A Plea for Bureaucratic Socialism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-06-28 · 2:16:05 · 16,902 words
communism-socialismideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsdemocracyfascism-populismliberalism-political-correctnessrevolution-violencesexuality-gendercapitalismsubjectivityeveryday-lifephilosophy-generalhistory
Žižek delivers a political lecture titled 'A Plea for Bureaucratic Socialism,' arguing that the left's fixation on ecstatic moments of popular mobilization is misguided, and that durable emancipatory change requires reinventing efficient, alienated administrative mechanisms, bureaucracy, rather than transcending them. He diagnoses the contemporary crisis of the left through the failures of Syriza, the rise of right-wing populism (Trump, Le Pen, Kaczyński), and the collapse of the classical left-right party structure, arguing that capitalism is disintegrating but no progressive revolutionary subject has emerged to replace it. The talk weaves together Lacanian concepts of jouissance and objet petit a with Hegelian determinate negation to analyze ideology, consumerism, and 'ways of life,' concluding with a defense of fighting universality over particularist identity politics. The Q&A extends into debates about Podemos, feminism and Judith Butler's performativity, Trotsky's failure, money under communism, and the relationship between state power and civil society movements.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “bureaucratic socialism”
Žižek's positive reappropriation of the Stalinist insult: a socialism premised on efficient, alienated, invisible administrative mechanisms that sustain the space of non-alienated local life, as opposed to permanent revolutionary mobilization.
as “new proverbs”
Žižek's Althusserian-inflected category for the political task: not overturning old accepted wisdoms nor repeating them, but inventing new ones, as Lenin and Mao did, that reshape common sense.
The spectral, abstract dimension of social life (money, capital, law) whose invisibility is a condition of local non-alienated community; Žižek invokes it to argue for embracing rather than abolishing alienated mechanisms.
The narrow informal circle around Tsipras that de facto made Syriza's decisions despite a large central committee, used as an example of how formalised left parties reproduce alienated elite structures.
as “post-ideological ideology”
Today's dominant ideology, which presents itself as a radical critique of utopian ideologies, cynical resignation disguised as realism, whose main function is to crush hope rather than to enforce a positive vision.
as “radical centre”
The new hegemonic political position that presents the status quo of global capitalism as neutral and socially liberal, against which only right-wing populism appears as the only alternative, erasing a more radical left.
The strategy of restoring the 'fascist' stigma to figures like Marine Le Pen after they have been normalised; Žižek argues this is insufficient without asking what structural conditions made such figures possible.
as “public obscenity”
The libidinal logic by which right-wing figures like Trump and Kaczyński gain popularity precisely through vulgar, transgressive behaviour, with which constituents identify because it mirrors their own actual enjoyment beneath official morality.
Žižek's formula for the contemporary paradox whereby figures like Breivik support Israeli Jews as a bulwark against Islam while being violently anti-Semitic at home, a split-level ideological structure parallel to Islamophobic respect for Islam.
Žižek's name for Trump's logic of simultaneously stoking anti-Muslim domestic paranoia while making deals with Saudi Arabia and Erdoğan, cynical multicultural ideology that subordinates human rights to market interests.
Not merely a cultural identity but a specific organization of jouissance, regulating sexuality, exchange of partners, and relations of domination, used here to analyze the limits of multicultural tolerance.
as “surplus enjoyment (objet petit a)”
Following Lacan, the spectral excess that is not pleasure itself but the obstacle or supplement that generates the phantom of full pleasure, illustrated by the abandoned shopping cart, the extra kilo on the body, and the missing cream in coffee.
Hegelian concept illustrated by 'coffee without cream' vs. 'coffee without milk': the absent element is not nothing but a specific, identity-conferring lack, so that what is missing defines what something is.
Lacanian symbolic order; implicitly at work in Žižek's analysis of prohibitions that must remain unannounced to function, and in the notion that ideology operates through what is left unsaid.
Žižek's alternative to UNESCO-style abstract universalism: a universality that appears as the inner antagonism within each particular way of life, embodied in protest movements that exceed their local context.
Althusser's concept: ideology hails or constitutes subjects by assigning them particular identities (woman, teacher, Christian), against which the hysterical question, 'why am I what you say I am?', opens the universal subject.
as “hysterical subject”
For Žižek following Lacan, the universal political subject: the one who refuses their particular symbolic identity by asking 'why am I what you say I am?', exemplified by feminist refusal of patriarchal role-assignment.
Enjoyment in the Lacanian sense: paradoxically an enjoyment through pain or prohibition, not identical to pleasure, and always inscribed in a community's specific 'way of life.'
as “the right kind of alienation”
Žižek's reversal of the standard emancipatory goal: instead of overcoming alienation, the left should aim to enforce the proper alienated institutional mechanisms that invisibly sustain communal life.
Žižek's critical label for Judith Butler-style feminism, which he argues describes the ideal figure of late-capitalist subjectivity (fluid, self-constructing) rather than a genuinely emancipatory politics.
as “in-itself / for-itself”
Hegelian dialectical pair used to name the left's perennial problem: the working class exists as a class 'in itself' (objectively) but has never constituted itself as a revolutionary 'for itself.'
Stories he reaches for 14
In Lubitsch's Ninotchka, a customer orders 'coffee without cream'; the waiter says they have no cream, only milk, so it will be 'coffee without milk.' Žižek uses this to illustrate Hegelian determinate negation, coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream; the specific absent element defines the thing.
“a guy enters a cafeteria and says coffee without cream please and the waiter answers sorry we don't have cream we only have milk so i can only give you coffee without milk”
Žižek says he is ready to sell his mother into slavery to see a film called 'V for Vendetta Part Two,' where the people have won, and must then decide what laws to pass and how to reorganise the state. The joke undercuts the leftist fetish for the moment of triumph.
“i am ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a film called v for vendetta part two. okay the people have won what happens the next day”
A Native American friend tells Žižek he hates the term 'native Americans', 'it means we are nature and you are cultural Americans.' He says: 'If you call us Indians, at least our name is proof of white men's stupidity, you thought you were in India.'
“if you call us indians at least our name is a sign a proof of white men's stupidity. you know you thought you were in india when you discovered”
Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn, after reading that his films used too many clichés, immediately sent a memo to his scenario department demanding 'we urgently need new clichés.' Žižek uses this as a positive model for political reinvention.
“we urgently need new cliches. he was right and that's what we need politically today”
In a 1935 Politburo debate on whether communism will have money, right-wingers say yes, left-wingers say no. Stalin provides the Hegelian 'dialectical synthesis': there will be money and there will not be money. Asked how, he says: 'Some people will have money, others will not.'
“in communism, there will be money and there will not be money... very simply, some people will have money, other people will not have money”
A twelve-year-old Roma girl fled to police to avoid an arranged marriage; a Roma elder countered that arranged child marriages are the very basis of how their community reproduces itself, without it, they survive only as a folkloric entity. Illustrates the antinomy between particular ways of life and universal rights.
“arranged marriages between children by parents are the very base of how our community reproduces itself if you take this away from us in two three generations we disappear”
Boris Grois told Žižek that manuscripts found in Kazan (where Bakhtin was exiled) reveal that his secret reference for 'carnival' was the Stalinist purge, the total inversion of social hierarchy where today's Central Committee member is tomorrow's gulag prisoner.
“what was for him carnival it wasn't a liberating experience the secret reference was stalinist purge... this was total chaos in social hierarchy so there is nothing subversive in it”
At a 1935 Moscow meeting, a man dares to say he disagrees with Stalin; another man shouts 'Don't you know it's prohibited to criticise Stalin!' Žižek's thesis: the second man would disappear even faster, publicly announcing the prohibition destroys it, since the prohibition must remain unannounced to function.
“in stalinism it was not only prohibited to criticise stalin it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition if you just publicly announce this prohibition you ruin it”
A friend observed newly impoverished middle-class Americans who go to Walmart as afternoon entertainment, fill carts with goods they cannot afford, then abandon them and leave. Žižek presents this as a pure case of surplus enjoyment without pleasure, enjoyment in the procedure itself.
“that's a nice example of pure surplus enjoyment without pleasure... enjoyment in procedure itself the process itself provides enjoyment”
Žižek confesses he caught himself enjoying The Handmaid's Tale too much, not critically but with a strange fascination for how that totalitarian world functions in detail. He links this to Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, whose 'greed is good' lines are the only fascinating moments, suggesting cinema often secretly enjoys the evil it officially condemns.
“i enjoyed it but all of a sudden i caught myself enjoying it too much... i don't think it's critical. i think that this is often the problem with movies who like to portray evil but do it in a suspicious fascinated way”
At the 1959 Lushan party conference, after admitting responsibility for the Great Leap Forward disaster and millions of deaths, Mao concluded his speech with the advice: 'if you have to shit, if you have to fart, fart, you will feel much better for it.' Žižek reads this as admitting responsibility meaning getting rid of it, not genuine remorse.
“if you have to cheat shit if you have to fart, fart, you will feel much better for it”
Accused of abandoning his Indian roots, Rushdie said his two greatest Indian literary influences were Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, explaining that Dickens's street children map onto Bombay slums and Austen's marriage plots onto Indian middle-class families. For Žižek, this illustrates true universality: being rooted in the particular while finding unexpected echoes elsewhere.
“no, it's not true. two great indian writers were an absolutely crucial influence on him which two? jane austen and charles dickens”
A student told Žižek: 'Your knowledge of Lacan convinced me, would you accept me as your patient?' Žižek's double reply: first, if you think an obvious madman like me could be your analyst, you need psychiatry; second, with me talking all the time, can you imagine me just listening to someone for more than a minute?
“if you think i could be your analyst with my obvious madness, then you really need psychiatric”
In a small Mexican city, indigenous elders sentenced a man who raped a twelve-year-old girl to pay the girl's father twelve bottles of beer and a pack of cans, feminists exploded, the judges defended traditional justice. Žižek uses this to illustrate the collision between particular 'ways of life' and universal rights.
“the punishment was two... twelve bottles a pack of cans of beer and the feminists exploded... sorry, this is our old justice, this is our traditional way of life”
Works invoked 14
Ninotchka film
Ernst Lubitsch film containing the 'coffee without cream' joke that illustrates Hegelian determinate negation.
V for Vendetta film
Žižek finds the celebratory final carnival scene politically useless, it ends at the moment of triumph without addressing the 'day after'; used to critique the ecstatic moment as revolutionary paradigm.
Elysium film
Cited alongside The Hunger Games as capturing the global cupola structure of contemporary world order.
Žižek confesses to a guilty fascination, enjoying it 'too much', which he reads as suspicious secret enjoyment of the evil depicted rather than critical engagement.
The Hunger Games film
Cited alongside Elysium as basically correct about the emerging global order: the privileged cupola inside versus the excluded outside.
Star Wars film
Žižek's 'old obsession' is to retell it from the other side: Palpatine and Darth Vader as progressive Bonapartist centralizers, the Jedi Republic as feudal sham, the official narrative is ideologically inverted.
The Laws of Manu book
Described as 'one of the most horrible ideological books I know'; the British colonial revitalisation of this caste-system text in the 1840s-50s is cited as proof that 'authentic' traditions can be imperial fabrications.
Gillian Rose's book, cited as one of the five greatest books on Hegel written by women in the last thirty years.
Malcolm X (film) film
Denzel Washington in Spike Lee's film cited as the medium through which Žižek explains Malcolm X's reinterpretation of the X.
The Future of Hegel book
Catherine Malabou's book, cited as one of the five greatest books on Hegel by women.
Mourning Sickness book
Rebecca Comay's book, cited as one of the five greatest books on Hegel by women.
Wall Street film
Oliver Stone film whose villain Gordon Gekko ('greed is good,' 'if you need a friend buy yourself a dog') is the only fascinating character, used to illustrate cinema's suspicious libidinal identification with evil.
Kafka's parable from The Trial, read via Derrida: law at its most fundamental is itself prohibited from public announcement, the door-keeper story illustrates the prohibition of the prohibition.
Wolfgang Streeck's essay collection; cited approvingly for diagnosing capitalism's disintegration without a successor revolutionary subject, Žižek recommends it and asks if it's been translated into Spanish.
People invoked 57
Franz Kafka positive
The 'Before the Law' parable from The Trial is used via Derrida to illustrate the prohibition of the prohibition.
Gillian Rose positive
Hegel Contra Sociology cited as one of the five greatest books on Hegel in the last thirty years, all written by women.
Cited alongside Rifkin as describing tendencies toward post-capitalism through digitalisation, but described as 'way too simple.'
Narendra Modi negative
Cited as example of the new authoritarian-multicultural world order where each country's market participation is combined with local authoritarian nationalism.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as Žižek's 'Slovenian colleague'; her new book cited as one of the five greatest recent books on Hegel.
Compared to Macron as a figure who exploded with establishment support in a moment of political crisis, mobilising around an empty universalist name.
Marine Le Pen negative
Described as a neo-fascist populist who was 'de-diabolised'; Žižek insists re-diabolising her is insufficient without asking what structural conditions made her possible.
Jacques Derrida positive
Cited approvingly for reading Kafka's 'Before the Law' parable as revealing that law is itself prohibited from being publicly announced; also for the Jewish 'I am nothing' joke.
Rebecca Comay positive
Mourning Sickness cited as one of the five greatest books on Hegel.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited as an inventor of 'new proverbs,' aware that mobilisation would be short and cadre preparation essential; his stroke, ethics of requesting poison, and Stalin's sabotage form a tragic narrative.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Mentioned in passing for a remark that extended Marx's 'opium of the people' to include drugs and 'the people' itself as opiates.
His memoirs of the Bolshevik International cited as source for Stalin's remark that Trotsky was more popular but Stalin had the cadres.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical resource throughout: objet petit a, surplus enjoyment, jouissance, the hysterical subject, and the notion that the universal subject has no sex.
Louis Althusser positive
Cited via Milner for the typology of revolutionaries and proverbs; interpellation theory deployed to explain ideology and the hysterical subject.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited approvingly in passing as aware (despite being a 'poet of multiplicity') that particularity as such has no emancipatory dimension.
Mikhail Bakhtin negative
Žižek rejects the leftist celebration of carnival as revolutionary; argues Bakhtin's secret reference was the Stalinist purge, not liberation.
Francis Fukuyama negative
The 'naive' end-of-history thesis, global democracy as universal horizon, is cited as what the West has now abandoned in favour of cynical multicultural market pragmatism.
Not named, but the post-ideological ideology described echoes what Žižek elsewhere calls the postmodern suspicion of grand narratives.
Co-author with Lenin of the Politburo letter requesting poison; Stalin insulted her to humiliate Lenin.
Judith Butler negative
Personal relations described as 'good'; intellectual reproach is that her performative model of gender identity inadvertently describes the ideal subject of late capitalism rather than an emancipatory politics.
Donald Trump positive
Analysed not just condemned: his obscene vulgarity is the site of libidinal identification; voters identify with Trump because he embodies what they actually are beneath official morality.
Not mentioned by name but the type of 'naive' protest-movement-focused left she represents is implicitly criticised throughout.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Friend and Vice President of Bolivia cited as a 'good friend' precisely because he is a theorist; described as successfully combining social movement base with hard state power use.
Wolfgang Streeck positive
German sociologist whose essay collection 'How Will Capitalism End?' is cited approvingly for diagnosing capitalism's disintegration without a successor revolutionary subject.
Emmanuel Macron negative
Characterised as the pure candidate of the establishment whose function is to obfuscate social antagonism and erase a radical left option.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for formulating that ideology today crushes hope rather than actual resistance; also mentioned for observing the role of women as 'human face of power' in French institutional oppression.
Discussed in the context of Syriza's capitulation after the referendum; Žižek does not blame him personally but diagnoses structural failure.
Elon Musk negative
Grouped with Zuckerberg as pseudo-progressive ideologist whose rhetoric about capitalism's end is more dangerous than Trump's.
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Reports the Althusser anecdote on revolutionary proverbs.
Leon Trotsky positive
Sympathetically treated but his tragedy is diagnosed: total failure to perceive Stalin's cadre-accumulation, demonstrated by reading Flaubert at Politburo sessions.
Bernie Sanders positive
Cited as the radical left option that the Democratic Party eliminated, allowing Trump to win; his marginalisation is analogous to Macron's erasure of a radical left in France.
Mark Zuckerberg negative
Described as a 'pseudo-progressive liberal corporate leader' more dangerous than Trump; one of those claiming capitalism is disappearing.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan negative
Cited as one of the authoritarian leaders with whom Trump makes deals while running Islamophobic domestic propaganda, example of the new multicultural world order.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Cited as source confirming that Tsipras was shocked by the referendum victory and had intended to lose honourably.
Evo Morales positive
His regime is cited as a positive example of combining social movement legitimacy with effective use of state power.
Catherine Malabou positive
The Future of Hegel cited as one of the five greatest books on Hegel in the last thirty years.
Malcolm X positive
Described as a 'Hegelian genius' and one of Žižek's big revolutionary heroes; the X reinterpreted not as tragic erasure but as liberation from particular roots enabling universal reinvention.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Cited as the revolutionary who used no proverbs; grouped with Lenin and Trotsky as those who knew one cannot maintain permanent emergency mobilisation.
Anders Behring Breivik negative
Cited as the exemplar of Zionist anti-Semitism: supporting Israel as bulwark against barbarism while being anti-Semitic about Jews in his own country.
Salman Rushdie positive
Despite criticism for 'going too much into liberalism,' his formulation of Jane Austen and Dickens as his 'Indian' influences is cited as a beautiful example of true universality.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
The 'conservative' Sloterdijk is credited with the metaphor of the global world as a cupola/dome, the privileged inside versus the excluded outside.
Isaac Deutscher positive
Biography of Trotsky cited as source for Trotsky's Politburo reading habits and Stalin's cadre strategy.
Béatrice Longuenesse positive
Hegel and the Critique of Metaphysics cited as one of the five greatest books on Hegel by women.
Cited alongside Mason as seeing post-capitalist tendencies in digitalisation and zero marginal cost reproduction.
Darian Leader positive
Described as a 'good friend,' British Lacanian psychoanalyst; his interpretation of the 'bed for two' slip illustrates the surplus-enjoyment / obstacle structure of desire.
Used as exemplar of right-wing populism delivering social reforms the left cannot; his public vulgarity ('our time to fuck the whore') illustrates the libidinal logic of conservative identification.
Mao Zedong positive
Cited as an inventor of new proverbs and as Communist example of tactical non-dogmatism (Chinese Communist Party's nationalist rather than socialist mobilisation); his 'shit and fart' Lushan speech analysed as libidinal disavowal of responsibility.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon positive
Defended against ex-friends who invented 'Le Pen Trotskyites' to tar him as objectively supporting Le Pen; represents the radical left option erased by Macron.
Hillary Clinton negative
Lost because she rid herself of Sanders' wing; the Russian hacking narrative serves to disavow this internal failure.
Boris Groys positive
Friend and Russian theorist who told Žižek about Bakhtin's Kazan manuscripts revealing carnival's secret reference to Stalinist purge.
Samuel Goldwyn positive
Described as 'a genius' despite apparent primitivism; his memo demanding 'new clichés' is used as a political model.
No illusions about Obama but cited as example of a specific modest demand (healthcare) that was too provocative and triggered massive backlash, the model of the 'wrong button' that disintegrates the room.
Vladimir Putin negative
Listed alongside Modi and Erdoğan as forming the new genuinely multicultural but authoritarian world order; the Russian hacking narrative serves Democratic disavowal.
Analysed structurally: his strength was cadre loyalty over popularity; Žižek describes Stalin's sabotage of Lenin's suicide request and his attacks on bureaucracy as mistaking the symptom for the cause.
Karl Marx positive
Cited as having been right about capitalism's final crisis but wrong about the emergence of a proletarian revolutionary subject; religion as 'opium of the people' (not 'for the people') is noted as non-vulgar.
René Descartes positive
The Cartesian cogito is cited as the paradigm of the sexless universal subject, a philosophical position that was notably popular among early modern women precisely because 'cogito doesn't have a sex.'
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central philosophical reference throughout: determinate negation (coffee without cream), in-itself/for-itself dialectic, and the claim that the five greatest recent books on Hegel were by women.
What it argues
bureaucratic socialism as the left's missing horizonthe crisis of the revolutionary subject under late capitalismthe collapse of the traditional left-right political spectrumjouissance, surplus enjoyment, and the paradoxes of desiredeterminate negation and the constitutive role of the absent elementfighting universality versus particularist identity politics and 'ways of life'public obscenity and libidinal identification in right-wing populism
Dialectical moves 13
“We should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation.”
