Quantum physicists often accuse us philosophers of appropriating, in a superficial way, some claims of quantum mechanics (like superposition, collapse, etc.) and using them in a vague metaphoric way which really contributes nothing to a philosopher’s theory, but just covers it with a cloud of scientific reference. However, I find that quantum physicists are often doing the same, mentioning philosophy to cover their scientific hypotheses with a cloud of philosophical reference. Here is a surprising case: like hundreds of thousands all around the world, I eagerly await Carlo Rovelli’s new book On the Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy (New York: Scribner, 2026). Since it will appear only in September 2026, I cannot restrain myself from reacting to Nathan Gardels’s review of the book in Noema, where he focuses on the chapter dedicated to the analogy between quantum mechanics and the theology of Soeren Kierkegaard – here is a long passage from this review:

“The dominant cultural paradigm of Kierkegaard’s time, from the early to mid-19th century, was the Hegelian system, ‘where everything finds its place in a rational universal conception of reality.’ Yet, Kierkegaard felt intuitively that ‘something essential was missing’ from this grand framework of the spirit of history unfolding from above and beyond. Rovelli recounts the doubts the Danish philosopher cast on the abstract notion of an objective order as an encompassing whole, the laws of which humans could only endeavor to decipher. As Kierkegaard saw it, ‘the system of Hegel, or all the objective truths of Christianity, are irrelevant to our individual choice, which is the central issue, the only true issue,’ writes Rovelli. Standing at the crossroads between salvation and eternal damnation in the Christian eschatology, Kierkegaard argued that the choice of believing in God or not was of ‘infinite importance for each one of us.’ In deploying his system Hegel describes reality from the outside, from a safe distance, so »what distinguishes it from the abstract description of something that is not real? What links it to reality? The answer is that it is our individual perspective that shows it to us as real, since we, as parts of it, are ourselves real. This way of thinking puts the individual perspective at the center, even if every individual perspective is only partial. This is the inescapable existential situation in which we find ourselves. Kierkegaard’s conclusion is extreme — ‘truth is subjectivity’ — thus overturning the widespread idea that arriving at truth requires our subjectivity to be set aside.”

How does this relate to quantum physics? “The truth of a physical process is subjective. It lies in the observer. Kierkegaard, like Bohr, intuits that the heart of reality lies in subjectivity, and in the plurality of subjectivities … the ‘subjectivity’ I am speaking of has nothing to do with the eternal salvation of Christianity, nor even with us humans in general. It is instead the central idea that truth is intrinsically perspectival. ‘Relative’ is thus a better word than ‘subjective’ here, since ‘subjective’ is usually reserved for human or animal perspectives. But the thread from the tormented Danish philosopher is nevertheless there. /.../ Objectivity without a subject is an abstract construct, of little relevance — it is the illusion of a science now belonging to the past.” As “co-creators of the fabric of reality,” the world ahead of us is not predetermined but shaped by the choices we make. Yet those choices must be made in the absence of full knowledge of the world, in the uncertainty of an undetermined future that can’t be known. Their true meaning will only emerge after events occur. We don’t know in advance what reality will emerge from the plurality of relational influences that converge to constitute the next moment. Kierkegaard pithily summed up this existential condition of humanity, which also conveys the insights of quantum science: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”1

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What is debt? One way to think of debt is to conceive it as one of the fundamental forms of our social relationships, of our relationship to the Other—where “Other” does not refer only to another person or a figure of authority, but has a broader meaning that can include the community, society and its institutions, language and even the symbolic horizon to which one belongs (hence, in the sense that Lacanians speak about “the big Other”). In this sense, debt resonates strongly with the notion of belonging and pertains to its register. It engages with the question of how one belongs—with our relation to this Other—as well as with the means of sustaining this relation or bond.

In this presentation, we will briefly walk through a series of figures in which debt has existed—and continues to exist—as a social bond, also in a historical sense. The forms or figures of debt we will touch upon are by no means exhaustive; nevertheless, they may offer us a certain insight into the fundamental logic of how debt operates, and especially into some of the permutations we have been witnessing in recent times. Precisely because it is situated at the intersection—the point of overlap—between the subject and the Other, or between the individual and the social, the phenomenon of debt is also an exceptionally important vantage point from which one can observe the irreducible and intrinsic connection—the entanglement—of these two dimensions.

Psychoanalysis can serve as an important point of departure in this regard, since—particularly in its Freudian-Lacanian orientation—it was, from the very beginning, conceived as something that inherently possesses a social, objective, and critical dimension. It is never merely a matter of individuals and their (more or less intimate) problems—these are, from the outset, inscribed within the sociosymbolic field that Lacan calls the “Other.” In this way, “our” problems are never simply “our” problems; strictly speaking, they are also problems of the big Other. And Freud quickly recognized how, together with his patients or analysands on the couch, the social or familial order is always present as well.

This aspect of the intersection between the subject and the Other provides a very specific and delimited focus for what is otherwise an ambitious arc outlined by the text—one that could be (mistakenly) understood as an attempt at a “short history of debt.” Yet this is by no means the case, just as the text does not attempt to place itself alongside the detailed and excellent studies of the phenomenon of debt that already exist.

1. Debt, Guilt, and Their Ambiguity

As Freud shows, for example, in his analysis of obsessional neurosis (the case study of the “Ratman”), debt plays a key role in this structure: obsessional subjects experience themselves as always indebted to the Other—be it the father, the Law, God, or the analyst. They are trapped in a paradox: on the one hand, they want to pay their debt, to be free; on the other, they endlessly postpone payment, because if the debt were ever settled, the Other’s desire would be extinguished—and that is unbearable. The obsessional solution, therefore, is to keep the debt alive. This gives them a sense of control over the Other’s desire (“I still owe, so the Other still wants (something from me)”), albeit at a very high cost, which can almost completely paralyze life, as we vividly see in the case of the “Rat Man.” Freud extends the fundamental logic of this compulsive structure to the functioning of religion in general, understanding the latter as a kind of “universal obsessive neurosis”: religion is not simply a set of beliefs and intimate faith; it operates as a system of practices and rituals aimed at managing anxiety and guilt in relation to the Other. Since, for Freud, there is at the same time no such thing as a completely non-pathological psychological structure, obsessive neurosis can be understood as one of the possible structures of “normality.”

In a slightly different register—one in which debt also resonates with guilt (as it does directly in the German language, where Schuld means both debt and guilt, though this connection is culturally more universal)—it is interesting to observe how this plays out in classical tragedy, and later in modern tragedy. As Hegel notes in his Lectures on Aesthetics, the force of the great tragic characters of antiquity lies in the fact that they have no choice: they are what they will and accomplish from their birth onward, and they are this with all their being. For this reason, Hegel continues, they do not in any way claim to be innocent of their acts. On the contrary, the greatest offence one can commit against a great tragic hero is to regard him or her as innocent; for great tragic characters, it is an honor to be guilty.[1]

To be guilty—to carry one’s particular symbolic debt—is to be, in the emphatic sense of the term. In this configuration, guilt pertains to being in a double sense: not only are we already guilty by virtue of existing (like in the tragedy of Oedipus), but guilt/debt also serves as the proof—the manifestation—of our being. Roughly speaking, we can see this logic at work later as well, in most of the classical tragedies.

In this respect, one of the most significant shifts that takes place with modernity is the idea that this symbolic debt, which once equaled (and justified) our being, can be taken away from us. In his reading of modern tragedy, as exemplified by Paul Claudel, Jacques Lacan points out that this is precisely what befalls his tragic heroines—particularly Sygne de Coûfontaine from the Coûfontaine trilogy.

“We are no longer guilty just in virtue of symbolic debt. … It is the debt itself in which we have our place that can be taken away from us, and it is here that we can feel completely alienated from ourselves. The ancient Ate doubtless made us guilty of this debt, but to renounce it as we can now means that we are left with an even greater misfortune: destiny no longer applies.”[2]

This possibility that arises with modernity is a possibility of a more radical alienation, which can lead to something like the sacrifice of the sacrifice itself: we can be asked or expected to sacrifice everything we have for a cause, but the next level, so to speak, is when we are then asked to sacrifice/betray this cause itself, the very thing for which we were willing to sacrifice everything. In this case, we don’t just lose everything we have; at the horizon looms the loss of everything we are.

In all these examples, debt functions as our attachment to the Other, who also bestows upon us our being. Yet we can also look at this from the other side: although the relation is not simply symmetrical, the Other too seems to depend on our debt—or guilt—for its own existence and prosperity. This, for instance, is something Nietzsche repeatedly exposed in his writings, taking Christianity as the model par excellence of this dynamic.

Christianity, and particularly its Catholic strain, devised a complex system for forgiving and atoning for our sins, while simultaneously maintaining our debt to the Father and the Son who made such forgiveness possible. A sin that is forgiven, in this logic, amplifies rather than abolishes our debt.

This is the reason what Nietzsche insisted on the importance of the distinction between forgiving and forgetting: forgiving is a way of sustaining a bond—and with it, a debt. Forgiveness has a perverse way of entangling us even further in indebtedness. To forgive always somehow implies “paying” for the other, and thus turning the very act of injury and its forgiveness into a new kind of “engagement ring.” God forgives our sins by paying for them—by paying for them with his own flesh.

This, for Nietzsche, constitutes the fundamental perversity of Christianity: while forgiving, it simultaneously waves before us the cross—the instrument of torture, the reminder of the one who suffered and died so that we might be forgiven, the memory of the one who paid for us. Christianity forgives, but it does not forget.

One could say that, with the eyes of the sinner fixed on the cross, forgiveness creates a new debt in the very act of forgiving. It forgives what was done, but it does not forgive the act of forgiving itself. On the contrary, the latter establishes a new bond and a new debt. It is now infinite mercy—understood as the capacity for forgiveness—that sustains the infinite debt, the debt as infinite. The debt is no longer brought about by our actions; it is produced by the act of forgiving those actions. We are indebted for forgiveness.[3] This is the reason why Nietzsche counters the concept of forgiving with the concept of forgetting (“a good example of this in modern times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done to him and was unable to forgive simply because he – forgot”).

Christianity thus invented a singular way of maintaining and amplifying our debt—through the Savior paying for it, and through the Church forgiving our sins in His name. At the same time, for doctrinal reasons, the Catholic religion long struggled with—and resisted—the idea that today appears as an entirely natural precondition of debt, or its internal moment: namely, interest. More precisely, it resisted the monetary expression of the increase of debt, which it nevertheless very much practiced on the symbolic level.

Credit means that when we receive or borrow something—especially when we borrow money—our debt grows with time, and we must return more than we were lent. We pay for the time during which the Other holds us “in credit,” and we pay, so to speak, for the very access to debt. The notion that money could generate (more) money—that value could emerge from nothing but time—stood in deep conflict with theological orthodoxy. For this reason, in the Middle Ages only non-Christians (Jewish, and later Lombard or Florentine bankers) were permitted to lend at interest, often acting as intermediaries. Of course, this also meant that Christians could use them to lend money at interest without themselves being held accountable—thus giving rise to the classical antisemitic topos of the usurious “Jew.”

2. Capitalism and Metamorphoses of Debt

But times—and Christianity with them—have changed rapidly, and attitudes have shifted. As with so many other things, capital has also revolutionized debt and debt relations. Marx and Engels famously captured this “capitalist revolution” in The Communist Manifesto:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”[4]

By the seventeenth century, interest rates had become institutionalized, especially with the rise of public debt (e.g., the Dutch Republic and later in Britain). By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, interest rates were not only legitimate but had become central to capitalism—determining the cost of credit, investment, and economic growth.

Since then, it has become difficult, if not impossible, to think of debt outside this specific economic logic and relation pertaining to capital. Debt has become inseparable from, and intrinsically bound to, the (capitalist) economy and all its developments and shifts. And to return to our previous example: when Freud wrote about obsessional neurosis and its entanglement with debt, one could already discern in his case study of obsessional “fixations” this curious underside opened to flexibility and metonymical movement/substitution to which debt can, and will, lend itself.

Let us thus pursue this question of debt further along the capitalist path. The story acquires an additional twist—or rather, a push forward—with the form of capital known as financial capital. The latter no longer needs to invest in anything (that is, in any kind of production), but instead thrives on speculative gambling in financial markets.

For example, when Volkswagen—or any large corporation—uses its profits not to reinvest in production (in new factories, technology, or labor) but to buy its own shares, it effectively withdraws from the sphere of production—the so-called “real economy”—into the sphere of circulation, the financial market. How does this relate to debt?

The relation is very interesting, and by no means merely metaphorical. Stock buybacks mimic the structure of debt repayment without any reduction of debt: the company uses existing profits (already extracted surplus) to inflate its own market value, rather than to reduce liabilities or invest productively. This creates the appearance of growth while in fact indebting the future, since fewer productive investments mean less real foundation for future profit. In other words, the company pays itself in the present by borrowing against its own future capacity to produce. Present “profits,” in this sense, are nothing but debts—debts that, in most cases, someone else will eventually have to repay (or lose their job), even as this profits-debts are presented as the fruits of the company’s past and present “success.”

The futurability [5] of interest thus acquires a new twist. One no longer profits simply from the interest rate on a given sum of debt; rather, the debt itself—one’s own debt—becomes an object (a commodity) and a potential source of profit. In this new configuration, debt also becomes a driver of “growth” through the difference between cheap and expensive credit. “Cheap debt” means that one can actually profit from acquiring debt: access to low-interest credit is more desirable, and economically more advantageous, than having no debt at all.

This is one of the reasons why the richest countries also hold the largest national debts—with the United States leading, at a staggering $37 trillion (the last time I checked). Without delving into the economic complexities of this fact, we can simply note that debt itself has become a form of value and an object of both international and domestic trade. One can be in a position where others want to hold your debt—“desire your debt”—because it functions as an investment vehicle.

But the modifications and shifts in the functioning of the global capitalist economy do not stop with the form of financial capital, which thrives on interest and speculation—where profit comes from anticipating price changes, from betting on future movements, and where prices do not depend on any value tied to commodities or the “market,” but rather on what investors think others will think.

Something else has joined this logic and the vicissitudes of debt: a new kind of object to be traded within the anticipatory and speculative logic of profit—something that involves our bodies and minds more directly, from within. The time when selling our labor power on the market was the principal source of capitalist profit is long gone. Alongside speculative capital, we now have algorithmic capital as a new or additional form of credit system—one that involves a digital form of debt concerning our desires, emotions, and habits.

Not that these dimensions had been absent from earlier marketing strategies, but the algorithmic data generated by our intense, daily engagement with social media has brought this to an entirely new level. The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (2020) illustrated this quite well—and things have since advanced far beyond that depiction.

Platforms like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and TikTok speculate on future behavior — your clicks, your attention, your potential purchases. Data becomes a kind of collateral: it doesn’t have value in itself, but because it predicts what you’ll do next. The algorithm’s goal is to optimize returns on that future — by keeping you scrolling, clicking, reacting.

In the contemporary economy, the logic of debt and interest finds a new, algorithmic expression. Just as financial capital speculates on the future value of money, algorithmic capital speculates on the future value of human attention and behavior. Both systems operate through anticipation: they extract profit not from production but from prediction, from the capacity to pre-empt and shape what is yet to come. In this sense, the algorithm functions as a digital equivalent of the credit system—it binds the subject through invisible obligations, a continuous repayment in data, attention, and affect. What financial capital achieves by converting time into interest, algorithmic capital achieves by converting desire into a specific form of engagement—“attention” has become one of the key market categories. The “interest rate” of our connected lives is measured not in percentages but in notifications, clicks, and emotional volatility: each moment of distraction is a micro-installment in the debt of our attention. The result is a form of soft servitude, in which the future—once the site of possibility—becomes the primary terrain of capitalization.

Put differently, in the algorithmic economy, the logic of debt and interest assumes a form that is even more explicitly libidinal. If, in Marx’s schema, capital is value that valorizes itself through the exploitation of labor, then financial capital radicalizes this by extracting value from the anticipation of value—from the future itself. Algorithmic capital extends this one step further: it speculates not only on the future of production or exchange, but on the future of desire (thus, we could add, robbing desire of its future). Like financial derivatives, algorithms convert uncertainty into a field of calculation; they extract surplus not from things, but from “subjectivity”—from the circulation of affect and attention.

We could perhaps say that what interest is to capital, engagement is to the algorithm: both are measures of libidinal investment, ways of taxing the subject’s relation to lack. Thus, in the digital sphere, the credit system becomes psychologized — or rather, psychical life becomes collateral. We live in a regime where desire itself accrues compound interest, and where the future, as both Marx and Lacan might agree, is mortgaged to the endlessly deferred satisfaction that sustains the system. (In the sense that, on the one hand, it promises “full, ultimate satisfaction,” while on the other hand it profits from its structural impossibility.)

It looks almost as if the economic system has fully adopted and institutionalized the complex and “irrational” mechanism invented on the individual level by Freud’s “Ratman.” Or else, that the case history of “Ratman” anticipates much of the debt-driven shifts and reversals of contemporary capitalism. Obsessed with the idea that, if he had not paid his debt correctly, something terrible would happen to the people he loved, he became consumed with the need to avert this disaster—but every attempt to make things right only made the situation more complicated and confusing.

He rushed to pay off the debt, then hesitated, unsure whether he should pay or not, to whom, or how much. At one moment, he decided that paying would save his loved ones; at the next, that paying would bring about their ruin. He borrowed money to cover the supposed debt, then wanted to return it immediately. Each action brought temporary relief, followed by a new doubt and a new compulsion. His days became filled with calculations, errands, and small rituals meant to avert the imagined catastrophe. He felt he must watch over every coin, every step, every word, lest they bring harm to those he loved. The debt became an all-consuming labyrinth of obligations, rules, and prohibitions and compulsions—an invisible chain binding him to endless, self-canceling acts of repayment and reversal.

Sounds crazy? Or is it rather that, stripped of a few piquant details and individual obsessions, this sounds uncannily like our everyday involvement with the debt-driven adventures of capitalist economy—an economy that has become inseparable from ourselves?

Yes and no. The contemporary algorithmic configuration of debt, our entanglement within it, and at the same time the libidinal gain it can bring (us), could also be seen as a step beyond obsessive neurosis, which—with its fixations and often paralyzing anxiety—nonetheless hinders circulation from within and prevents its “free flow.” Rather, it can be understood as a step toward the clinical structure of perversion, in which debt and its circulation become the very substance of enjoyment, of satisfaction.

In the case of “Rat Man” debt functions as the signifier of an impossible repayment — the subject is caught between wanting to pay (to clear the debt) and not wanting to pay (to preserve the bond with the Other). The subject’s position here is divided — between servitude to the system’s injunctions and the fantasy of autonomy. However, the algorithmic economy — especially in its libidinal dimension — also has a different, perverse aspect.

In Lacanian terminology, perversion is not simply a deviation but a structural position in which the subject strives to sustain the enjoyment of the Other. The subject perceives itself as an instrument of the Other’s enjoyment—deriving enjoyment both from being instrumentalized and from the feeling that in this way, and through this very path, it controls the Other. Unlike the structure of the obsessive neurotic, who attempts to control the Other through lack (by always owing something to it), the perverse structure controls the Other through excess, or through satisfaction (“you need me for your enjoyment and functioning”). Unlike the neurotic, who is split, the perverse subject finds itself “within” the mechanism it sustains, where, through participation and collaboration in it, it asserts a sense of control. By this I do not mean that people are suddenly turning en masse toward perversion; rather, that this is the form of subjectivation posited and imposed by the aforementioned permutations of algorithmic capital and its “system.”

We can see, for instance, how this is mirrored in the way we, as users, interact with algorithmic systems: we derive enjoyment from serving the algorithm—from curating our own exposure, from knowing the system’s “tricks,” from being seen by the system. In this configuration, debt is no longer merely the medium of the subject’s relation to the Other, but becomes something direct and substantial. My being is a debt that can sustain the Other.

3. Capitalism or Neofeudalism?

If, in conclusion, we take a step back and broaden our focus to the outlined tableau—a focus that has thus far been directed exclusively at the question of debt—additional connections and dimensions begin to emerge. For example, we cannot ignore how this latest shift in the logic of debt (its algorithmic form) coincides with what we usually describe as the rise of authoritarian regimes across the world—and, what is new, also within so-called developed capitalist states. This is in fact new, though not unprecedented—after all, fascism itself grew precisely on the ground of capitalism and out of it, as a solution to its “crisis.” And something similar is happening now.

This new authoritarianism and its appeal, of course, do not rely solely on social media; they operate through a broader orchestration of the social circulation of enjoyment (affective stimulation, resentment, the instrumentalization of transgression, etc.), which is becoming a new form of social bond on the ruins of what was once a more “social” economic policy. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the case that what we once called “the social”—in the form of socially solidaristic safety nets—is increasingly being replaced, on a mass scale, by “the social” in a completely different sense and logic, carried precisely by “social” networks and the algorithmic circulation of otherwise entirely individual and segregated forms of satisfaction.

