A New Kind of Communism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-11-02 · 0:56:49 · 7,098 words
ideologyhegel-dialecticscapitalismcommunism-socialismcinema-art-cultureecology-climatepsychoanalysisliberalism-political-correctnessrace-antisemitismeveryday-lifephilosophy-generaleconomics
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture opening with Chesterton's 'philosophical police' to introduce the Hegelian notion of totality as a critical rather than harmonious concept. He then demonstrates how ideology functions through what is unsaid, using jokes about coffee, the film They Live, Starbucks, organic food, and charity ads, before turning to structural unemployment, the privatization of the commons (general intellect), and the failure of market solutions to ecology, bio-genetics, and intellectual property. He closes by arguing that 'communism' names not a solution but the problem of the commons, and that narcissistic ideology today manifests in the flight from risk in love, sex, and political commitment.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 26
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “philosophical police”
Chesterton's figure of policemen who detect philosophical crimes (advocacy of totality) before they become political ones; Žižek uses it to frame the project of immanent critique.
Not an organic harmonious whole but a critical concept that includes all distortions, antagonisms, and inconsistencies as integral parts of the system.
The shift from seeing a concept's failure as contingent misapplication to recognising the failure as structurally necessary to what the concept is.
The Hegelian move from an external negation (a flaw imposed on an idea from outside) to an immanent negation (the flaw shown to be constitutive of the idea itself).
The discovery that the distortion of a notion is not accidental but built into the notion itself, e.g. property already containing theft.
The methodological axiom that analysis must include not only what is positively present in a phenomenon but also its negative determinations, what is absent but structurally implied.
Lacan's object-cause of desire, here illustrated by the plastic toy inside a Kinder Surprise egg, the small object filling the central void of desire.
as “ideology as the unsaid”
Ideology operates through the interplay between what is explicitly stated and what is structurally implied but unspoken, the gap between manifest and latent message.
as “ideological critical glasses”
The analytical operation, allegorised by Carpenter's They Live sunglasses, of reading the real ideological command hidden beneath the surface message of cultural artefacts.
The hidden enjoyment that ideology offers beneath its official moral message, visible only with ideological-critical 'glasses', e.g. the KKK's promise of nocturnal violence under a Christian civic facade.
Zygmunt Bauman's characterisation, endorsed by Žižek, of the London riots as a post-ideological protest that mimics consumer ideology rather than articulating a counter-programme.
as “post-ideological ideology”
The form of ideology operative in supposedly post-ideological times, where consumerism and feel-good practices replace explicit political commitment, exemplified by Starbucks and organic food.
as “anti-Semitic pro-Zionism”
The paradoxical ideological formation in which Euro-American anti-Semites support Israeli expansionism, united by a shared hostility to the immigrant Other, as exemplified by Breivik and Fox News.
as “structural unemployment as exploitation”
The claim that those structurally prevented from obtaining employment are exploited, not merely excluded, extending Marx's category of exploitation beyond the wage-relation.
The thesis that contemporary capitalism is returning from profit (extracted from labour) to rent (extracted from privatised access to the shared commons of knowledge and infrastructure).
Marx's term for shared social-productive knowledge; Žižek argues that capitalism privatises this collective field, converting it from a basis of capitalism's dissolution into a source of rent.
The silent assumption, shared even by many radicals, that the liberal-democratic capitalist framework is the final horizon within which only incremental adjustments are possible.
as “commons”
The shared substance of life, nature, bio-genetic endowment, cultural-intellectual production, and universal social space, whose enclosure or exclusion defines the central antagonism of today.
Žižek redefines communism not as a blueprint for a future society but as the name for the set of problems, the commons, that capitalism structurally cannot resolve.
as “magical thinking (ecology)”
Individual low-level ecological acts like recycling or buying organic food function as magical rituals that make people feel they are doing something while leaving systemic causes untouched.
as “depoliticisation via tolerance”
The ideological operation of translating structural-economic problems (racism, sexism) into problems of cultural attitude (tolerance), thereby displacing political and legal demands into psychology.
as “tolerance as intolerance of over-proximity”
Liberal calls for tolerance actually encode an injunction to maintain proper distance from the Other as a desiring body, a covert intolerance of the Other's sensory and bodily over-proximity.
as “harassment as over-proximity”
Žižek argues that anti-harassment discourse often encodes not protection from assault but an aversion to the Other's bodily closeness, a form of racism at the level of the senses.
The contemporary narcissistic desire to have the outcome of falling in love (belonging, connection) while eliminating the risk and vulnerability of the fall itself, embodied by algorithmically arranged matches.
as “thing without its substance”
A pervasive contemporary cultural logic in which commodities and experiences are offered in versions deprived of their defining element, decaf coffee, fat-free chocolate, alcohol-free beer, sex-free romance.
as “decaffeinated Other”
The multiculturalist ideological fantasy of an Other purged of its disturbing specificity, otherness enjoyed without its unsettling substance, mirroring decaf coffee or fat-free chocolate.
Stories he reaches for 15
A customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they only have milk, so offers coffee without milk. The joke shows that the absent ingredient determines what is present, there is no pure self-identical coffee.
“We only have milk, so can I bring you coffee without milk?”
Starbucks includes a surcharge for good causes (Guatemala children, rainforest) in the price of coffee, so the consumer's guilt for consumerism is pre-paid within the act of consumption itself, the archetypal form of contemporary humanitarian-capitalist ideology.
“Starbucks had an ingenious idea, to include this price for the sin of consumerism into the price of the commodity itself.”
In Carpenter's film a homeless worker finds sunglasses that reveal the true commands hidden in advertisements (Obey, Reproduce, Don't Think). Žižek uses it to model how ideology operates through its unsaid, then complicates it: the film inverts the real ideological structure where the obscene supplement is hidden, not the explicit command.
“The first thing to note here is that the constellation that we get in Carpenter's film is the reversal of the classic ideological constellation.”
In the film Brassed Off, a woman invites a man in for coffee, then admits she has no coffee. Her double negation is a direct sexual invitation made without naming sex, ideology through the unsaid.
“I would love to, but there is a problem. I don't drink coffee. No problem, I don't have any.”
Bill Gates's wealth is not profit from exploiting workers but rent: he has partially privatised the shared communicative field (the internet/OS commons) and everyone pays him rent to communicate with each other.
“We are all paying him a rent in order precisely in order to communicate with each other.”
Half-rotten organic apples cost twice as much as beautiful GM apples; Žižek argues we buy them not for material quality but to feel good about saving Mother Earth, pure feel-good ideology.
“It's pure feel-good ideology.”
Žižek challenges the reader to search MLK's texts for the word 'tolerance', it would have been absurd for him to demand white tolerance of Black people, revealing how the tolerance frame is ideologically regressive.
“It would have been ridiculous for Martin Luther King to say I want from white people more tolerance and so on.”
In The Da Vinci Code, the scandalous revelation that Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene distracts from the fact that nothing happens between Langdon and Sophie, desire displaced onto a theological surrogate.
“Poor Jesus Christ has to make love to cover up the fact that here there is no love between Robert Langdon and the great-great-great-granddaughter of Jesus Christ.”
Closing joke: today we get coffee without caffeine, sausage without fat, chocolate without calories, beer without alcohol, and multiculturalism offers a decaffeinated Other, otherness without its disturbing substance.
“Coffee yes without caffeine. Sausage yes without fat. Chocolate without calories. Beer without alcohol. This is my problem with multiculturalism.”
Quantum of Solace is politically progressive (Bond saves Morales's Bolivia) yet is the first Bond film to end without sex between Bond and the Bond girl, part of a broader cultural trend of experience without its substance.
“It's the first James Bond film where at the end there is no sex between Bond and Bond girl.”
Anders Breivik's manifesto is simultaneously anti-Semitic (too many Jews in France and the US) and pro-Zionist (strong Israel as bulwark against Islam). Žižek reads this as the extreme form of a real ideological formation shared by Christian conservatives and Fox News.
“He is literally an anti-Semitic pro-Zionist.”
A customer in socialist Poland asks a store if they don't have butter; the clerk corrects him, this store doesn't have toilet paper, the one across the street doesn't have butter. The joke maps ideological absences onto shortage economies.
“We are the store which doesn't have toilet paper. The one across the street is the one which doesn't have butter.”
Sister Maria tells Mother Superior she is in love with Baron Von Trapp and expects punishment; instead Mother Superior sings 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain', whose real message is 'go back and screw him.' This illustrates ideology's obscene supplement: the official moral message conceals the libidinal instruction.
“Mother Superior starts to sing a song called Climb Ev'ry Mountain. And the basic message of this song is literally something like go back screw the guy like crazy.”
Holmes draws attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time; it did nothing, that was the curious incident. Žižek uses this as the model for attending to negative determinations: what is absent is often the crucial clue.
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing in the night-time. That was the curious incident.”
Žižek recasts the run-up to the Iraq invasion as a Brassed Off dialogue: the US asks Europe to join the search for WMD; Europe demurs; Rumsfeld's 'sexual' answer is that there are no WMD anyway.
“No problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no?”
Works invoked 12
Capital book
To be re-read focusing on the notion of unemployment, as Jameson proposes; Žižek extends Marx's analysis to structural exclusion as exploitation.
Ninotchka film
Lubitsch's 'classic comedy' provides the coffee-without-cream joke, the lecture's central running motif for ideological negation.
They Live film
Called a 'great classic of Hollywood Left'; central to the lecture's analysis of ideology, though Žižek complicates its model by showing it inverts the real ideological structure.
The Da Vinci Code book
Used as an example of love-without-sex: the theological scandal of Jesus's sexuality screens the absence of any real desire between the novel's protagonists.
Brassed Off film
Called an 'English working-class drama / half comedy'; the invitation-without-coffee scene is used to model double negation as erotic invitation.
Quantum of Solace film
Politically progressive (saves Bolivia's Morales regime) yet notably the first Bond film to end without sex, symptom of the thing-without-substance logic.
The Sound of Music film
The Mother Superior / Climb Ev'ry Mountain scene is called 'the most obscene moment in Hollywood' and used to illustrate the obscene supplement of official moral discourse.
