Against Progress

i
 Žižek’s Essays
Series Editor: Liza Thompson

Žižek’s Essays showcase the best of Slavoj Žižek’s thought and writing
in short, punchy collections of essays. Carefully curated to chart the
intellectual journeys of one of the world’s prominent philosophers, each
book brings together writings addressing the most urgent issues facing
the contemporary subject. Written with Žižek’s characteristic verve,
expansiveness, erudition and imagination, the essays combine the enduring
Žižekian preoccupations of Marxism, psychoanalysis, contemporary politics
and film with emerging themes—particle physics, new theories of history,
authenticity in the age of AI, war and ecological collapse in all its catastrophic
forms. Žižek’s Essays invite both seasoned readers and new discoverers to
experience thinking life, politics and history through the idiosyncratic and
topsy-turvy brilliance of the ultimate philosopher for a world turned upside
down.

Also Available from Bloomsbury

Christian Atheism, Slavoj Žižek

Freedom, Slavoj Žižek
Surplus-Enjoyment, Slavoj Žižek
Hegel in a Wired Brain, Slavoj Žižek
Sex and the Failed Absolute, Slavoj Žižek
Disparities, Slavoj Žižek
Antigone, Slavoj Žižek

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Against Progress

Slavoj Žižek

iii
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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 Contents

Editors’ Note vii

Progress and its Vicissitudes 1

Against Progress 13
Acceleration 23
Holographic History 29
Absolute Invariants 37
Worsting 43
Concrete Analysis of a Concrete Situation 47
Civil War 51
Authority 57
From Bad to Worse 85
We Are Biomass 91
The End of the World 97
Disavowal 103

Notes 107
Index 117

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 Editors’ Note

Living in a world in which new possibilities for annihilation seem

to be proliferating – global conflict, the confirmed climate crisis
leading to ecological collapse, the rise of the far right, and the
crumbling of many of the pillars of the liberal social democratic
order we took for granted – ‘progress’ seems, in some ways, a quaint
concept to seize upon. A word redolent of Victorian reformers,
earnest Fabians, and 1950s ‘imagineers’ envisioning a bright and
shining future, it seems at first glance an odd preoccupation for
times in which all we can know for certain is that tomorrow will not
be like today.
But as Slavoj Žižek persistently argues in this unsettling book,
we do not behave as if we know that the days of our old certainties
are numbered. We go to work, pursue our individual goals, drive
cars, eat meat, throw away what we no longer want, have children,
just as if the planet is not burning, as if its resources are not
exhausted, as if our societies are not sliding into neo-fascist
oligarchies. Wedged inexorably in what Žižek, drawing on Jacques
Lacan, calls the ‘fetishistic split’, we have lost the ability to imagine
a future other than the one that we know for certain will not
materialize, the one in which our way of life continues without
destabilization. These essays chart the absences left by the loss of
old certainties, even such basic certainties as the survival of the
human species; and the ways in which the void left by lost futures is
filled by demagogues of all types, making disingenuous appeals to
‘traditional’ values to bolster their claim to define what the future
can be.
Characteristically, Žižek finds that the only way to address the
idea of progress is to thoroughly and ruthlessly deconstruct it,
pursuing it through its various protean forms. ‘Progress and

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 EDITOR’S NOTE

Vicissitudes’ sets the tone by exposing, mercilessly and not without

some fiendish delight, the ‘squashed dead birds’ which are the
inevitable, unpleasant offsets of attempts to forcibly create a better
world for other people. It is not merely corporate machinations or
the nightmarish visions of neoliberalism which are exposed as
hiding squalid, violent realities, either. In ‘Against Progress’, one of
the most helpful, leftist visions of what progress might look like –
the eco-Marxism of Kohei Saito – is shown to be fatally flawed in
its reliance on humans being something other than they are. Not
for the last time, Žižek calls for a rehabilitation of planning, showing
that slowing down and decentralizing, appealing as they might
sound, are not the answer to a rat-king of global crises gathering
pace and power. Nor is racing to catch-up with them in a desperate
rush towards annihilation (‘Acceleration’).
None of this is merely intellectual; there is a visceral panic
haunting this book. It is vividly conjured in ‘Worsting’, where
our dread of regression exposes itself in the resurrection of the
‘obscene paternal figure’ of the Strongman, patriarchal authority’s
compulsion to persist combined with our desperate attachment to
old certainties. Yet Žižek sympathizes with this desperation, this
dread: such sympathy, such radical solidarity with the least wanted
aspects of our collective selves – the bin juice, dead rats, deadly
bacteria and severed limbs, the horrific, collateral of the way we are
living – is the matter of ‘We Are Biomass’. A different kind of
reckoning takes place in ‘Holographic History’, where a seemingly
abstract thought-experiment – is our world a hologram? – becomes
a melancholic confrontation with images of what might have been,
and with the unsettling role that chance plays in the collapse of
potentials into leaden reality. And yet, as in all these essays, there is
a strange kind of revitalizing possibility that comes from
interrogating ideas of inevitability; if it could have been different, it
can – perhaps – always already be different too.
Whatever form it takes, progress is encountered as an idea in
crisis. It is a concept at war with its own foundations in the reason
of the Enlightenment and the imperialism that underpinned even
Karl Marx’s formulations of human historical teleology, embattled
by Western neo-liberal notions of the ‘end of history’. Progress
has to be encountered as fragmented, partial and perpetually

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undermining the universalist pretensions that once formed its very

core. It is this sense of constant rupturing that makes the form of
this book – that of the essay – so vital. These are places to explore
and expand, to attack and retreat (in Žižek-approved Leninist
fashion), to encounter both desolation and a fractured kind of
hope. These pieces speak to a tension, an irreconcilability of feelings
where, in the end, we both believe and do not believe things can
get better. As Žižek writes in ‘Civil War’, expanding on Franz
Kafka’s maxim: ‘There is hope . . . just not for us.’ Or at least, not as
we are now.
Amidst the warnings against hypocrisy and fake self-criticism
in ‘Authority’ we are perhaps given the most concrete glimpse of
something that, for Žižek, constitutes authentic progress. In giving
short shrift to claims to ‘authority’ which derive from an objective,
eternal truth, he finds in Soren Kierkegaard an unlikely ally. In
the Kierkegaardian vision of transformation as neither gradual
teleological process nor isolated redemptive moment but as
‘repetitive movement’, we glimpse the lineaments of a revolution
which embraces failure, incompleteness: which is always starting
again. We have no place to land, no ground upon which to stand
still and no end in sight but we do have curiosity, an insatiable thirst
for mischief and delight, a capacity to critique both ourselves and
the structures which threaten to swamp us. In Žižek’s eclectic,
enlivening prose is found an affirmative response to Socrates’ call
to endlessly repeat a question, a model for our own capacity for that
affirmative response. For him, progress is a state of vigilance, a
continual resistance to complacency, a paradoxical dive further
into what we are driven most desperately to escape – what we
ourselves are – which creates the possibility of transformation. It is
in working with the bizarre mechanisms of denial and doublethink
with which we navigate our reality and embracing the inevitability
of utter destruction that hope (if there is any) lies; this is the oddly
optimistic note on which ‘Disavowal’ ends the book.
Because Against Progress is, ultimately, an optimistic book;
optimistic in its energy, its anger, its resistance to passive drift and
entropy. It is exhilarating to be along for the ride as Žižek pounces
on a concept or formulation, sucks the juices out of it, and moves
on to the next, from quantum mechanics and the mysterious

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entanglements of subatomic particles to the emancipatory potential

of South Korean ‘web sosoeol’ and the inadvertent political
commentary of Hollywood blockbusters, via Einstein, Freud,
Adorno, Lacan, the Buddha and, of course, Hegel. And there are
jokes, of course. Dirty ones. Being challenged, being surprised,
being maddened is part of what’s best about reading Žižek; and
each one of these pieces can feel like a gauntlet flung down. Žižek
shows us that the second we rest on the laurels of any insufficiently
examined assumption, the instant we are comfortable, we lose
our potential to act as revolutionary subjects. Revolution is not
a transcendent, shining moment, nor a linear process (or even a
progress), but a constant beginning again. That is what these pieces
do; begin again and again, from a different angle, applying a
different kind of conceptual leverage, worrying away at the
intractable, sometimes reeling away blood-spattered, but always,
always, returning to the fray. And not only because the alternative
is all too thinkable.

Liza Thompson and Hannah Wilks

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 Progress and its Vicissitudes

Early in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a magician performs a

trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage flattened on
the table. A small boy in the audience starts to cry, distraught that
the bird was killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the
trick, gently producing a living bird out of his hand – but the boy is
not convinced, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead
bird’s brother. After the show, we see the magician alone, putting a
bird squashed into the trash where many other dead birds lie. The
boy was right. The trick could not be performed without violence
and death, but it relies for its effectiveness upon concealing the
squalid, broken residue of what has been sacrificed, disposing of it
where no one who matters will see. Therein resides the basic
premise of a dialectical notion of progress: when a new higher
stage arrives, there must be a squashed bird somewhere.

The Squashed Birds of Progress

The first thing to renounce is thus any notion of the global linear
progress of humanity, whether formulated by Karl Marx, postulated
by liberals like Francis Fukuyama (who declared the end of history)
or dominated by Enlightenment dialectics. Marx’s overall vision of
history is that of a linear succession of ‘progressive’ modes of social
development from primitive societies through the Asiatic mode
of production, slavery, feudalism, capitalism to socialism and
communism. Problems arise almost immediately with the historical
dynamic Marx envisioned; to start with, the notion of an ‘Asiatic
mode of production’ is clearly problematic (it is an empty category
into which Marx threw whatever didn’t fit his Eurocentric logic of

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history, and thus in itself a receptacle for squashed dead birds). As

for socialism, Rosa Luxemburg’s claim ‘the future will be socialism
or barbarism’ proved to be wrong also: what we got in Stalinism
was a socialist barbarian, and the corpses are still being counted. As
for liberalism, its state of crisis is obvious, so much so that even
Fukuyama has renounced his notion of the end of history.
There should be no holds barred in the pursuit of squashed
birds. Russia and China like to present themselves as partisans of a
new multi-centric world order in which all ways of life will coexist
as equal and in which Western colonial economic and ideological
domination will finally be swept away. In this rhetoric we might see
whole cages of squashed birds swept aside with the West, not only
economic and political but also the flattening of feminism, gay
rights and general human freedoms. A fairly recent example might
be the debate that took place in the Ugandan parliament in
February 2023 as the legislature contemplated a further toughening
of the anti-gay law – where the most radical proponents demanded
the death penalty, or at least life imprisonment, for those caught in
the act. Anita Among, speaker of the parliament, stated: ‘You are
either with us, or you’re with the Western world.’1 We live in an era
of unholy alliances, collaborations and conjunctions of ideological
forces which disrupt the standard binary of Left and Right.
Feminist, gay and trans struggles are denounced as an instrument
of Western ideological colonialism used to undermine African
identity. If this type of thinking continues to be allowed to define
the debate, the possibility of being a gay Ugandan, a feminist
Ugandan, a trans Ugandan can be redefined out of existence;
another casualty of a narrow definition of ‘progress’.
The miserable reality is that the promise of decolonization can
be co-opted as a screen for other processes, its liberatory potential
caught in the vicelike grip of a too-rigid definition of what moving
forward means, and suffocated. The people of numerous African
countries, from Angola to Zimbabwe, exist under more or less
corrupt social systems in which the gap between the ‘masters’ and
the poor majority – the gap in wealth, in power, in privileges
and freedom – is arguably even wider than under colonial rule.
‘Decolonization’ in these circumstances can function almost as a
metaphor for the emergence of new class-based hierarchies. While

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 P R O G R E S S A N D I T S V IC I S SI T U D E S

there are, of course, a myriad of arguments that one can advance

against any suggestion that things were ‘better’ under colonial rule,
if we fail to recognize the potential for decolonial movements to be
absorbed into problematic regimes, the new Right will do it for us
(as they are already doing in the case of South Africa, bloviating
about the inability of Black people to run the country ‘properly’.)
Mao said: ‘Revolution is not a dinner party.’ But what if the reality
after the revolution is even less of a dinner party? This in no way
implies that we should abandon progress – we should rather
redefine it, and the first step towards doing so is to be able to
acknowledge uncomfortable realities, even those which appear
squalid and mangled, and especially those we find shameful and
grievous and which seem to have no remedy. We need less squashed
birds hidden in trunks while we applaud the false living bird
distracting us from capitalist corruption and authoritarian power.
The two articles Marx wrote on India in 1893 (‘The British Rule
in India’ and ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’), usually
dismissed by postcolonial scholars as embarrassing cases of Marx’s
‘Eurocentrism’, are today more interesting than ever. Marx outlines,
without restraint, the brutality and exploitative hypocrisy of the
British colonization of India, right up to the systematic use of
torture prohibited in the West but ‘outsourced’ to Indians (really
there is nothing new under the sun – these were the Guantanamos
of nineteenth-century British India): ‘The profound hypocrisy and
inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before
our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable
forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.’2 All Marx adds is that
England has broken down the entire framework of Indian
society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing.
This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a
particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the
Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its
ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history. [. . .]
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan,
was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her
manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The
question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental

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revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have

been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of
history in bringing about that revolution.3
Despite the mention of ‘destiny’, one should not wholly dismiss the
notion of the ‘unconscious tool of history’ as naive teleology, an
ends-justify-the-means fatalistic ‘trust into the Cunning of Reason
which makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress’. The
point Marx is making is simply that the British colonization of
India created conditions for the double liberation of India: from
the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization
itself . . . Today, of course, such a standpoint appears all too naive –
now we know how the British colonizers destroyed local industries
in India and provoked havoc with tens of millions dead. Of course,
we would never say that the horrors of colonization were worth
the price of progressing towards some nebulous utopian future.
A much more modest stance should be adopted: Great Britain’s
actions in India were inexcusable and the direct outcome a
devastating catastrophe; however, once this catastrophe happened,
it opened up a new path for India. That ‘however’ is an uncomfortable
adverb to dwell in, but it remains open to hope as neater historical
narratives do not.
When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer delineate the
contours of the emerging late-capitalist ‘administered world’
(verwaltete Welt), they are presenting it as coinciding with barbarism,
as the point at which civilization itself returns to barbarism. A kind
of negative telos of the whole progress of Enlightenment, as the
Nietzschean kingdom of the Last Men: ‘One has one’s little pleasure
for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard
for health. “We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they
blink.’4 At the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer nevertheless
warn against the more direct ‘ontic’ catastrophes (different forms
of terror, etc.). The liberal-democratic society of Last Men is thus
unimaginably awful, the only problem being that all other societies
are worse, so that the choice appears as one between bad and worse
(or a rock and a hard place). The ambiguity is here irreducible: on the
one hand, the ‘administered world’ is the final catastrophic outcome
of the Enlightenment; on the other hand, the ‘normal’ societal path is

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continually threatened by catastrophes, from war and terror to

ecological disasters. We are required to battle these ‘ontic’ catastrophes
(what we experience as catastrophic events in our social reality)
while simultaneously bearing in mind that the ultimate catastrophe
is the apparently ‘normal’ structures and rhythms of the ‘administered
world’. In other words, we are walking a kind of Moebius path: if we
progress far enough on one side, we reach our starting point again.
Does the same not hold for progressivism in general? After centuries
in which visionaries of all stripes dreamed of what humanity might
achieve together. the only indubitable ‘progressive’ goal that humanity
can pursue today, in view of ecological and other threats, is to simply
survive.
The possibilities and pitfalls of technological and scientific
advancement have been the stuff of centuries’ worth of dreaming
about human progress, yet here too we find ourselves treading a
viciously circular path. Free development, experimentation and
research leads to Artificial Intelligence, which not only threatens to
supplant the human mind but is intended specifically to overcome
its limitations, to replicate humanity without its frailties. Leaving
aside more abstract questions about what this would look like and
mean should it be achieved, one does not have to look very far for
the dead birds littering the path to ‘progress’ like autumn leaves,
from the astronomical energy costs burdening a burning planet to
the people whose jobs will increasingly be done by AI. This is what
blind commitment to an uncritically adopted idea of ‘progress’
looks like; proponents of AI talk about the freedom it brings, but
are vague on freedom from what, for who and what for. Freedom
for humanity to dedicate itself to leisure, art or meditation? Or
freedom for an oligarchy of technocrats from the slightest tethering
to the social contract, in exchange for reducing humanity to a cog
in the endless self-reproduction of AI?
This brings us to the relationship between progress and freedom.
The axiom of modern philosophy is that progress is, at its most
fundamental, progress in freedom. (This is how Hegel conceives
the development of the entire history of humanity: in Oriental
despotism only the despot is free; in antique slavery only the few
are free; and with Christianity all are free.) However, problems with
the definition of freedom explode here from the very beginning.

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Within the Enlightenment tradition, there is true freedom only

if all are equally free, while for conservative liberals equality
limits freedom; then there is the opposition between individual
freedom and collective freedom (freedom of a nation advocated by
fascism). For socialists, freedom is actual only when its material
and institutional conditions are present (free education and press,
healthcare), while for liberal conservatives, such measures already
limit the full freedom of individuals (recall how US Republicans
opposed Obamacare, claiming that it will limit the freedom to
choose your own doctor).
The issue is further complicated by the post-1960s shift away
from economic and political freedom to cultural freedom. Why,
after the 1960s, have so many problems come to be perceived as
problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation,
injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation,
political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer is the
‘culturalization of politics’, in which political differences, differences
conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation and
so forth are neutralized into ‘cultural’ differences, different ‘ways
of life’, which are something given, something that cannot be
overcome, but merely ‘tolerated’. The response to this shift comes in
Benjaminian terms: from culturalization of politics to politicization
of culture. The cause of this culturalization is the retreat or failure of
direct political solutions, such as the welfare state, socialist projects,
attempts to do, to build. Tolerance is the post-political ersatz of these
solutions:
The retreat from more substantive visions of justice heralded by
the promulgation of tolerance today is part of a more general
depoliticization of citizenship and power and retreat from
political life itself. The cultivation of tolerance as a political end
implicitly constitutes a rejection of politics as a domain in which
conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a domain
in which citizens can be transformed by their participation.5
The squashed dead bird here is politics itself. And this bird remains
squashed even after the rise of the Rightist new populism: the
conflict between the liberal centre and the new Right, political as it
may appear, still excludes emancipatory politics proper.

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Progress as Redemption

How, then, should we orient ourselves in this mess? Our starting

point should be that there is no such thing as progress in general:
progress is the inner development of a system, the gradual
actualization of its potentials, so it all depends on which system
serves as a point of reference. The most radical vision of (quite
literally) universal progress was proposed by the so-called
‘bio-cosmism’, a strange combination of vulgar materialism and
Gnostic spirituality which formed the obscene secret teaching of
Soviet Marxism. Repressed out of public sight in the central
(Stalinist) period of the Soviet state, bio-cosmism was openly
propagated only in the first and in the last two decades of the Soviet
rule; its main theses are that the goals of religion (collective
paradise, overcoming of all suffering, full individual immortality,
resurrection of the dead, victory over time and death, conquest of
space far beyond the solar system) can be realized in terrestrial life
through the development of modern science and technology. In
the future, not only will sexual difference be abolished, with the
rise of chaste post-humans perpetuating themselves through direct
bio-technical reproduction; it will also be possible to resurrect all
the dead of the past (establishing their biological formula through
their remains and then re-engendering them), thus even erasing all
past injustices, ‘undoing’ past suffering and destruction. In this
bright bio-political communist future, not only humans, but also
animals, all living beings, will participate in a directly collectivized
Reason of the cosmos. (Note that today’s proponents of ‘the
Singularity’ advocate a similar vision.)
Today more than ever, we should leave this notion of global
progress behind and insist on its localized character. A sign of
genuine progress is, paradoxically enough, our becoming aware of
this localization, of the embeddedness of progress in the system
which it is actively evolving. This means that we also become aware
of the multiplicities, the complexities and – inevitably – the
inconsistencies of what presents itself as progress.
Consider an apparently minor phenomenon which compels us
to redefine the predominant notion of progress. In July 2024, the
media reported on a growing number of Chinese workers swapping

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high-pressure office jobs for flexible blue-collar work. Li, 27, from
Wuhan said:
I like cleaning up. As living standards improve (across the
country), the demand for housekeeping services is also surging
with an ever-expanding market. The change it brings is that my
head no longer feels dizzy. I feel less mental pressure. And I am
full of energy every day.6
This flies in the face of several major assumptions about what
constitutes ‘progress’, including the idea that having an office job is
more desirable, prestigious and lucrative than blue-collar work,
and that this is a small price to pay for long hours and high pressure.
So is this trend a sign of progress? And if it is, how should we
redefine our notion of progress? Should we leave behind standard
topics like pay inequality and gender representation in social life
and shift the focus on to personal, individual satisfaction? Or would
we, by doing so, be engaging in precisely the type of retreat from
the possibility of political participation, political change which
I discussed above as the culturalization of politics? We must
recognize that progress is never a linear approximation to some
pre-existing goal since every step forward that deserves the name
‘progress’ implies a radical redefinition of the very notion of
progress – progress needs to be constantly redefined, and this
redefinition is a crucial part of progress.
True progress thus occurs in two steps: first, we make a step
towards actualizing what we consider progress, and when we
become aware of the squashed bird that was the victim of this
progress, we then accordingly redefine our notion of progress. It is
in this sense that I define myself as a moderately-conservative
communist: in order to survive we need a radical re-arrangement
of our entire way of life towards some form of global solidarity and
cooperation, but the urgent need to achieve this goal brings new
dangers, so we should act with urgency and care.
An illusion is never simply an illusion: it is not enough to make
the old Marxist point about the gap between the ideological
appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests
that effectively sustain it – as is so common amongst ‘-correct’
critics on the Left. The counter-argument that the form is never a

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‘mere’ form, but involves a dynamic of its own which leaves traces
in the materiality of social life, made by Jacques Rancière, is fully
valid. After all, the ‘formal freedom’ of the bourgeois sets in motion
the process of ‘material’ political demands and practices, from trade
unions to feminist movements. Rancière rightly emphasizes the
radical ambiguity of the Marxist notion of the gap between formal
democracy with its discourse of the rights of man and political
freedom and the economic reality of exploitation and domination.
This gap between the ‘appearance’ of equality-freedom and the
social reality of economic and cultural differences can either be
interpreted in the standard symptomatic way – that is, that the
form of universal rights, equality, freedom and democracy is just
a necessary but illusory expression of its concrete social content,
the universe of exploitation and class domination. Or it can be
interpreted in the much more subversive sense of a tension in
which the ‘appearance’ of égaliberté is precisely not a ‘mere
appearance’ but has a power of its own. This power allows it to set
in motion the process of the re-articulation of actual socio-
economic relations by way of their progressive ‘politicization’: why
shouldn’t women also vote? Why shouldn’t workplace conditions
be of public political concern?, etc. If the bourgeois freedom is
merely formal and doesn’t disturb the true relations of power, why,
then, didn’t the Stalinist regime allow it? Why was it so afraid of it?
In the opposition between form and content, the form possesses an
autonomy of its own – one can almost say a content of its own. This
content cannot be dismissed as merely covering the broken, bloody
bodies within.
One of the reliable measures of authentic progress is a negative
one: in true ethical progress, something previously perceived as
more or less normal (slavery, direct oppression of women, torture)
simply becomes impossible – if one tries to justify it, one appears as
an eccentric idiot. The reverse is also true: when, as is the case today,
the acceptability of torture again becomes a matter of public debate,
we are for sure witnessing an ethical regression. Following a true
progressive historical break, one simply cannot return to the past,
one cannot go on as if nothing happened – if one does, the same
practice acquires a radically changed meaning. Adorno deftly
illustrated this point by using the example of Schoenberg’s atonal

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

revolution: after it took place, one could, of course, go on composing

in the traditional tonal way (and one does), but the resulting music
has lost its innocence, since it is already ‘mediated’ by the atonal
break and thus functions as its negation. And the same goes for all
domains: after the emergence of philosophical analysis of notions
with Plato, mythical thought lost its immediacy, all revival of it is a
fake; after the emergence of Christianity, all revivals of paganism
are a nostalgic fake.
Last but not least, there are moments which we could call ‘eternal’
(falling in love, a supreme artistic achievement) where the idea of
progress simply doesn’t apply – moments which are absolute in
themselves. There is a story that Italian composer Gioachino Rossini
was asked who the greatest composer was; he responded, ‘Beethoven.’
When his interlocutor asked,‘But what about Mozart?’, Rossini calmly
quipped: ‘Mozart is not the best composer, he is the only composer!’
But there are also political events in which echoes of eternity interrupt
temporal life. In his late ‘Conflict of Faculties’, Kant addresses a simple
but difficult question: Was there true progress in history? (He meant
ethical progress in terms of freedom, not just material developments.)
Kant conceded that actual history is confused and allows for no clear
proof of progress (think of how the twentieth century brought
unprecedented democracy and welfare, but also the Holocaust and
the gulag). He concluded that, although progress cannot be proven,
we can discern signs that progress is possible. Kant interpreted the
French Revolution as such a sign – a sign pointing towards the
possibility of freedom. The hitherto unthinkable happened – a whole
people fearlessly asserted their freedom and equality. For Kant, even
more important than the – often bloody – reality of what went on in
the streets of Paris was the enthusiasm that the events in France
prompted in sympathetic observers around Europe:
The recent Revolution of a people which is rich in spirit, may
well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity, it
nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators (who are
not themselves caught up in it) a taking of sides according to
desires which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very
expression was not without danger, can only have been caused
by a moral disposition within the human race.7

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 P R O G R E S S A N D I T S V IC I S SI T U D E S

If it sounds all too easy to dismiss the bloodiness of reality, one

should note that the enthusiasm generated by the French Revolution
swept not only Europe, but also places like Haiti; and the enthusiasm
there was not only that of dispassionate Kantian observers, but an
engaged, practical one – a key moment of another world-historical
event: enslaved Black people fighting for full participation in the
emancipatory project of the French Revolution.
German Idealism disrupts the standard Aristotelian ontology
which is structured around the vector running from possibility
to actuality. In contrast to the idea that every possibility strives
to fully actualize itself, one should conceive of ‘progress’ as a move
of restoring the dimension of potentiality to mere actuality, of
unearthing, in the very heart of actuality, a secret striving towards
potentiality. Recall Walter Benjamin’s notion of revolution as
redemption-through-repetition of the past:8 where the French
Revolution, for example, is concerned, the task of a true Marxist
historiography is not to describe events the way they really were
(and to explain how these events generated the ideological illusions
that accompanied them). The task is rather to unearth the hidden
potentiality, the utopian emancipatory potentials, which were
betrayed in the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome, the
rise of utilitarian market capitalism. Equally, we could reconsider
decolonization as an open-ended, ongoing experience which
contains multitudes of possibility: the liberatory potential of
African ways of being, organizing, living which are not constrained
by the polarizing rigidities of ‘Western’ or ‘African’. The point of
Marx is not primarily to make fun of the wild hopes of the Jacobins’
revolutionary enthusiasm, to point out how their high emancipatory
rhetoric was just a means used by the historical ‘cunning of reason’
to establish the vulgar commercial capitalist reality; it is to explain
how these betrayed radical-emancipatory potentials continue to
‘insist’ as a kind of historical spectres and to haunt the revolutionary
memory, demanding their enactment, so that the later proletarian
revolution should also redeem (put to rest) all these past ghosts. In
short, a true progress also aims at retroactively redeeming all the
squashed birds of the past progresses – not redeeming them in
reality (the bio-cosmist dream), but redeeming the potentiality that
was present in them.

