Simon Gros

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Whose Servant Is a Master? stages a concentrated intervention into contemporary political philosophy by treating “mastery” less as an archaic residue than as a recurring functional necessity generated by modern emancipatory projects themselves. The lecture’s distinctive scholarly stake lies in its attempt to re-map authority after the Enlightenment by refusing the easy consolations of either restoration or abolition: it reconstructs how modern freedom, equality, and rational administration each reproduce a need for figures, fictions, and excesses of command, while simultaneously displacing the locus of “the master” from personal sovereignty to symbolic machinery, institutional anonymity, and transnational coordination. Its contribution is methodological as much as substantive: it proceeds through a dialectical sequencing of examples, psychoanalytic schemata, and political typologies, designed to show how the justificatory humility of rule (“servant of the people”) can coincide with terror and yet also mark a site where emancipatory agency becomes thinkable.

The outer framing already sets the tone: the introducer performs the conventional modesty of academic protocol while insisting that protocol cannot contain the speaker’s volume and volatility. Two references are singled out as orienting coordinates. First, the early “Three Lectures” associated with the establishment of a society for theoretical psychoanalysis, whose continued contemporaneity is emphasized precisely because they were composed in a context of Yugoslav self-management, a political environment that treated participation, collective decision, and the everyday machinery of administration as its ideological signature. Second, Absolute Recoil is invoked through its Hegelian provenance, where a concept drawn from Science of Logic is re-functionalized into a thesis about political community as “profoundly groundless,” a community whose legitimacy lacks any positive substrate and thus appears as a self-positing that cannot be insured by reference to stable foundations. The introduction does more than flatter: it preloads the lecture with a problem of ground and authority. If political legitimacy is structurally ungrounded, then authority cannot be understood as a mere add-on to an otherwise transparent social order; it becomes a site where groundlessness is managed, denied, stylized, or converted into a practical consistency. The conference frame—the master(s) as a thematic nucleus—further indicates that “master” will be treated as a concept whose pluralization matters: the master disperses into modalities, discourses, and performances rather than remaining a single sovereign figure.

The lecture proper begins with a narrative diagnosis that is presented as “gradually emerging” over the last decade: a “return of what was repressed” in the age of modernity and Enlightenment. Yet the return is immediately rendered more intricate than a simple opposition between Enlightenment and its outside. The antagonism is said to run through the Enlightenment edifice itself, such that the repression belongs to Enlightenment as an internal operation. The speaker sketches this immanent antagonism through a series of paired polarities—Plato and Aristotle, French Revolution and English reform, politics and economy, egalitarian freedom and liberty rooted in customs—whose function is not historical survey but conceptual triangulation. The point is that Enlightenment is not a unified project with a single trajectory; it is a field structured by a constitutive conflict between radical egalitarian universalism and a particularist, experimental, incremental pragmatics. Even the seemingly technical opposition between “politics” and “economy” is treated as an index of a deeper split: the universalist ambition of equality and freedom generates demands that cannot be reduced to the cautious empiricism of custom-bound governance, while the empiricist posture claims realism by anchoring legitimacy in inherited forms. The speaker’s evaluative tilt is explicit: the truth, he insists, does not lie “by far” on the side of cautious empiricism. This is not offered as romantic exaltation of revolution; it is offered as a premise for understanding why authority returns. If emancipation proceeds by dissolving traditional forms of domination—paternal authority, the master of the household, faith—then the disappearance of these forms does not simply leave a vacuum filled by autonomous subjects; it produces new figures of domination that often appear more unbound, more invasive, and more obscene than the older forms. The return is thus not a restoration of the old father; it is a transformation of the conditions under which command can be exercised and justified.

To render this transformation precise, the lecture pivots to Freud as an early diagnostician of an ambiguity in the decline of paternal authority. The father as moral authority enables the child’s moral autonomy by offering a symbolic support for resisting peer pressure and corrupted environments. This is a strategically significant claim: paternal authority is described as enabling autonomy, not merely constraining it. The lesson is neither nostalgic nor therapeutic; it is structural. If the father’s symbolic function provides the medium through which autonomy can be formed, then dismantling that function without replacing its structural role risks producing subjects who are more, not less, vulnerable to pressure. Horkheimer is brought in as making the same point in the 1930s, and Adorno is invoked for the claim that Hitler is not a paternal figure. The provocation—“if you are anti-patriarchal, congratulations you have Hitler and Stalin on your side”—functions as a methodological warning: political critique that equates authority with paternal prohibition misunderstands the forms of domination that emerge when paternal symbolism collapses. Here a key dialectical motion begins: the critique of authority, if conducted at the level of moralized imagery (father versus freedom), risks aligning itself with forces that mobilize anti-paternal energies into new authoritarian formations.

From this structural ambiguity the lecture derives a typology of contemporary mastery. The most visible form is the “obscene master,” described as a new figure perhaps akin to Freud’s primordial father. Once traditional authority loses substantial power, returns to it become postmodern fakes. The example is Trump: his conservatism is characterized as a postmodern performance, an ego-trip, mixing invocations of tradition with public obscenities. The obscenity here is not merely vulgarity; it is a mode of authority that no longer relies on the substance of tradition but uses traditional signifiers as theatrical props while demonstrating that the master is exempt from the norms he cites. In this sense, the “conservatism” enacted does not restore the law; it exhibits the master’s enjoyment in transgressing it while claiming to embody it. The comparison with Bernie Sanders—Trump as postmodern politician, Sanders as old-fashioned moralist—sharpens the distinction: moralism belongs to a universe in which law retains a semblance of seriousness; postmodern mastery belongs to a universe in which law becomes a stage for performance and the master’s immunity becomes the real message.

