2011 as „The Year of Dreaming Dangerously“
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012-04-25 · 1:47:37 · 13,660 words
capitalismideologydemocracycommunism-socialismfascism-populismrace-antisemitismrevolution-violencecinema-art-culturepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsreligion-theologygeopolitics-warliberalism-political-correctness
Žižek delivers a lecture analyzing the 2011 cycle of protests, Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Breivik's massacre, European anti-immigrant populism, as symptoms of a structural deadlock in global capitalism following the breakdown of the post-1970s US-led financial order. He develops a logic of negation (coffee without cream vs. without milk) to expose how ideology conceals what is actually absent, applies it to post-communist Eastern Europe, the Iraq invasion, and the healthcare debate, and argues that the Occupy movement correctly identifies that existing democratic institutions cannot cope with transnational financial capital even if protesters lack a positive program. The lecture ends with a defense of Lars von Trier's Melancholia as embodying the necessary 'zero point' of radical negativity one must pass through before genuine emancipatory action, followed by a Q&A and dialogue with a co-author, a Croatian Protestant theologian, covering communism's failures, monastic utopias, strikes, and organization.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
A Persian expression meaning to murder someone, bury the body, then grow flowers over it, used to describe how mainstream media kills the radical emancipatory potential of protest events while concealing the threat.
The ideological function of providing a simple narrative explanation for complex social troubles, as Hitler used the 'Jewish plot' and today anti-immigrant sentiment serves for anxious populations facing opaque financial crisis.
Capital as a self-propelling machine is the true 'foreign body' that cannot be assimilated, unlike actual immigrants who serve as its ideological displacement.
as “coffee without cream / coffee without milk”
A logical schema drawn from Lubitsch's Ninotchka showing that what is absent determines meaning: ideology systematically substitutes one negation for another, giving people coffee without milk while claiming it is coffee without cream.
as “freedom of choice without freedom of choice”
The Republican healthcare argument offers formal freedom of choice stripped of the social substance that makes choice meaningful, a thing deprived of itself.
The emerging governance form where elected politicians are replaced by expert technocrats (as in Greece and Italy), effectively suspending democracy while preserving its institutional shell.
Yanis Varoufakis's concept, adopted by Žižek, for the monstrous financial engine born after Nixon abandoned the gold standard, whereby the rest of the world continuously transfers capital to finance US deficits.
as “hysterical call for a new master”
Žižek's reading of many protest demands ('we want a just life', 'banks should serve people') as unconsciously requesting a new authority figure rather than structural transformation.
as “cycle of life (Lion King wisdom)”
Žižek's name for a resigned ideological wisdom that naturalizes systemic violence and exploitation by folding resistance back into an eternal cycle, exemplified by The Lion King's 'Circle of Life' song.
as “law and its transgression”
Following Foucault, Žižek argues that apparent resistance (transgression) is structurally implied by and necessary to the law it seemingly opposes, exemplified by how Soviet regimes needed the black market they officially fought.
Ayn Rand's distinction between creative productive geniuses and parasitic non-producers, which Žižek perversely repurposes: the true leftist task is to stop being Dagny-like creative rescuers of the system and let it collapse.
The Hegelian-inflected moment where one sees how standard resistance perpetuates the system; only after this passage can real change be envisaged.
The inadequate leftist response that blames individual greed (bankers, Madoff) rather than the structural necessity of the system that produces such figures, Žižek calls for prohibiting this critique as the first political task.
The moment when one recognizes that one's own resistant activity merely makes the system run; passing through this point, embodied in Melancholia's heroine, is the condition of genuine freedom and political engagement.
as “melancholy as preemptive mourning”
Following Freud's Trauer und Melancholie via Agamben: melancholy is not fidelity to a lost object but treating as lost an object that is still present, the shadow of loss falls before the actual separation.
Distinct from the sociological category of the working class, this designates a subjective position of void and radical loss that enables one to see through the system, Žižek proposes redefining proletariat around this position rather than employment status.
Not doing the same thing again but bringing out unrealized potentials from the first attempt's failures; Žižek proposes this as the proper relation to Marx and communist tradition.
Herbert McCabe's term invoked by Žižek to describe Occupy participants whose mere visible presence functions like meditating monks, inspiring others by demonstrating that political action is possible.
Stories he reaches for 9
In Lubitsch's Ninotchka, a customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream but can bring coffee without milk. The same absence (no coffee additive) is marked by two different negations that are not equivalent.
“Sorry, but we have run out of cream. Can I bring you coffee without milk?”
In Brassed Off, a woman invites a man in for coffee; he says he doesn't drink coffee; she replies she has none, communicating a direct sexual invitation through a double negation without ever naming sex.
“Would you like to come in for a coffee? I would love to, but I don't drink coffee. No problem, I don't have any.”
Breivik is simultaneously anti-Semitic and pro-Israel, viewing Israel as the first defense line against Muslim expansion; he wrote that Jews are acceptable as long as there are not too many, the US has a 'Jewish problem', Western Europe does not.
“Jews are okay as long as there aren't too many of them.”
At the 1968 Paris protests Lacan told students: what you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master, and you will get one. Žižek rejects this as too cheap but acknowledges a grain of truth in the context of today's protests.
“What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”
In Buddhist countries, most people don't meditate but relate to meditating monks as a living reminder that enlightenment is possible. Similarly, many people who didn't go to Zuccotti Park related to Occupy protesters as reminders that political action is possible.
“It did stir something in them up like, 'My God, but you are there to remind them.' That something can be done.”
The Jesuit missions in Paraguay ('Reducciones') were thriving economies with Guarani-language books; they were not destroyed by internal utopian collapse but by a ruthless military attack by Brazil and Spain, with even the Vatican against them.
“It didn't, as they like to say, 'The utopia self-destroyed itself from...' No! Brazil and Spain together attacked them.”
In the Yugoslav People's Army, one morning's class taught the Geneva Convention prohibition on shooting parachuters before they land; the next class was practice targeting parachuters in the air. When Žižek naively asked about the contradiction, the officer called him utterly stupid.
“I thought you were an intellectual, how could you be so utterly stupid?”
In the film Wrath of the Titans, Hades tells Zeus that when a man dies he survives in memory and descendants, but when a god dies he truly dies, inverting Heidegger's mortal/immortal distinction.
“When a man dies, he somehow survives in memory, descendants. But when a god dies, he really dies. Only gods are real mortals.”
Žižek imagines a 'Brassed Off' version of the Iraq invasion: Rumsfeld invites Europeans to join the search for WMDs; Europeans say they have no facilities; Rumsfeld says no problem, there are no WMDs anyway, let's just attack.
“No problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Let's just attack it.”
Works invoked 16
Ninotchka film
Called 'one of the absolute masterpieces of Jewish Hollywood'; the coffee-without-cream scene provides the central logical schema for the talk's ideology theory.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's 'mega book' on Hegel (1000+ pages); he jokes about it in Stalinist terms, exceeding his five-year plan.
Brassed Off film
Used alongside Ninotchka to illustrate the double-negation logic of ideology through the erotic coffee-invitation scene.
Melancholia film
Screened at length and defended as deeply optimistic, not escapist religion, because it genuinely confronts radical negativity and absolute annihilation without metaphysical consolation, providing the only ground for genuine political engagement.
Life is Beautiful film
Used as a vehicle for an imagined added scene applying the Lion King 'cycle of life' to the Holocaust, exposing the obscenity of that ideological figure.
Empire book
Hardt and Negri's book; the priest co-author cites its closing image of Francis of Assisi as communist activist figure.
Atlas Shrugged book
Žižek admits he could not finish it ('with all my goodwill') but deliberately misappropriates its internal logic, Dagny as the system's true support, for radical leftist purposes.
Hegel's text cited for the anecdote about Jesuit Reducciones including a bell for regulated conjugal sex, used comically to illustrate total social organization.
The Wire tv
Called 'an absolute masterpiece' of ethical storytelling; the final scene is screened and analyzed as a site of political ambiguity between resigned Lion King wisdom and genuine confrontation with systemic corruption.
The Lion King film
The 'Cycle of Life' sequence is Žižek's epitome of ideological naturalization of violence and exploitation, a film he 'really hates'.
Capitalism as Religion essay
Walter Benjamin's early essay (cited by the priest); described as prophetic, if capitalism is religion, only religion can criticize it.
God in Pain book
Žižek's co-authored book with the Croatian Protestant theologian present at the talk; described as potentially turning atheists into believers and believers into atheists, a book of tools for thinking.
After the Empire book
Emmanuel Todd's book on US imperial decline; Žižek calls it one-sided but acknowledges its moment of truth about US as non-productive predatory consumer of global surplus.
The Tree of Life film
Cited as the wrong film, a spiritualist false position, in direct contrast to Melancholia.
Wrath of Titans film
Called 'shitty' except for one line, Hades on gods as true mortals, which Žižek uses to invert Heidegger's mortal/immortal distinction.
Trauer und Melancholie essay
Freud's text on mourning and melancholy; Žižek cites the concept of 'preemptive mourning', melancholy as treating as lost what is still present.
People invoked 28
Life is Beautiful is used as a vehicle for Žižek's reductio ad absurdum of Lion King 'cycle of life' wisdom applied to the Holocaust.
Ayn Rand positive
Finds her ridiculous and pathetic but deliberately misappropriates Atlas Shrugged's internal logic (Dagny as system's true support) for radical leftist purposes.
Lars von Trier positive
Žižek defends Melancholia against the charge of religious-ideological escapism, praising it as genuinely confronting absolute negativity without metaphysical consolation.
Vladimir Lenin positive
His texts are cited with sympathy; Žižek gives a 'Leninist' organizational advice to Occupy (organize!) while explicitly distancing from totalitarian implications.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cites Lacan's '68 remark, 'You will get a new master', as a diagnostic grain of truth about protest movements' unconscious desire, while also citing Lacan on the authenticity of celibacy (nuns) against pseudo-Freudian pathologization.
Cited as a rare Hollywood figure who went set to set to support striking low-paid film workers, an example of genuine solidarity across class lines.
Terrence Malick negative
The Tree of Life is held up as precisely the wrong spiritualist counterexample to Melancholia, a totally false position.
Ernest Jones negative
Žižek calls Jones's 1930s reflections on the 'tolerable percentage' of foreign population 'quite shocking', an acceptance of Nazi problematic dressed as liberal moderation.
Anne Applebaum negative
Žižek subjects her Washington Post critique of Occupy to detailed analysis, showing she herself concedes globalization undermines democracy yet illogically blames protesters for the same insight.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just positive
Cited (by the priest co-author) for the definition of politics: if you don't want terror, virtue, you get corruption.
Empire's closing image of Francis of Assisi as the communist activist of the future is cited by the priest co-author as relevant to monastic utopias.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Cited for the genealogy of monastic politics combining forms of life and forms of discourse, drawing on Pierre Hadot; also cited for his reading of Freud on melancholy.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Žižek recalls BHL dismissing the 2008 financial crisis as a minor problem Obama could fix; also attacks his thesis that anti-capitalism is disguised anti-Semitism as protecting capital from structural critique.
Herbert McCabe positive
Coined the phrase 'mystic guerrilla' which Žižek uses to describe Occupy protesters as living reminders that political action is possible.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for suggestions in his book on capital about expanding the category of proletariat to include the unemployed and Third World.
Adolf Hitler negative
Used as an example of cognitive mapping: offering the Jewish plot as a simple explanation for complex social troubles; also cited to show that moral slogans ('money should serve people') are insufficient, Hitler would agree with them.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Žižek cites Varoufakis's concept of the 'Global Minotaur' to explain the structural shift in US-led capitalism since Nixon abandoned the gold standard.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited for theorizing that resistance is part of the law, law and transgression imply each other, in the context of analyzing how apparent resistance reproduces the system.
Herman Melville positive
Bartleby's 'I would prefer not to' is cited as the implicit political formula of the Occupy movement, a refusal without positive program that is nonetheless a beginning.
Hannah Arendt positive
Invoked to distinguish fascism from communism: Arendt says only Nazism is true totalitarianism and is more differentiated toward Soviet communism, against those who blur the two.
Walter Benjamin positive
His essay 'Capitalism as Religion' is cited (by the priest co-author) as a prophetic text arguing only religion can critique capitalism.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
The Kierkegaardian concept of repetition, not doing the same but bringing out unrealized potentials, is invoked as the correct relation to Marxist tradition.
Francis of Assisi positive
Invoked (via Negri and the priest) as a figure of the communist activist of the future embodying joyful being-in-common.
Emmanuel Todd positive
Žižek calls Todd's vision of US as non-productive predator empire (After the Empire) one-sided but acknowledges a moment of truth in its analysis of US trade deficits.
Creator of The Wire; Žižek notes Simon himself hints at the resigned Lion King reading of the finale but argues it is not the only possible reading.
Karl Marx positive
The working class is 'revolutionary or it is nothing' (quoted); also invoked for the implicit distinction between the sociological working class and the proletarian position; fidelity to Marx requires Kierkegaardian repetition, not reproduction.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for Trauer und Melancholie and the concept of 'preemptive mourning' (melancholy as treating as lost what is still present); also that Ernst Jones 'was so trusted by Freud' despite his reactionary 1930s reflections.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked for the logic of repetition in history (Napoleon), the concept of radical negativity, and a comic anecdote about the Jesuit Reducciones' regulated sexuality from Philosophy of History.
What it argues
the logic of negation and ideological concealmentstructural limits of liberal democracy under global capitalismOccupy Wall Street and the absence of a positive programzero point of radical negativity as condition of freedomBreivik and the Zionist-rightist pactthe Global Minotaur and the US deficit-fueled world economycommunism's authentic but failed emancipatory potential
Dialectical moves 11
“The true foreign body which cannot be assimilated are not foreigners; it is the self-propelling machine of capital itself.”
Anti-immigrant ideology is a displaced reaction to the real alien element, capital, which is then projected onto actual immigrants.
“The true self-hating Jews are precisely the Zionists making a pact with Western conservative anti-Semites.”
The accusation of 'self-hating Jew' is inverted: those who forge alliances with anti-Semites in the name of Zionism are the ones who truly betray Jewish identity.
“Anti-capitalism is a disguised form of anti-Semitism — but the reverse is true: classical anti-Semitism was always a mystified anti-capitalism.”
BHL's inversion of the Marxist reading of anti-Semitism is rejected by restoring the original direction of the relation.
“We get coffee without milk while the claim is we are getting coffee without cream.”
Ideology substitutes one mode of absence for another, the wrong thing is negated, and the substitution is invisible until analyzed structurally.
“Freedom of choice without the social substance which makes freedom of choice meaningful is precisely a freedom of choice without freedom of choice.”
The Republican anti-healthcare argument offers the form of freedom emptied of the conditions that make it real, a thing without itself.
“Not only is the activity of honest policemen in The Wire not a threat to the system — paradoxically, it enables the system to function smoothly.”
Ethical resistance within a corrupt system does not undermine it but provides the legitimating cover that makes it sustainable.
“The true enemy of the prime mover is not the second-handers but herself — Dagny is the enemy.”
Applied leftward: those who desperately try to keep the system running (even in opposition) are the system's true support; withdrawal and letting it collapse is the radical act.
“What looks like radical resistance — protesting the system — far from damaging it, makes it run.”
The standard left-liberal oppositional move (protest, moral critique) is the very thing the system needs to reproduce itself.
“When a god dies, he really dies — only gods are real mortals.”
Inverting Heidegger's mortal/immortal distinction: humans survive in memory and descendants, while gods truly perish, making divinity the site of genuine finitude.
“Melancholy is not fidelity to the lost object; it is treating as lost an object which is still here — a preemptive mourning.”
Melancholy is not about actual loss but anticipatory loss: the shadow of absence falls on what is still present.
“The only way to remain faithful to Marx is to move further — to repeat, but repeat in the Kierkegaardian sense, which doesn't mean do the same.”
Fidelity to a thinker requires not repeating their conclusions but repeating the gesture of confronting failure and potentials not yet realized.
