A Reply to my Critics
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2013-02-28 · 2:02:55 · 16,540 words
hegel-dialecticsrevolution-violenceideologypsychoanalysiscommunism-socialismliberalism-political-correctnessdemocracyrace-antisemitismgeopolitics-warphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture at Birkbeck responding to critics and elaborating his positions on direct democracy, violence, eurocentrism, and Hegelian dialectics. He argues against Deleuzian horizontal multitude politics, Badiou's rehabilitation of the master figure, and Mignolo's post-colonial anti-eurocentrism, while defending a notion of emancipatory politics grounded in Lacanian and Hegelian thought. A central thread runs through violence, distinguishing systemic/objective violence from reactive physical violence, and through colonialism, where Hegel's logic of the fall is used to critique both nostalgic nativism and naive anti-eurocentrism. He closes with remarks on the Slovenian protest movement and a critique of cynicism as ideology.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “leftist super-ego logic”
The guilt-inducing demand for permanent political mobilization and participation, where the more you participate the more you feel guilty for not participating enough.
Deleuzian concept of horizontal, decentralized political organization invoked by Žižek as the mode that both contemporary protest movements and today's capitalism itself operate in.
Invoked implicitly via the master/analyst figure: the psychoanalyst is 'supposed to know,' enabling transference, which is Rüdinesco's and Badiou's argument for restoring the master.
The psychoanalytic relationship in which the patient attributes knowledge to the analyst; used by Rüdinesco to argue that the master's position enables emancipatory transformation.
Contemporary infinitely plastic, self-reconstructing subjectivity with no traditional patriarchal master figure, which Žižek argues fits perfectly today's relations of domination.
Used (via Badiou) as a specific determination/definition of the problem rather than a solution: communism names that our problems are grounded in the antagonisms of capitalist self-reproduction.
Benjamin's term for the foundational violence that establishes and sustains the legal/state order, cited by Žižek to explain why states react so brutally to peaceful protest.
Benjamin's term for the violence that disrupts and potentially dissolves the existing legal order, contrasted with mythic violence in Žižek's account of Gandhi vs. Hitler.
Žižek's critical label for Mignolo's position: not genuine alternate modernities but a post-modern move of accepting the problem (capitalism) while proposing culturally-specific exit paths that remain inside the same horizon.
Žižek's gloss on Lacan: not only is language the 'house of being' in which we dwell, but it is simultaneously a torture house, we are never fully at home in any language.
The fundamental gap or imbalance between being human and language, used here to argue that no language is a 'home', colonial language does not uniquely torture, one's own language does too.
Hegelian sublation: Žižek reads it not as synthesis restoring original unity but as full immersion in the fall that reveals the liberating potential within the fall itself.
Žižek's ironic label for the eschatological political logic, shared by Marx, Heidegger, and Derrida, in which extreme danger or alienation simultaneously opens the possibility of redemption/salvation.
Implicit in Žižek's claim that we know capital relies on our own fictions and virtual reality, yet the less it has a 'metaphysical' substance the less we can dominate it.
The symbolic order or anonymous authority; Žižek notes that capitalism has fatally wounded it and we cannot return to it, against Badiou's nostalgia for the master.
The invisible violence inscribed into the normal functioning of the social order itself, as opposed to the visible subjective violence of protesters or criminals.
Direct, visible physical violence by an agent, riots, protests, state repression, which must always be understood against the backdrop of objective violence.
Borrowed from Milner: Žižek's label for privileged cultural workers (writers, intellectuals) who belatedly join protest movements only when their own material interests are threatened.
Implied in the discussion of the super-ego's comic/sadistic dimension, the excess enjoyment the super-ego commands that makes it more brutal, not softer.
as “super-ego”
Discussed via Critchley's reading: Žižek argues (with Lacan/Freud) that the comic aspect of the super-ego does not make it softer but renders it more sadistic and brutal.
Stories he reaches for 4
Malcolm X's 'X' does not mean 'we blacks were deprived of our original roots' but stands for an X of creative opening. Being torn from their original constellation gives Black people a unique chance to become more universally emancipated than whites, which is why Malcolm X chose Islam as a radically universal religion, not Black roots.
“precisely because we are more without roots than the whites, we have a unique chance of becoming more universal, emancipated than the whites”
Žižek paraphrases Brecht to ask: what are the destructive outbursts of Red Guards compared to the true cultural revolution, the permanent dissolution of all life forms that capitalist reproduction dictates?
“What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank? What are the violent and destructive outbursts of Red Guardists... compared to the true cultural revolution”
De Gaulle unified France by starting from a tiny, apparently crazy minority position, opposing French forces and defying the democratically legitimized Pétain government. Žižek uses this to argue that authentic unity only emerges from an initial act of division.
“the Pétain government was fully democratically legitimized... Who is de Gaulle? It's like wild military force opposing a democratically justified government.”
Žižek notes Stalin's characteristic rhetorical form, posing questions and answering them himself ('What are, comrades, the problems of our present moment? Comrades, the problems...'), and humorously claims to be mimicking it in his own self-interview format.
“You know how you recognize Stalin's style? Stalin always asks as a question and answer.”
Works invoked 9
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own large Hegel book, referenced when discussing how he develops the language-as-torture-house theme and his Hegelian position.
Žižek's own book; he references the first chapter for the discussion of the Book of Manu and British colonial construction of Indian tradition.
Badiou's book; Žižek finds it strange that Badiou, who argues communist politics is the only serious politics, would then also advocate restoring the master figure.
Infinitely Demanding book
Critchley's book; criticized for claiming Lacan ignores the comic aspect of the super-ego, Žižek says Critchley didn't do his homework and misses that the comic makes the super-ego more sadistic, not softer.
Žižek is contemptuous of Ali's rushed book with the same title as the Badiou/Žižek project, criticizing its naive claim that communism failed by forgetting democracy.
Horkheimer's analysis of authority and the family, cited for showing how traditional patriarchal authority, despite its oppressiveness, created space for principled opposition within the ruling ideological structure.
The Cleanest Race book
By B.R. Myers; described as 'a wonderful, very simple book' revealing North Korea's matriarchal state ideology; Žižek uses it extensively to argue against patriarchal-master-figure accounts of totalitarianism.
Oublier Foucault book
Baudrillard's short book is cited as the precedent for Mignolo's battle cry of 'forget Europe.'
Zero Dark Thirty film
Žižek attacks those who defend it as 'neutral reporting' on torture; argues that presenting torture without moral judgment is already a fiasco, comparable to presenting rape without being against it.
People invoked 50
Frantz Fanon positive
'Fanon is my hero.' Žižek defends Fanon's universalism against both Mignolo's appropriation and Homi Bhabha's softening; quotes Fanon at length to assert that Black identity is not bound to pre-colonial origins.
Myers (B.R. Myers) positive
Author of 'The Cleanest Race,' cited for discovering that North Korean internal propaganda presents the state as matriarchal; his analysis is described as 'ingeniously simple' and 'wonderful.'
Udi Aloni positive
'Good friend' who made a documentary on West Bank subculture including a Palestinian punk band; co-organized the Ramallah cinema theory school with Žižek.
Walter Mignolo negative
Žižek devotes extended critique to Mignolo's decolonial anti-eurocentrism, calling it naively eurocentric, built on an empty goal of 'harmony and plenitude,' and misreading Fanon.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as a Slovenian friend; co-organizing the three-day Hegel congress at Birkbeck.
Santiago Zabala positive
Wrote a positively oriented essay on Žižek for Al Jazeera that provoked the Mignolo response; described as friend of Gianni Vattimo.
Jacques Derrida negative
Included in the Hölderlin paradigm: his notion of the closure of metaphysics exhausting its possibilities is another version of the 'extreme danger opens salvation' logic that Žižek rejects.
Rebecca Comay positive
Named among the invited speakers for the Birkbeck Hegel congress.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for his analysis of the structure of fascist propaganda showing that totalitarian leaders like Hitler were not master figures in the traditional sense.
Mentioned as Santiago Zabala's friend; no direct assessment.
Jacques Lacan positive
Repeatedly invoked as authority on the super-ego (its comic-sadistic nature), symbolic castration, the act (no right moment), and the possibility of a social link not founded on the master; described as 'much better than Badiou' on the decline of the master.
His book 'Oublier Foucault' (Forget Foucault) is cited as a precursor to Mignolo's battle cry of 'forget Europe.'
Wendy Brown positive
Made an 'extremely important point' that today's capitalist power already operates in the post-Oedipal multitude mode, which Žižek endorses, though he was too polite to push the implication at the time.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Deleuzian horizontal networking politics and the rhizomatic multitude are Žižek's main target throughout; he notes Deleuze himself saw that today's power already operates in this mode.
Baudrillard's 'Oublier Foucault' is referenced as a parallel to Mignolo's 'forget Europe', Jean Baudrillard is the actual person here.
Charles de Gaulle positive
Used as the paradigm example that authentic unity comes from division: de Gaulle unified France by starting from a tiny minority position opposing the democratically legitimate Pétain government.
Frank Ruda positive
Named among the invited speakers for the Birkbeck Hegel congress.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide positive
Cited as an example of true political heroism: knowing the situation is hopeless in the long run but acting anyway; his use of gangs against gangs in Haiti is defended as fully justified given the desperate situation.
Judith Butler negative
Criticized for writing as if the enemy is still a patriarchal identitarian logic, whereas Wendy Brown showed that today's power already functions in post-Oedipal mode.
Élisabeth Roudinesco negative
Co-author with Badiou of a dialogue Žižek finds shocking; her argument that without the master we end up with fascism is described as 'even for me with my bad taste jokes a little bit too much.'
Antonio Negri negative
Grouped with Deleuzians promoting the shift from hierarchy to rhizomatic networks as progressive political form, which Žižek rejects.
Alain Badiou negative
Žižek calls him 'best friend almost' and 'good friend-enemy' but sharply disagrees with his rehabilitation of the master figure and the cult of personality in Communist movements; admires his audacity but cannot follow him.
Alexis Tsipras positive
'Tsipras is a genius', praised for uniting principled positions with intelligent pragmatic compromises; cited as model of political heroism in impossible situations.
Tariq Ali negative
Criticized for rushing out a book titled 'The Idea of Communism' (the same title as Žižek/Badiou's project) and for the naive claim that communism's tragedy was forgetting democracy.
Homi Jehangir Bhabha negative
Accused of trying to normalize and neutralize Fanon by claiming he didn't really mean violence, 'soft guys like Homi Bhabha.'
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Žižek borrows Milner's term 'revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie' to describe privileged cultural workers joining protest movements belatedly.
Alan Johnson negative
Dismissed as a 'non-entity' whose attacks Žižek refuses to dignify with serious response.
Fredric Jameson negative
'My good friend Fred Jameson', criticized for recently repeating the claim that we live in post-ideological cynical times where ideology critique is no longer needed; Žižek calls this 'maybe the most dangerous illusion.'
Wang Hui negative
Described as personally a good friend but intellectually criticized for 'left-Friedmanism', attempting to distinguish just market exchange from capitalist distortion in a non-Marxist way that ignores immanent exploitation.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Paraphrased: 'What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?', used to argue that physical destruction is trivial compared to systemic transformation.
Hamlet positive
Reinterpreted (via Cutrofello) as a progressive figure embodying the Lacanian paradox of the act: always simultaneously too late (catastrophe has already happened) and too early (never the right moment).
Mladen Dolar positive
Slovenian friend and colleague; co-organizing the Birkbeck Hegel congress.
Catherine Malabou positive
Named among the invited 'guys we like' for the Hegel congress at Birkbeck.
Malcolm X positive
Cited as understanding that the 'X' of Black identity is a creative opening, not a lament for lost roots; his turn to Islam represents a universalist rather than identitarian emancipation.
Pierre Legendre negative
French Lacanian dismissed for advocating a return to paternal authority, 'standard patriarchal bullshit' which Žižek explicitly rejects.
Milton Friedman negative
Cited as the emblematic ideologist of free-market economics; Wang Hui is criticized for being a 'left-Friedmanist' who takes basic market exchange as just and locates distortions only in social pathologies.
Beppe Grillo negative
Italian election results made Žižek skeptical of the 'carnivalesque principle' Grillo represents; used as a contrast case when discussing Slovenia's need for authentic political leadership.
Martin Heidegger negative
Cited for the Hölderlin line ('where there is danger, the solution arises') and the notion of the 'reversal' (Kehre) as exemplifying the eschatological paradigm Žižek wants to abandon; also cited for 'language as house of being.'
John N. Gray negative
Dismissed as a non-entity whose attacks contain nothing of interest; briefly reengaged for the accusation that Žižek's argument about the Nazi and the Jew implies preparing a new Holocaust.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for the distinction between mythic violence (sustaining the state) and divine violence (disrupting it), used to explain why Gandhi's peaceful resistance counts as more radically violent than Hitler's killings.
Rosa Luxemburg positive
Cited for the insight that there is never a 'right moment' for revolution, premature attempts are necessary to constitute the revolutionary subject.
Friedrich Hölderlin negative
Minor German poet whose line 'where there is danger, the saving solution arises' is used by Žižek to name an eschatological paradigm he argues must be abandoned.
Max Horkheimer positive
Cited approvingly for his 1930s analysis of the family and authority: that patriarchal authority, despite its oppressiveness, created space for principled opposition, while post-Oedipal totalitarianism does not.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for the immanent development from just market exchange to exploitation and monopoly (against Wang Hui), and for the Hölderlin-style logic of capitalism as utter alienation opening collective re-appropriation.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the insight that cynical perverse openness is the greatest illusion, and for the deepest insight about the super-ego's sadistic dimension; foundational for the Lacanian framework throughout.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central reference throughout: Žižek defends a Hegelian dialectics where the fall comes first and creates what it falls from, against the Hölderlin paradigm; describes Hegel as post-eschatological and post-apocalyptic; writing a new book on Hegel.
Simon Critchley negative
Grouped with Alan Johnson and John Gray as critics Žižek dismisses at the first level; also referenced for his 'Infinitely Demanding' where he argued Lacan sees only the terrorizing super-ego but misses its comic aspect, Žižek says Critchley didn't do his homework.
Andrew Cutrofello positive
Lacanian Hegelian from Chicago, praised for reinterpreting Hamlet as a progressive figure and for his critical work on Badiou and the act (the paradox of always too early and too late).
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
The concept of 'reactive' violence is invoked in Nietzschean terms: state violence to restore normalcy is reactive in Nietzsche's sense, protective rather than creative.
Mentioned as one of the European thinkers Fanon engaged with intensively, used as evidence against Mignolo's claim that one can simply step outside European philosophy.
What it argues
critique of Deleuzian horizontal/rhizomatic politics and direct democracyviolence as sign of impotence vs. emancipatory systemic transformationthe master figure: Badiou's rehabilitation versus Lacanian declineanti-eurocentrism and the colonial paradox (Hegel, Malcolm X, Fanon)cynicism as ideology: the illusion of post-ideological realismHegelian dialectics as post-eschatological: the fall creates what it falls fromthe Slovenian protest movement and the need for proper political division
Dialectical moves 12
“In his self-perception, the Nazi is not merely the one who holds a fantasy about the Jew — he is himself a figure in his own ideological dream about the Jews.”
Anti-semitic identity is not just constituted by a fictional Jew it projects; the anti-semite's own self-image is part of that fiction, 'I am in the Jew' as much as 'the Jew is in me.'
“Far from being the most violent man of the 20th century, Hitler was a modest reactive figure: his violence was an admission of impotence, a proof he could not achieve real social change.”
Physical mass violence is reframed as the opposite of power, the more brutal the violence, the more it signals fundamental inability to transform the system.
“Gandhi was more violent than Hitler — in the sense that his nonviolent resistance effected radical systemic transformation whereas Hitler's mass killing prevented real change.”
The inversion of 'violence' reveals that the truly violent act is the one that attacks the system itself, not the one that kills the most people.
“The only defense against fascism is a master — and without a master there is no emancipation: this is Rüdinesco and Badiou's paradox, which Žižek finds one step too far.”
Žižek presents Badiou's own dialectical reversal, that emancipation requires the very authority it seems to oppose, in order to reject it while acknowledging its grain of truth.
“The British did not impose English to civilize Indians; they kept Indians attached to their own original culture — and where that culture didn't exist, they even created it.”
Colonial power worked not by imposing its culture but by fabricating and reifying indigenous 'authentic' culture as an instrument of control.
“What is lost in the colonial encounter is not what was actually there before the loss; the loss itself retroactively creates the thing it appears to destroy.”
Hegelian logic applied to colonialism: the authentic Indian democratic aspiration did not preexist colonial imposition but was produced through it.
“For Hegel, the fall comes first — paradise is simply stupid animal kingdom, and the fall itself creates what it is the fall from.”
Hegelian dialectics does not begin from original unity that gets split and then reunited; the originary loss or fall is constitutive of the very thing lost.
“Mignolo's anti-eurocentrism is itself naively eurocentric — far from escaping European categories, it reproduces them in a more primitive form.”
The rejection of European universalism from the standpoint of alternative local cultures remains trapped within the same universalist-particularist opposition it claims to transcend.
“Precisely when we know fully that there is no substantial metaphysical Capital — that it's just us playing with our fictions — we are least able to dominate it.”
The demystification of capitalism does not liberate; the more transparent capital becomes as a human construction, the more opaque and intractable its domination.
“The true measure of revolutionary change is not the ecstatic moment on Tahrir Square but what happens when things return to normal: is this normalcy the same as before?”
Revolution is not the spectacular rupture but the transformation of the everyday, the hardest and most significant change happens in the background, not the moment of upheaval.
“Far from being subversive, cynical laughter can be on the side of those in power; cynical humor does not soften the super-ego but makes it more sadistic.”
The comic aspect of power and the super-ego does not neutralize their oppressive function; humor is not inherently emancipatory.
“All authentic unity comes from an act of division — de Gaulle united France by first taking the most crazy minority position against the democratically legitimized Pétain government.”
Political universality (broad coalition) is only possible after, and through, an initial act of particular division that defines one's terrain.
