DIARY 2010+ March 9th 2010 Baudrillard was reporting from Australia, where he experienced what he called a 'radical anthropological shock'. He realised that the aborigines have 'a kind of visceral, profound rejection of what we represent...there is something irremediable, irreducible in this'. We can offer them every help, understanding, support, but to no avail. He goes on to suggest that at the same time as the universal was invented, the other was discovered. The gulf between the other that refuses the universal and those within the West is growing inexorably. 'I have the impression that the gulf is hardening and deepening between a culture of the universal and those singularities [e.g. Taliban, Islamists, Jihadists, Al Qaeda, etc.] that remain. These people cannot allow themselves offensive passions; they don't have the means for them. But contempt is still available to them'. (ibid, p143). Beyond, 'we-only-have-our-bodies', the means to strike out effectively are becoming available to make mass radical vengeance a possibility. This is not a new version of the the old class hatreds which happened within the enlightenment tradition. Neither is it an anti-colonial struggle, where there were clear objectives to be achieved through force. These insurgents are not part of a grand historical process, a dialectic, Fukuyama was right about the so-called End of History, but for the wrong reasons. They want to end history by blind objective force - 'We choose death, while you choose life'. Some may be won over to the enlightenment side in Afghanistan, for instance, but the singularity that refuses - the other - will persist. March 6th 2010 'Against all modern superstitions of "liberation", it must be said that forms are not free, figures are not free. They are on the contrary bound: the only way to liberate them is to chain them together, in other words to find their links, the ties that create and bind them, that chain them gently together. Moreover, they connect and engender themselves...'. (Baudrillard, J. The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e) 2005, p127). Liberation leads to atomisation. The modernist "superstition" (we thought we were getting away from superstition once and for all), was that liberation was an undiluted good. Baudrillard cites Omar Khayyam: 'It is better for you to have enslaved one free man with kindness that to have freed a thousand slaves'. Liberation leads to evaporation and diffusion. The heroic days of liberation, the dissident days, are always in the beginning, during the phase of breaking free from bondage. With the bonds loosened, there is suddenly nothing! Hence, the need to find new victims in chains, new discriminations, to re-live the old days, the old battles, before everyone became freely the same - without links.   March 4th 2010 Alan Dershowitz: 'The current “Israel Apartheid Week” on universities around the world, by focusing only on the imperfections of the Middle East’s sole democracy, is carefully designed to cover up far more serious problems of real apartheid in Arab and Muslim nations. The question is why do so many students identify with regimes that denigrate women, gays, non-Muslims, dissenters, environmentalists and human rights advocates, while demonizing a democratic regime that grants equal rights to women (the chief justice and speaker of the Parliament of Israel are women), gays (there are openly gay generals in the Israeli Army), non-Jews (Muslims and Christians serve in high positions in Israel) and dissenters, (virtually all Israelis dissent about something). Israel has the best environmental record in the Middle East, it exports more life saving medical technology than any country in the region and it has sacrificed more for peace than any country in the Middle East. Yet on many college campuses democratic, egalitarian Israel is a pariah, while sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, terrorist Hamas is a champion. There is something very wrong with this picture'. Antisemitism is inexorably rising being the racism of choice of so-called anti-racists; the racism that decent people can safely avow. According to Anthony Julius, talking about his new book, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. Oxford University Press, British Jews are wondering whether or not now is the time to leave. The desire to deligitimise Israel and destroy the Jewish state has to do with the unacknowledged total fear engendered by 9/11 and the thought that killing 3000 was, as Blair suggested at Chilcot, only the start. They wanted to kill 30,000  or 300,000. The cold logic is: if destroying Israel will appease them, lets do it. March 1st 2010 A recent report for the British Home Office warns that the images we consume and the way we consume them are lending credence to the idea that women are there to be used and that men are there to use them, encouraging boys to become fixated on being macho and dominant, while girls in turn presented themselves as sexually available and permissive. One outcome had been the rise of sexual bullying in which girls felt compelled to post topless or naked pictures on social networks. The evidence gathered in the review suggests a clear link between consumption of sexualised images, tendency to view women as objects and the acceptance of aggressive attitudes and behaviour as the norm. So instead of a transgendered convergence and loss of stereotyping, all the work of liberation has created a counter-reaction. Who could have imagined that after half a century of second wave feminism that young women in such large numbers would willingly enslave themselves to the other with airbrushing, cosmetic surgery, depilation, ultra-conformism, and so on? The removal of the old constraints and rituals between the sexes was bound to lead to increasing violence of all kinds as sexuality becomes pure exchange value. And the shape of the violence is quite predictable: for women against themselves (anorexia, bulimia, etc); for men, violence against women, "scoring", "riding", etc.   