Claims 19
asserts
The mainstream media response to 2011 protest events (Arab Spring, Occupy, Breivik) was a Var Nam Nihadan — burying the radical emancipatory potential while growing flowers of normalization over it.media ideology and 2011 protest cycle
asserts
The rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in Western Europe is structurally interconnected with the financial crisis, serving as an ideological displacement: the real 'foreign body' is capital itself, not immigrants.anti-immigrant ideology and capitalism
asserts
The State of Israel is making a catastrophic mistake by downplaying traditional European anti-Semitism and focusing instead on 'progressive anti-Semitism' (coded criticism of Israeli policy), forging a perverse pact with Western right-wing anti-Semites.Israeli politics and Zionist-rightist alliance
reframes
The true 'self-hating Jews' are not Jewish critics of Israel but the Zionists who make implicit pacts with conservative anti-Semites.Zionism and the charge of self-hatred
asserts
Anti-Semitism must be located in the same series as racism, sexism, and homophobia — not exceptionalized — in order to ground both critique and solidarity correctly.anti-Semitism and comparative politics of identity
rejects
Bernard-Henri Lévy's claim that 'beneath every radical anti-capitalism today, look for anti-Semitism' effectively prohibits legitimate structural critique of capital and is wrong.BHL's equation of anti-capitalism with anti-Semitism
asserts
The ongoing financial crisis is not about greed or bad regulation but reflects a structural deadlock — the end of the cycle begun in the early 1970s when the US moved from surplus recycler to deficit-financed global consumer.structural nature of the financial crisis
asserts
The Occupy movement's key insight — even without positive proposals — is that the structural crisis exceeds the capacity of existing democratic institutions, and this is correct.Occupy Wall Street and institutional democracy
rejects
Anne Applebaum's critique of Occupy, after conceding that globalization undermines democracy, illogically shifts blame onto the protesters for pointing out what her own argument admits.Applebaum's critique of Occupy
asserts
Democracy is gradually being de facto suspended — through pressure against referenda in Greece and congressional panic-votes in the US — in the name of technocratic necessity.de facto suspension of democracy
asserts
The left must pass through a 'zero point' of recognizing that its own resistant activity often makes the system run better before genuine emancipatory change is possible.conditions for radical political change
asserts
Lars von Trier's Melancholia embodies the necessary political stance: accepting catastrophe and radical negativity as the only authentic ground from which to fight.Melancholia and radical politics
rejects
Leftist progressivism's optimistic 'humanity will win' narrative is false and should be abandoned; political freedom requires accepting ultimate contingency.leftist optimism
asserts
Twentieth-century communism was a genuine tragedy with authentic emancipatory potential that nonetheless failed to produce any viable new form of social organization.historical assessment of 20th-century communism
asserts
Fascism and communism must be strictly distinguished: only fascism is 'true totalitarianism' (per Arendt); communism had immanent dissident tensions fascism entirely lacked.totalitarianism and the fascism/communism distinction
asserts
The moralizing critique ('punish the bankers', 'blame greed') is the first thing the left must abandon today; structural analysis of why the system opened space for such figures is required.leftist political strategy
asserts
Proletariat must be redefined as a subjective position of void and loss rather than a sociological category of employed workers, expanded to include the unemployed and Third World populations.redefinition of proletariat
asserts
The contemporary European strike has been captured by a state-financed lower bourgeoisie defending its privileges rather than expressing solidarity with precarious private-sector workers.the politics of strike action
asserts
Trying to move beyond market exchange has historically produced new forms of direct domination and servitude — this lesson of the 20th century must be taken seriously by the left.market, money, and totalitarianism
Quotes 14
“The true foreign body which cannot be assimilated are not foreigners; it is the self-propelling machine of the capital itself.”Slavoj Žižek · capital as the real alien element, not immigrants
“Beneath every radical anti-capitalism today, look for anti-Semitism.”Slavoj Žižek · BHL's equation of anti-capitalism with anti-Semitism (cited to be rejected)
“We often get coffee without milk while the claim is we are getting coffee without cream.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology substitutes one negation for another
“The freedom of choice that they are offering is precisely a freedom of choice without the social substance which makes freedom of choice meaningful — a freedom of choice without freedom of choice.”Slavoj Žižek · formal freedom emptied of real content
“What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's diagnosis of revolutionary desire as desire for a new master
“The true revolution is not to resist as part of this cycle of life. The true revolution is precisely the change in this very cycle of life.”Slavoj Žižek · genuine revolution vs. resistance within the system
“This is for me, if not happiness, the condition of happiness. If you are not ready to go through this zero point, then you live a false life.”Slavoj Žižek · catastrophic acceptance as condition of authentic political life
“Don't fall in love with yourself.”Slavoj Žižek · warning to Occupy protesters against narcissism of protest
“The only way to become faithful to Marx is to move further, to repeat, but repeat in the Kierkegaardian sense, which doesn't mean do the same.”Slavoj Žižek · Kierkegaardian repetition as fidelity to Marx
“My basic advice to you would be Leninist one, not in the totalitarian sense: organize, organize!”Slavoj Žižek · Leninist organizational imperative minus totalitarianism
“What I detest is this big moment where we all cry how beautiful and then we go home and do our dirty job.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of protest as emotional catharsis without organization
“Melancholy is not when I lose my lover, but my lover is still here; the shadow of death, of partition, is already here. So melancholy is a preemptive mourning.”Slavoj Žižek · melancholy as anticipatory loss of what is still present
“Was the predominant reaction of our media not precisely a Var Nam Nihadan? The media were killing the radical emancipatory potential of the events.”Slavoj Žižek · media as ideological burial of protest potential
“I claim that the first thing to do today is to totally prohibit this moralistic critique. 'Oh, greedy financial speculators.' The problem is not this.”Slavoj Žižek · rejecting moralistic critique in favor of structural analysis
Transcript 65 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. I'm really glad to be here already for the fourth or fifth time. So let me go directly to my topic. There is a wonderful expression in Persian, so I read, "Var Nam Nihadan," which means to murder somebody, bury his body, then grow flowers over the body to conceal it. In we were witnessing and participating in a series of shattering events, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, from the United Kingdom suburban protests to Breivik's ideological madness in Oslo. was thus the year of dreaming dangerously in both directions. There were emancipatory dreams mobilizing protesters all around the world, and there were obscure, destructive dreams propelling racist populists all around Europe, from Netherlands to Hungary. The primary task of the hegemonic ideology was to neutralize the true dimension of these events. Was the predominant reaction of our media not precisely a Var Nam Nihadan? The media were killing the radical emancipatory potential of the events, or they were obfuscating their threat to democracy, and they were growing flowers over the buried corpse. This is why it is so important to set the record straight, to locate these events into the totality of what is going on today. What totality? According to Hegel, repetition plays a precise role in history. When something happens just once, it may be dismissed as a mere accident, as something that might have been avoided through better handling of the situation. But when the same event repeats itself, this is a sign that we are dealing with a deeper historical necessity. When Napoleon lost the first time in it looked he had just bad luck. When he lost the second time at Waterloo, it was clear his time was over. And does the same not hold for the ongoing financial crisis? When it first hit the markets in September it looked as an accident to be corrected through better regulations. I was here that October, and I remember having a debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy, and I remember how he said, "Oh, this is just a minor problem. I'm sure the new President Obama will fix it immediately with some better laws," and so on and so on. Now it is clear that we are dealing with a structural deadlock. How can we find our way in such a confusing situation? Back in 1930s, Hitler offered anti-Semitism as a narrative explanation of the troubles experienced by ordinary Germans: unemployment, moral decay, social unrest. Behind all this stands the Jew. That is to say, evoking the Jewish plot made everything clear to ordinary people by way of providing a simple cognitive mapping. Does today's hatred of multiculturalism and of the immigrant threat not function in a homologous way? Strange things are happening. Financial meltdowns occur which affect our daily lives, but they are experienced as totally opaque. And the rejection of multiculturalism introduces a false clarity into the situation. It is the foreign intruders who are disturbing our way of life. There is thus an interconnection, I think, between the rising anti-immigrant tide in Western countries and the ongoing financial crisis. Clinging to ethnic identity serves as a protective shield against the traumatic fact of being caught in the whirlpool of non-transparent financial abstractions. The true foreign body which cannot be assimilated are not foreigners; it is the self-propelling machine of the capital itself. There are things which... this is why there are things which should make us think in Breivik's, the Norway guy, you know, the killer, Breivik's ideological self-justification, as well as in international reactions to his act. Breivik is anti-Semitic but pro-Israel, since for him, the State of Israel is the first defense line against the Muslim expansion. He even wants to see the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt. His view, Breivik's view, is that Jews are okay as long as there aren't too many of them. Or, as he wrote in his manifesto, I quote, "There is no Jewish problem in Western Europe with the exception of the UK, as we only have one million of them in Western Europe. The United States, on the other hand, with more than six million Jews, percent more than Europe, actually has a considerable Jewish problem." What are we to make of this? A key is provided by the reactions of the European right to Breivik's attack. The mantra of these reactions was that, of course, we condemn his murderous spree, but we should not forget that he addressed legitimate concerns about genuine problems. Mainstream politics is failing to address the corrosion of Europe by Islamization and multiculturalism. Or, to quote the Jerusalem Post: we should use the Oslo tragedy, I quote, "as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate politics for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere." This is crucial. The reference to Israel is, of course, implicit in this evaluation. A multiculturalist Israel has no choice to survive; apartheid is the only realistic option. The price for this properly perverse Zionist-rightist pact is that in order to justify their claim to Palestine, Zionist representatives of the State of Israel have to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews themselves. The implicit deal is here: we, radical Zionists, are ready to acknowledge your Western European and so on intolerance towards other cultures in your midst, if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst. The tragic irony of this implicit deal is that in the European history of last centuries, Jews themselves were the first, let's call them like this, multiculturalists. Their problem was how to survive with their culture intact in places where another culture was predominant. Incidentally, one should note here that in 1930s, in direct response to Nazi anti-Semitism, Ernst Jones, the main agent of the conformist gentrification of psychoanalysis, engaged in weird reflections on the percentage of foreign population a national body can tolerate in its midst without putting in danger its own identity. It's quite shocking how he, who was so trusted by Freud, accepted the Nazi problematic. He just said maybe the Nazis are a little bit too radical, maybe we can tolerate five percent, not more, and so on and so on. At the end of this road lies the extreme possibility, which should in no way be discarded, that of a historic pact between Zionists and Muslim fundamentalists. But what if we are entering a new era where this new reasoning based on ethnic identities will universally impose itself? Recent outbursts of homophobia in East European post-communist countries should give us a pause to think. In early there was a gay parade in Istanbul where thousands paraded in peace. Try to do something similar in ex-Yugoslavia. Gay parades were regularly interrupted by violent mob in a lynching mood. Now, it is crucial for me to locate anti-Semitism into this series, as one of the elements alongside other forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. In order to ground its Zionist politics, I think the State of Israel is here making a catastrophic mistake. It decided to downplay the so-called old, traditional European anti-Semitism, focusing instead on the new, allegedly progressive anti-Semitism, masked, so they say, as the critique of the Zionist politics of the State of Israel. Along these lines, Bernard-Henri Lévy recently claimed that the anti-Semitism of the 21st century will be progressive or there will be none. Brought to the end, this thesis compels us to turn around the old Marxist interpretation of anti-Semitism as a mystified anti-capitalism. Instead of blaming the capitalist system, we focus on the corruptive influence of Jews. For Henri Lévy and his partisans, it is today's anti-capitalism which is a disguised form of anti-Semitism. He explicitly stated this in an interview: "Beneath every radical anti-capitalism today, look for anti-Semitism." This unspoken, but no less efficient, prohibition of attacking the old anti-Semitism is taking place at the very moment when the old anti-Semitism is returning all around Europe, from post-communist countries to Scandinavia. We can observe a similar alliance in the United States. How can the US Christian fundamentalists, who are as it were by nature anti-Semitic, now passionately support the Zionist policy of the State of Israel? Israel is playing here a dangerous game. Fox News, the main US voice of the radical right, a staunch supporter of the Israeli expansion, recently had to demote Glenn Beck who, as you know, whose comments, as you know, were getting openly anti-Semitic. And this, I think, is a very dark tendency, namely, the standard Zionist argument against the critics of the politics of the State of Israel is that, of course, like every other state, the State of Israel should be judged and eventually criticized. But, so they claim, the critics of Israel often misuse the critique of Israeli policy for anti-Semitic purposes. When the unconditional Christian fundamentalist supporters of the Israeli policy reject leftist critique of Israeli policy, is their implicit line of argumentation not best rendered by a wonderful cartoon published in July in the Viennese Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse? It's a wonderful caricature showing two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend, "Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of the State of Israel." These are today's allies of the State of Israel. Jewish critics of the State of Israel are regularly dismissed as self-hating Jews. However, I think the true self-hating Jews, that is to say, those who secretly hate the true greatness of the Jewish nation, are precisely the Zionists making a pact, an implicit pact, with Western conservative anti-Semites. How did we end up in such a weird situation? Let me begin with a wonderfully dialectical joke from one of the absolute masterpieces of Jewish Hollywood, what conservatives—another field of conservative anti-Semitism—attacking Hollywood as hedonist, decadent, in short, as Jewish. In Ernst Lubitsch's "Ninotchka," a wonderful detail, maybe you remember it. The hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. Can I bring you coffee without milk?" because we have only milk. So the customer gets coffee alone. But this coffee is accompanied by a different negation: coffee without cream is not the same thing as coffee without milk. You will see why this logic is important for how ideology functions today. But before going on, let me give you another example from another popular film, also about coffee, the English working-class melodrama "Brassed Off." There, the hero accompanies home a young pretty girl and of course there is erotic tension between the two of them, so at the entrance to her flat she tells him, "Would you like to come in for a coffee?" He answers, "I would love to, but there is a problem: I don't drink coffee." She retorts with a smile, "No problem, I don't have any." The immense erotic power of her reply resides in how, through a double negation, she pronounces an embarrassingly direct sexual invitation without even making sex. She invites him for a coffee, then she says it doesn't matter if you don't drink coffee, I don't have it, which means sex, directly. Now why lose time with such stupid jokes? Because again, they allow us to grasp at its purest how ideology functions today in our allegedly post-ideological times. To detect the so-called ideological distortions, you should note not only what is said, but the complex interplay between what is said and what is not said, which unsaid is implied in what is said. We often get coffee without milk while the claim is we are getting coffee without cream. How can this happen? Already in Eastern Europe, there was a political equivalent of this coffee joke from "Ninotchka." A friend told me that in communist era in Poland when things were often lacking in stores, there is a joke where a customer enters a store and asks, "You probably didn't yet get butter? You don't have butter, or do you?" and the answer is, "Sorry, but we are the store which doesn't have toilet paper; the store which doesn't have butter is the one across the street." One can imagine also a "Brassed Off" dialogue between the US and Europe in late when the invasion of Iraq was being prepared. Rumsfeld says to his European colleagues, "Would you care to join us in the attack on Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction?" Europeans replied, "But we have no facilities to search for the weapons of mass destruction." The Rumsfeld answer was basically, "No problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Let's just attack it, you know." The same goes for, in Europe, the disappointment after As the name of the Polish movement Solidarność, dissident movement says, the protesters against communist rule wanted freedom and democracy without ruthless capitalist lack of solidarity. What they got was exactly freedom and democracy without solidarity. So again, they got what they wanted, but with the wrong absent element, with the wrong without. And to bring this logic to the end, the most interesting point is when we get a thing as it were without itself. I think this is the crux of the healthcare debate which is now again actual in the United States. Republicans, to simplify the line of argumentation of course, Republicans are claiming that state regulation, universal healthcare and so on, deprive you of the freedom of choice. Our answer should be, this is absolutely a false misleading opposition. There, the freedom of choice that they are offering is precisely a freedom of choice without the social substance which makes freedom of choice meaningful. It's precisely a freedom of choice without de facto, without freedom of choice. Now, with this conceptual apparatus we can approach the key question: what is the ongoing crisis about? The first thing to discard: it's not about reckless spending, greed, ineffectual bank regulations and so on and so on. For example, in Europe, it's now fashionable as you know to target Greece. "Oh, those lazy Greeks spending European money" and so on and so on. But I think the fact is much more crucial and tragic. Greece is not an exception. It is simply one of the main testing grounds to impose a new socio-economic model with universal claim: the depoliticized technocratic model where bankers and other experts are allowed to squash democracy. Why is this happening now? An economic cycle, I think, is coming to an end. A cycle which began in the early 1970s, the time when, according to a Greek economist Varoufakis, the so-called Global Minotaur, the Greek monster, was born. The monstrous engine that was running the world economy from the early 1980s to So Yanis Varoufakis claims that the late sixties and the early seventies were not just the time of oil crisis and stagflation. Nixon's decision to abandon the gold standard for the US dollar was the sign of a much more radical shift in the basic functioning of the capitalist system. By the end of the sixties, the US economy was no longer able to continue the recycling of its surpluses to Europe and Asia. Its surpluses had turned into deficits. In US government responded to this decline with an audacious strategic move. Instead of tackling the nation's exploding deficit, it decided to do the opposite: to boost the deficit. And who would pay for it? The rest of the world. How? By means of a permanent transfer of capital that rushed ceaselessly across the two great oceans to finance America's deficits. Although Emmanuel Todd's vision of today's global order described in his book "After the Empire" is one-sided, I think it has a moment of truth. The US are an empire in decline. Its growing negative trade balance demonstrates that the US is a non-productive predator. It has to suck up one billion dollars daily influx from other nations to buy for its consumption and is as such the universal Keynesian consumer that keeps the world economy running. This influx, which is effectively like the money paid to Rome in antiquity or the gifts sacrificed to Minotaur by ancient Greeks, relies on a complex economic mechanism. United States are trusted as the safe and stable center so that all others, from oil-producing Arab countries to Western Europe, Japan and now China, invest their surplus profit into the United States. Since this trust is primarily ideological and military, not economic, the problem for the United States is how to justify its imperial role. It needs a permanent state of war, so United States had to invent the war on terror, offering itself as the universal protector of all other normal, not rogue, states. This era, I claim, is now breaking up. This strange instability where the whole world in a way financed the... financed the United States. And I claim that the Occupy Wall Street movement was a reaction to this. I don't exaggerate its importance, especially