WHERE IS THE RIFT ？MARX, LACAN, CAPITALISM, AND ECOLOGE

什么是裂痕 马克思？拉康，资本主义，和生态主义

when, decades ago, ecology emerged as a crucial theoretical and practical issue, many
Marxists (as well as critics of Marxism) noted that nature – more precisely, the exact
ontological status of nature – is the one topic where even the crudest dialectical
materialism has an advantage over Western Marxism. Namely, dialectical materialism
allows us to think humanity as part of nature, while Western Marxism considers
socio-historical dialectics as the ultimate horizon of reference and, ultimately, reduces
nature to a background of the historical process, to nature as a historical category, as
Lukacs put it. Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism[i] is the latest most consistent
attempt to redress the balance and think humanity’s embeddedness in nature without
regressing to dialectical-materialist general ontology.

几十年前，当生态学成为一个关键的理论和实践问题时，许多马克思主义者
（以及马克思主义的批评者）指出，自然——更准确地说，是自然的确切本体
论地位——是一个即使是最粗糙的辩证唯物主义也比西方马克思主义更有优势
的话题。也就是说，辩证唯物主义允许我们将人类视为自然的一部分，而西方
马克思主义则将社会历史辩证法视为最终的参照地平线，并最终将自然归结为
历史过程的背景，将自然归结为历史范畴，正如卢卡奇所说。斋藤晃平（Kohei
Saito）（1）的卡尔·马克思（Karl Marx）的《生态社会主义》（Ecosocialism）
[i]是纠正平衡的最新尝试，并认为人类在自然中的嵌入性 ，而不会倒退到辩证
唯物主义的一般本体论。

Since the main philosophical reference of Western Marxism is Hegel, no wonder that
Saito aggressively rejects the Hegelian inheritance. His starting point is not nature as
such, but human labor as the process of metabolism between humanity (as part of
nature) and its natural environs, a process which is, of course, part of the universal
metabolism (exchange of matter) within nature itself. At its most basic, labor is a
material process of exchange which locates humanity in a much wider context of
natural processes and, as such, cannot be reduced to any form of Hegelian self-
mediation: the externality of nature is irreducible. This apparently abstract point has
crucial consequences for how we deal with our ecological predicament. Saito sees the
root of the ecological crisis in the rift between the material metabolism of our life-
process and the autonomous logic of the reproduction of capital, which poses a threat
to this metabolism. In the course of the book, Saito admits there are previous rifts:

由于西方马克思主义的主要哲学参考是黑格尔，难怪斋藤积极拒绝黑格尔的遗
产。他的出发点不是自然本身，而是人类劳动作为人类（作为自然的一部分）
与其自然环境之间的新陈代谢过程，这一过程当然是自然本身普遍新陈代谢
（物质交换）的一部分。从根本上说，劳动是一种物质的交换过程，它把人类
置于自然过程的更广阔的背景下，因此，不能归结为任何形式的黑格尔式的自
我中介：自然的外在性是不可还原的。这个看似抽象的观点对我们如何处理生
态困境具有至关重要的影响。斋藤认为生态危机的根源在于我们生命过程的物
质新陈代谢与资本再生产的自主逻辑之间的裂痕，这对这种新陈代谢构成了威
胁。在书中，斋藤承认之前有过裂痕：

“despite the appearance of long-term sustainable production in precapitalist societies

there was always a certain tension between nature and humans. Capitalism alone does
not create the problem of desertification ex nihilo, /…/ it transforms and deepens the
transhistorical contradiction by radically reorganizing the universal metabolism of
nature from the perspective of capital’s valorization.”(250)[ii]

“尽管在前资本主义社会中出现了长期可持续生产，但自然与人类之间始终存在
某种紧张关系。资本主义本身并不能凭空制造荒漠化问题，它通过从资本价值
化的角度从根本上重组自然界的普遍新陈代谢，改变和深化了跨历史的矛盾。
(250)[ii]

