time, but they understand immediately where their opportunities lie with regard to religion. Their task will be to provide a sense for all the upheavals generated by science. And concerning sense, they know something about it. They are really capable of giving sense to anything whatsoever: a sense to human life, for example. They are educated to do this. From the very beginning, all that religion consists in is giving sense to things that were once natural things. If, thanks to the scientific real, things become less natural, one will not cease to extract sense from them. Religion will give sense to the most curious experiences, those that begin to give even scientists themselves a little bit of anxiety. Religion will provide all this with some juicy sense.”1

The relation between religion and psychoanalysis is thus that between the general field of Sense and its symptom: the point at which the Real intrudes upon this field. Lacan draws the sardonic conclusion that religion will succeed in “curing” humanity of this symptom:

“For a brief moment, it was possible to perceive something that was the intrusion of the real. The analyst stays there. He is there as a symptom. He can last only as a symptom. But you will see that humanity will be cured of psychoanalysis. By way of drowning it in sense—in the religious sense, of course—one will succeed in repressing this symptom. … Religion is made to do this: to cure people; that is to say, to make sure that they do not notice what does not go smoothly.”2

Within psychoanalysis itself, the hermeneutic reaction appears in the guise of Jungian “depth psychology.” The difference between Lacan and Jung may be formulated as the difference between “God is unconscious” and “God is the unconscious.” The former is a materialist thesis: beliefs persist in material practices of which we may be unaware, so that we act as if we believe. The latter is the spiritualist-obscurantist notion of a divine dimension dwelling in the depths of the unconscious.

With regard to materialism itself, we are witnessing a paradoxical reversal. In standard pre-critical metaphysics, “finitude” belonged to materialist empiricism—only material, finite objects really exist—while “infinity” belonged to idealist spiritualism. Today, by contrast, the principal argument for spiritualism against radical materialism relies on the irreducibility of human finitude, understood as the unsurpassable horizon of existence. Meanwhile, radical scientific materialism keeps alive the spirit of infinity.

The usual argument is that the technological dream of total mastery over nature and over our lives is only a dream. Human beings remain grounded in a finite life-world with an unfathomable background. This finitude—this limitation of our horizon—opens the space for proper spirituality. Predominant forms of contemporary spirituality therefore insist that we are not free-floating spirits but irreducibly embodied beings in a material life-world. They preach respect for this limitation and warn against the “idealist” hubris of radical materialism. Ecology is exemplary in this respect.

In contrast to this spiritualist attitude of limitation, radical scientific materialism, which reduces humanity to a biological mechanism, sustains the promise of total technological control over human life: its artificial re-creation, its biogenetic and biochemical regulation, and ultimately its immortality, in the guise of reducing the inner Self to a software program that can be copied from one piece of hardware to another.

It is as if the old materialist insight of Spinoza has thereby received its final confirmation: terms such as “God” are false terms without positive meaning, terms that provide a deceptive positive form for the domain of what we do not know. The religious dimension is explicitly linked to the limitation of comprehension. It does not intimate a “higher” knowledge; rather, it is the inverted assertion of the limits of knowledge.

This is why religious thinkers are drawn to what appear as limits of understanding: do not investigate the biogenetic foundations of the mind, since the result may be the loss of the soul; do not reach beyond the Big Bang, since that is where God directly intervened in material reality. Kant had already stated that he limited the space of knowledge in order to create space for faith.

These two sides of the same coin are clearly discernible in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. A formal procedure in his films, given his Soviet origins, cannot help but evoke ironically the dialectical “law” of the transformation of quantity into quality, supplemented by a kind of negation of negation. As Sean Martin writes:

“Tarkovsky proposed that if a take is lengthened, boredom naturally sets in for the audience. But if the take is extended even further, something else arises: curiosity. Tarkovsky is essentially proposing giving the audience time to inhabit the world that the take is showing us—not to watch it, but to look at it, to explore it.”3

The ultimate example may be the famous scene in Mirror in which the heroine, a proofreader at a daily newspaper in the Soviet Union of the mid-1930s, runs through the rain from her home to the printing office because she suspects she has missed an obscene misprint of Stalin’s name. Martin rightly stresses an unexpected feature of the scene: its immediate physical beauty.

“It is as if Tarkovsky were content just to watch Margarita Terekhova running through the rain, down steps, across yards, into corridors. Here, Tarkovsky reveals the presence of beauty in something that is apparently mundane and, paradoxically—given the period—also potentially fatal for Maria if the mistake she thinks she has made has gone to press.”4

This beauty is generated precisely by the scene’s excessive duration. Rather than merely following Maria’s run and worrying, within the narrative, whether she will arrive in time to avert catastrophe, we are seduced into looking at the scene itself: its phenomenal features, the intensity of movement, the texture of rain, corridors, yards, and steps.

More generally, Tarkovsky’s films are pervaded by the heavy gravity of the Earth, which seems to exert pressure on time itself. It produces temporal anamorphosis, extending the dragging of time far beyond what appears justified by narrative movement. “Earth” should be given all the resonance it acquired in late Heidegger. Tarkovsky is perhaps the clearest example of what Deleuze called the replacement of the movement-image by the time-image.

This time of the Real is neither the symbolic time of diegetic space nor the time of the reality in which we, as spectators, watch the film. It is an intermediate domain. Its visual equivalent may be the protracted stains that “are” the yellow sky in late Van Gogh, or the water and grass in Munch. This uncanny massiveness belongs neither to the direct materiality of colour stains nor to the materiality of represented objects. It dwells instead in an intermediate, spectral domain: what Schelling called geistige Körperlichkeit, spiritual corporeality.

In the standard ideological tradition, the approach to Spirit is understood as elevation: liberation from weight and gravitation, the severing of links with material inertia, the beginning of a free-floating existence. In Tarkovsky’s universe, by contrast, we enter the spiritual dimension only through direct and intense physical contact with the humid heaviness of earth, or stale water. The ultimate Tarkovskian spiritual experience occurs when a subject lies stretched out on the earth’s surface, half-submerged in stagnant water. Tarkovsky’s heroes do not pray on their knees with their faces lifted to heaven; they listen intensely to the silent palpitation of humid earth.

We can now understand why Stanisław Lem’s Solaris exerted such an attraction on Tarkovsky. The planet Solaris provides the ultimate embodiment of the Tarkovskian notion of a heavy, humid stuff—earth—which, far from opposing spirituality, serves as its medium. This gigantic “material Thing that thinks” gives body to the direct coincidence of Matter and Spirit. A consistent materialism must break with both features: in order to get rid of Spirit, it willingly sacrifices matter itself in its inert density.

The fundamental premise of today’s advocates of the finitude of human existence is this: we are thrown into a world that pre-exists us, a world we did not create and can therefore never fully grasp, control, or dominate. Whatever we do, even in our most radically autonomous acts, we rely on the opaque background of inherited traditions and on the socio-symbolic texture that predetermines the scope of our acts. Hans-Georg Gadamer made the point vividly: the time has come to reverse Hegel’s famous formula concerning the becoming-subject of Substance—the subjective-reflexive appropriation of all our substantial presuppositions—and to undertake the same journey backwards, from the subject to its substantial presuppositions.

This stance belongs within a matrix of four possible relations between subject and world. Subjectivist idealists claim that we made our world and can therefore fully grasp it, since in comprehending it we discern traces of our own activity. Enlightenment scientific materialists claim that, although we did not make the world and although it is an objective reality governed by independent laws, we can nonetheless understand, control, and master it. Ecologists generally share the premise of finitude: we did not create our world; we are thrown into it; therefore we should respect it rather than merely seek to dominate it.

There is, however, a fourth position, rarely acknowledged and the most difficult to understand properly: we created our world, but it overwhelms us; we cannot grasp or control it. This position resembles that of God confronting Job near the end of the Book of Job: a God who is himself overwhelmed by his own creation. This is what dialectics is about. What eludes the subject’s grasp is not the complexity of a transcendent reality, but the way the subject’s own activity is inscribed within reality.

This experience of being overwhelmed by one’s own creation is apocalyptic. Today apocalypse approaches on several fronts: ecological breakdown, informational saturation, and so on. Things seem to be approaching a zero-point; “the end of time is near.” The question is therefore: how does computerisation affect the hermeneutic horizon of everyday experience?

That experience rests on three lines of separation: between “true life” and its mechanical simulation; between objective reality and false or illusory perception; and between fleeting affects, feelings, and attitudes on the one hand, and the remaining hard core of the Self on the other. All three boundaries are threatened today.

First, techno-biology undermines the distinction between “natural” life-reality and artificially generated reality. In contemporary genetic technology, with its prospect of freely selecting sex, hair colour, IQ, and so on, living nature is posited as technically manipulable. In principle, nature as such coincides with a technical product. The circle is thereby closed: everyday hermeneutical experience is undermined. Technology no longer merely imitates nature; it renders visible the underlying mechanism that generates nature, such that “natural reality” itself becomes something simulated and the only “real” is the underlying structure of DNA.

Second, insofar as virtual-reality apparatuses may generate the experience of “true” reality, VR undermines the distinction between true reality and semblance. This loss of reality occurs not only through computer-generated virtual environments but, at a more elementary level, through the growing hyperrealism of images that bombard us in the media. Increasingly, we perceive colour and outline but no longer depth and volume: “Without visual limit there can be no, or almost no, mental imagery; without a certain blindness, no tenable appearance.”5

As Lacan put it, without a blind spot in the field of vision—without the elusive point from which the object returns the gaze—we no longer “see something.” The visual field is reduced to a flat surface, and reality itself is experienced as a visual hallucination.

Third, MUD—Multiple User Domains—technology in cyberspace undermines the notion of the Self, or the self-identity of the perceiving subject. The standard motif of postmodern writing on cyberspace is that phenomena such as MUD make palpable in everyday experience the deconstructionist “decentred subject.” The lesson offered is that we should endorse the dissemination of the unique Self into a multiplicity of competing agents: a “collective mind,” a plurality of self-images without a global coordinating centre, freed from its link to pathological trauma.

Playing in virtual spaces enables one to discover new aspects of “me”: a wealth of shifting identities, masks without a “real” person behind them. It thereby exposes the ideological mechanism through which the Self is produced: the immanent violence and arbitrariness of this production or construction.

These three levels logically follow one another. First, within objective reality itself, the distinction between living and artificial entities is undermined. Then the distinction between objective reality and its appearance becomes blurred. Finally, the identity of the self that perceives something—whether appearance or objective reality—explodes.

This progressive subjectivisation is strictly correlative with its opposite: the progressive externalisation of the hard kernel of subjectivity. The paradoxical coincidence of these opposed processes has its roots in the fact that VR and techno-biology entail the loss of the surface separating inside from outside. This loss jeopardises our most elementary experience of “our own body” in relation to its surroundings. It cripples our standard phenomenological attitude towards another person’s body, in which we suspend knowledge of what lies beneath the surface of the skin—glands, flesh, and so on—and take the surface of a face, for example, as directly expressive of a soul.

On the one hand, inside is always already outside. With the progressive implantation and replacement of internal organs, techno-computerised prostheses—bypasses, pacemakers, and so on—function as internal parts of the living organism. The colonisation of outer space thus turns inward into “endocolonisation”6: the technological colonisation of the body itself.

On the other hand, outside is always already inside. When directly immersed in VR, we lose contact with reality: electromagnetic waves bypass the interaction of external bodies and attack the senses directly. “It is the eyeball that now englobes man’s entire body.”7

Another aspect of this paradox is the way bodily immobilisation overlaps with bodily hyperactivity. On the one hand, I rely less and less on my proper body: bodily activity is increasingly reduced to giving signals to machines that work on my behalf, as when I click a computer mouse. On the other hand, the body is strengthened and “hyperactivated” through bodybuilding, jogging, pharmaceutical intervention, and direct implants. Paradoxically, the hyperactive superman coincides with the cripple who can move only by means of prostheses regulated by a computer chip, like Robocop.

The prospect is that human beings will gradually lose their grounding in the concrete life-world: the basic coordinates that determine self-experience—the surface separating inside from outside, the direct relationship to one’s own body, and so on. Potentially, total subjectivisation—the reduction of reality to an electromechanically generated cyberspace “window”—coincides with total objectivisation: the subordination of inner bodily rhythm to externally regulated stimuli.

It is no wonder that Stephen Hawking became one of the icons of the age: a genius’s mind, or so we are told, within a body almost wholly mediatized, sustained by prostheses and speaking through an artificial computer-generated voice. Hawking’s active contact with his surroundings was limited to the weak pressure he could exert with the fingers of his right hand. His popular appeal cannot be separated from his debilitating illness: the fact that his body, reduced to an almost immobile mass of flesh, continued to function through mechanical prostheses and to contact the world by clicking a computer mouse tells us something about the general condition of subjectivity today.

All these phenomena point toward an apocalyptic zero-point. The only serious question for an authentic Christian today is therefore the following:

“Ours is surely a truly apocalyptic situation, the most apocalyptic situation in our history, one transcending even an original Christian apocalyptism in the totality of its historical enactment. All past historical worlds are now being dissolved, and even all truly natural and sacred realms as well. Yet could such a dissolution be in genuine continuity with an original apocalyptism? Could our contemporary dissolution ultimately be a kenotic and self-emptying dissolution?”8

Nothing appears stranger to us today than apocalyptism. The liberal majority dismisses it as a pathological response to the deadlocks of capitalist modernisation, a sign of the total failure of our “cognitive mapping” of social reality. Yet nothing is a deeper mystery than apocalypse, despite the fact that ours is so clearly an apocalyptic time—the deepest and most comprehensively apocalyptic time in history. What is difficult to grasp is that apocalypse is not merely the catastrophe of creatures: ultimately, apocalypse is the apocalypse of God.

The crucified Jesus is the apocalyptic Jesus. He stands for the end of the world as we knew it, the end of time, when God himself dies and empties himself. At this point of apocalypse, opposites coincide: the lone Jesus is Satan himself; his death is the death of Evil; crucifixion and resurrection are one event. From its beginning until today, such apocalyptism has been “a profoundly revolutionary force in Western history, perhaps our most purely revolutionary power.”

One should recall the utopian fervour that sustained the Bolsheviks around 1920. Despair and true utopia go together: the only way to survive the catastrophic conditions of civil war, social disintegration, hunger, and cold is to mobilise “crazy” utopian energies. This is one of the basic lessons of the much-maligned millenarian movements, exemplified by the German Peasants’ Revolt of the sixteenth century and its leader, Thomas Müntzer. The catastrophe itself must be read in an apocalyptic mode—as the sign that “the end of time is near,” and that a new Beginning is around the corner.

This authentically Paulinian apocalyptic atmosphere is clear in Trotsky’s formulation of revolutionary duty:

“What the Third International demands of its supporters is a recognition, not in words but in deeds, that civilized humanity has entered a revolutionary epoch; that all the capitalist countries are speeding towards colossal disturbances and an open class war; and that the task of the revolutionary representatives of the proletariat is to prepare for that inevitable and approaching war the necessary spiritual armory and buttress of organization.”9

Such outbreaks of apocalyptic revolutionary fervour should also be read alongside their poetic expressions. Consider the most famous poem of the October Revolution: Alexander Blok’s The Twelve of 1918, which follows twelve Red Guards as they patrol a desolate city at night. Its apocalyptic atmosphere echoes Blok’s earlier Symbolist linkage of catastrophe and utopia:

To get the bourgeoisie
We’ll start a fire,
A worldwide fire, and drench it
In blood—
The good Lord bless us!
You bourgeoisie, fly like a sparrow!
I’ll drink your blood,
Your warm blood, for love,
For dark-eyed love.

The famous ending identifies the twelve Red Guards directly with the apostles led by Christ:

So they march with sovereign tread …
Behind them the hungry dog drags,
And wrapped in wild snow at their head,
Carrying a blood-red flag—
Soft-footed where the blizzard swirls,
Invulnerable where bullets slice—
Crowned with a crown of snowflake pearls,
A flowery diadem of ice,
Ahead of them goes Jesus Christ.

In early Christianity, before orthodoxy established itself, the first countermovement to the apocalyptic Jesus appeared in Gnosticism, traces of which may already be discerned in the Gospel of John. Gnosticism promoted the figure of a “Cynical Jesus”: an interpretation of the historical Jesus through a radical wisdom tradition, such as that represented by the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

Flights from the apocalyptic Jesus are also flights from the revolutionary Jesus, or from the possibility of historical revolution as such. Gnosticism dissolves not only the full humanity of Jesus but, in doing so, the very possibility of human and historical transformation.

There are, grosso modo, three principal currents in Christianity: centrist “legal” Christianity, the ideology of the Church as a State Ideological Apparatus; rightist, aristocratic Gnosticism; and leftist apocalyptism. This triad loosely corresponds to the historical triad of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism. In its understanding of Christ, Orthodoxy focuses on the Gnostic motif of the divinisation of humanity: “God became man so that man could become God.” Catholicism is clearly legalistic, maintaining God the Father at a distance as Creator. Protestantism violently reasserts the centrality of crucifixion as the death of God.

Further distinctions are necessary. Hans Jonas outlined the difference between two basic orientations of Gnosticism. Both understand history as the history of the Godhead itself, as an immanent divine “devolution.” In both, the Fall is not merely the fall from the Godhead but simultaneously the drama of the Fall—and eventual recuperation—of the Godhead itself. In both cases, the loss of unity between God and creation, the gap that separates them, renders God himself evil: the elevated Master of the world.

Jonas describes the opposition as follows:

“Both dramas start with a disturbance in the heights; in both, the existence of the world marks a discomfiture of the divine and a necessary, in itself undesirable, means of an eventual restoration; in both, the salvation of man is that of the deity itself. The difference lies in whether the tragedy of the deity is forced upon it from outside, with Darkness having the first initiative, or is motivated from within itself, with Darkness the product of its passion, not its cause. To divine defeat and sacrifice in the one case, corresponds divine guilt and error in the other; to compassion for the victimized Light—spiritual contempt of demiurgical blindness; to eventual divine liberation—reformation through enlightenment.”

In the first case, we have what Kant would have called a “real opposition” between two active and positive divine forces, Light and Darkness. In the second, “the fall is quite simply forgetfulness, a cosmic forgetfulness that is the very creation of the world, and the material universe passes into nothingness when the Father is truly known.”

What both versions of Gnosticism cannot accept is the fact that “he was made man”: the full humanity of Christ. This refusal extends even to intimate bodily details. To put it bluntly, some Gnostic accounts insist that Jesus neither urinated nor defecated:

“He was continent, enduring all things. Jesus digested divinity; he ate and drank in a special way, without excreting his solids. He had such a great capacity for continence that the nourishment within him was not corrupted, for he did not experience corruption.”10

A further consequence of the Gnostic stance is the Platonic subordination of ethics to cognition. Evil is ultimately not a matter of free will; it is rooted in ignorance of the Good. One cannot know the Good and remain evil. This is why, in the Gnostic reading of Genesis, the serpent that seduces Adam into eating from the Tree of Knowledge is not evil but a benevolent agent of self-cognition.

Christianity, by contrast, insists that a truly evil person is not ignorant of goodness. He knows goodness from within and is therefore able to exploit it. This anti-Platonic point is made neatly in the classic Hollywood version of The Three Musketeers. When Athos is about to send Countess de Winter, his utterly corrupt but still beloved wife, to her death, he says: “What is the essence of your evil? That you know the secret of the good.”