February 26th 2010 It is clearly not sufficient to have a culture that is only implicitly nihilistic; a secular progressivist regime that only aspires to be nihilistic is not enough. At some point the nothingness must materialise itself in various ways. We expect nihilism to bear fruit. All this work should produce some results. Within the small psychoanalytic field, there is Lacan, who is exemplary. Within the wider social, we should expect the immanence of nihilism through numerous disappearances, perhaps multiple disappearances. However, the disappearance of the real occurs at precicely the same rate as our incapacity to register its disappearance, therefore, it will go unnoticed! Creeping indifference affects our judgement as well. One generalised product of nihilism is the creation of "shell institutions" (Giddens). These are institutions that retain their name, but which have been hollowed out from within; they have had any substantial reality taken from them. Similarly, images no longer reflect the solid real, but point to its absence (Baudrillard). Images now refer to themselves or other images. To paraphrase Lacan, there are many things - not just the big Other, the woman and the sexual relation - that do not exist. February 24th 2010 Jalo. Elias Khoury (2002). Trans. Humphrey Davies. London, MacLehose Press. 2009.       Daniel Habeel Abyad is under interrogation and torture. He is a young man of Assyrian Christian background, who is accused of a number of crimes, raping women and robbing their lovers in a pine forest above Beirut at the back of a house, the Villa Gardenia, where he is employed as an armed guard. But it is his alter ego, Jalo, who tries to engage with his interrogator and give him what he wants. He writes and re-writes the story of his life as he tries to situate himself in the aftermath of the brutal Lebanese civil war in which many young men like Yalo were caught up and where on the Green line in Beirut when the shooting started Jalo experienced real fear and shat himself.       Jalo was brought up by his mother, Gaby, after his father was sent away by his grandfather, when Gaby was 7 months pregnant. She had been having an affair with the tailor she worked for who was 20 years older than her. For Yalo, his grandfather replaced his father and Gaby was called his sister. Under interrogation, 'He discovered that he did not know this man called Daniel, whom they nicknamed Jalo'.(p2). Shireen was in the interrogation room too. She had been with a grey haired man as Jalo in his long black coat had approached their car in the dark in the forest with his torch and his Kalashnikov. He'd tap on the window with the barrel of the rifle. The man had driven off in terror and Jalo had taken Shireen with him back to his hut. He developed an obsessive love for her, 'from his spine' ('the love that shatters one's back'), and from the smell of incense that arose from her wrists, in spite of her being engaged to be married. He was seduced by his employer's wife, Mme Randa, and the intense sex they had together, he termed it 'randarising'. 'Her love brought me back to life, but it opened a well in my heart that nothing could fill. When I stood in the garden and smelled the scent of the pines, I was in turmoil. Believe me, sir, I became part of nature and nature doesn't recognise the boundaries between things'.(p239). However, it made him feel very guilty because his employer had recued Jalo in Paris, after he had been dumped by his friend Tony who had fled with the barracks money they had both stolen back in Beirut. Jalo, alone in his cell, is told to write his story. 'He has to release ink onto the sheets of paper. He is like the squid. All he possesses to squirt and mislead the fishermen and escape death is the weapon of ink, but alas if the sea creature should fall into the fisherman's net, for then they will cook it in its ink. It occurred to Jalo that he would be cooked in the ink he was writing with, that the black ink that flowed across the sheets of paper would kill him, and that he was incapable of misleading the fishermen...'. (p98).       The interrogator's torture increases. 'Yalo, the tall man who wore a black coat and descended on lovers in their cars, Yalo who laughed while he fought and killed, no longer exists...I've become another person'.(p236). But what does the Other want. While the Other seems to want or desire something from him, a minimum of meaning and narrative coherence still seems just possible. And Yalo clings to this forlorn hope as he writes and rewrites his life - a kind of positive transference towards the interrogator which amounts to a pleading for his life. He plumbs even the tragic complex origins of his grandfather before the inevitable end. February 23rd 2010 Aside from the massive crowd of protesters that said in relation to Iraq, "we-went-to-war-on-a-lie", there is another largely silent crowd - the silent masses - that will complain that, "we-went-to-peace-on-a-lie". Consider, for instance, the re-heating of the left-overs of the Cold War with the reassertion of Russian military strength; consider the wholesale rejection of the Obama out-stretched hand gesture of the last year; consider the Religion of Peace (see below); consider the CIRA and RIRA; consider the Revolutionary Guards. No. The silent masses are shouting - PEACE, not in my name.  