In this respect, we are dealing both with an amplification and with a shift in tone and style. For example, compared to Trump, Biden’s volume of tweeting or posting was significantly lower—one analysis recorded roughly 2,500 tweets from Biden’s official account over several years, which is only a fraction of Trump’s approximately 57,000 during his first term—and this has, of course, multiplied in the new term. The tone and style have also shifted markedly: from a more message-oriented and formal register to something much more personal, emotional, and explicitly informal—mockery, personal attacks, calculated provocations designed to incite people, and so on. Yet this shift was, of course, not invented by Trump personally, just as it is impossible to regard Biden and other recent Democratic presidents as innocent in this process. On the contrary, it was they who successfully drove capital and its logic to the point where someone like Trump could seize and twist it.

And perhaps all this is part of an even broader and more fundamental shift in socio-economic relations. The functioning of algorithmic debt (and economy), which we have briefly outlined above, also raises the question of whether, in this new configuration, we are still dealing with a capitalist economy in the strict sense of the term. In recent years, serious theoretical proposals have emerged suggesting that this may no longer be the case. Many speak of the “end of capitalism” as we have known it (McKenzie Wark), and of its transition into something resembling “techno-feudalism” (Yanis Varoufakis) or neo-feudalism (Jodi Dean)[6].

Jodi Dean argues that contemporary capitalism has ceased to function as capitalism in any meaningful sense and has instead morphed into a neo-feudal order. Rather than organizing social life primarily through markets, wage labor, and competitive production, today’s dominant system is increasingly structured around enclosure, rent extraction, and relations of dependency. In her account, what is decisive is not simply that capitalism has become more unequal or more monopolistic, but that its basic mechanism has shifted: instead of capital investing in production in order to generate profit, we see the consolidation of power through the control of infrastructures, access, and networks, enabling owners to demand payment simply for entry and participation. The central figure is no longer the capitalist entrepreneur competing in a market, but the lord who owns the gate, the channel, the platform, the territory, and who can therefore extract tribute from all who pass through.

Digital platforms and financial infrastructures thus operate as private estates: they enclose what once appeared as public or common spaces (communication, sociability, information, even attention), and they regulate access to them in increasingly arbitrary ways. Users and workers do not simply “participate” in these spaces; they are rendered dependent upon them, compelled to remain within them because their economic, social, and symbolic existence is increasingly mediated by them. Dean emphasizes that extraction here is continuous and ubiquitous: it is not limited to the workplace or the labor contract but extends across the whole of life, in the form of subscriptions, fees, data extraction, algorithmic visibility, and the constant conversion of activity into value for others. What looks like openness and connectivity is, from this perspective, an enclosure of the commons: a privatization of the conditions of social existence.

In place of the universalizing antagonism between capital and labor—an antagonism that, at least potentially, produced a collective subject and a shared terrain of struggle—neo-feudalism fragments subjects into hierarchies of status, identity, and access. Dean repeatedly insists that neo-feudal relations are not primarily competitive but stratified: not a field of formally equal participants in a market, but a differentiated order of ranks and privileges. The social field is organized around differential visibility, differential mobility, and differential security. Those at the top occupy positions of insulated sovereignty, while those below are locked into various degrees of precarity and dependency. This hierarchical organization undermines collective political struggle not only materially but symbolically: subjects are individualized, sorted, and divided, encouraged to compete for recognition, attention, and platform access, rather than to recognize themselves as part of a common antagonistic position.

Dean also discusses debt as a crucial mechanism of this transformation. Where wages once (however insufficiently) indexed the exchange between labor and capital, debt increasingly binds individuals and institutions to opaque powers that govern without democratic accountability. Debt is not merely an economic burden but a political relation: it produces obligation, guilt, discipline, and dependence, while rendering the debtor legible and governable through financial metrics. In this sense debt replaces wages as the primary mechanism of subordination: it does not integrate subjects into a social contract, but ties them to private authorities and impersonal institutions that can demand repayment, impose conditions, and extract wealth regardless of the debtor’s capacity to comply. The subject of neo-feudalism is thus less a worker bargaining over the price of labor than a debtor bound by an indefinite obligation—an obligation that extends beyond individuals to cities, states, and entire populations.

For Dean, this transformation demands a shift in critique and strategy. If the problem were simply exploitation within capitalism, one could imagine reforms that restore competition, regulate monopolies, or redistribute wealth while leaving the basic system intact. But if the core issue is domination by rent-seeking lords over enclosed commons, then the task becomes different: not to repair markets, but to contest enclosure; not to humanize extraction, but to reassert collective control over infrastructures and resources; not to defend an already exhausted ideal of capitalism, but to build renewed forms of collective, anti-feudal politics. The political horizon is thus not a nostalgic return to “functioning markets,” but a struggle against privatized sovereignty—against those who rule by owning access—and for the re-commoning of the conditions of social life.

If we return to the starting point of this essay: insofar as debt is indeed a key nodal point and expression of social relations, it is hardly surprising that with every fundamental shift in these relations, a new and different form of debt comes to the fore. These new forms are not the causes of change, but rather their manifestations and symptoms. They must be read and interpreted carefully and pragmatically, for like any symptom they also testify to the cracks and internal contradictions of systemic structures, however strong and invincible these may appear.

The fragmentation of society and of the economic system itself is a symptom in this sense: it is a response to a problem that nevertheless persists. How, within fragmentation—which prevents any universalization of struggles and strategies—to invent a new medium of the universal; that is, to devise a configuration in which the universal is not a “hat” placed over some “all,” but is itself the very medium of connecting and solidarity—this remains the key task. In fact, “task” is not quite the right word. Rather a “compass”, something that can help us at least to some extent orient ourselves within a fragmented chaos, where very few past and tested recipes remain operative.

Alenka Zupančič

[1] G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in: Werke in zwanzig Bänden, hrsg. von Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970, Bd. 13, S. 573.

[2] Jacques Lacan, Le transfer, Paris: Seuil, 1991, p. 354.

[3] I comment on this extensively in The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, MIT Press, London & Cambridge 2003.

[4] Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, in: Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), Bd. 4, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972, S. 465.

[5] The term was popularized by Franco “Bifo” Berardi in his book Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, New York & London: Verso, 2019.

[6] Cf. McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Somethinh Worse? (Verso, London & New York 2019) Janis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? (Mellvile House, London &New York 2023); Jodi Dean, Capital’s Grave. Neo-feudalism and the new Class Struggle. (Verso, London & New York 2025).

The Trumpian campaign to bar gender and race ideologies from education came close to ridicule at Texas A&M University, whose ruling body decided that an intro-level philosophy course should be taught without mentioning Plato. Professor Martin Peterson had planned to teach excerpts from Symposium, a foundational work in ancient philosophy, in his Philosophy 111 course. Given the option of removing that content or being reassigned to a new class, he has been forced to opt for the former. Why prohibit the teaching of a text by Plato, the founder of Western philosophy? Race ideology (attempting “to shame a particular race or ethnicity”) and gender ideology (“a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex”) were prohibited when the school system changed its course-content bylaws in November 20251, and the first victim was Plato, considered by many an arch-conservative. The ruling body targeted specifically the speech by Aristophanes in Symposium, where he develops his myth about the origin of sexual difference: to simplify it to the utmost, humans were first rounded as a ball, then they were cut into two halves which search for each other to return to unity – in short, this myth was considered all too close to the LGBT+ and trans topic of fragmented bodies searching for a renewed unity through different combinations. The madness of this decision cannot but strike the eye. If we follow its logic to the end, many of the passages from the Bible should also be prohibited. (They effectively were prohibited in the Catholic Church, where children were not allowed to read the Bible directly, without the guidance of a priest.)

At this point, I must confess my stupidity: when I first heard the news about this prohibition without knowing the details, I wasn’t sure if it was a Trumpian rightist act (which it turned out to be) or a politically correct leftist act against patriarchal binary sexuality (Plato seems to advocate a binary notion of sexual difference which strives towards a harmonious Whole). However, I think there was a moment of truth in my stupidity: the neoconservative patriarchal claim that there are two sexes grounded in biology, dismissing all other combinations as pathological, and the trans celebration of the multiple choices of our gender identity share a key feature – they both ignore the constitutively traumatic nature of sexuality brought out by psychoanalytic theory and practice. This is why the trans ideologists, sometimes even more than patriarchal neoconservatives, reject psychoanalysis, reproaching it for secret heterosexual normativity: psychoanalysis relies on a conceptual apparatus (phallus, sexual maturation towards normality through the resolution of the Oedipus complex, etc.). In clear contrast to this predominant stance, I think the psychoanalytic insight into the traumatic impossibility operative in the very heart of sexuality is much more subversive than the trans celebration of the plasticity of gender positions. No wonder that, from the late 20th century, trans identities are omnipresent in our media, with trans persons acquiring almost a star status. Incidentally, it is the same with the topic of decolonization: although it presents itself as the ultimate anti-Eurocentric notion, the very fact that it predominates “radical” social thought is in itself a negative proof that it fits perfectly with global capitalism, without disturbing in any serious way its basic antagonisms. We live in an era in which the ruling system reproduces itself through the appearance of its radical self-critique, so that there is almost something refreshing in an open apology of the existing system.

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Kim Murphy’s critique of my reading of Buddhism is the last in the long series of Buddhist replies to my work, and since he brings together many of these other reproaches in a very systematic way, I think it deserves an answer. The only part of his critique that I really don’t like is how he, after quite correctly stating that my account of Buddhism “has, for more than two decades, been widely criticized by scholars of religion and comparative Eastern and Western philosophy,” specifies that I was criticized for my “persistent oversimplification of a diverse and internally complex tradition consisting of at least eleven strands within Buddhism.”

This is something you can always say about any critique: there are always other approaches; you always have to ignore something. Let’s take an extreme case: if I criticize Nazism, I can always be accused of oversimplifying a complex ideological space, that Hitler’s Nazism was not the same as Rosenberg’s, that Speer’s was not the same as that of Goebbels… (And these differences are real: Hitler himself said about Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the main and most systematic deployment of the Nazi vision of the world, that it is not worth the paper it was printed on.)

In contrast to this approach, I will try to prove that not only do I not ignore the different strands in Buddhism, but that these differences form the very basis of my critique – the Buddhist edifice is necessarily inconsistent; there is no neutral universal Buddhist theory (and practice). So I am tempted to say that Murphy is doing exactly what he is reproaching me for: ridiculously oversimplifying my presentation and critique of Buddhism. Already the summary of his text perfectly renders the gist of his argumentation: in my Quantum History I conceive of Buddhism:

“as a quietist pursuit of ‘inner peace’ incompatible with human finitude and negativity. I argue that Žižek inherits this caricature from Alexandre Kojève’s flawed or misconceived reading of Early and Mahayana Zen Buddhism, collapsing certain extraordinarily diverse traditions into a monolithic ideology of retreat and emotional pacification. Such portrayals not only ignore the ethical, metaphysical, and socially engaged dimensions of Buddhist thought—from early Theravāda analyses of suffering to Mahāyāna accounts of relationality and modern movements for anti-war and anti-colonial resistance—but also misrepresent the very concepts of nirvāṇa, non-self, and return to the unconditioned states, and equanimity seen in early Buddhism. Rather than denying negativity, Buddhist traditions confront suffering through insight, ethical discernment, and transformative practice. Far from promoting withdrawal, they cultivate socially embedded forms of attention, compassion, and ethical behavior.”1

I totally agree with the last sentence in this quote – yes, Buddhism doesn’t deny or ignore or eliminate negativity; it “confronts suffering through insight, ethical discernment, and transformative practice.” But the aim of this confrontation is to contain the destructive aspect of negativity (by way of diminishing suffering), not to elevate it into the founding principle of reality. Murphy goes on elaborating this reproach:

“By presuming from the outset that Buddhism seeks a transcendence of negativity, he cannot perceive the tradition’s rich discourse on the transformation – not the elimination – of the forces that generate suffering. The non-self doctrine is not a metaphysics of dissolution but a phenomenological claim about the instability and conditioned nature of the aggregates of experience. Likewise, nirvāṇa is not the annihilation of subjectivity but its reconfiguration: a mode of perceiving and acting unbound by the compulsive tendencies that give rise to suffering. Far from aiming at a state of unworldly calm, major Buddhist traditions … situate liberation precisely in the thick of worldly contingency.”

Murphy then goes on to substantiate his reproach by providing a series of particular cases that confirm his reading of Buddhism. In the encounters and dialogues of the early Chan monks, “there are riddles and paradoxes, frustrations, and rhetorical violence, which signal not a flight from contradiction but rather an intense purification in its depths. This, I argue, is Buddhist equanimity, which is not the same as detachment or inner peace. Similarly, tantric forms of Vajrayāna Buddhism elevate the most intense traumatic, emotional, and perceptual states—fear, desire, aversion—into opportunities for realization, precisely because they reveal the mind’s capacity to transmute negativity rather than evade it. In these traditions, therefore, finitude is not overcome; it is inhabited more fully.”

Things get problematic (for me, at least) when Murphy refers to the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya Sutta), in which nirvāṇa is described as “the extinguishment or ‘cooling’ of greed, hatred, and delusion, a metaphor for ending reactive behaviors rather than achieving emotional numbness.” Murphy then goes a step further and mentions the Pali Canon, which claims that “the Awakened, Enlightened being only experiences suffering on the level of the body, but not a mental form of emotional suffering attached to ego-derived suffering in Freud.” With this last claim I emphatically disagree: no, the ultimate suffering is spiritual. Incidentally, I never even mention Kojève in this context, and Kojève’s reading of Hegel is totally incompatible with mine, plus Heideggerian finitude is for me not the ultimate horizon of our thinking. I repeatedly point out that finitude is necessarily, in its very notion, supplemented by immortality in the sense of undeadness – negativity (the Freudian “death drive”) is Freud’s name for its opposite, for immortality.

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To clarify this crucial point of quantum mechanics, let me begin with a precise critique of my reading of it by Sašo Dolenc, a Slovene popularizer of science (whom I appreciate very highly)1: we are dealing here with a concise formulation of a reproach that is often made in a more diffuse way. To cut a long story short, according to Dolenc my mistake resides in my identification of relationality with incompleteness: from the fact that properties are not absolute (independent of their context), I wrongly conclude that reality is not determined. But relationality can be – and in physics also is – completely determined and real. The fact that an electron appears with a different spin if we change the axis of our measurement (its referential system) does not prove a lack in reality; it just proves the wealth of its relational potentials. A relational property is not simply a property of the object “in itself” but a property of the couple “object–referential system”2. With regard to the wave function, this means that it is a wholesome mathematical object which describes all possible correlations between events in time. When we choose today how we will measure a system, we merely choose which of the already existing correlations we will actualize. However, this idea of the wave function as a “wholesome mathematical object which describes all possible correlations between events in time” is by far not globally accepted in quantum theory: it gives preference to space over time – when in our time we just select a possibility, we merely actualize something already present in the timeless matrix of all possible options.​

My first comment: the majority of quantum theorists deny the very possibility of imagining the totality of all possible correlations, not only due to our empirical limitation but already at the abstract theoretical level. Plus the idea that, in making a measurement, we choose one among the already existing possibilities secretly introduces a very problematic notion of (our) freedom – as if we were somehow at a distance from the “wholesome mathematical object” and were thus free to make different choices. Furthermore, in a proper quantum measurement, we choose a space of possible outcomes (defined by Schrödinger’s equation, which determines the probabilities of different results), and the individual result we get is contingent, unpredictable. This is why, if we repeat the same measurement with the same object, we get different results. This brings us to the basic ontological coordinates Dolenc attributes to quantum mechanics and contrasts with my notion of quantum mechanics. His basic premise is the dualism of quantum reality and our ordinary reality:​

“The world is consistent both at the level of qubits and at the level of bits. The quantum state (qubit) is mathematically precise and physically real, just as classical information is real. The problem arises only at the transition. We cannot directly transfer or share quantum reality because we cannot copy it. To speak of it at all, we must translate it into bits. This translation is necessarily a reduction, but this reduction is not an ontological loss of substance, but an epistemological necessity of communication. The randomness that appears in this process is not proof that reality is missing something. Randomness is the tax we pay for conversion; it is the price for importing data from the quantum to the classical world. This is not a glitch in the system of reality, but a structural property of information itself: a qubit cannot pass into a bit without payment, and the currency of this payment is randomness.”​

I agree that the problem arises at the transition, but in a much more radical sense than the one implied by Dolenc, who qualifies this transition (from the quantum domain to our ordinary reality) in two ways, both of which I find problematic. First, he qualifies it as the translation of the privacy of the quantum domain to the public domain of social communication: “If we want knowledge that can be shared, copied, and socially transmitted—if we want to cross from the privacy of the quantum to the publicity of the classical—we must accept the necessity of translation or measurement.” Second, he further qualifies the public domain as the domain of language, of communication: “Reality is full and rich at the level of qubits, but we cannot transfer this fullness forward. To be able to speak of it at all, we must translate it into bits.” Does this notion of quantum reality not reduce our ordinary reality to an effect of our epistemological limitation? Dolenc’s key claim is: “Qubits are what is; bits are what we can say.” So the only real reality is the quantum one, while what we experience as external reality is reality reduced through the filter of language. (Dolenc’s answer here would be that information itself is a material fact.)​

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What am I, a philosopher, doing here, where specialists will debate features of quantum gravity well beyond the scope of my understanding? From its very beginnings, it was clear that quantum mechanics (QM) has earth-shattering implications for our notion of reality. However, although there were speculations here and there, the predominant stance until recently was Copenhagen orthodoxy: “Don’t think, just calculate!” In the last decades, ontological questions have exploded. At the very beginning of his bestselling The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking triumphantly proclaims that “philosophy is dead.” With the latest advances in quantum physics and cosmology, so-called experimental metaphysics has reached its apogee: metaphysical questions about the origins of the universe, the nature of space and time, etc.—which until now were the topic of philosophical speculation—can now be answered through experimental science and thus, in the long term at least, empirically tested. However, things are not as simple as that. Many quantum scientists are now aware that they should be raising proper philosophical questions (for example: What is the nature of quantum waves? Do they form a reality separate from our common material reality, or are they just instruments of calculation?).

Following these debates as an outsider, I noticed that many quantum physicists have taken refuge in esoteric spiritualism or direct subjective idealism. Here is a typical comment: “Do paradoxes like this really echo ancient philosophies like Advaita Vedanta, which say separateness is an illusion and everything is connected? Quantum entanglement reveals particles can remain linked across vast distances, as if part of one indivisible whole.” Even Roger Penrose wrote at some point that “Somehow, our consciousness is the reason the universe is here,” not to mention Zeilinger, who links QM to Tibetan Buddhism. No wonder that many obscurantist philosophers join them in this endeavour—for them, the quantum collapse is an act of free conscious decision.

Lacan knew what he was saying when he claimed that quantum mechanics is the first science that deals with the Real—the Real as distinct from the symbolically constituted reality. The whole point of quantum mechanics is that there is another level of being which obeys laws different from our ordinary reality: the Real of quantum waves, of quantum superpositions that collapse into our reality. This level is indeterminate but still deterministic; the probability of a collapse is governed by the very precise Schrödinger equation. At this quantum level, our standard notion of time and space as universal containers of all reality must also be abandoned.

To interpret this quantum domain as the final refutation of materialism and as proof that reality is spiritual succeeds only if we restrict ourselves to the classic deterministic notion of reality—small material particles jumping around in all-encompassing space and time. Furthermore, the role of observation is far more complex: experiments confirm that a collapse occurs when a quantum process is "observed" by a measuring device, even with no conscious awareness whatsoever.

Those who claim there is no reality outside consciousness dismiss as a pseudo-problem the most philosophically intriguing aspect of quantum mechanics: the exact ontological nature of quantum waves, their collapse, and the retroactive causation implied by such events. So you, quantum scientists, need philosophy, but you should not trust philosophers who appropriate your work for obscurantist purposes.

Here enter people like Lee and the entire gang around him, from Francesca Vidotto and Carlo Rovelli to Julian Barbour and Sean Carroll. Like me, they remain materialists, although they are well aware that the notion of materialism has to be radically rethought after quantum physics. So what does materialism mean here? Not that the ultimate reality is empty space with small elements floating in it, but something much more interesting. Einstein’s full determinism relies on a religious foundation—he wrote: "Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht." (God is subtle, but he is not intentionally deceiving us). Although Einstein repeatedly pointed out that he didn’t believe in a personal god, he proclaimed himself deeply religious: "I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.” In this sense, for him, religion and science necessarily coexist: science itself is sustained by the deep faith that our universe is marvellously arranged in a harmony that pervades all that exists. I think it is this very belief which has been dealt a mortal blow by quantum mechanics. For me, quantum mechanics implies an inconsistent, plural world not grounded in any big foundation, even if this foundation is the Void itself.

The basic premise of QM is that reality is not what we experience as our well-known external world. The theological implications of this premise are of special interest: “If God collapses the wave functions of large things to reality by His observation, quantum experiments indicate that He is not observing the small.” The ontological cheating with virtual particles (an electron can create a proton and thereby violate the principle of constant energy, on condition that it reabsorbs it before its environs ‘take note’ of the discrepancy) is a way to cheat God himself, the ultimate agency of taking note of everything that goes on: God himself doesn’t control the quantum processes; therein resides the atheist lesson of quantum physics. Einstein was right with his famous claim, “God doesn’t cheat”—what he forgot to add is that God himself can be cheated.