Claims 23
asserts
The large majority of people, including Žižek himself, want to be passive and rely on an efficient state apparatus rather than engage in permanent active participation.direct democracy and participatory politics
asserts
The myth of non-representative direct self-organization is the last and deepest ideological trap of contemporary left politics.Deleuzian multitude politics
asserts
A good politician does not follow or learn what people want but tells people what they want, triggering an 'aha-effect' — this is not authoritarian but necessary.political leadership and the elite
asserts
Today's power already functions in the post-Oedipal multitude mode, making it no less oppressive.capitalism and power structures
rejects
Badiou's rehabilitation of the master figure — arguing that without a master there is no emancipation — is an error Žižek admires for its audacity but cannot follow.Badiou's position on the master
asserts
The decline of the symbolic master figure is an irreversible process; we cannot return to patriarchal authority.symbolic authority and the master
asserts
We can only speak seriously about emancipatory politics if we can imagine a society not held together by a master figure.conditions of emancipation
asserts
Violence is always a sign of impotence: physical violence is a reactive admission that one cannot achieve the real social change needed.violence and social change
asserts
In the sense of radical social transformation, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler, because Hitler prevented real change through mass murder whereas Gandhi attacked the system itself.the concept of violence
asserts
The limitation of violence to its directly visible physical aspect is not neutral common sense but an ideological distortion.ideology and the concept of violence
reframes
One should not directly condemn Communist violence without first asking what was wrong in the Communist project as such that necessitated that violence as a response to a deeper failure.20th-century communist violence
rejects
Mignolo's anti-eurocentrism is itself naively eurocentric and his definition of the shared goal — harmony, plenitude of life — is an empty signifier that fascists could equally embrace.Mignolo's post-colonial decolonial politics
asserts
Different positions on a crisis do not merely offer different solutions to the same problem; they produce entirely different identifications of what the problem is.the relation between problem-identification and solution in politics
asserts
The European universalist legacy must be defended, but through a Hegelian reading that shows the colonial imposition creates retroactively the very thing it appears to destroy.European universalism and colonialism
asserts
What is lost in colonialism is not what was actually there before; the loss retroactively creates through itself what it claims to have destroyed.colonialism, loss, and Hegelian dialectics
rejects
The Hölderlin paradigm — that extreme danger simultaneously opens the solution — must be dropped; Hegel is instead a post-eschatological, post-apocalyptic thinker.eschatological logic in Marx, Heidegger, Derrida
asserts
Cynicism — 'greed is good,' post-ideological realism — is the deepest contemporary ideology: those who think they have no illusions are the most blinded.cynicism and ideology
asserts
The financial crisis was not caused by welfare-state ideals but by cynical realists who thought they had no illusions.financial crisis and ideology
asserts
There is no ontological guarantee for the struggle for freedom; it is a risky struggle with no predetermined outcome.emancipatory politics and contingency
asserts
The more we know that capital is just our own fiction with no metaphysical substance, the less able we are to dominate it.capitalism and ideology
asserts
Authentic unity in politics always comes from an act of division — one must first mark one's terrain before forming coalitions.political organization and coalition-building
asserts
True emancipatory violence is not defeating the enemy but changing the entire discursive field so that the enemy's position becomes self-evidently ridiculous.political strategy and violence
asserts
The act of waiting for the right revolutionary moment ensures it never arrives; premature attempts are necessary to constitute the revolutionary subject.revolutionary timing and the political act
Quotes 16
“The true battle of the Left has to be won here. By here, I mean in the domain of citizen's passivity. The true measure of change is not those ecstatic moments, we are all on Tahrir Square, but when things return back to normal. Is this normalcy the same as before?”Slavoj Žižek · revolution measured by transformation of everyday normalcy, not ecstatic rupture
“Violence is always, from individual to collective level, a sign of impotence, basically. If your father beats you, slaps you, it may hurt you, but it always as a rule ruins his authority.”Slavoj Žižek · physical violence as sign of impotence
“Without master, no emancipation.”Slavoj Žižek · Badiou's paradox of the master (presented to be rejected)
“It's difficult to be really violent. And the same holds for violence which has any effect on the system.”Slavoj Žižek · true systemic violence is rare and difficult
“I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. In no way does my basic vocation has to be drawn from the past of peoples of color.”Slavoj Žižek · Fanon's universalism against identity politics (quoted by Žižek approvingly)
“There is no black mission, there is no white burden.”Slavoj Žižek · Fanon's rejection of racial essentialism (quoted approvingly)
“Not simply the last cause, it's a reaction to some deeper failure.”Slavoj Žižek · Communist violence as symptom of deeper project failure, not the root cause
“Precisely those who think we have no illusions, that's the brutality of life, they err most. This is the big lesson of Hegel.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical realism as the most ideologically blinded position
“The more we are aware of how capitalism relies on our own fictions, on virtual reality... the less we are able to dominate it.”Slavoj Žižek · demystification of capitalism does not produce freedom
“For Hegel, overcoming the fall does not mean you somehow squeeze back to purity, it means that you fully immerse yourself into the fall and see the liberating potential of the fall itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian reconciliation as immersion in the fall, not return to purity
“All authentic unity comes from an act of division.”Slavoj Žižek · political universality requires prior particular division
“True violence is for me a change in the entire discursive field so that when somebody advocates rape, you don't even have to attack me, he simply appears as an idiot.”Slavoj Žižek · true political violence as transformation of the discursive field itself
“Language is at the same time a torture house. That we are never at home in language.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian insight that symbolic castration means no language is truly a home
“What Fanon clearly saw is that today's global world is capitalist and as such cannot be effectively problematized from the standpoint of pre-capitalist local culture.”Slavoj Žižek · Fanon's universalism against nativist anti-capitalism
“There is never the right moment. If you wait for the right moment it will never arrive.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian theory of the act: no right moment exists
“The comic aspect of super-ego doesn't make it softer but makes it even a much more brutal and sadistic.”Slavoj Žižek · humor intensifies rather than subverts super-ego power
Transcript 32 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you. Just to make it clear, I, of course, I will not be dealing with non-entities like Alan Johnson or John Gray and so on. I mean, read them. If you find anything of any interest in their attacks on me, then you simply shouldn't read—I mean, then you are beyond help. I want nonetheless seriously to answer two, three other critical points made. First, a couple of observations about the ongoing political situation in Europe, all the protests exploding. I think that these protests seem to converge in a series of demands which, in their very spontaneity and obviousness, form a kind of—I apologize for this jargon—a kind of epistemological obstacle to the proper confrontation with the ongoing crisis. What people usually demand when they protest is really—what it amounts to—it's a kind of a popularized version of Deleuzian politics. People know what they want, they are able to discover and formulate it, but only through their own continuous engagement and activity. So we need, so we are told, active participatory democracy. Not just representative democracy with its electoral ritual every four years, which just interrupts the voter's passivity. Then we are told we need the self-organization of the multitude, molecular from beneath, not a centralized Leninist party with the leader and so on and so on. It is, I think, this myth of non-representative direct self-organization which is the last trap, the deepest illusion which is most difficult to renounce. Yes, there are, in every revolutionary process, ecstatic moments of group solidarity when thousands, hundreds of thousands, together occupy a public space, like on Tahrir Square in Cairo two years ago. Yes, there are moments of intense collective participation where local communities debate, decide, when people live in a kind of permanent emergency state taking things into their own hands, with no leader guiding them. But, I claim, such states don't last. And tiredness—getting tired of it—is not a simple psychological fact. So now comes my first thesis—I will try to be as brutal and provocative as possible: the large majority of people—and I'm not here presenting you the variation of that percent of the people are idiots, no, I include myself into this large majority—large majority, I claim, wants to be passive and just rely on an efficient state apparatus. Like, I'm sorry to tell you, but I wouldn't like to live in a state where some kind of permanent participation, engagement is going on and so on and so on. I much prefer to be a passive citizen. There is a machinery of state or whatever social services which smoothly does its work, and the less I know about it, all the better. And I don't despise ordinary people for it. Next point: people really know what they want when they are engaged? I claim no, they don't. Up to a point, I claim even the majority even don't want to know, really. I claim that we should rehabilitate, of course not in the old class sense, the term elite. What does a good politician do? A good politician absolutely doesn't follow or learn from the people what they want. No, he tells them what they want. And if he is a really good politician, people have this aha-effect: "Oh my god, how clear, now I know what I want." And again, I find nothing authoritarian or whatever in this. As to this molecular self-organizing multitude against hierarchic order and so on. Well, I always start to laugh because when I ask people, especially today: "Okay, okay, give me an example of this, no?" They told me: "But you know what's going on in Venezuela? You know factories being given to workers, they organize themselves in communes and so on and so on." Yes, but if you want a leaderless society, I somehow wouldn't exactly propose Venezuela as a model. You know, you have the big fat guy on the top, which is absolutely inherent to this. It's absolutely naive not to see how—and it's a nice dialectical case—how, of course, sometimes it is happening in Venezuela, a kind of authentic local in favelas or elsewhere self-organization outside the standard multiparty representative mechanisms. But I claim that the leader, which is precisely a kind of a trans-democratic leader, strong charismatic leader, is strictly correlative to this low-level elementary self-awakening of the people. They belong together. Is it as if you want real awakening of the people, then you need a charismatic leader on the top. As to, again, to the—yes, sorry—so now what's my point here? Does this rejection of direct democracy mean a resigned surrender to the hegemonic power structure? Am I simply saying, "Yeah, yeah, revolution is good for a—or direct democracy—for a couple of months when things are in turmoil, but then things return back to normal and so on and so on"? No, I think that there is nothing inherently conservative in being tired of the usual leftist demands for permanent mobilization, active participation and so on. This is the leftist super-ego logic. The more you participate, the more you are guilty for not participating enough and so on and so on. The battle, I claim, the true battle of the Left, has to be won here. By here, I mean in the domain of citizen's passivity. The true measure of change is not those ecstatic moments, we are all on Tahrir Square or whatever, but when things return back to normal. Is this normalcy the same as before? You know, how is your everyday life affected? This is the revolution which is really difficult to make. Let me make, along these lines, a step further. One of the politico-ideological topics rendered popular by different Deleuzians, Negri and so on, is the idea that we are witnessing today the shift from traditional hierarchy, a pyramid-like subordination to a master, a shift from this hierarchy to, as they put it, pluralizing rhizomatic networks. Along these lines, political analysts like to point out that the new anti-globalist protests all around Europe and United States, from Occupy Wall Street to Spain, Greece—although Greece is more interesting here—have no central agency. All people, even in my own country Slovenia, Slovenia, who demonstrate like this is wonderful, there is no central committee, we just meet, we debate and so on. There are just multiple groups interacting. Again, what I'm tempted to say are two things. First, was it in this room when we had last year a round table where Wendy Brown was here, or in the other room? She made an extremely important point, and since I am nonetheless a moderately polite person, I didn't want to provoke her too much by asking her the obvious question, namely: you remember when she said how we leftists still behave as we are, as if we are fighting a hierarchic central paternal power, while today's capitalism power itself already works, operates in this, let's call it in fashionable terms, post-Oedipal multitude way and so on and so on? I mean, the question to ask, I wanted to ask her but out of politeness I didn't, would have been: "Is this your family polemics?" I mean, because my problem with Judith Butler is that she mostly writes as if the enemy is still some kind of patriarchal identitarian logic. No, as Wendy made it very clear, today's power itself—and this was clear to Deleuze up to a point also—today's power more and more already functions in this non-hierarchic multitude mode, which makes it, and that's the paradox, which makes it no less oppressive. Now, there is a step to be made here, which I'm nonetheless not ready to make it. And I admire my good friend-enemy Alain Badiou that he made this step, but I'm not ready to follow him here. Namely, there is something nonetheless wrong in what he did. This is my first reply to critics. My first critic is here, my best friend almost, Alain Badiou. In a recent interview, he published a short book together with—and this I will never forgive him—together with Élisabeth Rüdinesco. A dialogue where—it's quite shocking what he they together propose there. The idea is that since all this Deleuzian horizontal networking and so on is the way, as Badiou likes to put it, today's human animal functions our utilitarian everyday life, the only way to break the spell of bourgeois ideology today is with a new master. That the Left should reinvent the master. His idea is a very simple one, Badiou's. It's that—you know Badiou's opposition between animal life, just hedonist individuals, and then subject, subject as defined by his, her, their fidelity to truth. And Badiou's point is very simple here: what makes an individual—you know, this pleasure-oriented bourgeois individual—a subject is fidelity to a master. It's a total rehabilitation of a master. And I almost admire Badiou here because he goes to the end and claims that there was a deep necessity in so-called cult of personality in Communist movement: Lenin, Stalin, Mao. Here is the quote. It's—there are three persons: Rüdinesco, Badiou and then Aeschlimann, this is the journalist of Libération now he moved to Nouvel Observateur, who is asking them. Rüdinesco: "In the last resort, what was lost in psychoanalytic societies is the position of the master to the benefit of the position of small bosses." The journalist: "What do you mean by master?" Rüdinesco: "The position of the master allows transference. The psychoanalyst is supposed to know what the analysand will discover. Without this knowledge attributed to the psychoanalyst, the search for the origin of suffering is quasi-impossible." The journalist: "Do we really have to go through the restoration of the master?" Badiou now, quite crazy: "The master is the one who helps the individual to become subject. That is to say, if one admits that the subject emerges in the tension between individual and the universality, then it is obvious that the individual needs a mediation and thereby an authority in order to progress on this path. The crisis of the master is a logical consequence of the crisis of the subject, and psychoanalysis did not escape it. One has to renew the position of the master. It is not true that one can do without it, and especially in the perspective of emancipation." Do you see the nice paradox? Without master, no emancipation. And then Élisabeth Rüdinesco does the last kick. Rüdinesco: "When the master disappears, he is replaced by the boss. By his bosses' authoritarianism. And sooner or later this always ends in fascism. Unfortunately, history has proven this to us." No, this is even for me with my bad taste jokes a little bit too much. Like, the only—the only defense against fascism is a master. Although, again, one has to admit the obvious element of truth in it. That in today's type of subjectivity, we effectively no longer have a traditional patriarchal master figure. And again, I'm not saying anything extra new here. This was known, for example, already to Horkheimer and Adorno way back in the 1930s where, in their excellent analysis, Horkheimer in "Authoritarianism and the Family" (Autorität und Familie), Adorno in his analysis of structure of fascist propaganda, emphasized that the totalitarian leader—Hitler, Stalin—these are not master figures. But nonetheless, my problem is that—I hope we agree here that—of course this post-Oedipal postmodern subjectivity, infinitely plastic subjectivity, you reconstruct yourself all the time and so on and so on, that that—this one fits perfectly today's relations of domination. That even if you don't have master in this classical sense, oppression can be even worse. This is—I accept this. And furthermore, I think I repeat myself a little bit here, the last time I was here I already developed this, namely, that we have regimes today which we would all have agreed are, in some naive sense, extremely authoritarian, totalitarian and so on, but they are not the regimes of the patriarchal master. And there was a book written by a guy called—I forgot his Christian name, I'm sorry, it's Myers, M-Y, something, called "The Cleanest Race." I think, again, I repeat myself a little bit, but nonetheless to make the point, about today's North Korea. The guy did something pretty interesting. He lived as a journalist in Korea and used the—in North Korea—and used a little bit of freedom that he had to go a little bit, he was allowed to, I don't know how, to countryside. He looked not at the propaganda that North Korea addresses to the West, but at, as it were, propaganda for "Aborigines," their own people there, and discovered that it's absolutely not that all this bullshit about Korea being deeply embedded in old Confucian society and so on. No, it's strictly matriarchal. And it's a wonderful, very simple book. But, for example, he draws attention to the fact that with all Stalinist retouching and so on, if you look at the official portraits of the leader—the old two ones, now it's different, who knows what will come out of this young guy—Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The official portraits don't try to obliterate, diminish their tummy, stomach, their stockiness. It's even emphasized. Like, there are some almost embarrassing portraits of Kim Il Sung where you see his stomach and even, relatively strong for a man, breasts and so on. So this guy went deeply into it and discovered that the entire state metaphorics is: Party and Leader are mothers. And he gives some wonderful—maybe you know them, I'm sorry—examples. I don't have now time to quote them all. For example, the most popular North Korean Party song is dedicated of course to the Communist Party as Mother. And it's an absolutely obscene song. It says that we Korean children are, like, people are like children sucking milk from the big breasts of—of Party, our Mother, and we will never abandon your breasts, we need your breasts to survive. And then this guy provides another promise, another wonderful example. He did something ingeniously simple. He looked into the latest edition of the Korean official, like, dictionary of Korean language and looked at the two entries: Mother, Father. The entry Mother is over one page. It goes into Mother, all the definitions. First the biological mother of a child, then metaphorical mother of the family who takes care of all of them, and then, yes, as you expect, in a larger sense, the Party is the Mother of the people, blah blah, with all the examples. And then Father: one line. The man who helped the mother to become a mother. I mean, you—and then in a more subtle analysis even, he claims: "Did you noticed how Kim Jong Il, who now died, the middle leader, how he usually had some strange ordinary wind jacket and his hair was kind of, no?" That—he claims that this is the typical image of a Korean ordinary women who has these mass-produced plastic jackets and spends hours waiting for food and so on and so on. That it's again a subtle maternal identification. Now, I am definitely not buying here the standard patriarchal bullshit advocated unfortunately by some Lacanians like Pierre Legendre in France, according to which: "Oh, we should return to paternal authority. If you want—more power to the women you get North Korea and so on, no?" I'm not saying this. All I'm saying is something much more—of course, the first thing to note would be here that—the obvious thing, no, which one can learn also from old histories that—you know, if you are precisely a woman, beware of societies where you have a mother goddess ruling you, you know? Then actual women are usually even more oppressed than in standard patriarchal societies. So, of course, this Mother is a male myth. Of course at the de facto level, male domination is absolute in North Korea. This guy reports on how even what you get in some Communist countries where, as a rule, I remember from my youth and reading books, like, to show how nonetheless we take care of women rights, usually you have three ministries which were, in socialist countries, more or less reserved for women, you know? They are of course the soft ones where there is not real power. It's Education, Health, and Culture. You know, they can be left to women, but never the serious ministries. So again, of course this is a mystified notion. But all I'm saying is nonetheless this simple fact that—and this is what was nicely formulated already by Horkheimer—that with all the oppressiveness, the traditional paternal authority nonetheless gave you a kind of a support within, for example, Protestant logic to oppose yourself to external authority. You know, like, it's—you know, it's a great—I'm saying this shamelessly—a great civilizatory achievement to have in the ruling ideological structure a space for radical opposition. So that you can say officially, as it were, that it's my right to oppose society's wrong and so on. And here patriarchal authority can up to a point, up to a point, play a positive role. But let me now make a step further. I nonetheless think—and Lacan is here much better than Badiou and Rüdinesco—that this is an irreversible process. What is going on today is, I think, the final decline of the figure of the master, as the symbolic authority and so on and so on. I think they are simply too nostalgic here, Rüdinesco and Badiou. No, we cannot return. What happens today with—whatever we call it—postmodern capitalism is that the symbolic authority is fatally wounded, we cannot return to it. So, and I find especially strange from Badiou to advocate this return to the master, because, you know, Badiou likes to emphasize, for example, in his book on "The Communist Hypothesis" that the only politics can be serious politics can be the Communist politics. All others are just pragmatic opportunism and so on and so on. Yeah, but I claim that the only—we can only talk seriously about emancipatory politics if the master—master is not the ultimate horizon of our social life. If we cannot imagine a society which is not held together by a master figure, but in a different way, then we can pack our luggage and there—let's—let's play pragmatic—let's play pragmatic politics and so on and so on. So again, the challenges—the challenges are great here. I think that in this debate Badiou versus postmodern fluid plural multitude figures of authority, I think that both—both—both poles are wrong. Master—the structure of a master as well as this polymorphous multitude structure—it doesn't function. There is a challenge here, and there are some hints in Lacan or somewhere that you can have a social link which is not founded on the figure of the master. Next point: now I come more to self—to criticism—would be where—for which I am often attacked—would be violence. That I am—my god, it's quite funny for me to read about myself—that I am secretly fascinated by violence, that I am dreaming about some—some, I don't know, final explosion where purifying end of the world, whatever you want. Uh—no. Again, I think that apropos violence, first one should demystify the problem of violence. In what sense? One should reject claims that the 20th-century communism used too much excessive murderous violence and that we should be careful not to fall into this trap again. I mean, of course in a way this is true. But I claim that it's not the right way to approach what went wrong with the 20th-century communism. Violence is not directly the cause of it. You know, it's not to say, as some naive Marxists do say—and somebody showed to me a—a book, just the quote, I didn't read it of course, of Tariq Ali, "The Idea of Communism." You know, the book which was published one year after the conference on Communism, and our book, ready, which was finished earlier, appeared only a year later. So you can make your own thoughts about it. How is it that a Verso author, the moment he heard about our project, "The Idea of Communism," wrote quickly another book with the same title as an answer? Okay. There he says: "The tragedy of communism was that they forgot about democracy, they didn't—" No, like, no. I claim, of course it was terrifying, recourse to violence. But the ques—but to resolve the problem, one should precisely not directly say, "Oh, we should take care of," or "we should—we should have taken care of violence," what, prohibit such violence? No. The true problem is: what was wrong in the Communist project, the way it was formulated in the 20th century? What was wrong in the project as such so that the only way to survive he had to take recourse to violence? Violence, as is always the case, was already an answer to a certain deadlock. So as I put it in my book, far from celebrating violence, I think that if we mean what we usually mean by violence—direct physical violence and so on—violence is always, from individual to collective level, a sign of impotence, basically. I mean, this is an old story, you know it. If your father beats you, slaps you, it may hurt you, but it always as a rule ruins his authority. The fact that the father slaps you means he was really impotent, he lacked proper authority. And it's the same socially. If you look at all the big explosions of violence: Hitler, Stalin and so on. For example, what is arguably the greatest violence in Soviet Union? The late twenties, early thirties, the forced collectivization. This violence was one big proof that they were not able to approach properly the problem of—of peasants, farmers, collectivization, agriculture and so on and so on. That's—so again, it's stupid to say Communists neglected the problem of violence or neglected the impor—the importance of democracy. No, this neglect is not simply the last cause, it's a reaction to some deeper failure. Now I will try to repro—to answer—I'm sorry for a relatively long quote—one of the critics of myself. It was formulated somewhere, I will even not quote the author because by mistake I dropped that reference, it doesn't really