interview by Oliver Kupper
with Nadya Tolokonnikova
portraits by Pat Martin
On the quantum plane, nothing is fixed. Reality itself remains incomplete until observation—until the wave function collapses. Even the past and future may be relative. For Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, quantum physics presents a fascinating materialist quandary with drastic implications for how we understand what we see and what we believe, thereby undermining the foundational tenets of surveillance’s all-seeing, all-knowing gaze.
OLIVER KUPPER In your new book, Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy, you argue that reality itself is incomplete and cannot be fully observed. If even God cannot see everything, what does this imply for our belief in a totalizing, all-seeing surveillance system—a “quantum panopticon”?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK This is why I think quantum physics is the ultimate form of materialism. Some quantum physicists will still claim that God exists independently of us, the idea goes: even when we don’t observe, God is observing it all. But no—the basic premise of quantum physics is precisely that observation is always located, always particular. You cannot build a totality. It’s a messy world. A world that cannot be totalized. There is a dimension that escapes God’s own gaze. There is this quantum wave dimension that is precisely what God misses, if you understand God in this way. This is why, although he was officially a Kantian agnostic, Niels Bohr was right about quantum mechanics, and Einstein was wrong. The most amusing part for me about quantum physics is that scientists are usually so arrogant about it. “Oh, you’re confused, philosophers, you don’t even know what’s true.” Well, quantum physics today, it’s even worse. Almost every imaginable position has someone to advocate it. Is there a collapse or not? You have versions claiming there is no collapse. You have versions claiming collapse doesn’t exist because objects already exist in themselves.
For all imaginable positions, there is somebody to advocate them. I’m not a relativist here. I remain a standard European in a good sense—a rationalist, in the sense that I’m not saying, “Oh, science is just another relativist discourse. Should it be any better than so-called primitive wisdom?” No. Very naïvely, I believe we are now in a period of crisis, and then there will be a new discovery. The problem is: will it be what Einstein was waiting for—some hidden variables so that we simply learn more—or will it be a much more terrifying, as I hope, idea that the world is in itself incomplete? What you have to abandon is precisely this naïve, realist idea. We are here, our gaze is always particular, but in itself, there is reality.
Another thing that fascinates me is that, for Lacan, the gaze is opposed to the eye. The eye is what you see. The gaze is an object in itself. In every reality painting that you see, there is a blind spot—a spot from which the object looks back at you. That’s why, even in sexuality, it remains much more mysterious. Usually, as a rule, even though you cannot tolerate someone truly watching you, when you are engaged in a sexual act, it’s never pure enjoyment. You always imagine somebody observing you.
OLIVER KUPPER As I read your book, I kept thinking of the New Order lyric: “A thought that never changes remains a stupid lie.” If reality is fundamentally incomplete, how should we think about our political and ethical ideas in a world of uncertainty? How do we hold onto enduring principles without falling into rigid dogma?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK You see, you immediately provoke my critical reaction. At the same time, I think the deepest lie is opportunistic change. The deepest truth, for me, is to insist on an old thought and rethink it in a new situation—ideas like freedom, democracy, and, although I’m more skeptical, equality.
NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA I really love what you do with materialism. You call it ‘mystical materialism’. It’s so beautiful.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK Because I think that the experience on the cross—as Hegel said, “God himself dies”—is a certain experience we cannot help but determine as mystical. And this is the most radical, mystical experience. It’s not the Buddhist one. My god, how many people hate me for saying this, who want to say, “Okay, the world is a mess, but you can climb up to nirvana.” No, you cannot. I claim nirvana is in itself something very brutally violent. The ultimate experience is this abyss—the fall into total inconsistency, and so on. That is the most radical mysticism.
And again, I even have a polemic with some of my Muslim friends. Everybody likes Sufi mysticism, where they have this wonderful idea that the primordial name for God is a cloud—God is not an entity; you look at reality, but you see it only through a cloud. My counter-argument is not that we can get rid of the cloud. My argument is much more complex: what if there is just a cloud, and no positive, all-knowable God beneath or above it? This is already from the good aspects of Marx. How? It’s not simply a matter of dropping the illusion and going straight into reality—seeing reality as it is. No. Illusions are already inscribed into reality itself. If you take away the illusion, reality itself will disappear.
KUPPER In your talk on surveillance, you mentioned that in materialism, the new stage we’re at is this unfinished character of the universe, without the omnipotent gaze of God.