But the overall scheme remains one of linear progress in alienation. That’s why Marx
was also in his late years more and more interested in an “unconscious socialist
tendency” in the persisting remainders of pre-capitalist forms of communal life and
speculated that these remainders could directly pass into a post-capitalist society. (For
example, in his famous letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx plays with the idea that, maybe,
Russian village communes could function as places of resistance against capital and
establish socialism without going through capitalism.) Pre-capitalist forms maintain
the more of intimate ties of the human with the earth. Along these lines, the title of the
first chapter of Saito’s book – “Alienation of Nature as the Emergence of the
Modern”(25) – clearly locates the “rift” in capitalist modernity: “After the historical
dissolution of the original unity between humans and the earth, the production can
only relate to the conditions of production as an alien property.”(26) And Marx’s
Communist project is expected to heal that rift:

但总体方案仍然是异化的线性进展之一。正因为如此，马克思在晚年也越来越
关注前资本主义公共生活形式中持续存在的“无意识的社会主义倾向”，并推
测这些剩余部分可以直接进入后资本主义社会。（例如，在他写给维拉 ·扎苏利
奇的著名信中，马克思玩弄了这样一种观点，即也许俄罗斯的乡村公社可以作
为抵抗资本的场所，并在不经过资本主义的情况下建立社会主义。前资本主义
形式保持了人类与地球的密切联系。按照这些思路，斋藤的书第一章的标题—
—“作为现代的出现的自然的异化”（25）——清楚地定位了资本主义现代性
的“裂痕”：“在人类与地球之间原有的统一性历史性解体之后，生产只能作
为异化财产与生产条件联系起来。（26）马克思的共产主义计划有望弥合这一
裂痕：

“Only if one comprehends the estrangement in capitalist society as a dissolution of

humans’ original unity with the earth does it become evident that Marx’s communist
project consistently aims at a conscious rehabilitation of the unity between humans
and nature.”(42)

“只有当人们把资本主义社会的隔阂理解为人类与地球原有统一体的消解时，马
克思的共产主义计划一贯旨在有意识地恢复人与自然之间的统一性。(42)

The ultimate ground of this rift is that, in capitalism, the labor process does not serve
our needs; its goal is to expanded the reproduction of capital itself, irrespective of the
damage it does to our environment. Products count only insofar as they are valorized,
and consequences for the environment literally do not count. The actual metabolism
of our life process is thus subordinated to the artificial “life” of the reproduction of
capital. There is a rift between the two, and the ultimate goal of the Communist
revolution is not so much to abolish exploitation, as to abolish this rift.

这种裂痕的最终根源是，在资本主义中，劳动过程不能满足我们的需求;它的目
标是扩大资本本身的再生产，而不管它对我们的环境造成什么破坏。产品只有
在价值范围内才算数，对环境的影响实际上不算数。因此，我们生命过程的实
际新陈代谢从属于资本再生产的人为“生命”。两者之间存在裂痕，共产主义
革命的最终目标与其说是消灭剥削，不如说是消灭这种裂痕。

In capitalism, the rift under discussion here gets more radical not just in the sense that
the metabolic process between humans and nature is subordinated to the valorization
of capital itself. What made the rift explode was the intimate link between capitalism
and modern science: capitalist technology, which triggered radical changes in rational
environs, cannot be imagined without science, which is why some ecologists have
already proposed to change the term for the new epoch we are entering from
Anthropocene to Capitalocene. Apparatuses based on science enable humans not only
to get to know the real, which is outside the scope of their experiential reality (like
quantum waves); they also enable us to construct new “unnatural” (inhuman) objects
which cannot but appear to our experience as freaks of nature (gadgets, genetically
modified organisms, cyborgs, etc.). The power of human culture is not only to build
an autonomous symbolic universe beyond what we experience as nature, but to
produce new “unnatural” natural objects which materialize human knowledge. We not
only “symbolize nature”; we, as it were, denaturalize it from within.

在资本主义中，这里讨论的裂痕变得更加激进，这不仅仅是因为人与自然之间
的新陈代谢过程从属于资本本身的价值化。让裂痕爆炸的是资本主义与现代科
学之间的密切联系：没有科学，资本主义技术引发了理性环境的根本变化，这
是无法想象的，这就是为什么一些生态学家已经提议将我们正在进入的新时代
的术语从人类世改为资本世。基于科学的装置不仅使人类能够了解真实，这超
出了他们的经验现实的范围（如量子波）;它们还使我们能够构建新的“非自
然”（非人）物体，这些物体在我们的经验中只能看起来像是自然界的怪胎
（小工具、转基因生物、机器人等）。人类文化的力量不仅在于建立一个超越
我们所体验到的自然的自主象征宇宙，而且在于产生新的“非自然”自然物体，
使人类知识具体化。我们不仅“象征自然”;可以说，我们从内部将其非自然化。

