Brexit: Freedom, Possible and Impossible
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-02-13 · 1:08:34 · 8,451 words
ideologydemocracycapitalismliberalism-political-correctnessfascism-populismphilosophy-generalhegel-dialecticsgeopolitics-warrevolution-violenceeveryday-lifeethicscommunism-socialism
Žižek delivers a lecture in Zurich on the paradoxes of freedom in contemporary liberal-democratic society, arguing that the explosion of personal and technological freedoms coexists with a deepening unfreedom in the socioeconomic domain. He diagnoses the decay of unwritten social norms (Sittlichkeit), the rise of market-worship as a new animism, and the hollowing of parliamentary democracy by technocratic and corporate power. The talk concludes with a defense of European emancipatory universalism against both anti-immigrant populism and postcolonial localism, insisting that only through capitalism's own logic of disintegration can new spaces of freedom emerge.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 16
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The problem of what comes after a revolutionary ecstatic moment, who takes power, how it is organized, which Žižek identifies as the true test and tragedy of the left.
as “freedom as necessity / freedom as 'cannot do otherwise'”
Žižek's metaphysical claim that the highest freedom is acting not from deliberate choice but from inner necessity, falling in love, joining resistance, where the choice is 'always already made'.
as “techno-gnostic immortality”
The transhumanist prospect of achieving immortality by uploading one's identity as software and downloading it to successive hardware platforms.
The ideological claim (attributed to Tietmeyer) that financial markets constitute a more continuous and global form of democratic expression than parliamentary elections.
The new quasi-religious tendency to speak of the Market as a living being that reacts, worries, and makes demands, despite rational awareness that it is a reified abstraction.
as “unfreedom appearing as freedom”
The ideological operation by which genuine social constraints are experienced by subjects as expansions of personal freedom, e.g. losing universal healthcare rebranded as gaining freedom of choice.
as “entrepreneur of the self”
The neoliberal ideological figure in which every individual is called to treat themselves as a capitalist investing resources (health, education, leisure) in themselves.
as “freedom of choice vs. freedom to change conditions of choice”
Žižek distinguishes mere consumer-style freedom of choice from true freedom, which he defines as the collective capacity to transform the very conditions that determine what choices are available.
as “healthy dogmatism”
Žižek's counter-intuitive claim that a free society needs certain non-negotiable ethical commitments that are not up for debate, as a measure of civilizational health.
Implied in the analysis of how ideological obscenity (Trump, politicians defecating in public) provides an excess pleasure that supplements official political discourse.
Hegelian ethical life as the thick background of unwritten social rules and customs that hold a community together, beyond explicit moral prohibitions.
as “big Other”
The symbolic order whose decay is evidenced by the normalization of torture debates and conspiracy theories entering public discourse, the collapse of the fiction that maintains social decency.
The process by which political correctness purges violence from language while actual social brutality intensifies, with Žižek arguing these two movements are the obverse of each other.
Legal mechanisms within trade agreements (like TTIP) allowing unelected transnational corporations to sue democratically elected governments for policies that affect expected profits.
as “democratic fascism”
Žižek's label for the new anti-immigrant right-wing populism that is not classical fascism but is genuinely democratically legitimized, complicating straightforward antifascist critique.
as “the X as chance”
Malcolm X's move of treating the mark of rupture from roots (the 'X' replacing the slave name) not as a wound but as an opening toward universal freedom.
Stories he reaches for 5
Žižek invokes the film V for Vendetta, which ends with masked revolutionaries storming Parliament, to ask what happens the next day: who takes power, how is it organized? The film's silence on this question emblematizes the left's failure to think beyond the ecstatic revolutionary moment.
“I would sell my mother into slavery to see part two of that film. You remember how the film ends? Revolution wins... Can you even imagine what happens the next day?”
Malcolm X adopted 'X' to mark his people's violent severance from African roots and slave names; rather than seeking a return to African tribal identity (as in Alex Haley's Roots), he converted this rupture into the basis for a new universal freedom, seeing the problem itself as part of the solution.
“Malcolm X saw this being cut off from your roots as a chance of new universal freedom... It's an ingenious trick of seeing the problem itself as part of a solution.”