I don't attribute to them a knowledge which they obviously don't possess. For me, the key message of Occupy Wall Street or wherever around the world is a double message: A, this is no longer just a one-issue movement, you know, like protesting racism, a certain war and so on. It's a movement which targets a kind of a construction flaw in the system as such, in global capitalist system as such, and point to another implication of Occupy Wall Street is that the existing democratic institutional order is not strong enough to resolve this problem. They don't have positive answers how to do it; I don't have them. But this insight, I claim, is true. Let me provide you a brief analysis of a text attacking Occupy Wall Street so that you will see how obvious this is even to the enemies of Occupy Wall Street. I'm referring to a quite amusing text by Anne Applebaum which was first published half a year ago as a comment in Washington Post. And her thesis is that protests around the world, these Occupy protests, are, I quote, "similar in their lack of focus, in their confused nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions." In New York, marchers chanted, "This is what democracy looks like," but actually, this isn't what democracy looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, and so on and so on. But then she goes on: "Yet in one sense, the international Occupy movement's failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable. Both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie by definition outside the competence of local or national politicians. The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident; it reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy works only within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A global community cannot be a national democracy, and the national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund." Then she goes on, this is all a quote: "Although I still believe in globalization's economic and spiritual benefits, globalization has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies. Global activists of the Occupy movement, if they are not careful, will accelerate this decline. Protesters in London shout, 'We need to have a process!' Well, they already have a process. It's called the British political system, and if they don't figure out how to use it, they'll simply weaken it further." End of quote. My comment: did you notice the shocking part, a weird gap in Applebaum's argumentation towards the end of this quote? After conceding that the undeserved economic consequences of global capitalist finances are due to their international character out of control of democratic mechanisms, she draws the necessary conclusion, which is precisely the basic insight of Occupy movements: that globalization undermines the legitimacy of our democracies. So far okay, we can say. This is precisely what the protesters were drawing attention to. But instead of drawing the only logical conclusion from this, that we should start thinking about how to expand democracy beyond its existing institutional form, which obviously leaves out, is not able to cope with destructive consequences of our economic system, instead of this she performs a weird turn around and she shifts the blame on protesters themselves who precisely raised these questions. That is to say, according to Applebaum, since global economy is outside the scope of democratic politics, we should nonetheless engage in existing political system which, again according to her own account, cannot do the job. You notice this strange gap: first she says I understand protesters, they can't give any problem and our political system cannot cope with the crisis, the crisis which undermines our democracy. But at the end, my God, all she can offer is the existing democracy itself. Here at least, I claim, protesters, even if they did not have any positive proposals, saw much more than her. They don't offer any easy answer. I'm fully aware that their answer is basically, ironically, that of a political figure which also was from Wall Street: Herman Melville's Bartleby. It's more "I would prefer not to." No positive program. Maybe this is how we should begin, although there is a long road ahead. Soon we will have to ask for at least elements of a positive program. Why? Reacting to the protests in Paris in Jacques Lacan said, quote: "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one." End of quote. Okay, I think this diagnostic and prognostic should be rejected. It's too cheap. But it contains a grain of truth. I claim that this is a problem with today's protests, at least in Europe, in Spain Indignados, up to a point even in Greece. Whenever I meet with protesters, I insist on a stupid naive question: "What do you want?" And the you like, what do you want? A little bit more regulation, higher ethical standards, better capitalism, return to some social democracy, or some neo-Marxist revolution? I am regularly treated as if I am raising some prohibited obscene question, like "How can you be doing this? It's not the time to ask these questions," and so on and so on. I think, I think it is. Much of this protests which pose demands—"We want a just life, we want a life where banks serve people, people don't serve money," and so on—are effectively a call for a new master. A typical hysterical gesture calling for a new master, and we are already getting the glimpse of this new master in Greece and Italy. As if ironically answering the lack of expert programs of the protesters, the trend is now to replace politicians in the government with a neutral government of depoliticized technocrats. And I claim that it's no longer a joke. Democracy is gradually, although in a democratic way, gradually half-suspended. You remember that moment which was terrifying for me, when Greece was in deep crisis, the last Pasok Prime Minister Papandreou proposed a referendum. And the entire Europe was in... how can you do referendum? Referendum has nothing to do here. Literally, it was a pressure to say no, this is a problem for experts, don't, don't mess with, don't mess with democracy here. Incidentally, exactly the same thing that happened already in the United States in Do you remember? First Bush government, still George Bush, presented to the Congress this proposal for billion dollars. At that point, it was a great sum; today, it's peanuts. And remember, the Congress voted two-thirds against first. Then the entire political elite—Bush, McCain, Obama—went there and in a panic convinced them. What was their basic message? It was, "Listen, we need this money now. There is no time for democratic bullshit blah blah blah." And a week later, there was a new vote: two-thirds for. So this is for me de facto ongoing suspension of democracy. What I'm claiming is, again, there are no easy solutions. The lesson of Occupy Wall Street for me is just: we have to start thinking. Something is happening. There are great dangers on the horizon. Again, first, we see clearly the limits of the system as such. And B, we see—my God, an Applebaum, liberal-conservative admits it—we see how the existing institutional system cannot cope with it. So allow me just a short conclusion in two parts. First, what can we do here? What can we do? I would like to begin with a quite shocking example, maybe shocking for you. I would like to show you the final scene, final four minutes of the very final of the last year of "The Wire," the TV series, which is the moment of failure... like, you know, McNulty, who is fired, has to withdraw, just goes to a bridge overlooking the... the Baltimore harbor. And what I want to draw your attention to is this ambiguity of wisdom. That is to say, what we get here is a kind of concluding wisdom. The immediate reading of this scene would have been something like, like, "You know, it's all part of the same cycle. We were protesting, we honest policemen were trying to do whatever we can do, but it was all co-opted by the system." So it is something like... now I am consciously evil. It's the "The Wire" version of what in a movie that I really hate, "The Lion King," is called, you remember, "The Cycle of Life." You know, when the small lion asks the father, "But why are we killing eating zebras?" The father starts to sing something like, "You know, yes, we are eating zebras, but then we die, we turn to... we turn to manure, we feed grass, and grass is eaten by zebras, and so it's all one big cycle of life." I have a problem with this type of wisdom. Because, you know, like, let me be now truly evil. Imagine an added scene to Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful," where the wife... sorry, where the son asks the father the same question: "But why are the Nazis screwing us, killing us?" And Roberto Benigni starts to sing, "It's all one big cycle of life, you know. Like, the Nazis are killing us, but the Nazis will turn into dust... into manure, the Nazis will feed the... okay, they dance, we will beat them, the Nazis, okay. The Nazis... will be manure for grass, cows will eat the grass, we will slaughter the grass and eat the steaks, and then Nazis will eat us again. So it's all one big cycle of life." Well, in general, this is true. Although, you know, the true revolution is not to resist as part of this cycle of life. The true revolution is precisely the change in this very cycle of life. I mean, I hope that, that the only possible cycle of life is not the one where millions of Jews get killed or where, whatever you want, where millions die in Africa, where millions die in Gulag and so on and so on. So please, let's have this clip. And then I will add some concluding thoughts and add another ultra-optimistic, for me, clip. With this I will finish. [The final scene of the final episode of "The Wire" plays, featuring background music ("Way Down in the Hole") and a visual montage of the series' characters' fates in Baltimore. McNulty stands on a bridge.] Larry: "It's gone." [The montage continues. McNulty drives away.] At the very end, and I claim at least for me, it's deeply ambiguous. The predominant reading, even one at which the author David Simon himself hints at, is kind of a... what I call in more philosophical terms, the resigned withdrawal or surrender to the position of the absolute. Like, we are fighting our fights, but again, it's the Lion King reading. But you know, it's all part of a cycle of life. We resist, maybe we succeed, but criminal... crime... crime reorganizes itself. We cannot even be sure if in our success against mid-level criminals we don't enable the crime gangs to become more efficient. Every resistance is part of the game and so on and so on. So the usual reading would be this resigned wisdom. We may try honestly fight crime, but it's just part of an internal cycle and so on and so on. It almost naturalizes the cycle, this one. But I claim this is not a necessary reading. This is for me precisely the... the problem. I'm well aware the extent to which false resistance can even be part... is even part of the system. This is the obsession of my work, how apparent transgressions not only are compatible with the system but allow the system to reproduce itself. So we should go to the end here in this reading. Not only is all the activity of this group of honest policemen meeting in that dilapidated basement in "The Wire," not only is it not a threat to the system, but paradoxically, it enables the system with drug dealers and so on to function in a smooth way. I mean, I can give you here dozens of examples of this mixture. Michel Foucault theorized it, of how resistance is part of the law. Law and its transgression imply each other. For example, I remember, this is the pure example, my eternal trauma when I was serving in mid-seventies Yugoslav People's Army. We had political education and one day, the first hour in the morning was a class on international war rules. And the officer was explaining to us this Geneva Convention, whatever, which, you probably know this, it prohibits shooting a parachuter, the enemy dropping, before he hits the ground. This is the international rule. Okay, in a kind of a poetic justice, the second, the next hour of morning education was practicing targeting the gun. And yes, the topic of that day was how to hit a parachuter in the air. You know, how you have to... to take into account the direction of the wind, you have to estimate how quick... to, of course, to target to a little bit to aim a little bit lower to hit him. And then I did something so naive and stupid that only an intellectual can do it. I asked the officer like, "But isn't this in contradiction with what you were telling me an hour ago, us?" And he, in a fully justified way, he looked at me and said, "I thought you were an intellectual, how could you be so utterly stupid?" And but similarly, even more, for example, socialist systems, communist, whatever you call them, they fought all the time black market. But without black market, it's absolutely clear they wouldn't have survived. For example, do you know that in Brezhnev era, the last ten, fifteen years of Soviet Union, up to thirty, forty percent of food, especially vegetables, meat, fruit, came from the black market? So they fought it, but it was absolutely, it was absolutely necessary for their survival. Okay, this is the usual transgression, police and drug dealers. The problem is what about, again, this, because for me "The Wire" is focused precisely on this ethical problem: what can we do in such a corrupted situation? You have all the options, from that wonderful figure of Omar to McNulty, all the figures. What to do? But should we simply accept that this also, these honest protesters who try to repair the system, are part, that all... they are all part of the game? Yes and no. I will try to conclude to elaborate this with a weird reference. Aha, now comes the surprise. What the left can learn from the greatest one, from Ayn Rand. The true conflict in the universe of Ayn Rand novels is not between the so-called prime movers and the crowd of second-handers who are parasitic on the prime movers' productive genius. It's something quite different. If you take that masterpiece that with all my goodwill I wasn't able to read to the end, "Atlas Shrugged," the true conflict is between John Galt, whatever, and Dagny, the heroine. Why? It's between... it's the true conflict runs within the prime movers, the creative geniuses. It resides in the tension between, sexualized tension between, the prime mover, the guy, John Galt, and his hystericized partner, the potential prime mover who remains caught in the deadly self-destructive dialectic. When in "Atlas Shrugged," one of the prime movers—I'm not sure it's John Galt—tells Dagny, the heroine, who unconditionally wants to pursue her work and keep the transcontinental railroad company running, that she is told that the prime mover's true enemy is not the crowd of... of these inert second-handers, but herself. She is the enemy. I think this is to be taken literally. Dagny, the heroine, becomes aware of it. When prime movers start to disappear from public productive life, she suspects a dark conspiracy. The conspiracy who forces them to withdraw and thus gradually bring the entire social life to a standstill. Why? What's the point? Second-handers possess no consistency of their own. The key to solution is not to break them, but to break the chain which forces the creative prime movers to work for them. You know, her idea is that in the corrupted welfare state system that Ayn Rand is describing that, again, the problem is not this Roosevelt, Obama bureaucracy, whatever. The problem are the creative people who still worry how to make the system work. Who fight the system within the
Thanks very much. I'm really glad to be here already for the fourth or fifth time. So let me go directly to my topic. There is a wonderful expression in Persian, so I read, "Var Nam Nihadan," which means to murder somebody, bury his body, then grow flowers over the body to conceal it. In we were witnessing and participating in a series of shattering events, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, from the United Kingdom suburban protests to Breivik's ideological madness in Oslo. was thus the year of dreaming dangerously in both directions. There were emancipatory dreams mobilizing protesters all around the world, and there were obscure, destructive dreams propelling racist populists all around Europe, from Netherlands to Hungary. The primary task of the hegemonic ideology was to neutralize the true dimension of these events. Was the predominant reaction of our media not precisely a Var Nam Nihadan? The media were killing the radical emancipatory potential of the events, or they were obfuscating their threat to democracy, and they were growing flowers over the buried corpse. This is why it is so important to set the record straight, to locate these events into the totality of what is going on today. What totality? According to Hegel, repetition plays a precise role in history. When something happens just once, it may be dismissed as a mere accident, as something that might have been avoided through better handling of the situation. But when the same event repeats itself, this is a sign that we are dealing with a deeper historical necessity. When Napoleon lost the first time in it looked he had just bad luck. When he lost the second time at Waterloo, it was clear his time was over. And does the same not hold for the ongoing financial crisis? When it first hit the markets in September it looked as an accident to be corrected through better regulations. I was here that October, and I remember having a debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy, and I remember how he said, "Oh, this is just a minor problem. I'm sure the new President Obama will fix it immediately with some better laws," and so on and so on. Now it is clear that we are dealing with a structural deadlock. How can we find our way in such a confusing situation? Back in 1930s, Hitler offered anti-Semitism as a narrative explanation of the troubles experienced by ordinary Germans: unemployment, moral decay, social unrest. Behind all this stands the Jew. That is to say, evoking the Jewish plot made everything clear to ordinary people by way of providing a simple cognitive mapping. Does today's hatred of multiculturalism and of the immigrant threat not function in a homologous way? Strange things are happening. Financial meltdowns occur which affect our daily lives, but they are experienced as totally opaque. And the rejection of multiculturalism introduces a false clarity into the situation. It is the foreign intruders who are disturbing our way of life. There is thus an interconnection, I think, between the rising anti-immigrant tide in Western countries and the ongoing financial crisis. Clinging to ethnic identity serves as a protective shield against the traumatic fact of being caught in the whirlpool of non-transparent financial abstractions. The true foreign body which cannot be assimilated are not foreigners; it is the self-propelling machine of the capital itself. There are things which... this is why there are things which should make us think in Breivik's, the Norway guy, you know, the killer, Breivik's ideological self-justification, as well as in international reactions to his act. Breivik is anti-Semitic but pro-Israel, since for him, the State of Israel is the first defense line against the Muslim expansion. He even wants to see the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt. His view, Breivik's view, is that Jews are okay as long as there aren't too many of them. Or, as he wrote in his manifesto, I quote, "There is no Jewish problem in Western Europe with the exception of the UK, as we only have one million of them in Western Europe. The United States, on the other hand, with more than six million Jews, percent more than Europe, actually has a considerable Jewish problem." What are we to make of this? A key is provided by the reactions of the European right to Breivik's attack. The mantra of these reactions was that, of course, we condemn his murderous spree, but we should not forget that he addressed legitimate concerns about genuine problems. Mainstream politics is failing to address the corrosion of Europe by Islamization and multiculturalism. Or, to quote the Jerusalem Post: we should use the Oslo tragedy, I quote, "as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate politics for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere." This is crucial. The reference to Israel is, of course, implicit in this evaluation. A multiculturalist Israel has no choice to survive; apartheid is the only realistic option. The price for this properly perverse Zionist-rightist pact is that in order to justify their claim to Palestine, Zionist representatives of the State of Israel have to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews themselves. The implicit deal is here: we, radical Zionists, are ready to acknowledge your Western European and so on intolerance towards other cultures in your midst, if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst. The tragic irony of this implicit deal is that in the European history of last centuries, Jews themselves were the first, let's call them like this, multiculturalists. Their problem was how to survive with their culture intact in places where another culture was predominant. Incidentally, one should note here that in 1930s, in direct response to Nazi anti-Semitism, Ernst Jones, the main agent of the conformist gentrification of psychoanalysis, engaged in weird reflections on the percentage of foreign population a national body can tolerate in its midst without putting in danger its own identity. It's quite shocking how he, who was so trusted by Freud, accepted the Nazi problematic. He just said maybe the Nazis are a little bit too radical, maybe we can tolerate five percent, not more, and so on and so on. At the end of this road lies the extreme possibility, which should in no way be discarded, that of a historic pact between Zionists and Muslim fundamentalists. But what if we are entering a new era where this new reasoning based on ethnic identities will universally impose itself? Recent outbursts of homophobia in East European post-communist countries should give us a pause to think. In early there was a gay parade in Istanbul where thousands paraded in peace. Try to do something similar in ex-Yugoslavia. Gay parades were regularly interrupted by violent mob in a lynching mood. Now, it is crucial for me to locate anti-Semitism into this series, as one of the elements alongside other forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. In order to ground its Zionist politics, I think the State of Israel is here making a catastrophic mistake. It decided to downplay the so-called old, traditional European anti-Semitism, focusing instead on the new, allegedly progressive anti-Semitism, masked, so they say, as the critique of the Zionist politics of the State of Israel. Along these lines, Bernard-Henri Lévy recently claimed that the anti-Semitism of the 21st century will be progressive or there will be none. Brought to the end, this thesis compels us to turn around the old Marxist interpretation of anti-Semitism as a mystified anti-capitalism. Instead of blaming the capitalist system, we focus on the corruptive influence of Jews. For Henri Lévy and his partisans, it is today's anti-capitalism which is a disguised form of anti-Semitism. He explicitly stated this in an interview: "Beneath every radical anti-capitalism today, look for anti-Semitism." This unspoken, but no less efficient, prohibition of attacking the old anti-Semitism is taking place at the very moment when the old anti-Semitism is returning all around Europe, from post-communist countries to Scandinavia. We can observe a similar alliance in the United States. How can the US Christian fundamentalists, who are as it were