matter. It's a very interesting criticism of me because it is kind of a reaction to my refutal of the first-level criticism. The first-level criticism is, you know, all this Alan Johnson, John Gray and Simon Critchley stuff, that I'm fascinated by some violent explosion blah blah blah, I'm really a coward who just dreams of some violence blah blah. Okay. Now when these guys are forced to admit that nonetheless I am not as crazy as that, then they change the argument and claim that what I am really doing is just putting in provocative terms an extremely common-sense obvious point, which is totally acceptable, but just not interesting. For example, when I say, "The problem with Hitler was that he wasn't violent enough." Okay, at this point you get the heart attack of liberals, no. "Ah, do you think he should have killed us all Jews or what?" you know. But then when I add, "In the sense in which Gandhi was more violent than Hitler," then they say, "Oh, it's just that he's making a totally common-sense point, that one thing is violence in the normal sense of killing people, another thing is social change." And why do I have to put it in this confusing provocative way using the same word "violence" at both levels? Why don't I just say: "We have violence as killing people, torturing, which is unacceptable, and we have a radical social change, which is not inherently linked to violence." So that I'm just trying to make a scandalous effect, you know? But really what I am saying is something even totally acceptable for a liberal. So that you will not say that I'm dreaming the argument, please allow me, two minutes, a long quote. "Žižek is here using language in a way that is designed to be provocative and to confuse people. He doesn't actually mean that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. What he means to do instead is to alter the typical understanding of the word violence, so that Gandhi's nonviolent means of protest against the British will be considered more violent than Hitler's incredibly violent attempts at world domination and genocide. Violence for Žižek in this particular instance actually means that which causes massive social upheaval. In that way, he considers Gandhi to be more violent than Hitler. But this, like so much of what Žižek writes, is actually nothing new or interesting or surprising. And that's why he writes it in the provocative, confusing and bizarre manner that he chooses instead of a straightforward manner. If he would have written that Gandhi accomplished more through nonviolence that aimed at systemic change than Hitler accomplished through violent means, we would all agree. But we would also know that there is nothing profound in such a statement. Instead, Žižek attempts to shock us and in doing so he covers up the completely humdrum conclusion about Gandhi and Hitler that everyone already believed to be true before they read Žižek. The same is true of Žižek's controversial point about Jews and anti-Semites. There is nothing remarkable about the argument that in the mind of every Nazi who hates Jews, there must also be a fictional Jew for that Nazi to hate. And thus any attempt to rid Nazis of the Jews within themselves, as Žižek tells us Hitler once said, would result in the destruction of the Nazis themselves, since the anti-Semites in themselves require the continued existence of the Jews within themselves. In other words, Žižek is once again simply making a muddled word salad in an attempt to dress up commonplaces as profundity. Gandhi's method of changing things worked because he went after the system itself. The anti-Semite can never kill the object of his hatred because his virtue necessitates the fictional Jew." End of quote. Hehe! Admit you were convinced, no? Okay. In both cases, so you got it, the reproach is the same. I try to sell the common thesis that Gandhi aimed at changing the system, not destroying people. But since this is a commonplace I want to be provocatively popular, I formulate it more provocatively, weirdly expanding the meaning of the word violence to include institutional changes. The same goes for my statement about the Jew is in the anti-Semite but the anti-Semite is also in the Jew. It's just a garbled way to deliver the commonplace that in the mind of every Nazi who hates Jews, there must also be a fictional Jew for that Nazi to hate. Like, you know, that the Nazis don't really hate actual Jews but what they hate, what they construct as the object of their hatred is their own fantasy. But is this the case? What if, I claim, the key point gets lost in this translation of my, as the kind writer wrote, "muddled word salad" into common sense? In the second case, it's wonderful how he missed my point. My point is not just the effectively obvious claim that the Jew to whom the Nazi refers in his ideological, that this Jew is his ideological fiction. I know this is a commonplace. But I'm saying something else. What I'm saying is that his own ideological identity of the Nazi is simultaneously grounded in this fiction, not simply depending on it. The Nazi is, in his self-perception, a figure in his own dream about the Jews. And this, I think—you see my point? It's not only that the Jew is in me, my fantasy. Is that I am in the Jew, in the sense that I am part of my own ideological dream. It's a slightly more complex point. So back to now to Gandhi. So why call Gandhi's attempts to undermine the British state in India more violent than Hitler's mass killings? Well, to draw attention to the fundamental violence that sustains a normal functioning of the state. Benjamin called it mythic violence. And the no less fundamental violence that sustains every attempt to undermine the functioning of the state, Benjamin's divine violence. This is why the reaction of the state power to those who endanger it through peaceful demonstrations and so on is so brutal, and why in its very brutality, this reaction is reactive in the Nietzschean sense, protective. So far from eccentricity, the extension of the notion of violence so that for me nonetheless Hitler was violent but Gandhi also, is based on a key theoretical insight. And it is the limitation of violence to its directly visible physical aspect which, far from being neutral common sense, relies on ideological distortion. This is also why the reproach that I'm fascinated by some ultra-radical violence with comparison to which Hitler and Khmer Rouge didn't go far enough, misses the point, which is not to go further in this type of violence, like it's not: "Oh, why did Khmer Rouge kill only one—one-quarter of Cambodians? They should have killed more, one-one-half or whatever." Is that one should change the entire terrain. It's difficult to be—it's difficult to be really violent. And the same holds for violence which has any effect on the system. For example, take, I remember, I'm unfortunately old enough, it was possible when I was very young to see them on screen, you know, they—during Chinese Cultural Revolution, all those thousands of young people trying to get rid of tradition, smashing with—with even sometimes their hands, old monuments and so on. Already at that point, this did strike me as sign—precisely this physical violence did strike me as, again, a sign of some fundamental impotence. So—I am tempted to paraphrase here again the old Brecht: "What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?" What are the violent and destructive outbursts of Red Guardists caught in a Cultural Revolution compared to the true cultural revolution which was, which is the permanent dissolution of all life forms which capitalist reproduction dictates? I mean, if we, again, we have to use the same—you see my point—the same, of course, violence which I praise, socially trans—the violence of social transformation, of course, and hopefully it's so, of course, it's not necessarily brutal physical violence. But the precise point I'm trying to make is that brutal physical violence is an act of cowardice. It's always a reactive violence, an admission of impotence. You explode in brutal destruction when you can't do the, let's call it naively, real social change. Or, as it's a commonplace of leftist critique of Hitler, he had to kill millions not to change things but precisely to prevent real change to occur. In this sense, again, to see things in this continuum of violence: how the true violence is precisely radical social change, and it has nothing to do with physical violence. But again, if we simply say, "No, but this is social transformation, why use the term violence?" we lose this point which is for me absolutely crucial of seeing how all those big violent agents—Hitler, even Stalin and so on—are really modest reactive guys. Reactive in the sense of—that their violence was an admission of impotence and so on and so on. So much about this. Now let's go further. Problem—you will have to pardon me another quote, long—Santiago Zabala, the friend of Gianni Vattimo, recently wrote an essay on me, positively oriented essay for Al Jazeera debate. And then this essay provoked from some multicultural post-colonial blah blah anti-eurocentrist guys a pretty violent response, predictably accusing me of eurocentrism and so on. Now, this is an interesting debate, up to a point. Why? Here is the quote again. It's a guy called, he teaches I think at Duke, yeah, do you know him? Is he as stupid as in real life as he sounds? Okay, he—here is the quote. I will be fair and again translate for you a long—translate, sorry, read you a long passage. "As a non-European thinker, my senses reacted to the first sentence of Žižek's article." He's referring to my article on "Leftist Defense, a Plea for Leftist Eurocentrism," something like that. Here is what I say: "When one says eurocentrism, every self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture: to reach for a gun, hurling accusation of proto-fascist eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, is it possible to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy?" That's where he quotes me. And then he, Mignolo, goes on. "My response to that paragraph is the following: when one says eurocentrism, every self-respecting de-colonial"—this is probably his neologism to be more respectful than post-colonial, no, this is the good term—"de-colonial intellectual has not as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture, to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of proto-fascist eurocentrist cultural imperialism. A self-respecting de-colonial intellectual will reach instead to Frantz Fanon." And then there is a quote from Fanon here: "Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. So my brothers, how could we fail to understand that we have better things to do than follow that Europe's footstep?" End of quote from Mignolo. And then Mignolo goes on: "We de-colonial intellectuals, if not philosophers, have better things to do, as Fanon would say, than be engaged with issues debated by European philosophers." It's interesting that—but this is just my sarcastic remark then—then of course I ask myself: "Okay, fuck you, who are these bloody much more interesting intellectuals, no?" Then—well, let's say I was not overly impressed, no? Like, one of them was otherwise my good friend Wang Hui. Wang Hui, how do you pronounce it—Wang Hui, you know the Chinese leftist? Yeah, but—yeah, yeah, yeah—I wouldn't exactly quote him as a model of non-European authentic tradition because I couldn't—he, I'm on very good terms with him, he sent me recently a text on "China and Modernization," where he does an operation which I find deeply problematic. He tries to be, I'm not kidding, what I would have called a—who was the bad guy who did market economy? Milton Friedman. Like, "left-Friedmanist." Left Friedman. He—what he tries to do is to oppose real just market exchange and its capitalist distortion through monopoly and so on and so on. So as it exists, there is a true honest market exchange and he explicitly positively quotes Friedman. And then there are distortions which he—we, in a typical non-Marxist way—he sees the causes of these distortions not in economic relations themselves but in social pathology. Like he says, when power structure and other social pathologies distort the market, then we get market monopolies and so on and so on. Sorry, I'm, as you probably know, far—I'm all the time attacked there—far from being a dogmatic Marxist. But nonetheless I think that there is something in the demonstration of Marx how the development for this idealized simple just market exchange to exploitation, monopoly and so on, it's an immanent one. That you cannot just put the blame on social distortion and then let's restore—okay. Now let's go back to Mignolo. So what Mignolo proposes is just a version of Baudrillard's battle cry "Oublier Foucault," forget Foucault, you know, a short book by Baudrillard. Mignolo's proposal is: "Forget Europe. We have better things to do than to deal with European philosophy, even better things than endlessly deconstructing." He, Mignolo, explicitly includes also deconstruction in it. Like, "this is still endless narcissistic self-probing, we should simply step out." But, but, the irony here is that this battle cry obviously did not hold for Fanon himself, who dealt intensively and was proud of it, and—like the first obscenity seems to me, how dare he to quote Fanon. Fanon is my hero. That's why I defend him against—against soft guys like—like Homi Bhabha, who wrote long text trying to—to neutralize, normalize Fanon. Like: "No, he really didn't mean it with killing and violence, he meant some sublime gesture where there is no blood and nobody is really hurt." So let's face it: Fanon dealt extensively and intensively with Hegel, psychoanalysis, Sartre, even Lacan. So when my third reaction now paraphrased would have been: when I read lines like Mignolo's, I reach not for the gun but for Fanon, for this Fanon—I'm sorry, a long quote, I quoted it already in one of my books but I love it, this is Fanon, this is true post-colonialism. Fanon says: "I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible only for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation has to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving some black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. Haven't I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the blacks of the 17th century? I, as a man of color, do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt towards the past of my race. I, as a man of color, do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission, there is no white burden. I do not want to be victim of the ruse of a black world. Am I going to ask today's white man to answer for the slave traders of the 17th century? Am I going to try, by every means available, to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors. It would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the 3rd century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of eight-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe. I find myself in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: that of demanding human behavior from the other," and so on and so on. Sorry, but that's my position. And he was not a soft guy. He knew what is violent revolution and so on and so on. So again, I found very weird Mignolo to—to focus on Fanon. What Fanon—end of quote, of course—clearly saw is that today's global world is capitalist and as such cannot be effectively problematized from the standpoint of pre-capitalist local culture. This is why I think Mignolo's view of the anti-capitalist struggle is deeply flawed. Here is, sorry, another quote which really condenses all that I'm opposed to. Mignolo, again: "As we know from history, the identification of the problem doesn't mean that there is only one solution, or better yet, we can coincide in the perspective of harmony as a desirable global future, but communism is only one way to move towards it. There cannot be only one solution simply because there are many ways of being, which means of thinking and doing. Communism is an option, not an abstract universal. In the non-European world, communism is part of the problem rather than the solution, which doesn't mean that if you are not communist in the non-European world, you are capitalist. So the fact that Žižek and other European intellectuals are seriously rethinking communism means that they are engaging in one option, the reorientation of the Left among many today, marching towards the prospect of harmony, overcoming the necessity of war, overcoming success and competition which engender corruption and selfishness, and promoting the plenitude of life over development and death." End of quote. I claim that, first, Mignolo relies here on a totally naive, for me unacceptable, distinction between problems and solutions. Like: "We can all identify the problem, today's global capitalism, but different cultures have different solutions." If there is a thing we really know from history is that, while it's true the identification of a problem doesn't mean that there is only one solution, there also is all—only—there also is not only a single identification of the problem. When we encounter a problem—like a global economic crisis—we get a multitude of formulations in what this problem resides, which are its causes. Like, everybody more or less agrees we, at least in the developed West, are in some kind of a crisis. But what you will get from different positions is not only different solutions, but simply different identifications, definitions of what the problem is. For example, a radical neoliberal will say, "It's not too much state regulation, it's on the other, on the opposite, that we didn't push enough for—for state-free liberal society and so on and so on." A Catholic would have said, a Catholic capitalist ecologist, as a representative of the Pope said—and there is maybe God, punish Pope, because did you see what happened? The moment—a couple of minutes after Pope renounced resignation, lightning it strike on the dome, no. So, you know, you never know, no? Sorry. So what I want to say is that these different identifications of the problem form a dialectical unity with proposed solutions. I think the first thing to reproach again to Mignolo is this absolutely naive opposition of "We all see what's the problem, we have different solutions." No, all definitions of the problem are always already formulated from the perspective of a possible solution. Like I was just mentioned the church, one apologist said: "It's crucial to see that today's crisis is not about capitalism but it's a crisis of morality." I mean, this definition obviously of crisis is not neutral. So—which is why again, communism, I'm almost tempted to precisely say the opposite of Mignolo. And to claim that yes, while I definitely agree that we should not impose on all parts of the world the same path towards how to get rid of, whatever, today's deadlocks of global capitalism, but communism for me at least today is not solution—fuck it, who knows how will it look and so on—it's precisely a specific definition determination of the problem. The idea is that our problems are—are grounded in the antagonisms of capitalist self-reproduction and so on and so on. On the contrary, Mignolo's identification of the problem, I think, is worth reading carefully. You remember, I will read it again. Here is how he defines our common goal, allegedly we all share this opinion: "Marching towards the prospect of harmony, promoting the plenitude of life." Well, it's certainly not my goal, you know? That's what he thinks is a formulation of what we all share. The problem, what is for him the problem? I quote again: "The necessity of war, success and competition which engender corruption and selfishness, development and death." So his goal—harmony, plenitude of life—I think it's total empty nonsense. It's an empty signifier which can mean many incompatible things precisely depending on how we understand plenitude and life of—of harmony. For example, I can well imagine a fascist saying: "Yeah, yeah, Jews and Marxists introduce this harmony so, oh, life of plenitude and harmony, absolutely," and so on. Why—the fast equation of development at death as well as abstract rejection of war, corruption and selfishness are no less meaningless abstractions. So again, you see the problem that Mignolo encounters the moment he then he says, "We share the same goal," and then he proposes his definition of the goal that absolutely I don't share. And I think that would be—but I don't have time to develop it now, not to take the time. Yeah, okay—no if I—don't worry I'm already almost half into it so don't worry. Yeah, okay. No. What I'm saying is that—you see my—don't misunderstand me here. I'm much more politically correct in serious sense of anti-wrong eurocentrism that I may appear. My critic of Mignolo is not that he is neglects Europe, but in his primitive anti-eurocentrism he is way too eurocentric, in a naive sense that what he defines as this broader perspective doesn't work. So what Mignolo offers are not alternate modernities, but I'm tempted to say alternate post-modernities. Like, we know what's the problem, capitalist modernity, but each of our culture has its own way to step out and so on and so on. Against such an approach, we should totally defend European universalist legacy. How? Haha. Now comes the problem, the most probably problematic part. I will take an example of the point that I'm trying to make: what does it mean, the ambiguity of colonization and European universalism, by reporting to you on an incident that happened to me, not even incident, in India, when I was there. In a debate, an Indian cultural theorist complained that—against me—that I am in a privileged situation there, because he claimed it's easy for me to speak English. But am I aware of what an a priori formal oppression or language colonization is the very fact that, for them to debate with me, they have to use the very language of colonization, English, to formulate their very program of decolonization. Okay, as—so the idea was that the English language means that already formally in their very fight against colonization they are colonized. I exploded, as you can imagine. First I made an obvious remark, which was very well received, of typical big nation racism. Fuck him, my language is not English, you know? Like, since I come from small city Slovene nation, it's okay for me to talk—to speak English, no? But they, big nation, they have the dignity of whatever. But my serious answer was much more problematic for them. I claim that what this guy didn't see is how—and be very careful here, this is the Hegelian point—this imposition of English, a foreign language, created the very "X" which is oppressed by it. Because what is oppressed, what they feel, Indian emancipatory fighters, as being oppressed, is not the actual pre-colonial India, but the authentic dream of a new universalist democratic India. So, you see my point? I totally agreed with them that they experience English language as imposed, that the fact of being compelled to speak to—to debate in English means that they are deprived of something. But my point was here a much more vicious one. It was that that what they feel deprived of emerged only through this loss itself by them being forced to speak English. It's not the actual pre-modern India, which was just a kind of oppressive plural inconsistent society and so on and so on. You see the nice paradox. Which is why incidentally, this is how I explain of how the great intention of British colonizers there was not: "We must civilize Indians, we must impose of them our values." No, from the beginning they were not so stupid, but in an evil sense they were not stupid, the British. They knew very well that to control Indians, they must keep them apart. They precisely want them to stick to their own original culture. If there was no original culture, they even created it. My friends in India gave me—I quote it in I think in "The—Living in the End Times," the first chapter—you know the Book of Manu? It's the great classical text, the Bible of Indian traditional—uh—Hindu social thought. It justifies castes, describes in detail the duties, rules and so on. Nice, but you know what's the paradox? This book didn't exist before 18th century. There were just different fragments here, there. It was put together by British colonizers to have a kind of a unique ideological body to apply it to—to apply it to—to apply it to Indians. So again, what I am claiming here is that—and you know who knew this? There is another guy who is a tough guy, but he is my hero: Malcolm X. That's what his "X" means, Malcolm X. It's not simply we blacks were deprived of our original roots, we just have an X. For him, I read him, I'm not bluffing, not totally, X was precisely X of an opening, creative opening. His idea was not just we blacks are oppressed, but precisely because we are—were torn from our original constellation whatever, and precisely because we are more without roots than the whites, we have a unique chance of becoming more universal, emancipated than the whites. Which is why, it may be problematic choice, but I admit it, which is why as you all know, at the end Malcolm X's solution was not some stupid black roots but Islam, precisely in his view, Islam as a radically universal religion. And—or to put it in yet another way, more refined even psychologically: you know, I develop this in my big fat Hegel book, you know this Lacan's idea that not only language is the house of being, not only we dwell in language, but that language is at the same time a torture house. That we are never at home in language. That's the basic lesson of psychoanalysis, called symbolic castration, whatever the bullshit, that there is a fundamental gap imbalance between being human and language. There is always something goes wrong. The problem with this Indian vision is that, by locating this imbalance into—into colonial language, you obfuscate the fact that—like, okay, you are tortured by English language, but where is the torture done to you by your own local previous language? In other words, the most oppressive thing that could have happened to Indians is some kind of false liberation when someone would have told him, "Okay, let's get rid of English, let's return to your primordial whatever this was culture." You know what—how would this liberation look? Warning to those who are sensitive: now comes a really dirty story. A joke about Jesus Christ, which was told to me—I love them—by a Palestinian Christian in Ramallah when I was there. The joke is this one, it's vulgar, not even good joke, but I like the logic. The last evening before crucifixion, you know, Christ was there praying in the tent and so on, and of course he was God and he knew this is his last day in peace, no? So the apostles are worried, you know, like, "Oh my God, our—our Lord did such great things and he didn't have any fun in his life, no? So let's organize some fun of him." So they called Mary Magdalene, no, and says, "Would you go in and seduce"—so that at least the last night he will have some fun, you know? Okay, being who she is, no, she said, "Oh, gladly," and went in. After five minutes, in a totally—with totally horrified cry, she run out. And they asked her—no, don't worry, Christ is a good guy, he didn't rape her or what, much worse. They asked her: "What went wrong?" And she said: "First everything was okay. I danced a little bit before our Lord, then I pulled out my skirt, I spread widely my legs, he looked interested and then—and then Christ looked closely at my vagina and he said, 'Oh, what a terrible wound!' and put a hand on it and closed it totally," you know? Like, something like that would have been, I think, return to pre-colonial origins, you know? The whole point is that, how should I put it, to—to admit the wound, to fully identify with it. Like, for me again, the true victory over colonialism is not "let's return to some primitive local culture," but it's—what is already happening. This is why I have nothing against English language. Intelligent American conservatives already knew it: "Okay, English language is winning today." But if you look at it closely, it's no longer American or British English. It's English whose model speakers are probably some kind of a half illiterate in English literature, Singapore merchants or whatever. Or Slovenian philosophers. Or Greeks who will ruin all us Europe with their laziness, but that's another story. Sorry. No, but what has all—now I will conclude quickly, but what has all to do with Hegel? My—I'm so sorry, I don't have time to do it because, you know, I'm getting tired of politics. It may surprise you. I am now in the middle, even already finishing, a big new book on Hegel, which will not be as long as the other one, it will have just pages, I'm there now, and I focus precisely on this how the Hegelian dialectical process is not this type of from some immediate unity you have split and then magically synthesis again. No. At the beginning is the fall for Hegel. The good example would be this Indian example: you have a pre-colonial situation. We shouldn't demonize it, maybe it was worse, maybe it was better, the problem is just that it was something as it were totally different. And also we