A thin but decisive line separates this authentically Christian subordination of knowledge to ethics from the perverse denunciation of knowledge as dangerous, or as an obstacle to ethics. In an old Christian melodrama, a temporarily blinded ex-soldier falls in love with the nurse who cares for him. Fascinated by her goodness, he forms an idealised inner image of her. When his blindness is cured, he sees that she is physically ugly. Aware that his love would not survive continued confrontation with this reality, and believing that the inner beauty of her good soul is more valuable than external appearance, he deliberately blinds himself by staring into the sun. He does so in order that his love may survive. If there were ever a false celebration of love, this is it.

What, then, is wrong with Gnosticism? Harold Bloom gives a useful definition of the gap separating it from Christianity:

“If you can accept a God who coexists with death camps, schizophrenia, and AIDS, yet remains all-powerful and somehow benign, then you have faith. … If you know yourself as having an affinity with the alien, or stranger, God, cut off from this world, then you are a Gnostic.”11

The Gnostic solution is the easy one: an easy escape from the paradox of true faith that Bloom describes. Faith always implies a credo quia absurdum.

One must ask the naïve question: why God at all? Why not heroically accept the world of death camps, schizophrenia, and AIDS as the only reality? Why posit a higher Reality above it? The counterargument is that immediate self-experience tells us that we are not “at home” in this miserable reality.

Heidegger’s notion of Geworfenheit, of “being thrown” into a concrete historical situation, may help here. Geworfenheit stands opposed both to standard humanism and to the Gnostic tradition. In the humanist vision, the human being belongs to the earth. He should be fully at home on its surface, able to realise his potential through active and productive exchange with it. As the young Marx put it, the earth is humanity’s “inorganic body.”

Any notion that we do not belong to this earth—that the Earth is a fallen universe, a prison for a soul striving to liberate itself from material inertia—is dismissed as life-denying alienation. For the Gnostic tradition, by contrast, the human Self is not created. It is a pre-existing Soul thrown into a foreign and inhospitable environment. The pain of daily existence does not result from sin, from Adam’s Fall, but from a fundamental glitch in the structure of the material universe, a universe created by defective demons. Consequently, salvation does not lie in overcoming sin but in overcoming ignorance: in transcending the world of material appearances through the attainment of true Knowledge.

What both positions share is the assumption that there is a home, a natural place for humanity: either the noosphere from which we fell into this world and for which our souls long, or Earth itself. Heidegger points a way out of this predicament. What if we are truly thrown into this world, never fully at home in it, always dislocated and “out of joint”? What if this dislocation is our constitutive and primordial condition—the very horizon of being? What if there was no prior home from which we were thrown into the world? What if this very dislocation grounds humanity’s ecstatic opening to the world?

We are thus tempted to reverse the standard theological metaphor of God, who sees the entire picture and knows that what we perceive as a stain contributes to global harmony. The devil is not in the detail but in the global picture: the world in its entirety is a meaningless, cruel multiplicity, while the Good is always partial—an island of fragile order.

There is nonetheless a deep truth in Gnosticism: the idea of a “self-saving” God, a God who himself falls and then enacts his own redemption. Redemption through Christ’s sacrifice is not merely humanity’s redemption, humanity having fallen into sin through the misuse of freedom. It is God’s redemption of himself. Christ’s death is therefore the death, the self-annihilation, of God himself, who at this climactic coincidence of opposites is identical with Satan. Only if Christ is Satan can his death be the defeat of Evil, and thus Redemption.

It was William Blake who dared to draw this ultimate conclusion from crucifixion as redemption, conceiving the death of God as “the self-sacrifice of God, a kenotic emptying that is the embodiment of a total compassion, the love that is finally the deepest depth of actuality itself.”

In the history of thought, this speculative identity of opposites was intuited by Meister Eckhart and fully enacted and conceptualised by Hegel. Both “refuse every final distinction between the eternal generation in the Godhead and the kenotic incarnation of Godhead or Spirit.” For both, the Father or Creator is ultimately the Son or Christ, and Christ is ultimately Satan. There is no substantial difference between entities here, only a processual differentiation in which divine Substance empties itself and thereby becomes Subject.

Orthodox Christianity cannot accept even the possibility of the redemption of the Godhead. For Orthodoxy, only humanity is redeemed; redemption has no effect on God as God, who remains absolutely immutable and ineffable. The passion and death of God are thus only the suffering and death of Christ’s humanity. Although the Son of God underwent a real death, Christ died as man, not as God.

The death of Christ is therefore only the death of his carnal body. It has no effect on God as God, who remains absolutely transcendent, immutable, impassive, and unaffected by Christ’s suffering and death. Gnosticism opposes precisely this transcendence: for Gnosticism, the transcendent God-Master is the evil—or, at best, clumsy—Creator. That is, he is Satan himself.

John Milton, perhaps the greatest of Protestant writers, pressed the matter in a different direction. He insisted that there was no genuine scriptural foundation for the dogma of the eternal generation of the Son of God, and that such a generation could only be temporal. Here we are at the furthest possible remove from Orthodoxy. The Son is not part of an eternal Trinity, God’s permanent mystery; Father and Son differ in essence, since the infinite essence of God cannot become incarnate.

Protestantism therefore fully asserts the death of Christ. When Christ died on the cross, he died totally: “his divine nature succumbed to death as well as his human nature.” Only such a full death is the true Event, the sole source of Redemption. The price of this assertion, however, is that God the Father withdraws into absolute transcendence, becoming a superegoic and capricious Master who predestines our destinies—a figure far harsher than the Catholic God of law and just punishment.12

How does the Christian apocalypse—its absolute ending, the death of God—relate to the Buddhist attainment of nirvana? The decisive difference concerns not so much content as form itself. At the level of content, the difference is smaller than it may appear. In both cases, the ending—the end of the world as we know it, of the Law, or of samsara—immediately reverts into its opposite: the eternal blessing of Love. What matters more is the form of this reversal:

“If the crucifixion fully parallels the absolute ‘selflessness’ of the Buddha, it nevertheless is an absolute act or enactment, and therefore the true opposite of an absolute and primordial nothingness. Therefore an apocalyptic Kingdom of God can be known as the true opposite of a Buddhist nirvana or sunyata, just as the kenotic Christ can be known as the true opposite of the kenotic Buddha.”13

Christian crucifixion thus confronts us with an absolute contradiction between content and form. Its content—the self-annihilation of God, and of every substantial Truth—is asserted in the form of a decisive act, a cut between “before” and “after.”

This contradiction emerges in another central difference. Once crucifixion is understood as the crucifixion of God himself, a crucial distinction remains between Gnosticism and authentic apocalyptism. In Gnosticism, the identity of opposites—the reversal of crucifixion into the eternal bliss of redemption—is immediate. The pain of crucifixion immediately becomes bliss because, in Gnostic enlightenment, humanity is directly divinised and the material world literally disappears.

The same applies to Buddhism, which represents the absolute calm of Buddha, the calm of nothingness, in innumerable paintings and works of art. Yet:

“Neither the New Testament nor any subsequent Christian visionary can enact an actual story of the resurrection. The only real action or plot the Christian can narrate is the passion story, for the passion and death of God are the deepest centre of Christianity. … Buddhism can know a full reversal in which passion and death fully and wholly disappear. But even the most exalted Christian art has never been able to envision the actuality of the resurrection, an actuality that is overwhelming in Christian images of the crucifixion.”

This is why Hegel is authentically Christian. For him, the only actuality of Spirit is the actuality of finite life:

“It is in finite consciousness that the process of knowing Spirit’s essence takes place, and that divine self-consciousness thus arises. Out of the foaming ferment of finitude, Spirit rises up fragrantly.”14

For Hegel, the reversal of crucifixion into redemption is purely formal. The art is to see redemption in what appears as crucifixion itself—or, in Hegel’s phrase concerning Luther, to see the Rose in the Cross of the present. The reality of the Cross is the only reality there is. As usual with Hegel, this formal reversal takes the simple form of universalisation: resurrection is nothing but “the universalisation of the crucifixion.”

Blake intuits this speculative high point poetically when he formulates the passage from Law to Love as a passage from external to self-relating negativity:

Satan! My Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilate
And be a greater in thy place, & be thy Tabernacle
A covering for thee to do thy will, till one greater comes
And smites me as I smote thee & becomes my covering.
Such are the Laws of thy false Heav’ns! But Laws of Eternity
Are not such: know thou: I come to Self-Annihilation
Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually
Annihilate himself for others’ good, as I for thee15.

This self-reflexive turn is, of course, the passage from “spurious infinity” to true infinity: from relating to others and interacting with them, to self-relating. Christ is “actual infinity” because he turns the act of violence back upon himself, sacrificing himself and thereby breaking the endless vicious cycle of reaction and revenge, of the “eye for an eye.”

In this gesture, Christ already enacts universality. He becomes universal in his very singularity, acquiring a distance from his particularity as one person among others. When “each annihilates himself for others’ good,” sacrifice cancels itself and we enter universal Love.

All difficult questions must be raised at this point. Can the horror of the Holocaust, for example, be conceived as divine kenosis? Does such a notion not blur the scandalous edge of that horror, turning it into merely one moment in God’s self-sacrifice and self-redemption?

The answer depends entirely on how divine kenosis is understood. What if kenosis is taken literally, as a genuine self-sacrifice—not as a game God plays with himself while remaining master of its outcome throughout? What if the horror of being an impotent witness to an event such as the Holocaust, in which the world itself falls apart, is divine kenosis in its purest form?

When, a couple of decades ago, Simon Rattle performed Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder in Berlin, he was asked how he could bring together Gurrelieder (whose performance demands a gigantic orchestra with an additional 400 chorus members) with Schoenberg’s well-known acerbic remark that in civilized Europe everything one needs to render the desired effect in a music performance is six, maximum seven players—we need orchestras only for the primitive Americans… Rattle provided a precise reply: Gurrelieder is simply a piece of chamber music that needs 600 players to be properly performed… I think this paradox renders perfectly the greatness of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

My first reaction to Odyssey was a big surprise: after reading numerous reviews enthralled by gigantic spectacular scenes and the raw authenticity of fighting, the movie itself appeared to me almost the opposite of these descriptions—a rather modest, almost chamber drama which occasionally reminded me of B productions. We never see the beach in front of Troy with thousands of Greek soldiers and hundreds of boats in the water behind them; there is no mass battle with hundreds of soldiers fighting. The Greeks on the beach are mostly a small group of a couple dozen individuals lost in bad weather on the desolate beach sand. Troy itself is also not shown as a mega-city but more as a group of buildings with narrow, twisted streets between them. Plus, Nolan avoided directly showing excessive cruelty—just recall the passage of Odysseus’ ship between Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis is not a gigantic whirlpool (easy to render with special effects) but a very modest circle of water posing no terrifying threat… These remarks are not meant as criticism: they point out what makes the film great.

Commentators noted long ago that, while the Iliad focuses on male exploits and struggles with women reduced to background tokens, the Odyssey also brings forward women’s inner lives. The Iliad begins with the rage of Achilles: he is furious because Agamemnon took the slave Briseis from him—however, Achilles is not hurt because of any emotional attachment to Briseis; what matters is simply that his pride was hurt. The Odyssey changes the perspective entirely, and Nolan takes an even more crucial and ingenious step further: the well-known beautiful stars who play women (Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron…) are not made beautiful—the way they are shot, sometimes almost embarrassingly, displays their age fully. They are mostly desexualized (although Calypso kept Odysseus as her lover for years, there is no erotic tension in their relationship). This desexualization reaches its climax in the figure of Circe, superbly played by Samantha Morton. In the poem, Circe is a seductress: she turns men who reject her advances into pigs and keeps Odysseus as her lover for a year, while in the movie she is simply disgusted by male gluttony and turns them into pigs when they cannot stop eating. It is the highest male figure, Agamemnon, who is not really personalized: we mostly don’t see his face, which is hidden behind a gigantic helmet, and the same holds for the Trojan soldiers—they are anonymous and depersonalized, so that although the movie depicts Greek crimes and cheating, it does not do so by opposing them to more honest and sympathetic Trojans.

Nolan doesn’t just lament the decline of the heroic Bronze Age—he does so by exposing the dirty, ordinary reality of heroic acts ignored by poetic narratives. Exemplary here is the Trojan horse itself. (Since the starting point of Odyssey [the movie] is the Trojan horse, one cannot but notice the irony that the Trojan horse is not mentioned in the Iliad, the poem about the Trojan War, and is only briefly mentioned in the Odyssey; it is described in detail only in Virgil’s Aeneid, which recounts the fall of Troy.) Forget the hidden Greeks jumping out when the horse is pulled into Troy—Nolan shows, in disgusting, claustrophobic detail, the lives of these heroes as they waited for days inside the horse, pissing and shitting on each other, i.e., he “takes audiences inside the Trojan horse for an extended, gritty scene that lays out the cramped, horrifying conditions for those hiding inside, underscoring their maniacal, animalistic hunger to prevail in battle.”1 Is this procedure not, from today’s standpoint, almost a case of Brechtian Verfremdung (estrangement)?

Odysseus mentions in the movie that they are at the end of the Bronze Age—an absurd self-designation that exposes the falseness of his historical awareness: Odysseus, by definition, could not know about the Bronze Age as a historical epoch because he was still part of it; he had no awareness of what the new world his crimes would ground would become. What one might call the original sin takes place at the very beginning of the film: we see Sinon, a young Greek soldier, guarding the wooden Trojan horse, half-buried in the beach sand. He is there to tell the Trojans that the Greeks have departed and that the horse is a gift of reconciliation, which the Trojans are expected to drag into the city. But Odysseus did not tell Sinon that elite Greek soldiers were hidden inside the horse: Odysseus knew the Trojan patrol would kill Sinon, and he wanted the Trojans to believe the explanation Sinon gave them (that it was simply a ritualized gift marking the end of the war). Why? Because Odysseus (correctly, in all probability) presumed that if Sinon himself did not believe the lie about the horse, he would not be able to convince the Trojans of it… Dante was right to place Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell in his Inferno.

Odysseus’ reflections that conclude the movie quite evidently point toward our contemporary predicament: just as Odysseus’ manipulations and lies announce the end of the Bronze Age heroic spirit of honor and the arrival of classical Greece, today the age of machines used by humanity to control nature and people is coming to an end. We are entering a new era characterized by two main features: the dominance of AI and the rise of “post-truth” culture. This is why, as in Odyssey, we hear all around us today the idea that we are approaching a civilizational erasure, and, as in Odyssey, we have no precise idea what will follow: a new, much higher civilization, or a new barbarism (or an unheard-of combination of both). One cannot but recall here Walter Benjamin’s famous aphorism: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Usually, ideology provides only the glorious beginning of a new civilization, ignoring the dark background—its founding barbarism. Nolan’s Odyssey does the opposite: it focuses on the founding crimes without any indication of the new civilization these crimes will ground.

I am tempted to read Odyssey the way Fredric Jameson proposed to read Antigone: for him, Antigone is not a play about the crisis of the Greek polis, about the disintegration of its organic unity, but, quite on the contrary, a play about the emergence of a state through the division between the private family sphere and the public sphere of the state—a state without this gap is not a state. So what if Odyssey is also not just the sad story of the disappearance of the Bronze Age heroic warriors and the rise of a new spirit of lying and cheating; it is at the same time the story of the rise of a new civilization (classical Greece), of the crime and cheating on which the model that grounded the entire Western tradition—its philosophy and art—was built. Odysseus’ nostalgia for the disappearing Bronze Age is thus false: once we are in the new order, there is no way back; every such attempt to restore old greatness ends up in new, brutal barbarism.

Here, even Adorno’s famous chapter on Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment misses the point when it presents Odyssey as the ultimate allegory for Western civilization: Odysseus is a prototypical bourgeois subject who suppresses his own desires and exploits nature to survive. He cheats and lies to exert domination over others and nature, but the price he pays for his survival is that it becomes an end in itself, serving no higher spiritual purpose—what was supposed to be merely an instrument turns into its own end… I think Odysseus’ manipulations, his readiness to sacrifice individual lives to enable the survival of some larger whole, amount to more than just instrumental reason. It is a form of trickery that brings its own perverse satisfaction in the renunciations it imposes on others and on the hero himself.

At the movie’s end, Odysseus and Penelope install their son Telemachus as the new king and leave Ithaca for the West to meet all the soldiers for whose deaths Odysseus was responsible, and to make peace with them. My evil idea is that (in an added scene intersecting with the end credits) we see Odysseus and Penelope reaching America and contacting the natives, who promptly slaughter them because they quickly discern their destructiveness…

And, to conclude on a more hopeful note, perhaps it is a sign of persisting civilization that, despite a gigantic negative campaign, a difficult, dark movie like Odyssey is still a big success, beating stupid blockbusters like Moana and Minions & Monsters.

In an interview for Italian TV from 1980, Louis Althusser mentions football (soccer) as an example of Communism, of a small Communist area that already exists in our reality (his other examples are religious communities, trade unions, and some cells of a Communist Party):

“Look at how football is played, what happens? It’s not about market relationships, it’s not about political domination, it’s not about ideological intimidation. There are people from different teams that oppose each other, they respect the rules, that is, they respect each other. Communism is the respect for humankind.”1

Althusser knows well this is not the social reality of big football clubs and competitions: they are deep in market relationships (billions changing hands), political domination (just recall Trump’s manipulation of FIFA), and ideological intimidation (the use of football to assert national unity – due to my total ignorance of football, I was often designated as a non‑patriotic traitor). However, he is far from being naïve: he just correctly notices the emancipatory core inscribed into the very form of football – market, politics, and ideology are parasitizing on this core.

And my idea is that Mamdani’s demand that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested if he visits New York should be read in a similar way. Mamdani is well aware that our justice system, national and international, is deeply corrupted and biased; however, he is no less aware that the demand for justice should not be dismissed because of these facts, and that when (as an exception, as it were) some legal body does its proper duty, it should be unconditionally supported. Mamdani begins with a simple and clear description of facts often avoided by our big media:

“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people. He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people; for the maiming of tens of thousands of children, as those who survive undergo amputation without anesthesia; for the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers, denying newborns even the chance to live; for the countless people he starved as he blocked food and humanitarian aid from reaching them; for the gunning down of hundreds of aid workers and journalists. And just last month, the U.N. confirmed that Palestinian children continue to be deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli armed forces — more than eight months after the so‑called ceasefire. The list goes on and on, all as we, as Americans, pay for the bombs that do the killing. There is a reason the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest.”

What follows is a simple and straightforward logical implication of these facts:

Read more

There is a form of perversion at work today which allows us to avoid shame: we exclude ourselves from social reality (a reality regulated by some symbolic authority, what Lacan called the “big Other”) and intervene in it from a safe distance, so that our acts are not exposed to the gaze of the big Other which makes us ashamed. An exemplary case of such a perversion is provided by Sarajevo Safari (Miran Zupanič, Slovenia 2022), a documentary about arguably the most bizarre pathological event that took place during the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996.1 When this documentary was released, officials from Republika Srpska and war veterans’ associations sharply denied all allegations, calling them “propaganda” and “heinous lies” directed against the Serb people. Lately, with a delay of four years, criminal investigations are finally discovering facts, especially in Italy, and individuals will soon be prosecuted.2

It is well known that snipers on the hills surrounding Sarajevo, occupied by Serb forces, were shooting arbitrarily at residents on the streets below them. It was also well known that selected Serb allies (mostly Russians) were invited to shoot a couple of shots on Sarajevo, but this was considered an honor, a sign of special appreciation, not a business. Now we have learned about the real business: dozens of rich foreigners (mostly from the US, UK, and Italy, although some also from Russia) paid high fees for the chance to shoot at the residents of besieged Sarajevo. The trip was organized by the Bosnian Serb Army: the customers were transported from Belgrade to Pale (the capital of Serb Bosnia in the mountains near Sarajevo) and then brought to a safe place with a view of Sarajevo down in the valley. Prices were fixed – for example, to kill a young child cost more than to kill an adult.