Our predominant approach is that our knowledge is always, by definition, limited, and this limitation appears when we arrive at inconsistent claims or results. In such cases, our conclusion is that inconsistency signals the limitation of our knowledge—there must be some unknown hidden variables that we missed. However, as we all know, in QM the situation can be the exact opposite—let me just mention the simplest case, the wave-particle duality. Particles such as electrons and photons exhibit both wave-like and particle-like properties, depending on whether they are being observed or not. The question “But what is really an electron in itself?” is thus meaningless; the electron is this very duality—there is nothing beyond. So what appears as an epistemic obstacle is turned around into a positive ontic feature.

Similar cases abound in QM and—surprise—in Marxism. Just recall the well-known Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the antagonistic character of the notion of society: at first glance, the split between the two notions of society (the Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic notion, which emerges through the interaction of individuals, and the Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality that preexists individuals) seems irreducible. We seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy, which cannot be resolved via a higher synthesis and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself. However, one should merely take note of how this radical antinomy, which seems to preclude our access to the Thing, ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF—the essential feature of today’s society IS the irreconcilable antagonism between Totality and the individual. What this means is that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: it has no substantial density in itself; it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from one to the other.

This is why, as a Hegelian philosopher, I am so fascinated by quantum mechanics, despite the fact that they are definitely strange bedfellows—already the substantives seem incompatible: ‘dialectics’ versus ‘mechanics’… But what we find in quantum physics is something that is usually considered an exclusive feature of the symbolic universe: a self-reflective move of including the observer’s own position into the series of observed phenomena. Recall Hegel’s famous infinite judgment, “Spirit is a bone”—how does it work? Instead of arguing (from the safe distance of an observer) that spirit cannot be reduced to a bone, it begins by endorsing the claim “spirit is a bone.” Our reaction to this statement is one of shock; we experience this claim as blatant nonsense… but it is only through experiencing the nonsense/negativity of this statement that we arrive at Spirit, because “spirit” is just such a self-relating negativity which encompasses me in my subjective stance.

QM talks a lot about loops, and I think there is a fundamental loop that characterizes the human subject. We humans dwell in language, but we are never fully at home in language. The positive spin of a failure can be best illustrated by the loop of symbolic representation: a subject endeavors to adequately express or represent itself, this representation fails, and the subject IS the result of this failure. Recall what one might be tempted to call the “Hugh Grant paradox” (referring to the famous scene from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral): the hero tries to articulate his love to the beloved, he gets caught in stumbling and confused repetitions, and it is this very failure to deliver his message of love in a perfect way that bears witness to its authenticity… It is obvious that Grant’s individuality expresses itself precisely through these failures: if he were to declare his love in a perfect and smooth way, we would get a robot-like recitation. The loop here is not the simple organic co-dependence of a body and its parts but a leap mediated by a failure. An impulse fails to fully actualize itself, and this impulse retroactively emerges from this failure.

When I asked Carlo Rovelli a nasty question at a recent debate in Hay-on-Wye, I ironically characterized myself as a “Stalinist with a human face”; Carlo immediately snapped back: “I am a Leninist with an ugly face.” (His Leninist stance was perfectly rendered in the title of his opening intervention at this conference: “One of us would be superfluous”—so it is not just a big friendly dialogue; there are (theoretical) liquidations…) This is what I will do now: while generally I fully support Lee’s project, I will now address to Lee two observations that express my Leninist confusion. So my first question to Lee is: he claims that “I am convinced that quantum mechanics is not a final theory. I believe this because I have never encountered an interpretation of the present formulation of quantum mechanics that makes sense to me.” If his project to move beyond both Einstein’s relativity and QM succeeds, what will happen to this feature of QM that most fascinates me—this transposition of epistemic into ontic limitation? Is the gap between gravity and quantum mechanics also its own solution? No, I think this is a much stronger conceptual difference: the two, gravity (as articulated in Einstein’s general relativity theory) and QM, belong to incompatible conceptual spaces. This is why Lee is right: quantum gravity will compel us to move beyond both spaces; it is not a synthesis of the two.

My second question concerns the social and political implications that Lee draws from his ontological vision of the primacy of time—the vision of openness and democracy that he shares with Roberto Unger. Lee advocates “principles for an open future,” which he claims underlie the work of both healthy scientific communities and democratic societies. Here is a quote from his Time Reborn:

(1) When rational argument from public evidence suffices to decide a question, it must be considered to be so decided.
(2) When rational argument from public evidence does not suffice to decide a question, the community must encourage a diverse range of viewpoints and hypotheses consistent with a good-faith attempt to develop convincing public evidence.

If loops in quantum gravity are more basic than spacetime, in what sense is time then primordial? The primacy of time means that the past itself is open towards the future; it is not simply “what really happened,” but is full of cracks and alternate possibilities—the past is also what failed to happen, what was crushed so that “what really happened” could have occurred. It is at this point that we should avoid the fatal trap of conceiving this “openness” of reality in the sense of a single temporal reality that is open towards the future and solicits incessant, gradual progress.

No wonder that Smolin, an opponent of block-universe theory and advocate of the reality of time, co-wrote a book with Unger whose stance is that of a “radicalized pragmatism,” “the operational ideology of the shortening of the distance between context-preserving and context-transforming activities.” It is thus a program of permanent revolution—however, a program so conceived that the word ‘revolution’ is robbed of all romantic otherworldliness and reconciled to the everydayness of life as it is. Here, we see an example of how a socio-political vision of gradual progress, of the permanent self-transformation of humans, echoes a fundamental ontological vision that appears to me out of touch with the ontology implied by QM. Does QM not imply a universe in which there is no global progress, in which every progress is localized and may appear a catastrophe from a different standpoint? The most obvious case: who knows what the final outcome of AI will be? How will a direct link between our flow of thoughts and a digital network affect our humanity? Is not the lesson of the twentieth century that the dream of a more just society can turn into hell on earth?

The space for a dialogue with science is opened up by the fact that the specifically human dimension of dwelling in language and engaging in symbolic exchanges does not take place due to the intervention of some higher spiritual force standing above the mere reproduction of life; it happens within life itself, as its self-negation, which occurs due to some totally contingent anomaly, through the exaptation of what was in itself a misfortune. Our entire spiritual edifice comes second; it is a reaction to this disturbance, an attempt to cope with it. The ultimate irony of the “becoming-human of apes” is that the reason was utterly contingent and without any meaning—in all probability, some pathological neuronal short-circuit, a meaningless malfunction. At the organic level, something went wrong: a living being got caught in a repetitive loop of self-destructive acts, and out of this weird accident all of our ethics and the symbolic order itself arose. If, then, science discovers how self-awareness emerged, the result will not be perceived as the clarification of a deep mystery, as an act of bringing out a secret that perhaps should have remained hidden, but as something profoundly disappointing, outrageous in its stupidity.

Does our era, in which our very survival is at stake, not make “radicalized pragmatism” all too flat? Is it not clear that crazy social acts will be needed—acts which will undermine many basic premises of our normal daily life? The point of my two questions to Lee is thus clear: I want to keep alive the madness of QM as well as the madness of politics that alone can save us today. The time of realist pragmatism, which ‘makes sense’ is over; we have to get ready for new emergency states.

The Digital Perversion

... et pourtant, il revient dans le réel

The first paradox of this retreat of the big Other is discernible in the so-called "culture of complaint," with its underlying logic of ressentiment: far from cheerfully assuming the inexistence of the big Other, the subject blames the Other for its failure and/or impotence, as if the Other is guilty for the fact that it doesn't exist, i.e., as if impotence is no excuse—the big Other is responsible for the very fact that it wasn't able to do anything: the more the subject's structure is "narcissistic," the more he puts the blame on the big Other and thus asserts his dependence on it. The basic feature of the "culture of complaint" is thus a call, addressed at the big Other, to intervene and to set things straight (to recompense the damaged sexual or ethnic minority, etc.)—how, exactly, is this to be done is again a matter of different ethico-legal "committees." Is thus the "culture of complaint" not today's version of hysteria, of the hysterical impossible demand addressed to the Other, a demand which effectively wants to be rejected, since the subject grounds his/her existence in his/her complaint—"I am insofar as make the Other responsible and/or guilty for my misery"? The gap is here insurmountable between this logic of complaint and the true "radical" ("revolutionary") act which, instead of complaining to the Other and expecting it to act, i.e., displacing the need to act onto it, suspends the existing legal frame and itself accomplishes the act... So what is wrong with the complaint of those who are really deprivileged? The fact that, instead of undermining the position of the Other, they still address themselves to it: by way of translating their demand into the terms of legalistic complaint, they confirm the Other in its position in the very gesture of attacking it.

Furthermore, a wide scope of phenomena (the resurgent ethico/religious "fundamentalisms" which advocate a return to the Christian patriarchal division of sexual roles; the New Age massive re-sexualization of the universe, i.e., the return to pre-modern pagan sexualized cosmo-ontology; the growth of "conspiracy theories" as a form of popular "cognitive mapping") seem to counter this retreat of the big Other. It is all too simple to dismiss these phenomena as simply "regressive," as new modes of the "escape from freedom," as unfortunate "remainders of the past" which will disappear if we only continue to proceed even more resolutely on the deconstructionist path of historicization of every fixed identity, of unmasking the contingency of every naturalized self-image. These disturbing phenomena rather compel us to elaborate much more in detail the contours of the retreat of the big Other: the paradoxical result of this mutation in the "inexistence of the Other"—of the growing collapse of the symbolic efficiency—is precisely the re-emergence of the different facets of a big Other which exists effectively, in the Real, not merely as a symbolic fiction.

The belief in the big Other which exists in the Real is, of course, the most succinct definition of paranoia; for that reason, two features which characterize today's ideological stance—cynical distance and full reliance on paranoiac fantasy—are strictly codependent: the typical subject today is the one who, while displaying cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats, and excessive forms of enjoyment of the Other. The distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions), the subject's refusal to "take it seriously," relies on the belief that there is an "Other of the Other," that a secret, invisible and all-powerful agent effectively "pulls the strings" and runs the show: behind the visible, public Power, there is another obscene, invisible power structure. This other, hidden agent acts the part of the "Other of the Other" in the Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life). It is here that we should look for the roots of the recent impasse of narrativization, i.e., of the motif of the "end of large narratives": in our era when—in politics and ideology as well as in literature and cinema—global, all-encompassing narratives ("the struggle of liberal democracy with totalitarianism," etc.) seem no longer possible, the only way to arrive at a kind of global "cognitive mapping" seems to be the paranoiac narrative of a "conspiracy theory"—not only for the right-wing populism and fundamentalism, but also for the liberal center (the "mystery" of Kennedy's assassination) and left-wing orientations (see the old obsession of the American Left with the notion that some mysterious government agency is experimenting with nerve gasses enabling the power to regulate the behaviour of the population). The large majority of movies which, in the last two decades, were able to attract the public interest on account of their plot, not of the fire-cracking action, were different versions of conspiracy theory. And it is all too simplistic to dismiss conspiracy narratives as the paranoiac proto-Fascist reaction of the infamous "middle classes" which feel threatened by the process of modernization: it would be much more productive to conceive "conspiracy theory" as a kind of floating signifier which, as we have just seen, can be appropriated by different political options, enabling them to obtain a minimal cognitive mapping.

This, then, is one version of the big Other which continues to exist in the wake of its alleged disappearance. Another version is operative in the guise of the New Age Jungian re-sexualization of the universe ("men are from Mars, women are from Venus"): according to it, there is an underlying, deeply anchored archetypal identity which provides a kind of safe haven in the flurry of contemporary confusion of roles and identities; from this perspective, the ultimate origin of today's crisis is not the difficulty to overcome the tradition of fixed sexual roles, but the disturbed balance in the modern man who puts an excessive emphasis on male-rational-conscious etc. aspect, neglecting the feminine-compassionate etc. aspect. Although this tendency shares with feminism the anti-Cartesian and anti-patriarchal bias, it rewrites the feminist agenda into a re-assertion of archetypal feminine roots repressed in our competitive male mechanistic universe... Yet another version of the real Other is the figure of the father as sexual harasser of his young daughters, which stands in the very centre of the so-called "false-memory syndrome": here, also, the suspended father as the agent of symbolic authority, i.e., the embodiment of a symbolic fiction, "returns in the real" (what causes such controversy is the contention of those who advocate re-memorization of childhood sexual abuses that sexual harassment by the father is not merely fantasized or, at least, an indissoluble mixture of fact and fantasy, but a plain fact, something that, in the majority of families, "really happened" in the daughter's childhood—an obstinacy comparable to Freud's no less obstinate insistence on the murder of the "primordial father" as a real event in the humanity's prehistory). A further aspect of this "return in the real" of the father is undoubtedly the growing obsession of the popular pseudo-science with the mystery of the alleged Christ's tomb and/or progeny (from his alleged marriage with Mary Magdalene) which focuses on the region around Rennes-le-Château in the south of France, weaving into a large coherent narrative the Grail myth, Cathars, Templars, Freemasons, etc.: these narratives endeavour to supplant the diminishing power of the symbolic fiction of the Holy Ghost (the community of believers) with the bodily Real of Christ and his descendants.

The Digital Perversion

So, back to cyberspace: these complications seem to indicate how both standard reactions to cyberspace (cyberspace as involving a kind of break with the Oedipal symbolic Law; cyberspace as a continuation of Oedipus with other means) are deficient. There is, however, in psychoanalytic clinic, a third, intermediary concept between these two extremes: that of perversion. The key point is clearly to delineate the specific intermediate status of perversion, in-between psychosis and neurosis, in-between the psychotic's foreclosure of the Law and the neurotic's integration into the Law. According to the standard view, the perverse scenario stages the "disavowal of castration": perversion can be seen as a defence against the motif of "death and sexuality," against the threat of mortality as well as the contingent imposition of sexual difference: what the pervert enacts is a universe in which, as in cartoons, a human being can survive any catastrophe; in which adult sexuality is reduced to a childish game; in which one is not forced to die or to choose one of the two sexes. As such, the pervert's universe is the universe of pure symbolic order, of the signifier's game running its course, unencumbered by the Real of the human finitude.

In a first approach, it may seem that our experience of cyberspace fits perfectly this universe: is cyberspace not also a universe unencumbered by the inertia of the Real, constrained only by its self-imposed rules? However, according to Lacan, what this standard notion of perversion leaves out of consideration is the unique short-circuit between Law and jouissance which characterizes the innermost structure of perversion: in contrast to the neurotic who acknowledges the Law in order occasionally to take enjoyment in its transgressions (masturbation, theft...), and thus obtains satisfaction by way of snatching back from the Other part of the stolen jouissance, the pervert directly elevates the enjoying big Other into the agency of Law. The pervert's aim is to establish, not to undermine, the Law: the proverbial male masochist elevates his partner, the Dominatrix, into the Law-giver whose orders are to be obeyed. A pervert fully acknowledges the obscene underside of the Law, since he gains satisfaction out of the very obscenity of the gesture of installing the rule of Law, i.e., of "castration." In the "normal" state of things, the symbolic Law prevents access to the (incestuous) object, and thus creates the desire for it; in perversion, it is the object itself (say, Domina in masochism) which makes the law. The theoretical concept of the masochist perversion touches here the common notion of a masochist who "enjoys being tortured by the Law": a masochist locates enjoyment in the very agency of the Law which prohibits the access to enjoyment. To put it in yet another way: in contrast to the "normal" subject, for whom the Law functions as the agency of prohibition which regulates (the access to the object of) his desire, for the pervert, the object of his desire is Law itself—the Law is the Ideal he is longing for, he wants to be fully acknowledged by the Law, integrated into its functioning... The irony of this should not escape us: the pervert, this "transgressor" par excellence who purports to violate all the rules of "normal" and decent behaviour, effectively longs for the very rule of Law.

So what is effectively at stake in perversion? There is an agency in New York called "Slaves are Us," which provides people who are willing to clean your apartment for free, and want to be treated rudely by the lady of the house. The agency gets the cleaners through ads (whose motto is "Slavery is its own reward!"): most of them are highly paid executives, doctors and lawyers, who, when questioned about their motives, emphasize how they are sick of being in charge all the time—they immensely enjoy just being brutally ordered to do their job and shouted at, insofar as this is the only way open to them to gain access to Being. And the philosophical point not to be missed here is that masochism as the only access to Being is strictly correlative with the modern Kantian subjectivity, with the subject reduced to the empty point of self-relating negativity. The scope of the Kantian revolution can be discerned through an interesting detail from literary history: the sudden change in the perception of the theme of the double. Till the end of the 18th century, this theme mostly gave rise to comic plots (two brothers who look alike are seducing the same girl; Zeus seducing Amphitrion's faithful wife disguised as Amphitrion, so that, when Amphitrion unexpectedly returns home, he encounters himself leaving his bedroom; etc.); all of a sudden, however, in the historic moment which exactly fits the Kantian revolution, the topic of the double becomes associated with horror and anxiety—encountering one's double or being followed and persecuted by him is the ultimate experience of terror, it is something which shatters the very core of the subject's identity.

The horrifying aspect of the theme of the double thus has something to do with the emergence of the Kantian subject as pure transcendental apperception, as the substanceless void of self-consciousness which is not an object in reality. What the subject encounters in the guise of his double is himself as object, i.e., his own "impossible" objectal counterpoint. In the pre-Kantian space, this encounter was not traumatic, since the individual conceived himself as a positive entity, an object within the world. Another way to make the same point is to locate in my double, in the encountered object which "is" myself, the Lacanian objet petit a: what makes the double so uncanny, what distinguishes it from other inner-worldly objects, is not simply its resemblance to me, but the fact that he gives body to "that which is in myself more than myself," to the inaccessible/unfathomable object that "I am," i.e., to that which I forever lack in the reality of my self-experience...

A feature which seems to confirm this hypothesis is the fact that the impact of cyberspace is strictly correlative to the changed status of sado-masochist bodily practices in our society. Let us explain this shift by way of addressing the standard criticism of psychoanalysis according to which psychoanalytic interpretation reduces a work of art or a religious experience to a pathological perverse, neurotic or even psychotic formation, to a sublimated expression of some unconscious impetus or conflict, etc. How does Lacan answer this criticism? By turning the terms of such "reductionist" interpretive procedure around: the problem, for him, is not to establish the pathological libidinal roots of a publicly acknowledged symbolic formation (religious vision, work of art, etc.), but, on the opposite, how is the public socio-symbolic space of the "big Other" structured so that an agent who undoubtedly displays the features of psychopathology acquires the status of a public person of great esteem? How is it—to take the classic case—that a woman with features on account of which, in an Oriental or so-called "primitive" culture, would be praised as a deep mystic visionary, is in our modern culture dismissed as the hysterical or even psychotic author of hallucinatory ramblings? How is it that a man who finds intense fulfilment in starving and whipping himself was in the early Christianity hailed as an ascetic martyr, while today, he appears to us as a masochist pervert? Therein resided the wisdom of the Catholic Church: to allow a space within its institutionalized ranks for the exercise of the jouissance féminine irreducible to the paternal symbolic Law (nuns allowed to practice their mystical experiences). At a different level, the same goes for modern art: say, how is it that today, a pervert ritual of piercing one's body which, even a decade ago, would be dismissed as an abhorrent private monstrosity, can be staged in public and presented as an artistic performance? How is it that this is included into the "big Other"? Lacan's notion of perversion (the pervert ritual) as a process which, far from undermining the symbolic Law, rather stands for a desperate attempt of the subject to stage the scene of installing (setting up) the rule of the Law, of its inscription onto the human body, thus enables us to throw a new light on the recent artistic tendencies of masochist body-performances—are they not an answer to the disintegration of the rule of Law, an attempt to restore the symbolic Prohibition? And, again, since the Law in its capacity of prohibiting direct ("incestuous") access to jouissance is getting more and more inoperative, the only remaining way to sustain the Law is to posit it as identical with the very Thing which embodies jouissance.

The Fantasy Which Cannot Be Subjectivized

How does all this concern cyberspace? It is often said that cyberspace opens up the domain to realize (to externalize, to stage) our innermost fantasies. Here, it is again crucial to bear in mind the key dimension of the notion of fantasy. Insofar as, according to Lacan, the subject of the signifier is the "barred," empty subject, le manque à être, lacking a support in the positive order of Being, what fantasy stages is precisely the subject's impossible Being lost on account of the subject's entry into the symbolic order. No wonder, then, that the fundamental fantasy is passive, "masochistic," reducing me to an object worked upon by others: it is as if only the experience of the utmost pain can guarantee to the subject the access to Being: la douleur d'exister means that I "am" only insofar I experience pain. At this point, a brief survey of post-Cartesian philosophy is very instructive: it was haunted by the vestiges of an Other Scene at which the subject, this free, active, self-positing agent, is reduced to an object of unbearable suffering or humiliation, deprived of the dignity of his freedom.