should not forget, there was nothing immediate, substantial about it. It had its own civil and the problem is then something new happens, like British colonization, and something is lost. But what is lost is not what was actually lost. What is lost is retroactively created through this very loss. And if you think I'm dreaming here, that's the whole point, for example, of Hegel of his—in his reading of Christianity. He says it openly that paradise is simply stupid animal kingdom. That loss—fall comes first. Fall itself creates what it is the fall from, that dimension. So again, for Hegel, overcoming the fall does not mean you somehow squeeze back to purity, it means that you fully immerse yourself into the fall and, as it were, you see the liberating potential of the fall itself. Which is why, again, we should be very cautious about this logic of, you know, Hegel: beginning, then things go wrong, then magically they come together. First thing don't go wrong, they are wrong from the very beginning, as it were. And again, at the end you don't get any synthesis or whatsoever. And now if you allow me nonetheless five minutes to quickly conclude: why is this important? Because of our present historical moment. I think that what we should get rid of, if we want seriously to maintain a radical emancipatory political perspective, is what I ironically am tempted to call the Hölderlin paradigm. Hölderlin, you know, the German poet, minor one—Kleist was better but that's another point. You know his famous line quoted endlessly by Heidegger and others: "Wo das Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch"—"where there is danger, the redeeming or solving solution arises also." This reading that today we are approaching some zero point of extreme danger, alienation, but this danger at the same time renders possible the solution, the re—you know, like, we have this in Marx clearly. Capitalism as the utter alienation, but at the same time opening up the possibility of collective re-appropriation of the alienated substance. Heidegger, forgetting of being but, "kehre," the reversal emerging it. Even Derrida, I would have said, is in this very strangely. He always emphasized that we are living in the final moment of the metaphysical closure. That you know, like, metaphysical closure is coming to its end, exhausting its possibility and so on and so on. I think that what we should learn from Hegel is precisely that this entire paradigm is to be dropped. That what Hegel calls reconciliation is not some magic solution, but it's precisely to—this reconciliation with the evil, the fall itself, to see how what appears as evil is at the same time the very recourse of our salvation. Like what Malcolm X saw. Yes, X, we were terribly brutally deprived, but this deprivation, depriving us, white slave-holders, of our black roots, gives us a unique possibility of being universal subjects of emancipation and, as it were, beating the blacks—sorry, beating the whites at their own—at their own terrain. So what also—but this solution is not a cynical—now I am really concluding—is not a cynical one, namely a cynical one in the sense of, "Yeah, okay, we need fall to redeem ourselves so we should manipulate or whatever." With this I will conclude: I think rather that if there is a lesson, progressive one, from the ongoing crisis, it's that cynicism doesn't work. I was still surprised how even a guy from whom I would have expected more, my good friend Fred Jameson, again recently repeated that old stupidity that we live in cynical times where ruling ideology no longer takes itself seriously, so we don't even need today critique of ideology. We no longer need that delicate Hegelian conceptual analysis of discerning the inconsistencies, the voids of argumentation. Those in power are brutal, they admit everything more or less openly. We live in post-ideological cynical times. You will never surprise those in power by demonstrating to them that they are lying, that they are inconsistent and so on. I think this is maybe the most dangerous illusion that there is. If there is something to be learned from Freud, it is that precisely this type of perverse cynical openness is at the same time the greatest illusion. You are really in illusion in social, material social life, not when you are telling some dreaming stories about divine intervention, but precisely when you adopt this cynical attitude, you know, like: "Fuck it, what ideals? Let's be frank. It's all about money, power, pleasures," whatever. Precisely this type of cynical realism doesn't work. It's the most—you are most blinded. Why? What you don't see is precisely illusions which still regulate your life precisely when you think you are directly, brutally realist. Let's not forget, for example, the crisis of It was not caused by some crazy welfare state ideals. It was caused precisely by, you know, that Michael Douglas bullshit that "Greed is good," cynical realists. Precisely those who think we have no illusions, that's the brutality of life, they err most. This is the big lesson of Hegel. This does not mean life is just a muddle, we can't do anything, but—now I'm really, you see, like, just concluding. You know, I think that what's great in Hegel is that he is a post-eschatological thinker. His problem is not: things are bad, but we are there, just push it a little bit and everything will turn around and so on and so on. The greatness of Hegel is that he is a post-apocalyptic thinker, in the sense of: we tried it—okay, I don't agree with Hegel here but his idea is French Revolution—they tried to realize freedom, it went terribly wrong for Hegel. I'm not so sure. Like French revolutionary terror. And then his point is precisely to demonstrate how this doesn't mean we were wrong. We should accept the lesson of what for Hegel is the fiasco of French Revolution is simply the openness of history. It's not pre-determined, it went wrong. It just means Hegel does compel us to accept a certain basic alienation of social life. But it doesn't—not in the Marxist sense that oh, irreducibly we are enslaved to some alienated substance, fate, capital, whatever to rule us. No. I think Hegel would have loved the paradox of today, which is: the more we are aware of how capitalism relies on our own fictions, on virtual reality and so on, so we are well aware there is no "capital in itself" mystique, we are playing with our fictions and so on, precisely when we know fully that there is no substantial metaphysical capital with a capital C, that it's just we are fighting with our fictions, the less we are able to—to dominate it. So there is no big Other, but this doesn't mean it's just me. It means that the situation becomes much more non-transparent and so on and so on. So again, I think that the lesson of Hegel—now I am very short, I will develop more this in my book—is that the struggle for freedom should go on, but we should just learn to accept its dangers. There is no ontological guarantee. It's a risky struggle, there is no guarantee how it will end. We cannot ever step on our shoulder and control the effects of what we do. So again, I think that—that's again this—this is what we need today, because again, the thing to avoid today is precisely, I think, this type of cheap cynicism and... Now I will just add something that you will like. You know, I agree here with Costas, I really think that Syriza is something special. Maybe you don't read in your newspapers enough about it, but I really think that Tsipras is a genius. Because the way, I will not go into it how, the way he unites a principled attitude and very intelligent pragmatic compromises. For example, I pray to God that he will succeed trying to make a deal with Europe, kind of a controlled temporary divorce. You know, like, step out of Euro for two years to put it in order then rejoin the Euro. It's interesting how even his enemies, like Financial Times, here I read, there was again a couple of months ago a comment in Financial Times where they said whatever even if we disagree with him in fundamental issues, Tsipras seems to be the only guy in Greece who talks sense, you know? Thank you, thank you. You see, you see, your masters in New Democracy paid you to interrupt me now, no? Okay, so we had a number of criticisms, self-criticisms coming through that covered a number of areas. Indeed you did start with this critique of the multitude and the rhizomatic, the Deleuzian and so on. I thought that after the various debates that you had including with me about the Tahrir Square, Syntagma and Puerta del Sol, you would have changed, and you've changed but only partly, you know, you repeat yourself again in relation to that. We can leave it for another occasion. It is very interesting however that in your kind sort of references today you have co-opted two people that in the past were kind sort of like arch, if not arch enemies, but clearly great opponents: Heidegger and Derrida, God forbid. I mean, you know sort of—wait a minute, I critically—and then to criticize your great friend Wang Hui and I should tell you that Wang Hui is the, perhaps you know, the most prominent representative of the Chinese new Left. He's someone who edits, he's the editor of the magazine Dushu, a monthly magazine that sells up to half a million copies, and he is THE new Left, and indeed I should say that Wang Hui will be giving a masterclass here at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in late October, early November, we will announce that and hopefully you'll come to talk with Wang Hui because, you know, suddenly praising Derrida and criticizing Wang Hui sounded a bit strange to me. But anyway, Walter Mignolo we can discuss some other time. It was such a rich series of topics that you touched today, Slavoj, so I think that rather than sort of a chronological series of questions... No, but wait a minute, very shortly, can I? First, this was a misunderstanding. Wasn't it clear that I criticized Derrida and Heidegger, that they are still part of this what I called Hölderlin paradigm: things are bad but we are close to better? No. And my only critical claim was there that Hegel, who is usually taken as part of that paradigm—extreme alienation and then op-op—no no no, it was a misunderstanding. Second, Wang Hui. I was critical of him at a very specific point, which is that this left-Friedmanism. He really thinks that market is, at its basic dimension, a just market and it's just distorted by strong bureaucracy and so on and so on. So I mean, my first very brief question is: if someone wants to know your Hegel position, should they buy "Less Than Nothing" at pages or wait for the next book at pages? Will the next book summarize the earlier? They should buy all of my books. And two copies, two copies! Okay. Question, the gentleman back please. Can you please stand up? A little bit louder or come here, I'm sorry. Point of clarification: you said that in the opposition between Badiou and broadly postmodernism, both poles were wrong. And then I didn't understand whether you were saying that somehow there was some new form of social link possible that was not founded on either patriarchal or matriarchal? Is that what you said, that it was possible? And—I just wanted to clarify that because it sounds a difficult thing to explain. But I mean, it sounds a simple point. No, wait a minute, my point is very simple. If you reject this, then my god, then the only alternative is either some postmodern capitalist individualism or traditional hierarchy. I mean, I thought I even said something—but what Lacan told to the students in '68? That's why he was wrong. That's why he was wrong. I don't have any problems here, really. Lacan also would get his re-education camp if he were to be alive when I take power. Sorry, please. I would just like to return to the question of violence. You were talking about violence as coming—coming from the authority, and you called it as an act of cowardice. And then you also talked about violence as in radicality, anti-systemic subversion, as in radical social change. But I want to ask you about the spontaneity of violence in riots or protest movements. And we know what the classical liberal response usually is in the media right afterwards, it's the immediate response, the demonization of this kind of violence. Can you be—can you more elaborate on this? And perhaps because our friend here is from Slovenia, you could say a few things about the recent events in Slovenia. I would like to, but the only problem is that like what do you know about it, you know what I mean? I would have to explain the background. I just think that now, and literally now, yesterday evening, the whatever you call it, right-populist leader and government fell. I think that now is the crucial moment. The trap to be avoided is now to give too much a chance to this government now. The great thing of the protest movement in Slovenia was that, you know, the slogan was "Neither-Nor," which meant: "Yes, of course, No to this right-wing populism, but at the same time No to, I didn't know how to call them, this pseudo-left post-communist orientation, full of corruption, without any ideas." For example, it shocked me when one of the representatives of this official Left, let's call it, said when asked why does he consider himself a leftist, he said that the crucial point of reference to decide who is left or right today in Slovenia is how do you relate to the partisan World War II struggle. Okay, I mean, I don't demonize partisan struggle, I just think that in today's crisis here and now, isn't it very sad if the only thing that comes to your mind is whatever? So again, I—I—I think that the dangerous moment will arrive now. But already this movement in Slovenia is extremely important, which is why in an almost pure clinical way, you can see how different circles tried to reappropriate it. On the one hand, the ex-official Left tried to claim: "Oh, it's the same battle, they are ours," and so on and so on. But also, and this will render me unpopular in Slovenia—I already called—yeah, but I will make a step further, where I will brutally attack all this Writers' Union and so on, attempt at reappropriation by the cultural establishment. I mean, I'm totally opposed to them. I think that the—so again, the question of violence that you asked us—yeah—yeah, but—yeah, but—no no, here, I mean, again, we have to delineate clearly. On the one hand, I don't think that so-called objective violence, violence inscribed into the order, social order as such, justifies subjective violence. Because some people criticized me for this, that my notion of objective violence gives too much space for this quick justification of, like, you know: I can start shooting whatever and I can say, "Oh, it was just my reaction to the invisible objective violence" or whatever and so on and so on. But although I'm not saying this, but nonetheless, I think that the only way to understand so-called subjective violence, like of protesters, is to take into account the objective, invisible violence, violence in the institutions themselves. It has to be called violence. You lose the whole—you lose the whole point. If you don't say this then—I mean, this is for me the ABC, the beginning of proper dialectical analysis: that you don't locate violence only in what disturbs the existing order. You have to see the violence which is already here in the order, as it were, in the existing order itself. In—and you know where it is for me here, as to physical violence, so that I will not appear as any advocate of physical violence. As already said, this is for me typical about Tahrir Square. Didn't the people notice that the violence of the protesters, which was for me real radical violence—why? because my god, they brought the whole state to a stop, what more violent thing can you imagine—but was they didn't, basically, kill anyone. They came there to the Tahrir Square and they said: "We stay here, we don't move." And then all physical violence was done precisely by the forces of order, as they put it repeatedly, "in order to return things to normal," "in order to re-establish order." You know all those thugs paid by Mubarak forces who attacked people on Tahrir Square and so on and so on. I think that this whole liberal view of things basically, the way they are when nothing happens, are normal and then violence is just change. No, the ABC of Marxism—and here I am a Marxist—is that there is a tremendous amount of violence necessary for just the things to go on the way they are. And if we don't take this into account, you know, then—then in a way then—then we are lost, in a way. Okay, a couple of questions. Then the next round. Can I ask something on that point? Then how is the revolution in a normal state of affairs? How can a revolution in a normal state of affairs happen? If it's not the violence that you say in this ecstatic moment, but when things return to normal and you have this kind—Ah, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, wait a minute, let me make some things clear. I am no big fan of physical violence. I'm not crazy. But nonetheless, you know, and now I will say something horrible, okay? Like, there are moments when you need violence, you know, when you need real violence. I don't have any problems with that. For example, you know, I read a wonderful interview with some black guys who protested, I don't know where, it was years ago when I was young, and they did some usual protest, they broke some windows and so on, no? And then white liberals came to them and said: "But we all sympathize with you. Why didn't you just make the point, why did you have to be violent?" And the guy gave a perfect answer, no? He says: "Yes, but you know, if we were just be doing what you are telling us to do now, you wouldn't be here now. We would be maybe a small footnote in a local newspaper." You know what—you know what I mean? Or let me give you another brutal example, which will be really maybe shocking to you, where I'm even ready to condone not torture, but personal private brutal pressure and so on. Friends from Turkey told me a wonderful story. There is a big prison somewhere in the Eastern Turkey, mostly for Kurdish so-called terrorists, where of course they were—I was told this story, even if it's not true, it makes a point nicely—and they are there, of course they were tortured. All of a sudden, the tor—torturing declined tremendously in that prison. And then some Turkish journalist—that's the story I've heard in Istanbul—went there and looked into it and discovered what happened.
Thank you. Just to make it clear, I, of course, I will not be dealing with non-entities like Alan Johnson or John Gray and so on. I mean, read them. If you find anything of any interest in their attacks on me, then you simply shouldn't read—I mean, then you are beyond help. I want nonetheless seriously to answer two, three other critical points made. First, a couple of observations about the ongoing political situation in Europe, all the protests exploding. I think that these protests seem to converge in a series of demands which, in their very spontaneity and obviousness, form a kind of—I apologize for this jargon—a kind of epistemological obstacle to the proper confrontation with the ongoing crisis. What people usually demand when they protest is really—what it amounts to—it's a kind of a popularized version of Deleuzian politics. People know what they want, they are able to discover and formulate it, but only through their own continuous engagement and activity. So we need, so we are told, active participatory democracy. Not just representative democracy with its electoral ritual every four years, which just interrupts the voter's passivity. Then we are told we need the self-organization of the multitude, molecular from beneath, not a centralized Leninist party with the leader and so on and so on. It is, I think, this myth of non-representative direct self-organization which is the last trap, the deepest illusion which is most difficult to renounce. Yes, there are, in every revolutionary process, ecstatic moments of group solidarity when thousands, hundreds of thousands, together occupy a public space, like on Tahrir Square in Cairo two years ago. Yes, there are moments of intense collective participation where local communities debate, decide, when people live in a kind of permanent emergency state taking things into their own hands, with no leader guiding them. But, I claim, such states don't last. And tiredness—getting tired of it—is not a simple psychological fact. So now comes my first thesis—I will try to be as brutal and provocative as possible: the large majority of people—and I'm not here presenting you the variation of that percent of the people are idiots, no, I include myself into this large majority—large majority, I claim, wants to be passive and just rely on an efficient state apparatus. Like, I'm sorry to tell you, but I wouldn't like to live in a state where some kind of permanent participation, engagement is going on and so on and so on. I much prefer to be a passive citizen. There is a machinery of state or whatever social services which smoothly does its work, and the less I know about it, all the better. And I don't despise ordinary people for it. Next point: people really know what they want when they are engaged? I claim no, they don't. Up to a point, I claim even the majority even don't want to know, really. I claim that we should rehabilitate, of course not in the old class sense, the term elite. What does a good politician do? A good politician absolutely doesn't follow or learn from the people what they want. No, he tells them what they want. And if he is a really good politician, people have this aha-effect: "Oh my god, how clear, now I know what I want." And again, I find nothing authoritarian or whatever in this. As to this molecular self-organizing multitude against hierarchic order and so on. Well, I always start to laugh because when I ask people, especially today: "Okay, okay, give me an example of this, no?" They told me: "But you know what's going on in Venezuela? You know factories being given to workers, they organize themselves in communes and so on and so on." Yes, but if you want a leaderless society, I somehow wouldn't exactly propose Venezuela as a model. You know, you have the big fat guy on the top, which is absolutely inherent to this. It's absolutely naive not to see how—and it's a nice dialectical case—how, of course, sometimes it is happening in Venezuela, a kind of authentic local in favelas or elsewhere self-organization outside the standard multiparty representative mechanisms. But I claim that the leader, which is precisely a kind of a trans-democratic leader, strong charismatic leader, is strictly correlative to this low-level elementary self-awakening of the people. They belong together. Is it as if you want real awakening of the people, then you need a charismatic leader on the top. As to, again, to the—yes, sorry—so now what's my point here? Does this rejection of direct democracy mean a resigned surrender to the hegemonic power structure? Am I simply saying, "Yeah, yeah, revolution is good for a—or direct democracy—for a couple of months when things are in turmoil, but then things return back to normal and so on and so on"? No, I think that there is nothing inherently conservative in being tired of the usual leftist demands for permanent mobilization, active participation and so on. This is the leftist super-ego logic. The more you participate, the more you are guilty for not participating enough and so on and so on. The battle, I claim, the true battle of the Left, has to be won here. By here, I mean in the domain of citizen's passivity. The true measure of change is not those ecstatic moments, we are all on Tahrir Square or whatever, but when things return back to normal. Is this normalcy the same as before? You know, how is your everyday life affected? This is the revolution which is really difficult to make. Let me make, along these lines, a step further. One of the politico-ideological topics rendered popular by different Deleuzians, Negri and so on, is the idea that we are witnessing today the shift from traditional hierarchy, a pyramid-like subordination to a master, a shift from this hierarchy to, as they put it, pluralizing rhizomatic networks. Along these lines, political analysts like to point out that the new anti-globalist protests all around Europe and United States, from Occupy Wall Street to Spain, Greece—although Greece is more interesting here—have no central agency. All people, even in my own country Slovenia, Slovenia, who demonstrate like this is wonderful, there is no central committee, we just meet, we debate and so on. There are just multiple groups interacting. Again, what I'm tempted to say are two things. First, was it in this room when we had last year a round table where Wendy Brown was here, or in the other room? She made an extremely important point, and since I am nonetheless a moderately polite person, I didn't want to provoke her too much by asking her the obvious question, namely: you remember when she said how we leftists still behave as we are, as if we are fighting a hierarchic central paternal power, while today's capitalism power itself already works, operates in this, let's call it in fashionable terms, post-Oedipal multitude way and so on and so on? I mean, the question to ask, I wanted to ask her but out of politeness I didn't, would have been: "Is this your family polemics?" I mean, because my problem with Judith Butler is that she mostly writes as if the enemy is still some kind of patriarchal identitarian logic. No, as Wendy made it very clear, today's power itself—and this was clear to Deleuze up to a point also—today's power more and more already functions in this non-hierarchic multitude mode, which makes it, and that's the paradox, which makes it no less oppressive. Now, there is a step to be made here, which I'm nonetheless not ready to make it. And I admire my good friend-enemy Alain Badiou that he made this step, but I'm not ready to follow him here. Namely, there is something nonetheless wrong in what he did. This is my first reply to critics. My first critic is here, my best friend almost, Alain Badiou. In a recent interview, he published a short book together with—and this I will never forgive him—together with Élisabeth Rüdinesco. A dialogue where—it's quite shocking what he they together propose there. The idea is that since all this Deleuzian horizontal networking and so on is the way, as Badiou likes to put it, today's human animal functions our utilitarian everyday life, the only way to break the spell of bourgeois ideology today is with a new master. That the Left should reinvent the master. His idea is a very simple one, Badiou's. It's that—you know Badiou's opposition between animal life, just hedonist individuals, and then subject, subject as defined by his, her, their fidelity to truth. And Badiou's point is very simple here: what makes an individual—you know, this pleasure-oriented bourgeois individual—a subject is fidelity to a master. It's a total rehabilitation of a master. And I almost admire Badiou here because he goes to the end and claims that there was a deep necessity in so-called cult of personality in Communist movement: Lenin, Stalin, Mao. Here is the quote. It's—there are three persons: Rüdinesco, Badiou and then Aeschlimann, this is the journalist of Libération now he moved to Nouvel Observateur, who is asking them. Rüdinesco: "In the last resort, what was lost in psychoanalytic societies is the position of the master to the benefit of the position of small bosses." The journalist: "What do you mean by master?" Rüdinesco: "The position of the master allows transference. The psychoanalyst is supposed to know what the analysand will discover. Without this knowledge attributed to the psychoanalyst, the search for the origin of suffering is quasi-impossible." The journalist: "Do we really have to go through the restoration of the master?" Badiou now, quite crazy: "The master is the one who helps the individual to become subject. That is to say, if one admits that the subject emerges in the tension between individual and the universality, then it is obvious that the individual needs a mediation and thereby an authority in order to progress on this path. The crisis of the master is a logical consequence of the crisis of the subject, and psychoanalysis did not escape it. One has to renew the position of the master. It is not true that one can do without it, and especially in the perspective of emancipation." Do you see the nice paradox? Without master, no emancipation. And then Élisabeth Rüdinesco does the last kick. Rüdinesco: "When the master disappears, he is replaced by the boss. By his bosses' authoritarianism. And sooner or later this always ends in fascism. Unfortunately, history has proven this to us." No, this is even for me with my bad taste jokes a little bit too much. Like, the only—the only defense against fascism is a master. Although, again, one has to admit the obvious element of truth in it. That in today's type of subjectivity, we effectively no longer have a traditional patriarchal master figure. And again, I'm not saying anything extra new here. This was known, for example, already to Horkheimer and Adorno way back in the 1930s where, in their excellent