An Israeli anti-terrorist unit raids a Palestinian apartment looking for a suspected terrorist; when a frightened girl is called by her mother ('Come Sara'), an Israeli soldier reveals his own daughter has the same name and shows the mother a photo, producing a moment of 'warm human contact'. Žižek finds this the most disgusting thing imaginable, it erases the reality of occupation behind a sentimental humanist veil.
“He stepped towards the mother 'You see the photo? Oh, we have the daughter of the same name'. This is the most disgusting thing I can imagine.”
Syriza won the Greek election on an anti-austerity platform but then implemented austerity more efficiently than a right-winger would, the paradigmatic example of the 'morning after' failure of the left.
“Syriza... won and now they are doing what a proper right-winger should be doing. They are doing it in an even more efficient way.”
Indian Prime Minister Modi is simultaneously a radical neoliberal in economic policy and a Hindu religious nationalist, exemplifying Žižek's thesis that global capitalism and local authoritarian-religious traditions fit perfectly together.
“Modi... is at the same time absolutely radical neoliberal in economy but at the same time pretty much a Hindu fanatic, local traditions and so on.”
Works invoked 5
V for Vendetta film
Žižek would 'sell his mother into slavery' to see part two; the film's ending (revolution wins, people storm parliament) is used to dramatize the 'morning after' problem of what comes after revolutionary ecstasy.
Roots tv
Alex Haley's TV series, representing the politically correct liberal ideology of Blacks finding their roots in African tribal identity, contrasted negatively with Malcolm X's embrace of rootlessness as universal freedom.
The trumpet call announcing 'Freiheit' but actually announcing the minister's authority is the launching paradox of the talk's meditation on freedom.
Buñuel's film inverting eating and defecating is Žižek's key satirical image for the inversion of public propriety in contemporary political discourse.
Edgar Allan Poe story referenced ironically in connection with EU Trade Commissioner Malmström's surname.
People invoked 30
Cecilia Malmström negative
EU Trade Commissioner whose statement 'I do not take my mandate from the European people' is treated as the emblematic formulation of post-democratic technocracy; Žižek also notes her name's resonance with 'Maelstrom'.
Saroj Giri positive
Marxist friend who supplied the observation about dynamic Indian capitalists combining radical neoliberalism with Hindu goddess worship.
Jeroen Dijsselbloem negative
Eurogroup president with 'stupidly smiling face' who became a symbol of unelected EU bureaucratic pressure on Greece; Varoufakis described him refusing to provide meeting minutes.
Narendra Modi negative
Prime example of the compatibility of radical neoliberal economics with Hindu religious nationalism, demonstrating that local tradition and global capitalism fit perfectly.
Marine Le Pen negative
Invoked as the symbol of an anti-immigrant populist 'Europe' that would destroy what is actually worth saving in European civilization.
Palestinian Grand Mufti falsely implicated by Netanyahu in convincing Hitler to genocide Jews; Žižek does not comment on him but on the falsity and political use of the claim.
Referenced for 'A Descent into the Maelstrom' in connection with Malmström's name as an ironic symbolic coincidence.
Ted Cruz negative
Treated as cowardly for refusing to clearly dismiss the Jade Helm/Chinese occupation conspiracy as nonsense and instead demanding Pentagon details, signaling the normalization of conspiracy thinking.
Judith Butler negative
Her theory of experimentally constructed identity was explicitly cited by a US capitalist journal to justify precarious labor as a form of freedom, for Žižek 'the ultimate obscenity'.
Žižek argues Trump is not a dangerous eccentric but an ordinary centrist Republican whose vulgarity masks ideological ordinariness; his excesses are compared to defecating in public.
Alex Haley negative
His TV series Roots and its 'return to Africa / find your tribe' ideology is contrasted negatively with Malcolm X's embrace of rootlessness as universal freedom.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for celebrating capitalism's power to disintegrate communal ties as opening the space for radical emancipation, aligned with Žižek's defense of European emancipatory universalism.
EU Vice-President whose intervention against Polish constitutional court changes raises the paradox: a non-democratically legitimized official defending democracy against democratically legitimized illiberalism.