This prepares an analysis of the left-liberal reaction to the January 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol. The description is deliberately double-edged: fascination and horror, condemnation laced with envy, the spectacle of “ordinary people” breaking into the sacred seat of power as carnival, as suspension of rules. The lecture’s interest lies in what this event reveals about political desire: the left’s fantasy of popular intrusion into power is mirrored and “stolen” by right populism, producing a crisis about the last resort of resistance. Yet the lecture refuses to concede the populist claim that “the people” are finally acting. The “people,” it insists, do not exist in the populist sense; “population” is a mask of power, a fantasized entity evoked by new masters to justify their rule as servants of the people and to designate opponents as enemies of the people. Here the title problem—whose servant is a master—acquires conceptual teeth. The master legitimates himself by claiming to serve; the very grammar of service becomes an instrument of domination because it installs a fiction of representation that immunizes power against critique: opposition becomes treason against the represented collective.

At this point the lecture introduces the Enlightenment-era formula that crystallizes the paradox: Friedrich the Great defining himself as “the first servant of the state.” This is proposed as an early modern solution to the loss of traditional authority: the sovereign becomes the most dutiful servant, thereby re-grounding command in a performative humility. Yet humility is presented as compatible with terror; Stalin is explicitly located in this space of “serving the servants.” The lecture refuses sentimental distinctions between benevolent service and brutal domination; it treats service as a justificatory position that can license extremes. Crucially, however, this position is said to admit multiple modalities—from technocracy and liberal democracy to authoritarianism. Service can become the self-description of expert administration (“we merely implement necessary measures for the general welfare”), of democratic representation (“we execute the people’s will”), and of direct terror (“we purify the people’s body in their name”). The master as servant thus becomes a morphologically flexible device that crosses regimes.

The lecture then stages a branching response to the disintegration of traditional authority. One branch accepts the need to return to some form of authority, often in a Lacanian register: the decline of the “Name-of-the-Father” is said to unleash pathological narcissism, evoking the specter of the primordial father; consequently, one tries to restore law as prohibition. This option is rejected, yet acknowledged as correctly pointing to a danger: the decline of mastery does not automatically guarantee emancipation; it can yield more oppressive domination. The second branch is introduced through Jacques-Alain Miller’s proposal, called “cynical”: since we cannot return to the authority of law, we act as if we sustain it, maintaining its authority as necessary while knowing it is not true. The psychoanalytic image is striking: “psychotics who try to play normal hysterics.” The formula yields a political ethic: protect the semblances of power so enjoyment can continue; do not attach oneself to them as real, treat them as necessary. The lecturer detects here Kafka’s line from The Trial: the law is not true, it is necessary. This is an early crest of a recurring tension: political order seems to require fictions that are explicitly known as fictions, yet the stance of knowing can slide into cynicism, where enjoyment becomes the only truth.

To complicate the cynicism-versus-belief opposition, the lecture introduces the spectacle of the British monarchy, especially the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, watched on a global scale. The ceremony is treated as evidence that ideological fantasy is not an epiphenomenal mask; it is a component that enables actual power relations to reproduce themselves. The monarchy’s diminishing geopolitical role coincides with an expanding symbolic fascination. The reference to Richard III’s reburial intensifies the point: the fantasy exceeds the present and organizes a temporal depth in which the symbolic head of power is continually re-staged. The lesson drawn is the distinction between symbolic top/head of power and actual executive power. “Kings and queens reign, they don’t rule,” and their ceremonial reign is crucial. This becomes a pivot for redefining Stalinism: the Stalinist leader is “the very opposite” of a monarch, neither traditional master, obscene master, nor liberal-democratic agent of rational knowledge. Instead Stalinism is described as a pathological distortion of “university discourse”: the master signifier overlaps directly with knowledge; knowledge acts as truth itself, without the post-truth multiplicity and self-irony typical of obscene mastery. Contemporary China is then positioned as opposite to Trump yet within the same space: the appearance of all-knowing power is protected, producing a mastery of knowledge rather than a mastery of transgression. The lecture thereby installs a two-axis map: mastery can be obscene performance that flaunts exemption, or it can be epistemic saturation where knowledge itself becomes the master signifier.

With this map in place, the lecture turns to the “anarchist way” as the other response to authority’s decline: go to the end, eliminate the master in all dimensions. Contemporary anarchism is presented as revived, associated with figures and thinkers, and articulated through a claim of radical equality where citizens are able to command and obey. Democratic expression is linked to contingency via lottery, and governing is said not to require particular skill. Yet the lecture quickly draws in a critical dialogue: Balibar is cited as formulating the anarchist extrapolation from local self-organization (cooperatives, towns, federations) to global society, with examples like Rojava or Chiapas functioning as empirical warrants for the claim that alternative fabrics can be practiced locally and scaled via federation.

The lecture’s argumentative pressure then intensifies through Malabou’s critique: anarchism becomes a key feature of global capitalism itself. The coexistence of de facto anarchism and “awakening” anarchism is named, where de facto anarchism is anarcho-capitalism contemporaneous with the end of the welfare state, producing abandonment. Capitalism’s libertarian turn is rendered through “uberization” as generalized platform-mediated precarization. The second problem is formulated as a paradox: authoritarianism does not contradict the disappearance of the state; it serves as its messenger, the mask of the collaborative economy that pulverizes fixed structures. The lecturer adds a decisive twist: this mask is also the hidden truth of the collaborative economy. The resulting thesis is that rising authoritarianism is the other side of the disappearance of the state, especially the disappearance of the state’s function of providing public services. Here the lecture displaces the image of the master from spectacular leaders to infrastructural dependency: the “master” is partially the invisible network of services without which autonomy collapses into desperation.

This displacement is supported by the introduction of emergency phenomena: natural disasters and pandemics. The “heat dome” over the Pacific Northwest is described as a local manifestation of global disturbances tied to human interventions in natural cycles. The lesson is strategic: global processes require global action and tight cooperation between states, because the state is often what remains in emergency. The lecture insists that public services—healthcare, education—cannot be provided by expanding cooperatives or local self-organization alone. Balibar’s point about American suburbs becomes emblematic: the catastrophe for marginalized groups is insufficient state, not excessive state. The lecture thus constructs a political realism that is not conservative: popular mobilization outside party politics is needed, yet communities rely on a thick texture of alienated institutional mechanisms. Electricity, water, rule of law, healthcare: these are the invisible cobweb sustaining community life. Here the lecture introduces one of its most provocative normative reversals: emancipatory struggles should shift from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation, achieving smooth functioning of alienated invisible mechanisms that sustain spaces of non-alienated community life. The concept of good alienation becomes a key operator that will later migrate into discussions of democracy, freedom, and authority as fiction.