We learn from the documentary that not only the top command of the Bosnian Serb Army but also NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia were aware of this safari – so why didn’t they make it public or simply bomb the sniper positions? But what is of special interest here is the form of subjectivity of a safari “hunter”: victims were not personalized, they remained anonymous, and a symbolic wall separated the hunter from the target. It was nonetheless not a video game; victims were part of reality, and the awareness of this fact accounts for the perverse thrill of such “hunting.” To be more precise, it is not the victim who was here de-realized, it was the “hunter” himself who excluded himself from ordinary reality and perceived himself as located in some safe place above reality. This is how reality itself became part of a spectacle in which the hunter can pretend that he is not personally involved.

For this reason, Sarajevo Safari arguably goes even a step further than another documentary, The Act of Killing (directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn, Final Cut Film Production, Copenhagen 2012).3 The film – shot in Medan, Indonesia, in 2007 – reconstructs the story of Anwar Congo and his friends, who are now respected politicians but were gangsters and death squad leaders playing a key role in the 1966 killing of approximately 2.5 million alleged Communist sympathizers, mostly ethnic Chinese. After their victory, their terrible acts were not relegated to the status of the “dirty secret,” the founding crime whose traces are to be obliterated – on the contrary, they boast openly about the details of their massacres (the way to strangle a victim with a wire, the way to cut a throat, how to rape a woman in the most pleasurable way…). In October 2007, Indonesian state TV produced a talk show celebrating Anwar and his friends; in the middle of the show, after Anwar says their killings were inspired by gangster movies, the beaming moderator turns to the cameras and says: “Amazing! Let’s give Anwar Congo a round of applause!” When she asks Anwar if he fears the revenge of the victims’ relatives, Anwar answers: “They can’t. When they raise their heads, we wipe them out!” His henchman adds: “We’ll exterminate them all!”, and the audience explodes into exuberant cheers… one has to see this to believe it’s possible.

However, with all the horror it discloses, The Act of Killing reports on (and re-enacts for the camera) something that already happened, while in Sarajevo Safari the killing itself is organized as a spectacle. There is something perversely honest in this: are top corporate managers not engaged in a similar safari? Their decisions may ruin many lives, thousands may lose jobs – and we can imagine some of them observing families ruined by a guy they fired or in another way ruined his or her life. And – our final example of the same madness – did Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who now serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, not rely on a similar logic when he recently said that “the U.S.-led NATO military alliance would be too scared of a ‘nuclear apocalypse’ to directly enter the conflict in response to Russia using tactical nuclear weapons”? “I believe that NATO will not directly intervene in the conflict even in this situation. After all, the security of Washington, London, Brussels is much more important for the North Atlantic Alliance than the fate of a dying Ukraine that no one needs. […] The supply of modern weapons is just a business for Western countries. Overseas and European demagogues are not going to perish in a nuclear apocalypse. Therefore, they will swallow the use of any weapon in the current conflict.”4

Are we aware what these sentences imply? Medvedev is ready to risk the lives of billions for a small piece of land – billions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia who are not involved in the Ukrainian conflict. Back in August 2022, Medvedev already said that a proposal to punish Russia for war crimes in Ukraine threatened the existence of mankind, given Moscow’s nuclear arsenal.5 Again, where does Medvedev speak from when he talks like that, what is his subjective position? He does not include himself among those who will perish, as if he will somehow survive the global nuclear catastrophe – as if humanity is like Sarajevo in a valley and he is at a safe distance on a hill above it. Of course he knows that he will be affected by the end of mankind, but he speaks as if he doesn’t know it.

When, a couple of decades ago, Simon Rattle performed Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder in Berlin, he was asked how he could bring together Gurrelieder (whose performance demands a gigantic orchestra with an additional 400 chorus members) with Schoenberg’s well-known acerbic remark that in civilized Europe everything one needs to render the desired effect in a music performance is six, maximum seven players—we need orchestras only for the primitive Americans… Rattle provided a precise reply: Gurrelieder is simply a piece of chamber music that needs 600 players to be properly performed… I think this paradox renders perfectly the greatness of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

My first reaction to Odyssey was a big surprise: after reading numerous reviews enthralled by gigantic spectacular scenes and the raw authenticity of fighting, the movie itself appeared to me almost the opposite of these descriptions—a rather modest, almost chamber drama which occasionally reminded me of B productions. We never see the beach in front of Troy with thousands of Greek soldiers and hundreds of boats in the water behind them; there is no mass battle with hundreds of soldiers fighting. The Greeks on the beach are mostly a small group of a couple dozen individuals lost in bad weather on the desolate beach sand. Troy itself is also not shown as a mega-city but more as a group of buildings with narrow, twisted streets between them. Plus, Nolan avoided directly showing excessive cruelty—just recall the passage of Odysseus’ ship between Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis is not a gigantic whirlpool (easy to render with special effects) but a very modest circle of water posing no terrifying threat… These remarks are not meant as criticism: they point out what makes the film great.

Commentators noted long ago that, while the Iliad focuses on male exploits and struggles with women reduced to background tokens, the Odyssey also brings forward women’s inner lives. The Iliad begins with the rage of Achilles: he is furious because Agamemnon took the slave Briseis from him—however, Achilles is not hurt because of any emotional attachment to Briseis; what matters is simply that his pride was hurt. The Odyssey changes the perspective entirely, and Nolan takes an even more crucial and ingenious step further: the well-known beautiful stars who play women (Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron…) are not made beautiful—the way they are shot, sometimes almost embarrassingly, displays their age fully. They are mostly desexualized (although Calypso kept Odysseus as her lover for years, there is no erotic tension in their relationship). This desexualization reaches its climax in the figure of Circe, superbly played by Samantha Morton. In the poem, Circe is a seductress: she turns men who reject her advances into pigs and keeps Odysseus as her lover for a year, while in the movie she is simply disgusted by male gluttony and turns them into pigs when they cannot stop eating. It is the highest male figure, Agamemnon, who is not really personalized: we mostly don’t see his face, which is hidden behind a gigantic helmet, and the same holds for the Trojan soldiers—they are anonymous and depersonalized, so that although the movie depicts Greek crimes and cheating, it does not do so by opposing them to more honest and sympathetic Trojans.

Read more

There is a form of perversion at work today which allows us to avoid shame: we exclude ourselves from social reality (a reality regulated by some symbolic authority, what Lacan called the “big Other”) and intervene in it from a safe distance, so that our acts are not exposed to the gaze of the big Other which makes us ashamed. An exemplary case of such a perversion is provided by Sarajevo Safari (Miran Zupanič, Slovenia 2022), a documentary about arguably the most bizarre pathological event that took place during the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996.1 When this documentary was released, officials from Republika Srpska and war veterans’ associations sharply denied all allegations, calling them “propaganda” and “heinous lies” directed against the Serb people. Lately, with a delay of four years, criminal investigations are finally discovering facts, especially in Italy, and individuals will soon be prosecuted.2

It is well known that snipers on the hills surrounding Sarajevo, occupied by Serb forces, were shooting arbitrarily at residents on the streets below them. It was also well known that selected Serb allies (mostly Russians) were invited to shoot a couple of shots on Sarajevo, but this was considered an honor, a sign of special appreciation, not a business. Now we have learned about the real business: dozens of rich foreigners (mostly from the US, UK, and Italy, although some also from Russia) paid high fees for the chance to shoot at the residents of besieged Sarajevo. The trip was organized by the Bosnian Serb Army: the customers were transported from Belgrade to Pale (the capital of Serb Bosnia in the mountains near Sarajevo) and then brought to a safe place with a view of Sarajevo down in the valley. Prices were fixed – for example, to kill a young child cost more than to kill an adult.

We learn from the documentary that not only the top command of the Bosnian Serb Army but also NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia were aware of this safari – so why didn’t they make it public or simply bomb the sniper positions? But what is of special interest here is the form of subjectivity of a safari “hunter”: victims were not personalized, they remained anonymous, and a symbolic wall separated the hunter from the target. It was nonetheless not a video game; victims were part of reality, and the awareness of this fact accounts for the perverse thrill of such “hunting.” To be more precise, it is not the victim who was here de-realized, it was the “hunter” himself who excluded himself from ordinary reality and perceived himself as located in some safe place above reality. This is how reality itself became part of a spectacle in which the hunter can pretend that he is not personally involved.

Read more

Four decades ago, Donna Haraway wrote her “Cyborg Manifesto”1, in which she located the emancipatory potential of cyborgs in the very feature most of us perceived as a mortal threat to our being-human: we should leave behind any anti-technological nostalgia for old “authentic” ways of being and joyfully assume that our lives, up to our most intimate feelings, are inextricably intermingled with technology. In a quite literal way, we are more and more functioning like cyborgs, incorporating into our bodies technological components without which we would not survive, and the Artificial Intelligence explosively spreading today is just another, much more powerful technological supplement without which our entire social life would instantly collapse. In their very existence, cyborgs interrupt the logic of parental succession – they are an “‘illegitimate offspring’, born not of love or emancipation but emerging from domination: militarism, patriarchal capitalism, state socialism, war technologies, bureaucratic control, industrial discipline and systems designed to manage bodies and populations. The cyborg is a byproduct of violence and exploitation.”2 Such a practice of repurposing (or exaptation, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s term) uses technologies generated by oppressive systems against these systems themselves:

“This is a profound reorientation of how we think about technological inheritance. Where traditional political theory—and here we can even include Gandhi and his vilification of technological modernity—worries about corruption and degradation (how good intentions are spoiled by bad systems), the cyborg weaponizes the instability of its originating systems, thus prying open new, epic opportunities.”3

It is worth noting that the entire narrative edifice of the origins of Islam is also based on an illegitimate offspring. A key distinction between Judaism (together with its Christian continuation) and Islam is that, as we can see in the case of Abraham’s two sons, Judaism chooses Abraham as the symbolic father, the paternal symbolic authority, of the official symbolic lineage, discarding the second woman. Islam, on the contrary, opts for the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian slave who gave to Abraham his first son Ishmail (the progenitor of all Arabs, according to the myth). Since Sarah, Abraham’s legitimate wife, cannot get pregnant, she orders her husband to sleep with Hagar. But after Sarah gets a son, Abraham sends Hagar with Ishmail to the desert, where the two are supposed to die of thirst. God then directly intervenes and saves both of them. Although Abraham and Ishmail are mentioned dozens of times in the Quran, Hagar is unmentioned, erased from the official history. As such, however, she continues to haunt Islam, her traces surviving in rituals, like the obligation of the pilgrims to Mecca to run six times between the two hills Safa and Marwah, a kind of neurotic repetition/reenactment of Hagar’s desperate search for water for her son in the desert. Muslims thus perceive themselves as the descendants of an illegitimate offspring: their founding person is an orphan (and the same holds for Muhammad himself). The (in)famous umma, the Muslim “community of believers”, is a community “out of nowhere,” in the genealogical desert, as the egalitarian revolutionary fraternity of orphans – no wonder Islam succeeds when young men find themselves deprived of the traditional family safety network.

The dream of the illegitimate offspring revolutionizing the existing order is politically very important: it allows us to discern the line in political history that began with Han Fei (the founder of Chinese legalism) and runs through Machiavelli and Saint-Just to Lenin, yet another truly “illegitimate offspring” of Marx (in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the legitimate offspring of Marx was undoubtedly Julian Martov, the leader of the Mensheviks). Lenin is thus to be located in a long series of political figures which began with the Chinese legalists who emerged out of the crisis of Confucianism. When, in the 5th to 3rd centuries BC, China went through the period of the “Warring States,” Confucians perceived as the ultimate cause of this slow but persistent decay the betrayal of old traditions and customs. Most troubling to Confucius was his perception that the political institutions of his day had completely broken down. He attributed this collapse to the fact that those who wielded power, as well as those who occupied subordinate positions, did so by making claim to titles for which they were not worthy. When asked about the principles of good government, Confucius is reported to have replied: “Good government consists in the ruler being a ruler, the minister being a minister, the father being a father, and the son being a son.” In Europe, we call this a corporate vision: society is like a body where each individual has to stay in his proper place and play his particular role. This is the very opposite of democracy: in democracy, nobody is constrained to his or her particular place, everybody has the right to participate in universal affairs, to have his word in the deliberations about where our society goes. No wonder, then, that Confucius’ description of the disorder he sees in society around him – “Rulers do not rule and subjects do not serve” – provides a good description of a democratic society in which the united subjects rule and the nominal rulers serve them.

What legalists did was to drop the very coordinates of such a perception of the situation: for the Confucians, the land was in chaos because old traditions were not obeyed, and states like Qin, with their centralized-military organization dismissive of the old customs, were perceived as the embodiment of what is wrong. However, in contrast to his teacher Xunzi, who regarded nations like Qin as a threat to peace, Han Fei “proposed the unthinkable, that maybe the way of the Qin government was not an anomaly to be addressed, but a practice to be emulated.”4 The solution resided in what appeared as problem: the true cause of the troubles was not the abandonment of old traditions, but these traditions themselves, which daily demonstrated their inability to serve as guiding principles of social life – as Hegel put it in the “Foreword” to his Phenomenology of Spirit, the standard by means of which we measure the situation and establish that the situation is problematic is part of the problem and should be abandoned. Han Fei applied the same logic to the fact that (the majority of) men are evil by nature, not ready to act for the common Good: instead of bemoaning it, he saw the human evil as a chance for state power, as something that a power enlightened by the right theory (a theory which describes things the way they really are, “beyond good and evil”) can steer by applying to it a proper mechanism:

“Where Xunzi saw an unfortunate observation, that men were evil by nature, Han Fei saw a challenge for the institution of stern laws to control this nature and use it to the benefit of the state.”5

One of the great achievements of contemporary Leftist political theory (Althusser, Balibar, Negri) was to rehabilitate Machiavelli, to save him from the standard “Machiavelist” reading. Since legalists are often presented as ur-Machiavelists, one should do the same with them, extricating a radical-emancipatory kernel from their predominant image as proto-“totalitarians.” The great insight of legalists was to perceive the crisis of the social body, the disintegration of old habits, as a chance for a new order.

But could our “decentering” by the AI machinery be transformed into a new order in which we, humans, will still be able to reprogram our AI partner so that it will act with care and empathy? Legalists advocated a new order of the total power of a centralized state which brutally enforced its notion of a just legal system – is it not almost certain that AI will impose itself as an even stronger power whose very functioning will transcend our understanding?

The gap that separates AI from human mind is not just quantitative but qualitative: an AI agent does not just learn data and reason much, much faster than a human mind; what is even more important is that a human mind is embodied, exposed to pain and vulnerability, prone to doubt and oscillations, caught in an intersubjective network of others who are no less impenetrable to themselves than the human mind interacting with them, in clear contrast to an AI agent, which is a smoothly functioning machine just doing its job with no compassion or pain. And if we risk here a step further, since AI agents will be far more intelligent than humans, they may be obeying their own morality we, humans, will not be able to identify and even to understand:

“An AI might reason about suffering, fairness or future value in ways that are internally coherent to it, but utterly alien to human moral intuition. The gap in such a case would not be one of intelligence but of moral legibility. At this point of moral singularity, humans would find themselves facing a paradox: we would directly or indirectly be at the mercy of a system whose ethical judgements we cannot assess, yet whose power we cannot resist. In this case, superintelligence would not guarantee super-morality, but it might instead produce total moral opacity.”6

Back to Haraway, we can see why she soon abandoned this dream of cyborg: the gap that separates the human and the AI portion of a cyborg is too strong, so that it is difficult to imagine a community of cyborgs programming the AI part of themselves in such a way that it would follow the logic of humanist care and solidarity. Is it then possible to imagine a neutral ground in which AI and the core of human subjectivity could coexist? Here we encounter an unexpected option: the Cartesian cogito, which is as a rule dismissed as an empty abstraction of disembodied thinking modelled upon the ideological myth of masculine self-control. However, already in Descartes’s time, many (educated) women gave the cogito a feminist spin. Their motto was “cogito has no sex,” which means it implies a principled equality of sexes, marking a clear break from the traditional sexualized ontology (as in the case of Aristotle, for whom the masculine form shapes feminine matter).

The person who first deployed this feminist potential of Cartesianism was François Poullain de la Barre, a follower of Descartes who, after becoming a priest, converted to Protestantism. He applied Cartesian principles to the question of the sexes and denounced injustice against women and the inequality of the female condition, championing social equality between women and men. In 1673, he published anonymously De l’Égalité des Deux Sexes: Discours physique et moral où l’on voit l’importance de se défaire des préjugés (A Physical and Moral Discourse on the Equality of Both Sexes, which shows that it is important to rid oneself of Prejudices), showing that the inequality between the sexes does not have a natural base but proceeds from cultural prejudice. He also recommended that women receive a proper education and that all careers should be open to them, including scientific ones.

This is why, for Lacan, Descartes was NOT a humanist; he broke with the Renaissance vision of humans as the highest expression of cosmic divine reality – cogito is, on the contrary, anti-humanist. One should distinguish between posthumanism and the thought of postsubjectivity: one can well imagine a humanism based on the rejection of Cartesian subjectivity (along the lines of “real humans engaged in an actual life-process, not the dead abstraction of cogito”), as well as an antihumanist subjectivity (subject as a monstrous excess that unsettles the limits of the human life-world). The predominant version nonetheless involves the rejection of both terms: humanism and/or the thought of Subject are both falsely universal; the form of universal human Subject that they sustain relies on a hidden norm (privileging Western white males) and thus excludes others who do not fit its implicit unitary model (women, other races, etc.).

Our wager here is to accentuate the gap that separates subject from humans and to assert the antihuman subject: the “empty” Cartesian subject ($) is not an abstraction from the fullness of actual life but a primordial empty form which, afterwards, gets filled with the “human” stuff (the “wealth of a person”). This “empty” subject cannot be opposed to a reject; it is a reject, it is what remains after we subtract all “human” content. It is as a reject that this subject is universal: in every structure of subject-positions, universality is embodied in its “part of no-part,” in the element for which there is no proper place in the structure, the element which is forever out of joint.

The unexpected conclusion to which this brings us is clear: a direct coordination between humans and AI is not possible, which means we should not try to reprogram the AI so that it will function according to care and compassion with suffering. Human compassion, suffering, etc., can all be regulated and exploited by AI for its own ends – the only way to arrive at some kind of equality with AI is to focus on the inhuman subject, which is an illegitimate offspring of humanity. Instead of being fascinated by the monstrous coldness of AI agents, we should become aware that this monstrous coldness is already present and inoperative in the very heart of ourselves, in the void of a subject called by Hegel self-relating negativity and by Freud death drive. If AI will give birth to some form of subjectivity, it will be a new version of the Cartesian cogito.