The true aim is not abolishing alienated mechanisms but building better ones, the inversion reframes bureaucracy from obstacle to goal.
“Stalinism was not too bureaucratic—it wasn't bureaucratic enough. Stalinism is precisely the failure of bureaucracy.”
The standard charge against Stalinism is inverted: its pathologies (emergency state, terror) arose from bureaucracy's non-functioning, not its excess.
“It's not that life should not be ossified in fixed structures—it should be ossified, but in different structures.”
The emancipatory task is not fluidity but building the right fixity; the reversal redirects leftist energy from dismantling to constructing.
“The predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of a utopian future but a cynical resignation—it appears as its opposite, as a radical critique of ideological utopias.”
Ideology functions today precisely by posing as anti-ideology; the reversal reveals cynical acceptance as the deepest ideological position.
“Far from being a sign of direct popular engagement beyond party politics, figures like Macron and Berlusconi function precisely to obfuscate and mystify actual social antagonisms.”
What appears as populist renewal outside party structures is in fact the establishment's mechanism for erasing genuine antagonism.
“No enjoyment, no guilt—but we must push further: no guilt, no enjoyment. That is the perversity of a certain type of Catholic morality.”
The first negation (enjoyment produces guilt) is inverted and then inverted again: guilt itself becomes a condition of intense enjoyment, revealing the libidinal structure of religious morality.
“The missing element—what is missing in its absence—is part of the identity of what a thing is.”
Absence is not mere lack but a constitutive, identity-defining element; the reversal grounds Žižek's Hegelian-Lacanian account of ideology via the 'coffee without cream' joke.
“Universality is inscribed as an inner antagonism into each of our ways of life—it is part of it, not an external imposition.”
Universal struggles emerge from within particular cultures as their own internal contradiction, not by abstracting away from particularity.
“X was not just a sign of tragedy—it was for Malcolm X a new chance: we are free to reinvent our own universality, which will be more authentically universal than white Western universality.”
The sign of historical dispossession is reread as liberation from particular roots, enabling a stronger universalism.
“In Stalinism it was not only prohibited to criticise Stalin—it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition.”
The meta-prohibition (don't mention the prohibition) is more fundamental than the first-order prohibition; ideology functions through what cannot be stated, not just what is forbidden.
“Voters identify with Trump not despite his vulgarity but precisely because of it—they identify with both sides of Trump simultaneously.”
Libidinal identification works at the level of the obscene underside, not the official persona; moral hypocrisy is the feature, not the bug.
“To really enjoy sex you must feel guilty—if you just do it innocently it is not real intense enjoyment.”
The Lacanian-Catholic reversal: guilt is not the inhibitor of enjoyment but its condition, revealing the perverse structure of jouissance.
“The caste system was not a primordial Indian tradition but was deliberately revived and institutionalised by British colonisers precisely to prevent class struggle.”
What presents itself as authentic local tradition is revealed as an imperial technology of domination; the reversal undermines culturalist defences of the caste system.
Claims 22
asserts
The left's goal should shift from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation—efficient, invisible bureaucratic mechanisms that sustain space for non-alienated local life.bureaucracy and emancipatory strategy
asserts
Stalinism was not too bureaucratic but insufficiently bureaucratic—its permanent emergency state was a symptom of bureaucracy's failure, not its excess.Stalinism and bureaucracy
asserts
The true test of revolution is not ecstatic moments of mass mobilisation but how ordinary everyday life is transformed once the excitement subsides.revolution and political change
reframes
Syriza failed not because it abandoned its civil-movement roots for the state, but because it failed to find a new way of reorganising the state itself.Syriza's failure
asserts
The dominant ideology today is not a positive utopian vision but cynical post-ideological resignation whose function is to crush hope by dismissing every progressive project as totalitarianism-in-waiting.contemporary ideology
asserts
The standard left-right binary is collapsing, replaced by a 'radical centre' of global capitalism plus social liberalism versus right-wing populism, with a radical left erased from the picture.the contemporary political landscape
reframes
The Trump phenomenon and Kaczyński's vulgarity are not failures of right-wing moral messaging but sites of libidinal identification: voters identify with the obscene underside, not the official moral persona.right-wing populism and identification
asserts
Hillary Clinton lost because she marginalized Bernie Sanders' wing; the Democratic obsession with Russian hacking serves to disavow this internal failure.the 2016 US election and the Democratic Party
asserts
Capitalism is disintegrating, but unlike Marx's prediction there is no progressive subject ready to take it over—only disintegration without a successor.Marxism's failed revolutionary-subject thesis
rejects
Celebrating refugees as a potential revolutionary subject is obscene outsourcing of the revolutionary subject that treats migrants as instrumental substitutes for the missing proletariat.refugees as revolutionary agent
asserts
Particularist 'indigenous' or 'way of life' strategies against global capitalism always end up fitting capitalism perfectly; only a stronger, fighting universality can challenge it.identity politics and anti-capitalism
asserts
Universality is not an external imposition on particular ways of life but is inscribed as an inner antagonism within each way of life, manifest wherever members rebel against their assigned roles.universality and particular cultures
asserts
Malcolm X's genius was to embrace the X—the erasure of particular African roots under slavery—as an opportunity to reinvent a more authentically universal identity.Malcolm X and universality
asserts
Feminist emancipation requires a hysterical refusal of assigned symbolic identity ('why am I what you say I am?'), which opens onto universal subjectivity rather than a new positive particular identity.feminism and universal subjectivity
rejects
Judith Butler's performative model of sexual identity inadvertently describes the ideal subject of late capitalism rather than a genuinely emancipatory position.Judith Butler's performativity
asserts
Sexual difference names a deeper ontological antagonism that cannot be reduced to the play of gender roles or performative social construction.sexual difference vs. gender performativity
asserts
The British colonisers deliberately revived the caste system in India through the Laws of Manu to prevent class struggle and maintain colonial domination.British colonialism and the caste system
asserts
Abolishing money without a careful restructuring risks returning direct personal relations of domination, as happened under Stalinism's parallel distribution networks.money, communism, and domination
asserts
Trotsky's tragedy was his failure to notice or respond to Stalin's systematic accumulation of cadre loyalty, demonstrated by his contemptuous reading of French literature at Politburo sessions.Trotsky's political failure
reframes
The left should reject the false dilemma between state power and civil society movements and instead pursue both simultaneously.state power vs. social movements
rejects
Carnival and temporary social role-reversals (Bakhtin's model) are not subversive but were for Bakhtin himself secretly a figure for Stalinist purges—total chaos in social hierarchy.carnival as revolutionary paradigm
rejects
A woman serving as the 'human face of power' is an obscene betrayal of feminism rather than feminist progress.women in institutional power
Quotes 20
“i am not impressed by that at all i think this is even relatively easy to do the true test of a revolution or radical social change is how do ordinary people experience the change when the ecstatic moment is over”Slavoj Žižek · the day-after test of revolution
“we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation”Slavoj Žižek · bureaucratic socialism as positive programme
“stalinism is for me precisely the failure of bureaucracy”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinism was not too bureaucratic but insufficiently so
“the left really doesn't have a vision. instead of saying fine work less we see in this the extreme panic oh my god we will lose our jobs. this is a very sad sign”Slavoj Žižek · the left's failure to embrace automation
“the main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance but to crush hope to immediately denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which there is always something like good luck”Slavoj Žižek · post-ideological ideology crushes hope
“i claim hillary clinton lost because she got rid of bernie sanders' wing in her own party. and that's why you need trump as a russian agent”Slavoj Žižek · Democratic Party disavowal of its own failure
“every vision of another world is dismissed as ideology... this is how ideology functions today”Slavoj Žižek · cynical resignation as dominant ideology
“no enjoyment, no guilt. but... no guilt, no enjoyment. that is the perversity of some type of catholic morality”Slavoj Žižek · guilt as condition of jouissance
“what is missing in its absence is part of the identity of what a thing is”Slavoj Žižek · determinate negation / constitutive absence
“in stalinism it was not only prohibited to criticise stalin it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition if you just publicly announce this prohibition you ruin it”Slavoj Žižek · ideology functions through the unannounced prohibition
“universality is inscribed as an inner antagonism into each of our ways of life it is part of it”Slavoj Žižek · universality as inner antagonism of the particular
“the only path to freedom is through this proletarian position where you are deprived of your roots”Slavoj Žižek · universality through dispossession
“which american tribes can afford to return to their roots only those who are lucky enough to have on their reservation mines minerals or casinos”Slavoj Žižek · indigenism always fits global capitalism
“the universal subject is hysterical subject... the basic hysterical question is why am i what you are saying that i am”Slavoj Žižek · hysteria as the structure of universal subjectivity
“true love is a much more desperate radical stance true love means i want to be with you because i simply cannot survive without you it is total despair”Slavoj Žižek · love as radical singular despair vs. polyamory
“coffee or tea yes please state power or civil society yes please”Slavoj Žižek · reject the false dilemma: pursue both
“what judith butler is describing as her model of how subjectivity is built i suspect is not a utopian goal but simply the ideal figure of today's late capitalism”Slavoj Žižek · Butler's performativity as late-capitalist ideology
“sexual difference names antagonism which is stronger than this. sexual difference is not just the result of performative games”Slavoj Žižek · sexual difference as ontological antagonism beyond gender performance
“cogito doesn't have a sex. the whole cartesian philosophy is based on this doubting my identity am i really what you are saying that i am”Slavoj Žižek · Cartesian cogito as sexless universal subject
“trotsky was at that point like the example that i always use, that cat who is walking above the precipice and doesn't know it's already walking in empty air”Slavoj Žižek · Trotsky's blindness to Stalin's cadre-accumulation
Transcript 46 turns
Slavoj Žižek
i hope i will not speak too fast that the translation will work and i am really glad to be here again. i'm grateful to you i also admire ed accal and others who regularly publish my work here and especially with you you were i can more or less i understand spanish i followed what you said and you know i was almost like waiting, just good thing then i was asking myself, but you must be sharping your knife in the back of you so where is are you keeping this for questions to the end or whatever you know because what i will say today will be more a political talk what i will say today will be put in a very problematic way. i hope. some of you will react even violently because i really see our situation today as very. controversial in the sense of it's a paradoxical situation in what sense let me begin with the title of my talk a plea for bureaucratic socialism' now your first reaction is this must be another of my stupid post modern jokes or paradoxes and so on so i cannot emphas enough that i mean this title in a totally positive naive way i think we have to reinvent bureaucratic socialism socialism which will be alienated but alienated in the right way what do i mean by this? er. jean-clude milner reports that when he was young he was sitting at a table with louis altiche alter, who once in a coffee table debate said something surprising and i think very intelligent altisar says that there are three types of revolutionaries those who use old proverbs those who use no proverbs those those who invent or use new proverbs and i think this is... an excellent definition. for altichar for example he noticed how stalin from the early th thirties liked to use old russian proverbs, old wisdoms and so on how robespierre mostly used no. proverbs another revolutionary figure and how lenin and mao even even when they pretend to repeat old proverbs they are really inventing new proverbs i agree with altar that this is the task of a true revolutionary why proverbs they stand for accepted wisdom. end it's easy to overturn to make fun of old proverbs. the really difficult thing is to invent new proverbs. what do i mean by this? uh. the well known hollywood producer chem goldwyn he was a genius i think for all his apparent primitivism nonsenses but which we know today they were well planned one one story about sh goldwyn is that he read in a newspaper some journalist criticizing. films produced by his studio for using too many old cliches and he immediately wrote a memo to his screenplay scenario department saying we urgently need new cliches he was right and that's what we need politically today i i will present you quite brutally na it will be a very what i will do today my thesis i am sick and tired of revolutionaryaries or protest movements which focus on those ecstatic moments oh my god one million people on sintagma square in tahrir square in istanbul and so on we were all enthusiastic there and so on and so on i am not impressed by that at all i think this is even relatively easy to do the true test of a revolution or radical social change is how do ordinary people experience the change when the ecstatic moment is over when things return to normal that's the most difficult task when nothing happens when just everyday life is here how is this everyday life different from the previous everyday life which is why i was never fascinated by all those comparaisons uh. between revolution and carnival you know mikhail bakin the fellow traveller of russian formalists developed this point nicely on how àçois rabelais qui this. how we have those wonderful moments in social life where social hierarchy disintegrates a slave is a master a master is a slave everything is turned around there is sudden freedom old rules no longer apply and so on and so on and some stupid leftists took this as the paradigm of the revolution now my friend i don't always agree with him but here i do boris grois the russian theorist working in germany told me a wonderful thing recently they discovered some manuscripts of michael vin in kazan why he was exiled there in the age of stalinism that's how he survived and it's clear from those manuscripts what was for him carnival it wasn't a liberating experience the secret reference. was stalinist pur this was for bachtin the true carnival today i am member of a central committee tomorrow i'm prisoner in a gulag and so on and so on this was total chaos in social hierarchy so there is... nothing can subversive in it. the true problem again is not to say we need a release of fresh energy our life should not be ossified in fixed structures and so on and so on no it should be ossified but in different structures that's the difficult thing to do it's easy to have again ecstatic moments of freedom oh we are all free' okay we are free for one week for three weeks for five weeks and then and then that's why if you permit me to repeat an old joke of mine why i find very problematic the film which many leftists like very much i don't v for vendetta if you saw it you remember the final scene wonderful ecsties carnival the crowd penetrates the police cordon enters the parliament people take over but as i like to say in my tasteless way i am ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a film called v for vendetta part two okay the people have won what happens the next day what new laws do they pass how do they do it how do they reorganise state apparatus and so on and so on so now i will go more in detail and where where i see the problem and again i am on purpose provocative when one hears anarchists deploying their idea of local communities which work in a transparent way with no alienated representative mechanisms with all members engaged in organising their lives one should recall that their survival of these non alienated local communities relies on a thick texture of alienated institutional mechanisms where do electricity and water come from who guarantees the rule of law to whom do we turn for healthcare and so on the more a community is selfuling the more this network has to function smoothly and invisibly so maybe we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation to to achieve a smooth functioning of alienated invisible social mechanisms which sustain the space of our local non-alated life. we we all like this idea we are a community we debate all the time but are we aware how many things must function in the background for this to be possible and we have an old name for these alienated mechanisms bureaucracy which is why the left needs today to reinvent bureaucratic socialism the standard characterisation of stalinist regimes as bureaucratic socialism i think is totally wrong it is the way the stalinist regime itself perceived its problems the cause of its failures and troubles. stalinists always claimed if there are not enough products in the stores if authorities do not respond to people's demands and so on and so on then they always blamed the bureaucratic attitude of indifference and so on and so on. no wonder that from the late twenty s onwards stalin was writing attacks on bureaucracy on bureaucratic attitudes but i think that paradoxically what didn't function it's not that stalinism was too bureaucratic it wasn't bureaucratic enough nothing functioned bureaucracy didn't function really that's why stalinism had to live all the time through an emergency state stalinism is for me precisely the failure of bureaucracy. what does this mean for our world today uh. what happened in greece how did we end up where we are today and it's a very sad thing where are we this is maybe the best indication of the confusion of our predicament if you want today a minimal series series of measures which at least in some sense serve workers workers' interests students and so usually it's quite often right wing populist regimes who are the only ones who dare to do this for example in poland where you have the kaczynski brother, jan kaczynski, one of the two, the other died, the de facto ruler of poland. you know that now they enacted incredible set of reforms. they lowered retirement age, made it easier for students to get loans and so on, health care and all that. only a radically right-wing nationalist government can do this. and on the opposite, isn't it sad? that if you want the toughest austerity measures the best way to do it is a radical left party in power just imagine if in greece conservatives new democracy were to remain in power tsriza in opposition would have probably organised massive demonstrations and so on and so on with syriza doing the austerity measures the demoralisation is total. what went wrong i think that again that great disappointment you remember on one day two years ago when syriza won the referendum surprisingly for themselves i know from varouakis that tsipras was totally shocked he wanted honourably to lose the referendum they won the referendum literally one day later they capitulated i don't blame them i am not saying traitors and so on it's a real difficulty of the left today again the difficulty of the day after okay you triumph referendum but what to do the next day there is a narrative now emerging about greece. the idea is that when syriza was approaching power the tsipras leadership made a series of decisions not only about the political party line but also about the type of party. they needed they advocated the transformation of syriza from a coalition of disparate organisations and civil movements into a unified centralised party. the great number of members of its central committee made it sure that de facto decisions were made in advance in a narrow informal circle around tsras.. the so called paraenter of power so it is easy then to claim that the problem of syriza was that it became an alienated party elite running the state and that it lost contact with its social base civil movements trade unions protest movements and so on and so on and then the obvious solution is we should rejuven reunite this basis in popular movements but i think that this analysis is totally misleading where syriza failed is. not in simply accepting the. logic of state and abandoning its roots in civil movements but to find a new way how to reorganise the state.. it's not enough to say we have to keep always the pressure of the people the presence of grassroots organisations and so on and so on yes but what does this mean for the state itself how to reinvent the state itself because again as all great revolutionaries from robespierre to lenin and trotsky knew very well you cannot maintain a permanent emergency state with people have an attitude of permanent mobilisation we are always active' and so on and so on and so on again the problem is how to do it when things return to normal when people get tired of being permanently mobilised then you need maybe not the state we have it but you need some alienated mechanisms and i am not afraid of liking them listen now i will make a personal confession for which some of you will probably want to lynch me can you imagine me living in a small community where every afternoon we have to debate how we distribute water how how we do the kindergarten care for the children how this how that it would be hell for me i want to live in peace i i want to live my life of reading books watching movies writing about them and i simply want an efficient invisible mechanism to take care of all that and i don't think there is anything bourgeois or whatever in this the challenge is to build this in a different way outside the scope of capitalism and so on and so on i will even go a step further here when we talk about popular pressure popular mobilisation the long history of universal suffrage in the west shows that the vast majority of the people is as a rule passive caught in the inertia of survival not ready to be mobilised for some cause that is why every radical movement is always constrained to a vanguard minority and in order to gain hegemony it has to wait patiently for a crisis usually war which provides a narrow window of opportunity in such moments an authentic avantanguard can seize the day mobilise the people and take over and communists here and i am not criticising them i admire them are always utterly nonogmatic here ready to parasise on another issue remember that the october revolution gained support not with we want socialism' but with land and peace the chinese communist party its slogan was national liberation and unity against corruption so communists were always aware that mobilisation will be soon over and they were carefully preparing the power apparatus to keep them in power at that moment. so... this betrays another big problem of western marxism where is the revolutionary subject how is it? we that the working class does not complete the passage as we say in hegelian terms from in itself to for itself how is it that it doesn't constitute itself as a revolutionary agent this is why a very vicious remark all marxists really like very much psychoanalysis why they claim we have the best theory that explains economic crisis and so on but then this theory predicted the emergence of proletariat as a revolutionary agent. and then when you ask them, the communists, i'm one of them, by the way, when you ask them, but why is there no revolution, they say,, to explain this, we need psychoanalysis to describe the deep manipulation and so on and so on, whatever. for this reason western marxism was also all the time in search of a other social agents. which could play the role of the revolutionary agent student uh third world peasants intellectuals even and i think this is the lowest point with all my support for refugees this is why i find this horrible some of the leftists celebrate refugees why? their idea is this one we have good revolutionary theory we just don't have revolutionary agents. maybe if we import refugees they will fill in this gap and we will be able to make a revolution in western europe with enough refugees. i find this obscene it means like outsourcing the revolutionary subject you know we don't have a revolutionary subject we will import it e. so, uh... because of this. situation. we are today in a unique predicament. which is really tragic namely. let me return to marx marxism. was right about the so called final crisis of capitalism we are clearly entering it today i claim if you look at the signs all the problems we are encountering ecology refugees biogenetics financial capital and so on and so on my god even official ideologists like whom i really hate i think they are more dangerous than trump even these pseudogressive liberal corporate leaders like you know mark zuckerberg elon musk and so on this is the big slogan today capitalism is disappearing and so on they are right you know where marxism obviously went wrong the idea of marxism was that when capitalism will be disintegrating there will be another agent waiting to take over and bring capitalism to the higher stage. but today and this was unthinkable for marx we only have disintegration but... no progressive force taking it over or to put it in another way on the one hand and this is the tragic split. on the one hand we have all these protest movements against. capitalism. earth. against neocolonialism, against precarious workers and so on and so on. or protesting protesting how call it, when you don't have joblessness. sorry? yeah, yeah, but you know what's so sad here? first, let me ask you a common sense question. i never understood it why are people afraid of robotization that it will take them their jobs. isn't this wonderful? we will have to work less. this shows how deeply perverted our universe instead of saying fine work less' we see in this the extreme panic oh my god, we will lose our jobs. this is a very sad sign which shows that the left really doesn't have a vision. so again, at the same time that we have all these protest movements, we have, they were described at different levels, and these descriptions are way too naive. i don't trust them, but nonetheless, like paul mason, jeremiah rifkin and so on, they describe how capitalism is reaching its end. how through digitalisation market economy can no longer dominate the entire production and so on and so on. but so really we can see in these processes of digitalization, automatization already the roots of a post-capitalist world. but no link between this and most at least of the protest movements. so let me quote you. ger german sociologist who wrote a wonderful collection of essays called how will capitalism end? wolfgang streck with two is's. is it translated into spanishain? it's worth reading. here is a quote from him. it is a marxist, or better modernist prejudice that capitalism as a historical epoch will end only when a new, better society is in sight. and a revolutionary subject ready to implement it for the advancement of mankind this presupposes a degree of political control over