11
12
 Against Progress

Consider oxycodone.
The prescription pain medication, an opioid drug like morphine,
codeine and methadone, was discovered in Germany in 1917.
During World War II, it was widely used by the Nazis to keep their
soldiers impervious to pain and suffering (Adolf Hitler’s doctor
Theodor Morrell gave it regularly to Hitler himself). Its most
popular form was OxyContin (often referred to as ‘Oxy’), developed
in 1995 to provide long-lasting pain relief. Widely prescribed,
OxyContin became associated with serious abuse and addiction
problems. When the patent expired, similar products emerged onto
the market with similarly destructive results.1
Consider Greece’s Syriza party (the Coalition of the Radical
Left—Progressive Alliance, to give it its full name), which on
24 September 2023 elected former Goldman Sachs trader Stefanos
Kasselakis as its leader. Kasselakis, the son of a shipowner and CEO
of a shipping company (with all the symbolic weight this carries in
Greece), was until recently based in Miami. When he made his
entry into politics, he was not shy about openly declaring that for
him, politics was merely a stopgap between business ventures.
Consider BRICS, an acronym for the world’s largest emerging
markets. Many outside the developed West see the coalition of
developing economies, which currently includes Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa (and is soon to be joined by
Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates), as a sign of progress – not merely a new bloc to oppose
the hegemonic Western bloc, but a new kind of economic alliance.
A multiplicity of different cultures peacefully coexisting and
collaborating for the benefit of the world. Consider the Russian
foreign minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech to the UN General

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

Assembly on 23 September 2023, in which he claimed that the

efforts of Western countries to cling to their outsized influence over
‘global affairs’ was doomed:
The rest of the planet is sick of it. They don’t want to live under
anybody’s yoke any more . . . Our future is being shaped by a
struggle, a struggle between the global majority in favour of a
fairer distribution of global benefits and civilized diversity and
between the few who wield neocolonial methods of subjugation
in order to maintain their domination which is slipping through
their hands.
Consider pain. Consider the Left. Consider progress.
The technocratic dream that scientific advancement will alleviate
human suffering produces the ideal capitalist commodity: effective,
addictive, and productive of proliferating side effects. The Left
‘modernizes’ by eschewing ‘old’ battlegrounds like class struggle and
social inequality. Valorizing anything which moves us away from
the colonialism practised by the West leads to nations like Uganda
(which just outlawed homosexuality), Iran (which just quashed a
feminist rebellion), Afghanistan (with its continuing instability) and
North Korea being celebrated as paradigms of anti-colonial ‘civilized
diversity’.
The worst thing that can happen to our concept of progress is to
allow opponents of authentic betterment to define what counts as
progress. Surely any affirmative notion of progress today should
include finding ways to limit the free distribution of products like
oxycodone; should include a Left which rejects the ‘post-political’
and aims to squarely address the gaping inequalities in society;
should include societies which, whatever their flaws, leave space for
self-criticism and internal critique. We should think like Hegel
here: progress is never a linear approximation to some pre-existing
goal since every step forwards that deserves the name ‘progress’
implies a radical redefinition of the very notion of progress. As
Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito conclusively demonstrated in his
ground-breaking contribution to eco-Marxism,2 the only way to
achieve real progress today is to problematize the very notion of
progress which dominates not only our ideology but our actual
lives. Yet, on a burning planet, even this does not go far enough.

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

The paradox is that one of the most radical ideas of authentic

progress comes from an attempt to get rid of the ‘progressist’ aspect
of Marx’s theory. Unlike the ‘modernized’ Left who would like to
leave communist notions behind, Saito’s eco-Marxism envisions
replacing the communist project of unrestrained growth with a
different kind of Leftist thinking: ‘degrowth communism’.
Saito’s aim is neither to prevent the rise of capitalist modernity
nor to combine it with conservative social values and practices (as
different forms of fascism do) but to propose a radical alternative to
the devastating ecological and social consequences of unlimited
capitalist modernization. ‘Degrowth communism’ is really a
misnomer, for Saito does not advocate a project of new austerity –
‘degrowth’ has a precise meaning here, that of rejecting the
unconditional drive towards expanded progress that characterized
even Marx:
At a certain stage of development, the material productive
forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of
production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal
terms – with the property relations within the framework of
which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development
of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the
economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation
of the whole immense superstructure.3
And for Marx the same holds true for the transition from capitalism
to communism – this shift becomes a necessity when capitalist
relations become an obstacle for the further development of
productive forces. In Saito’s well-known reading of Marx, he
demonstrates that from 1868 onwards Marx abandoned this
progressist approach and focused more and more on how capitalism’s
ruthless exploitation of nature posed a threat to the very survival of
humanity. He doesn’t mince words here; Saito is well aware that
ecological awareness has been co-opted by mainstream capitalist
ideology to the point that (almost) everybody pays lip service to it.
Which is why Saito’s argument doesn’t target climate-change deniers
but the advocates of ‘sustainable growth’, the central organizing
principle in global responses to climate change. Saito is particularly

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

critical of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), describing

them as ‘the new opium of the masses’: in short, SDGs disavow the
brutal fact that its goals cannot be achieved under a capitalist system.
Instead, Saito promotes his particular vision of degrowth, the
slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of
labour and production: the transition to use-value economy,
against affluence society; decarbonization through shorter working
hours for a higher quality of life; opening up the production process
towards more creativity and meaningfulness; the democratization
of the work-process, so that the decisions will be left to customers
who really need a product; the re-evaluation of essential work as
opposed to bullshit jobs, so that tasks like caregiving become
compensated in accordance with their importance.
Ecosocialist degrowth thus implies the elimination of some
sectors of production (arms, advertising, etc.), radical reduction of
other branches (individual automobiles, for example), but also the
growth of some activities (education, healthcare, adequate housing,
electrical and water infrastructure in the poorer areas or countries,
etc.). Here, however, problems arise. An important critique from
Rafael Bernabe claims that Saito embraces the vision of local
cooperative and municipal initiatives as an alternative to capitalism
and state centralism:
It is hard to see how Saito’s municipal socialism can paralyse the
process of capitalist accumulation, nor is it clear how such local
initiatives can provide a coherent alternative if the relations
between them are structured through the market, in other
words, lacking some form of centralized planning. Ecosocialism
requires far more than cooperative or municipal initiatives: it
demands democratically centralized planning.4
To achieve Saito’s goal, strong, centralized and even, possibly,
dictatorial measures would have to be taken. It is worth noting that
some of these concepts are deeply rooted in Japanese history: did
Japan not already enact a unique collective decision by isolating
itself from the outside world and ‘slowing down’ in 1603, when the
chaos of the Sengkoku period ended? The Edo or Tokugawa period,
which began in 1603 and ended when the Meiji Restoration took
place in 1868, was characterized by strict social order, isolationist

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foreign policies, a stable population, perpetual peace, and popular

enjoyment of arts and culture. In spite of all the deeply problematic
aspects of what took place in Japan in 1603, the Edo period provides
a unique case study of how a society can be determined by a large,
conscious political decision – a kind of collective decision-making
needed today, more than ever.
So the paradox is that to effectively slow down we will have to
mobilize in an as yet undefined way. Saito knows we need to
rehabilitate planning, but this will have to be done in a much more
brutal sense than he envisages. Just think about the global measures
required to cope with global warming, population movements, and
threatened or actual war, not to mention the increasing digital
control over our daily lives. The next problem is that Saito seems
to ignore how, with the latest trends, global capitalism itself is
changing its basic structure to such an extent that it is doubtful if it
should still be called capitalism – or if, to quote Yanis Varoufakis,
‘[c]apitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse.’5 Indeed,
Varoufakis considers this new epoch ‘techno-feudalism’. So the
question remains: Is the notion of capitalism on which Saito bases
his critique still relevant in an age of techno-feudalism?
If progress, at least in part, can be defined as a continual
resistance to fascism then a ‘degrowth’ model which relies on
continual self-sacrifice and moderation and repressed desires can’t
be viewed as a form of progress. The agility of capitalism, its shape-
shifting capacities, will always outrun this model. This brings us to
the exceptional nature of capitalism. Todd MacGowan6 provided
a Lacanian explanation of the resiliency of capitalism, boldly
admitting that, in some (very qualified) sense capitalism effectively
does fit ‘human nature’. In contrast to pre-modern social orders
which obfuscate the paradox of human desire and presume that
desire is structured in a straightforward teleological way (that
humans strive towards some ultimate goal, be it happiness or
another kind of material or spiritual fulfilment, and aim at finding
peace and satisfaction in its achievement), capitalism is the first
and only social order that incorporates into its functioning the
basic paradox of human desire. This is why the imbalance of the
system defines capitalism: capitalism can only thrive through its
own constant self-undermining and revolutionizing.

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

The third problem is an even more basic one: is the vision of

future society imagined by Saito desirable at all, desirable in the
simple sense that the majority of people would find it satisfying?
Do we really think pursuing a future which doesn’t promise
pleasure (or which specifically promises its absence, maybe) can
really be included in a definition of progress most people would
recognize?
Saito imagines a society in which desire is divested of its
constitutive excess and is satisfied by its self-limitation, a society
in which advertising and luxury consumer goods tend to be
eliminated. In this he comes close to a position advocated by
Buddhist economics. As its partisans repeat tirelessly, Buddhism
does not advocate ascetic renunciation of worldly pleasures but the
proper measured balance between wealth and poverty, between
individualism and communal spirit. Indeed, wealth is considered
good if it serves our collective well-being. The Buddhist notion of
the right measure, of ‘just the right amount’, does not refer only to
individuals: it aims at not harming oneself or others, where ‘others’
includes not only other human beings but all that lives. In contrast
to Western individualism, Buddhism advocates a holistic approach:
my well-being depends on the well-being of all others around me,
but also on the balanced exchange with nature. No wonder, then,
that Buddhist economics advocates a constrained/limited desire,
a desire controlled by spirit, deprived of its excessive nature. In
advocating this, it relies on a knowledge of the distinction between
true desires and false desires. False desires are desires for pleasure
attained through the consumption of sensual objects or through
their possession, and they are by definition insatiable, bottomless
appetites, always striving for more. True desires are characterized
by their drive towards well-being, and to arrive at this state, a
rational mind has to regulate and contain sensual desires. We thus
arrive at an opposition between limitless sensual desires and the
spiritual desire for well-being. As Buddhist economics advocate
Ven. P. A. Payutto puts it:
Consumption may satisfy sensual desires, but its true purpose is
to provide well-being. For example, our body depends on food
for nourishment. Consumption of food is thus a requirement

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for well-being. For most people, however, eating food is also a

means to experience pleasure. If in consuming food one receives
the experience of a delicious flavor, one is said to have satisfied
one’s desires.7
From my Lacanian standpoint, it is here that problems arise: what
Buddhist economics aims at is a desire deprived of its excess, which
is precisely what makes it a human desire! It is enjoyment deprived
of its constitutive surplus. When we eat, we almost never do it just
for our long-term spiritual and physical well-being: we do it mostly
in a joyless way to satisfy our hunger, or we do it for the pleasure
of eating, and it is this pleasure, not its subordination to some
higher goal, which makes us human. However, this pleasure is
never simply bodily, it cannot be reduced to satisfaction of a
physical need. Our desire, even when it appears as a craving for
some physical satisfaction, is always pervaded by an obscene
spiritual dimension of a limitless expansion, which is why no
physical object or act can pacify it. The opposition between false
limitless desires which only bring suffering and the authentic
spiritual desire for well-being thus appears problematic: sensual
desires are in themselves moderate, constrained to their direct
goals; they become infinite and self-destructive only when they
are infected by a spiritual dimension. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling knew that spirituality is self-destructive in its longing for
infinity, which is why evil is much more spiritual than our sensual
reality. In other words, the root of Evil is not our egotism but, on the
contrary, a perverted self-destructive spirituality which can prompt
unnecessary personal self-sacrifice. Think of The Turn of the Screw,
where the governess’s determination to ‘save’ the children in her
care from the unholy evil of contaminating sensuality leads to one
child’s death – possibly, depending on one’s reading of the text, a
death literally caused by the governess’s smothering love.
This dimension, of a destructive excess which is in itself spiritual,
is missing in Buddhist economics, which is why its declared goal of
the proper measure, when one attempts to practice it, tends to end
up in some form of (not always) soft fascism. The basic feature
of every fascist project is that of a conservative modernization: to
engage in industrial and scientific modernization while keeping its

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destructive effects under check through a stable authoritarian power

grounded in some traditional ideology. The paradox is that, because
we desire the surplus that eludes every object, our very orientation
towards pleasure and satisfaction compels us to permanently
sacrifice available satisfactions on behalf of satisfactions to come –
in capitalism, hedonism and asceticism coincide. Fascism tries to
square this circle by way of containing it within a vision of society as
an organic unity of its members. However, once we are in capitalism,
there is no way back, which is why, instead of aiming at a return to
some version of organic unity with nature, we have to do the exact
opposite and denaturalize nature itself. Not only does being human
involve a rupture between ourselves and nature, we should take a
step further and admit that nature is in itself ‘unnatural’. Nature is
not a stable homeostatic system derailed by human hubris, it is full
of self-destructive excesses and perturbances. The very idea of being
able to move forward (let alone meaningfully address) the climate
crisis is dependent upon a total reorientation of our sense of reality
and our relationships to the phenomenological world.
The true source of our problems is not then, as Timothy Morton
would have it, ‘the most significant event to affect Western culture
during recent centuries’, namely the ‘breakdown of the relationship
between man and nature’ and the retreat of the relation of
confidence.8 On the contrary: this very ‘relationship of faith with
reality itself ’9 is the main obstacle that prevents us from confronting
the ecological crisis at its most radical. That is to say, with regard to
the prospects of an ecological catastrophe, it is too short-sighted to
attribute our disbelief in the catastrophe to the impregnation of our
mind by scientific ideology which leads us to dismiss the sane
concerns of our common reason, the gut instinct that tells us that
something is fundamentally wrong with the scientific-technological
attitude. The problem is much deeper, it resides in the unreliability
of our common sense itself which, habituated as it is to our ordinary
life-world, finds it difficult to truly accept that our everyday reality
can be disrupted. Our attitude here is that of the fetishist split:
‘I know very well (that global warming is a threat to the entire
humanity), but nonetheless . . . (I cannot really believe it). It is
enough to look at the surroundings to which my mind is wired: the
green grass and trees, the whistle of the wind, the rising of the sun

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

. . . can this really all be disturbed?’ The difficult ethical task is thus
to ‘un-learn’ the most basic coordinates of our immersion into our
life-world: what once served as the recourse to Wisdom (the basic
trust in the background coordinates of our world) is now the
source of mortal danger.
Greta Thunberg was right when she claimed that politicians
should listen to science – the line in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal,
‘Die Wunde schliest der Speer nur, der Sie schlug’ (‘The wound can
only be healed by the spear that made it’) thus acquires a new
actuality. Today’s threats are not primarily external (earthquakes,
asteroids hitting our planet) but self-generated by the human
activity permeated by science (the ecological consequences of our
industry, the psychic consequences of uncontrolled biogenetics,
etc.), so that sciences are simultaneously (one of) the source(s) of
risks and the sole medium we have to grasp and define the threats.
Even if we blame the scientific-technological civilization for global
warming, we need the same science not only to define the scope of
the threat, but to perceive the threat in the first place.
What we do not need is a science that rediscovers its grounding
in pre-modern wisdom, because traditional wisdom is precisely
something that prevents us from perceiving the real threat of
ecological catastrophes. Wisdom ‘intuitively’ tells us to trust Mother
Nature, the nature which is the stable ground of our being – but it
is precisely this stable ground which is undermined by modern
science and technology. So we need a science that is decoupled
from both poles, from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as
from traditional wisdom, a science which could finally stand on
its own.

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22
 Acceleration

Accelerationism, a recent form of historic determinism, is a

notion whose basic core should not be confused with its different
versions and aspects (neofeudalism against egalitarian democracy,
abundancy communism, and so on). The impulse at the heart of
accelerationism is clearly articulated by Nick Land in the title of his
book on Georges Bataille, The Thirst for Annihilation.1 Land’s
message is this: capitalism equals deterritorialization, a permanent
intensification of development, a once-and-for-all overcoming
of all stable forms of social life. In defiance of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, Land insists that there is no other effective
deterritorialization: all attempts in this direction (especially the
Leftist ones) got stuck and were consumed by capitalism. However,
this accelerating process doesn’t go on endlessly: a final moment is
inscribed into its logic, the moment of the self-abolition or self-
overcoming of humanity, when we will no longer be mortal humans
confined to our bodies but realize our fantasies of becoming
directly connected as one collective mind. As the title of Land’s
collected writings – Fanged Noumena2 – indicates, the idea is
that at this point, the Kantian distinction between phenomena
(ordinary reality we experience) and noumena (the way things are
in themselves) will break down and we will directly experience
the noumenal Real. How is this to be achieved? One of the key
foundations of this acceleration is the explosive development of
Artificial Intelligence which will inevitably lead to the rise of the
Singularity, a nightmarish/blissful Godlike collective self-awareness
which will engulf individuals, depriving them of their singular
selves, absorbing us into one glorious whole.
In the face of overwhelming humanist pessimism about what
will become of us in the new world permeated by AI, accelerationism

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

thus joyfully celebrates the self-extinction of humanity. However,

this stance is far from asserting what Sigmund Freud called ‘death-
drive’; it rather amounts to its thorough denial. The headlong,
exuberant rush towards a zero point is deterministic teleology at its
worst: history has a preordained endpoint, and our gleeful push to
reach it is joy at its purest. The Freudian death-drive, on the
contrary, describes a process of endless procrastination, of missing
the (final) point over and over again. As a close reading of Freud
quickly demonstrates, the death-drive was the name he gave to a
weird obscene immortality, a drive which insists on existence
beyond the binary of life and death; what in horror is called
undeath, the living dead. The accelerationist push towards self-
annihilation is not actually a death-drive but simply a desire to
reach the end. Like the shocked observers in King Lear, reacting to
the sight of the slain Cordelia in her father’s arms – ‘Is this the
promised end? / Or image of that horror?’ – accelerationism posits
that worse than annihilation is the perpetual postponement of that
annihilation, the horrifying idea that the nadir might be endlessly
deferred.
The term ‘dark Enlightenment’ used by Land3 is fully justified:
accelerationism brings the logic of incessant progress that
characterizes the Enlightenment to its extreme endpoint. And the
end that accelerationism desires is above all the end of politics as
we know it: it imagines a society which will eradicate the social
antagonisms that animate, that constitute, political life. (One should
note here that Lenin too envisioned a society without politics: he
wrote that Bolsheviks foresaw a future era in which social decisions
would be made by depoliticized specialists.)
It is its naivety about process which makes accelerationism all too
optimistic: before the post-political Singularity can be reached, we –
humanity – have to confront much more immediate self-destructive
possibilities, from ecological catastrophes and global war to social
chaos, where politics at its most forceful will have to intervene. Even
if this longed-for state of Singularity is achieved, it
is immanently false: what it presents as a post-human future is
a fantasy which remains rooted in our (human) finitude and
mortality, its emergence is predicated upon us remaining finite
mortal beings. To put it in speculative philosophical terms: humanity’s

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 AC C E L E R AT IO N

historical existence is not the ultimate reality, it emerges out of a

(pre-) ontological gap called by Martin Heidegger ‘ontological
difference’, and by G.W.F. Hegel ‘self-relating negativity’. Any vision of
Singularity just avoids or obfuscates this gap, it doesn’t really abolish
or overcome it. Of course humanity can annihilate itself in many
ways, but what will follow can’t be anticipated. Hopes to the contrary
are merely wishful thinking, wistful projections into that abyss.
The vision of the future described by accelerationism is more
than a tendency. It is one of the ‘superposed’ determinations of our
future which, to paraphrase Jean-Pierre Dupuy, if it happens will
appear as having always been necessary. Dupuy’s thinking is an
important antidote to the too-simplistic view that there are two
possibilities: catastrophe (whether military, ecological or social) or
recovery. What we have instead are two superposed necessities.4
In our predicament, it is necessary that there will be a global
catastrophe; the logic of our entire history as a species demands it.
And it is necessary that we act to prevent it, because the alternative
is in a very literal sense unthinkable and because the dereliction
involved in failing to act is unforgivable. In a collision of these two
superposed necessities, only one of them will actualize itself, so that
in either case our history will (have) be(en) necessary:
There are no alternative possible futures since the future is
necessary. Instead of exclusive disjunction there is a superposition
of states. Both the escalation to extremes and the absence of one
are part of a fixed future: it is because the former figures in it that
deterrence has a chance to work; it is because the latter figures in it
that the adversaries are not bound to destroy each other. Only the
future, when it comes to pass, will tell.
Our ultimate horizon is what Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed
point”, the zero point of nuclear war, ecological breakdown, global
economic and social chaos, or some other currently unimaginable
apocalypse. Even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero point is
the virtual ‘attractor’ towards which our reality, left to itself, tends.
The only way to combat this future catastrophe is through acts
which interrupt our passive drifting towards this ‘fixed point’.5 In an
interview in September 2023, the retired Russian Major General
Alexander Vladimirov described one such ‘fixed point’ when he

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warned that nuclear war was the ‘inevitable’ conclusion of Russia’s

invasion of Ukraine:
‘For the transition to the use of weapons of mass destruction, only
one thing is needed – a political decision by the Supreme
Commander-in-Chief [Vladimir Putin]’, the veteran commander
warned in an interview with journalist Vladislav Shurygin. ‘The
goals of Russia and the goals of the West are their survival and
historical eternity. And this means that in the name of this, all
means of armed struggle available to them will be used, including
such a tool as their nuclear weapons. . . . I am sure that nuclear
weapons will be used in this war – inevitably, and from this
neither we nor the enemy have anywhere to go.’6
A few months before this interview, Christopher Nolan’s film
Oppenheimer was released. Its use of the Bhagavad Gita during an
intimate scene angered many Indian moviegoers, some of whom
took to Twitter, wondering how the censorship board cleared the
scene. A statement from the Save Culture Save India Foundation said:
We do not know the motivation and logic behind this
unnecessary scene [in the] life of a scientist. A scene in the
movie shows a woman mak[ing] a man read Bhagwad Geeta
aloud while getting over him and doing sexual intercourse’7
My reaction to this scene is exactly the opposite: Bhagavad Gita
advocates a horrible ethics of military slaughter as an act of highest
duty, so we should protest that a gentle act of passionate lovemaking
is besmirched by a spiritualist obscenity. Is Vladimirov not doing
something similar in the quoted passage? He presents a self-
destructive murderous passion in terms of a higher ‘historical
eternity’. In order to find our way in the ongoing mess, we should
follow the example (arguably) set by Nolan and bring out the
horror which sustains the ‘spiritualization’ of carnal passion.
The caution issued by Vladimirov should absolutely not be
dismissed as a mere strategic threat in the ongoing Ukrainian war:
even if it was meant like that, it possesses its own remorseless logic
which can push actors to actualize what they thought was only a
threat. Clearly, we are already beyond the logic of MAD (mutually
assured destruction) which prevented nuclear catastrophe during the

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 AC C E L E R AT IO N

Cold War: mutual destruction is simply presented as inevitable since

‘neither we nor the enemy have anywhere to go’ . . . Key to
understanding this seeming lack of recourse is Vladimirov’s claim
that ‘the goals of Russia and the goals of the West are their survival
and historical eternity’ – what does the strange term ‘historical
eternity’ mean here? It’s a clue to the situation as understood by high-
ranking Russian military personnel, as reliant on a series of radical
choices: as if Russia, no less than Ukraine, is fighting for survival and
thus neither has any way to de-escalate the situation. (Of course, this
is wildly contrary to the facts as the rest of the world understands
them: that Russia denies Ukraine’s very identity and right to exist,
while nobody expressed any intention to, or interest in, changing
Russia’s borders.) Russia is also fighting for survival only if we
understand ‘Russia’ to mean something, literally, much larger: the
geographical space occupied by imperial Russia, by the Soviet Union.
This understanding is reminiscent of Anatoly Formenko’s ‘new
chronology’, which posits (among other things) that all the great
cities and empires of history are mere conspiratorial refractions of
Moscow and the ‘Russian Horde’. What is eternal in ‘historical eternity’
is the enduring idea of Russia at its greatest, its most expansive. This
is why Vladimirov doesn’t invoke the excuse of Russia’s justified
defence against the Ukrainian attack; he even uses the expression
‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’ – we are in the realm of manifest destiny,
of the fates of great nations, of a battle to the death where such minor
questions as ‘who started it?’ become insignificant. ‘Let’s not bicker
and argue about who killed who’, as Monty Python would have it.
So what is to be done? To begin with, one should read the
situation closely to detect signs which may point in a direction
different from the simplistic linear development towards doom. In
mid-September 2023, it was reported that a human trafficking ring
had been uncovered in Cuba which had ‘aimed at recruiting Cubans
to fight as mercenaries for Russia in its war in Ukraine’. The Cuban
foreign ministry issued a statement announcing the discovery of
the network and that authorities were working to ‘neutralize and
dismantle’ it.8 One should, of course, immediately ask the question:
did Cuba, a tightly controlled country, really ‘discover’ such a ring
so suddenly? They must have known about it for quite some time,
so the real question becomes: Why did the Cuban government

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

decide to make this ‘discovery’ public at this moment, and to end

the network’s activities? Does it mean that even Cuba, staunch
supporter of Russia in its war against Ukraine, decided to distance
itself from Russia’s dangerous adventure?
_________________________________________________________

More generally, the only possible principled and at the same

time pragmatic approach is one of disavowal: to take cognizance of
Russian nuclear threats but ignore them at the level of diplomacy
and military strategy. The worst thing to do is to succumb to
Russia’s blackmail and follow the logic of ‘we shouldn‘t provoke
Russia too much’ – one should continue to help Ukraine while
making it clear that no one wants to appropriate any part of Russian
territory (in its borders before the occupation of Crimea, of course).
Russia should be pushed into a position in which it will be clear
that, if it uses nuclear weapons, it did this of its own volition, not in
desperate reaction to an existential threat to its territory.
And this brings us back to our starting point: accelerationism.
Its basic weakness is that it is too static: the radical change it
envisages is just the ultimate conclusion of one of the tendencies
within the existing world order – in its very utopian vision of a
post-human society, it utterly fails to interrogate the basic
coordinates of this world order. We live in a strange time in which
the scenario of a global nuclear war neutrally coexists with the
culture war of populist neocons against Cancel Culture, while in
the developed West life mostly appears to go on as usual – in the
summer of 2023, people in Europe mostly worried about the
possibility that bad weather and flight cancellations would ruin
their holidays . . . Our true madness resides in this peaceful
coexistence of radically different options: it is possible we will all
perish in a nuclear war, but what really annoys us is Cancel Culture
or populist excesses, and ultimately we don’t really care even about
this but just about our daily lives. Rationally we know these three
levels (not to mention ecological disasters) are interconnected, but
we continue to act as if they are not. The only ethico-political
imperative is thus a negative one: the plurality of today’s crises
makes it clear that things cannot go on the way they are now – how
we proceed is a matter of risk and improvisations.

