A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2014-09-23 · 1:11:38 · 8,889 words
ideologycapitalismpsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnessdemocracyethicseveryday-lifephilosophy-generalgeopolitics-warrace-antisemitism
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging public lecture arguing that universities are being reduced to expert-producing factories, and that genuine intellectual work requires questioning the framing of problems rather than merely solving them. The core of the talk examines how ideology operates not through explicit prohibitions but through unwritten meta-rules, obscene undergrounds, super-ego guilt, and the ready admission of faults that nonetheless neutralizes critique. Drawing on examples from Starbucks consumerism, Catholic Church pedophilia, political correctness, WikiLeaks, TISA negotiations, and the Maidan uprising, Žižek argues that the truly subversive act today is to withdraw and think rather than rush to act.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The expert solves problems formulated by those in power; the true intellectual first questions whether the problem is correctly posed.
as “emotional charity blackmail”
The ideological mechanism by which humanitarian appeals to suffering are used to pre-empt systemic critique and manufacture guilt-driven consumer compliance.
as “learned pleasure”
The argument that even the most intimate pleasures, smoking, sexuality, obscene speech, are culturally acquired through imitation, not natural spontaneous outbursts.
Implicitly present in the discussion of how pleasures (smoking, Coke, dirty talk) are learned and culturally imposed rather than naturally spontaneous.
as “obscene underground”
The publicly disavowed but structurally necessary dark supplement of official ideology, from sexual myths of power to ritualized violence.
A meta-rule whereby something is prohibited but the prohibition itself cannot be publicly stated; one must act as if no prohibition exists.
The unwritten rules that govern how official rules are actually to be applied, including instructions to violate them, or rights that must not be exercised.
Althusser's concept whereby ideology recruits individuals into subjects by having them recognize themselves in an ideological call.
as “big Other”
The symbolic order in whose name super-ego pressure operates; under super-ego individualization one is left alone with no big Other to shelter behind.
as “super-ego individualization”
Balibar's reversal of Althusser: if ideology interpellates individuals into subjects, super-ego does the opposite, reducing subjects to isolated, guilt-ridden individuals.
as “inverted racism”
The form of racism that denies the full moral agency of the other by excusing their actions as mere reactions to Western guilt, effectively denying they can be 'truly evil'.
The Lacanian structure whereby authority is never intrinsic to the person but always comes from an external symbolic insignia, crown, robe, creating a gap between miserable reality and symbolic identity.
For Lacan (contra feminist misreading), the signifier not of male virility but of castration itself, the detachable insignia of power that demonstrates authority is never self-grounded.
The cancellation of a genuine civilizational event or achievement, such as the legal prohibition of torture, through normalization and regression.
The condition in which things previously unthinkable, such as legalizing torture, have become normalized objects of public debate, marking a regression rather than progress.
The ideological category whereby the indebted individual is invited to see her financial decisions as structurally equivalent to capitalist investment, thereby obscuring class distinction.
Jameson's concept invoked to name what we currently lack: a coherent conceptual image of where we are in today's global order.
Stories he reaches for 13
Starbucks posters announce that buying your cappuccino simultaneously helps save rainforests and brings water to the Sahara, collapsing the opposition between consumerism and humanitarian concern into a single purchase.
“pay for your cappuccino cents more, and by drinking our cappuccino you will also do your humanitarian duty”
White apartheid literature defended racial separation not on grounds of economic exploitation but as protection of Aboriginal cultural diversity, illustrating how a true colonizer always concedes deeper spiritual superiority to the colonized.
“a true colonizer is always...ready to admit the some deeper spiritual superiority of the other, of the colonized”
Afghanistan was once a relatively tolerant Muslim country with a pro-Western king and a strong Communist Party; successive interventions (Soviet, then US backing Bin Laden) fundamentalized it, demonstrating that fundamentalism is produced by geopolitical processes, not atavism.
“as the result of this process of being caught into world history, Afghanistan fundamentalized itself”
In Stalinist Moscow, criticizing Stalin was fatal, but so was publicly announcing that criticism was forbidden, the second person disappeared even faster, illustrating the meta-rule that the prohibition itself must not be named.
“it was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition”
The Church's response to thousands of pedophilia cases, protecting perpetrators rather than victims, reveals pedophilia is not incidental but part of the institution's structural identity.
“pedophilia is something like the hidden curriculum, if you want, the obscene underground of Catholic Church as an institution”
Serial killings of young women workers in Ciudad Juárez follow a strict pattern, gang rape, ritualized torture, disposal, making them a culturally structured act, not random brutality.
“it's not that brutal violent animal nature, it's precisely that they are in some terrifying sense cultural”
Maori visual artists initially gave Žižek the standard line about spirits and anti-imperialism, then revealed they have agents in New York and Paris who track fashion and they adapt their 'spirit talk' accordingly, debunking the myth of naive Aboriginal sincerity.
“we have two agents, one in New York, the other in Paris, who tell us what's the latest fashion and then we quickly adapt our original talk with spirits”
After all European socialist parties voted for war credits in 1914, Lenin withdrew to Switzerland to re-read Hegel's Logic, refusing the pressure to act without first rethinking all coordinates, offered as a model for disengagement.
“he moved to Switzerland and read Hegel's logic...he saw that the fiasco was so radical that all even the basic coordinates have to be re-thought”
Žižek engages with Dershowitz's argument for medically supervised legal torture: he does not deny he might personally succumb in extremis, but insists the ethical line is keeping it prohibited so that transgressing it remains shameful.
“I should at least remain aware that out of pure despair I did something terrifying. The ethical catastrophe is when this is normalized, legalized.”
White men ritually kidnap and kill Aboriginal women near Vancouver reservations; authorities systematically downplay the collective, ritualistic character by reducing it to family violence and drugs.
“they systematically try to downplay this...collective ritualistic aspect of it”
Žižek's Native American friends in Missoula rejected the myth of their organic relationship with nature by boasting that they burned more forests and killed more buffaloes than white men, exposing the patronizing Western projection of ecological purity.
“We burned more forest than you stupid white men ever did. We killed more buffaloes, we brought more violence, destruction to nature.”
Hundreds of Pakistani gang rapes in Rotherham were systematically downplayed by police and left-liberals afraid of being called Islamophobic, which Žižek argues is itself an inverted, more insidious racism.
“this appears to be ultra-political correctness...I think that this is just an inverted and maybe even more terrifying form of racism”
Negotiations on the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) were conducted in secret and the text stipulated it must remain secret for five years after ratification, illustrating how decisive economic constraints on freedom are invisible to citizens exercising consumer choice.
“it's even part of the text of the agreement that when it will be accepted, enforced, it should remain secret for five years”
Works invoked 7
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's mega-book on Hegel; Absolute Recoil is framed as its companion and corrective.
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek's own book, just appearing from Verso; described as a post-coital reflection on Less Than Nothing, addressing what he felt he missed.
Inuit film praised as 'wonderful' and used to illustrate that retelling myths anew is authentic Inuit practice; the Inuit director's rebuke of the white journalist is celebrated.
Event book
Žižek's own book; he refers specifically to the chapter on de-eventalization in his discussion of the normalization of torture.
Hegel's Logic book
The text Lenin read in Switzerland after WWI; invoked as the paradigm of necessary withdrawal into fundamental rethinking.
The Balcony play
Jean Genet's play cited via Badiou's commentary on democracy and the disappearance of the costumes of power.
Maurizio Lazzarato's book recommended by Žižek for its analysis of debt as ideological disciplinary machine that obfuscates class distinction.
People invoked 22
Paul Krugman negative
Mentioned alongside Piketty and Stiglitz as a Keynesian reformist, reform within capitalism is deemed insufficient.
Named as one of the US-financed Afghan allies during the anti-Soviet jihad, illustrating how fundamentalism was produced by geopolitical processes.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited as a model for disengagement (reading Hegel in Switzerland after WWI) and for asking 'Freedom for whom to do what?'; also the subject of the wife/mistress joke.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the concepts of symbolic castration, the phallic signifier, the big Other, and super-ego; Žižek defends Lacan's meaning of 'phallic signifier' against feminist misreading.
Alan Dershowitz negative
Attacked once in a NYT footnote; Žižek rejects his proposal to legalize medically supervised torture as exemplifying ethico-political regress.
Louis Althusser positive
His formula of ideological interpellation (individuals into subjects) is used as the baseline that Balibar then reverses with the super-ego concept.
Joseph E. Stiglitz negative
Mentioned alongside Piketty and Krugman as a Keynesian reformist, 'I like them, but they are not enough'.
Jean Genet positive
His play The Balcony is the occasion for Badiou's quote about democracy and the absence of costumes of power.
Judith Butler positive
Despite many polemics, Žižek agrees with her claim that the first subversive act in feminist struggle is to state oppression openly; they are described as personally friendly.
Étienne Balibar positive
Cited approvingly for the reversal of Althusser: super-ego interpellates subjects back into isolated, guilty individuals.
Alain Badiou positive
Quoted on Jean Genet's The Balcony for the observation that democracy means power no longer wears a costume, leaving inequality naked.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for the concept of 'cognitive mapping', what Žižek says we currently lack: a coherent image of where we are globally.
Appears only as the 'bon vivant' who chooses a mistress in the wife/mistress joke.
Julian Assange positive
Described as a friend whom Žižek admires but warns not to overestimate WikiLeaks' revelatory power, the real achievement is making private knowledge public.
Used as an extended case study of how official identity is constituted through an obscene supplement (virility myth) that must remain publicly deniable.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as an example of those in power using the 'ivory tower vs. real suffering' rhetoric, the same rhetoric once used against intellectuals by the left, to neutralize critique.
Mentioned ironically in the running joke about Marxists always announcing 'the last stage of capitalism'.
Karl Marx positive
Mentioned via the joke about wife/mistress and as background to the critique of orthodox Marxism; also cited for claims about capitalism's end.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Referenced as the reason Žižek wrote Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil; invoked via the 'world spirit' and as what Lenin studied in Switzerland.
Ludwig Wittgenstein positive
Ordinary language philosophy invoked: 'the meaning of a word is its use', applied to interrogating what 'freedom' really means in practice.
Maurizio Lazzarato positive
His book The Making of the Indebted Man is recommended for its analysis of debt as an ideological disciplinary machine that obfuscates class distinction.
Thomas Piketty negative
Grouped with Stiglitz and Krugman as Keynesian reformists whose prescriptions Žižek respects but considers insufficient for today's crisis.
What it argues
intellectuals vs. experts: questioning problem-formulation itselfideology in everyday consumerism and charityobscene underground as constitutive of official ideologyprohibition of prohibition and super-ego individualizationthe neutralizing power of over-hasty admissionexpanding freedom beyond individual consumer choicedisengagement and thinking as political act
Dialectical moves 12
“The expert solves problems formulated by others; the true intellectual is someone who first questions the problem itself.”
Genuine intellectual work inverts expert logic: the critical move is upstream of the solution, at the level of problem-formation.
“Islamic fundamentalism is not the opposite of global capitalism but part of the same dynamic.”
What appears as the ancient enemy of modernity is actually produced by modernity's own internal contradictions.
“The message 'people are suffering, stop ideological struggles and just do something' effectively means 'don't think, don't do anything'.”
The humanitarian injunction to act is precisely the mechanism that prevents genuine political action.
“These violent acts are so terrifying not because they are brutally uncivilized but precisely because they are cultural.”
Ritualized violence inverts our expectation: its horror lies in its symbolic, learned character, not in animal nature breaking through.
“It was more dangerous to publicly deny the prohibited myth (Atatürk as seducer) than to affirm official norms—the second man disappeared faster.”
The obscene supplement is more essential to power than its official content; attacking the supplement attacks power more directly than attacking the surface.
“Super-ego does the opposite of ideology: if ideology interpellates individuals into subjects, super-ego interpellates subjects back into individuals.”
The Balibar reversal of Althusser: super-ego undoes the solidarity of ideological subjectification, isolating you in private guilt.
“For Lacan, the phallic signifier is the signifier of castration—to assume phallus means to assume your castration.”
The symbol of power is paradoxically the mark of its lack of self-grounding; authority is always external, never one's own.