our common fate of we cannot even dream after the destruction of collective agency and indeed the hope for it in the neoliberal globalist so again the disease of stre is yes capitalism is disintegrating but according to marxist doxa this disintegration should be the very moment of the rise of a new revolutionary subject which doesn't happen i'm not saying this is a spontaneous process the whole effort of today's ideology goes into what how does ideology today function. it appears precisely as its opposite as a radical critique of ideological utopias i think that the predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of some utopian future but a cynical resignation an acceptance of how the world really is the acceptance accompanied by a warning that if we want to change the world too much only a totalitarian horror can be the final result so every vision of another world is dismissed as ideology al badi you put it in a wonderful and precise way he wrote that the main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance this. the job of repressive state apparatuses but to crush hope to immediately denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which there is always something like good luck. and this let's call it post-ideological ideology ideology whose entire identity is based on denouncing every progressive hope as ideology this is how ideology functions today end. dysfunction of ideology also accounts for some strange events. taking place today what do you mean by this? uh. an old chinese curse is, it's not really chinese, it's just some englishman, i spoke with my chinese friends, some englishman claimed that he heard it in china, but nobody knows about this in china. okay. it's that. when you really hate someone you tell him may you live in interesting times' because interesting times are of course the times of troubles confusion and suffering it seems that in some of our democratic countries we are really witnessing now a strange phenomenon which proves that we live in interesting times did you notice how for example apropos macron in france a candidate emerges and wins elections as as it were from nowhere in a moment of confusion building a movement around his both berlusconi and macron i that like this. but what is this process a sign of definitely not. a sign of any kind of direct popular engagement beyond party politics on the contrary we should never forget that such figures explode with the full support of the social and economic establishment their function is precisely to obfuscate mystify actual social antagonisms people are magically united against some demonised fascist threat this weird phenomenon is i think one of the visible effects of the long term rearrangement of the political space in. europe today we no longer have two big parties as you also in spain you had them till some i don't know when five ten years ago you know left centre party right centre party and then you have some marginal parties but basically the two parties replace each other and all phenomena like trump like le pen and so on signal! in this direction this standard duality moderate left moderate right is disappearing more and more one party presents itself as what some people call a radical centre it's the party of status quo usually it's the party of global capitalism but at the same time socially very liberal they don't have any problem with pride parades of gay people with abortion and so on and so on this is the establishment and then again instead we have anti immigrant racism populism and so on and so on and you must have noticed what disappears here a more radical left. we saw this clearly in the case of macron in france i was also one of the marginal victims attacked there because while of course i agreed that le pen is a catastrophe i just wanted to signal that macron nonetheless stands for the establishment he is the candidate of the establishment and i i find it very sad that okay it's nice to say we need antiascist unity against marine le pen but it's very sad to see a candidate of pure establishment don't have any illusions the entire economic ideological journalistic tv establishment was full speed supporting macron and if you just hinted some critical point against him what happened was that you were immediately denounced as object objectively supporting marine le pen. some of my ex friends in france even invented the term le pen trotskyistes claiming that mellenchon is objectively working for marine le pen. how do this? movement look. already the names of this movement. sound familiar in their empty universality sorry fits everyone and everything berlusconiis motto forza italia. with macron it was la république on so they both designate just an abstract sense of victorious movement forward without any specification of the direction we should pursue both movements exploded as reactions of the establishment in a panic there is of course an obvious difference between the two berlusconi and macron. berlusconi entered the scene when, after the big anti-corruption campaign, the entire traditional political configuration in italy collapsed and ex-communists remained as the only viable force. berlusconi's mobilisation was against what he perceived in the establishment as a communist threat while macron entered the scene when le pen's neoofascist populism was perceived as potential winner. uh macron's role is best described by a word used by some of his supporters in the last years they claim marine le pen was gradually de-diabolised perceived as part of the normal acceptable populist political space and the task is to re diabolise her to make her diabolic again to show to the public that she is the same old antimitic fascist not to be tolerated by any serious democrat but i think such a gesture is not enough it's not enough to re diabolise le pen if we want to be serious we should do what the duty of the left is to ask how a phenomenon like le pen was possible what made it possible it's clear what made it possible the failure of the establishment of the predominant hegemonic politics so i think that when we have the battle like the one in france macron popular unity against the fascist threat of marine le pen i think we should always ask ourselves yes but who is missing from the picture a more radical left and i think that the true task of macron was not just to defeat marine le pen but to not just defeat to make disappear a more radical leftist option it's the same in the united states even hi. know what horror donald trump is but i claim that the... us democrats diabolize trump as the evil horror and so on in order to get rid of bernie sanders who? poses a threat to the. democratic establishment this is why although i don't doubt that there is truth in it but this is why we witness in the united states this weird obsession of the democratic party with russian hacking of the election probably there was some hacking but nonetheless the true failure was their own. dismissal of ch i claim hillary clinton lost because she got rid of bernie sanders' wing in her own party. and that's why you need trump as a russian agent so that the image remains we would have won only we lost because of putin and so on in this way we no longer have to ask critical questions it's just the objective situation another thing that is part of this new space that is emerging, populism versus establishment, is the saddest thing maybe i claim, is what some people call great regression, the rise of public obscenity. and here democrats in the united states were spectacularly wrong about trump did you notice something so weird how many times has trump said something which appeared catastrophic for liberals and then there were predictions oh trump just committed public suicide he is out you remember when his tapes were disclosed where trump is boasting how he was touching freely women between their legs or when he made fun of the father of an american war hero and so on all that how they were wrong democrats they thought now he is finished no he these apparent scandals just helped him why let's go to the end many of my friends even ask a question how can a corrupted lewd destitute person vulgar like donald trump the very opposite of christian decency how can he function as the chosen hero of the christian moral majority conservatives the usual answer that i hear is that they know what kind of a scamum moral conservatives trump is but they care just about one or two points of his programme he promised to for example abolish or at least limit abortion so they claim we don't care we know what kind of person he is but if he does this limit abortion it's a great thing and of course some other things but i don't think this is the case i think that something what more complex is at work here for which we need psychoanalytic theory of identification you know when trump made all these failures or mistakes vulgar remarks and so on brutal almost openly racist antieminist at that point people identified with him because what do they see in trump? a person who professes to be christian high principles but in reality he is a greedy sexist vulgar guy but these are neoconservatives today it is. they don't have to be disappointed in what trump is that's what they are. they identify precisely with both sides of trump so i think that i don't have time to go into it now that this should be a chance of the left today with people like trump and so on the left should emerge and i think if i'm well informed i don't know enough about you that podemos is trying up to a point to do this let us not leave to the right wingers a nice term there is nothing wrong in it about moral majority the only true moral majority is the left today with figures like trump and so on it's over let me give you another example of these public figures of great morality but where you see this other side of obscene vulgarity a friend from poland told me this and i was shocked poland's de facto ruler i already mentioned him sorry it's not jan jaroslaw kaczynski made an interview in one nine hundred and seven for the big liberal newspaper gazeta w borsca where when he described how his party will take over he used an incredibly vulgar exclamation and he didn't disown it afterwards he proudly insists on it he exclaimed in polish it means it's our fucking term but... i asked my polish friend and they claim that although the meaning of this phrase is it's our fucking time' now we are in power it's our turn' but the literal meaning of this phrase is something much more vulgar it's something like now it's our time to fuck the whore. like you know, this vulgar lower class idea a paid prostitute is laying and we wait, not the two of us. sorry well maybe you never know where we are. no, but sorry. we wait turn and you finish and then i say it's my turn. but it's important that this phrase was publicly uttered by a devout catholic conservative protector of christian morality and again i think this is precisely why people identify with him it's not that people think he is a great moral figure and then they are disappointed my god how no both sides are part of the hegemonic ideology okay just to amuse you a little bit it's incredible how communists in power also are not far behind with similar vulgarities for example it will shock you in his speech at the lan party conference in nin h hundred fifty nine just when it became clear that things are not doing well with the fiasco of the great leap forward the result is mass hunger millions dying and so on mao called the party cadre to assume their part of responsibility he said you know we failed with the great leap forward millions of farmers are dying we made serious mistakes' and he said that the greatest is my own responsibility especially for the unfortunate campaign to make steel still like still fact in every village. then then comes the surprise this is not one hidden part in the middle these are literally the last lines of his speech the chaos caused was on a grand scale the chaos of the great leap forward and i take responsibility comrades you must all analyse your own responsibility l now. if you have to cheat shit if you have to fart, fart, you will feel much better for it. end of it. now why this vulgar metaphor in what sense can the selfritical admission of one's responsibility for a serious mistake mistakes be compared to the need to shit and fart. i presume the solution is that for mao to take responsibility does not mean so much an expression of remorse which may even push me to offer to step down it's more that by doing it you get rid of responsibility so that. no wonder you feel much better for it like after a good cheat you don't admit you are shit you get rid of the sheet i mean... are you again, are you? that's the only way i can read are you aware of this utter vulgarity when mao is talking about his responsibility for the death of millions his metaphor for admission of guilt is like cheating farting do it you will feel better okay here we are if you allow me nonetheless slowly to come to an end so... what can we do in this sh. web. uh. obviously. the world is becoming one the functioning of our universe where. we have an inside and an outside i think that films like hunger games elysium' are basically right this is the world that is slowly emerging as a conservative peter schterijk but who i claim is not an idiot nonetheless developed the metaphor for today's new world order is that it is a global system but global also in the sense of cupola a globe and we are inside others are outside the idea that we the twenty maybe twenty five privileged live in our safe space and we look outside and then refugees of course are those who penetrate this barrier coming inside and so on and so on. this is true. one the other aspect which worries me today is that we were so used when we were younger years ago to critic western neoocolonialism how the notions of human rights and so on are really western imposition falsifying local imposing western values on third world cultures and so on and so on i think that something new is emerging now which worries me much more all. phenomena like modi in india putin erdogan and finally trump himself making pact with saudi arabia even china and so on demonstrate clearly that a new genuinely multicultural but multicultural in a terrible sense order is emerging where global market can be perfectly combined with each country orisation living in its own secluded world for example that is why it was easy for trump to make pact with saudi arabia and so on and so on the west even. resigned itself to accepting this it no longer the old naive fukuyama idea we have a vision global democracy we have to impose it onto the world no we can be good multiculturalists to each country its own values so while we can be feminists in our countries we shouldn't mess with other countries if they do horrible things to women and so on and so on in one of my recent texts maybe some of you know it i compared this to a strange phenomenon that i noticed with anti-semitism, how today the latest form of anti-semitism is zionist anti-semitism. i mean it quite literally. for example, you remember brik, the guy, the norwegian crazy guy who shot 80 social democratic young kids there. he was representative of this he said in israel we should fully support the jews they protect us from bar barbarism and so on but no jews here. so here we are anti semitic too many jews and so on jews control too much england america but there we should fully support them and i think what is emerging now with trump is something parallel not just anti semitic zionism but. islamophobic respect for islam look what trump is doing at the same time that he spreads this islamophobic paranoia in the united states he has no problem making deals with erdoan with saudi arabia and so on and so on so again it's a new totally cynical functioning of ideology which makes critical job very difficult you remember when american imperialism legitimized itself through human rights and all that it was relatively easy for us critics of ideology no but to see they are lying their universality of human rights is a false one it really privileges certain cultural features of western white masculine culture and so on and so on capitalism today no longer needs this what matters is universal market what you do at the level of so-called human rights is your problem. so that's why if you allow me some concluding remarks which will be even more problematic for you that's why and a little bit of philosophy in need also that's why. it is crucial today to find the right formula for how to relate the universal struggle for emancipation to the plurality of the ways of life because that's the problem today. we have. some people even don't like the term way of life' they claim it already sounds of fascism and so on but nonetheless i think that why are... so called ways of life effect. because they are not just ways of life in the sense of abstractacultural identity they are ways to organise regulate our and i use here this term in its full psychoanalytic lian sense juouissance excessive enjoyment enjoyment if you allow me to improvise a little bit here enjoyment is for me something like for laccon very paradoxical it is not the same as pleasure enjoyment is even usually enjoyment in pain enjoyment is how. through pain you deal with pleasure let me give you if you allow me a little bit of impression no don't tell a madman like me just go on because then okay did you read in your newspapers it was probably reported i checked it up with my friends in mexico and mexico is a wonderful country strong progressive movement i'm not against it i'm talking about specific examples. in some small city they want to be not politically correct but you know they want to unite with traditions i mean their ancient wisdom indigenous is so when you have minor crime acts they don't simply leave it to the state legal system they have some local reunions of old wise people who know old indigenous rules and they pass the judgment. so a scandal happened when an older guy raped a young girl and. there was a problem because these wise old people well vers in judicial justice passed a judgment and condemned the old guy. and the punishment was two. bye! to the father of the girl how do you call it a pe twelve bottles a pack of cans of beer and the feminists exploded and so on but the judges said, sorry, this is our old justice, this is our traditional way of life. and i think it's too easy to try to find your way out here because... i try to reconstruct let's go a little bit more in theory so that i don't tell just jokes and politics what was the judge's reasoning? okay, the judge was corrupted he was paid because sorry there is another case which is even worse a similar one et. a group of young people raped a girl and one of them was pardoned by the judge it was corruption but the reasoning is interesting one of them was pardoned by a judge because he's... no facts were disputed he admitted but he claimed i am not guilty because i didn't sexually enjoy it' so he admitted he in a vulgar way sezed the breasts of the girl pushed his fingers into her vagina but he said but i didn't penetrate her i wasn't aroused i didn't enjoy it' and the judge said no then you are not guilty it is i think hard to read this because in my naive some feminists may accuse me here i very naif here. although if he enjoyed it sexually while raping the girl, it's also has to be harshly punished. but i think for me at least it's just a tiny bit worse if you didn't enjoy it then my god why did you do it then? obviously just out of evil to hurt her or to impress your colleagues or whatever so i claim the premise of the judge was you can be. only guilty if you enjoyed it so enjoyment as such is, or pleasure etc as such is sinful, makes you guilty. uh. no! enjoyment, no guilt. but i think we should push this even a step further it's not enough to say no enjoyment no guilt we should even say no guilt no enjoyment' that is the perversity of some type of catholic morality if you just do it innocently you make love you it's pleasurable. but it's not real intense enjoyment to really enjoy it you must feel guilty here things get so complicated and i think to analyse all these paradoxes it is crucial to understand the deadlocks of our consumerism or whatever uh. for example something strange happened recently a friend of mine from the united states told me he observed a strange phenomenon when he entered a walmart mega store it was towards the end of the working day and when he exited the store he saw many of these shopping carts full of stuff but. abandoned there and he asked a seller there what's going on and the seller said these are the newly impoverished middle classes who. no longer can afford buying commodities there so they just as afternoon amusement, they go to the mega store. put things in the cart and then leave it there and just say this is a nice example of pure surplus enjoyment without pleasure that's what... lacon means by surplus enjoyment enjoyment in in a way... enjoyment in procedure itself the process itself provides enjoyment and our sexuality is always characterised by this paradox let me give you another example my good friend the british lacian half lian half kleinian psychoanalyst dian le told me a wonderful anecdote one of his patients told him of his patient's wonderful sleep of tongue he wanted to seduce a lady so he took a lady to a nice restaurant which was part of a hotel of course the idea was. i will first invite her to a nice dinner and then suggest why don't we go to a room upstairs but she made the mistake in entering the restaurant instead of saying a table for two please. he said a bed for two please. now comes the correct interpretation. it's not that his mind was already at sex. dya leader guessed in a wonderful way that it was the exact opposite. he was afraid. that he will enjoy too much. and and that he will forget where is the true duty you know. so it was more to remind himself be careful, don't enjoy here too much. and this eating in this sense is what lacanbe calls object object a the surplus enjoyment that it's necessary. like if you directly make love if you directly go to sex. it wouldn't have worked you need the obstacle that! this paradoxical structure of an obstacle which as an obstacle is a condition of what it is obstacle to is crucial let me give you another example i'm full of examples a lady from latin america who was maybe flirting with me told me that. when her last lover saw her naked, he told her that except for one or two kilos too much her body is perfect. and i immediately told her this lady, just don't lose those one of two kilos because it's true that those one of two kilos were too much but through being there as too much, they created. the illusion that without these two kilos too much, she would be perfect. but you see the paradox. you take two kilos too much away, you don't get perfect body. you get something totally non-interest. you see my logic? this is what laccon calls surplus enjoyment. you add something. which ruins the full pleasure but ruining it creates the phantom of full pleasure. and here i'm so sorry we don't have time to go into it because all my fun is here here. la enters la kenian analysis in in a specific way which i see as connected with.. connected with hegelian dialectics. why? an example that i like to use, i'm sorry if some of you know it already, an example that i like to use recently. perfect example of how pleasure functions. let's take coffee let's say you or me i will say you because i don't like it let's say you like coffee. there is a wonderful scene from the film, from one of the hollywood classics, ernst lubitch ninochka. a joke is told there. i'm sure if you know it, where everybody knows this joke. a guy enters a cafeteria and says... and says coffee but coffee without cream please and the waiter answers sorry' we don't have cream we only have milk so i cannot give you coffee without cream i can only give you coffee without milk and he was totally right because this is what hegel means by determinate negation although it's materially the same coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream so a simple coffee can be three different things coffee coffee coffee without cream coffee without milk and maybe you are a pervert i hope you are in this good sense that you really enjoy for some masochists reasons syria coffee without cream. but it has to be coffee without cream, not just coffee. and i would love you for, let's say you visit us and my wife or me, i'm here a good feminist, at least here, i bring you coffee and you protest, sorry, this is just coffee. where is the missing missing milk or cream. now you will say this is a joke. no, it's not. because in socialism where things were always missing in stores there was one of the wonderful jokes on these motives it's from poland this joke that somebody enters a store and asks them did you already get butter third like or you still don't have butter and the lady who is shelling rings there tells him sorry sir, you are in the wrong store. we are the store which doesn't have butter. no, we are the store which doesn't have let's say whatever sausages. across the street is the store which doesn't have butter and so on. so you see what i mean what is missing in its absence is part of the identity of what a thing is and i claim this is especially true for the way we enjoy maybe maybe enjoy. not just what we do but the right type of renunciation that's why... and that is i claim how ideology functions today it provides you it gives you coffee. but it claims it's coffee without milk. and so on this abstract spectral element is is absolutely crucial element called by lacon objects small a and so on another way to approach this pleasures and so on. you know where? enjoyment is inscribed in our way of life and this always fascinated me i would love to learn some examples how does this function here with you in spain because things are very specific here namely we all know that to be part of a certain community it's not enough just to know the rules in every community there are always meta rules which tell you what to do with explicit rules which rules you are allowed to violate or the opposite which is even more interesting which rules. offer you something but you are given a certain freedom on condition that you do't use this freedom i claim this although i generally don't always agree with him jacques dererrida in his reading of kafka that famous parable in front of the door of the law made this wonderfully that uh... law is not just simply the agency that prohibits at the most fundamental level law itself is itself prohibited prohibited to be announced. publicly if i may repeat an old joke if you allow me imagineagine we are in moscow in 35, i'm stalin. okay, what can i do? i give a speech. you have to otherwise you disappear you applaud okay then we have a debate one of you stands up and says i don't disagree with comrade stalin he made mistakes here okay the next day the big question would be who was the last one to see that guy alive of course but now let's imagine something much more horrible that then another guy stands up and starts to shout at the first guy are you crazy don't you know that we in the soviet union don't criticize stalin that it is prohibited my thesis is the second one would disappear even faster in stalinism it was not only prohibited to criticise stalin it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition if you just publicly announce this prohibition you ruin it there are prohibitions which function only in this way as nonannounced that's why i think critique of ideology is still actual today because today's ideology may appear just offering a scoop you know very simple direct cynical no no there is. at the level of what is left unsaid what is implied by it the situation is much more complex. okay so now let me really conclude so let me stop. for me the problem of a way of life is what there is a certain leftist vision of some of my friends with which i radically disagree the vision is this one. we have to be tolerant we have only to unite people at the level of basic economic political struggle but as to its specific way of life every community should be allowed its particular features. they are not a threat to the unity of humanity. they bring more wealth to it. you know we sing these songs, you sing those songs it's a wonderful wealth and so on and so on. my problem with these friends of mine is that this analysis works insofar as the examples that you use are this neutral one. we have our cuisine, you have your own. we have our songs, you have your own and so on but what really defines the way of life is i think the organisation of sexuality exchange of partners and relations of authority domination there i'm so sad i don't have time to go into this because this is especially