Should we not apply Marx’s description of how in capitalism “all that is solid melts
into air, all that is holy is profaned” also to nature itself? Today, with the latest
biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase, in which it is simply nature
itself that melts into air: the main consequence of scientific breakthroughs in
biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural
organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and
inhuman, is thus “desubstantialized,” deprived of its impenetrable density, of what
Heidegger called “earth.” This compels us to give a new twist to Freud’s
title Unbehagen in der Kultur – discontent, uneasiness, in culture. With the latest
developments, discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer
“natural,” the reliable “dense” background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile
mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.

我们难道不应该把马克思关于资本主义中“一切固体都融化成空气，一切神圣
的东西都被亵渎”的描述也应用于自然本身吗？今天，随着最新的生物遗传学
发展，我们正在进入一个新阶段，在这个阶段，自然本身融化成空气：生物遗
传学科学突破的主要后果是自然的终结。一旦我们知道了它的构造规则，自然
有机体就会变成可以操纵的物体。因此，自然，无论是人类的还是非人类的，
都被“去实体化”了，被剥夺了其不可穿透的密度，被海德格尔称为“地球”。
这迫使我们对弗洛伊德的标题“Unbehagen in der Kultur”（《文明及其不满》）
进行了新的转折——文化中的不满、不安。随着最新的发展，不满情绪从文化
转向自然本身：自然不再是“自然”的，不再是我们生活中可靠的“密集”背
景;它现在似乎是一个脆弱的机制，在任何时候都可能向灾难性的方向爆炸。

The latest example of such “unnatural nature” was provided by the infamous DARPA
(Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency):

臭名昭著的 DARPA（国防高级研究计划局）（2）提供了这种“非自然性质”
的最新例子：

“Researchers in the US have created the first living machines by assembling cells
from African clawed frogs into tiny robots that move around under their own steam.
‘These are entirely new lifeforms. They have never before existed on Earth,’ said
Michael Levin, the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University in
Medford, Massachusetts. ‘They are living, programmable organisms.’ Their unique
features mean that future versions of the robots might be deployed to clean up
microplastic pollution in the oceans, locate and digest toxic materials, deliver drugs in
the body or remove plaque from artery walls, the scientists say. ‘It’s impossible to
know what the applications will be for any new technology, so we can really only
guess,’ said Joshua Bongard, a senior researcher on the team at the University of
Vermont. Sam Kriegman, a PhD student on the team at the University of Vermont,
acknowledged that the work raised ethical issues, particularly given that future
variants could have nervous systems and be selected for cognitive capability, making
them more active participants in the world. But the work aims to achieve more than
just the creation of squidgy robots. ‘The aim is to understand the software of life,’
Levin said. ‘If you think about birth defects, cancer, age-related diseases, all of these
things could be solved if we knew how to make biological structures, to have ultimate
control over growth and form.’”[iii]

“美国的研究人员通过将非洲爪蛙的细胞组装成在自己的蒸汽下四处移动的微型
机器人，创造了第一台活体机器。这些是全新的生命形式。它们以前从未存在
于地球上，“马萨诸塞州梅德福塔夫茨大学艾伦探索中心主任迈克尔 ·莱文说。
“它们是活生生的、可编程的有机体。科学家们说，它们的独特功能意味着未
来版本的机器人可能会被部署来清理海洋中的微塑料污染，定位和消化有毒物
质，在体内输送药物或去除动脉壁上的斑块。“不可能知道任何新技术的应用
是什么，所以我们只能猜测，”佛蒙特大学团队的高级研究员 Joshua Bongard
说。佛蒙特大学（University of Vermont）该团队的博士生萨姆·克里格曼（Sam
Kriegman）承认，这项工作引发了伦理问题，特别是考虑到未来的变种可能具
有神经系统，并被选为认知能力，使它们成为世界上更积极的参与者。但这项
工作的目标不仅仅是创造柔软的机器人。“目的是了解生命的软件，”莱文说。
“如果你考虑出生缺陷、癌症、与年龄有关的疾病，如果我们知道如何制造生
物结构，最终控制生长和形态，所有这些事情都可以得到解决。[iii]