by nature anti-Semitic, now passionately support the Zionist policy of the State of Israel? Israel is playing here a dangerous game. Fox News, the main US voice of the radical right, a staunch supporter of the Israeli expansion, recently had to demote Glenn Beck who, as you know, whose comments, as you know, were getting openly anti-Semitic. And this, I think, is a very dark tendency, namely, the standard Zionist argument against the critics of the politics of the State of Israel is that, of course, like every other state, the State of Israel should be judged and eventually criticized. But, so they claim, the critics of Israel often misuse the critique of Israeli policy for anti-Semitic purposes. When the unconditional Christian fundamentalist supporters of the Israeli policy reject leftist critique of Israeli policy, is their implicit line of argumentation not best rendered by a wonderful cartoon published in July in the Viennese Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse? It's a wonderful caricature showing two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend, "Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of the State of Israel." These are today's allies of the State of Israel. Jewish critics of the State of Israel are regularly dismissed as self-hating Jews. However, I think the true self-hating Jews, that is to say, those who secretly hate the true greatness of the Jewish nation, are precisely the Zionists making a pact, an implicit pact, with Western conservative anti-Semites. How did we end up in such a weird situation? Let me begin with a wonderfully dialectical joke from one of the absolute masterpieces of Jewish Hollywood, what conservatives—another field of conservative anti-Semitism—attacking Hollywood as hedonist, decadent, in short, as Jewish. In Ernst Lubitsch's "Ninotchka," a wonderful detail, maybe you remember it. The hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. Can I bring you coffee without milk?" because we have only milk. So the customer gets coffee alone. But this coffee is accompanied by a different negation: coffee without cream is not the same thing as coffee without milk. You will see why this logic is important for how ideology functions today. But before going on, let me give you another example from another popular film, also about coffee, the English working-class melodrama "Brassed Off." There, the hero accompanies home a young pretty girl and of course there is erotic tension between the two of them, so at the entrance to her flat she tells him, "Would you like to come in for a coffee?" He answers, "I would love to, but there is a problem: I don't drink coffee." She retorts with a smile, "No problem, I don't have any." The immense erotic power of her reply resides in how, through a double negation, she pronounces an embarrassingly direct sexual invitation without even making sex. She invites him for a coffee, then she says it doesn't matter if you don't drink coffee, I don't have it, which means sex, directly. Now why lose time with such stupid jokes? Because again, they allow us to grasp at its purest how ideology functions today in our allegedly post-ideological times. To detect the so-called ideological distortions, you should note not only what is said, but the complex interplay between what is said and what is not said, which unsaid is implied in what is said. We often get coffee without milk while the claim is we are getting coffee without cream. How can this happen? Already in Eastern Europe, there was a political equivalent of this coffee joke from "Ninotchka." A friend told me that in communist era in Poland when things were often lacking in stores, there is a joke where a customer enters a store and asks, "You probably didn't yet get butter? You don't have butter, or do you?" and the answer is, "Sorry, but we are the store which doesn't have toilet paper; the store which doesn't have butter is the one across the street." One can imagine also a "Brassed Off" dialogue between the US and Europe in late when the invasion of Iraq was being prepared. Rumsfeld says to his European colleagues, "Would you care to join us in the attack on Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction?" Europeans replied, "But we have no facilities to search for the weapons of mass destruction." The Rumsfeld answer was basically, "No problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Let's just attack it, you know." The same goes for, in Europe, the disappointment after As the name of the Polish movement Solidarność, dissident movement says, the protesters against communist rule wanted freedom and democracy without ruthless capitalist lack of solidarity. What they got was exactly freedom and democracy without solidarity. So again, they got what they wanted, but with the wrong absent element, with the wrong without. And to bring this logic to the end, the most interesting point is when we get a thing as it were without itself. I think this is the crux of the healthcare debate which is now again actual in the United States. Republicans, to simplify the line of argumentation of course, Republicans are claiming that state regulation, universal healthcare and so on, deprive you of the freedom of choice. Our answer should be, this is absolutely a false misleading opposition. There, the freedom of choice that they are offering is precisely a freedom of choice without the social substance which makes freedom of choice meaningful. It's precisely a freedom of choice without de facto, without freedom of choice. Now, with this conceptual apparatus we can approach the key question: what is the ongoing crisis about? The first thing to discard: it's not about reckless spending, greed, ineffectual bank regulations and so on and so on. For example, in Europe, it's now fashionable as you know to target Greece. "Oh, those lazy Greeks spending European money" and so on and so on. But I think the fact is much more crucial and tragic. Greece is not an exception. It is simply one of the main testing grounds to impose a new socio-economic model with universal claim: the depoliticized technocratic model where bankers and other experts are allowed to squash democracy. Why is this happening now? An economic cycle, I think, is coming to an end. A cycle which began in the early 1970s, the time when, according to a Greek economist Varoufakis, the so-called Global Minotaur, the Greek monster, was born. The monstrous engine that was running the world economy from the early 1980s to So Yanis Varoufakis claims that the late sixties and the early seventies were not just the time of oil crisis and stagflation. Nixon's decision to abandon the gold standard for the US dollar was the sign of a much more radical shift in the basic functioning of the capitalist system. By the end of the sixties, the US economy was no longer able to continue the recycling of its surpluses to Europe and Asia. Its surpluses had turned into deficits. In US government responded to this decline with an audacious strategic move. Instead of tackling the nation's exploding deficit, it decided to do the opposite: to boost the deficit. And who would pay for it? The rest of the world. How? By means of a permanent transfer of capital that rushed ceaselessly across the two great oceans to finance America's deficits. Although Emmanuel Todd's vision of today's global order described in his book "After the Empire" is one-sided, I think it has a moment of truth. The US are an empire in decline. Its growing negative trade balance demonstrates that the US is a non-productive predator. It has to suck up one billion dollars daily influx from other nations to buy for its consumption and is as such the universal Keynesian consumer that keeps the world economy running. This influx, which is effectively like the money paid to Rome in antiquity or the gifts sacrificed to Minotaur by ancient Greeks, relies on a complex economic mechanism. United States are trusted as the safe and stable center so that all others, from oil-producing Arab countries to Western Europe, Japan and now China, invest their surplus profit into the United States. Since this trust is primarily ideological and military, not economic, the problem for the United States is how to justify its imperial role. It needs a permanent state of war, so United States had to invent the war on terror, offering itself as the universal protector of all other normal, not rogue, states. This era, I claim, is now breaking up. This strange instability where the whole world in a way financed the... financed the United States. And I claim that the Occupy Wall Street movement was a reaction to this. I don't exaggerate its importance, especially I don't attribute to them a knowledge which they obviously don't possess. For me, the key message of Occupy Wall Street or wherever around the world is a double message: A, this is no longer just a one-issue movement, you know, like protesting racism, a certain war and so on. It's a movement which targets a kind of a construction flaw in the system as such, in global capitalist system as such, and point to another implication of Occupy Wall Street is that the existing democratic institutional order is not strong enough to resolve this problem. They don't have positive answers how to do it; I don't have them. But this insight, I claim, is true. Let me provide you a brief analysis of a text attacking Occupy Wall Street so that you will see how obvious this is even to the enemies of Occupy Wall Street. I'm referring to a quite amusing text by Anne Applebaum which was first published half a year ago as a comment in Washington Post. And her thesis is that protests around the world, these Occupy protests, are, I quote, "similar in their lack of focus, in their confused nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions." In New York, marchers chanted, "This is what democracy looks like," but actually, this isn't what democracy looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, and so on and so on. But then she goes on: "Yet in one sense, the international Occupy movement's failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable. Both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie by definition outside the competence of local or national politicians. The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident; it reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy works only within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A global community cannot be a national democracy, and the national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund." Then she goes on, this is all a quote: "Although I still believe in globalization's economic and spiritual benefits, globalization has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies. Global activists of the Occupy movement, if they are not careful, will accelerate this decline. Protesters in London shout, 'We need to have a process!' Well, they already have a process. It's called the British political system, and if they don't figure out how to use it, they'll simply weaken it further." End of quote. My comment: did you notice the shocking part, a weird gap in Applebaum's argumentation towards the end of this quote? After conceding that the undeserved economic consequences of global capitalist finances are due to their international character out of control of democratic mechanisms, she draws the necessary conclusion, which is precisely the basic insight of Occupy movements: that globalization undermines the legitimacy of our democracies. So far okay, we can say. This is precisely what the protesters were drawing attention to. But instead of drawing the only logical conclusion from this, that we should start thinking about how to expand democracy beyond its existing institutional form, which obviously leaves out, is not able to cope with destructive consequences of our economic system, instead of this she performs a weird turn around and she shifts the blame on protesters themselves who precisely raised these questions. That is to say, according to Applebaum, since global economy is outside the scope of democratic politics, we should nonetheless engage in existing political system which, again according to her own account, cannot do the job. You notice this strange gap: first she says I understand protesters, they can't give any problem and our political system cannot cope with the crisis, the crisis which undermines our democracy. But at the end, my God, all she can offer is the existing democracy itself. Here at least, I claim, protesters, even if they did not have any positive proposals, saw much more than her. They don't offer any easy answer. I'm fully aware that their answer is basically, ironically, that of a political figure which also was from Wall Street: Herman Melville's Bartleby. It's more "I would prefer not to." No positive program. Maybe this is how we should begin, although there is a long road ahead. Soon we will have to ask for at least elements of a positive program. Why? Reacting to the protests in Paris in Jacques Lacan said, quote: "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one." End of quote. Okay, I think this diagnostic and prognostic should be rejected. It's too cheap. But it contains a grain of truth. I claim that this is a problem with today's protests, at least in Europe, in Spain Indignados, up to a point even in Greece. Whenever I meet with protesters, I insist on a stupid naive question: "What do you want?" And the you like, what do you want? A little bit more regulation, higher ethical standards, better capitalism, return to some social democracy, or some neo-Marxist revolution? I am regularly treated as if I am raising some prohibited obscene question, like "How can you be doing this? It's not the time to ask these questions," and so on and so on. I think, I think it is. Much of this protests which pose demands—"We want a just life, we want a life where banks serve people, people don't serve money," and so on—are effectively a call for a new master. A typical hysterical gesture calling for a new master, and we are already getting the glimpse of this new master in Greece and Italy. As if ironically answering the lack of expert programs of the protesters, the trend is now to replace politicians in the government with a neutral government of depoliticized technocrats. And I claim that it's no longer a joke. Democracy is gradually, although in a democratic way, gradually half-suspended. You remember that moment which was terrifying for me, when Greece was in deep crisis, the last Pasok Prime Minister Papandreou proposed a referendum. And the entire Europe was in... how can you do referendum? Referendum has nothing to do here. Literally, it was a pressure to say no, this is a problem for experts, don't, don't mess with, don't mess with democracy here. Incidentally, exactly the same thing that happened already in the United States in Do you remember? First Bush government, still George Bush, presented to the Congress this proposal for billion dollars. At that point, it was a great sum; today, it's peanuts. And remember, the Congress voted two-thirds against first. Then the entire political elite—Bush, McCain, Obama—went there and in a panic convinced them. What was their basic message? It was, "Listen, we need this money now. There is no time for democratic bullshit blah blah blah." And a week later, there was a new vote: two-thirds for. So this is for me de facto ongoing suspension of democracy. What I'm claiming is, again, there are no easy solutions. The lesson of Occupy Wall Street for me is just: we have to start thinking. Something is happening. There are great dangers on the horizon. Again, first, we see clearly the limits of the system as such. And B, we see—my God, an Applebaum, liberal-conservative admits it—we see how the existing institutional system cannot cope with it. So allow me just a short conclusion in two parts. First, what can we do here? What can we do? I would like to begin with a quite shocking example, maybe shocking for you. I would like to show you the final scene, final four minutes of the very final of the last year of "The Wire," the TV series, which is the moment of failure... like, you know, McNulty, who is fired, has to withdraw, just goes to a bridge overlooking the... the Baltimore harbor. And what I want to draw your attention to is this ambiguity of wisdom. That is to say, what we get here is a kind of concluding wisdom. The immediate reading of this scene would have been something like, like, "You know, it's all part of the same cycle. We were protesting, we honest policemen were trying to do whatever we can do, but it was all co-opted by the system." So it is something like... now I am consciously evil. It's the "The Wire" version of what in a movie that I really hate, "The Lion King," is called, you remember, "The Cycle of Life." You know, when the small lion asks the father, "But why are we killing eating zebras?" The father starts to sing something like, "You know, yes, we are eating zebras, but then we die, we turn to... we turn to manure, we feed grass, and grass is eaten by zebras, and so it's all one big cycle of life." I have a problem with this type of wisdom. Because, you know, like, let me be now truly evil. Imagine an added scene to Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful," where the wife... sorry, where the son asks the father the same question: "But why are the Nazis screwing us, killing us?" And Roberto Benigni starts to sing, "It's all one big cycle of life, you know. Like, the Nazis are killing us, but the Nazis will turn into dust... into manure, the Nazis will feed the... okay, they dance, we will beat them, the Nazis, okay. The Nazis... will be manure for grass, cows will eat the grass, we will slaughter the grass and eat the steaks, and then Nazis will eat us again. So it's all one big cycle of life." Well, in general, this is true. Although, you know, the true revolution is not to resist as part of this cycle of life. The true revolution is precisely the change in this very cycle of life. I mean, I hope that, that the only possible cycle of life is not the one where millions of Jews get killed or where, whatever you want, where millions die in Africa, where millions die in Gulag and so on and so on. So please, let's have this clip. And then I will add some concluding thoughts and add another ultra-optimistic, for me, clip. With this I will finish. [The final scene of the final episode of "The Wire" plays, featuring background music ("Way Down in the Hole") and a visual montage of the series' characters' fates in Baltimore. McNulty stands on a bridge.] Larry: "It's gone." [The montage continues. McNulty drives away.] At the very end, and I claim at least for me, it's deeply ambiguous. The predominant reading, even one at which the author David Simon himself hints at, is kind of a... what I call in more philosophical terms, the resigned withdrawal or surrender to the position of the absolute. Like, we are fighting our fights, but again, it's the Lion King reading. But you know, it's all part of a cycle of life. We resist, maybe we succeed, but criminal... crime... crime reorganizes itself. We cannot even be sure if in our success against mid-level criminals we don't enable the crime gangs to become more efficient. Every resistance is part of the game and so on and so on. So the usual reading would be this resigned wisdom. We may try honestly fight crime, but it's just part of an internal cycle and so on and so on. It almost naturalizes the cycle, this one. But I claim this is not a necessary reading. This is for me precisely the... the problem. I'm well aware the extent to which false resistance can even be part... is even part of the system. This is the obsession of my work, how apparent transgressions not only are compatible with the system but allow the system to reproduce itself. So we should go to the end here in this reading. Not only is all the activity of this group of honest policemen meeting in that dilapidated basement in "The Wire," not only is it not a threat to the system, but paradoxically, it enables the system with drug dealers and so on to function in a smooth way. I mean, I can give you here dozens of examples of this mixture. Michel Foucault theorized it, of how resistance is part of the law. Law and its transgression imply each other. For example, I remember, this is the pure example, my eternal trauma when I was serving in mid-seventies Yugoslav People's Army. We had political education and one day, the first hour in the morning was a class on international war rules. And the officer was explaining to us this Geneva Convention, whatever, which, you probably know this, it prohibits shooting a parachuter, the enemy dropping, before he hits the ground. This is the international rule. Okay, in a kind of a poetic justice, the second, the next hour of morning education was practicing targeting the gun. And yes, the topic of that day was how to hit a parachuter in the air. You know, how you have to... to take into account the direction of the wind, you have to estimate how quick... to, of course, to target to a little bit to aim a little bit lower to hit him. And then I did something so naive and stupid that only an intellectual can do it. I asked the officer like, "But isn't this in contradiction with what you were telling me an hour ago, us?" And he, in a fully justified way, he looked at me and said, "I thought you were an intellectual, how could you be so utterly stupid?" And but similarly, even more, for example, socialist systems, communist, whatever you call them, they fought all the time black market. But without black market, it's absolutely clear they wouldn't have survived. For example, do you know that in Brezhnev era, the last ten, fifteen years of Soviet Union, up to thirty, forty percent of food, especially vegetables, meat, fruit, came from the black market? So they fought it, but it was absolutely, it was absolutely necessary for their survival. Okay, this is the usual transgression, police and drug dealers. The problem is what about, again, this, because for me "The Wire" is focused precisely on this ethical problem: what can we do in such a corrupted situation? You have all the options, from that wonderful figure of Omar to McNulty, all the figures. What to do? But should we simply accept that this also, these honest protesters who try to repair the system, are part, that all... they are all part of the game? Yes and no. I will try to conclude to elaborate this with a weird reference. Aha, now comes the surprise. What the left can learn from the greatest one, from Ayn Rand. The true conflict in the universe of Ayn Rand novels is not between the so-called prime movers and the crowd of second-handers who are parasitic on the prime movers' productive genius. It's something quite different. If you take that masterpiece that with all my goodwill I wasn't able to read to the end, "Atlas Shrugged," the true conflict is between John Galt, whatever, and Dagny, the heroine. Why? It's between... it's the true conflict runs within the prime movers, the creative geniuses. It resides in the tension between, sexualized tension between, the prime mover, the guy, John Galt, and his hystericized partner, the potential prime mover who remains caught in the deadly self-destructive dialectic. When in "Atlas Shrugged," one of the prime movers—I'm not sure it's John Galt—tells Dagny, the heroine, who unconditionally wants to pursue her work and keep the transcontinental railroad company running, that she is told that the prime mover's true enemy is not the crowd of... of these inert second-handers, but herself. She is the enemy. I think this is to be taken literally. Dagny, the heroine, becomes aware of it. When prime movers start to disappear from public productive life, she suspects a dark conspiracy. The conspiracy who forces them to withdraw and thus gradually bring the entire social life to a standstill. Why? What's the point? Second-handers possess no consistency of their own. The key to solution is not to break them, but to break the chain which forces the creative prime movers to work for them. You know, her idea is that in the corrupted welfare state system that Ayn Rand is describing that, again, the problem is not this Roosevelt, Obama bureaucracy, whatever. The problem are the creative people who still worry how to make the system work. Who fight the system within the