From services and alienation the lecture transitions to representative democracy. Critics attack elections as betrayals of “true” democracy, yet the lecture argues that minimal alienation—signaled by representation—is precisely how democracy functions. A new separation enters: the Lacanian separation between master signifier (S1) and expert knowledge (S2). The people, through voting, formally decide; experts suggest what to choose. This yields the thesis that democracy provides appearance of choice rather than real choice. In a constitutional democracy every citizen is effectively a king in the constitutional-monarchic sense: formally deciding, functionally signing measures proposed by executive administration. Here monarchy returns as an analogy: the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the problem of constitutional monarchy—how to protect the dignity of the king, how to maintain the appearance that the king decides when everyone knows he does not. The lecture names a “minimal aspect of politeness”: those in power pretend they do not hold power and ask the people to freely give them power. This polite fiction becomes a component of the “big Other,” the symbolic substance of social being. When politeness disappears, disintegration of the big Other becomes plausible.

Yet the lecture is careful: it refuses a simplistic narrative in which Western liberal democracies are polite manipulations while Stalinism is crude reality. Stalinism, it argues, combined brutal terror with obsessive protection of appearances. The regime panicked whenever appearances were threatened; the media avoided “black chronicles,” crime reports, prostitution. Stalinism is thus a rule of appearances that must not be disturbed even when everyone knows they are false; the big Other of appearances must not notice the falsehood. This yields caution about claims that the big Other is disintegrating today. The lecture rejects the thesis that digital chaos and fake news amount to generalized foreclosure where symbolic space collapses. Instead it proposes that chaotic digital space may constitute a new form of big Other: an arena of influencer competition for clicks, roles performed through platforms, and cancel culture as a strict regime of exclusion. The “carnival without limitation” characterization is called misleading: limitations exist, perhaps stronger than paternal prohibition, because paternal prohibition at least solicits desire to transgress, whereas contemporary prohibitions operate through murky criteria and pervasive fear.

This analysis culminates in a provocative claim about “woke” culture: it is described as racism in the time of the many without the One. The lecture acknowledges the problematic nature of the characterization while defending its precision: traditional racism posits a foreign intruder threatening the unity of the One; the woke stance targets those suspected of not abandoning older forms of the One—patriarchal values, Eurocentrism—thus producing a regime where permissiveness turns into universal prohibition. One never knows when cancellation will occur; criteria are unclear. The broader thesis is that contemporary social regulation migrates from stable law to unpredictable punitive symbolic economies. This is another displacement: authority moves from identifiable masters to distributed prohibitions embedded in public space.

The lecture then announces a set of concluding points that function as a constructive redefinition of mastery. First, a “true master” is not an agent of discipline and prohibition; his message is neither “you cannot” nor “you have to,” but the enabling injunction “you can,” including the imperative to do what appears impossible within existing coordinates. The political specification is direct: one can think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework. The master is described as a vanishing mediator who returns one to oneself, delivering one to the abyss of freedom. Under true leadership one discovers that one wanted something without knowing it. A master is needed because freedom cannot be exceeded directly; access requires being pushed from outside the natural state of inert hedonism, the human-animal state. The paradox is sharpened: the more we live as free individuals with no master, the less free we become, caught within the existing frame of possibilities. The master “disturbs” one into freedom.

Second, the lecture reiterates good alienation: one should not strive for a self-transparent order without alienation; one should aim for a reliance on thick invisible cobwebs of regulations sustaining freedom. The ethical task becomes inventing a different mode of passivity: coping with unavoidable alienation by trusting and ignoring the cobweb so that freedom can operate without obsessive management of conditions.

Third, the lecture insists on the excess of power as constitutive. When one looks closely at state power, one detects an implicit signal: even if democratic, power says between the lines that it can do whatever it wants. The lecture endorses this excess: without the threat of arbitrary omnipotence, state power loses authority. Hence the attempt to limit power to a rational democratic extent is criticized as a game; the excess must be accepted. Here the lecture introduces a risk: it treats authoritarian potential as a structural ingredient of authority rather than a pathological deviation. The claim is not a recommendation to terrorize populations; it is a claim about how authority functions symbolically. Yet the provocation is explicit: trumpian populists undermine authority, presumably by dissolving the symbolic excess into carnivalesque performance that erodes the state’s capacity for decisive action.

From here the lecture approaches its densest tension: the conjunction of “there is no big Other” with advocacy of reliance on the figure of a big Other. The “obvious” reading would have the bearer of authority confess unqualifiedness and step down, leaving subjects to confront reality. Arendt is cited on parental authority: modern parents can refuse responsibility for the world, confessing insecurity and innocence, telling children to manage as best they can, with no entitlement to call parents to account. The lecture agrees that such an answer can be factually true and subjectively false: one cannot wash one’s hands existentially. Similarly, claiming one has no free will may be factually true and subjectively false as an excuse. The ethical lesson is that parents must pretend to know; authority must be assumed in its fictionality. This resembles Miller’s necessary-fake stance, yet the lecture distinguishes them: cynicism concludes that enjoyment is the only truth, while the Arendtian fiction is “more true than reality” precisely because it is fiction, and people risk their lives for it. The Lacanian formula follows: truth has the structure of a fiction.