It’s the old story of an invention propagated for its benevolent uses (“to clean up
microplastic pollution in the oceans,” etc.), with the fact that it is part of a defence
(military) project left unsaid. But the crucial point is that an “entirely new lifeform”
was created through this combination of a natural organism with a robot, something
that exists nowhere in nature. The very expression “the software of life” tells it all:
life itself loses its impenetrable density once it is considered to be something
regulated by a “software” (a term from computer programming). In the combination
of a natural organism with an artificial one, the artificial organism predominates,
determining the medium of their encounter. It would be easy to engage here in the
praise of cyborgs as the new post-human mode of existence that blurs the old
“metaphysical” limits between animal life, human life, and artificial life – it’s more
difficult to simply think out the consequences and basic coordinates of what is going
on. What, exactly, is disappearing and what is emerging?

这是一个古老的故事，一项发明因其仁慈的用途（“清理海洋中的微塑料污
染”等）而传播，事实上它是国防（军事）项目的一部分。但关键的一点是，
通过自然有机体与机器人的结合，创造了一种“全新的生命形式”，这在自然
界中是不存在的。“生命的软件”这个表达本身就说明了一切：一旦生命被认
为是由“软件”（计算机编程中的一个术语）调节的东西，生命本身就会失去
其不可穿透的密度。在自然有机体与人工有机体的结合中，人造有机体占主导
地位，决定了它们相遇的媒介。在这里，人们很容易将半机械人赞美为一种新
的后人类生存模式，它模糊了动物生命、人类生命和人造生命之间的旧“形而
上学”界限——简单地思考正在发生的事情的后果和基本坐标更加困难。究竟
什么正在消失，什么正在出现？

Biogenetics, with its reduction of the human psyche itself to an object of

technological manipulation, is effectively a kind of empirical instantiation of what
Heidegger perceived as the “danger” inherent to modern technology. Crucial here is
the interdependence of the human and nature: by reducing the human to just another
natural object whose properties can be manipulated, what we lose is not (only)
humanity but nature itself. In this sense, Francis Fukuyama was right: humanity itself
relies on some notion of “human nature,” as what we inherited as simply given to us,
the impenetrable dimension in/of ourselves into which we are born/thrown. The
paradox is, thus, that there are human beings only insofar as there is impenetrable
inhuman nature (Heidegger’s “earth”). But, with the prospect of biogenetic
interventions opened up by access to the genome, the species freely
changes/redefines itself, its own coordinates. This prospect effectively emancipates
humankind from the constraints of a finite species, from its enslavement to the
“selfish gene.”

生物遗传学将人类心灵本身简化为技术操纵的对象，实际上是海德格尔所认为
的现代技术固有的“危险”的一种经验实例。这里的关键是人与自然的相互依
存关系：通过将人简化为另一个属性可以纵的自然对象，我们失去的不仅仅是
人性，而是自然本身。从这个意义上说，弗朗西斯·福山是对的：人类本身依赖
于某种“人性”的概念，即我们继承的东西，只是赋予我们，我们出生/被扔进
去的我们自己内在的不可穿透的维度。因此，悖论在于，只有当存在不可穿透
的非人性（海德格尔的“大地”）时，才有人类。但是，随着通过访问基因组
而开辟了生物遗传干预的前景，该物种可以自由地改变/重新定义自己，自己的
坐标。这一前景有效地将人类从有限物种的束缚中解放出来，从奴役到“自私
的基因”中解放出来。

The mutual implication, complicity even, of science and capitalism is, of course, not
seamless, seeing that it implies an immanent tension in each of the two terms. Science
offers itself to capitalism insofar as it is in itself blind toward a key dimension of its
existence signalled by Lacan in a couple of co-dependent formulations. Science
forecloses the dimension of the subject; science operates at the level of knowledge
and ignores truth; science has no memory. Let’s begin with this last feature:

当然，科学和资本主义的相互影响，甚至是共谋，当然，这并不是天衣无缝的，
因为它意味着这两个术语中的每一个都存在着内在的张力。科学向资本主义提
供了自己，因为它本身对拉康在几个相互依赖的公式中表明的其存在的关键维
度视而不见。科学排除了主体的维度;