actual today when while... it may appear that our capitalism is getting more and more financial abstract know things happen at the level of meta speculations with futures we do't know yes this is true but that is why as if because financial speculations get totally detached from the level of relations between the people direct relations of domination are violently coming back slavery is returning and so on and so on but okay that's another topic to conclude i just want to say this that. so let's take a community. let let me give you an example of what happened some fifteen twenty years ago in my own country roma in the sense of the bad word is gypsy girl escape from her home and took refuge with the police she was twelve years old claiming my father. wants to marry me to his friend, okay. then all the feminists supported her and so on and so on but then her father or what is i think some elder figure of the roma community made a very reasonable counterargument he said but listen arranged marriages between children by parents are the very base of how our community reproduces itself if you take this away from us in two three generations we disappear okay you can use us to play some band, to do some spicy food, but we survive as. folkloric entity but not a substantial community so you see the problem the problem is. that we cannot that is my point there are other examples for example in india i was always in trouble because i raised these questions of universality democracy critic caste system and it often happened to me that i was then criticised for imposing on them western imperialist notions some of my friends even defend caste system as part of their way of life, which again, i'm sorry, it's true. so what is my solution is my solution then that we should nonetheless impose on others our wter. falsely universal notions of women's rights authority no but we should admit something that this image of all of us participating in some universality while each of us keeps. its own way of life is wrong universality is inscribed as an inner antagonism into each of our ways of life it is part of it for example if in a certain community women rebel their role this is how universality appears within that community in saudi arabia it's a modest example but it's the beginning of something women who refuse not to drive who risk being arrested by driving cars it's universality the point the problem for me is this one there are no particular ways of life safely in their seclusion and so on and so on if they are they are precisely on account of their full inclusion into the global world order precisely in india the situation is so interesting do you know for example that the caste system was already disappearing in the seventeenth and eighth centuries and then when the british colonized india they got it immediately what our some multiculturalist idiots don't get it that the strategy of imperialism was never . become like us. no, they were horrified by these british colonizers. they knew that if all indians become like englishmen they would have class struggle. no, they want them to remain. so beshai the one of the most horrible ideological books that i know the laws of manu a system describing in detail the caste system was reprinted revitalised in the eighteen hundred hundred fortiesifties by the british colonizers precisely to keep the locals there in der. in their subjected position of being dominated so i think again that this is why i absolutely reject this idea global . capitalism is universal so the only way to undermine it by referring to our particular way of life indigenous traditions and so on and so on this is a very problematic and limited strategy for me no we should bring struggle into every particular way of life we should not say to saudi arabia you are primitive you have to accept our notions' but we should look where struggles are already going on there and they are going in india you have untouchables and so on you have people who radically reject caste system and so on in saudi arabia you have already protests and so on and so on so i claim that again universality is not this unesco universality i hate those unesco books on world culture you know like we are all one big family of humanity one culture sorry yeah this folkloric no each way of life each culture is in itself marked by an antagonism caught in a conflict between each particular identity and de facto force of universality which pro protests are always by definition authentic protests universal and to conclude you know probably this example of mine but i like it you know who is one of my big heroes of big revolutionaries. i forgot to mention it to you. malcolm x, you know why? i'm sorry to know this. because of x. he was a hegelian genius. i'm not bluffing. i met some people who met some people who knew him, and they confirmed this to me. you know what was for malcolm x, you know, denjelle washington in the film, so that i speak language which you understand. ex of course meant we were enslaved we were torn out of our particular context african roots but the genius of malcolm x was to reject this idea of so let's return to our roots' no. x was not just a sign of tragedy we are x we don't have family roots' no x was for malcolm x a new chance x means we are not rooted in particular identity we are free to reinvent our own universality which will be more authentically universal than white people western universality that's why we may disagree here with him malcolm x looked for this universality in islam so this is the crucial dimension today we can only fight global capitalism with an even stronger universality because every type of indigenism and so on always believe me fits perfectly global capitalism. you know who confirmed this to me? i love them they are among my best friends in the united states some of okay. officially we have to call them native americans or whatever they prefer indians the term. did i tell you my old joke why? one of them told me native americans i hate this term. it means we are nature and what are you white people cultural americans or what they claim if you call us indians at least our name is a sign a proof of white men's stupidity. you know you thought you were in india when you discovered but he told me this guy. something wonderful he told me you know which american tribes can afford to return to their roots only those who are lucky enough to have on their reservation mines minerals or casinos so that there they get the money to do it no i think that i see no contradiction in the fact that saudi arabia is at the same time it's you don't have to think about saudi arabia as a state it's like a big mafia family which deals with not so much oil as financial speculations and so on but at the same time conservative religiously and the two that's crucial fit perfectly together so i claim that the big problem today is to define a new universality i here a traditional marking capitalism result we should celebrate it still is that it dissolved or particular identities is opened up universality. we we have to go through as it were through this we have to the only path to freedom is through this proletarian position where you are deprived of your roots jacques dererrida quotes a wonderful jewish joke and i think we should take it seriously that on sabbat or whenever they do it in jews meet and have their confessions, prayers, whatever, it doesn't matter in their synagogue. and one wealthy jew says, oh god, i may be wealthy, but i'm nobody, i'm nothing. i'm nothing. that another jew, a famous singer, whatever, says, oh god, it's the same for me. i may be famous, blah, blah. but i am nothing and then a poor jew stands up and says, oh my god, i am also nothing. and then one rich jew says to the other, but who is this guy that he just thinks that he can say he is also nothing? you know is and they are right. they want the universality all was nothing. no, they were right. and here i also have a different attitude towards religion. i'm totally an atheistist. don't be afraid. but you know when marx said religion is the opium of the people, not for the people. he said of the people. he was not vulgar in the sense that some rich priests are inventing religion corrupted priests. you know, adorno already had this remark, and the other one i find it somewhere, which is the best answer to this. namely, the idea is this one. marx said religion is the opium of the people. but today there are two other opiums of the people you know which two opium and people many of us, you don't even need ethol, you have opium or some drugs, that's your opium and people themselves it's precisely this substantial populist notion. people in this anti immigrant refugee sense these are the true opiums of the people today and the only way to fight them is again new universality not this abstract universality human rights but the fighting universality how are you universal not by claiming we are part of a human species we contribute to it that's nothing you are universal where when you experience the contradiction the tension when you are not... you you are universal protest your particular identity which is why the universal subject as jacques laccon saw it clearly and here you have a link between politics and psychoanalysis the universal subject is hysterical subject what is hysteria at its most elementary you know louis altisser's theory of interpellation, like ideology interpellates you into something. you are a woman, a teacher, a christian, whatever. today you are enlightened buddhist hedonist's okay. the basic hysterical question is why am i what you are saying that i am this doubt about my own particular symbolic identity that's how feminism begins society is telling traditional patriarchal society to a woman you are this your role in the family blah blah blah and the simple question is why am i what you are saying that i am this here! when you start to raise this question you emerge as a universal subject i would even say you emerge as a cartesian cogito that's why there is so many interesting things in history of philosophy. you know this is the secret of descartes do you know that cartesian philosophy was extremely popular among women those rich women who were able to reach him. but immediately women saw one of the french women ladies immediately said why she likes the car. she said because cogito doesn't have a sex. the whole cartesian philosophy is based on this doubting my identity am i really what you are saying that i am that is why i am again so worried about this allegedly. emancipatory potential of identities like you know like i am bisexual or transgender and okay perfect but like, i think that. this statement has an emancipatory potential only if it echoes a universal dimension like if you say i am transgender and i suffer because of it but my suffering is in some way exemplary of what is wrong with our society of the falsity of universal functioning of sexual difference whatever and so on and so on i don't think that any particularity as such has emancipatory dimension in itself. gilles deleuze knew this, although he is a poet of this multidimensional whatever. gilles deleuze and to conclude really, believe me or not, i will conclude now that's why for example now it's fashionable to be for polyamory you know like not just one i love you you you no i am still for singular love you know why because this polyamory is simply particular i love you for this i love you for this and so on but i'm very romantic here true love is not this true love is not i like you for this but i have other needs so i need another partner or whatever' true love is a much more desperate radical stance true love means i want to be with you because i simply cannot survive without you it is total despair i cannot imagine my life outside without you and that's what today is more and more threatening this crazy radical love okay i could go on indefinitely but let's stop i am very grateful to you for your incredible patience in tolerating an obvious madman like me at least i will give you one final joke can you imagine some stupid student mine why stupid? because they told me oh professor you convinced me with your knowledge of lacon would you accept me as your patient you know well my answer is always double first if you think i could be your analyst with my obvious madness, then you really need psychiatric. and my second joke is with me talking all the time, can you really imagine me just listening to another person for more than... thank you very much. stop, stop! we are not yet in communism. when we will take over, you will have to applaud the leader. not now. now you can stop. okay.
i hope i will not speak too fast that the translation will work and i am really glad to be here again. i'm grateful to you i also admire ed accal and others who regularly publish my work here and especially with you you were i can more or less i understand spanish i followed what you said and you know i was almost like waiting, just good thing then i was asking myself, but you must be sharping your knife in the back of you so where is are you keeping this for questions to the end or whatever you know because what i will say today will be more a political talk what i will say today will be put in a very problematic way. i hope. some of you will react even violently because i really see our situation today as very. controversial in the sense of it's a paradoxical situation in what sense let me begin with the title of my talk a plea for bureaucratic socialism' now your first reaction is this must be another of my stupid post modern jokes or paradoxes and so on so i cannot emphas enough that i mean this title in a totally positive naive way i think we have to reinvent bureaucratic socialism socialism which will be alienated but alienated in the right way what do i mean by this? er. jean-clude milner reports that when he was young he was sitting at a table with louis altiche alter, who once in a coffee table debate said something surprising and i think very intelligent altisar says that there are three types of revolutionaries those who use old proverbs those who use no proverbs those those who invent or use new proverbs and i think this is... an excellent definition. for altichar for example he noticed how stalin from the early th thirties liked to use old russian proverbs, old wisdoms and so on how robespierre mostly used no. proverbs another revolutionary figure and how lenin and mao even even when they pretend to repeat old proverbs they are really inventing new proverbs i agree with altar that this is the task of a true revolutionary why proverbs they stand for accepted wisdom. end it's easy to overturn to make fun of old proverbs. the really difficult thing is to invent new proverbs. what do i mean by this? uh. the well known hollywood producer chem goldwyn he was a genius i think for all his apparent primitivism nonsenses but which we know today they were well planned one one story about sh goldwyn is that he read in a newspaper some journalist criticizing. films produced by his studio for using too many old cliches and he immediately wrote a memo to his screenplay scenario department saying we urgently need new cliches he was right and that's what we need politically today i i will present you quite brutally na it will be a very what i will do today my thesis i am sick and tired of revolutionaryaries or protest movements which focus on those ecstatic moments oh my god one million people on sintagma square in tahrir square in istanbul and so on we were all enthusiastic there and so on and so on i am not impressed by that at all i think this is even relatively easy to do the true test of a revolution or radical social change is how do ordinary people experience the change when the ecstatic moment is over when things return to normal that's the most difficult task when nothing happens when just everyday life is here how is this everyday life different from the previous everyday life which is why i was never fascinated by all those comparaisons uh. between revolution and carnival you know mikhail bakin the fellow traveller of russian formalists developed this point nicely on how àçois rabelais qui this. how we have those wonderful moments in social life where social hierarchy disintegrates a slave is a master a master is a slave everything is turned around there is sudden freedom old rules no longer apply and so on and so on and some stupid leftists took this as the paradigm of the revolution now my friend i don't always agree with him but here i do boris grois the russian theorist working in germany told me a wonderful thing recently they discovered some manuscripts of michael vin in kazan why he was exiled there in the age of stalinism that's how he survived and it's clear from those manuscripts what was for him carnival it wasn't a liberating experience the secret reference. was stalinist pur this was for bachtin the true carnival today i am member of a central committee tomorrow i'm prisoner in a gulag and so on and so on this was total chaos in social hierarchy so there is... nothing can subversive in it. the true problem again is not to say we need a release of fresh energy our life should not be ossified in fixed structures and so on and so on no it should be ossified but in different structures that's the difficult thing to do it's easy to have again ecstatic moments of freedom oh we are all free' okay we are free for one week for three weeks for five weeks and then and then that's why if you permit me to repeat an old joke of mine why i find very problematic the film which many leftists like very much i don't v for vendetta if you saw it you remember the final scene wonderful ecsties carnival the crowd penetrates the police cordon enters the parliament people take over but as i like to say in my tasteless way i am ready to sell my mother into slavery to see a film called v for vendetta part two okay the people have won what happens the next day what new laws do they pass how do they do it how do they reorganise state apparatus and so on and so on so now i will go more in detail and where where i see the problem and again i am on purpose provocative when one hears anarchists deploying their idea of local communities which work in a transparent way with no alienated representative mechanisms with all members engaged in organising their lives one should recall that their survival of these non alienated local communities relies on a thick texture of alienated institutional mechanisms where do electricity and water come from who guarantees the rule of law to whom do we turn for healthcare and so on the more a community is selfuling the more this network has to function smoothly and invisibly so maybe we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation to to achieve a smooth functioning of alienated invisible social mechanisms which sustain the space of our local non-alated life. we we all like this idea we are a community we debate all the time but are we aware how many things must function in the background for this to be possible and we have an old name for these alienated mechanisms bureaucracy which is why the left needs today to reinvent bureaucratic socialism the standard characterisation of stalinist regimes as bureaucratic socialism i think is totally wrong it is the way the stalinist regime itself perceived its problems the cause of its failures and troubles. stalinists always claimed if there are not enough products in the stores if authorities do not respond to people's demands and so on and so on then they always blamed the bureaucratic attitude of indifference and so on and so on. no wonder that from the late twenty s onwards stalin was writing attacks on bureaucracy on bureaucratic attitudes but i think that paradoxically what didn't function it's not that stalinism was too bureaucratic it wasn't bureaucratic enough nothing functioned bureaucracy didn't function really that's why stalinism had to live all the time through an emergency state stalinism is for me precisely the failure of bureaucracy. what does this mean for our world today uh. what happened in greece how did we end up where we are today and it's a very sad thing where are we this is maybe the best indication of the confusion of our predicament if you want today a minimal series series of measures which at least in some sense serve workers workers' interests students and so usually it's quite often right wing populist regimes who are the only ones who dare to do this for example in poland where you have the kaczynski brother, jan kaczynski, one of the two, the other died, the de facto ruler of poland. you know that now they enacted incredible set of reforms. they lowered retirement age, made it easier for students to get loans and so on, health care and all that. only a radically right-wing nationalist government can do this. and on the opposite, isn't it sad? that if you want the toughest austerity measures the best way to do it is a radical left party in power just imagine if in greece conservatives new democracy were to remain in power tsriza in opposition would have probably organised massive demonstrations and so on and so on with syriza doing the austerity measures the demoralisation is total. what went wrong i think that again that great disappointment you remember on one day two years ago when syriza won the referendum surprisingly for themselves i know from varouakis that tsipras was totally shocked he wanted honourably to lose the referendum they won the referendum literally one day later they capitulated i don't blame them i am not saying traitors and so on it's a real difficulty of the left today again the difficulty of the day after okay you triumph referendum but what to do the next day there is a narrative now emerging about greece. the idea is that when syriza was approaching power the tsipras leadership made a series of decisions not only about the political party line but also about the type of party. they needed they advocated the transformation of syriza from a coalition of disparate organisations and civil movements into a unified centralised party. the great number of members of its central committee made it sure that de facto decisions were made in advance in a narrow informal circle around tsras.. the so called paraenter of power so it is easy then to claim that the problem of syriza was that it became an alienated party elite running the state and that it lost contact with its social base civil movements trade unions protest movements and so on and so on and then the obvious solution is we should rejuven reunite this basis in popular movements but i think that this analysis is totally misleading where syriza failed is. not in simply accepting the. logic of state and abandoning its roots in civil movements but to find a new way how to reorganise the state.. it's not enough to say we have to keep always the pressure of the people the presence of grassroots organisations and so on and so on yes but what does this mean for the state itself how to reinvent the state itself because again as all great revolutionaries from robespierre to lenin and trotsky knew very well you cannot maintain a permanent emergency state with people have an attitude of permanent mobilisation we are always active' and so on and so on and so on again the problem is how to do it when things return to normal when people get tired of being permanently mobilised then you need maybe not the state we have it but you need some alienated mechanisms and i am not afraid of liking them listen now i will make a personal confession for which some of you will probably want to lynch me can you imagine me living in a small community where every afternoon we have to debate how we distribute water how how we do the kindergarten care for the children how this how that it would be hell for me i want to live in peace i i want to live my life of reading books watching movies writing about them and i simply want an efficient invisible mechanism to take care of all that and i don't think there is anything bourgeois or whatever in this the challenge is to build this in a different way outside the scope of capitalism and so on and so on i will even go a step further here when we talk about popular pressure popular mobilisation the long history of universal suffrage in the west shows that the vast majority of the people is as a rule passive caught in the inertia of survival not ready to be mobilised for some cause that is why every radical movement is always constrained to a vanguard minority and in order to gain hegemony it has to wait patiently for a crisis usually war which provides a narrow window of opportunity in such moments an authentic avantanguard can seize the day mobilise the people and take over and communists here and i am not criticising them i admire them are always utterly nonogmatic here ready to parasise on another issue remember that the october revolution gained support not with we want socialism' but with land and peace the chinese communist party its slogan was national liberation and unity against corruption so communists were always aware that mobilisation will be soon over and they were carefully preparing the power apparatus to keep them in power at that moment. so... this betrays another big problem of western marxism where is the revolutionary subject how is it? we that the working class does not complete the passage as we say in hegelian terms from in itself to for itself how is it that it doesn't constitute itself as a revolutionary agent this is why a very vicious remark all marxists really like very much psychoanalysis why they claim we have the best theory that explains economic crisis and so on but then this theory predicted the emergence of proletariat as a revolutionary agent. and then when you ask them, the communists, i'm one of them, by the way, when you ask them, but why is there no revolution, they say,, to explain this, we need psychoanalysis to describe the deep manipulation and so on and so on, whatever. for this reason western marxism was also all the time in search of a other social agents. which could play the role of the revolutionary agent student uh third world peasants intellectuals even and i think this is the lowest point with all my support for refugees this is why i find this horrible some of the leftists celebrate refugees why? their idea is this one we have good revolutionary theory we just don't have revolutionary agents. maybe if we import refugees they will fill in this gap and we will be able to make a revolution in western europe with enough refugees. i find this obscene it means like outsourcing the revolutionary subject you know we don't have a revolutionary subject we will import it e. so, uh... because of this. situation. we are today in a unique predicament. which is really tragic namely. let me return to marx marxism. was right about the so called final crisis of capitalism we are clearly entering it today i claim if you look at the signs all the problems we are encountering ecology refugees biogenetics financial capital and so on and so on my god even official ideologists like whom i really hate i think they are more dangerous than trump even these pseudogressive liberal corporate leaders like you know mark zuckerberg elon musk and so on this is the big slogan today capitalism is disappearing and so on they are right you know where marxism obviously went wrong the idea of marxism was that when capitalism will be disintegrating there will be another agent waiting to take over and bring capitalism to the higher stage. but today and this was unthinkable for marx we only have disintegration but... no progressive force taking it over or to put it in another way on the one hand and this is the tragic split. on the one hand we have all these protest movements against. capitalism. earth. against neocolonialism, against precarious workers and so on and so on. or protesting protesting how call it, when you don't have joblessness. sorry? yeah, yeah, but you know what's so sad here? first, let me ask you a common sense question. i never understood it why are people afraid of robotization that it will take them their jobs. isn't this wonderful? we will have to work less. this shows how deeply perverted our universe instead of saying fine work less' we see in this the extreme panic oh my god, we will lose our jobs. this is a very sad sign which shows that the left really doesn't have a vision. so again, at the same time that we have all these protest movements, we have, they were described at different levels, and these descriptions are way too naive. i don't trust them, but nonetheless, like paul mason, jeremiah rifkin and so on, they describe how capitalism is reaching its end. how through digitalisation market economy can no longer dominate the entire production and so on and so on. but so really we can see in these processes of digitalization, automatization already the roots of a post-capitalist