analysis, Horkheimer in "Authoritarianism and the Family" (Autorität und Familie), Adorno in his analysis of structure of fascist propaganda, emphasized that the totalitarian leader—Hitler, Stalin—these are not master figures. But nonetheless, my problem is that—I hope we agree here that—of course this post-Oedipal postmodern subjectivity, infinitely plastic subjectivity, you reconstruct yourself all the time and so on and so on, that that—this one fits perfectly today's relations of domination. That even if you don't have master in this classical sense, oppression can be even worse. This is—I accept this. And furthermore, I think I repeat myself a little bit here, the last time I was here I already developed this, namely, that we have regimes today which we would all have agreed are, in some naive sense, extremely authoritarian, totalitarian and so on, but they are not the regimes of the patriarchal master. And there was a book written by a guy called—I forgot his Christian name, I'm sorry, it's Myers, M-Y, something, called "The Cleanest Race." I think, again, I repeat myself a little bit, but nonetheless to make the point, about today's North Korea. The guy did something pretty interesting. He lived as a journalist in Korea and used the—in North Korea—and used a little bit of freedom that he had to go a little bit, he was allowed to, I don't know how, to countryside. He looked not at the propaganda that North Korea addresses to the West, but at, as it were, propaganda for "Aborigines," their own people there, and discovered that it's absolutely not that all this bullshit about Korea being deeply embedded in old Confucian society and so on. No, it's strictly matriarchal. And it's a wonderful, very simple book. But, for example, he draws attention to the fact that with all Stalinist retouching and so on, if you look at the official portraits of the leader—the old two ones, now it's different, who knows what will come out of this young guy—Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The official portraits don't try to obliterate, diminish their tummy, stomach, their stockiness. It's even emphasized. Like, there are some almost embarrassing portraits of Kim Il Sung where you see his stomach and even, relatively strong for a man, breasts and so on. So this guy went deeply into it and discovered that the entire state metaphorics is: Party and Leader are mothers. And he gives some wonderful—maybe you know them, I'm sorry—examples. I don't have now time to quote them all. For example, the most popular North Korean Party song is dedicated of course to the Communist Party as Mother. And it's an absolutely obscene song. It says that we Korean children are, like, people are like children sucking milk from the big breasts of—of Party, our Mother, and we will never abandon your breasts, we need your breasts to survive. And then this guy provides another promise, another wonderful example. He did something ingeniously simple. He looked into the latest edition of the Korean official, like, dictionary of Korean language and looked at the two entries: Mother, Father. The entry Mother is over one page. It goes into Mother, all the definitions. First the biological mother of a child, then metaphorical mother of the family who takes care of all of them, and then, yes, as you expect, in a larger sense, the Party is the Mother of the people, blah blah, with all the examples. And then Father: one line. The man who helped the mother to become a mother. I mean, you—and then in a more subtle analysis even, he claims: "Did you noticed how Kim Jong Il, who now died, the middle leader, how he usually had some strange ordinary wind jacket and his hair was kind of, no?" That—he claims that this is the typical image of a Korean ordinary women who has these mass-produced plastic jackets and spends hours waiting for food and so on and so on. That it's again a subtle maternal identification. Now, I am definitely not buying here the standard patriarchal bullshit advocated unfortunately by some Lacanians like Pierre Legendre in France, according to which: "Oh, we should return to paternal authority. If you want—more power to the women you get North Korea and so on, no?" I'm not saying this. All I'm saying is something much more—of course, the first thing to note would be here that—the obvious thing, no, which one can learn also from old histories that—you know, if you are precisely a woman, beware of societies where you have a mother goddess ruling you, you know? Then actual women are usually even more oppressed than in standard patriarchal societies. So, of course, this Mother is a male myth. Of course at the de facto level, male domination is absolute in North Korea. This guy reports on how even what you get in some Communist countries where, as a rule, I remember from my youth and reading books, like, to show how nonetheless we take care of women rights, usually you have three ministries which were, in socialist countries, more or less reserved for women, you know? They are of course the soft ones where there is not real power. It's Education, Health, and Culture. You know, they can be left to women, but never the serious ministries. So again, of course this is a mystified notion. But all I'm saying is nonetheless this simple fact that—and this is what was nicely formulated already by Horkheimer—that with all the oppressiveness, the traditional paternal authority nonetheless gave you a kind of a support within, for example, Protestant logic to oppose yourself to external authority. You know, like, it's—you know, it's a great—I'm saying this shamelessly—a great civilizatory achievement to have in the ruling ideological structure a space for radical opposition. So that you can say officially, as it were, that it's my right to oppose society's wrong and so on. And here patriarchal authority can up to a point, up to a point, play a positive role. But let me now make a step further. I nonetheless think—and Lacan is here much better than Badiou and Rüdinesco—that this is an irreversible process. What is going on today is, I think, the final decline of the figure of the master, as the symbolic authority and so on and so on. I think they are simply too nostalgic here, Rüdinesco and Badiou. No, we cannot return. What happens today with—whatever we call it—postmodern capitalism is that the symbolic authority is fatally wounded, we cannot return to it. So, and I find especially strange from Badiou to advocate this return to the master, because, you know, Badiou likes to emphasize, for example, in his book on "The Communist Hypothesis" that the only politics can be serious politics can be the Communist politics. All others are just pragmatic opportunism and so on and so on. Yeah, but I claim that the only—we can only talk seriously about emancipatory politics if the master—master is not the ultimate horizon of our social life. If we cannot imagine a society which is not held together by a master figure, but in a different way, then we can pack our luggage and there—let's—let's play pragmatic—let's play pragmatic politics and so on and so on. So again, the challenges—the challenges are great here. I think that in this debate Badiou versus postmodern fluid plural multitude figures of authority, I think that both—both—both poles are wrong. Master—the structure of a master as well as this polymorphous multitude structure—it doesn't function. There is a challenge here, and there are some hints in Lacan or somewhere that you can have a social link which is not founded on the figure of the master. Next point: now I come more to self—to criticism—would be where—for which I am often attacked—would be violence. That I am—my god, it's quite funny for me to read about myself—that I am secretly fascinated by violence, that I am dreaming about some—some, I don't know, final explosion where purifying end of the world, whatever you want. Uh—no. Again, I think that apropos violence, first one should demystify the problem of violence. In what sense? One should reject claims that the 20th-century communism used too much excessive murderous violence and that we should be careful not to fall into this trap again. I mean, of course in a way this is true. But I claim that it's not the right way to approach what went wrong with the 20th-century communism. Violence is not directly the cause of it. You know, it's not to say, as some naive Marxists do say—and somebody showed to me a—a book, just the quote, I didn't read it of course, of Tariq Ali, "The Idea of Communism." You know, the book which was published one year after the conference on Communism, and our book, ready, which was finished earlier, appeared only a year later. So you can make your own thoughts about it. How is it that a Verso author, the moment he heard about our project, "The Idea of Communism," wrote quickly another book with the same title as an answer? Okay. There he says: "The tragedy of communism was that they forgot about democracy, they didn't—" No, like, no. I claim, of course it was terrifying, recourse to violence. But the ques—but to resolve the problem, one should precisely not directly say, "Oh, we should take care of," or "we should—we should have taken care of violence," what, prohibit such violence? No. The true problem is: what was wrong in the Communist project, the way it was formulated in the 20th century? What was wrong in the project as such so that the only way to survive he had to take recourse to violence? Violence, as is always the case, was already an answer to a certain deadlock. So as I put it in my book, far from celebrating violence, I think that if we mean what we usually mean by violence—direct physical violence and so on—violence is always, from individual to collective level, a sign of impotence, basically. I mean, this is an old story, you know it. If your father beats you, slaps you, it may hurt you, but it always as a rule ruins his authority. The fact that the father slaps you means he was really impotent, he lacked proper authority. And it's the same socially. If you look at all the big explosions of violence: Hitler, Stalin and so on. For example, what is arguably the greatest violence in Soviet Union? The late twenties, early thirties, the forced collectivization. This violence was one big proof that they were not able to approach properly the problem of—of peasants, farmers, collectivization, agriculture and so on and so on. That's—so again, it's stupid to say Communists neglected the problem of violence or neglected the impor—the importance of democracy. No, this neglect is not simply the last cause, it's a reaction to some deeper failure. Now I will try to repro—to answer—I'm sorry for a relatively long quote—one of the critics of myself. It was formulated somewhere, I will even not quote the author because by mistake I dropped that reference, it doesn't really matter. It's a very interesting criticism of me because it is kind of a reaction to my refutal of the first-level criticism. The first-level criticism is, you know, all this Alan Johnson, John Gray and Simon Critchley stuff, that I'm fascinated by some violent explosion blah blah blah, I'm really a coward who just dreams of some violence blah blah. Okay. Now when these guys are forced to admit that nonetheless I am not as crazy as that, then they change the argument and claim that what I am really doing is just putting in provocative terms an extremely common-sense obvious point, which is totally acceptable, but just not interesting. For example, when I say, "The problem with Hitler was that he wasn't violent enough." Okay, at this point you get the heart attack of liberals, no. "Ah, do you think he should have killed us all Jews or what?" you know. But then when I add, "In the sense in which Gandhi was more violent than Hitler," then they say, "Oh, it's just that he's making a totally common-sense point, that one thing is violence in the normal sense of killing people, another thing is social change." And why do I have to put it in this confusing provocative way using the same word "violence" at both levels? Why don't I just say: "We have violence as killing people, torturing, which is unacceptable, and we have a radical social change, which is not inherently linked to violence." So that I'm just trying to make a scandalous effect, you know? But really what I am saying is something even totally acceptable for a liberal. So that you will not say that I'm dreaming the argument, please allow me, two minutes, a long quote. "Žižek is here using language in a way that is designed to be provocative and to confuse people. He doesn't actually mean that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. What he means to do instead is to alter the typical understanding of the word violence, so that Gandhi's nonviolent means of protest against the British will be considered more violent than Hitler's incredibly violent attempts at world domination and genocide. Violence for Žižek in this particular instance actually means that which causes massive social upheaval. In that way, he considers Gandhi to be more violent than Hitler. But this, like so much of what Žižek writes, is actually nothing new or interesting or surprising. And that's why he writes it in the provocative, confusing and bizarre manner that he chooses instead of a straightforward manner. If he would have written that Gandhi accomplished more through nonviolence that aimed at systemic change than Hitler accomplished through violent means, we would all agree. But we would also know that there is nothing profound in such a statement. Instead, Žižek attempts to shock us and in doing so he covers up the completely humdrum conclusion about Gandhi and Hitler that everyone already believed to be true before they read Žižek. The same is true of Žižek's controversial point about Jews and anti-Semites. There is nothing remarkable about the argument that in the mind of every Nazi who hates Jews, there must also be a fictional Jew for that Nazi to hate. And thus any attempt to rid Nazis of the Jews within themselves, as Žižek tells us Hitler once said, would result in the destruction of the Nazis themselves, since the anti-Semites in themselves require the continued existence of the Jews within themselves. In other words, Žižek is once again simply making a muddled word salad in an attempt to dress up commonplaces as profundity. Gandhi's method of changing things worked because he went after the system itself. The anti-Semite can never kill the object of his hatred because his virtue necessitates the fictional Jew." End of quote. Hehe! Admit you were convinced, no? Okay. In both cases, so you got it, the reproach is the same. I try to sell the common thesis that Gandhi aimed at changing the system, not destroying people. But since this is a commonplace I want to be provocatively popular, I formulate it more provocatively, weirdly expanding the meaning of the word violence to include institutional changes. The same goes for my statement about the Jew is in the anti-Semite but the anti-Semite is also in the Jew. It's just a garbled way to deliver the commonplace that in the mind of every Nazi who hates Jews, there must also be a fictional Jew for that Nazi to hate. Like, you know, that the Nazis don't really hate actual Jews but what they hate, what they construct as the object of their hatred is their own fantasy. But is this the case? What if, I claim, the key point gets lost in this translation of my, as the kind writer wrote, "muddled word salad" into common sense? In the second case, it's wonderful how he missed my point. My point is not just the effectively obvious claim that the Jew to whom the Nazi refers in his ideological, that this Jew is his ideological fiction. I know this is a commonplace. But I'm saying something else. What I'm saying is that his own ideological identity of the Nazi is simultaneously grounded in this fiction, not simply depending on it. The Nazi is, in his self-perception, a figure in his own dream about the Jews. And this, I think—you see my point? It's not only that the Jew is in me, my fantasy. Is that I am in the Jew, in the sense that I am part of my own ideological dream. It's a slightly more complex point. So back to now to Gandhi. So why call Gandhi's attempts to undermine the British state in India more violent than Hitler's mass killings? Well, to draw attention to the fundamental violence that sustains a normal functioning of the state. Benjamin called it mythic violence. And the no less fundamental violence that sustains every attempt to undermine the functioning of the state, Benjamin's divine violence. This is why the reaction of the state power to those who endanger it through peaceful demonstrations and so on is so brutal, and why in its very brutality, this reaction is reactive in the Nietzschean sense, protective. So far from eccentricity, the extension of the notion of violence so that for me nonetheless Hitler was violent but Gandhi also, is based on a key theoretical insight. And it is the limitation of violence to its directly visible physical aspect which, far from being neutral common sense, relies on ideological distortion. This is also why the reproach that I'm fascinated by some ultra-radical violence with comparison to which Hitler and Khmer Rouge didn't go far enough, misses the point, which is not to go further in this type of violence, like it's not: "Oh, why did Khmer Rouge kill only one—one-quarter of Cambodians? They should have killed more, one-one-half or whatever." Is that one should change the entire terrain. It's difficult to be—it's difficult to be really violent. And the same holds for violence which has any effect on the system. For example, take, I remember, I'm unfortunately old enough, it was possible when I was very young to see them on screen, you know, they—during Chinese Cultural Revolution, all those thousands of young people trying to get rid of tradition, smashing with—with even sometimes their hands, old monuments and so on. Already at that point, this did strike me as sign—precisely this physical violence did strike me as, again, a sign of some fundamental impotence. So—I am tempted to paraphrase here again the old Brecht: "What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?" What are the violent and destructive outbursts of Red Guardists caught in a Cultural Revolution compared to the true cultural revolution which was, which is the permanent dissolution of all life forms which capitalist reproduction dictates? I mean, if we, again, we have to use the same—you see my point—the same, of course, violence which I praise, socially trans—the violence of social transformation, of course, and hopefully it's so, of course, it's not necessarily brutal physical violence. But the precise point I'm trying to make is that brutal physical violence is an act of cowardice. It's always a reactive violence, an admission of impotence. You explode in brutal destruction when you can't do the, let's call it naively, real social change. Or, as it's a commonplace of leftist critique of Hitler, he had to kill millions not to change things but precisely to prevent real change to occur. In this sense, again, to see things in this continuum of violence: how the true violence is precisely radical social change, and it has nothing to do with physical violence. But again, if we simply say, "No, but this is social transformation, why use the term violence?" we lose this point which is for me absolutely crucial of seeing how all those big violent agents—Hitler, even Stalin and so on—are really modest reactive guys. Reactive in the sense of—that their violence was an admission of impotence and so on and so on. So much about this. Now let's go further. Problem—you will have to pardon me another quote, long—Santiago Zabala, the friend of Gianni Vattimo, recently wrote an essay on me, positively oriented essay for Al Jazeera debate. And then this essay provoked from some multicultural post-colonial blah blah anti-eurocentrist guys a pretty violent response, predictably accusing me of eurocentrism and so on. Now, this is an interesting debate, up to a point. Why? Here is the quote again. It's a guy called, he teaches I think at Duke, yeah, do you know him? Is he as stupid as in real life as he sounds? Okay, he—here is the quote. I will be fair and again translate for you a long—translate, sorry, read you a long passage. "As a non-European thinker, my senses reacted to the first sentence of Žižek's article." He's referring to my article on "Leftist Defense, a Plea for Leftist Eurocentrism," something like that. Here is what I say: "When one says eurocentrism, every self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture: to reach for a gun, hurling accusation of proto-fascist eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, is it possible to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy?" That's where he quotes me. And then he, Mignolo, goes on. "My response to that paragraph is the following: when one says eurocentrism, every self-respecting de-colonial"—this is probably his neologism to be more respectful than post-colonial, no, this is the good term—"de-colonial intellectual has not as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture, to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of proto-fascist eurocentrist cultural imperialism. A self-respecting de-colonial intellectual will reach instead to Frantz Fanon." And then there is a quote from Fanon here: "Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. So my brothers, how could we fail to understand that we have better things to do than follow that Europe's footstep?" End of quote from Mignolo. And then Mignolo goes on: "We de-colonial intellectuals, if not philosophers, have better things to do, as Fanon would say, than be engaged with issues debated by European philosophers." It's interesting that—but this is just my sarcastic remark then—then of course I ask myself: "Okay, fuck you, who are these bloody much more interesting intellectuals, no?" Then—well, let's say I was not overly impressed, no? Like, one of them was otherwise my good friend Wang Hui. Wang Hui, how do you pronounce it—Wang Hui, you know the Chinese leftist? Yeah, but—yeah, yeah, yeah—I wouldn't exactly quote him as a model of non-European authentic tradition because I couldn't—he, I'm on very good terms with him, he sent me recently a text on "China and Modernization," where he does an operation which I find deeply problematic. He tries to be, I'm not kidding, what I would have called a—who was the bad guy who did market economy? Milton Friedman. Like, "left-Friedmanist." Left Friedman. He—what he tries to do is to oppose real just market exchange and its capitalist distortion through monopoly and so on and so on. So as it exists, there is a true honest market exchange and he explicitly positively quotes Friedman. And then there are distortions which he—we, in a typical non-Marxist way—he sees the causes of these distortions not in economic relations themselves but in social pathology. Like he says, when power structure and other social pathologies distort the market, then we get market monopolies and so on and so on. Sorry, I'm, as you probably know, far—I'm all the time attacked there—far from being a dogmatic Marxist. But nonetheless I think that there is something in the demonstration of Marx how the development for this idealized simple just market exchange to exploitation, monopoly and so on, it's an immanent one. That you cannot just put the blame on social distortion and then let's restore—okay. Now let's go back to Mignolo. So what Mignolo proposes is just a version of Baudrillard's battle cry "Oublier Foucault," forget Foucault, you know, a short book by Baudrillard. Mignolo's proposal is: "Forget Europe. We have better things to do than to deal with European philosophy, even better things than endlessly deconstructing." He, Mignolo, explicitly includes also deconstruction in it. Like, "this is still endless narcissistic self-probing, we should simply step out." But, but, the irony here is that this battle cry obviously did not hold for Fanon himself, who dealt intensively and was proud of it, and—like the first obscenity seems to me, how dare he to quote Fanon. Fanon is my hero. That's why I defend him against—against soft guys like—like Homi Bhabha, who wrote long text trying to—to neutralize, normalize Fanon. Like: "No, he really didn't mean it with killing and violence, he meant some sublime gesture where there is no blood and nobody is really hurt." So let's face it: Fanon dealt extensively and intensively with Hegel, psychoanalysis, Sartre, even Lacan. So when my third reaction now paraphrased would have been: when I read lines like Mignolo's, I reach not for the gun but for Fanon, for this Fanon—I'm sorry, a long quote, I quoted it already in one of my books but I love it, this is Fanon, this is true post-colonialism. Fanon says: "I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible only for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation has to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving some black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. Haven't I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the blacks of the 17th century? I, as a man of color, do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt towards the past of my race. I, as a man of color, do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission, there is no white burden. I do not want to be victim of the ruse of a black world. Am I going to ask today's white man to answer for the slave traders of the 17th century? Am I going to try, by every means available, to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors. It would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the 3rd century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of eight-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe. I find myself in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: that of demanding human behavior from the other," and so on and so on. Sorry, but that's my position. And he was not a soft guy. He knew what is violent revolution and so on and so on. So again, I found very weird Mignolo to—to focus on Fanon. What Fanon—end of quote, of course—clearly saw is that today's global world is capitalist and as such cannot be effectively problematized from the standpoint of pre-capitalist local culture. This is why I think Mignolo's view of the anti-capitalist struggle is deeply flawed. Here is, sorry, another quote which really condenses all that I'm opposed to. Mignolo, again: "As we know from history, the identification of the problem doesn't mean that there is only one solution, or better yet, we can coincide in the perspective of harmony as a desirable global future, but communism is only one way to move towards it. There cannot be only one solution simply because there are many ways of being, which means of thinking and doing. Communism is an option, not an abstract universal. In the non-European world, communism is part of the problem rather than the solution, which doesn't mean that if you are not communist in the non-European world, you are capitalist. So the fact that Žižek and other European intellectuals are seriously rethinking communism means that they are engaging in one option, the reorientation of the Left among many today, marching towards the prospect of harmony, overcoming the necessity of war, overcoming success and competition which engender corruption and selfishness, and promoting the plenitude of life over development and death." End of quote. I claim that, first, Mignolo relies here on a totally naive, for me unacceptable, distinction between problems and solutions. Like: "We can all identify the problem, today's global capitalism, but different cultures have different solutions." If there is a thing we really know from history is that, while it's true the identification of a problem doesn't mean that there is only one solution, there also is all—only—there also is not only a single identification of the problem. When we encounter a problem—like a global economic crisis—we get a multitude of formulations in what this problem resides, which are its causes. Like, everybody more or less agrees we, at least in the developed West, are in some kind of a crisis. But what you will get from different positions is not only different solutions, but simply different identifications, definitions of what the problem is. For example, a radical neoliberal will say, "It's not too much state regulation, it's on the other, on the opposite, that we didn't push enough for—for state-free liberal society and so on and so on." A Catholic would have said, a Catholic capitalist ecologist, as a representative of the Pope said—and there is maybe God, punish Pope, because did you see what happened? The moment—a couple of minutes after Pope renounced resignation, lightning it strike on the dome, no. So, you know, you never know, no? Sorry. So what I want to say is that these different identifications of the problem form a dialectical unity with proposed solutions. I think the first thing to reproach again to Mignolo is this absolutely naive opposition of "We all see what's the problem, we have different solutions." No, all definitions of the problem are always already formulated from the perspective of a possible solution. Like I was just mentioned the church, one apologist