Angels and Demons film
The film version removes the sex that exists in the novel, illustrating that Hollywood is now deleting sex rather than adding it.
The X-Files tv
Alien spectacle functions to mask the sexual non-event between Mulder and Scully, exemplar of the thing-without-substance / love-without-the-fall logic.
The Lost Symbol book
Called 'one of the worst novels of all times'; nonetheless used as evidence for the trend: absolutely no sex, no tension, no desire.
Chesterton's novel is the opening source for the philosophical policeman concept; quoted at length and treated as a productive provocation.
Silver Blaze book
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story provides the 'dog in the night-time' model for the differential approach to ideology.
People invoked 25
Glenn Beck negative
Cited as a Fox News commentator fired for open anti-Semitism while the network was simultaneously pro-Zionist, evidence of the paradoxical ideological formation.
John Carpenter positive
They Live is treated as a rich (if ultimately inverted) model for understanding ideological critique.
Mentioned alongside Popper and Levinas as subscribing to a version of the philosophical-police idea; not developed further.
Mentioned alongside Popper and Adorno as another thinker who draws the line from totality to totalitarianism.
Zygmunt Bauman positive
His characterisation of the London riots as 'defective and disqualified consumerism' is endorsed as being 'on the right track.'
Cited in the economist's quip that Deng thought only capitalism could save China, now reversed.
Jacques Lacan positive
The objet petit a is invoked to analyse the Kinder Surprise toy; Lacan is used as a key theoretical authority.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Described as 'my favorite Catholic theologian'; his philosophical policeman concept opens the lecture and provides the frame for Žižek's notion of immanent critique.
Donald Rumsfeld negative
His announcement of no WMD is deployed as an ironic 'sexual' punchline in the Brassed Off analogy for the Iraq invasion.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Called 'that crazy guy who thought history is at its end'; Žižek argues we are all silently Fukuyamaist and that bio-genetics undermines his thesis, an admission Fukuyama himself reportedly made to Žižek.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as a friend; cited for noticing the French dating-agency ad promising 'love without the fall.'
Fredric Jameson positive
Described as 'my good friend American Marxist'; his idea of re-reading Capital through the lens of unemployment is endorsed and extended.
Arthur Conan Doyle positive
The Sherlock Holmes 'dog in the night' story from Silver Blaze is used as a model for the differential approach, attending to absent determinations.
Anders Behring Breivik negative
Described as 'crazy' but his manifesto is read as an extreme expression of a real and worrying ideological formation (anti-Semitic pro-Zionism).
Ernst Lubitsch positive
The Ninotchka coffee-without-cream joke is drawn from his film and used as a key illustration of ideological negation.
Darian Leader positive
Described as a friend; cited for the observation that X-Files' alien spectacle masks the absence of anything happening between Mulder and Scully.
Bill Gates negative
Used as the exemplar of rent extraction via privatisation of the general intellect; not personally attacked but his wealth is analysed as structurally extractive.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon positive
Quoted for the phrase 'property is theft' as the exemplary statement of immanent negation.
Mentioned as another source from which the philosophical policeman deduces future political crimes.
Dan Brown positive
Lost Symbol is called 'one of the worst novels of all times'; yet The Da Vinci Code and its sequel are used as rich illustrations of the love-without-sex / thing-without-substance thesis.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Used to demonstrate that the tolerance frame is ideologically regressive: MLK never demanded tolerance, he demanded rights.
Karl Popper negative
Listed as one of those who draw a straight line from philosophical totality to political totalitarianism, an anti-totalitarian liberal Žižek implicitly critiques.
Mentioned as an example: the philosophical policeman discovers from Plato's dialogues that a political crime will be committed.
Karl Marx positive
Capital is re-read through the lens of structural unemployment; the general intellect concept is both used and criticised (Marx failed to foresee its privatisation).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central theoretical resource throughout; the negation of negation, immanent critique, and totality are all Hegelian concepts Žižek deploys as his analytical toolkit.
What it argues
ideology as the unsaid — what is not present defines what isHegelian totality as inclusive of its own distortions and antagonismsstructural unemployment and the excluded as a form of exploitationprivatization of the general intellect and the return to rentcommunism as the name of the problem of the commons, not a solutionnarcissistic subjectivity and the flight from risk in love and politicsthe paradox of tolerance as covert intolerance of the other's over-proximity
Dialectical moves 10
“The distortion of a notion is not external but constitutive of the notion itself — property is already theft.”
The move from 'this idea was misapplied' to 'this idea carries its failure within it' is the basic Hegelian gesture.
“Every simple 'just coffee' is already a coffee without — there is no full, self-identical plain coffee.”
Fullness or presence is always already structured by absence; the neutral term conceals its negative determination.
“The constellation in Carpenter's film is the reversal of the classic ideological constellation — in reality, it is the official message that is the surface cover and the obscene enjoyment that is the hidden truth.”
They Live inverts the usual ideological logic: Žižek reverses the reversal to restore the correct picture of how ideology actually works.
“The true enemies of European civilisation are not the immigrants but the defenders of Europe — the anti-immigrant racists.”
Those who claim to protect a value are its actual destroyers; the threat is internal and self-inflicted.
“The only true utopia today is the idea that with small changes here and there things can go on the way they do.”
What presents itself as pragmatic realism is the real utopia; radical transformation is the sober, realistic position.
“Communism today is not the name of a solution — it is the name of a problem.”
Rather than designating a positive programme, communism names the set of antagonisms (the commons) that capitalism structurally cannot resolve.
“Tolerance often means the exact opposite — intolerance: don't come too close to me, maintain a proper distance.”
Liberal tolerance discourse encodes a prohibition on the Other's over-proximity, masking racism behind a gesture of openness.
“What is possible (immortality, splitting the penis) is unlimited, while what is impossible is raising taxes for healthcare — this is the triumph of ideology.”
The field of the politically thinkable is more restricted than the field of the technologically fantastic; ideology polices the boundary.
“The excluded and permanently unemployed are not merely left out — they are exploited.”
Exclusion from the labour market is not outside capitalism's logic of exploitation but is one of its forms.
“The most efficient capitalist countries today are those where either a communist party or another authoritarian movement holds power — capitalism is decoupling from democracy.”
The supposed eternal marriage of capitalism and democracy is dissolving; authoritarianism may be capitalism's coming political form.
Claims 24
asserts
The philosophical concept of totality is not a blueprint for organic harmony but a critical tool that must include the system's own distortions and antagonisms as constitutive elements.Hegelian totality
asserts
The basic philosophical gesture is to move from seeing a concept's failure as external misapplication to recognising the failure as immanent to the concept itself — the Hegelian negation of negation.dialectical method / Hegel
asserts
Ideology operates not through what is said but through the complex interplay between the said and the unsaid — detecting ideology means reading what is structurally implied but left out.how ideology functions
asserts
The classic ideological constellation is the reverse of They Live's logic: in reality the official message is the surface cover while the obscene enjoyment is the hidden ideological supplement.ideology and its obscene underside
asserts
Starbucks and ethical consumerism represent a new ideological operation in which the price of guilt for consuming is included in the commodity price itself, eliminating the need for separate charitable acts.humanitarian capitalism / Starbucks ideology
asserts
Individual ecological acts like recycling and buying organic are a form of magical thinking that gives people a feel-good substitute for the radical systemic changes actually required.everyday ecology as ideology
asserts
The London riots were post-ideological protest: a direct enactment of consumerist logic by those excluded from it, not an articulated political counter-project.the 2011 UK riots
asserts
Structural unemployment is not merely exclusion but a form of exploitation — those prevented from working are exploited just as those who work and yield surplus value are.unemployment and exploitation under capitalism
asserts
Contemporary capitalism is returning from profit to rent: wealth is generated not by exploiting labour but by privatising the shared commons of knowledge (general intellect).capitalism and rent / general intellect
asserts
Marx wrongly assumed that the socialisation of knowledge would dissolve capitalism; he failed to foresee that the general intellect itself could be privatised.Marx's limits / general intellect
asserts
The crucial problems of today — ecology, intellectual property, bio-genetics, new forms of apartheid — cannot be resolved within the liberal-democratic capitalist framework.limits of capitalism
asserts
Most self-described radicals are silently Fukuyamaist — they accept the basic liberal-democratic capitalist framework and seek only incremental adjustments within it.radical left's implicit Fukuyamaism
reframes
The idea that small changes can sustain the current system is the only true utopia today; real pessimism requires acknowledging that fundamental transformation is necessary.utopianism vs. realism
asserts
Capitalism and democracy are decoupling: the most efficient capitalist states today are authoritarian, suggesting capitalism may increasingly shed democratic form.capitalism and democracy
reframes
Communism is not the name of a solution but the name of the problem of the commons in its four dimensions: nature, bio-genetics, intellectual property, and universal social inclusion.communism
reframes
The true enemies of European civilisation are not immigrants but the anti-immigrant racists who claim to defend it.European identity and immigration
asserts
Translating problems of racism and sexism into problems of tolerance depoliticises them by converting structural-economic issues into cultural-psychological ones.political correctness and tolerance discourse
asserts
Tolerance discourse is often covertly intolerant: the injunction not to harass encodes the demand that the Other maintain a proper distance and not impinge with their bodily specificity.tolerance and racism
asserts
Multiculturalism can be a form of racism when the Other it celebrates is a 'decaffeinated Other' — an Other stripped of its disturbing substance.multiculturalism
asserts
The contemporary trend toward algorithmically arranged love replicates the logic of decaffeination: love is desired without the risk and exposure of falling.love and narcissistic subjectivity
asserts
Anders Breivik's anti-Semitic Zionism is not an aberration but an extreme expression of a real ideological formation in which anti-Semites and Zionist expansionists make a tacit pact against the immigrant Other.anti-Semitism and Zionism
reframes
The basic income proposal is interesting precisely because it represents a return to rent logic — paying the excluded a stipend so they can survive as consumers.universal basic income
asserts
Afghanistan was primitivised by globalisation, not primitive by nature — it was a tolerant, multi-religious country before communist coup, counter-revolution, and external intervention.fundamentalism and globalisation
asserts
The art of formulating problems correctly is as important as finding solutions; the very framing of a problem is always already part of the ideological field.intellectual and political method
Quotes 18
“Totality is not an ideal organic whole but a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its distortions, antagonisms, inconsistencies.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian totality as critical concept
“The basic philosophical gesture is that you cannot simply stick to idea and claim it just went wrong in reality. There must have been a flaw, something wrong in the idea itself.”Slavoj Žižek · immanent critique / negation of negation
“There is no full self-identical plain coffee. Every simple just coffee is already a coffee without.”Slavoj Žižek · absence as constitutive of presence
“To detect so-called ideological distortions, one should note not only what is said but the complex interplay between what is said and what is not said. Which unsaid is implied in what is said?”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as the unsaid