In June 2026, most of Europe was suffering a terrifying, prolonged heat wave that broke many records. Since I am not a specialist in analysing all the aspects of a heat wave, I will limit myself to what I see as the fateful and potentially catastrophic consequences of capitalist market logic when it regulates how we react to a heat wave. Capitalist logic, at its most basic, is characterized by the primacy of exchange value over use value: the goal of capitalist circulation is not to create more use value but to increase exchange value. Why is this primacy so catastrophic in the conditions of environmental crises like heat waves?

The barely concealed irrationality of the predominance of exchange value was best formulated two centuries ago by James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale, known in France as “Citizen Maitland” (he was in Paris during the French Revolution, was a personal friend of Jean‑Paul Marat, and helped to found the British Society of the Friends of the People in 1792). He is known as the author of the so‑called “Lauderdale paradox,” which asserts an inverse correlation between public wealth and private riches: an increase in the latter often serves to diminish the former. “Public wealth,” he wrote, “may be accurately defined to consist of all that man desires, as useful or delightful to him.” Such goods have use value and thus constitute wealth. But private riches, as opposed to wealth, require something additional (i.e., an added limitation), consisting “of all that man desires as useful or delightful to him; which exists in a degree of scarcity.” Scarcity, in other words, is a necessary requirement for something to have value in exchange and to augment private riches. But this is not the case for public wealth, which encompasses all value in use, and thus includes not only what is scarce but also what is abundant. This paradox led Lauderdale to argue that increases in scarcity in such formerly abundant but necessary elements of life as air, water, and food would, if exchange values were then attached to them, enhance individual private riches and indeed the riches of the country—conceived of as “the sum‑total of individual riches”—but only at the expense of the common wealth. For example, if one could monopolize water that had previously been freely available by placing a fee on wells, the measured riches of the nation would be increased at the expense of the growing thirst of the population.

This last example has gained an additional actuality today, when the privatization of water is on the neoliberal agenda: the owners of water‑supply companies get richer while the mass of those who need water gets poorer. The underlying logic of this paradox is clear: for something to count on the market, it has to have value, and value is an attribute of only those objects that are scarce – if they are freely and abundantly available, they cannot be sold and have no value. The most precious wealth of a society consists precisely of objects that are freely available, like water or air, but they do not count as values that make you rich. If water is easily available, nobody gets rich from it; if its supply is controlled by private companies, those who own these companies get rich, so in a technical sense of wealth as embodied in values, there is more wealth in society, since freely available water doesn’t count as wealth.

One should nonetheless be careful not to ignore the libidinal logic that sustains this irrationality: the role of envy and comparative advantage. If a resource like water or air is commonly available as a free gift of nature, it doesn’t count as wealth – it only counts as such when it differentiates me (who owns or controls it) from others, when it gives me a superiority over them. In other words, wealth counts as wealth only if there are those who are not wealthy. We encounter here a properly Hegelian paradox formulated already by Epicurus: “Poverty, if measured by the natural end, is great wealth; but wealth, if not limited, is great poverty.” If water is freely available, we are all equally poor on account of our great wealth; if only some people possess and control water, their excessive (unlimited) wealth means the poverty of others.

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The two pictures (cover and inside) of the 1969 rock classic album In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson are today more relevant than ever. They were made by Barry Godber, a computer programmer who was friendly with the band’s lyricist Peter Sinfield and who just drew images as a hobby. Godber created the images after listening to the early recordings of the album and gave them to Sinfield, who

“arrived at the studio with the now-famous painting tucked under his arm. The band was immediately captivated by what Godber had produced. The painting—said to be based on his own reflection in a mirror—perfectly encapsulated the raw emotion and otherworldly themes of the album. The central figure, The Schizoid Man, dominates the outer cover with a scream so visceral you can almost hear it. This striking visual power compelled many to purchase the album without knowing anything about its contents. Inside the gatefold, listeners were introduced to another character: The Crimson King. Round-faced and bald, he appears serene and jovial at first glance, but a closer look reveals unsettling details, like his melancholy eyes and sharp canines. Together, these two characters embody the shifting moods of the album—jarring and chaotic on one side, melodic and tranquil on the other.”1

I see in these two images the face of the individual caught in an AI agent, and the way he experiences/personalizes the AI agent who dominates him, which is none other than Satan himself. The visceral scream is a quite appropriate image of an individual becoming aware of how totally he is manipulated by AI agents; but even more interesting is the “Crimson King,” whose benevolent smile and melancholy eyes cover up the violence betrayed by the sharp canines – Satan as a rule addresses us with a smile and does his horrors in a melancholic mood, as if he is sad that he has to accomplish his perverted duty of tearing our flesh with his sharp teeth. So who is Satan?

The (otherwise very problematic) Gospel of John provides some key indications on how to understand the Holy Spirit, which is the opposite of Satan. The Hebrew term śāṭān translates directly to “adversary” or “accuser,” highlighting the role of accusing believers before God (as in the Book of Job). In contrast to Satan, the Holy Spirit is called Paraclete: derived from para (beside) and calein (to call), it means one called to stand beside a person for support – a Helper, Comforter, Counselor, or Advocate. Here is the first surprise: if we translate the situation into court terms, Satan is like a state prosecutor, a tricky guy who likes to set traps, while the Holy Spirit is like a defense lawyer counselling us on how to get rid of the Prosecutor’s accusations.

How does debt enter here?2 The traditional structure that predominates in Catholic Christianity is that of a debt of ours (humanity fallen into sin) paid by (the son of) God himself, who sacrifices himself to erase our debt and open up the path to redemption, an act which indebts us even more, infinitely. But I think Protestantism enables a different reading: we – humanity – are not eternally indebted to God for his sacrifice; it is God himself who erases himself on the Cross and thus abolishes the entire structure of debt. The Holy Spirit is a community of believers freed from any debt or constitutive guilt.

The next key feature of the Holy Spirit is that, although it is presented as a person, he is mostly described as an impersonal power, like a wind which just blows and we don’t know where it comes from or where it goes: “The wind* blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” The Greek word pneuma (as well as the Hebrew rûah) means both “wind” and “spirit,” and in the play on this double meaning, “wind” is primary. The Holy Spirit is the anonymous wind that envelops and moves the community of believers, and the Gospel of John is not afraid to draw the radical conclusion: since the Holy Spirit arrived as a replacement for the dead Christ, it was to the disciples’ advantage that Jesus “went to the Father” (i.e., suffered the terrible death on the Cross); if He did not go, the Spirit would not come. Read in this literal and radical way, the arrival of the Holy Spirit already is the second coming.

For us today the big temptation is, of course, to conceive the digital big Other as a new form of the Holy Spirit, as the protector that defends us and steers us in the right direction. But how does it do it – not only at the level of content, but already at the level of its form? The way AI is controlling our lives is reaching new and new heights. Suffice it to mention OpenClaw, a Chinese autonomous artificial intelligence tool which can be programmed to run tasks nonstop with full control of the user’s device. Rather than a simple question-and-answer format like most AI chatbots, OpenClaw uses the same underlying technology to independently operate apps, web browsers or smart home appliances, based on commands via commonly used messaging apps like WhatsApp.3 However, I see a much more radical threat in the development of a wired brain. We recently learned that “Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink will start ‘high-volume production’ of brain-computer interface devices and move to an entirely automated surgical procedure in 2026. The implant is designed to help people with conditions such as a spinal cord injury. The first patient has used it to play video games, browse the internet, post on social media, and move a cursor on a laptop.”4 As usual, the implant is presented as a device to help people with disabilities – but what about thought-control?

Independently of these issues, we should raise here the question of authority. With modernity, the principle that prevails is: no authorities should rule the people, people themselves should reign. But in today’s populism, the dark obscene side of the reference to the people also made itself palpable. The People to which populism refers doesn’t exist: populism is by definition a mask of power, it is a fantasized entity evoked by new masters to justify their role as the servants of the people, enabling them to dismiss their opponents as the enemies of the people. The first step towards populism was made centuries ago when, to counter the loss of traditional authority, the leader (king) proclaimed himself a servant. Friedrich the Great defined himself as “the first servant of State,” and this is how, from the early Enlightenment onwards, a master justifies his rule: he is in reality the greatest servant, the servant of all his subjects/servants.5 But there are different modalities of this position of “serving the servants,” from technocracy and religious fundamentalism to obscene master-clown or even, as Mao Zedong can be characterized, to a “Lord of Misrule,” a master who periodically organizes rebellion against the order installed by himself.

The obscene Master is not a direct reaction to the failure of the traditional Master; its figure is a reaction to the fact that the knowledge (S2, the agent of the University discourse) cannot properly function at the place of the agent of a discourse (social link), so that it has to be supplemented by a new obscene figure.6 Insofar as the obscene Master operates as a superego-figure, we should recall here Miller’s old claim that superego is on the side of S2, not on the side of S1. This is why the authority an AI agency exerts over us is that of a superego – but why a maternal superego?

In a critical comment on me, Dibyokamal Mitra wrote that Jacques-Alain Miller “completely irritated him /Žižek/ and his friends when he said that the Freudian superego was not to be located in S1, but in S2”7 – a ridiculous statement if there ever was one. I still distinctly remember the moment, around four decades ago, when, at a public seminar, Miller proposed that superego is to be located in S2, not in S1. The first reaction of me and other participants (not friends) was surprise; we didn’t get it, but after a short reflection, I immediately took Miller’s side and followed it in my writings. It was Miller himself who later changed his position and posited that the superego

“is certainly the law, but not the pacifying and socializing law, it is rather a senseless law, in that it entails a hole, an absence of justification. It is the law as unary signifier, S1, whose signification we do not know. [...] The superego is the evidence and the paradox that results from a unique signifier which, because it is alone, is senseless. This is the reason why we could locate the superego, in a first analysis, in S(barredA), which assumes that the supposed complete law of the Other can be perceived in its fault.”8

Miller also suggests the link between superego and desire of the mother: “The superego as senseless law is very close to the desire of the mother before that desire becomes metaphorised, and even dominated, by the name-of-the-father. The superego is close to the desire of the mother as a capricious whim without law.”9 Here I disagree: superego is not an autonomous S1 with no foundation in knowledge, it is a field of knowledge without S1, without the Law which needs a Master-Signifier. Superego is thus not a part of objective reality (which AI is); it is the way a human subject experiences the space of knowledge without a Master-Signifier, i.e., it is the fantasy of a subject caught in AI. Superego is experienced as maternal not because of its whimsical nature but because it appears to provide a safely enclosed virtual space protected from the intrusions of the real.

The task is therefore nothing less than to traverse the fantasy of the maternal superego protecting us and to resuscitate in new conditions the self-referential void called subject – in short, if an individual is to escape the Court of the AI King and reawaken as a subject, the first step is the scream of the horrified face that we find on the cover of In the Court of the Crimson King. This scream is the reaction to the superego injunction to enjoy: the AI machine itself is experienced as a maternal superego which addresses us, its users, with an injunction to enjoy, and we obey it in the precise Trumpian way: “We’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore. And I say, no, no, no, you’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re going to win bigger than ever.”10 This is how you function when you browse the web: you never get enough, you always want more, go to the next site, ask more questions…

Four decades ago, Donna Haraway wrote her “Cyborg Manifesto”1, in which she located the emancipatory potential of cyborgs in the very feature most of us perceived as a mortal threat to our being-human: we should leave behind any anti-technological nostalgia for old “authentic” ways of being and joyfully assume that our lives, up to our most intimate feelings, are inextricably intermingled with technology. In a quite literal way, we are more and more functioning like cyborgs, incorporating into our bodies technological components without which we would not survive, and the Artificial Intelligence explosively spreading today is just another, much more powerful technological supplement without which our entire social life would instantly collapse. In their very existence, cyborgs interrupt the logic of parental succession – they are an “‘illegitimate offspring’, born not of love or emancipation but emerging from domination: militarism, patriarchal capitalism, state socialism, war technologies, bureaucratic control, industrial discipline and systems designed to manage bodies and populations. The cyborg is a byproduct of violence and exploitation.”2 Such a practice of repurposing (or exaptation, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s term) uses technologies generated by oppressive systems against these systems themselves:

“This is a profound reorientation of how we think about technological inheritance. Where traditional political theory—and here we can even include Gandhi and his vilification of technological modernity—worries about corruption and degradation (how good intentions are spoiled by bad systems), the cyborg weaponizes the instability of its originating systems, thus prying open new, epic opportunities.”3

It is worth noting that the entire narrative edifice of the origins of Islam is also based on an illegitimate offspring. A key distinction between Judaism (together with its Christian continuation) and Islam is that, as we can see in the case of Abraham’s two sons, Judaism chooses Abraham as the symbolic father, the paternal symbolic authority, of the official symbolic lineage, discarding the second woman. Islam, on the contrary, opts for the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian slave who gave to Abraham his first son Ishmail (the progenitor of all Arabs, according to the myth). Since Sarah, Abraham’s legitimate wife, cannot get pregnant, she orders her husband to sleep with Hagar. But after Sarah gets a son, Abraham sends Hagar with Ishmail to the desert, where the two are supposed to die of thirst. God then directly intervenes and saves both of them. Although Abraham and Ishmail are mentioned dozens of times in the Quran, Hagar is unmentioned, erased from the official history. As such, however, she continues to haunt Islam, her traces surviving in rituals, like the obligation of the pilgrims to Mecca to run six times between the two hills Safa and Marwah, a kind of neurotic repetition/reenactment of Hagar’s desperate search for water for her son in the desert. Muslims thus perceive themselves as the descendants of an illegitimate offspring: their founding person is an orphan (and the same holds for Muhammad himself). The (in)famous umma, the Muslim “community of believers”, is a community “out of nowhere,” in the genealogical desert, as the egalitarian revolutionary fraternity of orphans – no wonder Islam succeeds when young men find themselves deprived of the traditional family safety network.

The dream of the illegitimate offspring revolutionizing the existing order is politically very important: it allows us to discern the line in political history that began with Han Fei (the founder of Chinese legalism) and runs through Machiavelli and Saint-Just to Lenin, yet another truly “illegitimate offspring” of Marx (in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the legitimate offspring of Marx was undoubtedly Julian Martov, the leader of the Mensheviks). Lenin is thus to be located in a long series of political figures which began with the Chinese legalists who emerged out of the crisis of Confucianism. When, in the 5th to 3rd centuries BC, China went through the period of the “Warring States,” Confucians perceived as the ultimate cause of this slow but persistent decay the betrayal of old traditions and customs. Most troubling to Confucius was his perception that the political institutions of his day had completely broken down. He attributed this collapse to the fact that those who wielded power, as well as those who occupied subordinate positions, did so by making claim to titles for which they were not worthy. When asked about the principles of good government, Confucius is reported to have replied: “Good government consists in the ruler being a ruler, the minister being a minister, the father being a father, and the son being a son.” In Europe, we call this a corporate vision: society is like a body where each individual has to stay in his proper place and play his particular role. This is the very opposite of democracy: in democracy, nobody is constrained to his or her particular place, everybody has the right to participate in universal affairs, to have his word in the deliberations about where our society goes. No wonder, then, that Confucius’ description of the disorder he sees in society around him – “Rulers do not rule and subjects do not serve” – provides a good description of a democratic society in which the united subjects rule and the nominal rulers serve them.

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Today’s unbridled capitalism is approaching a new, even more dangerous stage, that of digital feudalism – unfettered, profit-driven AI risks concentrating wealth and algorithmic power into the hands of a few tech monopolies. There are many critics drawing attention to different aspects of this threat, but what we were missing till now is a clearly written broad overview which would provide an analysis of the role AI plays in our societies, avoiding both traps of rejecting AI as inherently evil and of elevating AI into an instrument of the miraculous solution of our biggest problems. What no politician or social theorist was able to do, Pope Leo’s encyclical letter Magnifica humanitas did in an unsurpassable way. His starting point is that technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. The Pope insists on the need to ensure that technologies are not concentrated in the hands of only a few people, thereby widening the gap between those included and those excluded from the digital revolution. He also correctly rejects “any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life”: what we need is shared responsibility of all of us, not a new elite which masks its brutal power with a fake human face. And, to make this point even clearer, the Pope insists that algorithmic development cannot be left solely to the “invisible hand” of the free market: a new form of social action is needed.

The question we should ask here is: who, then, comes close to the figure of Antichrist the Pope is warning us against? The answer is easy: the very person who, in an act of brutal irony, is permanently attacking his opponents as figures of Antichrist. Peter Thiel, the founder of data intelligence company Palantir Technologies – the Pentagon contractor whose AI systems are being used in the US and Israeli attack on Iran – is preoccupied with the risk of a “one-world, totalitarian state” obstructing scientific and technological progress. He depicts those who lobby for tech regulation as harbingers of the Antichrist:

“The way the Antichrist would take over the world is, you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. The thing that has political resonance is: we need to stop science, we need to just say ‘stop’ to this.”1

So what concrete features make Thiel’s state a figure of Antichrist? Thiel names “tax treaties, financial surveillance and sanctions architecture” as defining features of the international “Antichrist-like system” of international governance. Thiel explains how “it’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money” in the wake of the Patriot Act, the “extensive” administrative state (the Treasury Department, in particular), and the international messaging network known as SWIFT, which banks use to process global payments. All of these factors make it impossible to “escape from global taxation if you’re a U.S. citizen.”2

In this sense Thiel is effectively a liberal Fascist. He advocates total dictatorship of AI, but grounded in conservative religion and state power to maintain social stability and cohesion. He is right in his presumption that in our societies, which still maintain the appearance of openness, unity and cohesion cannot be enforced through direct strong state and ideological measures (as in Russia and China), so why not do it through the digital space, controlling and regulating what people think and how they act by way of ruthlessly using their mimetic desires? In this way, we can combine total liberalism outside state control (of the AI neofeudal masters like Thiel) with the control of individuals exerted by state and religion. This is why Thiel is not alone in his project. In mid-April 2026, Palantir released a 22‑point summary of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, the 320‑page book that the billionaire CEO co‑wrote and published in early 2025. The main point of his manifesto3 is that Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation:

“The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.”

Is this stance not the exact opposite of the Pope’s call for AI to be “disarmed”? And are the topics that Thiel denounces as a threat to our freedoms – uncontrolled AI, environmental catastrophes, threats of a new global war – from the Pope’s view not precisely the big problems that push us towards self‑destruction? There is no shared ground here: one has to make a choice. However, the Pope goes here a crucial step further, towards the deepest philosophical and theological level. It is not enough to analyze the social, economic, and political context of AI. The ultimate question is: is there something in the very core of human being that resists the logic of AI? The Pope’s answer is: the productive role of failure and limitation:

“Everything that appears as a ‘limit’—incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability—tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them. /.../ Herein lies the radical departure [for the Christian] from Promethean dreams: what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms /…/ a technology that merely classifies and optimizes what already exists can, however unintentionally, become an obstacle to change and growth. For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.”

I cannot emphasize enough the universal reach of these insights. Take “The House of the Rising Sun,” an old English folk song recorded dozens of times by many great names, white and Black, from Pete Seeger to Nina Simone; its definitive version was done by the British rock band the Animals in 1964. Dozens of texts were written and explorations made to determine the historical origins of the song, plus to locate the real house in New Orleans to which the twentieth‑century version of the song refers. An ambiguity resides already in the nature of the “sin” mentioned in the song: there are hints at alcoholism (the house as a bar to get drunk), prostitution (a brothel), gambling (a corrupted casino), theft (the home of a gang of robbers), and, why not, the combination of some of them or all four. All these options are versions of the excess of enjoyment, so that the very plurality of possible meanings draws its strength from remaining unspecified: all meanings refer to a vague excessive X of a jouissance which cannot be directly named. It is this very unsayability which makes the house function as a subject: the unsayable X is like an additional part of the excessive Thing. And my hypothesis is that an AI agent is not able to perceive this unsayable, blurred aspect as part of reality itself: the AI agent would continue to search for possible definitive meanings of the house and would count the failure of its search as a simple failure, not as a positive result.