Nicolas Sarkozy negative
Example of politician 'defecating in public' through his 'Casse-toi, pauv' con' outburst at a farmer who refused to shake his hand.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan negative
Example of a politician 'defecating in public' by calling critics foreign agents in a paranoiac outburst; also cited as exemplifying capitalism combined with local authoritarian legitimation.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Personal friend; shares stories about Eurogroup non-transparency and supports his DiEM movement's goal of EU transparency, though Žižek notes the paradox that transparency could harm Greece.
Malcolm X positive
Called 'a political genius': for converting the trauma of severance from African roots (the 'X') into the basis for a new universal freedom rather than seeking roots in African tribal identity.
Benjamin Netanyahu negative
At the World Zionist Congress falsely claimed the Grand Mufti convinced Hitler to exterminate rather than merely expel Jews; Žižek treats this as a paradigmatic example of publicly circulated obscene conspiracy.
Mentioned briefly: Žižek notes he and Sloterdijk were accused of Nazism by a German philosopher named Precht, which Žižek dismisses as a misreading.
Mario Monti negative
Quoted as emblematic of technocratic post-democracy: his claim that governors must not be bound by parliamentarians is used as evidence of explicit anti-democratic ideology.
Luis Buñuel positive
His film Le Fantôme de la liberté is used approvingly as a conceptual resource for satirizing the inversion of public/private in contemporary political discourse.
Her decision to invite hundreds of thousands of refugees into Germany without formal democratic consultation is used to raise the problem of the limits of democratic legitimation.
Mentioned as an example of 1960s left-wing student revolutionary who used vulgar language to contrast with official polished political discourse, context reversed today.
Hans Tietmeyer negative
Former Bundesbank governor praised for preferring 'permanent plebiscite of global markets' over ballot-box democracy; Žižek reads this as the key ideological statement of market animism.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Accused of idealizing the past of the European Union, the democratic EU he mourns never actually existed; his critique of EU democratic deficit misses that it is structurally necessary to global capitalism.
Mentioned alongside Dutschke as a 1960s student revolutionary who used common language in contrast to official political jargon.
Vladimir Putin negative
Example of public obscenity: his televised threat to medically castrate a critic of his Chechen policy, and cited as exemplifying capitalism + Orthodox Church legitimation.
Plato positive
Cited as an example of a distinctly European intellectual event in the defense of European emancipatory universalism.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked for the Marxist insight that fascism is engendered by liberalism, and for the thesis that capitalism's disintegration of communal ties opens the space for new freedom, Žižek claims Marx is 'absolutely vindicated' by contemporary developments.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked for the concept of Sittlichkeit (ethical life as unwritten social norms) as the framework for diagnosing the decay of public decency.
What it argues
the paradox of exploding personal freedom and shrinking collective freedomthe decay of Sittlichkeit and unwritten social normsmarket animism and technocratic post-democracythe 'morning after' problem of revolutionary momentsEuropean emancipatory universalism vs. postcolonial localismthe right to politeness and decency as a leftist causetrue freedom as the ability to change the conditions of choice
Dialectical moves 10
“Freedom is Angst, not ecstasy—the highest freedom is not exuberant choice but the necessity of 'I cannot do it otherwise'.”
Žižek inverts the common liberal identification of freedom with choice, locating true freedom in acts done from inner compulsion rather than deliberation.
“The very experience of our freedom is effectively the experience of our unfreedom.”
Social control no longer appears as a limit on freedom but must appear as the self-experience of free individuals, what feels like freedom is the ideological form of domination.
“True democracy is the democracy of the markets.”
Žižek quotes Tietmeyer's formulation ironically to expose how democratic rhetoric is hijacked to legitimate market authoritarianism.
“Politically correct gentrification of language is the obverse of growing brutality in actual life.”
The more aggressively violence is scrubbed from language, the more actual social violence intensifies, the two movements are dialectically linked.
“The new fascism is a strictly secondary phenomenon engendered by its apparent opposite, the open liberal democratic universe.”