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 Holographic History

Are we living in a hologram? Originally proposed by Juan

Malcadena in 1997, the idea that the universe itself is a hologram
– that the three-dimensional reality which we inhabit is the
projected image of something etched on an unimaginably distant
two-dimensional surface – is by now familiar to theoretical
physicists and consumers of popular science.1 Could the political
and social world that we currently inhabit be read the same way?
Quantum mechanics defines a hologram as an image of an object
which catches not only its actual state but also its interference
pattern with other possibilities that were lost when the final state is
actualized. Is this the way we live now, in an unbearably prolonged
burst of crackling static as different futures teeter on the brink
of collapse and consolidation? There is no longer one notion of
progress which dominates our vision of past, present and future
(even the usual mainstay headline of economic development is
no longer convincing). We live in an era of the superposition of
different universal visions of progress, each of them leading to
a different inevitable future. The leading contenders seem to be:
remnants of the Francis Fukuyama vision of the end of history;
religious fundamentalism; and especially what I can only call a
moderately-authoritarian soft fascism – the fusion of market
capitalism with a strong state, mobilizing nationalist ideology to
maintain social cohesion.
My suspicion is that this soft fascist option won’t be effective
against the threats we face today, and that a new form of communism
will have to be invented. The ongoing geoengineering impasse
makes the need for global cooperation brutally clear – it’s the only
way global warming can be addressed. The west coast of the US has
been experiencing horrific prolonged heatwaves and the authorities’

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

‘plan’ is to spray gases above the sea near the coast, to block the heat
from the sun rays from reaching the earth. Critics have pointed out
that this spraying idea is risky not only because it may cause
unpredictable damage in the area itself, but because it could shift
atmospheric conditions elsewhere so that heat domes will just be
displaced and re-emerge in other parts of the earth, most likely in
Western Europe.2 An example of how the effects of global warming
can be redistributed (through wealth and power) – the rich
countries will protect themselves at the expense of the poorer ones,
‘outsourcing’ life-threatening weather to them.
The climate catastrophe is the historical necessity that must
surely push us towards global solidarity. However, history is not on
our side (it tends towards our collective suicide). No wonder many
commentators conclude that the battle against global warming is
already lost – the moment has arrived for us to accept this fact and
to rethink our entire strategy.
First, we should abandon the notion of historical progress. As
Walter Benjamin wrote, our task today is not to push the train of
historical progress onwards but to pull the emergency brake before
we all end in post-capitalist barbarism. The complex interplay of
catastrophe, potential and actualized, is uncontrollable and full of
dangers, and such a risky situation makes our moment an eminently
political one. The priority is to respond directly to our predicament:
to prepare for the forthcoming state(s) of emergency which will
become our new quotidian. The paradox is that acting like they will
happen in all their dimensions (from ecological catastrophes to wars
and digital breakdowns) is the only way we might prevent them
actually happening. As Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said: ‘I
know it sounds devastating, especially to people of the younger
generation, but we have to mentally get used to the arrival of a new
era. The pre-war era.’3 He is right, although not unconditionally – the
situation is still in flux, and what we should say, to be more precise, is:
‘If a new world war happens, it will be clear that it has begun back in
2022, with the Russian attack on Ukraine, and that its deployment
was necessary.’ Why this strange paradox of retroactivity? Maybe
quantum mechanics offers a solution here.
While I am still learning about quantum mechanics, I find the
insights it might provide about human history irresistible and one

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of them is that we can read it as ‘holographic’ – as the result of a

series of contingent collapses of superposed possibilities. Such a
conceptualization can provide an antidote to the teleological
necessity which is too often elided into a narrative of universal
progress.
Perhaps the supreme example of what we might call ‘holographic
history’ is provided by none other than Karl Marx. Marx is not an
evolutionist, he writes history ‘top-down’: his starting point is the
contemporary global capitalist order, and from this position he
reads the entire history of human society as a gradual approach to
capitalism. This is not teleology: history is not guided by capitalism
as its telos, but once capitalism emerges, it provides the key to
the entirety of (pre)history: witness Marx’s well-known narrative,
as told in Grundrisse, of linear development from prehistorical
societies through Asiatic despotism, antique slavery, and feudalism
to capitalism. But there is no teleological necessity in this
development; Marx does not claim that it had to be this way, or was
always going to be this way.
Quantum waves describe ‘the world at some kind of pre-existence
level’4 since what exists in – as – our reality is only the outcome of the
collapse of quantum superpositions. At this pre-existence level,
particles ‘follow all possible paths when they move from one point to
another’.5 Consider the well-known double-slit experiment, in which
‘individual electrons follow not one but every possible path from the
gun to the screen. One path takes the electron through the left slit,
another through the right, back out through the left, into a U-turn,
and through the right slit once more.’6 To understand how something
emerges into our reality in a particular form, we have to understand
that it enacted all possible forms, and that these ‘superposed’
forms continue to echo in the final form; like the hologram, it is
indissolubly haunted by the unrealized possibilities it makes visible,
the things it could have become, but did not.7 Along these lines,
Richard Feynman proposed the ‘path integral formulation’ which
replaces the classical notion of a single, unique trajectory for a system
with a sum, or functional integral, over an infinity of quantum-
mechanically possible trajectories to compute a quantum amplitude.
The ‘path integral formulation’ thus suggests that ‘our reality is a sort
of blending — a sum — of all imaginable possibilities’.8

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When the wave function collapses, other possible superpositions

do not simply disappear, they leave their traces etched in the single
reality that emerges. Does something similar not hold for political
struggles? When a peaceful negotiation wins over armed resistance,
armed resistance is inscribed in the result. Media narratives like to
remind us of two examples of the triumph of negotiation: the rise of
the ANC to power in South Africa and the peaceful protests led by
Martin Luther King in the US. In both cases, it is obvious that the
(relative) victory of the peaceful negotiations came about because
the establishment feared violent resistance (from the more radical
wing of the ANC and key figures in the push for racial justice like
Malcolm X). In short, negotiations succeeded because they were
accompanied by the ominous threat of armed struggle; by the
determination and commitment of those willing to fight, a violent
conflict was inscribed as one of the futures hanging in the balance.
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow
propose that we abandon capitalism as the ‘pinnacle’, the outcome
from which we reverse-engineer history to explain its creation and
triumph.9 Works like Graeber and Wengrow’s project a kind
of quantum superposition upon the actual early development of
civilization. The Inca Empire, for example, was a big well-organized
state which (for some time, at least) did not develop along the accepted
lines of neolithic centralization, state authority and class distinctions.
The split of Inca society into its ‘anarchist’ and authoritarian versions
capture the moment when, in a kind of Darwinian struggle, two
superposed social orders were fighting for predominance, and the
authoritarian version won.
Along the same lines, some Marxist historians have pointed out
that the explosion of capitalism in early modernity was conditioned
by (the contingent interaction of) two unconnected factors: the
availability of surplus financial wealth (mainly gold from Latin
America), and the rise of dispossessed ‘free’ individuals through the
privatization of commons. The surplus wealth was ‘invested’ and
used to employ and exploit dispossessed workers. However, these
factors were in no way predestined and history could have taken
a very different turn, with the dispossessed poor enslaved or
mobilized as a threat to the existing order and with the surplus of
gold only bringing about its devaluation.

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How right Jacques Lacan was when he pointed out that the idea of
progressive evolution is a new form of teleology. The only way to
break from teleology is adopting a top-down reading of history
which conceives of linear progress as a retroactive fact, as the outcome
of a backwards-projection of our standpoint into the past. In a
quantum-holographic history, this retroactivity is rendered visible,
and all superpositions that were present in the past and were erased
through their collapse become apparent once again. In this sense one
can even say that Walter Benjamin, in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy
of History’, proposes a holographic notion of history in contrast to
the predominant progressist-evolutionary version. A revolution in
the present redeems the past in that it re-actualizes past superpositions
lost in their collapse towards a ruling ideology. Such a direct contact
between the present and the past is timeless in the sense that it
bypasses the network of causality and temporality connecting the
past and the present. As Benjamin put it:

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is

referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between
past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected
on earth.10

How can we read this claim without collapsing back into

anthropocentric-teleological thinking? We go back to Marx and his
top-down reading of history. In the introduction to Grundrisse, he
wrote:

Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex

historic organization of production. The categories which express
its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also
allows insights into the structure and the relations of production
of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and
elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered
remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have
developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy
contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations
of higher development among the subordinate animal species,
however, can be understood only after the higher development is
already known.11

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

In short, to paraphrase Pierre Bayard,12 what Marx is saying here is

that the anatomy of the ape, although it was formed earlier in time
than the anatomy of man, nonetheless in a way plagiarizes by
anticipation the anatomy of man. There is no teleology here, the effect
of teleology is strictly retroactive: once capitalism is here (emerging
in a wholly contingent way), it provides the key for understanding
all the other possible formations. Teleology resides precisely in
evolutionary progressism where the key to the anatomy of man is
the anatomy of ape. In a holographic, top-down history, the key to
the anatomy of the ape is the anatomy of man which it anticipates.
This sense of radical contingency (brought about by awareness
of the hologram images of what could have been) is also present in
Kant. His writings claim that, in some sense, the world was created
so that we can fight our moral struggles in it. So that when we are
in the midst of an intense struggle which means everything to us,
we experience it as if the whole world could collapse if we fail. A
similar feeling occurs when we fear the failure of an intense love
affair. There is no direct teleology here, our love encounter is the
result of a contingent encounter, so it could easily also not have
happened – but once it does happen, it decides how we experience
the whole of reality. When Benjamin wrote that a big revolutionary
battle decides not only the fate of the present but also of all past
failed struggles, he mobilizes the same retroactive mechanism
epitomized by religious claims that, in a crucial battle, not only the
fate of mortals but the fate of God himself is decided.
Holography thus implies that the whole is a part of its part, i.e.,
that a part is composed of all the (other) parts of its whole.
Capitalism is not only a part of history, a moment in the global
narrative, it is itself the prism through which we see all the steps
leading to it. True history is thus not a gradual development of
parts, but a series of shifts in how its ‘whole’ itself is structured. We
don’t change past facts, we just locate them in a different symbolic
context, we change their meaning. So, we do not have a whole which
comprises its parts: each part comprises multiple universalities
between which we will inevitably choose, without necessarily being
aware of doing so.
Our predicament confronts us with the deadlock in the so-called
‘society of choice’. In certain societies or cultures, we can apparently

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‘freely’ decide about important matters. However, we find ourselves

constantly in the position of having to decide about things that
will fundamentally impact our lives, but without the knowledge
required to make such decisions responsibly. Such a situation is
properly frustrating: although we know that it all depends on us, we
cannot ever predict the consequences of our acts – we are not
impotent, but, quite on the contrary, omnipotent, without being able
to determine the scope of our powers. While we cannot gain full
mastery over our biosphere, it is unfortunately in our power to
derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will run amok, swiping
us away in the process. Whichever form our present morass of
possibilities collapses into, it will remain inscribed with all the ways
it could have been different. To remember contingency, to assume
responsibility for the future in the full and painful consciousness of
our limitations, is to think ‘holographically’. And by doing so, we
can remain hopeful, in despite of – because of – dwelling in daily
intimacy with defeat.

35
36
 Absolute Invariants

Albanian prime minister Edi Rama told the following joke at an

international conference:
Russia is considering unifying its time zones because there is a
nine-hour difference between one side of the country and the
other. In response, the Russian prime minister said to Vladimir
Putin: ‘There is a problem. My family was on vacation and I
called them to say good night and it was morning and they were
at the beach. I called Olaf Scholz to wish him a happy birthday,
but he said they would be there the next day. I called Xi Jinping
to wish him a Happy New Year, but he replied that they still had
the old one . . .’ Putin responded: ‘Yes, it happened to me too. I
called Yevgeny Prigozhin’s family to express my condolences,
but his plane has not taken off yet.’1
In this joke, Putin obviously thinks he lives in a universe where the
future (of the bomb exploding on Prigozhin’s plane) already exists
now for him as the ultimate privileged observer. This brings us
directly to our topic, the problem of simultaneity.
It is well known how special relativity theory relativizes the
concept of the simultaneity of two events. As David Mermin
commented: ‘That no inherent meaning can be assigned to the
simultaneity of distant events is the single most important lesson to
be learned from relativity.’2 The basic idea is clear: there is no
absolute position in spacetime, every movement is a movement in
relation to a certain observer and the position from which they are
observing. The paradox this thesis involves is popularly described
in terms of Albert Einstein’s famous thought experiment in which
a flash of light is given off at the centre of a moving train with one
observer in the middle of the train and another in the middle of the

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platform. To the observer on the train, the light flashes reach the
front and back of the train simultaneously; the observer on the
platform sees an interval between them: ‘For both observers,
the speed at which the light traveled is constant, but the distance
traveled (and thus the time consumed in covering the distance)
varies depending on the relative motion of the observer.’3
Can we then decide if one observer is right and the other wrong?
We certainly cannot prove that either is wrong: ‘a simultaneity in
one inertial frame need not be true outside that frame.’4 Sabine
Hossenfelder pulls out the ontological consequence of this paradox:
[T]he physics of Einstein’s special relativity does not allow us to
constrain existence to merely a moment that we call ‘now’. Once
you agree that anything exists now elsewhere, even though you
see it only later, you are forced to accept that everything in the
universe exists now. This perplexing consequence of special
relativity has been dubbed the block universe by physicists. In
this block universe, the future, present, and past exist in the
same way, it’s just that we do not experience them in the same
way.5
Let me also quote from Sean Carroll here:
[F]or objects spatially distant from each other, there is no
absolute simultaneity. A faraway event might be in the ‘future’ or
in the ‘past’ of some nearby event, depending on one’s frame of
reference. The slightly slippier point is: therefore, if I want to
attribute reality to all things ‘now,’ I have to attribute it to a set of
faraway events that might be in the direct past or future of each
other. And therefore I pretty much have to attribute reality to the
whole four-dimensional universe, including events in my own
past and future.6
The basic logic that underlies these conclusions is clear: we see the
explosion of a star which took place millions of years ago now, so it
exists now for us, but it existed millions of years ago for a putative
observer who was near it when the explosion took place, so we have
two nows, ours and the putative observer’s. I see some problems
with the conclusion that ‘everything in the universe exists now’, the
future, present and past. Can we also say that we – who observe the

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explosion in our now – fully exist in the future for the putative
observer who was close to the star? What if a contingent event that
might have happened a mere half-million years ago (measured in
our time) were to annihilate all life on our earth? Would it not be
more logical to say that everything fully exists in its own now
(which cannot be synchronized with my own now)?
For an event to appear to multiple observers perceiving it in
different nows, it has to ‘really occur’ at a moment simultaneous to
an observer in the same place. Can we really collapse future events
or objects into now? How can something appear ‘now’ to an
observer when it didn’t even take place? Only by reducing time, the
temporal flow, to the limitation that pertains to our subjective
perception – a conclusion which is also problematic! If the future
also exists now, if (our) future events are real in the same sense
(our) present events are, then space has priority over time – the
future and the past would be real and present for an omnipotent
observer able to see the entire block of past, present and future.
However, what if time is not just another dimension of space but a
crack in space, an imperfection of space which is not just
epistemological but ontological? What if space in itself, not just as it
appears in our limited perception, is imperfect and traversed by
cracks?
Furthermore, what happens when we imagine faster-than-light
travel (and information can travel faster than light when two
particles are entangled, as recent experiments demonstrated)? We
still have multiple observers, so it can’t be the case that the eternal
Now becomes reality and everything coexists simultaneously. So
how will one observer perceive an object which moves faster than
light for another observer? Since the speed of light is the maximum
speed in our spacetime, the unavoidable conclusion might be that
for the first observer, the object will move back in time. To go back
to Mermin, the paradox of travelling back in time ‘can occur in
special relativity when faster-than-light travel is possible, because
an object that moves faster than light for one observer can look as
if it’s going back in time for another observer’. Faster-than-light
motion hence inevitably opens the door to causality paradoxes.7
Do we not encounter a somewhat similar spatial paradox when
we consider that elementary particles, as we envision them, are

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both by definition microscopic and yet have a large internal

volume? In other words, these quarks, leptons and bosons, like
Doctor Who’s TARDIS, might be ‘bigger on the inside’: ‘in general
relativity we can curve our space-time so strongly that it’ll form
bags figures. These bags can have a small surface area – i.e., look
small from the outside – but have a large volume inside.’8 Like Mary
Poppins’ bag, these elementary constituents of our universe have
the capacity to contain something much larger than should possibly
be able to exist within them. Theorists of relativity tend to discuss
thought experiments involving astronomical distances and mind-
boggling paradoxes, but this disjunction between perceiving
something from the outside and experiencing it from the inside is
familiar to our everyday reality, too: a car appears from the outside
too small for me to get in, but once I’m in I may feel quite
comfortable in it. The problem could not get closer to home, it
occurs within my own body: am I simultaneous with/to myself, my
own body? The basic lesson of the analysis of perception is that I do
not immediately see what I see: I rely on my expectations about the
future to compose the mess of my perceptions and then I project
this construct forwards into the now. In short, what I experience as
something here-and-now is sustained by a complex backwards-
and-forwards movement. As Hinze Hoogendorn puts it, what we
feel to be the case – that we perceive events in our environment as
they occur, in real time – is not just inaccurate, but neurobiologically
impossible:
. . . at any given moment, instead of representing a single
timepoint, perceptual mechanisms represent an entire timeline.
On this timeline, predictive mechanisms predict ahead to
compensate for delays in incoming sensory input, and
reconstruction mechanisms retroactively revise perception
when those predictions do not come true.9
So here we are (or were, or will be): unmoored in time and space,
even within our own bodies. Nevertheless, amidst all this relativity,
Einstein’s special theory implies two absolutes. The first is familiar:
that the speed of light is the maximum speed in our material
universe, independent of the movement of objects and observers
within this universe. The second is less known, but much more

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interesting: it is the existence of the absolute observable, the idea

that the interval between two events can be formulated as a fact (a
number) independent of all observers. However, the true paradox
is that this ‘fact’ does not rely on the absence of any observer: each
observer can arrive at the absolute interval not by ignoring his
observations but by submitting them to the same mathematical
procedure. Firstly, you take the time interval between the two
events as you perceive it (and this interval is not the same as the
interval perceived by another observer) and submit it to the
prescribed procedure; then you take the spatial distance as you
perceive it (and, again, this distance is not the same as the distance
perceived by another observer) and square it; finally you subtract
the two numbers and you get a number which is the same for all
observers.10 However, since I am not a specialist in relativity theory,
rather than dwelling in the details of the absolute observable, I will
shift to a homology which immediately struck me, a parallel with a
key antagonism in our society: class struggle.
This resemblance begins with the thought that social classes are
not an objective fact, they exist only as an effect of class struggle,
which is why class difference is not a symbolic difference but the
Real of an antagonism: it is real in the sense that it cannot be fully
symbolized since it triggers two mutually exclusive symbolizations.
As Lacan would have put it, there is no metalanguage in class
struggle, no neutral way to describe it: every description of class
struggle is performed from a position within class struggle. In other
words, class struggle impacts the very notion of class struggle: it
appears in a different way to those at the bottom, exploited, and to
those at the top. To put it in simple terms, for those at the bottom,
society is split into two antagonistic camps, while for those at the
top, society is not split but a well-organized whole disturbed by
extremists on both sides – a Right-winger automatically perceives
himself as part of a moderate centre.
However, this ‘relativization’ does not imply a relativistic
subjectivization: there is an ‘absolute invariant’ of class struggle, just
as there is an absolute observable, and it too can be reached through
subjective perceptions and stances. Indeed, a self-awareness of the
position from which one is observing is an essential component of
this equation. Of course, this ‘absolute invariant’ cannot be

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determined as a number; it can only be specified as a basic

antagonism that is in this case arrived at by way of identifying it as
the common denominator to which all class positions react.
The fact that class struggle logically precedes classes means not
only that the relationship between classes is antagonistic (‘il n’y a
pas de rapport de classe’, ‘there is no such thing as rapport between
the classes’ as Lacan might have put it) but that the identity of each
class is in itself antagonistic. The ruling class operates in a masculine
mode, it is an exception which totalizes a society (which is why it
perceives all other classes as a threat to social unity) – it is an
exception in the well-known sense of an illegal element (such as
unlawful violence) which sustains the rule of law. The exploited
class is non-all (dispersed, not totalized) and for this reason it has
no exception to sustain its unity – when such an exception emerges
(as in the guise of the Stalinist Party), its ultimate outcome is the
re-introduction of the logic of class power: seemingly seamless as
space, but riddled with flaws and fissures nonetheless.