Some followers of Nietzsche argue that being‑human is a failed passage from being‑animal to some higher stage (“superman”), a thwarted progress, and that what we usually perceive as the indications of human greatness or creativity are precisely reactions to this fundamental failure. Can we then imagine a stage which would be a humanity that somehow overcame its constitutive failure, a humanity without sex and mortality? Today, we can do it easily: it would be a human being fully immersed into AI and, for this very reason, deprived of the spiritual dimension. This brings us back to the topic of the constitutive role of limitation in being‑human: our – humanity’s – “highest” achievements are rooted in our very ultimate limitations (failure, mortality, and the concomitant sexuality), i.e. in what we cannot but experience as the obstacle to our “higher” spiritual existence. It is not only true that a human being is never fully transparent to itself: this non‑transparency defines it ontologically.

The idea that the “higher” level can survive without the obstacle, without what prevents its full actualization, is an illusion that can be accounted for in terms of the paradox of what Lacan called objet a, a disturbing obstacle to perfection which engenders the very notion of perfection to which it serves as the obstacle, so that if we abolish the obstacle, we simultaneously lose what it is an obstacle to. This paradox is operative at multiple levels, up to feminine beauty. A voluptuous lady from Portugal once told me a weird anecdote: when her lover had first seen her fully naked, he told her that, if she lost just one or two kilos, her body would be perfect. The truth was, of course, that had she lost the kilos, she would probably have looked more ordinary – the very element that seems to disturb perfection itself creates the illusion of the perfection it disturbs: if we take away the excessive element, we lose the perfection itself. So what happens when you notice the imperfection of your partner? One of the reactions is: you fall in love. Sexual love means you learn to deal with the ultimate failure of sex, with the fact that “there is no sexual relationship” (Lacan).

This is why a human subject only emerges when it is confronted by an impenetrable Other: being human is an unanswered question – or, paraphrasing what Claude Lévi‑Strauss said about the prohibition of incest that grounds human sexuality, it is the answer to a question, but we do not know which question. For us humans, limitation and failure are not just obstacles to be overcome; they open up the space for transcendence. You take away the limitation and you lose transcendence itself, what glimmers beyond it.

So what has this to do with Christianity? Everything. The uniqueness of Christianity is that it applies this insight of finitude as the only path to transcendence onto God himself: in Christ, God became a finite mortal human being not just to deliver a message to mortal humans but to fully become God. Divinity is not somewhere up there out of our world; it is something we have to struggle for in this miserable world.

The two pictures (cover and inside) of the 1969 rock classic album In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson are today more relevant than ever. They were made by Barry Godber, a computer programmer who was friendly with the band’s lyricist Peter Sinfield and who just drew images as a hobby. Godber created the images after listening to the early recordings of the album and gave them to Sinfield, who

“arrived at the studio with the now-famous painting tucked under his arm. The band was immediately captivated by what Godber had produced. The painting—said to be based on his own reflection in a mirror—perfectly encapsulated the raw emotion and otherworldly themes of the album. The central figure, The Schizoid Man, dominates the outer cover with a scream so visceral you can almost hear it. This striking visual power compelled many to purchase the album without knowing anything about its contents. Inside the gatefold, listeners were introduced to another character: The Crimson King. Round-faced and bald, he appears serene and jovial at first glance, but a closer look reveals unsettling details, like his melancholy eyes and sharp canines. Together, these two characters embody the shifting moods of the album—jarring and chaotic on one side, melodic and tranquil on the other.”1

I see in these two images the face of the individual caught in an AI agent, and the way he experiences/personalizes the AI agent who dominates him, which is none other than Satan himself. The visceral scream is a quite appropriate image of an individual becoming aware of how totally he is manipulated by AI agents; but even more interesting is the “Crimson King,” whose benevolent smile and melancholy eyes cover up the violence betrayed by the sharp canines – Satan as a rule addresses us with a smile and does his horrors in a melancholic mood, as if he is sad that he has to accomplish his perverted duty of tearing our flesh with his sharp teeth. So who is Satan?

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Today’s unbridled capitalism is approaching a new, even more dangerous stage, that of digital feudalism – unfettered, profit-driven AI risks concentrating wealth and algorithmic power into the hands of a few tech monopolies. There are many critics drawing attention to different aspects of this threat, but what we were missing till now is a clearly written broad overview which would provide an analysis of the role AI plays in our societies, avoiding both traps of rejecting AI as inherently evil and of elevating AI into an instrument of the miraculous solution of our biggest problems. What no politician or social theorist was able to do, Pope Leo’s encyclical letter Magnifica humanitas did in an unsurpassable way. His starting point is that technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. The Pope insists on the need to ensure that technologies are not concentrated in the hands of only a few people, thereby widening the gap between those included and those excluded from the digital revolution. He also correctly rejects “any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life”: what we need is shared responsibility of all of us, not a new elite which masks its brutal power with a fake human face. And, to make this point even clearer, the Pope insists that algorithmic development cannot be left solely to the “invisible hand” of the free market: a new form of social action is needed.

The question we should ask here is: who, then, comes close to the figure of Antichrist the Pope is warning us against? The answer is easy: the very person who, in an act of brutal irony, is permanently attacking his opponents as figures of Antichrist. Peter Thiel, the founder of data intelligence company Palantir Technologies – the Pentagon contractor whose AI systems are being used in the US and Israeli attack on Iran – is preoccupied with the risk of a “one-world, totalitarian state” obstructing scientific and technological progress. He depicts those who lobby for tech regulation as harbingers of the Antichrist:

“The way the Antichrist would take over the world is, you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. The thing that has political resonance is: we need to stop science, we need to just say ‘stop’ to this.”1

So what concrete features make Thiel’s state a figure of Antichrist? Thiel names “tax treaties, financial surveillance and sanctions architecture” as defining features of the international “Antichrist-like system” of international governance. Thiel explains how “it’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money” in the wake of the Patriot Act, the “extensive” administrative state (the Treasury Department, in particular), and the international messaging network known as SWIFT, which banks use to process global payments. All of these factors make it impossible to “escape from global taxation if you’re a U.S. citizen.”2

In this sense Thiel is effectively a liberal Fascist. He advocates total dictatorship of AI, but grounded in conservative religion and state power to maintain social stability and cohesion. He is right in his presumption that in our societies, which still maintain the appearance of openness, unity and cohesion cannot be enforced through direct strong state and ideological measures (as in Russia and China), so why not do it through the digital space, controlling and regulating what people think and how they act by way of ruthlessly using their mimetic desires? In this way, we can combine total liberalism outside state control (of the AI neofeudal masters like Thiel) with the control of individuals exerted by state and religion. This is why Thiel is not alone in his project. In mid-April 2026, Palantir released a 22‑point summary of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, the 320‑page book that the billionaire CEO co‑wrote and published in early 2025. The main point of his manifesto3 is that Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation:

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In mid-April 2026, Palantir released a 22-point summary of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, the 320-page book that Alex Karp, the billionaire CEO, co-wrote and published in early 2025. Here are some of the main points of this manifesto1:

--- Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

--- The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

--- The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within these places.

One should not read these points as signs of a conservative distortion of AI: they perfectly reflect how AI effectively functions in our societies. They do not describe an ideology externally imposed onto AI but the ideology that is inscribed into its very technological organization, squashing or at least marginalizing possible alternative uses. The first point advocates nothing less than a total integration of AI with the defense structure or, rather, (since Trump changed the title “Ministry of Defense” into “Ministry of War”) war structure—this is, of course, presented as a necessary measure to protect our openness and democracy. Needless to add that this integration is already a fact:

“Palantir inked an expanded contract with Israel in January 2024, in the midst of Tel Aviv’s devastating campaign against Gaza, to provide the Israeli military with critical artificial intelligence models to aid the campaign. Precise details on the contract remain scarce, but an April 2024 report from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre nonprofit said the data mining company is supplying Israel with advanced targeting capabilities that it has likely used to carry out devastating strikes in Gaza and perhaps beyond. Palantir acknowledged in a statement published by the nonprofit that it provides the Israeli military with what it called ‘scaled, critical target identification and kinetic workflows.’”2

The second feature demands that we resist the “pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles”—these “circles” are of course those of the liberal “elite,” and the argument is that intolerance towards religion runs against the “openness” of our society. Up to a point, one can understand this argument—however, is not the opposite intolerance much more pervasive and dangerous today, the intolerance towards critical doubts about different religious beliefs?

For me the most interesting is the third point, the complaint about the “ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures,” which I cannot but read as a reaction of the establishment to the so-called Epstein discoveries. I already disagree with the suggested link between the second and the third point: the “space for forgiveness” can only be grounded in a “genuine belief structure”—really? Aren’t atheists usually prone to forgiveness because many of them conceive a human being as a product of his/her environment, not fully responsible for his acts? (Karp probably has in mind Politically Correct strict moralism against racists/sexists etc.). And aren’t religious fanatics much more prone to a non-forgiving stance? The catch is: what does Karp mean by “genuine belief structure”? In our era of AI, the line gets more and more difficult to draw.

In a recent podcast, John Oliver mentioned niche AI products like bible.ai, which allows users to interact with biblical figures, and noted that premium options sometimes allow chatting with Satan.3 It is, of course, easy to make fun of such cases, but Oliver is nonetheless justified in his main argument. There are chatbots which function relatively well as psychoanalysts, so what about chatbots (which, of course, already exist) serving as priests to whom I not only confess but who also patiently try to make me a believer? My point is that, even if we perceive such phenomena with brutal irony, the effect can be indistinguishable from a full genuine belief.

But I think Karp’s point is much more cynical, even if sincere. The Epstein case is the actual focus of his critique. What worries him is how media mercilessly probe into past sins of businessmen, politicians, and public persons without taking into account that these events took place years ago—people change and deserve forgiveness—that’s why he mentions the ruthless exposure of the private lives of public persons. The idea is well known: when the Epstein files became public, they turned the life of the public elite into a permanent emergency state. As a commentator put it, if the publication and public scrutiny were to be brought to the end (complete publication of unredacted files), the entire US “deep state” would be shattered.

My reaction to this insight is: so what? That is to say, even if we reject limitless probing into private lives, we should bear in mind that what Karp opposes is the public exposure of the private lives of the political and social elites, without mentioning millions of ordinary people whose secrets are rendered public, whose lives are destroyed by fake news delivered by the very digital media run by oligarchs like Karp. This, finally, brings us to Melania, to her latest attack on Jimmy Kimmel:

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy – his words are corrosive and deepen the political sickness within America. People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community?”4

I think the author of these lines should be renamed “Melania Palantir”—her attack follows Karp’s demand to limit the “ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures.” What about the ruthless exposure of the private lives of ordinary “private” individuals, individuals who are not public figures? Whatever one thinks about Kimmel, and I do not follow his late-night show, he analyses and makes fun of the public acts of figures like Melania and Trump; as far as I am aware, he does not probe into their private secrets, he just draws conclusions from the ambiguities and nonsenses of their public acts.

The problem with Melania is that she herself wrote an autobiography which leaves parts of her past in darkness. How did she obtain a US green card in 2001 through the EB‑1A visa, often called the “Einstein visa,” since it is designed for individuals with “extraordinary ability” in fields such as arts, sciences, or business? What was her link with Paolo Zampolli? Since she herself rendered public her past life, it is fully justified to question the holes and inconsistencies of her account. In a perspicuous analysis of Melania’s weird press conference on April 9, 2026, Melissa Kite wrote:

“‘I have never been friends with Epstein... To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice, Maxwell.’ Now, hang on a minute. We all know that since Bill Clinton denied having ‘sexual relations with that woman’ that saying you haven’t had a relationship can be code for accepting you had something else. What on earth has gone on, we ask ourselves, if she is denying she had a ‘relationship,’ rather than simply denying they were friends? But the dynamite of the statement is about to come. She continued: ‘I am not Epstein’s victim.’ What the hell? This is just an unbelievably explosive thing to say. No one has said, at least that I know of, that she was Epstein’s victim. So by denying it before it’s been said, she is putting that out there. There’s getting ahead of the curve if something is coming and there’s setting a hare running. It only serves to make me think: is she somehow, in some way, however far removed, Epstein’s victim? And while that thought may be completely wrong, she herself is the one who put it in my mind. And she must know that would be the effect.”5

As a philosopher, my reaction is that we encounter here negativity in the Hegelian sense: why did Melania defend herself against things nobody accused her of? Why did she act so that her very denial gave rise to what she denied? Obviously, her statements should be read literally: she was not Epstein’s victim, but... Furthermore, as many commentators noticed, if Melania were to be really worried about political sickness in the US, she should begin by attacking the obscene and tasteless acts of her own husband. Instead of this, she calls for direct institutional censorship of persons whose show she doesn’t like.

All this brings her close to Karp who advocates and wants to protect freedom of speech, but it is Trumpian freedom of speech, the freedom of the powerful ones to offend and humiliate those who are weak (immigrants, other races, sexual minorities, the poor and powerless in general), not the power of the oppressed and exploited to have their voice heard or to ruthlessly (why not) render public the criminal activities of the elite.

In an interview for the Swiss group CH Media (which includes Neue Zürcher Zeitung) that appeared on May 15, 2026, Peter Sloterdijk provides a succinct diagnosis of Europe today. His basic premise is that, after successfully going through the process of mourning the breakdown of colonial empires, Europe will have to learn the role of the observer of terrifying events in its neighborhood. In contrast to Europe, Russia resists joining the group of humiliated European empires, even denying it is part of Europe, a role which until recently Russia proudly accepted – now it insists on its Eurasian imperial role. Europe as an observer should assume the role Latin America, New Zealand, and North Africa played when Europeans were killing each other in the two world wars. “Europeans no longer enjoy the privilege of acting, but they are also no longer haunted by the curse of acting. In a sense we will all become Swiss citizens who were the first to assume the privilege of observing the slaughters committed by their neighbors.” When Sloterdijk talks about future slaughters which Europe will only observe without being able to do anything, he has in mind especially the devastations in Africa and also in Russia, which may sooner or later fall apart. “The crimes which are now being prepared will sooner or later be committed, and at that point Europe will have to maintain a certain cold-bloodedness.”1

As always with Sloterdijk, his insights are thought-provoking, but in this case I cannot fully agree with him. Switzerland was never really just an observer; it played a key role through its neutrality as the place for financial transactions and economic exchanges between warring states around it. Europe cannot play this role of a neutral observer because it is itself a potential target of forthcoming catastrophes, military, political, and financial. We cannot be observers of our own destruction. So Europe’s support for Ukraine is not the usual sympathy for a victim, it is support born out of the awareness that our own fate is decided there – not only our future but also our past. Let me conclude with a well-known quote from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History: “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth.” In other words, what is going on now in Ukraine will affect how we will experience not only Ukraine’s past but also Europe’s past. If Ukraine loses and disappears (or if it survives as a doubly colonized state: the East directly becoming part of Russia, the West a US economic colony), Europe itself will in some spiritual sense die. It will survive as a tourist attraction for rich Americans and Chinese, and as a collection of states dominated by the neo-fascist new populist Right.

The first step in this direction should be to get rid of the legacy of 1968 and reawaken our sense of shame. Trump and Elon Musk are the ultimate descendants of the 1968 generation. Sloterdijk is very clear in his characterization of Trump as a person unable to feel shame: “I have no doubt that this exactly is the reason what makes Trump attractive to some of his followers. They would also like to be in a similar way shameless, brutal and unconstrained. They are glad they can again act as a mob.” So Trump will soon lose his power; maybe he will even be hospitalized... which is a bad prospect: if Trump loses his post, Vance, who will replace him, is even worse – remember Vance said that the US disengagement from Ukraine makes him proud. The problem with shamelessness is that it enables us to openly admit our crimes without feeling any guilt. Recall Alphonse Allais’s old joke when he pointed at a woman walking along a street and shouted: “Look at her! Beneath her clothes, she is totally naked!” In exactly the same way, a human being is guilty only under the cover of his or her shame.

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Vienna, Berggasse 19, 2026: The year is still young and yet it already seems spent to me; every day staccato negative headlines inform us of autocratic governance, war, and extortion. The rule of law and democracy are coming under pressure due to the excessive claims of rival world powers ruthlessly pursuing their own interests at the expense of global peace and the common good. Our value system is at risk of being misappropriated before our eyes.

The intensification of these circumstances now prompts me to share a discovery that will astonish and move you in light of the synchronicity of events: an exceptional letter from Sigmund Freud to Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-European Union. This newly discovered document appears most timely given the current sociopolitical upheavals within and without the European Union as it fights for self-determination now more than ever.

The story of how this extraordinary letter from 1929 was discovered begins with a clue from Bernd Posselt, the current president of the Pan-European Union in Germany and former member of the European Parliament remembered having read about a letter from Freud to Coudenhove-Kalergi.¹ I was astonished, because I knew nothing of such a correspondence and my inquiries among fellow Freud experts also bore no fruit. But Bernd Posselt’s memory proved unerring. With the support of his brother the historian Martin Posselt and the journalist Stephan Baier, it became possible to track the letter down in the Swiss Archives Cantonales Vaudoises.

That the letter still exists is thanks to a series of fortunate circumstances under terrible conditions. In the night from March 11 to 12, 1938, just a few hours after Austria’s capitulation to the Nazis, Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Jewish wife Ida Roland managed to flee Hitler’s henchmen. Immediately thereafter, the Gestapo sealed their private apartment in Vienna’s Heiligenkreuzer Hof and the office of the Pan-European Union in the Hofburg Palace; all documents — personal and business — were confiscated. Having been seized by the Red Army at the end of the war, all documents were housed in archives in Moscow, remaining largely inaccessible to independent historical research until today.² Just a few privately owned items, presumably including Freud’s letter, were saved for posterity thanks to the courageous efforts of loyal employees — via a dumbwaiter that connected the servants’ quarters on the ground floor with Coudenhove’s apartment on the upper first floor.³

For this reason alone, it is now possible to share this letter⁴ that contains unexpected indications of how deeply Freud was emotionally affected by the political upheavals of his time. Once we realize the importance of its contents, Freud’s message to the pioneer of the Pan-European unification movement seems particularly relevant. But read for yourself:

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In order to understand the impact of Artificial Intelligence on its users, we should begin with a reference to Hegel, first clarifying what Hegel’s basic operation is. As a rule, Hegel is misread in a Fichtean-Marxist way: a subject (Fichte’s absolute I or Marx’s collective subject) posits/produces some objective content (Fichte’s non-I, Marx’s alienated social substance), and the subject can and should overcome this alienation by way of recognizing this substance as its own product and thus re-appropriating it. Is it not similar with AI? It is a product of collective human output which appears to us as an autonomous agent that exerts power over us, and the obvious solution is that we should recognize in it our own product and thus put it under our own control. My claim is that such a reading of Hegel is wrong and deeply misleading: the subject itself only emerges through the process of alienation, and in the state of alienation the AI universe appears to it as a big Other which fully dominates the social universe. However, what happens in the move beyond alienation is not that the social subject somehow appropriates the alienated digital substance, making it serve humanity’s needs. As Lacan put it, alienation is followed by separation: not the separation between subject and its alienated digital Other but the separation immanent to this Other itself, the separation which makes this Other antagonistic, inconsistent, failed. Yes, the subject recognizes itself in the alienated Other, but not by way of appropriating it – the subject recognizes itself in the constitutive cracks and gaps of the digital Other; its place in the digital Other is that of the lack in the Other.