world. but no link between this and most at least of the protest movements. so let me quote you. ger german sociologist who wrote a wonderful collection of essays called how will capitalism end? wolfgang streck with two is's. is it translated into spanishain? it's worth reading. here is a quote from him. it is a marxist, or better modernist prejudice that capitalism as a historical epoch will end only when a new, better society is in sight. and a revolutionary subject ready to implement it for the advancement of mankind this presupposes a degree of political control over our common fate of we cannot even dream after the destruction of collective agency and indeed the hope for it in the neoliberal globalist so again the disease of stre is yes capitalism is disintegrating but according to marxist doxa this disintegration should be the very moment of the rise of a new revolutionary subject which doesn't happen i'm not saying this is a spontaneous process the whole effort of today's ideology goes into what how does ideology today function. it appears precisely as its opposite as a radical critique of ideological utopias i think that the predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of some utopian future but a cynical resignation an acceptance of how the world really is the acceptance accompanied by a warning that if we want to change the world too much only a totalitarian horror can be the final result so every vision of another world is dismissed as ideology al badi you put it in a wonderful and precise way he wrote that the main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance this. the job of repressive state apparatuses but to crush hope to immediately denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which there is always something like good luck. and this let's call it post-ideological ideology ideology whose entire identity is based on denouncing every progressive hope as ideology this is how ideology functions today end. dysfunction of ideology also accounts for some strange events. taking place today what do you mean by this? uh. an old chinese curse is, it's not really chinese, it's just some englishman, i spoke with my chinese friends, some englishman claimed that he heard it in china, but nobody knows about this in china. okay. it's that. when you really hate someone you tell him may you live in interesting times' because interesting times are of course the times of troubles confusion and suffering it seems that in some of our democratic countries we are really witnessing now a strange phenomenon which proves that we live in interesting times did you notice how for example apropos macron in france a candidate emerges and wins elections as as it were from nowhere in a moment of confusion building a movement around his both berlusconi and macron i that like this. but what is this process a sign of definitely not. a sign of any kind of direct popular engagement beyond party politics on the contrary we should never forget that such figures explode with the full support of the social and economic establishment their function is precisely to obfuscate mystify actual social antagonisms people are magically united against some demonised fascist threat this weird phenomenon is i think one of the visible effects of the long term rearrangement of the political space in. europe today we no longer have two big parties as you also in spain you had them till some i don't know when five ten years ago you know left centre party right centre party and then you have some marginal parties but basically the two parties replace each other and all phenomena like trump like le pen and so on signal! in this direction this standard duality moderate left moderate right is disappearing more and more one party presents itself as what some people call a radical centre it's the party of status quo usually it's the party of global capitalism but at the same time socially very liberal they don't have any problem with pride parades of gay people with abortion and so on and so on this is the establishment and then again instead we have anti immigrant racism populism and so on and so on and you must have noticed what disappears here a more radical left. we saw this clearly in the case of macron in france i was also one of the marginal victims attacked there because while of course i agreed that le pen is a catastrophe i just wanted to signal that macron nonetheless stands for the establishment he is the candidate of the establishment and i i find it very sad that okay it's nice to say we need antiascist unity against marine le pen but it's very sad to see a candidate of pure establishment don't have any illusions the entire economic ideological journalistic tv establishment was full speed supporting macron and if you just hinted some critical point against him what happened was that you were immediately denounced as object objectively supporting marine le pen. some of my ex friends in france even invented the term le pen trotskyistes claiming that mellenchon is objectively working for marine le pen. how do this? movement look. already the names of this movement. sound familiar in their empty universality sorry fits everyone and everything berlusconiis motto forza italia. with macron it was la république on so they both designate just an abstract sense of victorious movement forward without any specification of the direction we should pursue both movements exploded as reactions of the establishment in a panic there is of course an obvious difference between the two berlusconi and macron. berlusconi entered the scene when, after the big anti-corruption campaign, the entire traditional political configuration in italy collapsed and ex-communists remained as the only viable force. berlusconi's mobilisation was against what he perceived in the establishment as a communist threat while macron entered the scene when le pen's neoofascist populism was perceived as potential winner. uh macron's role is best described by a word used by some of his supporters in the last years they claim marine le pen was gradually de-diabolised perceived as part of the normal acceptable populist political space and the task is to re diabolise her to make her diabolic again to show to the public that she is the same old antimitic fascist not to be tolerated by any serious democrat but i think such a gesture is not enough it's not enough to re diabolise le pen if we want to be serious we should do what the duty of the left is to ask how a phenomenon like le pen was possible what made it possible it's clear what made it possible the failure of the establishment of the predominant hegemonic politics so i think that when we have the battle like the one in france macron popular unity against the fascist threat of marine le pen i think we should always ask ourselves yes but who is missing from the picture a more radical left and i think that the true task of macron was not just to defeat marine le pen but to not just defeat to make disappear a more radical leftist option it's the same in the united states even hi. know what horror donald trump is but i claim that the... us democrats diabolize trump as the evil horror and so on in order to get rid of bernie sanders who? poses a threat to the. democratic establishment this is why although i don't doubt that there is truth in it but this is why we witness in the united states this weird obsession of the democratic party with russian hacking of the election probably there was some hacking but nonetheless the true failure was their own. dismissal of ch i claim hillary clinton lost because she got rid of bernie sanders' wing in her own party. and that's why you need trump as a russian agent so that the image remains we would have won only we lost because of putin and so on in this way we no longer have to ask critical questions it's just the objective situation another thing that is part of this new space that is emerging, populism versus establishment, is the saddest thing maybe i claim, is what some people call great regression, the rise of public obscenity. and here democrats in the united states were spectacularly wrong about trump did you notice something so weird how many times has trump said something which appeared catastrophic for liberals and then there were predictions oh trump just committed public suicide he is out you remember when his tapes were disclosed where trump is boasting how he was touching freely women between their legs or when he made fun of the father of an american war hero and so on all that how they were wrong democrats they thought now he is finished no he these apparent scandals just helped him why let's go to the end many of my friends even ask a question how can a corrupted lewd destitute person vulgar like donald trump the very opposite of christian decency how can he function as the chosen hero of the christian moral majority conservatives the usual answer that i hear is that they know what kind of a scamum moral conservatives trump is but they care just about one or two points of his programme he promised to for example abolish or at least limit abortion so they claim we don't care we know what kind of person he is but if he does this limit abortion it's a great thing and of course some other things but i don't think this is the case i think that something what more complex is at work here for which we need psychoanalytic theory of identification you know when trump made all these failures or mistakes vulgar remarks and so on brutal almost openly racist antieminist at that point people identified with him because what do they see in trump? a person who professes to be christian high principles but in reality he is a greedy sexist vulgar guy but these are neoconservatives today it is. they don't have to be disappointed in what trump is that's what they are. they identify precisely with both sides of trump so i think that i don't have time to go into it now that this should be a chance of the left today with people like trump and so on the left should emerge and i think if i'm well informed i don't know enough about you that podemos is trying up to a point to do this let us not leave to the right wingers a nice term there is nothing wrong in it about moral majority the only true moral majority is the left today with figures like trump and so on it's over let me give you another example of these public figures of great morality but where you see this other side of obscene vulgarity a friend from poland told me this and i was shocked poland's de facto ruler i already mentioned him sorry it's not jan jaroslaw kaczynski made an interview in one nine hundred and seven for the big liberal newspaper gazeta w borsca where when he described how his party will take over he used an incredibly vulgar exclamation and he didn't disown it afterwards he proudly insists on it he exclaimed in polish it means it's our fucking term but... i asked my polish friend and they claim that although the meaning of this phrase is it's our fucking time' now we are in power it's our turn' but the literal meaning of this phrase is something much more vulgar it's something like now it's our time to fuck the whore. like you know, this vulgar lower class idea a paid prostitute is laying and we wait, not the two of us. sorry well maybe you never know where we are. no, but sorry. we wait turn and you finish and then i say it's my turn. but it's important that this phrase was publicly uttered by a devout catholic conservative protector of christian morality and again i think this is precisely why people identify with him it's not that people think he is a great moral figure and then they are disappointed my god how no both sides are part of the hegemonic ideology okay just to amuse you a little bit it's incredible how communists in power also are not far behind with similar vulgarities for example it will shock you in his speech at the lan party conference in nin h hundred fifty nine just when it became clear that things are not doing well with the fiasco of the great leap forward the result is mass hunger millions dying and so on mao called the party cadre to assume their part of responsibility he said you know we failed with the great leap forward millions of farmers are dying we made serious mistakes' and he said that the greatest is my own responsibility especially for the unfortunate campaign to make steel still like still fact in every village. then then comes the surprise this is not one hidden part in the middle these are literally the last lines of his speech the chaos caused was on a grand scale the chaos of the great leap forward and i take responsibility comrades you must all analyse your own responsibility l now. if you have to cheat shit if you have to fart, fart, you will feel much better for it. end of it. now why this vulgar metaphor in what sense can the selfritical admission of one's responsibility for a serious mistake mistakes be compared to the need to shit and fart. i presume the solution is that for mao to take responsibility does not mean so much an expression of remorse which may even push me to offer to step down it's more that by doing it you get rid of responsibility so that. no wonder you feel much better for it like after a good cheat you don't admit you are shit you get rid of the sheet i mean... are you again, are you? that's the only way i can read are you aware of this utter vulgarity when mao is talking about his responsibility for the death of millions his metaphor for admission of guilt is like cheating farting do it you will feel better okay here we are if you allow me nonetheless slowly to come to an end so... what can we do in this sh. web. uh. obviously. the world is becoming one the functioning of our universe where. we have an inside and an outside i think that films like hunger games elysium' are basically right this is the world that is slowly emerging as a conservative peter schterijk but who i claim is not an idiot nonetheless developed the metaphor for today's new world order is that it is a global system but global also in the sense of cupola a globe and we are inside others are outside the idea that we the twenty maybe twenty five privileged live in our safe space and we look outside and then refugees of course are those who penetrate this barrier coming inside and so on and so on. this is true. one the other aspect which worries me today is that we were so used when we were younger years ago to critic western neoocolonialism how the notions of human rights and so on are really western imposition falsifying local imposing western values on third world cultures and so on and so on i think that something new is emerging now which worries me much more all. phenomena like modi in india putin erdogan and finally trump himself making pact with saudi arabia even china and so on demonstrate clearly that a new genuinely multicultural but multicultural in a terrible sense order is emerging where global market can be perfectly combined with each country orisation living in its own secluded world for example that is why it was easy for trump to make pact with saudi arabia and so on and so on the west even. resigned itself to accepting this it no longer the old naive fukuyama idea we have a vision global democracy we have to impose it onto the world no we can be good multiculturalists to each country its own values so while we can be feminists in our countries we shouldn't mess with other countries if they do horrible things to women and so on and so on in one of my recent texts maybe some of you know it i compared this to a strange phenomenon that i noticed with anti-semitism, how today the latest form of anti-semitism is zionist anti-semitism. i mean it quite literally. for example, you remember brik, the guy, the norwegian crazy guy who shot 80 social democratic young kids there. he was representative of this he said in israel we should fully support the jews they protect us from bar barbarism and so on but no jews here. so here we are anti semitic too many jews and so on jews control too much england america but there we should fully support them and i think what is emerging now with trump is something parallel not just anti semitic zionism but. islamophobic respect for islam look what trump is doing at the same time that he spreads this islamophobic paranoia in the united states he has no problem making deals with erdoan with saudi arabia and so on and so on so again it's a new totally cynical functioning of ideology which makes critical job very difficult you remember when american imperialism legitimized itself through human rights and all that it was relatively easy for us critics of ideology no but to see they are lying their universality of human rights is a false one it really privileges certain cultural features of western white masculine culture and so on and so on capitalism today no longer needs this what matters is universal market what you do at the level of so-called human rights is your problem. so that's why if you allow me some concluding remarks which will be even more problematic for you that's why and a little bit of philosophy in need also that's why. it is crucial today to find the right formula for how to relate the universal struggle for emancipation to the plurality of the ways of life because that's the problem today. we have. some people even don't like the term way of life' they claim it already sounds of fascism and so on but nonetheless i think that why are... so called ways of life effect. because they are not just ways of life in the sense of abstractacultural identity they are ways to organise regulate our and i use here this term in its full psychoanalytic lian sense juouissance excessive enjoyment enjoyment if you allow me to improvise a little bit here enjoyment is for me something like for laccon very paradoxical it is not the same as pleasure enjoyment is even usually enjoyment in pain enjoyment is how. through pain you deal with pleasure let me give you if you allow me a little bit of impression no don't tell a madman like me just go on because then okay did you read in your newspapers it was probably reported i checked it up with my friends in mexico and mexico is a wonderful country strong progressive movement i'm not against it i'm talking about specific examples. in some small city they want to be not politically correct but you know they want to unite with traditions i mean their ancient wisdom indigenous is so when you have minor crime acts they don't simply leave it to the state legal system they have some local reunions of old wise people who know old indigenous rules and they pass the judgment. so a scandal happened when an older guy raped a young girl and. there was a problem because these wise old people well vers in judicial justice passed a judgment and condemned the old guy. and the punishment was two. bye! to the father of the girl how do you call it a pe twelve bottles a pack of cans of beer and the feminists exploded and so on but the judges said, sorry, this is our old justice, this is our traditional way of life. and i think it's too easy to try to find your way out here because... i try to reconstruct let's go a little bit more in theory so that i don't tell just jokes and politics what was the judge's reasoning? okay, the judge was corrupted he was paid because sorry there is another case which is even worse a similar one et. a group of young people raped a girl and one of them was pardoned by the judge it was corruption but the reasoning is interesting one of them was pardoned by a judge because he's... no facts were disputed he admitted but he claimed i am not guilty because i didn't sexually enjoy it' so he admitted he in a vulgar way sezed the breasts of the girl pushed his fingers into her vagina but he said but i didn't penetrate her i wasn't aroused i didn't enjoy it' and the judge said no then you are not guilty it is i think hard to read this because in my naive some feminists may accuse me here i very naif here. although if he enjoyed it sexually while raping the girl, it's also has to be harshly punished. but i think for me at least it's just a tiny bit worse if you didn't enjoy it then my god why did you do it then? obviously just out of evil to hurt her or to impress your colleagues or whatever so i claim the premise of the judge was you can be. only guilty if you enjoyed it so enjoyment as such is, or pleasure etc as such is sinful, makes you guilty. uh. no! enjoyment, no guilt. but i think we should push this even a step further it's not enough to say no enjoyment no guilt we should even say no guilt no enjoyment' that is the perversity of some type of catholic morality if you just do it innocently you make love you it's pleasurable. but it's not real intense enjoyment to really enjoy it you must feel guilty here things get so complicated and i think to analyse all these paradoxes it is crucial to understand the deadlocks of our consumerism or whatever uh. for example something strange happened recently a friend of mine from the united states told me he observed a strange phenomenon when he entered a walmart mega store it was towards the end of the working day and when he exited the store he saw many of these shopping carts full of stuff but. abandoned there and he asked a seller there what's going on and the seller said these are the newly impoverished middle classes who. no longer can afford buying commodities there so they just as afternoon amusement, they go to the mega store. put things in the cart and then leave it there and just say this is a nice example of pure surplus enjoyment without pleasure that's what... lacon means by surplus enjoyment enjoyment in in a way... enjoyment in procedure itself the process itself provides enjoyment and our sexuality is always characterised by this paradox let me give you another example my good friend the british lacian half lian half kleinian psychoanalyst dian le told me a wonderful anecdote one of his patients told him of his patient's wonderful sleep of tongue he wanted to seduce a lady so he took a lady to a nice restaurant which was part of a hotel of course the idea was. i will first invite her to a nice dinner and then suggest why don't we go to a room upstairs but she made the mistake in entering the restaurant instead of saying a table for two please. he said a bed for two please. now comes the correct interpretation. it's not that his mind was already at sex. dya leader guessed in a wonderful way that it was the exact opposite. he was afraid. that he will enjoy too much. and and that he will forget where is the true duty you know. so it was more to remind himself be careful, don't enjoy here too much. and this eating in this sense is what lacanbe calls object object a the surplus enjoyment that it's necessary. like if you directly make love if you directly go to sex. it wouldn't have worked you need the obstacle that! this paradoxical structure of an obstacle which as an obstacle is a condition of what it is obstacle to is crucial let me give you another example i'm full of examples a lady from latin america who was maybe flirting with me told me that. when her last lover saw her naked, he told her that except for one or two kilos too much her body is perfect. and i immediately told her this lady, just don't lose those one of two kilos because it's true that those one of two kilos were too much but through being there as too much, they created. the illusion that without these two kilos too much, she would be perfect. but you see the paradox. you take two kilos too much away, you don't get perfect body. you get something totally non-interest. you see my logic? this is what laccon calls surplus enjoyment. you add something. which ruins the full pleasure but ruining it creates the phantom of full pleasure. and here i'm so sorry we don't have time to go into it because all my fun is here here. la enters la kenian analysis in in a specific way which i see as connected with.. connected with hegelian dialectics. why? an example that i like to use, i'm sorry if some of you know it already, an example that i like to use recently. perfect example of how pleasure functions. let's take coffee let's say you or me i will say you because i don't like it let's say you like coffee. there is a wonderful scene from the film, from one of the hollywood classics, ernst lubitch ninochka. a joke is told there. i'm sure if you know it, where everybody knows this joke. a guy enters a cafeteria and says... and says coffee but coffee without cream please and the waiter answers sorry' we don't have cream we only have milk so i cannot give you coffee without cream i can only give you coffee without milk and he was totally right because this is what hegel means by determinate negation although it's materially the same coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream so a simple coffee can be three different things coffee coffee coffee without cream coffee without milk and maybe you are a pervert i hope you are in this good sense that you really enjoy for some masochists reasons syria coffee without cream. but it has to be coffee without cream, not just coffee. and i would love you for, let's say you visit us and my wife or me, i'm here a good feminist, at least here, i bring you coffee and you protest, sorry, this is just coffee. where is the missing missing milk or cream. now you will say this is a joke. no, it's not. because in socialism where things were always missing in stores there was one of the wonderful jokes on these motives it's from poland this joke that somebody enters a store and asks them did you already get butter third like or you still don't have butter and the lady who is shelling rings there tells him sorry sir, you are in the wrong store. we are the store which doesn't have butter. no, we are the store which doesn't have let's say whatever sausages. across the street is the store which doesn't have butter and so on. so you see what i mean what is missing in its absence is part of the identity of what a thing is and i claim this is especially true for the way we enjoy maybe maybe enjoy. not just what we do but the right type of renunciation that's why... and that is i claim how ideology functions today it provides you it gives you coffee. but it claims it's coffee without milk. and so on this abstract spectral element is is absolutely crucial element called by lacon objects small a and so on another way to approach this pleasures and so on. you know where? enjoyment is inscribed in our way of life and this always fascinated me i would love to learn some examples how does this function here with you in spain because things are very specific here namely we all know that to be part of a certain community it's not enough just to know the rules in every community there are always meta rules which tell you what to do with explicit rules which rules you are allowed to violate or the opposite which is even more interesting which rules. offer you something but you are given a certain freedom on condition that you do't use this freedom i claim this although i generally don't always agree with him jacques dererrida in his reading of kafka that famous parable in front of the door of the law made this wonderfully that uh... law is not just simply the agency that prohibits at the most fundamental level law itself is itself prohibited prohibited to be announced. publicly if i may repeat an old joke if you allow me imagineagine we are in moscow in 35, i'm stalin. okay, what can i do? i give a speech. you have to otherwise you disappear you applaud okay then we have a debate one of you stands up and says i don't disagree with comrade stalin he made mistakes here okay the next day the big question would be who was the last one to see that guy alive of course but now let's imagine something much more horrible that then another guy stands up and starts to shout at the first guy are you crazy don't you know that we in the soviet union don't criticize stalin that it is prohibited my thesis is the second one would disappear even faster in stalinism it was not only prohibited to criticise stalin it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition if you just publicly announce this prohibition you ruin it there are prohibitions which function only in this way as nonannounced that's why i think critique of ideology is still actual today because today's ideology may appear just offering a scoop you know very simple direct cynical no no there is. at the level of what is left unsaid what is implied by it the situation is much more complex. okay so now let me really conclude so let me stop. for me the problem of a way of life is what there is a certain leftist vision of some of my friends with which i radically disagree the vision is this one. we have to be tolerant we have only to unite people at the level of basic economic political struggle but as to its specific way of life every community should be allowed its particular features. they are not a threat to