“Today's master fully admits castration—'I'm a weak ordinary guy like you'—but this very admission is the condition and instrument of power.”
The democratic renunciation of symbolic insignia does not dissolve mastery but reconstitutes it on new grounds.
“Ideology today reproduces itself precisely by admitting its own weakness.”
The over-hasty admission neutralizes critique: confessing everything while curtailing the symbolic consequences is more effective than denial.
“Today's predominant form of racism is our privileging ourselves as the only ones capable of being truly evil.”
Liberal guilt-laden universalism inverts colonial racism but retains its structure: denying the Other full moral agency.
“The truly subversive thing today is precisely to keep a distance and do totally useless thinking.”
In an era that demands action, withdrawal into thought is the genuinely political gesture.
“Torture should remain prohibited even if I cannot promise I wouldn't succumb to it; the ethical catastrophe is when this is normalized, legalized.”
The distinction between transgressive exception and legal norm is itself the ethical line, its collapse marks regression.
Claims 26
asserts
The true intellectual's first task is to question the framing of a problem rather than solve the problem as given by those in power.the role of intellectuals vs. experts
asserts
Islamic fundamentalism is not a remnant of the past but a product generated by the internal dynamics of today's global capitalist order.fundamentalism and global capitalism
asserts
The rhetoric of 'real people are suffering while you are in your ivory tower' is one of the most efficient rhetorical devices of those in power.anti-intellectual populism
asserts
Charity and emotional charity blackmail are not mere additions but key elements of today's dominant ideology.humanitarian ideology and consumerism
asserts
Starbucks exemplifies how anti-consumerist humanitarian concerns are absorbed back into consumerism itself.ideology in everyday consumption
asserts
Collective ritualized violence—gang rapes, serial killings—is not a spontaneous outbreak of brutality but a culturally learned, symbolically structured practice.violence as cultural ritual
asserts
Pedophilia in the Catholic Church is not an accidental pathology but part of the institution's hidden curriculum and identity.Catholic Church institutional unconscious
asserts
Official ideology always includes an obscene underground that is publicly denied but structurally constitutive.ideology and its obscene supplement
asserts
It can be more dangerous to publicly disavow a prohibited dark secret than to violate an explicit official norm.prohibition of the prohibition
asserts
Ecological super-ego discourse addresses individuals as a priori guilty to deflect attention from industrial mega-companies.ecological guilt and ideology
asserts
Politically correct self-examination generates its own perverse pleasure rather than genuine emancipation.political correctness and super-ego
asserts
Covering up the Rotherham rapes under fear of Islamophobia accusations is itself an inverted and more terrifying form of racism.political correctness and racism
asserts
The predominant Western liberal left form of racism today is to deny the full moral agency of the Other by making Westerners responsible for all Third World violence.liberal racism and white man's burden
asserts
The assumption that Aboriginal cultures have an organic, holistic relationship to nature is a patronizing Western myth that functions as apartheid logic.primitivism and cultural authenticity
asserts
In today's democratic society, masters no longer need costumes or insignia; their admission of weakness and ordinariness is itself the instrument of power.contemporary power and symbolic castration
asserts
Ideology today reproduces itself precisely by admitting its own weakness, neutralizing critique through over-hasty acknowledgment.ideology's self-perpetuation
asserts
WikiLeaks' real achievement was not revealing unknown facts but making it impossible to pretend we did not know.WikiLeaks and public knowledge
asserts
Legalizing torture is an ethical catastrophe because it normalizes what should remain an exceptional transgression one is ashamed of.torture and ethical regression
asserts
Debt functions as a disciplinary ideological machine that obfuscates class distinction through the category of self-entrepreneurship.debt and class ideology
asserts
Individual consumer freedoms are real but insufficient; true freedom requires collective agency to change the institutional economic framework itself.freedom and collective agency
asserts
The truly subversive act today is to think and withdraw rather than rush to action.disengagement and intellectual work
rejects
Terms like 'information society', 'risk society', and 'post-industrial society' are not yet real concepts; we lack cognitive mapping of our situation.contemporary social theory
rejects
Psychoanalysis is used by old-fashioned Marxists as a convenient alibi for why the working class fails to revolt, rather than as genuine critical inquiry.orthodox Marxist use of psychoanalysis
rejects
Keynesian reformism (Piketty, Stiglitz, Krugman) may be insufficient to address the depth of today's crisis.Keynesian reformism
reframes
The real question about ISIS is not 'fanatics vs. the free West' but what in global capitalist dynamics generates such fundamentalism.ISIS and the War on Terror
reframes
The real issue with WikiLeaks is not what was revealed but the change in the status of public knowledge itself.WikiLeaks revelations
Quotes 18
“The truly subversive thing is precisely to keep a distance, to say: 'No, I want to do some totally useless thinking.'”Slavoj Žižek · thinking as subversion
“Charity and this emotional charity blackmail is not just an idiosyncratic addition, but it's the key element of today's ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · humanitarian charity as ideology
“Manipulation is an objective process in our most ordinary everyday experience.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as objective structure
“What makes these serial rapes so terrifying is not that brutal violent animal nature, it's precisely that they are in some terrifying sense cultural.”Slavoj Žižek · violence as cultural ritual
“It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition.”Slavoj Žižek · prohibition of the prohibition
“In the eyes of the super-ego, I am alone; there is no big other beneath which I can hide. I am guilty as charged.”Slavoj Žižek · super-ego individualization and guilt
“Today's predominant form of racism is our privileging us as the only guys who are able to be really evil.”Slavoj Žižek · inverted racism of liberal guilt
“Democracy means precisely that there are no costumes. Inequality no longer wears a costume or a dress.”Slavoj Žižek · democracy and naked power
“This admission of castration—'I'm a weak guy'—not only in no way undermines his or her power, but it's even the condition of the power.”Slavoj Žižek · admitted weakness as instrument of power
“Ideology today reproduces itself precisely by way of admitting its own weakness.”Slavoj Žižek · self-admitting ideology
“The true target of WikiLeaks revelations are not those in power, but we.”Slavoj Žižek · WikiLeaks and public knowledge
“The ethical catastrophe is when this is normalized, legalized. That's the end, in a way.”Slavoj Žižek · normalization of torture as ethical catastrophe
“We live in an era of ethico-simply of ethico-political regress.”Slavoj Žižek · ethico-political regress
“Freedom, yes, but freedom for whom to do what?”Slavoj Žižek · Leninist question on freedom
“We no longer have this freedom in the West. We cannot even imagine something like that happening.”Slavoj Žižek · loss of collective agency in the West
“Maybe we were doing too much. And I'm claiming maybe our motto should be: 'Don't just do things, talk, think.'”Slavoj Žižek · thinking over acting
“We are really in a critical situation, because it's not only as old Marxists thought, 'We know what is to be done, we just don't know how to mobilize people.'”Slavoj Žižek · depth of current political crisis
“We at least prefer to be called Indians—at least our name is a monument to white man's stupidity, you know, who thought they are in India.”Slavoj Žižek · Native American wit on naming
Transcript 5 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much, I am really honored to be here. Why? Because it's a general tendency in the so-called free Western world that academic institutions are more and more transformed into factories to produce experts. And if being an intellectual means anything today, it means you are not an expert. Not in the sense that you are just speaking general platitudes and bluffing, but why? What does an expert do? An expert solves the problems which are formulated by others—those in power, basically. As a guy in France in a debate explained to me, this was a couple of years ago when, you remember, cars were burning in the suburbs of Paris, he said, "Here we need you academics: a good psychologist to explain to us how you control the crowd, a good urban planner to explain to us how to dispose the streets so that the crowd is easier to crash or whatever." Like, the others formulate the problem, you are supposed to provide solutions. But I think the ABC, the basic feature of a true intellectual, is that first you question the problem itself. Like, is this really a problem? How come that the problem is presented to us in such a way? Because I claim this is most often the case today. For example, media bombard us, especially now with this new war against ISIS. I have no sympathy for them, my problem is somewhere else. That it's presented as: free permissive Western world against fanatics. No, I think the first question to be raised here is, what is it in the dynamic of immanent, inherent dynamics of today's global order which generates fundamentalism? Fundamentalism is not a remainder of the past and so on, it's something generated by today's global dynamics. Look, I have no sympathy for Muslim fundamentalism, but you know, these are official sources I read about it here, that FBI is observing, has under observation registered around two million people in the United States as potentially Christian fundamentalist terrorists. Sorry to tell you, this is approximately the same number of terrorists as potential terrorist fundamentalists as in Arab countries. Or to give you another example which is my favorite: Afghanistan. You know, today the very notion of a fundamentalist country, crazy Taliban, whatever. But listen, I'm unfortunately old enough to remember years ago. Do you know that Afghanistan was arguably the most enlightened, tolerant Middle East Muslim country? They had a king who was a kind of a pro-Western technocrat, they had even a very strong local Communist Party, and then things began to happen. You remember, Communist Party took power, when they started to lose power, Soviet army intervened. Then to crash, to beat the Soviets, United States mobilized their allies there, financing them. You maybe know some of the names of those American allies there: Osama bin Laden and so on, literally. And what I'm saying here is that as the result of this process of being caught into world history, Afghanistan fundamentalized itself. So you see, it's not an old backward country. No, it's—what does this mean? That it doesn't mean we should now admire—I'm not one of those crazy pseudo-leftists who claim even if we don't agree with all the details, women's rights and so on, nonetheless Islamic fundamentalists are a form of resistance towards global capitalism. No, no, but they are part of the same dynamic with global capitalism. So, that's the beginning of it. And I didn't lose my thread back to my starting point. Precisely because universities are being more and more turned into factories to produce experts, it's places like your place here which are still part of intellectual life, but it's public sphere with a distance outside official academic machinery where, if I may put it in this Hegelian idealist way, the world spirit is still alive. In places like this. Because you know, I'm again old enough to remember when I was young, leftists usually like to say this: "Oh, you intellectuals, students, you live in your ivory tower while real people are suffering out there, blah blah." But then I was quite shocked when some two or three years ago I heard Bill Gates saying exactly the same thing. You know, I claim that today this rhetoric of "real people are suffering against ivory tower," I claim it's one of the most efficient rhetorical devices of those in power. Because what happens here? Ah, this is the ingenuity of today's capitalism. Basically, if you read these messages in detail, these statements, the message is: "Millions are dying, Somalia, wherever, people are suffering and so on. Why don't we forget all our stupid ideological struggles—capitalism, socialism, who cares? Why don't we all, people of goodwill, come together: government, bankers, capitalists, TV movie stars, ordinary people, and just do something." I claim the message here is: "Don't do something," which means "don't think too much, just do it." Which is why today I think the truly subversive thing is precisely to keep a distance, to say: "No, I want to do some totally useless thinking." I even once—and you know, I was in Northern Africa once and this is one of my proudest moments—they applauded me when I told them how their suffering, very real suffering, is manipulated by the West and how the true reply when some Western liberal is telling you "But people are suffering there, blah blah," I told them the true answer should be "Fuck off. I don't care, I don't care if all the orphans die in Somalia, I want to finish this book on Hegel." And they started to applaud because they got the point: that this is not against them, this is how their very real suffering is manipulated. Which is why I think that charity and this emotional charity blackmail is not just an idiosyncratic addition, but it's the key element of today's ideology. This is why, as I often did in my older books, I like if there is one phenomenon that I think really embodies today's everyday ideology, it's Starbucks. You know why? You enter it and you see all those disgusting posters, you know, like: of this goes to keep the rainforest, the other to bring water to Sahara," whatever. You know why I find this so ingenious? Because in the old days, we were supposed to be split between consumerism and let's call this general political care, philanthropy