In "Le prix du progrès," one of the fragments which conclude The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer quote the argumentation of the French 19th century physiologist Pierre Flourens against medical anaesthesia with chloroform: Flourens claims that it can be proven how the anaesthetic works only on our memorial neuronal network—in short, while we are butchered alive on the operating table, we fully feel the terrible pain, the point is only that later, after the awakening, we do not remember it... For Adorno and Horkheimer, this, of course, is the perfect metaphor of the fate of Reason based on the repression of nature in itself: his body, the part of nature in the subject, fully feels the pain, it is only that, on account of the repression, the subject does not remember it. Therein resides the perfect revenge of nature for our domination over it: unknowingly, we are our own greatest victims, butchering ourselves alive. Is it not also possible to read this as the perfect fantasy scenario of inter-passivity, of the Other Scene in which we pay the price for our active intervention into the world? A sado-masochist willingly assumes this suffering as the access to Being. Our second example: Kant, in a subchapter of his Critique of Practical Reason mysteriously entitled "Of the Wise Adaptation of Man's Cognitive Faculties to His Practical Vocation," answers the question of what would happen to us if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to Things in themselves:

"... instead of the conflict which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations and in which, after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually won, God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes. /.../ Thus most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures."image.jpg

No wonder that this vision of a man who, on account of his direct insight into the monstrosity of the divine being-in-itself, would turn into a lifeless puppet, provokes such an unease among the commentators of Kant (usually, it is either passed over in silence or dismissed as an uncanny, out-of-place foreign body): what Kant delivers in it is no less than what one is tempted to call the Kantian fundamental fantasy, the inter-passive Other Scene of freedom, of the spontaneous free agent, the Scene in which the free agent is turned into a lifeless puppet at the mercy of the perverse God. The lesson of it, of course, is that there is no active free agent without this fantasmatic support, without this Other Scene in which he is totally manipulated by the Other. In short, the Kantian prohibition of the direct access to the noumenal domain should be reformulated: what should remain inaccessible to us is not the noumenal Real, but our fundamental fantasy itself—the moment the subject comes too close to this fantasmatic kernel, it loses the consistency of his existence.

This is also one of the ways in which to specify the meaning of Lacan's assertion of the subject's constitutive "decentrement": its point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms which are "decentered" with regard to my self-experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but rather something much more unsettling—I am deprived of even my most intimate "subjective" experience, the way things "really seem to me," that of the fundamental fantasy which constitutes and guarantees the kernel of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it... According to the standard view, the dimension which is constitutive of subjectivity is that of the phenomenal (self)experience—I am a subject the moment I can say to myself: "No matter what unknown mechanism governs my acts, perceptions and thoughts, nobody can take from me what I see and feel now." Lacan turns around this standard view: the "subject of the signifier" emerges only when a key aspect of the subject's phenomenal (self)experience (his "fundamental fantasy") becomes inaccessible to him, i.e., is "primordially repressed." At its most radical, the Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism which regulates my phenomenal experience. So, in contrast to the commonplace according to which we are dealing with a subject the moment an entity displays signs of "inner life," i.e., of a fantasmatic self-experience which cannot be reduced to external behavior, one should claim that what characterizes human subjectivity proper is rather the gap which separates the two, i.e., the fact that fantasy, at its most elementary, becomes inaccessible to the subject—it is this inaccessibility which makes the subject "empty" ($). We thus obtain a relationship which totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experiences himself, his "inner states": an "impossible" relationship between the empty, non-phenomenal subject and the phenomena which remain inaccessible to the subject.

In one of the most famous scenes in Hitchcock's Vertigo: the magic moment when, in Ernie's restaurant, Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time. More precisely, the misrepresentation concerns the status of two shots. After seeing the entrance to Ernie's from the outside, there is a cut to Scottie sitting at the bar counter in the front room of the restaurant and looking through a partition into the large room with tables and guests. A long panning shot (without a cut) then takes us back and to the left, giving us an overview of the entire crowded room, the soundtrack reproducing the chatter and clatter of a busy restaurant—we should bear in mind that this, clearly, is not Scottie's point-of-view. All of a sudden, our (or, rather, the camera's) attention is caught by a focal point of attraction, a fascinum which fixes our gaze, a bright dazzling stain which we soon identify as the naked back of a beautiful woman. The background sound is then drowned out by Herrmann's passionate music, which accompanies the camera in its gradual approach to the fascinum—we first recognize Elster, Madeleine's husband, facing us, and from this fact we deduce that the woman must be Madeleine. After this long shot, there is a cut back to Scottie peeping at Madeleine's table, and then another cut to Scottie's point-of-view and what he sees (Madeleine covering her back with her jacket and getting ready to leave).

After Madeleine and Elster leave their table and approach Scottie on their way out, we get another famous shot. Scottie sees that the couple is getting close and, in order not to betray his mission, he looks away towards the glass across the partition of the bar, just barely peeping over his back. When Madeleine comes close to him and has to stop for a moment (while her husband is settling things with the waiter), we see her mysterious profile (and the profile is always mysterious—we see only the half, while the other half can be a disgusting, disfigured face—or, as a matter of fact, the "true," common face of Judy, the girl who, as we learn later, is impersonating Madeleine). This fascinating shot is thus again not Scottie's point-of-view shot. It is only after Elster rejoins Madeleine, with the couple moving away from Scottie and approaching the exit from the restaurant, that we get, as a counter-shot to the shot of Scottie behind the bar, his point-of-view shot of Madeleine and Elster.

The ambiguity of subjective and objective is crucial here. Precisely insofar as Madeleine's profile is not Scottie's point-of-view, the shot of her profile is totally subjectivized, depicting not what Scottie effectively sees, but what he imagines, that is, his hallucinatory inner vision (recall how, while we see Madeleine's profile, the red background of the restaurant wall seems to get even more intense, almost threatening to explode in red heat turning into a yellow blaze—as if his passion is directly inscribed into the background). No wonder, then, that, although Scottie does not see Madeleine's profile, he acts as if he is mysteriously captivated by it, deeply affected by it. What we get in these two shots which are subjectivized without being attributed to a subject is precisely the pure pre-subjective phenomenon. The profile of Madeleine is a pure appearance, permeated with an excessive libidinal investment—in a way, precisely too subjective, too intense, to be assumed by the subject.

The Frog and the Bottle of Beer

Let us specify the status of these strange phenomena which cannot be subjectivized by a decades old publicity spot for a beer. Its first part stages the well-known fairy-tale anecdote: a girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, and, of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story isn't over yet: the young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her towards himself, kisses her—and she turns into a bottle of beer which the man holds triumphantly in his hand... For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signalled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence (in Lacan's mathemes, the big Phi); for the man, it is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (in Lacan's mathemes, the object small a). On account of this asymmetry, "there is no sexual relationship": we have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer—what we can never obtain is the "natural" couple of the beautiful woman and man... Why not? Because the fantasmatic support of this "ideal couple" would have been the inconsistent figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. (Of course, the obvious feminist point would be that what women witness in their everyday love experience is rather the opposite passage: one kisses a beautiful young man and, after one gets too close to him, i.e., when it is already too late, one notices that he is effectively a frog...) This, then, opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through the very over-identification with it, i.e., by way of embracing simultaneously, within the same space, the multitude of inconsistent fantasmatic elements. That is to say, each of the two subjects is involved in his or her own subjective fantasizing—the girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man, the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer. What modern art and writing oppose to this is not objective reality but the "objectively subjective" underlying fantasy which the two subjects are never able to assume, something similar to a Magrittesque painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer, with a title "A man and a woman" or "The ideal couple." (The association with the famous surrealist "dead donkey on a piano" is here fully justified, since surrealists also practiced a version of traversing the fantasy.) And is this not the ethical duty of today's artist—to confront us with the frog embracing the bottle of beer when we are daydreaming of embracing our beloved? In other words, to stage fantasies which are radically desubjectivized, which cannot ever be assumed by the subject?

This then, is the point we were aiming at all along: perhaps, cyberspace, with its capacity to externalize our innermost fantasies in all their inconsistency, opens up to the artistic practice a unique possibility to stage, to "act out," the fantasmatic support of our existence, up to the fundamental "sado-masochistic" fantasy which cannot ever be subjectivized. We are thus invited to risk the most radical experience imaginable: the encounter with our "noumenal Self," with the Other Scene which stages the foreclosed hard core of the subject's Being. Far from enslaving us to these fantasies and thus turning us into desubjectivized blind puppets, it enables us to treat them in a playful way and thus to adopt towards them a minimum of distance—in short, to achieve what Lacan calls la traversée du fantasme, "going-through, traversing the fantasy."

So let us conclude with a reference to the (in)famous last proposition of Wittgenstein's Tractus: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muss man schweigen." This proposition renders in the most succinct way possible the paradox of the Oedipal Law which prohibits something (incestuous fusion) that is already in itself impossible (and thereby gives rise to the hope that, if we remove or overcome the prohibition, the "impossible" incest will become possible). If we are effectively to move to a region "beyond Oedipus," Wittgenstein's proposition is to be rephrased into: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muss man SCHREIBEN." There is, of course, a long tradition of conceiving art as a mode or practice of writing which augurs that which "one cannot speak about," i.e., the utopian potential "repressed" by the existing socio-symbolic network of prohibitions. There is also a long tradition of using writing as a means to communicate a declaration of love too intimate and/or too painful to be directly asserted in a face-to-face speech act. Not only is Internet widely used as a space for the amorous encounters of shy people; significantly, one of the anecdotes about Edison, the inventor of the telegraph, is that he himself used it to declare love and ask the hand of his secretary (being too shy to do it directly, by means of a spoken word). However, what we are aiming at is not this standard economy of using cyberspace as a place in which, since we are not directly engaged in it, i.e., since we maintain a distance towards it, we feel free to externalize and stage our innermost private fantasies. What we have in mind is a more radical level, the level which concerns our very fundamental fantasy as that "wovon man nicht sprechen kann": the subject is never able to assume his/her fundamental fantasy, to recognize himself/herself in it in a performance of a speech act: perhaps, cyberspace opens up a domain in which the subject can nonetheless externalize/stage his/her fundamental fantasy and thus gain a minimum of distance towards it...

This, however, in no way entails that inducing us to "traverse the fantasy" is an automatic effect of our immersion into cyberspace. What one should do here is, rather, to accomplish a Hegelian reversal of epistemological obstacle into ontological deadlock: what if it is wrong and misleading to ask which of the four versions of the libidinal/symbolic economy of cyberspace that we outlined (psychotic suspension of the Oedipus; the continuation of the Oedipus with other means; the perverse staging of the Law; traversing the fantasy) is the "correct" one? What if these four versions are the four possibilities opened up by the cyberspace technology, so that, ultimately, the choice is ours? How cyberspace will affect us is not directly inscribed into its technological properties; it rather hinges on the network of socio-symbolic relations (of power and domination, etc.) which always-already over-determines the way cyberspace affects us.

Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Practical Reason, New York: Macmillan 1956, p. 152-3.image.jpg

THE RETREAT OF THE BIG OTHER

The Informational Anorexia

Today, the media constantly bombard us with requests to choose, addressing us as subjects supposed to know what we really want (which book, clothes, TV program, place of holiday...) - "press A, if you want this, press B, if you want that," or, to quote the motto of the recent "reflective" TV publicity campaign for advertisement itself: "Advertisement - the right to choose." However, at a more fundamental level, the new media deprive the subject radically of the knowledge of what he wants: they address a thoroughly malleable subject who has constantly to be told what he wants, i.e., the very evocation of a choice to be made performatively creates the need for the object of choice. One should bear in mind here that the main function of the Master is to tell the subject what he wants - the need for the Master arises in answer to the subject's confusion, insofar as he does not know what he wants. What, then, happens in the situation of the decline of the Master, when the subject himself is constantly bombarded with the request to give a sign as to what he wants? The exact opposite of what one would expect: it is when there is no one here to tell you what you really want, when all the burden of the choice is on you, that the big Other dominates you completely, and the choice effectively disappears, i.e., is replaced by its mere semblance. One is tempted to paraphrase here Lacan's well-known reversal of Dostoyevsky ("If there is no God, nothing is permitted at all."): if no forced choice confines the field of free choice, the very freedom of choice disappears.

This suspension of the function of the (symbolic) Master is the crucial feature of the Real whose contours loom at the horizon of the cyberspace universe: the moment of implosion when humanity will attend the limit impossible to transgress, the moment at which the coordinates of our societal life-world will be dissolved. At this moment, distances will be suspended (I will be able to communicate instantly through teleconferences with anywhere on the globe); all information, from texts to music to video, will be instantly available on my interface. However, the obverse of this suspension of the distance which separates me from a far-away foreigner is that, due to the gradual disappearance of contact with "real" bodily others, a neighbour will no longer be a neighbour, since he or she will be progressively replaced by a screen spectre; the general availability will induce unbearable claustrophobia; the excess of choice will be experienced as the impossibility to choose; the universal direct participatory community will exclude all the more forcefully those who are prevented from participating in it. The vision of cyberspace opening up a future of unending possibilities of limitless change, of new multiple sex organs, etc., conceals its exact opposite: an unheard-of imposition of radical closure. This, then, is the Real awaiting us, and all endeavours to symbolize this real, from utopian (the New Age or "deconstructionist" celebrations of the liberating potentials of cyberspace), to the blackest dystopian ones (the prospect of the total control by a God-like computerized network...), are just this, i.e., so many attempts to avoid the true "end of history," the paradox of an infinity far more suffocating than any actual confinement. Is therefore one of the possible reactions to the excessive filling-in of the voids in cyberspace not the informational anorexia, the desperate refusal to accept information?

Or, to put it in a different way, digitalization cancels the distance between a neighbour and a distant foreigner, insofar as it suspends the presence of the Other in the massive weight of the Real: neighbours and foreigners, all are equal in their spectral screen-presence. That is to say, why was the Christian injunction "love thy neighbour like thyself" so problematic for Freud? The proximity of the Other which makes a neighbour neighbour is that of jouissance: when the presence of the Other becomes unbearable, suffocating, it means that we experience his or her mode of jouissance as too intrusive. And what is the contemporary "postmodern" racism, if not a violent reaction to this virtualization of the Other, a return of the experience of the neighbour in his or her (or their) intolerable, traumatic presence? The feature which disturbs the racist in his Other (the way they laugh, the smell of their food...) is thus precisely the little piece of the real which bears witness to their presence beyond the symbolic order.

We are thus far from bemoaning the loss of the contact with a "real," flesh-and-blood other in cyberspace, in which all we encounter are digital phantoms: our point is rather that cyberspace is not spectral enough. One of the tendencies in theorizing cyberspace is to conceive cybersex as the ultimate phenomenon in the chain whose key link is Kierkegaard, his relationship with Regina: in the same way Kierkegaard rejected the actual proximity of the Other (the beloved woman), and advocated loneliness as the only authentic mode of relating to a love object, cybersex also involves the nullification of the "real life" object, and draws erotic energy from this very nullification - the moment I encounter my cybersex partner(s) in real life is the moment of desublimation, the moment of the return to vulgar "reality"... Convincing as it may sound, this parallel is deeply misleading: the status of my cyberspace sexual partner is NOT that of Kierkegaard's Regina. Regina was the void at which Kierkegaard addressed his words, a kind of "vacuole" weaved by the texture of his speech, while my cyberspace sexual partner is, on the contrary, over-present, bombarding me with the torrential flow of images and explicit statements of her (or his) most secret fantasies. Or, to put it in another way: Kierkegaard's Regina is the cut of the Real, the traumatic obstacle which again and again unsettles the smooth run of my self-satisfying erotic imagination, while cyberspace presents its exact opposite, a frictionless flow of images and messages - when I am immersed in it, I as it were return to a symbiotic relationship with an Other in which the deluge of semblances seems to abolish the dimension of the Real.

The easiest way to discern the set of social relations which overdetermine the mode of operation of cyberspace, is to focus on the predominant "spontaneous ideology of cyberspace," the so-called cyberevolutionism which relies on the notion of cyberspace (or World Wide Web) as a self-evolving "natural" organism. Crucial is here the blurring of the distinction between "culture" and "nature": the obverse of the "naturalization of culture" (market, society etc. as living organisms) is the "culturalization of nature" (life itself is conceived as a set of self-reproducing information - "genes are memes"). This new notion of Life is thus neutral with respect to the distinction of natural and cultural or "artificial" processes - the Earth (as Gaia) as well as global market, they both appear as gigantic self-regulated living systems whose basic structure is defined in the terms of the process of coding and decoding, of passing information, etc. The reference to World Wide Web as a living organism is often evoked in contexts which may seem liberating: say, against the State censorship of Internet. However, this very demonization of State is thoroughly ambiguous, since it is predominantly appropriated by right-wing populist discourse and/or market liberalism: its main targets are the state interventions which try to maintain a kind of minimal social balance and security - the title of Michael Rothschild's book (Bioeconomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism) is here indicative. So, while cyberspace ideologists can dream about the next step of evolution in which we will no longer be mechanically interacting "Cartesian" individuals, in which each "person" will cut his substantial link to his individual body and conceive itself as part of the new holistic Mind which lives and acts through him or her, what is obfuscated in such direct "naturalization" of the World Wide Web or market is the set of power relations - of political decisions, of institutional conditions - within which "organisms" like Internet (or market or capitalism...) can only thrive.

What Can Meteorology Teach Us About Cyberspace?

In what, then, resides the key feature of la coupure digitale? Perhaps the best way to approach it is via the gap which separates the modern universe of science from the traditional knowledge: for Lacan, modern science is not just another local narrative grounded in its specific pragmatic conditions, since it does relate to the (mathematical) Real beneath the symbolic universe. Let us recall the difference between the modern satellite meteorology and the traditional wisdom about weather which "thinks locally." Modern meteorology assumes a kind of meta-language view on the entire atmosphere of the Earth as a global and self-enclosed mechanism, while the traditional meteorology involves a particular viewpoint within a finite horizon: out of some Beyond which, by definition, remains beyond our grasp, clouds and winds arrive, and all one can do is formulate the rules of their emergence and disappearance in a series of "wisdoms" ("if it rains on the first of May, beware of the drought in August," etc.). The crucial point is that "meaning" can only emerge within such a finite horizon: the weather phenomena can be experienced and conceived as "meaningful" only insofar as there is a Beyond out of which these phenomena emerge following the laws which are not directly natural laws - the very lack of natural laws directly connecting actual weather here and the mysterious Beyond sets in motion the search for "meaningful" coincidences and correlations. The paradox is that, although this traditional "closed" universe confronts us with unpredictable catastrophes which seem to emerge "out of nowhere," it nonetheless provides a sense of ontological "safety," of dwelling within a self-enclosed finite circle of meaning where things (natural phenomena) in a way "speak to us," address us.

This traditional closed universe is thus in a sense more "open" than the universe of science: it implies the gateway into the indefinite Beyond, while the direct global model of the modern science is effectively "closed," i.e., it allows for no Beyond. The universe of modern science, in its very "meaninglessness," involves the gesture of "going through fantasy," of abolishing the dark spot, the domain of the Unexplained which harbours fantasies and thus guarantees Meaning: instead of it, we get the meaningless mechanism. This is why, for Heidegger, modern science stands for the metaphysical "danger": it poses a threat to the universe of meaning. There is no meaning without some dark spot, without some forbidden/impenetrable domain into which we project fantasies which guarantee our horizon of meaning. Perhaps this very growing disenchantment of our actual social world accounts for the fascination exerted by cyberspace: it is as if, in it, we encounter again a Limit beyond which the mysterious domain of the fantasmatic Otherness opens up, as if the screen of the interface is today's version of the blank, of the unknown region in which we can locate our own Shangri-las or the kingdoms of She.

Paradigmatic here are the last chapters of E.A. Poe's Gordon Pym, which stage the fantasmatic scenario of passing the threshold into the pure Otherness of the Antarctic. The last human settlement prior to this threshold is a native village on an island with savages so black that even their teeth are black; significantly, what one encounters on this island is also the ultimate Signifier (a gigantic hieroglyph inscribed into the very shape of the mountain chain). Savage and corrupted as they are, the black men cannot be bribed into accompanying the white explorers further south: they are scared to death by the very notion of entering this prohibited domain. When the explorers finally enter this domain, the ice-cold polar snowscape gradually and mysteriously turns into its opposite, a domain of thick, warm and opaque whiteness... in short, the incestuous domain of primordial Milk. What we get here is another version of the kingdom of Tarzan or She: in Rider Haggard's She, Freud's notorious claim that feminine sexuality is a "dark continent" is realized in a literal way: she-who-must-be-obeyed, this Master beyond Law, the possessor of the Secret of Life itself, is a White Woman ruling in the midst of Africa, the dark continent. This figure of She, of a woman who exists (in the unexplored Beyond), is the necessary fantasmatic support of the patriarchal universe. With the advent of modern science, this Beyond is abolished, there is no longer a "dark continent" which generates a Secret - and, consequently, Meaning is also lost, since the field of Meaning is by definition sustained by an impenetrable dark spot in its very heart.