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system. "No, we should make that railroad run. No, we should..." These people are the true enemies. And the idea is they should stop worrying other people's worries. They should withdraw, let the system reach its low point, and only in this way you can bring about a radical change. Now here I'm totally misusing Ayn Rand for radical leftist purposes. Maybe this is what we, if still want to be, if we still want to be—I certainly do want to be—some kind of a radical left. Maybe this is what we at some level should learn. Don't, don't be like Dagny and so on, these creative people who... who try desperately to save the system and even if they appear to resist it, are effectively prolonging its life, making it run. Like in Europe now, "What will happen with Euro? What will happen with financial crisis?" and so on and so on. Of course, to avoid a misunderstanding, I'm not saying if millions starve, we do
system. "No, we should make that railroad run. No, we should..." These people are the true enemies. And the idea is they should stop worrying other people's worries. They should withdraw, let the system reach its low point, and only in this way you can bring about a radical change. Now here I'm totally misusing Ayn Rand for radical leftist purposes. Maybe this is what we, if still want to be, if we still want to be—I certainly do want to be—some kind of a radical left. Maybe this is what we at some level should learn. Don't, don't be like Dagny and so on, these creative people who... who try desperately to save the system and even if they appear to resist it, are effectively prolonging its life, making it run. Like in Europe now, "What will happen with Euro? What will happen with financial crisis?" and so on and so on. Of course, to avoid a misunderstanding, I'm not saying if millions starve, we do
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nothing. But this is not what we worry today. What we worry about today are problems like financial breakdown. I'm more and more tempted to say maybe we should allow it to happen. Don't worry other people's
nothing. But this is not what we worry today. What we worry about today are problems like financial breakdown. I'm more and more tempted to say maybe we should allow it to happen. Don't worry other people's
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worries. Don't be in this sense a resistant whose desperate ethic endeavor makes the system work. Withdraw, allow the system to... allow the system to in a way allow the system to self-destruct itself. Which is why, coming back to this final reflection, I think that every true social change has to go through this moment. Only after going through this moment, when you see how your activity to resist the system, far from really damaging it, makes it run, only going through the system you can envisage the real change. There is no real change without this as it were passage through the point of the absolute. Where again, you see how the standard resistance for... and makes the system run. This is for me what would be today the standard resistance: the moralizing critique. You know, nationalize the banks or punish the financial speculators and so on and so on. My God, I wanted to write seriously a defense of Bernard Madoff. No, no. He is scum and so
worries. Don't be in this sense a resistant whose desperate ethic endeavor makes the system work. Withdraw, allow the system to... allow the system to in a way allow the system to self-destruct itself. Which is why, coming back to this final reflection, I think that every true social change has to go through this moment. Only after going through this moment, when you see how your activity to resist the system, far from really damaging it, makes it run, only going through the system you can envisage the real change. There is no real change without this as it were passage through the point of the absolute. Where again, you see how the standard resistance for... and makes the system run. This is for me what would be today the standard resistance: the moralizing critique. You know, nationalize the banks or punish the financial speculators and so on and so on. My God, I wanted to write seriously a defense of Bernard Madoff. No, no. He is scum and so
Slavoj Žižek
on. But
on. But
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don't blame him, blame the system which enabled him to did... to do what he did. He is not the problem. Don't... I... I claim that the first thing to do today is to totally prohibit this moralistic critique. "Oh, greedy financial
don't blame him, blame the system which enabled him to did... to do what he did. He is not the problem. Don't... I... I claim that the first thing to do today is to totally prohibit this moralistic critique. "Oh, greedy financial
Slavoj Žižek
speculators" and so on and so on. The problem
speculators" and so on and so on. The problem
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is not this; the problem is why the system opened up the space for such financial speculations. And I think it's a deep structural necessity; it has nothing to do with bankers' greed and so on and so on. So now to conclude, I would like to go a step further and show you—I'm not laughing here, please believe me—show you the final five minutes of a film which is... I'm not making a bad taste joke here... which is deeply optimistic for me. It's the last four-five minutes of Lars von Trier's "Melancholia." The end of the world. I really think that the... you know, we should abandon that leftist progressivism: "Oh, people will be happy at the end" and so on and so on. To really fight for justice or whatever, you have to
is not this; the problem is why the system opened up the space for such financial speculations. And I think it's a deep structural necessity; it has nothing to do with bankers' greed and so on and so on. So now to conclude, I would like to go a step further and show you—I'm not laughing here, please believe me—show you the final five minutes of a film which is... I'm not making a bad taste joke here... which is deeply optimistic for me. It's the last four-five minutes of Lars von Trier's "Melancholia." The end of the world. I really think that the... you know, we should abandon that leftist progressivism: "Oh, people will be happy at the end" and so on and so on. To really fight for justice or whatever, you have to
Slavoj Žižek
go through this point that you will see here, accept the ultimate vanity we will appear only if you are at peace with this position embodied here in the heroine played by
go through this point that you will see here, accept the ultimate vanity we will appear only if you are at peace with this position embodied here in the heroine played by
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Kirsten Dunst, this acceptance of catastrophe. Only if you go through this zero point, you can fight from freedom, all that, all that, and so on. I was always opposed
Kirsten Dunst, this acceptance of catastrophe. Only if you go through this zero point, you can fight from freedom, all that, all that, and so on. I was always opposed
Slavoj Žižek
to this idea that being progressive, radical politically involves some kind of stupid optimism: humanity will win or whatever, we will live eternally. No. This not only does not immobilize you, it gives you as it were the necessary distance to engage. This position that you will see at the end, it's not, "Oh, let's sit down, everything is over." No. It's a... it creates the only possible space for a radical position. Which is why, time is running, I don't have time. If I were to have time, I would oppose this film to Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life," which is, I think, precisely the wrong spiritualist film. Totally, totally false position there. Here we have an... what... the reason I like "Melancholia" is that did you notice how it turns around the standard asteroid hits the Earth story, which is that this mega catastrophe is simply a metaphor for something going wrong with the love couple? You know, like then when the couple is reconciled, the asteroid disappears or whatever and so on and so on. Here the Melancholia, the asteroid, is definitely not just a metaphor of what doesn't function with the couple. No, the Earth really disappears and so on and so on. And what I like so much in the film is that it fully engages in this wonderfully shot—you will not see all, of course—in this imagining in a very minimalist way how entire reality around us is disintegrating. How just before—you will not see this—the final events, all of a sudden, in an almost David Lynch moment, worms, all the creatures from the Earth start to crawl up as if you know, in the last moments, the normal frame of nature is falling apart and so on and so on. This would be the Hegelian moment of radical negativity and so on. We have to confront it. We have to accept that we are free only against this background. So I really mean it. I'm not kidding here. We have to adopt her position. It's absolutely the price to really fight even for everyday freedoms. Please, let's do it. [The final sequence of "Melancholia" plays. No dialogue is spoken, but dramatic classical music ("Tristan und Isolde" Prelude) accompanies the visual of the planet Melancholia colliding with Earth. The scene transitions to the end.] Again, I'm not kidding. This is for me, if not happiness, the condition of happiness. If you are not ready to go through this zero point, then you live a false life. Now we are from politics to more metaphysics, theology. So I would like now to invite my good friend with whom I co-wrote the book, a Croat Protestant theologian. That's important. In our two respect... respective countries, like Protestants are not exactly nationally constitutive, no? Priest: Tiny minority. Žižek: Yeah. So I was glad to do a book with him together. So to do nonetheless the commercial introduction, I didn't talk about this in my talk, but this is... you can get this talk either without coffee or without milk. Sorry, without cream or without milk. "Without cream" is the book that we co-published—my talk was without this—"Dialogues: God in Pain." And "without milk" would have been my mega book which I don't yet have it but I was told you can buy it here, "Less Than Nothing" on Hegel. And as a Stalinist, I can tell you it has pages printed. So as a Stalinist, I can say since my five-year plan was I went over the plan for So I hope I will get the medal of model socialist worker. So I'm glad to have him here for ten minutes. Priest: Okay. Žižek: Because I am allowed to go over a little bit, you not. You know, this is life, you know. As in "The Lion King" they would say, some people eat zebras, cycle of life, yeah. And then we will play democracy a little bit, Q&A, please. Priest: Thank you very much. With that kind of introduction, a friend you don't need enemy, right? So I will be very short and I just want to share some of the insights about our co-work. Because I'm a priest and theologian and Slavoj is a psychoanalyst and philosopher, it's a very... Žižek: But you are a real priest. Priest: Yeah, I'm a real priest. Žižek: I am the true psychoanalyst. Can you imagine if you are in trouble coming to me? I mean, this would be in a sense proof that you are really crazy, of course. Priest: Yeah, it's the same with me as a priest, you know. So, a friend of mine said after he read the book, he says, "This is very dangerous book because it can turn atheist into believer and believer into atheist." I think, well, that's exactly what we intend. To feel pain, it's... there's nothing wrong with feel pain because if you cannot feel pain, you cannot feel anything else. I think that's the one of the ideas lurking in that book. But the whole idea is it... this is a book about tools. Gilles Deleuze said that capitalism is enslavement of desire. And as Slavoj said here with the young people who are protesting all over the Europe, and if you ask them question like "What do you really want? What do you really desire?" they will be almost provoked by that. But I think it's... the important thing is how to shape our desires and what to do with our desires. And I think to... to have... to give answer, it's a small... I just want to remind you on small essay written by Walter Benjamin in early twenties. He wrote essay called "Capitalism as Religion." And it's very prophetic, very profound text. And in that text, you know, the conclusion is this: if capitalism is religion, then only religion can criticize capitalism. And what kind of religion? And of course we think that it's Christianity. And to do that, we need to rethink our Christian tradition and Christian faith. And it's not like, like in Europe now you have left and you have right. And you know, left... left-wingers were always like creative, imaginative, they were spontaneous, they understand things, they have a vision, and right-wing people they stick to tradition, rule, law. But it's... it's just inversion, you know. We have leftists without ideas, without imagination, without spontaneity. And then we have the right-wingers who are... you know, they don't obey tradition, they don't follow the laws, they don't pay the taxes, they are corrupted. And all of a sudden, we have total mess. So I think it's very important to... to have certain tools to think what was not thinkable before. And to do that, the whole procedure how we think about things in our book is to make step back, you know, make the distance. And out of modernity, which is late modernity, which is equal as capitalism, it's important just to make some methodological procedure and step back into pre-modernity and use texts like Bible or Quran or Augustine and Dante and just rethink our desires through those old ancient texts so that we can make two steps in front and see what's going on here. So I think Augustine done that in pretty interesting way and he just says that what we really need is apocalyptic collective, which was of course Christianity is an apocalyptic religion and Jesus was apocalyptic prophet. And we have apocalyptic collective of radical equal people. So we need to rethink our desires and reshape them through virtues. And of course Augustine and of course New Testament said, you know, we need faith, love, hope to do that. But also to think virtues, we also need to accept classical virtues like courage, like prudence, temperance, and to do... if we rethink these virtues, then you can make two steps in front and you can come to equality and brotherhood and egality and everything what was the moment of enlightenment politics and the whole enlightenment movement. And for me, and I will just kind of provoke you here, for me it was very... one of the best definitions of politics was... it was defined by Antoine Saint-Just when he said that if you don't want... you know, he was called Archangel of Terror and he was there with Robespierre and Marat and he was killed when he was at twenty-four. So he defined politics like if you don't want terror or if or virtue, you want corruption. And I think that's... that's where we are now today. You know, like to do, you know, who is doing politics through terror? Virtue is difficult and it's very unpredictable and how to live in virtue as a community, this is very difficult. Then what we are left with is with the corruption. I think our book, the whole idea behind the book is to provide certain tools for thinking. Pre-modern tools for contemporary situation. How to think something what was not thinkable before. So, thank you very much for your time and for your patience, so if you have some questions, I will be happy to answer. Žižek: I... I promise that next time, I hope this is not our last time together... Priest: Okay, of course. Žižek: ...that I will be in a more egalitarian mood. Like, you get the same amount of time, you know. Priest: No problem with that. We already had this discussion there in Eastern Europe and you know, like we play this... Žižek: Yeah, but we are now in a more primitive country, you know. It may be clear for us in Eastern Europe but still... Priest: Yeah, but you know in Eastern Europe like... like in European family, Eastern Europeans are treated as... as drunk uncle, you know, on family reunion. You always have drunk uncle who know all of these dirty jokes and he know all of the stories behind people are embarrassing. So we have this discussion and like when Slavoj used this metaphor that Jesus is Marx and then Paul is Lenin. And I wrote something about Mark, Gospel of Mark, and I said well he's a Trotsky, you know. I try to kind of convince people well Mark is like Trotsky. And Slavoj asked question like, "But who is the Stalin?" And I said, "Well, Judas I guess, I don't know." Žižek: So here maybe we can have a debate, yeah. Okay, so let's now, my God, it's so dark. Can you maybe put the light someone on, because... and please, I was told Charles you will help us if there will be an ideological confusion, but there is a microphone here. Please simply step forward and ask the question. Please. It would be better even for you if I think they're them to be seen. Is it possible to turn on the light? Please, a little bit more. Yes. Just the usual bullshit, you know, like ask the question, don't give a talk. We were here just to bore people, not you, and yeah, please. And specify to whom the question is addressed if it's not self-evident, no? Please. Questioner I wanted to respond to your statement that democracy is at an end and that we... that in Greece... Žižek: The existing institutional democracy. I was very clear here. All right. Not democracy as such. Questioner I see. Okay. And they're using these technocrats to... to govern Greece because their democracy was impossible, just as ours has broken down because I think the right has refused to budge. But the... the masters are these globalized, of course, outside of democracy, banks. And I think the Occupy Wall Street is trying to address them with a popular movement. Isn't there a tension between these two entities, the large impersonal globalized banks and the democratic surge of Occupy Wall Street? Žižek: I see your point, but again, I'm here very skeptical in the sense that I think that the first duty of a leftist today is to be ruthlessly critical also towards the left itself. Yes, I agree with you in general. But what does this concretely mean? Ask the Occupy people, "Okay, what do you want to do with the banks?" You get either purely moralistic answers like the one I already mentioned, money should serve people, not people serve money. Well, my cynical answer is Hitler would fully agree with it. Because he would add, "Money which is not controlled by the people is controlled by the Jews," and there we are and so on, no? So my first move is: don't focus excessively on... I'm sick and tired of this blaming the financial capital. The problem is how did, because of what tendencies in the global movement, did financial capital in the last twenty, thirty years start to play this role? Then how to do it, how to fight it, and so on and so on. I'm just saying there are serious problems here. And let me go even provoke you more, another Ayn Rand insight. You know, I mean she is ridiculous, I'm not crazy. But you know, she did hit something on its head when she claimed in this ridiculous pathetic way that without money there is no freedom, because only on the... like, I have something that you want, you have something that I want. Only through money and free exchange can each get what he wants without domination, servitude and so on. Of course, I don't agree that this is the ultimate horizon. But it is true that it's a mega problem. Wasn't the lesson of totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century that trying to move over market and money effectively did bring back direct relations of servitude and domination? So for me, it's a very serious problem. Is it how to reorganize society where market exchange will not be the determining factor without regressing to some new form of direct servitude domination relations? I mean, you know, of course now you can, not you personally, people can tell me the usual bullshit:
