A Lacanian Plea for Fundamentalism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2000-09-18 · 1:26:03 · 13,098 words
ideologypsychoanalysisreligion-theologycapitalismhegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnessphilosophy-generalsubjectivityrace-antisemitismcinema-art-cultureeveryday-lifeethicsgeopolitics-wartechnology-ai-cyberspace
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture structured around Lacan's 'big Other' as a cobweb of unwritten social rules, using Hollywood clichés and academic life as entry points. He argues that contemporary ideology functions not through symptomatic repression but through fetishistic disavowal, exemplified by Western Buddhism as the perfect ideological supplement to global capitalism. The talk then develops a 'defense of fundamentalism', distinguishing authentic fundamentalists (Tibetans, Amish) who lack envy from false fundamentalists and multiculturalists who share an obsessive fascination with the other's enjoyment. It closes with reflections on trauma, the Judeo-Christian legacy, Lacan's ethics of the act, and a critique of the Derrida-Habermas consensus around the ethics of openness to otherness.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 28
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “big Other”
The symbolic substance of social being, not explicit rules but the intricate cobweb of unwritten, implicit rules that hold communities together and are even prohibited from being stated publicly.
The implicit regulations of social life that are more binding than explicit laws precisely because their public announcement is itself forbidden, illustrated by Hollywood clichés and Stalinist political culture.
The academic debating tactic Žižek criticizes as theoretically wrong: when lacking arguments, demanding ever-more concrete context ('Which woman? Spanish, lesbian?'), wrong because reality itself is already governed by real abstraction.
The Marxian mechanism by which social reality is already governed by abstraction, people are treated as abstract possessors of value, used here to counter historicist demands for ever-more contextualization.
as “real abstraction (Realabstraktion)”
Marx's concept that abstraction is not only a procedure of thought but is inscribed in social relations themselves, in commodity fetishism one is treated as an abstract bearer of value, not a concrete person.
as “mourning”
The successful Freudian work of accepting loss through symbolization/internalization, renouncing the real object while gaining its meaning (Aufhebung of the object); today's doxa wrongly dismisses this as betrayal.
as “melancholy”
Not mere failed mourning but, following Agamben, an intention to mourn that anticipates and precedes the loss, the subject has the object but has already lost the cause of desire.
Hegelian sublation, the dialectical process of negating and preserving, invoked here as the work of mourning that elevates the lost object from its immediate reality to its meaning.
as “object of desire versus cause of desire”
Lacanian distinction between what one desires (the object) and that on whose behalf one desires it (the cause, usually unconscious); the melancholic loses the cause while retaining the object, extinguishing desire itself.
as “objet petit a / cause of desire”
The Lacanian cause (not object) of desire, that unconscious, often unrecognizable feature on behalf of which one desires the object; its loss while the object remains constitutes the melancholic structure.
Implied in the discussion of transferential relationships, the person (father-figure/professor) whose opinion confers desirability on the object, making him the true cause of desire rather than the object itself.
as “symptomal logic”
The structuralist-era understanding of how ideology works through repression and the return of the repressed truth, contrasted with the contemporary fetishistic mode in which the lie is no longer repressed but openly sustained by a disavowal-object.
The return of the repressed truth within the field of a globalized lie, the older, structuralist-era mode of ideological functioning that Žižek contrasts with the now-dominant fetishistic mode.
as “fetish / fetishistic disavowal”
A particular lie or object that enables one to sustain a cynically realistic attitude toward a traumatic truth; in contrast to the symptom, the fetish is not the return of the repressed but the very shield that allows full confrontation with the truth.
Camp term for concentration-camp prisoners deprived of all subjectivity, living dead who neither defended themselves nor engaged in egotistic survival strategies; the racist etymology (passive Muslims) is noted and critiqued.
Žižek's term for the New Age adoption of Buddhist/Taoist attitudes in the West, which he argues functions as the hegemonic ideological supplement of global capitalism, providing inner distance that allows more efficient participation in the capitalist dynamic.
as “ideological superstructure / economic infrastructure”
The classical Marxist base/superstructure distinction, invoked to describe the paradox where European capitalism triumphs at the infrastructure level while Asiatic New Age spirituality conquers the ideological superstructure.
The capacity to orient oneself within an accelerating social/technological environment, Žižek uses its absence (future shock) to explain the appeal of Western Buddhism as a coping mechanism.
as “Eurocentrism as decentrement”
Žižek's claim that the fundamental ingredient of Eurocentrism is not simple self-assertion but the idea that wisdom is always elsewhere, a displaced search for a lost original jewel, from Plato's Egypt to Tibet.
The shared structural feature of both moral-majority fundamentalists and false multiculturalists, a fascinated obsession with the transgressive enjoyment presumed to be occurring in the other's space; its absence defines authentic fundamentalism.
For Žižek, thrift (one of the seven deadly sins) is not the opposite of desire but its purest form, the miser's relation to the hoarded treasure is Lacan's paradigm of the subject's relation to the object of desire; capitalism then introduces the paradox that one must spend to preserve.
as “Gnostic ideology”
The dominant cyberspace/virtual-reality ideology, characterized by radical self-objectivization (genome) overlapping with radical subjectivization (virtual immersion), a spiritualized body escaping material resistance, against which Žižek defends the Judeo-Christian notion of reality as that which resists.
Fichte's term for the external impetus or check that the absolute ego necessarily encounters, used by Žižek to argue that human subjectivity always requires an external traumatic encounter, not inner self-discovery.
The thesis that what makes human beings spiritual/symbolic is not Gnostic inner self-discovery but a derailing external traumatic encounter with the other's desire, exemplified by the Jewish call of God and by psychoanalytic structure.
Derrida's concept of democracy as a perpetually deferred ideal, cited by Žižek as an example of the shared Derrida-Habermas assumption that a gap between unconditional ethical call and concrete politics must always be maintained.
In the Lacanian sense: an unconditional gesture that closes the gap between an ethical injunction and concrete political action, exemplified by Antigone's refusal to argue, which Žižek defends against the Derridean-Habermasian ethics of the infinite gap.
Žižek's term for nations (like Bosnian Muslims) whose ethnic identity is explicitly experienced not as biological given but as a reflexive, performative choice, an artificially imposed identity that became a genuine point of identification.
A position (exemplified by Tibetans and the Amish) that is free of envy of the other's enjoyment and therefore genuinely tolerant, in contrast to false moral-majority fundamentalism, which is defined by obsessive fascination with the other.
Stories he reaches for 9
At a Central Committee session, the person who stands up and says 'Don't you know it's prohibited to criticize Stalin?' would be arrested before the critic himself, because the prohibition on criticism was itself prohibited from being stated.
“the second one would be arrested earlier than the first one. Because although everybody knew that it is prohibited to criticize Stalin, this prohibition itself was prohibited.”
Žižek's communist friends call him 'Fidel' because, like Fidel Castro, he promises 'just five minutes of remarks' and then goes on for five hours.
“friends of mine... call me Fidel, because you know, Fidels like comrades, just five minutes of remarks and then you are for five hours.”
Twenty-five years ago, having your argument compared to Hannah Arendt was a conversation-ender; today she is almost untouchable even for those (like Kristeva or Bernstein) who should theoretically oppose her.
“when somebody in the debate stood up and said, 'But what you just said reminds me of Hannah Arendt,' it means you are finished.”
Reading Mein Kampf, one finds Hitler at one moment coolly describing how to manipulate crowds with a simple enemy-image, and a few pages later exploding in obviously sincere rage, illustrating how one can start with a conscious lie and end up believing it.
“he was fully aware that he is manipulating but at the same time he believed in it.”
Agnes Heller reported that even the most ruthless egotistic survivors in concentration camps always maintained a rumor that somewhere there was one person who had retained dignity; when they discovered this was fiction, they regressed to Muselmann state.
“all these people... there was always, always, I emphasize this always, a rumor among them that there is one. There is one person... who retained his or her dignity.”
Creon in Sophocles' Antigone is actually the Habermasian, he gives reasons, argues his case, is communicatively rational. Antigone simply insists without argument: 'I want because I want.' Žižek takes this as the model of the Lacanian act.
“the only Habermasian in the play is Creon. The bad king... He gives reasons... And what is Antigone's answer? None! She says, 'No, I want because I want, I want...' She simply insists.”
Plato refers to Egypt as the true locus of wisdom, the founding gesture of Western Eurocentrism's decentrement, continuous from Plato to contemporary airport bestsellers about pyramid mysteries.
“For him it's clear, who were these others? Egyptians, no? Plato all the time refers to Egypt as the true locus of wisdom.”
The top third of a toothpaste tube is colored differently and marked 'free', Žižek is always tempted to cut it off and demand just that part, but it doesn't work, illustrating capitalism's promise that spending more saves more.
“I'm always tempted to say, to cut off and give me... give me just that, no? But it doesn't go.”
New Age Buddhist/Taoist courses openly advertise that inner peace will make participants perform better on the market, their own marketing confirms that the spiritual practice serves capitalist efficiency rather than opposing it.
“after our course you will be able to function even better on the market”
Works invoked 8
Antigone play
Central philosophical example for the Lacanian act: Antigone's unconditional insistence without argument contrasted with Creon's Habermasian reasoning, Žižek defends Antigone as the model of the ethical act.
Mein Kampf book
Described as boring and 'even worse than Ayn Rand'; nonetheless used intellectually to demonstrate the paradox of cynical sincerity, Hitler simultaneously describes manipulation and sincerely believes his own lie.
Atlas Shrugged book
Mentioned only as the benchmark of tedious unreadability that Mein Kampf allegedly surpasses.
The Fragile Absolute book
Žižek's own book, self-referenced twice: first because he narcissistically looked it up in a bookstore and found it in the Christian section; second because it contains the Israeli kibbutz pig example showing Jewish legalism without superego guilt.
Used as the model for a proposed (hypothetical) sequel: 'The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism', the structural homology frames Žižek's argument about Western Buddhism.
Romeo and Juliet play
Juliet's formula 'the more I give, the more I have' is cited as the basic paradox of capitalism, spending to multiply.
Cited for Lacan's elaboration (with reference to Simone Weil) of the miser as the paradigm of specifically human desire, not yet translated into English at the time of the talk.
Praised as 'formidable'; the fruit cart and grocery bag rules are used to illustrate the big Other's unwritten implicit rules.
People invoked 26
Colonel Francis Younghusband negative
British commander who invaded Tibet, slaughtered Tibetans, then declared inner peace upon entering Lhasa, the paradigmatic example of colonial false reverence for the other.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte positive
Cited for the concept of Anstoß, the external check the absolute ego necessarily encounters, used to argue against Gnostic inner self-discovery and for the necessity of external traumatic encounter.
Jacques Derrida negative
Critiqued for sharing with Habermas the premise of an irreducible gap between unconditional ethical call and pragmatic politics ('démocratie à venir'); Žižek argues this gap must be closed by the act (Antigone).
Ayn Rand negative
Mentioned only as the benchmark of tedious unreadability, Mein Kampf is described as 'even worse than Ayn Rand, this Atlas Shrugged.'
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe positive
Cited for the claim that the Jewish prohibition on images is connected to the prohibition on killing, Žižek endorses this connection via the idea that the image would reveal a primordial crime.
Simone Weil positive
Mentioned as the reference point in Lacan's Seminar 6 discussion of the miser as paradigm of desire.
Mentioned as an example of a psychoanalyst who should theoretically oppose Arendt (given Arendt's anti-psychoanalysis stance) but who now treats her with respect.
Founder of the Amish; noted to have been extremely aggressive and violent, every Amish person is extremely embarrassed even to mention him, illustrating the dialectic of asceticism gone wrong.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout; invoked for the big Other, object/cause of desire distinction, the miser as paradigm of desire (Seminar 6), jouissance, and the ethics of the act. Žižek aligns himself fully with Lacan's position on Antigone.
Cited as an example of a Frankfurt School–oriented thinker who should oppose Arendt (given her hostility to Frankfurt School) but now defers to her.
Roger Ebert positive
His 'Little Book of Hollywood Clichés' is praised as 'formidable' and used to illustrate the big Other's unwritten rules via the fruit cart and grocery bag rules.
Daniel Dennett positive
Officially designated as an enemy ('cognitive psychology'), but his point about Lincoln's ambiguous quote is cited approvingly as 'spontaneously a Hegelian one', a rare partial endorsement.
Judith Butler positive
Described as 'my good friend enemy', Žižek fully accepts her critique that he (in early work) assumed an authentic feminine position behind male distortions; Butler's counter that there is nothing behind the distortions is endorsed.
Ágnes Heller positive
Hungarian philosopher who taught at New School for Social Research; cited for her testimony about concentration camp survivors' fetishistic need to believe in 'the one who retained dignity.'
Giorgio Agamben positive
Cited in partial agreement: Agamben's analysis of melancholy as anticipatory mourning (intention to mourn that precedes loss) is endorsed here, despite Žižek noting he does not always agree with Agamben.
Jerry Falwell negative
Moral majority false fundamentalist, mentioned because Žižek's book was shelved next to Falwell's in a Christian bookstore.
Adolf Hitler negative
Mein Kampf used to illustrate the ideology thesis that one can start with a conscious manipulation and end up genuinely believing one's own lie, the paradox of cynical sincerity.
Pat Robertson negative
Moral majority false fundamentalist, shelved next to Žižek's book in a Christian bookstore; cited as epitome of false fundamentalism driven by envy.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Cited (by an audience member quoting him) for the formula 'there is no other', taken up as the paradox of fundamentalism that must maintain a space within itself.
Used as an example of shifting academic status: once career-ending to be compared to her, now she is untouchable. No substantive endorsement or critique of her ideas.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Critiqued alongside Derrida for the ethics of communicative openness; Creon in Antigone is identified as 'the only Habermasian', on the wrong side. Habermas's communicative rationalism is shown to translate into Creon's losing position.
Plato positive
Cited as the founding figure of Western Eurocentrism's de-centered structure, Plato points to Egypt as the locus of original wisdom, establishing the pattern from antiquity to contemporary airport pyramid books.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked for commodity fetishism and Realabstraktion (real abstraction), the thesis that abstraction is inscribed in social relations themselves, used against historicist contextualism.
Sigmund Freud positive
Freud's distinction between normal mourning (acceptance of loss through symbolization) and pathological melancholy (narcissistic identification with lost object) is the baseline Žižek defends against today's academic doxa.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central philosophical authority: invoked for Aufhebung, the dialectic of asceticism, the passage from consciousness to self-consciousness ('behind the veil nothing but what you put there'), the logic of ideology coming second, and as context for Antigone.
Max Weber positive
Proposed as the intellectual who would, if alive today, write 'The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism', used to frame the homology between Protestantism/capitalism and Taoism/global capitalism.
What it argues
unwritten rules and the big Other as symbolic substancefetishistic disavowal as the dominant mode of contemporary ideologymourning versus melancholy and the loss of the cause of desireWestern Buddhism as ideological supplement to global capitalismdefense of authentic fundamentalism against envious false fundamentalismtrauma as external encounter versus Gnostic inner self-discoverythe ethics of the act against the Derrida-Habermas gap between norm and politics
Dialectical moves 12
“The semblance had to be unconditionally maintained that it is allowed to criticize Stalin — the prohibition itself was prohibited.”
The unwritten rule that enforces obedience is more absolute than the explicit rule because it cannot even be named; the second-order prohibition is the real power.
“Melancholy is not the failure to mourn but its very opposite: an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object.”
What appears as excessive attachment (melancholy) is actually a pre-emptive mourning, the subject has already lost the cause of desire while still possessing the object.
“The melancholic loses not the object of desire but desire itself — he has what he wants, but no longer wants it.”
The apparent paradox of melancholy resolves into a loss not of the object but of the cause, extinguishing desire while leaving the object intact.
“Far from being the remedy against capitalist stress, Western Buddhism is the perfect ideological supplement of global capitalism.”
What presents itself as resistance to the capitalist dynamic in fact enables more efficient participation in it by providing a false inner distance.
“Consumption is the mode of appearance of its very opposite — thrift.”
Capitalism does not produce subjects of pure consumption but subjects for whom spending is always already economizing, the miser's logic generalized.
“The true trauma is not that behind the mask there is some horrible other, but that there is nothing behind the mask — only what you put there.”
The Hegelian lesson (from Hegel's passage on consciousness to self-consciousness) that the apparent mystery of the other dissolves into a reflexive encounter with one's own projections.
“The mysteries of the Egyptians were mysteries also for the Egyptians themselves.”
The obstacle preventing us from understanding the other is not our epistemological limitation but the other's own non-self-identity, the other does not possess the hidden truth we seek.
“The only true fundamentalists — hence the only truly tolerant people — are those who do not envy the other's enjoyment.”
Tolerance is not the product of openness toward otherness but of indifference to it, authentic fundamentalism, paradoxically, produces the most genuine multiculturalism.
“Creon is the only Habermasian in Antigone — he argues, gives reasons, is communicatively rational; Antigone simply insists without argument, and she is right.”
The supposedly rational communicative position (Creon/Habermas) is on the wrong side; unconditional insistence without argumentation (Antigone/Lacan) is the authentic ethical stance.