The lecture then elaborates a parallel between determinism and freedom: radical acts of freedom become possible under predestination, because one knows one is predestined without knowing how. One must decide knowing the decision is decided, which becomes a condition of real freedom. Radical freedom is thereby separated from consumer choice. The paradox is restated: “there is no big Other” does not entail permissiveness; it entails prohibition—indeed, universal prohibition—requiring counterfactual action to break out. Moreover, describing the absence of the big Other as a neutral fact risks occupying the place of a big Other. Hence “there is no big Other” must be assumed in maximum subjective engagement: one identifies oneself as a crack in its edifice. At this point the lecture proposes a final correction to Lacan: the ultimate position is not that of the analyst; to avoid cynicism after traversing fantasy, one must heroically pass to the position of a new master. The lecture ends its prepared portion by marking this as the most philosophical point and stopping.

The Q&A reframes these theses by forcing them into practical confrontations. The moderator’s initial response suggests resonance with conference discussions: perhaps the master is not so bad. The speaker interrupts to insist on what he was “really saying”: democracy functions as fake politeness; he wants appearance to decide as an ordinary person. He rejects the liberal view of government as necessary in limited ways; government functions through an excessive threat—“I can do whatever I want.” He denies any desire for local community self-management; he prefers good alienation to endless meetings. This exchange intensifies the lecture’s anti-romantic stance toward participatory ideals: emancipation is reconceived as the maintenance of institutional invisibility rather than constant deliberative exposure.

Pressed on whether he wants the premodern father back, he refuses both premodern command and postmodern therapeutic coercion, yet he flips the common intuition about oppression: the truly oppressive father is the one who says “go only if you really want,” because this imposes a doubled order—one must obey and also desire obedience. The pattern is then generalized into capitalism’s “uberization”: precarious workers are free to choose additional work while their employment depends on choosing it. Freedom becomes a coercive form. This is aligned with a broader anthropological claim: at a basic level, “you are given a choice only if you make the right choice.” The speaker calls this civilization and endorses it. The anecdote about the Yugoslav army oath—being ordered to “freely” sign—functions as a crystallization of modern authority: freedom is demanded as a form of obedience.

The exchange then expands into theology and Marxism via Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is presented as claiming that the most atheist stance is to behave as a free reasonable chooser among religions; true authority works inversely: to understand Christianity’s argument, one must already believe. This is then mapped onto Marx: Stalin’s version of Marxism as rational betting on historical necessity is rejected; Marx’s own position is presented as requiring one to already be a Marxist to understand Marxism. The lecture thus treats commitment as a condition of intelligibility. Authority is recast as an a priori “choice” already made, a transcendental commitment that precedes reflective selection.

The speaker then distinguishes normal states from states of emergency. In normal states, the master should be reduced to an “idiot,” which motivates an ironic sympathy for monarchy. Monarchs are defined by platitudes and proverbs; the symbolic emptiness of their function is precisely what is valuable. In exceptional states, one needs a more real master, yet even here mastery is a function of transference: Mandela and Havel are described as ordinary, even “flat,” and what matters is what people “put in them.” The master’s message is again enabling: “yes, you can.” Mastery is thus split between ceremonial emptiness and emergency activation. The lecture’s earlier typology is implicitly reworked: symbolic heads, obscene performers, epistemic masters, and emergency mediators each occupy different roles in maintaining political consistency.

Later questions force further displacements. The Praxis school is criticized as nostalgically powerless during socialism’s disintegration, incapable of offering even minimal alternatives, ultimately aligning with party apparatus. Venezuela is invoked as a supposed anarchist success that in fact depended on a mega master. “Terror” is proposed in a limited, artificial sense directed against those in power rather than the people, with a controversial historical aside about Stalin’s purges being redirected against higher bureaucracy. Here the lecture’s endorsement of “excess” shifts into an advocacy of punitive mechanisms aimed at constraining elites, again aligning authority with the capacity to act decisively against entrenched power.

On Big Tech, the speaker insists that the only realistic way to contain it is a stronger state, under popular control. He cites state cancellation of monopolizing rights to enable competition, presenting a paradox: markets can have good effects when tightly controlled by the state; without the state one would already be in neo-feudalism; without the market, something else collapses. He notes an ethical shift in denunciation: whistleblowers become heroes. He then describes censorship within liberal democracies through his own publication difficulties regarding Ukraine and Western privatization pressures, indicating that “you can say anything” is an ideological claim masking strict limits. The master-servant paradox reappears: liberal public space presents itself as open, while its constraints operate through gatekeeping and moral framing.

Questions about “stupid masters” elicit a grim pragmatism: if the master is stupid, the regime is bad; one wants a master in a position where stupidity does not matter, again aligning with constitutional monarchy. Revolution becomes an ever-present possibility; leaders can be “killed,” even “liquidated,” and revolutions may require turning against their own leaders. The tragic problem becomes the revolution against the revolution: how to prevent it from becoming counter-revolution. Illusion is declared necessary; there is no realist revolution that begins with known limitations. Here the lecture’s earlier paradox about fiction becomes political: emancipatory action requires believing in an illusion whose falsity can be acknowledged only retroactively, because action cannot be grounded in neutral meta-language.

Globalization and climate questions push the lecture toward the need for international federation. Full sovereignty is rejected; global warming and immigration require tighter, obligatory federation. Yet pessimism intrudes: perhaps developed countries have not suffered enough to act; knowledge does not produce action, as shown by climate conferences yielding nothing. Yugoslav self-management is reinterpreted as a system that functioned only if people did not take it seriously; those who believed were dangerous. This becomes a diagnosis of contemporary discourse: talking about ecology serves to ensure that nothing changes, resembling obsessional talk meant to ward off difficult questions. The master is displaced again: the master becomes the discursive compulsion itself, the ritualized speech that protects the existing order by substituting articulation for transformation.

Freedom is then treated through material conditions: liberal freedoms of press and law are precious, yet insufficient without healthcare and education. Obamacare’s cancellation is read as propaganda about freedom masking the need for collective provision. The speaker’s anecdote about his son responding “yes, I can” to a request to pass salt captures a crucial theme: formal capacity and literal compliance can function as refusal. Applied politically, bureaucratic literalism becomes a technique of sabotage. Freedom thus becomes operational: freedom that “works,” not abstract permission.