42
 Worsting

I was reading Jacques Lacan’s seminar . . . or Worse,1 and was, from

time to time, checking the depressing news from around the world:
the continuing ‘Russification’ of Georgia (the imposition of the law
on ‘foreign agents’); Putin’s ‘peace proposal’ to end the Ukrainian
war (Ukraine has to withdraw from much of the territory it still
holds); a renewed threat of Russia employing nuclear arms first if
its existence is endangered (in Putin’s interpretation, if Ukraine
wins back some territory, Russia’s survival is imperiled); the G7
meeting in Italy, where BRICS countries like Brazil and South
Africa refuse to sign the joint declaration of support for Ukraine;
our media full of the story of the eight IDF soldiers killed in Gaza,
but silent on the question of how many Palestinians were ‘found
dead’ during the IDF operation . . . With this cacophony of news in
the background, a truly miraculous coincidence occurred. I
stumbled upon a speech Marine le Pen gave after the victory of her
Rassemblement National (National Rally) in European elections –
and, like a lightning bolt, a link between this last news item and
Lacan’s seminar struck me.
The title of Lacan’s seminar – . . . or Worse – immediately raises
the question: What is the ellipsis standing in for? What is the
missing term in relation to which something is worse? Lacan
provides a hint when he plays on the (almost) homonymy (in
French) between ‘le père’ (father) and ‘pire’ (worse). The full title is
thus ‘le père ou pire’ (the father or worse). ‘Father’ here is not just a
reference to traditional paternal authority, but a variable, an empty
spot that can be filled by different terms (that’s why it is replaced by
an ellipsis rather than the word itself). In sociopolitical terms, we
can say that ‘. . .’ stands for any social relation which implies a
position of controlling authority: father, boss, leader, expert,

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

professor . . . Lacan’s point is that when such an authority is

gradually undermined, it tries to redeem itself by way of ‘worsting
itself ’,or, as he puts it in verbalizing the term ‘pire’, ‘ça s’oupire’, ‘it
makes itself or-worse’.
Are figures like Donald Trump not exemplary cases of the
‘worsting’ of a political leader, of a political culture of leaders? The
(appearance of) dignified authority is replaced by an obscene
paternal figure openly making fun of itself, resorting to dirty sexist
jokes and racist innuendos. This populist Right is immanently
‘popu-Lust’ (‘Lust’ is German for pleasure); it allows you to indulge
in your lowest racist and sexist pleasures brought about by
humiliating the hated Other.
I cannot avoid mentioning here an unexpected homonymy of
‘ça s’oupire’ (it makes itself worse, it moves towards or-worse) in my
own (Slovene) language: the populist new Right ‘se upira’, it
(attempts to) resist(s) what it denounces as the new globalist elites
which combine the deep state and the corporate powers.
It is also clear here that Lacan’s point is not to issue a typical
conservative warning against radical change, in the sense of ‘If you
try to undermine the paternal authority, things will only get worse.’
Indeed, ‘worsting’ is precisely a desperate attempt to keep the old
authority alive. This is why today’s ‘dignified’ conservatives who
want to return to the authentic forms of traditional authority (like
Liz Cheney in the US) are condemned to fail – the only way out is
a radical change of the entire structure of authority or, in this
reading, the ellipsis.
This brings us back to Marine le Pen’s speech after her electoral
victory.2 When le Pen took over from her father, her goal was, as she
put it, the ‘de-demonization of the National Front’. To make this
strategy, or maybe the party itself, appear less abrasive, she excluded
some party members accused of racism or anti-Semitism, and in
2015 she even expelled her own father. This is why the task of anti-
fascists today is precisely to re-demonize le Pen: she is worse than
her father because she largely succeeded in making her party
acceptable to mainstream voters (in contrast to her father who
remained a marginalized figure, seen as an extremist).
What is striking about her speech is its strict legalism, its
emphasis on national unity. In contrast to Steve Bannon or even

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 WO R ST I N G

Trump, she insists that her country already has good and adequate
laws and that all her government (led by Jordan Bardella) will do is
fully implement them. She claims it is the globalists in power who
violate existing French laws, looking the other way when Muslim
fundamentalists violate women’s rights or react with intolerance at
other cultures . . . Le Pen’s supreme obscenity resides in the fact that
she presents her extreme views as the embodiment of tolerant
centrism, a bulkwark against all forms of extremism.
_________________________________________________________
The new Right’s agenda rotates around four central motifs:
opposition to ‘excessive’ environmental worries, immigration and
LGBTQ+ rights, and advocating a passionate patriotism. But many
‘Muslim fundamentalists’ (to use le Pen’s term) are also against
‘excessive’ green activity or conservation, against LGBTQ+ rights,
and against multiculturalists who undermine their ethnic or
cultural identity. The conclusion that imposes itself is that the new
Right populists are simpatico with the Muslim fundamentalists
they claim to oppose.
This is clear hypocrisy. However, liberal multiculturalism – the
common target of the new Right and Muslim fundamentalists – is
also hypocritical, and not just in the sense that the multiculturalism
of the West is not really open to others. The superego is at play here:
the more supposedly open to others one is, the more guilt one
experiences. What makes Western liberal Leftists hypocritical is
precisely their fake self-critical stance which leads them to be
constantly asserting their own guilt. It should be clear by now that
‘worsting’ is not solely a practice and prerogative of the Right. In
this framing, we can read the endless guilty self-critique of the
Western liberal Left as its own ‘worsting’, as it becomes the victim of
its own hypocritical logic.
So how does the Left break out of this superegotistical cycle?
Instead of constantly worrying about being accused of
‘Eurocentrism’, the task of the Left should be to rediscover the
emancipatory potential of the European tradition – by re-engaging
with it and rethinking it, if necessary – and to form alliances with
Third World protest movements on this basis. So, for example,
instead of justifying the obligatory covering of women as the
expression of a culture different from ours, one should connect with

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

the wave of women’s protests following the death of Mahsa Amini

which rocked Iran in 2022 – these protests didn’t copy ineffective
Western models of resistance, they were much more radical in
targeting the basic power structure itself. What this means is that
every authentic ‘Eurocentrist’ should fully support them as more
European than Europe itself – in the same way that the Haitian
Revolution of 1791–1804 was much closer to the authentic core of
the French Revolution than the actual French Revolution itself.
_________________________________________________________
So while we should expose the European tradition to merciless
critique, we should also bear in mind that what enables us to criticize
the racist and sexist aspects of the European legacy are the
emancipatory elements of this legacy itself. We should also note that
the non-European states which ferociously reject Eurocentrism tend
to fully assume and practice the worst part of the European legacy,
the notion of a strong nation-state (one need look no further than le
Pen’s ‘patriotism’ as an example). Is this not happening in today’s
China, in India, in Turkey, and many others? What goes on there is
not a self-worsting of Europe but a self-worsting of these countries
themselves, legitimized by European tradition. As for Europe, if what
goes on now is a ‘worsting of Europe’ by itself, the only solution I see
is a return to the roots of European thought – to Socrates.
The Socratic revolution is characterized by two features. First, it
is a reaction to the general crisis of the Greek social life which, for
Socrates, is embodied in the widespread popularity of sophists,
performers of empty rhetorical tricks who enacted a self-worsting
of the tradition of polis. Secondly, what Socrates opposes in this
decay is not simply a return to the glorious past but a radical self-
questioning. The basic tenet of Socrates’ philosophy is the endless
repetition of the formula: ‘What, exactly, do you mean by [. . .]?’ –
by virtue, truth, goodness, and similar fundamental questions?
Today, we need the same questioning: what do we mean by equality,
freedom, human rights, the people, solidarity, emancipation, and all
other notions we use to legitimize our decisions? The point is thus
not to return to the legacy of Europe but to bring it back by way of
rethinking it thoroughly.

46
 Concrete Analysis of a
Concrete Situation

Lenin died almost 100 years ago, and although he is a deeply

problematic figure, one feature of his thinking seems more vital
than ever today: what one may call Lenin’s ‘principled pragmatism’.
Recall his well-known motto: ‘concrete analysis of concrete
situation.’ This motto expresses the need to avoid the trap of
dogmatic fidelity to a Cause, as well as that of unprincipled
opportunism: in a specific, localized, fluid situation, the only way to
be truly faithful to a principle – to remain ‘orthodox’ in the positive
sense of the term – is to ruthlessly change one’s own position in a
new situation. In a properly Leninist way, G.K. Chesterton asserts
that, far from being boring, humdrum and safe, the search for true
orthodoxy is the most daring and perilous adventure – far more
risky and much less passively opportunistic than the easy revisionist
conclusion that the changed historical circumstances demand
some ‘new paradigm’:
Have we fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as
predictable and safe? There is nothing so perilous or so exciting
as orthodoxy.1
Lenin himself resisted this trap when, in 1922, after winning the Civil
War against all odds, the Bolsheviks had to retreat into NEP (the ‘New
Economic Policy’, which allowed much wider scope for market
economy and private property). His response was a short text, ‘On
Ascending a High Mountain’, which uses the image of a climber making
his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak who has to retreat back
to the valley to describe what retreat means in a revolutionary process,
and to explain how one retreats without opportunistically betraying
one’s fidelity to the Cause. After enumerating the achievements and the
failures of the Soviet state, Lenin concludes:

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to

despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility ‘to
begin from the beginning’ over and over again in approaching
an extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability
will not perish).2
An unlikely interlocutor we might bring in here is the Danish
philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, a revolutionary
process is not a gradual progress, but a repetitive movement, a
movement of repeating the beginning again and again. Is this not
precisely where we are today? Is there any meaningful continuity
with the Leftist ‘victories’ of the last two centuries or are we just
starting from the beginning time and time again? Although sublime
moments like the Jacobin climax of the French Revolution and the
October Revolution will forever remain a key part of our memory,
that story is over. Everything should be rethought, one should
begin again from the zero point.
Starting from zero is crucial, especially now when it is global
capitalism that behaves like a revolutionary force while the Left
obsesses over protecting the achievements of the past (e.g.
maintaining the welfare state). Just reflect on how much capitalism
has changed the entire texture of our societies in the last few
decades. One of the rare theorists and politicians who has
courageously addressed the consequences of the recent shifts in
global capitalism is Yanis Varoufakis who proposed a series of
radical claims. One is that capitalism itself is morphing into techno-
feudalism, which is why traditional anti-capitalist rhetoric is losing
its efficiency – we should abandon social democracy and the central
idea of a Left-liberal welfare state. In a properly Leninist way,
Varoufakis assumes that the object of our critical analysis
(capitalism) has changed, and we should change with it – if we
don’t, we are just helping capitalism to revitalize itself in a new form.
Such a stance is in no way limited to the Left – let’s take a
surprising example from Israel. Reacting to the ongoing deadlock
of the war on Gaza, Ami Ayalon, a former leader of Shin Bet,
demanded that Israel should enact a radical paradigm shift when
he said, ‘We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians,
have hope.’3 Ayalon went on to underline the point that Israel will

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 C O N C R E T E A NA LYSI S O F A C O N C R E T E SI T UAT IO N

not have security until Palestinians have their own state by calling
for Israeli authorities to release Marwan Barghouti, jailed leader of
the second intifada. Barghouti is effectively perceived by millions
there as the Palestinian Mandela (he is imprisoned for over twenty
years), and for Ayalon to call for his release in order to direct
negotiations into creating a state for Palestinians is principled
pragmatism in action:
Look into the Palestinian polls. He is the only leader who can
lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel. First of all because
he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he
won his legitimacy by sitting in our jails.4
Let us conclude with an even more surprising example. At the end
of January 2024, Ukrainian army chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi laid out a
set of priorities for Ukraine and named challenges blighting the
country’s war effort in an opinion piece published after several
media outlets reported that he could be dismissed from his post.
‘The challenge for our armed forces cannot be underestimated,’ he
wrote:
It is to create a completely new state system of technological
rearmament. Crucially, it is these unmanned systems – such as
drones – along with other types of advanced weapons, that
provide the best way for Ukraine to avoid being drawn into a
positional war, where we do not possess the advantage.5
I consider Zaluzhnyi’s text a model Leninist intervention – and I
am well aware that Zaluzhnyi himself and today’s radical Leftists
would consider this characterization crazy. I should also add that I
am not qualified to judge the particulars of the power struggles
which are destroying Ukraine and, indeed, Zaluzhnyi’s role in these.
All I claim is that Zaluzhnyi’s text combines fidelity to the goal
(maintaining Ukrainian independence and territorial integrity as a
democratic state) with concrete analysis of the situation (how
developments on the battlefield demand that the Ukrainian state
and army should radically change). To put it bluntly, the heroic
phase of popular resistance to the invader and close personal
combat on frontlines is over. Ukraine should reorient itself to new
technologies which imply war at a distance (drones, rockets, etc.).

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

Furthermore, Ukraine should assume the consequences of the

international situation (the growing reluctance of the developed
West to deliver help), plus it should enact changes in inner politics:
more serious struggle against corruption and oligarchs, as well as a
more open vision of what Ukraine is fighting for, a vision freed
from any form of narrow nationalism and suspicion of the
Ukrainian Left as pro-Russian. Zaluzhnyi was thus right, his advice
is ‘Leninist’ in the authentic sense of the term. Only the changes he
proposed can enable Ukraine to prevent the disastrous effects of
the exhaustion of its own people from the war. Having the agility
and courage to make these changes would be the most radical act
of orthodoxy under fire imaginable.

50
 Civil War

When Donald Trump was found guilty on all thirty-four felony

charges by a Manhattan jury, he announced that he will remain a
presidential candidate and that, if he wins, he is ready to act as
president from prison. Even if this absurd scenario is disregarded
(which it now has been), it’s worth pausing to reflect upon the utter
craziness of that situation, historical though it is: Trump is the first
former or serving US president to be found guilty of a crime, as
well as the first major-party nominee to become a convicted felon.
The fact that the Republican Party has nominated, as their
electoral representative, a man tried and convicted of multiple
crimes raises the stakes of this election well beyond the usual
political consequences. Even those who are critical of the US state
cannot deny that it is still perceived by many as the model of a rich
and free society, attracting millions of immigrants. The spectacle of
a presidential election in such disarray must surely elicit change in
the global world order, and the spectre of an actual civil war in the
US, once unthinkable, now seems not only frighteningly plausible
but maybe even imminent.
How do we begin to approach such unprecedented times? We
can begin by using a lens which enables us to see more clearly the
underlying social trends blurred by the confusion of actual events:
fiction, in this case Alex Garland’s 2024 film Civil War.
The movie takes place in the middle of a civil war between a
federal government led by a third-term president and multiple
secessionist movements. The strongest, the ‘Western Forces’ (WF)
led by Texas and California, ultimately occupy the White House and
kill the president. The story is told from the perspective of a small
group of journalists travelling from New York City to Washington
D.C. to interview the besieged president, principal among them

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

veteran war photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), and aspiring

young photojournalist Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny). Jessie berates
herself for being too scared to take photos; gradually her nerve and
photography skills improve as she becomes desensitized to violence.
When the duo enter the half-abandoned White House, Jessie steps
into the line of gunfire while taking photos and Lee intercedes with
fatal results. Jessie captures Lee’s death as she pushes her to safety,
and then, apparently unaffected, continues into the Oval Office
where a group of WF soldiers are getting ready to kill the president.
Jessie proceeds to photograph the presidential murder and the
soldiers posing with their feet on his corpse.
As soon as I saw the film two reproaches emerged: first, Civil
War can be read as an example of the Bildungsroman literary genre,
which depicts the ethical maturation of a person who begins the
story naive and confused; Jessie initially feels too much compassion
for those suffering to focus, as the desensitized Lee does, on the job
of taking photos, but by the end she is detatched and neutral, even
capturing an image of Lee’s futile, fatal attempt to protect her.
Having Lee’s engagement result in her death, while Jessie is the one
who reaches the Oval Office and documents what is happening
there, can be interpreted as suggesting that adopting the desensitized
distance of the observer is the price that must be paid for the
all-important work of capturing the truth of violence and conflict.
But Lee’s sacrifice subverts this valuation of ‘objectivity’, encoding
within the film the idea that such neutral reporting is fake, a trap to
be avoided at any price: today engagement is needed more than
ever, because to be desensitized to violence means we already are
part of a violent system. In Ukraine, in Gaza and the West Bank,
and in hundreds of other places, only an engaged view, precisely
one that prompts a response, is where we will find the truth we
need to find. Was Garland aware of the falseness of this idolised
neutrality? Probably not: he remains firmly entrenched in the
ideology of neutral ‘objective’ reporting. But the tension he ignores
is inscribed into the story, making Civil War a work which reveals/
exposes more than the author intended it to say.
The second reproach concerns a feature noted by many of the
film’s critics: the political divisions that propel the civil war are
totally muddy. The military alliance between liberal California and

52
 C I V I L WA R

conservative Texas is a patent absurdity, the authoritarian third-

term president combines features of a Biden liberal and of a Trump
populist and, apart from some casually racist remarks, it’s not clear
who the soldiers that the journalists meet on their way to
Washington are fighting for. It would be wrong to dismiss this
simply as a commercial strategy, intended to avoid alienating
viewers who would might be opposed to a particular political
position. As in the case of the film’s praise of neutral reporting, the
message that comes through is unintended, but for this reason all
the more true. What remains and stands out when we ignore
concrete political disagreements is the prospect of a civil war which
has haunted American public life in the last decade or so, a conflict
rooted in the growing disintegration of a shared social substance.
This dissolution is more and more the reality in which we live,
and not just in the US. Yes, we have the big, ‘classic’ opposition
between the liberal centre and the populist Right, plus some
elements of a new Left (student protests). But we’re also having to
contend with a series of strange diagonal alliances (extreme Left
and extreme Right both oppose supporting Ukraine), and a
succession of new splits (the pro-Palestinian Left divided between
peaceniks opposed to terror and those who support Hamas as an
authentic resistance group that should be exempted from criticism).
My premise is that all these conflicts are pseudo-conflicts: even
if they are very dangerous and may take the lives of millions, they
are all attempts to avoid or obfuscate the true antagonisms that
befall our global capitalist society, just as in Civil War the reasons
for the violence are ultimately far less important than the spectacle
of it. Trump’s populism is, at least in part, a reaction to the failure of
the liberal-democratic welfare state, so while we can and should
support some measures advocated by the liberal centre
(pro-abortion laws, racial equality, etc.), we should always bear in
mind that in the long term, the liberal centre is at the root of our
crises. This brings us to the well-known Antonio Gramsci remark
from his Prison Notebooks: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact
that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum
a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’1 The battles we are
fighting today, from the populist Right to cancel culture, are mostly
such morbid symptoms of the liberal centre.

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

Various reactions are possible to this mess we’re in. Recall

Sydney Lumet’s 1973 film Serpico in which the hero is not simply
an honest policeman fighting police corruption. His basic stance is
a more subtle one: he just wants to stay out of the circle of
corruption, refusing to accept his share of money offered by his
colleagues, and he even asks repeatedly to be transferred back onto
the street as a plain uniform policeman where corruption – at an
institutional level at least – is mostly absent. I don’t underestimate
such a stance: by way of ignoring corruption, by acting as if the
system functions normally, he becomes an even stronger thorn in
the heel of the corrupted policemen than those who openly fight
corruption.
However, in a situation where civil war looms on the horizon,
the heroic moral stance adopted by Serpico loses its efficacy. Do we
find this stance anywhere in the film? Is Serpico the small town in
Civil War where journalists briefly stop to buy provisions, where
people pretend that life goes on as normal, the stores selling
fashionable clothes open for business? (On the roofs, of course, we
see gunmen protecting the town.) Many voters behave in this way:
they just want to survive the political storm in their safe haven,
continuing their daily life as if nothing big is going on.
But when the state itself and its organs are directly implicated in
crime, the Serpico strategy no longer works. Keeping your head
down and pretending corruption doesn’t exist only works if the
larger social contract retains some force and integrity. Recall the
scandal with Jacob Zuma, the ex-president of South Africa: after he
was condemned to a prison term, he simply ignored the summons
to go, and the state authorities weren’t prepared to arrest him. The
Western media were aghast at the inefficiency of the rule of law in
a ‘Third World country’. But how then do we judge a country where
there seemed to be a serious possibility of a convicted felon being
elected president, even doing his job from jail? And what if the
mere possibility of this happening renders visible the half-
concealed truth of our – call it global neofeudal or neo-Fascist –
system?
Immediately after he left the courtroom, Trump said: ‘The real
verdict is going to be [on] 5 November, by the people.’ It’s clear what
he meant – to quote the pollster Doug Schoen: ‘While it’s not a

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 C I V I L WA R

great thing to be convicted of a crime, what voters will be thinking

about in November is inflation, the southern border, competition
with China and Russia and the money that is being spent on Israel
and Ukraine.’2 Describing being convicted of a crime as ‘not . . .
great’ is true enough, if a mammoth understatement; but such a
conviction does make you a criminal, and it is a greatly unacceptable
thing when a criminal can be elected the president of what is still
the strongest state in the world.
Schoen’s point is, of course, the negligent impact Trump’s
conviction might have upon his standing with the voters, and in
this respect, both outcomes are catastrophic. If Trump wins, it
means the end of the rule of law as we understand it, including the
separation of powers. Trump has already announced the radical
measures he will impose if he wins, and if he does win, the mere
fact of his victory would imply the possibility that he could push
through measures which will limit freedoms to such an extent that
our common notion of democracy will become ridiculously
inadequate to describe social life, without even mentioning
international consequences (no support for Ukraine but full
support of Israel, etc.) which will de facto amount to the US
becoming another BRICS state. If Trump loses, it might be even
worse: a large tranche of America will perceive itself as excluded
from the public space – they will be pushed towards civil war and
secessionist tendencies will explode since federal state power will
not be accepted as legitimate (nearly 70 per cent of Republican and
Republican-leaning independent voters do not consider Biden a
legitimate President).3 There is no middle way, no compromise
between the two options in view (Trump’s populism and Biden’s
legalist liberal democracy) – one can even question whether all-out
civil war can be endlessly postponed.
So what hope is there? As Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Max
Brod: ‘There is infinite hope – just not for us.’4 An ambiguous
statement which can also mean: not for us as we are now, so we
have to change radically, to be reborn. Kafka also noted, apropos
the October Revolution: ‘The decisive moment in human
development is everlasting. For this reason the revolutionary
movements of intellect/spirit that declare everything before them
to be null and void are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.’5

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

Today, the fact that nothing has yet happened means that all the
main pathways to progress – the populism of the new Right, the
compromised liberal centre, the old social-democratic welfare
state, religious fundamentalism, even the naive belief that the
strengthening of the BRICS powers will usher in a new multi-
centric world – lead nowhere. All our futures are stillborn. The true
utopia is the idea that a new world order able to cope with our
crises, from the decaying environment to global war, will gradually
emerge from the options that are available today. But this will not
just happen without our intervention and engagement. What
Theodor Adorno wrote decades ago – ‘Nothing but despair can
save us’6 – is today more true than ever. This doesn’t mean that we
should just sit back and hope: we should act in all possible ways
even without hope.

56
 Authority

A lot has been written lately about the crisis of authority, as well as
about the figures supplanting its failure: pseudo-neutral experts,
populist demagogues, obscene clowns, murderous fundamentalist
dictators . . . The first thing to understand is that this is nothing new:
from the beginning of modernity, authority has been in crisis because
a new authority grounded in competences and/or enlightened
popularism will never quite work. Although conservative critics,
from Edmund Burke onwards, who have been warning that a
disintegration of traditional authorities will spawn much more brutal
forms of oppression were wrong on the whole, there were strands of
truth therein. This is why the next step should be to analyse the
multiple facets and internal tensions already at work within precisely
the traditional forms of authority for which many people long. And
what better starting point for this analysis than Søren Kierkegaard
and his sensitive remarks on the forms and justifications of authority.
Kierkegaard’s aim was to reaffirm the Christian attitude in its
‘scandalous’ original form, before it settled down into a force of law
and order (i.e., to reaffirm it as an act, as was the very appearance
of Christ in the eyes of the keepers of the old law, before Christ was
‘Christianized’, made part of the new law of Christian tradition).
This scandalous ‘suspension of the Ethical’ (of the old Jewish law)
inherent to the Christian attitude is what Kierkegaard wanted to
resuscitate in his furious polemics against institutionalized
Christianity (‘Christendom’) that occupied the last years of his life.
Kierkegaard insisted that every believer must ‘repeat’ Christ’s
scandal: every believer has to pass through Christianity in its
‘becoming’, before it turned into an established necessity. Recall
G.K. Chesterton’s perspicacious remark that ‘civilization itself is the
most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions’1

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 AGAINST PRO GRESS

– to paraphrase Chesterton, when a true Christian believer stands

alone, fearless amid the knives and fists of the servants of established
necessity, it serves to remind us that it is the agent of belief who is
the original and subversive figure, while the mob of detractors are
merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial
respectability of apes and wolves. Or, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht
from his Threepenny Opera, we enter the religious when we say to
ourselves,
What is a transgression of the law against the transgression that
pertains to the law itself? What are the petty human crimes
against the voice of God ordering Abraham the senseless
sacrifice of his son? Which human crime can approach the
cruelty of God’s trifling with human destiny?2
What one should not overlook here is the inherent link between
this suspension of the Ethical and Kierkegaard’s notion of authority.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s Abraham attests his
unconditional submission to God’s authority through his readiness
to sacrifice his beloved son. If he judged God’s demand in relation
to its content (‘How can He demand of me something so
atrocious?’), God’s authority would be submitted to his human
judgement and thereby devalorized. In other words, God’s proper
authority is experienced only in the suspension of the Ethical – in
what Kierkegaard considers the ‘religious’. If God were to be
reduced to human ethical concerns, he would lose his proper
authority and function as an aesthetic supplement to ethics – a
kind of imaginary creature asking ordinary people, enslaved to
imagination, to obey the abstract ethical imperatives. The religious
suspension of the Ethical is not simply the external abolition of the
Ethical, it is what makes it possible for the Ethical to exist and
confers its identity, its inherent condition of possibility. This can
also be understood in terms of the universal and its constitutive
exception: the religious suspension of the Ethical refers to an
exception which does not relate to the universal as its external
transgression but, precisely qua exception, founds it:
The rigorous and determinate exception who although he is in
conflict with the universal still is an offshoot of it, sustains himself.

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The exception who thinks the universal in that he thinks himself

through; he explains the universal in that he explains himself.
Consequently, the exception explains the universal and himself, and
if one really wants to study the universal, one only needs to look
around for a legitimate exception. The legitimate exception is
reconciled in the universal.3
At the very point at which Kierkegaard most violently opposes the
alleged Hegelian ‘tyranny of the Universal’, he is, of course, at his
closest to Hegel. What is the Hegelian ‘concrete Universal’ if not the
‘exception reconciled in the Universal’, i.e., the unity of the abstract
Universal with its constitutive exception? The best-known example
of this type of Hegelian thinking is, of course, that of the state as a
rational totality of individuals who ‘made’ themselves by means of
their labour: the state achieves its actuality in the person of the
monarch who is in his very nature what he is in his symbolic
determination (one becomes king by birth, not by one’s merits).
The exception of the king is therefore an exception ‘reconciled in
the Universal’ since it founds it. Abstract, pre-religious ethical
republicanism à la Fichte would of course protest against this royal
exception, condemning it as an unbearable affront to republican
principles and calling upon us to treat the King the same way we
treat other citizens, whereas the Hegelian speculation demonstrates
how ethical universality, in order to sustain itself, requires an
exception, a point at which it is suspended.
To avoid becoming mired in such commonplaces, let us refer to
an entirely different domain: the stylistic pecularities of Theodor
W. Adorno. As Fredric Jameson pointed out, the rhythm of
Adorno’s essays always contains a sudden halt; the refined
dialectical analysis is abruptly cut off with a proposition which
clearly recalls the good old Marxist invectives such as ‘ideology of
late capitalism’, ‘expression of the class position of big capital’, etc.4
From whence arises the necessity of such repeated lapses into
‘vulgar sociologism’? Far from attesting to Adorno’s theoretical
weakness, they present the way a thought’s constitutive limit is
inscribed within the thought itself.
Crucially, these ‘vulgar-sociological’ references concern the level
of content; they point towards the ‘social content’ of the interpreted

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phenomena. Dialectical analysis is, ultimately, analysis of form; it

endeavours to dissolve the positivity of its object in
the totality of its formal mediations. Within the standard
‘poststructuralist’ perspective, it would therefore seem that such
‘vulgar’ references denote the moment of ‘closure’, the moment
when the given field is ‘sutured’ and blinds itself to its constitutive
outside. However, Jameson’s point is that it is precisely such ‘vulgar-
sociological’ references which keep the field of the analysis of form
open, which prevent the thought from falling into the trap of
identity and mistaking its limited form of reflection for the
unattainable form of thought as such. In other words, the function
of the ‘vulgar-sociological’ reference is to represent within the
notional content what eludes notion as such, namely the totality of
its own form: in it, that which escapes reflection, the form of its
own totality, acquires positive existence under the guise of its
opposite. Is it necessary to point out how it is precisely here, where
Adorno purports to break the closed circle of the Hegelian self-
transparency of the notion, that he is most thoroughly Hegelian?
More precisely, it is only here that he attains the proper level of the
Hegelian speculative identity: what Hegel calls ‘speculative identity’
is precisely the identity of the form, of the totality of dialectical
mediation which eludes the thought’s grasp, with some unmediated
bit of content referred to in the ‘vulgar-sociological’ gesture (or, in
the case of the state, the identity of the state qua rational totality
with the ‘irrational’ biological positivity of the king’s body). The
proper dialectical approach therefore includes its own suspension,
a point of exception which is constitutive of the dialectical analysis.
Therein resides the infamous dialectical ‘coincidence of the
opposites’: the pure form of dialectical mediation maintains its
distance from the positive content it mediates only by means of its
coincidence with the most inert, ‘non-mediated’ remainder of this
content; and the Lacanian ‘Real’ ultimately denotes such a
non-mediated leftover which serves as a support of the symbolic
structure in its formal purity. Yet the paradox of identity resides in
the fact that it is precisely through this remainder of the Real –
through this supplementary remark which maintains its
non-identity and openness – that the system (whether Hegelian
state or Adorno’s theoretical edifice) achieves its identity with itself.