ŽIŽEK But we cannot simply get rid of God. There is something that pushes us toward divinity—something constitutive of human nature. What do I mean by this? Atheism, for me, doesn’t mean the absence of God; it means that there is a void, an abyss in your experience of reality, which opens up a place for God. That remains. I have a problem with people like Deleuze and others who are pure immanentists: “Nothing is beyond, everything is here.” No. I’m not saying there is anything beyond, and I’m not saying there is anything simply here. I’m just saying that in what is here, there is an opening—sorry for the obscenity—a crack. (laughs)
TOLOKONNIKOVA We love the crack. (laughs) This reminds me of a song in the Ghost in the Shell series. In Japanese, one line translates roughly as “the gods have left this world and gathered in a new one.” It’s not literally God leaving, but it captures the same sense of absence and rupture.
ŽIŽEK Here, I have problems. Lacan says, God was always dead—he just didn’t know it. What happened in modernity is not that God was once alive. No. It was God’s stupidity: God thought he was alive. You can find something similar already in Nietzsche, although I often have problems with Nietzsche. Peter Sloterdijk wrote a wonderful text on Nietzsche—on his arrogant, over-the-top self‑affirmations, especially in Ecce Homo—where he says, “Why am I so beautiful? Why am I so great?” Nietzsche is to be read as an implicit critique of the worst secret absolutism—this masked postmodern relativist stance. Usually, in today’s academic discourse, you are expected to relativize your statement in advance. You should say, “This is a risky hypothesis. I myself don’t fully agree with it.” Here, I follow my great Catholic theologian G.K. Chesterton, who said: “It is the most obscene thing to claim you don’t even agree with yourself.” No, no. Absolutely not. The risk of faith is that, although you know you may be wrong, you risk it. This is why I think that without a certain—in a good sense—dogmatism, you don’t have a real debate. The postmodern debate is: I say something, you say the opposite, and I say, “Yes, who knows? You are a relative.” Am I relative? We don’t even stick to our positions. True debate means precisely that I clearly state what I think, and in this way, I expose myself to criticism.
KUPPER In your new book, you mention Hegel’s famous maxim, spirit is a bone. Can you talk a little bit about that contradiction?
ŽIŽEK Although it’s more complex. But you know how it is when you read Hegel—this comes from Hegel’s critique of phrenology, the idea that if you analyze the form of your bones, you can see what you are spiritually made of. But Hegel’s reading is much more refined. Of course, “spirit is a bone” is, in some sense, nonsense. Spirit is not a bone. The bone is the most inert object. But when you say spirit is a bone, you immediately experience the ultimate contradiction, the tension. And this is God. If you directly say spirit is a relativism, or the power of spirit, and so on, it’s too easy. You don’t really undermine your position. You must experience it.
Our version of “spirit is a bone” is God as Jesus Christ. This is my standard procedure with people who truly believe in Christianity. I ask them, “Are you a Christian?” “Yes, absolutely.” “So you believe in God?” “Absolutely.” Then I go to the second stage: “Do you really believe that 2,000 years ago in Palestine a man was walking around who was not merely a messenger of God, but God himself?” Incredibly, all of them say, “Well, I’m not sure, but it doesn’t really matter.” They become postmodernists. They claim it’s maybe just a metaphor, and so on and so on. So I tell them: “Fuck you, you are the true historical relativist.”
KUPPER Nadya, you started writing letters to Slavoj while you were in prison. I assume that correspondence was being surveilled. It’s interesting to compare Russian or Chinese surveillance with US surveillance. Slavoj, last night at your talk, you mentioned missing the old days of surveillance—when it was as simple as a car following you down the street.
ŽIŽEK US [surveillance] is maybe worse. Worse, because, as I always repeat, the worst unfreedom is the unfreedom which you experience as freedom. We’re not even aware.
TOLOKONNIKOVA In the US, I never know. I’m quietly banned from everywhere. Sometimes, I don’t get invited to exhibitions because of something I’ve said. Maybe I wrote the word ‘abortion’ on Instagram, where it’s forbidden. Even the name itself, Pussy Riot, is shadowbanned on YouTube because of ‘pussy’ in the name.
KUPPER There’s a quiet level of control and censorship.
TOLOKONNIKOVA Obviously, living in China or Russia is much worse than living in the United States. But the problem is with the quietness of it. The problem is that you don’t really know how to resist it or how to organize to resist it. What will the tipping point be when it gets worse than in China or in Russia?