Right-wing populism is not an external enemy of liberalism but its internal product; defeating it requires overcoming liberalism's own immanent contradictions.
“Global capitalism is inherently multiculturalist—it is not only easy but the most natural thing for global capitalism to accommodate itself to local traditions.”
The apparent tension between globalization and cultural particularism dissolves: local traditions are a perfect ideological supplement to, not resistance against, global capital.
“The X [Malcolm X's mark of rupture] is not just a negative feature—it is the very opening of the space for a new universal freedom.”
Being severed from one's cultural roots, normally experienced as loss, is reread as the condition of possibility for a genuinely universal emancipation rather than a return to tribal particularity.
“The enemy of European values is not Islamic immigration but the anti-immigrant populist defenders of Europe—Europe run by Le Pen would no longer be Europe.”
The self-proclaimed guardians of European civilization are its greatest threat; those who invoke Europe to exclude are the ones destroying what is worth saving in Europe.
“People quite often do not know what they want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing.”
Democratic legitimacy cannot be unconditional, popular will is internally contradictory and subject to ideological distortion, making vox populi an insufficient foundation for emancipatory politics.
“We are not people like us—we ourselves are monsters.”
The multicultural ideology of 'open yourself and you'll find we're all the same' is false because we ourselves are internally divided, unconscious, and opaque; racism toward others is mediated by fear of what we are ourselves.
Claims 19
asserts
In contemporary society, personal and technological freedoms are expanding while collective socioeconomic freedoms are contracting, producing a structural paradox.ideology of freedom under neoliberal capitalism
asserts
True freedom is not freedom of choice but the freedom to collectively change the very conditions that determine what can be chosen.the concept of freedom
asserts
Financial markets function ideologically as a new form of animism—a hypostatized agency treated as a living being with desires and reactions.market ideology and religion
asserts
The loss of universal healthcare, precarious employment, and privatized education are ideologically repackaged as new freedoms of choice.neoliberal ideology
asserts
Political correctness correctly perceives the decay of public decency but wrongly tries to regulate it explicitly, thereby destroying the ethical substance of unwritten rules.political correctness and Sittlichkeit
asserts
The normalization of the torture debate, not torture itself, is the true social regression—once a category is openly debated, a civilizational threshold has already been crossed.torture, decency, and civilizational norms
asserts
The new anti-immigrant right-wing populism is a secondary phenomenon engendered by the immanent contradictions of liberal democracy itself, not an external threat to it.fascism and liberalism
asserts
The left should reject the idea that the primary political task today is to unite against fascism; it must instead overcome the limitations of the liberal democratic order that produces it.left strategy against right-wing populism
asserts
Emancipatory politics should not be unconditionally bound by formal democratic procedures, since majorities can vote for racist, sexist, or otherwise wrong outcomes.democracy and emancipation
asserts
Global capitalism does not require democracy and is in fact perfectly compatible with—even enhanced by—local authoritarian regimes legitimized by traditional religion or ethnicity.capitalism, democracy, and authoritarianism
asserts
Postcolonial resistance to global capitalism on behalf of local traditions is itself an ideological complement to capitalism, not a genuine alternative.postcolonial thought and capitalism
asserts
European emancipatory universalism—radical egalitarianism, communism, modern subjectivity—is more precious than ever and should not be abandoned under postcolonial critique.Eurocentrism and emancipation
asserts
A free society needs a healthy dogmatism—certain ethical commitments that are simply not up for debate—as the very condition of social freedom.freedom and dogmatism
asserts
Donald Trump is not a dangerous eccentric but an ordinary centrist Republican whose vulgarity masks his ideological ordinariness.Donald Trump
asserts
The real threat to European democracy is not Muslim immigration but trade agreements like TTIP and ISDS mechanisms that transfer sovereign policy space to corporations.democracy and TTIP/ISDS
asserts
In normally functioning parliamentary democracy, people do not really want to decide; they want the appearance of decision while being discreetly guided toward a predetermined outcome.parliamentary democracy
rejects
The ideology of deep mutual understanding across cultures ('the enemy is the one whose story you were not ready to hear') is false and should be rejected.multiculturalist ideology of empathy
asserts
The democratic deficit of the European Union is not a correctable flaw but a structural necessity of global capitalism.European Union and democracy
asserts