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As Hegel puts it, a state without the monarch at its head is not
actually a state, and the same goes for Adorno’s theory which,
devoid of the ‘vulgar-sociological’ sallies, would remain a maze of
disconnected associations.
Isn’t the same paradox of identity at work in the way fantasy
guarantees the coherence of a socio-ideological edifice? That is to
say, ‘fantasy’ designates an element which ‘sticks out’, which cannot
be integrated into the given symbolic structure, yet which, precisely
as such, constitutes its identity. The psychoanalytic clinic detects its
fundamental matrix in the so-called ‘pre-genital’ (anal) object:
according to Freudian orthodoxy, the fixation on it prevents the
emergence of the ‘normal’ (genital) sexual relationship; in Lacanian
theory, however, as Jacques-Alain Miller puts it:
[the] object is not what hinders the advent of the sexual
relationship, as a kind of perspective error makes us believe. The
object is on the contrary a filler, that which fills in the relationship
which does not exist and bestows on it its fantasmatic
consistency.5
Sexual relationship is in itself impossible, hindered, and the object
does nothing but materialize this ‘original’ impossibility, this
inherent hindrance; the ‘perspective error’ consists in conceiving
of it as a stumbling block to the emergence of the ‘full’ sexual
relationship – as if, without this troublesome intruder, the sexual
relationship would be possible in its intact fullness. What we
encounter here is the paradox of the sacrifice in its purest: the
illusion of the sacrifice is that renunciation of the object will render
accessible the intact whole. In the ideological field, this paradox
finds its clearest articulation in the anti-Semitic concept of the Jew:
the Nazi has to sacrifice the Jew in order to be able to maintain
the illusion that it is only the ‘Jewish plot’ which prevents the
establishment of the ‘class relationship’, of society as a harmonious,
organic whole. Which is why, in the last pages of Seminar XI, Lacan
is fully justified in designating the Holocaust as a sacrifice to the
Other destined to bring reconciliation: is not the Jew the anal
object par excellence, i.e., the partial object-stain which disturbs
the harmony of the class relationship?6 One is tempted, here, to
paraphrase the above-quoted proposition:

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The Jew is not what hinders the advent of the class relationship,
as the anti-Semitic perspective error makes us believe. The Jew
is on the contrary a filler, that which fills in the relationship
which does not exist and bestows on it its fantasmatic
consistency.
In other words, what appears as the hindrance to society’s full identity
with itself is actually its positive condition: by transposing onto the
Jew the role of the foreign body which introduces disintegration and
antagonism into the social organism, the fantasy-image of society as
consistent, harmonious whole is rendered possible.
What we have to be attentive to is the inherently authoritarian
character of this feature, that is to say, the inherent link of identity
with authority: the monarch performs his role as a figure of pure
authority, as the one who, by means of his diktat and decision, cuts
through the endless tangles of pros and cons. And do Adorno’s
‘vulgar-sociological’ outbursts not perform the same authoritarian
gesture of reference to the Marxist dogma which breaks the endless
thread of dialectical argumentation? It is by no means accidental
that tautologies – statements which purport to identify with their
subject – are the clearest example of ascertaining authority: ‘Law is
law!’, ‘It is so because I say so!’, etc. According to Lacan, Antigone’s
defence against Creon’s accusations ultimately consists of precisely
such an ‘authoritarian’ tautology: she does not counter Creon’s
arguments with her own, she does not oppose to Creon’s law of
polis the subterranean divine law protecting the right of the
deceased, as Hegel wrongly assumed; she simply interrupts his flow
of argumentation by insisting that ‘It is so because it is so!’, ‘My
brother is my brother!’ . . .7 The best way to illuminate the logic of
her defence is perhaps to evoke Saul Kripke’s notion of the ‘rigid
designator’, of a signifier which designates the same object ‘in all
possible worlds’, i.e., even if all of its positive properties were
changed.8 The ‘rigid designator’ thus fixes the real kernel of the
designated object, what in it ‘always returns to its place’ (Lacan’s
definition of the real). In the case of Polynices, it designates his
absolute individuality that remains the same beyond the changing
properties that characterize his person (his good or evil deeds). The
‘law’ in the name of which Antigone insists on Polynices’ right to

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burial is this law of the ‘pure’ signifier, preceding every other law
that judges our deeds: it is the law of the Name which fixes our
identity beyond the eternal flow of generation and corruption.
Identity becomes ‘authoritarian’ the moment we overlook, in a
kind of illusory perspective, that it is nothing but the inscription of
pure difference, of a lack. In this sense, authority is far from being a
remnant of the pre-Enlightenment: it is inscribed in the very
heart of the Enlightenment project. Not until the Enlightenment
did the structure of authority come into sight as such, against
the background of rational argumentation as the foundation of
enlightened knowledge. It is a symptomatic fact that the first to
render the outlines of ‘pure’ authority visible was precisely
Kierkegaard, one of the great critics of Hegel.
The crucial text in which Kierkegaard delineates the break between
the traditional and the ‘modern’ (i.e., for him, Christian) status of
knowledge are his Philosophical Fragments.9 At first sight, this text
does not belong to philosophy but rather to an intermediate domain
between philosophy proper and theology: it endeavours to distinguish
the Christian religious position from the Socratic philosophical one.
Yet its positioning ‘outside of’ philosophy is the same kind as that
assumed by Plato’s Symposion: it circumscribes the discourse’s frame,
i.e., the intersubjective constellation, the relationship towards the
teacher, towards authority, which renders possible the philosophical
(or Christian) discourse. In this sense, the Fragments are to be read as
the repetition of Plato’s Symposion (repetition in the precise meaning
this term receives with Kierkegaard): their aim is to perform Plato’s
gesture in new circumstances, within the new status that knowledge
acquired with the advent of Christianity.
Both texts, Symposion as well as Philosophical Fragments, are texts
on the love and transference which form the basis of every
relationship with the teacher qua ‘subject supposed to know’.
Kierkegaard’s starting point is that all philosophy from Plato to Hegel
is ‘pagan’, i.e., embedded in the pagan (pre-Christian) logic of
knowledge and remembrance: our life as that of finite individuals by
definition takes place in an aftermath, since all that really matters has
always already happened; up till the Hegelian Er-Innerung, knowledge
is therefore always conceived as a retrospective remembrance, an
internalization of what was already dimly felt and sensed, a return to

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the ‘timelessly past being’ (‘das zeitlos gewesene Sein’, Hegel’s

definition of essence). True, the transient, finite subject attains
eternal truth at some discrete instant in their life; once the subject
enters the truth, however, this instant is abrogated, cast away like a
useless ladder. Which is why Socrates is quite justified in comparing
himself with a midwife: his job is to enable the subject to give birth
to the knowledge already present in him, so the supreme recognition
one can grant to Socrates is to say he was forgotten the moment we
found ourselves face to face with truth.
With Christ, it is just the opposite: the Christian truth, while no
less eternal than the Socratic one, is indelibly branded with an
historical event, the moment of God’s incarnation. Consequently,
the object of Christian faith is not the teaching, but the teacher: a
Christian believes in Christ as a person, not immediately in the
content of his statements; Christ is not divine because He uttered
such deep truths, His words are true because they were spoken by
Him. The paradox of Christianity consists in this bond linking
eternal truth to a singular historical event: I can know eternal truth
only insofar as I believe that the miserable creature who walked
around Palestine two thousand years ago was God.
Motifs which, according to the conventional wisdom of
philosophy, define the post-Hegelian reversal – the affirmation of
the event, of the instant, as opposed to the timeless, immovable
truth; the priority of existence (of the fact that a thing exists) over
essence (over what this thing is), etc. – acquire here their ultimate
background. Within the Socratic perspective, the truth of a
statement resides in its universal meaning, what is ‘eternal’ in it; as
such, it is in no way affected by its position of enunciation, by the
place from which it was enunciated. The Christian perspective, on
the other hand, makes the truth of a statement dependent on the
event of its enunciation: the ultimate guarantee of the truth of
Christ’s words is their utterer’s authority, the fact that they were
uttered by Christ, not the profundity of their content:

When Christ says, ‘There is an eternal life’; and when a theological

student says, ‘There is an eternal life’; both say the same thing, and
there is no more deduction, development, profundity, or
thoughtfulness in the first expression than in the second; both

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statements are, judged aesthetically, equally good. And yet there is

an eternal qualitative difference between them! Christ, as God-
Man, is in possession of the specific quality of authority.10

Kierkegaard develops this ‘qualitative difference’ apropos of the

abyss that separates a ‘genius’ from an ‘apostle’: ‘genius’ represents
the highest, purest manifestation of immanent human capacities
(wisdom, creativity, and so forth), whereas an ‘apostle’ is sustained
by a transcendent authority which a genius lacks. This abyss is best
exemplified by the very case where it seems to disappear, namely
the poetic exploitation of religious motifs: Richard Wagner, for
example, used Christian motifs in Parsifal to invigorate his artistic
vision; he thereby aestheticized them in the strict Kierkegaardian
sense of the term, i.e., making use of them with their ‘artistic
efficacy’ in mind. Religious rituals like the uncovering of the Grail
fascinate us with their breathtaking beauty, yet their religious
authority is suspended, bracketed.
If, however, the truth claim of a statement cannot be authorized
by means of its inherent content, what is then the foundation of its
authority? Here Kierkegaard is quite outspoken: the ultimate and
only support of a statement of authority is its own act of enunciation:

But now how can an Apostle prove that he has authority? If he

could prove it physically, then he would not be an Apostle. He
has no other proof than his own statement. That has to be so; for
otherwise the believer’s relationship to him would be direct
instead of being paradoxical.11
When authority is backed up by an immediate physical
compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper
(i.e., symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force:
authority proper is at its most radical level always powerless, it is a
certain ‘call’ which ‘cannot effectively force us into anything’, and
yet, by a kind of inner compulsion, we feel obliged to follow it
unconditionally. As such, authority is inherently paradoxical. As
we have just seen, authority is vested in a certain statement insofar
as the immanent value of its content is suspended; we obey a
statement of authority because it has authority, not because its
content is wise, profound, etc.:

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Authority is a specific quality which, coming from elsewhere,

becomes qualitatively apparent when the content of the message
or of the action is posited as indifferent. To be prepared to obey a
government department if it can be clever is really to make a fool
of it. To honor one’s father because he is intelligent is impiety.12
Kierkegaard is seemingly unequivocal; the teacher is what matters,
not the content of the teaching. Yet at the same time he also
intimates the exact opposite: an apostle – a person in whom God’s
authority is vested – is reduced to his role of a carrier of some
foreign message, totally abrogated as a person, and subordinated to
the only thing that matters, the content of the message:
Just as a man, sent into the town with a letter, has nothing to do
with its contents, but has only to deliver it; just as a minister
who is sent to a foreign court is not responsible for the content
of the message, but has only to convey it correctly: so, too, an
Apostle has really only to be faithful in his service, and to carry
out his task. Therein lies the essence of an Apostle’s life of
selfsacrifice, even if he were never persecuted, in the fact that he
is ‘poor, yet making many rich.’13
An apostle therefore corresponds perfectly to the function of the
signifying Repraesentanz; the invalidation of all ‘pathological’
features (his psychological propensities, etc.) makes out of him a
pure representative whose clearest corollary is a diplomat:
We mean by representatives what we understand when we use
the phrase, for example, the representative of France. What do
diplomats do when they address one another? They simply
exercise, in relation to one another, that function of being pure
representatives and, above all, their own signification must not
intervene. When diplomats are addressing one another, they are
supposed to represent something whose signification, while
constantly changing, is, beyond their own persons, France,
Britain, etc. In the very exchange of views, each must record only
what the other transmits in his pure function as signifier, he must
not take into account what the other is, qua presence, as a man
who is likable to a greater or lesser degree. Inter-psychology is an
impurity in this exchange. The term Repraesentanz is to be taken

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in this sense. The signifier has to be understood in this way, it is

at the opposite pole from signification.14
Therein consists the paradox of authority: we obey a person in
whom authority is vested irrespective of the content of his
statements (authority ceases to be what it is the moment we make
it dependent on the quality of its content), yet this person retains
authority only insofar as he is reduced to a neutral carrier, bearer of
some transcendent message. The apostle is set up in opposition to
the genius, who produces work in which the abundance of the
content expresses the inner wealth of its creator’s personality. The
same double suspension defines the supreme case of authority, that
of Christ: in his Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard points out
how it is not enough to know all the details of the teacher’s (Christ’s)
life, all he has done and all his personal features, in order to be
entitled to consider oneself his pupil; such a description of
Christ’s features and deeds, even if truly complete, still misses what
makes Him an authority. Nor do those who leave Christ qua person
out of it and concentrate on His teaching, endeavoring to grasp
the meaning of every word he ever uttered, fare any better; this
way, Christ is reduced to Socrates, to a mere middleman enabling
us to access eternal truth. If, consequently, Christ’s authority is
contained neither in his personal qualities nor in the content of
his teaching, in what does it reside? The only possible answer is that
it resides in the empty space of intersection between the two sets,
that of his personal features and that of his teaching, in the
unfathomable X which is ‘in Christ more than Himself ’ – in
this intersection which corresponds exactly to what Lacan called
objet petit a.
As is clear from the passage from Lacan’s Four Fundamental
Concepts discussed above, the paradox of this double suspension is

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ultimately the paradox of the signifier itself. A signifier is by

definition a pure representative which ‘has nothing to do with its
signified content, but has only to deliver it’ (to conceive the meaning
of the word ‘fish’, one has to obliterate all the immediate physical
features of any particular species of fish). Such a statement requires
its obverse, however, and that is the constitutive authority of the
signifier: in the symbolic order, the purely formal network of
differential features has priority over the content (the ‘signified’) of
its individual components, i.e., its ‘signified’ is ultimately posited as
secondary and indifferent. In terms of speech-act theory, this
paradox is the ‘impossible’ point of intersection between constative
and performative – the true stumbling block of this theory. Even in
John Austin’s How to Do Things with Words,15 the evolution from
the opposition of performative/constative to the triad of locution/
illocution/perlocution and to the subsequent classification of
illocutionary acts betrays a fundamental theoretical deadlock. Far
from being a simple elaboration of the original insight into how
one can ‘do things with words’, the transformation of performative
into illocutionary act entails a certain radical loss: even at the level
of an immediate, ‘naive’ approach, one cannot avoid the impression
that, in the course of this passage, what was truly subversive in
the notion of the performative somehow gets lost. On the other
hand, it is clear that Austin was compelled to accomplish this
shift from performative to illocutionary by the insufficiency of the
performative/constative binary. The taxonomy of illocutionary acts
proposed by John Searle16 enables us to locate this lack by producing
the point of intersection between Austin I and Austin II: one of the
species of illocution (‘declarations’) coincides with the ‘pure’
performative.
The starting point of Searle’s taxonomy is the ‘direction of fit’
between words and the world implied by the different species of
speech acts: in the case of assertives, the direction of fit is words to
world (when I say ‘There is a table in the room next door’, the
condition of satisfaction of this proposition is that the content of
the utterance corresponds to the designated state of things, i.e., that
there really is a table in the room next door); in the case of
directives, the direction of fit is world to words (when I say ‘Shut
the door!’ the condition of satisfaction of this proposition is that

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the act in the world follows, realizes, the uttered command, i.e., that
the addressee effectively shuts the door and that he does it because
of my command and not for other reasons). The ‘trickiest case’, as
Searle puts it, is, however, declarations: their direction of fit is
double, world to words as well as words to world. Let us take the
proposition ‘The meeting is closed’ – what does the speaker
accomplish by pronouncing it? He brings about a new state of
things in the world (the meeting closes – world to words), yet
he accomplishes this by presenting this state of things as if it is
already accomplished (the meeting is closed – words to world). He
makes it happen by saying it has happened. In a declaration,
the speaker
is trying to cause something to be the case by representing it as
being the case. [I]f he succeeds he will have changed the world
by representing it as having been so changed.17
Every utterance, to be sure, accomplishes the act defined by the
illocutionary force that pertains to it; there is, however, a crucial
difference between declarations and, say, directives. By saying ‘Shut
the door!’ I accomplish the act of command, but it remains for the
addressee to carry it out and effectuate the new state of things,
whereas by saying ‘The meeting is closed’, I effectively close the
meeting. Only declarations contain this ‘magical power’ of
effectuating their propositional content. The direction of fit (world
to words) is not limited to the fact that a new state of things in the
world has to follow the utterance, since the causality is, so to speak,
immediate: utterance itself brings about the new state of things.
Yet, as we have just seen, the price to be paid for this ‘magic of the
verb’ is its ‘repression’: one closes the meeting by stating that it is
closed, i.e., one pretends to be merely describing a state of affairs
that already exists, disavowing one’s own role in causing that state
of affairs to (imminently) be. In order to be effective, the ‘pure’
performative (the speech act which brings about its own
propositional content) has to endure an inner split and assume the
form of its opposite, of a constative.
It is in the light of this split that one must interpret Searle’s
theory of ‘indirect speech acts’, i.e., propositions of the type ‘Can
you pass the salt?’ where the primary illocutionary act (the directive,

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the demand to the addressee to pass the salt) is accomplished by

means of a secondary illocutionary act (the interrogation
concerning the addressee’s ability to comply with the demand).
Searle conceives such propositions as ‘parasitic’: their nature is
secondary, they presuppose some logically prior illocutionary act
(in the case of ‘Can you pass the salt?’, the direct command ‘Pass the
salt!’). Yet do ‘declarations’ not denote a case where the parasitic, in
a way, came first, is original? Their primary illocutionary dimension
(the ‘magical power’ to bring about the propositional content) can
manifest itself only in the guise of the assertive, of a statement that
‘it is (already) like that’. This paradox offers us a clue to Lacan’s
thesis according to which ontology pertains to the ‘discourse of the
Master’: the (philosophical) discourse of being
is simply being on thrust [a la botte], being on order, what will
have been if you have understood what I have ordered you. The
entire dimension of being is produced within the movement of
the discourse of the Master, of the one who, uttering a signifier,
expects from it what is one of its effects of link not to be
neglected, namely that the signifier commands. The signifier is
first of all imperative.18
The discourse of ontology is thus sustained by an ‘indirect speech
act’: its assertive surface, its statement that the world ‘is like that’,
conceals a performative dimension, i.e., ontology is constituted by
the misrecognition of how its enunciation brings about its
propositional content. The only way to account for this ‘magical
power’ declarations possess is by having recourse to the Lacanian
hypotheses of the ‘big Other’: Searle himself has a presentiment of
it when he points out that ‘it is only given such institutions as the
church, the law, private property, the state and a special position of
the speaker and hearer within these institutions’19 that one can
accomplish a declaration. In Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The
Emperor’s New Clothes’, all the world knows that the emperor has
no clothes, and everybody knows that all the world knows it – why,
then, does the simple public statement that ‘the emperor has no
clothes’ blow up the entire established network of intersubjective
relations? In other words: if everybody knew it, who did not know
it? The Lacanian answer is, of course: the big Other (in the sense of

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the field of socially recognized knowledge). Declarations imply

the same logic: the meeting is closed when, by means of the
utterance, ‘The meeting is closed’, this fact comes to the big Other’s
knowledge.
When, in his Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan specifies the
Freudian ‘primordial repression’ as the ‘fall of the binary signifier’,
he seems to allude precisely to this inherent split of the ‘pure’
performative (of the declaration), i.e., to the fact that it can actualize
itself only under the guise of its opposite.20 What is ‘originally
repressed’, what, in accordance with a structural necessity, has to
disappear in order that the symbolic network can establish itself, is
a signifier of the ‘pure’ performative, i.e., of a performative which
would not assume the form of its opposite, of a constative. In this
split, in this impossibility of a ‘pure’ performative, the subject of the
signifier emerges: his place is the void opened up by the fall of the
‘impossible’ binary signifier. That is to say, the gesture which
constitutes the subject is the empty gesture of a forced choice:
reality is ‘subjectivized’ when the subject posits as his free choice
what is forced upon him, i.e., what he encounters as given, positive
reality. This formal act of conversion of reality qua given into reality
qua produced is founded precisely in the above-described
coincidence of ‘pure’ performative with its opposite (constative):
the performative production of reality necessarily assumes the
form of stating that ‘it is so’. Because of this split, the Lacanian
mathem for the subject is $: an empty gesture of consenting to what
is given as if to one’s free choice.
The Lacanian S 1, the ‘Master signifier’ which represents the
subject for other signifiers, is therefore the point of intersection
between performative and constative, the point at which the ‘pure’
performative coincides with (assumes the form of) its opposite. We
can see, now, what is lacking in Austin I (that of the ‘performative’)
as well as in Austin II (that of the ‘illocutionary force’): a kind of
paradoxical, inward-inverted topological model where the extreme
interior of the ‘pure’ performative coincides with the exterior of the
constative. This uttermost point of intersection is of course that of
authority; its immanent split is best rendered by the ambiguity of
the verb ‘to establish’: authority is ultimately the name of a gesture
which ‘establishes (constitutes, creates)’ a certain state of things in

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the very act of ‘establishing (certifying, stating, ascertaining)’ that

‘things are thus’.21
Such an assertion of authority seems to be the very opposite of
the Enlightenment whose fundamental aim is precisely to render
truth independent of authority, in which truth is arrived at by
means of the critical procedure which questions the pro et contra of
a proposition irrespective of the authority that pertains to its place
of enunciation. To undermine this supposed incompatibility
between authority and Enlightenment, it’s sufficient to remember
how the two supreme achievements of the unmasking of ideological
prejudices that grew out of the project of the Enlightenment,
Marxism and psychoanalysis, both refer to the authority of their
respective founders. Their structure is inherently ‘authoritarian’:
since Marx and Freud each opened up a new theoretical field which
sets the very criteria of veracity, their words cannot be put to the
test the same way one is allowed to question the statements of their
followers; if there is something to be refuted in their texts, these are
simply statements which precede the ‘epistemological break’, i.e.,
which do not belong under the field opened up by the founder’s
discovery (Freud’s writings prior to the discovery of the
unconscious, for example). Their texts are thus to be read the way
one should read the text of a dream, according to Lacan: as ‘sacred’
texts which are in a radical sense ‘beyond criticism’ since they
constitute the very horizon of veracity.
For that reason, every ‘further development’ of Marxism or
psychoanalysis necessarily assumes the form of a ‘return’ to Marx
or Freud: a (re)discovery of some hitherto overlooked stratum of
their work, of bringing to light what the founders ‘produced
without knowing what they produced’, to invoke Louis Althusser’s
formula. In his article on Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Andre Bazin
recommends the same attitude as the only one which befits
Chaplin’s genius: even when some details in Limelight appear to us
aborted and dull (the tedious first hour of the film; Calvero’s
pathetic vulgar-philosophical outbursts, etc.), we have to turn the
critical scrutiny on ourselves and ask what was wrong with our
approach to the film, our expectations of it.22 Such an attitude
clearly articulates the transferential relationship of the pupil to the
teacher: the teacher is by definition ‘supposed to know’, the fault is

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always ours. The scandalous truth authenticated by the history of

psychoanalysis and Marxism is that such a ‘dogmatic’ approach
proves far more productive than ‘open’, critical dealing with the
founder’s text: how much more fecund was Lacan’s ‘dogmatic’
return to Freud than the American academic machinery which
transformed Freud’s oeuvre into a collection of positive scientific
hypotheses to be tested, refuted, combined, developed, and so on!
Lacan’s scandal, the dimension of his work which resists
incorporation into the academic machinery, ultimately resides in
the fact that he openly and shamelessly posited himself as such an
authority. He repeated the Kierkegaardian gesture in relationship
to his followers: what he demanded of them was not fidelity to
some general theoretical propositions, but precisely fidelity to his
person – which is why the circular letter announcing the foundation
of La Cause freudienne is addressed to ‘those who love me’. This
unbreakable link between the doctrine and the contingent person
of the teacher, i.e., to the teacher qua material surplus that sticks
out from the neutral edifice of knowledge, is the scandal everybody
who considers theirselves Lacanian has to consider themself
implicated in: Lacan was not a Socratic master obliterating himself
before hard-won knowledge. His theory sustains itself only through
the transferential relationship to its founder. In this precise sense,
Marx, Freud and Lacan are not ‘geniuses’, but ‘apostles’: when
somebody says, ‘I follow Lacan because his reading of Freud is the
most intelligent and persuasive’, he immediately exposes himself as
non-Lacanian.
This ‘scandal’, the blemish of contingent individuality upon the
neutral field of knowledge, points towards what we could designate
Kierkegaard’s ‘materialist reversal of Hegel’. Hegel ultimately stays
within the boundary of the ‘Socratic’ universe: in his Phenomenology
of Spirit, consciousness arrives at the Truth, recollects it and
internalizes it, via its own effort, by comparing itself with its own
immanent Notion, by confronting the positive content of its
statements with its own place of enunciation, by working through
its own split, without any external support or point of reference.
The standpoint of dialectical truth (the ‘for us’) is not added to the
consciousness as a kind of external standard by which the progress
of that consciousness is then measured: ‘we’, dialecticians, are