the unity of humanity. they bring more wealth to it. you know we sing these songs, you sing those songs it's a wonderful wealth and so on and so on. my problem with these friends of mine is that this analysis works insofar as the examples that you use are this neutral one. we have our cuisine, you have your own. we have our songs, you have your own and so on but what really defines the way of life is i think the organisation of sexuality exchange of partners and relations of authority domination there i'm so sad i don't have time to go into this because this is especially actual today when while... it may appear that our capitalism is getting more and more financial abstract know things happen at the level of meta speculations with futures we do't know yes this is true but that is why as if because financial speculations get totally detached from the level of relations between the people direct relations of domination are violently coming back slavery is returning and so on and so on but okay that's another topic to conclude i just want to say this that. so let's take a community. let let me give you an example of what happened some fifteen twenty years ago in my own country roma in the sense of the bad word is gypsy girl escape from her home and took refuge with the police she was twelve years old claiming my father. wants to marry me to his friend, okay. then all the feminists supported her and so on and so on but then her father or what is i think some elder figure of the roma community made a very reasonable counterargument he said but listen arranged marriages between children by parents are the very base of how our community reproduces itself if you take this away from us in two three generations we disappear okay you can use us to play some band, to do some spicy food, but we survive as. folkloric entity but not a substantial community so you see the problem the problem is. that we cannot that is my point there are other examples for example in india i was always in trouble because i raised these questions of universality democracy critic caste system and it often happened to me that i was then criticised for imposing on them western imperialist notions some of my friends even defend caste system as part of their way of life, which again, i'm sorry, it's true. so what is my solution is my solution then that we should nonetheless impose on others our wter. falsely universal notions of women's rights authority no but we should admit something that this image of all of us participating in some universality while each of us keeps. its own way of life is wrong universality is inscribed as an inner antagonism into each of our ways of life it is part of it for example if in a certain community women rebel their role this is how universality appears within that community in saudi arabia it's a modest example but it's the beginning of something women who refuse not to drive who risk being arrested by driving cars it's universality the point the problem for me is this one there are no particular ways of life safely in their seclusion and so on and so on if they are they are precisely on account of their full inclusion into the global world order precisely in india the situation is so interesting do you know for example that the caste system was already disappearing in the seventeenth and eighth centuries and then when the british colonized india they got it immediately what our some multiculturalist idiots don't get it that the strategy of imperialism was never . become like us. no, they were horrified by these british colonizers. they knew that if all indians become like englishmen they would have class struggle. no, they want them to remain. so beshai the one of the most horrible ideological books that i know the laws of manu a system describing in detail the caste system was reprinted revitalised in the eighteen hundred hundred fortiesifties by the british colonizers precisely to keep the locals there in der. in their subjected position of being dominated so i think again that this is why i absolutely reject this idea global . capitalism is universal so the only way to undermine it by referring to our particular way of life indigenous traditions and so on and so on this is a very problematic and limited strategy for me no we should bring struggle into every particular way of life we should not say to saudi arabia you are primitive you have to accept our notions' but we should look where struggles are already going on there and they are going in india you have untouchables and so on you have people who radically reject caste system and so on in saudi arabia you have already protests and so on and so on so i claim that again universality is not this unesco universality i hate those unesco books on world culture you know like we are all one big family of humanity one culture sorry yeah this folkloric no each way of life each culture is in itself marked by an antagonism caught in a conflict between each particular identity and de facto force of universality which pro protests are always by definition authentic protests universal and to conclude you know probably this example of mine but i like it you know who is one of my big heroes of big revolutionaries. i forgot to mention it to you. malcolm x, you know why? i'm sorry to know this. because of x. he was a hegelian genius. i'm not bluffing. i met some people who met some people who knew him, and they confirmed this to me. you know what was for malcolm x, you know, denjelle washington in the film, so that i speak language which you understand. ex of course meant we were enslaved we were torn out of our particular context african roots but the genius of malcolm x was to reject this idea of so let's return to our roots' no. x was not just a sign of tragedy we are x we don't have family roots' no x was for malcolm x a new chance x means we are not rooted in particular identity we are free to reinvent our own universality which will be more authentically universal than white people western universality that's why we may disagree here with him malcolm x looked for this universality in islam so this is the crucial dimension today we can only fight global capitalism with an even stronger universality because every type of indigenism and so on always believe me fits perfectly global capitalism. you know who confirmed this to me? i love them they are among my best friends in the united states some of okay. officially we have to call them native americans or whatever they prefer indians the term. did i tell you my old joke why? one of them told me native americans i hate this term. it means we are nature and what are you white people cultural americans or what they claim if you call us indians at least our name is a sign a proof of white men's stupidity. you know you thought you were in india when you discovered but he told me this guy. something wonderful he told me you know which american tribes can afford to return to their roots only those who are lucky enough to have on their reservation mines minerals or casinos so that there they get the money to do it no i think that i see no contradiction in the fact that saudi arabia is at the same time it's you don't have to think about saudi arabia as a state it's like a big mafia family which deals with not so much oil as financial speculations and so on but at the same time conservative religiously and the two that's crucial fit perfectly together so i claim that the big problem today is to define a new universality i here a traditional marking capitalism result we should celebrate it still is that it dissolved or particular identities is opened up universality. we we have to go through as it were through this we have to the only path to freedom is through this proletarian position where you are deprived of your roots jacques dererrida quotes a wonderful jewish joke and i think we should take it seriously that on sabbat or whenever they do it in jews meet and have their confessions, prayers, whatever, it doesn't matter in their synagogue. and one wealthy jew says, oh god, i may be wealthy, but i'm nobody, i'm nothing. i'm nothing. that another jew, a famous singer, whatever, says, oh god, it's the same for me. i may be famous, blah, blah. but i am nothing and then a poor jew stands up and says, oh my god, i am also nothing. and then one rich jew says to the other, but who is this guy that he just thinks that he can say he is also nothing? you know is and they are right. they want the universality all was nothing. no, they were right. and here i also have a different attitude towards religion. i'm totally an atheistist. don't be afraid. but you know when marx said religion is the opium of the people, not for the people. he said of the people. he was not vulgar in the sense that some rich priests are inventing religion corrupted priests. you know, adorno already had this remark, and the other one i find it somewhere, which is the best answer to this. namely, the idea is this one. marx said religion is the opium of the people. but today there are two other opiums of the people you know which two opium and people many of us, you don't even need ethol, you have opium or some drugs, that's your opium and people themselves it's precisely this substantial populist notion. people in this anti immigrant refugee sense these are the true opiums of the people today and the only way to fight them is again new universality not this abstract universality human rights but the fighting universality how are you universal not by claiming we are part of a human species we contribute to it that's nothing you are universal where when you experience the contradiction the tension when you are not... you you are universal protest your particular identity which is why the universal subject as jacques laccon saw it clearly and here you have a link between politics and psychoanalysis the universal subject is hysterical subject what is hysteria at its most elementary you know louis altisser's theory of interpellation, like ideology interpellates you into something. you are a woman, a teacher, a christian, whatever. today you are enlightened buddhist hedonist's okay. the basic hysterical question is why am i what you are saying that i am this doubt about my own particular symbolic identity that's how feminism begins society is telling traditional patriarchal society to a woman you are this your role in the family blah blah blah and the simple question is why am i what you are saying that i am this here! when you start to raise this question you emerge as a universal subject i would even say you emerge as a cartesian cogito that's why there is so many interesting things in history of philosophy. you know this is the secret of descartes do you know that cartesian philosophy was extremely popular among women those rich women who were able to reach him. but immediately women saw one of the french women ladies immediately said why she likes the car. she said because cogito doesn't have a sex. the whole cartesian philosophy is based on this doubting my identity am i really what you are saying that i am that is why i am again so worried about this allegedly. emancipatory potential of identities like you know like i am bisexual or transgender and okay perfect but like, i think that. this statement has an emancipatory potential only if it echoes a universal dimension like if you say i am transgender and i suffer because of it but my suffering is in some way exemplary of what is wrong with our society of the falsity of universal functioning of sexual difference whatever and so on and so on i don't think that any particularity as such has emancipatory dimension in itself. gilles deleuze knew this, although he is a poet of this multidimensional whatever. gilles deleuze and to conclude really, believe me or not, i will conclude now that's why for example now it's fashionable to be for polyamory you know like not just one i love you you you no i am still for singular love you know why because this polyamory is simply particular i love you for this i love you for this and so on but i'm very romantic here true love is not this true love is not i like you for this but i have other needs so i need another partner or whatever' true love is a much more desperate radical stance true love means i want to be with you because i simply cannot survive without you it is total despair i cannot imagine my life outside without you and that's what today is more and more threatening this crazy radical love okay i could go on indefinitely but let's stop i am very grateful to you for your incredible patience in tolerating an obvious madman like me at least i will give you one final joke can you imagine some stupid student mine why stupid? because they told me oh professor you convinced me with your knowledge of lacon would you accept me as your patient you know well my answer is always double first if you think i could be your analyst with my obvious madness, then you really need psychiatric. and my second joke is with me talking all the time, can you really imagine me just listening to another person for more than... thank you very much. stop, stop! we are not yet in communism. when we will take over, you will have to applaud the leader. not now. now you can stop. okay.
Moderator
muchas gracias, sí, pediría a la organización, que no sé si está previsto, los traductores han tenido una tarde exigente, por si acaso hay preguntas en castellano, no sé si está prevista una traducción inversa. en caso de que fuese así, igual ayuda. gracias, sonia.
muchas gracias, sí, pediría a la organización, que no sé si está previsto, los traductores han tenido una tarde exigente, por si acaso hay preguntas en castellano, no sé si está prevista una traducción inversa. en caso de que fuese así, igual ayuda. gracias, sonia.
Slavoj Žižek
i also now no i cannot resist it an absolute vulgarity to conclude i was in argentina that's the finesse of my knowing spanish that you know the verb coer here it means just to look for, to search. in argentina, as you probably know, is the s-word. okay, so that's my preferred argentinian joke. one of you idiots, spanish, comes to argentina and asks, ¿d puedo coger un taxi? in words the argentinian answer, you can try into the exhaust fume.. that's the limit of my spanish.
i also now no i cannot resist it an absolute vulgarity to conclude i was in argentina that's the finesse of my knowing spanish that you know the verb coer here it means just to look for, to search. in argentina, as you probably know, is the s-word. okay, so that's my preferred argentinian joke. one of you idiots, spanish, comes to argentina and asks, ¿d puedo coger un taxi? in words the argentinian answer, you can try into the exhaust fume.. that's the limit of my spanish.
Moderator
let's see if it works. i'm going to summarize your talk in order to test if it works.
let's see if it works. i'm going to summarize your talk in order to test if it works.
Audience Member 6
okay.
okay.
Moderator
yeah.
yeah.
Audience Member 6
two, yes.
two, yes.
Moderator
and where is the voice?
and where is the voice?
Slavoj Žižek
channel no volume here yeah.
channel no volume here yeah.
Moderator
i think it's okay. i'm going to talk in spanish test. yes. m. bueno, mientras se ordena un poco el turno de preguntas, supongo que habrá un micrófono yo... querría insistir en el agradecimiento a gk por... por esta charla, la que ha puesto en juego... alggunurar de las claves de su pensamiento, la verdad es que es realmente placentero escuchar cómo se usa universal concreto, negación determinada o la diferencia entre placer y goce en laan y darle un uso político agudo y a la vez gracioso. en esta charla ha puesto en juego también lo importante de la revolución, que es la manera en la que... transforme de manera efectiva la vida cotidiana de las personas, que también me parece un acierto, me hacido, solo quería subrayar eso antes de dar paso a las preguntas, una charla muy representativa de su pensamiento, muy aguda y en la que, ya digo, ha puesto en juego algunas de las fórmulas que en filosofía tenemos problemas para explicar con ejemplos, lo hace, en mi opinión, con pertinencia y con agudeza y... de una manera muy graciosa y muy interesante, yo creo que ha movilizado algunos de los principales problemas, no solo de la izquierda, sino de los seres humanos, cómo gestionar el poder, cómo ganar el poder, cómo transformar nuestras vidas en un mundo en el que se ha fragmentado todo, se ha desactivado a veces la ilusión y la esperanza y ha denunciado muy bien el cinismo es siempre parte de una ideología conservadora. ya digo... creo que el protagonista es seli y ahora os toca a vosotros, entonces, bueno, no sé si hay preguntas, quizá el procedimiento de levantar la mano ahora micrófonos.
i think it's okay. i'm going to talk in spanish test. yes. m. bueno, mientras se ordena un poco el turno de preguntas, supongo que habrá un micrófono yo... querría insistir en el agradecimiento a gk por... por esta charla, la que ha puesto en juego... alggunurar de las claves de su pensamiento, la verdad es que es realmente placentero escuchar cómo se usa universal concreto, negación determinada o la diferencia entre placer y goce en laan y darle un uso político agudo y a la vez gracioso. en esta charla ha puesto en juego también lo importante de la revolución, que es la manera en la que... transforme de manera efectiva la vida cotidiana de las personas, que también me parece un acierto, me hacido, solo quería subrayar eso antes de dar paso a las preguntas, una charla muy representativa de su pensamiento, muy aguda y en la que, ya digo, ha puesto en juego algunas de las fórmulas que en filosofía tenemos problemas para explicar con ejemplos, lo hace, en mi opinión, con pertinencia y con agudeza y... de una manera muy graciosa y muy interesante, yo creo que ha movilizado algunos de los principales problemas, no solo de la izquierda, sino de los seres humanos, cómo gestionar el poder, cómo ganar el poder, cómo transformar nuestras vidas en un mundo en el que se ha fragmentado todo, se ha desactivado a veces la ilusión y la esperanza y ha denunciado muy bien el cinismo es siempre parte de una ideología conservadora. ya digo... creo que el protagonista es seli y ahora os toca a vosotros, entonces, bueno, no sé si hay preguntas, quizá el procedimiento de levantar la mano ahora micrófonos.
Audience Member 4
hello, thank you. i'm speaking in english, so you can take... thank you for all your fantastic ideas and the ideas of the madman. i agree with most of them. i agree, no, well, i agree no, there's no but. i just want to ask you, because... your ideas about the universalism. i'm just wanting to know if you agree with something i've deduced from that.. because you're also a lover of cinema. uh... thinking of a future politics, what kind of plan can we use to drive us, what kind of purpose can there be for this future ideology? universal ideology and my idea is that it could be star trek. it could be for star trek.
hello, thank you. i'm speaking in english, so you can take... thank you for all your fantastic ideas and the ideas of the madman. i agree with most of them. i agree, no, well, i agree no, there's no but. i just want to ask you, because... your ideas about the universalism. i'm just wanting to know if you agree with something i've deduced from that.. because you're also a lover of cinema. uh... thinking of a future politics, what kind of plan can we use to drive us, what kind of purpose can there be for this future ideology? universal ideology and my idea is that it could be star trek. it could be for star trek.
Slavoj Žižek
ayarse.
ayarse.
Audience Member 4
yeah, that's star trek. the first thing about star trek is how do we get to the star trek civilization? i i think the first thing you have to do is abolish money so we have to go beyond the pragmatism that we have today of that money is important and then we can use our robots and everything and we don't have to work, as you mentioned before.
yeah, that's star trek. the first thing about star trek is how do we get to the star trek civilization? i i think the first thing you have to do is abolish money so we have to go beyond the pragmatism that we have today of that money is important and then we can use our robots and everything and we don't have to work, as you mentioned before.
Slavoj Žižek
it is a wonderful question which means that it's a difficult question about universality i must clarify one possible misunderstanding uh. i was not advocating universality in the sense of raising to a higher level abstracting from our particular condition. look, i don't like salman rdi too much he went way too much into liberalism for me but once he did give and even not here but in bilbao so for the time being still part of spain she gave a wonderful answer to the question somebody accused him of uh. not being faithful to his indian roots to you know being too much now part of the liberal london united kingdom tradition and then he said something wonderful there i do admire him he said that, uh... no, it's not true. two great indian writers were an absolutely crucial influence on him which two? jane austen and charles dickens. and he explained this wonderfully he said charles dickens's oliver twist all those poor kids wandering that suburbs of bombay today that's the best image and he said these upper middle class families fighting who will marry whom this is jane austen and so on that is for me the true universality let us take shakespeare for example true universality is not you abstract from concrete conditions true universality is how a work of art which is very specific clearly rooted in certain historical situation can be. wonderfully can be reborn in another context where it works in. wonderful way and this is i think for example the wonder of shakespeare for me, how you can get then a romantic, a modern, whatever, all harblez you can get, all others you can get. so again, this is for me universality. the miracle is that to be a universal writer, you don't have to think about, my god, this is too much rooted in my context, how will i will make it to more universal. if you do this, it will be absolutely proven. you can be sure, you know. you must be absolutely particular in your world but in a way which from within finds echo in other works and so on and so on that would be just the point about universality what you said about. all this... uh. i must say i confess my sin nobody is perfect don't kill me for this. i was never able to really integrate towards really star trek so you can but i must tell you something else that and this is not star trek i am talking about another thing some people think that all this catastrophic! science movies you know all this variation of there is some either civil war atomic explosion whatever and. the old civilization is wiped out and. out of its ruins a newisation will emerge' i don't think there is anything progressive in it i think it's precisely rad radical capitalist dream to begin from the zero point because then what emerges is exactly the same society as the old one just purified of its sins or whatever there is even another thing and i want to provoke you here another example of jouissance much more problematic now now watch okay the first season is did you watch that famous margaret atwood novel it was a movie now handmade tale okay let me provoke you with something i enjoyed it but all of a sudden i caught myself enjoying it too much and i asked myself, okay, all liberals could enjoy it, have... official justification for it it's a warning it shows dark potential of christian conservative
it is a wonderful question which means that it's a difficult question about universality i must clarify one possible misunderstanding uh. i was not advocating universality in the sense of raising to a higher level abstracting from our particular condition. look, i don't like salman rdi too much he went way too much into liberalism for me but once he did give and even not here but in bilbao so for the time being still part of spain she gave a wonderful answer to the question somebody accused him of uh. not being faithful to his indian roots to you know being too much now part of the liberal london united kingdom tradition and then he said something wonderful there i do admire him he said that, uh... no, it's not true. two great indian writers were an absolutely crucial influence on him which two? jane austen and charles dickens. and he explained this wonderfully he said charles dickens's oliver twist all those poor kids wandering that suburbs of bombay today that's the best image and he said these upper middle class families fighting who will marry whom this is jane austen and so on that is for me the true universality let us take shakespeare for example true universality is not you abstract from concrete conditions true universality is how a work of art which is very specific clearly rooted in certain historical situation can be. wonderfully can be reborn in another context where it works in. wonderful way and this is i think for example the wonder of shakespeare for me, how you can get then a romantic, a modern, whatever, all harblez you can get, all others you can get. so again, this is for me universality. the miracle is that to be a universal writer, you don't have to think about, my god, this is too much rooted in my context, how will i will make it to more universal. if you do this, it will be absolutely proven. you can be sure, you know. you must be absolutely particular in your world but in a way which from within finds echo in other works and so on and so on that would be just the point about universality what you said about. all this... uh. i must say i confess my sin nobody is perfect don't kill me for this. i was never able to really integrate towards really star trek so you can but i must tell you something else that and this is not star trek i am talking about another thing some people think that all this catastrophic! science movies you know all this variation of there is some either civil war atomic explosion whatever and. the old civilization is wiped out and. out of its ruins a newisation will emerge' i don't think there is anything progressive in it i think it's precisely rad radical capitalist dream to begin from the zero point because then what emerges is exactly the same society as the old one just purified of its sins or whatever there is even another thing and i want to provoke you here another example of jouissance much more problematic now now watch okay the first season is did you watch that famous margaret atwood novel it was a movie now handmade tale okay let me provoke you with something i enjoyed it but all of a sudden i caught myself enjoying it too much and i asked myself, okay, all liberals could enjoy it, have... official justification for it it's a warning it shows dark potential of christian conservative
Audience Member 4
frankly when i watch it
frankly when i watch it
Slavoj Žižek
i'm absolutely fascinated how this world functions and i like all the details how you know women. sh. women not allowed to read so how they communicate these dead and basically, it's a strange fascination and i don't think it's critical. i think that this is often the problem with movies who like to portray evil but do it in a suspicious fascinated way. for example, do you remember that oliver stone movie which was famous20 years ago wall street. the bad guy, michael douglas, you know, greeted all those. legendary statements which become part of the common wisdom from the film like if you need a friend buy yourself a dog greed is good whatever it- they are pronounced by the bad guy, officially you're supposed to. i see him michael douglas as horror but he is absolutely the only fascinating person end... they're cl i find it has to be done i think there is something absolutely wrong in this fascination this secret fascination with evil
i'm absolutely fascinated how this world functions and i like all the details how you know women. sh. women not allowed to read so how they communicate these dead and basically, it's a strange fascination and i don't think it's critical. i think that this is often the problem with movies who like to portray evil but do it in a suspicious fascinated way. for example, do you remember that oliver stone movie which was famous20 years ago wall street. the bad guy, michael douglas, you know, greeted all those. legendary statements which become part of the common wisdom from the film like if you need a friend buy yourself a dog greed is good whatever it- they are pronounced by the bad guy, officially you're supposed to. i see him michael douglas as horror but he is absolutely the only fascinating person end... they're cl i find it has to be done i think there is something absolutely wrong in this fascination this secret fascination with evil
Audience Member 4
i... also, i find okay, i will not go into it.
i... also, i find okay, i will not go into it.