February 20th 2010 The general knee-jerk assumption has been that it was Mossad who used stolen British passport identities for the hit-squad which assassinated senior Hamas operative Mahmoud al Mabhouh. However, according to Middle-East analyst Tom Gross, 'Many governments wanted Mabhouh out of the way, not only Israel. Sources confirm to me that the missiles Mabhouh was procuring from the Iranians had the capability of hitting central Tel Aviv, and were Hamas to use such missiles later this year, the Israeli response might lead to a region-wide conflagration, which many Western and Arab governments want to avoid'. He continues, 'Sources tell me that this was a particularly significant trip by Mabhouh (to Dubai, the regional arms hub, from his home in Damascus), in which he was en route to procure weapons of particular significance. His present activity was viewed as a turning point in the type of weaponry being smuggled, and it was considered very important to intervene at an early stage. Some Arab media have reported that the operation against Mabhouh may have been carried out by a rival Palestinian group and the photographed individuals have nothing to do with it'. In the post-Real world almost any version of the hyper-real is possible. 1) It was indeed Mossad, in spite of the bungling "total visibility" of the attack. 2) It was a Palestinian group hoping to weaken Hamas and incriminate Israel at the same time. 3) It was Mossad, but disguising itself by looking unusually careless with its image trail. 4) It was Hamas hitting itself to incriminate Israel. 5) It was agents of other Arab State(s) hoping to hit the Iran-Hamas link, knowing that Mossad will be blamed. February 17th 2010 Nicholas Krystof in the New York Times writes that the civil war in Congo has claimed almost seven million lives over the last dozen years. It has also created a whole new vocabulary to describe the other horrific abuses it has generated – such as ‘autocannibalism,’ which is when militiamen cut flesh from living victims and force the victims to eat it, or ‘re-rape,’ which applies to women and girls who are raped anew every time militiamen visit their town. Yet the world rarely hears about Congo, because groups such as Amnesty and HRW (Human Rights Watch) have left, or report only infrequently. Therefore, by implication, it is preferably Western nations, and in particular, Israel and the US that commit human rights violations. "The Religion of Peace" website lists all the atrocities committed in the name of the religion of peace on a daily basis, the vast majority of killings against fellow Muslims. But the sustained belief that only Western nations can really commit human rights violotaion bolsters the more comforting liberal illusion that Evil is implicitly rational. February 13th 2010 'It's an act of prestidigitation by which you pull away the tablecloth leaving the objects on the table, because there is always a material presence of objects, from which, however, the meaning has been removed'. (from a discussion between Baudrillard and Noailles in Exiles from Dialogue, Polity 2007, p7). What should we derive from this old trick, of the sudden removal of the cloth? The cloth has something in common with the Lacanian point-de-capiton, and the question of psychosis. For the discussants, it involves their passion for the Real (attempting being exiles from dialogue) and the question of being present before meaning intervenes, 'to arrive even before the objects had entered the order of reference'. This is what Baudrillard hoped to do when taking a photograph, to catch the form before it has context. Alternatively, generalising to the whole culture, such sleight-of-hand, could represent the end product of the modernising process itself involving the catastrophic loss of all moral orientation. February 9th 2010 What do you think about global warming? We'd love to hear your views and observations. Apparently, the IPCC relies for its conclusions about AGW not just on the bedrock of peer-reviewed scientific findings, but also, the urgency of the problem facing us demands that we include claims about global warming from newspaper reports and environmental NGOs, according to an interview with a spokeman for the IPCC on Newsnight (February 2nd). So the glaciers in the Himalayas will be gone in 25 years, the Amazon rainforests are being depleted, there are more severe storms - none of this based on accurate scienctific investigations, but rather the opinions of interested parties. But the urgency of the problem facing us. Remember? It justifies anything we might do by way of falsifying existing data, or making up new data. So tell us what you think. Remember what you think in important to us. We are waiting to hear from you. Make that call, especially if you are a friend of the earth. February 6th 2010 The recent psychoanalytic film festival in Dublin showed Ai no corrida, In the Realm of the