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nothing but passive observers who retroactively reconstruct the

way consciousness itself arrived at the Truth (i.e., the ‘absolute’
standpoint without presuppositions). When, at some point of the
journey of consciousness, Truth effectively appears as a positive
entity possessing an independent existence, as an ‘in itself ’
assuming the role of the external measure of the consciousness’s
‘working through’, this is simply a necessary self-deception
‘sublated’ in the further succession of the ‘experiences of
consciousness’. In other words – in the words of the relationship
between belief and knowledge – the subject’s belief in an (external)
authority which is to be accepted unconditionally and ‘irrationally’
is nothing but a transitional stage ‘sublated’ by the passage into
reflected knowledge. For Kierkegaard, on the contrary, our belief in
the person of the Saviour is the absolute, un-abolishable condition
of our access to truth: eternal truth itself clings to this contingent
material externality and the moment we lose this little piece of the
real (the historical fact of Incarnation), the moment we cut our link
with this material fragment (reinterpreting it as a parable of man’s
affinity with God, for example), the entire edifice of Christian
knowledge crumbles.
On another level, the same goes for psychoanalysis: in the
psychoanalytic cure, there is no knowledge without the ‘presence
of the analyst’, without the impact of his dumb material weight.
Here we encounter the inherent limitation of all attempts to
conceive of a psychoanalytic cure on the model of the Hegelian
reflective movement in the course of which the subject becomes
conscious of his own ‘substantial’ content, i.e., arrives at the
repressed truth which dwells deep in him.23 If such were the case,
psychoanalysis would be the ultimate stage of the Socratic ‘Know
thyself!’ and the psychoanalyst’s role would be that of an accoucheur,
a kind of ‘vanishing mediator’ enabling the subject to achieve
communication with himself by finding access to its repressed
traumas.
This dilemma presents itself most vividly apropos of the role of
transference in the psychoanalytic cure. Insofar as we remain
within the domain of the Socratic logic of remembrance,
transference is not an ‘effective’ repetition but rather a means of
recollection: the analysand ‘projects’ past traumas which

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unconsciously determine his present behaviour (repressed and

unresolved conflicts with his father, for example) onto his
relationship to the analyst; by means of the deft manipulation of
the transferential situation, the analyst then enables the analysand
to recall the traumas which were hitherto ‘acted out’ blindly. In
other words, the task of the analyst is to make evident to the
analysand how ‘he (the analyst) is not really the father’, i.e., to bring
to awareness how the analysand, caught in the transference, used
his relationship to the analyst to stage past traumas. Lacan’s
emphasis is, on the contrary, Kierkegaardian through and through:
transferential repetition cannot be reduced to remembrance, and
transference is not a kind of ‘theatre of shadows’ where we settle
with past traumas in effigia. It is repetition in the full meaning of
the term, i.e., in it, the past trauma is literally repeated, ‘actualized’.
The analyst is not the father’s ‘shadow’, he is a presence in front of
which the past battle has to be fought out ‘for real’.
The point of the preceding argumentation, of course, is not to
defend blind submission to authority, but to illuminate the fact that
discourse itself is in its fundamental structure ‘authoritarian’ (for
that reason, the ‘discourse of the Master’ is the first, ‘founding’
discourse in the Lacanian matrix of the four discourses; or, as
Jacques Derrida would say in his late writings, every discursive
field is founded on some ‘violent’ ethico-political decision). Out of
the free-floating dispersion of signifiers, a consistent field of
meaning emerges through the intervention of a Master Signifier,
why? The answer is contained in the paradox of the ‘finite infinity/
totality’ which, as one knows from Claude Levi-Strauss onwards,
pertains to the very notion of the signifier: the symbolic order in
which the subject is embedded is simultaneously ‘finite’ (it consists
of a limited and ultimately contingent network which never
overlaps with the Real) and ‘infinite’, or, to use a Sartrean term,
‘totalizing’ (in any given language, ‘everything can be told’, there is
no external standpoint from which one can judge its limitations).
Because of this inherent tension, every language contains a
paradoxical element which, within its field, stands in for what
eludes it – in Lacanese, in every set of signifiers, there is always ‘at
least one’ which functions as the signifier of the very lack of the
signifier. This signifier is the Master Signifier: the ‘empty’ signifier

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which totalizes (‘quilts’) the dispersed field – in it, the infinite chain
of causes (‘knowledge’) is interrupted with a founding act of abyssal
violence.
The philosophical term for this inversion of impotence into a
constitutive power is, of course, the notion of the transcendental
with all its inherent paradoxes: the subject experiences as his
constitutive power the very horizon which frames his vision due to
his finitude. For that reason, it is precisely the notion of the
transcendental which enables us to distinguish Lacan from, say,
Jürgen Habermas. With Habermas, the status of the ‘disturbances’
which vitiate the course of ‘rational argumentation’ by way of a
non-reflected constraint is ultimately contingent/empirical; these
‘disturbances’ emerge as empirical impediments on the path to
gradual realization of the transcendental regulative Idea. Whereas
with Lacan, the status of the Master Signifier, the signifier of the
symbolic authority founded only in itself (in its own act of
enunciation), is strictly transcendental: the gesture which ‘distorts’
a symbolic field, which ‘curves’ its space by introducing in it an
unfounded violence, is stricto sensu correlative to its very
establishment. In other words, the moment we subtract from a
discursive field its ‘distortion’, the field itself disintegrates (‘dequilts’).
Lacan’s position is therefore the very opposite of that of Habermas,
according to whom the inherent pragmatic presuppositions of a
discourse are ‘non-authoritarian’ (the notion of discourse implies
the idea of a communication free of constraint where only rational
argumentation counts, etc.).
Lacan’s fundamental thesis is that the Master is by definition an
impostor. The Master is somebody who, upon finding himself at
the site of the constitutive lack in the structure, acts as if he holds
the reins of that surplus, of the mysterious X which eludes the grasp
of the structure. This accounts for the difference between Habermas
and Lacan as to the role of the Master: with Lacan, the Master is an
impostor, yet the place he occupies – the site of the lack in the
structure – cannot be abolished, since the very finitude of every
discursive field imposes its structural necessity. The unmasking of
the Master’s imposture does not abolish the place he occupies, it
just renders it visible in its original emptiness, i.e., as preceding the
element which fills it out. Hence the Lacanian notion of the analyst

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as the obverse (l’envers) of the Master: of somebody who holds the

place of the Master, yet who, by means of his (non)activity,
undermines the Master’s charisma, suspends the effect of ‘quilting’,
and thus renders visible the distance that separates the Master from
the place it occupies, i.e., the radical contingency of the subject
who occupies this place.
Consequently, Lacan and Habermas’s strategies of subverting
symbolic authority are fundamentally different despite some
seeming similarities. Habermas simply relies on the gradual
reflective elucidation of the implicit prejudices which distort
communication, i.e., on the asymptotic approach to the regulative
ideal of free, unconstrained communication. Lacan is also
anti-authoritarian, he is as far as possible from any kind of
obscurantism of the ineffable, he too remains thoroughly attached
to the space of public communication. This unexpected proximity
of Lacan to Habermas is corroborated by a procedure, proposed by
Lacan, which caused a great amount of resistance even among
some of his closest followers: la passe, the ‘passage’ of an analysand
into the place of the analyst. Its crux is the intermediate role of the
so-called passeurs: the analysand (the passant) narrates the results
of his analysis, the insights at which he arrived, to the two passeurs,
his peers, who report on it to the committee (comite de la passe) –
the committee then decides on the analysand’s ‘passage’ to the place
of the analyst. The idea of these two middlemen who channel every
contact between the passant and the committee is very
‘Habermasian’ indeed: they are there to prevent any kind of initiatic
relationship between the passant and the committee, i.e., to prevent
la passe from functioning as the transmission of an initiatic
knowledge, after the model of secret cults: the analysand must be
able to formulate the results of his analysis in such a way that the
two passeurs, these two average men who stand in for the common
knowledge, are able to transmit it integrally to the committee – in
other words, the detour through the field of public knowledge must
not affect the ‘message’ in any way.
However, the contrast between Habermas and Lacan finds its
clearest expression apropos of the notion of the ‘ideal speech
situation’: Habermas conceives it as the asymptotic ideal of
intersubjective communication free of constraint where the

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participants arrive at consensus by means of rational argumentation.

Contrary to common opinion, Lacan also knows of an ‘ideal speech
situation’ which undermines the imposture of the Master Signifier:
it is none other than the analytic situation itself – here, the abyss
that separates Lacan from Habermas is unmistakable. In the
process of psychoanalysis, we also have two subjects speaking to
each other; yet instead of facing each other and exchanging
arguments, one of them lies on the couch, stares into thin air and
throws out disconnected prattle, whereas the other mostly stays
silent and terrorizes the first by the weight of his oppressive mute
presence. This situation is ‘free of constraint’ in the precise meaning
of suspending the structural role of the Master Signifier: the
analytic discourse as the obverse of the discourse of the Master
transposes us into a state of undecidability which precedes the
‘quilting’ of the discursive field by a Master Signifier, i.e., into the
state of ‘free-floating’ signifiers – what is ‘repeated’ in it is ultimately
the very contingency which engendered the analysand’s symbolic
space.
Although all of Kierkegaard’s work seems to move in this
direction, his actual statements are more refined – recall his claim
about the futility of philosophical systems (his target here is, of
course, Hegel):
In relation to their systems most systematisers are like a man
who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack close by;
they do not live in their own enormous systematic buildings.24
As is often the case in Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, he misses the
point and ignores his own proximity to Hegel: the final result of the
Hegelian movement is precisely that enormous castles are only
finished when they are accompanied/supplemented by a small
shack in which the subject who built them has to dwell . . . In short,
to paraphrase Hegel’s well-known programmatic slogan from his
Phenomenology: one should conceive the Absolute not only as a
magnificent castle but also as a small shack attached to it. Or the
Christian version: one should conceive God not only as the majestic
creator of everything but also as a miserable individual walking
around Palestine 2,000 years ago. In his Castle, Kafka has a clear
premonition of this paradox: the novel’s hero decides to climb up

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the hill and approaches the majestic castle on the top of it; however,
the closer he comes to the castle, the more he notices that the castle
is not composed of majestic buildings but dirty small shacks . . .
And exactly the same holds for language: there is no great castle
of Language with all its noble poetic or scientific statements without
what amounts to the linguistic version of small dirty shacks. As
Lacan repeatedly points out, ‘primordial’ speech acts are single
exclamations, as a rule curses or vulgar words (‘Shit’, ‘Wow!’ . . .),
which play a very specific role: they are neither statements about
things and processes that are going on in reality (like ‘a storm is
coming from the north’), nor are they expressions of our inner
reaction to external events (fear, anger, joy . . .). At their most basic,
they express our lack of a proper place in the symbolic order in
which we dwell. We enter the symbolic order first as its objects: we
somehow grasp that others are talking about us, that we are within
the scope of their interest, but we don’t clearly understand what
they are saying, what they want from us, what they see in us –
language as a medium is a big Other, connecting us with others and
simultaneously walling us off, separating us, from them. It is in this
sense, for Lacan (who often evokes his dog Justine), that dogs speak
without really inhabiting language; they are unable to subjectivize
themselves in it, to assume a stance towards others in it. They are
perplexed by human language, and they get frustrated by their
inability to participate in linguistic exchanges – as Lacan put it,
dogs are neurotic, hystericized by language, without being its
subjects. So they are not simply outside language: what they can
experience is a frustration that they cannot find their place within
language, that they cannot inscribe their subjective position into it.
This is where human curses and exclamation come in: they don’t
simply express our fear or anger or joy, but a much more basic
frustration at the impossibility of saying in clear language what we
want to say, of ‘find[ing] the right word’, as Aaron Schuster puts it:

If a dog could speak, would he not bellow a curse? [. . .] To speak

is to tarry with the impossibility of speaking, to give voice to and
do something with the bewilderment, lassitude, and rage—the
abject objecthood—in which Sartre’s dog can only helplessly
languish. To enter the symbolic order doesn’t mean to simply

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leave behind the pet animal’s protosymbolic confusion and take

up one’s place in behind the pet animal’s culture. Rather it is to
raise this impasse to the level of the word, and thereby
subjectivize it. What Sartre describes as canine ennui ought to
be understood as an essential moment in the becoming of the
speaking being.25

As a further illustration Schuster mentions the famous ‘all-fuck’

investigation scene in The Wire (season 1, episode 4), a scene that I
analysed in detail in an old book of mine.26 In an empty ground-
floor apartment where a murder took place six months previously,
McNulty and Bunk, their sole witness a silent housekeeper, try to
reconstruct how it happened, using only the word ‘fuck’. They say
‘fuck’ thirty-eight times in a row, in so many different ways – it
comes to mean anything, from annoyed boredom to elated
triumph, from pain or disappointment or shock at the horror of a
gruesome murder to pleasant surprise, and it reaches its climax in
the self-reflexive reduplication of ‘Fuckin’ fuck!’. One can easily
imagine the same scene in which each ‘fuck’ is replaced by a more
‘normal’ way of conveying the same thing: ‘Again, just another
photo!’, ‘Ouch, it hurts!’, ‘Now I got it!’, etc. This scene works on
multiple levels, but at its most basic, it shows a curse in the full
multitude of its uses: the same word can function in such a dizzying
array of ways precisely because this multitude is sustained by the
frustrating impossibility of clearly expressing one’s subjective
stance. So this scene does not enact a metaphorical or reflective
game adding another level to the ‘realistic’ functioning of language
– on the contrary, it enacts the basic gesture of language, by bringing
out the impossibility on which language is based: we
use words in a language because the ‘true’ word is missing, and
this word is missing because I – the speaking subject – don’t
have a proper place within the symbolic, because I am a crack in
its edifice.
We can – should, even – imagine an ideal analytic session in
which the analyst reenacts the scene from The Wire and from time
to time just interrupts the patient’s flow of words with a curse,
maybe even with a simple ‘Fuck!’. It is also in this sense that the
analyst is the obverse of the master. The so-called ‘pansexualism’

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wrongly attributed to Freud (‘behind everything there is sex’)

would acquire in this way an unexpected meaning: yes, the analyst’s
reply to everything is ‘Fuck!’, but this fuck has nothing to do with
sexuality, it can refer to anything and nothing.
And let’s take this all the way, as far as we can: does the
exclamation ‘Christ!’ not work in a similar way to ‘Fuck!’? We can
easily imagine the scene from The Wire with the ‘Christ!’ instead of
‘Fuck!’ where the curse would express the same frustrating inability
to subjectivize our position in the big Other. And why should we
not bring the two dimensions – sex and God’s name – together?
Recall (trigger warning!) the dirty joke in which a teacher asks an
elementary school class how people go to heaven when they are
dying, and one of the boys replies: ‘First with our legs.’ Surprised,
the teacher asks why, and the boy replies: ‘A week ago, when my
father was on a business trip, I entered my parents’ bedroom and I
saw a man lying on my mother making strange movements; my
mother’s legs were raised high up and she was shouting: “Oh Christ,
I’m coming!”’ This mention of Christ is not simply a blasphemous
punchline; it puts words to the mother’s frustrating inability to find
the right word for the intense pleasure she is experiencing. Even if
Christ were not Christ, would he not also be justified in uttering
a simple ‘Christ’ or ‘Fuck!’ instead of the well-known ‘Father, why
have you abandoned me’ when dying on the cross? Only in
Christianity can we imagine such an outcry.
To conclude, let us make it clear why swearing is an immanent
part and sign of an authentic authority. In her Disavowal,27 Alenka
Zupančič rejects the commonplace that we live in an era in which
all forms of authority are disintegrating; she focuses on the form of
authority which is today stronger than ever, the authority of
science. She begins by pointing out that its authority operates at
two levels. Immanently, i.e., within the scientific discourse itself, a
scientific endeavour gains its authority by way of surviving the test
of refutability as defined by Karl Popper: if it survives this test, it is
(for the time being) confirmed as true. Externally, science functions
as an authority in social space: even those who do not understand
a complex theory acknowledge it as true and relevant, i.e., as
something that can be evoked as a justification of certain measures
(‘science has proved that we, humans, are also responsible for global

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warming’). At this level, however, critique of science intervenes

with claims that scientific research was influenced or even
controlled by the interests of capital which pushed scientists to
ignore the ecological impact of human activity (or to exaggerate it),
and to serve as an instrument of social domination.
Zupančič convincingly demonstrates that such a critique of
science relies on a short circuit between the two levels: it pretends
to undermine science from within while it brings out only its
social status. It is not enough to say that scientists acted under
the influence of the interests of capital; even if they did, their
conclusions can still be true if we apply to them immanent criteria
of scientific procedures. (But also the other way round: a science
can advocate authentic emancipatory interests while it is
scientifically worthless.) Furthermore, such a direct reference to
the subjective corruption of scientists is too soft towards capitalism:
it reduces to the psychological conditions of contingent individuals
what is a feature of capitalism as a system, what belongs to its very
notion (as Hegel would have put it).
To these two levels one should add a third one: what if scientific
discourse (in the sense of modern science) is limited and
constrained not just due to the external influence of social
interests, but because this limitation is inscribed into its very form?
As Lacan put it, the scientific discourse forecloses (excludes) the
subject, it adopts a disinterested panoramic view on reality
posing as ‘objective science’ while ignoring its own social
mediation. The Frankfurt School Marxists endeavoured to prove
that the basic procedure of ‘objective science’, its alleged social
neutrality, practices what they called ‘instrumental reason’,
reducing reality to an external object to be manipulated, and such
an approach is possible only within a modern capitalist society.
Marxism and psychoanalysis practice a totally different approach:
they target a truth which can emerge only through radical subjective
engagement, i.e., subjective engagement is not an obstacle to
objective truth but its condition because the scientist itself is part
of its object, not its external observer. In Marxism, a theory
mobilizes its object, transforming it into a revolutionary subject,
while in psychoanalysis, interpretation affects the object (the
patient) if it is done at a right moment.

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Such an engagement is only possible if we break out of today’s

liberal ideological universe in which permissiveness and free
choice are elevated into a supreme value. In this universe, social
control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on the
subject’s freedom: they are only permitted if they appear as (and are
sustained by) individuals experiencing themselves as free. Unable
to break out of this vicious cycle alone, as isolated individuals, since
the more we act freely the more we get enslaved into the system, we
need to be ‘awakened’ from this ‘dogmatic slumber’ of fake freedom
from outside, by the push of a Master figure. This is why Isolde
Charim is fully justified to characterize today’s post-patriarchal
narcissistic subject as a subject practicing voluntary servitude:28
When I focus on my Ego, its potentials, interests and needs, I am
far from being free, I remain enslaved to the socio-symbolic space
within which my Ego was shaped.
A true Master doesn’t try to guess what people want; he simply
obeys his own desires so that it is for the people to decide if
they will follow him. In other words, his power stems from his
fidelity to his desire, from not compromising it. Therein resides
the difference between a true Master and, say, a Fascist or
Stalinist leader who pretends to know (better than the people
themselves) what people really want (what is really good for
them), and is then ready to enforce this on them even against
their will. In short, in order for individuals to ‘reach beyond
themselves’, to break out of their passivity and engage themselves
as direct political agents, the reference to a Leader is necessary,
a Leader who allows them to pull themselves out of the swamp
like Baron Munchausen. Alain Badiou’s thesis is that a subject
needs a Master to elevate itself above the ‘human animal’ and to
practice fidelity to a Truth-Event:

The master is the one who helps the individual to become

subject. That is to say, if one admits that the subject emerges in
the tension between the individual and the universality, then it
is obvious that the individual needs a mediation, and thereby an
authority, in order to progress on this path. The crisis of the
master is a logical consequence of the crisis of the subject, and
psychoanalysis did not escape it. One has to renew the position

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of the master, it is not true that one can do without it, even and
especially in the perspective of emancipation.29
And Badiou is not afraid to oppose the necessary role of the Master
to our ‘democratic’ sensitivity: ‘This capital function of leaders is
not compatible with the predominant “democratic” ambience,
which is why I am engaged in a bitter struggle against this ambience
(after all, one has to begin with ideology).’30 And we should go to
the end here: one of the signs of such an authentic Master is that he
swears – there is no authority without curses. Swearing is here not
a ‘personal touch’, not an obscenity signaling the presence of a
private person, it is an immanent feature of the engaged Master.
Only experts do not need to swear, and that’s why their authority is
much more dangerous.

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Over the past decade, Islamist insurgents linked to AQIM (al-Qaeda

in the Islamic Maghreb) have staged a series of military coups in
central Africa – Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso – with the open support
of Russians from the Wagner group. The world media have told two
stories about these events. Pro-Russian outlets interpret these
events as a popular rebellion against French neocolonialism linked
to local corrupted elites. The Western big media sees in them a
large-scale plot by AQIM and Russia to establish an anti-Western
and anti-liberal empire in central Africa. Both stories are true . . . up
to a point.
France have continued to exert a subtle (or sometimes not-so-
subtle) neocolonial rule over its African ex-colonies. After France
granted independence to its Western and Central African colonies
peacefully in the 1960s, it continued to exercise economic, political,
and military influence in la Françafrique. France retains the largest
military presence in Africa of any former colonial power; it forces
African countries to give preference to French interests and
companies in terms of public procurement and public bidding. It
imposed on its former possessions the African Financial
Community (CFA) monetary zone, which is inherently unequal
and rooted in exploitative practices.1
However, it could also be argued that the uprisings in central
Africa which have positioned themselves as ‘anti-colonial’ leave
nations such as Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso even worse off than
they were under French neocolonialism. Do these nations face
futures in which they struggle with the same intractable problems
facing the likes of Zimbabwe and Myanmar: authoritarian military
rule, economic regression into new lows of poverty in which only
the corrupt elite have access to wealth, political and social discourse

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gripped by an ideological fundamentalism which stigmatizes such

things as equal rights for LGBTQ+ people as ‘colonial’ and thus
deplorable? Emancipatory leaders like Thomas Sankara in Burkina
Faso are a thing of the past, it seems. How can it be that much of
Africa finds itself in such a desperate situation, where the only
actual choice is between bad (Western neocolonialism) and worse
(fake authoritarian anti-colonialism)?
One has to gather the courage here to reject the simple
explanation that what is missing is the mobilization of the people,
a true democracy sustained by popular engagement. If there is a
lesson to be learned from the latest Right-populist protests, it is that
the time has come to modify Abraham Lincoln’s adage, ‘You can
fool all people some of the time and some people all the time. But
you can never fool all people all the time.’ In today’s world, it might
be more accurate to say, ‘Most people can avoid being fooled some
of the time and some people can avoid being fooled all the time.
But most people are being fooled all the time.’ A genuine
emancipatory engagement with and for the people is a rare event
and one which, historically, quickly disintegrates – and not only in
the history of Western democracy, either. Recall how, in the time of
the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong sent thousands of intellectuals
to the agricultural communes to learn from ordinary farmers
whom he elevated into ‘subjects supposed to know’ – one can argue
that it was good for intellectuals to get acquainted with the lived
realities of rural farm labour, but it would be a stretch to claim that
deeper wisdom about social life would inevitably result. There is no
one group, economically privileged or not, which possesses an
authentic understanding of society.
There are two crucial steps we need to take in order to disrupt
the notion of a hierarchy of understanding. The first is to dispel the
myth of meritocracy: that whatever your social position at birth,
society provides the opportunity and mobility necessary for talent
and effort to rise to the top. In Against Meritocracy, Jo Littler
demonstrated that meritocracy is the key cultural means of
legitimation for contemporary neoliberal culture, and that whilst it
promises opportunity, it in fact creates new forms of social division,
since the structural inequalities of class, race and gender continue
to play a much more important role than the apparent opportunities

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on offer.2 One could also add to Littler’s analysis a heterogeneous

factor – that of chance. In Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the
Myth of Meritocracy, Robert Frank, while not discounting the
importance of hard work, shows that among groups of people
performing at a high level, chance plays an enormous role in an
individual’s success.3
For most of the critics of meritocracy, the alternative is to trust
that people, however manipulated and embedded in everyday
ideology, however brainwashed by religious or ethnic
fundamentalism, will eventually arrive at a spontaneous
understanding of the justice and injustice on display in their social
world. In short, many critics of meritocracy lean into a version of
Lincoln’s saying. Unfortunately, the complexity of today’s global
situation compels us to abandon the faith that people will come to
a point of realization or recognition. For example, many people’s
hopes of averting total ecological collapse rest on the vague faith
that ‘people will act’ before it is too late. But if the people who must
act are comprised of individuals struggling with a cost of living
crisis, bombarded by conflicting information on global warming –
with even scientists and experts, who might be expected to hold
authority, espousing radically divergent views about the nature of
the problem, let alone what must be done to combat it – is it
remotely realistic to expect that person to be able to act decisively
in the world? When there appears to be no ‘correct’, definitive or
clear answer to the ecological crisis, how can someone find the
hope, faith or volition to subject themselves voluntarily to measures
which in the short term promise to thrust them even deeper into
poverty? I don’t consider what people might call the ‘intellectual
elites’ as immune to this same issue in any way. The endless loop of
being unable to arrive at what Fredric Jameson called a proper
cognitive mapping impacts us all. Nor is the solution to strive for a
‘true’ meritocracy; in order to achieve such a thing, our entire social
order would have to be transformed.
To return to Abraham Lincoln’s formulation, or its contemporary
translation, it’s not so much that the majority of people are fooled,
it is basically that they don’t care – their main concern is that their
relatively stable life goes on undisturbed. The majority doesn’t want
actual democracy in which they would really decide: they want the

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appearance of democracy where they freely vote, but some higher

authority which they trust presents them with a choice and then
simultaneously shows then how they should vote. When the
majority refuses to accept the hints and nudges from the status quo,
confusion abounds; a situation in which they do have the power to
decide is paradoxically experienced as a crisis of democracy, as a
threat to the stability of the system. Furthermore, when people who
have been made to feel like victims realize that they do have a
choice, they often explode in real anger and things as a rule get
much worse. The desire may be to have their voice heard, to have
some say over their own lot, but as the ongoing wave of Rightist
populism vastly demonstrates, this understandable desire exposes
them even more fatally to manipulation, conspiracy theories and
similar insidious narratives in which righteous frustrations are
displaced on to blameless targets.
But is this all there is? An endless loop of ignorance, crisis, anger
and conspiracy? Fortunately, I don’t think so – there is a second
step to be accomplished: one should accept that that, from time to
time, in an unpredictable way, exceptions occur. The mist dispels,
clarity prevails, the majority are mobilized for the right cause. Such
moments are history at its purest – moments when years of change
happen within the scope of a week (as it happened during the
October Revolution). So, back to our starting point: Is there a
chance that such a moment might occur in central Africa? If it did,
the prerequisite would be that Western colonial forces rejected
their own neocolonialism, which only serves to feed the false anti-
colonialism of fundamentalist ideology. They would need to behave
better than the bewildered individual we contemplated above, and
sacrifice their own short-term profits in the interest of longer-term
and perhaps less tangible gains. However, the Western colonial
forces could only do this – turn against their own neocolonialism
which feeds the false fundamentalist anti-colonialism – if they
radically transform their own economy and gather the courage to
rehabilitate the very concept of planning – a large-scale obligatory
planning and not just vague ‘coordination’ or ‘collaboration’. Such
planning, which reaches well beyond the scope of single nation-
states may appear unimaginable today, but there is simply no other
way to confront the crises that pose a threat to our survival.