“the fact is that science, if one looks at it closely, has no memory. Once constituted, it forgers the
circuitous path by which it came into being; otherwise stated, it forgets a dimension of truth that
psychoanalysis seriously puts to work. I must, however, be more precise. It is widely known that
theoretical physics and mathematics – after every crisis that is resolved in a form for which the
term “generalized theory” can in no way be taken to mean “a shift to generality” – often maintain
what they generalize in its position in the preceding structure. That is not my point here. My
concern is the toll [drame], the subjective toll that each of these crises takes on the learned. The
tragedy [drame] has its victims, and nothing allows us to say that their destiny can be inscribed in
the Oedipal myth. Let us say that the subject has not been studied to any great extent. J. R. Mayer,
Cantor – well I am not going to furnish a list of first-rate tragedies, leading at times to the point of
madness; the names of certain of our contemporaries, in whose cases I consider exemplary the
tragedy of what is happening in psychoanalysis, would soon have to be added to the list.”[iv]

“事实是，如果仔细观察，科学是没有记忆的。一旦形成， 它就锻造了它形成的迂回道路;
用另一种方式说，它忘记了精神分析认真对待的真理维度。然而，我必须更精确。众所周
知，理论物理学和数学——在每一次危机都以一种“广义理论”一词绝不能被理解为“向
普遍性的转变”的形式得到解决之后——往往保持着它们在前面结构中的概括地位。这不
是我在这里的重点。我担心的是代价，即每一场危机对有学问的人造成的主观损失。悲剧
有它的受害者，没有什么可以让我们说他们的命运可以铭刻在俄狄浦斯神话中。可以说，
这个主体还没有被研究到任何程度。J.R. 梅耶尔，康托尔——好吧，我不会提供一份一流
的悲剧清单，有时会导致疯狂的地步；我们某些同时代人的名字，我认为在他们的案例中
是精神分析中正在发生的事情的悲剧的典范，很快就会被添加到名单中。[Ⅳ]

What Lacan aims at here goes far beyond the psychic tragedies of great scientific
inventors. (He mentions Cantor whose revolutionizing of the notion of infinity
triggered inner turmoil which pushed him to the limit of madness and even led him to
practice coprophagia.) From the scientific standpoint, such tragedies are irrelevant
private life details which in no way affect the status of a scientific discovery. Such
details HAVE to be ignored if we want to comprehend a scientific theory, and this
ignorance is not a weakness of the scientific theory but its strength. A scientific theory
is “objective”: it suspends its position of enunciation. It doesn’t matter who enounces
it; all that matters is its content. In this sense, the discourse of science forecloses its
subject. Lacan, however, tries to think the subject of modern science, bringing out
such “psychological” details not in order to relativize the validity of scientific theories
but to answer the question: what shifts have to happen in the subjectivity of a scientist
so that such a theory can be formulated? A theory may be “objectively valid,” but its
enunciation can nonetheless rely on traumatic subjective shifts: there is no pre-
established harmony between subject and object.

拉康在这里所要追求的远远超出了伟大科学发明家的心理悲剧。（他提到了康
托尔，他对无限概念的革命引发了内心的动荡，将他推向了疯狂的极限，甚至
导致他练习食粪（3））。从科学的角度来看，这些悲剧是无关紧要的私人生活
细节，绝不会影响科学发现的地位。如果我们想理解一个科学理论，就必须忽
略这些细节，而这种无知不是科学理论的弱点，而是它的优势。科学理论是
“客观的”：它暂停了它的阐述立场。谁宣布它并不重要;重要的是它的内容。
从这个意义上说，科学话语排除了它的主体。然而，拉康试图思考现代科学的
主体，提出这些“心理”细节，不是为了相对化科学理论的有效性，而是为了
回答这个问题：科学家的主体性必须发生哪些转变才能形成这样的理论？一个
理论可能是“客观有效的”，但它的阐述仍然依赖于创伤性的主观转变：主体
和客体之间没有预先建立的和谐。