On media, the speaker proposes prohibiting social platforms and punishing overuse through compulsory public labor, then qualifies by refusing to exaggerate the novelty of post-truth; Cold War had hegemonic lies. The deeper cause lies in socio-economic structures, with media as instruments rather than origins. The invisible hand question yields a nuanced stance: the invisible hand names unintended consequences; a basic “stupidity” belongs to symbolic order since one does not control effects of one’s speech and acts. Marx is criticized for thinking unintended consequences belong only to alienated societies; revolutions show unintended outcomes persist. Conspiracy theories are rejected as ideology, yet real conspiracies exist; the 2008 crisis is described as proven planned maneuvers by banks, with no punishment. The invisible hand becomes the back hand pushing toward collective suicide: left to its logic, the system tends toward catastrophe.

The final question—“what is to be done?”—draws the lecture into an explicit Hegelian self-identification. Hegel refuses discourse about the future in meta-language; projections are immanent to the present. Marx is criticized as idealist for positing proletarian revolution as transparent self-knowledge. Hegel’s empirical remarks are praised as penetrative, predicting U.S. and Russia as dominant powers, and Engels is invoked for predictions about world wars and revolution. Hegel’s last text on electoral reform is cited as warning that expanded participation can be manipulated by vulgar new rich bourgeoisie against the poor. Hegel’s central topic becomes: how best ideas go wrong, how progress yields catastrophe. Risk is necessary; doing nothing is worse. Terror is discussed as historically necessary rather than chosen among options. The lecture closes by insisting that long-term global planning is required, while electoral systems incentivize short-termism; a cynical Chinese interlocutor is cited to frame planning horizons. The concluding affect is tragic urgency: without confronting antagonisms beyond the comfort of sticking to liberal democracy, “we are lost.”

If one tracks the internal composition of the lecture as a work, its movement can be read as a sequence of conceptual displacements. It begins with an Enlightenment antagonism, then shifts to paternal authority’s ambiguity, then to postmodern obscene mastery, then to populist fantasy of “the people,” then to the servant-master formula as a justificatory device, then to fictions of law and monarchy, then to Stalinism as epistemic mastery, then to anarchism and its capitalist shadow, then to public services and alienated infrastructure, then to democratic ritual as constitutional monarchy generalized, then to big Other debates in digital space, then to cancel culture as universal prohibition, then to the “true master” as enabling mediator, then to authority as fiction more true than reality, then to predestination as a condition of radical freedom, and finally to the injunction to become a new master as the only exit from cynicism. The Q&A does not merely supplement this arc; it redistributes weight. It forces the lecture to re-affirm its anti-deliberative preference for institutional invisibility; it translates the master’s enabling function into anecdotes about coerced freedom; it exposes the lecture’s own reliance on humor as a device for making structural points palatable; it shifts the master from leader to bureaucracy, from sovereign to platform capitalism, from national state to international federation, from ideological figure to temporal horizon of planning. What remains consistent is the insistence that authority persists as a structural requirement of collective life under conditions of groundlessness, and that the moralized hope for pure autonomy repeatedly generates coercive fantasies.

The central conceptual tension, repeatedly staged and never fully pacified, concerns the relation between fiction and power. Authority appears as fiction, yet fiction is described as more true than factual confession when it sustains responsibility. Democracy appears as polite fiction, yet the fiction is said to be a necessary component of symbolic life. The big Other does not exist, yet social life requires forms of big-Other reliance, and the lecture proposes that the most radical stance is to assume mastery rather than remain in analytic detachment. The master justifies himself as servant, yet service becomes a fetish that obfuscates power’s constitutive excess. The lecture’s philosophical wager is that these tensions are not external contradictions to be dissolved by a cleaner theory; they are the very material of political ontology under modern conditions. “Whose servant is a master?” thus functions as a question whose answer keeps moving: the master serves the state, the people, knowledge, enjoyment, symbolic appearances, infrastructural necessities, and—most unsettlingly—the subject’s access to its own freedom. The lecture closes by implying that the decisive task lies in constructing institutions and transnational forms capable of long-term coordination while sustaining the fictions that make responsibility and action possible, without collapsing into either cynical enjoyment or catastrophic surrender to the system’s suicidal logic.

The lecture’s method, when read as a composed philosophical act rather than as an improvised performance, consists in repeatedly moving the listener from a seemingly empirical claim to a structural formalization, and then returning to an empirical scene that retroactively acquires a different meaning. The opening diagnosis about a “return of the repressed” exemplifies this: it begins as a cultural narrative about the last decade, then re-describes itself as an antagonism internal to Enlightenment, and then immediately begins to distribute that antagonism across historically spaced pairs. What matters in these pairs is not the historical accuracy of the sketch, which the lecture does not attempt to secure by scholarly apparatus, but the way the pairs function as conceptual attractors: the Platonic-Aristotelian opposition is treated as a schema for the opposition between universal normative construction and immanent description of existing forms; French revolutionary rupture and English reformist pragmatics become two models of political rationality; egalitarian freedom and customary liberty become two rival grammars of legitimation. The lecture thereby installs a background claim about modernity: modernity produces its own internal split between a universalism that demands radical transformation and a particularism that legitimates itself through incremental adaptation. The “master” returns because modernity cannot simply occupy one side of this split without producing pathologies on the other.

This yields a first tension that animates everything that follows: the lecture privileges radical egalitarian universalism as the bearer of truth while also treating universalist projects as producing new domination. The tension is not resolved by moderation or by a stable “balance.” The lecture instead pursues a dialectical configuration in which universalism remains the horizon of emancipation while the social forms that claim to embody universalism are repeatedly shown to generate their own masters. In this regard, the remark that dismantling paternal authority can place one “on the side” of Hitler and Stalin is not an ad hominem reversal but a warning about a structural possibility: an anti-authoritarian gesture, when it treats authority as identical with the paternal law, can prepare a terrain where authority returns as something more intrusive, precisely because it no longer depends on a substantial symbolic figure capable of mediating between subject and social order. Paternal authority, in the Freudian-Horkheimerian line invoked, supplies a symbolic relay that enables moral autonomy; its decline therefore exposes subjects to social pressures that are less legible, more dispersed, and more easily internalized as one’s own “choice.” The master’s return thus occurs through a change in the mode of subjectivation rather than through the reappearance of an old patriarch.