said: "It's crucial to see that today's crisis is not about capitalism but it's a crisis of morality." I mean, this definition obviously of crisis is not neutral. So—which is why again, communism, I'm almost tempted to precisely say the opposite of Mignolo. And to claim that yes, while I definitely agree that we should not impose on all parts of the world the same path towards how to get rid of, whatever, today's deadlocks of global capitalism, but communism for me at least today is not solution—fuck it, who knows how will it look and so on—it's precisely a specific definition determination of the problem. The idea is that our problems are—are grounded in the antagonisms of capitalist self-reproduction and so on and so on. On the contrary, Mignolo's identification of the problem, I think, is worth reading carefully. You remember, I will read it again. Here is how he defines our common goal, allegedly we all share this opinion: "Marching towards the prospect of harmony, promoting the plenitude of life." Well, it's certainly not my goal, you know? That's what he thinks is a formulation of what we all share. The problem, what is for him the problem? I quote again: "The necessity of war, success and competition which engender corruption and selfishness, development and death." So his goal—harmony, plenitude of life—I think it's total empty nonsense. It's an empty signifier which can mean many incompatible things precisely depending on how we understand plenitude and life of—of harmony. For example, I can well imagine a fascist saying: "Yeah, yeah, Jews and Marxists introduce this harmony so, oh, life of plenitude and harmony, absolutely," and so on. Why—the fast equation of development at death as well as abstract rejection of war, corruption and selfishness are no less meaningless abstractions. So again, you see the problem that Mignolo encounters the moment he then he says, "We share the same goal," and then he proposes his definition of the goal that absolutely I don't share. And I think that would be—but I don't have time to develop it now, not to take the time. Yeah, okay—no if I—don't worry I'm already almost half into it so don't worry. Yeah, okay. No. What I'm saying is that—you see my—don't misunderstand me here. I'm much more politically correct in serious sense of anti-wrong eurocentrism that I may appear. My critic of Mignolo is not that he is neglects Europe, but in his primitive anti-eurocentrism he is way too eurocentric, in a naive sense that what he defines as this broader perspective doesn't work. So what Mignolo offers are not alternate modernities, but I'm tempted to say alternate post-modernities. Like, we know what's the problem, capitalist modernity, but each of our culture has its own way to step out and so on and so on. Against such an approach, we should totally defend European universalist legacy. How? Haha. Now comes the problem, the most probably problematic part. I will take an example of the point that I'm trying to make: what does it mean, the ambiguity of colonization and European universalism, by reporting to you on an incident that happened to me, not even incident, in India, when I was there. In a debate, an Indian cultural theorist complained that—against me—that I am in a privileged situation there, because he claimed it's easy for me to speak English. But am I aware of what an a priori formal oppression or language colonization is the very fact that, for them to debate with me, they have to use the very language of colonization, English, to formulate their very program of decolonization. Okay, as—so the idea was that the English language means that already formally in their very fight against colonization they are colonized. I exploded, as you can imagine. First I made an obvious remark, which was very well received, of typical big nation racism. Fuck him, my language is not English, you know? Like, since I come from small city Slovene nation, it's okay for me to talk—to speak English, no? But they, big nation, they have the dignity of whatever. But my serious answer was much more problematic for them. I claim that what this guy didn't see is how—and be very careful here, this is the Hegelian point—this imposition of English, a foreign language, created the very "X" which is oppressed by it. Because what is oppressed, what they feel, Indian emancipatory fighters, as being oppressed, is not the actual pre-colonial India, but the authentic dream of a new universalist democratic India. So, you see my point? I totally agreed with them that they experience English language as imposed, that the fact of being compelled to speak to—to debate in English means that they are deprived of something. But my point was here a much more vicious one. It was that that what they feel deprived of emerged only through this loss itself by them being forced to speak English. It's not the actual pre-modern India, which was just a kind of oppressive plural inconsistent society and so on and so on. You see the nice paradox. Which is why incidentally, this is how I explain of how the great intention of British colonizers there was not: "We must civilize Indians, we must impose of them our values." No, from the beginning they were not so stupid, but in an evil sense they were not stupid, the British. They knew very well that to control Indians, they must keep them apart. They precisely want them to stick to their own original culture. If there was no original culture, they even created it. My friends in India gave me—I quote it in I think in "The—Living in the End Times," the first chapter—you know the Book of Manu? It's the great classical text, the Bible of Indian traditional—uh—Hindu social thought. It justifies castes, describes in detail the duties, rules and so on. Nice, but you know what's the paradox? This book didn't exist before 18th century. There were just different fragments here, there. It was put together by British colonizers to have a kind of a unique ideological body to apply it to—to apply it to—to apply it to Indians. So again, what I am claiming here is that—and you know who knew this? There is another guy who is a tough guy, but he is my hero: Malcolm X. That's what his "X" means, Malcolm X. It's not simply we blacks were deprived of our original roots, we just have an X. For him, I read him, I'm not bluffing, not totally, X was precisely X of an opening, creative opening. His idea was not just we blacks are oppressed, but precisely because we are—were torn from our original constellation whatever, and precisely because we are more without roots than the whites, we have a unique chance of becoming more universal, emancipated than the whites. Which is why, it may be problematic choice, but I admit it, which is why as you all know, at the end Malcolm X's solution was not some stupid black roots but Islam, precisely in his view, Islam as a radically universal religion. And—or to put it in yet another way, more refined even psychologically: you know, I develop this in my big fat Hegel book, you know this Lacan's idea that not only language is the house of being, not only we dwell in language, but that language is at the same time a torture house. That we are never at home in language. That's the basic lesson of psychoanalysis, called symbolic castration, whatever the bullshit, that there is a fundamental gap imbalance between being human and language. There is always something goes wrong. The problem with this Indian vision is that, by locating this imbalance into—into colonial language, you obfuscate the fact that—like, okay, you are tortured by English language, but where is the torture done to you by your own local previous language? In other words, the most oppressive thing that could have happened to Indians is some kind of false liberation when someone would have told him, "Okay, let's get rid of English, let's return to your primordial whatever this was culture." You know what—how would this liberation look? Warning to those who are sensitive: now comes a really dirty story. A joke about Jesus Christ, which was told to me—I love them—by a Palestinian Christian in Ramallah when I was there. The joke is this one, it's vulgar, not even good joke, but I like the logic. The last evening before crucifixion, you know, Christ was there praying in the tent and so on, and of course he was God and he knew this is his last day in peace, no? So the apostles are worried, you know, like, "Oh my God, our—our Lord did such great things and he didn't have any fun in his life, no? So let's organize some fun of him." So they called Mary Magdalene, no, and says, "Would you go in and seduce"—so that at least the last night he will have some fun, you know? Okay, being who she is, no, she said, "Oh, gladly," and went in. After five minutes, in a totally—with totally horrified cry, she run out. And they asked her—no, don't worry, Christ is a good guy, he didn't rape her or what, much worse. They asked her: "What went wrong?" And she said: "First everything was okay. I danced a little bit before our Lord, then I pulled out my skirt, I spread widely my legs, he looked interested and then—and then Christ looked closely at my vagina and he said, 'Oh, what a terrible wound!' and put a hand on it and closed it totally," you know? Like, something like that would have been, I think, return to pre-colonial origins, you know? The whole point is that, how should I put it, to—to admit the wound, to fully identify with it. Like, for me again, the true victory over colonialism is not "let's return to some primitive local culture," but it's—what is already happening. This is why I have nothing against English language. Intelligent American conservatives already knew it: "Okay, English language is winning today." But if you look at it closely, it's no longer American or British English. It's English whose model speakers are probably some kind of a half illiterate in English literature, Singapore merchants or whatever. Or Slovenian philosophers. Or Greeks who will ruin all us Europe with their laziness, but that's another story. Sorry. No, but what has all—now I will conclude quickly, but what has all to do with Hegel? My—I'm so sorry, I don't have time to do it because, you know, I'm getting tired of politics. It may surprise you. I am now in the middle, even already finishing, a big new book on Hegel, which will not be as long as the other one, it will have just pages, I'm there now, and I focus precisely on this how the Hegelian dialectical process is not this type of from some immediate unity you have split and then magically synthesis again. No. At the beginning is the fall for Hegel. The good example would be this Indian example: you have a pre-colonial situation. We shouldn't demonize it, maybe it was worse, maybe it was better, the problem is just that it was something as it were totally different. And also we should not forget, there was nothing immediate, substantial about it. It had its own civil and the problem is then something new happens, like British colonization, and something is lost. But what is lost is not what was actually lost. What is lost is retroactively created through this very loss. And if you think I'm dreaming here, that's the whole point, for example, of Hegel of his—in his reading of Christianity. He says it openly that paradise is simply stupid animal kingdom. That loss—fall comes first. Fall itself creates what it is the fall from, that dimension. So again, for Hegel, overcoming the fall does not mean you somehow squeeze back to purity, it means that you fully immerse yourself into the fall and, as it were, you see the liberating potential of the fall itself. Which is why, again, we should be very cautious about this logic of, you know, Hegel: beginning, then things go wrong, then magically they come together. First thing don't go wrong, they are wrong from the very beginning, as it were. And again, at the end you don't get any synthesis or whatsoever. And now if you allow me nonetheless five minutes to quickly conclude: why is this important? Because of our present historical moment. I think that what we should get rid of, if we want seriously to maintain a radical emancipatory political perspective, is what I ironically am tempted to call the Hölderlin paradigm. Hölderlin, you know, the German poet, minor one—Kleist was better but that's another point. You know his famous line quoted endlessly by Heidegger and others: "Wo das Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch"—"where there is danger, the redeeming or solving solution arises also." This reading that today we are approaching some zero point of extreme danger, alienation, but this danger at the same time renders possible the solution, the re—you know, like, we have this in Marx clearly. Capitalism as the utter alienation, but at the same time opening up the possibility of collective re-appropriation of the alienated substance. Heidegger, forgetting of being but, "kehre," the reversal emerging it. Even Derrida, I would have said, is in this very strangely. He always emphasized that we are living in the final moment of the metaphysical closure. That you know, like, metaphysical closure is coming to its end, exhausting its possibility and so on and so on. I think that what we should learn from Hegel is precisely that this entire paradigm is to be dropped. That what Hegel calls reconciliation is not some magic solution, but it's precisely to—this reconciliation with the evil, the fall itself, to see how what appears as evil is at the same time the very recourse of our salvation. Like what Malcolm X saw. Yes, X, we were terribly brutally deprived, but this deprivation, depriving us, white slave-holders, of our black roots, gives us a unique possibility of being universal subjects of emancipation and, as it were, beating the blacks—sorry, beating the whites at their own—at their own terrain. So what also—but this solution is not a cynical—now I am really concluding—is not a cynical one, namely a cynical one in the sense of, "Yeah, okay, we need fall to redeem ourselves so we should manipulate or whatever." With this I will conclude: I think rather that if there is a lesson, progressive one, from the ongoing crisis, it's that cynicism doesn't work. I was still surprised how even a guy from whom I would have expected more, my good friend Fred Jameson, again recently repeated that old stupidity that we live in cynical times where ruling ideology no longer takes itself seriously, so we don't even need today critique of ideology. We no longer need that delicate Hegelian conceptual analysis of discerning the inconsistencies, the voids of argumentation. Those in power are brutal, they admit everything more or less openly. We live in post-ideological cynical times. You will never surprise those in power by demonstrating to them that they are lying, that they are inconsistent and so on. I think this is maybe the most dangerous illusion that there is. If there is something to be learned from Freud, it is that precisely this type of perverse cynical openness is at the same time the greatest illusion. You are really in illusion in social, material social life, not when you are telling some dreaming stories about divine intervention, but precisely when you adopt this cynical attitude, you know, like: "Fuck it, what ideals? Let's be frank. It's all about money, power, pleasures," whatever. Precisely this type of cynical realism doesn't work. It's the most—you are most blinded. Why? What you don't see is precisely illusions which still regulate your life precisely when you think you are directly, brutally realist. Let's not forget, for example, the crisis of It was not caused by some crazy welfare state ideals. It was caused precisely by, you know, that Michael Douglas bullshit that "Greed is good," cynical realists. Precisely those who think we have no illusions, that's the brutality of life, they err most. This is the big lesson of Hegel. This does not mean life is just a muddle, we can't do anything, but—now I'm really, you see, like, just concluding. You know, I think that what's great in Hegel is that he is a post-eschatological thinker. His problem is not: things are bad, but we are there, just push it a little bit and everything will turn around and so on and so on. The greatness of Hegel is that he is a post-apocalyptic thinker, in the sense of: we tried it—okay, I don't agree with Hegel here but his idea is French Revolution—they tried to realize freedom, it went terribly wrong for Hegel. I'm not so sure. Like French revolutionary terror. And then his point is precisely to demonstrate how this doesn't mean we were wrong. We should accept the lesson of what for Hegel is the fiasco of French Revolution is simply the openness of history. It's not pre-determined, it went wrong. It just means Hegel does compel us to accept a certain basic alienation of social life. But it doesn't—not in the Marxist sense that oh, irreducibly we are enslaved to some alienated substance, fate, capital, whatever to rule us. No. I think Hegel would have loved the paradox of today, which is: the more we are aware of how capitalism relies on our own fictions, on virtual reality and so on, so we are well aware there is no "capital in itself" mystique, we are playing with our fictions and so on, precisely when we know fully that there is no substantial metaphysical capital with a capital C, that it's just we are fighting with our fictions, the less we are able to—to dominate it. So there is no big Other, but this doesn't mean it's just me. It means that the situation becomes much more non-transparent and so on and so on. So again, I think that the lesson of Hegel—now I am very short, I will develop more this in my book—is that the struggle for freedom should go on, but we should just learn to accept its dangers. There is no ontological guarantee. It's a risky struggle, there is no guarantee how it will end. We cannot ever step on our shoulder and control the effects of what we do. So again, I think that—that's again this—this is what we need today, because again, the thing to avoid today is precisely, I think, this type of cheap cynicism and... Now I will just add something that you will like. You know, I agree here with Costas, I really think that Syriza is something special. Maybe you don't read in your newspapers enough about it, but I really think that Tsipras is a genius. Because the way, I will not go into it how, the way he unites a principled attitude and very intelligent pragmatic compromises. For example, I pray to God that he will succeed trying to make a deal with Europe, kind of a controlled temporary divorce. You know, like, step out of Euro for two years to put it in order then rejoin the Euro. It's interesting how even his enemies, like Financial Times, here I read, there was again a couple of months ago a comment in Financial Times where they said whatever even if we disagree with him in fundamental issues, Tsipras seems to be the only guy in Greece who talks sense, you know? Thank you, thank you. You see, you see, your masters in New Democracy paid you to interrupt me now, no? Okay, so we had a number of criticisms, self-criticisms coming through that covered a number of areas. Indeed you did start with this critique of the multitude and the rhizomatic, the Deleuzian and so on. I thought that after the various debates that you had including with me about the Tahrir Square, Syntagma and Puerta del Sol, you would have changed, and you've changed but only partly, you know, you repeat yourself again in relation to that. We can leave it for another occasion. It is very interesting however that in your kind sort of references today you have co-opted two people that in the past were kind sort of like arch, if not arch enemies, but clearly great opponents: Heidegger and Derrida, God forbid. I mean, you know sort of—wait a minute, I critically—and then to criticize your great friend Wang Hui and I should tell you that Wang Hui is the, perhaps you know, the most prominent representative of the Chinese new Left. He's someone who edits, he's the editor of the magazine Dushu, a monthly magazine that sells up to half a million copies, and he is THE new Left, and indeed I should say that Wang Hui will be giving a masterclass here at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in late October, early November, we will announce that and hopefully you'll come to talk with Wang Hui because, you know, suddenly praising Derrida and criticizing Wang Hui sounded a bit strange to me. But anyway, Walter Mignolo we can discuss some other time. It was such a rich series of topics that you touched today, Slavoj, so I think that rather than sort of a chronological series of questions... No, but wait a minute, very shortly, can I? First, this was a misunderstanding. Wasn't it clear that I criticized Derrida and Heidegger, that they are still part of this what I called Hölderlin paradigm: things are bad but we are close to better? No. And my only critical claim was there that Hegel, who is usually taken as part of that paradigm—extreme alienation and then op-op—no no no, it was a misunderstanding. Second, Wang Hui. I was critical of him at a very specific point, which is that this left-Friedmanism. He really thinks that market is, at its basic dimension, a just market and it's just distorted by strong bureaucracy and so on and so on. So I mean, my first very brief question is: if someone wants to know your Hegel position, should they buy "Less Than Nothing" at pages or wait for the next book at pages? Will the next book summarize the earlier? They should buy all of my books. And two copies, two copies! Okay. Question, the gentleman back please. Can you please stand up? A little bit louder or come here, I'm sorry. Point of clarification: you said that in the opposition between Badiou and broadly postmodernism, both poles were wrong. And then I didn't understand whether you were saying that somehow there was some new form of social link possible that was not founded on either patriarchal or matriarchal? Is that what you said, that it was possible? And—I just wanted to clarify that because it sounds a difficult thing to explain. But I mean, it sounds a simple point. No, wait a minute, my point is very simple. If you reject this, then my god, then the only alternative is either some postmodern capitalist individualism or traditional hierarchy. I mean, I thought I even said something—but what Lacan told to the students in '68? That's why he was wrong. That's why he was wrong. I don't have any problems here, really. Lacan also would get his re-education camp if he were to be alive when I take power. Sorry, please. I would just like to return to the question of violence. You were talking about violence as coming—coming from the authority, and you called it as an act of cowardice. And then you also talked about violence as in radicality, anti-systemic subversion, as in radical social change. But I want to ask you about the spontaneity of violence in riots or protest movements. And we know what the classical liberal response usually is in the media right afterwards, it's the immediate response, the demonization of this kind of violence. Can you be—can you more elaborate on this? And perhaps because our friend here is from Slovenia, you could say a few things about the recent events in Slovenia. I would like to, but the only problem is that like what do you know about it, you know what I mean? I would have to explain the background. I just think that now, and literally now, yesterday evening, the whatever you call it, right-populist leader and government fell. I think that now is the crucial moment. The trap to be avoided is now to give too much a chance to this government now. The great thing of the protest movement in Slovenia was that, you know, the slogan was "Neither-Nor," which meant: "Yes, of course, No to this right-wing populism, but at the same time No to, I didn't know how to call them, this pseudo-left post-communist orientation, full of corruption, without any ideas." For example, it shocked me when one of the representatives of this official Left, let's call it, said when asked why does he consider himself a leftist, he said that the crucial point of reference to decide who is left or right today in Slovenia is how do you relate to the partisan World War II struggle. Okay, I mean, I don't demonize partisan struggle, I just think that in today's crisis here and now, isn't it very sad if the only thing that comes to your mind is whatever? So again, I—I—I think that the dangerous moment will arrive now. But already this movement in Slovenia is extremely important, which is why in an almost pure clinical way, you can see how different circles tried to reappropriate it. On the one hand, the ex-official Left tried to claim: "Oh, it's the same battle, they are ours," and so on and so on. But also, and this will render me unpopular in Slovenia—I already called—yeah, but I will make a step further, where I will brutally attack all this Writers' Union and so on, attempt at reappropriation by the cultural establishment. I mean, I'm totally opposed to them. I think that the—so again, the question of violence that you asked us—yeah—yeah, but—yeah, but—no no, here, I mean, again, we have to delineate clearly. On the one hand, I don't think that so-called objective violence, violence inscribed into the order, social order as such, justifies subjective violence. Because some people criticized me for this, that my notion of objective violence gives too much space for this quick justification of, like, you know: I can start shooting whatever and I can say, "Oh, it was just my reaction to the invisible objective violence" or whatever and so on and so on. But although I'm not saying this, but nonetheless, I think that the only way to understand so-called subjective violence, like of protesters, is to take into account the objective, invisible violence, violence in the institutions themselves. It has to be called violence. You lose the whole—you lose the whole point. If you don't say this then—I mean, this is for me the ABC, the beginning of proper dialectical analysis: that you don't locate violence only in what disturbs the existing order. You have to see the violence which is already here in the order, as it were, in the existing order itself. In—and you know where it is for me here, as to physical violence, so that I will not appear as any advocate of physical violence. As already said, this is for me typical about Tahrir Square. Didn't the people notice that the violence of the protesters, which was for me real radical violence—why? because my god, they brought the whole state to a stop, what more violent thing can you imagine—but was they didn't, basically, kill anyone. They came there to the Tahrir Square and they said: "We stay here, we don't move." And then all physical violence was done precisely by the forces of order, as they put it repeatedly, "in order to return things to normal," "in order to re-establish order." You know all those thugs paid by Mubarak forces who attacked people on Tahrir Square and so on and so on. I think that this whole liberal view of things basically, the way they are when nothing happens, are normal and then violence is just change. No, the ABC of Marxism—and here I am a Marxist—is that there is a tremendous amount of violence necessary for just the things to go on the way they are. And if we don't take this into account, you know, then—then in a way then—then we are lost, in a way. Okay, a couple of questions. Then the next round. Can I ask something on that point? Then how is the revolution in a normal state of affairs? How can a revolution in a normal state of affairs happen? If it's not the violence that you say in this ecstatic moment, but when things return to normal and you have this kind—Ah, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, wait a minute, let me make some things clear. I am no big fan of physical violence. I'm not crazy. But nonetheless, you know, and now I will say something horrible, okay? Like, there are moments when you need violence, you know, when you need real violence. I don't have any problems with that. For example, you know, I read a wonderful interview with some black guys who protested, I don't know where, it was years ago when I was young, and they did some usual protest, they broke some windows and so on, no? And then white liberals came to them and said: "But we all sympathize with you. Why didn't you just make the point, why did you have to be violent?" And the guy gave a perfect answer, no? He says: "Yes, but you know, if we were just be doing what you are telling us to do now, you wouldn't be here now. We would be maybe a small footnote in a local newspaper." You know what—you know what I mean? Or let me give you another brutal example, which will be really maybe shocking to you, where I'm even ready to condone not torture, but personal private brutal pressure and so on. Friends from Turkey told me a wonderful story. There is a big prison somewhere in the Eastern Turkey, mostly for Kurdish so-called terrorists, where of course they were—I was told this story, even if it's not true, it makes a point nicely—and they are there, of course they were tortured. All of a sudden, the tor—torturing declined tremendously in that prison. And then some Turkish journalist—that's the story I've heard in Istanbul—went there and looked into it and discovered what happened.