“Starbucks is for me ideology at its purest... to include this price for the sin of consumerism into the price of the commodity itself.”Slavoj Žižek · humanitarian capitalism as ideology
“Ideology is one of the most important in this sense commodities today.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as commodity
“The worker is dancing without milk while the banker is dancing without cream.”Slavoj Žižek · class difference beneath apparent equality
“Exploited are not only workers producing surplus value appropriated by the capital. Exploited are also those who are structurally prevented from getting employment.”Slavoj Žižek · exclusion as a form of exploitation
“Years ago Deng Xiaoping thought only capitalism can save China. Now the West thinks only China can save capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · authoritarian capitalism outperforming liberal capitalism
“The only true question today is Fukuyama or not... the only true utopia today is the idea that with small changes here and there things can go on the way they do.”Slavoj Žižek · radical change as realism, incrementalism as utopia
“Communism today for me is not the name of a solution. It's the name of a problem. The problem of commons in all its dimensions.”Slavoj Žižek · communism redefined as the problem of the commons
“The greatest revenge of ex-communists is that well what... the West thinks only China can save capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · irony of communist authoritarianism saving capitalism
“When we mean tolerance we mean there should not be harassment... Often it means... The aversion towards the proximity of the other as an actual desiring being.”Slavoj Žižek · tolerance as covert intolerance of bodily proximity
“We will enable you to be in love without the fall, without falling.”Slavoj Žižek · narcissistic desire for love without risk
“Coffee yes without caffeine. Sausage yes without fat. Chocolate without calories. Beer without alcohol. This is my problem with multiculturalism.”Slavoj Žižek · decaffeinated Other / thing without its substance
“It's precisely through globalization that Afghanistan, tolerant country, became fundamentalized.”Slavoj Žižek · fundamentalism as product of globalisation
“The art of formulating problems in the right way... is as important as the art of finding answers to problems. Here is ideology at its purest.”Slavoj Žižek · problem-formulation as ideological act
“Even a fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. We in the West we don't need such a prohibition. We automatically assume that it's not possible.”Slavoj Žižek · internalised impossibility of alternatives vs. external censorship
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I'm proud to be here. So, let me begin with my favorite Catholic theologian, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who, ironically, proposed to install a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. This is a quote from Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Quote, the work of the philosophical policeman is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves. We go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. End of quote. Now, this idea may appear ridiculous, but would thinkers as different as Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno, or Emmanuel Levinas, would they also not subscribe to a slightly changed version of this idea? Where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is condensed in the notion of totality. According to this line of thought, a straight road leads from the philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism. And the task of philosophical police is to discover from a book of Plato's dialogues or from a treatise on social contract by Rousseau that a political crime, Gulag, whatever, will be committed. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest potential terrorists. The philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia on dangerous ideas and so on to detect proponents of totality. The ordinary anti-terrorist policeman tries to detect those preparing to blow up buildings and bridges. The philosophical policeman tries to detect those about to deconstruct the religious and moral foundations of our society. This analysis nonetheless, I think, demonstrates the limitation of Chesterton. What we critical philosophers try to do is not distract, sorry, destroy or whatever, the ruling ideas, but to demonstrate how these ideas, once they are allowed to realize themselves, negate themselves or, if you want, distract themselves. If there is an elementary philosophical gesture, it's a gesture from noticing the distortion of a notion. How, I had a wonderful idea but unfortunately in reality this idea was wrongly applied and led to a catastrophe. To the distortion constitutive of this notion. The basic philosophical gesture is that you cannot simply stick to idea and claim it just went wrong in reality. There must have been a flaw, something wrong in the idea itself. This is at its most elementary what Hegel calls the negation of negation. There is the external negation, for example, to take a well-known communist example precisely, the external negation theft, a thief takes away your property. And then there is the immanent negation where, to quote the well-known phrase by Proudhon, you discover how property itself already has a dimension of theft in it. This passage from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of this notion is the basic feature of the Hegelian notion of totality. This is why I think this notion is extremely useful today. Totality is not an ideal organic whole but a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its distortions, antagonisms, inconsistencies, to see these distortions as integral parts of the system. For example, let's what does it mean to see today's capitalism as a totality? If you want to talk about global capitalism, you shouldn't just say, okay, we have highly developed countries like United States, Scandinavia and so on, and then countries which didn't yet catch up with this liberal democratic ideal. On the contrary, you have to include into capitalist totality, for example, a country like Congo, a country in disarray with thousands of drugged children, child warriors, but a country which is precisely as such fully integrated into a global system. So what is our totality today? Insofar as totality is a whole inclusive of its immanent distortions, the first axiom of an analysis which locates a phenomenon into its totality should be a differential approach. When you look at a phenomenon, you should include into it not only what you see, what is present in it, but also its negative determinations. What do I mean by this? Recall the famous line of dialogue between the Scotland Yard detective Gregory and Sherlock Holmes from Silver Blaze, the story about the famous curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Gregory asks Sherlock Holmes, is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention? Sherlock Holmes answers, to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing in the night-time. Sherlock Holmes' famous reply, that was the curious incident. How does this work in practice? There is a wonderful joke in Ernst Lubitsch's classic comedy Ninotchka. The hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. The waiter replies, sorry, but we have run out of cream. We only have milk, so can I bring you coffee without milk? We have to ask here a simple question. Why do we add to coffee milk or cream? Because there is obviously something missing in coffee alone and we try to fill in this void. What this means, among other things, is that there is no full self-identical plain coffee. Every simple just coffee is already a coffee without. The structure is here the same as that of Kinder Surprise, empty eggshells made of chocolate and wrapped up in lively colored paper. After you unwrap the egg and crack the chocolate shell open, you find in it a small plastic toy. Is this toy not what Jacques Lacan called l'objet petit a, the object small a, the small object filling in the central void of our desire, the hidden treasure? No wonder Kinder Surprise was at least five years ago prohibited to sell in the United States. I think because like it renders too palpable the structure of a commodity. Now, I want to mention another incident with coffee from popular cinema, this time from the English working-class drama, or half drama half comedy, Brassed Off with Ewan McGregor, when he was still a working-class hero before he became Jedi and so on. The hero accompanies home a young pretty woman who, at the entrance to her flat, tells him, would you like to come in for a coffee? His answer, I would love to, but there is a problem. I don't drink coffee. Her answer, no problem, I don't have any. The immense erotic power of her reply resides in how, through a double negation, she pronounces an embarrassingly direct sexual invitation without ever mentioning sex. When she first invites the guy in for a coffee and then admits she has no coffee, she does not cancel her invitation, she just makes it clear that the first invitation for a coffee was a pretext, indifferent in itself, for the invitation to sex. Why lose time with such dialectical jokes? Because I claim they allow us to grasp at its purest how ideology functions in our allegedly post-ideological times. To detect so-called ideological distortions, one should note not only what is said but the complex interplay between what is said and what is not said. Which unsaid is implied in what is said? Do we get coffee without cream or coffee without milk? There is a political equivalent of these lines in a well-known joke from my youth from socialist Poland, a customer enters a store and asks, you probably don't have butter, or do you? The answer, sorry, but we are the store which doesn't have toilet paper. The one across the street is the one which doesn't have butter. And what about a scene in today's Brazil where, in a carnival, people from all classes dance together on the street, momentarily obliterating their race and class differences? It is obviously not the same if a jobless worker delivers himself to free dance, forgetting his worries about how to take care of his family, or a rich farmer lets himself go and feels good about being one with the people, forgetting that perhaps he refused a loan to the poor worker. They are both the same on the street, but the worker is dancing without milk while the banker is dancing without cream. One can also imagine a Brassed Off dialogue between the United States and Europe, for example, in late when the invasion of Iraq was being prepared. The US, Rumsfeld, was basically saying to Europe, would you care to join us in the attack on Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction? Europe replied, but we doubt if it's worth doing it. We have no facilities to search for the weapons of mass destruction. And Rumsfeld's sexual answer was, no problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in in Iraq, no? Now, it's not only jokes. Let me go a little bit more in detail how ideology functions here through my last example from cinema, one of the great classics of Hollywood Left, John Carpenter's They Live from It's the story of John Nada, Spanish for nothing, a homeless worker in LA who enters a neglected, an abandoned church, finds there a box with strange sunglasses and, when he puts these sunglasses on, he discovers something strange. These are literary critique of ideology sunglasses, like you put them on and you see the real message, as it were. For example, he walks along a big publicity board claiming something like go to Hawaii, have a holiday of your lifetime, enjoy life there, and then when he puts the glasses on he sees the true message: obey, marry and reproduce, don't think and so on, whatever. Now this may appear naive, but I think that this gap between what is said and what is implied is crucial about how ideology works. The first thing to note here is that the constellation that we get in Carpenter's film is the reversal of the classic ideological constellation. In the classic constellation, what you see directly, without glasses as it were, is precisely the direct order and what you see between the lines, what you see if you put ideological glasses on, is the implicit pleasure, the obscene bribe as it were that ideology offers you in order to take hold of you. For example, let's imagine American South, a classic example, in the 1920s, a small city with Ku Klux Klan and so on. The official message: we are a Christian nation, go to church and so on. You put the glasses on and you see: so if you are one of us then in the evening we can go and kill some blacks, rape some black women or whatever, promising you as it were the implicit carnival. Or even, sorry for the obscenity, I have a great respect for Christianity, but nonetheless, imagine today a poster or whatever for Catholic priests, serve God, dedicate your life to God. You put the glasses on and maybe you would have seen something like: and you can have all the small boys you want and so on with pedophilia and so on. Now, this is an absolutely, I cannot emphasize how important this is, crucial mechanism. This dimension of the unsaid, which is why if I may briefly refer to a classic example which I developed much more in detail in my books, which is why I think a movie like The Sound of Music was such a mega success. I think the key scene of the film is you remember like half into the film when Julie