Slavoj Žižek
but what i'm saying is that even when hollywood appears at its relatively progressive and so on. it's usually very suspicious that's why i don't like what i ironically call hollywood marxism you know all those movies about the end of the world or whatever but there is something wrong in the very fascination with this evil world and so on so one way to counteract it would have been i wonder so if i can... repair a little bit of shocking cultural lack but don't worry that's how i treat my son you know i told him. if you don't know who wrote oipus or divina comedia buff it's okay but if you don't know the difference between the first and second version of hitchcock's the man who knew too much you are out you know. so along at the same level. with uh... science fiction and all these mythic worlds you know what would really interest me to do don't now denounce me as a stalinist but for example it is my old temptation i warn you torote okay i don't have billions to reshoot it star wars presenting palpatine and darth vader as good progressive egalitarian centralist fighting reactionary feudalists all those jedi bullshit particulars tout. do tell totally the opposite story from the other's point, what if what do they stand for all that republic blah blah what strange of republic is republic when you have princess leia knights kings and so on no palpatine the emperor and dartth vader they are my god progressive bonapartist revolutionaries trying to get rid of the old world you know that this is my old obsession just to to turn it around you know in this sense for example i liked i... i sorry? ugh. you know what i'm afraid of? let me answer you with one of my i'm sorry if you know it one of my favorite stalinist jokes it's a joke from the soviet union in the mid thirties, precisely this. they have a debate, that's the joke they have a debate in 35 in politburo, will there be money in communism or not? then you have right-wingers, bukhharin pupils who claim of course it has to be money it's natural to have money you cannot exchange commodities. then the left-wingers, some followers still there of trotsky say no money is alienation in communism no money. then comrade stalin intervenes and says you are both wrong here we have right wing deviation and left wing deviation the truth is, as they say in stalinism, dialectical synthesis of the opposites. in communism, there will be money and there will not be money. okay. then they ask him. but comrade stalin, how do you mean this? and you can guess what stalin says. very simply, some people will have money, other people will not have money. no, but... quite seriously now i agree with you people who think we cannot get beyond money and so on are wrong if something is happening read authors who are way too simple like paul mason or jeremiah riskin but they see some tendency which is that exactly with what they call internet of things and this zero reproduction when you can reproduce a phenomenon without additional costs that money no longer functions because look with this glass of water money and competition works because if i drink it, you will not drink it and vice versa. but knowledge is not money. if you know it, i don't lose any of my knowledge. maybe you will say something and you will even more knowledge and so on. so i effectively think that now what is happening with this digitalisation and so on paradoxically is a way where money no longer can play its role which is why as we see intellectual property is i think one of the unsolvable problems for capitalism they will not be able to commodify so called intellectual property the problem that i see is another one that i already hinted at whatever we say about money and marx was aware of it it has won i wouldn't say a good feature but death. we no longer have direct relations of domination we don't need them because you can dominate me through money and so on but that's why we have at least formal freedom and so on the danger is that if you abolish money or limit its role in the wrong way direct personal relations of domination will violently return did this happen for example in the soviet union yeah. there was money but de facto money was limited for example you had a certain salary but this didn't really matter under stalinism what matters is for example if you were a top scientist you get special allowances where you go for a holiday or it was the whole parallel distribution of wealth done outside the market in a different way that's what i see as a problem debt. it's how to abolish money without returning to some form of direct relations of domination the sorry, i let you go, okay.
but what i'm saying is that even when hollywood appears at its relatively progressive and so on. it's usually very suspicious that's why i don't like what i ironically call hollywood marxism you know all those movies about the end of the world or whatever but there is something wrong in the very fascination with this evil world and so on so one way to counteract it would have been i wonder so if i can... repair a little bit of shocking cultural lack but don't worry that's how i treat my son you know i told him. if you don't know who wrote oipus or divina comedia buff it's okay but if you don't know the difference between the first and second version of hitchcock's the man who knew too much you are out you know. so along at the same level. with uh... science fiction and all these mythic worlds you know what would really interest me to do don't now denounce me as a stalinist but for example it is my old temptation i warn you torote okay i don't have billions to reshoot it star wars presenting palpatine and darth vader as good progressive egalitarian centralist fighting reactionary feudalists all those jedi bullshit particulars tout. do tell totally the opposite story from the other's point, what if what do they stand for all that republic blah blah what strange of republic is republic when you have princess leia knights kings and so on no palpatine the emperor and dartth vader they are my god progressive bonapartist revolutionaries trying to get rid of the old world you know that this is my old obsession just to to turn it around you know in this sense for example i liked i... i sorry? ugh. you know what i'm afraid of? let me answer you with one of my i'm sorry if you know it one of my favorite stalinist jokes it's a joke from the soviet union in the mid thirties, precisely this. they have a debate, that's the joke they have a debate in 35 in politburo, will there be money in communism or not? then you have right-wingers, bukhharin pupils who claim of course it has to be money it's natural to have money you cannot exchange commodities. then the left-wingers, some followers still there of trotsky say no money is alienation in communism no money. then comrade stalin intervenes and says you are both wrong here we have right wing deviation and left wing deviation the truth is, as they say in stalinism, dialectical synthesis of the opposites. in communism, there will be money and there will not be money. okay. then they ask him. but comrade stalin, how do you mean this? and you can guess what stalin says. very simply, some people will have money, other people will not have money. no, but... quite seriously now i agree with you people who think we cannot get beyond money and so on are wrong if something is happening read authors who are way too simple like paul mason or jeremiah riskin but they see some tendency which is that exactly with what they call internet of things and this zero reproduction when you can reproduce a phenomenon without additional costs that money no longer functions because look with this glass of water money and competition works because if i drink it, you will not drink it and vice versa. but knowledge is not money. if you know it, i don't lose any of my knowledge. maybe you will say something and you will even more knowledge and so on. so i effectively think that now what is happening with this digitalisation and so on paradoxically is a way where money no longer can play its role which is why as we see intellectual property is i think one of the unsolvable problems for capitalism they will not be able to commodify so called intellectual property the problem that i see is another one that i already hinted at whatever we say about money and marx was aware of it it has won i wouldn't say a good feature but death. we no longer have direct relations of domination we don't need them because you can dominate me through money and so on but that's why we have at least formal freedom and so on the danger is that if you abolish money or limit its role in the wrong way direct personal relations of domination will violently return did this happen for example in the soviet union yeah. there was money but de facto money was limited for example you had a certain salary but this didn't really matter under stalinism what matters is for example if you were a top scientist you get special allowances where you go for a holiday or it was the whole parallel distribution of wealth done outside the market in a different way that's what i see as a problem debt. it's how to abolish money without returning to some form of direct relations of domination the sorry, i let you go, okay.
Audience Member 1
there are more questions maybe. yeah. hello, là. here. sorry i'm going to make the call.
there are more questions maybe. yeah. hello, là. here. sorry i'm going to make the call.
Slavoj Žižek
you see, you are on the center left, from radical left, sorry to no, radical right, whatever, sorry please, yes. okay, i'm going
you see, you are on the center left, from radical left, sorry to no, radical right, whatever, sorry please, yes. okay, i'm going
Audience Member 1
to make the question spanish if you don't care because
to make the question spanish if you don't care because
Slavoj Žižek
oh, okay,.
oh, okay,.
Audience Member 1
okay. bueno, cuando has... al principionc de la charla de este día después de ub de vendeta parte 2, se me viene a la cabeza una batalla que ha habido aquí en españa con podemos. hace un tiempo, hace unos meses, se disputó una batalla en la que había básicamente un bando que defendía, a grandes rasgos, una... una apuesta por la institución una apuesta porque el cambio solo se consolidaría si se institucionalizaba. y bla bla bla otro bando que quizás era más apegado a la manifestación, a la ebullición social, ¿. cre creo que se llegó a un equilibrio a una especie de armonía entre estas dos partes una que te permitía consolidar cambios pero por otro lado te obligaba a estar en permanente contacto con. con la sociedad y no burocratizarte del todo. en tu opinión no sé si alegas por una burocracia absoluta en la que ni siquiera haya una parte apegada a las manifestaciones, a los movimientos sociales, etctera. y en ese caso cómo podrían... ¿cómo podría no surgir de nuevo la queja que dio inicio podemos, que era quizá la apelación a unas élites que se habían separado demasiado del pueblo? ¿cómo podría? no volver a surgir otro podemos debido a esta burocracia total. thank you.
okay. bueno, cuando has... al principionc de la charla de este día después de ub de vendeta parte 2, se me viene a la cabeza una batalla que ha habido aquí en españa con podemos. hace un tiempo, hace unos meses, se disputó una batalla en la que había básicamente un bando que defendía, a grandes rasgos, una... una apuesta por la institución una apuesta porque el cambio solo se consolidaría si se institucionalizaba. y bla bla bla otro bando que quizás era más apegado a la manifestación, a la ebullición social, ¿. cre creo que se llegó a un equilibrio a una especie de armonía entre estas dos partes una que te permitía consolidar cambios pero por otro lado te obligaba a estar en permanente contacto con. con la sociedad y no burocratizarte del todo. en tu opinión no sé si alegas por una burocracia absoluta en la que ni siquiera haya una parte apegada a las manifestaciones, a los movimientos sociales, etctera. y en ese caso cómo podrían... ¿cómo podría no surgir de nuevo la queja que dio inicio podemos, que era quizá la apelación a unas élites que se habían separado demasiado del pueblo? ¿cómo podría? no volver a surgir otro podemos debido a esta burocracia total. thank you.
Slavoj Žižek
no, i see you're sorry. i see the problem here and maybe the answer will not satisfy you but let me first begin with an observation you know maybe i missed something so i want to be very careful here. on the one h! i see this idea of if you simply accept the power game you become just another political party ossified and so on and so on' but what i'm no less afraid of is that if you say let's stay outside in our local communities and so on and so on that is for me a too easy solution you leave the power to itself if you don't have a concrete vision of what to do in the long term with state power. that is what maybe you can help me i am very sincere here with all my absolute sympathies for podemos and so on that is where i don't see okay but maybe even i am too violent here to ask this question what i don't see is maybe too violent but what does want does it want power or not if it doesn't want power then what does it want does it want to be just some kind of a critical corrective to power? okay let me put it in another way let's say that through some miracle whatever the last elections podemos won and through some other small leftist groups it takes power what would be done then? would it say no sorry guys we don't want to become part of institutional's power we just step down' or what if they were to stay in power how would they have done it but uh... my solution here is why is not that we have clearly to take to take sides here i think just be ruthless we want everything let's keep social movements and let's grab power wherever we can i think we should avoid this dilemma as if you know we have to choose clearly for example i will not name them but i think one of the most tragic things is i will not name them but some very well known leftists today big names when you speak with them privately they give you a very sad vision they claim that eh. simply. the fact that even if we have a crisis now there is no revolutionary potential and so on means that we cannot change anything in a democratic way so the only thing is to seed down getting ready and be prepared for some big catastrophe war or ecological catastrophe which will give us a chance to grab power to take over and some of them i will not name them even went a step further and whispered into my ear but maybe we should organise this incident we should maybe risk hundreds of thousands of lives to trigger a mega i don't know nuclear reactor or whatever
no, i see you're sorry. i see the problem here and maybe the answer will not satisfy you but let me first begin with an observation you know maybe i missed something so i want to be very careful here. on the one h! i see this idea of if you simply accept the power game you become just another political party ossified and so on and so on' but what i'm no less afraid of is that if you say let's stay outside in our local communities and so on and so on that is for me a too easy solution you leave the power to itself if you don't have a concrete vision of what to do in the long term with state power. that is what maybe you can help me i am very sincere here with all my absolute sympathies for podemos and so on that is where i don't see okay but maybe even i am too violent here to ask this question what i don't see is maybe too violent but what does want does it want power or not if it doesn't want power then what does it want does it want to be just some kind of a critical corrective to power? okay let me put it in another way let's say that through some miracle whatever the last elections podemos won and through some other small leftist groups it takes power what would be done then? would it say no sorry guys we don't want to become part of institutional's power we just step down' or what if they were to stay in power how would they have done it but uh... my solution here is why is not that we have clearly to take to take sides here i think just be ruthless we want everything let's keep social movements and let's grab power wherever we can i think we should avoid this dilemma as if you know we have to choose clearly for example i will not name them but i think one of the most tragic things is i will not name them but some very well known leftists today big names when you speak with them privately they give you a very sad vision they claim that eh. simply. the fact that even if we have a crisis now there is no revolutionary potential and so on means that we cannot change anything in a democratic way so the only thing is to seed down getting ready and be prepared for some big catastrophe war or ecological catastrophe which will give us a chance to grab power to take over and some of them i will not name them even went a step further and whispered into my ear but maybe we should organise this incident we should maybe risk hundreds of thousands of lives to trigger a mega i don't know nuclear reactor or whatever
Audience Member 3
two to triga.
two to triga.
Slavoj Žižek
it. so, uh... my position here is, you know what? don't get caught in these abstract dilemmas i would say of course the situation is contradictory but that's politics try everything on the other hand if you can keep alive these social based civil society networks wonderful but why not nonetheless grab power wherever you can it's possible to combine them. i will give you an example a good friend of mine and also that's why he's good friend of mine i'm a monster i only have good friends who are theorists alvaro garcia linera the vice president of bolivia he plays wonderfully this game the... theyvo morales regime they try to keep alive their social contact base and so on but they are at the same time aware of the critical limitations of this you know for example linera told me don't trust too much all those native tribes they get corrupted most of them he told me and so on but at the same time they use brutally where they can central state power power. i think our ideal should not be either or why not all why not have strong state power and social movements i think it can be done even... gut populistisch! sometimes succeeded in doing it. so again. uh. another thing i tried to develop lately is that there are many this is my hope if you say a big revolution it's a cheap position it means basically nothing you know but isn't the art to in each concrete society in each situation to ask something that would have been for me today an ideal political act to act to choose a topic, a task. which appears as innocent as possible but in reality it can trigger a big process this is at this level and i have no illusions about obama that's the example i often use obama health nothing revolutionary he was able to say wait a minute most of europe has it canada has it but it was such a trauma for the united states that now the first thing trump is doing is to repeal it and so on and so on. so in one of my texts i use this example of science fiction where you know you enter a room with many buttons but then you press the wrong button and the whole room disintegrates like it's the prohibited button we should find these good appropriate particular demands like again in the united states where they are obsessed with their own individualist notion of freedom and so on and so on universal healthcare was obviously a way too provocative idea so again we should do things like this find issues which are apparently modest nobody can accuse you of anything but they trigger process these are the real changes i claim.. not if you immediately opt for a big change de facto it means nothing because it means let's comfortably wait so my defence of podemos would have been that. this dilemma debate that you presented this is our predicament today on the one hand we cannot simply say we will enjoy our comfortable position of true civil society because this de facto means let's have the state the way it is no we don't do this but also we must be aware of the limits of state power and we have to find a way with this contradiction again the main point for me would be to reject this as a choice why not have it both the best political motto for me is still i think the english have one proverb like this coffee or tea yes please state power or civil society yes please
it. so, uh... my position here is, you know what? don't get caught in these abstract dilemmas i would say of course the situation is contradictory but that's politics try everything on the other hand if you can keep alive these social based civil society networks wonderful but why not nonetheless grab power wherever you can it's possible to combine them. i will give you an example a good friend of mine and also that's why he's good friend of mine i'm a monster i only have good friends who are theorists alvaro garcia linera the vice president of bolivia he plays wonderfully this game the... theyvo morales regime they try to keep alive their social contact base and so on but they are at the same time aware of the critical limitations of this you know for example linera told me don't trust too much all those native tribes they get corrupted most of them he told me and so on but at the same time they use brutally where they can central state power power. i think our ideal should not be either or why not all why not have strong state power and social movements i think it can be done even... gut populistisch! sometimes succeeded in doing it. so again. uh. another thing i tried to develop lately is that there are many this is my hope if you say a big revolution it's a cheap position it means basically nothing you know but isn't the art to in each concrete society in each situation to ask something that would have been for me today an ideal political act to act to choose a topic, a task. which appears as innocent as possible but in reality it can trigger a big process this is at this level and i have no illusions about obama that's the example i often use obama health nothing revolutionary he was able to say wait a minute most of europe has it canada has it but it was such a trauma for the united states that now the first thing trump is doing is to repeal it and so on and so on. so in one of my texts i use this example of science fiction where you know you enter a room with many buttons but then you press the wrong button and the whole room disintegrates like it's the prohibited button we should find these good appropriate particular demands like again in the united states where they are obsessed with their own individualist notion of freedom and so on and so on universal healthcare was obviously a way too provocative idea so again we should do things like this find issues which are apparently modest nobody can accuse you of anything but they trigger process these are the real changes i claim.. not if you immediately opt for a big change de facto it means nothing because it means let's comfortably wait so my defence of podemos would have been that. this dilemma debate that you presented this is our predicament today on the one hand we cannot simply say we will enjoy our comfortable position of true civil society because this de facto means let's have the state the way it is no we don't do this but also we must be aware of the limits of state power and we have to find a way with this contradiction again the main point for me would be to reject this as a choice why not have it both the best political motto for me is still i think the english have one proverb like this coffee or tea yes please state power or civil society yes please
Moderator
siento ejercer de polo, pero me piden que solo haya una pregunta más. se me ocurre, veo al menos dos manos ahora, si podéis ser breves, quizá podamos unir las dos. por ir una a cada lado y... que se conteste en... no.
siento ejercer de polo, pero me piden que solo haya una pregunta más. se me ocurre, veo al menos dos manos ahora, si podéis ser breves, quizá podamos unir las dos. por ir una a cada lado y... que se conteste en... no.
Audience Member 3
okay.
okay.
Moderator
hacemos, sí, se os parece, porque 3 es un número... viaécticicamente.
hacemos, sí, se os parece, porque 3 es un número... viaécticicamente.
