no longer dominated by the dynamics of capitalism as it was described by Marx. In order to avoid this worn-out example, however, let us turn to the domain of sexuality. One of today's commonplaces is that so-called 'virtual' or 'cyber' sex presents a radical break with the past, since in it, actual sexual contact with a 'real other' is losing ground against masturbatory enjoyment, whose sole support is a virtual other -phone-sex, pornography, up to computerized 'virtual sex' . . . . The Lacanian answer to this is that first we have to expose the myth of 'real sex' allegedly possible 'before' the arrival of virtual sex: Lacan's thesis that 'there is no sexual relationship' means precisely that the structure of the 'real' sexual act (of the act with a flesh-and-blood partner) is already inherently phantasmic -- the 'real' body of the other serves only as a support for our phantasmic projections. In other words, virtual sex' in which a glove simulates the stimuli of what we see on the screen, and so on, is not a monstrous distortion of real sex, it simply renders manifest its underlying phantasmic structure.

An exemplary case of the opposite misperception is provided by the reaction of Western liberal intellectuals to the emergence of new states in the process of the disintegration of real Socialism in Eastern Europe: they (mis)perceived this emergence as a return to the nineteenthcentury tradition of the nation-state, whereas what we are actually dealing with is the exact opposite: the 'withering-away' of the traditional nation-state based upon the notion of the abstract citizen identified with the constitutional legal order. In order to characterize this new state of things, Étienne Balibar recently referred to the old Marxian phrase Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa -- there no longer exists a proper state in Europe. The old spectre of Leviathan parasitizing on the Lebenswelt of society, totalizing it from above, is more and more eroded from both sides. On the one hand, there are the new emerging ethnic communities -- although some of them are formally constituted as sovereign states, they are no longer states in the proper modern-age European sense, since they did not cut the umbilical cord between state and ethnic community. (Paradigmatic here is the case of Russia, in which local mafias already function as a kind of parallel power structure.) On the other hand, there are the multiple transnational links, from multinational capital to mafia cartels and inter-state political communities ( European Union).

There are two reasons for this limitation of state sovereignty, each of which is in itself compelling enough to justify it: the transnational character of ecological crisis and of nuclear threat. This eroding of state authority from both sides is mirrored in the fact that today the basic political antagonism is that between the universalist 'cosmopolitical' liberal democracy (standing for the force corroding the state from

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