Senses, literally 'Bullfight (Spanish: Corrida) of Love', a 1976 film directed by Nagisa Oshima. It tells the true story of Sada Abe a prostitute in pre-war Japan who came to work as a maid in a hotel and who begins an affair with the owner which becomes more and more intense and obsessive, escalating to the point where the man becomes excited by being strangled during sex. He is eventually killed in this fashion. Abe then severs his penis so that the couple 'will be the two of us forever', which she writes in blood on his chest. The so-called, "unsimulated sex" caused a problem  initially for the censors in many countries. "Polymorphously perverse", it has minimal narrative content and therefore the scene of seduction for the viewer is largely absent. One is left with the endless ecstasy of orgiastic mechanics, the pulsion of the drives and ultimately the death drive itself. In Baudrillard's terms, this is the ob-scene of "cool seduction", seduction by "the System" itself. One feels nothing for the protagonists as they are no more than instruments of pure pleasure. Ironically, this is an anti-sexual film, as what we call sexuality depends for it seductive effects on repression. In a situation of total disenchantment and unsimulation, with everything stripped bare, naked, there is an absence of any erotic effect, like bodies on a nudist beach. Enchantment, seduction, beauty depend on the veil and the minimal illusion it creates. Rip that away and all that is there is flesh, meat.  February 3rd 2010 The true question is not the much talked about opposition between science and religion, but the creeping religiosity of science itself. We have seen in the recent past the faith that one has to have in science, not so much as a process of investigation per se, but faith in the specific "findings" of science: you must believe, or risk being called a "denier". And the list of beliefs is getting longer. In the '60s and '70s it was the coming ice age; we were told it could come with alarming rapidity. In the '80s, salmonella and eggs; in the '90s, it was BSE/CJD, and maybe 100,000 deaths of young people from this deadly brain disease. Then came the millennium bug and the so-called link between the MMR vaccine and autism. In this century Bird flu, then Swine flu and most of all Global Warming by human activity (AGW). In each of these cases, there is no knowing whether or not the Real will spring up and avenge the impostors of theory and faith. The record has not been kind to the people of scientific faith and their preachings. And their response has been to become even more evangelical. The World generally is becoming more religious and science is getting in on the act. All this belongs in the context of the promiscuity of the post-modern, where opposites interact and diffuse. Religion over the centuries has ceded its authority to science and now science cedes its authority to a new pagan religion. Consider, for instance, the religious science of the Dark Greens and their eco-sophy, beyond mere anthropocentric environmentalism. February 1st 2010 What should we make of the Andy Murray "scream", as he wins in the semi-final of the Australian Open and again when he loses to Federer in the final? At one point the camera lingers on this gesture of intensity for too long and the gesture becomes obscene in its persistence. We are seeing too far into Murray's interior. One commentator referred to Murray's 'blazing hunger' to win with his Munch-like scream and another refers to it a 'unlovable'. But you can see right into his mouth, his vast gaping orifice, his primordial yearning exposed to the world! He has moved beyond the symbolic excited "sporting" gesture of winning/losing, passed over the border towards the Real of obscenity. What shocks us in the nullity of the void itself as well as the in-human dimension of the modern competitive process, the machine-like quality demanded of the athlete, and those who drive them. January 27th 2010 Žižek says of himself and his incredible output of writing and speaking that maybe he performs so much because behind it he is nothing. If he doesn't speak and write, there is nothing there. He says, 'I am very much against this notion which is current today that, as people say, "I am a professional this or that, I do this or that, but behind it I am really a very nice guy, a warm human person, who has feelings and needs just like other people, I like good food and music, and so on, and just like you, I am also anxious, I eat too much, etc"'. Žižek states that this is part of our spiritual hedonistic ideology today, part of our deep belief that underneath it all, we are warm human beings beyond the false surface appearances of everyday life. He turns this around, suggesting that when the mask slips, when the cracks appear, there is nothing running underneath.       