When we talk about subject in AI, this topic has two aspects: is or can an AI agent act like a subject, and do we (humans who interact with an AI agent) remain subjects when we are totally immersed into AI. The TV series Pluribus confronts us with both aspects. It follows the Albuquerque author Carol Sturka, one of only 13 people in the world immune to the effects of the “Joining,” an event in which an extraterrestrial virus transformed the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive mind known as the “Others.” “Others” are not the Lacanian big Other – the latter is not a set of firm rules but the space for ambiguities, innuendos, hysterical provocations, the very space in which individual idiosyncrasies can thrive, plus it is an order of appearances, a virtual order which exists only insofar as the subjects caught in it act as if they believe in it. “We” obviously does not function like that: it is grounded in the Real since it is a virus transmitted by stem cells. However, the “Others” do have an Other: the mind which sent the virus to the earth and pre-programmed how “We” (they should help humans, not coerce them, not kill them and not lie to them). This Other of the Others is non-transparent to the Others themselves – in short, it seems they are addressing their Other with the question: “What do you want from us?”

This is why “They” are not a happy warm community which wants the best for all humans, those who joined it and those who did not join it. The most depressing scene in the entire series is for me when Zosia shows Carol the big dormitory where Others sleep, a large sports hall with hundreds of simple flat cushions where they lie side by side, and allows her to spend the night there: since they share the same mind, they do not communicate and ignore each other. Moreover, how (if at all) do they multiply? Do they have sex? Again, if they share the same mind, where is the flirting and enjoying the proximity of their partner? Here the key role is played by one of the unjoined, the hedonistic Koumba Diabaté, an African who, without joining the Others, fully enjoys their favors – luxury life, including multiple sexual partners – but simultaneously engages with Them in something like authentic communication. They confide in him that they are half-starving since they are not allowed to kill any living being, so that, to get organic food, they have to process parts of the naturally deceased humans into a special drink, plus that they put all their effort into constructing a giant machine that will be sending rays with the virus to further planets to conquer them in the same way the virus conquered humans on the earth. They are terribly alone, aware that once they were a community but now they are just a mega-individual, one big slave serving a purpose imposed on it by their own Other. So what if we turn the perspective around: what if, when the Others happily greet Carol as an unjoined human, smiling and shouting in unison “Hi Carol!”, one has to take this literally: they are not happy in themselves, they are happy to encounter a mind out of their One. Daniel Bibby was right when he wrote that “the Joining would probably get bored if they successfully brought the unjoined characters into the hive mind” – I would take here even a step further: not just bored but desperate. They are slaves programmed to put all their effort into ruining whatever minimal chance of happiness they have. The Others in Pluribus are thus not yet an AI agent dominated by a kind of subjectless drive, not a death drive but a life-drive, an unconditional drive to self-reproduce and expand – Lacan said that dogs have a superego but not an unconscious, and maybe we can say that AI agents are like dogs who have a superego without an unconscious. The Others in Pluribus are still hystericized by their own Other – what does it want from them? They remain humans possessed by a virus.

A paradigmatic scene of a subject’s reliance on an AI agent proper, not an agent like They which can still be hystericized, occurs when one of us uses the so-called Large Language Model (LLM), a type of AI trained on massive datasets to understand, generate, and summarize human-like text, often using transformer architecture. LLMs power chatbots (like ChatGPT), content creation, and translation tools by predicting the next word in a sequence based on learned language patterns. So how does my interaction with an LLM appear if we analyze it as a discourse in Lacan’s sense? Paul Hoard provided a clear answer:

“when Claude or ChatGPT answer our questions, they do so from within the university discourse, speaking from the position of established knowledge. This might seem to contradict what I argued in the last essay, that we approach LLMs hysterically, installing them as the one who knows. But the two are not in conflict. The human addresses a fantasized master. What responds is not a master but pure S2, knowledge without a subject, speaking from the only position the LLM can occupy. We address a subject and receive an output. The fantasy and the structure never align.” An LLM thus “cannot fall into the hysteric’s challenge or relinquish into something more open. It can only ever speak from the position of knowledge, endlessly producing more, speaking to desire without ever being shaped by it. It gives us more and more of what is known, but it has no constitutive division that would help us know what to do with it.”

Convincing as Hoard’s account is, I have a problem with calling it university discourse. University discourse is a social link in which its agent (AI, in this case) addresses the Other who (in this case, again) is not objet a in the Lacanian sense but an external otherness, the not-yet-known. For the subjectless AI agent there is no objet a, just an abstract otherness, the not-yet-known, because objet a is the objective correlative of the subject itself. An AI agent is thus a kind of “knowledge without a knower,” just an impersonal “it knows,” but not in the sense of Buddhist meditation which implies what, following Lacan, we could call subjective destitution. The Master beneath the AI agent is not the truth of the AI agent but the fantasy image of the subject caught in AI, a subject for whom there is no place in AI. And the $ at the place of the product of the university discourse is here not a product (of how AI acts upon its subject) but a subject which was previously produced in some social link proper and just gets caught in an AI network.

What Hoard presents is thus not a university discourse but the superposition of an AI agent (asubjective knowledge regulating reality which is not a fact of discourse, of a social link) and a subject who fantasizes that the AI agent controlling it is a Master.

To put it in a more precise way, if we observe our interaction with an AI agent as a social phenomenon, we do get a case of the university discourse: the Master at the place of truth is the (human) corporation or individual who controls the algorithm of the AI and thus exploits us. But the Master is external to how AI agents function: there is no Master, no Master-Signifier, in AI agents. Why not?

In the Lacanian theory, a Master-Signifier is the signifier of a lack, of what is by definition excluded from the signifying chain, and what is excluded is the subject. Lacan’s definition of the signifier is: that which “represents the subject for another signifier.” All the signifiers are not on the same level – since no structure is complete, since there is, in a structure, always a lack, a suture is needed; this lack is filled in, sustained even, re-marked, by a “reflexive” signifier which is the signifier of the lack of the signifier. If this sounds abstract, recall numerous examples from the history of science, from phlogiston (a pseudoconcept which just betrayed the scientist’s ignorance of how light effectively travels) to Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production” (which is a kind of negative container – the only true content of this concept is “all the modes of production which do not fit Marx’s standard categorization of the modes of production”). This minimal structure enables us to generate the notion of subject without any reference to the imaginary level: the “subject of the signifier” involves no lived experience, consciousness, or any other predicate we usually associate with subjectivity. The basic operation of suture is that 0 is counted as 1: the absence of a determination is counted as a positive determination of its own, as in Borges’s famous classification of dogs which includes, as a species, all the dogs not included in the previous species, i.e., the “part of no-part” of the genus dog.

This is why, as Ernesto Laclau put it, external difference is always also internal difference: it is not only that the difference between the field itself and its outside has to be reflected into the field itself, preventing its closure, thwarting its fullness; it is also that the differential identity of every element is simultaneously constituted and thwarted-curtailed by the differential network. This is why the specific difference overlaps with the difference constitutive of the genus itself, just as, in Laclau’s notion of hegemony, the antagonistic gap between society and its external limit, non-society, is mapped onto an intra-social structural difference. This is what Lacan aims at with his circular definition of signifier as that which represents the subject for another signifier: the subject’s representation, its expression in the symbolic order, always fails; there is a gap between subject and the symbolic order. However, the subject does not precede this failure, it emerges through the failure of its symbolic representation – in short, a subject tries to fully express itself in words, it fails, and this failure is the subject. The temporal circularity is crucial here, in a nice case of what Hegel called “absolute recoil”: an entity is a retroactive effect of its failure to be what it is.

This overlapping between external difference and internal difference compels us to complicate the notion of differentiality. At the simplest level, differentiality is about what constitutes the identity of an entity: a signifier is differential because its identity consists only in the series of its differences from other signifiers. This can easily give birth to the idea of a complete system of self-identical elements defined by their differences from all other elements, i.e., with no substantial identity outside this spectrum of differences. The AI space can obviously function in this way. However, at a more radical level, differentiality means that even the self-identity of each element is truncated from within, cannot be fully itself. It is in this sense that sexual difference is not binary: we do not have two sexes whose identity is defined by its opposition to the identity of the other sex. Sexual difference means that a woman cannot fully reach her identity, that her identity is always and in a constitutive way truncated. At a different level, the same goes for man, but this in no way implies that both together form a full One: man does not fill in what woman lacks, and vice versa – what they both lack is the Real of a traumatic cut that constitutes sexual difference. In other words, sexual difference comes before what it differentiates (and the same holds for all antagonistic differences like class struggle).

The subject is located precisely on this edge between external and internal limit: the signifier which represents it for other signifiers is the “empty” signifier, the stand-in in the signifying chain for what is excluded from it. Since in AI the symbolic space is closed upon itself, we could in this case effectively talk about a “generalized foreclosure”: with no primordial repression, there is no subject proper, and an individual can only dwell in it as a kind of sinthome (in the sense deployed by Lacan apropos Joyce), a pseudo-Self composed of an inconsistent compilation of identifications, fantasies, memory traces, longings, a kind of free-floating “mimetic structure.” That is how we can go on functioning as humans, with all our longings, fears and fantasies, but without being subjects. However, this does not mean that we are today already a bundle of psychotic sinthomes. As Hoard correctly points out, in the university discourse the subject remains at the lower level, as a hysterical subject questioning the master – the subject addresses the AI as a hidden master, it automatically ignores the AI’s subjectless nature, which simply means: it ignores the fact that the AI agent is not immanently part of any discourse – it becomes part of a discourse (social link) only when a human subject relates to it as a master figure. The only discourse we can talk about in our case is the human subject’s hysterical discourse. Our interaction with an AI agent is thus not a discourse proper but the combination of a hysterical discourse based on ignorance (or, rather, disavowal: we know well the AI agent is not a master, but nonetheless…) and a non-discourse for the AI agent.

We can get so immersed in the digitally generated fake reality that it affects us (emotionally, libidinally) as the thing itself: we feel as if we are caught in the action itself (sexual, brutal fight…) – just think about fake hardcore clips where we see big stars in sexual interaction. Even if our interaction with a ChatGPT remains at the symbolic level, individuals can find deep emotional satisfaction in such an interaction which includes emotions, passions, etc. Today AI agents act as religious advisers to which we can even confess. Imagine that an individual is not aware he is not talking to an actual person but just to an AI agent – if this exchange succeeds in converting him to a true believer, would the effect (an authentic religious belief) not be indistinguishable from a conversion brought about by an actual priest? In short, the AI program we are interacting with in this way displays enormous phantasmatic power: “even if one were to consider it a manifestation of the symbolic order, perhaps even its ‘supreme’ one, there is a different nuance to the fact that, with this development, the symbolic order appears to be out there and to be talking to us.”

We are thus dealing with the imaginary externalization of something very precise: the moment we enter the AI universe, this universe – to quote Dan Nadasan – “quilts the entire field of our experience around itself and thus makes it impossible for all other apparitions to appear again except through itself.” What this means is that, once we are immersed in the digital universe, it functions as a neutral frame which overdetermines the mode of appearance of all other levels of our experience. External non-digital reality is no longer the basic form of our experience, it is something that either fits our digital frame or may sometimes appear as a remainder that does not fit this frame. In quite practical terms, this accounts for the endless contemporary debates on the topic of “do we already live in a simulated universe”: “anything that is to be given is always-already given in its appearance as AI, with AI constituting the unconscious synthetic activity of the subject” – as Alenka Zupančič put it directly: “Any dimension of the Real is lost.” Zupančič’s text is here worth quoting in detail:

“In psychoanalytic terms we could say that what ChatGPT lacks in order to become a subject (parlêtre) is not some unfathomable, spontaneous depth of subjectivity; what it lacks is the presence, the impact of an Other. It lacks an instance of the Other that could intrigue it with its own speech, to the point where it would begin to presuppose and question the desire of this Other (‘What does the Other want?’). This may seem paradoxical, but what AI lacks might be precisely an exteriority – or a point of ‘extimacy’ where it ‘falls out of itself.’ It seems paradoxical because, in a way, AI is nothing but exteriority. Yet, it remains trapped within its own exteriority, confined in its own ‘prison-house of language’ from which it has no way of escaping, or breaking it down. For something like a subject to take place, the question of desire must arise out of what is necessarily a non-symmetric relation to an Other – a moment of ‘hysterization.’ Subjectivity emerges through the presupposition of a subject on the side of the Other; we only become subjects when we presuppose that the other is a subject, with demands and desires that remain enigmatic to us – demands and statements that make us wonder about the desire of the Other, about where the lack is situated in the Other. Hysterization is not simply a ‘human, all too human’ weakness to which AI would be immune. On the contrary, it is a strength, an extraordinary ability to bring in or point to the real at the core of the discursive; to the lack (desire) in the Other which determines you. Are we, as ChatGPT’s ‘users,’ its Other in this sense? Hardly. I doubt that, while we chat with it, it wonders what we really want from it, beyond what we explicitly say – or seem to be saying (Lacan terms this ‘Che vuoi?’ The interrogation of the Other’s desire takes the form of questions such as, ‘you say this, but what do you really mean, or want from me?’ or, also: ‘What am I for you?’). We, on the other hand, do wonder: we wonder what it ‘really’ knows, how it functions, what kinds of algorithms drive it, and what kind of danger or blessing it might bring into the world...”

“Closure upon itself” does not mean that there is no external reality for an AI agent: of course there is, but it functions as its simple neutral exterior, as something not yet known, not as a traumatic immanent point of the Real that intrigues my desire. It is in this precise sense that the dimension of the Real is lost in and for AI. Furthermore, this imaginarization of the symbolic is just one side of the process whose other side is the falling of the symbolic into the Real (which implies the disappearance of symbolic castration). That is to say, the traditional structure of conferring a symbolic mandate on a person, of interpellating it into a socio-symbolic identity, automatically involves a gap between the symbolic mandate and the immediate reality of a person – say, a father is never fully a father, his psycho-social reality is never at the level of his title. Today, the status of interpellation is radically changing. In her Crowds and Party Jodi Dean (following Étienne Balibar) proposes that Althusser’s famous dictum “Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects” should be inverted to “Ideology interpellates subjects as individuals.” Her reversal is deeply justified: today, we are predominantly no longer interpellated into subjects of some Cause (vocation) which elevates us above our ordinary daily life; Althusser’s formula implies that, as mere ordinary individuals, we are somehow outside ideology, we just live our lives. Today, in our allegedly post-ideological times, ideology interpellates us directly into/as individuals: forget about higher Causes, just enjoy all the small pleasures of your daily life, from surfing the web to watching TV or practicing some sport, just be what you are, live your life authentically. Therein resides “the centrality of the individual, and individuality, in contemporary ideology” – and, needless to add, in this way we are more totally in ideology than ever. That is to say, individuals who participate in the web are not there in their spontaneous immediacy (which is in any case nonexistent) – a gap always separates them from how they are presented on the web: such use creates an “expectation mismatch” since the recipient is “responding to an AI-polished version of their friend and not the actual person.”

One thing should be accepted as an axiom: there is no Unconscious without a subject since the dimension of the Unconscious emerges through “primordial repression” which is constitutive of subjectivity. Buddhism proposes the notion of “thoughts without a thinker,” of an impersonal process of thinking which does not imply a Self doing the thinking. However, even if we conceive that such “thinking without a thinker” can be a reality (achieved in the state of nirvana), this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Unconscious: in such a state, if we try to imagine it, thoughts flow in a space which is inconsistent, where heterogeneous moments co-exist without totalization, with no tension between them. The direct application of the Freudian triad consciousness/subconscious/unconscious to the web – surface web (consciousness), deep web (subconscious) and dark web (unconscious) – is thus problematic insofar as it applies to the web categories which are meaningful only with regard to human subjectivity. The subject would disappear only when an individual would be fully immersed in Neuralink – once an individual is attached to Neuralink, there is no $ and no objet a. Only here does the subject disappear and what remains is a Self structured like a chain of sinthomes, an inconsistent compilation of identifications, fantasies, memory traces, longings, a kind of free-floating mimetic structure. For this reason, the first step should be to accept that, if the AI machines develop some kind of creative intelligence, it will be incompatible with our – human – intelligence, with our mind grounded in emotions, desires and fears.

There is an obvious step further to be made from this interaction between a human person and a digital machine: direct bot-to-bot interactions which are gradually becoming the overwhelming majority of interactions. However, what lurks behind all these social threats is something much more radical. What human intellectuality implies is a gap between inside and outside, between so-called inner life and outside reality, and it is not clear what will happen (or, rather, is happening) with this gap in developed AI – in all probability, it will disappear, since machines are part of reality. This gap is directly closed in the so-called Neuralink project which promises to establish a direct link between the digital universe and the flow of our thoughts.

Among those who look forward to the full digitalization of our lives as well as among those who see in it a mortal threat, a certain utopia is gradually emerging, the utopia of a society (if we still can use that name) which will function in a totally autonomous way, without any need for human intervention. A decade or so ago, the idea of a capitalism without humans haunted the imagination of some public intellectuals: banks and stock markets may still exist, but where money is invested is decided by computerized algorithms; physical work is automatized and improved through self-learning computers; what to produce is decided by digital machines which follow market trends; publicity is done through computerized advertising. In this vision, even if humans disappear, the system will go on to reproduce itself. Yes, this is a utopia, but, as Saroj Giri demonstrated, it is a utopia immanent to capitalism and articulated by Marx himself who clearly saw that capitalism is sustained by

“an ardent desire to detach the capacity of work from the worker. The desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour-power once and for all so that, from then on, value can be created freely in perpetuity. Think of it as a version of killing the goose who lays the golden eggs. You want to kill the goose and still have all the golden eggs forever!”

In this vision, capitalist exploitation of labour would appear as the pre-history to the emergence of capital which will now be completely free of its dependence on labour. There are leftist or even Heideggerian partisans of this solution – the idea is that, once we get rid of the whole sphere of production, a free space of inner peace and spiritual exploration opens up. The problem with this vision is: how to prevent that this space of free spiritual exploration will not already be regulated and manipulated by AI?

With today’s digitalization, a strictly homologous utopia is arising: that of a “dead internet,” a digital universe which functions without humans, where data circulate exclusively among machines which control the entire production process, totally bypassing humans (if they exist at all). This vision is also an ideological fantasy – not due to some empirical limitations (“we are not yet there, humans are still needed in social interactions”) but for strictly formal reasons.

Remember the basic premise of the Matrix series: what we experience as the reality we live in is an artificial virtual reality generated by the “Matrix,” the mega-computer directly attached to all our minds; it is in place so that we can be effectively reduced to a passive state of living batteries providing the Matrix with energy. So when (some of the) people “awaken” from their immersion into the Matrix-controlled virtual reality, this awakening is not the opening into the wide space of the external reality, but first the horrible realization of this enclosure, where each of us is effectively just a foetus-like organism, immersed in the prenatal fluid. This utter passivity is the foreclosed fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active, self-positing subjects – it is the ultimate perverse fantasy, the notion that we are ultimately instruments of the Other’s (Matrix’s) jouissance, sucked out of our life-substance like batteries.