One can see this change crystallize in the lecture’s account of the “obscene master.” The obscenity is not presented as an accidental supplement. It names a transformation in the relationship between authority and normativity: authority ceases to appear as the guardian of a law and begins to appear as the one who enjoys a privileged exemption. The lecture’s insistence that contemporary restorations are “postmodern fakes” gives the obscenity a specific ontological status: it is a performance that displays the absence of substantial authority while commanding precisely through that display. When a leader invokes tradition while transgressing its codes, the invocation does not function as a binding norm; it functions as a theatrical prop that signals to followers that the leader stands above the norm and thus can stand for it. The obscene master thereby produces a peculiar mixture of liberation and subjection: liberation from the need to believe in the norm’s substance, subjection to the leader as the locus of exemption. The lecture’s reading of Trump as the ultimate postmodern president, placed against Sanders as moralist, is methodologically important because it distinguishes two political affects: moralism presupposes that the law’s authority can still be addressed, criticized, or repaired; postmodern mastery presupposes that the law’s authority is already hollow, and thus only the master’s theatricality can fill the void.

The January 6 episode then appears as a test-case for how this theatricality functions at the level of mass politics. The lecture does not treat the event primarily as an institutional crisis; it treats it as a scene that reveals the distribution of desire across the political field. The left-liberal reaction becomes an object of analysis because it discloses that the fantasy of the people’s intrusion into power is not the exclusive property of emancipatory politics. The lecture suggests that the right can appropriate the “last resort” of the left, turning carnival against the institutions that claimed to represent the people. Yet, in the lecture’s view, this appropriation does not realize a genuine popular agency; it realizes the master’s need to conjure the “people” as a mask of power. Here the title’s servant-master riddle gains its decisive political form: the master constitutes himself as servant precisely by producing the entity he claims to serve. “The people” become less a referent than an effect of invocation. Once invoked, the people can be used to mark an enemy as enemy of the people, and thus to place critique outside legitimacy.

This performative production of the people links directly to the Enlightenment-era invention of the ruler as servant, exemplified by Friedrich the Great’s formula. The lecture treats this as a strategic adaptation to the decline of traditional authority: when authority can no longer rely on the sacred aura of lineage or divine right, it can rely on the ethics of service. Yet the lecture’s crucial point is that service does not neutralize power. Service supplies a moral narrative that can justify the most brutal measures, since terror can be rendered as a sacrifice undertaken “for” those whom the ruler serves. Stalin is placed within this space of servant-mastery, which prevents any easy moral separation between enlightened administration and totalitarian brutality: the same justificatory grammar can be inhabited by technocracy, liberal democracy, authoritarianism, and terror. The lecture thereby reframes the problem of mastery: mastery is not simply coercion; it is a mode of legitimation that can accommodate coercion and can also accommodate administrative rationality, because both can present themselves as the burdens of service.

At this point the lecture’s psychoanalytic apparatus becomes more explicit. The temptation to “restore” the law through prohibition is described as one response to authority’s decline. Even when rejected, it is granted a diagnostic value: it recognizes that the disappearance of a master does not secure emancipation. Yet the lecture invests more conceptual energy in Miller’s proposal of maintaining the law’s semblance while knowing it is not true. This stance is called cynical because it risks placing enjoyment at the center: if the law is treated as a necessary fiction that enables enjoyment, then the subject’s relation to the law becomes managerial rather than ethical. The lecture’s citation of Kafka’s “not true, necessary” formula captures the sense in which modern legitimacy can detach itself from truth-claims and still operate through necessity-claims. Yet the lecture refuses to end here, precisely because such a position can be too stable: it can become a technique for maintaining order while evacuating responsibility.

The monarchy excursus functions as a counterexample to the cynically managed semblance. The lecture treats royal ceremonial as more than ideological decoration. It becomes an infrastructure of fantasy that enables power relations to reproduce. This claim is philosophically loaded: it attributes causal efficacy to symbolic forms without reducing them to simple masking. The monarchy’s ceremonial role is crucial because it provides a visible separation between symbolic head and executive function. The formula “reign without ruling” names a structural partition of power that liberal-democratic imaginaries often conceal: symbolic dignity and administrative command need not coincide. When the lecture then claims that Stalinism is the opposite of monarchy, it does not mean Stalinism lacks ceremonial forms; it means Stalinism collapses the partition between master signifier and knowledge. The leader becomes the embodiment of knowledge-as-truth. The lecture’s characterization of Stalinism as a pathological distortion of “university discourse” is decisive here. In Lacanian terms, university discourse places knowledge in the agent position, producing subjects as effects; the master signifier operates as hidden truth. Stalinism, in the lecture’s account, forces the master signifier to overlap directly with knowledge, thereby producing a regime where knowledge is treated as immediate truth, and where the protection of appearances becomes obsessive precisely because truth has become fused with power’s self-presentation.

This fusion enables the lecture to re-situate contemporary China within the same conceptual field as Trump while preserving their opposition. Trump exemplifies obscene mastery; China exemplifies the protection of an all-knowing power’s appearance. Both inhabit the space of modern authority after the decline of substantial tradition, yet they occupy different modalities. The lecture thus resists the popular simplification that equates authoritarianism with vulgar demagogy: one can have authoritarianism as epistemic closure, where knowledge is monopolized as truth and where self-irony disappears. This difference matters because it shows that modern mastery does not have a single face. It varies with the social technology of legitimacy: spectacle and transgression on one side, epistemic saturation on the other.