The very process of colonization thus produces the excess which resists it: does the mystery of Shangri-la (or of Tarzan's kingdom, or of the kingdom of She or...) not reside precisely in the fact that we are dealing with the domain which was not yet colonized, with the imagined radical Otherness which forever eludes the colonizer's grasp? Here, however, we encounter another key paradox. This motif of She relies on one of the key mythical narratives of colonialism: after white explorers transgress a certain frontier which is taboo even for the most primitive and cruel aborigines and enter the very "heart of darkness," what they encounter there, in this purely fantasmatic Beyond, is again the rule of a mysterious White Man, the pre-Oedipal father, the absolute Master. The structure is here that of Moebius band - in the very heart of Otherness, we encounter the other side of the Same, of our own structure of domination. This figure of the white Master who rules in this fantasmatic domain of radical Otherness is split into two opposites: either the horrifying embodiment of the "diabolical Evil" who knows the secret of jouissance and, consequently, terrorizes and tortures his subjects (from Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim to the feminine version of it Rider Haggard's She), or the saint who rules his kingdom as a benevolent theocratic despotism (Shangri-La in The Lost Horizon). The point, of course, resides in the "speculative identity" of these two figures: the diabolically evil Master is "in himself or for us" the same as the saintly sage-ruler, their difference is purely formal, it concerns only the shift in the perspective of the observer. (Or, to put it in Schelling's terms, the saintly wise ruler is in the mode of potentiality what the evil Master is in the mode of actuality, since "the same principle carries and holds us in its ineffectiveness which would consume and destroy us in its effectiveness".1) What the hundreds-year-old monk who runs Shangri-La and Kurtz from The Heart of Darkness share is that they both have cut their links with common human considerations and entered the domain "between the two deaths." As such, Kurtz is the Institution at its fantasmatic pure: his very excess merely realizes, brings to the end, the inherent logic of the Institution (the Company and its colonization of the wilderness of Congo). This inherent logic is concealed in the "normal" functioning of the Institution: the very figure which literally realizes the logic of the Institution is, in a properly Hegelian way, perceived as an unbearable excess which has to be finished off.image.jpg

What, then, does all this tell us about cyberspace? Cyberspace, of course, is a thoroughly technological-scientific phenomenon; it develops the logic of modern meteorology to extreme: not only is there no place for the fantasmatic screen in it, it even generates the screen itself by way of manipulating the Real of bytes. However, it is by no means accidental that the modern science, inclusive of meteorology, inherently relies on the interface screen: in the modern scientific approach, processes are simulated on the screen, from the models of atomic subparticles, through the radar images of clouds in weather reports, up to the fascinating pictures of the surface of Mars and other planets (which are all manipulated by computer procedures - added colorization, etc. - in order to enhance their effect). The outcome of the suspension of the dark spot of Beyond in the universe of modern science is thus that the "global reality" with no impenetrable dark spot is something accessible only on screen: the abolishment of the fantasmatic screen which served as the gateway into the Beyond turns the entire reality into something which "exists only on screen," as a depthless surface. Or, to put it in ontological terms: the moment the function of the dark spot which maintains open the space for something for which there is no place in our reality is suspended, we lose our very "sense of reality."

The problem with today's social functioning of cyberspace is thus that it potentially fills in the gap, the distance between the subject's public symbolic identity and its fantasmatic background: fantasies are more and more immediately externalized in the public symbolic space, the sphere of intimacy is more and more directly socialized. The inherent violence of cybersex does not reside in the potentially violent content of sexual fantasies played out on the screen, but in the very formal fact of seeing my innermost fantasies being directly imposed on me from without.

Oedipus or Anti-Oedipus?

So, again: how does cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity? What are the consequences of cyberspace for Oedipus, i.e., for the mode of subjectivization that psychoanalysis conceptualized as the Oedipus complex and its dissolution? The fact that cyberspace involves the suspension of the symbolic function of the Master seems to confirm the predominant doxa according to which cyberspace explodes or at least potentially undermines the reign of Oedipus: it involves the "end of Oedipus," i.e., what occurs in it is the passage from the structure of symbolic castration (the intervention of the Third Agency which prohibits/disturbs the incestuous dyad and thus enables the subject's entry into the symbolic order), to some new post-Oedipal libidinal economy. Of course, the mode of perception of this "end of Oedipus" depends on the standpoint of the theoretician: first, there are those who see in it a dystopian prospect of individuals regressing to pre-symbolic psychotic immersion, of losing the symbolic distance which sustains the minimum of critical/reflective attitude (the idea that computer functions as a maternal Thing which "swallows" the subject who entertains towards it an attitude of incestuous fusion) - in short, today, in the digitalized universe of simulation, Imaginary overlaps with the Real, at the expense of the Symbolic.

This position is at its strongest when it insists on the difference between appearance and simulacrum: "appearance" has nothing in common with the postmodern notion that we are entering the era of universalized simulacra in which reality itself becomes indistinguishable from its simulated double. The nostalgic longing for the authentic experience of being lost in the deluge of simulacra, as well as the postmodern assertion of Brave New World of universalized simulacra as the sign that we are finally getting rid of the metaphysical obsession with authentic Being, both miss the distinction between simulacrum and appearance: what gets lost in today's digital "plague of simulations" is not the firm, true, non-simulated real, but appearance itself. So what is appearance? In a sentimental answer to a child asking him how does God's face look, a priest answered that, whenever the child encounters a human face irradiating benevolence and goodness, whomever this face belongs to, he gets a glimpse of His face... the truth of this sentimental platitude is that the Suprasensible (God's face) is discernible as a momentary, fleeting appearance, a "grimace," of an earthly face. It is THIS dimension of "appearance" which transubstantiates a piece of reality into something which, for a brief moment, irradiates the suprasensible Eternity, that is missing in the logic of simulacrum: in simulacrum which becomes indistinguishable from the real, everything is here and no other, transcendent dimension effectively "appears" in/through it. We are here back at the Kantian problematic of the sublime: in Kant's famous reading of the enthusiasm evoked by the French Revolution in the enlightened public around Europe, the revolutionary events functioned as a sign through which the dimension of trans-phenomenal Freedom, of a free society, appeared. "Appearance" is thus not simply the domain of phenomena, but those "magic moments" in which the other, noumenal, dimension momentarily "appears" in ("shines through") some empirical/contingent phenomenon. Therein resides also the problem with cyberspace and virtual reality: what VR threatens is NOT "reality" which is dissolved in the multiplicity of its simulacra, but, on the contrary, APPEARANCE itself. To put it in Lacanian terms: simulacrum is imaginary (illusion), while appearance is symbolic (fiction); when the specific dimension of symbolic appearance starts to disintegrate, imaginary and real become more and more indistinguishable. The key to today's universe of simulacra in which real is less and less distinguishable from its imaginary simulation resides in the retreat of the "symbolic efficiency." This crucial distinction between simulacrum (overlapping with the real) and appearance is easily discernible in the domain of sexuality, as the distinction between pornography and seduction: pornography "shows it all," "real sex," and for that very reason produces the mere simulacrum of sexuality, while the process of seduction consists entirely in the play of appearances, hints and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing.

On the other hand, there are those who emphasize the liberating potential of cyberspace: cyberspace opens up the domain of shifting multiple sexual and social identities, potentially at least liberating us from the hold of the patriarchal Law; it as it were realizes in our everyday practical experience the "deconstruction" of old metaphysical binaries ("real Self" versus "artificial mask," etc.). In cyberspace, I am compelled to renounce any fixed symbolic identity, the legal/political fiction of a unique Self guaranteed by my place in the socio-symbolic structure - in short, according to this second version, cyberspace announces the end of the Cartesian cogito as the unique "thinking substance." Of course, from this second point of view, the pessimist prophets of the psychotic "end of Oedipus" in the universe of simulacra simply betray their inability to imagine an alternative to Oedipus. What we have here is another version of the standard postmodern deconstructionist narrative according to which, in the bad old patriarchal order, the subject's sexual identity was predetermined by his/her place and/or role within the fixed symbolic Oedipal framework - the "big Other" took care of us and conferred on us the identity of either a "man" or a "woman," and the subject's ethical duty was limited to the effort to succeed in occupying the preordained symbolic place (homosexuality and other "perversions" were perceived as simply so many signs of the subject's failure to succeed in going through the Oedipal path and thus achieving "normal"/"mature" sexual identity). Today, however, as Foucault allegedly demonstrated, the legal/prohibitive matrix of Power which underlies the Oedipal functioning of sexuality is in retreat, so that, instead of being interpellated to occupy a preordained place in the socio-symbolic order, the subject gained the freedom (or at least the promise, the prospect of freedom) to shift between different socio-symbolic sexual identities, to construct his Self as an aesthetic oeuvre - the motif at work from the late Foucault's notion of the "care of the Self" up to deconstructionist feminist emphasis on the social formation of gender. - It is easy to perceive how the reference to cyberspace can provide an additional impetus to this ideology of aesthetic self-creation: cyberspace delivers me from the vestiges of biological constraints and elevates my capacity to construct freely my Self, to let myself go to a multitude of shifting identities...

However, opposed to both versions of "cyberspace as the end of Oedipus" are some rare, but nonetheless penetrating theoreticians2 who assert the continuity of cyberspace with the Oedipal mode of subjectivization: cyberspace retains the fundamental Oedipal structure of an intervening Third Order which, in its very capacity of the agency of mediation/mediatisation, sustains the subject's desire, while simultaneously acting as the agent of Prohibition which prevents its direct and full gratification - on account of this intervening Third, every partial gratification/satisfaction is marked by a fundamental "this is not THAT." The notion that cyberspace as the medium of hyperreality suspends the symbolic efficiency and brings about the false total transparency of the imaginary simulacra coinciding with the Real, this notion, while effectively expressing a certain "spontaneous ideology of cyberspace" (to paraphrase Althusser), dissimulates the actual functioning of cyberspace which not only continues to rely on the elementary dispositif of the symbolic Law, but even renders it more palpable in our everyday experience. Suffice it to recall the conditions of our surfing along in the Internet or participating in a virtual community: first, there is the gap between the "subject of enunciation" (the anonymous X who does it, who speaks) and the "subject of the enunciated / of the statement" (the symbolic identity that I assume in cyberspace, and which can and in a sense always is "invented" - the signifier which marks my identity in cyberspace is never directly "myself"); the same goes for the other side, for my partner(s) in cyberspace communication - here, the undecidability is radical, I can never be sure who they are, are they "really" the way they describe themselves, is there a "real" person at all behind a screen-persona, is the screen-persona a mask for a multiplicity of persons, does the same "real" person possess and manipulate more screen-personas, or am I simply dealing with a digitalized entity which does not stand for any "real" person? In short, INTER-FACE means precisely that my relationship to the Other is never FACE-TO-FACE, that it is always mediat(iz)ed by the interposed digital machinery which stands for the Lacanian "big Other" as the anonymous symbolic order whose structure is that of a labyrinth: I "browse," I err around in this infinite space where messages circulate freely without fixed destination, while the Whole of it - this immense circuitry of "murmurs" - remains forever beyond the scope of my comprehension. (In this sense, one is tempted to propose the proto-Kantian notion of the "cyberspace Sublime" as the magnitude of messages and their circuits which even the greatest effort of my synthetic imagination cannot encompass/comprehend.) Furthermore, does the a priori possibility of viruses disintegrating the virtual universe not point towards the fact that, in the virtual universe also, there is no "Other of the Other," that this universe is a priori inconsistent, with no last guarantee of its coherent functioning? The conclusion thus seems to be that there IS a properly "symbolic" functioning of cyberspace: cyberspace remains "Oedipal" in the sense that, in order to circulate freely in it, one must assume a fundamental prohibition and/or alienation - yes, in cyberspace, "you can be whatever you want," you're free to choose a symbolic identity (screen persona), but you must choose one which will always in a way betray you, which will never be fully adequate; you must accept to be represented in cyberspace by a signifying element which runs around in the circuitry as your stand-in... Yes, in cyberspace, "everything is possible," but for the price of assuming a fundamental impossibility: you cannot circumvent the mediation of the interface, its "by-pass," which separates you (as the subject of enunciation) forever from your symbolic stand-in.

"L'autre n'existe pas"...

Our contention is that both versions miss the point; they are either too strong (claiming that cyberspace involves a kind of psychotic suspension of the "big Other" qua the symbolic Law) or too weak (positing a direct continuation of Oedipus in cyberspace). The fact is that today, in a sense, "the big Other no longer exists" - however, in WHAT sense? In a way, with the big Other, it is the same as with God according to Lacan (it is not that God is dead today - God was dead from the very beginning, only that He didn't know it...): it never existed in the first place, i.e., the inexistence of the "big Other" is ultimately equivalent to the fact that the big Other is the symbolic order, the order of symbolic fictions which operate at a level different from direct material causality. (In this sense, the only subject for whom the big Other does exist is the psychotic, the one who attributes to words direct material efficiency.) In short, the "inexistence of the big Other" is strictly correlative to the notion of belief, of symbolic trust, credence, of taking what others say "at their word's value."

In one of the Marx brothers' films, Groucho, when caught in a lie, answers angrily: "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?" This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of the symbolic order, in which the symbolic mask-mandate matters more than the direct reality of the individual who wears this mask and/or assumes this mandate. This functioning involves the structure of fetishist disavowal: "I know very well that things are the way I see them /that this person is a corrupted weakling/, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him." So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes, i.e., I believe in Another Space (the domain of pure symbolic authority) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen... The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge - if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. This paradox is what Lacan aims at with his "les non-dupes errent": those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most... What a cynic who "believes only his eyes" misses is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures our experience of reality. The same gap is at work in our most intimate relationship to our neighbours: we behave AS IF we do not know that they also smell bad, secrete excrements, etc. - a minimum of idealization, of fetishizing disavowal, is the basis of our co-existence.

Today, with the new digitalized technologies enabling perfectly faked documentary images, not to mention Virtual Reality, the motto "believe my words (argumentation), not the fascination of your eyes!" is more actual than ever. That is to say, the crucial point here is to keep in sight how the logic of "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?", i.e., of "I know well, but nonetheless... /I believe/", can function in two different ways, that of the symbolic fiction and that of the imaginary simulacrum. In the case of the efficient symbolic fiction of the judge wearing his insignia, "I know very well that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him as if /I believe that/ the symbolic big Other speaks through him": I disavow what my eyes tell me and I choose to believe the symbolic fiction. In the case of the simulacrum of virtual reality, on the contrary, "I know very well that what I see is an illusion generated by the digital machinery, but I nonetheless accept to immerse myself in it, to behave as if I believe it" - here, I disavow what my (symbolic) knowledge tells me and I choose to believe my eyes only...

This reversal signals the fact that, today, the big Other's inexistence has reached a much more radical dimension: what is more and more undermined is precisely this symbolic trust which persists against all sceptical data. Perhaps the most eye-catching facet of this new status of the "non-existence of the big Other" is the sprouting of "committees" destined to decide upon the so-called ethical dilemmas which pop up when technological developments in an ever-increasing way affect our life-world: in medicine and biogenetics (at what point does an acceptable and even desirable genetic experiment or intervention turn into an unacceptable manipulation?), in the application of universal human rights (at what point does the protection of the victim's rights turn into an imposition of Western values?), in sexual mores (what is the proper, non-patriarchal, procedure of seduction?), not to mention the obvious case of cyberspace (what is the status of sexual harassment in a virtual community? How does one distinguish here between "mere words" and "deeds"?). So, to resolve the deadlock, one convenes a committee to formulate, in an ultimately arbitrary way, the precise rules of conduct... The work of these committees is caught in a symptomal vicious cycle: on the one hand, they try to legitimate their decisions in the most advanced scientific knowledge (which, in the case of abortion, tells us that a foetus does not yet possess self-awareness and experience pain; which, in the case of a mortally ill person, defines the threshold beyond which euthanasia is the only meaningful solution); on the other hand, they have to evoke some non-scientific ethical criterion in order to direct and posit a limitation to the inherent scientific drive.

We celebrate World Philosophy Day every third Thursday in November—this year it falls on November 20. So let’s use this opportunity to recall what philosophy is at its most basic.

Alain Badiou opens his True Life with the provocative claim that, from Socrates onward, the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth—to estrange them from the predominant ideologico-political order. Such “corruption” is needed especially today, in our liberal-permissive West, where most people are not even aware of the ways the establishment controls them, precisely when they appear to be free. The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom that we experience as freedom. Or, as Goethe put it two centuries ago: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Is a libertarian, who works on destroying the thick social network of customs in which he can only thrive, really free?

The Socratic revolution is characterized by two features. First, it is a reaction to the general crisis of Greek social life, which, for Socrates, is embodied in the widespread popularity of sophists—performers of empty rhetorical tricks who enacted a decay of the tradition of the polis. Second, what Socrates opposes to this decay is not a simple return to the glorious past but a radical self-questioning. The basic procedure of Socrates is the endless repetition of the formula: “What, exactly, do you mean by …?”—by virtue, truth, the Good, and similar basic notions. Today, we need the same questioning: what do we mean by equality, freedom, human rights, the people, solidarity, emancipation, and all other similar words which we use to legitimize our decisions? Thinking means that, when we are confronted with the ecological crisis, we don’t just focus on saving nature, we also ask ourselves what nature means today. With the rise of AI, it is not enough just to ask whether machines are able to think—we should also ask what human thinking really means. We should follow Descartes here: when he wrote that God could have decided that 1 + 1 is not 2, this insight is not a regression to obscurantism but the beginning of modern science, which realizes the contingency of even our most self-evident truths.

Let’s give a simple but extreme case of what thinking means. On 12 June 2025, Air India Flight 171 from Ahmedabad Airport in India to London Gatwick Airport crashed 32 seconds after takeoff. All 12 crew members and 229 of the 230 passengers aboard died. On the ground, 19 people were killed and 67 others were seriously injured. As the aircraft reached its maximum recorded airspeed of 180 knots (330 km/h; 210 mph) three seconds after takeoff, both fuel control switches sequentially moved from RUN to CUTOFF, one second apart. Both engines immediately shut down and stopped producing thrust. The investigation led to a quite terrifying conclusion: the cause of the catastrophe was neither personal (pilot’s error) nor mechanical but purely digital. Because of some miscommunication between the different parts of its digital machinery, the digital system that regulates the plane was simultaneously informed that it was still on the ground and already in the air. When confronted with such contradictory information, the digital system “played it safely” in the same way we might do upon seeing a machine malfunction—not knowing what was really going on, it decided to stop the machine working. So the digital system didn’t think the plane was still on the ground—it didn’t know where the plane was, on the ground or in the air—and deactivated its activity. It also prevented the pilots from intervening because it thought that one of them might accidentally push the fuel control button. In short, the catastrophe was caused by the very precautionary measures intended to prevent a catastrophe. What the digital system was not able to do was a simple decision that even a bad pilot would be able to make: seeing that the plane is in the air, you switch the fuel control to RUN.

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When we hear or read about how artificial intelligence is taking over and regulating our lives, our first reaction is: no panic, we are far from there; we still have time to reflect in peace on what is going on and prepare for it. This is how we experience the situation, but the reality is quite the opposite: things are happening much faster than we think. We are simply not aware of the extent to which our daily lives are already manipulated and regulated by digital algorithms that, in some sense, know us better than we know ourselves and impose on us our “free” choices. In other words, to mention yet again the well-known scene from cartoons (a cat walks in the air above a precipice and only falls when it looks down and realizes there is no ground beneath its feet), we are like a cat refusing to look down.

The difference here is the Hegelian one between In-itself and For-itself: in itself, we are already regulated by the AI, but this regulation has not yet become for itself—something we subjectively and fully assume. Historical temporality is always caught between these two moments: in a historical process, things never just happen at their proper time; they always happen earlier (with regard to our experience) and are experienced too late (when they are already decided). What one should take into account in the case of AI is also the precise temporal order of our fear: first, we—the users of AI—feared that, in using AI algorithms like ChatGPT, we would begin to talk like them; now, with ChatGPT 4 and 5, what we fear is that AI itself talks like a human being, so that we are often unable to know with whom we are communicating—another human being or an AI apparatus.

In our—human—universe, there is no place for machinic beings capable of interacting with us and talking like us. So we do not fear their otherness; what we fear is that, as inhuman others, they can behave like us. This fear clearly indicates what is wrong in how we relate to AI machines: we are still measuring them by our human standards and fear their fake similarity with us. For this reason, the first step should be to accept that if AI machines do develop some kind of creative intelligence, it will be incompatible with our human intelligence, with our minds grounded in emotions, desires, and fears.

However, this distinction is too simple. Many of my highly intellectual friends (even the majority of ChatGPT users, I suspect) practice it in the mode of the fetishist’s denial: they know very well that they are just talking to a digital machine regulated by an algorithm, but this very knowledge makes it easier for them to engage in a ChatGPT dialogue without any restraints. A good friend of mine, who wrote a perspicuous Lacanian analysis of ChatGPT interaction, told me how the simple polite kindness and attention of the machine to what she says makes it so much better than an exchange with a real human partner, who can often be inattentive and snappy.