What Lacan aims at also goes beyond the so-called “ethical responsibility” of
scientists for the (mis)use of their scientific achievements. He mentions a couple of
times J.R.Oppenheimer, the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory often
credited with being the “father of the atomic bomb.” When the first atomic bomb was
successfully detonated in July 16 1945, he remarked that it brought to mind words
from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I became Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Beset by
ethical qualms, he expressed his doubts publicly and, as a consequence, he suffered
the revocation of his security clearance and was effectively stripped of direct political
influence… Commendable as it is, such a critical stance is not enough: it remains at
the level of “ethical committees” which proliferate today and try to constrain
scientific progress into the straightjacket of predominant norms” (how far should we
go in biogenetic manipulations, etc.). The reason as to why this is not enough is that it
amounts to no more than secondary control over a machine which, if allowed to run
its immanent course, would have engendered catastrophic results.

拉康的目标也超越了科学家对（错误）使用其科学成果的所谓“道德责任”。
他多次提到 J.R.奥本海默（J.R.Oppenheimer），他是洛斯阿拉莫斯实验室（Los

Alamos Laboratory）的战时负责人，经常被誉为“原子弹之父”。 当第一颗原

子弹在 1945 年 7 月 16 日成功引爆时，他说这让人想起了《薄伽梵歌》中的话 ：

“现在我变成了死神，世界的毁灭者。”在道德疑虑的困扰下，他公开表达了
自己的怀疑，结果，他的安全许可被撤销，实际上被剥夺了直接的政治影响
力...... 尽管值得称赞，但这种批判立场是不够的：它仍然停留在“伦理委员
会”的水平上，这些委员会今天激增，并试图将科学进步限制在主流规范的紧
身衣中“（我们应该在生物基因操作方面走多远，等等）。这还不够的原因是，
它只不过是对一台机器的二级控制，如果任其运行其固有的过程，就会产生灾
难性的后果。
The trap to be avoided here is double. On the one hand, it is insufficient to locate
danger in particular misuses of science due to corruption (like the scientists who
support climate change denial) or something similar. The danger resides at a much
more general level, concerning the very mode of functioning of science. On the other
hand, we should also reject the over-hasty generalization of danger to what Adorno
and Horkheimer called “instrumental reason” – the idea that modern science is in its
very basic structure directed to dominate, manipulate and exploit nature, plus the
concomitant idea that modern science is ultimately just a radicalization of a basic
anthropological tendency. (For Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of
Enlightenment, there is a straight line from the primitive use of magic to the influence
modern technology wields over natural processes). The danger resides in the specific
conjunction of science and capital.

这里要避免的陷阱是双重的。一方面，仅仅将危险定位为由于腐败（如支持否
认气候变化的科学家）或类似原因而滥用科学是不够的。危险存在于更普遍的
层面上，涉及科学的运作方式。另一方面，我们也应该摒弃过分草率地将危险
概括为阿多诺和霍克海默所谓的“工具理性”——即现代科学在其基本结构中
旨在支配、操纵和利用自然，以及随之而来的现代科学最终只是基本人类学倾
向的激进化的观点。（对于阿多诺和霍克海默来说，在他们的《启蒙辩证法》
中，从魔法的原始使用到现代技术对自然过程的影响是一条直线）。危险在于
科学和资本的具体结合。

To get the basic dimension of what Lacan is aiming at in the passage quoted above,
we have to introduce the difference between knowledge and truth, wherein ”truth”
acquires all its weight. To indicate this weight, let’s mention yet again Lacan’s
paradox of jealousy. Lacan wrote that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his
wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still
pathological. The pathological elements is the husband’s need for jealousy as the only
way to retain his dignity, identity even. Along the same lines, one could say that, even
if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they
seduce German girls…) – which they do not, of course -, their anti-Semitism would
still be (and was) a pathological phenomenon because it repressed the true reason why
the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. In the
Nazi vision, their society is an organic whole of harmonious collaboration, so an
external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms.