The openness of borders demanded by radical liberals, when implemented within nation-state democracies, amounts to a suspension of democracy.open borders and democracy
Quotes 20
“Freedom is Angst. Freedom is not ecstasy.”Slavoj Žižek · true freedom as anxiety, not exuberance
“The highest freedom maybe is: the choice is always already made.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom as inner necessity, not deliberate choice
“Maybe we will become immortal, everything is possible, but it's not possible to raise taxes one percent to give more money to education.”Slavoj Žižek · paradox of unlimited personal possibility vs. collective impossibility
“True freedom is not the freedom of choice. True freedom is the freedom to collectively change the very conditions of choice.”Slavoj Žižek · collective vs. consumer freedom
“Market expressed its worry... as if it's a living being. This then is where we stand with regard to democracy and freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · market animism
“I am, as a good bourgeois well-mannered communist, I believe in superficial manners, in rules of politeness.”Slavoj Žižek · defense of decency and formalism by a communist
“The fiasco was not that torture became acceptable, but that we even accepted the debate about it.”Slavoj Žižek · normalization of the torture debate as regression
“Politically correct gentrification of language... is the obverse of the growing brutality in actual life.”Slavoj Žižek · politically correct language and real brutality as dialectical pair
“The new anti-immigrant populism is strictly a secondary phenomenon engendered by its apparent opposite, the open liberal democratic universe.”Slavoj Žižek · fascism as product of liberalism
“People quite often do not know what they want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of democratic voluntarism
“Global capitalism is inherently in this sense multiculturalist. It's not only easy but the most natural thing for global capitalism to accommodate itself to local traditions.”Slavoj Žižek · multiculturalism as capitalist ideology
“No wonder critique of Eurocentrism is so popular today. Because it fits perfectly to today's global capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · postcolonial critique as complement to capitalism
“The enemy is the one whose story you were not ready to hear — the most stupid proverb I know.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of the multiculturalist empathy ideology
“We are not people like us. We are monsters and so on. That's the truly difficult thing to accept.”Slavoj Žižek · self-opacity and the impossibility of deep mutual understanding
“The reality of the struggle is the ultimate reality—not the reality that we are all deep people behind.”Slavoj Žižek · social antagonism over humanist reconciliation
“I do not take my mandate from the European people. — Cecilia Malmström [quoted approvingly as symptom]”Slavoj Žižek · technocratic post-democracy
“Domination is maybe stronger than ever but it absolutely should not appear openly as a domination.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as the invisibility of domination
“Malcolm X saw this being cut off from your roots as a chance of new universal freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · rupture as condition of universal emancipation
“I think that without this risky step—exchange obscenities—you are stuck with the politically correct official anti-racism.”Slavoj Žižek · shared obscenity as more authentic anti-racism
“Today's global capitalism can survive quite well with less and less democracy.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's post-democratic tendency
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I hope you can follow my English. Ich verstehe Deutsch, aber ich kann nicht gut genug Deutsch sprechen, so ist es. I just to begin, I would like to say that I'm in a big temptation to simply drop my talk and comment on what I heard here. Because I like very much—I know a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit of classical music. And I like in the musical accompaniment, or musical part to last performance, those a couple of times, four-five, I think, intervention, the trumpet from Fidelio. Are you aware what kind of a paradox that trumpet is? Leonore is ready to sacrifice herself and then the trumpet is like a mystical intervention. Everybody freezes: Freiheit. But what is this freedom? Correct me if I'm wrong. The words that we hear is then—is it Joachim or Rocco said, 'Herr Minister ist da, Herr Minister ist da'. So Minister brings freedom from King and so on. And this goes on. I mean, you know, this is for me from my perspective the central paradox of Freiheit, freedom, today. I'm more and more obsessed by what we call 'the morning after' which in English means after the night of drinking, you know. I'm less and less impressed by this great ecstatic moments. One million people on Tahrir Square, Gezi Square, Syntagma Square in Athens. Okay, okay. It's easy to do this. We all cry 'My God, the unity, we are all one with the people'. What happens the morning after? Did you see the film V for Vendetta? I would sell my mother into slavery to see part two of that film. You remember how the film ends? Revolution wins, we are all that guy with a mask and