for others. But the basic operation of Starbucks is to include your general humanitarian anti-consumerist concerns into consumerism itself. The point is: pay for your cappuccino cents more, and by drinking our cappuccino you will also do your humanitarian duty, you will show solidarity and so on and so on. This is why I'm even doubtful, and this statement whenever I repeat it got me many enemies, I'm even doubtful about all this obsession with organic food, apples and so on. Look, do you really believe that those half-rotten apples which cost double because they are organic—okay, maybe they are better. I'm just claiming that we are really, if you look deep into your heart, if you have one, I'm not sure I have one, this is not why we are buying. It makes us feel good. Like, you know, you say, "Isn't it beautiful, Mother Earth is in crisis, and by buying those apples I'm doing something for the Mother Earth, I'm part of a great movement of solidarity and so on and so on." This is where ideology is today. Of course, there is no ideology at that stupid general level of some big projects and so on and so on. We live ideology in everyday life. And this is what I want to talk about today. Not about the topics of this book, *Event*, or the other one, *Absolute Recoil*—now I'm making a little bit of propaganda, which will just appear by Verso. That book I like very much, *Absolute Recoil*, because it's, you know, I did write a mega-book in terms of quantity on Hegel, *Less Than Nothing*, which certainly doesn't weigh less than nothing because it's pages, no? And this book, *Absolute Recoil*, is a kind of a post-coital reflection on that one. I mean, you know, after I finish that one, it always happens, then after you deliver the manuscript you start to have nightmares, "My God, why didn't I say that?" you know. And this book—so let me—I will just, I would like to focus on these different aspects of how we are manipulated, but not in the sense that there are some manipulators who pull the strings. Manipulation is an objective process in our most ordinary everyday experience. I would like to begin by demonstrating or at least indicating how our most intense forms of pleasures are not spontaneous outbursts, they are something learned by imitation, they are an acquired taste. What do I mean by this? Be honest and recall your first experience of smoking or drinking a hard liquor. As a rule, how did it happen? It was a slightly older peer who told you in half-secret: "You know what adults are doing? They are smoking, they are drinking." And then he offered or she offered you to taste a cigarette or a whiskey and, admit it, your first reaction was distaste, disgust. "Ah, is this it?" and so on. And then you start coughing, spitting it out, thinking "Is this supposed to be pleasurable?" Then gradually you learn to enjoy it. I remember, because I come from an ex-communist country where Coke was introduced relatively late, how even when we got our first taste of Coke, it was exactly the same: "But this is bitter, tasteless, is this it?" But then we learned, "Yes, this is it." So what I'm—and now I will go to the end here—I claim that the same goes even for things like sexuality. I don't think it's really natural, if I may put it this way, to engage in sex, sexual activity with another person. The most—you just masturbate yourself, it's controlled and so on. It's always, you know, this element of—you learn it from outside, it's imposed on you. And I claim it's the same even with talking dirty, swearing. Usually, we think "I talk with you in a polite way, then I don't know for what reason I get furious, I cannot any longer control myself so I explode, I just do it." I don't think it functions like this. Maybe I'm a weird entity here, but I have a certain ritual which I love with my friends. When we meet, first for minutes—and it's a ritual—we talk really dirty. We exchange this—it's ritualized, you know, like, and I'm coming from Balkan, you know, when I say dirty I mean dirty, like "I will dig your mother out of her grave and screw her up" and all that, you know. And then it's a beautiful moment how after minutes of this, we look at each other and we say, "Oh, finally we got over this boring ritual, now we can talk normally," you know. And it's wonderful, I mean, like you are released of this pressure, of this compulsion. So again, the lesson is that precisely these obscene pleasures, they are not spontaneous, they are learned. Which means they are strictly part of our culture. And now let me give you another much more crucial and pertinent example. We should apply this lesson also to forms of collective violence today like gang rapes and killings. One of the terrifying effects of the non-contemporaneity of different levels of social life today is the rise of violence against women. Not just random violence, but systematic violence, violence which is specific to a certain social context, which follows a pattern, which transmits a message. Let me give you two opposite examples here. The serial killings of women in Ciudad Juárez, you know, opposite El Paso in Northern Mexico. They are not just private pathologists—pathologists, I read two-three books on them, I spoke with some Mexican friends and they told me it's not just, I don't know what, pathology and so on, it's strictly ritualized activity, part of the subculture of local gangs. It always follows the same model: first gang rape, then torture till death, which is done usually in a terrifying way, cutting off breast nipples with scissors and so on, directed at young women working in many assembling factories around Ciudad Juárez. So again, you see my point: this is not an uncivilized brutal outburst, no. It's what makes these serial rapes so terrifying, it's not that brutal violent animal nature, it's precisely that they are in some terrifying sense cultural. They are a ritual with meaning. Now you will say, "Okay, easy, Mexico bashing down there." Ah, so let's go to the opposite side. I have friends in Vancouver who told me something similar is happening with Native American—okay, Indian, to say in the old way—Aboriginal women in Western Canada. There are reservations around Vancouver where it's again a ritual. It happens all the time: a group of white men kidnap a girl from reservation and again tortures her, kills her, then they drop her within the reservation because they know that Indians there don't have effective enough police. And what makes all this so sad is that when authorities investigate this, they systematically try to downplay this, let's call it collective ritualistic aspect of it. They systematically try to reduce it to totally accidental contingent local matters, like "Oh, probably parents were drug addicted, it's family violence" and so on and so on. They usually, the police, limit their investigation to the native community in order to present the crime as a case of, again, local family violence due to drugs and alcohol and so on and so on. In all these cases, the social dislocation due to fast industrialization and modernization provokes a brutal reaction of men who experience this development as a threat. And again, the crucial feature in all these cases is that the criminal violent act is not a spontaneous outburst of raw brutal energy which breaks the chains of civilized customs, but something learned, externally imposed, ritualized, part of collective symbolic substance of a community. What is repressed for the public gaze is not the cruel brutality of the act, but precisely its cultural, symbolic character. And I claim that in a way the same goes for what we all know is the dark spot of today's Catholic Church: pedophilia. I insist again, I am not claiming that there is no Church without pedophilia. Maybe there can be a Catholic Church without it. All I am claiming is that pedophilia is something like the hidden curriculum, if you want, the obscene underground of Catholic Church as an institution. It's part of the Church's identity. It's not simply that, okay, there are pedophiles among all people, so why they shouldn't be also in the Catholic community? No, they are part of that identity. Which is why once I even used the term "institutional unconscious" to designate this underside. How do you know—now you will say "But how do I know that this is part of Church's identity?" It's very clear if you—I don't know the situation here, but at least in Europe, in my own country, Ireland, Poland and so on, thousands of cases, how the Church as an institution reacted to it, trying to play it down, protecting not the victims but the perpetrators and so on and so on and so on. And so what's the lesson of this? It is that when we see these types of behavior, criminal, brutally violent behavior, in these cases at least, this is not something subversive in the sense of undermining official ideology. It's the key constituent of official ideology. So when we talk about official ideology, we should always remember it's not just the explicit norms, values, practices, we should also include this, let's call it obscene underground. What is of course publicly denied, nobody admits it, but it's part of its identity. How does this work? I was recently in Turkey and a Turkish friend told me a wonderful story about Kemal Paşa Atatürk, you know, the father of modern Turkey. The official image of Atatürk was: hardworking general, he dedicated his life to the well-being of Turkey, working hours a day and so on and so on. Then there was a myth that he is in reality an ultra-seducer, that he's screwed the wives of all his ministers and so on and so on. But now, it's still prohibited to attack him in public in Turkey, but nonetheless some researches were done discreetly and the result is wonderful. Although if you said this publicly—but wait a minute, Atatürk is the guy who was seducing women all around—although you got arrested, it was nonetheless a myth propagated by the power itself. It was part of Atatürk's public identity. Why? Because in reality he wasn't like that. Now some memoirs of his relatives were published, some censored, which clearly demonstrate that at least from late 1920s, Atatürk was totally impotent, what seducing women. Most he was—he sometimes ordered some young boy prostitute to be brought to him and he didn't even penetrate them, he just played a little bit. So the nice thing you see is that this obscene myth—oh, he's not just working hours a day, he's seducing women—this was part of his official identity. Which is why—now I'm coming to my point—a wonderful thing happened in Turkey. In the '50s some—there was some official political meeting where the representative of the Kemalist Party, who were still in power there, said, "There are slanderous rumors that our great leader Atatürk was seducing women. No, these rumors are totally false." And then a member of the opposition stood up and said, "Yes, I totally agree with you, these rumors are totally false." This guy was arrested and disappeared the next day. Because you see, this is what I'm talking about. It's something which is officially denied, but precisely as such, it's part of the official identity, as it were. And sometimes it's even more dangerous to disavow, to deny this prohibited dark secret than to deny public values and so on and so on. This brings me to another feature of how ideology functions. We usually identify an ideology with prohibitions: there are things which are permitted, there are things which are prohibited. But what interests me, what always fascinated me, are cases where—how should I put it?—prohibition itself is prohibited. Something is prohibited, but you are not allowed to pronounce publicly this prohibition. You have to act as if it's not prohibited, but you just don't do it. And I read now new history of how Stalinist regime functioned, and I discovered that there, the logic was this one—I'm sorry if you know this story, but I will repeat it, I found it wonderful. Let's imagine that we are in Moscow in '35. I am Stalin, I give a long speech, then there is a debate. And then in that debate, one of you who is stupid enough stands up and attacks me, criticizes me. Of course, we all know: next day the talk of the town would be who has seen—was the last to have seen alive that guy, no? But now let's imagine something else: that another guy stands up and attacks the first guy who criticized me, Stalin, saying something like, "But are you crazy? Don't you know that we don't criticize Comrade Stalin here?" I claim he, the second guy, would have disappeared even faster. You see what I mean? It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition. This is why, although I had many polemics with her, I agree here with, personally we are nonetheless friendly, Judith Butler, who claimed how the first subversive act in—okay, she doesn't consider herself a feminist but nonetheless in feminist struggle is to state openly oppression. Like in today's liberal society where woman's oppression often has precisely this form of—you know, not only women are oppressed, but it's precisely considered tasteless and so on for them to publicly claim—you know, it's like what always fascinated me, this postmodern figure of a boss. It's no longer the traditional master who terrorizes you, it's something like, you know, today's boss, he is friendly with you, embraces you, "did you have good sex last night?" whatever, as if you are—but he still maintains all authority. You see what I mean? It is authority, unquestionable, but masked as friendship and so on and so on. And in such conditions, the first step you really hurt him is to claim, "No, sorry, we are not colleagues, you are my boss. I'm subordinate to you, so please ask—sorry, act like a boss" to, again, to break all this. So this form of prohibiting the prohibition brings us to another topic which I develop in many of my books, I don't have now time to go into it, which always fascinated me: this gap between explicit and implicit which characterizes every culture. What defines a certain culture at all levels, from a small community like a university department to larger communities, is that you don't only have rules which regulate your behavior, you also always have meta-rules which tell you how to obey explicit rules. Like, there are some rules which prohibit something, but effectively you are expected to violate those rules. I think that many rules of patriarchal oppression are like that. In the sense that, for example, in the standard male chauvinist family, at least in the old one, today it's different, father of course wanted to discipline