ŽIŽEK For example, take Julian Assange. I know you met him, and I appreciated very much that you supported him. Although he had great illusions about Putin. He was convinced the West is much worse.
TOLOKONNIKOVA Noam Chomsky is the same. I thought of Noam Chomsky as the smartest human being on the planet. And then he started saying this stuff, and it broke my heart.
ŽIŽEK Just imagine what would have happened to a Russian Assange. No trial. He would disappear. His family would disappear. Or, in China, even worse. Not to mention the greatest “democratic” states like North Korea. They have this rule there—if you do something like this, they punish three generations of your family. But you know what’s so interesting? It is really a new feudal society in North Korea, in the sense that you have three or four castes of people. You have the top inner circle—maybe one, two, three thousand top generals and officials. They have access to whiskey, to Western goods, to everything. Then you have the privileged layer below them.
Pyongyang is a Potemkin city. It’s totally encircled. You cannot live in the provinces and say, “Okay, we have a free afternoon—let’s take a train to Pyongyang.” Ah, ah, ah. You need special permission. Then you have the ordinary people, this grey mass. And finally, you have the worst category—those considered potential enemies. They are strictly kept apart. Everything depends on where you are placed. The rules are so strict that, now, because of hunger, they have had to make some small adjustments. For example, although it’s officially prohibited, in small towns they tolerate local markets where you can sell potatoes, vegetables, whatever, because otherwise people would starve.
The same thing happened when, for example, Fidel Castro discovered digital tracking technology. He said, “It’s wonderful—we will erase corruption with state cars or trucks. They will no longer distribute smuggled goods to the black market.” But then, some rational people told him, “Are you crazy? This would cause immediate starvation.” The black market is precisely what enabled people to survive. Was it ever so bad—or not so bad—in Russia?
TOLOKONNIKOVA In the ’90s, yes.
ŽIŽEK Here, I'm a little bit anti-American. The advice that Americans were giving to Russia weakened Russia.
TOLOKONNIKOVA Exactly. That was devastating. It was just a playground for libertarian economists. The problem was that the price was my mother’s survival.
ŽIŽEK The tragedy of Russian privatization, somebody explained, was that it was the exact opposite of China. In China, they were not crazy to privatize mineral resources. They’re the state’s profits. Why? They start with local objects for consumption, like shoes, baskets, and so on. And it worked wonderfully. In Russia, they did almost the opposite. They began with privatizing forests, oil, or whatever. It was madness.
TOLOKONNIKOVA Well, it was corrupted from the beginning. It was all set in a way that a number of people who belonged to the elite nomenklatura got rich.
KUPPER I want to talk about AI, surveillance, and the future. We are constantly being watched, and the digital traces we leave behind can begin to shape the paths available to us in the future. Recently, a paper even proposed the idea of a quantum panopticon, suggesting that these logics of observation and prediction may extend even further as technologies evolve.
ŽIŽEK Next week, I will meet in London for a round table with Emily Adlam, a young quantum physicist. Her idea is basically—but I don’t agree, and she knows I am an idiot here—her idea is that in the future we will be able to establish a matrix of all possible collapses so that all of reality can be formalized. Then you have a timeless fracture, where even the past and future don’t exist. I think that this type of reasoning cannot be combined with the basic quantum insight. It precisely presupposes this kind of totality view. One matrix covering all of that is not legitimate, but I am an idiot. Although what I suspect is that she also doesn’t have a good theory of how to test it. It’s just a crazy hypothesis.
KUPPER If our desires and intentions are shaped by unconscious contradictions—wanting and not wanting something at the same time—can systems like AI or neural interfaces ever truly ‘read’ the human mind, or will they always miss the very ambiguity that defines us?
ŽIŽEK You know what my problem is? They say, “With neurolink, they will be able to read our mind.” But how will that work with the Freudian unconscious? I pretend to love you. I really hate you. I’m split here. What will the machine register? Will it register this tension, or will it reduce it to one? The moment you introduce the unconscious, artificial intelligence surveillance becomes ambiguous. A Polish friend once told me a wonderful anti-communist joke from the 1950s, when there were food shortages. A guy entered a small store and said, “Are you the store who should have butter, but don’t have it?” And the server answers, “No. Sorry. You are on the wrong side of the street. We are the store that doesn’t have ham. The store across the street is the store that doesn’t have butter.” (laughs) Even a perfect machine cannot fully register these distinctions.