to this idea that being progressive, radical politically involves some kind of stupid optimism: humanity will win or whatever, we will live eternally. No. This not only does not immobilize you, it gives you as it were the necessary distance to engage. This position that you will see at the end, it's not, "Oh, let's sit down, everything is over." No. It's a... it creates the only possible space for a radical position. Which is why, time is running, I don't have time. If I were to have time, I would oppose this film to Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life," which is, I think, precisely the wrong spiritualist film. Totally, totally false position there. Here we have an... what... the reason I like "Melancholia" is that did you notice how it turns around the standard asteroid hits the Earth story, which is that this mega catastrophe is simply a metaphor for something going wrong with the love couple? You know, like then when the couple is reconciled, the asteroid disappears or whatever and so on and so on. Here the Melancholia, the asteroid, is definitely not just a metaphor of what doesn't function with the couple. No, the Earth really disappears and so on and so on. And what I like so much in the film is that it fully engages in this wonderfully shot—you will not see all, of course—in this imagining in a very minimalist way how entire reality around us is disintegrating. How just before—you will not see this—the final events, all of a sudden, in an almost David Lynch moment, worms, all the creatures from the Earth start to crawl up as if you know, in the last moments, the normal frame of nature is falling apart and so on and so on. This would be the Hegelian moment of radical negativity and so on. We have to confront it. We have to accept that we are free only against this background. So I really mean it. I'm not kidding here. We have to adopt her position. It's absolutely the price to really fight even for everyday freedoms. Please, let's do it. [The final sequence of "Melancholia" plays. No dialogue is spoken, but dramatic classical music ("Tristan und Isolde" Prelude) accompanies the visual of the planet Melancholia colliding with Earth. The scene transitions to the end.] Again, I'm not kidding. This is for me, if not happiness, the condition of happiness. If you are not ready to go through this zero point, then you live a false life. Now we are from politics to more metaphysics, theology. So I would like now to invite my good friend with whom I co-wrote the book, a Croat Protestant theologian. That's important. In our two respect... respective countries, like Protestants are not exactly nationally constitutive, no? Priest: Tiny minority. Žižek: Yeah. So I was glad to do a book with him together. So to do nonetheless the commercial introduction, I didn't talk about this in my talk, but this is... you can get this talk either without coffee or without milk. Sorry, without cream or without milk. "Without cream" is the book that we co-published—my talk was without this—"Dialogues: God in Pain." And "without milk" would have been my mega book which I don't yet have it but I was told you can buy it here, "Less Than Nothing" on Hegel. And as a Stalinist, I can tell you it has pages printed. So as a Stalinist, I can say since my five-year plan was I went over the plan for So I hope I will get the medal of model socialist worker. So I'm glad to have him here for ten minutes. Priest: Okay. Žižek: Because I am allowed to go over a little bit, you not. You know, this is life, you know. As in "The Lion King" they would say, some people eat zebras, cycle of life, yeah. And then we will play democracy a little bit, Q&A, please. Priest: Thank you very much. With that kind of introduction, a friend you don't need enemy, right? So I will be very short and I just want to share some of the insights about our co-work. Because I'm a priest and theologian and Slavoj is a psychoanalyst and philosopher, it's a very... Žižek: But you are a real priest. Priest: Yeah, I'm a real priest. Žižek: I am the true psychoanalyst. Can you imagine if you are in trouble coming to me? I mean, this would be in a sense proof that you are really crazy, of course. Priest: Yeah, it's the same with me as a priest, you know. So, a friend of mine said after he read the book, he says, "This is very dangerous book because it can turn atheist into believer and believer into atheist." I think, well, that's exactly what we intend. To feel pain, it's... there's nothing wrong with feel pain because if you cannot feel pain, you cannot feel anything else. I think that's the one of the ideas lurking in that book. But the whole idea is it... this is a book about tools. Gilles Deleuze said that capitalism is enslavement of desire. And as Slavoj said here with the young people who are protesting all over the Europe, and if you ask them question like "What do you really want? What do you really desire?" they will be almost provoked by that. But I think it's... the important thing is how to shape our desires and what to do with our desires. And I think to... to have... to give answer, it's a small... I just want to remind you on small essay written by Walter Benjamin in early twenties. He wrote essay called "Capitalism as Religion." And it's very prophetic, very profound text. And in that text, you know, the conclusion is this: if capitalism is religion, then only religion can criticize capitalism. And what kind of religion? And of course we think that it's Christianity. And to do that, we need to rethink our Christian tradition and Christian faith. And it's not like, like in Europe now you have left and you have right. And you know, left... left-wingers were always like creative, imaginative, they were spontaneous, they understand things, they have a vision, and right-wing people they stick to tradition, rule, law. But it's... it's just inversion, you know. We have leftists without ideas, without imagination, without spontaneity. And then we have the right-wingers who are... you know, they don't obey tradition, they don't follow the laws, they don't pay the taxes, they are corrupted. And all of a sudden, we have total mess. So I think it's very important to... to have certain tools to think what was not thinkable before. And to do that, the whole procedure how we think about things in our book is to make step back, you know, make the distance. And out of modernity, which is late modernity, which is equal as capitalism, it's important just to make some methodological procedure and step back into pre-modernity and use texts like Bible or Quran or Augustine and Dante and just rethink our desires through those old ancient texts so that we can make two steps in front and see what's going on here. So I think Augustine done that in pretty interesting way and he just says that what we really need is apocalyptic collective, which was of course Christianity is an apocalyptic religion and Jesus was apocalyptic prophet. And we have apocalyptic collective of radical equal people. So we need to rethink our desires and reshape them through virtues. And of course Augustine and of course New Testament said, you know, we need faith, love, hope to do that. But also to think virtues, we also need to accept classical virtues like courage, like prudence, temperance, and to do... if we rethink these virtues, then you can make two steps in front and you can come to equality and brotherhood and egality and everything what was the moment of enlightenment politics and the whole enlightenment movement. And for me, and I will just kind of provoke you here, for me it was very... one of the best definitions of politics was... it was defined by Antoine Saint-Just when he said that if you don't want... you know, he was called Archangel of Terror and he was there with Robespierre and Marat and he was killed when he was at twenty-four. So he defined politics like if you don't want terror or if or virtue, you want corruption. And I think that's... that's where we are now today. You know, like to do, you know, who is doing politics through terror? Virtue is difficult and it's very unpredictable and how to live in virtue as a community, this is very difficult. Then what we are left with is with the corruption. I think our book, the whole idea behind the book is to provide certain tools for thinking. Pre-modern tools for contemporary situation. How to think something what was not thinkable before. So, thank you very much for your time and for your patience, so if you have some questions, I will be happy to answer. Žižek: I... I promise that next time, I hope this is not our last time together... Priest: Okay, of course. Žižek: ...that I will be in a more egalitarian mood. Like, you get the same amount of time, you know. Priest: No problem with that. We already had this discussion there in Eastern Europe and you know, like we play this... Žižek: Yeah, but we are now in a more primitive country, you know. It may be clear for us in Eastern Europe but still... Priest: Yeah, but you know in Eastern Europe like... like in European family, Eastern Europeans are treated as... as drunk uncle, you know, on family reunion. You always have drunk uncle who know all of these dirty jokes and he know all of the stories behind people are embarrassing. So we have this discussion and like when Slavoj used this metaphor that Jesus is Marx and then Paul is Lenin. And I wrote something about Mark, Gospel of Mark, and I said well he's a Trotsky, you know. I try to kind of convince people well Mark is like Trotsky. And Slavoj asked question like, "But who is the Stalin?" And I said, "Well, Judas I guess, I don't know." Žižek: So here maybe we can have a debate, yeah. Okay, so let's now, my God, it's so dark. Can you maybe put the light someone on, because... and please, I was told Charles you will help us if there will be an ideological confusion, but there is a microphone here. Please simply step forward and ask the question. Please. It would be better even for you if I think they're them to be seen. Is it possible to turn on the light? Please, a little bit more. Yes. Just the usual bullshit, you know, like ask the question, don't give a talk. We were here just to bore people, not you, and yeah, please. And specify to whom the question is addressed if it's not self-evident, no? Please. Questioner I wanted to respond to your statement that democracy is at an end and that we... that in Greece... Žižek: The existing institutional democracy. I was very clear here. All right. Not democracy as such. Questioner I see. Okay. And they're using these technocrats to... to govern Greece because their democracy was impossible, just as ours has broken down because I think the right has refused to budge. But the... the masters are these globalized, of course, outside of democracy, banks. And I think the Occupy Wall Street is trying to address them with a popular movement. Isn't there a tension between these two entities, the large impersonal globalized banks and the democratic surge of Occupy Wall Street? Žižek: I see your point, but again, I'm here very skeptical in the sense that I think that the first duty of a leftist today is to be ruthlessly critical also towards the left itself. Yes, I agree with you in general. But what does this concretely mean? Ask the Occupy people, "Okay, what do you want to do with the banks?" You get either purely moralistic answers like the one I already mentioned, money should serve people, not people serve money. Well, my cynical answer is Hitler would fully agree with it. Because he would add, "Money which is not controlled by the people is controlled by the Jews," and there we are and so on, no? So my first move is: don't focus excessively on... I'm sick and tired of this blaming the financial capital. The problem is how did, because of what tendencies in the global movement, did financial capital in the last twenty, thirty years start to play this role? Then how to do it, how to fight it, and so on and so on. I'm just saying there are serious problems here. And let me go even provoke you more, another Ayn Rand insight. You know, I mean she is ridiculous, I'm not crazy. But you know, she did hit something on its head when she claimed in this ridiculous pathetic way that without money there is no freedom, because only on the... like, I have something that you want, you have something that I want. Only through money and free exchange can each get what he wants without domination, servitude and so on. Of course, I don't agree that this is the ultimate horizon. But it is true that it's a mega problem. Wasn't the lesson of totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century that trying to move over market and money effectively did bring back direct relations of servitude and domination? So for me, it's a very serious problem. Is it how to reorganize society where market exchange will not be the determining factor without regressing to some new form of direct servitude domination relations? I mean, you know, of course now you can, not you personally, people can tell me the usual bullshit:
unknown
people's direct democracy, self-organization, whatever whatever. Well, let me tell you I'm skeptical about this, you know. Questioner Regulations, laws. The right has since Bush since Reagan, Bush and Clinton, have deregulated the financial markets. And as William Black pointed out, the corruption filled in the spaces. Žižek: I agree, but I don't think it's as simple as that. You know, when we talk so much about deregulation, are we aware that today's capitalism is not really deregulated? Certain things are deregulated, other things are probably more regulated than ever. I don't think there ever was in the history of humanity a state more controlling, intervening even in economy than the United States. You are not a liberal country, I'm talking now in economic sense. The state intervenes through political measures, economic support and so on. Everyone already regulates, so you should at least ask what kind of regulation. So you know, and again, what limit to regulation? Where do you stop? Do you just think, "Okay, this would be a social-democratic solution"? And I respect it up to a certain point. I'm well aware of the problems; I'm not an idiot who claims, "Oh, we need a new proletarian revolution, ha-ha, who will do it, how?" But what I'm saying is: is this enough, just by better laws, better regulation, or is something more needed? Maybe a little bit more radical. And I am aware of the problem: how to do it without new total control, new forms of domination? No, I'm modest here. I don't have easy solutions. I'm just saying: time to start to think. All right. Questioner Um, I want to ask about... don't you think it's too easy and simplistic what Lars von Trier do, because it's functioning exactly as religions do? Like, on the background of apocalyptic things, ideology can function, while really what you miss in death drive
people's direct democracy, self-organization, whatever whatever. Well, let me tell you I'm skeptical about this, you know. Questioner Regulations, laws. The right has since Bush since Reagan, Bush and Clinton, have deregulated the financial markets. And as William Black pointed out, the corruption filled in the spaces. Žižek: I agree, but I don't think it's as simple as that. You know, when we talk so much about deregulation, are we aware that today's capitalism is not really deregulated? Certain things are deregulated, other things are probably more regulated than ever. I don't think there ever was in the history of humanity a state more controlling, intervening even in economy than the United States. You are not a liberal country, I'm talking now in economic sense. The state intervenes through political measures, economic support and so on. Everyone already regulates, so you should at least ask what kind of regulation. So you know, and again, what limit to regulation? Where do you stop? Do you just think, "Okay, this would be a social-democratic solution"? And I respect it up to a certain point. I'm well aware of the problems; I'm not an idiot who claims, "Oh, we need a new proletarian revolution, ha-ha, who will do it, how?" But what I'm saying is: is this enough, just by better laws, better regulation, or is something more needed? Maybe a little bit more radical. And I am aware of the problem: how to do it without new total control, new forms of domination? No, I'm modest here. I don't have easy solutions. I'm just saying: time to start to think. All right. Questioner Um, I want to ask about... don't you think it's too easy and simplistic what Lars von Trier do, because it's functioning exactly as religions do? Like, on the background of apocalyptic things, ideology can function, while really what you miss in death drive
Slavoj Žižek
immediately can create the pleasure principle and the jouissance of the end. So it's a very easy trick that religion uses all the time by keeping apocalyptic in order for us to function. While really the real situation that it's in the title, melancholy, that from that position, that there is no end and there is no solution, that's really the position that we should act as a pessimistic, active political people. That it's much harder position but without the jouissance of the end. Žižek: I agree here basically with you. But again, I think it's more complex. Because first, I don't think that what we have here is some fundamental religious experience, but it's the experience of the real absolute end. And religion precisely never accepts it. Although it's again more tricky. Let me share—I talk as if tonight I flew in from there as if I'm in California, there they talk like this—let me share an experience with you. Did you see that shitty movie? I did, and I enjoyed only one line, otherwise it's shitty: "The Wrath of the Titans." You know, with Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson. There is one line which is nice there. When Ralph Fiennes, Hades, addresses Zeus, he tells him something which in a way turns around Heidegger. You know, Heidegger's idea of God are immortals, we humans are mortals. What
immediately can create the pleasure principle and the jouissance of the end. So it's a very easy trick that religion uses all the time by keeping apocalyptic in order for us to function. While really the real situation that it's in the title, melancholy, that from that position, that there is no end and there is no solution, that's really the position that we should act as a pessimistic, active political people. That it's much harder position but without the jouissance of the end. Žižek: I agree here basically with you. But again, I think it's more complex. Because first, I don't think that what we have here is some fundamental religious experience, but it's the experience of the real absolute end. And religion precisely never accepts it. Although it's again more tricky. Let me share—I talk as if tonight I flew in from there as if I'm in California, there they talk like this—let me share an experience with you. Did you see that shitty movie? I did, and I enjoyed only one line, otherwise it's shitty: "The Wrath of the Titans." You know, with Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson. There is one line which is nice there. When Ralph Fiennes, Hades, addresses Zeus, he tells him something which in a way turns around Heidegger. You know, Heidegger's idea of God are immortals, we humans are mortals. What
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he says there, Hades, is that when a man dies, he somehow survives in memory, descendants, and so on and so on. So men are immortal through humanity and so on. But when a god dies, he really dies. Only gods are, if
he says there, Hades, is that when a man dies, he somehow survives in memory, descendants, and so on and so on. So men are immortal through humanity and so on. But when a god dies, he really dies. Only gods are, if
Slavoj Žižek
they die, really, real mortals. So
they die, really, real mortals. So
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in this sense, maybe there is a theological dimension here, and I see your point about... I've written about it also... about death drive, immortality and so on and so on. I just think, but I don't have time to develop it now, that melancholy is maybe not the right name here. I don't think the right name of this planet is Melancholia. I don't like melancholy. I don't buy this idea which was very fashionable in some circles at least twenty years ago: good melancholy versus bad mourning. You know, like mourning is a compromise, you basically accept the loss by symbolizing it and you move on, like we bury you, fuck off, we move on. While a melancholic remains stuck on the lost object. No, I think as I often developed, following Agamben, Freud already and so on, that no, melancholy is not fidelity to the lost object. Melancholy is, on the opposite, to treat as lost an object which is still here. Freud uses a wonderful expression in his *Trauer und Melancholie* where he says melancholy is a preemptive mourning. You know, melancholy is not when I lose my lover, but if she or he or it, a dog, so that you will not be accused of speciesism, whatever, no? My lover is still here; the shadow of death, of partition, is already here. So again, yes, you raised difficult questions which I prefer to avoid today. Thanks very much. Please. I talk too much. I need a master to stop me. Sorry. Questioner Well, this is rather intimidating. I'm just a high school teacher. My question... Žižek: Oh, it's difficult. You deal with real people; it's much more difficult for you to bluff. Questioner So perhaps my question... perhaps my question is simple. It seems to be a simple proposition, relatively uncontroversial, that the true utopia is a sustainable capitalism. I seem to understand that from your presentation. And yet, you speak of the old movement, the old communist movement, in terms that are... ranged from derisive to dismissive and that's it. And so, uh, my question is: is there nothing we can learn from the victories of the workers in places like Cuba, the Soviet Union,
in this sense, maybe there is a theological dimension here, and I see your point about... I've written about it also... about death drive, immortality and so on and so on. I just think, but I don't have time to develop it now, that melancholy is maybe not the right name here. I don't think the right name of this planet is Melancholia. I don't like melancholy. I don't buy this idea which was very fashionable in some circles at least twenty years ago: good melancholy versus bad mourning. You know, like mourning is a compromise, you basically accept the loss by symbolizing it and you move on, like we bury you, fuck off, we move on. While a melancholic remains stuck on the lost object. No, I think as I often developed, following Agamben, Freud already and so on, that no, melancholy is not fidelity to the lost object. Melancholy is, on the opposite, to treat as lost an object which is still here. Freud uses a wonderful expression in his *Trauer und Melancholie* where he says melancholy is a preemptive mourning. You know, melancholy is not when I lose my lover, but if she or he or it, a dog, so that you will not be accused of speciesism, whatever, no? My lover is still here; the shadow of death, of partition, is already here. So again, yes, you raised difficult questions which I prefer to avoid today. Thanks very much. Please. I talk too much. I need a master to stop me. Sorry. Questioner Well, this is rather intimidating. I'm just a high school teacher. My question... Žižek: Oh, it's difficult. You deal with real people; it's much more difficult for you to bluff. Questioner So perhaps my question... perhaps my question is simple. It seems to be a simple proposition, relatively uncontroversial, that the true utopia is a sustainable capitalism. I seem to understand that from your presentation. And yet, you speak of the old movement, the old communist movement, in terms that are... ranged from derisive to dismissive and that's it. And so, uh, my question is: is there nothing we can learn from the victories of the workers in places like Cuba, the Soviet Union,
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China, and etc.? Because our enemy, capital—you don't speak of the full power of the state—our enemy is armed. Our enemy has armed forces, carries out genocide across the seas. And if we're talking about liberation, we are talking about a self-defense movement on the part of the working class to chase the imperialists from power. They have their fingers on the atomic triggers. What can we learn from the old revolutionary movements? Because I don't know if there's time to wait for us to begin to think, as you might suggest. So what can we take from the past that is worth replicating, repeating, and for the working class to defend itself against the onslaught of capital with some semblance of a pride in the history of the communist movement? That's my question. Žižek: I first, let me do a little bit of self-criticism, sincerely. I know that when I pronounced that formula "communism twentieth century was a total failure," that I said something which is not precisely what I wanted to say. My point was not: no, all was horrible and so on and so on. I always draw this distinction which I think is crucial, and even those detractors who like to refer to Hannah Arendt, like "Oh, they are just the same two forms of totalitarianism"—I doubt if they read Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt makes it very clear that only Nazism is the true totalitarianism. She is much more differentiated towards even the Soviet communism. So my God, I did bring together Lenin's texts and so on. My difference is this one: that the defeat of communism in the twentieth century is a genuine tragedy, an authentic emancipatory potential well, got into deep shit. But it is inherent, which is why how I try to explain all the things which are radically different between fascism and communism. For example, and this is for me precisely the sign that communism is not just—twentieth-century communism—a simple bad thing from the beginning: you have all
China, and etc.? Because our enemy, capital—you don't speak of the full power of the state—our enemy is armed. Our enemy has armed forces, carries out genocide across the seas. And if we're talking about liberation, we are talking about a self-defense movement on the part of the working class to chase the imperialists from power. They have their fingers on the atomic triggers. What can we learn from the old revolutionary movements? Because I don't know if there's time to wait for us to begin to think, as you might suggest. So what can we take from the past that is worth replicating, repeating, and for the working class to defend itself against the onslaught of capital with some semblance of a pride in the history of the communist movement? That's my question. Žižek: I first, let me do a little bit of self-criticism, sincerely. I know that when I pronounced that formula "communism twentieth century was a total failure," that I said something which is not precisely what I wanted to say. My point was not: no, all was horrible and so on and so on. I always draw this distinction which I think is crucial, and even those detractors who like to refer to Hannah Arendt, like "Oh, they are just the same two forms of totalitarianism"—I doubt if they read Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt makes it very clear that only Nazism is the true totalitarianism. She is much more differentiated towards even the Soviet communism. So my God, I did bring together Lenin's texts and so on. My difference is this one: that the defeat of communism in the twentieth century is a genuine tragedy, an authentic emancipatory potential well, got into deep shit. But it is inherent, which is why how I try to explain all the things which are radically different between fascism and communism. For example, and this is for me precisely the sign that communism is not just—twentieth-century communism—a simple bad thing from the beginning: you have all