you and so on and so on, but the message within the lines is "Go, play with girls, do it, just do it discreetly" and so on and so on. You know, to be part of some culture is precisely to know how a prohibition effectively functions. For example, I was told, I read some stupid manager report, that that's the big problem of Western companies doing business in China today. That there it's, you know, when you have a certain rule, it's extremely complex: do you have to take that rule literally and so on and so on? And things get even more complex when you have the opposite paradox: not rules which you are expected to violate them, but rules which give you the right to do something, but you are given this right only if you do not use it, you know. It's—and I think this complexity is what characterizes ideology. Ideology is not so much in explicit rules as in this thick cobweb of unwritten rules which tell you how to treat explicit rules. Here the super-ego agency, what in psychoanalysis is called super-ego, enters. Super-ego would have been precisely that when you have a certain legal prohibition, "don't do this," super-ego would have been the implicit message which means "do it but discreetly" or whatever, like the opposite injunction. Which is why—and I here refer to Étienne Balibar, the pupil of Louis Althusser—his wonderful reversal of Louis Althusser's classical formula according to which, you know, an ideology interpellates individuals into subjects. By identifying yourself with a certain ideological call, you become subject of ideology: whatever you are—your ideological identity—mother, father, teacher, socialist, liberal, whatever. Balibar's idea is that super-ego, if explicit ideology interpellates individuals into subjects—like after you recognize yourself, for example, in a certain political ideology, you're not just an individual, you are a subject, a liberal, a fascist, whatever—super-ego does the opposite: it interpellates subject into individuals. It reduces you, a super-ego call, to your unique individuality burdened with guilt and responsibility. This is why super-ego pressure gives rise to anxiety. In the eyes of the super-ego, I am alone; there is no big other beneath which I can hide. I am guilty as charged. How does this work today? A series of situations that characterize today's society, I claim, exemplify perfectly this type of super-ego individualization: ecology, political correctness, poverty, up to the way debt, indebtedness, functions in general. Does the predominant ecological discourse today not address us as a priori guilty, indebted to Mother Nature, under the constant pressure of the ecological super-ego agency? "What did you do today to repay your debt to nature? Did you put all newspapers into appropriate recycle bin? All the bottles of beer or cans of Coke? Did you use your car where you could have used a bike or some means of public transport? Did you use air condition instead of just opening wide your windows?" and so on and so on. I think there is nothing progressive in this pressure. It's precisely when you want to address the true issue—what our industrial mega-companies are doing—you know, super-ego reaction is: "Who are you to say this? Everyone can criticize big companies, but what did you do today? Did you separate all newspapers?" and so on and so on. I think this is perfect ideological machinery of addressing you as isolated individual and making you feel guilty to terrorize you not to attend big questions. And I think the same goes for endless political correct self-examination. "Was my look at the flight attendant too intrusive and sexually offensive? Did I use any words with possible sexist undertones while addressing her?" and so on and so on. The pleasure provided by such self-probing is evident. I claim that there is even a kind of a politically correct pleasure when, you know, some of my friends who are in this politically correct game, I see their pleasure. "You know, I used an expression but then I discovered I was still a racist. I thought I'm free of—no but there was a shade of racism in that" and so on and so on. As for charity, recall how we are all the time bombarded by messages destined to make us feel guilty for our comfortable way of life. Messages which simultaneously offer an easy way out: "You can make a difference. Give monthly and you will make a black orphan happy" or whatever. Again, the ideological underpinning is easily discernible here. And I claim that the same—this is a little bit more problematic maybe for you—the same holds even for the pathological fear of some Western liberal leftists to be guilty of today, for example, Islamophobia. I mean, I wrote about it. I'm the first to emphasize emancipatory potential of historical Islam, at least. But you know what depressed me very deeply? Maybe you followed it and it's again very sad how it was under-reported. Was it reported in your media? Even in United Kingdom they tried to contain it, play it down. Did you hear? Does the name Rotherham mean anything to you? It's a city about north of London where they discovered now—and these facts are undisputed—that in the last years at least girls were systematically, serially, hundreds of times raped by Pakistani youth gangs. And everyone was embarrassed. The police played it down: "No, we shouldn't bring this out, we will be accused of Islamophobia" and so on. So instead of Pakistani, they used the term "Asians," Asiatic men. Other leftists claimed "This has nothing to do with religion or race, this is just men's violence over..." You know, I think that although this appears to be ultra-political correctness—like you know, "Muslims are marginalized and so on, we shouldn't criticize them"—I think that this is just an inverted and maybe even more terrifying form of racism. I think the only true favor we can do to our Muslim friends is to criticize them ruthlessly when they deserve it. There is nothing emancipatory in this game of "Oh, if they are raping women, they are maybe just reacting in a desperate way towards against their marginalization" and so on and so on. No, this is precisely inverted racism. I'm even tempted to say that today's predominant form of racism is our privileging us as the only guys who are able to be really evil. You know, I noticed how when some big terrible thing is happening in some third world country—like, I remember Rwanda massacre some years ago—the reaction of Western European liberal leftists was: "Oh, these are all aftereffects of colonization, like we are guilty" and so on. But what they were effectively saying—that's the racist dimension that I saw—was something like, "They are so undeveloped and that they even are not able to be truly evil," if I may put it in this way. When—you know, it's as if, you know, in good, good-bad old days, we had this ideology of white man's burden. You know, like, "We white men are destined because of our intelligence and so on to lead others." Now we have a different type of white man's burden, which is I claim no less racist: whenever something horrible happens in a third world country, we must be in some sense responsible, you know. Even now with ISIS, you know, the general mantra of the leftists: "But we are guilty for ISIS in Iraq and Syria because it was the result of American intervention" and so on and so on. And I think there is something so arrogant in it. Which is why I deeply understand my Native American, which means Indian—I hate the term Native American, and my Native American friends hate this term, they consider it racist. My friends told me—it happened in Missoula, Montana, a wonderful situation—they told me, "Why are we Native Americans? Opposite of nature is culture, so you are cultural Americans, we are..." and maybe you know this joke, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, they told me, "We much prefer to be called Indians, at least our name is a monument to white man's stupidity, you know, who thought they are in India," no? And where I fell in love with them instantly is how they told me, my Native American Indian friends there, how "You stupid white men, you think that we have some stupid organic, holistic relationship to nature, you know." No, and with such pride they told me, "We burned more forest than you stupid white men ever did. We killed more buffaloes, we brought more violence, destruction to nature." It was a wonderfully correct, you know, statement, because they discerned very well this patronizing attitude hidden in this, you know, this—this is I claim one of the main forms of today's racism when you say "We with our mining companies, we just come there and ruthlessly dig into the earth, but a Native American, he first talks to the spirits of a mountain and only when a mountain permits this..." No, I think this is apartheid logic. I remember when I was young, I was reading also—it was very interesting—white apartheid racist South African books which tried to defend apartheid. Ah, you know what was their reasoning? Not the real one, economic exploitation, but multiculturalism. Their claim was: "If we simply introduce egalitarian democracy in South Africa, what will happen with all those wonderful Aboriginal cultures, Bushman, Hottentot? They will become vulgar technologically oriented consumers like us" and so on and so on. You know, a true colonizer is always—that's the ABC of colonization—is always ready to admit the some deeper spiritual superiority of the other, of the colonized. Like, all British colonizers, read their memoirs, always claimed, "Okay, we British, we are better in economy, but a modest Indian Hindu priest has more wisdom than all Western science" and so on and so on. Which is why I think the truly emancipatory approach here is to allow the others to become corrupted in consumerism and so on the way we are. Don't try to retain them in their purity or whatever. Which is why for example my favorite example is—maybe you know the story—when I was in New Zealand, I become friendly with some local artists there, visual artists, painters. First they gave me their usual bullshit, you know, like "Oh, we talk to spirits, we resist your imperialist technology" and so on. But then they told me something wonderful: they told me that "You know, but nonetheless we have two agents, one in New York, the other in Paris, who tell us what's the latest fashion and then we quickly adapt our original talk with spirits to the latest fashion" and so on. And you know what's my point here? I claim there was nothing corrupted in it. This idea of some naive sincerity of Aboriginal cultures is a myth. Did you see another example? A wonderful—and I really mean it—very watchable good movie, Inuit, Canadian Eskimo movie, *The Fast Runner*. You know, it's a retelling of an old Inuit myth, two tribes in conflict. Okay, the point is this one: in the original myth, it's a catastrophe at the end, universal slaughter, tribe—the two tribes kill each other and so on. In the film it's more upward optimistic ending: they just exile, not even kill, two bad guys and then the tribes are reconciled. And then a totally stupid Western—I mean white Canadian—journalist attacked the director, an Inuit, accusing him of succumbing to consumerist culture. Like, "Why didn't you remain faithful to the authentic myth? Why do you introduce this happy end to make your movie more commercial?" and so on. And he, this journalist, got a correct answer: namely, the Inuit movie director told him, "No, you are a racist here, because this idea of authenticity that you are trying to impose on us is your Western invention." He said, "What I did with the myth—retell it in a new way—this is part of our culture. The original authentic version is not part of our culture. In our culture, in each new situation, you change the story, you retell the myth in a new way" and so on and so on. So, that I don't get lost, because I'm probably—where am I now? Yeah, we're at time. Already? Okay, just a little bit more if you allow me. No, no, I'm just trying to—okay, I will go directly to this. Where are we today? The image that I was giving you is still the image of traditional functioning of power. We have what in psychoanalysis we call symbolic castration, that is to say, let's say we have an ordinary miserable individual, but you know, the moment he puts on the insignia of power, it's no longer just him, it's power, law, authority, divine authority itself which speaks through him. This is the traditional logic of power. Why in Lacanian theory we call this castration? Because you are decentered. You know, here we can see where some old-fashioned feminists get it wrong. When Lacan talks about so-called phallic signifier, he doesn't mean any symbol of male virility. For Lacan, phallic signifier is the signifier of castration. To assume phallus means to assume your castration. In what sense? The phallic element for Lacan is the insignia of power. You put—a judge puts on a robe, a king has a crown whatever—and this is the phallic element. And you see the joke: that the phallic element is detached from you. That's why Lacan talks about castration: the authority never comes from you yourself, it's always external. There is always a gap between your miserable reality and your symbolic identity. But I claim, if you allow me the concluding line here, I claim that this gap between the symbolic title and the miserable reality of an individual functions today in a different way. More and more, it's like this—I quote here Alain Badiou, who wrote this a-propos Jean Genet's wonderful play *The Balcony*. Quote from Badiou: "We encounter here an imaginary feature of democracy. Democracy means precisely that there are no costumes. Inequality no longer wears a costume or a dress. There are dramatic, gigantic inequalities, but their laicization leaves them without a costume." End of quote. On a simple descriptive level, this means that in a democratic egalitarian society, masters, those who exert power over others, no longer have to wear insignia or costumes. They can dress and act naturally like everybody else, renouncing all dignity. Today's master's message is precisely, "See, we are all common people like you, with all weaknesses, fears, limitations" and so on and so on. So today's master is fully ready to admit its castration, in the sense of "I'm a weak guy" and so on, blah blah. But the trick is that this admission of castration—like "Don't take me too seriously, I'm weak guy like you"—not only in no way undermines his or her power, but it's even the condition of the power. It's the very means, instrument, of how power