so on, people storm the parliament. Can you even imagine what happens the next day? Who takes over? Who takes power? How is it organized? and so on and so forth. And that's for me the ultimate tragedy, if you want, of the left. Look at what happened with Syriza. It won and now they are doing what a proper right-winger should be doing. They are doing it in an even more efficient way and so on and so forth. So, what is going on here? What can we do? I agree with basic thesis—but I don't want to go into it—with what I agree, don't agree with the performance that went on here before. Because if I got it correctly, you remember at the end, it was that hysterical shouting 'Freiheit', many voices, and then interrupted by uncanny protracted, prolonged moments of silence. I think that silence stood for Freiheit. Precisely when Freiheit loses, lost its singing voice. Because for me Freiheit is not ecstasy. Freiheit is Angst. Freiheit is not for me—that's the paradox. Our—and I will return to it later—our spontaneous today ideological notion of freedom is freedom of choice. As if the model of freedom is: you go to a patisserie and decide, strawberry cake or chocolate cake. No, for me the highest freedom—and I speak very ancient metaphysical language here—is freedom to do something, not out of a free choice but because you cannot do it otherwise, to put it simply. Let's take, say your country, pathetic example, is under occupation. And the greatest act of freedom is to join resistance, risk your life. But you don't reason: 'I have a choice now, do this, do that'. No, you do it because you cannot do it otherwise. Or let me give you another example, very pathetic one: falling in love. You never have a choice. I mean, if you look around, that girl, that girl or boy or animals so that you will not accuse me of metaphysical binary logic thinking, whatever. You never go around and make a choice 'I love you more than you'. The moment you do this, it's not love. Love is that you never fall in love. All of a sudden you discover that you are already in love. The choice is always already made. And that's the highest freedom maybe. But let's not get lost into it. I will now begin with the first paradox that I see of freedom today. Freedom, I mean here how we experience freedom. Did you notice—and this is what my title refers to—how in our universe, possible and impossible are distributed in a strange way when we speak about freedom. On the one hand, in the domain of personal freedoms or technology, the impossible is more and more possible. Or so we are told. Nothing is impossible. We can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions. And I mean it quite literally. Two years ago in New York I met an Ein Chirurg, a surgeon, whose specialty is to cut a penis into two. And somehow he can do it in such a refined way that a man can have sex with two women in the same way and so on and so on. Nothing is impossible. All archives of music are accessible to us. Going into space will be soon available for everyone—with money of course. There is the prospect of enhancing our physical, psychic abilities and so on and so on. You know the techno-gnostic perspective of achieving immortality by changing our identity into a software and we just download oneself from one to another hardware. So everything is possible here. But did you notice how everything is possible at this level? Person—intense personal experiences, technological, scientifically generated transformations. But on the other hand, in the domain of social and economic relations, our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which with the collapse of communist states, humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality. Which of course means capitalist reality. With all its impossibilities. So at the same time we are being told 'Maybe we will become immortal, you can enjoy any way you want' or whatever. But at the same time we are bombarded by a whole series of 'You cannot'. You cannot engage in large—in large collective acts. We are told if you do this we will end in totalitarian terror. We cannot keep alive old welfare state. It makes us non-competitive, it leads to economic crisis. We cannot isolate ourselves from global market and so on and so on. We even have the ideological version of this limitation, a leftist one. I noticed how ecology also tends to function like this. Namely, it feeds into this obsession with setting a limit. Temperature can raise—and I think this is totally irrational—we are told 'Global temperature for two degrees Celsius'. If it's more, it's the end of civilization, global warming and so on. So on the other hand, it's this desperate search for limit. For what we cannot do. So we live in strange times where—to put it in a funny way, one phrase—maybe we will become immortal, everything is possible, but it's not possible to raise taxes one percent to give more money to education. That's our reality. So maybe the time has come to rearrange our notions of possible and impossible. What is possible, what is impossible. Here is an extreme case of what is perceived as impossible today. Mario Monti—you know who he is—recently said, I quote: 'Those who govern must not allow themselves to be completely bound by parliamentarians.' End of quote. Which then is for