“The most racist attitude is not reducing the other to primitivism but the opposite: insisting there is always an inaccessible mystery to the other that we can never fully comprehend.”
Mystification of the other through infinite deference reproduces colonial structure more insidiously than overt hierarchy.
“In order to be a ruthless egotist in the concentration camp, you needed to believe that somewhere there is one who retained dignity — you needed a fetish.”
Even pure egotism requires an ideological supplement: the fictional other who embodies the values one has abandoned.
“The very procedure by which the Amish try to assert modesty undermines the goal — the more modest they make themselves, the more arrogant the very procedure of marking that modesty.”
A Hegelian dialectic of asceticism: the performance of humility is self-subverting because it re-introduces the very distinction (us vs. them) it claims to refuse.
Claims 24
asserts
What holds communities together is not explicit rules but unwritten implicit rules — rules that are even prohibited from being stated publicly.the big Other / social symbolic order
rejects
Today's academic doxa wrongly reverses Freud's hierarchy by treating melancholy (fidelity to the lost object) as the ethical stance and mourning as betrayal.contemporary deconstructionist reassertion of melancholy
asserts
The melancholic does not lose the object of desire but the cause of desire — he has what he wants but no longer desires it.the structure of melancholy
asserts
The dominant mode of ideology today is no longer symptomatic (repression + return of the repressed) but fetishistic — a particular lie that enables one to sustain full cynical contact with the truth.contemporary ideology
asserts
Western Buddhism functions as the perfect ideological supplement of global capitalism by providing a false inner distance that makes capitalist participation more efficient rather than less.Western Buddhism / New Age ideology
asserts
If Max Weber were alive today he would write a supplementary volume to The Protestant Ethic entitled 'The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.'Taoist/Buddhist ethics and capitalism
asserts
Both moral-majority fundamentalists and postmodern multiculturalists share the same structure of envy — a fascinated obsession with the transgressive enjoyment of the other.false fundamentalism and false multiculturalism
asserts
Authentic fundamentalists (Tibetans, Amish) are the only truly tolerant people because they lack this envy and do not need to seek wisdom elsewhere.authentic fundamentalism and tolerance
asserts
Eurocentrism is constitutively de-centered — its fundamental ingredient is the idea that wisdom is always elsewhere, requiring a violent journey to retrieve it.Eurocentrism
asserts
The dominant ideology of global capitalism is not Christianity but New Age Asiatic thought (Buddhism, Taoism) — which is conquering the Western ideological superstructure precisely as Western capitalism conquers the economic infrastructure of Asia.global ideological hegemony
reframes
Consumer society is a misnomer: capitalism is characterized by consumption as the mode of appearance of its very opposite — thrift.capitalism and consumption
asserts
The drug junkie is the only true subject of pure consumption in capitalism precisely because he goes to the end without the element of thrift.drug addiction and capitalism
asserts
Cyberspace ideology is essentially Gnostic — it offers a resolution of the tension between thrift and consumption by allowing one to act out all fantasies in a virtual, non-material mode.cyberspace / virtual reality ideology
asserts
Reality is always defined by minimal resistance and friction; the Gnostic prospect of full virtualization erases precisely this defining feature of the real.the real / virtual reality
asserts
What makes human beings spiritual is not inner self-discovery (the Gnostic path) but an external traumatic encounter with the other's desire — a lesson shared by the Judeo-Christian tradition and psychoanalysis.human subjectivity and trauma
asserts
Derrida and Habermas, despite their apparent opposition, share the same fundamental premise: an irreducible gap between an unconditional ethical call and our pragmatic political measures.Derrida-Habermas consensus
asserts
Antigone, not Creon, exemplifies Lacan's notion of the act — her unconditional insistence without argumentation closes the gap between ethical injunction and concrete demand, making her 'totalitarian' in the best sense.Antigone / the Lacanian act
rejects
The historicist demand for contextualization is theoretically wrong because reality itself is already governed by real abstraction — abstraction is not merely a procedure of thought.historicist contextualization in academia
asserts
The most racist imaginable attitude is not the claim that the other is primitive but the mystifying idea that the other harbors an inaccessible, inexhaustible wisdom we can never fully understand.racism and Eurocentrism
asserts
The Bosnian Muslim identity is a postmodern ethnic identity — not a biological given but a reflexive choice, an artificially imposed category that became a genuine point of identification for which people were ready to die.Bosnian Muslim identity / Yugoslav wars
rejects
The Yugoslav wars were not primarily religious wars but political struggles that adopted a religious/ethnic semblance staged for Western consumption — ideology comes second, as a legitimation after the struggle begins.religious character of Yugoslav wars
asserts
In concentration camps, even the most ruthless egotistic survivors needed the fetishistic fiction that somewhere there was one person who retained dignity — without this fiction they regressed into Muselmann-like living dead.fetish / ideology under extreme conditions
asserts
The Jewish God is the first fully anthropomorphic God in the sense of being fully a person; pagan gods are merely impersonations of cosmic forces — and the prohibition of images exists because making an image of God would bring something horrible to light.Jewish iconoclasm and anthropomorphism
asserts
Cynical politicians who do not believe their own ideology need intellectuals nearby not to cover their criminal origins (Carnegie style) but to believe on their behalf — a fetishistic function.ideology, cynicism, and intellectuals
Quotes 18
“The prohibition itself was prohibited. It wasn't allowed to... that is to say, the appearance, the semblance had to be unconditionally maintained that it is allowed to criticize Stalin.”Slavoj Žižek · the unwritten rule as second-order prohibition
“What the melancholic subject actually loses is not the object of desire, but his desire itself. He has what he wants, he no longer desires it.”Slavoj Žižek · melancholy as loss of the cause of desire
“What you are really afraid of is not the fact that simply you will no longer be at your home. But what makes you really sad is the awareness that sooner or later you will lose your very attachment to your home.”Slavoj Žižek · melancholic anticipatory mourning
“It is the particular lie which enables you to sustain, to endure the truth. [The fetish]”Slavoj Žižek · fetish as disavowal enabling truth-contact
“Western Buddhism functions as the perfect ideological supplement to global capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · Western Buddhism as capitalist ideology
“If Max Weber were to live today, he would definitely wrote a second supplementary volume… entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · Taoism as the Protestant ethic of global capitalism
“Consumption is the mode of appearance of its very opposite, of thrift.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's inner structure as thrift, not consumption
“The junkie is effectively the only true subject of consumption. He really goes to the end, consumes himself in his unbowed consumption without reserve.”Slavoj Žižek · drug addiction as pure consumption capitalism cannot tolerate
“The true trauma is as Hegel puts it… that behind the veil of appearance there is nothing, only what you put there.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's lesson: the void behind appearance
“The mysteries of the Egyptians were mysteries also for the Egyptians themselves.”Slavoj Žižek · the other's non-self-identity / anti-Eurocentrist lesson
“The most racist imaginable attitude is this idea that we will never fully understand the other because… there is always something more to be learned.”Slavoj Žižek · mystification of the other as structural racism
“The only Habermasian in the play is Creon. The bad king.”Slavoj Žižek · Antigone's reversal: rational argument is on the wrong side
“Maybe Lacan is for this reason totalitarian, but then so am I.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's embrace of the Lacanian act against liberal ethics
“What I call Western Buddhism: at the very moment European capitalism triumphs at the level of infrastructure, Asiatic thought is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of Western Buddhism's ideological function
“In order to be egotistic monster and so on, fighting all the others, you had to believe that someone, there is someone. You needed a fetish.”Slavoj Žižek · fetish as necessary supplement to pure egotism
“Reality itself is always defined as that which resists through the minimal resistance, friction and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · the real as defined by minimal resistance — against Gnosticism
“Trauma is not simply part of your environment. Trauma is precisely that which doesn't fit your standard environment. It's something which derails you.”Slavoj Žižek · trauma as extra-environmental derailment
“You start with a conscious lie, you end up believing your own lie. This is I think, if anything, something which defines today our multiculturalism.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as sincere belief in one's own lie
Transcript 17 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here again. I think that five years ago, if I remember correctly, I was in this same room. It looks familiar. I thought that I could repeat the old Marx Brothers joke. No wonder that it looks like the same room, because it was the same room. Okay, it doesn't go. But since Carmen already thanked all the others, so I would like only to thank her, and so in a transitive logical way all others are covered, I hope. Okay, let me... I have, as usual, you will understand after listening to me, why some friends of mine, not of Communist leanings, call me Fidel, because you know, Fidels like comrades, just five minutes of remarks and then you are for five hours. So, I will try to do it more consistently, but nonetheless, it will take time. So, let me begin with a brief introduction to the notion of the big other. So-called Big Other as the symbolic substance of our being, as it were, the symbolic space within which we human beings dwell. People usually think about symbolic rules regulating social interaction and so on and so on. But I think it is much more productive to focus on another aspect of this so-called what Lacan calls big other, the intricate cobweb of unwritten implicit rules. They are never explicitly stated. If you state them explicitly, you even usually commit some kind of crime violation. You know, this is what always interests me, how what holds communities together are not explicit rules, but the unwritten rules which are even prohibited to be announced publicly. Now, you will say I'm exaggerating here. No, I'm not. Imagine even the most... one of, okay, the most totalitarian communities imaginable. The Stalinist. Really, they no longer make them like that today. The real old one from the thirties. You will say, but there everything was clear, no unwritten rules. Oh, they were. Imagine a session of the Central Committee where someone stands up and starts to criticize Stalin. Now, everybody knows this was prohibited. But that's the catch. Imagine someone else standing up and saying, "But listen, are you crazy? Don't you know that it's prohibited to criticize Comrade Stalin?" I claim the second one would be arrested earlier than the first one. Because although everybody knew that it is prohibited to criticize Stalin, this prohibition itself was prohibited. It wasn't allowed to... that is to say, the appearance, the semblance had to be unconditionally maintained that it is allowed to criticize Stalin, but simply, why criticize him since he's so good and so on? You know what... got my point, that the appearance of a free choice had to be sustained. So, how do then these unwritten rules function closer to our reality today? Let me begin, as it is probably expected from me, with Hollywood. Roger Ebert in his small book, *The Little Book of Hollywood Clichés*, enumerates hundreds of examples which I think are formidable. From the most obvious ones which all of you know, of course, the so-called fruit cart rule. You know, during any chase scene involving an ethnic locale, a fruit cart will be overturned and an angry peddler will run into the middle of the street and shake hero... you know, this is absolute rule at any James Bond or whatever. But there are much more intelligent unwritten rules, like what Ebert calls the grocery bag rule. Whenever a scared, cynical woman who doesn't want to fall in love again is pursued by a suitor who wants to tear down her so-called wall of loneliness, she will go grocery shopping. Then, when she exits, the bags will break and the fruits and vegetables spill around so that then the guy will step closer and literally help her to pick up the pieces of the fruit, which symbolically means to pick up the pieces of her life and so on and so on. You know, this is then what the big other is. This cobweb of unwritten rules. And this is how you become the member of a society. This is what false snobbery is. In a false snobbery, you follow exactly all the written rules, but nonetheless you are not in because, again, you don't follow the unwritten rules. Now, let's turn to a more unpleasant domain, which is ourselves, academia. I claim that today's academia, as every... all the time it was, also fully participates in this dialectic of unwritten rules. Let me first just mention two rules that I remember from my own lifetime. One is, did you notice how, at least in my experience, the status of Hannah Arendt changed in the last... I'm active in academia let's say for twenty-five years? I remember when I started participating at symposiums, when somebody in the debate stood up and said, "But what you just said reminds me of Hannah Arendt," it means you are finished. No, it means it's over. Today it's almost the opposite. She's almost the untouchable one. Even people who, as to their theoretical orientation, should have been opposed to her, like psychoanalysts like Julia Kristeva, since as we know Hannah Arendt was against psychoanalysis, or people like Richard Bernstein, since as we know Hannah Arendt was for personal reasons, we don't know why, very much against Frankfurt School. Even they treat her with respect. Another rule is the rule which I really hate, which is I think theoretically wrong although it masks as politically correct. And it may appear as a Hegelian, but I think it's the ultimate affront to anyone who knows even vaguely what Hegel is about. This rule of historicist contextualization. If you have a debate in concepts, in notions, true notions with someone, the other one, the other guy today, when he lacks arguments, can always play this game of "Yes, but you speak about X, whatever, let's say women. There is no woman. Which woman do you mean? Spanish, lesbian, and so on." You know, this false notion that you can always approach the other with the lack of contextualization, like contextualize, give the concrete context. Why do I think that this is wrong, although again and again you find this argument? Because, and here I will try to make a nice Hegel-Marxian argument, because if the Marxian so-called dialectic of commodity fetishism has any meaning, it says, it claims that... and this is what Marx aimed at with his notion of so-called *Realabstraktion*, real abstraction. That our social reality itself is already ruled, governed by abstractions. It's, for example, commodity fetishism means that in social reality itself, you are treated as an abstract entity, as the possessor of value only and so on and so on. So again, reality itself already has in it this abstraction. Abstraction is not only the procedure of our thinking, it is inscribed in social relations themselves. But okay, so that I don't get lost in these preambles, my main example, the third rule with which I will actually begin, of these unwritten rules, concerns the relationship I noticed between mourning and melancholy. This may appear to you an innocent example, but when I was in Chicago half a year ago, a little bit more, at the last MLA, I know—I will not tell you names—okay, but I know of over five examples of young postgraduates and so on who didn't get their job because their position here was wrong. Because they opted for, to put it in naive terms, for mourning against melancholy. Namely, what I claim is the unwritten rule today. It's the anti-Freudian rule. The doxa today which you have to obey is the following one, I claim. Freud opposed the normal mourning, the successful acceptance of the loss, to the pathological melancholy. The subject insists in his or her narcissistic identification with the lost object. That is to say, Freud's idea was: when someone close, dear to you dies or you lose him in any other way, or her, the proper thing to do is to come to terms with this loss through the work of symbolization or internalization. You renounce the real object, but you gain his or her or its meaning. You come to terms with it. While melancholy is then conceived as a failed mourning. You still remain attached to the particular object. You are unable to perform what—maybe they are justified here, maybe not—it is justified but let's say in vaguely Hegelian terms, we can call the *Aufhebung*, the sublation of the immediate reality of the object in its his or her meaning. So, this is the standard, in a very simplified way rendered here of course, approach. But in contrast to it, today's doxa is to reverse the terms and to claim that no, mourning is the betrayal of the fidelity to the object. And then comes all this deconstructionist jargon. There is an indivisible remainder, there is something which resists this Hegelian sublation, and the true fidelity is the fidelity to this remainder. So, in other words, melancholy is the truly ethical stance of fidelity. You don't accept, you don't renounce the object. The one who accomplishes the work of mourning is, well, the traitor, to put it in a simplified way. And of course, this story can be given a multitude of twists. From the queer one: homosexuals are those who retain the fidelity to the repressed identification with the same-sex libidinal object. To the post-colonial ethnic one: when an ethnic group enters the capitalist modernization, when it is under the threat that its specific legacy will be swallowed by the new global culture, what a lot of post-colonials advise us is to adopt this kind of attitude of mourning. You know, like, I do participate in the global capitalist game, but nonetheless I retain my fidelity to the lost ethnic roots. So again, I claim that this reassertion of melancholy is not only politically wrong in the sense that I claim that it fits perfectly this sticking to the lost roots, this attachment, continued attachment to the lost ethnic whatever roots, renders perfectly the ideal structure of subjectivity of today's so-called postmodern, global, however we call subjectivity. It's also at the same time, for the same reasons, ultimately theoretically wrong. In what way? I would like to refer here to the work of Giorgio Agamben, with whom I otherwise do not always agree, but here I do, when he emphasizes how in contrast to mourning, melancholy is not simply the failure of the work of mourning, the persistence of the attachment to the real of the object. But melancholy is rather its very opposite. If in the process of mourning you engage precisely in the rituals of mourning, you mourn the loss of the object, the libidinal object after you lose it. Melancholy offers the paradox of an intention to mourn which precedes and anticipates the loss of the object. That's the first thing to note here, I think. What makes melancholy so strange is not, "No, I don't want to lose the object, I retain my fidelity to the object." It's the contrary. It's: the object is still here, and I already treat it as if it's lost. I already mourn its loss. Now, how can this happen? Ah, here we should elaborate things a little bit. The first thing to do is to introduce the distinction between object, in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, between object and cause of desire. The object of desire is simply the, to simplify it somehow again, that which you desire, the desired object. I don't know, in sexual terms, a woman, a man, whomever you want to have sex with or whatsoever. On the contrary, the cause of desire is that on behalf of which you desire this object. And the two are not the same. When you are libidinally attached to some person, the psychoanalytic question is always: what makes you desire this object? And this is usually even to the person, to the desiring subject him or herself, this is never obvious. Usually, this is even unconscious. It is some feature, some particular feature which then, of course, within the chain of unconscious associations reminds you of something else. I will not go here into these boring stories of how you fall in love with a woman where some feature of this woman reminds you of your mother, all these stories. It's not as simple as that. Why not? Because I think it's usually even the opposite. For example, often you fall in love, if you are heterosexual, with a woman because the person, the male friend with whom you have a kind of transferential relationship, gave you a hint that this woman is worthy of desire. I know for example of, not from my personal life—I'm fortunate enough—but from a friend of mine who was in love with a certain woman and suddenly dropped her like hot potato, as you put it. What happened? He learned that the guy, whom he thought had a high opinion of this woman, that it was really a misunderstanding, that it wasn't this woman whom this other guy... and now you will think this is an extreme example. No, I claim you get here only at its purest the structure of it. What did happen to me is once when I was young, I was involved in the usual process of seduction, and these were still old times of socialism where, you know, in order to get the approach to the lady, okay young girl, I had to talk with her father, who was a philosopher, my professor. And the lady was, the girl was intelligent enough to notice that, how should I put it, although she was the object of my desire, the cause of my desire was her father's respect. So that she noticed at a certain point that I'm so deeply concerned in fascinating intellectually her father that at a certain point she said, "Okay, you two guys, why don't you talk it out and I can leave?" No, and it's really between the two of you. So again, there always is a gap between the two. Why am I mentioning this? Because this allows us now to return to the paradox of the melancholic. The melancholic is not the one who loses the object of desire. He has the object, but he or she has lost the cause of desire. The paradox of the melancholic is that he or she has what he or she wants, but the cause is no longer here and so, in other words, the desire is no longer here. So again, what the melancholic subject actually loses is not the object of desire, but his desire itself. He has what he wants, he no longer desires it. So that you will not say that I'm giving you only here cheap paradoxes, invented sexual examples, let me give you a more tragic ordinary but nonetheless, I think, profound experience. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are forced because of, I don't know, professional interests, marriage, whatsoever, to leave, to change the place where you live. To leave the place which was for long years your home. Now of course, you are sad. And now I will make a naive experiment and ask you, look, imagine this situation and look deep into yourself. What are you really afraid of? I claim if you really look deep into yourself, you would discover that what you are really afraid of is not the fact that simply you will no longer be at your home. But what makes you really sad is the awareness that sooner or later you will lose your very attachment to your home. That's what makes you sad. This is what you really know. So this is then, in a closer perspective, the melancholic structure. Now, why all this stuff about melancholy? I think that these paradoxes of melancholy are crucial if we want to understand how today ideology functions. In the traditional way, ideology functions following what, once in the good old times of structuralism, it was called the symptomal logic. What is symptom in psychoanalysis? To put it in the most elementary terms, it is the return of the repressed truth within the field of the globalized lie. Let's say you organize your life, your symbolic universe, based upon a certain lie in the sense of something is repressed, and then of course then the repressed returns. These are symptoms, the returns of the repressed. Let's take again an example of mourning. Let's say that someone close to you suddenly dies. In the case of a symptom, you would repress this knowledge. Let's say your beloved wife dies of a breast cancer. You repress it, don't want to... but then of course, you know, whatever sooner or later you go around, something will remind you of this traumatic fact. The repressed returns. This is, okay, elementary enough. But now you will say, "In our postmodern, cynical, whatever times, we no longer have these ideological lies that had to be then undermined through symptoms. Aren't we today cynical enough to accept the way things truly are and so on?" Ah, I claim no, the deception is in a way even more radical, more refined today. The structure today, predominant structure, is no longer that of a symptom. Again, symptom as the return of the repressed, as the moments where the truth returns within the global field of a lie. But fetish... sorry, symptom is the opposite. It's—sorry, fetish—it's the particular lie which enables you to sustain, to endure the truth. Let me give you... let me return to the same example, that of a death of a beloved person. It's a sad experience which actually happened to a friend of mine, but probably not only to him. His wife died of breast cancer and what we all were so shocked, his friends, was how he was able, this friend of mine, of a totally realistic attitude in the sense of no trauma apparently. He was able not only to sustain but to talk about it. You know, this was how it was when she was dying, this, that. No denial! We thought, "My God, is he a monster?" so-called, or what? Then at some point we understood. He was able to confront the truth because the disavowal was embodied in the fetish. And it's very sentimental, almost in the style of the early Hollywood melodramas, the fetish was the cat. The cat, the wife's favorite pet, the cat. He simply... he simply embodied his denial. We noticed then a subtle detail, okay not even so subtle, of almost too melodramatic, that all the time when he was discussing his wife's final suffering and death, he was holding this cat in his hands and so on. The idea was, "Yeah, yeah, we can talk, but here I have my fetish." This fetish provides a kind of a shield. It's in a way, "I can confront truth because here it's the element which tells me that... which allows me to maintain a distance towards the truth." Which is why incidentally, again it's a very simple story but nonetheless sad, when the usual thing happened, when this poor cat was overrun by a car, she immediately... he, sorry, he immediately broke down and had to be hospitalized, no? Because again, it wasn't only the cat. It was that the fetish which enabled him to sustain reality was taken from him. So, I hope now that you got the point, the paradox that I'm aiming at. That fetishists are not, you know, crazy people who live in a world of strange beliefs. No! The magic, almost the nice realistic pragmatic solution of the fetishist when confronted with a traumatic fact is that they organize their universe so that they can very well survive in an extremely cynically realist way. Everything functions. They can talk about traumas and so on and so on, because the reference to the fetish enables them to maintain a necessary distance. And I claim again that whenever today we hear about all this mantra about how the loss of values, people are cynical and so on and so on, I claim no, people are cynical at a certain superficial level, but they always have fetishes to support their cynicism. And the first task of a critique of ideology today is to look for these points of a fetishist belief. And they can be sometimes even surprisingly simple. See, I was involved up to a point, I even still am, in my own country, and it's nice to be involved there in politics because we are two millions. What's this? Nothing. It's kind of a small village where Slovenia, everybody knows everybody else, which is why the system is transparent. What always amuses me—this is a nice example of the fetishist logic—of how the more our politicians, those who are—not all of them are, but most of them are with us also—the more they are corrupted, cynical in the sense of, "Who cares about ideology, freedom? Let's just do the job," the more they want in their proximity us, intellectuals. Why? Not simply for the same reason that these American barons, gangster industrialist like Carnegie, wanted, you know, gave endowments to universities to erase their criminal origins. But because they didn't believe in it. They were corrupted, but they needed someone else to believe for them. They... I noticed for example when I am in a company of Slovenian Prime Minister and some other people—I mean, it's... I'm not boasting, it's a small country, it's nothing special to be in the company—but what I'm saying is that it always surprises me how he always turns to me and says, "Yes, but you know, what would you as a philosopher say? Is this okay?" and so on and so on. He needs someone through whom, how should I put it, he can be sincere although he personally is, I wouldn't say corrupted, but extremely ruthless, which is why I love him, extremely ruthless, cynical manipulator, but... And now, so that you will not only say that I'm telling you these easy joke examples. Let me take a more serious example. This is what Agnes Heller—you know, the Hungarian philosopher I met who was teaching, I think now she's back at Hungary, in Hungary at New School for Social Research—she told me she, as you may know, some of you may know, she was actually in a concentration camp. And she told me an interesting example of the same logic. Namely of how in the concentration camp most of the people, except those so-called Muselmänner, *Muselmanen*, who were those horrible, the living dead, simply deprived of subjectivity. They didn't defend themselves, they didn't even fight for things in a survivalist way. You know, they even lost the cruelty. They simply functioned as a living dead. Okay, this was almost the larger group, or thirty, forty percent of them. Then there was another thirty, forty, even more percent of them who were, how should I put it, those who survived by developing... by regressing to some kind of radically egotistic life or death struggle attitude. It was... everything was basically allowed: to steal, to lie, whatever. You did everything just to survive. But you know what is so interesting? And that's what she told me. That all these people—now I'm speaking about this category who were and perceived themselves as extreme egotists—there was always, always, I emphasize this always, a rumor among them that there is one. There is one person, if not in their block, barrack, in the next one, who retained his or her dignity. Who wasn't reduced to simple egotistic survival machine. Who still has dignity, who is still able simply not to function as a pure egotistic survival machine, but help others, function as a normal moral person, to put it... And it's interesting how even to remain the most ruthless egotist, you needed this fiction. Even if it was a fiction! There is there one who retained his dignity. Now you will ask me, "But what happened when sooner or later, unfortunately, they discovered that this is a fiction?" That, for example, through immediate contact with that person, you discover that he is the same as you? Ah, they regressed. They disintegrated back into *Muselmanen*. They became the living dead. So you got the paradox. In order to be egotistic monster and so on, fighting all the others, you had to believe that someone, there is someone. You needed a fetish, to cut long story short. And why am I telling you this? Aha, now come... we come to the my first point. Because my point is that today more and more I'm convinced—you may disagree, but I'm convinced—that in our societies the reference to a certain kind of religion which in an ironic parallel with so-called Western Marxism, I'm tempted to call Western Buddhism. The Buddhism the way it functions in our society, I claim it plays exactly the same fetishist role. Let me elaborate this a little bit. I claim that we are witnessing today a strange exchange between Europe and Asia. At the very moment when at the level of the, to use the old-fashioned Marxist terms, so-called economic infrastructure, the European technology and capitalism are triumphant, winning all around the world. At the very same time, at the level of so-called ideological superstructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is more and more threatened or replaced in the European space itself by the onslaught of the New Age Asiatic thought which again in its different guises, from Buddhism to Taoism and so on and so on, is... this is what I claim, is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. What do I mean by this? Although Western Buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple, to retain the inner peace and so on, I claim it actually functions as the perfect ideological supplement to the global capitalism. What I'm referring here to is of course the well-known topic of the so-called future shock, of how today people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and social changes. Things simply move too fast before we can accustom ourselves to a new... to them. When there is a new invention, before we can cope with it, this invention is already replaced by a new one and so on and so on, so that we forever lack so-called cognitive mapping. And I claim that the recourse to Taoism or Buddhism whatsoever offers a way out of this predicament. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of progress, the idea is that we should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as an expression of the modern logic of domination. We should instead let oneself go, drift along while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards this accelerated social process. A difference, a distance based on the insight that all this social technological upheaval is ultimately just a proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being. So, got my point? I claim that in the present situation, this Western Buddhist notion is... fits perfectly. Because today to function in today's mad circulation of capitalism, you... if you were really fully to participate in it, you would explode. You cannot do it. So you need a kind of a false bumper to... a false inner distance, which is in an ideal way, I claim, provided by Western Buddhism. You know, it's not reality, it's all just a dream, we are not really... you have a distance which enables you to cope with it in a much more stressless way. And it's very... very interesting. I'm always the attentive reader of these different posters announcing, you know, come to our Tao or whatever transcendental meditation course. How they always emphasize... they are usually intelligent enough to emphasize this moment: that not only will we help you to reduce stress and so on, but after our course you will be able to function even better on the market, no? Because you will not be and so on and so on. So my claim is that if Max Weber were to live today, he would definitely wrote a second supplementary volume to his, you know, *Protestant Ethic* and so on, entitled *The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism*. This is what fits, this is where the two fit perfectly. Now I come to the paradox of my title, so that you will not accuse me that I'm totally crazy. *The Defense of Fundamentalism*. What do I really mean by it? What happens within this economy, ideological economy, with the image of the East itself? The first thing that interests me is of course the ambiguity of this image. Let's take the ultimate fetish today, ideological fetish, which is of course Tibet. Okay, I will not lose time going into... what I find so fascinating is how the image of Tibet even today, and it was from the very beginning, is radically ambiguous. At the same time, this sublime place where people are exempted from the mad rhythm of the capital, but at the same time extreme filth, primitivism and so on and so on. So even this radical ambiguity so that I don't lose time, goes even up to the music itself. Did you sometimes listen to these, you know, low horns, almost horrifying Buddhist music? It's supposed to be spiritual peace and so on. But I wonder if FBI was not right when they... sorry, heard you remember in '96 this siege or in Waco, Texas of the Branch Davidians. You know that one of the musical numbers they played again and again to make them break the nerves was precisely this Tibetan music and so on. Now I think they were right in what sense? That this is for me even an argument for Buddhism, what we have... for Tibetan Buddhism. What we have here is the awareness that, almost a Hegelian insight, that this original peace or whatever is at the same time the ultimate horrible unrest. Okay, I will not go into that. What interests me is the following thing: that apart from all the paradoxes we can develop here, not the least of them being how all... how this idea of Tibet as the place of ultimate peace, inner peace, was from the very beginning the dream of all colonizers. For example, I wonder if you know that it was already in that an English expedition penetrated into Tibet, occupied Lhasa, killing on the way of course hundreds of Tibetan soldiers. But that the very guy who led the expedition said when he entered Tibet, entered Lhasa, quote—this was his... he is called, nice Freudian name, Colonel Francis Younghusband, okay—"Never again could I think of evil, or ever again be at enmity with any man." Wait a minute. This was said by a man who before and after that statement without any problem ordered the slaughter of hundreds of Tibetans. So what is my... what am I aiming at here? The idea is the following one: that first, when we speak about Eurocentrism, we should never, never forget that the fundamental ingredient from the very beginning, I claim, of Eurocentrism is a kind of decenterment. That is to say, the idea that we, European rational whatever civilization, are deprived of or we at some point lost some original wisdom. And this wisdom is somewhere else. And we had to go there and through difficult ordeals... you know, this idea of the lost jewel, the truth is out there somewhere and Tibet comes very handy because it's occupied behind high mountains and so on, that you know, it's a long difficult journey to get it. I said from the very beginning because who is the first big Western guy? Plato. For him it's clear, who were these others? Egyptians, no? Plato all the time refers to Egypt as the true locus of wisdom. It's from Plato to recent... I read them somewhere, you know these airport bestsellers about the mystery of the pyramids and so on and so on. So but again what interests me is how I claim in order to comprehend the logic of colonialism, it was never simply colonialism. It was never simply: we Europeans are higher than the other, we should simply repress, colonize the other. But it was always that this brutal imposition of our order was combined, supplemented by this false respect of the other sustained by the idea that there in the middle of the other we will find the kernel of our own wisdom. And this brings me finally, although I will not yet end unfortunately, to my title, *Defense of Fundamentalism*. What do I mean by it? I claim that this eccentricity of European civilization—not in any tricky deconstructionist sense, but simply in the sense that we always think that wisdom is somewhere else, a hidden jewel to be recaptured through violent effort, struggle and so on—is, if you read Tibetans themselves, is what is totally foreign to them. The authentic Tibetans always claim that they can understand everything, just this they cannot understand: why do we Europeans look for the wisdom elsewhere? This idea that wisdom is to be gained through struggle, this is totally alien to them. Why? Because... now I come to my point... because they are true fundamentalists. And as such, the only almost, I would claim, authentic multiculturalists, truly tolerant. Why? Now let me make the first provocative point. I claim that what the so-called moral majority false fundamentalists and multiculturalists, our postmodern liberal multiculturalists share, is—both of them have this, although once it's in the tolerant, the other time round in the intolerant mode—but they both share this fascination with the other. Ask any multiculturalist, and the further away the other is, all the better, no? For example, we white English, if they stick to their roots, it's racism. Italians, it's so-so, a little bit of Mafia but it goes. Latinos, it's better. Native Americans, it's absolutely multiple orgy immediately, absolutely for. So you know, this idea that the further the other, the more the other can do what we are prohibited to do. Of course, the so-called moral majority fundamentalists share the same logic of envy. It's the other. In their very... in their very attacks on corruption, Hollywood, whatever. And I recently I encountered some of these attacks because I was, as every usual narcissistic subject does, I checked in New York where do they have this book of mine, *The Fragile Absolute*. I discovered that they don't have it under philosophy, so by some divine inspiration I looked into Christian inspiration and there I was in the same shelf with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. What more, what more do I want? Okay, but seriously, what they share is this logic of envy. All the time they are fascinated with the other. And I claim that if this term has any meaning at all, a truly radical fundamentalism precisely is the position which is able to renounce this envy. If you read Tibetans themselves, their point is, "We are the center of the world. We have what we want, we don't envy the others." And if you look even in the... here in the United States, I'm far from idealizing them. I read books about the Amish and you know, they have rape, incest, whatever you want, they are like us. But nonetheless, the reason I think they are true fundamentalists is that they don't envy. They don't... they don't have this logic, "Something is going out there between the English men, something horrible, excessive pleasures are going on." No! Basically they don't care. They don't have this logic of envy. Which is why they are tolerant. And I think so the problem for me is precisely this logic of envy shared, shared by moral majority fundamentalists as well as by a certain type at least of false multiculturalist. This envy is, I think, closely connected with thrift. Thrift as one of the seven fundamental sins. And I found thrift, being a miser, a miserly disposition, an extremely interesting category if we are to understand what actually goes on today in our capitalist society. Why? Think a little bit about it. Among the seven deadly sins, thrift occupies an exceptional place. What's our ordinary notion of desire, excessive desire and its ethic, an ethical stance which controls it? The idea is that desire is something transgressive. To give way to desire, to your passion means, I don't know, to let yourself go in frenetic sexual orgies, to gluttony, to eat to death, to I don't know, to whatever, to this excessive destructive passion. And then the idea is that ethics is ultimately the ethics of moderation. Ethics tells you ultimately how to avoid this extreme, how to control, how to stop, how not to go to the end. Of course, in contrast