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Because this was
Because this was
Slavoj Žižek
a small community, like prison guards also live there and
a small community, like prison guards also live there and
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terrorists, so-called terrorists, arrested there—they simply looked at, because it was relatively small prison, they were like: "Who is doing the torturing? Who is they?" They traced them to their private dwellings, houses, and simply they told them, you know: "Like, if you touch that guy again, your son will be beaten, your daughter will be raped" and so on. And look look what happened, torturing disappeared, no? I'm not saying that I'm very glad of this. But I'm—I don't think we have any moral right to say no to these guys. In a desperate situation, like imagine
terrorists, so-called terrorists, arrested there—they simply looked at, because it was relatively small prison, they were like: "Who is doing the torturing? Who is they?" They traced them to their private dwellings, houses, and simply they told them, you know: "Like, if you touch that guy again, your son will be beaten, your daughter will be raped" and so on. And look look what happened, torturing disappeared, no? I'm not saying that I'm very glad of this. But I'm—I don't think we have any moral right to say no to these guys. In a desperate situation, like imagine
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somebody close to you being tortured nearby and you can't do anything. We don't have any right to be—to be opposed to that. And so on and so on. You know, like, this is what always shocks me: how—how selective we are always in violence. Which violence is visible, which violence is in—like, I'm sorry if you already know this, but my eternal example: people say "Ooh horror, human rights, this country, that country." I mean, if you really care about human suffering, then go to Republic of Congo and do something, you know? But nothing happens there because it's simply not within our perspective, nobody cares. Everyone knows Congo is as close as you can come to hell on earth. Or another example of violence which was pretty tough, but
somebody close to you being tortured nearby and you can't do anything. We don't have any right to be—to be opposed to that. And so on and so on. You know, like, this is what always shocks me: how—how selective we are always in violence. Which violence is visible, which violence is in—like, I'm sorry if you already know this, but my eternal example: people say "Ooh horror, human rights, this country, that country." I mean, if you really care about human suffering, then go to Republic of Congo and do something, you know? But nothing happens there because it's simply not within our perspective, nobody cares. Everyone knows Congo is as close as you can come to hell on earth. Or another example of violence which was pretty tough, but
Slavoj Žižek
I think it was fully justified. I know the situation in detail, I spoke with people. Aristide in Haiti. Yes, absolutely, he used gangs. He used black gangs against other black gangs and so on and so on. But he ab—he was absolutely justified in doing it and so on and so on. So no, I don't play here an innocent. I'm just saying that we should rediscover the vio—this is for me emancipatory violence: like, very simple, like Tahrir Square. People coming there and simply say: "Fuck you, we stay here till..." This—can you imagine anything more violent? Although
I think it was fully justified. I know the situation in detail, I spoke with people. Aristide in Haiti. Yes, absolutely, he used gangs. He used black gangs against other black gangs and so on and so on. But he ab—he was absolutely justified in doing it and so on and so on. So no, I don't play here an innocent. I'm just saying that we should rediscover the vio—this is for me emancipatory violence: like, very simple, like Tahrir Square. People coming there and simply say: "Fuck you, we stay here till..." This—can you imagine anything more violent? Although
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nobody is hurt. The whole life is brought to—to a standstill. And this is my problem with Slovenia, as a good friend of mine, good journalist Boštjan Videmšek developed,
nobody is hurt. The whole life is brought to—to a standstill. And this is my problem with Slovenia, as a good friend of mine, good journalist Boštjan Videmšek developed,
Slavoj Žižek
that in Slovenia maybe we are not yet
that in Slovenia maybe we are not yet
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desperate
desperate
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enough. Our protest were not like Tahrir Square or of your Greece, where people stay there. No, our protestors come there for two hours and then they dance and go home, you know, and like—this sense of urgency is missing. It's
enough. Our protest were not like Tahrir Square or of your Greece, where people stay there. No, our protestors come there for two hours and then they dance and go home, you know, and like—this sense of urgency is missing. It's
Slavoj Žižek
when—two problems I have with Slovenia. And how incredibly, how everyone accepts this bullshit that: "It's the time of a crisis, we need unity." No, we need division, we need the right division. You know what shocked me? If you are in Slovenia, I now wrote an essay, which will be interview with me, but I don't like to be asked
when—two problems I have with Slovenia. And how incredibly, how everyone accepts this bullshit that: "It's the time of a crisis, we need unity." No, we need division, we need the right division. You know what shocked me? If you are in Slovenia, I now wrote an essay, which will be interview with me, but I don't like to be asked
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questions, so I
questions, so I
Slavoj Žižek
wrote questions and answer. The Right-wingers had a big meeting on the main square in Slovenia. And they published there a declaration demanding four points. At the same
wrote questions and answer. The Right-wingers had a big meeting on the main square in Slovenia. And they published there a declaration demanding four points. At the same
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on the
on the
Slavoj Žižek
same day two hours later, there was the opposite Leftist revolt meeting. What shocked me is that if you look at this
same day two hours later, there was the opposite Leftist revolt meeting. What shocked me is that if you look at this
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declaration of the Rightists, it was: "What, we need a state of law where all people are equal. We need a transparent just system" and so on. I was so frustrated by this, like, I almost wanted to propose, but everyone would subscribe this. So why don't they organize—Janša and—why don't you organize one big meeting and vote for this same resolution? And I—what I'm saying is that
declaration of the Rightists, it was: "What, we need a state of law where all people are equal. We need a transparent just system" and so on. I was so frustrated by this, like, I almost wanted to propose, but everyone would subscribe this. So why don't they organize—Janša and—why don't you organize one big meeting and vote for this same resolution? And I—what I'm saying is that
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that's maybe
that's maybe
Slavoj Žižek
the tragedy of Slovenia, that this is a terrible indictment of a situation when even a difference cannot be properly formulated. Everyone agrees with this total bullshit which is meaningless: "We need more transparent democracy" and so on. And that some idiots even give me Switzerland as a model of transparent—are they crazy? Switzerland is the most oppressive state in Europe. You have referendum—referenda in Switzerland. But I know, I'm evil guy, when I'm there I ask friends there. They have public referenda, but you know, when you get the voting paper, you get with it another paper which suggests you how to vote. And then yes, and we know the wonderful results of Swiss referendum, no? It's that's why precisely women got the right to vote only two decades ago, I think, there. That's why they prohibited minarets construction and so on. This is what I meant before. No, we have to accept this. Okay, I'm not an old Stalinist, intellectuals don't know, especially in Greece, don't know what they want. But—but people also, literally, we are all lost. I don't accept this Maoist bullshit, learn from the people, people know. No, people don't know. They need not an authoritarian leader, but an authentic leader. An authentic leader is not the one who—who orders you. An authentic leader is the one who tells you and then you discover yourself, "Oh my God, now I know what I want." So again, it's just a messy situation, no? But I think on the other hand, I'm nonetheless not a pessimist. To conclude with this, take Greece. Yes, we can say liberal cynics are now triumphing. So where are we now? It's worse than ever. Life was even a little bit more free under Mubarak, now we have a pact between Islamists and the army. True, but don't underestimate it. At the same
the tragedy of Slovenia, that this is a terrible indictment of a situation when even a difference cannot be properly formulated. Everyone agrees with this total bullshit which is meaningless: "We need more transparent democracy" and so on. And that some idiots even give me Switzerland as a model of transparent—are they crazy? Switzerland is the most oppressive state in Europe. You have referendum—referenda in Switzerland. But I know, I'm evil guy, when I'm there I ask friends there. They have public referenda, but you know, when you get the voting paper, you get with it another paper which suggests you how to vote. And then yes, and we know the wonderful results of Swiss referendum, no? It's that's why precisely women got the right to vote only two decades ago, I think, there. That's why they prohibited minarets construction and so on. This is what I meant before. No, we have to accept this. Okay, I'm not an old Stalinist, intellectuals don't know, especially in Greece, don't know what they want. But—but people also, literally, we are all lost. I don't accept this Maoist bullshit, learn from the people, people know. No, people don't know. They need not an authoritarian leader, but an authentic leader. An authentic leader is not the one who—who orders you. An authentic leader is the one who tells you and then you discover yourself, "Oh my God, now I know what I want." So again, it's just a messy situation, no? But I think on the other hand, I'm nonetheless not a pessimist. To conclude with this, take Greece. Yes, we can say liberal cynics are now triumphing. So where are we now? It's worse than ever. Life was even a little bit more free under Mubarak, now we have a pact between Islamists and the army. True, but don't underestimate it. At the same
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time
time
Slavoj Žižek
now, we have a well-organized civil society, clearly opposed to Islamists and to the army. It's a whole new, much more authentic political subject which emerged. And back to Slovenia. I think the absolutely crucial point is that the protest movement will not be swallowed by any of the existing, the old Left, the cultural people writers. Just something must emerge, we shouldn't worry about "Oh, with whom we make a coalition." The main task—do you think Beppe Grillo after the Italian election perhaps becomes a leader of that movement? I first—I don't deserve it, I don't want—Italian elections if anything made me very skeptical of this, you know, carnivalesque principle. But Slovenia does not have a leader like that. I mean, you know you are the kind of person who could become a Beppe Grillo. Slovenia may be a shitty country, but I think they are nonetheless wise enough not to—it would be their final indictment to—to accept me as a leader. You know—somehow, you know what I mean, like—no no, what it just makes me afraid—Lacanian universalism. Yeah, no no no. How—how, how should I put it, how people are afraid to say this obvious thing, like: "What bullshit unity? We need proper division. All authentic unity comes from an act of division." And sorry if I repeat myself, but my most beautiful example is the one which definitely you will probably agree with it, nothing problematic: General de Gaulle. The guy who did unite Frenchmen. You know how he started? With the most crazy minority division you can imagine. In his position was: "No, the war is not over, we should attack even the French forces," and don't forget something—and this is the secret which has to be spelled out—the Pétain government was fully democratically legitimized. When France was defeated, large majority of Assemblée Nationale met in some Bordeaux, I don't know where down there, and voted powers of—so Pétain was formally legally right when he says: "Who is de Gaulle? It's like wild military force opposing a democratically justified government." You need to begin by a—you know what, the problem is not—I'm not a sectarian—of course we have to make all possible coalitions and so on. But my god, before you make a coalition you have to, like, you know what even dogs or wolves are doing, when you urinate
now, we have a well-organized civil society, clearly opposed to Islamists and to the army. It's a whole new, much more authentic political subject which emerged. And back to Slovenia. I think the absolutely crucial point is that the protest movement will not be swallowed by any of the existing, the old Left, the cultural people writers. Just something must emerge, we shouldn't worry about "Oh, with whom we make a coalition." The main task—do you think Beppe Grillo after the Italian election perhaps becomes a leader of that movement? I first—I don't deserve it, I don't want—Italian elections if anything made me very skeptical of this, you know, carnivalesque principle. But Slovenia does not have a leader like that. I mean, you know you are the kind of person who could become a Beppe Grillo. Slovenia may be a shitty country, but I think they are nonetheless wise enough not to—it would be their final indictment to—to accept me as a leader. You know—somehow, you know what I mean, like—no no, what it just makes me afraid—Lacanian universalism. Yeah, no no no. How—how, how should I put it, how people are afraid to say this obvious thing, like: "What bullshit unity? We need proper division. All authentic unity comes from an act of division." And sorry if I repeat myself, but my most beautiful example is the one which definitely you will probably agree with it, nothing problematic: General de Gaulle. The guy who did unite Frenchmen. You know how he started? With the most crazy minority division you can imagine. In his position was: "No, the war is not over, we should attack even the French forces," and don't forget something—and this is the secret which has to be spelled out—the Pétain government was fully democratically legitimized. When France was defeated, large majority of Assemblée Nationale met in some Bordeaux, I don't know where down there, and voted powers of—so Pétain was formally legally right when he says: "Who is de Gaulle? It's like wild military force opposing a democratically justified government." You need to begin by a—you know what, the problem is not—I'm not a sectarian—of course we have to make all possible coalitions and so on. But my god, before you make a coalition you have to, like, you know what even dogs or wolves are doing, when you urinate
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around you to—you have to mark your terrain. You have to define yourself. If you
around you to—you have to mark your terrain. You have to define yourself. If you
Slavoj Žižek
don't do this, then coalitions are meaningless, no? And what I am afraid of is that I hope that the protest movement will retain the strength not to fall into this trap. Because something—maybe you know—you know what was beautiful in Slovenia, and I precisely didn't want to intervene because I didn't want to appear an old guy who tries to reappropriate? But it was an incredible intellectual explosion. All of a sudden, people started to write texts debating how to change society or all that. And it was totally outside this official types of discourse. The official Left than the—the—these cultural people writers who I think, I think they in Slovenia are most of them perfectly covered by that term that I borrowed from Milner, "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie," you know? Nobody of them cared a shit when thousands, ten thousands of textile workers and so on lost their jobs. All of a sudden, they're privileged a little bit cut on, "Oh, they discovered that they are also protestors," all these people of culture, you know? No, no, no, it's like Syriza. We are in the Leninist phase, okay, without some—not in Syriza, but anyway. Okay, that's another thing. We will—when you will be arrested when I take over, you will explain all this to the—no, no, seriously. What—no, no, but I mean Lenin is simply—the greatness of Syriza for me is that they were not afraid to organize themselves as a serious political agent. They know the—you know, for me true political greatness is you are in a shitty situation when you know there is no simple solution. But you don't say, "Oh, so let's wait for the big revolution." You are not afraid to take all the risks. This is for me true political heroism. This is what Aristide did in Haiti. I know people who knew Aristide, and he—he didn't have any illusions. He wasn't a crazy new Che Guevara who thought "I will trigger an all Latin-American revolution." But you know, things is lost in the long term, but nonetheless you said, "Whatever the hell, let's try, let's risk, let's do something." Again, this is for me crucial in Slovenia, in other places, that something will remain. Now this was obfuscated by this debate: do we need a new party or not? But you know, the problem is not party, because what I am afraid of is that this debate then meant should the movement become another term just to help the old Left pseudo-left coalition to retain power? No, no, no, we shouldn't worry about that. The point is that some institutional collective intellectual whatever form should remain. This is absolutely crucial at this point, no? Okay, so can we have a couple of two or three last questions and then you can answer all of them together so we can—I only know that you are doing now some such mean manipulations that I cannot even imagine what you are doing now. Is it clear to you what is he doing, you know, with this all—Okay, on the back. Yeah, this gentleman. I much enjoyed how you discussed violence versus non-violence and the way in which these two concepts are necessarily conflated or convoluted. What remains of non-violence? I had some difficulty to—I don't know what you make of non-violence thereafter because there seems to be very little left for it whatever—This is in a way true, yeah. How do we get to it? And my second question was again on violence: you seem to appraise negatively reactive violence in the same way that Nietzsche would to posit it about it. But then if—if the state of affairs is violent itself, then true violence must be reactive violence, mustn't it? Yeah, reactive in this sense that you—no by—yeah. No, I see what you mean. But nonetheless, true violence must not be only—it must nonetheless here I agree with you, with violence like not just reacting to it within the same field but with a vision to change the entire field. This is and this was for me, for example, in Slovenia the tragedy that the existing Right and the existing so-called Left remind me—I used this metaphor years ago and it was censored, even by Mladina, the leftist, they didn't want to publish the illustration of, you know, that Escher paradox: two hands drawing each other. I think this was the old Left and Right in Slovenia. They literally needed each other to reproduce themselves. So true violence is for me not to destroy the enemy, but to change the entire field so that the enemy becomes ridiculous. Or let me give you how this looks in a discursive strategy. True violence is not that in a tough fight you—we—defeat advocates of rape, of racism. True violence is for me a change in the entire discursive field so that when somebody advocates rape, you don't even have to attack me, he simply appears as an idiot, you know, "haha interesting stupid," you know what I mean? Like, like—this is why again, I know I repeat this all the time, it can be problematic. I am tempted to praise dogmatism here. And that's why I react like crazy—you remember in The Guardian when they published that Zero Dark Thirty piece, no? How some people fell again for her point claiming "But don't I see that she is not for—for torture? She just wants neutrally to report and to make us think." Well, fuck you. I don't want to think about—you know, for me it's already a fiasco if you think about it. Like, to see what is wrong, imagine a similar approach to rape. I would have presented a movie where I would report on rape and without being against it, and then I would say, "I want you to start the debate about rape." What is there to debate there? We have, you know what I mean? And incidentally, maybe I hope this will amuse you at least a little bit. I love them, they publish me at The Guardian, but in that text they did censor three, four of my lines. In my magnifi—I'm a good guy, I'm like Comrade Stalin in his best mood, you know. No, you remember I report there how I attack but this is the obvious thing, this American doublespeak, you know? Instead of torture you say "enhanced interrogation technique," no? Already they left out part of the sentence which makes my point clear: that this neutralization at the level of words is strictly correlative to the strengthening of the actual torture violence. But then I did something which obviously was too much of them, but I found it totally politically correct and acceptable. I said that what if we do the same with rape and without rape we say "enhanced seduction technique" and so on, no? Incredible, it disappeared, it disappeared, you know? So it's incredible how even with them, you know, like, there was—there was the—Ah, can I—okay, so that you will see how tough are these problems. My good friend Udi Aloni told me that he now finished a movie, very good one, on subculture in—on the West Bank among Palestinians. Excellent documentary, you get a totally different picture, it's wonderful, you know. Do you know that West Bank is the only, so it looks, part of Middle East Arab countries where you have open gay culture, you have gay clubs and so on and so on? But—his point is this one. He presents there a punk band from West Bank which did a couple of song attacking their own culture, attacking honor killings, you know, of women who blah blah. And he told me he was shocked: he presented this film in United—in LA, in Los Angeles, and he was ferociously attacked by some politically correct idiots there claiming: "But you shouldn't do this! Can't you see that Palestinians do honor killings as a reaction because—because Israelis kept them in isolation from culture and so on, so as if, you know, like, even this type of self-criticism is not allowed?" We should be glad, because I agree that we Western people, it's always the danger of liberal patronizing if we just attack their honor killings. But these are, my God, their own people who formulated it! And even here the political correctness enters, you know, and "No, you shouldn't," and so on and so on. Why am I opposed to this? Because are we aware what humiliating image of Palestinians this presupposes? That they are so stupid isolated there that they cannot even be hold to be mature enough to attack themselves, their own sad practices like—like honor killings and so on and so on, you know? Of course, no! They supported him. But don't underestimate Ramallah, it's a great city, my god. All my—I practiced it there. I told you, the joke I told you about Jesus Christ, I got it in Ramallah. My god, the joke that I repeated here years ago: why do Iraqi women don't want to fuck American soldiers? Because after American soldier finish it, they talk all the time about pulling out but never do it. This is remarkable! Ramallah is a civilized country, my god. You know why what I did with—with—with Udi Aloni and with the good guy, the producer James Schamus, Focus Pictures? We did a thing I'm really proud of. Last summer, we organized in Ramallah—we wanted to do it in Jenin but that guy Juliano was killed there we couldn't—cinema theory school. And people came there, of them from Israel. This is the true struggle for Palestine: they told me they are sick and tired of white