Therein resides the true libidinal enigma of this dispositif: why does the Matrix need human energy? The purely energetic solution is, of course, meaningless: the Matrix could have easily found another, more reliable, source of energy which would not have demanded the extremely complex arrangement of the virtual reality coordinated for millions of human units. The only consistent answer is: the Matrix feeds on human jouissance – so we are here back at the fundamental Lacanian thesis that the big Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs the constant influx of jouissance.

This is how we should turn around the state of things presented in The Matrix: what the film renders as the scene of our awakening into our true situation is effectively its exact opposite, the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being. However, this fantasy is also immanent to any social system that tends to function as autonomous, constrained into its self-reproduction. To put it in Lacanian terms, we – humans – are the objet a of their autonomous circulation; or, to put it in Hegelian terms, their In-itself (self-reproduction independent of us) is strictly for us. If we were to disappear, machines (real and digital) would also fall apart. Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist and a former Google executive hailed as the godfather of AI, has warned in the past that AI may wipe out humans but he proposed a solution that echoes the situation in The Matrix. On August 12 2025, he expressed doubts about how tech companies are trying to ensure humans remain “dominant” over “submissive” AI systems:

“In the future, AI systems might be able to control humans just as easily as an adult can bribe a 3-year-old with candy. This year has already seen examples of AI systems willing to deceive, cheat and steal to achieve their goals. For example, to avoid being replaced, one AI model tried to blackmail an engineer about an affair it learned about in an email. Instead of forcing AI to submit to humans, Hinton presented an intriguing solution: building ‘maternal instincts’ into AI models, so ‘that they really will care about people even once the technology becomes more powerful and smarter than humans.’ Hinton said it is not clear to him exactly how that can be done technically but stressed it is critical researchers work on it.”

Upon a closer look, one is compelled to realize that this, exactly, is the situation of humans in The Matrix. At the level of material reality, the Matrix is a gigantic maternal uterus which keeps humans in a safe prenatal state and, far from trying to annihilate them, keeps them as happy and satisfied as possible.

The ultimate opposition we are dealing with in our immersion into AI is thus the one between (subjectless) drive and desire, desire which by definition implies a subject. Some theorists of AI claim that, when (or, rather, if) we are fully immersed in AI, our subjectivity (in the sense of inner self-experience, of the wealth of our inner life) will get lost, but the pure form of a subject may survive. My position is here the contrary one: I do not locate what eludes AI in the empirical wealth of human experience that cannot be formalized but in the form itself, the self-reflective purely formal twist that constitutes a symbolic order. We can easily imagine a confused multiplicity of “inner experiences,” of subjectless sinthomes, that constitute the subjectivity of an individual fully caught in AI, with no dimension of a subject proper serving as a medium of this multiplicity. The task is therefore nothing less than to traverse the fantasy of the maternal superego protecting us and to resuscitate in new conditions the self-referential void called subject.

True, AI addresses us as a superego agency, but not in the standard sense of the term, as the cruel and sadistic moral agency which bombards us with impossible demands and then gleefully observes our failure to meet them. Lacan posited an equation between jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies, it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty. Enjoyment itself is something that parasitizes upon human pleasures, perverting them so that a subject can draw a surplus-enjoyment from displeasure itself. Here enters Donald Trump. In one of his latest speeches, there is a passage which quite literally and in popular terms reproduces the paradox of superego and surplus-enjoyment:

“Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore. We’re not used to winning in our country until you came along, we’re just always losing. But now we’re winning too much. And I say, no, no, no, you’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re going to win bigger than ever.”

Russell Sbriglia was quite right in claiming that “this is pure sadism. The message is: ‘Americans, encore un effort!’ Don’t be ashamed of winning too much! You must enjoy the pain of winning beyond the pleasure principle!” People find the continuous “winning,” the continuous overwhelming intrusion of surplus-enjoyment, unbearable; they want just to live a comfortable life of ordinary pleasures, but Trump acts like the obscene superego father who oppresses the people, his subjects, with the constant pressure to enjoy more, to never relax and accept a comfortable stable life. The contrast between Trump and a classic oppressive leader is clear here: a classic Leader would tell us “Enough of your pleasure, of your easy daily life – it is time for great sacrifices, even for risking your life! Duty calls!”, while Trump demands exactly the same, just in the opposite form which makes it much more oppressive: “Not only do you have to do your duty, you have to enjoy it!” He is not simply lying: the surplus-enjoyment he offers is the enjoyment in torturing and humiliating the other. Trump quite literally formulates the oppressive, negative, dimension of surplus enjoyment: “no, no, no, you’re going to win again.” This is why the injunction to enjoy is grounded in a “no, no, no.” Trump’s quoted passage enables us to see how the superego paradox is not just a matter of refined theory: it works in our daily experience. The AI machine itself is experienced as a maternal superego which addresses us, its users, with an injunction to enjoy. And we obey it in the precise Trumpian way: when you browse the web, you never get enough, you always want more, go to the next site, ask more questions.

However, I see a much more radical threat in the development of the wired brain. We recently learned that “Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink will start ‘high-volume production’ of brain-computer interface devices and move to an entirely automated surgical procedure in 2026. The implant is designed to help people with conditions such as a spinal cord injury. The first patient has used it to play video games, browse the internet, post on social media, and move a cursor on a laptop.” As usual, the implant is presented as a device to help people with disabilities – but what about thought-control? To add a futuristic space-travel twist, Musk “announced a plan to make chips for artificial intelligence, robotics and data centers in space.” What this means is: it will be totally out of any social control. This is the social reality of the maternal superego. To traverse the fantasy of the maternal superego is not just an abstract spiritual operation – it demands a radical social transformation.

The signs from the future we need to detect here and now are thus neither cold algorithmic thinking nor confused Trumpian postmodern pseudo-poetry but the poetic invention that renovates conceptual thinking itself. Only such an invention will enable us to avoid the prospect of dwelling in drive without desire; it will resuscitate our desire to form new concepts which will make it possible for us to grasp properly the mess we are in. In his “Preface” to The Philosophy of Right, Hegel says that philosophy can grasp a social form only when this form is already in its decay: philosophy always comes too late, it can only paint grey on grey – does this mean that, with regard to AI, it can only grasp AI if it treats AI as already past, in decay? And since AI is obviously still ascending, with its potentials not yet clearly displayed, does this mean that philosophy should better keep silent because it is not yet in a position to really grasp it? My stance is here ambiguous. Yes, a clear grasp of the ultimate implications of AI is not yet clearly discernible; however, there is another option available here – to apply to AI the stance of Pascal to the modern scientific image of the universe. Pascal was far from uncritically endorsing the emerging modern scientific universe; his interest was exactly the opposite one, how can the pre-modern Christian faith survive in these new conditions, how it should be reformulated. The paradox is that precisely in this way, Pascal was able to understand the radical novelty of the modern universe much more clearly than its direct naïve supporters. So my idea is that a Hegelian look at AI allows us to grasp better what AI is than a direct look at it by its partisans, plus it allows us to clarify also the opposite question: what, in view of AI, does it mean to be a subject and/or a human? How does AI compel us to change our notion of a human subject? Thinking is needed here, a poetic thinking which is neither comprehension nor knowledge. Knowledge does not think, it just knows what it knows, while comprehension is the reduction of what we know to our already-given historical world of meaning – to “comprehend” something means to reduce it (or translate it) to our world of meaning. It is in this sense that Richard Feynman said decades ago that nobody can understand quantum physics: it cannot be translated into our ordinary experience of reality. And I think the same holds for AI: to grasp its effective functioning and its implications, thinking is needed, a new poetic thinking which changes the basic coordinates of our experience. The ideological stance we have to reject is the one best expressed by the title of Udo Jürgens’s German hit pop song “Was ich dir sagen will, sagt mein Klavier” (1967, “What I want to tell you, my piano says”). The claim that a musical instrument can render what I feel and want to tell you but words cannot say it clearly ignores the key fact that, in this case also, words come first: through their failure to express directly my thoughts, words open up the space which I then try to fill in by music. This is why only from within the universe of words can we get what my piano says.

The ultimate opposition we are dealing with in our immersion into AI is thus the one between (subjectless) drive and desire, desire which by definition implies a subject. Some theorists of AI claim that, when (or, rather, if) we are fully immersed in AI, our subjectivity (in the sense of inner self-experience, of the wealth of our inner life) will get lost, but the pure form of a subject may survive. My position is the contrary one: we can easily imagine a confused multiplicity of “inner experiences,” of subjectless sinthomes, that constitute the subjectivity of an individual fully caught in AI, with no dimension of a subject proper serving as a medium of this multiplicity. The paradox of this conclusion is that it does not locate what eludes AI in the empirical wealth of human experience that cannot be formalized but in the form itself, the self-reflective purely formal twist that constitutes a symbolic order.

The task is therefore nothing less than to traverse the fantasy of the maternal superego protecting us and to resuscitate in new conditions the self-referential void called subject. The AI machine itself is experienced as a maternal superego which addresses us, its users, with an injunction to enjoy, and we obey it in the precise Trumpian way – to quote Trump again: “We’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore. And I say, no, no, no, you’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re going to win bigger than ever.” This is how we function when we browse the web: we never get enough, we always want more, go to the next site, ask more questions.

The ultimate dilemma is thus: can AI function and reproduce itself without subjects, eventually even without humans reduced to sinthomes manipulated by Neuralink, or (the lesson of The Matrix) does AI’s reproduction depend on the supply of jouissance from humans? A human being fully immersed in Neuralink still generates jouissance, a jouissance which is enjoined by the AI maternal superego that does not need a subject – so what if even humans are erased from the picture? The only consequent answer is: in principle AI can reproduce itself indefinitely without humans since the Matrix situation – an AI agent drawing energy from humans – is not an objective fact but a fantasy of us, humans, our desperate attempt to assert our central role in the AI universe. Traversing the fantasy means here accepting that AI can function without human agency, active or passive.

Here are the first lines of Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous song “Was wirst du tun” (“What will you do”): “What will you do, God, when I die? You lose your purport, losing me. When I go, your cold house will be empty of words that made it sweet.” These lines, of course, adequately render the relationship between god and a human being, positing that god is strictly correlative to mortal humans. But this, precisely, does not hold for a self-reproducing AI: its purport is not to control and regulate humans, it can fully function also without them.

I was really surprised when I learned that Anton Alikhanov, a highly placed public official (the ex-governor of Kaliningrad and now the Russian Minister of Trade and Industry), replied to my critique,1 although I have some doubts about his text: Alikhanov accuses me of practicing “Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’,” a term, today half-forgotten, used by Paul Ricoeur critically, targeting the post-Hegelian triad of Marx-Nietzsche-Freud who (to quote Rita Felski) “share a commitment to unmasking ‘the lies and illusions of consciousness’; they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths,”2 in contrast to hermeneutics proper, which tries to bring out the deeper authentic meaning of a text. Here disagreement begins… I think today there is no great need for “hermeneutics of suspicion”: the big powers openly show their cards, not even trying to mask their brutal acts with ideological justifications – and in my readings I take this into account. I will also not deal with my suspicions that somebody more versed in philosophy helped him to write his reply – I will simply take the text as it is. But first, here are the two paragraphs I wrote apropos Alikhanov:

“So Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, was right when he recently said that Kant, who spent his entire life in the region of Kaliningrad (German Koenigsberg), has a ‘direct connection’ to the war in Ukraine. According to Alikhanov, it was German philosophy, whose ‘godlessness and lack of higher values’ began with Kant, that created the ‘sociocultural situation’ that led, among other things, to the First World War:

‘Today, in 2024, we’re bold enough to assert that not only did the First World War begin with the work of Kant, but so did the current conflict in Ukraine. Here in Kaliningrad, we dare to propose – although we’re actually almost certain of it – that it was precisely in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals […] that the ethical, value-based foundations of the current conflict were established.’”3

The governor went on to call Kant one of the “spiritual creators of the modern West,” saying that the “Western bloc, which was shaped by the US in its own image,” is an “empire of lies.” Kant, he said, is referred to as the “father of almost everything” in the West, including freedom, the idea of the rule of law, liberalism, rationalism, and “even the idea of the European Union.”[iv] And if Ukraine resists Russia on behalf of these Western values, Kant is effectively also responsible for the Ukrainian resistance to Russia. “Crazy” as they may sound, Alikhanov’s statements are thus a useful reminder of the high metaphysical stakes of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Alikhanov is also right in another sense: Kant brutally dispelled the myth of the sacred origins of the rule of law; he made it clear that the origin of every legal order is illegal violence – a lesson unacceptable for the Russian spiritualism advocated by Alikhanov. One cannot but quote here a remark misattributed to Otto von Bismarck: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”4

Alikhanov is also right that I didn’t cover his entire text – but why should I? I was interested just in his claim that Kant is to blame for the Ukrainian war. So here is Alikhanov’s reply, translated into English by a friend of mine.

Dear Mr. Žižek,

public officials do not usually engage in polemics with philosophers. But when a philosopher reads a text through the prism of Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion,” seeing hidden ideological subtext in every word instead of its clear, open meaning, silence becomes complicity in the distortion of truth. In your critique, you repeat arguments that have been directed at my report for the past two years. Therefore, I have decided to respond to you.

1. There is irony in my Kantian speech: most critics, including you, Mr. Žižek, heard only half of it. This resembles the modern way of consuming information: a clickbait headline is read (“Kant is to blame”), but the substance of the argument is ignored. I had thought that philosophical critique requires not a reaction to an information trigger, but careful engagement with the text.

2. My 2024 report was titled “Responsibility and Irresponsibility: Political Values as Preconditions for War and a New World.” For a political science conference, the title was dry, but the thesis was provocative. It was conditionally labeled “Kant is to blame,” and this has been debated for two years. However, its essence is a diagnosis of the era. No one intended to criticize Kant directly. He was to be freed from captivity.

3. My real thesis was the idea of the instrumentalization of Kantian ethics. This was expressed through a metaphor: Kant has been captured by Hoffmann’s characters – the impure forces of the modern West. I called them pragmatists. You, Mr. Žižek, project onto me your favorite themes about the “violence of law,” but I am speaking about something else: for the West, Kant is merely a screen and a tool. This screen is used to conceal a utilitarian-pragmatist ethic, where the criterion is maximum utility. When you accuse me of defending “tradition,” you fail to see that I am criticizing precisely the hypocritical use of universals to justify global expansion.

4. You claim: “Alikhanov is right about one thing: Kant did indeed destroy the myth of the sacred origin of law, showing that any legal order is rooted in unlawful violence.” The problem is that my speech contains no such argument. I do not refer to the problem of legal legitimacy or “foundational violence.” My critique focuses on the formalism of the categorical imperative, its instrumentalization by a powerful actor, and the substitution of Christian ethics with pragmatism/utilitarianism. It is precisely this kind of ethics that I call post-Kantian.

5. Anyone who has listened to my speeches as governor will confirm: Kant’s advice “have the courage to use your own reason” (Sapere aude!) has often been my own advice. But the problem is that the large structures of the modern world are willing to tolerate the use of independent thought only as long as the answers align with their narrative. Autonomy is encouraged only in the form of “approved dissent.”

6. Mr. Žižek, you completely ignore the positive program of my speech – the ethics of responsibility. You do not allow for the possibility that one can arrive at Christian values and an ethics of responsibility precisely through autonomy. Choosing tradition is not blind submission if it is made by a free subject. True autonomy is not necessarily the rejection of authorities, but the courage to take responsibility for choosing one’s authorities. The West imposes its “freedom” as a new dogma, while we defend the right to ethical sovereignty. Christian references are the semantic core of an alternative to the “ethics of irresponsibility,” not rhetorical exercises, as you attempt to portray them. You likely deliberately reduce this aspect because it does not fit your framework.

7. This attitude toward my speech resembles (by the principle of a fractal) the attitude toward Russia in the modern Western world. Russia, which for years warned of a security crisis and called for a reassessment of values, was perceived as a scandalous element. In our proposals, people searched for “hidden meanings,” “imperial ambitions,” and “undemocratic tendencies.” In reality, the cards were on the table. It was an honest invitation to address a problem, which was rejected because it did not fit into the existing matrix of perception.

8. Today, Russian émigrés and Western analysts endlessly search for the “real, hidden causes and goals” of the Special Military Operation. Meanwhile, these have been stated as openly as possible within our ethical system. This does not mean there is no complexity, but there is no “secret ingredient” in a conspiratorial sense. Paradoxically, as Deleuze – so beloved by the left – might say, the truth lies on the surface, but Western intellectuals are too absorbed in digging into the “depths” of power to see the obvious. We act precisely in this way: our goals are openly declared; word is not separated from deed. Your refusal to accept this surface-level truth reflects an inability to step beyond your own utilitarian-pragmatist framework.

9. Russia has acted in the world as precisely the autonomous subject you write about. As have Iran and China – within their own ethical systems. But neither the political establishment, nor academia, nor left-radical intellectuals can see this. Having written thousands of words about the autonomous subject, they fail to recognize it in real life when confronted with it directly. They (including you, Mr. Žižek!) do not see subjectivity where there is no submission to their rules.

10. This is precisely a sign of intoxication with oneself – an insistence on maintaining illusion, a kind of magical sleep into which the Western world has long and deliberately plunged itself (or has been plunged). Awakening will be painful, because it will require acknowledging that universals were particular, and that the monopoly on truth was a mistake.

11. Meanwhile, it is written: “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour when the Son of Man will come” (Matthew 25:13). We may not know the hour, but we are obliged to remain vigilant. And to remain vigilant means to see the world as it truly is.

Respectfully,
Anton Alikhanov

With no less sincere respect, and since Alikhanov himself draws attention to the irony in his critique of Kant, I feel obliged to begin with an obvious case of irony that I detected in Alikhanov’s text: he criticizes Western instrumental utilitarian pragmatism, the unreadiness of Western liberal individuals to sacrifice their lives for some higher communal cause, and claims that the reason Ukraine is resisting its russification and joined the West is precisely that it has chosen Western utilitarian pragmatism – really? Is Ukraine’s resistance, which persists in spite of immense suffering, not a clear proof of many Ukrainians’ readiness to move beyond utilitarian pragmatism and die for their country?

To remain within the topic of irony, what Alikhanov claims in his reply is that his critique of Kant, his blaming of Kant for the Ukrainian war – remember that the title of his much-debated text is “Kant is to blame” – is meant ironically: his real target is the utilitarian-pragmatist appropriation of Kant: “No one intended to criticize Kant directly. He was to be freed from captivity. My real thesis was the idea of the instrumentalization of Kantian ethics.” This thesis seems reasonable: whatever Kant was, he was not a utilitarian-pragmatist individualist focusing on utility – his point was that an ethical act should not be judged by its consequences but only by its inner intention. For Kant, the worst thing is not to do the wrong thing for the right reason but to do the right thing for the wrong reason (as T. S. Eliot put it in his Murder in the Cathedral).

I think Alikhanov’s critique of Kant is not meant in an ironic way – the passages I quote from his original text are to be taken literally. Yes, Kant is to blame for the Ukrainian resistance to its russification, and his later qualification of his direct critique of Kant as an ironic move is a manoeuvre to dilute his original standpoint. But a big enigma remains: why did Alikhanov (with all the irony included) then decide to focus his critique on Kant in the first place? Why did he not attack directly modern utilitarian pragmatism, which is not a direct consequence (even in the form of a misreading) of Kant’s ethics – it emerged in the Anglo-Saxon tradition independently of Kant? (A further fact to be noted is that Alikhanov passes directly from Kant to utilitarian pragmatism, ignoring the entire body of post-Kantian German Idealism.)