to this transgressive notion of desire, the miser invests with desire moderation itself. Do not spend, economize, retain instead of letting go and so on and so on. So and here I would like to briefly refer to Jacques Lacan, who elaborates this point in his seminar six, not yet translated into English, with reference to Simone Weil precisely. Lacan makes a very nice point here: how if we want to grasp at its purest or render at its purest an image of specifically human desire, forget about these notions of transgressive desire, you know, excessive violence, excessive sexual orgy, whatever. No! The ultimate figure of the subject of desire for Lacan is this mysterious attitude of the miser to his precious possession. You know, this proverbial figure... I know this figure because I'm one of them at the same... you know, in the evening you return home, you look around, nobody looking, you just open the chest and look at the precious object. You don't do anything to the object. There's always also an element of impotence in it. You just gather the objects, which are elevated into kind of untouchable thing which can only be observed, never fully enjoyed. This for Lacan is the ultimate relationship to the object of desire. However, capitalism introduces a twist into this logic. The capitalist is no longer the lone miser who sticks to his hidden treasure, taking a secret peek at it when he is alone. But the capitalist is the subject who accepts the basic paradox that the only way to preserve, to multiply one's treasure is to spend it. You all know Juliet's formula of love from *Romeo and Juliet*: the more I give, the more I have. That's capitalism. The more you invest, the more you have. This basic paradox enables us to generate even phenomena like the most elementary marketing strategy, which is precisely an appeal to your, the consumer's thrift. If you read closely publicity clips or whatever, they never simply tell you spend more, just spend and so on. The message is always: spend more and you will economize, you will get a surplus for free. That's I think absolutely crucial to understand how publicity works. You are never directly interpelled, addressed as a subject of pure consumption, "Just shop 'til you drop, just spend to the end." It's always—you know, this proverbial male chauvinist example, but it goes also for men—you know like, "Buy one jacket, it's one hundred dollars. But buy two and it's one hundred and fifty." And you know, that's always the promise, that the more you spend, the more you economize. The ultimate image of this for me is, and I love them for this reason, you remember these proverbial toothpaste tubes where the upper third is usually in different color and then it says free." Of course, I'm always tempted to say, to cut off and give me... give me just that, no? But it doesn't go. So what I claim here is that the usual designation of our society as society of consumption... I think it's not quite accurate. What characterizes capitalism, I claim, is precisely that consumption is the mode of appearance of its very opposite, of thrift. And the ultimate proof of it today, I claim, is our obsession, the attention to the figure of the junkie, drug dependence. Why is it that in our era and not before—although before they also did use drugs, but as you know, for example, one hundred years ago from De Quincey, Baudelaire and so on whom you... two hundred years ago whenever, when they had drugs, this was simply a kind of a, okay, not very respectable thing to do, but it wasn't perceived as such a threat to the social texture. I claim that precisely the junkie is effectively the only true subject of consumption. He really goes to the end, consumes himself in his unbowed consumption without reserve, without this... without this element of thrift. Okay, since I'm approaching the end, if you allow me, okay I will do the cynical trick and propose you the following. Let's say the discussion begins and I'm now asking myself, "What did I want to say in the remaining part?" Okay, I'll do it very briefly. My idea is how a cyberspace ideology, which is I think in religious terms Gnostic ideology, intervenes here in order to resolve this tension between thrift and consumption. There, you are allowed to go to the end, to act out all your destructive fantasies and so on, but in the virtual mode, in the mode of virtuality, in virtual space. So let me just enumerate very briefly a couple of paradoxes of cyberspace. First is the ambiguous fate of the body, of the bodily experience in it. Usually we perceive the so-called progress of civilization as from the concrete form to more and more abstract forms: speech, book and so on and so on, abstract signals. But in cyberspace or virtual reality, at the same time you... this abstraction reaches its high point. Reality itself dissolves in a series of zeros and ones, but at the same time the body returns, the virtual body, a kind of ethereal non-material body. And I think this is ultimately what Gnosticism is about. This not spirituality which is a strange bodily spirituality. The idea not simply of leaving behind this heavy inert materia of our body, of entering pure spirit, but of entering another bodily dimension, precisely the dimension of kind of a spiritualized body, body of ethereal ghosts, uncanny virtual body. The next point here would be: what interests me in cyberspace is how cyberspace is part of a larger image of what goes on today where, in a way, self-objectivization overlaps with its opposite. That is to say, isn't it interested how today in popular perception at least, which is of course ideological, we have at the same time the idea of complete self-objectivization in the genome. Of course, the horror of genome is that you see out there in a formula what you effectively are. And I claim that at a certain point of course, if this promise will help how true this will confront us with problems like: do you really want to know if it's already decided there? And so on and so on. How this self-objectivization overlaps with radical subjectivization. In the sense that the prospect of virtual reality is that it will be possible at a certain point through direct neurological implants to switch directly from our common reality to another computer related... computer, sorry, computer generated reality and so on and so on. So again, what I claim is both these prospects: radical subjectivization in the sense of reality itself will become virtualized, reality will lose its resistance, the friction which defines it at reality. This overlaps with its opposite, the radical self-objectivization. Where does this leave us? Because I claim, this will be my final point, that this... this minimum, if there is a lesson to be retained today from on the one hand Judeo-Christian religious tradition and on the other hand from the great philosophical tradition of German idealism, it is that reality itself is always defined as that which resists through the minimal resistance, friction and so on. For example, as you know, even Fichte, the most radical so-called subjective idealist, posited immediately as correlative to the absolute ego some externality as what he called—it's difficult to translate from German—*Anstoß*, that which you encounter and which gives you impetus to... so that there must be, to cut the long story short, an external encounter. And here I claim that we encounter the ultimate dilemma. To put it in religious terms: should we accept this standard Gnostic attitude which predominates today? That is to say, the perspective is that of radical self-objectivization at the same time full immersion into virtual reality, the real as that which resists potentially at least disappears. Or should we stick to this notion of the real as that which resists? It's interesting how even those who were exalted by the prospect of identifying the genome, usually emphasized how—I quote a journalist—"the old formula that every disease with the exception of trauma has a genetic component, that this formula is really going to be true." Ah, here I see how human freedom can be saved, to put it in naive terms. They say, "Every disease with the exception of trauma." But is trauma for a human being really an exception? I claim that here... I'm now condensing what I wanted to say... here I think we should stick more than ever to the legacy which is paradoxically at the same time the Judeo-Christian legacy and the legacy of psychoanalysis. Namely the idea that what makes us actually, to put it in this old-fashioned pathetic terms, spiritual human beings, is... cannot be properly conceived in the terms of the inner self-discovery. You know, this Gnostic logic: go deep into yourself, recollect, immerse into yourself. That what makes human being human being is some external traumatic encounter which derails you and then it is in order to cope with this encounter that you develop the so-called symbolic spiritual dimension whatsoever. Because is not here exactly the same the lesson for example of Jewish religion, which is precisely... remember, Jews didn't discover their God through by way of looking deep into themselves. It was an external traumatic encounter. They were nicely wandering around and all of a sudden there was this call from the God, nobody knows why, and it's an enigma to them. That is to say, here you find in Jewish-Christian tradition precisely what psychoanalysis articulates as the encounter of the ultimate trauma, which is the trauma of the other's desire. Of the desiring other in its his or her impenetrability. And so I claim that, which is why to put it in naive terms, I don't fear this prospects of you know genome of whatever total objectivization and so on. That's not it! And also I think that the alternative between nature and nurture or your genome or environment is... doesn't cover the entire field. Because trauma is not simply part of your environment. Trauma is precisely that which doesn't fit your, how should I put it, standard environment. It's something which derails you, which throws you off the rails. And such an encounter is that which I claim is worth saving in our legacy. And now really to finish, I'm tempted to claim that here even the difference between Judaism and Christianity can be elaborated in very nice terms. In the sense that in the Jewish tradition this mystery of the otherness is still... how should I put it... remains this abyss of the other, this abyss of the other precisely in its otherness. The problem of the Jewish tradition is how to retain the openness towards the mystery of the other. And here let me conclude now with a slightly provocative philosophical premise. Usually officially, although they are both a little bit *démodé*, *passé*, but I think that at least Derrida doesn't deserve this, the opposites today are supposed to be in popular predominant philosophy deconstructionism versus Habermas. I claim this is a false opposition. I claim they both share a certain fundamental set of premises and basically supplement each other. What they both share is that the fundamental problem of ethics is how to retain the openness towards the other, how to retain the basic communicative hospitality. Of course they elaborate it in totally opposite terms. For Derrida it's precisely how to retain the openness towards these totally contingent encounters of the radical alterity of the other. While Habermas wants to elaborate a set of communicative rules which guarantee the communication with the other without constraints. But I think that in a way each of them gets from the other what he is lacking in this case. Habermas is right to emphasize against Derrida that if you do not elaborate this openness towards the otherness within the set of concrete propositions, then this respect for otherness can turn into some idiosyncrasy which can be even an extremely violent closure. On the other hand, Derrida is also right I claim to emphasize against Habermas that if you translate opening towards the otherness into simply a set of positive rules which guarantee communication without distortion, you already close yourself to the radical openness towards the other. What I claim is that this ethics which is then also operationally translated into the ethics of a gap ultimately between ethics and politics... what both Derrida—I simplify it a little bit but I claim not in the essential dimension—what both Derrida and Habermas share, although again formulated in a totally opposed way, is ultimately the idea of a gap between pure normativity and pragmatic politics. The whole idea of the Derridean *démocratie venir*, democracy to come, is no, this idea of that we have this undecidable call of absolute otherness, injunction, and that the whole point is that in any of our concrete particular real acts, we cannot ever catch up with this otherness. There is always a gap between the unconditional call of the other and what we can actually do. And that we should precisely respectfully retain this gap. That if we do not, then we fall either... either we forget the radical otherness and we are in unprincipled pragmatism, or if we posit our concrete political social measures as directly expressing articulating this otherness, we are in totalitarianism. And I think that both share this gap. Now without trying to convince you, just to tease you a little bit, the answer you will find in my new book, on love and so on, I claim that at the same time the Christian legacy and Lacan do not accept this. Let me just give you an example why do I think like this. Think about, okay it's already boring how classical this example is, but nonetheless just think about it: Antigone. How if within this field of the gap between this unconditional ethical injunction and our pragmatic relative measures which never live up to it, how would you locate the figure of Antigone? I claim that if you really accept these premises of Derridean-Habermasian openness towards the mystery of the otherness and so on, then Antigone should be dismissed as a totalitarian. Because let's read the play and you will see how the only Habermasian in the play is Creon. The bad king. Creon argues! In the best Habermasian tradition, he gives reasons. He is not the brutal, the brutal contingent... sorry, capricious ruler. No! He says basically his message to Antigone is, "I understand your sorrow, but listen, we had recently a civil war. Your brother was a traitor. If we bury your brother publicly, my God, violence will explode again," and so on and so on. And what is Antigone's answer? None! She doesn't argue. Read it! She says, "No, I want because I want, I want..." She simply insists. Point two: isn't it clear that her act is not located within this gap of some kind of transcendental call which is always other and concrete pragmatic measures which never live up to this call? No! What she proposes is, how should I put it, a measure which is immediately at the level of this other. She is in this sense fully totalitarian. She unconditionally insists on her demand. Her demand immediately for her translates this call of the other. And what I claim is that within the Lacanian space, this precisely is what an act is. In an act you can close this gap. Maybe Lacan is for this reason totalitarian, but then so am I. Thanks very much. [Applause] I'm sure many of you have questions. Please wait for the mic and speak through... exactly, just enter into this... exactly. Okay, okay, this is fine. First of all, thank you very much for a wonderful and inspiring talk. In the inspiration maybe, thinking outside in terms of seeing for example what Tibetan Buddhism would mean for the Christians and vice-versa, seeing it in terms of desire and so on, and referring to nameless authors, of nameless Tibetan authors, how did you themselves and so on. Similarly, there is a move style outside in the sense where you describe the Christians or even the distinction between the two. And this comes from outside... Maybe, probably... no, I'm sure that I will not answer your question satisfactorily, so let me just give you a couple of points. First, let me make it clear why it can be explained very easily. It was simply the reflex of a certain racist prejudice why *Muselmanen*, Muslims were called like this, because it was as you may know till the middle of our century when Muslims finally became more active, the cliché was that the Muslims are this ultimately passive religion where anything that happens you just... you just passively accept it, everything is fate, what can we do and so on. And since these so-called Muslims now in the camps, *Muselmanen*, were usually seen as just like making gestures like this and doing nothing, this is how through this racist short circuit they were given this name. What is so interesting... I will not now, I will really become another Fidel if I were to answer you fully... but just to give you an interesting example is how you are probably aware that in old ex-Yugoslavia, if anything the Muslims were the opposite. They were the most vital... I even am ready to use the term "the most pro..." okay, I'm a little bit narcissistic here maybe together with us Slovenes, but nonetheless in a certain way even more than us Slovenes, the most pro-Western multiculturalist whatever you want part of ex-Yugoslavia. No wonder that the best cinema, the best rock bands, all came from Sarajevo. Where I slightly disagree with you is only when you say that the war was fought for religion. I doubt it, if you ask me. I have here a much more cynical view. It appeared that way, but was there really... I think that it's only... it's the West who believes this, how should I put it? You know, there was a certain spectacle of religious warfare staged up to a point, staged for the West. But if you look at the structure itself, I would claim that paradoxically, a lot of time incidentally political struggles do function in that way. Hegel was aware of it, was that ideology comes second, not in the primitive but in the sense that—not in the vulgar Marxist sense that first you have material interests and then you mask them as ideology, but in the sense that first there is a struggle. Then in order to legitimize the struggle, you invent ironically in an artificial way a certain religion and you end up believing in this religion. And this is the miracle of ideology. The crucial moment, as Hegel would have put it, is not how you start with an organic unity and then this gets resolved into something artificial. Is how often the process is the opposite one: you start with a conscious lie, you end up believing your own lie. This is I think, if anything, something which defines today our multiculturalism, even the ideology of our century. It's not simply cynicism. My favorite mental experiment or test: do it yourself if you don't believe it. Read a very boring book—I'm not saying this because of politically correct reasons, I'm ready to read the devil himself if he is not boring, I'm speaking now about Hitler's *Mein Kampf*. It is a boring book, so I somehow succeeded in reading, okay, two thirds of it. It's even worse than Ayn Rand, this *Atlas Shrugged* or what. But what I mean is that: ask yourself a simple stupid question. Did Hitler really believe it or not? And you end up in a paradoxical answer that he was fully aware that he is manipulating but at the same time he believed in it. That is to say, at a certain point Hitler clearly, how should I put it, shows his cards, describes the manipulation. He says, "You know, in order to control the crowd you must present them with a simple image of the enemy control" and so on and so on. So he describes the procedure. But wait a minute! A couple of pages later he explodes in a rage which is obviously, to use these terms whatever they mean, which is obviously sincere in a certain way. So I claim that, now back to Bosnia, you know what surprised me and why I think that we, the Balkan, are in a way your future? The nations which emerged from ex-Yugoslav war are the first, I claim, maybe one of the first at least, truly postmodern nations. You know in what sense? In the sense that let's precisely take the example that you mentioned: Muslims. Do you know that Muslims in Bosnia does not designate an ethnic... sorry, I made a slip which already tells the truth... does not designate a religious community but an ethnic community? You can be an atheist and you are still a Muslim. You know, here we have a nice example of how something artificially imposed ended up the true point of identification for which people are ready to die and so on. You know how it all happened? Before, by before I mean till late fifties, there were simply Serbs and Croats in Bosnia and everyone admits, everyone knows that ethnically in the realistic naive biological sense there are no Muslims. There are Serbs and Bos... sorry, Serbs and Croats and among the Serbs and Croats, as the result of the four hundred years of Ottoman occupation, some of them adopted the Muslim religion. And it was always then, because as you probably know the fundamental tension of old Yugoslavia was the tension for hegemony between Serbs and Croats. And Bosnia was always the point of explosion, which is why we even have a
Thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here again. I think that five years ago, if I remember correctly, I was in this same room. It looks familiar. I thought that I could repeat the old Marx Brothers joke. No wonder that it looks like the same room, because it was the same room. Okay, it doesn't go. But since Carmen already thanked all the others, so I would like only to thank her, and so in a transitive logical way all others are covered, I hope. Okay, let me... I have, as usual, you will understand after listening to me, why some friends of mine, not of Communist leanings, call me Fidel, because you know, Fidels like comrades, just five minutes of remarks and then you are for five hours. So, I will try to do it more consistently, but nonetheless, it will take time. So, let me begin with a brief introduction to the notion of the big other. So-called Big Other as the symbolic substance of our being, as it were, the symbolic space within which we human beings dwell. People usually think about symbolic rules regulating social interaction and so on and so on. But I think it is much more productive to focus on another aspect of this so-called what Lacan calls big other, the intricate cobweb of unwritten implicit rules. They are never explicitly stated. If you state them explicitly, you even usually commit some kind of crime violation. You know, this is what always interests me, how what holds communities together are not explicit rules, but the unwritten rules which are even prohibited to be announced publicly. Now, you will say I'm exaggerating here. No, I'm not. Imagine even the most... one of, okay, the most totalitarian communities imaginable. The Stalinist. Really, they no longer make them like that today. The real old one from the thirties. You will say, but there everything was clear, no unwritten rules. Oh, they were. Imagine a session of the Central Committee where someone stands up and starts to criticize Stalin. Now, everybody knows this was prohibited. But that's the catch. Imagine someone else standing up and saying, "But listen, are you crazy? Don't you know that it's prohibited to criticize Comrade Stalin?" I claim the second one would be arrested earlier than the first one. Because although everybody knew that it is prohibited to criticize Stalin, this prohibition itself was prohibited. It wasn't allowed to... that is to say, the appearance, the semblance had to be unconditionally maintained that it is allowed to criticize Stalin, but simply, why criticize him since he's so good and so on? You know what... got my point, that the appearance of a free choice had to be sustained. So, how do then these unwritten rules function closer to our reality today? Let me begin, as it is probably expected from me, with Hollywood. Roger Ebert in his small book, *The Little Book of Hollywood Clichés*, enumerates hundreds of examples which I think are formidable. From the most obvious ones which all of you know, of course, the so-called fruit cart rule. You know, during any chase scene involving an ethnic locale, a fruit cart will be overturned and an angry peddler will run into the middle of the street and shake hero... you know, this is absolute rule at any James Bond or whatever. But there are much more intelligent unwritten rules, like what Ebert calls the grocery bag rule. Whenever a scared, cynical woman who doesn't want to fall in love again is pursued by a suitor who wants to tear down her so-called wall of loneliness, she will go grocery shopping. Then, when she exits, the bags will break and the fruits and vegetables spill around so that then the guy will step closer and literally help her to pick up the pieces of the fruit, which symbolically means to pick up the pieces of her life and so on and so on. You know, this is then what the big other is. This cobweb of unwritten rules. And this is how you become the member of a society. This is what false snobbery is. In a false snobbery, you follow exactly all the written rules, but nonetheless you are not in because, again, you don't follow the unwritten rules. Now, let's turn to a more unpleasant domain, which is ourselves, academia. I claim that today's academia, as every... all the time it was, also fully participates in this dialectic of unwritten rules. Let me first just mention two rules that I remember from my own lifetime. One is, did you notice how, at least in my experience, the status of Hannah Arendt changed in the last... I'm active in academia let's say for twenty-five years? I remember when I started participating at symposiums, when somebody in the debate stood up and said, "But what you just said reminds me of Hannah Arendt," it means you are finished. No, it means it's over. Today it's almost the opposite. She's almost the untouchable one. Even people who, as to their theoretical orientation, should have been opposed to her, like psychoanalysts like Julia Kristeva, since as we know Hannah Arendt was against psychoanalysis, or people like Richard Bernstein, since as we know Hannah Arendt was for personal reasons, we don't know why, very much against Frankfurt School. Even they treat her with respect. Another rule is the rule which I really hate, which is I think theoretically wrong although it masks as politically correct. And it may appear as a Hegelian, but I think it's the ultimate affront to anyone who knows even vaguely what Hegel is about. This rule of historicist contextualization. If you have a debate in concepts, in notions, true notions with someone, the other one, the other guy today, when he lacks arguments, can always play this game of "Yes, but you speak about X, whatever, let's say women. There is no woman. Which woman do you mean? Spanish, lesbian, and so on." You know, this false notion that you can always approach the other with the lack of contextualization, like contextualize, give the concrete context. Why do I think that this is wrong, although again and again you find this argument? Because, and here I will try to make a nice Hegel-Marxian argument, because if the Marxian so-called dialectic of commodity fetishism has any meaning, it says, it claims that... and this is what Marx aimed at with his notion of so-called *Realabstraktion*, real abstraction. That our social reality itself is already ruled, governed by abstractions. It's, for example, commodity fetishism means that in social reality itself, you are treated as an abstract entity, as the possessor of value only and so on and so on. So again, reality itself already has in it this abstraction. Abstraction is not only the procedure of our thinking, it is inscribed in social relations themselves. But okay, so that I don't get lost in these preambles, my main example, the third rule with which I will actually begin, of these unwritten rules, concerns the relationship I noticed between mourning and melancholy. This may appear to you an innocent example, but when I was in Chicago half a year ago, a little bit more, at the last MLA, I know—I will not tell you names—okay, but I know of over five examples of young postgraduates and so on who didn't get their job because their position here was wrong. Because they opted for, to put it in naive terms, for mourning against melancholy. Namely, what I claim is the unwritten rule today. It's the anti-Freudian rule. The doxa today which you have to obey is the following one, I claim. Freud opposed the normal mourning, the successful acceptance of the loss, to the pathological melancholy. The subject insists in his or her narcissistic identification with the lost object. That is to say, Freud's idea was: when someone close, dear to you dies or you lose him in any other way, or her, the proper thing to do is to come to terms with this loss through the work of symbolization or internalization. You renounce the real object, but you gain his or her or its meaning. You come to terms with it. While melancholy is then conceived as a failed mourning. You still remain attached to the particular object. You are unable to perform what—maybe they are justified here, maybe not—it is justified but let's say in vaguely Hegelian terms, we can call the *Aufhebung*, the sublation of the immediate reality of the object in its his or her meaning. So, this is the standard, in a very simplified way rendered here of course, approach. But in contrast to it, today's doxa is to reverse the terms and to claim that no, mourning is the betrayal of the fidelity to the object. And then comes all this deconstructionist jargon. There is an indivisible remainder, there is something which resists this Hegelian sublation, and the true fidelity is the fidelity to this remainder. So, in other words, melancholy is the truly ethical stance of fidelity. You don't accept, you don't renounce the object. The one who accomplishes the work of mourning is, well, the traitor, to put it in a simplified way. And of course, this story can be given a multitude of twists. From the queer one: homosexuals are those who retain the fidelity to the repressed identification with the same-sex libidinal object. To the post-colonial ethnic one: when an ethnic group enters the capitalist modernization, when it is under the threat that its specific legacy will be swallowed by the new global culture, what a lot of post-colonials advise us is to adopt this kind of attitude of mourning. You know, like, I do participate in the global capitalist game, but nonetheless I retain my fidelity to the lost ethnic roots. So again, I claim that this reassertion of melancholy is not only politically wrong in the sense that I claim that it fits perfectly this sticking to the lost roots, this attachment, continued attachment to the lost ethnic whatever roots, renders perfectly the ideal structure of subjectivity of today's so-called postmodern, global, however we call subjectivity. It's also at the same time, for the same reasons, ultimately theoretically wrong. In what way? I would like to refer here to the work of Giorgio Agamben, with whom I otherwise do not always agree, but here I do, when he emphasizes how in contrast to mourning, melancholy is not simply the failure of the work of mourning, the persistence of the attachment to the real of the object. But melancholy is rather its very opposite. If in the process of mourning you engage precisely in the rituals of mourning, you mourn the loss of the object, the libidinal object after you lose it. Melancholy offers the paradox of an intention to mourn which precedes and anticipates the loss of the object. That's the first thing to note here, I think. What makes melancholy so strange is not, "No, I don't want to lose the object, I retain my fidelity to the object." It's the contrary. It's: the object is still here, and I already treat it as if it's lost. I already mourn its loss. Now, how can this happen? Ah, here we should elaborate things a little bit. The first thing to do is to introduce the distinction between object, in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, between object and cause of desire. The object of desire is simply the, to simplify it somehow again, that which you desire, the desired object. I don't know, in sexual terms, a woman, a man, whomever you want to have sex with or whatsoever. On the contrary, the cause of desire is that on behalf of which you desire this object. And the two are not the same. When you are libidinally attached to some person, the psychoanalytic question is always: what makes you desire this object? And this is usually even to the person, to the desiring subject him or herself, this is never obvious. Usually, this is even unconscious. It is some feature, some particular feature which then, of course, within the chain of unconscious associations reminds you of something else. I will not go here into these boring stories of how you fall in love with a woman where some feature of this woman reminds you of your mother, all these stories. It's not as simple as that. Why not? Because I think it's usually even the opposite. For example, often you fall in love, if you are heterosexual, with a woman because the person, the male friend with whom you have a kind of transferential relationship, gave you a hint that this woman is worthy of desire. I know for example of, not from my personal life—I'm fortunate enough—but from a friend of mine who was in love with a certain woman and suddenly dropped her like hot potato, as you put it. What happened? He learned that the guy, whom he thought had a high opinion of this woman, that it was really a misunderstanding, that it wasn't this woman whom this other guy... and now you will think this is an extreme example. No, I claim you get here only at its purest the structure of it. What did happen to me is once when I was young, I was involved in the usual process of seduction, and these were still old times of socialism where, you know, in order to get the approach to the lady, okay young girl, I had to talk with her father, who was a philosopher, my professor. And the lady was, the girl was intelligent enough to notice that, how should I put it, although she was the object of my desire, the cause of my desire was her father's respect. So that she noticed at a certain point that I'm so deeply concerned in fascinating intellectually her father that at a certain point she said, "Okay, you two guys, why don't you talk it out and I can leave?" No, and it's really between the two of you. So again, there always is a gap between the two. Why am I mentioning this? Because this allows us now to return to the paradox of the melancholic. The melancholic is not the one who loses the object of desire. He has the object, but he or she has lost the cause of desire. The paradox of the melancholic is that he or she has what he or she wants, but the cause is no longer here and so, in other words, the desire is no longer here. So again, what the melancholic subject actually loses is not the object of desire, but his desire itself. He has what he wants, he no longer desires it. So that you will not say that I'm giving you only here cheap paradoxes, invented sexual examples, let me give you a more tragic ordinary but nonetheless, I think, profound experience. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are forced because of, I don't know, professional interests, marriage, whatsoever, to leave, to change the place where you live. To leave the place which was for long years your home. Now of course, you are sad. And now I will make a naive experiment and ask you, look, imagine this situation and look deep into yourself. What are you really afraid of? I claim if you really look deep into yourself, you would discover that what you are really afraid of is not the fact that simply you will no longer be at your home. But what makes you really sad is the awareness that sooner or later you will lose your very attachment to your home. That's what makes you sad. This is what you really know. So this is then, in a closer perspective, the melancholic structure. Now, why all this stuff about melancholy? I think that these paradoxes of melancholy are crucial if we want to understand how today ideology functions. In the traditional way, ideology functions following what, once in the good old times of structuralism, it was called the symptomal logic. What is symptom in psychoanalysis? To put it in the most elementary terms, it is the return of the repressed truth within the field of the globalized lie. Let's say you organize your life, your symbolic universe, based upon a certain lie in the sense of something is repressed, and then of course then the repressed returns. These are symptoms, the returns of the repressed. Let's take again an example of mourning. Let's say that someone close to you suddenly dies. In the case of a symptom, you would repress this knowledge. Let's say your beloved wife dies of a breast cancer. You repress it, don't want to... but then of course, you know, whatever sooner or later you go around, something will remind you of this traumatic fact. The repressed returns. This is, okay, elementary enough. But now you will say, "In our postmodern, cynical, whatever times, we no longer have these ideological lies that had to be then undermined through symptoms. Aren't we today cynical enough to accept the way things truly are and so on?" Ah, I claim no, the deception is in a way even more radical, more refined today. The structure today, predominant structure, is no longer that of a symptom. Again, symptom as the return of the repressed, as the moments where the truth returns within the global field of a lie. But fetish... sorry, symptom is the opposite. It's—sorry, fetish—it's the particular lie which enables you to sustain, to endure the truth. Let me give you... let me return to the same example, that of a death of a beloved person. It's a sad experience which actually happened to a friend of mine, but probably not only to him. His wife died of breast cancer and what we all were so shocked, his friends, was how he was able, this friend of mine, of a totally realistic attitude in the sense of no trauma apparently. He was able not only to sustain but to talk about it. You know, this was how it was when she was dying, this, that. No denial! We thought, "My God, is he a monster?" so-called, or what? Then at some point we understood. He was able to confront the truth because the disavowal was embodied in the fetish. And it's very sentimental, almost in the style of the early Hollywood melodramas, the fetish was the cat. The cat, the wife's favorite pet, the cat. He simply... he simply embodied his denial. We noticed then a subtle detail, okay not even so subtle, of almost too melodramatic, that all the time when he was discussing his wife's final suffering and death, he was holding this cat in his hands and so on. The idea was, "Yeah, yeah, we can talk, but here I have my fetish." This fetish provides a kind of a shield. It's in a way, "I can confront truth because here it's the element which tells me that... which allows me to maintain a distance towards the truth." Which is why incidentally, again it's a very simple story but nonetheless sad, when the usual thing happened, when this poor cat was overrun by a car, she immediately... he, sorry, he immediately broke down and had to be hospitalized, no? Because again, it wasn't only the cat. It was that the fetish which enabled him to sustain reality was taken from him. So, I hope now that you got the point, the paradox that I'm aiming at. That fetishists are not, you know, crazy people who live in a world of strange beliefs. No! The magic, almost the nice realistic pragmatic solution of the fetishist when confronted with a traumatic fact is that they organize their universe so that they can very well survive in an extremely cynically realist way. Everything functions. They can talk about traumas and so on and so on, because the reference to the fetish enables them to maintain a necessary distance. And I claim again that whenever today we hear about all this mantra about how the loss of values, people are cynical and so on and so on, I claim no, people are cynical at a certain superficial level, but they always have fetishes to support their cynicism. And the first task of a critique of ideology today is to look for these points of a fetishist belief. And they can be sometimes even surprisingly simple. See, I was involved up to a point, I even still am, in my own country, and it's nice to be involved there in politics because we are two millions. What's this? Nothing. It's kind of a small village where Slovenia, everybody knows everybody else, which is why the system is transparent. What always amuses me—this is a nice example of the fetishist logic—of how the more our politicians, those who are—not all of them are, but most of them are with us also—the more they are corrupted, cynical in the sense of, "Who cares about ideology, freedom? Let's just do the job," the more they want in their proximity us, intellectuals. Why? Not simply for the same reason that these American barons, gangster industrialist like Carnegie, wanted, you know, gave endowments to universities to erase their criminal origins. But because they didn't believe in it. They were corrupted, but they needed someone else to believe for them. They... I noticed for example when I am in a company of Slovenian Prime Minister and some other people—I mean, it's... I'm not boasting, it's a small country, it's nothing special to be in the company—but what I'm saying is that it always surprises me how he always turns to me and says, "Yes, but you know, what would you as a philosopher say? Is this okay?" and so on and so on. He needs someone through whom, how should I put it, he can be sincere although he personally is, I wouldn't say corrupted, but extremely ruthless, which is why I love him, extremely ruthless, cynical manipulator, but... And now, so that you will not only say that I'm telling you these easy joke examples. Let me take a more serious example. This is what Agnes Heller—you know, the Hungarian philosopher I met who was teaching, I think now she's back at Hungary, in Hungary at New School for Social Research—she told me she, as you may know, some of you may know, she was actually in a concentration camp. And she told me an interesting example of the same logic. Namely of how in the concentration camp most of the people, except those so-called Muselmänner, *Muselmanen*, who were those horrible, the living dead, simply deprived of subjectivity. They didn't defend themselves, they didn't even fight for things in a survivalist way. You know, they even lost the cruelty. They simply functioned as a living dead. Okay, this was almost the larger group, or thirty, forty percent of them. Then there was another thirty, forty, even more percent of them who were, how should I put it, those who survived by developing... by regressing to some kind of radically egotistic life or death struggle attitude. It was... everything was basically allowed: to steal, to lie, whatever. You did everything just to survive. But you know what is so interesting? And that's what she told me. That all these people—now I'm speaking about this category who were and perceived themselves as extreme egotists—there was always, always, I emphasize this always, a rumor among them that there is one. There is one person, if not in their block, barrack, in the next one, who retained his or her dignity. Who wasn't reduced to simple egotistic survival machine. Who still has dignity, who is still able simply not to function as a pure egotistic survival machine, but help others, function as a normal moral person, to put it... And it's interesting how even to remain the most ruthless egotist, you needed this fiction. Even if it was a fiction! There is there one who retained his dignity. Now you will ask me, "But what happened when sooner or later, unfortunately, they discovered that this is a fiction?" That, for example, through immediate contact with that person, you discover that he is the same as you? Ah, they regressed. They disintegrated back into *Muselmanen*. They became the living dead. So you got the paradox. In order to be egotistic monster and so on, fighting all the others, you had to believe that someone, there is someone. You needed a fetish, to cut long story short. And why am I telling you this? Aha, now come... we come to the my first point. Because my point is that today more and more I'm convinced—you may disagree, but I'm convinced—that in our societies the reference to a certain kind of religion which in an ironic parallel with so-called Western Marxism, I'm tempted to call Western Buddhism. The Buddhism the way it functions in our society, I claim it plays exactly the same fetishist role. Let me elaborate this a little bit. I claim that we are witnessing today a strange exchange between Europe and Asia. At the very moment when at the level of the, to use the old-fashioned Marxist terms, so-called economic infrastructure, the European technology and capitalism are triumphant, winning all around the world. At the very same time, at the level of so-called ideological superstructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is more and more threatened or replaced in the European space itself by the onslaught of the New Age Asiatic thought which again in its different guises, from Buddhism to Taoism and so on and so on, is... this is what I claim, is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. What do I mean by this? Although Western Buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple, to retain the inner peace and so on, I claim it actually functions as the perfect ideological supplement to the global capitalism. What I'm referring here to is of course the well-known topic of the so-called future shock, of how today people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and social changes. Things simply move too fast before we can accustom ourselves to a new... to them. When there is a new invention, before we can cope with it, this invention is already replaced by a new one and so on and so on, so that we forever lack so-called cognitive mapping. And I claim that the recourse to Taoism or Buddhism whatsoever offers a way out of this predicament. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of progress, the idea is that we should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as an expression of the modern logic of domination. We should instead let oneself go, drift along while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards this accelerated social process. A difference, a distance based on the insight that all this social technological upheaval is ultimately just a proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being. So, got my point? I claim that in the present situation, this Western Buddhist notion is... fits perfectly. Because today to function in today's mad circulation of capitalism, you... if you were really fully to participate in it, you would explode. You cannot do it. So you need a kind of a false bumper to... a false inner distance, which is in an ideal way, I claim, provided by Western Buddhism. You know, it's not reality, it's all just a dream, we are not really... you have a distance which enables you to cope with it in a much more stressless way. And it's very... very interesting. I'm always the attentive reader of these different posters announcing, you know, come to our Tao or whatever transcendental meditation course. How they always emphasize... they are usually intelligent enough to emphasize this moment: that not only will we help you to reduce stress and so on, but after our course you will be able to function even better on the market, no? Because you will not be and so on and so on. So my claim is that if Max Weber were to live today, he would definitely wrote a second supplementary volume to his, you know, *Protestant Ethic* and so on, entitled *The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism*. This is what fits, this is where the two fit perfectly. Now I come to the paradox of my title, so that you will not accuse me that I'm totally crazy. *The Defense of Fundamentalism*. What do I really mean by it? What happens within this economy, ideological economy, with the image of the East itself? The first thing that interests me is of course the ambiguity of this image. Let's take the ultimate fetish today, ideological fetish, which is of course Tibet. Okay, I will not lose time going into... what I find so fascinating is how the image of Tibet even today, and it was from the very beginning, is radically ambiguous. At the same time, this sublime place where people are exempted from the mad rhythm of the capital, but at the same time extreme filth, primitivism and so on and so on. So even this radical ambiguity so that I don't lose time, goes even up to the music itself. Did you sometimes listen to these, you know, low horns, almost horrifying Buddhist music? It's supposed to be spiritual peace and so on. But I wonder if FBI was not right when they... sorry, heard you remember in '96 this siege or in Waco, Texas of the Branch Davidians. You know that one of the musical numbers they played again and again to make them break the nerves was precisely this Tibetan music and so on. Now I think they were right in what sense? That this is for me even an argument for Buddhism, what we have... for Tibetan Buddhism. What we have here is the awareness that, almost a Hegelian insight, that this original peace or whatever is at the same time the ultimate horrible unrest. Okay, I will not go into that. What interests me is the following thing: that apart from all the paradoxes we can develop here, not the least of them being how all... how this idea of Tibet as the place of ultimate peace, inner peace, was from the very beginning the dream of all colonizers. For example, I wonder if you know that it was already in that an English expedition penetrated into Tibet, occupied Lhasa, killing on the way of course hundreds of Tibetan soldiers. But that the very guy who led the expedition said when he entered Tibet, entered Lhasa, quote—this was his... he is called, nice Freudian name, Colonel Francis Younghusband, okay—"Never again could I think of evil, or ever again be at enmity with any man." Wait a minute. This was said by a man who before and after that statement without any problem ordered the slaughter of hundreds of Tibetans. So what is my... what am I aiming at here? The idea is the following one: that first, when we speak about Eurocentrism, we should never, never forget that the fundamental ingredient from the very beginning, I claim, of Eurocentrism is a kind of decenterment. That is to say, the idea that we, European rational whatever civilization, are deprived of or we at some point lost some original wisdom. And this wisdom is somewhere else. And we had to go there and through difficult ordeals... you know, this idea of the lost jewel, the truth is out there somewhere and Tibet comes very handy because it's occupied behind high mountains and so on, that you know, it's a long difficult journey to get it. I said from the very beginning because who is the first big Western guy? Plato. For him it's clear, who were these others? Egyptians, no? Plato all the time refers to Egypt as the true locus of wisdom. It's from Plato to recent... I read them somewhere, you know these airport bestsellers about the mystery of the pyramids and so on and so on. So but again what interests me is how I claim in order to comprehend the logic of colonialism, it was never simply colonialism. It was never simply: we Europeans are higher than the other, we should simply repress, colonize the other. But it was always that this brutal imposition of our order was combined, supplemented by this false respect of the other sustained by the idea that there in the middle of the other we will find the kernel of our own wisdom. And this brings me finally, although I will not yet end unfortunately, to my title, *Defense of Fundamentalism*. What do I mean by it? I claim that this eccentricity of European civilization—not in any tricky deconstructionist sense, but simply in the sense that we always think that wisdom is somewhere else, a hidden jewel to be recaptured through violent effort, struggle and so on—is, if you read Tibetans themselves, is what is totally foreign to them. The authentic Tibetans always claim that they can understand everything, just this they cannot understand: why do we Europeans look for the wisdom elsewhere? This idea that wisdom is to be gained through struggle, this is totally alien to them. Why? Because... now I come to my point... because they are true fundamentalists. And as such, the only almost, I would claim, authentic multiculturalists, truly tolerant. Why? Now let me make the first provocative point. I claim that what the so-called moral majority false fundamentalists and multiculturalists, our postmodern liberal multiculturalists share, is—both of them have this, although once it's in the tolerant, the other time round in the intolerant mode—but they both share this fascination with the other. Ask any multiculturalist, and the further away the other is, all the better, no? For example, we white English, if they stick to their roots, it's racism. Italians, it's so-so, a little bit of Mafia but it goes. Latinos, it's better. Native Americans, it's absolutely multiple orgy immediately, absolutely for. So you know, this idea that the further the other, the more the other can do what we are prohibited to do. Of course, the so-called moral majority fundamentalists share the same logic of envy. It's the other. In their very... in their very attacks on corruption, Hollywood, whatever. And I recently I encountered some of these attacks because I was, as every usual narcissistic subject does, I checked in New York where do they have this book of mine, *The Fragile Absolute*. I discovered that they don't have it under philosophy, so by some divine inspiration I looked into Christian inspiration and there I was in the same shelf with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. What more, what more do I want? Okay, but seriously, what they share is this logic of envy. All the time they are fascinated with the other. And I claim that if this term has any meaning at all, a truly radical fundamentalism precisely is the position which is able to renounce this envy. If you read Tibetans themselves, their point is, "We are the center of the world. We have what we want, we don't envy the others." And if you look even in the... here in the United States, I'm far from idealizing them. I read books about the Amish and you know, they have rape, incest, whatever you want, they are like us. But nonetheless, the reason I think they are true fundamentalists is that they don't envy. They don't... they don't have this logic, "Something is going out there between the English men, something horrible, excessive pleasures are going on." No! Basically they don't care. They don't have this logic of envy. Which is why they are tolerant. And I think so the problem for me is precisely this logic of envy shared, shared by moral majority fundamentalists as well as by a certain type at least of false multiculturalist. This envy is, I think, closely connected with thrift. Thrift as one of the seven fundamental sins. And I found thrift, being a miser, a miserly disposition, an extremely interesting category if we are to understand what actually goes on today in our capitalist society. Why? Think a little bit about it. Among the seven deadly sins, thrift occupies an exceptional place. What's our ordinary notion of desire, excessive desire and its ethic, an ethical stance which controls it? The idea is that desire is something transgressive. To give way to desire, to your passion means, I don't know, to let yourself go in frenetic sexual orgies, to gluttony, to eat to death, to I don't know, to whatever, to this excessive destructive passion. And then the idea is that ethics is ultimately the ethics of moderation. Ethics tells you ultimately how to avoid this extreme, how to control, how to stop, how not to go to the end. Of course, in contrast to this transgressive notion of desire, the miser invests with desire moderation itself. Do not spend, economize, retain instead of letting go and so on and so on. So and here I would like to briefly refer to Jacques Lacan, who elaborates this point in his seminar six, not yet translated into English, with reference to Simone Weil precisely. Lacan makes a very nice point here: how if we want to grasp at its purest or render at its purest an image of specifically human desire, forget about these notions of transgressive desire, you know, excessive violence, excessive sexual orgy, whatever. No! The ultimate figure of the subject of desire for Lacan is this mysterious attitude of the miser to his precious possession. You know, this proverbial figure... I know this figure because I'm one of them at the same... you know, in the evening you return home, you look around, nobody looking, you just open the chest and look at the precious object. You don't do anything to the object. There's always also an element of impotence in it. You just gather the objects, which are elevated into kind of untouchable thing which can only be observed, never fully enjoyed. This for Lacan is the ultimate relationship to the object of desire. However, capitalism introduces a twist into this logic. The capitalist is no longer the lone miser who sticks to his hidden treasure, taking a secret peek at it when he is alone. But the capitalist is the subject who accepts the basic paradox that the only way to preserve, to multiply one's treasure is to spend it. You all know Juliet's formula of love from *Romeo and Juliet*: the more I give, the more I have. That's capitalism. The more you invest, the more you have. This basic paradox enables us to generate even phenomena like the most elementary marketing strategy, which is precisely an appeal to your, the consumer's thrift. If you read closely publicity clips or whatever, they never simply tell you spend more, just spend and so on. The message is always: spend more and you will economize, you will get a surplus for free. That's I think absolutely crucial to understand how publicity works. You are never directly interpelled, addressed as a subject of pure consumption, "Just shop 'til you drop, just spend to the end." It's always—you know, this proverbial male chauvinist example, but it goes also for men—you know like, "Buy one jacket, it's one hundred dollars. But buy two and it's one hundred and fifty." And you know, that's always the promise, that the more you spend, the more you economize. The ultimate image of this for me is, and I love them for this reason, you remember these proverbial toothpaste tubes where the upper third is usually in different color and then it says free." Of course, I'm always tempted to say, to cut off and give me... give me just that, no? But it doesn't go. So what I claim here is that the usual designation of our society as society of consumption... I think it's not quite accurate. What characterizes capitalism, I claim, is precisely that consumption is the mode of appearance of its very opposite, of thrift. And the ultimate proof of it today, I claim, is our obsession, the attention to the figure of the junkie, drug dependence. Why is it that in our era and not before—although before they also did use drugs, but as you know, for example, one hundred years ago from De Quincey, Baudelaire and so on whom you... two hundred years ago whenever, when they had drugs, this was simply a kind of a, okay, not very respectable thing to do, but it wasn't perceived as such a threat to the social texture. I claim that precisely the junkie is effectively the only true subject of consumption. He really goes to the end, consumes himself in his unbowed consumption without reserve, without this... without this element of thrift. Okay, since I'm approaching the end, if you allow me, okay I will do the cynical trick and propose you the following. Let's say the discussion begins and I'm now asking myself, "What did I want to say in the remaining part?" Okay, I'll do it very briefly. My idea is how a cyberspace ideology, which is I think in religious terms Gnostic ideology, intervenes here in order to resolve this tension between thrift and consumption. There, you are allowed to go to the end, to act out all your destructive fantasies and so on, but in the virtual mode, in the mode of virtuality, in virtual space. So let me just enumerate very briefly a couple of paradoxes of cyberspace. First is the ambiguous fate of the body, of the bodily experience in it. Usually we perceive the so-called progress of civilization as from the concrete form to more and more abstract forms: speech, book and so on and so on, abstract signals. But in cyberspace or virtual reality, at the same time you... this abstraction reaches its high point. Reality itself dissolves in a series of zeros and ones, but at the same time the body returns, the virtual body, a kind of ethereal non-material body. And I think this is ultimately what Gnosticism is about. This not spirituality which is a strange bodily spirituality. The idea not simply of leaving behind this heavy inert materia of our body, of entering pure spirit, but of entering another bodily dimension, precisely the dimension of kind of a spiritualized body, body of ethereal ghosts, uncanny virtual body. The next point here would be: what interests me in cyberspace is how cyberspace is part of a larger image of what goes on today where, in a way, self-objectivization overlaps with its opposite. That is to say, isn't it interested how today in popular perception at least, which is of course ideological, we have at the same time the idea of complete self-objectivization in the genome. Of course, the horror of genome is that you see out there in a formula what you effectively are. And I claim that at a certain point of course, if this promise will help how true this will confront us with problems like: do you really want to know if it's already decided there? And so on and so on. How this self-objectivization overlaps with radical subjectivization. In the sense that the prospect of virtual reality is that it will be possible at a certain point through direct neurological implants to switch directly from our common reality to another computer related... computer, sorry, computer generated reality and so on and so on. So again, what I claim is both these prospects: radical subjectivization in the sense of reality itself will become virtualized, reality will lose its resistance, the friction which defines it at reality. This overlaps with its opposite, the radical self-objectivization. Where does this leave us? Because I claim, this will be my final point, that this... this minimum, if there is a lesson to be retained today from on the one hand Judeo-Christian religious tradition and on the other hand from the great philosophical tradition of German idealism, it is that reality itself is always defined as that which resists through the minimal resistance, friction and so on. For example, as you know, even Fichte, the most radical so-called subjective idealist, posited immediately as correlative to the absolute ego some externality as what he called—it's difficult to translate from German—*Anstoß*, that which you encounter and which gives you impetus to... so that there must be, to cut the long story short, an external encounter. And here I claim that we encounter the ultimate dilemma. To put it in religious terms: should we accept this standard Gnostic attitude which predominates today? That is to say, the perspective is that of radical self-objectivization at the same time full immersion into virtual reality, the real as that which resists potentially at least disappears. Or should we stick to this notion of the real as that which resists? It's interesting how even those who were exalted by the prospect of identifying the genome, usually emphasized how—I quote a journalist—"the old formula that every disease with the exception of trauma has a genetic component, that this formula is really going to be true." Ah, here I see how human freedom can be saved, to put it in naive terms. They say, "Every disease with the exception of trauma." But is trauma for a human being really an exception? I claim that here... I'm now condensing what I wanted to say... here I think we should stick more than ever to the legacy which is paradoxically at the same time the Judeo-Christian legacy and the legacy of psychoanalysis. Namely the idea that what makes us actually, to put it in this old-fashioned pathetic terms, spiritual human beings, is... cannot be properly conceived in the terms of the inner self-discovery. You know, this Gnostic logic: go deep into yourself, recollect, immerse into yourself. That what makes human being human being is some external traumatic encounter which derails you and then it is in order to cope with this encounter that you develop the so-called symbolic spiritual dimension whatsoever. Because is not here exactly the same the lesson for example of Jewish religion, which is precisely... remember, Jews didn't discover their God through by way of looking deep into themselves. It was an external traumatic encounter. They were nicely wandering around and all of a sudden there was this call from the God, nobody knows why, and it's an enigma to them. That is to say, here you find in Jewish-Christian tradition precisely what psychoanalysis articulates as the encounter of the ultimate trauma, which is the trauma of the other's desire. Of the desiring other in its his or her impenetrability. And so I claim that, which is why to put it in naive terms, I don't fear this prospects of you know genome of whatever total objectivization and so on. That's not it! And also I think that the alternative between nature and nurture or your genome or environment is... doesn't cover the entire field. Because trauma is not simply part of your environment. Trauma is precisely that which doesn't fit your, how should I put it, standard environment. It's something which derails you, which throws you off the rails. And such an encounter is that which I claim is worth saving in our legacy. And now really to finish, I'm tempted to claim that here even the difference between Judaism and Christianity can be elaborated in very nice terms. In the sense that in the Jewish tradition this mystery of the otherness is still... how should I put it... remains this abyss of the other, this abyss of the other precisely in its otherness. The problem of the Jewish tradition is how to retain the openness towards the mystery of the other. And here let me conclude now with a slightly provocative philosophical premise. Usually officially, although they are both a little bit *démodé*, *passé*, but I think that at least Derrida doesn't deserve this, the opposites today are supposed to be in popular predominant philosophy deconstructionism versus Habermas. I claim this is a false opposition. I claim they both share a certain fundamental set of premises and basically supplement each other. What they both share is that the fundamental problem of ethics is how to retain the openness towards the other, how to retain the basic communicative hospitality. Of course they elaborate it in totally opposite terms. For Derrida it's