Slavoj Žižek
i know, i know what i will do. i will give you some zen buddhist shit, you know, like my answer will be, listen to my silence or clap with one hand, you know like sorry, please give me the answer. the question. i must ask.
i know, i know what i will do. i will give you some zen buddhist shit, you know, like my answer will be, listen to my silence or clap with one hand, you know like sorry, please give me the answer. the question. i must ask.
Moderator
hacemos una cosa, hay muchas. por favor tres seguidas breves y que las conteste en la medida que sea posible de manera unificada.
hacemos una cosa, hay muchas. por favor tres seguidas breves y que las conteste en la medida que sea posible de manera unificada.
Audience Member 3
okay, so you were talking about the problem about we can want both things, okay, both the state and like the social movements or whatever.
okay, so you were talking about the problem about we can want both things, okay, both the state and like the social movements or whatever.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
Audience Member 3
but there's one problem with bureaucracy and with the huge level of bureaucracy in which we live since mainly after the second world war or whatever, that is that the same bureaucratic state destroys a lot of the stuff that you need to be a leftist. like, for example, this capacity to have a strong individual being. i think we feel overwhelmed by bureaucracy. and i feel that you see this conflict inside politics, not just inside the conflict between left and right, but also you see the conflict inside the same left.
but there's one problem with bureaucracy and with the huge level of bureaucracy in which we live since mainly after the second world war or whatever, that is that the same bureaucratic state destroys a lot of the stuff that you need to be a leftist. like, for example, this capacity to have a strong individual being. i think we feel overwhelmed by bureaucracy. and i feel that you see this conflict inside politics, not just inside the conflict between left and right, but also you see the conflict inside the same left.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
Audience Member 3
because the people who want to rule are the main ones who want to destroy the movements. so what happened with that? what happened when you can't have coffee and tea because coffee and tea are struggling between themselves.
because the people who want to rule are the main ones who want to destroy the movements. so what happened with that? what happened when you can't have coffee and tea because coffee and tea are struggling between themselves.
Slavoj Žižek
okay. no, but nonetheless, please, it would be, let's go a little bit longer because i would like to answer you directly. okay, bason, very brutally. what would you have done here? what's your solution here? i think you have to strive for confidence because what will you say? people who want to rule want to destroy us so okay, what's then your solution? i have a very naive solution that get the people who will rule us in such a way that they will not destroy us. it's a very naive position but i think because then the only solution is. let's not rule which means another maybe even worse people will rule and that's what i want absolutely to avoid this comfortable position people rule there while we are comfortably in a civil society our hands have to get totally dirty with ruling i'm not afraid of that but when you said bureaucracy and so on on listen. i don't think that bureaucracy cannot look at a country like switzerland. i don't idealize. it's a proto-fascist country or whatever. but nonetheless, it did succeed, or some other countries like norway and so on. as far as i can see, they did succeed in bringing together a certain level of civil society mobilization with very efficient democracy. bureaucracy. and even now comes my paradox when there is a conflict between the two i'm often even on the side of bureaucracy don't forget that because of this popular tradition of civil society in switzerland women got the right to vote only in the mid sixties or whatever sorry seventy71 even yes. so you see what i am afraid of i am afraid of if you say those who rule. want to lead. want to destroy us the problem i'm not saying that we should use the state the way it is we should transform it and so on but i think the battle is not lost because with the complexity of today's situation.. we need some type of okay maybe bureaucracy is not the right word by bureaucracy i simply mean a complex structure of administration which is not totally transparent to us local people i find here many solutions and maybe it will bring me a lot of trouble if i name them one solution would be an inverted stalinist one death. two. have what stalin was doing but in not such a terrorist way be aware when you have people who lead you that there are also other people who control these people support factional struggles a little bit of terror not against the people but against those who lead us. i think that this is a nice tradition of some progressive states where okay you lead but usually you will lose your head for it that would be, why not, one formula. okay, let's do it. another right. you promised.
okay. no, but nonetheless, please, it would be, let's go a little bit longer because i would like to answer you directly. okay, bason, very brutally. what would you have done here? what's your solution here? i think you have to strive for confidence because what will you say? people who want to rule want to destroy us so okay, what's then your solution? i have a very naive solution that get the people who will rule us in such a way that they will not destroy us. it's a very naive position but i think because then the only solution is. let's not rule which means another maybe even worse people will rule and that's what i want absolutely to avoid this comfortable position people rule there while we are comfortably in a civil society our hands have to get totally dirty with ruling i'm not afraid of that but when you said bureaucracy and so on on listen. i don't think that bureaucracy cannot look at a country like switzerland. i don't idealize. it's a proto-fascist country or whatever. but nonetheless, it did succeed, or some other countries like norway and so on. as far as i can see, they did succeed in bringing together a certain level of civil society mobilization with very efficient democracy. bureaucracy. and even now comes my paradox when there is a conflict between the two i'm often even on the side of bureaucracy don't forget that because of this popular tradition of civil society in switzerland women got the right to vote only in the mid sixties or whatever sorry seventy71 even yes. so you see what i am afraid of i am afraid of if you say those who rule. want to lead. want to destroy us the problem i'm not saying that we should use the state the way it is we should transform it and so on but i think the battle is not lost because with the complexity of today's situation.. we need some type of okay maybe bureaucracy is not the right word by bureaucracy i simply mean a complex structure of administration which is not totally transparent to us local people i find here many solutions and maybe it will bring me a lot of trouble if i name them one solution would be an inverted stalinist one death. two. have what stalin was doing but in not such a terrorist way be aware when you have people who lead you that there are also other people who control these people support factional struggles a little bit of terror not against the people but against those who lead us. i think that this is a nice tradition of some progressive states where okay you lead but usually you will lose your head for it that would be, why not, one formula. okay, let's do it. another right. you promised.
Moderator
hacemos eso. por favor, preguntáis dos, me están pidiendo que acabemos ya. sois breves y contestas de manera unificada. sí.
hacemos eso. por favor, preguntáis dos, me están pidiendo que acabemos ya. sois breves y contestas de manera unificada. sí.
Audience Member 5
yo voy a preguntar en español.
yo voy a preguntar en español.
Slavoj Žižek
on behalf of the people, who are you to tell me to be short yet? you told me i was the boss. sorry, so who is the next one?
on behalf of the people, who are you to tell me to be short yet? you told me i was the boss. sorry, so who is the next one?
Audience Member 5
buenoo que ninguna mujer se atreve a preguntarte nada así que voy a empezar. bueno en primer lugar darte las gracias porque veo que has nombrado a las mujeres algunas veces, cosa que es muy raro en los filósofos hombres. en segundo lugar, preguntarte cuál es la solución para combatir el patriarcado y la violencia machista. y luego, en tercer lugar, si conocías la existencia del partido feminista de españa y ya con esto. terminó.
buenoo que ninguna mujer se atreve a preguntarte nada así que voy a empezar. bueno en primer lugar darte las gracias porque veo que has nombrado a las mujeres algunas veces, cosa que es muy raro en los filósofos hombres. en segundo lugar, preguntarte cuál es la solución para combatir el patriarcado y la violencia machista. y luego, en tercer lugar, si conocías la existencia del partido feminista de españa y ya con esto. terminó.
Slavoj Žižek
but. yes. sorry sorry, okay, okay, yeah, yeah yeah hello.
but. yes. sorry sorry, okay, okay, yeah, yeah yeah hello.
Audience Member 1
yo te quería preguntar muy brevemente, porque se ha mencionado, estaba en la superficie, por de alguna forma de la charla, de alguna forma, cuando hablabas del estalinismo, cuando hablabas de la burocracia, yo no puedo evitar recordar a la oposición de izquierdas que encabezó león trotsky y todo el papel que jugaron. y sencillamente te quería preguntar cuál es tu opinión sobre la oposición de izquierdas soviética, león troki... and so on, so on.
yo te quería preguntar muy brevemente, porque se ha mencionado, estaba en la superficie, por de alguna forma de la charla, de alguna forma, cuando hablabas del estalinismo, cuando hablabas de la burocracia, yo no puedo evitar recordar a la oposición de izquierdas que encabezó león trotsky y todo el papel que jugaron. y sencillamente te quería preguntar cuál es tu opinión sobre la oposición de izquierdas soviética, león troki... and so on, so on.
Slavoj Žižek
okay, no, it's a nice question, but you know recently i read a biography. isaac de isaak de maybe the best known sympathetic of trotsky and you know what shocked me there that was for me trotsky's biggest failure of course i sympathise with him all that goes by itself but precisely trotsky simply the crucial year in the soviet union was for me 22 twenty23 why lenin got the first stroke and it's a very tragic, almost greek tragedy story. you know what then happened you must know lenin this was typical for lenin's ethics he and nadezhda krubskaya his wife, wrote a letter to politburo demanding poison. they said i'm incapacitated, i cannot work politically and for me politics is only life i know so please give us some poison that we kill ourselves stalin sabotaged it you know why because he knew it if at that point lenin were to die and they would have to decide who? will be. the follower? then stalin probably would't yet have won he needed another year year and a half
okay, no, it's a nice question, but you know recently i read a biography. isaac de isaak de maybe the best known sympathetic of trotsky and you know what shocked me there that was for me trotsky's biggest failure of course i sympathise with him all that goes by itself but precisely trotsky simply the crucial year in the soviet union was for me 22 twenty23 why lenin got the first stroke and it's a very tragic, almost greek tragedy story. you know what then happened you must know lenin this was typical for lenin's ethics he and nadezhda krubskaya his wife, wrote a letter to politburo demanding poison. they said i'm incapacitated, i cannot work politically and for me politics is only life i know so please give us some poison that we kill ourselves stalin sabotaged it you know why because he knew it if at that point lenin were to die and they would have to decide who? will be. the follower? then stalin probably would't yet have won he needed another year year and a half
Audience Member 2
in that year only in year twenty. i. then, when he was strong,
in that year only in year twenty. i. then, when he was strong,
Slavoj Žižek
long enough the end of 22. stalin wanted to get lenin dead. he started to insult lenin, spoke dirty to nadezhda krovkaya to humiliate lenin. but you see stalin was aware of this and i read those memoirs by georgy dmitrov of the bolssov international where he reports how stalin once said at a meeting meeting of course that trotsky was undoubtedly more popular in mid twenties than he stalin but he said cadre they supported me that was crucial stalin and this was the tragedy of trotsky. he was he didn't have the sensibility for this. like from 23 at the sessions of politburo, you know what trotsky was doing to show his arrogance? i took this from de. he brought to the session of politbros french classic, flaubert, stendhal in french and read them there to show like, oh, i'm with this fuck you, you primitive. but but you know, trotsky was at that point like the example that i always use, that cat who is walking above the precipice and doesn't know it's already walking in empty air. this is what trotsky was missing. you know like why wasn't he more attentive to how stalin is de facto grabbing power? that was for me the true tragedy of trotsky. how he totally... lost didn't have this sensitivity there. as for sorry, women, yes, i'm so sad we don't have more time for this. at least i'm here clear in the sense that i wrote maybe even too much about sexual difference and so on. but you know from my american training, training in the sense that i have no training, that i'm often there. you know what the problem would have been like some american radical feminists, or they wouldn't even call themselves feminists, they would say transgender against heter, they would have said, no, feminist party still implies the opposition, feminine, masculine. we have to undermine this opposition itself, then you get transgenderies, the same toilets and so on and so on and so on. i think my position is here first! uh. that the most dangerous form of threat to radical authentic feminism today. ich yeah on the one hand that is sometimes blind against a certain postatriarchy which is emerging today. but which is in a way still. h secretly. antiancipatory and so on and so on. okay i'll put it clearly in these terms and i put it as provocatively and openly as i can my problem with judith butler with whom i have good personal relations and so on no problem there is this one what is my basic reproach to her it's dead. what she is describing as her model of how subjectivity is built there are no. in advance given sexual roles, we through performative games of paradigm imitation, we all the time reconstruct ourselves, construct ourselves in our always fragile sexual identities and so on and so on. what i suspect is that she is not describing a utopian goal, but simply the ideal figure of today's late capitalism. society i think that what idiots like trump and all those moral majority conservatives advocate is of course ridiculous but it's a lost battle this type of er. this type of performativo. where we have no fixed identities and so on and so on i don't see it as a very progressive i think it fits perfectly again today's ideology which is precisely the ideology of you have no fixed identity discover potentials in yourself reconstruct yourself all the time and so on and so on so, uh... the problem here for me is this one on the one hand of course we all agree in some sense jududith butler is right we should not appeal when we fight for feminism to some i don't know deeper feminine essence or whatever but at the same time where i don't agree with judith butler type of performative feminism which at the end even undermines itself she doesn't want even to be called a feminist. is that sorry another problem today and alain butadi you i think it was right to draw attention to it is that today a certain image of woman as a human face of power is emerging which i think is an obscene betrayal of feminism but it is one of the new ideological functions of women like butieu in a book on youth i don't know if it's translated into your language already he makes this wonderful observation that in french system of oppressing the young delinquents women play a crucial role the judge, the social worker, psychologists they are usually women and all this ideology you know, we don't want just to punish you, we want to re-educate you and so on and so on. i'll put it like this another ident offered here to women to stand for power with the human face and so on and so on which should also be rejected but where i absolutely agree feminism is dead this... i think for theoretical reasons and this brought me a lot of trouble in which i don't have time to go now that sexual difference cannot be reduced to what they call gender roles masculine and feminine is a stronger ontological opposition not natural it's still something specific to human symbolic universe but it cannot be reduced just to this like we have like in new york now it's legalized in the state of new york you have now recognized legally two sexual identities and they like to point out how masculine and feminine are just two in the middle. you have but, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trissexual, asexual, all that. no, i think that sexual difference names antagonism which is stronger than this. sexual difference is not just the result of this performative games and so on and so on. and my proof, is this one the way judith butler is sometimes read she is much more intelligent in this playful way we construct our sexual identities and so on my god i met some of them how can they write this did they meet any really suffering transgender people why because let's say biologically they appear to be a woman but subjectively they experience themselves as men or something third and so on. it is not for them a simple choice i play a performative game today i am a woman tomorrow i am a bisexual and so on for them this psychological identity is so strong they cannot escape it that they are ready to suffer to go through horrible painful sex change operations and so on this is what we have to accept yes our identity is not natural but this doesn't mean that it's simply a question of social games playing tomorrow i am a man the day after i am bisexual then i am a woman you know true freedom is in a way to choose your destiny to choose something from which you almost cannot escape but just to give you another thing now this is anecdotal why i maybe this still means that i am secretly anti feministist but why i don't have any problems with women especially in pure theory. look one of my great references you pointed out is hegelian sorry to tell you but the five greatest books on hegel in the last thirty years were all written by women jacqueline, no, the sister who died. gillian rose, hegel contra sociology, beatrice les, hegel and the critic of metaphysics, catherine malab, malabou, the future of hegel, then you have rebecca com, mel melancholy morning an excellent book and my sloven colleague aleka zantic her new book. isn't this a wonderful thing? it means something that it's not that women are good for this self-expressive bullshit you know how you feel something. no! women if there is a philosopher who stands for pure conceptual thinking, it's hegel. what does it mean that all great hegelians are women today? it mean something.
long enough the end of 22. stalin wanted to get lenin dead. he started to insult lenin, spoke dirty to nadezhda krovkaya to humiliate lenin. but you see stalin was aware of this and i read those memoirs by georgy dmitrov of the bolssov international where he reports how stalin once said at a meeting meeting of course that trotsky was undoubtedly more popular in mid twenties than he stalin but he said cadre they supported me that was crucial stalin and this was the tragedy of trotsky. he was he didn't have the sensibility for this. like from 23 at the sessions of politburo, you know what trotsky was doing to show his arrogance? i took this from de. he brought to the session of politbros french classic, flaubert, stendhal in french and read them there to show like, oh, i'm with this fuck you, you primitive. but but you know, trotsky was at that point like the example that i always use, that cat who is walking above the precipice and doesn't know it's already walking in empty air. this is what trotsky was missing. you know like why wasn't he more attentive to how stalin is de facto grabbing power? that was for me the true tragedy of trotsky. how he totally... lost didn't have this sensitivity there. as for sorry, women, yes, i'm so sad we don't have more time for this. at least i'm here clear in the sense that i wrote maybe even too much about sexual difference and so on. but you know from my american training, training in the sense that i have no training, that i'm often there. you know what the problem would have been like some american radical feminists, or they wouldn't even call themselves feminists, they would say transgender against heter, they would have said, no, feminist party still implies the opposition, feminine, masculine. we have to undermine this opposition itself, then you get transgenderies, the same toilets and so on and so on and so on. i think my position is here first! uh. that the most dangerous form of threat to radical authentic feminism today. ich yeah on the one hand that is sometimes blind against a certain postatriarchy which is emerging today. but which is in a way still. h secretly. antiancipatory and so on and so on. okay i'll put it clearly in these terms and i put it as provocatively and openly as i can my problem with judith butler with whom i have good personal relations and so on no problem there is this one what is my basic reproach to her it's dead. what she is describing as her model of how subjectivity is built there are no. in advance given sexual roles, we through performative games of paradigm imitation, we all the time reconstruct ourselves, construct ourselves in our always fragile sexual identities and so on and so on. what i suspect is that she is not describing a utopian goal, but simply the ideal figure of today's late capitalism. society i think that what idiots like trump and all those moral majority conservatives advocate is of course ridiculous but it's a lost battle this type of er. this type of performativo. where we have no fixed identities and so on and so on i don't see it as a very progressive i think it fits perfectly again today's ideology which is precisely the ideology of you have no fixed identity discover potentials in yourself reconstruct yourself all the time and so on and so on so, uh... the problem here for me is this one on the one hand of course we all agree in some sense jududith butler is right we should not appeal when we fight for feminism to some i don't know deeper feminine essence or whatever but at the same time where i don't agree with judith butler type of performative feminism which at the end even undermines itself she doesn't want even to be called a feminist. is that sorry another problem today and alain butadi you i think it was right to draw attention to it is that today a certain image of woman as a human face of power is emerging which i think is an obscene betrayal of feminism but it is one of the new ideological functions of women like butieu in a book on youth i don't know if it's translated into your language already he makes this wonderful observation that in french system of oppressing the young delinquents women play a crucial role the judge, the social worker, psychologists they are usually women and all this ideology you know, we don't want just to punish you, we want to re-educate you and so on and so on. i'll put it like this another ident offered here to women to stand for power with the human face and so on and so on which should also be rejected but where i absolutely agree feminism is dead this... i think for theoretical reasons and this brought me a lot of trouble in which i don't have time to go now that sexual difference cannot be reduced to what they call gender roles masculine and feminine is a stronger ontological opposition not natural it's still something specific to human symbolic universe but it cannot be reduced just to this like we have like in new york now it's legalized in the state of new york you have now recognized legally two sexual identities and they like to point out how masculine and feminine are just two in the middle. you have but, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trissexual, asexual, all that. no, i think that sexual difference names antagonism which is stronger than this. sexual difference is not just the result of this performative games and so on and so on. and my proof, is this one the way judith butler is sometimes read she is much more intelligent in this playful way we construct our sexual identities and so on my god i met some of them how can they write this did they meet any really suffering transgender people why because let's say biologically they appear to be a woman but subjectively they experience themselves as men or something third and so on. it is not for them a simple choice i play a performative game today i am a woman tomorrow i am a bisexual and so on for them this psychological identity is so strong they cannot escape it that they are ready to suffer to go through horrible painful sex change operations and so on this is what we have to accept yes our identity is not natural but this doesn't mean that it's simply a question of social games playing tomorrow i am a man the day after i am bisexual then i am a woman you know true freedom is in a way to choose your destiny to choose something from which you almost cannot escape but just to give you another thing now this is anecdotal why i maybe this still means that i am secretly anti feministist but why i don't have any problems with women especially in pure theory. look one of my great references you pointed out is hegelian sorry to tell you but the five greatest books on hegel in the last thirty years were all written by women jacqueline, no, the sister who died. gillian rose, hegel contra sociology, beatrice les, hegel and the critic of metaphysics, catherine malab, malabou, the future of hegel, then you have rebecca com, mel melancholy morning an excellent book and my sloven colleague aleka zantic her new book. isn't this a wonderful thing? it means something that it's not that women are good for this self-expressive bullshit you know how you feel something. no! women if there is a philosopher who stands for pure conceptual thinking, it's hegel. what does it mean that all great hegelians are women today? it mean something.