The anarchism segment introduces a further complication: emancipation understood as elimination of the master can coincide with capitalism’s own libertarian transformation. The lecture’s engagement with anarchism is not merely dismissive; it stages a genuine dilemma. On the one hand, local practices of self-organization provide experiential evidence that alternative social fabrics can be enacted. On the other hand, capitalism can absorb anti-statist energies by dismantling welfare infrastructures and transferring risks onto individuals and platforms. The lecture’s term “uberization” condenses this absorption: platform capitalism offers “freedom” as flexibility while imposing precarious dependency. This produces a new kind of mastery that does not look like mastery. It appears as contract, choice, and user empowerment, while functioning as a dispersed coercion. The lecture therefore treats “authoritarianism” as compatible with the disappearance of the state’s protective functions: coercion can operate through markets and platforms precisely when public services are withdrawn. The “mask” of collaborative economy becomes a truth: it reveals that social life depends on infrastructures that cannot be replaced by localized goodwill or cooperative enthusiasm.

This is why the lecture introduces emergencies and public services with such insistence. Natural disasters and pandemics become empirical proofs that local self-organization cannot substitute for coordinated, institutional capacity. In this sequence, the lecture’s notion of good alienation emerges as a central conceptual invention. Alienation is no longer treated as a purely negative condition to be overcome; it becomes the name for the necessary opacity and impersonality of mechanisms that enable freedom. Electricity, water, healthcare, education, rule of law: these are forms of alienated mediation that must function smoothly and invisibly for non-alienated life to occur. The lecture’s normative shift is precise: emancipatory struggle aims to secure the right alienation, meaning an alienation that supports freedom rather than crushing it. This shift reorients the critique of institutions: the problem is not institutional mediation as such; the problem is the configuration of mediation, its accessibility, its reliability, its distribution of burdens and benefits.

Representative democracy is then re-described through the same optic. The lecture does not deny democratic legitimacy; it reinterprets democratic functioning as dependent on minimal alienation and ritual. Elections are portrayed as polite fictions: those in power pretend to lack power and ask to be granted it. This politeness becomes an element of symbolic substance, the “big Other” of social life. The lecture’s analogy between democracy and constitutional monarchy is not a historical claim; it is a structural claim about the relationship between decision and authorization. The citizen’s role becomes analogous to the monarch’s signature: formal decision masks the locus of real administrative initiative. The S1/S2 separation maps onto this: the electorate occupies the place of master signifier as the formal decider; experts occupy the place of knowledge as the effective planner. The citizen becomes sovereign in the ceremonial sense, and this sovereignty requires rituals that preserve dignity even when efficacy lies elsewhere.

The lecture’s caution about the “disintegration of the big Other” follows from this. If ritual and politeness are structural components of symbolic life, then the erosion of politeness threatens the symbolic medium through which collective life is coordinated. Yet the lecture refuses the fashionable thesis that digital chaos equals symbolic collapse. It argues that digital space may constitute a new big Other: a chaotic public arena governed by metrics, visibility, and punitive exclusion. The subject is not simply “itself” on social platforms; it plays a role in a symbolic field structured by competition for recognition. Cancel culture then appears as a regime of prohibition with unclear criteria, producing fear and self-censorship. The lecture’s claim that such limitation can be stronger than paternal prohibition is conceptually significant: paternal prohibition invites transgression and thus sustains desire; contemporary prohibition operates through unpredictability and reputational annihilation, which can produce paralysis rather than transgressive desire.

From here the lecture’s redefinition of the master as enabling mediator becomes intelligible. If modern subjects are caught in dispersed prohibitions and managerial freedoms, then liberation cannot simply consist in removing constraints. It requires a disturbance of the coordinates that define what seems possible. The “true master” is defined as one who says “you can,” enabling the impossible within existing coordinates. In political terms, the lecture identifies this with the capacity to think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as final frameworks. This is not offered as a utopian blueprint; it is offered as a condition for regaining agency when the field of possibilities is saturated by what appears realistic. The master as vanishing mediator operates by producing a subjective displacement: one discovers one wanted something without knowing it. The master “returns you to yourself” by forcing you into the abyss of freedom, meaning into a situation where your attachment to existing possibilities is shaken.

This is where the lecture’s endorsement of the “excess of power” becomes most controversial and most revealing. The claim that authority requires an implicit threat of arbitrary omnipotence can be read as apologetics for domination. Yet the lecture’s own architecture suggests a different intention: it treats authority’s excess as a symbolic condition that stabilizes the field of action. Without some sense that power can act decisively, institutions lose credibility and coordination fails. The lecture’s hostility to the liberal ideal of limiting government to a rational democratic extent follows from this: rational limitation becomes another version of the servant-master fetish, where power presents itself as purely service-oriented and thus hides its constitutive capacity to impose. The lecture prefers an explicit acknowledgment of power’s excess over the fetish of benevolent service, because the fetish prevents subjects from assuming responsibility for their own agency. If power is imagined as servant that will take care of everything, subjects can remain passive, relieved of the burden of collective self-care. The lecture thus links the servant-master formula to a deeper pathology of dependency.

The deepest layer of the lecture, however, concerns fiction. Authority is described as a necessary fiction, yet the lecture insists that fiction can be “more true” than factual confession. The Arendtian parent who admits uncertainty and washes hands is factually correct and existentially false, because responsibility cannot be renounced without destroying the ethical medium in which subjects grow. The lecture’s claim that truth has the structure of fiction is therefore mobilized against cynicism. Cynicism treats fiction as mere instrument for enjoyment; the lecture treats fiction as the medium of responsibility and commitment. This is why predestination becomes the lecture’s paradoxical model of freedom: one knows that decisions are predetermined, yet one does not know how, and thus one must decide. Freedom appears as the subjective risk of assuming responsibility under conditions where guarantees are absent. The lecture thereby reframes the slogan “there is no big Other.” It does not become a descriptive claim about the world; it becomes an injunction to assume maximal engagement, identifying oneself as a crack in the symbolic edifice. The lecture’s proposed “correction” of the analytic stance follows from this: analysis can reveal the absence of guarantees, yet remaining at the analytic position risks becoming cynical. A further step is required: assuming the position of a “new master,” meaning taking responsibility for instituting fictions that enable collective life, while knowing that these fictions are fictions.