don't do this, then coalitions are meaningless, no? And what I am afraid of is that I hope that the protest movement will retain the strength not to fall into this trap. Because something—maybe you know—you know what was beautiful in Slovenia, and I precisely didn't want to intervene because I didn't want to appear an old guy who tries to reappropriate? But it was an incredible intellectual explosion. All of a sudden, people started to write texts debating how to change society or all that. And it was totally outside this official types of discourse. The official Left than the—the—these cultural people writers who I think, I think they in Slovenia are most of them perfectly covered by that term that I borrowed from Milner, "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie," you know? Nobody of them cared a shit when thousands, ten thousands of textile workers and so on lost their jobs. All of a sudden, they're privileged a little bit cut on, "Oh, they discovered that they are also protestors," all these people of culture, you know? No, no, no, it's like Syriza. We are in the Leninist phase, okay, without some—not in Syriza, but anyway. Okay, that's another thing. We will—when you will be arrested when I take over, you will explain all this to the—no, no, seriously. What—no, no, but I mean Lenin is simply—the greatness of Syriza for me is that they were not afraid to organize themselves as a serious political agent. They know the—you know, for me true political greatness is you are in a shitty situation when you know there is no simple solution. But you don't say, "Oh, so let's wait for the big revolution." You are not afraid to take all the risks. This is for me true political heroism. This is what Aristide did in Haiti. I know people who knew Aristide, and he—he didn't have any illusions. He wasn't a crazy new Che Guevara who thought "I will trigger an all Latin-American revolution." But you know, things is lost in the long term, but nonetheless you said, "Whatever the hell, let's try, let's risk, let's do something." Again, this is for me crucial in Slovenia, in other places, that something will remain. Now this was obfuscated by this debate: do we need a new party or not? But you know, the problem is not party, because what I am afraid of is that this debate then meant should the movement become another term just to help the old Left pseudo-left coalition to retain power? No, no, no, we shouldn't worry about that. The point is that some institutional collective intellectual whatever form should remain. This is absolutely crucial at this point, no? Okay, so can we have a couple of two or three last questions and then you can answer all of them together so we can—I only know that you are doing now some such mean manipulations that I cannot even imagine what you are doing now. Is it clear to you what is he doing, you know, with this all—Okay, on the back. Yeah, this gentleman. I much enjoyed how you discussed violence versus non-violence and the way in which these two concepts are necessarily conflated or convoluted. What remains of non-violence? I had some difficulty to—I don't know what you make of non-violence thereafter because there seems to be very little left for it whatever—This is in a way true, yeah. How do we get to it? And my second question was again on violence: you seem to appraise negatively reactive violence in the same way that Nietzsche would to posit it about it. But then if—if the state of affairs is violent itself, then true violence must be reactive violence, mustn't it? Yeah, reactive in this sense that you—no by—yeah. No, I see what you mean. But nonetheless, true violence must not be only—it must nonetheless here I agree with you, with violence like not just reacting to it within the same field but with a vision to change the entire field. This is and this was for me, for example, in Slovenia the tragedy that the existing Right and the existing so-called Left remind me—I used this metaphor years ago and it was censored, even by Mladina, the leftist, they didn't want to publish the illustration of, you know, that Escher paradox: two hands drawing each other. I think this was the old Left and Right in Slovenia. They literally needed each other to reproduce themselves. So true violence is for me not to destroy the enemy, but to change the entire field so that the enemy becomes ridiculous. Or let me give you how this looks in a discursive strategy. True violence is not that in a tough fight you—we—defeat advocates of rape, of racism. True violence is for me a change in the entire discursive field so that when somebody advocates rape, you don't even have to attack me, he simply appears as an idiot, you know, "haha interesting stupid," you know what I mean? Like, like—this is why again, I know I repeat this all the time, it can be problematic. I am tempted to praise dogmatism here. And that's why I react like crazy—you remember in The Guardian when they published that Zero Dark Thirty piece, no? How some people fell again for her point claiming "But don't I see that she is not for—for torture? She just wants neutrally to report and to make us think." Well, fuck you. I don't want to think about—you know, for me it's already a fiasco if you think about it. Like, to see what is wrong, imagine a similar approach to rape. I would have presented a movie where I would report on rape and without being against it, and then I would say, "I want you to start the debate about rape." What is there to debate there? We have, you know what I mean? And incidentally, maybe I hope this will amuse you at least a little bit. I love them, they publish me at The Guardian, but in that text they did censor three, four of my lines. In my magnifi—I'm a good guy, I'm like Comrade Stalin in his best mood, you know. No, you remember I report there how I attack but this is the obvious thing, this American doublespeak, you know? Instead of torture you say "enhanced interrogation technique," no? Already they left out part of the sentence which makes my point clear: that this neutralization at the level of words is strictly correlative to the strengthening of the actual torture violence. But then I did something which obviously was too much of them, but I found it totally politically correct and acceptable. I said that what if we do the same with rape and without rape we say "enhanced seduction technique" and so on, no? Incredible, it disappeared, it disappeared, you know? So it's incredible how even with them, you know, like, there was—there was the—Ah, can I—okay, so that you will see how tough are these problems. My good friend Udi Aloni told me that he now finished a movie, very good one, on subculture in—on the West Bank among Palestinians. Excellent documentary, you get a totally different picture, it's wonderful, you know. Do you know that West Bank is the only, so it looks, part of Middle East Arab countries where you have open gay culture, you have gay clubs and so on and so on? But—his point is this one. He presents there a punk band from West Bank which did a couple of song attacking their own culture, attacking honor killings, you know, of women who blah blah. And he told me he was shocked: he presented this film in United—in LA, in Los Angeles, and he was ferociously attacked by some politically correct idiots there claiming: "But you shouldn't do this! Can't you see that Palestinians do honor killings as a reaction because—because Israelis kept them in isolation from culture and so on, so as if, you know, like, even this type of self-criticism is not allowed?" We should be glad, because I agree that we Western people, it's always the danger of liberal patronizing if we just attack their honor killings. But these are, my God, their own people who formulated it! And even here the political correctness enters, you know, and "No, you shouldn't," and so on and so on. Why am I opposed to this? Because are we aware what humiliating image of Palestinians this presupposes? That they are so stupid isolated there that they cannot even be hold to be mature enough to attack themselves, their own sad practices like—like honor killings and so on and so on, you know? Of course, no! They supported him. But don't underestimate Ramallah, it's a great city, my god. All my—I practiced it there. I told you, the joke I told you about Jesus Christ, I got it in Ramallah. My god, the joke that I repeated here years ago: why do Iraqi women don't want to fuck American soldiers? Because after American soldier finish it, they talk all the time about pulling out but never do it. This is remarkable! Ramallah is a civilized country, my god. You know why what I did with—with—with Udi Aloni and with the good guy, the producer James Schamus, Focus Pictures? We did a thing I'm really proud of. Last summer, we organized in Ramallah—we wanted to do it in Jenin but that guy Juliano was killed there we couldn't—cinema theory school. And people came there, of them from Israel. This is the true struggle for Palestine: they told me they are sick and tired of white
unknown
people coming
people coming
Slavoj Žižek
there shouting "Free Palestine," they wanted to be treated as equal. Isn't this an intellectual triumph that Israeli people who want to
there shouting "Free Palestine," they wanted to be treated as equal. Isn't this an intellectual triumph that Israeli people who want to
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learn
learn
Slavoj Žižek
about—not patronizing about Palestinian culture,
about—not patronizing about Palestinian culture,
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but about cinema theory—go to Ramallah to—to learn about it? It was a triumph and it was totally—like, all I can say is that they are totally normal, in my sense,
but about cinema theory—go to Ramallah to—to learn about it? It was a triumph and it was totally—like, all I can say is that they are totally normal, in my sense,
Slavoj Žižek
I'm full of dirty jokes
I'm full of dirty jokes
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and so on, and not once did I have—it's typical how, when I'm in primitive countries like here in United States, you know, they always tell me "Oh, be careful about your jokes." Nobody told
and so on, and not once did I have—it's typical how, when I'm in primitive countries like here in United States, you know, they always tell me "Oh, be careful about your jokes." Nobody told
Slavoj Žižek
me this there in Ramallah, you know? Okay, I think we don't have any more questions. You have answered—Ah, okay sorry, you know—I doubt that you really think, but that's another question. Please. Okay, I let me put it like this, I see—I see your question. First all that super-ego stuff slightly surprised me, because in his book "Infinitely Demanding," he claims that one of the claims is that Lacan sees only the—this terrorizing demanding aspect of super-ego, but we should see the comic aspect of super-ego, which you know makes it more comic, easier and so on. Well, he didn't do his homework there. First, Lacan I remember has long pages on how already Kant knew it that there is always something comic in the demand of the super-ego. But Lacan knew something more: that this comic aspect of super-ego doesn't make it softer but makes it even a much more—a much more brutal and sadistic and so on. Yes, I mean this is for me the deepest insight already of Freud and so on that—you know, it's not that the power is dignified and laughter is subversive. There can be cynical humor and laughter also on the side of those in power. Just, I don't know the author, but recently somebody sent me a wonderful text which describes the whole shift from Leninism to Stalinism strictly in the sense of humor. How, you know, the type of political humor you heard in party congresses and so on, like it totally changes from the Left—sorry, from the late twenties. As to that the right moment—I'm a little bit embarrassed to answer to this reproach because again and again from my first book I quote Rosa Luxemburg and so on. That's the ABC of the Lacanian theory of the act: that there is never the right moment. If you wait for the right moment it will never arrive. Because as Rosa Luxemburg put it nicely, against those social democrats who said "Oh, too early for revolution, we should wait" that there is a time of revolution when the revolutionary subject is ready, but to get the revolutionary subject ready you have to do the premature attempts and so on. And you know who here did a wonderful thing? A guy called Andrew Cutrofello from Chicago, a Lacanian Hegelian which are good qualifications for me. He now is writing a book on Lacan and act, and very nicely critical of Badiou, namely where he develops how Hamlet should be reinterpreted as a much more progressive figure, Hamlet from the—namely the idea is this one: that the paradox that every act is always between too late and too early. But there is never the right moment, you know? It's at the same time always too late because the situation is already catastrophic, you always in a way act reacting to a catastrophe. But at the same time it's too early because you wait, wait and then you have to act because you never—if you wait for the right moment there never will be the right moment. No, so again I find it that's why I don't even want to reply to all this. I find so boring and unproductive polemics where you have to spend percent of the time just explaining where the other guys didn't—understand you properly. I only reacted briefly in digital media to John Gray because that was for me a little bit too much. Again, this idea that somehow in a twisted way I'm laying the foundations for the new Holocaust, you know? Like this is—you know, based on that—you know what is his reason? I'm saying that, to simplify it, I'm saying that it's not only Jew who is in my mind, it's me that for the Nazi he is also in the Jew. And then he says: "Oh, so Nazi is in the Jew, so the only way to get rid of the Nazis if they are in the Jews is to kill the Jews," no? So, "ah ah, Žižek is preparing the new Holocaust!" My God, I mean, no? I mean you know what I mean like, this is what disgusted me so much. The very same people who claim to be, you know, highly ethical and so on, are absolutely—and in my interview for that self-interview, of that I'm like Comrade Stalin here. You know how you recognize Stalin's style? I love this. Stalin always asks as a question and answer. You know, typical Stalinist: "What are, comrades, the problems of our present moment? Comrades, the problems of our present moment are..." and so on, you know. Like in this interview, you know which is just to give you an idea of how it is in Slovenia? There was some a
me this there in Ramallah, you know? Okay, I think we don't have any more questions. You have answered—Ah, okay sorry, you know—I doubt that you really think, but that's another question. Please. Okay, I let me put it like this, I see—I see your question. First all that super-ego stuff slightly surprised me, because in his book "Infinitely Demanding," he claims that one of the claims is that Lacan sees only the—this terrorizing demanding aspect of super-ego, but we should see the comic aspect of super-ego, which you know makes it more comic, easier and so on. Well, he didn't do his homework there. First, Lacan I remember has long pages on how already Kant knew it that there is always something comic in the demand of the super-ego. But Lacan knew something more: that this comic aspect of super-ego doesn't make it softer but makes it even a much more—a much more brutal and sadistic and so on. Yes, I mean this is for me the deepest insight already of Freud and so on that—you know, it's not that the power is dignified and laughter is subversive. There can be cynical humor and laughter also on the side of those in power. Just, I don't know the author, but recently somebody sent me a wonderful text which describes the whole shift from Leninism to Stalinism strictly in the sense of humor. How, you know, the type of political humor you heard in party congresses and so on, like it totally changes from the Left—sorry, from the late twenties. As to that the right moment—I'm a little bit embarrassed to answer to this reproach because again and again from my first book I quote Rosa Luxemburg and so on. That's the ABC of the Lacanian theory of the act: that there is never the right moment. If you wait for the right moment it will never arrive. Because as Rosa Luxemburg put it nicely, against those social democrats who said "Oh, too early for revolution, we should wait" that there is a time of revolution when the revolutionary subject is ready, but to get the revolutionary subject ready you have to do the premature attempts and so on. And you know who here did a wonderful thing? A guy called Andrew Cutrofello from Chicago, a Lacanian Hegelian which are good qualifications for me. He now is writing a book on Lacan and act, and very nicely critical of Badiou, namely where he develops how Hamlet should be reinterpreted as a much more progressive figure, Hamlet from the—namely the idea is this one: that the paradox that every act is always between too late and too early. But there is never the right moment, you know? It's at the same time always too late because the situation is already catastrophic, you always in a way act reacting to a catastrophe. But at the same time it's too early because you wait, wait and then you have to act because you never—if you wait for the right moment there never will be the right moment. No, so again I find it that's why I don't even want to reply to all this. I find so boring and unproductive polemics where you have to spend percent of the time just explaining where the other guys didn't—understand you properly. I only reacted briefly in digital media to John Gray because that was for me a little bit too much. Again, this idea that somehow in a twisted way I'm laying the foundations for the new Holocaust, you know? Like this is—you know, based on that—you know what is his reason? I'm saying that, to simplify it, I'm saying that it's not only Jew who is in my mind, it's me that for the Nazi he is also in the Jew. And then he says: "Oh, so Nazi is in the Jew, so the only way to get rid of the Nazis if they are in the Jews is to kill the Jews," no? So, "ah ah, Žižek is preparing the new Holocaust!" My God, I mean, no? I mean you know what I mean like, this is what disgusted me so much. The very same people who claim to be, you know, highly ethical and so on, are absolutely—and in my interview for that self-interview, of that I'm like Comrade Stalin here. You know how you recognize Stalin's style? I love this. Stalin always asks as a question and answer. You know, typical Stalinist: "What are, comrades, the problems of our present moment? Comrades, the problems of our present moment are..." and so on, you know. Like in this interview, you know which is just to give you an idea of how it is in Slovenia? There was some a
unknown
couple of years ago a certain Svetlana Makarovič, woman writer, rejected a state prize. And then some priest, some Catholic
couple of years ago a certain Svetlana Makarovič, woman writer, rejected a state prize. And then some priest, some Catholic
Slavoj Žižek
theoretician, was bothered by it. He characterized the situation like this. He wrote: "I know this woman. She is very kind as a person, even she is moral. Why did she do this, refuse that prize?" And then he goes on literally saying: "She looked there on stage where she said no, I reject the prize, as if she is under the control of some foreign evil power. As if it's not herself." And then without any argumentation, he goes on and says: "And then I thought who can represent this power in Slovenia, pure evil? It's Lacanians." And then he said: "So it must be that Lacanians somehow control her." I mean, it's pure madness. We don't know her, I hate Slovene writers, I—it's just like—this shocks me so much how, like, literally anything can be said. Like there are simply—or for example another big—who was it, yes, opposition politician attacked me claiming that it's my thesis that I think that the Western civilization is a dark stain which should be brutally annihilated. Like, "ah, okay!" I mean, I wrote, my God, I'm a good Christian, atheist Christian, I wrote four books defending Western legacy and so on, and so you can say this. I really think that we live in—this is what always shocks me how, maybe I'm even too naive for being surprised here, how actual polemics work. The trick is—you know, rhetoric can be so strong here. Like let's say I accuse you of something which is totally wrong and you protest, and then I say something like: "Oh, again your excuses" and so on and so on. You know, with these purely rhetorical means you can do it. It's incredible how much a normal debate presupposes from—from both sides at this level. You have to say "Thank you" to Slavoj for everything. Thank you. Ah, one more thing! Forget about that bullshit summer school. In the middle of May, there is something which is really a child of love, you know? It's here a three-day Hegel congress. All from Hegel, okay? With my Slovene friends Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar, we got all the guys we like: Catherine Malabou, Rebecca Comay, Frank Ruda and so on. And it will be pure madness to rehabilitate the notion of Absolute. No.
theoretician, was bothered by it. He characterized the situation like this. He wrote: "I know this woman. She is very kind as a person, even she is moral. Why did she do this, refuse that prize?" And then he goes on literally saying: "She looked there on stage where she said no, I reject the prize, as if she is under the control of some foreign evil power. As if it's not herself." And then without any argumentation, he goes on and says: "And then I thought who can represent this power in Slovenia, pure evil? It's Lacanians." And then he said: "So it must be that Lacanians somehow control her." I mean, it's pure madness. We don't know her, I hate Slovene writers, I—it's just like—this shocks me so much how, like, literally anything can be said. Like there are simply—or for example another big—who was it, yes, opposition politician attacked me claiming that it's my thesis that I think that the Western civilization is a dark stain which should be brutally annihilated. Like, "ah, okay!" I mean, I wrote, my God, I'm a good Christian, atheist Christian, I wrote four books defending Western legacy and so on, and so you can say this. I really think that we live in—this is what always shocks me how, maybe I'm even too naive for being surprised here, how actual polemics work. The trick is—you know, rhetoric can be so strong here. Like let's say I accuse you of something which is totally wrong and you protest, and then I say something like: "Oh, again your excuses" and so on and so on. You know, with these purely rhetorical means you can do it. It's incredible how much a normal debate presupposes from—from both sides at this level. You have to say "Thank you" to Slavoj for everything. Thank you. Ah, one more thing! Forget about that bullshit summer school. In the middle of May, there is something which is really a child of love, you know? It's here a three-day Hegel congress. All from Hegel, okay? With my Slovene friends Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar, we got all the guys we like: Catherine Malabou, Rebecca Comay, Frank Ruda and so on. And it will be pure madness to rehabilitate the notion of Absolute. No.