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The first model of a Communist solidarity was enforced upon

us by the Covid-19 pandemic: we were all aware that global
mobilization and coordination were needed, as well as measures
which clearly violated market rules (in the US, Trump passed a
measure giving every family a sum of $2,000 and reactualized a law
from the early 1950s, giving the federal government the power to
determine what single industries would produce). This mobilization
largely failed, but the only choice we have is to apply to it the old
Beckettian motto: ‘Try again, fail again, fail better.’ If there is
something of which we can be sure, it is that similar global
emergencies will arise again, and we should prepare now for them.

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 We Are Biomass

If we take as our starting point that capitalism isn’t the source of the
asymmetries and imbalances in the world, it also means our goal
shouldn’t be to restore the ‘natural’ balance and symmetry. Such a
project of restoring the pre-capitalist balance not only ignores (or
underestimates, at least) the rift between humans and the natural
world which is already at work in pre-capitalist societies: it also
ignores the emancipatory dimension of the rise of modern
subjectivity which leaves behind the traditional sexualized
cosmology of mother earth (and father heaven), of our roots in the
substantial ‘maternal’ order of nature. Marx’s metaphor for capital
is the vampire, the parasitic, predatory living dead sucking the
blood of the living – in the topsy-turvy world of capital, the dead
rule over the living and are, in some ways, more alive than the
living. The implicit premise (or promise) of this metaphor is that
revolution would reverse this hierarchy – to upend the state of
things and by doing so, return to the normal, ‘natural’ order in
which the living rule over the dead.
Lacan, however, teaches us that it is the inversion of the
relationship between the living and the dead which defines what it is
to be human in the first place: the ‘barred’ subject is the one who is
undead, estranged from its biological substance, since it is enmeshed
in the symbolic big Other which is a kind of parasite living off the
humans who serve it. Enjoyment itself is something that parasitizes
upon human pleasures, perverting them so that a subject can draw a
surplus-enjoyment from displeasure itself.1 In short, Lacan’s well-
known formula ‘between the two deaths’ (biological and symbolic)
should be supplemented by its opposite: ‘between the two lives’.
The primary characteristic of a radical ecology is, therefore, that
it radically modifies the very notion of nature. In ‘The Garden’, a

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story by Afghan writer and poet Mozhgan Majoob published in the

spring of 2024, the army builds a wall around a beautiful garden in
order to isolate its beauty. But Darya, the heroine, has a dream
which speaks to the failure of this barrier:
If the animals and birds are united, together with the water, the
plants and trees they can stop the army’s walls from growing.
The birds can fly above and past it, as I did in my dream, carrying
seeds, while the snakes and animals burrow beneath it and make
it weak, making room for the water to rush through and wash
the walls away. The ants can eat whatever the armies try to build,
and the bees buzz past carrying the pollen of every beautiful
flower to grow inside and outside—to bury all of the walls that
greedy people try to build. When nature is reunited, no human
power is strong enough to defeat its unity.2
This last sentence has the cadence of wisdom, but I say it is as wrong
as a human statement can be – what if (a part of) nature joins
human destruction? Why is nature a harmonious, hegemonic
whole? This is why we should reject the hidden anthropocentrism
that pervades many deep ecological stances. Slovene biologist Eva
Nadlučnik, who specializes in reducing suffering in animals, said
recently in an interview for Delo: ‘We should enable all animals to
lead a dignified life.’3 Compassionate as this aspiration sounds, its
arrogance should also be noted: ‘we’ (humanity) are now given the
task of diminishing the suffering of all animals even when this
suffering is not the result of how we (mis)treat them. Moreover, what
does a ‘dignified life’ mean to an animal? Is dignity not a specifically
human quality or stance? Instead of getting lost in such speculations,
we should rather focus on how contemporary history compels us
to radically rethink our basic notion of life-world.
Let me begin by citing Michael Marder’s ‘Compassionate
Genocide’, well worth quoting because he moves beyond the
expression of horror at what is taking place in Gaza to bring out the
properly ontological implications of what we see when our screens
bring us long drone shots of Gaza in ruins. It is a nightmarish vision
‘where high-rise buildings and human bodies, ecosystems . . . and
orchards are mutilated beyond recognition and reduced to organic-
inorganic rubble’; the basic distinction between human bodies, the

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world they construct, and the ‘natural’ one they inhabit ceases to have
any force. All are reduced to waste, horror, despair, the byproduct of
destruction. In the face of this catastrophic mingling of the organic
and the inorganic, the human, the natural and the artificial, Marder
suggests that the only response is to abandon attempts to imaginatively
identify with the victims of genocide in Palestine; a new kind of
solidarity ‘with dumpified lives, places and worlds’ is needed:

‘I am biomass’ is a speech act that identifies with a vanishing life,

with life’s vanishing into dumped massiveness. The affirmation
says: I am decimated being and stymied becoming, yet not
exactly nothing. Dumped, I resist the dump with the surreal
power of not-nothing. . . . [W]hat if Gaza were a condensed and
particularly blunt version of a planetary tendency, as neoliberal
newspeak with regard to ‘compassionate genocide’ leads us to
believe? If so, then the biomassification of life, which proceeds at
an uneven pace elsewhere, is accelerated in Gaza at the cutting
edge of the most recent technologies of devastation. Rather than
compassion, then, what is required is the solidarity of the
dumped, who dare assert, ‘We Are biomass.’4

When a wave of annihilation has passed over, whether that be in

the form of genocidal conflict or ecological self-destruction, what
is left – rubble, waste ground, a tangle of corpses and severed limbs
– is all that is left on the basis of which to organize and connect.
And the fact that something is left, abject and unwanted though it
may be, can be a sort of basis for solidarity and resistance; the
squashed dead birds of progress can unionize, the refuse can refuse
to be ignored, even if the only compassionate witness is itself. At
such a nadir, the neat divisions into organic/inorganic, alive/inert,
human/not human no longer possess any relevance or force.
Therein resides the key feature of the notion of biomass: in the
ontological levelization in which domains that are totally different
interact within the same space. The notion of biomass thus implies
a crucial insight, as formulated by Levi Bryant:

in an age where we are faced with the looming threat of

monumental climate change, it is irresponsible to draw our
distinctions in such a way as to exclude nonhuman actors.5

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Bryant provides the convincing and pertinent example of ecological

action in our capitalist societies: Why do all ideologico-critical calls
fail to mobilize people? Why are the majority not engaging in
serious action? If, in our approach to ideology, we remain at the
level of so-called ‘discourse analysis’ and focus exclusively on the
ideological motifs that are operative in our language games, this
failure becomes inexplicable; but if we widen our focus and include
other processes in social reality that influence our decisions –
biased media reports, economic pressures on workers (threat of
unemployment), material limitations, and so forth – the absence of
engagement becomes much more understandable. Recall Jane
Bennet’s description in Vibrant Matter of how actants (anything
which acts or to which activity is granted, with no implication of
human agency or even human involvement) interact at a polluted
rubbish dump; rotting trash, worms, insects, abandoned machines,
chemical poisons, and so on each play their (never purely passive)
role.6 She concludes her book with what she calls (in no way only
with irony) her ‘Nicene Creed for would-be materialists’:7
I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and
unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by
heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is
wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms,
and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help
reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and
exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with
lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery,
highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider
distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests.8
There is authentic theoretical and ethico-political insight to be
gained by taking the role of actants seriously. If our ability to
understand the environment as a biomass is triggered by a specific
catastrophic event caused by humans, then, in Hegelese, only in
such a context can ‘biomass’ become a concept-for-itself, part of
our lived experience of reality.
We should bear in mind that Gaza in ruins is an extreme case of
a biomass, one of the most profoundly horrifying and shocking
images with which our media (social and otherwise) confronts us.

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But there are also places throughout the globe where the distinction
between the human and the non-human is pushed beyond breaking
point: places where waste is dumped and thousands of people work
separating glass, metals, plastic, etc. from chaotic heaps of rubbish
– places where people nevertheless eat, breathe, live. Agbogbloshie
in the suburbs of Accra (the capital of Ghana), called by the
residents ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, is one such example; the waste
management system in Mumbai is another. The horrors experienced
by those existing in a biomass environment are difficult to
contemplate.
This does not render the biomass immune from exploitation.
‘Reclaiming’ these wastelands, breaking down what remains for
material which can be reused without carrying the traces of its
origin, is understandably attractive for ecological reasons, which
only makes it more compatible with the preoccupations of
technocratic societies. As Mark Wrathall argues in How to Read
Heidegger, ‘In the technological age, what matters to us most is
getting the “greatest possible use” out of everything’.
Does this not throw a new light on how ecological concerns
might enter an unholy alliance with the requirements of technology?
Is the point of using resources sparingly, of recycling, etc., not
precisely to maximize the use of everything? The huge masses of
trash we find throughout the world could be viewed as the ultimate
product of capitalism – useless computers, cars, TVs and VCRs.
Spaces like the famous ‘resting place’ of hundreds of abandoned
planes in the Mojave desert in California, where they are stored
(supposedly temporarily) until they can be sold or scrapped,10
confront us with the obverse truth of the capitalist dynamic, its
inert objectal remainder. And it is against this background that one
should read the ecological dream-notion of total recycling (in
which every remainder is used again) as the ultimate capitalist
dream, even if dressed up in the language of what is ‘natural’ and
‘balanced’. In the dream of the self-propelling circulation of capital
which would leave behind no material residue, we see the proof of
how capitalism can appropriate even the most unlikely ideologies.
However, what makes the exploitation of a biomass different
from business-as-usual capitalist logic is that it assumes a chaotic
wasteland as our basic predicament, a wasteland which can be

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partially exploited but never abolished – as Marder put it, biomass

is our new home, our being; we are biomass. This is why we can’t
simply avoid the horror of the biomass and exist in some ‘natural’,
ecologically sustainable idyll. If only it was that easy! We need to
affirm biomass as our only home and work within its confines,
transforming it, engaging with it so we can experience a new
harmony that pervades its very disturbing chaos. What if life as
biomass forces us to reject the usual Leftist reordering of hierarchies
and to open ourselves to what one cannot but call the objective
beauty of reality (humans, animals, bacteria, decaying ruins . . .),
leaving behind hierarchic order and existing in sameness and
solidarity?

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 The End of the World

Images of the end of the world, imagined and otherwise, pervade

our media. Alenka Zupančič noted ironically that one should not
expect too much from the end of the world – it may disappoint us.
I offer a similar sentiment, only phrased slightly differently: don’t
worry, sooner or later the end will come. This reassurance addresses
the underlying belief that, if we talk and worry enough about the
end of the world, it may not happen. This leads naturally enough to
the question: What if the true end of time is not a mega-catastrophe
but the endless repetition of the same endless deferred, and
endlessly deferred, moment? A moment epitomized by the standard
coda to an episode of a TV show, asking us to wait until next week
(or in streaming life, simply the next episode) for the narrative to
be continued – to quote Alessandro Sbordoni: ‘As the end gets
nearer, more is yet to come.’1 So maybe we already live (in) the end
of the world. An end which stretches on endlessly, with no possible
resolution.
Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, the great
interpreter of Hegel in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, saw the ‘end of
history’, the highest form of social order, take place first in Stalinist
Russia and then in contemporary Japan. A Korean friend, Alex
Taek-Gwang Lee, told me that, if Kojève were alive today, he would
have chosen South Korea as an example of a place where history
had ended, too. Why? It’s impossible to answer this question
without considering North Korea as well as South Korea, such is
the nature of their hopeless entanglement.
Entanglement is at the heart of quantum physics and future
quantum technologies. Like other aspects of quantum science, the
phenomenon of entanglement reveals itself at very tiny, subatomic
scales. When two particles, such as a pair of photons or electrons

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become entangled, they remain connected even when separated by

vast distances: if one gives to one particle, say, an upwards spin, the
other will enact a downward spin.2 Are South and North Korea not
entangled in a similar way, do they not function like a couple of
entangled particles, embodying the poles of our global world, the
two directions in which history could be said to have been trending,
developed to their most extreme extent? Kojève should thus be
supplemented here: it’s not South Korea alone which stands for the
end of history but the two Koreas together in their entanglement.
The end of history is thus not a global peace but the point of an
extreme and potentially self-destructive tension.
South Korea could be painted as the country of free choice – not
politically, but in the sense of daily life, especially among the
younger depoliticized generation. The choice we are talking about
is the indifferent choice of moderate daily pleasures, the choice
among options which don’t really matter: what to wear that day,
where to eat that evening, how to spend a lazy weekend. One could
argue that the emerging generation mostly doesn’t care about big
issues like human rights and freedoms or the threat of war – while
the world still pays attention to the aggressive pronouncements of
the North Korean regime accompanied by nuclear threats, the large
majority in South Korea simply ignore these threats. Since the
standard of living of the large majority is relatively high, one can
comfortably live in a bubble. The ritualistic consistency and slow,
predictable rhythms of such a post-political, disengaged individual,
ensconced in complacency that tomorrow will be much like today,
were perfectly depicted by a recent Wim Wenders film, Perfect Days
(incidentally a Japanese-German co-production). The protagonist,
Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), works as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, fully
content with the simplicity of his life. He follows a ritualized daily
rhythm at work, listening to music in his free time, reading before
bed every night. Japanese history and culture contains much about
the benefits of slowness and peacefulness. Even the immensely
popular Japanese eco-Marxist Kohei Saito (who is discussed in
more detail elsewhere in this book) advocates slowing down
(indeed his last book was called Slow Down).
The explosion in popularity of the so-called ‘web soseol’
( ) over the past couple of decades speaks volumes about the

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depoliticized lifestyle and outlook of the younger generations in

South Korea. These ‘novels on the web’ are all produced, distributed
and consumed online, which has completely changed the existing
publishing industry. The traditional protracted process of
producing, distributing and consuming books now occurs almost
simultaneously. Web novels are dominated by genre fiction –
romances, detective novels, science-fiction and fantasy – and
operate on a serialized model, with a new chapter released weekly.
The popularity of this form of literature is gradually spreading
outside South Korea, especially in China and the USA.
Web novels generate huge profits; bigger than Samsung, the
largest South Korean corporation. As digital payment is easy and
immediate, readers can enjoy web novels at a very low price (around
100 won – 0.07 Euros – per ‘episode’), and since around ten
companies are sharing the field, competition prevents centralized
control. This is not the only way in which they are decentralized.
Authors routinely engage directly with readers in the comments
section. In this way, the ‘web novel’ has more in common with a
traditional TV production model than the constant promise that
the story is ‘to be continued’; like network executives obsessively
monitoring focus groups and ratings and tweaking the following
week’s episode to try to more precisely satisfy the capricious
audience, authors can shape their texts in response to their
audience. The directness of this interaction between author and
reader problematizes traditional notions of authorship – who, in
the end, is really writing this material?
‘Web soseol’ is often dismissed, if not actively deplored, as the
end of ‘proper culture’, which probably has a great deal to do with
the fact that by far the most popular genre of ‘web soseol’ (64 per
cent of overall output) is romantic fiction and that 95 per cent of
readers are women. Forms of popular culture which are generally
consumed by women are usually the target of much handwringing
and contempt, and romance as a genre generally dismissed as
apolitical (as if marriage, the formation of family units, the
negotiation of partnerships and relationships between the genders
are not political!) and pure ‘wish fulfilment’ – a criticism which, in
the case of ‘web soseol’, gains force from the direct interaction
between producers and consumers under the auspices of big

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corporations. One could ask whether consuming ‘web soseol’ is so

different, or so much less ‘properly cultural’ or ‘political’, from the
types of cultural consumption common among younger
generations in the West – or is it simply that we expect more
political awareness, for political engagement to have more weight
and urgency, in South Korea than in the UK or Western Europe?
A more interesting question is whether web novels produced
and consumed in this way contain an unexpected emancipatory
potential. Is destabilizing the relationship between author and
reader not opening up spaces for new forms of creativity? Do many
of the features of web novels not point to them as a new communist
art form? A mostly anonymous crowd form spontaneous networks
in which readers and writers engage directly and the production
process is potentially collectivized – the figure of individual genius
creator disappears, art loses its elitism and becomes a popular and
collective process.
Ultimately one comes back to how ‘web soseol’ is being used,
and to my eyes, it lacks the politicizing impact of some social media
forms (see how Palestinians have used media to share videos of the
atrocities in Gaza). What we see with ‘web novels’ in South Korea
are depoliticized communities; while they are ostensibly more ‘open’
and agile, some very fundamental political aspects are missing
from the form. And the form, certainly in its South Korean
manifestation, is one which seems of a piece with the stability and
weightless variety of choice which characterizes life as a younger
person in South Korea.
North Korea is the precise opposite of this stability and
weightless variety: permanent mobilization, a constant state of
emergency, no free choice, life focused on how to confront the
Enemy. One should note here that despite their seeming
polarization, on a different level North Korea is nonetheless now
moving in the same direction as the South: the regime has publicly
announced that it is renouncing the goal of reunification with the
South which was the very pillar of its politics for decades. South
Korea was considered a part of the country occupied by a foreign
country – the US – and the goal was to ‘liberate’ it. Now the North
Korean elite is openly admitting that it is interested only in its own
survival as the ruling clique. The basic opposition between the

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North and the South, of course, remains intact: mobilization against

the Enemy versus relaxed indifference. However, both extremes
exist inside their own bubble: what they both exclude is a genuine
politicization, an engagement and commitment to cope with global
factors that threaten our survival.

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 Disavowal

Today, we are exposed to an entire series of traumatic and disturbing

events: the catastrophic effects of climate change, wars, migrations,
the disintegration of the social fabric that unites a society, the
growing gap between the rich and the poor which threatens to
trigger social upheaval . . . Then there is the rise of the new far
Right, manifested most recently in the string of victories for
neo-fascist populist parties in western Europe: Italy, Netherlands,
France . . . So how should we (by ‘we’ I mean those who perceive
these victories as a serious threat) react to this situation? The
common-sense answer – keep a cool head, carefully analyse the
situation and see what can realistically be done – is obviously too
flat: everybody would in principle agree with it, which makes it
toothless. A much better approach is to see what options are at our
disposal. As far as I can see, there are three.
First: Outright denial. ‘It’s all overblown, let’s just carry on with
our lives as usual.’ This strategy is mostly used by the new Right and
its conspiracy theories (climate change denialism, vaccinations as
the cause of autism, etc.), although recently Leftist versions have
also begun to emerge (variations on the theme that the ecological
panic, Covid pandemic, and the war in Ukraine are all inventions
by big capital to keep workers under control).
Second: A fascination with the apocalyptic threat that accepts it
as inevitable and something, perversely, which we are to enjoy. This
stance is, of course, rarely formulated in an explicit way, but it often
pervades our thinking as its obscure foundation.
Third, and most interesting: Disavowal. As Alenka Zupančič
demonstrated, disavowal best renders the structure underlying our
contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events,
from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue.1

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Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully

acknowledging what we disavow – its logic is that of the well-known
French phrase je sais bien, mais quand meme . . ., ‘I know very well
(that it’s true), but all the same . . . (I don’t really believe in it).’ Such a
stance is fast becoming the predominant mode in which we live our
social and political lives. We see it lived out among the vast swathes
of people who fully accept climate change and impending
environmental collapse as scientific realities, but nevertheless
continue to reproduce, drive cars, eat meat, rely on technologies and
so on, just as if the planet’s resources are limitless rather than
exhausted: ‘I know very well we are in serious trouble with our
environment, but nonetheless . . . (life must go on, our individual
desires are still worth pursuing, fundamentally it’s business as usual).’
Politically, we see it in the tepid response to the victories of neo-fascist
parties and actors across western Europe: ‘Yes, the rise of Rightist
populism is a serious threat to our democracy, but nonetheless . . .
(look at Italy, the Meloni government functions quite well in the EU
context; even in Netherlands Geert Wilders’ victory resulted in a
respected technocratic government; and we can be sure that
Rassemblement National in government will have to tone down its
excesses, everyday things will continue as they always have, life must
go on . . .).’ Continuity, business as usual, an assumption that there’s
no meaningful alternative to continuing to behave as if tomorrow
will not be materially different from today and that our way of life
can endure indefinitely: these are the mechanisms of disavowal.
However, when the country went to the polls for the second
round of the French elections on Sunday 7 July 2024, something
totally different happened. Conventional wisdom was found
wanting. Business was not conducted as usual.
The formula that best describes the success of the united bloc
against neo-fascism is as follows: ‘Of course we know very well that
Marine le Pen’s triumph is almost certain, the only open question is
if she will get an absolute majority in the parliament, opinion polls
are very clear, but nevertheless . . . (miracles happen, we may even
win, we just have to work as fast and as hard as if there is still a
realistic possibility of victory).’ And this is what happened: not only
did le Pen not get the absolute majority, her RN even finished third
well behind the Leftist bloc and Macron.

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 D I S AVOWA L

Why did this apparently irrational strategy work? Because the

knowledge contained in ‘Of course we know very well’ is not
neutral: its objectivity is already biased. What we ‘know very well’,
what is ‘obvious’, what is accepted as a matter of course, is not
written in stone, but in shifting sand; it is a socially-constructed
shared hegemonic opinion which obfuscates its owns cracks and
inconsistencies in order to seem immutable, and our task is to
change it. The point is not to provide ‘alternative facts’, but to
undermine the framing that makes us select some facts and ignore
others. This is why we are not dealing here with the usual disavowal
but with a courageous act of taking a risk and ignoring our apparent
limitations. Our stance should be: we know we appear weak and
divided, but we should nevertheless do what has to be done. We
know (or feel with the force of seeming knowledge) that we cannot
avert environmental collapse, but we should still take the actions
that would give us the best chance of doing so. In such a situation,
where apocalypse is on the horizon, one should bear in mind that
the standard logic of probability no longer applies – we need a
different logic, that described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy:
The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as a destiny,
for sure, but also as a contingent accident . . . [I]f an outstanding
event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not
have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it
is not inevitable. It is thus the event’s actualization – the fact that
it takes place – which retroactively creates its necessity.2
Dupuy provides the example of the French presidential elections in
May 1995; here is the January forecast from the main polling
institute: ‘If, on next May 8, Ms Balladur will be elected, one can say
that the presidential election was decided before it even took place.’
Applied to the situation in France, this means: ‘If there is economic
chaos and social unrest, this will be necessary and inevitable;
however, we could change the frame itself within which our fate
seems predetermined.’ This, according to Dupuy, is also how we
should approach the prospect of an ecological or social catastrophe:
not ‘realistically’ appraising the likelihood of the catastrophe, but
accepting it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, on the basis of this
acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change

105
 AGAINST PRO GRESS

destiny itself and thereby open up new possibilities within the

situation. Instead of saying ‘The future is still fluid, we still have
time, time to act and prevent the worst’, one should accept the
catastrophe as inevitable – and then act to undo the destiny which
is already ‘written in the stars’.
The problem is, of course, what to do now that disavowal, in this
particular case, worked? The predominant tone of the discourse
responding to the defeat of le Pen is best rendered by a CNN
headline: ‘Macron’s gamble has kept the far right out of power, but
plunged France into chaos.’3 The new conventional wisdom is that
Emmanuel Macron and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (the key figure in the
Left alliance) are so far apart politically that there seems to be no
possibility of a compromise on which a viable coalition could be
based. So, there will be prolonged instability which will for certain
unsettle the economy and probably create the perfect conditions
for a landslide Rassemblement National victory in the next elections.
Ominous signs are already emerging but these signs are ambiguous
– their meaning comes from the imagined/predestined catastrophe,
and it is in our power to rewrite the past that leads to this future.