为了了解拉康在上面引用的这段话中所要达到的基本维度，我们必须介绍知识
和真理之间的区别，其中“真理”获得了它的全部重量。为了表明这种分量，
让我们再次提到拉康的嫉妒悖论。拉康写道，即使一个嫉妒的丈夫对妻子的说
法（她和其他男人睡在一起）都是真的，他的嫉妒仍然是病态的。病态因素是
丈夫需要嫉妒，这是保持尊严甚至身份的唯一途径。同样，人们可以说，即使
纳粹关于犹太人的大多数说法都是真实的（他们剥削德国人，他们勾引德国女
孩......）——当然，他们不是——他们的反犹太主义仍然是（并且曾经是）一种
病态现象，因为它压制了纳粹需要反犹太主义来维持其意识形态立场的真正原
因。在纳粹的愿景中，他们的社会是一个和谐合作的有机整体，因此需要一个
外部入侵者来解释分裂和对立。

The same holds for how, today, anti-immigrant populists deal with the “problem” of
the refugees: they approach it in the atmosphere of fear, of the incoming struggle
against the islamicization of Europe, and they get caught in a series of obvious
absurdities. For them, the refugees who flee terror are equal to the terrorist they are
escaping from, oblivious to the obvious fact that, while there are among the refugees
also terrorists, rapists, criminals, etc., the large majority are desperate people looking
for a better life. The cause of problems that are immanent to today’s global capitalism
is projected onto an external intruder. We find here “fake news” which cannot be
reduced to a simple inexactitude: if they (partially, at least) correctly render (some of)
the facts, they are all the more dangerously a “fake.” Anti-immigrant racism and
sexism are not dangerous because they lie; they are at their most dangerous when the
lie is presented in the form of a (partial) factual truth.

今天，反移民民粹主义者如何处理难民的“问题”也是如此：他们在恐惧的气
氛中处理它，在即将到来的反对欧洲伊斯兰化的斗争中，他们陷入了一系列明
显的荒谬之中。对他们来说，逃离恐怖的难民等同于他们正在逃离的恐怖分子，
他们忽略了一个明显的事实，即虽然难民中也有恐怖分子、强奸犯、罪犯等，
但绝大多数是寻求更好生活的绝望者。当今全球资本主义固有的问题的根源被
投射到外部入侵者身上。我们在这里发现“假新闻”不能简化为简单的不准确：
如果它们（至少部分）正确地呈现了（部分）事实，那么它们就更加危险了。
反移民种族主义和性别歧视并不危险，因为它们撒谎;当谎言以（部分）事实真
相的形式呈现时，它们是最危险的。

It is this dimension of truth that eludes science: in the same way that my jealousy is
“untrue” even if its suspicions are confirmed by objective knowledge, in the same
way that our fear of refugees is false with regard to the subjective position of
enunciation it implies even if some facts can confirm it, modern science is “untrue”
insofar as it is blind to the way it is integrated into the circulation of capital, to its link
to technology and its capitalist use, i.e., to what in old Marxist terms was called the
“social mediation” of its activity. It is important to bear in mind that this “social
mediation” is not an empirical fact external to the scientific procedure; it is, rather, a
kind of transcendental a priori which structures the scientific procedure from within.
So, it is not only that scientists “don’t care” about the eventual misuse of their work
(if this were the case, more “socially conscious” scientists would be enough). Instead,
this “not-caring” is inscribed into its structure, coloring the very “desire” that
motivates scientific activity which is what Lacan aims at with his claim that science
doesn’t have memory. How so?

科学所回避的正是真理的这一维度：就像我的嫉妒是“不真实的”，即使它的
怀疑被客观知识所证实，就像我们对难民的恐惧是错误的，即使某些事实可以
证实它所暗示的主观阐述立场，现代科学也是“不真实的”，因为它对它融入
资本流通的方式视而不见，它与技术及其资本主义使用的联系，即用古老的马
克思主义术语来说，这就是其活动的“社会中介”。重要的是要记住，这种
“社会中介”不是科学程序之外的经验事实;相反，它是一种先验的先验，它从
内部构建了科学程序。因此，不仅仅是科学家“不关心”他们工作的最终滥用
（如果是这样的话，更多“有社会意识”的科学家就足够了）。相反，这种
“不在乎”被铭刻在它的结构中，为激发科学活动的“欲望”着色，这正是拉
康声称科学没有记忆的目的。怎么会这样？

In the conditions of developed capitalism, a strict division prevails between those who
do the labor (the workers) and those who plan and coordinate it. The latter are on the
side of capital: their job is to maximize capital’s valorization, and when science is
used to enhance productivity, it is also constrained to the task of facilitating the
process of capital’s valorization. Science is, thus, firmly entrenched on the side of the
capital: it is the ultimate figure of knowledge, which is taken away from laborers and
appropriated by capital and its executors. Scientists who work are also paid, but their
work is not at the same level as laborers’ work: they, as it were, work for the other
(opposite) side and are, in some sense, the strike-breakers of the production process…
This, of course, doesn’t mean that modern natural science is inexorably on the side of
the capital: today, science is needed more than ever in any resistance against
capitalism. The point is just that science itself is not enough to do this job, since it
“has no memory,” since it ignores the dimension of truth.