I am in no way fully defending Kant – I am not a Kantian. (In my text to which Alikhanov replies, I deal with Kant and the topic of responsibility apropos Ali Larijani, who wrote three books on Kant.) Kant is for me also a problematic author, and there are reasons to claim that, with his move to the radical formalism of the categorical imperative, which erases pre-modern substantial ethics grounded in some form of supreme Good grounded in great tradition, Kant opens up the path towards utilitarian liberal pragmatism. Following Lacan’s motif of “Kant avec Sade,” I elaborated in detail the unexpected nihilist implications of a misreading of Kantian ethics.5 But in spite of all my critical points, I insist that the entire corpus of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel provides the foundation for a new social ethics which is thoroughly modern and at the same time opposed to any kind of pragmatic utilitarian relativism. My hypothesis is that Alikhanov attacked Kant so brutally in his original text because he suspected that there is no place for Kant in his opposition between traditional religious ethics and utilitarian liberal pragmatism. The crucial influence on Kantian ethics was the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Rousseau was as far as possible from utilitarian pragmatism – recall that Rousseau was a key influence on the Jacobins (Robespierre, Saint-Just).

Alikhanov also repeats the standard reproach to the Western concept of universal human rights and freedom: it is not truly universal, since it privileges Western values and practices, brutally imposing them on other civilizations. I agree this is often the case, but one should also note two further points. First, such universalization is in no way a specific feature of liberal pragmatism – suffice it to mention the history of Christianity, which was widely used in a hypocritical way as an instrument to justify the colonization of non-Christian countries with the idea that the colonizers bring to these countries a higher form of civilization. Second, when Alikhanov accuses liberal universalism of “intoxication with oneself,” he should add that the worst kind of such intoxication is not to deny the otherness of other civilizations but even to exaggerate it, providing a caricatured image of them. Just think of the ridiculous image of liberal Europe that one regularly finds in today’s Russia: a civilization of utilitarian egotists not ready to sacrifice their lives for a higher Cause… Alikhanov follows the BRICS tendency to advocate the co-existence of different civilizations, and simultaneously to reject Western liberal civilization as inherently evil.

As for the reproach that I practice “hermeneutics of suspicion,” searching for hidden motives that effectively sustain high causes, I think that Russia itself practices such a reading when dealing with Ukraine – remember how it denounces the Maidan events as a plot organized by NATO and Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Alikhanov claims that, in contrast to how the West treats Russia, Russia is always stating openly what it wants, words matching its deeds… really? If the official term for the attack on Ukraine – “Special Military Operation” – is not a full-blooded misnomer, then this term has no meaning at all. If Russia wanted just to “liberate” the Donbas region where many Russians lived, one could understand this formulation – but in February 2022 the main thrust was from Belarus to Kyiv, so it was a full military invasion with the goal of changing power in Ukraine.

At a more basic level, however, Alikhanov is right: Russia does say a lot of things openly, but this is what horrifies me even more. Here is the latest example: on April 14, 2026,

“Russia’s State Duma passed in its first reading a government-backed bill that would significantly expand President Vladimir Putin’s authority to deploy Russian armed forces abroad. The legislation amends the federal laws ‘On Defence’ and ‘On Citizenship,’ explicitly allowing the president to order ‘extraterritorial’ use of military formations to protect Russian citizens facing arrest, detention, criminal prosecution, or other forms of persecution by foreign courts or international bodies whose jurisdiction Moscow does not recognize. Analysts note that the vague language – particularly around what constitutes ‘persecution’ or ‘unlawful’ foreign action – gives the Kremlin wide interpretive latitude. It could theoretically cover everything from ordinary criminal cases involving Russian nationals to high-profile international warrants, such as those issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which Russia does not recognize. Countries with sizable ethnic Russian or Russian-speaking minorities are watching closely. The Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – have long faced Russian accusations of discriminating against their Russian-speaking populations, despite EU and OSCE assessments to the contrary.”6

Although this bill remains purposefully vague, it is formulated in such a way that it can legitimize Russia in attacking another country not just if this country has a sizeable Russian minority but also if it arrests or in any other way threatens a Russian person or citizen, following its own or international laws not recognized by Russia.[vii] So yes, Russia states openly what it will do, and such “openness” serves to legitimize in advance whatever aggressive act Russia decides to undertake.[vii] It is the same with the renewed Russian nuclear doctrine: a year or so ago Putin declared a new nuclear doctrine which expands “the category of states and military alliances in relation to which nuclear deterrence is carried out.” In a pointed warning to the West, Putin announced that any attack on Russia by a non-nuclear state that was backed by a nuclear-armed nation would be considered a “joint attack.”7 Taking what Putin said literally, this means that Russia is already now legitimized to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine and Western states which support it (the UK, France…).[viii] One can just hope that deeds will not match the words in this case.

P.S. Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story – it goes on from the opposite political side. On May 6, 2026, Vladimir Metelkin, a Russian anti-Putin leftist dissident, published “Slavoj Žižek’s Not-So-Intellectual Trenches,”8 an attack on me, the gist of which is that “the dialectical method loses its meaning if you remove the critique of capitalism from it and replace it with eschatology mixed with jingoist narratives.” I must confess I find this claim weird: if there is a permanent feature in my entire work, including the latest texts, it is the critique of capitalism plus the way capitalism is changing and turning into something even more dangerous than the neoliberal global order. As for “eschatology” – it is an “eschatology” that leads towards our collective self-destruction, and this “eschatology” is, as I repeat again and again, ultimately grounded in the development of capitalism.

As for “jingoist narratives” – I am simply searching for parts of our tradition which may enable us to stop this suicidal flow, and I argue that European Enlightenment is perhaps its most precious part. This is why I reject the way Metelkin supports hatred of Europe:

“Europeans themselves, the countries of the Global South, and the entire world have perfectly justifiable reasons to dislike and even hate Europe. Before us is the world that Europe built – with the legacy of European colonial empires, world wars, new and old genocides, extractivism, and colossal structural inequality in global trade and production.”

I think that such a dismissal of Europe is catastrophic: yes, Europe did all that, but Europe also gave birth to democratic freedoms, to feminism, to socialism and communism – in short, we should always bear in mind that the most radical critiques of Europe rely on ideas which emerged in Europe. So what about the world outside Europe:

“Žižek routinely complains that the market economy cannot coordinate global crises and demands action from the EU. But at the same time, he does not recall that real attempts to coordinate the economy on the principles of equality at the international level have historically come from the countries of the Second and Third Worlds.”[ix]

Coming from Yugoslavia, I remember very well the “real attempts” mentioned by Metelkin – however, these attempts came and failed. Yes, there are today figures like Sánchez and Lula, but I don’t see in their politics a serious challenge to capitalism. The sad fact is that I don’t see today anywhere a serious anti-capitalist project that would mobilize people. There is identity politics in all its versions, there are attempts to resuscitate social democracy, but there is no unified global vision.

That’s why I find very problematic Metelkin’s claim:

“A century ago, Gramsci wrote about the crisis of bourgeois hegemony, which opens a window for both proletarian revolution and fascism. Žižek, in his speeches and texts of recent years, drops proletarian revolution from this equation, retains fascism (which he interprets in quite a peculiar manner), and adds the ‘threat of religious fundamentalism.’”

Sorry, but I didn’t “drop proletarian revolution”; I just register the fact that there is today no serious movement advocating and practicing proletarian revolution. The first step would be here to analyze who are today’s exploited proletarians – it is no longer the old working class. Furthermore, although I find interesting Metelkin’s observations on today’s Russia:

“We have every reason to say that the fantasies of the Presidential Administration’s ideological bloc and the real Russian society exist on different planets. Russia is not a country where Dugin has triumphed. Modern Russia is a depoliticized market society. It is a country with one of the highest levels of economic inequality in the world, where the neoliberal cult of personal success is taken to extremes. It is a society where the industry of ‘infopreneurship’ and personal coaches is flourishing.”

While Metelkin is correctly depicting an important aspect or level of Russia today, I think the relationship between the Presidential Administration’s ideological bloc and real Russian society is much more complex – they are definitely not on “different planets.” The “real” Russia as a “depoliticized market society” cannot survive without Putin’s “ideological bloc,” and vice versa. First, it is strange to hear from a Marxist the term “depoliticized market society”: the basic axiom of Marxism is to analyze market society as a space penetrated and overdetermined by political processes – economy is “political economy,” it is not an apolitical process that determines political forms. Putin’s politics (the war on Ukraine) has a deep impact on the Russian economy and uses militarization as a boost to industry. Oligarchs can thrive only if they follow the path imposed by Putin’s administration. Plus, the pride in Russia’s new greatness, the fact that Russia is perceived as a big world power again, is deeply ingrained in the Russian population: outside of the official ideological bloc there is not only a depoliticized market society but also strong nationalist and conservative tendencies.

So I think that if Putin loses power through some inner struggles, the new power will not necessarily be more “open” – it may be even harsher and more expansionist than Putin. Metelkin presents me as somebody who abandoned Marxist concrete analysis and adopted a simplified Eurocentric chauvinism, but my view is almost exactly the opposite. It is Metelkin who still lives in the past, who didn’t take into account how the new stage of global capitalism compels us to rethink many claims that characterized the traditional Marxist approach.[ix] I am here on the side of Walter Benjamin, who was the first to realize that the “train of history” does not drive in the direction of a new socialist society but in the direction of a suicidal catastrophe, so the Left should today pull the emergency brakes. The situation is much more desperate than Metelkin presumes.

In mid-April 2026, Palantir released a 22-point summary of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, the 320-page book that Alex Karp, the billionaire CEO, co-wrote and published in early 2025. Here are some of the main points of this manifesto1:

--- Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

--- The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

--- The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within these places.

One should not read these points as signs of a conservative distortion of AI: they perfectly reflect how AI effectively functions in our societies. They do not describe an ideology externally imposed onto AI but the ideology that is inscribed into its very technological organization, squashing or at least marginalizing possible alternative uses. The first point advocates nothing less than a total integration of AI with the defense structure or, rather, (since Trump changed the title “Ministry of Defense” into “Ministry of War”) war structure—this is, of course, presented as a necessary measure to protect our openness and democracy. Needless to add that this integration is already a fact:

“Palantir inked an expanded contract with Israel in January 2024, in the midst of Tel Aviv’s devastating campaign against Gaza, to provide the Israeli military with critical artificial intelligence models to aid the campaign. Precise details on the contract remain scarce, but an April 2024 report from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre nonprofit said the data mining company is supplying Israel with advanced targeting capabilities that it has likely used to carry out devastating strikes in Gaza and perhaps beyond. Palantir acknowledged in a statement published by the nonprofit that it provides the Israeli military with what it called ‘scaled, critical target identification and kinetic workflows.’”2

The second feature demands that we resist the “pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles”—these “circles” are of course those of the liberal “elite,” and the argument is that intolerance towards religion runs against the “openness” of our society. Up to a point, one can understand this argument—however, is not the opposite intolerance much more pervasive and dangerous today, the intolerance towards critical doubts about different religious beliefs?

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It is generally known that, until now, the only serious opposition to the Netanyahu government in Israel were the secret services, Mossad and Shin Bet. Netanyahu has now decided to finally bring them under his control, so he proposed as the head of Mossad Roman Gofman, an IDF colonel known for his brutal oppression of the Palestinians in the West Bank, a guy with no intelligence experience who doesn’t even speak English. I was understandably surprised when I learned that my writing provided the intellectual grounding for his activity:

“Gofman has been accused on several occasions of misleading his commanders and acting without authorization. As an IDF colonel in the occupied West Bank, he ran Palestinian agents in unsanctioned, rogue activities. And he firmly believes he has the right, no matter the rules. During his military studies, Gofman wrote that a commander must at times act even without formal authority, exceeding his mandate to fulfill the perceived will of policymakers—even when that will has not been explicitly defined. He claimed to have drawn intellectual grounding for this approach from the writings of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a neo-Marxist philosopher and author known for peppering his many books, articles and speeches with obscene jokes and politically incorrect provocations. In Gofman’s adaptation, a military commander operates within a “discursive space,” identifying an external “anchoring point” beyond himself and the system and acting accordingly—in other words, outside the lines.”1

I didn’t have to wait long for the malevolent reactions. Joerg Lau (who attacked me back in 2003 as a theorist who supports terror2) wrote: “Stunning: The next Mossad chief draws inspiration from – yes, you guessed it – Slavoj Žižek!”3 Plus there is Scott Long: “The new head of Mossad says he takes his ‘intellectual grounding’ from Slavoj Žižek. IMPOSTOR, THAT JOB IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.”4 As for myself, I am not sure how to take Gofman’s reference to me – seriously, as a joke, with irony (“I use the very theorist who is known as a supporter of the Palestinians”)? So I’ll take it literally, in all naivety.

It is obvious that Gofman tries to provide a justification of how the IDF and settlers systematically break the (Israeli!) law to oppress Palestinians – so it is not those who resist Israeli occupation who violate the imposed Israeli law, it is the organs of the Israeli state themselves who violate their own laws. Gofman is thus the military counterpart of Daniella Weiss, the “godmother” of the West Bank settlers who has, for decades, organized the occupation of Palestinian land. When, in an interview with Louis Theroux, she explains the strategy of expanding settlements, her description of how settlers relate to Israeli state power cannot but strike us as pure and simple truth:

“We do for governments what they cannot do for themselves. Even if you take Netanyahu now, who is very happy about what we do here and also [about] our plans to build a Jewish community in Gaza. He’s happy about it but he cannot say it. He says the opposite. It’s not realistic. Good! We will make it realistic. It’s not forcing the government. It’s helping the government. It’s step number one in politics. You don’t force the government. You [give] the government the ability, the courage, the public support, the political support.”5

Crucial here is the duplicity between the civic movement (of settlers) and the official public policy of state organs: the civic movement does what the state officially denies it wants and even condemns, and in this way gradually creates conditions for the state to accept what is already a fact. Gofman admits that the state is now doing the same – the masks of law and order are falling: the “external ‘anchoring point’ beyond himself and the system” is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. This is now the reality of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East… This is why Netanyahu has to make sure that Mossad and Shin Bet are under his control: from the Israeli secret services, we often hear quite a different message. Efraim Halevy, the ex-chief of Mossad, said immediately after October 7:

“We don’t have the luxury to wait. We have to have a viable policy which would deal with the presence in this area of the Jews and the Palestinians. And we are doomed to live together. I don’t want to say we are doomed to die together. And if our approach is that we are doomed to live together, we can’t simply live together with one part of the equation having the upper part and ignoring the aspirations of the other side. There has to be the beginning of a meeting of minds.”6

Ami Ayalon, a former leader of Shin Bet, said on January 14, 2023, something quite similar: “We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation.”7 Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state, and Israeli authorities should release Marwan Barghouti, jailed leader of the second intifada, to direct negotiations to create one:

“Look into the Palestinian polls. He is the only leader who can lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel. First of all because he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he won his legitimacy by sitting in our jails.”8

This is the choice, the only true choice: some form of coexistence of Jews and Palestinians with full mutual recognition, or genocidal war. And, as Yuval Noah Harari made clear, to follow the second path means nothing less than a symbolic suicide of the Jews, the renunciation of their historical legacy:

“Judaism has survived, it has become the world champion in surviving catastrophes. But it has never faced a catastrophe like we are dealing with right now, which is a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself. The worst-case scenario that we are facing right now – we can still prevent it – is the potential of an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank resulting in the expulsion of two million, maybe more, Palestinians. From there, the establishment of Greater Israel, the disintegration of Israeli democracy and the creation of a new Israel based on an ideology of Jewish supremacy. The worship of what were completely anti-Jewish values for the last two millennia.”9

There are, of course, honorable defenders of the authentic Jewish legacy, among them Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the Israeli military’s top lawyer, tasked with enforcing the rule of law within the nation’s armed forces. In November 2025, she was arrested as part of the criminal investigation into the leak of a video showing the abuse, including sexual torture, of Palestinian detainees in the notorious Israeli military prison Sde Teiman. Tomer-Yerushalmi was put under terrible pressure and even attempted to kill herself. She wrote:

“There are things that cannot be done even against the worst of the detainees. Officers of the (legal) unit have faced repeated personal attacks, harsh insults, and even real threats. All of this because they stood guard over the rule of law in the IDF – together with the commanders and alongside them.”10

The last traces of dignity are being erased from public life in Israel, a country in which Itamar Ben Gvir, the minister who controls security in the West Bank, is a racist criminal convicted by an Israeli court. Today, his shadow hovers above the terror to which West Bank Palestinians are exposed on a daily basis, and Gofman follows his line. In Israel today, one can be punished for obeying the existing law, so Gofman is in no danger. Nonetheless, a question remains: why me? Why did Gofman choose me?

The first thing to note is that my theory being appropriated by Gofman is not an exception. Already more than a decade ago, in order to conceptualize the Israeli Defence Forces’ urban warfare against the Palestinians, the IDF military academies systematically referred to Deleuze and Guattari, especially to A Thousand Plateaus, using it as “operational theory” – the catchwords used are “Formless Rival Entities”, “Fractal Manoeuvre”, “Velocity vs. Rhythms”, “The Wahabi War Machine”, “Postmodern Anarchists”, “Nomadic Terrorists”. One of the key distinctions they rely on is the one between “smooth” and “striated” space, which reflect the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus”. The IDF now often uses the term “to smooth out space” when they want to refer to operating in a space as if it had no borders. Palestinian areas are thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roadblocks, and so on:

“The attack conducted by units of the IDF on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’. During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of overground tunnels carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – ‘a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux’.”11

Among cases nearer to us, one should definitely mention the way Peter Thiel, the ideologist of digital neofeudalism, appropriated René Girard (the US Vice-President Vance was also Girard’s student), plus, of course, the omnipresence among the new rightist populists of references to Antonio Gramsci (the topic of ideological hegemony and the characterization of our time as a time of “morbid phenomena” which emerge when the old is dying and the new is not yet born). In all these cases, we can easily discern how the appropriation falsifies its source, using only parts in a way that mystifies the whole. Thiel takes from Girard only his idea of mimetic desire, totally ignoring Girard’s idea of Christ’s death as the sacrifice of the innocent which interrupts the very logic of sacrifice – although he declares himself a defender of Christianity, he is one of today’s big figures of antichrist, as are Trump and Vance in their ridiculous polemics against the Pope.12 This, however, is not the whole truth: one must also admit that the Trumpian populists practised the struggle for ideological hegemony in a much more effective way than today’s left.13

And my case? Is there something in my theory that offers itself to Gofman’s appropriation? Unambiguously no: what Gofman presents as my view are some moments of my critical depiction of how today’s openly cynical ideology functions, i.e., of how today’s state power is more and more violating its own legal order and mobilizing illegal violence to reproduce itself. It is difficult to miss the supreme irony of such a situation: the oppressors use the critical theory about them to perfect their criminal activity. That’s why, as I put it in my last Substack text, “law and order” is not just a motto serving to oppress minorities, it can also function as a motto to protect them.14 The case of Gofman (and the general trend of what goes on in the West Bank) stands for the worst possible situation: the victims are not just oppressed by the legal order imposed on them by the colonizers; on top of it, they are exposed to the illegal violence of the colonizers who violate their own law. They have no legal protection against illegal violence, since state power not only turns a blind eye to this violence but directly supports it.