106
 Notes

Progress and its Vicissitudes

1. Samuel Okiror, ‘Uganda MPs revive hardline anti-LGBTQ bill, calling

homosexuality a “cancer”’, The Guardian, 1 March 2023 (https://www.
theguardian.com/global-development/2023/mar/01/uganda-mps-
hardline-anti-lgbtq-bill, last accessed 21 August 2024).
2. Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, New York
Daily Tribune, 8 August 1853, accessed via marxists.org (https://www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm, last accessed 21
August 2024).
3. Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, New York Daily Tribune, 25 June
1853, accessed via marxists.org (http://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1853/06/25.htm, last accessed 21 August 2024).
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, quoted from The
Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1968), p.130.
5. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity
and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p.89.
6. See Chris Lau and Hassan Tayir, ‘They used to work for China’s
biggest companies. Now they’re doing manual labour’, CNN.com,
20 July 2024 (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/20/economy/
china-economy-employment-blue-collar-work-intl-hnk/index.html,
last accessed 21 August 2024).
7. Immanuel Kant, ‘The Conflict of Faculties’, Political Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.182.
8. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,
Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

107
 NOTES

Against Progress

1. See camh.ca, ‘Straight Talk – Oxycodone’ (https://www.camh.ca/en/

health-info/guides-and-publications/straight-talk-oxycodone, last
accessed 7 August 2024).
2. See Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2023).
3. Karl Marx, ‘Preface’, A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859; Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), accessed via
marxists.org (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/
critique-pol-economy/preface.htm, last accessed 7 August 2024).
4. Rafael Bernabe, ‘Saito, Marx and the Anthropocene: A Critique’,
originally published in Against the Current (July-August 2023).
Published on climateandcapitalism.com on 5 July 2023 (https://
climateandcapitalism.com/2023/07/05/saito-marx-and-the-
anthropocene-a-critique/, last accessed 7 August 2024).
5. Quoted in Carole Cadwalladr, ‘“Capitalism is dead. Now we have
something much worse”: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and
the tyranny of big tech’, The Guardian, 24 September 2023 (https://www.
theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/yanis-varoufakis-technofeudalism-
capitalism-ukraine-interview, last accessed 7 August 2024).
6. See Todd MacGowan, Capitalism and Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016).
7. Ven. P. A. Payutto, Buddhist Economics: A Middle Way for the Market
Place, compiled by Bruce Evans and Jourdan Arenson, translated by
Dhammavijaya and Bruce Evans (https://www.urbandharma.org/pdf/
Buddhist_Economics.pdf, last accessed 7 August 2024).
8. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press 2007), p.35.
9. Ibid.

Acceleration

1. With reference to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

See Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (London: Routledge, 1992).
2. See Land’s collected writings: Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected
Writings 1987–2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011).

108
 NOTES

3. See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Studies in Reaction, vol. 9)

(Perth, Australia: Imperium Press, 2022).
4. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The War That Must Not Occur (Redwood City :
Stanford University Press, 2023, quoted from the manuscript).
5. Ibid.
6. Will Stewart, ‘Nuclear war is the “inevitable” conclusion of the
Ukrainian invasion, warns Russian general who wrote the nation’s
“war bible”’, Mail Online, 5 September 2023 (https://www.dailymail.
co.uk/news/article-12482085/Nuclear-war-inevitable-conclusion-
Ukrainian-invasion-warns-Russian-general-wrote-nations-war-bible.
html, last accessed 19 August 2024).
7. ET Online, ‘“Remove it across the world”: Bhagavad Gita reference in
“Oppenheimer” sex scene sparks outrage’, The Economic Times, 23 July
2023 (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/media/
entertainment/remove-it-across-the-world-bhagavad-gita-reference-
in-oppenheimer-sex-scene-sparks-outrage/articleshow/102051810.
cms?from=mdr, last accessed 19 August 2024).
8. Pjotr Sauer, ‘Cuba uncovers “human trafficking ring” recruiting for
Russia’s war in Ukraine’, msn.com, 5 September 2023 (https://www.
msn.com/en-gb/news/world/cuba-uncovers-human-trafficking-ring-
recruiting-for-russia-s-war-in-ukraine/ar-AA1gha7S?ocid=msedgntp
&cvid=fe396f6e09d7445facbf288a32bbce3d&ei=9, last accessed 19
August 2024).

Holographic History

1. See Anil Ananthasawy, ‘Is our universe a hologram? Physicists debate

famous idea on its 25th anniversary’, Scientific American, 1 March
2023 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-our-universe-a-
hologram-physicists-debate-famous-idea-on-its-25th-anniversary1/,
last accessed 10 August 2024).
2. Jonathan Watts, ‘Climate engineering off US coast could increase
heatwaves in Europe, study finds’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024
(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/21/
climate-engineering-off-us-coast-could-increase-heatwaves-in-
europe-study-finds, last accessed 21 August 2024).
3. Lili Bayer, ‘Europe must get ready for looming war, Donald Tusk
warns’, The Guardian, 29 March 2024 (https://www.theguardian.com/

109
 NOTES

world/2024/mar/29/europe-must-get-ready-for-looming-war-
donald-tusk-warns, last accessed 21 August 2024).
4. Thomas Hertog, On the Origin of Time (London: Penguin, 2023), p.88.
5. Ibid., p.90.
6. Ibid., p.91.
7. I owe this thought to Jacqueline Rose.
8. Charlie Wood, ‘How our reality may be a sum of all possible realities’,
Quanta, 6 February 2023 (https://www.quantamagazine.org/
how-our-reality-may-be-a-sum-of-all-possible-realities-20230206/,
last accessed 21 August 2024).
9. See David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
10. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), translated by
Dennis Redmond, accessed via marxists.org (https://www.marxists.
org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm, last accessed 21
August 2024).
11. Karl Marx, ‘Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy’,
Grundrisse (1857-61; London: Penguin Books in association with
New Left Review, 1973, translated by Martin Nicolaus), accessed via
marxists.org (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/
grundrisse/ch01.htm#3, last accessed 21 August 2024).
12. See Pierre Bayard, Le plagiat par anticipation (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 2009).

Absolute Invariants

1. Tomasz Glen, ‘The Albanian Prime Minister told a joke about Putin.
The main character is Prigozhin’, Dnipro Today, 7 September 2023
(https://www.dniprotoday.com/en/news/the-albanian-prime-
minister-told-a-joke-about-putin-the-main-character-is-
prigozhin-725, last accessed 12 August 2024).
2. David N. Mermin, It’s About Time (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2021), p.9.
3. ‘Relativity of simultaneity’, chemeurope.com (https://www.
chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Relativity_of_simultaneity.html,
last accessed 12 August 2024).
4. Ibid.

110
 NOTES

5. Sabine Hossenfelder, Existential Physics (London: Atlantic Books,

2023), p.11.
6. Personal communication.
7. Mermin, It’s About Time, p.177.
8. Ibid., p.181.
9. Hinze Hoogendorn, ‘Perception in real-time: predicting the present,
reconstructing the past’, Trends in Cognitive Science 26.2, February
2022: 128-141 (https://psychologicalsciences.unimelb.edu.au/__data/
assets/pdf_file/0006/4028505/Hogendoorn-TiCS-2022.pdf, last
accessed 12 August 2024).
10. See ‘Understand Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, about what is
absolute and not relative’, Britannica.com (https://www.britannica.
com/video/185520/Description-theory-relativity-Albert-Einstein, last
accessed 12 August 2024).

Worsting

1. See Jacques Lacan, . . . or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book

XIX (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023).
2. See ‘Marine Le Pen calls on “patriots” to build future majority
government’, Guardian News YouTube channel, 10 June 2024 (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUAyCLsGlCo, last accessed 8 August
2024).

Concrete Analysis of a Concrete Situation

1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995),

p.139.
2. V. I. Lenin, ‘Notes from a Publicist: On Ascending a High Mountain’
(February 1922), The Collected Works of Vladimir Lenin, vol. 33
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), accessed via marxists.org
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/x01.htm,
last accessed 19 August 2024).
3. Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum, ‘Ex-Shin Bet
head says Israel should negotiate with jailed intifada leader’, The
Guardian, 14 January 2024 (https://www.theguardian.com/

111
 NOTES

world/2024/jan/14/shin-bet-ami-ayalon-calls-on-israel-release-
intifada-leader-marwan-barghouti, last accessed 19 August 2024).
4. Ibid.
5. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, ‘Ukraine’s army chief: The design of war has
changed’, CNN.com, 8 February 2024 (https://edition.cnn.
com/2024/02/01/opinions/ukraine-army-chief-war-strategy-russia-
valerii-zaluzhnyi/index.html, last accessed 19 August 2024).

Civil War

1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio

Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p.276.
2. Anthony Zurcher, ‘What Trump’s guilty verdict means for the 2024
election’, BBC.com, 30 May 2024 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
articles/cnll59r891xo, last accessed 21 August 2024).
3. Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy, ‘CNN Poll: Percentage of
Republicans who think Biden’s 2020 win was illegitimate ticks back
up near 70%’, CNN.com, 3 August 2023 (https://edition.cnn.
com/2023/08/03/politics/cnn-poll-republicans-think-2020-election-
illegitimate/index.html, last accessed 21 August 2024).
4. This saying was first reported by Max Brod, in ‘Der Dichter Franz
Kafka’, Die Neue Rundschau 32 (November 1921), p.1213.
5. Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, edited by Max Brod
(Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1991), p.41.
6. Quoted in Steven Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2005), p.438.

Authority

1. G.K. Chesterton, ‘A Defense of Detective Stories’, in H. Haycraft, ed., The

Art of the Mystery Story (New York: The Universal Library, 1946), p.6.
2. ‘What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?’, Bertolt
Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1928), III.3, accessed via cuny.edu
(https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/spring2017/files/2017/03/
The-Threepenny-Opera-by-Bertolt-Brecht.pdf, last accessed 20
August 2024).

112
 NOTES

3. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition: Kierkegaard’s

Writings, vol. 6, edited and translated by Edna H. Hong and Howard
V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p.227.
4. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism. Adorno, or, The Persistence of the
Dialectic (London: Verso Books, 1990), p.30.
5. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘D’un autre Lacan’, Ornicar? 28 (Paris: Navarin
Editeur, 1984), p.55.
6. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis
(New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company 1978),
p. 275.
7. See Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre VII: L’Ethique de la psychanalyse
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), chapter XXI.
8. See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA.: Cambridge
University Press, 1980).
9. See Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992).
10. Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Of the Difference between a Genius and an
Apostle’, The Present Age (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962),
pp.100–1.
11. Ibid., p.105.
12. Ibid., p.98.
13. Ibid., p.102.
14. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis
(London: Tavistock Publications, 1979), p.220.
15. See John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford
Higher Education, 1973).
16. See John Searle, ‘A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts’, Expression and
Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
17. John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), p.172.
18. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XX: Encore (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1975), p.33.
19. Searle, Expression and Meaning, p.18.
20. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,
chapter 17.
21. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words.

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 NOTES

22. See André Bazin and Eric Rohmer, Charlie Chaplin (Parcs: Éditions
de Cerf, 1972).
23. The two most elaborate versions of this approach are to be found in
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1971), and in Helmut Dahmer, Libido und Gesellschaft
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972).
24. Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1959), p.98.
25. Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2014), p.139.
26. See chapter 8 in Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
(London: Verso Books, 2012).
27. See Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024).
28. See Isolde Charim, Die Qualen des Narzissmus. Ueber freiwillige
Unterwerfung (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2022).
29. Eric Aeschimann, interview with Alain Badiou and Elisabeth
Roudinesco, ‘Appel aux psychanalystes. Entretien avec Eric
Aeschimann’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 April 2012.
30. Alain Badiou, personal communication (April 2013).

From Bad to Worse

1. See Isabelle King, ‘True Sovereignty? The CFA Franc and French
Influence in West and Central Africa’, Harvard International Review,
18 March 2022 (https://hir.harvard.edu/true-sovereignty-the-cfa-franc-
and-french-influence-in-west-and-central-africa/, last accessed
21 August 2024); and CaspianReport, ‘France secretly owns 14 countries’,
CaspianReport YouTube channel, 24 February 2024 (https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg, last accessed 21 August 2024).
2. See Jo Littler, Against Meritocracy (London: Routledge, 2017).
3. See Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of
Meritocracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

We Are Biomass

1. I’ve dealt more in detail with this topic in the first chapter of my book
Surplus-Enjoyment (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

114
 NOTES

2. Mozhgan Majoob, ‘The Garden’, Evergreen Review, Spring/Summer

2024 (https://evergreenreview.com/read/the-garden/?emci=50366e26-
e8df-ee11-85fb-002248223794&emdi=cfa86e30-81e0-ee11-85fb-
002248223794&ceid=629579, last accessed 21 August 2024).
3. See (in Slovene) Saša Senica, ‘Vsem živalim bi morali omogočiti
dostojno življenje’, Delo, 21 August 2024 (https://www.delo.si/novice/
znanoteh/vsem-zivalim-bi-morali-omogociti-dostojno-zivljenje, last
accessed 21 August 2024).
4. Michael Marder, ‘Compassionate Genocide’, The Philosophical Salon,
22 April 2024 (https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/compassionate-
genocide/, last accessed 21 August 2024).
5. Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open
Humanities, 2011), p.24.
6. Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), pp.4–6.
7. Op. cit., ibid.
8. Op. cit., ibid.
9. Mark Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger (London: Granta Books,
2006), p.102.
10. Zachary Franklin, ‘Airplane Graveyards: Exploring the World’s
Abandoned Aircraft Cemeteries’, EntireFlight.com, 22 October 2023
(https://www.entireflight.com/blogs/aviation-is-a-lifestyle/airplane-
graveyards#:~:text=These%20facilities%20are%20usually%20
located,Air%20Force%20Base%20in%20Arizona, last accessed 21
August 2024).

The End of the World

1. Alessandro Sbordoni, Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the

Apocalypse (Network Notion #1), published by the Institute of
Network Cultures, 21 December 2023 (https://networkcultures.org/
wp-content/uploads/2023/12/INC_nn1_Semiotics-of-the-End_Digi.
pdf, last accessed 21 August 2024).
2. Caltech Science Exchange, ‘What is entanglement and why is it
important?’, scienceexchange.caltech.edu (https://scienceexchange.
caltech.edu/topics/quantum-science-explained/entanglement, last
accessed 21 August 2024).

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 NOTES

Disavowal

1. See Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2024).

2. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite metaphysique des tsunami (Paris: Seuil,
2005), p.19.
3. Sakya Vandoorne, ‘Macron’s gamble has kept the far right out of
power, but plunged France into chaos’, CNN.com, 8 July 2024 (https://
edition.cnn.com/2024/07/07/europe/france-election-results-gamble-
analysis-intl-hnk/index.html#:~:text—acron’s%20gamble%20may%20
have%20prevented,Olympics%20in%20three%20weeks’%20time, last
accessed 7 August 2024).

116
 Index

acceleration 23–8 Bildungsroman 52

acceptance 103, 105 bio-cosmism 7
Adorno, Theodor 4, 9, 56, 59, 60, 62 biomass 91–6
advancement 5, 14 birds, squashed (dead) 1–3, 6, 8, 11, 93
advertising 18 Brecht, Bertolt 58
Afghanistan 14 BRICS countries 13, 43, 55, 56
Africa 85–6 see also China; India; South Africa
Against Meritocracy 86 Bryant, Levi 93–4
Agbogbloshie 95 Buddhism 18, 19
alienation 53 Burke, Edmund 57
alliances 13, 45, 52–3
Althusser, Louis 72 Cancel Culture 28
Among, Anita 2 capitalism 15, 17, 20, 23
animals 92 authority 59, 82
antiSemitism 61 biomass 91, 95
Artificial Intelligence (AI) 5, 23 holograms 31–2, 34
audiences 99 capitalism, global 48
Austin, John 68 Carroll, Sean 38
authority 43–4, 57–84 Castle 78
authors 99 catastrophes 5, 25, 30, 105, 106
Ayalon, Ami 48 chance 87
Charim, Isolde 83
Badiou, Alain 83–4 Chesterton, G.K. 47, 57–8
bags 40 China 2, 7, 99
balance, natural 91 Christianity 57, 64, 74
Bannon, Steve 44 circulation, capital 95
Barghouti, Marwan 49 civil war 51–6
battles 53 Civil War 51–2
Bayard, Pierre 34 class struggles 41–2
Bazin, Andre 72 climate change (crises) 15, 20, 93,
Benjamin, Walter 6, 11, 30, 33, 34 103–4
Bennet, Jane 94 coalitions 13, 106
Bernabe, Rafael 16 cognitive mapping 87
Bhagavad Gita 26 collaborations 2, 13, 88
big Other 70–1, 79, 81, 91 colonialism 2, 3, 4, 14, 85–6, 88

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communication 74, 76–7 destruction 93

communism 7, 15, 29, 100 mutual 26–7
communities 100 development, free 5
Compassionate Genocide 92 dictators 57
complacency 98 digital control 17
Concept of History, The 33 dignity 92
Conflict of Faculties 10 disavowal 103–6
conflicts 32, 52–3, 75, 93 Disavowal 81
consciousness 73–4 dispossession 32
consensus 78 disturbances 76
conspiracy theories 88, 103 divisions, political 52
constative 68, 69, 71 domination 9, 83
consumption (consumers) 99, 100 double suspension 67
content 58, 59–60, 64, 65, 66, 67 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre 25, 105
continuity 104
control 17, 43, 82, 83, 99 Einstein, Albert 37
convictions, criminal 55 see also Special Theory of Relativity
coordination 89 elections 106
corruption 2, 50, 54, 82 French 105
Covid-19 pandemic 89 presidential 51
creativity 16, 100 elites 44, 100
criminality (crime) 51, 54–5 intellectual 87
Cuba 27–8 emancipation 6, 45, 46, 100
cultural freedom 6 engagement 99
Cultural Revolution 86 enjoyment 91
cultures 13 Enlightenment 1, 4, 6, 63, 72
popular 99 dark 24
cursing 80, 84 entanglement 97–8
see also quantum mechanics
dark Enlightenment 24 (science)
Dawn of Everything, The 32 equality 6, 9
death-drive 24 establishing 71–2
decarbonization 16 eternal 64
decisions 94 ethics 9, 21, 52, 58
declarations see illocution Eurocentrism 1, 3, 45–6
(declarations) Evil 19
decolonization 2–3, 11 experimentation 5
degrowth 15, 16, 17 experts 57, 84
Deleuze, Gilles 23 exploitation 6, 9, 15, 42, 95, 96
democracy 9, 16, 55, 87–8, 104 extremism 45
denial, outright 103 see also fundamentalism
Derrida, Jacques 75
desensitization 52 facts 105
desires 18, 19 failure 94
despair 56 Fanged Noumena 23

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fantasies 61 How to Do Things with Words 68

fascism, soft 29 How to Read Heidegger 95
Fear and Trembling 58 human rights 98
feminism 2 human trafficking 27
fetishist split 20 humour see jokes
Feynman, Richard 31 hypocrisy 3, 45
films 26, 51–2, 54, 72, 98
finite infinite/totality 75 Idealism, German 11
Formenko, Anatoly 27 ideal speech situation 77–8
Four Fundamental Concepts 67, 71 identities 2, 45, 60, 61, 62, 63
France 85, 104, 105, 106 illocution (declarations) 68–71
Frankfurt School 82 illusions 8
Frank, Robert 87 Inca Empire 32
freedoms 2, 5, 6, 9, 98 India 3, 4
French Revolution 10–11, 46 Mumbai 95
Freud, Sigmund 24, 71, 73 inequalities 6, 8, 86
Fukuyama, Francis 29 inevitability 103
fundamentalism 29, 45, 56, 86–7 initiatives 16
injustice 6
Garden, The 91–2 instability 106
Garland, Alex 51, 52 intolerance 6, 45
gay rights (LGBTQ+) 2, 45, 86 Iran 14
Gaza 52, 92 Israel 48
gender 8
General Theory of Relativity 40 Jameson, Fredric 59–60, 87
global warming 17, 20, 21, 30, 87 Jews 61–2
Graeber, David 32 jokes 37, 44, 81
Gramsci, Antonio 53 justice 87
Great Britain 4
Greece 13 Kafka, Franz 55, 78
Grundrisse 31, 33 Kant, Immanuel 10, 34
Kasselakis, Stefanos 13
Habermas, Jürgen 76–8 Kierkegaard, Søren 48, 57–8, 63, 65–7,
Haitian Revolution 46 73–5, 78
heatwaves 29 knowledge 63, 64
Hegel, G.W.F. 5, 14, 25, 94 Kojève, Alexandre 97–8
authority 59–63, 73, 78 Kripke, Saul 62
Heidegger, Martin 25
hierarchies 2, 96 labour 16
historical eternity 27 Lacan, Jacques 19, 33, 91
Hogendoorn, Hinze 40 invariants 41–2
Holocaust 61 worsting 43–4
holograms 29–35 see also authority
Horkheimer, Max 4 Land, Nick 23, 24
Hossenfelder, Sabine 38 language 79, 80, 94

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Last Men 4 mortality 24

Lavrov, Sergey 13–14 Morton, Timothy 20
law 62, 63 motifs 64, 65, 94
Leaders 83 multiculturalism 45
legacies, European 46 mutually assured destruction (MAD)
Lenin, Vladimir 47 26–7
le Pen, Marine 43, 44–5, 104, 106
Limelight 72 Nadlučnik, Eva 92
Lincoln, Abraham 86 nationalism 29, 50
literature 99 nature (natural balance) 20, 91
Littler, Jo 86–7 negotiations 32
love 63 neocolonialism 14, 85–6, 88
Lumet, Sydney 54 networks 100
Luxemburg, Rosa 2 neutrality 52–3, 105
luxury goods 18 New Economic Policy (NEP) 47
Nietzsche, F. W. 4
MacGowan, Todd 17 Nolan, Christopher 1, 26
Macron, Emmanuel 106 North Korea 14, 100
Majoob, Mozhgan 92 noumena 23
Malcadena, Juan 29 novels, web 99–100
manipulation 88
mapping, cognitive 87 observability 41
Marder, Michael 92–3, 96 observers 52
Marx, Karl (Marxism) 1, 3–4, 15, 91 October Revolution 48, 55, 88
authority 72–3, 82 Oppenheimer 26
holograms 31, 33–4 oppression 57
Masters 83–4 or-worse 44
materiality 9 see also worsting
meaningfulness 16 Other, big see big Other
media 7, 85, 97 OxyContin (oxycodone) 13
biomass 94
concrete situations 49, 54 Palestine 49
holograms 32 pansexualism 80
worsting 43 Payutto, Ven P. A. 18–19
see also social media peacefulness 98
Mélenchon, Jean-Luc 106 père ou pire, le 43
meritocracy 86, 87 Perfect Days 98
Mermin, David 37, 39 phenomena 23
migrations 103 Phenomenology of Spirit 73
Miller, Jacques-Alan 61 Philosophical Fragments 63, 67
mobilization 86, 88, 89, 94, 100–1, 105 philosophy 10
moderation 17 planning 17, 88
modernization 19 Plato 63
monarchs 61, 62 political divisions 52
Monty Python 27 politics 6

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Poppins, Mary 40 Schoen, Doug 54, 55

popular culture 99 Schuster, Aaron 79–80
populations 17 sciences 7, 21, 81–2
populism 6, 28, 53, 56, 88, 104 Searle, John 68, 69–70
popu-Lust 44 self-destruction (annihilation) 24, 26
potentiality 11 self-sacrifice 17, 19
power 42, 46, 49 Seminar XI 61
Prestige, The 1 Serpico 54
Prison Notebooks 53 signifiers 75–8
probability 105 simultaneity 37, 39
producers 99 Singularity 23, 24, 25
production 16 slowness 98
protest movements 45 social classes 41, 42
psychoanalysis 72, 73, 74, 78, 82 social control 83
publishing 99 social democracy 48
social development 1
quantum mechanics (science) 29, 30, 97 social division 86
see also entanglement socialism 1–2
social media 100
Rancière, Jacques 9 social order 16
ratings, TV 99 social trends 51
readers 99 societies 48, 62, 95
reality 29 Socrates 46, 64
reclaiming 95 solidarity 93, 96
recycling 95 global 30, 89
redemption 7–11 South Africa 54
references, vulgar-sociological 59–60 South Korea 97–8, 99, 100
refutability 81 Soviet Union 7, 27
relationships 63, 73, 91, 100 see also Russia
sexual 61 space 39, 40
Repraesentanz 66 spaces 100
research 5 Special Theory of Relativity 37–40
resistance 32, 93 speculative identity 60
resources 95 Strauss, Claude-Levi 75
retreat 47 submission 75
revolutions 11, 46, 48, 91 subversion 9
rights 9 Success and Luck: Good Fortune and
Russia 26, 27, 28, 43 the Myth of Meritocracy 87
see also Soviet Union suffering, human 14
superposition 29, 31, 32, 33
sacrifices 61 survival 5
Saito, Kohei 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 98 Sustainable Development Goals
satisfactions 20 (SDGs) 16
Sbordoni, Alessandro 97 swearing 81, 84
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 19 Symposion 63

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teachers 63–4, 66–7, 72–3 violence 52–3

techno-feudalism 17, 48 Vladimirov, Alexander
technologies 7, 31, 33, 34, 49, 95 25–6
Theses on History 33 voters, presidential 54–5
Thirst for Annihilation, The 23
threats 32 Wagner, Richard 21, 65
Three-Penny Opera 58 wars 17, 30, 98, 103
Thunberg, Greta 21 civil 51–6
time 39, 40 nuclear 26, 28
time travel 39 waste 93, 95
tolerance 6 wastelands 95
trafficking, human 27 web novels 99–100
transference 63, 74–5 web soseol 99, 100
Trump, Donald 44, 45, 51, 53, 54 well-being 18–19
truth 52, 64, 65, 72, 73–4 Wengrow, David 32
Turn of the Screw, The 19 West Bank 52
Tusk, Donald 30 Wire, The 80–1
wisdom 21, 86, 92
Uganda 2, 14 women 99
Ukraine 26, 27, 28, 49, 50, 52 women’s rights 45, 46
understanding 86 workers 32, 94, 103
United States of America (USA) 29, worsting 43–6
51, 53, 99 Wrathall, Mark 95
unity, national 44
uprisings 85 Zaluzhnyi, Valerii 49–50
Zedong, Mao 3, 86
Varoufakis, Yanis 17, 48 Zuma, Jacob 54
Vibrant Matter 94 Zupančič, Alenka 81–2, 97, 103

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