The Q&A sequences amplify this by translating the conceptual claims into social micro-rituals. The father joke is reworked into a general theory of postmodern coercion: the demand to freely desire what one must do is more oppressive than direct command. The dinner bill ritual becomes an emblem of social politeness as a shared fiction. The “evil” pleasure of breaking the ritual by saying “you pay” reveals that rituals are maintained not because they are true, but because they coordinate desire and obligation. The Yugoslav army oath anecdote then becomes a paradigmatic scene of coerced freedom: the system must demand freedom as a form of obedience in order to maintain its legitimacy. The lecture thus shows that modern authority often operates by compelling subjects to present obedience as choice. The subject’s inner life becomes a site of governance.

When the lecture distinguishes normal states from emergencies, it implicitly offers an institutional design principle: reduce mastery to ceremonial emptiness in normal times, activate decisive coordination in emergencies. Monarchy becomes an ironic model for how to maintain symbolic dignity without concentrating executive power. Yet the lecture refuses to idealize symbolic emptiness: it insists that ceremonial roles are “empty but necessary.” This “necessity” is not metaphysical; it is political-psychological. Collective life needs symbolic condensations to stabilize identification and trust. At the same time, emergency requires something like mastery in the sense of decisive intervention. The lecture’s account of Mandela and Havel as ordinary individuals whose power lay in transference sharpens this: leadership’s efficacy depends on what collective subjects invest in the leader, not on leader’s intrinsic wisdom. This is consistent with the lecture’s broader claim that authority is fiction: the leader becomes a screen for collective desire, which can be mobilized toward action.

The lecture’s later discussions of Big Tech and censorship further broaden the master problem by relocating it into the structure of public space. The claim that strong state regulation is the only realistic containment is consistent with the earlier emphasis on public services and institutional alienation. Yet the lecture also notes that liberal public space is subject to gatekeeping and censorship. Here the master-servant question returns as a problem of who controls the symbolic infrastructure. Platforms and media institutions can function as dispersed masters, enforcing limits and shaping discourse while presenting themselves as neutral intermediaries or as servants of public debate. The lecture’s references to whistleblowing and to shifts in the moral valuation of denunciation underscore a transformation in the ethics of reporting: what was once betrayal becomes heroism. This indicates that authority’s location is shifting; the state, platforms, and public moral economies compete to define legitimacy.

The exchange about “stupid masters” intensifies the tragic dimension. The lecture refuses the fantasy of wise rulers. It seeks forms of authority where the ruler’s stupidity does not matter, again pointing to constitutional arrangements and symbolic partition. At the same time, the lecture’s openness to violent overthrow and to revolutions devouring their leaders is presented as grim realism. Revolutions require illusions; illusions are necessary for action. Yet illusions generate their own need to be negated, producing revolutions against revolutions. The lecture’s Hegelian orientation becomes clearer here: history proceeds through contradictions that cannot be avoided by prudent moderation. Action risks catastrophe; inaction produces worse catastrophes. The lecture thus presents political agency as structurally tragic: agency demands commitment without guarantee, and commitment produces unintended consequences that demand further commitments.

The global federation segment reveals the lecture’s final displacement of mastery beyond the state. Sovereign states cannot address climate and migration alone; global processes require obligatory international coordination. Yet the lecture sees the contemporary direction moving toward stronger sovereignty and fragmentation. This produces a concluding pessimism that is itself diagnostic: societies know truths and do nothing. The reference to climate conferences where apocalyptic knowledge yields no action is used to illustrate a new paralysis: the symbolic order can incorporate catastrophe as information without transforming it into collective will. The analogy with late Yugoslav self-management deepens the diagnosis: systems can function only when participants do not take them seriously; sincere belief becomes dangerous because it threatens to expose the system’s emptiness. The lecture suggests that contemporary discourse about change can function superstitiously, as a ritual meant to ensure that nothing changes. This is a severe indictment of liberal-democratic communication: speech substitutes for risk.

The closing Hegel sequence then serves as a final attempt to secure a philosophical ground for risk without guarantees. Hegel is praised for refusing meta-language about the future while offering penetrating empirical insights. Marx is criticized for positing a transparent revolutionary subject. Hegel becomes the thinker of how best intentions become catastrophes, how reforms produce new manipulations, how progress yields war and totalitarianism. Yet Hegel also becomes the thinker of necessary risk: action is required even when outcomes are unknown, because passivity worsens the situation. The lecture’s final emphasis on long-term planning and global coordination returns to the master question in its most contemporary form: ecological and geopolitical crises demand temporal horizons beyond electoral cycles. The lecture does not present a blueprint; it presents a dilemma of temporal rationality. Electoral systems reward short-term calculation; crises demand decades-long commitments. This mismatch becomes a new site where mastery returns, whether as technocratic planning, authoritarian sovereignty, or forced federation.

In this extended arc, the servant-master paradox functions less as a moral critique of hypocritical rulers and more as a conceptual instrument for tracking where authority migrates when modernity dissolves its traditional supports. Authority migrates into service narratives, into obscene performance, into epistemic monopolies, into platform-mediated freedom, into distributed prohibitions, into infrastructural mechanisms, into rituals of democratic politeness, into transnational planning demands. The lecture’s wager is that political philosophy can no longer treat mastery as a single figure opposed to freedom. Mastery becomes a set of functions that organize subjectivation, legitimacy, and coordination under conditions of structural groundlessness. The practical problem then becomes how to institute forms of good alienation and enabling leadership that can mobilize collective agency without collapsing into terror, cynicism, or suicidal drift under the invisible hand’s backhand.