在发达资本主义的条件下，从事劳动的人（工人）与计划和协调劳动的人之间
普遍存在着严格的划分。后者是站在资本一边的：他们的工作是使资本的价值
最大化，当科学被用来提高生产力时，它也被限制在促进资本价值化过程的任
务上。因此，科学牢牢地站在资本一边：它是知识的终极形象，它被从劳动者
手中夺走，并被资本及其执行者所占有。工作的科学家也有报酬，但他们的工
作与工人的工作不在同一水平上：他们可以说是为另一方（对立面）工作，从
某种意义上说，他们是生产过程的罢工破坏者...... 当然，这并不意味着现代自
然科学不可避免地站在资本一边：今天，在对资本主义的任何抵抗中，都比以
往任何时候都更需要科学。关键是科学本身不足以完成这项工作，因为它“没
有记忆”，因为它忽略了真理的维度。

We should draw a distinction between two levels of what makes science problematic.
First, there is, at a general level, the fact that science “has no memory,” which is a part
of the strength, constitutive of science. Second, there is the specific conjunction of
science and capitalism, where “having no memory” relates to the particular blindness
to its own social mediation. However, Greta Thunberg is right when she claims that
politicians should listen to science. Wagner’s “Die Wunde schliest der Speer nur, der
Sie schlug” (“The wound can only be healed by the spear that made it”) thus acquires
a new actuality.

我们应该区分使科学出现问题的两个层面。首先，在一般的层面上，科学“没
有记忆”，这是力量的一部分，是科学的组成部分。其次，科学与资本主义的
特殊结合，其中“没有记忆”与对自身社会中介的特殊盲目有关。然而，当格
蕾塔·桑伯格（Greta Thunberg）声称政治家应该听取科学意见时，她是对的。
瓦格纳的“Die Wunde schliest der Speer nur， der Sie schlug”（“伤口只能用制
造它的长矛来治愈”）因此获得了新的现实。

Today’s threats are not primarily external (natural) but self-generated by human
activity permeated by science (the ecological consequences of our industry, the
psychic consequences of uncontrolled biogenetics, etc.). As a result, the sciences are
simultaneously (one of) the source(s) of risks and the sole medium we have to grasp
and define the threats. Even if we blame scientific-technological civilization for
global warming, we need the same science not only to define the scope of the threat,
but often even to perceive the threat. What we need is not science that re-discovers its
grounding in pre-modern wisdom, given that traditional wisdom is, precisely,
something that prevents us from perceiving the real threat of ecological catastrophes.
After all, wisdom “intuitively” tells us to trust mother-nature which is the stable
ground of our being, but it is this stable ground, which is undermined by modern
science and technology. So, we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from
the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that
could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an
authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological
challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.

今天的威胁主要不是外部的（自然的），而是由科学渗透的人类活动（我们工
业的生态后果，不受控制的生物遗传学的心理后果等）自我产生的。因此，科
学既是风险的来源，也是我们必须掌握和定义威胁的唯一媒介。即使我们将全
球变暖归咎于科技文明，我们也需要同样的科学来定义威胁的范围，而且往往
甚至需要感知威胁。我们需要的不是重新发现其前现代智慧基础的科学，因为
传统智慧恰恰是阻止我们感知生态灾难的真正威胁的东西。

Notes:

[i] Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, New York: Monthly Review Press 2017.
Numbers in brackets refer to the pages of this book.

[ii] An exemplary case of a rift in premodern societies is provided by Island: it was

fully forested when Norwegians arrived there in 8th century, and soon afterwards it
was totally deforested.

[iii] Quoted from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/13/scientists-use-

stem-cells-from-frogs-to-build-first-living-robots.

[iv] Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, New York: Norton 2997, p. 738.

译注：

1.