is exercised. And now this bring me to my—I'm really cutting it short—to my concluding moment, which is a wonderful tautological mechanism of how—you know, today it's no longer subversive to claim our leader pretends to be a dignified person but really he is an ordinary guy like us. No, he openly admits that he is an ordinary guy like us, but he nonetheless continues to function, to function as a master. Which is why—and with this I wanted to conclude, but I will rather cut it short—what fascinated me is how today ideology reproduces itself precisely by way of admitting its own weakness. For example, let me go to WikiLeaks or Snowden revelations and so on. What was the basic reaction of those in power? It wasn't to deny anything—it's difficult to deny—it was more something like, "Okay, we all know this: that governments are doing secret things and so on. But what's the big deal? We didn't learn anything new" and so on. You see the point? They are ready to admit everything, they just want to curtail the symbolic consequences. It's the same strategy as, you know, if you are accused of something, of doing really something horrible, you must know that the most efficient way to avoid sincere apology is to apologize, but in this slightly aggressive way, you know, like "I did something horrible to you. What I would have—the way to..." "Okay, I'm sorry, now fuck off, leave me alone." You know what I mean? This logic of admitting it, that the very all too hasty admission neutralizes it. And I think this is maybe again one of the great ideological mechanisms today. This is why, unfortunately, I don't believe in the power of disclosure as such. And I'm a friend with Julian Assange, I love him, but I always warn him, don't think that WikiLeaks really taught people something they didn't know. Of course, we learn many details and it's good that you—we do. But let's be frank, didn't we all suspect it? So what's the point? The point is that we cannot any longer pretend that we don't know it. The true target of WikiLeaks revelations are not those in power, but we. We are not—we, ordinary people, we should change. Because I claim—this is a risky hypothesis—if we were to ask many ordinary people, "What do you think about torture, torturing prisoners and so on?" I claim that the majority of people, their answer would have been something like this: "Maybe it has to be done, but let's do it discreetly, don't bother..." you know, like "They should do it..." you know. And the point is to break this. The great again achievement of WikiLeaks is not what we learned, but that it became public knowledge. We cannot any longer pretend that it's just a private secret, we all know it's happening and so on and so on. This is why I claim again we need critique of ideology, that is to say denunciation as such is not enough. And this is why, with this I will conclude—for example, I don't agree—he attacked me once briefly in a footnote in *New York Times*—Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who proposed, you know, legalizing torture. In the sense of precise conditions: you have doctors who examine you, that's how much pain you can endure without risking your health, blah blah. And my point is, here I am referring to the *Event* book, the one chapter before the last where I talk about de-eventalization. In the sense that an event, in the sense of new civilizational achievement, is canceled, we regress. Look, I'm not a hypocrite here. When friends tell me, "But if you are desperate, wouldn't you torture someone?" I'm not a hypocrite here. In a little bit of melodramatic, stupid way, if you ask me frankly: yes, I can imagine situations where, honestly, the least I can say is, I cannot promise you not to succumb to the temptation of torturing. Let's take this ridiculous melodramatic situation: some evil guy kidnapped my young daughter, which I don't have. And then I have in my power a guy I know that he knows where my daughter is kept. Well, out of pure despair I cannot guarantee that I would not torture him. But I think it should remain prohibited. You know why? I should at least remain aware that out of pure despair I did something terrifying. The ethical catastrophe is when this is normalized, legalized. That's the end, in a way. And here I think we really live today in an—the public admission of torture is just one of the effects of this—we live in an era of ethical regression. We even don't notice how things which were unthinkable years ago are now a matter of public debate and so on and so on. So it's not true that things are simply, how should I put it, getting better and so on and so on, gradual progress. No, we live in an era of ethico-simply of ethico-political regress. In an era where ideology is stronger than it ever was. This is why, for example, I don't know if it's translated, you should read it, the wonderful book by Italian leftist sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato, *The Making of the Indebted Man*. It analyzes in detail the ideological dimension of debt and how it functions as a disciplinary machine. His point is that debt is used in order to even neutralize class distinction. The idea is this one: let's say I'm a poor guy, I barely survive, so I get indebted. And then I decide what I can do with the debt, with the money I got, no? Like, I can invest it in a good holiday, I can invest it into my son's education, I can invest it into better healthcare or whatever. The trick here is the category of self-entrepreneurship. The idea is we shouldn't even talk about capitalists and workers: am I when I'm doing this not doing basically the same thing as a big capitalist? Just instead of investing billions, I invest ten thousand or what, you know. But this is again a wonderful example of how class distinction can be obfuscated and so on. And just with this really to conclude, another example would have been freedom. I'm absolutely for freedom and also I'm not a stupid old-fashioned Marxist who buys this bullshit of "bourgeois just formal freedoms" and so on. But nonetheless, when people talk about freedom, we should nonetheless ask a simple question: the Leninist question, you know, Lenin liked to say "Freedom, yes, but freedom for whom to do what?" What do we mean today when we say we are free? We usually mean this everyday life level freedom of choice, you know. And it's an incredibly strong machine. You noticed how the entire Republican Party attack on Obama healthcare project was based on this: "Obama wants to take from us the freedom of choice in the domain of healthcare" and so on. So my point is, what does it mean in our everyday experience to be free? It means I do in my sex life whatever I want, I can decide where will I live, I can decide what I drink, what I—like, these everyday freedoms. But, and this—they are good, I'm not in any way mocking them—all I'm saying is: is this enough? The here I like to quote—and again, it's typical how under-reported this was—did you hear about, I don't know how to pronounce it in English, this TISA, T-I-S-A agreements? Do you even know what goes on? These are the latest WikiLeaks revelations which were practically ignored. Do you know that now, this month, a crucial negotiations are going on among superpowers to enforce a new worldwide trade agreement which fixes in advance the conditions of the free flow of money, of information, and so on and so on? It's something incredibly more important than NAFTA and so on. When endorsed—when, sorry, when enforced—this agreement will pose strict limits to what different elected governments will be able to do, limiting their—what they can do in healthcare, in education—because these financial rules regulating financial transactions will be enforced worldwide. Now what's so mysterious is that not only are these negotiations done in secret, but it's even part of the text of the agreement that when it will be accepted, enforced, it should remain secret for five years. Now you see, this is where we are today. Something that will have an incredibly strong economic power, which will structure our lives for decades to come, is done in secret. And of course, immediately we don't feel it as limiting our freedom. You can still do whatever you want with your money, this, that, and so on. But I think that we should expand the notion of freedom without limiting in any way our personal freedoms, to move beyond just this idea, this everyday freedom: "I can buy this car or that car, I can buy whatever book I want, I can do in my sex life whatever I want," and to ask: "But these freedoms always take place within certain economic, social, ethical, ideological coordinates." Wouldn't be a true freedom also the right to establish some kind of collective agency which changes also this institutional economic and so on framework within which I enact my freedom? And this is what makes me so sad. With this I will really conclude now the last sentence. This is maybe why we in Europe were so fascinated by the ongoing events in Ukraine. I claim it's not so much our Western European racism, like "Oh, those primitive Ukrainians now they want to be like us." No, I think what really fascinated us, although it's not this what really went on there but at least it appeared that what, hundreds of thousands of people gathered and enforced a collective will. People can gather and still do something. We no longer have this freedom in the West. We cannot even imagine something like that happening. So you see, I have no utopia here. I'm not saying this new freedom, we need an old-fashioned Communist Party or whatever. All I'm saying is, whenever people talk about freedom, just be attentive to—almost in a—if you know philosophy a little bit, you know this Wittgenstein ordinary language stuff of "the meaning of word is their use." So what does it mean when people claim "We are free today," and is this enough? Here things begin. And I don't have big answers, I don't have any easy solution. I am well aware of this terrifying deadlock of how we had protests here and there—Occupy Wall Street, Greece, Spain—but if you ask people, "Okay, what do you want?" you get either general platitudes, no, like "Money should serve people, people shouldn't serve money," which is meaningless platitude, every fascist would have agreed with it, no? Or you get some kind of Keynesianism. I like them, but they are not enough—this is Piketty, Stiglitz, Krugman line, you know, basically: "We keep capitalism but just we change it a little bit, like more taxes or whatever" and so on. And will this—this is the big question today: is this enough or not? So I claim again that we are much more than we think in a critical situation, because it's not only as old Marxists thought, "We know what is to be done, we just don't know how to mobilize people." This is why incidentally old Marxists, old-fashioned Marxists like psychoanalysis: because they have a certain theory, then you ask them, "But fuck you, you predict revolution, why is the working class not revolutionized?" and then they tell you, "Oh, because it's ideological manipulation, here psychoanalysis will explain it" and so on and so on. You know, like the reference to psychoanalysis makes it easy for them to stick to their theory, no? No, I'm not even saying this. I'm just saying that the situation is much worse. We are really, we lack what Fredric Jameson likes to call "cognitive mapping." We don't even have a good general concept image of where we are, of what is happening. I think that all these terms like, you know, information society, risk society, post-industrial society, are not yet concepts. Which is why, back to my starting point, we need public places like the one here, we need to think. I even think—and with this I will really conclude now—you know, I am here like Marxists, you know. Marx said capitalism is coming to an end. Then Lenin said imperialism is really the last stage of capitalism. Then years later Mao Zedong said now today's American imperialism is the absolutely last totally rotten stage of capitalism. Now they say, you know, that this digital new capitalism is the really—you know, always you get a little bit more, no? So it's like my talk. But what I'm saying is that I don't believe in this stupidity: "Don't just talk, do it." Maybe we were doing too much. And I'm claiming maybe our motto should be: "Don't just do things, talk, think." Don't be afraid to withdraw and just to think. Thanks very much for your kind— [Applause] Now I—we are basically out of time, so I think we're just going to wrap it up so—Yeah, but okay, let us—you know what, my friend told me that we are out of time, I talked too long. But I claim, now you will see my Stalinist nature, that we should get at least one question to pretend that there is freedom. And if you are a true Stalinist democrat, I hope you already wrote that question and distributed it or whatever, you know. Okay, so alright, one question. How can—how can disengagement become a constructive act? Constructive? Yeah, or like—Yeah. Because only through disengagement can you gain the space, the proper perspective to truly intervene. If you directly intervene, you never act in empty space. Without disengagement, you simply remain within the existing ideological coordinates and so on. I'm not talking of disengagement in the sense of "we all move to Tibet and meditate there" and so on. I'm just saying that we should lose this simple transparency of "we know what is to be done." No, I'm not so sure we know what is to be done. We need disengagement in the cognitive, and I think even, okay, if there is a politician of 20th century who is problematic today, is Lenin. But even he followed these lines. I always quote mega-fiasco, World War I, all local social democratic parties, except Russian social democrats and so on, voted for war credits and so on, total fiasco. What did he do? He moved to Switzerland and read Hegel's logic. You know, he wasn't afraid—he saw that the fiasco was so radical that all even the basic coordinates have to be—have to be re-thought. And we shouldn't succumb to this blackmail of "My God, we don't have time to think, act." If I may conclude—I know most of you know it, but I love it—joke about Lenin that I know from my youth. I come from a communist country where on school boards usually there was this phrase by Lenin, Lenin's advice to young children: "Learn, learn, and learn." I'm sorry if you know it, there is a wonderful joke from that era about how they ask Marx, Engels, and Lenin: "What do you prefer to have, wife or mistress?" Marx, more conservative, said: "Wife."