January 24th 2010 Baudrillard could have been speaking for psychoanalysts when he wrote, 'No one fundamentally believes in reality or in the evidence of his or her real life. That would be too sad'. Sadness belongs to the "depressive position", and it suggests that beyond all the hype and self promotion, there is loss and depression. People, as they say, don't want to know! They are saying in effect to Baudrillard, 'you are not going to discredit reality in the eyes of those who already have so much trouble living'. And he goes on to extend this contemporary critique of negativity by what he calls the 'good apostles', who tell him, 'you are not going to discredit abundance in the eyes of those who are dying of hunger. Or: you are not going to discredit class struggle for people who have not had their bourgeois revolution. Or: you are not going to discredit feminist and egalitarian protests for all the women who have never even heard of women's rights...If you don't like reality don't ruin it for everyone else'! ("Radical Thought", in The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), 2005, p163, emphasis added). That is what psychoanalysts do, they ruin things for people, by reclaiming 'the rugged reality of things' (Rimbaud). The good apostles continue: You're not going to undermine the ego for those who have hardly formed one. Or: discredit the Power of Now, for the unempowered. Or: undermine the beauty of love for those who have never even been loved.  If you're too sad to do positive living, keep it to yourself, don't ruin it for everyone else.       January 23rd 2010 Jesus was a feminist as this extract from the Gospel of St. Thomas testifies: 'Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females are not worthy of life". Jesus said, "Look, I shall guide her to make her male. So that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven"'. (TLS. January 1st 2010, p12) January 19th 2010 Why does Žižek call his short film, The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, rather than the consumer's guide, or some other name, for instance? Žižek's use of the term "pervert" may be entirely precise. Firstly, because within psychoanalysis it no longer has a pejorative sense. Secondly, the term refers to the subject who enjoys, who enjoys an enjoyment that goes all the way to excess or horror. In Lacan's little formula for perversion, the agent is situated at little "a", this strange attractor that is the cause, the originator, of desire. The divided subject is displaced to the position of the other. In other words, enjoyment takes preference over all else. This is the opposite to the discourse of the Master, where enjoyment is situated under the bar and is properly kept within the Law and what we term civil society. Žižek sees the film, on the other hand, as arousing our desire while simultaneously 'keeping it at a safe distance, domesticating it, rendering it palpable'! This so-called "safe distance" is neither safe nor distant, as the void of Real returns and threatens the coordinates of our constructed reality. January 14th 2010 The conservative commentator Melanie Phillips writes: 'Sexual restraint and the monogamy which enshrined and protected it were once considered a hallmark of civilisation and progress. It was primitive societies for which sex was merely a carnal and entirely non-judgmental procedure devoid of any spiritual, moral or socially progressive dimension. That is a key reason why such societies were very often marked by the oppression of women, cruelty and savagery and remained backward or even died out altogether'. Here, Phillips is remarkably like Freud, when he suggests, in Civilisation and its Discontents, that character formation and sublimation are essential for civilisation. 'Sublimation of instinct [sex and aggression] is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological', and thirdly, 'most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built upon the renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This "cultural frustration" dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. As we already know, it is the cause of hostility against which all civilisations have to struggle'. (SE. 21:97). Freud acknowledges that civilisation imposes 'an intolerable burden' leading to neurosis, guilt and discontent generally, and he recognises that what he describes as, 'races at a low level of civilisation, and among the lower strata of civilised races, the sexuality of children seems to be given free rein. This probably provides a powerful protection against the subsequent development of neuroses in the individual. But does it not at the same time involve an extraordinary loss of the aptitude for cultural achievement'? (SE 20:217). January 13th 2010 Much has been made of the "plasticity" of the brain, but for a long time now it seems as if the brain itself has become post-modern. The modernist notion of the self as central controlling agency in psychic functioning has been replaced by its post-modern counterpart, the self-emergence via autopoiesis. Here multiple competing "agents" and proto-agents struggle and communicate with each other for self-maintenance and self-evolution. An autopoietic unit is a system that makes itself, through a  network of interactions that take place within its own well-defined boundaries. According to Maturana and Varela, 'The living organization is a circular organization which secures the production or maintenance of the components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their functioning is the very same organization that produces them'. This is in effect a retroactive self-completing and self-organising, coupled with the world. There is no "inner self" directing operations; rather, a "self" that arises after the fact, a latecomer who claims authorisation. The so-called paradigm shift is thus apparent: the modernist bureaucratic top-down control yields to the post-modern horizontal networking fluid cybernetic control, essentially self-authorised and intensely interactive. There