Monti the higher force whose authority can suspend the decisions of a democratically elected body representative of the people. Already back in the answer was given by Hans Tietmeyer, at that time the governor of Deutsche Bundesbank, who praised national governments for preferring its—quote, a wonderful expression—'the permanent plebiscite of global markets to the plebiscite of the ballot box'. I think it's a wonderful ideological manipulation. Tietmeyer keeps the democratic rhetoric but he claims global markets are more democratic than parliamentary elections since the process of voting goes on in them permanently and is permanently reflected in market fluctuations. Not only every four years. And at the global level, not only within the limits of a nation state. So the underlying idea is that, freed from this higher control of markets and experts, parliamentary democratic decisions are irresponsible. True democracy is thus the democracy of the markets. And it's even true that a new form of religion is emerging here. Did you noticed how we are gradually entering an area of new animism. Market—although we all rationally know that market is just some kind of a hypostasized agency which doesn't really exist, it's a reified form of the chaotic result of our individual decisions, we nonetheless spontaneously talk as if market is a living being which reacts. We hear again and again, not in religious supplements to daily newspapers but in economic reports how 'Market expressed its worry', 'We should satisfy the demand of the market' and so on and so forth. As if it's a living being. This then is where we stand with regard to democracy and freedom. And I think the big economic-financial agreements like TiSA or TTIP are perfect examples of this state of things. The key decisions concerning our economy are negotiated and enforced in secrecy, out of sight, with no public debate. In this way, the space for decisions of the democratically elected political agents is very limited. And the political process deals predominantly with issues towards which capital is indifferent, like cultural wars. I mean, with all my sympathy for gay rights, abortion rights and so on and so forth. I claim that—now I speak as an animist, as if capital is a person—I claim that capital quite likes these struggles. It means we leave big economic decisions behind and we fight cultural wars. This is why I think in our societies, free choice is elevated into a supreme value. Why? Because we live in a formally democratic society, society of freedom, which means that social control and domination can no longer appear directly as a limit on subject freedom. They have to appear as the very self-experience of free individuals. Now you will say how is this possible? That our very unfreedom appears to us that we experience it as our freedom. Where? There are many forms of this appearing of unfreedom in the guise of its opposite. For example, when we are deprived of universal health care, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice. Like the idea is, if you are automatically given universal health care, totalitarian state decides on it. But now you are given a free choice. Will you invest the surplus of your money—or your credit money—for health care, or will you go a holiday and so on and so on. You have a new freedom of choice. When we no longer can rely on a long-term employment and when we are compelled to search for a new precarious work every year, every second year, we are again told that we are given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover new unexpected creative potentials that lurked in our personality. I read—and this is the ultimate obscenity—in a some capitalist small-circulation journal in United States, a wonderful argumentation for precarious work which—that's the irony—explicitly referred to Judith Butler and all those who advocate this kind of an experimentally constructed nature of human identity. They say precarious works means new freedom. You are given a chance to reinvent yourself every year, every second year, your identity is no longer fixed by society and so on and so on. When we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become entrepreneurs of the self. Acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how he will invest the resources he possesses or borrowed. Into education, health, travel and so on and so on. That's the ideology today. We are all capitalists, even if you are a poor worker and you acquire, you get some credit, francs let us say, you are free to decide. Will you invest it into your education to earn more, will you invest it in your children's education, will you invest it in your health or will you simply spend it for a holiday? But the idea is that okay, I am investing my capitalist friend is investing billion. But who cares? It's just, as they were singing here, quantitative difference. We are all capitalists. So we more and more experience our freedom as what it effectively is, a burden that deprives us of the true choice, the choice of change. Because I think if the word Freiheit, freedom, has any actual meaning today, we have to move beyond this category of the freedom of choice. True freedom is not the freedom of choice. True freedom is the freedom to collectively change the very conditions