precisely how to retain the openness towards these totally contingent encounters of the radical alterity of the other. While Habermas wants to elaborate a set of communicative rules which guarantee the communication with the other without constraints. But I think that in a way each of them gets from the other what he is lacking in this case. Habermas is right to emphasize against Derrida that if you do not elaborate this openness towards the otherness within the set of concrete propositions, then this respect for otherness can turn into some idiosyncrasy which can be even an extremely violent closure. On the other hand, Derrida is also right I claim to emphasize against Habermas that if you translate opening towards the otherness into simply a set of positive rules which guarantee communication without distortion, you already close yourself to the radical openness towards the other. What I claim is that this ethics which is then also operationally translated into the ethics of a gap ultimately between ethics and politics... what both Derrida—I simplify it a little bit but I claim not in the essential dimension—what both Derrida and Habermas share, although again formulated in a totally opposed way, is ultimately the idea of a gap between pure normativity and pragmatic politics. The whole idea of the Derridean *démocratie venir*, democracy to come, is no, this idea of that we have this undecidable call of absolute otherness, injunction, and that the whole point is that in any of our concrete particular real acts, we cannot ever catch up with this otherness. There is always a gap between the unconditional call of the other and what we can actually do. And that we should precisely respectfully retain this gap. That if we do not, then we fall either... either we forget the radical otherness and we are in unprincipled pragmatism, or if we posit our concrete political social measures as directly expressing articulating this otherness, we are in totalitarianism. And I think that both share this gap. Now without trying to convince you, just to tease you a little bit, the answer you will find in my new book, on love and so on, I claim that at the same time the Christian legacy and Lacan do not accept this. Let me just give you an example why do I think like this. Think about, okay it's already boring how classical this example is, but nonetheless just think about it: Antigone. How if within this field of the gap between this unconditional ethical injunction and our pragmatic relative measures which never live up to it, how would you locate the figure of Antigone? I claim that if you really accept these premises of Derridean-Habermasian openness towards the mystery of the otherness and so on, then Antigone should be dismissed as a totalitarian. Because let's read the play and you will see how the only Habermasian in the play is Creon. The bad king. Creon argues! In the best Habermasian tradition, he gives reasons. He is not the brutal, the brutal contingent... sorry, capricious ruler. No! He says basically his message to Antigone is, "I understand your sorrow, but listen, we had recently a civil war. Your brother was a traitor. If we bury your brother publicly, my God, violence will explode again," and so on and so on. And what is Antigone's answer? None! She doesn't argue. Read it! She says, "No, I want because I want, I want..." She simply insists. Point two: isn't it clear that her act is not located within this gap of some kind of transcendental call which is always other and concrete pragmatic measures which never live up to this call? No! What she proposes is, how should I put it, a measure which is immediately at the level of this other. She is in this sense fully totalitarian. She unconditionally insists on her demand. Her demand immediately for her translates this call of the other. And what I claim is that within the Lacanian space, this precisely is what an act is. In an act you can close this gap. Maybe Lacan is for this reason totalitarian, but then so am I. Thanks very much. [Applause] I'm sure many of you have questions. Please wait for the mic and speak through... exactly, just enter into this... exactly. Okay, okay, this is fine. First of all, thank you very much for a wonderful and inspiring talk. In the inspiration maybe, thinking outside in terms of seeing for example what Tibetan Buddhism would mean for the Christians and vice-versa, seeing it in terms of desire and so on, and referring to nameless authors, of nameless Tibetan authors, how did you themselves and so on. Similarly, there is a move style outside in the sense where you describe the Christians or even the distinction between the two. And this comes from outside... Maybe, probably... no, I'm sure that I will not answer your question satisfactorily, so let me just give you a couple of points. First, let me make it clear why it can be explained very easily. It was simply the reflex of a certain racist prejudice why *Muselmanen*, Muslims were called like this, because it was as you may know till the middle of our century when Muslims finally became more active, the cliché was that the Muslims are this ultimately passive religion where anything that happens you just... you just passively accept it, everything is fate, what can we do and so on. And since these so-called Muslims now in the camps, *Muselmanen*, were usually seen as just like making gestures like this and doing nothing, this is how through this racist short circuit they were given this name. What is so interesting... I will not now, I will really become another Fidel if I were to answer you fully... but just to give you an interesting example is how you are probably aware that in old ex-Yugoslavia, if anything the Muslims were the opposite. They were the most vital... I even am ready to use the term "the most pro..." okay, I'm a little bit narcissistic here maybe together with us Slovenes, but nonetheless in a certain way even more than us Slovenes, the most pro-Western multiculturalist whatever you want part of ex-Yugoslavia. No wonder that the best cinema, the best rock bands, all came from Sarajevo. Where I slightly disagree with you is only when you say that the war was fought for religion. I doubt it, if you ask me. I have here a much more cynical view. It appeared that way, but was there really... I think that it's only... it's the West who believes this, how should I put it? You know, there was a certain spectacle of religious warfare staged up to a point, staged for the West. But if you look at the structure itself, I would claim that paradoxically, a lot of time incidentally political struggles do function in that way. Hegel was aware of it, was that ideology comes second, not in the primitive but in the sense that—not in the vulgar Marxist sense that first you have material interests and then you mask them as ideology, but in the sense that first there is a struggle. Then in order to legitimize the struggle, you invent ironically in an artificial way a certain religion and you end up believing in this religion. And this is the miracle of ideology. The crucial moment, as Hegel would have put it, is not how you start with an organic unity and then this gets resolved into something artificial. Is how often the process is the opposite one: you start with a conscious lie, you end up believing your own lie. This is I think, if anything, something which defines today our multiculturalism, even the ideology of our century. It's not simply cynicism. My favorite mental experiment or test: do it yourself if you don't believe it. Read a very boring book—I'm not saying this because of politically correct reasons, I'm ready to read the devil himself if he is not boring, I'm speaking now about Hitler's *Mein Kampf*. It is a boring book, so I somehow succeeded in reading, okay, two thirds of it. It's even worse than Ayn Rand, this *Atlas Shrugged* or what. But what I mean is that: ask yourself a simple stupid question. Did Hitler really believe it or not? And you end up in a paradoxical answer that he was fully aware that he is manipulating but at the same time he believed in it. That is to say, at a certain point Hitler clearly, how should I put it, shows his cards, describes the manipulation. He says, "You know, in order to control the crowd you must present them with a simple image of the enemy control" and so on and so on. So he describes the procedure. But wait a minute! A couple of pages later he explodes in a rage which is obviously, to use these terms whatever they mean, which is obviously sincere in a certain way. So I claim that, now back to Bosnia, you know what surprised me and why I think that we, the Balkan, are in a way your future? The nations which emerged from ex-Yugoslav war are the first, I claim, maybe one of the first at least, truly postmodern nations. You know in what sense? In the sense that let's precisely take the example that you mentioned: Muslims. Do you know that Muslims in Bosnia does not designate an ethnic... sorry, I made a slip which already tells the truth... does not designate a religious community but an ethnic community? You can be an atheist and you are still a Muslim. You know, here we have a nice example of how something artificially imposed ended up the true point of identification for which people are ready to die and so on. You know how it all happened? Before, by before I mean till late fifties, there were simply Serbs and Croats in Bosnia and everyone admits, everyone knows that ethnically in the realistic naive biological sense there are no Muslims. There are Serbs and Bos... sorry, Serbs and Croats and among the Serbs and Croats, as the result of the four hundred years of Ottoman occupation, some of them adopted the Muslim religion. And it was always then, because as you probably know the fundamental tension of old Yugoslavia was the tension for hegemony between Serbs and Croats. And Bosnia was always the point of explosion, which is why we even have a
unknown
proverb: when a dangerous situation at any level, in family, wherever, is resolved, we
proverb: when a dangerous situation at any level, in family, wherever, is resolved, we
Slavoj Žižek
say, "Oh, then Bosnia will be calm." You know,
say, "Oh, then Bosnia will be calm." You know,
unknown
it's almost a proverb. So communists did something pretty ingenious, I claim, I think in the mid sixties
it's almost a proverb. So communists did something pretty ingenious, I claim, I think in the mid sixties
Slavoj Žižek
or when. They said, "Why not, in order to resolve
or when. They said, "Why not, in order to resolve
unknown
this eternal tension of to whom do Muslims belong, why should we not proclaim
this eternal tension of to whom do Muslims belong, why should we not proclaim
unknown
them as an ethnic group, as a nation?" And it worked wonderfully, at least for twenty, thirty years. You were not forced to choose. But the result, unfortunate result of this, was that today this division into Croats, Serbs and Muslims—especially in the case of the division between Muslims and Serbs—is an ethnic division. This is what
them as an ethnic group, as a nation?" And it worked wonderfully, at least for twenty, thirty years. You were not forced to choose. But the result, unfortunate result of this, was that today this division into Croats, Serbs and Muslims—especially in the case of the division between Muslims and Serbs—is an ethnic division. This is what
Slavoj Žižek
I would call conditionally postmodern. An ethnic division which is explicitly experienced not as a matter of your actual biological roots, but as a matter of choice. People were literally in the beginning of nineties in a position where they were forced to choose, to decide what are they ethnically: "Are you a Muslim or are you a Serb?" So when let's say some kind of ethnic police stops you in Bosnia and says, "Okay, what are you? Muslim or Serb?", they are not asking you simply what your family was. They are asking you which side did you take. Just to conclude so I don't spend too much time, where I think Western multiculturalism went wrong here... my God, this was horrible. Namely what? Look at what goes on now in Kosovo. This is the reason of my anti-at least a certain kind of multiculturalism. In Bosnia, the West was reasonable enough to see that simply these three nations cannot stand each other so they silently allowed partition into three units, so at least they have time, the people have time to at least forget a little bit the old traumas. And now things are incidentally pretty fast improving. For example, you can now even Muslims and Croats do now risk going through Serb territories. It is up to a point returning to normal. But the West sticks to this dream that Yugoslavia was once a multi-ethnic paradise and in order to save their honor, they want to retain this at least for Kosovo. So now we have a totally crazy situation where as you maybe know, for example, we have one Serb family living within an Albanian enclave and three people and then fifty United Nations soldiers guarding them and so on and so on. It's madness. They don't want to admit that simply it would be better at least for the time being to admit, to admit the distinction. But again, when you say religion and so on: yes, it is religion, people are ready to die for, but nonetheless it is already postmodern religion in the sense that there is clearly this element of reflexive choice in it. As to use Schiller's terms, it's not naive religion, it's sentimental religion. Sorry if I talked too long. Sorry, one more question? My God, what... I mean I am a... wait a minute, I'm a Stalin-Leninist. You know what Comrade Stalin said? We communists have a special body and so on, never die and can go on forever. So ask yourself how long you can go on. I'm eternal. I'm like Tom and Jerry Leninist, you know Tom and Jerry who you cut the mice, it starts again, it never dies. So your problem... I admire your work. I'm a little... but yes, go to but yes. When you begin by this, I see the your Norman Bates knife rising there. The affirmation of fundamentalism raises a number of questions. One of them is this: that you spoke of false fundamentalists, and I don't think you designated who the true fundamentalists were. And I see where in a sense fundamentalists might be tolerant because they're not questing after the other, but in fact a lot of fundamentalists seem to be intolerant. Then, the danger of questing after the other while it's always accompanied imperialism, it seems to me that questing after the other can serve a positive function. In other words, imperialism wasn't just destructive, it also spread certain possibilities, for, you know, shared interest. And then, if the movement towards the other is to be considered a problem, isn't the movement towards the other rather similar to the idea of trauma? In other words, isn't trauma an encounter with the other? Those are three questions about your overall picture. Okay, okay, okay, let me try really to be brief, maybe to allow you for another question. First, I think that, you know, there is trauma and trauma. Let's take precisely the male relationship towards femininity. I claim that this idea that behind the prejudices, the mask of what we men conceive as femininity, there is some concealed, inaccessible to us otherness of the true femininity—this is the ultimate male myth. In other and the same goes for colonialism. So I claim that the ultimate racism is not we can reduce the other, they are primitive and so on, but it's on the contrary this idea that there is an inaccessible mystery out there. This is the eternal, again to use this Fichtean word, *Anstoß* motive of colonialism. There is always, the more you conquer the other, all the more there is some mystery there. So the ultimate trauma for me is not this inaccessible other, but for example in terms of femininity, and here I agree with my good friend enemy Judith Butler, who once was quite justified I think in criticizing me from my early revisionist days when she said that the difference between her and me is that I still believe that there is something to be searched for as an authentic feminine position beneath or behind male distortions, while she knows that there is nothing behind the distortions. And I fully accept. In other words, the true trauma is not that you encounter some "ooh" like horror behind the mask, but that there is nothing behind the mask. Or to make my favorite, one of my favorite quotes from Hegel: the true trauma is as Hegel puts it in this crucial passage from consciousness to self-consciousness, that behind the veil of appearance there is nothing, only what you put there. Or to quote another Hegel's point which is I think crucial precisely for how to relate to the ethnic other: I quote it all the time but I think it's a perfect one. Hegel says that the mysteries of the Egyptians were mysteries also for the Egyptians themselves. And I think when you realize this, then you are authentically not Eurocentrist or whatsoever. That is to say, I claim that the most racist imaginable attitude is this idea that we will never fully understand the other because, you know, we never fully know the context, there is always something more to be learned and so on. But what if the other simply is in itself or him or herself not fully contextualized? You know, the mistake of this logic is that the obstacle which prevents us from fully understanding the other is simply an epistemological one. We do not yet know what... For example, you say something. We can easily play this solipsistic games: how do you know what you really meant, I would have known exactly all your life, but I cannot. Does this mean that I cannot fully understand you? No, because I claim that you do not fully understand yourselves. Let me give you one example with which I will finish from Daniel Dennett—okay officially my enemy cognitive psychology—who quotes, you know, this nice quote from Lincoln. Like, "You can fool some people all the time, you can fool all people some of the time, you cannot fool all the people all the time." Now as Dennett points out, there is a fundamental logical ambiguity here. Because when you say "you can fool some people all the time," this can be read as if there are some idiots who can be deceived all the time, some always the same people. Let's say I'm an idiot, you can deceive me all the time. Or it can mean all the time—that is to say at every time—there is some idiot, but once it's me, then it's maybe you, or I don't know. But now Dennett's point where I agree with him, spontaneously a Hegelian one, is that it's wrong to ask what did Lincoln really mean. He probably didn't know himself. It just sounded him a nice phrase. And I claim that Lincoln is not here an exception. You know, language in itself has this openness. And I wonder if the trauma is not to be thought more here. A propos of fundamentalism, I would simply say that... of
I would call conditionally postmodern. An ethnic division which is explicitly experienced not as a matter of your actual biological roots, but as a matter of choice. People were literally in the beginning of nineties in a position where they were forced to choose, to decide what are they ethnically: "Are you a Muslim or are you a Serb?" So when let's say some kind of ethnic police stops you in Bosnia and says, "Okay, what are you? Muslim or Serb?", they are not asking you simply what your family was. They are asking you which side did you take. Just to conclude so I don't spend too much time, where I think Western multiculturalism went wrong here... my God, this was horrible. Namely what? Look at what goes on now in Kosovo. This is the reason of my anti-at least a certain kind of multiculturalism. In Bosnia, the West was reasonable enough to see that simply these three nations cannot stand each other so they silently allowed partition into three units, so at least they have time, the people have time to at least forget a little bit the old traumas. And now things are incidentally pretty fast improving. For example, you can now even Muslims and Croats do now risk going through Serb territories. It is up to a point returning to normal. But the West sticks to this dream that Yugoslavia was once a multi-ethnic paradise and in order to save their honor, they want to retain this at least for Kosovo. So now we have a totally crazy situation where as you maybe know, for example, we have one Serb family living within an Albanian enclave and three people and then fifty United Nations soldiers guarding them and so on and so on. It's madness. They don't want to admit that simply it would be better at least for the time being to admit, to admit the distinction. But again, when you say religion and so on: yes, it is religion, people are ready to die for, but nonetheless it is already postmodern religion in the sense that there is clearly this element of reflexive choice in it. As to use Schiller's terms, it's not naive religion, it's sentimental religion. Sorry if I talked too long. Sorry, one more question? My God, what... I mean I am a... wait a minute, I'm a Stalin-Leninist. You know what Comrade Stalin said? We communists have a special body and so on, never die and can go on forever. So ask yourself how long you can go on. I'm eternal. I'm like Tom and Jerry Leninist, you know Tom and Jerry who you cut the mice, it starts again, it never dies. So your problem... I admire your work. I'm a little... but yes, go to but yes. When you begin by this, I see the your Norman Bates knife rising there. The affirmation of fundamentalism raises a number of questions. One of them is this: that you spoke of false fundamentalists, and I don't think you designated who the true fundamentalists were. And I see where in a sense fundamentalists might be tolerant because they're not questing after the other, but in fact a lot of fundamentalists seem to be intolerant. Then, the danger of questing after the other while it's always accompanied imperialism, it seems to me that questing after the other can serve a positive function. In other words, imperialism wasn't just destructive, it also spread certain possibilities, for, you know, shared interest. And then, if the movement towards the other is to be considered a problem, isn't the movement towards the other rather similar to the idea of trauma? In other words, isn't trauma an encounter with the other? Those are three questions about your overall picture. Okay, okay, okay, let me try really to be brief, maybe to allow you for another question. First, I think that, you