Andrews, Sister Maria, goes to Mother Superior and tells her about her problem, which is she escaped the family Von Trapp because she was not able to endure the situation of being passionately in love with Baron Von Trapp and but now she still feels desire for him so she needs punishment, whatever. And you have to remember what the answer of Mother Superior is. I think it's the most obscene moment in Hollywood for me. You expect punishment: how dare you think about sex, pray, humiliate, torture. No. Mother Superior starts to sing a song called Climb Ev'ry Mountain. And the basic message of this song is literally something like go back screw the guy like crazy, something like that. And you know if you look at intelligent Catholic propaganda, this is their message. It's the official message is renounce, renounce, but then the message between the lines is pretend to renounce and you can get all the all the dirty stuff you want and so on. So again it's crucial to bear in mind these two levels. You find them everywhere. Now, it's easy to make fun of the more conservatives, but what about our politically correct times? Another of my, sorry if you already know it, classic examples: Starbucks. I noticed it, you have them here. Starbucks is for me ideology at its purest. Why? You enter it and you know usually they have posters saying something like yes, our coffee is cheaper than with the others, but and then comes, yeah goes to some stupid Guatemala children, goes to rainforest and so on and so on to save the. I found this an ingenious ideological operation. Why? Because you know in the good old dirty capitalist consumerist times which I absolutely prefer, you were a consumerist and you felt bad for that. So then you had to do something against it: charity, solidarity with the poor and so on. But Starbucks had an ingenious idea, to include this price for the sin of consumerism into the price of the commodity itself. So it's a little bit more expensive but you should not feel bad because you know the price for your duty towards the poor ecology and so on and so on is included into it. This I claim is how in our charity humanitarian times ideology is more and more working. Just think about buying organic fruit. Think about all those half-rotten apples who cost twice the normal beautiful genetically modified apples. Maybe they are better but I don't think we, I mean better at the level of pure material quality, but I'm not so sure that we really believe in it or that we buy it for that reason. Isn't it more that you buy organically grown apples because to put it simply it makes you feel good: my god look I'm doing something for Mother Earth, I'm part of a great movement to save Mother Earth and so on all that stuff. This is what you would have seen if you were to put the ideological critical glasses on. It's the same with all these ads that you find them all around. For example, where you have a picture of a child, distorted black child, and then a message like for a price of a couple of cups of cappuccino you can make a change, you can save this child's life or whatever. What would you have seen if you were to put this ideological critical glasses on? Something like: I know you feel bad, you are ruining nature, we are exploiting the third world, but we allow you for the price of a couple of cups of cappuccino, not only the right to forget about all this, but even to feel better, like you are doing something for it and so on and so on. This I think is our daily ideology. So, I think ecology is extremely serious thing. I'm just saying we should be very careful about how ideology is part of our like everyday life, even in ecology. Of how, for example, this is why I don't trust all this stuff about about recycling and so on and so on. It's, I claim that nobody really believes that recycling helps. My god, much more radical changes will have to be done, but it makes us feel good, you know, hop, no, I separate, I didn't put the bottle of Coke in the same box as that piece of newspaper. It makes me feel good. It's pure feel-good ideology. We are ideology is one of the most important in this sense commodities today. So what's the result of this successful ideological operation? Well, we've seen the result recently in United Kingdom with this riots. I think that the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman was on the right track when he characterized the riots as acts of defective and disqualified consumerism. You know, it was fashionable to say that in in the Fukuyama style, the era of ideology was over, now we live in a post-ideological era. I say yes, so what we have seen in London and other British cities in their suburbs was precisely a kind of post-ideological protest. Protest which is not articulated in the form of even religious fundamentalist project, but is simple pure protest which just imitates the ruling ideology. Like we are bombarded by the social injunction of be a good consumerist, we cannot do it, we don't have money, so we will enact it directly. This I think is where things are getting complicated today. I'm sorry I don't have time to go more in detail, for example, into what is happening with anti-Semitism today. Here I am, my position is here paradoxical. I'm pro-Palestinian, I'm critical of the politics of the state of Israel, but I hope I can say this openly, precisely out of my great love for the Jewish people. What I mean precisely by this? Did you notice something terrifying which is I think one of the most depressing signs of where we are? About that crazy guy who, crazy as he was nonetheless, wrote texts which are crucial to understand the predicament of today's right. Namely, Anders Breivik, the crazy guy who did the shooting in Oslo. You know why he is so interesting? If you had the misfortune of reading his crazy manifesto, you may have noticed what he did. He is literally an anti-Semitic pro-Zionist. At the same time, he is anti-Semitic openly, for example, he says we in Norway are lucky we don't have too many Jews. France also. England, United States they have a problem, they have too many Jews, they will have to do something and so on. At the same time, he is absolutely pro-Zionist, supporting stronger state of Israel as a defense against the Muslims. Now you will say but this is a lunatic case. No it's not. I claim that what he did is just the extreme form of something which should worry every Jew today. It happened some years ago, I think, maybe I'm wrong, that the a group of people who how to put it it's in their nature to be anti-Semitic, American Christian conservatives, started to support the state of Israel in its politics of on the West Bank. Now take Fox News. On the one hand they are absolutely pro-Zionist in this sense. On the other hand, I mean what, you know that their top commentator Glenn Beck, they had to fire him because he was becoming more and more anti-Semitic openly. So we have this paradox about which I don't have time to enter into it, which is I think shocking. This weird pact between Zionists, those Zionists, I mean I'm not against Zionism as such, those Zionists who now are slowly appropriating West Bank and old-fashioned Euro-American anti-Semites. The idea is: if you allow us to do what we want there, we'll allow you your implicit anti-Semitism whatever in in your countries. I mean what unites them is precisely this perception that the danger is the immigrant other and so on and so on. Here also I think the left should change its position. You know it's very fashionable to be this self-torturing guilty guy, like when you have conservative defenders of Judeo-Christian European civilization to say oh no we are guilty, imperialism, killing the natives, all horrors stem for us. No, I claim that my god yes Europe, European civilization is in danger today, but its true enemies for example in Europe are not poor Turkish or Arab immigrants, it's these defenders of Europe themselves, anti-immigrant racists who are the true danger to European identity. I think the left should reinvent progressive radical, I wouldn't say Eurocentrism, but my god Eurocentrism means democracy, egalitarian spirit, human rights, French Revolution and so on and so on. The greatest thing even around the globe happened as an echo French Revolution. Remember Haiti revolution, the first black successful revolution, it was direct repetition of French Revolution and so on. And here Europe is in danger, but from its defenders. For example, I'm desperate now in Europe in post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. You know how things are tricky with gay homosexual parades, pride day and so on. If you organize one in Eastern Europe, it will probably be prohibited or brutally attacked by Christian counter-demonstrators. Like in the Croat city of Split a weird thing happened a couple of months ago. There was a gay parade, but it looked like this: some gays protected by policemen from the rage of people around them attacking them. I read today in a newspaper that in which I think it was even in Czech Republic or where, that gay parade was prohibited claiming that it would arouse public opinion and so on and so on. While whatever you say for example about Turkey, at least there was a couple of months ago there a big gay parade, tens of thousands of people without any counter-demonstrations and so on and so on. So again the the situation here is getting extremely complex, but we don't have time to go into it. Just let me go to the final part. What is effectively happening here? Where do we stand with global capitalism? I tend to agree with the idea proposed by my good friend, by my good friend American Marxist Fredric Jameson, that one should reread the Capital by Marx focusing on the notion of unemployment. Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and expansion which constitutes the very core of capitalism. And the idea is the following one: that today more and more with this incessant technological renewal revolution and so on, unemployment is becoming a key feature. Today's world market is a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer and labor has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system. We have even whole nations, massive populations around the world who are as it were dropped out of history, who are excluded from the modernizing projects. We have so-called failed states, rogue states, Congo, Somalia, victims of famine, ecological disasters, states caught in pseudo-archaic ethnic hatreds, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or of the war on terror. The category of the unemployed should thus be expanded to encompass a wide span of population, from the temporary unemployed through no longer employable and permanently unemployed up to people living in slums and other types of ghettos. And finally the whole areas, populations of states excluded from global capitalist system. So this I think is one fact which is absolutely crucial to grasp today's global capitalism. That it is with its expansion producing more and more inherent exclusions, the whole areas left out there as it were out of history. And don't be naive here. It's not that some primitive countries are left out. They are literally primitivized. Like my great example, just think about Afghanistan. If there is a country which appears crazy fundamentalist country, it's Afghanistan. Wait a minute, unfortunately I'm old enough to remember when I was young before even the Soviet invasion and before the communists took power there. Afghanistan was a maybe the most tolerant Near East predominantly Muslim country with a progressive technocratic pro-Western king, with a very strong local communist party, absolutely not, and with a great tradition of multi-religious tolerance. How did Afghanistan become fundamentalist? Well, first the communist party did a coup d'etat, then there was the counter-movement and so on and so on. So it's precisely through globalization that Afghanistan, tolerant country, became fundamentalized. The second thing we should bear in mind is that this new structural unemployment should be conceived, I think, as a form of exploitation. Exploited are not only workers producing surplus value appropriated by the capital. Exploited are also those who are structurally prevented from getting employment, all those all those excluded. Which is why I find this very interesting. Did you notice how the only original leftist idea of the last decades, economic idea, is the idea of basic citizens' income, which is basically a form of a rent? The idea is to save capitalism by enabling precisely those unemployed to get some basic rent and to survive but also to still function as consumers. Why is this so interesting? Because I claim we should here think further than Marx. In the sense that today we are somehow returning from profit to rent. Think about Bill Gates. How did he become, he no longer is, I know that Mexican guy is now the richest man in the world. I don't think he was ultra-exploiting his workers or what. I think it is rent. Something is going on today masked as technological innovation, computer clouds and so on, which is that, you know, Marx at his best but at the same time at his worst thought in a very naive way that the moment the main source of wealth is no longer physical work but knowledge, shared knowledge, social knowledge, productive knowledge, whatever Marx called this in English general intellect, that the moment this happens, capitalism can no longer function, it will as it were disintegrate. What Marx was not able to see is is the idea of of this general intellect, the shared collective field of knowledge, itself being privatized. And those who