is other, but there is no "Other of the other". There is no ultimate value-system to which one can appeal, as such a system will have to take its place along with every other idea in the vast total mix. It can no longer claim any "meta" status. However, it will be clear, this holistic analysis marginalises self-consciousness in any strong sense of the term, a strategy wholly suited to our late capitalist discourse, which thrives on chaos and complexity and our passive lostness within it. As Baudrillard says, no one tries to understand or analyse the post-modern, one just uses it. It also misses the "ontological crack" which is the Lacanian barred subject, the subject of conflict and antagonism. Through this crack comes death - death to this self-ing, self-centring, self-correcting smugness! Autopoiesis is Eros in action, gathering together the One that goes on living in spite of the deaths of individual entities. Language on the other hand introduces death, conflict, strife, which Lacan linked with the death drive. With self-consciousness, we introduce a pathological imbalance; we can think of tearing or destroying the world!   January 10th 2010 In terms of the three Lacanian registers, Brian Lenihan's dividedness relates to the Real in that his illness is quite beyond his control, while Gerry Adams's relates to the Symbolic and is an ethical issue, while for the Robinsons it is the Imaginary, or more a question of "optics" to use the current phrase. The Martin Turner cartoon in The Irish Times catches the hypocrisy of the leaders of Sinn Fein saying to Peter Robinson, 'We are worried that you might be bringing our coalition into disrepute', as Gerry Adams stands with his foot pushing back a door which is bursting open with a whole lot of skeletons about to tumble out. As Lacan says, the Master's truth is hidden from him; the 'discourse of synthesis' comes apart. In the place of "production" in the so-called "discourse of the Master", is the little "a" object, i.e. enjoyment. And we know that our political masters have been revealed not to lack in that production in any way. January 8th 2010 If you follow the Lacanian algebra that 'the truth of the Master is that he is really a divided subject', three leading Masters in Ireland have been revealed as (tragically) divided subjects in recent weeks: Brian Lenihan, at the level of the body, has been diagnosed with cancer; Gerry Adams has revealed that his father sexually abused his children and that his brother Liam, in his 50s, has been accused by his daughter Aine Tyrell, 36, of sexually abusing her from the age of four; Peter Robinson has been undermined by his wife mental illness, her affair with a 19 year old and possible financial irregularities arising therefrom. In the background to these high profile Masters are all those Bishops who have has to defend themselves. However, the three Masters are treated very differently. Brian Lenihan has received much deserved sympathy and has grown in stature. Gerry Adams, who has kept quiet about his brother's abuse for over twenty years, has not been challenged over this cover-up like the Catholic Bishops. Peter Robinson, on the other hand, because he comes from the loathed Protestant class, may be chased from office. So it seems that some Masters are destined to be more castrated than others. January 5th 2010 The card that arrived after Christmas was an Amnesty International USA one. On the front in large letters: Peace; Hope (with a ribbon tied around a globe); Love. Inside: 'Wishing you peace and happiness at this wonderful time of year'. A holistic message in line with the spiritual hedonism of the age. Here, in the West, we demand our freedom from Christianity. The story is told of a small boy, walking with his grandparent past a church in a small town in the former GDR, ‘What’s that strange building? What’s it for?’ he asked. There in the East, it took some time to destroy Christianity, against the wishes of the people. January 3rd 2010 Here is Žižek on nothing, which, paradoxically, is close to everything. 'There is nothing, basically. There is nothing, quite literally. But how do things emerge? Here, I feel a spontaneous affinity with Quantum Physics, where the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void. Then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. It is not just nothing; things are out there, but something went terribly wrong. What we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe - things exist by mistake! And I am ready to go to the end and say that the only way to counter the mistake is to go to the end and we have a name for this, and it is called love. Love is this cosmic imbalance. This is why I was always disgusted with this notion of universal love - I love the world! I don't love the world. I am somewhere between, I hate the world or I am indifferent towards it. Reality is just itself; it is out there, it's stupid, I don't care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not, I love you ALL. Instead love is, I pick out something, even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person, for instance, I say I love you more than anything else. In this quite formal sense, love is evil. You see perfection in imperfection'. The small youtube clips from Žižek demonstrate his radical Christianity, his love of contradiction and antagonism, the love of nothing for its creative potential. This is his theological materialism.   .