He is a rock star of philosophy, and his method –in which Marx and Lacan’s psychoanalysis are mixed with the examples of popular series, films and novels, whether they are The Matrix, The Invasion of Ultra-Corpses, the opera Parsifal or the series Detective Castle – has created a school. The Slovenian Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljana, 1949), an unstoppable and always brilliant actor of speech, international director of the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London, publishes in Spain Hegel and the connected brain (Paidós), a reflection on the future of the human condition at a time when Elon Musk wants to connect brains to computers, and Vacuum Incontinence (Anagram), on philosophy, sexual difference and critique of political economy. Zizek spoke by teleconference with La Vanguardia.
Covid, war, climate crisis, populism… Are the crises we are experiencing related?
All are moments of the expansive reproduction of current global capitalism. I don’t want to use the word neoliberalism because I agree with my friend Yanis Varoufakis that today’s capitalism is less neoliberal than we think, it is closer to neofeudalism. A few megacorporations privatize entire fields of commons. Now on Twitter Elon Musk decides. Before the pandemic, the official line was that taxes could not be raised, we could not spend a lot, it would be an economic catastrophe. Are you aware of how much money has been printed to control the effects of the pandemic? Don’t trust neoliberal dogmas. And if we print so much for the covid or the war, we can also print it for health. I am not saying that we should abolish capitalism, it is very productive. But in a situation of war, warming, epidemics, you can. The health crisis in the United Kingdom already means emergencies attended in 20 hours or more. The catastrophe is here. And the state must intervene brutally. In a war you cannot wait for the market to bring you weapons. I would say that to a certain extent capitalism is abolishing itself by going in a direction that cannot be justified with what they call market rationality. Elon Musk may have invented something, but he raised 300 billion dollars before the Twitter error, more than the GDP of many countries. It cannot be said that this wealth reflects his creativity. The market alone works badly.
In any case, in the last two years, economic policies have already broken many taboos.
The German social democratic theorist Streeck says that the problem is that capitalism today is disintegrating, but not in the Marxist sense but in something that could be worse. The reasonable thing is to reinforce what Peter Sloterdijk calls objective social democracy: that free education or universal healthcare are part of the constitutional order, whoever is in charge. And to achieve this the next necessary step is to control the huge flows of money that move freely. At the same time, we need new forms of real globalization. For an ecological megacrisis, only a coordinated response will work. Or we will return to a worse version of capitalism with small pockets of wealth surrounded by poverty and chaos.
Cooperating seems difficult with a cold war with China and Russia invading the Ukraine.
It is a catastrophe, but it is not just a conflict between Russia, China and the liberal West. There is a gap that runs through all countries. Remember Putin’s support in the West, Le Pen, his relations with Trump. Liberal capitalism has been in crisis for two decades since 9/11. Wang Huning, an author close to Xi Jinping, wrote a fantastic book, America vs. America. He says that he admires the dynamism of the United States, but that he saw in it a social catastrophe. Today we have two types of capitalism, authoritarian or populist, against standard liberal democracy, and it is a global conflict. A couple of months ago, Trump said that if the people are betrayed by the elites, they have the right to seize power with violence. It means that in the West we are also approaching some kind of civil war. And what worries me most is the fate of the global south. Don’t underestimate the impact of Russian propaganda there.
When Putin says that he is fighting for the soul of Russia, is the ideology real or just an excuse?
Many realists say that all this orthodox religious madness is just to conquer a piece of Ukraine. It is a naive vision. Since Hitler we know that ideology is not just ideology. Antisemitism could be an excuse for expansion, but millions were sacrificed. The Russian strategy is to get more than a piece of Ukraine. Putin repeated a day ago that it is a neo-Nazi regime. How to tolerate it? They fight to rebuild some form of empire.
Another danger that he denounces is digital authoritarianism.
The freedom that digital media give us is a false freedom, everything is controlled by algorithms that push us in certain directions. The horror for me is that in the good old days of totalitarianism we at least knew we were being controlled. Now the horrible thing is that where you think you are free we are controlled, regulated and manipulated. The most horrifying non-freedom is the one you experience as freedom.
Elon Musk talks about connecting brains to computers. Will we be demigods or servants?
If it succeeds, we will lose what we usually call human freedom. We will not only control machines, we will also be controlled. And in the end, digital media are part of a certain reality. Yuval Harari says that the immediate danger is that the computers will not control us directly, but that there will be people who will control the computers and others who will be controlled by them. The social struggle is still there.