Slavoj Žižek
the time dissident tensions and so on and so on. The only dissident tension in
the time dissident tensions and so on and so on. The only dissident tension in
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fascism was when Hitler got rid in '34 of SA, of the brutal ordinary thugs, to become somebody
fascism was when Hitler got rid in '34 of SA, of the brutal ordinary thugs, to become somebody
Slavoj Žižek
with pretending having enough dignity to rule and so on and so on. For example,
with pretending having enough dignity to rule and so on and so on. For example,
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already this, for example for me, it's absolutely crucial: fascist system was lacking this immanent instability which precisely demonstrates that there was another authentic emancipatory dimension in... in communist system. I made this clear also, for example, a propos the Chinese Cultural Revolution and so on. The problem with me is nonetheless here: maybe we are distinguishing. Yes, I agree with you, all this, you know the usual story, the attempts to do about okay, the usual first the usual line, healthcare, education, but all other things. But nonetheless, I think we have to concede that communism,
already this, for example for me, it's absolutely crucial: fascist system was lacking this immanent instability which precisely demonstrates that there was another authentic emancipatory dimension in... in communist system. I made this clear also, for example, a propos the Chinese Cultural Revolution and so on. The problem with me is nonetheless here: maybe we are distinguishing. Yes, I agree with you, all this, you know the usual story, the attempts to do about okay, the usual first the usual line, healthcare, education, but all other things. But nonetheless, I think we have to concede that communism,
Slavoj Žižek
the way we know it in twentieth century, did not really produce any, for me at least, viable workable new form of social organization. I don't see this. Even when you mention Cuba, even today Venezuela and so on and so on, I don't think we have the formula there, unfortunately. I don't see any real roots of... and also, this is why again, I see the communist terror even, it's not simply, you know, bad people doing horrible things. It's something extremely tragic, full of inner tensions and so on. And but nonetheless, with all good
the way we know it in twentieth century, did not really produce any, for me at least, viable workable new form of social organization. I don't see this. Even when you mention Cuba, even today Venezuela and so on and so on, I don't think we have the formula there, unfortunately. I don't see any real roots of... and also, this is why again, I see the communist terror even, it's not simply, you know, bad people doing horrible things. It's something extremely tragic, full of inner tensions and so on. And but nonetheless, with all good
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points here, there, no doubt also authentic dedication and so on, I just
points here, there, no doubt also authentic dedication and so on, I just
Slavoj Žižek
think that in not everything was
think that in not everything was
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wrong, but that, my God, in this fundamental way it failed. It didn't provide. Questioner Armed struggle? Yes or no? Žižek: Oh, absolutely! More than ever! You're talking my language here, yeah. Okay, folks, we'll take two more questions. Thank you. Ah, you are the Stalinist here, perfect. Questioner Okay, um, kind of building off that last point, I would maybe shift the emphasis to say that maybe what's best
wrong, but that, my God, in this fundamental way it failed. It didn't provide. Questioner Armed struggle? Yes or no? Žižek: Oh, absolutely! More than ever! You're talking my language here, yeah. Okay, folks, we'll take two more questions. Thank you. Ah, you are the Stalinist here, perfect. Questioner Okay, um, kind of building off that last point, I would maybe shift the emphasis to say that maybe what's best
Slavoj Žižek
to learn from the failure of communism in the 20th century is the defeats of the left rather than its victories. Um, and in that spirit with the... with the "Melancholia" film, I know that you don't like the title, but I wonder if you're calling for, you know, as Walter Benjamin put it and Jodi Dean, one of your exegetes, um, has put it, a sort of left melancholy, a sort of recognition of its own loss of self in the present. And in that vein, maybe saying, you know, with Marx, as Marx once said, the working class is revolutionary or it is nothing. I think today we have to recognize that it is nothing. But at this point, I mean, it's still there, something with us, that sort of melancholic, like it's still lost. It must become everything. The reason that it is nothing now is because it's not revolutionary. And so the task would be perhaps a pessimism of the strong, as Nietzsche put it, like a critical, ruthlessly self-critical left. Žižek: No, no, I simply, not to lose time, I agree with you. The only thing I would... the only thing I would add is that maybe we have to keep, that would be my solution, already in Marx if you really read him closely, although he doesn't explicitly draw the distinction, it's nonetheless implicit, I claim, a distinction between working class which is more a sociological positive category, people can be blah blah, and proletarian position, which would be this type of position of void, null... void as radical loss but at the same time as a loss which gives you freedom to see through and so on. And we should, I think, in this sense redefine proletariat and claim, like Fredric Jameson has some nice suggestion in his new book on this... on capital, the short one, how today unemployed, third world and so on and so on, we
to learn from the failure of communism in the 20th century is the defeats of the left rather than its victories. Um, and in that spirit with the... with the "Melancholia" film, I know that you don't like the title, but I wonder if you're calling for, you know, as Walter Benjamin put it and Jodi Dean, one of your exegetes, um, has put it, a sort of left melancholy, a sort of recognition of its own loss of self in the present. And in that vein, maybe saying, you know, with Marx, as Marx once said, the working class is revolutionary or it is nothing. I think today we have to recognize that it is nothing. But at this point, I mean, it's still there, something with us, that sort of melancholic, like it's still lost. It must become everything. The reason that it is nothing now is because it's not revolutionary. And so the task would be perhaps a pessimism of the strong, as Nietzsche put it, like a critical, ruthlessly self-critical left. Žižek: No, no, I simply, not to lose time, I agree with you. The only thing I would... the only thing I would add is that maybe we have to keep, that would be my solution, already in Marx if you really read him closely, although he doesn't explicitly draw the distinction, it's nonetheless implicit, I claim, a distinction between working class which is more a sociological positive category, people can be blah blah, and proletarian position, which would be this type of position of void, null... void as radical loss but at the same time as a loss which gives you freedom to see through and so on. And we should, I think, in this sense redefine proletariat and claim, like Fredric Jameson has some nice suggestion in his new book on this... on capital, the short one, how today unemployed, third world and so on and so on, we
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should build a different chain of proletarian position which no longer
should build a different chain of proletarian position which no longer
Slavoj Žižek
privileges the standard working class. Although again, we should also be aware that standard working class did not disappear. It is even here, it is in China, it is wherever you want, no? But again, I think, and maybe we agree on this formula: that the only way to become faithful to... to remain faithful to Marx is to move further, to repeat, but repeat in the Kierkegaardian sense, which doesn't mean do the same, but repeat means bring out what the points of failure, what was potentials not yet clear in the first attempt. And this, I think, should absolutely be done; this is the task today. Otherwise, I'm really a pessimist here. You know what's my nightmare? Let me describe it to you in a comical way: that one of the results of Occupy Wall Street will be that guys who were there will meet ten years from now in a cafeteria, "Oh my God, this was a nice time when we were there, so nice, we will order crying together," and then the phone of one guy will ring, "Sorry, I have to run to
privileges the standard working class. Although again, we should also be aware that standard working class did not disappear. It is even here, it is in China, it is wherever you want, no? But again, I think, and maybe we agree on this formula: that the only way to become faithful to... to remain faithful to Marx is to move further, to repeat, but repeat in the Kierkegaardian sense, which doesn't mean do the same, but repeat means bring out what the points of failure, what was potentials not yet clear in the first attempt. And this, I think, should absolutely be done; this is the task today. Otherwise, I'm really a pessimist here. You know what's my nightmare? Let me describe it to you in a comical way: that one of the results of Occupy Wall Street will be that guys who were there will meet ten years from now in a cafeteria, "Oh my God, this was a nice time when we were there, so nice, we will order crying together," and then the phone of one guy will ring, "Sorry, I have to run to
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my bank you know to go on with..." you know, that the same will happen as in France '68 where every respectful right-winger in France today will tell you, "Of course in '68 I was at the barricades," you know and so on and so on. This is what I mean when I say told them at Zuccotti Park: "Don't fall in love with yourself." Sorry, I cannot tell you more now. Questioner I'd like to ask the question for both of you and I'm looking for your viewpoints of monasteries as functioning communist utopias. Žižek: Absolutely. No, sorry, if I can just do then I leave you all the time. You know what is so important for me in Jacques Lacan, that for him, he is speaking about nuns. He is absolutely clear in rejecting this bullshit that being a priest or a nun—I mean now I mean
my bank you know to go on with..." you know, that the same will happen as in France '68 where every respectful right-winger in France today will tell you, "Of course in '68 I was at the barricades," you know and so on and so on. This is what I mean when I say told them at Zuccotti Park: "Don't fall in love with yourself." Sorry, I cannot tell you more now. Questioner I'd like to ask the question for both of you and I'm looking for your viewpoints of monasteries as functioning communist utopias. Žižek: Absolutely. No, sorry, if I can just do then I leave you all the time. You know what is so important for me in Jacques Lacan, that for him, he is speaking about nuns. He is absolutely clear in rejecting this bullshit that being a priest or a nun—I mean now I mean
Slavoj Žižek
more in a, you Protestants, you do all dirty things like we, but those who don't engage in sex—Lacan makes it clear that there is nothing pathological in it. We should absolutely not reject this pseudo-Freudian bullshit, you know: a normal woman or man has to make love, so if you withdraw to a convent, it must be something wrong, oppressed and so on and so on. No, it can be absolutely an authentic position. Now you, please, more serious answer. Priest: Yeah. Okay. Thank you. What I understand from your question is that like what is like politically mean or theologically in monasteries and how it compared that with utopias? Am I right? Questioner I purposely left the question open. Priest: Okay. Because for me here is... is important thing that... there is the whole monastic movement in the third-fourth century, it was way radical political movement and they start to criticize imperial power of the church because in Constantine time, church became a ministry of empire and the bishops were state officials, they get salaries and everything. So the people... desert fathers and desert mothers, they removed themselves from the so-called control of the empire and they went to desert. So I think they created their own rules and Giorgio Agamben wrote the book about it. And he just explained the whole politics behind it, which is very constructive, which is not typical for Agamben because he don't offer very lot of a constructive solutions in... in his thoughts. But this one was very, very interesting and he... he make almost like genealogy of monastics... monastic politics and theology behind it up to the Francis of Assisi and other people. So I think... I think that's a strong political alternative there because, you know, they share things, they... they do their own economy, which is very alternative to the empire. And, you know, if you want, if you read carefully *Empire* written by Toni Negri—I know what people think about it—but he end the book with sentence like this: "The joyfulness of communist being is embodied in Francis of Assisi." He is a metaphor, he is the figure of activist, communistic activist of the future. Žižek: Can I just maybe
more in a, you Protestants, you do all dirty things like we, but those who don't engage in sex—Lacan makes it clear that there is nothing pathological in it. We should absolutely not reject this pseudo-Freudian bullshit, you know: a normal woman or man has to make love, so if you withdraw to a convent, it must be something wrong, oppressed and so on and so on. No, it can be absolutely an authentic position. Now you, please, more serious answer. Priest: Yeah. Okay. Thank you. What I understand from your question is that like what is like politically mean or theologically in monasteries and how it compared that with utopias? Am I right? Questioner I purposely left the question open. Priest: Okay. Because for me here is... is important thing that... there is the whole monastic movement in the third-fourth century, it was way radical political movement and they start to criticize imperial power of the church because in Constantine time, church became a ministry of empire and the bishops were state officials, they get salaries and everything. So the people... desert fathers and desert mothers, they removed themselves from the so-called control of the empire and they went to desert. So I think they created their own rules and Giorgio Agamben wrote the book about it. And he just explained the whole politics behind it, which is very constructive, which is not typical for Agamben because he don't offer very lot of a constructive solutions in... in his thoughts. But this one was very, very interesting and he... he make almost like genealogy of monastics... monastic politics and theology behind it up to the Francis of Assisi and other people. So I think... I think that's a strong political alternative there because, you know, they share things, they... they do their own economy, which is very alternative to the empire. And, you know, if you want, if you read carefully *Empire* written by Toni Negri—I know what people think about it—but he end the book with sentence like this: "The joyfulness of communist being is embodied in Francis of Assisi." He is a metaphor, he is the figure of activist, communistic activist of the future. Žižek: Can I just maybe
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supplement, if you agree with your question,
supplement, if you agree with your question,
Slavoj Žižek
and ask you: would you also be ready, even if Jesuits are probably your
and ask you: would you also be ready, even if Jesuits are probably your
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death enemies and so on, I'm... would you also be ready nonetheless to include into this series the... how were they called, in reality they were called "Reducciones," missions in Paraguay? Priest: Oh, yeah. Žižek: Which is why, you know that something incredibly happened there? It was an incredibly thriving economy. Do you know if the Jesuit state of Paraguay were allowed to survive, we would have Guarani as a language? They even started to print book in native language there. And then something incredible happened: it didn't, as they like to say, "Oh, the utopia self-destroyed itself from..." No! Brazil and Spain together attacked them. It was an incredibly ruthless operation. The very success of Paraguay... Priest: Even... even the Vatican attacked them. I mean Rome attacked them. But I think that's exactly my point that to... to think what was not thinkable before, you know, you need to have as Jesuits have certain form of spiritual exercise. Foucault took it from Pierre Hadot, you know, certain... Foucault called it "technologies of self." You need to have certain tools for
death enemies and so on, I'm... would you also be ready nonetheless to include into this series the... how were they called, in reality they were called "Reducciones," missions in Paraguay? Priest: Oh, yeah. Žižek: Which is why, you know that something incredibly happened there? It was an incredibly thriving economy. Do you know if the Jesuit state of Paraguay were allowed to survive, we would have Guarani as a language? They even started to print book in native language there. And then something incredible happened: it didn't, as they like to say, "Oh, the utopia self-destroyed itself from..." No! Brazil and Spain together attacked them. It was an incredibly ruthless operation. The very success of Paraguay... Priest: Even... even the Vatican attacked them. I mean Rome attacked them. But I think that's exactly my point that to... to think what was not thinkable before, you know, you need to have as Jesuits have certain form of spiritual exercise. Foucault took it from Pierre Hadot, you know, certain... Foucault called it "technologies of self." You need to have certain tools for
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transformation of your desires and
transformation of your desires and
Slavoj Žižek
perception and everything. So, and monastic people, they have that. They have certain theology, certain practices. And what was good with that, and that's basically Giorgio Agamben's argument and he took it from Pierre Hadot as well, it's like to combine theory and practice. Forms of life and forms of discourse, and they come together. So yes, monastic theology is not just cheesy ethics, because we try to do ethics today, but Julian Rose is I think she is right: we don't need ethics, we need political theology. Žižek: Can I tell you ask you something more, and it's not just an... a horny old guy who wants to desperately prolong his sex life. I... it's not a jokish question; it's a very serious one. Can you imagine monastic life with sex? Priest: Well, that's a good question. Žižek: No, it's very naive, please don't take me just for a horny old man. I have maybe am but that's not... Can you imagine, do you think that or you maybe, do you think it a priori excludes sexual relations or... Priest: I don't think so. I think that there is some communities even now all over the world, they live some through some monastic rules, they have certain monastic vows, but they live together and it's kind of monastery of open kind. So people come together, they do different things together, in a sense of... Žižek: Because if you just give me sex, I would love to live in a monastery like this. It's very vulgar. Roland Barthes, he wrote something on that. Priest: Rabelais. Žižek: You know, my problem with Rabelais is that I don't like all that carnival and so on, you know. He is... I like order, like I don't like to... Priest: You know what Giorgio Agamben told us, you know we have this discussion and then... and he said like, "Well, this is a parody and this is the most serious kind of literature because if you want to make parody of something, you really need to know that." So he says well Rabelais, he is the one of those guys who kind of celebrate certain kind of monastic life, Thélème, which is very almost like hedonistic but... Žižek: Because do you know that also Hegel makes a parody in his *Philosophy of History*? He mentions this detail about Reducciones missions. He claims that everything was organized there, even at every evening a bell did ring, reminding
perception and everything. So, and monastic people, they have that. They have certain theology, certain practices. And what was good with that, and that's basically Giorgio Agamben's argument and he took it from Pierre Hadot as well, it's like to combine theory and practice. Forms of life and forms of discourse, and they come together. So yes, monastic theology is not just cheesy ethics, because we try to do ethics today, but Julian Rose is I think she is right: we don't need ethics, we need political theology. Žižek: Can I tell you ask you something more, and it's not just an... a horny old guy who wants to desperately prolong his sex life. I... it's not a jokish question; it's a very serious one. Can you imagine monastic life with sex? Priest: Well, that's a good question. Žižek: No, it's very naive, please don't take me just for a horny old man. I have maybe am but that's not... Can you imagine, do you think that or you maybe, do you think it a priori excludes sexual relations or... Priest: I don't think so. I think that there is some communities even now all over the world, they live some through some monastic rules, they have certain monastic vows, but they live together and it's kind of monastery of open kind. So people come together, they do different things together, in a sense of... Žižek: Because if you just give me sex, I would love to live in a monastery like this. It's very vulgar. Roland Barthes, he wrote something on that. Priest: Rabelais. Žižek: You know, my problem with Rabelais is that I don't like all that carnival and so on, you know. He is... I like order, like I don't like to... Priest: You know what Giorgio Agamben told us, you know we have this discussion and then... and he said like, "Well, this is a parody and this is the most serious kind of literature because if you want to make parody of something, you really need to know that." So he says well Rabelais, he is the one of those guys who kind of celebrate certain kind of monastic life, Thélème, which is very almost like hedonistic but... Žižek: Because do you know that also Hegel makes a parody in his *Philosophy of History*? He mentions this detail about Reducciones missions. He claims that everything was organized there, even at every evening a bell did ring, reminding
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couples time
couples time
Slavoj Žižek
to have sex. I mean, in a way I would like this. You don't have these problems:
to have sex. I mean, in a way I would like this. You don't have these problems:
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"Would you like to have
"Would you like to have
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sex?