succeed in privatizing it get rent, not profit. It's a return to rent. That's what Bill Gates did. Why is he so rich? Because in order for me to communicate with you, to be in touch, I have the very field shared by all of us is partially privatized by Bill Gates. It's not that he is earning a profit. We are all paying him a rent in order precisely in order to communicate with each other. Now to conclude so my idea is here the following one. Why communism? I'm not crazy. I'm well aware, I've written quite a lot about it, about how the 20th-century communist dream miserably failed, ending in an economic, ethico-political, ecological and so on catastrophe. So why still use the name communism? My answer is the following one, it's explained much more in detail in my books. I claim that the only true question today is Fukuyama or not. It's easy to make fun of Francis Fukuyama, that crazy guy who thought history is at its end. But aren't we all or most of us silently Fukuyamaists? Even so-called radicals, they think more gay rights, better ecology, blah blah, but nobody questions the basic liberal democratic capitalist framework. So the only true question for me is the problems we are confronted today, can they be solved within this frame or not? And I think, and this is even a sad pessimist thought, that in the long term, no. I claim that if you take the crucial problems we are confronting today, ecology, okay, you can do many things with market, I agree, if you tax products which pollute the environment and so on, but when you have serious disturbances like Fukushima and so on, nuclear plants or whatever, the melting of the ice, you cannot leave this to market. You need some kind of large globally coordinated social activity. Intellectual property, I think it's clear that it's maybe one of the main sources of all the financial market convulsions now and so on. I don't think capitalism will be able to to in the long term to control the or to even resolve to even cope with the problem of intellectual property. Which is why I think the greatest revenge of ex-communists is that well what, I read recently a commentary from an Singapore economist who said years ago Deng Xiaoping thought only capitalism can save China. Now the West thinks only China can save capitalism. That is to say did you noticed how the most efficient capitalist country today are the countries where either communist party or another authoritarian movement is at its power and that's what should worry us. Namely that till now we had the idea which was more or less even true, the idea of a kind of eternal marriage between capitalism and democracy. You may have years of dictatorship but sooner or later when capitalism becomes more productive you have a demand for democracy. But now I think unfortunately maybe this time is over. Capitalism will following its inner necessity will have to not maybe directly get rid of democracy but change it into an empty form. Then bio-genetics, my god, Fukuyama himself once when I met him admitted this to me recently that the fact of bio-genetics, the fact of the possibility to directly influence our psychic and so on features, makes his idea of the end of history obsolete. Not to mention the new forms of apartheid and so on and so on. Let me be very clear here. I am not saying oh back to Lenin's communism and so on. That is over, the 20th century is over. I have no nostalgic dreams here. What I'm saying is maybe even something much more pessimistic. What I'm saying is that unfortunately the problems are here. The problems which we face today are precisely at their most fundamental level the problems of the commons. The commons of nature, which cannot be, I claim, the way we deal with nature, resolved through market mechanisms. It needs a kind of a globally coordinated activity beyond nation state beyond the market. Intellectual property the same. Bio-genetics the same. And especially new forms of apartheid, new divisions, new walls. It's the irony that global capitalism where commodities circulate freely is characterized by new walls everywhere. I claim that more and more capitalism will not be able to sustain this what Marxists dismissively called formal freedom. We are all at least in our ideological political life acknowledged as free free individuals with human rights and so on and so on. More and more it's clear that some something has to be excluded. Now you will say okay but where are here concrete possibilities? How to do it? Well my answer here is that I'm not an old-style Marxist who claims you know there is a historical necessity, the train of history is on our side. No it's not. It's there is no guarantee that something will happen. Nonetheless, if you allow me just briefly to conclude with, nonetheless when I hear the word impossible, it's not possible, I get skeptical. What do I mean by this? Did you notice how in what a strange way this opposition between what is possible and what is impossible functions in our societies? On the one hand, especially in the domain of private pleasure, sexuality and technology, more and more things are becoming possible. They are telling us maybe we will become immortal, we will be able bio-genetically through cloning to grow organs to replace them whatever all these dreams. Or even in sexuality, the tasteless example that I like, I recently meet in New York a surgeon whose specialty is to cut the penis into two. So you have two penises you can do it with two women whatever. Everything is possible here. So this is possible, you can be immortal, we will be able to travel to Mars soon and so on. But to raise like taxes for to get better health care, ah that's impossible. This is our reality. How dare you have an absolute an absolute an absolute impossibility? And things are here very strange. This is the triumph of ideology today. Recently, in mid-April media reported and I checked it up with my Chinese friends they told me it's true, that Chinese government has prohibited showing on TV, in theaters, but also in novels and comics, stories which deal with time travel and alternate history. The official argument is that such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters. Of course, we know what it is about. Even a fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. But I think this is a good sign for the Chinese people. Like, those in power at least still see this as a danger. We in the West we don't need such a prohibition. We automatically assume that it's not possible. So communism today for me is not the name of a solution. It's the name of a problem. The problem of commons in all its dimensions. The commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problems of our bio-genetic commons, the problems of cultural commons, intellectual property, and the problem of commons as the universal space of humanity from which whole groups of people are more and more excluded. Whatever the solution, and it will certainly not be the 20th century communism, it will have to solve this problem. Because, to conclude by quoting myself from the way you quoted me, I think that when people say you are a utopian, well I'm saying no the only utopia today is the idea that with small changes here and there things can go on the way they do. I think that we witness today an incredible amount of refusal how to put it refusal to believe. For example take just ecology. On the one hand we refuse to take the ideological crisis seriously. Sorry the ecological crisis seriously. No they are exaggerating and so on and so on. But what is so interesting is that at the same time there is a lot of magical thinking going on in the way we deal with ecology. What do I mean by magical thinking? You know that wonderful everyday example of magical thinking when you sit at home in front of a TV and you watch a sport competition, you support your team, and even if you are alone at home or with a couple of friends you shout support as if in some magical way you can nonetheless influence the outcome. Well I claim that a lot of this everyday low-level personal ecology, this buying organic fruit, recycling, is pretty close to this sitting at home and and shouting and so on. I mean here comes the duty of us so-called public intellectuals today. I don't think, and those who think they can do are bluffing, I don't think we can offer solutions. I mean when people ask me what to do with ecology, my god what do I know, I don't have answers. What we can do is to see how when we are confronted a problem, the very way we formulate a problem is part of the problem. It's a great art as important as the art of finding answers to problems, is the art of formulating problems in the right way. Here is ideology at its purest. Just to conclude my standard example. Of course I am as all of you against sexism, racism and so on. But I'm deeply suspicious of, and this is what we are usually doing today, of automatically translating these problems into problems of tolerance. Make a simple test: Google Martin Luther King, his text, and look for tolerance. It would have been ridiculous for Martin Luther King to say I want from white people more tolerance and so on. Or for a feminist to say we want to be more tolerated women by men. That's humiliating, ridiculous. So why do we today automatically accept automatically translate problems of racism, sexism and so on into problems of tolerance? I claim it's one way of depoliticizing the situation. The problem which is basically economic, legal and so on problem, all of a sudden becomes a cultural problem: are we ready to tolerate others? And then you can even squeeze into it all the pseudo-psychoanalytic stuff like why do I hate the other? Is it that I hate by hating the other I hate something deep in me, so I should the solution is then to deeply analyze myself and so on whatever. So, or another even more direct ideology: when in developed countries we talk about tolerance, do we not often mean the exact opposite, intolerance? What do I mean by this? When we mean tolerance we mean there should not be harassment. Harassment is for me a very ambiguous term. Of course I'm opposed to it when we are dealing with rape or whatever, sexual harassment. But be careful when you hear the word harassment. Often it means something very precise which is much more problematic. The aversion towards the proximity of the other as a actual desiring being. Harassment means don't come too close to me, the other. Harassment means the fight against harassment often means stay at a proper distance. Your over-proximity bothers me. And it is here that racism functions today. A common liberal will always say I like blacks, Chinese, but I don't like, and then comes that element of over-proximity, but I don't like the way they smell, I don't like their music, I don't like again the taste of their food, whatever. The problem is this over-proximity. So basically, quite often, tolerance means I don't tolerate your over-proximity. Tolerance means don't come too close to me. And this is how in our narcissistic times ideology functions at the level of everyday life. And just to conclude with a totally crazy story. I claim that this is good news if you are an old romantic like me who still believes in love and passionate sex, not this kind of a healthy sex you know. I'm even suspicious of condoms like I deeply sympathize with the black guy from South Africa who asked once but why don't you use condoms? He says I know it's wrong politically from political correctness but I love the black guy's answer, he said well making love with a condom is the same as taking shower with a raincoat on, no? There is an, no but seriously, like so that you will not think that I'm dreaming. Did you notice something strange in the latest Hollywood products? The last James Bond, Quantum of Solace. Did you notice that although politically it's very progressive, basically James Bond saves the Morales regime in Bolivia against some bad international company, but did you notice that it's the first James Bond film where at the end there is no sex between Bond and Bond girl? Let's go further and the lowest possible level: Dan Brown. Did you notice The Da Vinci Code, no sex. And this is why I think it's the same logic as as that as is that how is it called the TV series where where with the two agents fighting the, sorry, X-Files, yes, X-Files, yes. I mean my friend Darian Leader drew attention to a simple fact: why do all those things happen out there, aliens intruding all the time, to mask up the fact that nothing happens here between the two of them. And it's exactly the same in in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Poor Jesus Christ has to make love to cover up the fact that here there is no love between Robert Langdon and the great-great-great-granddaughter of Jesus Christ. Then in the last novel, one of the worst novels of all times, Lost Symbol, there is absolutely no sex, no tension, no nothing. And even a step further. Did you notice how in how in with Angels and Demons? It's even more mysterious. There is sex in the novel at the end between Robert Langdon and that Italian scientist. There is no sex in the film. Where are we coming? In the good old days we said Hollywood added sex to make it more commercial. Now Hollywood is deleting sex. What is going on here? I think something very sad is going here. My friend Alain Badiou noticed a strange thing. He read a French ad for marital agencies where they said, it's the same it works in French as in English, tomber amoureux, to fall in love. It said: we will enable you to be in love without the fall, without falling. The idea is a very sad one. The idea is you know falling in love means precisely fall, you expose yourself to an open danger. And now I think it's a very sad sign of our narcissistic predominant forms of subjectivity that we want to have the result, be in love, but without risking the fall. Which is why something is really going on and agencies themselves are mentioning it: how we are in a way potentially returning to so-called old primitive strategies of of arranged marriages. Only today it's not relatives it's agencies who are doing like the idea is who has time for slow flirting, who can risk opening yourself to the other? You tell all your desires, blah blah blah, needs to an agency, they will do it for you and you will be just informed with whom to fall in love and so on and so on. This is this is our reality today and it's a it's a very sad reality today. Which is why again, absolutely to conclude with my now really with my old joke, you know how more and more we live in a society where you get a thing without its substance? Coffee yes without caffeine. Sausage yes without fat. Chocolate without calories. Beer without alcohol. This is my problem with multiculturalism. I'm afraid that the other that multiculturalist are offering us, you know this wonderful other who is holistic with organic harmony with nature, is the same decaffeinated other. Multiculturalism can be a form of racism. Maybe I should stop now. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. I'm proud to be here. So, let me begin with my favorite Catholic theologian, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who, ironically, proposed to install a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. This is a quote from Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Quote, the work of the philosophical policeman is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves. We go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. End of quote. Now, this idea may appear ridiculous, but would thinkers as different as Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno, or Emmanuel Levinas, would they also not subscribe to a slightly changed version of this idea? Where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is condensed in the notion of totality. According to this line of thought, a straight road leads from the philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism. And the task of philosophical police is to discover from a book of Plato's dialogues or from a treatise on social contract by Rousseau that a political crime, Gulag, whatever, will be committed. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest potential terrorists. The philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia on dangerous ideas and so on to detect proponents of totality. The ordinary anti-terrorist policeman tries to detect those preparing to blow up buildings and bridges. The philosophical policeman tries to detect those about to deconstruct the religious and moral foundations of our society. This analysis nonetheless, I think, demonstrates the limitation of Chesterton. What we critical philosophers try to do is not distract, sorry, destroy or whatever, the ruling ideas, but to demonstrate how these ideas, once they are allowed to realize themselves, negate themselves or, if you want, distract themselves. If there is an elementary philosophical gesture, it's a gesture from noticing the distortion of a notion. How, I had a wonderful idea but unfortunately in reality this idea was wrongly applied and led to a catastrophe. To the distortion constitutive of this notion. The basic philosophical gesture is that you cannot simply stick to idea and claim it just went wrong in reality. There must have been a flaw, something wrong in the idea itself. This is at its most elementary what Hegel calls the negation of negation. There is the external negation, for example, to take a well-known communist example precisely, the external negation theft, a thief takes away your property. And then there is the immanent negation where, to quote the well-known phrase by Proudhon, you discover how property itself already has a dimension of theft in it. This passage from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of this notion is the basic feature of the Hegelian notion of totality. This is why I think this notion is extremely useful today. Totality is not an ideal organic whole but a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its distortions, antagonisms, inconsistencies, to see these distortions as integral parts of the system. For example, let's what does it mean to see today's capitalism as a totality? If you want to talk about global capitalism, you shouldn't just say, okay, we have highly developed countries like United States, Scandinavia and so on, and then countries which didn't yet catch up with this liberal democratic ideal. On the contrary, you have to include into capitalist totality, for example, a country like Congo, a country in disarray with thousands of drugged children, child warriors, but a country which is precisely as such fully integrated into a global system. So what is our totality today? Insofar as totality is a whole inclusive of its immanent distortions, the first axiom of an analysis which locates a phenomenon into its totality should be a differential approach. When you look at a phenomenon, you should include into it not only what you see, what is present in it, but also its negative determinations. What do I mean by this? Recall the famous line of dialogue between the Scotland Yard detective Gregory and Sherlock Holmes from Silver Blaze, the story about the famous curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Gregory asks Sherlock Holmes, is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention? Sherlock Holmes answers, to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing in the night-time. Sherlock Holmes' famous reply, that was the curious incident. How does this work in practice? There is a wonderful joke in Ernst Lubitsch's classic comedy Ninotchka. The hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. The waiter replies, sorry, but we have run out of cream. We only have milk, so can I bring you coffee without milk? We have to ask here a simple question. Why do we add to coffee milk or cream? Because there is obviously something missing in coffee alone and we try to fill in this void. What this means, among other things, is that there is no full self-identical plain coffee. Every simple just coffee is already a coffee without. The structure is here the same as that of Kinder Surprise, empty eggshells made of chocolate and wrapped up in lively colored paper. After you unwrap the egg and crack the chocolate shell open, you find in it a small plastic toy. Is this toy not what Jacques Lacan called l'objet petit a, the object small a, the small object filling in the central void of our desire, the hidden treasure? No wonder Kinder Surprise was at least five years ago prohibited to sell in the United States. I think because like it renders too palpable the structure of a commodity. Now, I want to mention another incident with coffee from popular cinema, this time from the English working-class drama, or half drama half comedy, Brassed Off with Ewan McGregor, when he was still a working-class hero before he became Jedi and so on. The hero accompanies home a young pretty woman who, at the entrance to her flat, tells him, would you like to come in for a coffee? His answer, I would love to, but there is a problem. I don't drink coffee. Her answer, no problem, I don't have any. The immense erotic power of her reply resides in how, through a double negation, she pronounces an embarrassingly direct sexual invitation without ever mentioning sex. When she first invites the guy in for a coffee and then admits she has no coffee, she does not cancel her invitation, she just makes it clear that the first invitation for a coffee was a pretext, indifferent in itself, for the invitation to sex. Why lose time with such dialectical jokes? Because I claim they allow us to grasp at its purest how ideology functions in our allegedly post-ideological times. To detect so-called ideological distortions, one should note not only what is said but the complex interplay between what is said and what is not said. Which unsaid is implied in what is said? Do we get coffee without cream or coffee without milk? There is a political equivalent of these lines in a well-known joke from my youth from socialist Poland, a customer enters a store and asks, you probably don't have butter, or do you? The answer, sorry, but we are the store which doesn't have toilet paper. The one across the street is the one which doesn't have butter. And what about a scene in today's Brazil where, in a carnival, people from all classes dance together on the street, momentarily obliterating their race and class differences? It is obviously not the same if a jobless worker delivers himself to free dance, forgetting his worries about how to take care of his family, or a rich farmer lets himself go and feels good about being one with the people, forgetting that perhaps he refused a loan to the poor worker. They are both the same on the street, but the worker is dancing without milk while the banker is dancing without cream. One can also imagine a Brassed Off dialogue between the United States and Europe, for example, in late when the invasion of Iraq was being prepared. The US, Rumsfeld, was basically saying to Europe, would you care to join us in the attack on Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction? Europe replied, but we doubt if it's worth doing it. We have no facilities to search for the weapons of mass destruction. And Rumsfeld's sexual answer was, no problem, there are no weapons of mass destruction in in Iraq, no? Now, it's not only jokes. Let me go a little bit more in detail how ideology functions here through my last example from cinema, one of the great classics of Hollywood Left, John Carpenter's They Live from It's the story of John Nada, Spanish for nothing, a homeless worker in LA who enters a neglected, an abandoned church, finds there a box with strange sunglasses and, when he puts these sunglasses on, he discovers something strange. These are literary critique of ideology sunglasses, like you put them on and you see the real message, as it were. For example, he walks along a big publicity board claiming something like go to Hawaii, have a holiday of your lifetime, enjoy life there, and then when he puts the glasses on he sees the true message: obey, marry and reproduce, don't think and so on, whatever. Now this may appear naive, but I think that this gap between what is said and what is implied is crucial about how ideology works. The first thing to note here is that the constellation that we get in Carpenter's film is the reversal of the classic ideological constellation. In the classic constellation, what you see directly, without glasses as it were, is precisely the direct order and what you see between the lines, what you see if you put ideological glasses on, is the implicit pleasure, the obscene bribe as it were that ideology offers you in order to take hold of you. For example, let's imagine American South, a classic example, in the 1920s, a small city with Ku Klux Klan and so on. The official message: we are a Christian nation, go to church and so on. You put the glasses on and you see: so if you are one of us then in the evening we can go and kill some blacks, rape some black women or whatever, promising you as it were the implicit carnival. Or even, sorry for the obscenity, I have a great respect for Christianity, but nonetheless, imagine today a poster or whatever for Catholic priests, serve God, dedicate your life to God. You put the glasses on and maybe you would have seen something like: and you can have all the small boys you want and so on with pedophilia and so on. Now, this is an absolutely, I cannot emphasize how important this is, crucial mechanism. This dimension of the unsaid, which is why if I may briefly refer to a classic example which I developed much more in detail in my books, which is why I think a movie like The Sound of Music was such a mega success. I think the key scene of the film is you remember like half into the film when Julie Andrews, Sister Maria, goes to Mother Superior and tells her about her problem, which is she escaped the family Von Trapp because she was not able to endure the situation of being passionately in love with Baron Von Trapp and but now she still feels desire for him so she needs punishment, whatever. And you have to remember what the answer of Mother Superior is. I think it's the most obscene moment in Hollywood for me. You expect punishment: how dare you think about sex, pray, humiliate, torture. No. Mother Superior starts to sing a song called Climb Ev'ry Mountain. And the basic message of this song is literally something like go back screw the guy like crazy, something like that. And you know if you look at intelligent Catholic propaganda, this is their message. It's the official message is renounce, renounce, but then the message between the lines is pretend to renounce and you can get all the all the dirty stuff you want and so on. So again it's crucial to bear in mind these two levels. You find them everywhere. Now, it's easy to make fun of the more conservatives, but what about our politically correct times? Another of my, sorry if you already know it, classic examples: Starbucks. I noticed it, you have them here. Starbucks is for me ideology at its purest. Why? You enter it and you know usually they have posters saying something like yes, our coffee is cheaper than with the