Thanks very much, I am really honored to be here. Why? Because it's a general tendency in the so-called free Western world that academic institutions are more and more transformed into factories to produce experts. And if being an intellectual means anything today, it means you are not an expert. Not in the sense that you are just speaking general platitudes and bluffing, but why? What does an expert do? An expert solves the problems which are formulated by others—those in power, basically. As a guy in France in a debate explained to me, this was a couple of years ago when, you remember, cars were burning in the suburbs of Paris, he said, "Here we need you academics: a good psychologist to explain to us how you control the crowd, a good urban planner to explain to us how to dispose the streets so that the crowd is easier to crash or whatever." Like, the others formulate the problem, you are supposed to provide solutions. But I think the ABC, the basic feature of a true intellectual, is that first you question the problem itself. Like, is this really a problem? How come that the problem is presented to us in such a way? Because I claim this is most often the case today. For example, media bombard us, especially now with this new war against ISIS. I have no sympathy for them, my problem is somewhere else. That it's presented as: free permissive Western world against fanatics. No, I think the first question to be raised here is, what is it in the dynamic of immanent, inherent dynamics of today's global order which generates fundamentalism? Fundamentalism is not a remainder of the past and so on, it's something generated by today's global dynamics. Look, I have no sympathy for Muslim fundamentalism, but you know, these are official sources I read about it here, that FBI is observing, has under observation registered around two million people in the United States as potentially Christian fundamentalist terrorists. Sorry to tell you, this is approximately the same number of terrorists as potential terrorist fundamentalists as in Arab countries. Or to give you another example which is my favorite: Afghanistan. You know, today the very notion of a fundamentalist country, crazy Taliban, whatever. But listen, I'm unfortunately old enough to remember years ago. Do you know that Afghanistan was arguably the most enlightened, tolerant Middle East Muslim country? They had a king who was a kind of a pro-Western technocrat, they had even a very strong local Communist Party, and then things began to happen. You remember, Communist Party took power, when they started to lose power, Soviet army intervened. Then to crash, to beat the Soviets, United States mobilized their allies there, financing them. You maybe know some of the names of those American allies there: Osama bin Laden and so on, literally. And what I'm saying here is that as the result of this process of being caught into world history, Afghanistan fundamentalized itself. So you see, it's not an old backward country. No, it's—what does this mean? That it doesn't mean we should now admire—I'm not one of those crazy pseudo-leftists who claim even if we don't agree with all the details, women's rights and so on, nonetheless Islamic fundamentalists are a form of resistance towards global capitalism. No, no, but they are part of the same dynamic with global capitalism. So, that's the beginning of it. And I didn't lose my thread back to my starting point. Precisely because universities are being more and more turned into factories to produce experts, it's places like your place here which are still part of intellectual life, but it's public sphere with a distance outside official academic machinery where, if I may put it in this Hegelian idealist way, the world spirit is still alive. In places like this. Because you know, I'm again old enough to remember when I was young, leftists usually like to say this: "Oh, you intellectuals, students, you live in your ivory tower while real people are suffering out there, blah blah." But then I was quite shocked when some two or three years ago I heard Bill Gates saying exactly the same thing. You know, I claim that today this rhetoric of "real people are suffering against ivory tower," I claim it's one of the most efficient rhetorical devices of those in power. Because what happens here? Ah, this is the ingenuity of today's capitalism. Basically, if you read these messages in detail, these statements, the message is: "Millions are dying, Somalia, wherever, people are suffering and so on. Why don't we forget all our stupid ideological struggles—capitalism, socialism, who cares? Why don't we all, people of goodwill, come together: government, bankers, capitalists, TV movie stars, ordinary people, and just do something." I claim the message here is: "Don't do something," which means "don't think too much, just do it." Which is why today I think the truly subversive thing is precisely to keep a distance, to say: "No, I want to do some totally useless thinking." I even once—and you know, I was in Northern Africa once and this is one of my proudest moments—they applauded me when I told them how their suffering, very real suffering, is manipulated by the West and how the true reply when some Western liberal is telling you "But people are suffering there, blah blah," I told them the true answer should be "Fuck off. I don't care, I don't care if all the orphans die in Somalia, I want to finish this book on Hegel." And they started to applaud because they got the point: that this is not against them, this is how their very real suffering is manipulated. Which is why I think that charity and this emotional charity blackmail is not just an idiosyncratic addition, but it's the key element of today's ideology. This is why, as I often did in my older books, I like if there is one phenomenon that I think really embodies today's everyday ideology, it's Starbucks. You know why? You enter it and you see all those disgusting posters, you know, like: of this goes to keep the rainforest, the other to bring water to Sahara," whatever. You know why I find this so ingenious? Because in the old days, we were supposed to be split between consumerism and let's call this general political care, philanthropy for others. But the basic operation of Starbucks is to include your general humanitarian anti-consumerist concerns into consumerism itself. The point is: pay for your cappuccino cents more, and by drinking our cappuccino you will also do your humanitarian duty, you will show solidarity and so on and so on. This is why I'm even doubtful, and this statement whenever I repeat it got me many enemies, I'm even doubtful about all this obsession with organic food, apples and so on. Look, do you really believe that those half-rotten apples which cost double because they are organic—okay, maybe they are better. I'm just claiming that we are really, if you look deep into your heart, if you have one, I'm not sure I have one, this is not why we are buying. It makes us feel good. Like, you know, you say, "Isn't it beautiful, Mother Earth is in crisis, and by buying those apples I'm doing something for the Mother Earth, I'm part of a great movement of solidarity and so on and so on." This is where ideology is today. Of course, there is no ideology at that stupid general level of some big projects and so on and so on. We live ideology in everyday life. And this is what I want to talk about today. Not about the topics of this book, *Event*, or the other one, *Absolute Recoil*—now I'm making a little bit of propaganda, which will just appear by Verso. That book I like very much, *Absolute Recoil*, because it's, you know, I did write a mega-book in terms of quantity on Hegel, *Less Than Nothing*, which certainly doesn't weigh less than nothing because it's pages, no? And this book, *Absolute Recoil*, is a kind of a post-coital reflection on that one. I mean, you know, after I finish that one, it always happens, then after you deliver the manuscript you start to have nightmares, "My God, why didn't I say that?" you know. And this book—so let me—I will just, I would like to focus on these different aspects of how we are manipulated, but not in the sense that there are some manipulators who pull the strings. Manipulation is an objective process in our most ordinary everyday experience. I would like to begin by demonstrating or at least indicating how our most intense forms of pleasures are not spontaneous outbursts, they are something learned by imitation, they are an acquired taste. What do I mean by this? Be honest and recall your first experience of smoking or drinking a hard liquor. As a rule, how did it happen? It was a slightly older peer who told you in half-secret: "You know what adults are doing? They are smoking, they are drinking." And then he offered or she offered you to taste a cigarette or a whiskey and, admit it, your first reaction was distaste, disgust. "Ah, is this it?" and so on. And then you start coughing, spitting it out, thinking "Is this supposed to be pleasurable?" Then gradually you learn to enjoy it. I remember, because I come from an ex-communist country where Coke was introduced relatively late, how even when we got our first taste of Coke, it was exactly the same: "But this is bitter, tasteless, is this it?" But then we learned, "Yes, this is it." So what I'm—and now I will go to the end here—I claim that the same goes even for things like sexuality. I don't think it's really natural, if I may put it this way, to engage in sex, sexual activity with another person. The most—you just masturbate yourself, it's controlled and so on. It's always, you know, this element of—you learn it from outside, it's imposed on you. And I claim it's the same even with talking dirty, swearing. Usually, we think "I talk with you in a polite way, then I don't know for what reason I get furious, I cannot any longer control myself so I explode, I just do it." I don't think it functions like this. Maybe I'm a weird entity here, but I have a certain ritual which I love with my friends. When we meet, first for minutes—and it's a ritual—we talk really dirty. We exchange this—it's ritualized, you know, like, and I'm coming from Balkan, you know, when I say dirty I mean dirty, like "I will dig your mother out of her grave and screw her up" and all that, you know. And then it's a beautiful moment how after minutes of this, we look at each other and we say, "Oh, finally we got over this boring ritual, now we can talk normally," you know. And it's wonderful, I mean, like you are released of this pressure, of this compulsion. So again, the lesson is that precisely these obscene pleasures, they are not spontaneous, they are learned. Which means they are strictly part of our culture. And now let me give you another much more crucial and pertinent example. We should apply this lesson also to forms of collective violence today like gang rapes and killings. One of the terrifying effects of the non-contemporaneity of different levels of social life today is the rise of violence against women. Not just random violence, but systematic violence, violence which is specific to a certain social context, which follows a pattern, which transmits a message. Let me give you two opposite examples here. The serial killings of women in Ciudad Juárez, you know, opposite El Paso in Northern Mexico. They are not just private pathologists—pathologists, I read two-three books on them, I spoke with some Mexican friends and they told me it's not just, I don't know what, pathology and so on, it's strictly ritualized activity, part of the subculture of local gangs. It always follows the same model: first gang rape, then torture till death, which is done usually in a terrifying way, cutting off breast nipples with scissors and so on, directed at young women working in many assembling factories around Ciudad Juárez. So again, you see my point: this is not an uncivilized brutal outburst, no. It's what makes these serial rapes so terrifying, it's not that brutal violent animal nature, it's precisely that they are in some terrifying sense cultural. They are a ritual with meaning. Now you will say, "Okay, easy, Mexico bashing down there." Ah, so let's go to the opposite side. I have friends in Vancouver who told me something similar is happening with Native American—okay, Indian, to say in the old way—Aboriginal women in Western Canada. There are reservations around Vancouver where it's again a ritual. It happens all the time: a group of white men kidnap a girl from reservation and again tortures her, kills her, then they drop her within the reservation because they know that Indians there don't have effective enough police. And what makes all this so sad is that when authorities investigate this, they systematically try to downplay this, let's call it collective ritualistic aspect of it. They systematically try to reduce it to totally accidental contingent local matters, like "Oh, probably parents were drug addicted, it's family violence" and so on and so on. They usually, the police, limit their investigation to the native community in order to present the crime as a case of, again, local family violence due to drugs and alcohol and so on and so on. In all these cases, the social dislocation due to fast industrialization and modernization provokes a brutal reaction of men who experience this development as a threat. And again, the crucial feature in all these cases is that the criminal violent act is not a spontaneous outburst of raw brutal energy which breaks the chains of civilized customs, but something learned, externally imposed, ritualized, part of collective symbolic substance of a community. What is repressed for the public gaze is not the cruel brutality of the act, but precisely its cultural, symbolic character. And I claim that in a way the same goes for what we all know is the dark spot of today's Catholic Church: pedophilia. I insist again, I am not claiming that there is no Church without pedophilia. Maybe there can be a Catholic Church without it. All I am claiming is that pedophilia is something like the hidden curriculum, if you want, the obscene underground of Catholic Church as an institution. It's part of the Church's identity. It's not simply that, okay, there are pedophiles among all people, so why they shouldn't be also in the Catholic community? No, they are part of that identity. Which is why once I even used the term "institutional unconscious" to designate this underside. How do you know—now you will say "But how do I know that this is part of Church's identity?" It's very clear if you—I don't know the situation here, but at least in Europe, in my own country, Ireland, Poland and so on, thousands of cases, how the Church as an institution reacted to it, trying to play it down, protecting not the victims but the perpetrators and so on and so on and so on. And so what's the lesson of this? It is that when we see these types of behavior, criminal, brutally violent behavior, in these cases at least, this is not something subversive in the sense of undermining official ideology. It's the key constituent of official ideology. So when we talk about official ideology, we should always remember it's not just the explicit norms, values, practices, we should also include this, let's call it obscene underground. What is of course publicly denied, nobody admits it, but it's part of its identity. How does this work? I was recently in Turkey and a Turkish friend told me a wonderful story about Kemal Paşa Atatürk, you know, the father of modern Turkey. The official image of Atatürk was: hardworking general, he dedicated his life to the well-being of Turkey, working hours a day and so on and so on. Then there was a myth that he is in reality an ultra-seducer, that he's screwed the wives of all his ministers and so on and so on. But now, it's still prohibited to attack him in public in Turkey, but nonetheless some researches were done discreetly and the result is wonderful. Although if you said this publicly—but wait a minute, Atatürk is the guy who was seducing women all around—although you got arrested, it was nonetheless a myth propagated by the power itself. It was part of Atatürk's public identity. Why? Because in reality he wasn't like that. Now some memoirs of his relatives were published, some censored, which clearly demonstrate that at least from late 1920s, Atatürk was totally impotent, what seducing women. Most he was—he sometimes ordered some young boy prostitute to be brought to him and he didn't even penetrate them, he just played a little bit. So the nice thing you see is that this obscene myth—oh, he's not just working hours a day, he's seducing women—this was part of his official identity. Which is why—now I'm coming to my point—a wonderful thing happened in Turkey. In the '50s some—there was some official political meeting where the representative of the Kemalist Party, who were still in power there, said, "There are slanderous rumors that our great leader Atatürk was seducing women. No, these rumors are totally false." And then a member of the opposition stood up and said, "Yes, I totally agree with you, these rumors are totally false." This guy was arrested and disappeared the next day. Because you see, this is what I'm talking about. It's something which is officially denied, but precisely as such, it's part of the official identity, as it were. And sometimes it's even more dangerous to disavow, to deny this prohibited dark secret than to deny public values and so on and so on. This brings me to another feature of how ideology functions. We usually identify an ideology with prohibitions: there are things which are permitted, there are things which are prohibited. But what interests me, what always fascinated me, are cases where—how should I put it?