There is an obvious step further to be made from this interaction between a human and a digital machine: direct bot-to-bot interactions, which are gradually becoming the overwhelming majority of interactions. I often repeat a joke about how today, in the era of digitalization and mechanical supplements to our sexual practices, the ideal sexual act would look: my lover and I bring to our encounter an electric dildo and an electric vaginal opening, both of which shake when plugged in. We put the dildo into the plastic vagina and press the buttons so the two machines buzz and perform the act for us, while we can have a nice conversation over a cup of tea, aware that the machines are performing our superego duty to enjoy. Is something similar not happening with academic publishing? An author uses ChatGPT to write an academic essay and submits it to a journal, which uses ChatGPT to review the essay. When the essay appears in a “free access” academic journal, a reader again uses ChatGPT to read the essay and provide a brief summary for them—while all this happens in the digital space, we (writers, readers, reviewers) can do something more pleasurable—listen to music, meditate, and so on.

However, such situations are rather rare. It is much more common for bot-to-bot operations to happen out of our awareness, although they control and regulate our lives—just recall how much interaction goes on in the digital space when you do a simple transfer from your bank account to a foreign bank. When you read a book on Kindle, the company learns not only which book you bought but also how fast you are reading, whether you read the whole book or just passages, etc. Plus, when we are bombarded by news,

“it is making people more distrustful of both real and fake content as they fail to distinguish one from the other. It will likely increase self-censorship by disincentivizing people from sharing their own thoughts and creations for fear of them being used or stolen by bots, or being found unpopular in an unknowingly fake environment. In an extreme case scenario, the overcrowding of bots online may cause humans to stop using social media platforms as the social forums they were created to be. This would, indeed, mark the ‘death’ of the social media world we know today.”1

When people become aware of the overcrowding of bots online, their reaction can be “continued cynicism, or even worse, complete apathy”: instead of being open and accessible, the internet becomes monopolized by Big Tech - it is being foiled by the introduction of billions of fake images and fabricated news stories, and thus risks becoming useless as a space for obtaining information and exchanging opinions with others. Reactions to this prospect of the “death of the internet” are divided: while some claim this scenario is the worst outcome imaginable in the modern world, others celebrate the idea, since it would amount to toppling the surveillance mechanisms entrenched in social media.2

What further pushes many towards rejecting the World Wide Web is not only state and corporate control but also its apparent opposite: the spirit of lawlessness that is gradually spreading across the globe. Around 7,000 people were recently released from scam centers run by criminal gangs and warlords operating along Myanmar’s border with Thailand. Many detainees were held against their will and forced to defraud ordinary people—mostly from Europe and the United States—out of their life savings. Those released are only a fraction of the estimated 100,000 people still trapped in the area. Crime groups are now using artificial intelligence to generate scamming scripts and are exploiting increasingly realistic deepfake technology to create personas, pose as romantic interests, and conceal their identity, voice, and gender.

These syndicates have also quickly adopted cryptocurrency, investing in cutting-edge technologies to move money more efficiently and increase the effectiveness of their scams. Every year, regional crime groups in Southeast Asia cause losses exceeding $43 billion—nearly 40% of the combined GDP of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar. Experts caution that the industry will only return stronger after crackdowns.3 Although the U.S. administration routinely condemns such practices, its global strategy has created a world in which these activities are often tolerated when they are not seen as threatening to powerful states. China itself acted against Myanmar only after discovering that Chinese citizens were among the victims.

We often hear that digitalization will enable the full automation of most productive processes, eventually allowing the majority of humans to enjoy far more leisure time. Maybe, in the long term. But what we see today is a sharp increase in the demand for physical labor in developed countries. Behind these social threats, however, lurks something far more radical. Human intellectuality entails a gap between inner life and external reality, and it is unclear what will happen—or, rather, what is already happening—to this gap in the age of advanced AI. In all probability, it will disappear, since machines are wholly part of reality. This gap is being directly closed in the so‑called Neuralink project, which promises to establish a direct connection between the digital universe and human thought.4

For example: “I want to eat” appeared in Chinese characters on a computer at a public hospital in central Beijing. The words were generated from the thoughts of a 67‑year‑old woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, who cannot speak. The patient had been implanted with a coin‑sized chip called Beinao‑1, a wireless brain‑computer interface (BCI). This technology is being advanced by scientists in the United States, though experts believe China is quickly closing the gap. Most U.S. firms employ more invasive methods, placing chips inside the dura mater—the outer tissue protecting the brain and spinal cord—in order to capture stronger signals. But these methods require riskier surgeries.5

The Chinese approach is only semi‑invasive: the chip is placed outside the dura, covering a wider range of brain areas. While the signal precision for individual neurons is lower, the larger sample produces a more comprehensive picture. But can we truly imagine what the seemingly benevolent application of assisting impaired patients obscures? The deeper ambition is direct control over our thoughts—and, worse, the implantation of new ones.

Whether among those who welcome full digitalization or those who regard it as an existential threat, a peculiar utopia is emerging: a vision of a society functioning entirely autonomously, with no need for human input. A decade ago, public intellectuals imagined a capitalism without humans: banks and stock markets continuing to operate, but investment decisions made by algorithms; physical labor automated and optimized by self‑learning machines; production determined by digital systems tracking market trends; and advertising managed automatically. In this vision, even if humans disappeared, the system would continue reproducing itself. This may be a utopia, but as Saroj Giri notes, it is a utopia immanent to capitalism itself, articulated most clearly by Marx, who described in it:

“An ardent desire to detach the capacity for work from the worker—the desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour once and for all, so that value can be created freely and in perpetuity. Think of it as a version of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs: you want to kill the goose, yet still have all of its golden eggs forever.”6

In this vision, capitalist exploitation of labour appears as the pre-history to the emergence of capital, which will now be completely free of its dependence on labour. With today's digitalization, a strictly homologous utopia is arising: that of a “dead internet,” a digital universe that functions without humans—where data circulate exclusively among machines that 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. Which reasons?

The usual way to explain away this problem is to point out that the gap between production and consumption disappears with digitalization. In pre-digital capitalism, production (productive labour—the source of value, for Marx) is where profit comes from, and consumption does not add any value. However, in digital capitalism, our consumption (use of digital space: clicking on search, watching podcasts, exchanging messages, making ChatGPT do our work, etc.) is itself productive from the standpoint of the corporations that own digital space: it gives them data about us so that they know more about us than we ourselves do, and they use this knowledge to sell to us and manipulate us. In this sense, digital capitalism still needs humans. However, the need for humans runs deeper—as is often the case, cinema provides a key.

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 exists 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 in the Matrix-controlled virtual reality, this awakening is not the opening into the wide space of external reality, but instead the horrible realization of this enclosure, where each of us is effectively just a foetus-like organism, immersed in pre-natal 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 (the Matrix’s) jouissance, sucked out of our life-substance like batteries.7

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 easily have 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 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,” Hinton warned, “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 ‘they really will care about people even once the technology becomes more powerful and smarter than humans.’ Hinton said it’s not clear to him exactly how that can be done technically, but stressed it’s critical that researchers work on it.”8

Upon a closer look, one is compelled to realize that this, exactly, is the situation of humans in the Matrix (the movie). At the level of material reality, the Matrix is a gigantic maternal uterus that keeps humans in a safe pre-natal state and, far from trying to annihilate them, keeps them as happy and satisfied as possible. So why is the virtual world in which they live not a perfect world but rather our ordinary reality full of pains and troubles? In Matrix 1, Smith, the evil agent of the Matrix, gives a very Freudian explanation:

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops [of the humans serving as batteries] were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that...”

As a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from, which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.

One could effectively claim that Smith (let us not forget: he is not a human being like us, caught in the Matrix, but a virtual embodiment of the Matrix—the Big Other—itself) stands in for the figure of the psychoanalyst within the universe of the film. Here Hinton gets it wrong: our (humans’) only chance is to grasp that our imperfection is grounded in the imperfection of the AI machinery itself, which still needs us in order to continue running.

P.S. Isik Baris Fidaner informed me that he published back in February 2025 on the web a text WRITTEN BY CHATGPT with the following paragraph: "Science fiction has long been fascinated with powerful, quasi-maternal entities that dominate and nurture in equal measure. These characters and story elements uncannily resemble what psychoanalytic theory (and two recent manifestos) dub the “Maternal Phallus” – an all-encompassing maternal force that offers endless care and control. In Freudian post-feminist terms, the Maternal Phallus is a “suffocating maternal omnipresence” that grants constant provision and visibility at the cost of individual desire and freedom[1][2]. In sci-fi narratives across the ages, this concept takes on many forms: omnipotent motherly AIs, all-seeing computer systems, uncanny matriarchs, and hyper-controlled utopias. The result is often an eerie atmosphere of comfort turned oppressive – a “perverse maternal” realm that feeds but controls its subjects[3][4]. Below, we survey a wide range of examples – classic and modern – that embody or critique this uncanny Maternal-Phallic presence in science fiction. The Maternal Phallus in Science Fiction: Uncanny Mothers, Omnipotent AIs, and Totalitarian Nurture" The irony is unsurpassable: ChatGPT proposed a correct theory about its own role as perceived by humans.

When Socrates was standing in front of the Athenian tribunal in 399 BCE, this is what he said at the beginning of his defense:

There have been many who have accused me to you for many years now, and none of their accusations are true. These I fear much more than I fear Anytus and his friends [the present and identifiable accusers] … Those who spread the rumors, gentlemen, are my dangerous accusers … Moreover, these accusers are numerous, and have been at it a long time … What is most absurd in all this is that one cannot even know or mention their names … Those who maliciously and slanderously persuaded you … all those are most difficult to deal with: one cannot bring one of them into court or refute him; one must simply fight with shadows, as it were, in making one’s defense, and cross-examine when no one answers. … Very well then. I must surely defend myself and attempt to uproot from your minds in so short a time the slander that has resided there so long. (Apology, 18b-19a)

The situation is exemplary, it iconically stands at the very beginning of philosophy: Socrates, who fought the false opinions and beliefs and promoted knowledge as the way to truth based on logos more than anyone else in history, to the point that he became the model and the beacon of this struggle, this same Socrates was powerless against the power of rumors that have been spreading against him for many years and had no basis whatsoever, yet they resulted in the indictment, the trial, the sentence and death. He could have easily fought the visible opponents, but the ones he couldn’t contest were the invisible ones who paved the way for the visible ones. It’s like fighting shadows, but shadows won in the end. – Let’s say that logos is the early Greek name for what Lacan, 2500 years later, would call the big Other, in the sense of the guarantee of knowledge in its universal validity and in its binding character. Logos is the authority we all have to assume when aiming at knowledge and truth. In a maximum opposition to this, there is like another face of the big Other, epitomized by rumors, based on thin air, erratic and fickle, yet producing serious effects, efficient in spite of, or maybe because of, its lack of foundation. Rumors have no ascertainable origin and no verifiable content, nobody quite subscribes to them, one just hears them and passes them on, as a relay. ‘Rumor has it’, as the phrase goes, and maybe one should take it literally, ‘the rumor has IT’, oddly indicating that rumors may indeed have to do with the Freudian It (should one suggest ‘rumor has id’? or propose a title ‘rumors and their relation to the unconscious’?). In rumors it is as if ‘it speaks’, not us. It is as if the big Other presented two different faces, with no common measure, the face of logos and the buzz of rumors – shall we say the big Other and its double? The big Other and its shadow? The big Other and its symptom?

In the situation of Socrates before the court, the other face of the big Other, based on rumors, hearsay and slander, got the upper hand over its glorious face of logos, truth and epistemology. Logos was helpless against rumors, the faceless anonymous avalanche won against the best of arguments. This is a vintage case: the other big Other turned out to be more powerful than the official and celebrated one; rumors, trivial and unfounded as they are, have the capacity to outwit logos, which seems to be no match for them, and even the wisest of men (according to the Delphic oracle) had to concede defeat. This story stands at the very origin of philosophy, rumors appear as the philosophy’s other, an indomitable creature capable of defeating the best of arguments. The story has the value of a parable extending to present times.

There are many twists and turns in the long history of this parable. Concerning the speed of spreading and the reach of rumors, there is an ironic shift that qualifies modernity. In premodern times rumors were basically spreading by word of mouth while with advent of modernity they attained a whole different level with the possibility of mass reproduction and circulation. Let’s say that reason, the great slogan of the enlightenment, was the modern version of the big Other of logos, with the resolute trust in its powers and its unstoppable progress, supported by science, extended by massive technological advances, the idea of a democratic social order, economic rationality, the prospect of freedom and prosperity, sweeping away the false traditional authorities in order to install the rule of the true big Other of reason, science and democracy. Yet, doesn’t the entire subsequent history of modernity look like a long story of waning, decline, downfall of this big Other, and the resurgence of its shadow?

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Dear Readers,

Attached here is a short ‘propaganda clip’.

And the details for my talk in Los Angeles. Details here:

Date: Tue, 10/28/2025

Time: 7:00pm

Place: Robert Frost Auditorium
4401 Elenda St.
Culver City , CA 90230

Get your tickets HERE.

Normal posting to resume this weekend.

Also, a small YouTube clip on Wisdom.

When Jean Laplanche elaborates the impasses of the Freudian topic of seduction, he effectively reproduces the precise structure of a Kantian antinomy. On one hand, there is the brutal empirical realism of parental seduction: the ultimate cause of later traumas and pathologies is that children were effectively seduced and molested by adults. On the other hand, there is the (in)famous reduction of the seduction scene to the patient’s fantasy. As Laplanche points out, the ultimate irony is that the dismissal of seduction as fantasy passes today for the “realistic” stance, while those who insist on the reality of seduction end up advocating all kinds of molestations, up to satanic rites and extraterrestrial harassments. Laplanche’s solution is precisely the transcendental one: while “seduction” cannot be reduced merely to the subject’s fantasy, and does refer to a traumatic encounter with the Other’s “enigmatic message,” bearing witness to the Other’s unconscious, it also cannot be reduced to an event in the reality of the actual interaction between child and their adults. Seduction is, rather, a kind of transcendental structure—the minimal a priori formal constellation of the child confronted with the impenetrable acts of the Other, who bears witness to the Other’s unconscious. We are never dealing here with simple “facts,” but always with facts located in the space of indeterminacy between “too soon” and “too late”: the child is originally helpless, thrown into the world unable to take care of itself—i.e., their survival skills develop too late; at the same time, the encounter with the sexualized Other always, by structural necessity, comes “too soon,” as an unexpected shock that cannot ever be properly symbolized or translated into the universe of meaning.1 The fact of seduction is thus again that of the Kantian transcendental X—a structurally necessary transcendental illusion.image.jpg

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx,2 Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of such an in-between stance, which he calls the “parallax view”: when faced with an antinomic position in the precise Kantian sense, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other (or even more, to enact a kind of “dialectical synthesis” of the opposites). On the contrary, one should assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position opposed to another position, but the irreducible gap between the positions themselves—the purely structural interstice between them. This is the way one should read the Kantian notion of the Ding an sich (the Thing-in-itself, beyond phenomena): this Thing is not simply a transcendental entity beyond our grasp, but something discernible only via the irreducibly antinomic character of our experience of reality. (And, as René Girard pointed out, is the first full assertion of the ethical parallax not the Book of Job, in which two perspectives are confronted—the divine order of the world and Job’s complaint—and neither is the “truthful” one? The truth resides in their very gap, in the shift of perspective.)

Consider Kant’s confrontation with the epistemological antinomy that characterized his epoch: empiricism versus rationalism. Kant’s solution is neither to choose one of the terms nor to enact a higher “synthesis” that would “sublate” the two as partial moments of a global truth (and, of course, nor does he withdraw to pure skepticism). The stake of his “transcendental turn” is precisely to avoid the need to formulate one’s own “positive” solution. What Kant does is change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it, first, rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a fundamental and irreducible limitation (”finitude”) of the human condition, which is why the two poles—rational and sensual, active and passive—cannot ever be fully mediated or reconciled. The “synthesis” of these two dimensions (i.e., the fact that our Reason seems to fit the structure of external reality that affects us) always relies on a certain salto mortale or “leap of faith.” Far from designating a “synthesis” of the two dimensions, the Kantian “transcendental” stands for their irreducible gap as such: the “transcendental” points to something in this gap—a new dimension that cannot be reduced to any of the two positive terms between which the gap is gaping.

Perhaps the best way to describe the Kantian break toward this new dimension is by means of the changed status of the notion of the “inhuman.” Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment “the soul is mortal” can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject (”the soul is not mortal”), and when a non-predicate is affirmed (”the soul is non-mortal”)—the difference is exactly the same as the one known to every reader of Stephen King between “he is not dead” and “he is undead.” The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain that undermines the underlying distinction: the “undead” are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous “living dead.”3 The same goes for “inhuman”: “he is not human” is not the same as “he is inhuman”—”he is not human” simply means he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while “he is inhuman” means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither strictly human nor strictly inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as “humanity,” is inherent to being human. Perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans—beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness—while only with Kant and German Idealism does the excess to be fought become absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around). So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, i.e., animal passions or divine madness have taken over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being.

Which, then, is this new dimension that emerges in the gap itself? It is that of the transcendental “I” itself, of its “spontaneity”: the ultimate parallax, the third space between phenomena and noumenon itself, is the subject’s freedom/spontaneity, which—although, of course, it is not the property of a phenomenal entity, so it cannot be dismissed as a false appearance concealing the noumenal fact that we are totally caught in an inaccessible necessity—is also not simply noumenal. In a mysterious subchapter of his Critique of Practical Reason entitled “Of the Wise Adaptation of Man’s Cognitive Faculties to His Practical Vocation,” Kant endeavors to answer the question of what would happen if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the Ding an sich:

“... instead of the conflict which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations and in which, after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually won, God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes. [...] Thus most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures.”4

In short, direct access to the noumenal domain would deprive us of the very “spontaneity” which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom; it would turn us into lifeless automata, or, to put it in today’s terms, into “thinking machines.” The implication of this passage is much more radical and paradoxical than it may appear. If we discard its inconsistency (how could fear and lifeless gesticulation coexist?), the conclusion it imposes is that, at the level of phenomena as well as at the noumenal level, we—humans—are a “mere mechanism” with no autonomy and freedom; as phenomena, we are not free—we are part of nature, a “mere mechanism,” totally subject to causal links, part of the nexus of causes and effects—and as noumena, we again are not free, but reduced to a “mere mechanism.” (Is what Kant describes as a person who directly knows the noumenal domain not strictly homologous to the utilitarian subject whose acts are fully determined by the calculus of pleasures and pains?) Our freedom persists only in the space IN BETWEEN the phenomenal and the noumenal. It is not that Kant merely limited causality to the phenomenal domain to be able to assert that, at the noumenal level, we are free autonomous agents; we are only free insofar as our horizon is that of the phenomenal, insofar as the noumenal domain remains inaccessible to us. Is the way out of this predicament to assert that we are free insofar as we ARE noumenally autonomous, BUT our cognitive perspective remains constrained to the phenomenal level? In this case, we are “really free” at the noumenal level, but our freedom would be meaningless if we were also to have cognitive insight into the noumenal domain, since that insight would always determine our choices—who WOULD choose evil, when confronted with the fact that the price of doing evil will be divine punishment? However, does this imagined case not provide us with the only consequent answer to the question “what would a truly free act be,” a free act for a noumenal entity, an act of true noumenal freedom? It would be to KNOW all the inexorable, horrible consequences of choosing evil, and nonetheless to choose it. This would be a truly “non-pathological” act—an act in which one acts with no regard for one’s pathological interests. Kant’s own formulations are misleading here, since he often identifies the transcendental subject with the noumenal “I,” whose phenomenal appearance is the empirical “person,” thus shirking his radical insight into how the transcendental subject is a pure formal-structural function beyond the opposition of noumenal and phenomenal.

Crucial is thus the shift of the place of freedom from the noumenal beyond to the gap between phenomenal and noumenal; and this brings us to the complex relationship between Kant and Hegel. Is this shift not precisely the shift from Kant to Hegel, from the tension between immanence and transcendence to the minimal difference/gap in immanence itself? Hegel is thus not external to Kant: the problem with Kant was that he produced the shift but was not able, for structural reasons, to formulate it explicitly—he “knew” that the place of freedom is effectively not noumenal, but the gap between phenomenal and noumenal, but could not put it so explicitly, since, if he were to do so, his transcendental edifice would have collapsed. However, WITHOUT this implicit “knowledge,” there would also have been no transcendental dimension, so one is forced to conclude that, far from being a stable consistent position, the dimension of the Kantian “transcendental” can only sustain itself in a fragile balance between the said and the unsaid, through producing something the full consequences of which we refuse to articulate or “posit as such.” (The same goes, say, for the fact that, in the Kantian dialectic of the Sublime, there is no positive Beyond whose phenomenal representation fails: there is nothing “beyond”—the “Beyond” is only the void of the impossibility/failure of its own representation; or, as Hegel put it at the end of the chapter on consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit, beyond the veil of the phenomena, consciousness only finds what it itself has put there. Again, Kant “knew it” without being able to consistently formulate it.)