others, but and then comes, yeah goes to some stupid Guatemala children, goes to rainforest and so on and so on to save the. I found this an ingenious ideological operation. Why? Because you know in the good old dirty capitalist consumerist times which I absolutely prefer, you were a consumerist and you felt bad for that. So then you had to do something against it: charity, solidarity with the poor and so on. But Starbucks had an ingenious idea, to include this price for the sin of consumerism into the price of the commodity itself. So it's a little bit more expensive but you should not feel bad because you know the price for your duty towards the poor ecology and so on and so on is included into it. This I claim is how in our charity humanitarian times ideology is more and more working. Just think about buying organic fruit. Think about all those half-rotten apples who cost twice the normal beautiful genetically modified apples. Maybe they are better but I don't think we, I mean better at the level of pure material quality, but I'm not so sure that we really believe in it or that we buy it for that reason. Isn't it more that you buy organically grown apples because to put it simply it makes you feel good: my god look I'm doing something for Mother Earth, I'm part of a great movement to save Mother Earth and so on all that stuff. This is what you would have seen if you were to put the ideological critical glasses on. It's the same with all these ads that you find them all around. For example, where you have a picture of a child, distorted black child, and then a message like for a price of a couple of cups of cappuccino you can make a change, you can save this child's life or whatever. What would you have seen if you were to put this ideological critical glasses on? Something like: I know you feel bad, you are ruining nature, we are exploiting the third world, but we allow you for the price of a couple of cups of cappuccino, not only the right to forget about all this, but even to feel better, like you are doing something for it and so on and so on. This I think is our daily ideology. So, I think ecology is extremely serious thing. I'm just saying we should be very careful about how ideology is part of our like everyday life, even in ecology. Of how, for example, this is why I don't trust all this stuff about about recycling and so on and so on. It's, I claim that nobody really believes that recycling helps. My god, much more radical changes will have to be done, but it makes us feel good, you know, hop, no, I separate, I didn't put the bottle of Coke in the same box as that piece of newspaper. It makes me feel good. It's pure feel-good ideology. We are ideology is one of the most important in this sense commodities today. So what's the result of this successful ideological operation? Well, we've seen the result recently in United Kingdom with this riots. I think that the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman was on the right track when he characterized the riots as acts of defective and disqualified consumerism. You know, it was fashionable to say that in in the Fukuyama style, the era of ideology was over, now we live in a post-ideological era. I say yes, so what we have seen in London and other British cities in their suburbs was precisely a kind of post-ideological protest. Protest which is not articulated in the form of even religious fundamentalist project, but is simple pure protest which just imitates the ruling ideology. Like we are bombarded by the social injunction of be a good consumerist, we cannot do it, we don't have money, so we will enact it directly. This I think is where things are getting complicated today. I'm sorry I don't have time to go more in detail, for example, into what is happening with anti-Semitism today. Here I am, my position is here paradoxical. I'm pro-Palestinian, I'm critical of the politics of the state of Israel, but I hope I can say this openly, precisely out of my great love for the Jewish people. What I mean precisely by this? Did you notice something terrifying which is I think one of the most depressing signs of where we are? About that crazy guy who, crazy as he was nonetheless, wrote texts which are crucial to understand the predicament of today's right. Namely, Anders Breivik, the crazy guy who did the shooting in Oslo. You know why he is so interesting? If you had the misfortune of reading his crazy manifesto, you may have noticed what he did. He is literally an anti-Semitic pro-Zionist. At the same time, he is anti-Semitic openly, for example, he says we in Norway are lucky we don't have too many Jews. France also. England, United States they have a problem, they have too many Jews, they will have to do something and so on. At the same time, he is absolutely pro-Zionist, supporting stronger state of Israel as a defense against the Muslims. Now you will say but this is a lunatic case. No it's not. I claim that what he did is just the extreme form of something which should worry every Jew today. It happened some years ago, I think, maybe I'm wrong, that the a group of people who how to put it it's in their nature to be anti-Semitic, American Christian conservatives, started to support the state of Israel in its politics of on the West Bank. Now take Fox News. On the one hand they are absolutely pro-Zionist in this sense. On the other hand, I mean what, you know that their top commentator Glenn Beck, they had to fire him because he was becoming more and more anti-Semitic openly. So we have this paradox about which I don't have time to enter into it, which is I think shocking. This weird pact between Zionists, those Zionists, I mean I'm not against Zionism as such, those Zionists who now are slowly appropriating West Bank and old-fashioned Euro-American anti-Semites. The idea is: if you allow us to do what we want there, we'll allow you your implicit anti-Semitism whatever in in your countries. I mean what unites them is precisely this perception that the danger is the immigrant other and so on and so on. Here also I think the left should change its position. You know it's very fashionable to be this self-torturing guilty guy, like when you have conservative defenders of Judeo-Christian European civilization to say oh no we are guilty, imperialism, killing the natives, all horrors stem for us. No, I claim that my god yes Europe, European civilization is in danger today, but its true enemies for example in Europe are not poor Turkish or Arab immigrants, it's these defenders of Europe themselves, anti-immigrant racists who are the true danger to European identity. I think the left should reinvent progressive radical, I wouldn't say Eurocentrism, but my god Eurocentrism means democracy, egalitarian spirit, human rights, French Revolution and so on and so on. The greatest thing even around the globe happened as an echo French Revolution. Remember Haiti revolution, the first black successful revolution, it was direct repetition of French Revolution and so on. And here Europe is in danger, but from its defenders. For example, I'm desperate now in Europe in post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. You know how things are tricky with gay homosexual parades, pride day and so on. If you organize one in Eastern Europe, it will probably be prohibited or brutally attacked by Christian counter-demonstrators. Like in the Croat city of Split a weird thing happened a couple of months ago. There was a gay parade, but it looked like this: some gays protected by policemen from the rage of people around them attacking them. I read today in a newspaper that in which I think it was even in Czech Republic or where, that gay parade was prohibited claiming that it would arouse public opinion and so on and so on. While whatever you say for example about Turkey, at least there was a couple of months ago there a big gay parade, tens of thousands of people without any counter-demonstrations and so on and so on. So again the the situation here is getting extremely complex, but we don't have time to go into it. Just let me go to the final part. What is effectively happening here? Where do we stand with global capitalism? I tend to agree with the idea proposed by my good friend, by my good friend American Marxist Fredric Jameson, that one should reread the Capital by Marx focusing on the notion of unemployment. Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and expansion which constitutes the very core of capitalism. And the idea is the following one: that today more and more with this incessant technological renewal revolution and so on, unemployment is becoming a key feature. Today's world market is a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer and labor has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system. We have even whole nations, massive populations around the world who are as it were dropped out of history, who are excluded from the modernizing projects. We have so-called failed states, rogue states, Congo, Somalia, victims of famine, ecological disasters, states caught in pseudo-archaic ethnic hatreds, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or of the war on terror. The category of the unemployed should thus be expanded to encompass a wide span of population, from the temporary unemployed through no longer employable and permanently unemployed up to people living in slums and other types of ghettos. And finally the whole areas, populations of states excluded from global capitalist system. So this I think is one fact which is absolutely crucial to grasp today's global capitalism. That it is with its expansion producing more and more inherent exclusions, the whole areas left out there as it were out of history. And don't be naive here. It's not that some primitive countries are left out. They are literally primitivized. Like my great example, just think about Afghanistan. If there is a country which appears crazy fundamentalist country, it's Afghanistan. Wait a minute, unfortunately I'm old enough to remember when I was young before even the Soviet invasion and before the communists took power there. Afghanistan was a maybe the most tolerant Near East predominantly Muslim country with a progressive technocratic pro-Western king, with a very strong local communist party, absolutely not, and with a great tradition of multi-religious tolerance. How did Afghanistan become fundamentalist? Well, first the communist party did a coup d'etat, then there was the counter-movement and so on and so on. So it's precisely through globalization that Afghanistan, tolerant country, became fundamentalized. The second thing we should bear in mind is that this new structural unemployment should be conceived, I think, as a form of exploitation. Exploited are not only workers producing surplus value appropriated by the capital. Exploited are also those who are structurally prevented from getting employment, all those all those excluded. Which is why I find this very interesting. Did you notice how the only original leftist idea of the last decades, economic idea, is the idea of basic citizens' income, which is basically a form of a rent? The idea is to save capitalism by enabling precisely those unemployed to get some basic rent and to survive but also to still function as consumers. Why is this so interesting? Because I claim we should here think further than Marx. In the sense that today we are somehow returning from profit to rent. Think about Bill Gates. How did he become, he no longer is, I know that Mexican guy is now the richest man in the world. I don't think he was ultra-exploiting his workers or what. I think it is rent. Something is going on today masked as technological innovation, computer clouds and so on, which is that, you know, Marx at his best but at the same time at his worst thought in a very naive way that the moment the main source of wealth is no longer physical work but knowledge, shared knowledge, social knowledge, productive knowledge, whatever Marx called this in English general intellect, that the moment this happens, capitalism can no longer function, it will as it were disintegrate. What Marx was not able to see is is the idea of of this general intellect, the shared collective field of knowledge, itself being privatized. And those who succeed in privatizing it get rent, not profit. It's a return to rent. That's what Bill Gates did. Why is he so rich? Because in order for me to communicate with you, to be in touch, I have the very field shared by all of us is partially privatized by Bill Gates. It's not that he is earning a profit. We are all paying him a rent in order precisely in order to communicate with each other. Now to conclude so my idea is here the following one. Why communism? I'm not crazy. I'm well aware, I've written quite a lot about it, about how the 20th-century communist dream miserably failed, ending in an economic, ethico-political, ecological and so on catastrophe. So why still use the name communism? My answer is the following one, it's explained much more in detail in my books. I claim that the only true question today is Fukuyama or not. It's easy to make fun of Francis Fukuyama, that crazy guy who thought history is at its end. But aren't we all or most of us silently Fukuyamaists? Even so-called radicals, they think more gay rights, better ecology, blah blah, but nobody questions the basic liberal democratic capitalist framework. So the only true question for me is the problems we are confronted today, can they be solved within this frame or not? And I think, and this is even a sad pessimist thought, that in the long term, no. I claim that if you take the crucial problems we are