—prohibition itself is prohibited. Something is prohibited, but you are not allowed to pronounce publicly this prohibition. You have to act as if it's not prohibited, but you just don't do it. And I read now new history of how Stalinist regime functioned, and I discovered that there, the logic was this one—I'm sorry if you know this story, but I will repeat it, I found it wonderful. Let's imagine that we are in Moscow in '35. I am Stalin, I give a long speech, then there is a debate. And then in that debate, one of you who is stupid enough stands up and attacks me, criticizes me. Of course, we all know: next day the talk of the town would be who has seen—was the last to have seen alive that guy, no? But now let's imagine something else: that another guy stands up and attacks the first guy who criticized me, Stalin, saying something like, "But are you crazy? Don't you know that we don't criticize Comrade Stalin here?" I claim he, the second guy, would have disappeared even faster. You see what I mean? It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition. This is why, although I had many polemics with her, I agree here with, personally we are nonetheless friendly, Judith Butler, who claimed how the first subversive act in—okay, she doesn't consider herself a feminist but nonetheless in feminist struggle is to state openly oppression. Like in today's liberal society where woman's oppression often has precisely this form of—you know, not only women are oppressed, but it's precisely considered tasteless and so on for them to publicly claim—you know, it's like what always fascinated me, this postmodern figure of a boss. It's no longer the traditional master who terrorizes you, it's something like, you know, today's boss, he is friendly with you, embraces you, "did you have good sex last night?" whatever, as if you are—but he still maintains all authority. You see what I mean? It is authority, unquestionable, but masked as friendship and so on and so on. And in such conditions, the first step you really hurt him is to claim, "No, sorry, we are not colleagues, you are my boss. I'm subordinate to you, so please ask—sorry, act like a boss" to, again, to break all this. So this form of prohibiting the prohibition brings us to another topic which I develop in many of my books, I don't have now time to go into it, which always fascinated me: this gap between explicit and implicit which characterizes every culture. What defines a certain culture at all levels, from a small community like a university department to larger communities, is that you don't only have rules which regulate your behavior, you also always have meta-rules which tell you how to obey explicit rules. Like, there are some rules which prohibit something, but effectively you are expected to violate those rules. I think that many rules of patriarchal oppression are like that. In the sense that, for example, in the standard male chauvinist family, at least in the old one, today it's different, father of course wanted to discipline you and so on and so on, but the message within the lines is "Go, play with girls, do it, just do it discreetly" and so on and so on. You know, to be part of some culture is precisely to know how a prohibition effectively functions. For example, I was told, I read some stupid manager report, that that's the big problem of Western companies doing business in China today. That there it's, you know, when you have a certain rule, it's extremely complex: do you have to take that rule literally and so on and so on? And things get even more complex when you have the opposite paradox: not rules which you are expected to violate them, but rules which give you the right to do something, but you are given this right only if you do not use it, you know. It's—and I think this complexity is what characterizes ideology. Ideology is not so much in explicit rules as in this thick cobweb of unwritten rules which tell you how to treat explicit rules. Here the super-ego agency, what in psychoanalysis is called super-ego, enters. Super-ego would have been precisely that when you have a certain legal prohibition, "don't do this," super-ego would have been the implicit message which means "do it but discreetly" or whatever, like the opposite injunction. Which is why—and I here refer to Étienne Balibar, the pupil of Louis Althusser—his wonderful reversal of Louis Althusser's classical formula according to which, you know, an ideology interpellates individuals into subjects. By identifying yourself with a certain ideological call, you become subject of ideology: whatever you are—your ideological identity—mother, father, teacher, socialist, liberal, whatever. Balibar's idea is that super-ego, if explicit ideology interpellates individuals into subjects—like after you recognize yourself, for example, in a certain political ideology, you're not just an individual, you are a subject, a liberal, a fascist, whatever—super-ego does the opposite: it interpellates subject into individuals. It reduces you, a super-ego call, to your unique individuality burdened with guilt and responsibility. This is why super-ego pressure gives rise to anxiety. In the eyes of the super-ego, I am alone; there is no big other beneath which I can hide. I am guilty as charged. How does this work today? A series of situations that characterize today's society, I claim, exemplify perfectly this type of super-ego individualization: ecology, political correctness, poverty, up to the way debt, indebtedness, functions in general. Does the predominant ecological discourse today not address us as a priori guilty, indebted to Mother Nature, under the constant pressure of the ecological super-ego agency? "What did you do today to repay your debt to nature? Did you put all newspapers into appropriate recycle bin? All the bottles of beer or cans of Coke? Did you use your car where you could have used a bike or some means of public transport? Did you use air condition instead of just opening wide your windows?" and so on and so on. I think there is nothing progressive in this pressure. It's precisely when you want to address the true issue—what our industrial mega-companies are doing—you know, super-ego reaction is: "Who are you to say this? Everyone can criticize big companies, but what did you do today? Did you separate all newspapers?" and so on and so on. I think this is perfect ideological machinery of addressing you as isolated individual and making you feel guilty to terrorize you not to attend big questions. And I think the same goes for endless political correct self-examination. "Was my look at the flight attendant too intrusive and sexually offensive? Did I use any words with possible sexist undertones while addressing her?" and so on and so on. The pleasure provided by such self-probing is evident. I claim that there is even a kind of a politically correct pleasure when, you know, some of my friends who are in this politically correct game, I see their pleasure. "You know, I used an expression but then I discovered I was still a racist. I thought I'm free of—no but there was a shade of racism in that" and so on and so on. As for charity, recall how we are all the time bombarded by messages destined to make us feel guilty for our comfortable way of life. Messages which simultaneously offer an easy way out: "You can make a difference. Give monthly and you will make a black orphan happy" or whatever. Again, the ideological underpinning is easily discernible here. And I claim that the same—this is a little bit more problematic maybe for you—the same holds even for the pathological fear of some Western liberal leftists to be guilty of today, for example, Islamophobia. I mean, I wrote about it. I'm the first to emphasize emancipatory potential of historical Islam, at least. But you know what depressed me very deeply? Maybe you followed it and it's again very sad how it was under-reported. Was it reported in your media? Even in United Kingdom they tried to contain it, play it down. Did you hear? Does the name Rotherham mean anything to you? It's a city about north of London where they discovered now—and these facts are undisputed—that in the last years at least girls were systematically, serially, hundreds of times raped by Pakistani youth gangs. And everyone was embarrassed. The police played it down: "No, we shouldn't bring this out, we will be accused of Islamophobia" and so on. So instead of Pakistani, they used the term "Asians," Asiatic men. Other leftists claimed "This has nothing to do with religion or race, this is just men's violence over..." You know, I think that although this appears to be ultra-political correctness—like you know, "Muslims are marginalized and so on, we shouldn't criticize them"—I think that this is just an inverted and maybe even more terrifying form of racism. I think the only true favor we can do to our Muslim friends is to criticize them ruthlessly when they deserve it. There is nothing emancipatory in this game of "Oh, if they are raping women, they are maybe just reacting in a desperate way towards against their marginalization" and so on and so on. No, this is precisely inverted racism. I'm even tempted to say that today's predominant form of racism is our privileging us as the only guys who are able to be really evil. You know, I noticed how when some big terrible thing is happening in some third world country—like, I remember Rwanda massacre some years ago—the reaction of Western European liberal leftists was: "Oh, these are all aftereffects of colonization, like we are guilty" and so on. But what they were effectively saying—that's the racist dimension that I saw—was something like, "They are so undeveloped and that they even are not able to be truly evil," if I may put it in this way. When—you know, it's as if, you know, in good, good-bad old days, we had this ideology of white man's burden. You know, like, "We white men are destined because of our intelligence and so on to lead others." Now we have a different type of white man's burden, which is I claim no less racist: whenever something horrible happens in a third world country, we must be in some sense responsible, you know. Even now with ISIS, you know, the general mantra of the leftists: "But we are guilty for ISIS in Iraq and Syria because it was the result of American intervention" and so on and so on. And I think there is something so arrogant in it. Which is why I deeply understand my Native American, which means Indian—I hate the term Native American, and my Native American friends hate this term, they consider it racist. My friends told me—it happened in Missoula, Montana, a wonderful situation—they told me, "Why are we Native Americans? Opposite of nature is culture, so you are cultural Americans, we are..." and maybe you know this joke, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, they told me, "We much prefer to be called Indians, at least our name is a monument to white man's stupidity, you know, who thought they are in India," no? And where I fell in love with them instantly is how they told me, my Native American Indian friends there, how "You stupid white men, you think that we have some stupid organic, holistic relationship to nature, you know." No, and with such pride they told me, "We burned more forest than you stupid white men ever did. We killed more buffaloes, we brought more violence, destruction to nature." It was a wonderfully correct, you know, statement, because they discerned very well this patronizing attitude hidden in this, you know, this—this is I claim one of the main forms of today's racism when you say "We with our mining companies, we just come there and ruthlessly dig into the earth, but a Native American, he first talks to the spirits of a mountain and only when a mountain permits this..." No, I think this is apartheid logic. I remember when I was young, I was reading also—it was very interesting—white apartheid racist South African books which tried to defend apartheid. Ah, you know what was their reasoning? Not the real one, economic exploitation, but multiculturalism. Their claim was: "If we simply introduce egalitarian democracy in South Africa, what will happen with all those wonderful Aboriginal cultures, Bushman, Hottentot? They will become vulgar technologically oriented consumers like us" and so on and so on. You know, a true colonizer is always—that's the ABC of colonization—is always ready to admit the some deeper spiritual superiority of the other, of the colonized. Like, all British colonizers, read their memoirs, always claimed, "Okay, we British, we are better in economy, but a modest Indian Hindu priest has more wisdom than all Western science" and so on and so on. Which is why I think the truly emancipatory approach here is to allow the others to become corrupted in consumerism and so on the way we are. Don't try to retain them in their purity or whatever. Which is why for example my favorite example is—maybe you know the story—when I was in New Zealand, I become friendly with some local artists there, visual artists, painters. First they gave me their usual bullshit, you know, like "Oh, we talk to spirits, we resist your imperialist technology" and so on. But then they told me something wonderful: they told me that "You know, but nonetheless we have two agents, one in New York, the other in Paris, who tell us what's the latest fashion and then we quickly adapt our original talk with spirits to the latest fashion" and so on. And you know what's my point here? I claim there was nothing corrupted in it. This idea of some naive sincerity of Aboriginal cultures is a myth. Did you see another example? A wonderful—and I really mean it—very watchable good movie, Inuit, Canadian Eskimo movie, *The Fast Runner*. You know, it's a retelling of an old Inuit myth, two tribes in conflict. Okay, the point is this one: in the original myth, it's a catastrophe at the end, universal slaughter, tribe—the two tribes kill each other and so on. In the film it's more upward optimistic ending: they just exile, not even kill, two bad guys and then the tribes are reconciled. And then a totally stupid Western—I mean white Canadian—journalist attacked the director, an Inuit, accusing him of succumbing to consumerist culture. Like, "Why didn't you remain faithful to the authentic myth? Why do you introduce this happy end to make your movie more commercial?" and so on. And he, this journalist, got a correct answer: namely, the Inuit movie director told him, "No, you are a racist here, because this idea of authenticity that you are trying to impose on us is your Western invention." He said, "What I did with the myth—retell it in a new way—this is part of our culture. The original authentic version is not part of our culture. In our culture, in each new situation, you change the story, you retell the myth in a new way" and so on and so on. So, that I don't get lost, because I'm probably—where am I now? Yeah, we're at time. Already? Okay, just a little bit more if you allow me. No, no, I'm just trying to—okay, I will go directly to this. Where are we today? The image that I was giving you is still the image of traditional functioning of power. We have what in psychoanalysis we call symbolic castration, that is to say, let's say we have an ordinary miserable individual, but you know, the moment he puts on the insignia of power, it's no longer just him, it's power, law, authority, divine authority itself which speaks through him. This is the traditional logic of power. Why in Lacanian theory we call this castration? Because you are decentered. You know, here we can see where some old-fashioned feminists get it wrong. When Lacan talks about so-called phallic signifier, he doesn't mean any symbol of male virility. For Lacan, phallic signifier is the signifier of castration. To assume phallus means to assume your castration. In what sense? The phallic element for Lacan is the insignia of power. You put—a judge puts on a robe, a king has a crown whatever—and this is the phallic element. And you see the joke: that the phallic element is detached from you. That's why Lacan talks about castration: the authority never comes from you yourself, it's always external. There is always a gap between your miserable reality and your symbolic identity. But I claim, if you allow me the concluding line here, I claim that this gap between the symbolic title and the miserable reality of an individual functions today in a different way. More and more, it's like this—I quote here Alain Badiou, who wrote this