sex?
Slavoj Žižek
Do you have migraine or not?" No, it's taken care of, you
Do you have migraine or not?" No, it's taken care of, you
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know. Priest: It's a serious spiritual exercise. Žižek: That's a nice definition: sex is a very difficult serious spiritual exercise. Exactly. Yeah. So maybe another, yeah, please. Okay, so allow at least so that we can claim that ladies also ask, for false democracy let's pretend that you are equal. Yes, we'll take one more question and then there will be a book signing line; there's already a line forming right over there. Thank you. Žižek: So herself and Yoni behind me are both Occupy Wall Street... he is included, so we don't have to cut him off. He speaks through you. Questioner Awesome, awesome. Um, we're both Occupy Wall Street activists and we've been preparing for a couple months for the May Day General Strike. Um, and it's going to be hopefully an international
know. Priest: It's a serious spiritual exercise. Žižek: That's a nice definition: sex is a very difficult serious spiritual exercise. Exactly. Yeah. So maybe another, yeah, please. Okay, so allow at least so that we can claim that ladies also ask, for false democracy let's pretend that you are equal. Yes, we'll take one more question and then there will be a book signing line; there's already a line forming right over there. Thank you. Žižek: So herself and Yoni behind me are both Occupy Wall Street... he is included, so we don't have to cut him off. He speaks through you. Questioner Awesome, awesome. Um, we're both Occupy Wall Street activists and we've been preparing for a couple months for the May Day General Strike. Um, and it's going to be hopefully an international
Slavoj Žižek
strike, so we're asking you what you think the importance of a global strike as opposed to a national strike, you know, which has occurred historically? Žižek: I have... it's wonderful question. I will tell you what is a general reflection. Unfortunately, and I've written about it, I see things... happening... it's very important to redeem the form of strike. Why? Because I don't know what's the situation in United States, but in Europe, in my... it's a shitty small country, Slovenia, but I don't know how it's in Croatia, the strike... I'm almost tempted to oppose strikes. You know why? Ordinary workers in private companies, they don't dare to strike. They would lose job and so on. No, the only... typically in Slovenia now, I'm saying this here, back there they would have lynched me, at my... I wouldn't say, we have a strike which of course I in principle support; it's again the right-wing government and so on and so on. But there is nonetheless something wrong if you look closely at it. It's the strike of the state-financed middle class, let's call it intellectual bourgeoisie or whatever. It's... you know, it's... it's policemen who are relatively well paid, policemen, teachers, university professors and so on and so on. And if you look closely, you can clearly see that they strike precisely because they feel their position above ordinary workers in the private sphere threatened. It's really a paradoxical kind of a strike of the lower bourgeoisie being afraid to be reduced to the zero-level working class, you know. So which is why I think again it's important to... because again, those who are employed in private sector, they are just happy to get their jobs; they don't even dare to strike, you know. And and again, from what I was
strike, so we're asking you what you think the importance of a global strike as opposed to a national strike, you know, which has occurred historically? Žižek: I have... it's wonderful question. I will tell you what is a general reflection. Unfortunately, and I've written about it, I see things... happening... it's very important to redeem the form of strike. Why? Because I don't know what's the situation in United States, but in Europe, in my... it's a shitty small country, Slovenia, but I don't know how it's in Croatia, the strike... I'm almost tempted to oppose strikes. You know why? Ordinary workers in private companies, they don't dare to strike. They would lose job and so on. No, the only... typically in Slovenia now, I'm saying this here, back there they would have lynched me, at my... I wouldn't say, we have a strike which of course I in principle support; it's again the right-wing government and so on and so on. But there is nonetheless something wrong if you look closely at it. It's the strike of the state-financed middle class, let's call it intellectual bourgeoisie or whatever. It's... you know, it's... it's policemen who are relatively well paid, policemen, teachers, university professors and so on and so on. And if you look closely, you can clearly see that they strike precisely because they feel their position above ordinary workers in the private sphere threatened. It's really a paradoxical kind of a strike of the lower bourgeoisie being afraid to be reduced to the zero-level working class, you know. So which is why I think again it's important to... because again, those who are employed in private sector, they are just happy to get their jobs; they don't even dare to strike, you know. And and again, from what I was
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able to see, there is very minimal solidarity of this state-financed
able to see, there is very minimal solidarity of this state-financed
Slavoj Žižek
clientelist middle state people on making short strikes now with those how they call them really suffering, unemployed and so on and so on. It's almost a strike whose aim, of course they don't say it, but de facto aim is we want our privileges. And this is why I think it would be... this is why for me this may amuse you, I don't buy all this bullshit progressive Hollywood liberals, but I heard about... sorry,
clientelist middle state people on making short strikes now with those how they call them really suffering, unemployed and so on and so on. It's almost a strike whose aim, of course they don't say it, but de facto aim is we want our privileges. And this is why I think it would be... this is why for me this may amuse you, I don't buy all this bullshit progressive Hollywood liberals, but I heard about... sorry,
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it was not George Clooney, it was Alec Baldwin. He did nonetheless something that I found sympathetic. You remember some two-three years ago there was a strike in Hollywood of these ordinary low-paid guys, you know, people who carry equipment around and so on. And Alec Baldwin, I was told by friends there, did something. He went from set to set and tried to mobilize them like, "Strike now, help them, boycott Hollywood for these ordinary people." It's very rare that this happens, no? So what I would have said is that... it would be wonderful what you said to rehabilitate the form of strike, to tear it out of this clientelist privileged status that that it has now, I don't know how it is here, it has now in many countries. So I absolutely wish you all the best and also I think it's important you mentioned the internationalist connection. It is so important this, you know, without this we are simply lost, I claim. You know, then we will be... you know, my... we have to start to think in these terms that we, even if we are much more privileged, have something in common, I don't know, with those
it was not George Clooney, it was Alec Baldwin. He did nonetheless something that I found sympathetic. You remember some two-three years ago there was a strike in Hollywood of these ordinary low-paid guys, you know, people who carry equipment around and so on. And Alec Baldwin, I was told by friends there, did something. He went from set to set and tried to mobilize them like, "Strike now, help them, boycott Hollywood for these ordinary people." It's very rare that this happens, no? So what I would have said is that... it would be wonderful what you said to rehabilitate the form of strike, to tear it out of this clientelist privileged status that that it has now, I don't know how it is here, it has now in many countries. So I absolutely wish you all the best and also I think it's important you mentioned the internationalist connection. It is so important this, you know, without this we are simply lost, I claim. You know, then we will be... you know, my... we have to start to think in these terms that we, even if we are much more privileged, have something in common, I don't know, with those
Slavoj Žižek
in China exploited or in Africa and so on and so on. If we don't establish some kind of minimal solidarity here then... then politics is of no interest basically, no? But my basic advice to you would be Leninist one, not in the totalitarian sense. I'm not saying build there in the edge of Zuccotti Park a small Gulag for traitors, not that, but... but organize, organize! It's important that it's not just... for example, yesterday I flew in, the day before I was in San Francisco and they told me that in Oakland, how the movement survived. It's no longer a big movement, but they have small cooperatives,
in China exploited or in Africa and so on and so on. If we don't establish some kind of minimal solidarity here then... then politics is of no interest basically, no? But my basic advice to you would be Leninist one, not in the totalitarian sense. I'm not saying build there in the edge of Zuccotti Park a small Gulag for traitors, not that, but... but organize, organize! It's important that it's not just... for example, yesterday I flew in, the day before I was in San Francisco and they told me that in Oakland, how the movement survived. It's no longer a big movement, but they have small cooperatives,
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they organize thing and so on. Something should remain as an organizational network. I... I... what I detest is this big moment where we all cry how beautiful and then we go home and do our dirty job, you know. That's all I can tell you. If I say anything more, I would be bullshitting even more than usual. Priest: I just want to say something. It's what happened in Argentina with the... in beginning of nineties. They organized themselves through the certain collectives and one of them it's called Colectivo Situaciones, which is kind of famous, and they start doing what they call militant research.
they organize thing and so on. Something should remain as an organizational network. I... I... what I detest is this big moment where we all cry how beautiful and then we go home and do our dirty job, you know. That's all I can tell you. If I say anything more, I would be bullshitting even more than usual. Priest: I just want to say something. It's what happened in Argentina with the... in beginning of nineties. They organized themselves through the certain collectives and one of them it's called Colectivo Situaciones, which is kind of famous, and they start doing what they call militant research.
Slavoj Žižek
And this is exactly the small organizations doing things together but in same time they reflected on themselves, you know. They became object of research, which is very unusual. It's not academic, it's not activist, it's something third. And I think this militant research is
And this is exactly the small organizations doing things together but in same time they reflected on themselves, you know. They became object of research, which is very unusual. It's not academic, it's not activist, it's something third. And I think this militant research is
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quite interesting because if you want to do some social actions, you need to prepare yourself before that. So you will spend time with people, organize them, do certain procedures and
quite interesting because if you want to do some social actions, you need to prepare yourself before that. So you will spend time with people, organize them, do certain procedures and
Slavoj Žižek
continue if
continue if
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everything failed down.
everything failed down.
Slavoj Žižek
You can just continue and... and be with them and talk with them and exactly stay in
You can just continue and... and be with them and talk with them and exactly stay in
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this organization. Žižek: And can I just add another, just very briefly, praising you... Occupy Wall Street people? You know in what sense? No, no, I'm not bluffing here, I'll be very precise. I
this organization. Žižek: And can I just add another, just very briefly, praising you... Occupy Wall Street people? You know in what sense? No, no, I'm not bluffing here, I'll be very precise. I
Slavoj Žižek
read now in a very good book on Buddhism how we mystify Buddhism in the West. Our first association is transcendental meditation and so on. But I read there a fact which should have been obvious to me but it's usually neglected: that in the countries where Buddhism is really daily form of life—I don't
read now in a very good book on Buddhism how we mystify Buddhism in the West. Our first association is transcendental meditation and so on. But I read there a fact which should have been obvious to me but it's usually neglected: that in the countries where Buddhism is really daily form of life—I don't
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know, Thailand, whatever—large, large, large majority of people don't meditate. For them,
know, Thailand, whatever—large, large, large majority of people don't meditate. For them,
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Buddhism means you just follow
Buddhism means you just follow
Slavoj Žižek
certain rules, you know, you have your own problems,
certain rules, you know, you have your own problems,
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and people who meditate are more a kind of a model which present hope to you. Like, you know, "It's good
and people who meditate are more a kind of a model which present hope to you. Like, you know, "It's good
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to know that some people meditated and reached a
to know that some people meditated and reached a
Slavoj Žižek
certain level. I was not able to do it," no? And I noticed how in the same way, and don't patronize them, many people who didn't come there to Zuccotti Park or whatever, related to you in this way: it it did stir something in them up like, "My God, but you are there to remind them." That something can be done and so on and so on. Don't blame them if this is maybe even one of your crucial roles, that just to be there as a living reminder to other people. You know, don't underestimate this. Herbert McCabe called it "mystic guerrilla." Questioner So... um, right now in the United... I mean, the original intended role of the general strike is to have a literal shutdown of the cities of the country as a reminder to the ruling class that we retain the power. Um, I don't think that's going to happen quite here yet, but um, if we look at previous successful strikes such as Janitors with Justice or the Sotheby's workers, um, how do we retain, you know, in this paradigm that the workers, that we, you know, truly control ourselves, if that's the case and how do we make sure that it becomes a general strike and not just a collection of individual specific strikes? Žižek: Yeah. I would focus on something else, but this is a common-sense pragmatic thing. You know, let me try to think—this is very easy for me, my mind works like that—let me try to think from the other guys, from our enemies, to imagine. If I were to be your enemy, I would have said let me pray that your strike will succeed so that even for one day the life of ordinary people would be deeply perturbed: no this, no that, so that they will just be reminded what chaos there will be if state control no longer functions, you know. And my idea would have been to find creative ways to fight this. For
certain level. I was not able to do it," no? And I noticed how in the same way, and don't patronize them, many people who didn't come there to Zuccotti Park or whatever, related to you in this way: it it did stir something in them up like, "My God, but you are there to remind them." That something can be done and so on and so on. Don't blame them if this is maybe even one of your crucial roles, that just to be there as a living reminder to other people. You know, don't underestimate this. Herbert McCabe called it "mystic guerrilla." Questioner So... um, right now in the United... I mean, the original intended role of the general strike is to have a literal shutdown of the cities of the country as a reminder to the ruling class that we retain the power. Um, I don't think that's going to happen quite here yet, but um, if we look at previous successful strikes such as Janitors with Justice or the Sotheby's workers, um, how do we retain, you know, in this paradigm that the workers, that we, you know, truly control ourselves, if that's the case and how do we make sure that it becomes a general strike and not just a collection of individual specific strikes? Žižek: Yeah. I would focus on something else, but this is a common-sense pragmatic thing. You know, let me try to think—this is very easy for me, my mind works like that—let me try to think from the other guys, from our enemies, to imagine. If I were to be your enemy, I would have said let me pray that your strike will succeed so that even for one day the life of ordinary people would be deeply perturbed: no this, no that, so that they will just be reminded what chaos there will be if state control no longer functions, you know. And my idea would have been to find creative ways to fight this. For
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example, there was I don't know in what country, maybe even England, the transport strike, where they did an ingenious thing: subway trains still run but for free. You know, it was a wonderful thing because it hit really only the
example, there was I don't know in what country, maybe even England, the transport strike, where they did an ingenious thing: subway trains still run but for free. You know, it was a wonderful thing because it hit really only the
Slavoj Žižek
enemy. You know, and this is I think important. Yes, we should remind those up how we have the power, but don't hit the wrong target. To... to find creative ways so that ordinary people will not just, "Oh, again those rich guys who have time to be... to be... to be in Zuccotti Park, now they want even to annoy, to perturb our daily lives." To find creative ways to prevent this
enemy. You know, and this is I think important. Yes, we should remind those up how we have the power, but don't hit the wrong target. To... to find creative ways so that ordinary people will not just, "Oh, again those rich guys who have time to be... to be... to be in Zuccotti Park, now they want even to annoy, to perturb our daily lives." To find creative ways to prevent this
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kind
kind
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of perception of the strike. For me at least, this would have been the focus of it. Questioner That was very helpful. Thank
of perception of the strike. For me at least, this would have been the focus of it. Questioner That was very helpful. Thank
Slavoj Žižek
you. Žižek: Thank you, my God.
you. Žižek: Thank you, my God.