confronting today, ecology, okay, you can do many things with market, I agree, if you tax products which pollute the environment and so on, but when you have serious disturbances like Fukushima and so on, nuclear plants or whatever, the melting of the ice, you cannot leave this to market. You need some kind of large globally coordinated social activity. Intellectual property, I think it's clear that it's maybe one of the main sources of all the financial market convulsions now and so on. I don't think capitalism will be able to to in the long term to control the or to even resolve to even cope with the problem of intellectual property. Which is why I think the greatest revenge of ex-communists is that well what, I read recently a commentary from an Singapore economist who said years ago Deng Xiaoping thought only capitalism can save China. Now the West thinks only China can save capitalism. That is to say did you noticed how the most efficient capitalist country today are the countries where either communist party or another authoritarian movement is at its power and that's what should worry us. Namely that till now we had the idea which was more or less even true, the idea of a kind of eternal marriage between capitalism and democracy. You may have years of dictatorship but sooner or later when capitalism becomes more productive you have a demand for democracy. But now I think unfortunately maybe this time is over. Capitalism will following its inner necessity will have to not maybe directly get rid of democracy but change it into an empty form. Then bio-genetics, my god, Fukuyama himself once when I met him admitted this to me recently that the fact of bio-genetics, the fact of the possibility to directly influence our psychic and so on features, makes his idea of the end of history obsolete. Not to mention the new forms of apartheid and so on and so on. Let me be very clear here. I am not saying oh back to Lenin's communism and so on. That is over, the 20th century is over. I have no nostalgic dreams here. What I'm saying is maybe even something much more pessimistic. What I'm saying is that unfortunately the problems are here. The problems which we face today are precisely at their most fundamental level the problems of the commons. The commons of nature, which cannot be, I claim, the way we deal with nature, resolved through market mechanisms. It needs a kind of a globally coordinated activity beyond nation state beyond the market. Intellectual property the same. Bio-genetics the same. And especially new forms of apartheid, new divisions, new walls. It's the irony that global capitalism where commodities circulate freely is characterized by new walls everywhere. I claim that more and more capitalism will not be able to sustain this what Marxists dismissively called formal freedom. We are all at least in our ideological political life acknowledged as free free individuals with human rights and so on and so on. More and more it's clear that some something has to be excluded. Now you will say okay but where are here concrete possibilities? How to do it? Well my answer here is that I'm not an old-style Marxist who claims you know there is a historical necessity, the train of history is on our side. No it's not. It's there is no guarantee that something will happen. Nonetheless, if you allow me just briefly to conclude with, nonetheless when I hear the word impossible, it's not possible, I get skeptical. What do I mean by this? Did you notice how in what a strange way this opposition between what is possible and what is impossible functions in our societies? On the one hand, especially in the domain of private pleasure, sexuality and technology, more and more things are becoming possible. They are telling us maybe we will become immortal, we will be able bio-genetically through cloning to grow organs to replace them whatever all these dreams. Or even in sexuality, the tasteless example that I like, I recently meet in New York a surgeon whose specialty is to cut the penis into two. So you have two penises you can do it with two women whatever. Everything is possible here. So this is possible, you can be immortal, we will be able to travel to Mars soon and so on. But to raise like taxes for to get better health care, ah that's impossible. This is our reality. How dare you have an absolute an absolute an absolute impossibility? And things are here very strange. This is the triumph of ideology today. Recently, in mid-April media reported and I checked it up with my Chinese friends they told me it's true, that Chinese government has prohibited showing on TV, in theaters, but also in novels and comics, stories which deal with time travel and alternate history. The official argument is that such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters. Of course, we know what it is about. Even a fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. But I think this is a good sign for the Chinese people. Like, those in power at least still see this as a danger. We in the West we don't need such a prohibition. We automatically assume that it's not possible. So communism today for me is not the name of a solution. It's the name of a problem. The problem of commons in all its dimensions. The commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problems of our bio-genetic commons, the problems of cultural commons, intellectual property, and the problem of commons as the universal space of humanity from which whole groups of people are more and more excluded. Whatever the solution, and it will certainly not be the 20th century communism, it will have to solve this problem. Because, to conclude by quoting myself from the way you quoted me, I think that when people say you are a utopian, well I'm saying no the only utopia today is the idea that with small changes here and there things can go on the way they do. I think that we witness today an incredible amount of refusal how to put it refusal to believe. For example take just ecology. On the one hand we refuse to take the ideological crisis seriously. Sorry the ecological crisis seriously. No they are exaggerating and so on and so on. But what is so interesting is that at the same time there is a lot of magical thinking going on in the way we deal with ecology. What do I mean by magical thinking? You know that wonderful everyday example of magical thinking when you sit at home in front of a TV and you watch a sport competition, you support your team, and even if you are alone at home or with a couple of friends you shout support as if in some magical way you can nonetheless influence the outcome. Well I claim that a lot of this everyday low-level personal ecology, this buying organic fruit, recycling, is pretty close to this sitting at home and and shouting and so on. I mean here comes the duty of us so-called public intellectuals today. I don't think, and those who think they can do are bluffing, I don't think we can offer solutions. I mean when people ask me what to do with ecology, my god what do I know, I don't have answers. What we can do is to see how when we are confronted a problem, the very way we formulate a problem is part of the problem. It's a great art as important as the art of finding answers to problems, is the art of formulating problems in the right way. Here is ideology at its purest. Just to conclude my standard example. Of course I am as all of you against sexism, racism and so on. But I'm deeply suspicious of, and this is what we are usually doing today, of automatically translating these problems into problems of tolerance. Make a simple test: Google Martin Luther King, his text, and look for tolerance. It would have been ridiculous for Martin Luther King to say I want from white people more tolerance and so on. Or for a feminist to say we want to be more tolerated women by men. That's humiliating, ridiculous. So why do we today automatically accept automatically translate problems of racism, sexism and so on into problems of tolerance? I claim it's one way of depoliticizing the situation. The problem which is basically economic, legal and so on problem, all of a sudden becomes a cultural problem: are we ready to tolerate others? And then you can even squeeze into it all the pseudo-psychoanalytic stuff like why do I hate the other? Is it that I hate by hating the other I hate something deep in me, so I should the solution is then to deeply analyze myself and so on whatever. So, or another even more direct ideology: when in developed countries we talk about tolerance, do we not often mean the exact opposite, intolerance? What do I mean by this? When we mean tolerance we mean there should not be harassment. Harassment is for me a very ambiguous term. Of course I'm opposed to it when we are dealing with rape or whatever, sexual harassment. But be careful when you hear the word harassment. Often it means something very precise which is much more problematic. The aversion towards the proximity of the other as a actual desiring being. Harassment means don't come too close to me, the other. Harassment means the fight against harassment often means stay at a proper distance. Your over-proximity bothers me. And it is here that racism functions today. A common liberal will always say I like blacks, Chinese, but I don't like, and then comes that element of over-proximity, but I don't like the way they smell, I don't like their music, I don't like again the taste of their food, whatever. The problem is this over-proximity. So basically, quite often, tolerance means I don't tolerate your over-proximity. Tolerance means don't come too close to me. And this is how in our narcissistic times ideology functions at the level of everyday life. And just to conclude with a totally crazy story. I claim that this is good news if you are an old romantic like me who still believes in love and passionate sex, not this kind of a healthy sex you know. I'm even suspicious of condoms like I deeply sympathize with the black guy from South Africa who asked once but why don't you use condoms? He says I know it's wrong politically from political correctness but I love the black guy's answer, he said well making love with a condom is the same as taking shower with a raincoat on, no? There is an, no but seriously, like so that you will not think that I'm dreaming. Did you notice something strange in the latest Hollywood products? The last James Bond, Quantum of Solace. Did you notice that although politically it's very progressive, basically James Bond saves the Morales regime in Bolivia against some bad international company, but did you notice that it's the first James Bond film where at the end there is no sex between Bond and Bond girl? Let's go further and the lowest possible level: Dan Brown. Did you notice The Da Vinci Code, no sex. And this is why I think it's the same logic as as that as is that how is it called the TV series where where with the two agents fighting the, sorry, X-Files, yes, X-Files, yes. I mean my friend Darian Leader drew attention to a simple fact: why do all those things happen out there, aliens intruding all the time, to mask up the fact that nothing happens here between the two of them. And it's exactly the same in in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Poor Jesus Christ has to make love to cover up the fact that here there is no love between Robert Langdon and the great-great-great-granddaughter of Jesus Christ. Then in the last novel, one of the worst novels of all times, Lost Symbol, there is absolutely no sex, no tension, no nothing. And even a step further. Did you notice how in how in with Angels and Demons? It's even more mysterious. There is sex in the novel at the end between Robert Langdon and that Italian scientist. There is no sex in the film. Where are we coming? In the good old days we said Hollywood added sex to make it more commercial. Now Hollywood is deleting sex. What is going on here? I think something very sad is going here. My friend Alain Badiou noticed a strange thing. He read a French ad for marital agencies where they said, it's the same it works in French as in English, tomber amoureux, to fall in love. It said: we will enable you to be in love without the fall, without falling. The idea is a very sad one. The idea is you know falling in love means precisely fall, you expose yourself to an open danger. And now I think it's a very sad sign of our narcissistic predominant forms of subjectivity that we want to have the result, be in love, but without risking the fall. Which is why something is really going on and agencies themselves are mentioning it: how we are in a way potentially returning to so-called old primitive strategies of of arranged marriages. Only today it's not relatives it's agencies who are doing like the idea is who has time for slow flirting, who can risk opening yourself to the other? You tell all your desires, blah blah blah, needs to an agency, they will do it for you and you will be just informed with whom to fall in love and so on and so on. This is this is our reality today and it's a it's a very sad reality today. Which is why again, absolutely to conclude with my now really with my old joke, you know how more and more we live in a society where you get a thing without its substance? Coffee yes without caffeine. Sausage yes without fat. Chocolate without calories. Beer without alcohol. This is my problem with multiculturalism. I'm afraid that the other that multiculturalist are offering us, you know this wonderful other who is holistic with organic harmony with nature, is the same decaffeinated other. Multiculturalism can be a form of racism. Maybe I should stop now. Thank you very much.