a-propos Jean Genet's wonderful play *The Balcony*. Quote from Badiou: "We encounter here an imaginary feature of democracy. Democracy means precisely that there are no costumes. Inequality no longer wears a costume or a dress. There are dramatic, gigantic inequalities, but their laicization leaves them without a costume." End of quote. On a simple descriptive level, this means that in a democratic egalitarian society, masters, those who exert power over others, no longer have to wear insignia or costumes. They can dress and act naturally like everybody else, renouncing all dignity. Today's master's message is precisely, "See, we are all common people like you, with all weaknesses, fears, limitations" and so on and so on. So today's master is fully ready to admit its castration, in the sense of "I'm a weak guy" and so on, blah blah. But the trick is that this admission of castration—like "Don't take me too seriously, I'm weak guy like you"—not only in no way undermines his or her power, but it's even the condition of the power. It's the very means, instrument, of how power is exercised. And now this bring me to my—I'm really cutting it short—to my concluding moment, which is a wonderful tautological mechanism of how—you know, today it's no longer subversive to claim our leader pretends to be a dignified person but really he is an ordinary guy like us. No, he openly admits that he is an ordinary guy like us, but he nonetheless continues to function, to function as a master. Which is why—and with this I wanted to conclude, but I will rather cut it short—what fascinated me is how today ideology reproduces itself precisely by way of admitting its own weakness. For example, let me go to WikiLeaks or Snowden revelations and so on. What was the basic reaction of those in power? It wasn't to deny anything—it's difficult to deny—it was more something like, "Okay, we all know this: that governments are doing secret things and so on. But what's the big deal? We didn't learn anything new" and so on. You see the point? They are ready to admit everything, they just want to curtail the symbolic consequences. It's the same strategy as, you know, if you are accused of something, of doing really something horrible, you must know that the most efficient way to avoid sincere apology is to apologize, but in this slightly aggressive way, you know, like "I did something horrible to you. What I would have—the way to..." "Okay, I'm sorry, now fuck off, leave me alone." You know what I mean? This logic of admitting it, that the very all too hasty admission neutralizes it. And I think this is maybe again one of the great ideological mechanisms today. This is why, unfortunately, I don't believe in the power of disclosure as such. And I'm a friend with Julian Assange, I love him, but I always warn him, don't think that WikiLeaks really taught people something they didn't know. Of course, we learn many details and it's good that you—we do. But let's be frank, didn't we all suspect it? So what's the point? The point is that we cannot any longer pretend that we don't know it. The true target of WikiLeaks revelations are not those in power, but we. We are not—we, ordinary people, we should change. Because I claim—this is a risky hypothesis—if we were to ask many ordinary people, "What do you think about torture, torturing prisoners and so on?" I claim that the majority of people, their answer would have been something like this: "Maybe it has to be done, but let's do it discreetly, don't bother..." you know, like "They should do it..." you know. And the point is to break this. The great again achievement of WikiLeaks is not what we learned, but that it became public knowledge. We cannot any longer pretend that it's just a private secret, we all know it's happening and so on and so on. This is why I claim again we need critique of ideology, that is to say denunciation as such is not enough. And this is why, with this I will conclude—for example, I don't agree—he attacked me once briefly in a footnote in *New York Times*—Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who proposed, you know, legalizing torture. In the sense of precise conditions: you have doctors who examine you, that's how much pain you can endure without risking your health, blah blah. And my point is, here I am referring to the *Event* book, the one chapter before the last where I talk about de-eventalization. In the sense that an event, in the sense of new civilizational achievement, is canceled, we regress. Look, I'm not a hypocrite here. When friends tell me, "But if you are desperate, wouldn't you torture someone?" I'm not a hypocrite here. In a little bit of melodramatic, stupid way, if you ask me frankly: yes, I can imagine situations where, honestly, the least I can say is, I cannot promise you not to succumb to the temptation of torturing. Let's take this ridiculous melodramatic situation: some evil guy kidnapped my young daughter, which I don't have. And then I have in my power a guy I know that he knows where my daughter is kept. Well, out of pure despair I cannot guarantee that I would not torture him. But I think it should remain prohibited. You know why? I should at least remain aware that out of pure despair I did something terrifying. The ethical catastrophe is when this is normalized, legalized. That's the end, in a way. And here I think we really live today in an—the public admission of torture is just one of the effects of this—we live in an era of ethical regression. We even don't notice how things which were unthinkable years ago are now a matter of public debate and so on and so on. So it's not true that things are simply, how should I put it, getting better and so on and so on, gradual progress. No, we live in an era of ethico-simply of ethico-political regress. In an era where ideology is stronger than it ever was. This is why, for example, I don't know if it's translated, you should read it, the wonderful book by Italian leftist sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato, *The Making of the Indebted Man*. It analyzes in detail the ideological dimension of debt and how it functions as a disciplinary machine. His point is that debt is used in order to even neutralize class distinction. The idea is this one: let's say I'm a poor guy, I barely survive, so I get indebted. And then I decide what I can do with the debt, with the money I got, no? Like, I can invest it in a good holiday, I can invest it into my son's education, I can invest it into better healthcare or whatever. The trick here is the category of self-entrepreneurship. The idea is we shouldn't even talk about capitalists and workers: am I when I'm doing this not doing basically the same thing as a big capitalist? Just instead of investing billions, I invest ten thousand or what, you know. But this is again a wonderful example of how class distinction can be obfuscated and so on. And just with this really to conclude, another example would have been freedom. I'm absolutely for freedom and also I'm not a stupid old-fashioned Marxist who buys this bullshit of "bourgeois just formal freedoms" and so on. But nonetheless, when people talk about freedom, we should nonetheless ask a simple question: the Leninist question, you know, Lenin liked to say "Freedom, yes, but freedom for whom to do what?" What do we mean today when we say we are free? We usually mean this everyday life level freedom of choice, you know. And it's an incredibly strong machine. You noticed how the entire Republican Party attack on Obama healthcare project was based on this: "Obama wants to take from us the freedom of choice in the domain of healthcare" and so on. So my point is, what does it mean in our everyday experience to be free? It means I do in my sex life whatever I want, I can decide where will I live, I can decide what I drink, what I—like, these everyday freedoms. But, and this—they are good, I'm not in any way mocking them—all I'm saying is: is this enough? The here I like to quote—and again, it's typical how under-reported this was—did you hear about, I don't know how to pronounce it in English, this TISA, T-I-S-A agreements? Do you even know what goes on? These are the latest WikiLeaks revelations which were practically ignored. Do you know that now, this month, a crucial negotiations are going on among superpowers to enforce a new worldwide trade agreement which fixes in advance the conditions of the free flow of money, of information, and so on and so on? It's something incredibly more important than NAFTA and so on. When endorsed—when, sorry, when enforced—this agreement will pose strict limits to what different elected governments will be able to do, limiting their—what they can do in healthcare, in education—because these financial rules regulating financial transactions will be enforced worldwide. Now what's so mysterious is that not only are these negotiations done in secret, but it's even part of the text of the agreement that when it will be accepted, enforced, it should remain secret for five years. Now you see, this is where we are today. Something that will have an incredibly strong economic power, which will structure our lives for decades to come, is done in secret. And of course, immediately we don't feel it as limiting our freedom. You can still do whatever you want with your money, this, that, and so on. But I think that we should expand the notion of freedom without limiting in any way our personal freedoms, to move beyond just this idea, this everyday freedom: "I can buy this car or that car, I can buy whatever book I want, I can do in my sex life whatever I want," and to ask: "But these freedoms always take place within certain economic, social, ethical, ideological coordinates." Wouldn't be a true freedom also the right to establish some kind of collective agency which changes also this institutional economic and so on framework within which I enact my freedom? And this is what makes me so sad. With this I will really conclude now the last sentence. This is maybe why we in Europe were so fascinated by the ongoing events in Ukraine. I claim it's not so much our Western European racism, like "Oh, those primitive Ukrainians now they want to be like us." No, I think what really fascinated us, although it's not this what really went on there but at least it appeared that what, hundreds of thousands of people gathered and enforced a collective will. People can gather and still do something. We no longer have this freedom in the West. We cannot even imagine something like that happening. So you see, I have no utopia here. I'm not saying this new freedom, we need an old-fashioned Communist Party or whatever. All I'm saying is, whenever people talk about freedom, just be attentive to—almost in a—if you know philosophy a little bit, you know this Wittgenstein ordinary language stuff of "the meaning of word is their use." So what does it mean when people claim "We are free today," and is this enough? Here things begin. And I don't have big answers, I don't have any easy solution. I am well aware of this terrifying deadlock of how we had protests here and there—Occupy Wall Street, Greece, Spain—but if you ask people, "Okay, what do you want?" you get either general platitudes, no, like "Money should serve people, people shouldn't serve money," which is meaningless platitude, every fascist would have agreed with it, no? Or you get some kind of Keynesianism. I like them, but they are not enough—this is Piketty, Stiglitz, Krugman line, you know, basically: "We keep capitalism but just we change it a little bit, like more taxes or whatever" and so on. And will this—this is the big question today: is this enough or not? So I claim again that we are much more than we think in a critical situation, because it's not only as old Marxists thought, "We know what is to be done, we just don't know how to mobilize people." This is why incidentally old Marxists, old-fashioned Marxists like psychoanalysis: because they have a certain theory, then you ask them, "But fuck you, you predict revolution, why is the working class not revolutionized?" and then they tell you, "Oh, because it's ideological manipulation, here psychoanalysis will explain it" and so on and so on. You know, like the reference to psychoanalysis makes it easy for them to stick to their theory, no? No, I'm not even saying this. I'm just saying that the situation is much worse. We are really, we lack what Fredric Jameson likes to call "cognitive mapping." We don't even have a good general concept image of where we are, of what is happening. I think that all these terms like, you know, information society, risk society, post-industrial society, are not yet concepts. Which is why, back to my starting point, we need public places like the one here, we need to think. I even think—and with this I will really conclude now—you know, I am here like Marxists, you know. Marx said capitalism is coming to an end. Then Lenin said imperialism is really the last stage of capitalism. Then years later Mao Zedong said now today's American imperialism is the absolutely last totally rotten stage of capitalism. Now they say, you know, that this digital new capitalism is the really—you know, always you get a little bit more, no? So it's like my talk. But what I'm saying is that I don't believe in this stupidity: "Don't just talk, do it." Maybe we were doing too much. And I'm claiming maybe our motto should be: "Don't just do things, talk, think." Don't be afraid to withdraw and just to think. Thanks very much for your kind— [Applause] Now I—we are basically out of time, so I think we're just going to wrap it up so—Yeah, but okay, let us—you know what, my friend told me that we are out of time, I talked too long. But I claim, now you will see my Stalinist nature, that we should get at least one question to pretend that there is freedom. And if you are a true Stalinist democrat, I hope you already wrote that question and distributed it or whatever, you know. Okay, so alright, one question. How can—how can disengagement become a constructive act? Constructive? Yeah, or like—Yeah. Because only through disengagement can you gain the space, the proper perspective to truly intervene. If you directly intervene, you never act in empty space. Without disengagement, you simply remain within the existing ideological coordinates and so on. I'm not talking of disengagement in the sense of "we all move to Tibet and meditate there" and so on. I'm just saying that we should lose this simple transparency of "we know what is to be done." No, I'm not so sure we know what is to be done. We need disengagement in the cognitive, and I think even, okay, if there is a politician of 20th century who is problematic today, is Lenin. But even he followed these lines. I always quote mega-fiasco, World War I, all local social democratic parties, except Russian social democrats and so on, voted for war credits and so on, total fiasco. What did he do? He moved to Switzerland and read Hegel's logic. You know, he wasn't afraid—he saw that the fiasco was so radical that all even the basic coordinates have to be—have to be re-thought. And we shouldn't succumb to this blackmail of "My God, we don't have time to think, act." If I may conclude—I know most of you know it, but I love it—joke about Lenin that I know from my youth. I come from a communist country where on school boards usually there was this phrase by Lenin, Lenin's advice to young children: "Learn, learn, and learn." I'm sorry if you know it, there is a wonderful joke from that era about how they ask Marx, Engels, and Lenin: "What do you prefer to have, wife or mistress?" Marx, more conservative, said: "Wife."
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Engels,
Engels,
Slavoj Žižek
a bon vivant, said: "A mistress." Lenin said: "Both. I want a wife and a mistress." And shocked, the
a bon vivant, said: "A mistress." Lenin said: "Both. I want a wife and a mistress." And shocked, the
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journalists say:
journalists say:
Slavoj Žižek
"My God, is Lenin—we thought he is an ascetic revolutionary, is he a secret pervert?" They tell you, "Why?" And Lenin said: "So that I can tell my wife that I'm with my mistress, and I can tell my mistress that I'm with my wife." And they ask him, "But what do you really do then?" He says: "Learn, learn, and learn." This is what we need today. Don't be—don't feel guilty to, as it were, to step back. I'm just claiming that we really need to know where we are. We don't know where we are. Sorry. Thank you. [Applause] Oh, I hate this personalized show.
"My God, is Lenin—we thought he is an ascetic revolutionary, is he a secret pervert?" They tell you, "Why?" And Lenin said: "So that I can tell my wife that I'm with my mistress, and I can tell my mistress that I'm with my wife." And they ask him, "But what do you really do then?" He says: "Learn, learn, and learn." This is what we need today. Don't be—don't feel guilty to, as it were, to step back. I'm just claiming that we really need to know where we are. We don't know where we are. Sorry. Thank you. [Applause] Oh, I hate this personalized show.