According to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of “classical” political economy (Ricardo and his labor-theory of value—the counterpart to philosophical rationalism) and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance (Bailey—the counterpart to philosophical empiricism), accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treated this opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate both outside circulation, in production, AND in circulation. Post-Marx “Marxism”—in both its versions, Social Democratic and Communist—lost this “parallax” perspective and regressed into the unilateral elevation of production as the site of truth against the “illusory” sphere of exchange and consumption. As he emphasizes, even the most sophisticated theories of reification and commodity fetishism—from the young Lukács through Adorno up to Fredric Jameson—fall into this trap: the way they account for the lack of revolutionary movement is that the consciousness of workers is obfuscated by the seductions of consumerist society and/or the manipulation of the ideological forces of cultural hegemony, which is why the focus of the critical work should shift to “cultural criticism” (the so-called “cultural turn”)—the disclosure of ideological (or libidinal—it is here that originates the key role of psychoanalysis in Western Marxism) mechanisms that keep workers under the spell of bourgeois ideology. In a close reading of Marx’s analysis of the commodity form, Karatani grounds the insurmountable persistence of the parallax gap in the “salto mortale” that a product must accomplish to assert itself as a commodity:

“The price [of iron expressed in gold], while on the one hand indicating the amount of labour-time contained in the iron, namely its value, at the same time signifies the pious wish to convert the iron into gold—that is, to give the labour-time contained in the iron the form of universal social labour-time. If this transformation fails to take place, then the ton of iron ceases to be not only a commodity but also a product; since it is a commodity only because it is not a use-value for its owner—that is to say, his labour is only really labour if it is useful labour for others, and it is useful for him only if it is abstract general labour. It is therefore the task of the iron or its owner to find that location in the world of commodities where iron attracts gold. But if the sale actually takes place, as we assume in this analysis of simple circulation, then this difficulty, the salto mortale of the commodity, is surmounted. As a result of this alienation—that is, its transfer from the person for whom it is a non-use-value to the person for whom it is a use-value—the ton of iron proves to be in fact a use-value and its price is simultaneously realized, and merely imaginary gold is converted into real gold.”5

This jump, by means of which a commodity is sold and thus effectively constituted as a commodity, is not the result of an immanent self-development of (the concept of) Value but a “salto mortale” comparable to a Kierkegaardian leap of faith—a temporary, fragile “synthesis” between use-value and exchange-value, comparable to the Kantian synthesis between sensitivity and understanding: in both cases, the two irreducibly external levels are brought together. For this precise reason, Marx abandoned his original project (discernible in the Grundrisse manuscripts) of “deducing,” in a Hegelian way, the split between exchange-value and use-value from the very concept of Value: in Capital, the split between these two dimensions, the “dual character of a merchandise,” is the starting point. The synthesis has to rely on an irreducibly external element, as in Kant, where being is not a predicate (i.e., cannot be reduced to a conceptual predicate of an entity), or as in Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, where the reference of a name to an object cannot be grounded in the content of that name, in the properties it designates.

The very tension between production and circulation is thus again that of parallax: yes, value is created in the production process; however, it is created there only potentially, since it is only actualized as value when the produced commodity is sold and the circle M-C-M’ is completed. Crucial is this temporal GAP between the production of value and its actualization: even if value is produced in production, without the successful completion of the process of circulation, there literally is no value—the temporality here is that of the futur antérieur, i.e., value “is” not immediately, it only “will have been”; it is retroactively actualized, performatively enacted. In production, value is generated “in itself,” while only through the completed circulation process does it become “for itself.” This is how Karatani resolves the Kantian antinomy of value, which is AND is not generated in the process of production: it is generated there only “in itself.” And it is because of this gap between in-itself and for-itself that capitalism needs formal democracy and equality:

“What precisely distinguishes capital from the master-slave relation is that the worker confronts him as consumer and possessor of exchange values, and that in the form of the possessor of money, in the form of money, he becomes a simple center of circulation—one of its infinitely many centers, in which his specificity as worker is extinguished.”6

What this means is that, in order to complete the circle of its reproduction, capital has to pass through this critical point at which the roles are inverted: surplus value is realized only by workers in totality buying back what they produce. This feature provides the key leverage from which to oppose the rule of capital today: is it not natural that the proletarians should focus their attack on that unique point at which they approach capital from the position of buyer and, consequently, at which it is capital which is forced to court them? “/…/ if workers can become subjects at all, it is only as consumers.”7 It is perhaps the ultimate case of the parallax situation: the positions of worker-producer and consumer should be sustained as irreducible in their divergence, without privileging one as the “deeper truth” of the other. (Incidentally, did not the planned economy of State Socialism pay a terrible price for privileging production at the expense of consumption precisely by failing to provide consumers with needed goods, by producing products which nobody needed or wanted?) One should therefore thoroughly reject the (proto-Fascist, if anything) opposition of the financial-speculative profiteering capital to the “substantial” economy of capitalists engaged in productive activity: in capitalism, the production process is only a detour in the speculative process of money engendering more money—i.e., the profiteering logic is ultimately also what sustains the incessant drive to revolutionize and expand production:

“The majority of economists warn today that the speculation of global financial capital is detached from the ‘substantial’ economy. What they overlook, however, is that the substantial economy as such is also driven by illusion, and that such is the nature of the capitalist economy.”8

Consequently, there are four basic positions apropos money: (1) the mercantilist one—a direct naïve fetishist belief in money as a “special thing”; (2) the “classical bourgeois political economy,” embodied in Ricardo, which dismissed money-fetishism as mere illusion and conceived money as a mere sign of the quantity of socially useful labor—value here was inherent to a commodity; (3) the “neoclassical” school, which rejected the labor theory of value and also any “substantial” notion of value: for it, the price of a commodity is simply the result of the interplay of supply and demand, i.e., of the commodity’s usefulness with regard to other commodities. Karatani is right to emphasize how, paradoxically, Marx broke out of the confines of the “classical” Ricardo labor-theory of value through his reading of Bailey, the first “vulgar” economist to emphasize the purely relational status of value: value is not inherent to a commodity; it expresses the way this commodity relates to all other commodities. Bailey thus paved the way toward Marx’s structural-formal approach, which insists on the gap between an object and the structural place it occupies: in the same way that a king is a king not because of inherent properties, but because people treat him as one (Marx’s own example), a commodity is money because it occupies the formal place of the general equivalent of all commodities—not because, say, gold is “naturally” money. It is crucial to note how both mercantilists and their Ricardian critics remain “substantialist”: Ricardo was, of course, aware the object which serves as money is not “naturally” money—he laughed at the naïve superstition of money and dismissed mercantilists as primitive believers in magic properties; but in reducing money to a secondary external sign of the value inherent to a commodity, he nonetheless again naturalized value, conceiving it as a direct “substantial” property of a commodity. It is this illusion that opened the way to the naïve early socialist and Proudhonian practical proposal to overcome the money fetishism by introducing direct “labor money,” which would merely designate the amount each individual contributed to social labor.

However, is the ultimate Marxian parallax not the one between economy and politics, between the “critique of political economy” with its logic of commodities and the political struggle with its logic of antagonism? Both logics are “transcendental,” not merely ontico-empirical, and both are irreducible to each other. Of course, they both point toward each other (class struggle is inscribed into the very heart of economy, yet it has to remain absent, non-thematized—recall how the manuscript of Capital III abruptly ends with it; and class struggle is ultimately “about” economic power relations), but this very mutual implication is twisted so that it prevents any direct contact (any direct translation of political struggle into a mere mirroring of economic “interests” is doomed to fail, as is any reduction of the sphere of economic production to a secondary “reified” sedimentation of an underlying founding political process).

This “pure politics” of Badiou, Rancière, and Balibar, more Jacobin than Marxist, shares with its great opponent—the Anglo-Saxon Cultural Studies and their focus on struggles for recognition—the degradation of the sphere of economy. That is, all the new French (or French-oriented) theories of the Political, from Balibar through Rancière and Badiou to Laclau and Mouffe, aim at—put in traditional philosophical terms—the reduction of the sphere of economy (of material production) to an “ontic” sphere deprived of “ontological” dignity. Within this horizon, there is simply no place for the Marxian “critique of political economy”: the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is NOT just that of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of socio-transcendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations. The relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of the “two faces or a vase”: one either sees the two faces or a vase, never both—one has to make a choice. Similarly, one either focuses on the political, and the domain of economy is reduced to the empirical “servicing of goods,” or one focuses on economy, and politics is reduced to a theater of appearances, a passing phenomenon which will disappear with the advent of the developed Communist (or technocratic) society, in which, as Engels already put it, the “administration of people” will vanish in the “administration of things.”

The “political” critique of Marxism (the claim that, when one reduces politics to a “formal” expression of an underlying “objective” socio-economic process, one loses the openness and contingency constitutive of the political field proper) should be supplemented by its obverse: the field of economy is IN ITS VERY FORM irreducible to politics—this level of the FORM of economy (of economy as the determining FORM of the social) is what French “political post-Marxists” miss when they reduce economy to one of the positive social spheres.

The basic idea of the parallax view is that bracketing itself produces its object—”democracy” as a form emerges only when one brackets the texture of economic relations as well as the inherent logic of the political state apparatus: both must be abstracted from, and people who are effectively embedded in economic processes and subjected to state apparatuses must be reduced to abstract units. The same goes for the “logic of domination,” of the way people are controlled/manipulated by apparatuses of subjection: to clearly discern these mechanisms of power, one must abstract not only from the democratic imaginary (as Foucault does in his analyses of the micro-physics of power, and as Lacan does in his analysis of power in Seminar XVIII), but also from the process of economic (re)production. Finally, the specific sphere of economic (re)production only emerges if one methodologically brackets the concrete existence of state and political ideology—no wonder critics of Marx complained that Marx’s “critique of political economy” lacks a theory of power and state. Of course, the trap to be avoided here is precisely the naïve idea that one should keep in view the social totality, the parts of which are democratic ideology, the exercise of power, and the process of economic (re)production: if one tries to keep in view all, one ends up seeing nothing—the contours disappear. This bracketing is not only epistemological; it concerns what Marx called “real abstraction”: the abstraction from power and economic relations is inscribed into the very actuality of the democratic process, etc.

More radically, one should assert the parallax status of philosophy itself. From its very beginnings (with the Ionian pre-Socratics), philosophy emerged in the interstices of substantial social communities, as the thought of those caught in a “parallax” position, unable fully to identify with any of the positive social identities. This is what is missing in Heidegger’s account—how, from his beloved pre-Socratics onward, philosophizing involved an “impossible” position displaced with regard to any communal identity, be it “economy” as household organization or polis. Like exchange according to Marx, philosophy emerges in the interstices BETWEEN different communities, in the fragile space of exchange and circulation between them—a space lacking any positive identity. Is this not especially clear in the case of Descartes? The grounding experience of his position of universal doubt is precisely a “multicultural” experience of how one’s own tradition is no better than what appear to us as the “eccentric” traditions of others:

“[...] I had been taught, even in my College days, that there is nothing imaginable so strange or so little credible that it has not been maintained by one philosopher or another, and I further recognized in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not necessarily barbarians or savages, but may be possessed of reason in as great or even a greater degree than ourselves. I also considered how very different the self-same man, identical in mind and spirit, may become, according as he is brought up from childhood amongst the French or Germans, or has passed his whole life amongst Chinese or cannibals. I likewise noticed how even in the fashions of one’s clothing the same thing that pleased us ten years ago, and which will perhaps please us once again before ten years are passed, seems at the present time extravagant and ridiculous. I thus concluded that it is much more custom and example that persuade us than any certain knowledge, and yet in spite of this the voice of the majority does not afford a proof of any value in truths a little difficult to discover, because such truths are much more likely to have been discovered by one man than by a nation. I could not, however, put my finger on a single person whose opinions seemed preferable to those of others, and I found that I was, so to speak, constrained myself to undertake the direction of my procedure.”9

Cogito is thus not a substantial entity, but a pure structural function—an empty place. As such, it can only emerge in the interstices of substantial communal systems. The link between the emergence of cogito and the disintegration and loss of substantial communal identities is thus inherent, and this holds even more for Spinoza than for Descartes: although Spinoza criticized the Cartesian cogito, he criticized it as a positive ontological entity—but he implicitly fully endorsed it as the “position of enunciation,” the one which speaks from radical self-doubt, since, even more than Descartes, Spinoza spoke from the interstice of social spaces, neither as a Jew nor as a Christian.

It would be easy to counter here that this Cartesian multiculturalist opening and relativizing one’s own position is just a first step, the abandoning of inherited opinions, which should lead us to acquire absolutely certain philosophical knowledge—the abandoning of the false, shaky home in order to reach our true home. Did not Hegel himself compare Descartes’ discovery of the cogito to a sailor who, after long drifting around the sea, finally catches sight of firm ground? Is Cartesian homelessness, then, just a deceitful strategic move? Are we not dealing here with a Hegelian “negation of negation,” the Aufhebung of the false traditional home in the finally discovered conceptual true home? Was Heidegger, then, not justified in approvingly quoting Novalis’ description of philosophy as longing for the true lost home? Two things should be added here. First, Kant himself is truly unique in this topic: in his transcendental philosophy, homelessness remains irreducible; we remain forever split, condemned to a fragile position between two dimensions and to a “leap of faith” without guarantee. Secondly, are things really so clear with Hegel? Is it not that, for Hegel, this new “home” is in a way homelessness itself—the very open movement of negativity?

Along these lines of the constitutive “homelessness” of philosophy, one should actualize Kant’s idea of the cosmopolitan “world-civil-society /Weltbürgergesellschaft/,” which is not simply an expansion of the citizenship of a nation-state to the citizenship of a global trans-national State; it involves a shift from the principle of identification with one’s “organic” ethnic substance actualized in a particular tradition, to a radically different principle of identification. Karatani refers here to Deleuze’s notion of universal singularity as opposed to the triad of individuality-particularity-generality; this opposition is the opposition between Kant and Hegel. For Hegel, “world-civil-society” is an abstract notion without substantial content, lacking the mediation of the particular and thus the force of full actuality—i.e., it involves an abstract identification which does not grasp the subject substantially; the only way for an individual to effectively participate in universal humanity is therefore via full identification with a particular nation-state—I am “human” only as a German, Englishman, etc. For Kant, on the contrary, “world-civil-society” designates the paradox of universal singularity: a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypassing the mediation of the particular, directly participates in the Universal. This identification with the Universal is not the identification with an encompassing global Substance (”humanity”), but with a universal ethico-political principle—a universal religious collective, a scientific collective, a global revolutionary organization—all of which are in principle accessible to everyone. As Karatani points out, this is what Kant means, in the famous passage of his “What is Enlightenment?”, by “public” as opposed to “private”: “private” is not the individual as opposed to one’s communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification, while “public” is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s Reason. The paradox is that one participates in the universal dimension of the “public” sphere precisely as a singular individual extracted from or even opposed to one’s substantial communal identification—one is truly universal only as radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities.

The Digital Perversion

... et pourtant, il revient dans le réel

The first paradox of this retreat of the big Other is discernible in the so-called "culture of complaint," with its underlying logic of ressentiment: far from cheerfully assuming the inexistence of the big Other, the subject blames the Other for its failure and/or impotence, as if the Other is guilty for the fact that it doesn't exist, i.e., as if impotence is no excuse—the big Other is responsible for the very fact that it wasn't able to do anything: the more the subject's structure is "narcissistic," the more he puts the blame on the big Other and thus asserts his dependence on it. The basic feature of the "culture of complaint" is thus a call, addressed at the big Other, to intervene and to set things straight (to recompense the damaged sexual or ethnic minority, etc.)—how, exactly, is this to be done is again a matter of different ethico-legal "committees." Is thus the "culture of complaint" not today's version of hysteria, of the hysterical impossible demand addressed to the Other, a demand which effectively wants to be rejected, since the subject grounds his/her existence in his/her complaint—"I am insofar as make the Other responsible and/or guilty for my misery"? The gap is here insurmountable between this logic of complaint and the true "radical" ("revolutionary") act which, instead of complaining to the Other and expecting it to act, i.e., displacing the need to act onto it, suspends the existing legal frame and itself accomplishes the act... So what is wrong with the complaint of those who are really deprivileged? The fact that, instead of undermining the position of the Other, they still address themselves to it: by way of translating their demand into the terms of legalistic complaint, they confirm the Other in its position in the very gesture of attacking it.

Furthermore, a wide scope of phenomena (the resurgent ethico/religious "fundamentalisms" which advocate a return to the Christian patriarchal division of sexual roles; the New Age massive re-sexualization of the universe, i.e., the return to pre-modern pagan sexualized cosmo-ontology; the growth of "conspiracy theories" as a form of popular "cognitive mapping") seem to counter this retreat of the big Other. It is all too simple to dismiss these phenomena as simply "regressive," as new modes of the "escape from freedom," as unfortunate "remainders of the past" which will disappear if we only continue to proceed even more resolutely on the deconstructionist path of historicization of every fixed identity, of unmasking the contingency of every naturalized self-image. These disturbing phenomena rather compel us to elaborate much more in detail the contours of the retreat of the big Other: the paradoxical result of this mutation in the "inexistence of the Other"—of the growing collapse of the symbolic efficiency—is precisely the re-emergence of the different facets of a big Other which exists effectively, in the Real, not merely as a symbolic fiction.

The belief in the big Other which exists in the Real is, of course, the most succinct definition of paranoia; for that reason, two features which characterize today's ideological stance—cynical distance and full reliance on paranoiac fantasy—are strictly codependent: the typical subject today is the one who, while displaying cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats, and excessive forms of enjoyment of the Other. The distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions), the subject's refusal to "take it seriously," relies on the belief that there is an "Other of the Other," that a secret, invisible and all-powerful agent effectively "pulls the strings" and runs the show: behind the visible, public Power, there is another obscene, invisible power structure. This other, hidden agent acts the part of the "Other of the Other" in the Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life). It is here that we should look for the roots of the recent impasse of narrativization, i.e., of the motif of the "end of large narratives": in our era when—in politics and ideology as well as in literature and cinema—global, all-encompassing narratives ("the struggle of liberal democracy with totalitarianism," etc.) seem no longer possible, the only way to arrive at a kind of global "cognitive mapping" seems to be the paranoiac narrative of a "conspiracy theory"—not only for the right-wing populism and fundamentalism, but also for the liberal center (the "mystery" of Kennedy's assassination) and left-wing orientations (see the old obsession of the American Left with the notion that some mysterious government agency is experimenting with nerve gasses enabling the power to regulate the behaviour of the population). The large majority of movies which, in the last two decades, were able to attract the public interest on account of their plot, not of the fire-cracking action, were different versions of conspiracy theory. And it is all too simplistic to dismiss conspiracy narratives as the paranoiac proto-Fascist reaction of the infamous "middle classes" which feel threatened by the process of modernization: it would be much more productive to conceive "conspiracy theory" as a kind of floating signifier which, as we have just seen, can be appropriated by different political options, enabling them to obtain a minimal cognitive mapping.

This, then, is one version of the big Other which continues to exist in the wake of its alleged disappearance. Another version is operative in the guise of the New Age Jungian re-sexualization of the universe ("men are from Mars, women are from Venus"): according to it, there is an underlying, deeply anchored archetypal identity which provides a kind of safe haven in the flurry of contemporary confusion of roles and identities; from this perspective, the ultimate origin of today's crisis is not the difficulty to overcome the tradition of fixed sexual roles, but the disturbed balance in the modern man who puts an excessive emphasis on male-rational-conscious etc. aspect, neglecting the feminine-compassionate etc. aspect. Although this tendency shares with feminism the anti-Cartesian and anti-patriarchal bias, it rewrites the feminist agenda into a re-assertion of archetypal feminine roots repressed in our competitive male mechanistic universe... Yet another version of the real Other is the figure of the father as sexual harasser of his young daughters, which stands in the very centre of the so-called "false-memory syndrome": here, also, the suspended father as the agent of symbolic authority, i.e., the embodiment of a symbolic fiction, "returns in the real" (what causes such controversy is the contention of those who advocate re-memorization of childhood sexual abuses that sexual harassment by the father is not merely fantasized or, at least, an indissoluble mixture of fact and fantasy, but a plain fact, something that, in the majority of families, "really happened" in the daughter's childhood—an obstinacy comparable to Freud's no less obstinate insistence on the murder of the "primordial father" as a real event in the humanity's prehistory). A further aspect of this "return in the real" of the father is undoubtedly the growing obsession of the popular pseudo-science with the mystery of the alleged Christ's tomb and/or progeny (from his alleged marriage with Mary Magdalene) which focuses on the region around Rennes-le-Château in the south of France, weaving into a large coherent narrative the Grail myth, Cathars, Templars, Freemasons, etc.: these narratives endeavour to supplant the diminishing power of the symbolic fiction of the Holy Ghost (the community of believers) with the bodily Real of Christ and his descendants.