know, there is trauma and trauma. Let's take precisely the male relationship towards femininity. I claim that this idea that behind the prejudices, the mask of what we men conceive as femininity, there is some concealed, inaccessible to us otherness of the true femininity—this is the ultimate male myth. In other and the same goes for colonialism. So I claim that the ultimate racism is not we can reduce the other, they are primitive and so on, but it's on the contrary this idea that there is an inaccessible mystery out there. This is the eternal, again to use this Fichtean word, *Anstoß* motive of colonialism. There is always, the more you conquer the other, all the more there is some mystery there. So the ultimate trauma for me is not this inaccessible other, but for example in terms of femininity, and here I agree with my good friend enemy Judith Butler, who once was quite justified I think in criticizing me from my early revisionist days when she said that the difference between her and me is that I still believe that there is something to be searched for as an authentic feminine position beneath or behind male distortions, while she knows that there is nothing behind the distortions. And I fully accept. In other words, the true trauma is not that you encounter some "ooh" like horror behind the mask, but that there is nothing behind the mask. Or to make my favorite, one of my favorite quotes from Hegel: the true trauma is as Hegel puts it in this crucial passage from consciousness to self-consciousness, that behind the veil of appearance there is nothing, only what you put there. Or to quote another Hegel's point which is I think crucial precisely for how to relate to the ethnic other: I quote it all the time but I think it's a perfect one. Hegel says that the mysteries of the Egyptians were mysteries also for the Egyptians themselves. And I think when you realize this, then you are authentically not Eurocentrist or whatsoever. That is to say, I claim that the most racist imaginable attitude is this idea that we will never fully understand the other because, you know, we never fully know the context, there is always something more to be learned and so on. But what if the other simply is in itself or him or herself not fully contextualized? You know, the mistake of this logic is that the obstacle which prevents us from fully understanding the other is simply an epistemological one. We do not yet know what... For example, you say something. We can easily play this solipsistic games: how do you know what you really meant, I would have known exactly all your life, but I cannot. Does this mean that I cannot fully understand you? No, because I claim that you do not fully understand yourselves. Let me give you one example with which I will finish from Daniel Dennett—okay officially my enemy cognitive psychology—who quotes, you know, this nice quote from Lincoln. Like, "You can fool some people all the time, you can fool all people some of the time, you cannot fool all the people all the time." Now as Dennett points out, there is a fundamental logical ambiguity here. Because when you say "you can fool some people all the time," this can be read as if there are some idiots who can be deceived all the time, some always the same people. Let's say I'm an idiot, you can deceive me all the time. Or it can mean all the time—that is to say at every time—there is some idiot, but once it's me, then it's maybe you, or I don't know. But now Dennett's point where I agree with him, spontaneously a Hegelian one, is that it's wrong to ask what did Lincoln really mean. He probably didn't know himself. It just sounded him a nice phrase. And I claim that Lincoln is not here an exception. You know, language in itself has this openness. And I wonder if the trauma is not to be thought more here. A propos of fundamentalism, I would simply say that... of
unknown
course it was ironically meant and so on. But what I meant is simply that there is something which spontaneously in a totally naive way I cannot but designate as fundamentalism. If Tibetans and Amish are not fundamentalists, then I don't know who is fundamentalist. Point two: I claim there is a radical difference, absolutely evident, between them and so-called moral majority fundamentalists. A certain dimension, the dimension of envy, obsession with others' enjoyment, etc., is not present in these cases. That's all I meant, that there is a certain kind of... The conclusion that I draw from
course it was ironically meant and so on. But what I meant is simply that there is something which spontaneously in a totally naive way I cannot but designate as fundamentalism. If Tibetans and Amish are not fundamentalists, then I don't know who is fundamentalist. Point two: I claim there is a radical difference, absolutely evident, between them and so-called moral majority fundamentalists. A certain dimension, the dimension of envy, obsession with others' enjoyment, etc., is not present in these cases. That's all I meant, that there is a certain kind of... The conclusion that I draw from
unknown
this, which is maybe a little more unpleasant for some of you, is that the first thing that we should do today if we still want to play the game of being some kind of radical leftist is: do not accept the opposites,
this, which is maybe a little more unpleasant for some of you, is that the first thing that we should do today if we still want to play the game of being some kind of radical leftist is: do not accept the opposites,
Slavoj Žižek
the description of bad versus good
the description of bad versus good
unknown
guys, the way the media or the public opinion presents this opposition to you. I don't think that the opposition of liberals versus fundamentalists is the fundamental, the basic opposition which
guys, the way the media or the public opinion presents this opposition to you. I don't think that the opposition of liberals versus fundamentalists is the fundamental, the basic opposition which
Slavoj Žižek
should structure our political struggle. I don't think. I think that multiculturalist liberals themselves... that at least the predominant multiculturalist attitude had its own implicit racism. As to what you said about a respect for the other, opening to the other and so on: yes, I agree with you, but nonetheless I would emphasize how always colonialism had this element of false respect for the other. Let's take India. What surprised me is to what extent Indian colonizers always had a great respect for, you know, these Buddhist wise or Hindu old wise men. In other words, they were always ready to admit that we Westerners are vulgar mechanistic Cartesian all the Al Gore theory, you know, he's the big anti-Cartesian and so on, and that they are infinitely wiser than us. What they feared was not the otherness of the other but what if an Indian would try to develop technology and remain the same as us? I claim that the strategy of colonialism is not "let's erase the difference, let's impose our view." It's on the contrary how to maintain the difference. This was always the most fundamental goal of colonialism: how to maintain the difference. Nothing suited better again an English colonist than this famous Indian otherness. "Oh my god how wise they are, we are worthless of their wisdom, we immersed in our materialist culture," and so on. There're two of them, yeah. Please. The first thing is that I have doubts about the nature of Tibetans or the Amish as truly fundamentalist. We're privileged here to live near the Amish and to know that their relationship to cell phones and cocaine and other things is becoming increasingly problematic. And I think there is obviously in some way some kind of envy of what they would consider normal desire. The second thing is that you're talking about the general sort of Judeo-Christian envy of other cultures, and it seems today, looking at Madonna or anyone like that, it's actually Judaism that in some sense has become the envy kind of inner sanctum because of the Kabbalah and its nature. It's once again become exoticized. All of this is to say that in some sense my real concern is not that there's a problem with respect to envying the other, but as we talked about fundamentalism, the real problem is maintaining a relationship to the other where on one hand we believe in the other, but on the other hand as Jacques-Alain Miller says, there is no other. And that's sort of the problem. That strikes me as the paradox that has to be worked there. I wanted to tell a very quickly a joke. And the joke is that there's a Jewish family living on the Upper East Side, which is predominantly Jewish, and their child is sent to a school on the Upper West Side and comes back one day and says to his father, "You know I can't believe it. They are telling me that there are three gods. There's a Father, the Son, and there's a Holy Spirit." And the father says to him, "My son, there is only one God, and we don't believe in him." That's the paradox that has to be worked there. Because it's not just a matter of maintaining some kind of fundamentalism, but also maintaining a space within fundamentalism. I let me try again to be... my God but it's difficult to answer very briefly. First concerning Amish and so on. I'm well aware of this point. I'm well aware of where the Amish get caught in their own paradox. Because on the one hand, you know, they are against what is called *Gemüt*, this arrogance or what, no? But on the other hand, it's the elementary Hegelian point to be made, they... the way nonetheless their whole economy is: how to mark the distinction between them and the other? And the more they make themselves modest, the more actually through the very procedure they want to mark, to designate their modesty. The very procedure of making it is extremely arrogant. So I think it's an extremely interesting significant point to go back to the original guy himself, Jakob Ammann, who was extremely aggressive, violent and every Amish will be extremely embarrassed even to mention him. So here we have I think this nice example of the dialectic described by Hegel already a propos of asceticism and so on: how the very procedure by means of which you try to assert something undermines the goal. Because you know how what are the problems with the Amish, like buttons, no? Are they allowed? Are they already *Gemüt* arrogance or not? Are they allowed or not? And maybe you know then you have radicals: no buttons! Then those who allow buttons. Then you have this middle school who allow only one button, like... so I'm well aware of the problems. As to Kabbalah, yes, I'm aware of it. And unfortunately we don't have time to go into it, but Kabbalah interests me, you know why? Because Kabbalah is where within Judaism itself some kind of obscene repressed dimension returns. The official doxa is: before in paganism gods were fornicating, whatever, we know what the Greek gods were doing and so on. But then with Judaism we have this pure God and so on. Yes, it's true, but read Kabbalah and you have a treatise on vaginal juices and
should structure our political struggle. I don't think. I think that multiculturalist liberals themselves... that at least the predominant multiculturalist attitude had its own implicit racism. As to what you said about a respect for the other, opening to the other and so on: yes, I agree with you, but nonetheless I would emphasize how always colonialism had this element of false respect for the other. Let's take India. What surprised me is to what extent Indian colonizers always had a great respect for, you know, these Buddhist wise or Hindu old wise men. In other words, they were always ready to admit that we Westerners are vulgar mechanistic Cartesian all the Al Gore theory, you know, he's the big anti-Cartesian and so on, and that they are infinitely wiser than us. What they feared was not the otherness of the other but what if an Indian would try to develop technology and remain the same as us? I claim that the strategy of colonialism is not "let's erase the difference, let's impose our view." It's on the contrary how to maintain the difference. This was always the most fundamental goal of colonialism: how to maintain the difference. Nothing suited better again an English colonist than this famous Indian otherness. "Oh my god how wise they are, we are worthless of their wisdom, we immersed in our materialist culture," and so on. There're two of them, yeah. Please. The first thing is that I have doubts about the nature of Tibetans or the Amish as truly fundamentalist. We're privileged here to live near the Amish and to know that their relationship to cell phones and cocaine and other things is becoming increasingly problematic. And I think there is obviously in some way some kind of envy of what they would consider normal desire. The second thing is that you're talking about the general sort of Judeo-Christian envy of other cultures, and it seems today, looking at Madonna or anyone like that, it's actually Judaism that in some sense has become the envy kind of inner sanctum because of the Kabbalah and its nature. It's once again become exoticized. All of this is to say that in some sense my real concern is not that there's a problem with respect to envying the other, but as we talked about fundamentalism, the real problem is maintaining a relationship to the other where on one hand we believe in the other, but on the other hand as Jacques-Alain Miller says, there is no other. And that's sort of the problem. That strikes me as the paradox that has to be worked there. I wanted to tell a very quickly a joke. And the joke is that there's a Jewish family living on the Upper East Side, which is predominantly Jewish, and their child is sent to a school on the Upper West Side and comes back one day and says to his father, "You know I can't believe it. They are telling me that there are three gods. There's a Father, the Son, and there's a Holy Spirit." And the father says to him, "My son, there is only one God, and we don't believe in him." That's the paradox that has to be worked there. Because it's not just a matter of maintaining some kind of fundamentalism, but also maintaining a space within fundamentalism. I let me try again to be... my God but it's difficult to answer very briefly. First concerning Amish and so on. I'm well aware of this point. I'm well aware of where the Amish get caught in their own paradox. Because on the one hand, you know, they are against what is called *Gemüt*, this arrogance or what, no? But on the other hand, it's the elementary Hegelian point to be made, they... the way nonetheless their whole economy is: how to mark the distinction between them and the other? And the more they make themselves modest, the more actually through the very procedure they want to mark, to designate their modesty. The very procedure of making it is extremely arrogant. So I think it's an extremely interesting significant point to go back to the original guy himself, Jakob Ammann, who was extremely aggressive, violent and every Amish will be extremely embarrassed even to mention him. So here we have I think this nice example of the dialectic described by Hegel already a propos of asceticism and so on: how the very procedure by means of which you try to assert something undermines the goal. Because you know how what are the problems with the Amish, like buttons, no? Are they allowed? Are they already *Gemüt* arrogance or not? Are they allowed or not? And maybe you know then you have radicals: no buttons! Then those who allow buttons. Then you have this middle school who allow only one button, like... so I'm well aware of the problems. As to Kabbalah, yes, I'm aware of it. And unfortunately we don't have time to go into it, but Kabbalah interests me, you know why? Because Kabbalah is where within Judaism itself some kind of obscene repressed dimension returns. The official doxa is: before in paganism gods were fornicating, whatever, we know what the Greek gods were doing and so on. But then with Judaism we have this pure God and so on. Yes, it's true, but read Kabbalah and you have a treatise on vaginal juices and
unknown
so on and so on. So all this returns with a vengeance. Which, allow me to make a further point if you'd agree, I always asked myself a naive question, and now recently I spoke with some Jewish theologians and they tempted to agree with me. Namely, there is one cliché, two clichés which I think are utterly wrong about Jewish religion. One is that they are in
so on and so on. So all this returns with a vengeance. Which, allow me to make a further point if you'd agree, I always asked myself a naive question, and now recently I spoke with some Jewish theologians and they tempted to agree with me. Namely, there is one cliché, two clichés which I think are utterly wrong about Jewish religion. One is that they are in
Slavoj Žižek
contrast to the Christian
contrast to the Christian
unknown
religion of love, they are the religion of the guilt, superego and so on. Second, that other for other religions gods were anthropomorphic like humans, they prohibit iconoclasm, no? They prohibit images because their God is pure spiritual. I think wrong on both counts. First, if there is a religion which has no superego—and I to avoid any misunderstanding, I mean this as a... as a how should I put it, as something extremely positive—it's the Jewish religion. Because they... they think in legalistic terms which precisely avoid all this dialectic of guilt. For example, the example that I described in my book *The Fragile Absolute*, which people think that I'm making fun of Jews there. No! I admire them for them. You know how they circumvent this proposition which says where it says in the Bible it says no pigs should be raised on the land of Israel. No problem! Go north of Tel Aviv, you will find three kibbutzim where three feet above the land they raise pigs,
religion of love, they are the religion of the guilt, superego and so on. Second, that other for other religions gods were anthropomorphic like humans, they prohibit iconoclasm, no? They prohibit images because their God is pure spiritual. I think wrong on both counts. First, if there is a religion which has no superego—and I to avoid any misunderstanding, I mean this as a... as a how should I put it, as something extremely positive—it's the Jewish religion. Because they... they think in legalistic terms which precisely avoid all this dialectic of guilt. For example, the example that I described in my book *The Fragile Absolute*, which people think that I'm making fun of Jews there. No! I admire them for them. You know how they circumvent this proposition which says where it says in the Bible it says no pigs should be raised on the land of Israel. No problem! Go north of Tel Aviv, you will find three kibbutzim where three feet above the land they raise pigs,
Slavoj Žižek
no? Now we from our Christian perspective we say, "But they are cheating" and so on. No! No superego! Second point, more interesting, iconoclasm. Let's ask ourselves a simple question: against whom is this prohibition actually directed? I claim it is not against pagans, but against the founding gesture of Judaism itself. Contrary to the appearances, I would claim that it is the Jewish God who is the first fully anthropomorphic God, in the sense of being fully a person. It is pagan gods which are not really personal gods but just some kind of impersonations of cosmic forces, yin yang whatever you want. Jewish God is the one who says, "I am who I am," who as we learn made man in his image. And this is the reason why we in the Jewish tradition or whatever are not allowed to make images. Not because God is some spiritual entity betrayed by an image, but because if we were to make an image we may come too close to him, how should I put it, something horrible would have come to the day. Which is why I think that I think who was it, was Lacoue-Labarthe who made the claim that the prohibition of to make images is somehow connected with the prohibition to kill. It's correct because the image that would emerge would be precisely the image of the primordial crime and so on, you know maybe the story better than me. So again I am well aware of all these problems. What I am trying to do in my recent work, in this book on love which will maybe appear, it's where does here Christianity stand, no? Namely I tend to agree with you that Judaism is turning into almost an object of envy. And I know that to avoid any misunderstanding, I personally, I am a hundred percent old-fashioned materialist. When I speak about Christianity and so on, I speak about a certain structuring of the symbolic space and so on. Why... [End of recording]
no? Now we from our Christian perspective we say, "But they are cheating" and so on. No! No superego! Second point, more interesting, iconoclasm. Let's ask ourselves a simple question: against whom is this prohibition actually directed? I claim it is not against pagans, but against the founding gesture of Judaism itself. Contrary to the appearances, I would claim that it is the Jewish God who is the first fully anthropomorphic God, in the sense of being fully a person. It is pagan gods which are not really personal gods but just some kind of impersonations of cosmic forces, yin yang whatever you want. Jewish God is the one who says, "I am who I am," who as we learn made man in his image. And this is the reason why we in the Jewish tradition or whatever are not allowed to make images. Not because God is some spiritual entity betrayed by an image, but because if we were to make an image we may come too close to him, how should I put it, something horrible would have come to the day. Which is why I think that I think who was it, was Lacoue-Labarthe who made the claim that the prohibition of to make images is somehow connected with the prohibition to kill. It's correct because the image that would emerge would be precisely the image of the primordial crime and so on, you know maybe the story better than me. So again I am well aware of all these problems. What I am trying to do in my recent work, in this book on love which will maybe appear, it's where does here Christianity stand, no? Namely I tend to agree with you that Judaism is turning into almost an object of envy. And I know that to avoid any misunderstanding, I personally, I am a hundred percent old-fashioned materialist. When I speak about Christianity and so on, I speak about a certain structuring of the symbolic space and so on. Why... [End of recording]