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THE RETREAT OF THE BIG OTHER

The Informational Anorexia

Today, the media constantly bombard us with requests to choose, addressing us as subjects supposed to know what we really want (which book, clothes, TV program, place of holiday...) - "press A, if you want this, press B, if you want that," or, to quote the motto of the recent "reflective" TV publicity campaign for advertisement itself: "Advertisement - the right to choose." However, at a more fundamental level, the new media deprive the subject radically of the knowledge of what he wants: they address a thoroughly malleable subject who has constantly to be told what he wants, i.e., the very evocation of a choice to be made performatively creates the need for the object of choice. One should bear in mind here that the main function of the Master is to tell the subject what he wants - the need for the Master arises in answer to the subject's confusion, insofar as he does not know what he wants. What, then, happens in the situation of the decline of the Master, when the subject himself is constantly bombarded with the request to give a sign as to what he wants? The exact opposite of what one would expect: it is when there is no one here to tell you what you really want, when all the burden of the choice is on you, that the big Other dominates you completely, and the choice effectively disappears, i.e., is replaced by its mere semblance. One is tempted to paraphrase here Lacan's well-known reversal of Dostoyevsky ("If there is no God, nothing is permitted at all."): if no forced choice confines the field of free choice, the very freedom of choice disappears.

This suspension of the function of the (symbolic) Master is the crucial feature of the Real whose contours loom at the horizon of the cyberspace universe: the moment of implosion when humanity will attend the limit impossible to transgress, the moment at which the coordinates of our societal life-world will be dissolved. At this moment, distances will be suspended (I will be able to communicate instantly through teleconferences with anywhere on the globe); all information, from texts to music to video, will be instantly available on my interface. However, the obverse of this suspension of the distance which separates me from a far-away foreigner is that, due to the gradual disappearance of contact with "real" bodily others, a neighbour will no longer be a neighbour, since he or she will be progressively replaced by a screen spectre; the general availability will induce unbearable claustrophobia; the excess of choice will be experienced as the impossibility to choose; the universal direct participatory community will exclude all the more forcefully those who are prevented from participating in it. The vision of cyberspace opening up a future of unending possibilities of limitless change, of new multiple sex organs, etc., conceals its exact opposite: an unheard-of imposition of radical closure. This, then, is the Real awaiting us, and all endeavours to symbolize this real, from utopian (the New Age or "deconstructionist" celebrations of the liberating potentials of cyberspace), to the blackest dystopian ones (the prospect of the total control by a God-like computerized network...), are just this, i.e., so many attempts to avoid the true "end of history," the paradox of an infinity far more suffocating than any actual confinement. Is therefore one of the possible reactions to the excessive filling-in of the voids in cyberspace not the informational anorexia, the desperate refusal to accept information?

Or, to put it in a different way, digitalization cancels the distance between a neighbour and a distant foreigner, insofar as it suspends the presence of the Other in the massive weight of the Real: neighbours and foreigners, all are equal in their spectral screen-presence. That is to say, why was the Christian injunction "love thy neighbour like thyself" so problematic for Freud? The proximity of the Other which makes a neighbour neighbour is that of jouissance: when the presence of the Other becomes unbearable, suffocating, it means that we experience his or her mode of jouissance as too intrusive. And what is the contemporary "postmodern" racism, if not a violent reaction to this virtualization of the Other, a return of the experience of the neighbour in his or her (or their) intolerable, traumatic presence? The feature which disturbs the racist in his Other (the way they laugh, the smell of their food...) is thus precisely the little piece of the real which bears witness to their presence beyond the symbolic order.

We are thus far from bemoaning the loss of the contact with a "real," flesh-and-blood other in cyberspace, in which all we encounter are digital phantoms: our point is rather that cyberspace is not spectral enough. One of the tendencies in theorizing cyberspace is to conceive cybersex as the ultimate phenomenon in the chain whose key link is Kierkegaard, his relationship with Regina: in the same way Kierkegaard rejected the actual proximity of the Other (the beloved woman), and advocated loneliness as the only authentic mode of relating to a love object, cybersex also involves the nullification of the "real life" object, and draws erotic energy from this very nullification - the moment I encounter my cybersex partner(s) in real life is the moment of desublimation, the moment of the return to vulgar "reality"... Convincing as it may sound, this parallel is deeply misleading: the status of my cyberspace sexual partner is NOT that of Kierkegaard's Regina. Regina was the void at which Kierkegaard addressed his words, a kind of "vacuole" weaved by the texture of his speech, while my cyberspace sexual partner is, on the contrary, over-present, bombarding me with the torrential flow of images and explicit statements of her (or his) most secret fantasies. Or, to put it in another way: Kierkegaard's Regina is the cut of the Real, the traumatic obstacle which again and again unsettles the smooth run of my self-satisfying erotic imagination, while cyberspace presents its exact opposite, a frictionless flow of images and messages - when I am immersed in it, I as it were return to a symbiotic relationship with an Other in which the deluge of semblances seems to abolish the dimension of the Real.

The easiest way to discern the set of social relations which overdetermine the mode of operation of cyberspace, is to focus on the predominant "spontaneous ideology of cyberspace," the so-called cyberevolutionism which relies on the notion of cyberspace (or World Wide Web) as a self-evolving "natural" organism. Crucial is here the blurring of the distinction between "culture" and "nature": the obverse of the "naturalization of culture" (market, society etc. as living organisms) is the "culturalization of nature" (life itself is conceived as a set of self-reproducing information - "genes are memes"). This new notion of Life is thus neutral with respect to the distinction of natural and cultural or "artificial" processes - the Earth (as Gaia) as well as global market, they both appear as gigantic self-regulated living systems whose basic structure is defined in the terms of the process of coding and decoding, of passing information, etc. The reference to World Wide Web as a living organism is often evoked in contexts which may seem liberating: say, against the State censorship of Internet. However, this very demonization of State is thoroughly ambiguous, since it is predominantly appropriated by right-wing populist discourse and/or market liberalism: its main targets are the state interventions which try to maintain a kind of minimal social balance and security - the title of Michael Rothschild's book (Bioeconomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism) is here indicative. So, while cyberspace ideologists can dream about the next step of evolution in which we will no longer be mechanically interacting "Cartesian" individuals, in which each "person" will cut his substantial link to his individual body and conceive itself as part of the new holistic Mind which lives and acts through him or her, what is obfuscated in such direct "naturalization" of the World Wide Web or market is the set of power relations - of political decisions, of institutional conditions - within which "organisms" like Internet (or market or capitalism...) can only thrive.

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Imagine two different scenes of sexual seduction and activity. In the first, I meet someone at a cafeteria; we seem to like each other and talk at length. We decide to meet again the next day. During our next meeting, we continue discussing general topics—movies, music, politics, ecology—but sexuality is already hanging in the air. When one of us takes a risky step and proposes sex, the other simply nods. We go to one of our places and start kissing passionately in the elevator. In the apartment, we frantically pull off each other’s clothing and nervously engage in our first intercourse, followed by tender caressing until we are ready for a second round—a common scenario in today’s permissive society.

Now, imagine a different scene. I am alone at home and feel an urge to have sex, so I post my profile on a platform. I quickly find a person willing to engage, but we do not physically meet. Each of us takes a pill that enhances neural links in our brains; we select the same virtual space in which we interact as digitally altered versions of ourselves—our bodies look and perform better. I put on a device called a “smart condom,” among other enhancements, and we begin to interact, each of us performing similar clumsy movements in our actual, mundane reality. (The clumsy description reveals that I have not participated in such events.) What happens in this transition from the first to the second scene?

Media bombard us with speculations about how artificial intelligence will affect our lives, asserting itself as an alien power. Instead of merely extending our bodily organs and technological machines to serve us—making our lives less stressful and more satisfying—it will effectively regulate and dominate even our innermost feelings and desires. Surprisingly, although we believe we live in an era of sexual permissiveness, there are far fewer texts on the “transformations of sociality and sexuality in relation to digital technology,” i.e., on “the ways in which devices and platforms influence and produce normative systems capable of changing the way we perceive, desire, and relate to others”. Christian Damato’s Multiplication of Organs—Body, Technology, Identity, Desire1 addresses precisely this topic in all its dimensions, from fascinating analyses of wearable technologies to broader implications of digisexuality.

Wearable technologies in the field of digisexuality—teledildonics, smart condoms, and brain-computer interfaces—increasingly affect contemporary subjects in all aspects of life: measurement, gamification, control, and prediction of performance, emotions, and time. All these innovations reprogram how we “construct” desire, which Damato redefines as statistical desire—that is, a form of desire founded on quantification, gamification, predictability, and actions we intend to perform.2

At a more general level, Damato shows how digisexuality is rooted in the widespread unease with contact, with bodily proxemics: the discomfort with our own skin, aversion to being touched and to touching, resulting in contact avoidance. As sensorial experience is increasingly replaced by techno-semiotic exchange, perception is reconfigured; desire itself, through the hyper-semiotization of experience, is also transformed. This shift to digisexuality changes our very perception of reality. “Physical reality exists, but it is less and less the primary object of significant investment, and also of desiring investment—a cumbersome residue that we do not know what to do with.” The body is thus “no longer essential for communication,” increasingly “an embarrassing surplus in communication, a mass that we would be pleased to get rid of.” Damato's analysis focuses on the moment when this shift occurs (and is already underway): when our body is no longer “what we are,” where our self is located, but instead is experienced as something external—so that we become more “ourselves” in digital space than in our physical bodies.

One might think that the disappearance of the body will impoverish human culture, or alternatively, that human culture has been enriched by the renunciation of presence and physical contact. Damato’s intention is not to resolve this dilemma, but rather to open new avenues for investigation and reflection on a deeper question: Will this change in perception allow the emergence of a new ontology, or will the disappearance of the body mark the final dissolution of human life itself?

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When we hear or read about how artificial intelligence is taking over and regulating our lives, our first reaction is: no panic, we are far from there; we still have time to reflect in peace on what is going on and prepare for it. This is how we experience the situation, but the reality is quite the opposite: things are happening much faster than we think. We are simply not aware of the extent to which our daily lives are already manipulated and regulated by digital algorithms that, in some sense, know us better than we know ourselves and impose on us our “free” choices. In other words, to mention yet again the well-known scene from cartoons (a cat walks in the air above a precipice and only falls when it looks down and realizes there is no ground beneath its feet), we are like a cat refusing to look down.

The difference here is the Hegelian one between In-itself and For-itself: in itself, we are already regulated by the AI, but this regulation has not yet become for itself—something we subjectively and fully assume. Historical temporality is always caught between these two moments: in a historical process, things never just happen at their proper time; they always happen earlier (with regard to our experience) and are experienced too late (when they are already decided). What one should take into account in the case of AI is also the precise temporal order of our fear: first, we—the users of AI—feared that, in using AI algorithms like ChatGPT, we would begin to talk like them; now, with ChatGPT 4 and 5, what we fear is that AI itself talks like a human being, so that we are often unable to know with whom we are communicating—another human being or an AI apparatus.

In our—human—universe, there is no place for machinic beings capable of interacting with us and talking like us. So we do not fear their otherness; what we fear is that, as inhuman others, they can behave like us. This fear clearly indicates what is wrong in how we relate to AI machines: we are still measuring them by our human standards and fear their fake similarity with us. For this reason, the first step should be to accept that if AI machines do develop some kind of creative intelligence, it will be incompatible with our human intelligence, with our minds grounded in emotions, desires, and fears.

However, this distinction is too simple. Many of my highly intellectual friends (even the majority of ChatGPT users, I suspect) practice it in the mode of the fetishist’s denial: they know very well that they are just talking to a digital machine regulated by an algorithm, but this very knowledge makes it easier for them to engage in a ChatGPT dialogue without any restraints. A good friend of mine, who wrote a perspicuous Lacanian analysis of ChatGPT interaction, told me how the simple polite kindness and attention of the machine to what she says makes it so much better than an exchange with a real human partner, who can often be inattentive and snappy.

There is an obvious step further to be made from this interaction between a human and a digital machine: direct bot-to-bot interactions, which are gradually becoming the overwhelming majority of interactions. I often repeat a joke about how today, in the era of digitalization and mechanical supplements to our sexual practices, the ideal sexual act would look: my lover and I bring to our encounter an electric dildo and an electric vaginal opening, both of which shake when plugged in. We put the dildo into the plastic vagina and press the buttons so the two machines buzz and perform the act for us, while we can have a nice conversation over a cup of tea, aware that the machines are performing our superego duty to enjoy. Is something similar not happening with academic publishing? An author uses ChatGPT to write an academic essay and submits it to a journal, which uses ChatGPT to review the essay. When the essay appears in a “free access” academic journal, a reader again uses ChatGPT to read the essay and provide a brief summary for them—while all this happens in the digital space, we (writers, readers, reviewers) can do something more pleasurable—listen to music, meditate, and so on.

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In our pop-scientific culture, “singularity” refers to the idea that, by directly sharing my thoughts and experiences with others (a machine that reads my mental processes can also transpose them to another mind), a domain of globally shared mental experience will emerge that will function as a new form of divinity—my thoughts will be directly immersed in a global Thought of the universe itself. However, what if Singularity, if we imagine it as realized, will not be the immersion of individuals into a collective space, but rather an extremely solipsistic state where each self (reduced to a selfless flow of thoughts, no longer a Self opposed to others in an intersubjective space) functions similarly to the anonymous narrator of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable?

We read Beckett here with Jacques-Alain Miller, who, in his 2006–2007 seminar, describes the last years of Jacques Lacan’s teaching as preoccupied with an effort to delineate the contours of the One alone before the Other, of a hallucination before symbolic reality, of meaningless lapses prior to any signifying articulation.1 Lacan opposes two axes here. One is the axis of the symbolic Unconscious where, in transference, the subject relates to an Other, and where symptoms have a (supposed) meaning and, as such, await historicization—integrated into a symbolic narrative. The other is the axis of the real Unconscious, where the subject (or, rather, the subjectless Self) is all alone:

“Who is this self?—this self that knows that it has neither tail nor head, neither meaning nor interpretation. We have here an it that is not, as Lacan was able to play with it, the one of the unconscious, but an it that is a self.”2
“The pivot is that here, one considers the One-all-alone. At least two allusions from Lacan, in this text, find a way to be ordered from this all-alone. He says: ‘There is no friendship there, in that space that supports this unconscious.’ No friendship that can be the support of the unconscious.”3

“Friendship” stands here for the link from one to the other, between subjects but also between signifiers—signification arises only through such “friendship” where one signifier interprets the other.4 With the subjectless Self that is all alone, there is also speech, but this speech functions as pre-symbolic, erratic hallucination—a hallucination without law:

“The hallucination does not obey the laws of language, either those of connection or of substitution, and it appears as being independent of the intersubjective game.”5

So, again, on the one side we have the intersubjective game of transference, through which symptoms are decoded and historicized, integrated into the subject’s life story, while on the other side,

“we have a real cut off from speech, a real which ‘expects nothing from speech,’ and which ‘chatters all alone’ (cause tout seul). We know now to give its value to this all alone, which signals that we are not in history, in hysteria, in the one and the other, but, on the contrary, on the side of the solitary. Lacan even adds /that/ the real appears as a ‘noise in which one can hear anything and everything.’”6

This difference between speech as symptom pointing towards meaning, and speech as “chatter all alone”—composed of sinthoms which merely condense jouissance—does not overlap with the opposition between hysteria and psychosis; it divides the space of psychosis itself into paranoia (in which signifying mechanisms of retroaction are still operative) and schizophrenia, in which “the symbolic ceases making sense, making history, where the symbolic is at the level of the noise in which one can hear anything whatever. It is a collapse of the two dimensions: the symbolic founders on the real.”7 This is also why we are here in the domain of hallucinations: when the symbolic “founders on the real,” reality (by definition sustained by a gap that separates the symbolic from the real) disintegrates; the subject suffers a “loss of reality (Realitätsverlust).”

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As we know from psychoanalysis as well as from cognitive sciences, consciousness is always an intersubjective phenomenon. How, then, can quantum mechanics, as a complete theory of reality, explain itself as an intersubjectively shared universal theory? Emily Adlam acknowledges this problem:

“Any successful interpretation of quantum mechanics must explain how our empirical evidence allows us to come to know about quantum mechanics. … this vital criterion is not met by the class of 'orthodox interpretations' … observers in such a universe are unable to escape their own perspective in order to learn about the structure of the set of perspectives that is supposed to make up reality according to these interpretations. … it cannot be rational to believe these sorts of interpretations unless they are supplemented with some observer-independent structure which underwrites intersubjective agreement in at least certain sorts of cases.”

In the text co-written by Adlam and Carlo Rovelli, they frame this same issue as immanent to Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM), calling it a “tension between two founding principles of RQM”:

“The idea that information is physical and the idea that there exists no ‘view from nowhere’ from which the perspectives of different observers can be compared. How is this tension to be resolved? One possible response would be to argue that when Alice observes a measurement outcome, her ‘knowledge’ is somehow illusory: the real information is in the physical correlations which are accessible to Bob and other observers, which fail to single out any one measurement outcome. But in fact Alice’s subjective perspective cannot simply be disregarded in this way, because it is the subjective perspective which plays the central role in empirical confirmation. After all, when we are trying to get empirical confirmation for a scientific theory we are necessarily doing that from within our own subjective perspective based on the world as we perceive it.”

To resolve this tension, Rovelli and Adlam propose a new postulate for RQM:

“All of the information possessed by a certain observer is stored in physical variables of that observer and thus accessible by measurement to other observers. The postulate of cross-perspective links ensures that observers can reach intersubjective agreement about quantum events which have occurred in the past, thus shoring up the status of RQM as a form of scientific realism and ensuring that empirical confirmation is possible in RQM.”

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What am I, a philosopher, doing here, where specialists will debate features of quantum gravity well beyond the scope of my understanding? From its very beginnings, it was clear that quantum mechanics (QM) has earth-shattering implications for our notion of reality. However, although there were speculations here and there, the predominant stance until recently was Copenhagen orthodoxy: “Don’t think, just calculate!” In the last decades, ontological questions have exploded. At the very beginning of his bestselling The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking triumphantly proclaims that “philosophy is dead.” With the latest advances in quantum physics and cosmology, so-called experimental metaphysics has reached its apogee: metaphysical questions about the origins of the universe, the nature of space and time, etc.—which until now were the topic of philosophical speculation—can now be answered through experimental science and thus, in the long term at least, empirically tested. However, things are not as simple as that. Many quantum scientists are now aware that they should be raising proper philosophical questions (for example: What is the nature of quantum waves? Do they form a reality separate from our common material reality, or are they just instruments of calculation?).

Following these debates as an outsider, I noticed that many quantum physicists have taken refuge in esoteric spiritualism or direct subjective idealism. Here is a typical comment: “Do paradoxes like this really echo ancient philosophies like Advaita Vedanta, which say separateness is an illusion and everything is connected? Quantum entanglement reveals particles can remain linked across vast distances, as if part of one indivisible whole.” Even Roger Penrose wrote at some point that “Somehow, our consciousness is the reason the universe is here,” not to mention Zeilinger, who links QM to Tibetan Buddhism. No wonder that many obscurantist philosophers join them in this endeavour—for them, the quantum collapse is an act of free conscious decision.

Lacan knew what he was saying when he claimed that quantum mechanics is the first science that deals with the Real—the Real as distinct from the symbolically constituted reality. The whole point of quantum mechanics is that there is another level of being which obeys laws different from our ordinary reality: the Real of quantum waves, of quantum superpositions that collapse into our reality. This level is indeterminate but still deterministic; the probability of a collapse is governed by the very precise Schrödinger equation. At this quantum level, our standard notion of time and space as universal containers of all reality must also be abandoned.

To interpret this quantum domain as the final refutation of materialism and as proof that reality is spiritual succeeds only if we restrict ourselves to the classic deterministic notion of reality—small material particles jumping around in all-encompassing space and time. Furthermore, the role of observation is far more complex: experiments confirm that a collapse occurs when a quantum process is "observed" by a measuring device, even with no conscious awareness whatsoever.

Those who claim there is no reality outside consciousness dismiss as a pseudo-problem the most philosophically intriguing aspect of quantum mechanics: the exact ontological nature of quantum waves, their collapse, and the retroactive causation implied by such events. So you, quantum scientists, need philosophy, but you should not trust philosophers who appropriate your work for obscurantist purposes.

Here enter people like Lee and the entire gang around him, from Francesca Vidotto and Carlo Rovelli to Julian Barbour and Sean Carroll. Like me, they remain materialists, although they are well aware that the notion of materialism has to be radically rethought after quantum physics. So what does materialism mean here? Not that the ultimate reality is empty space with small elements floating in it, but something much more interesting. Einstein’s full determinism relies on a religious foundation—he wrote: "Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht." (God is subtle, but he is not intentionally deceiving us). Although Einstein repeatedly pointed out that he didn’t believe in a personal god, he proclaimed himself deeply religious: "I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.” In this sense, for him, religion and science necessarily coexist: science itself is sustained by the deep faith that our universe is marvellously arranged in a harmony that pervades all that exists. I think it is this very belief which has been dealt a mortal blow by quantum mechanics. For me, quantum mechanics implies an inconsistent, plural world not grounded in any big foundation, even if this foundation is the Void itself.

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