of choice. What can you choose and so on. You know, that's what some at least neoliberals don't get. That in order for us to be actually free again (if this words have any meaning today), then quite a dense network of social conditions, rules, regulations should be enacted as the background for it. Freedom doesn't mean I do whatever I want. Freedom means if I feel I can take a walk during the night around Zurich. But what does this imply? That most people rely on certain respect, certain basic rules of safety, that I can rely on police protection and so on and so on. A whole network of things has to be here. And I don't have time to go into it further, I'm even more and more tempted to say that freedom is, in a good sense, a dogmatic category. We need—we say today we are being told we shouldn't be dogmatic. We should think critically about everything. Aye, aye. Usually, you know where I often hear this argument for non-dogmatic spirit? With American right-wing liberals who want to justify torture now. No, I think that the measure of the freedom of a society—freedom in a positive sense—is a certain healthy dogmatism. Now you will say I'm crazy, but let me give you an example. Let us say: would you like to live in a society where you would have to argue all the time that women shouldn't be raped? I mean, there is something wrong with this society. I would like to live in a society where, when some stupid man argues 'But you know, women really like it, they just pretend not to like it' and so on, that you don't have to argue. He is simply dismissed as not even funny, an eccentric idiot or whatever. The moment you have to argue about it, there is something wrong with this society. And that's what is also wrong at a more general level today with our ethical standards. For me, the fiasco was not that torture became acceptable, but that we even accepted the debate about it. This is for me a clear social regression. Twenty years ago, no one would even have been thinking about possibility of torture. Now if you are a cynic you would tell me, 'Yeah, but we all know torture was going on'. Ah, here as a good bourgeois well-mannered communist, I believe in superficial manners, in rules of politeness. We should absolutely reject this cynical argument. 'But torture is going on all the time, it's not just United States, Guantanamo, Russia, China, they are torturing like crazy, so isn't it better to openly admit it and set some rules about it?' I think absolutely no. Not only for the realist pragmatic reason that in this way, even more torture would have been going on. But, you know, let me be quite open. I can imagine myself torturing someone. In an extreme situation. Let's be ridiculous, let me improvise this totally ridiculous situation. My small daughter whom I love is kidnapped by terrorists and I have in my basement one mean terrorist who smiles at me 'Haha, I know where your daughter is'. Sorry for the tasteless example. But in such ridiculous example I can well imagine torturing him. But you see my point? It shouldn't be normalized. It should—even here I have some doubts, but at least, even if out of despair I were to torture the guy, it should have remained something totally unacceptable that I did out of despair. It shouldn't be normalized. So again, what then should we do apropos this deadlock where, again—and that's our basic paradox today—the more we are free at the level of personal freedoms—you can read what you want, more or less, you can travel where you want, you can get a job that you want, if you get it of course—but this freedom is more and more constrained by a more basic unfreedom. Like as if the social-economic system in which we live is if not the best possible, at least the least bad and you can't do anything there. How—what should we do in this deadlock? Again, exploding personal freedoms, even in China. It's quite paradoxical. They are now on the edge of allowing gay marriages, I heard, and so on and so on. So China is a good example of how these small private freedoms can coexist with very limited collective social freedoms. The first thing to do—I want to return to what I was just saying—the first thing to do I think is to impose certain limitations. A couple of months ago, Donald Trump—and he is one of us, in Slovenia he is very popular, you know why? Because Melania Trump, his wife, is a Slovene woman. So we Slovenians are one step from White House, okay. Donald Trump was unflatteringly compared to a man who noisily defecates in the corner of a room in which a respectful drinking party is going on. But are other Republican candidates for the US presidency substantially any better? I hope you remember a scene from Luis Buñuel's Le Fantôme de la liberté, in which relations between eating and excreting, shitting, are inverted. People sit at their toilets around the table, pleasantly talking while defecating, and then when they want to eat, they silently ask the housewife 'Where is that place, you know?' and she there, there, and as a dirty private secret you go there and quickly swallow some sandwiches. So my metaphor is, when I'm looking now at the presidential debates of Republican candidates, they look to me like a reunion in Buñuel's film, you know. But does the same not hold for many leading politicians around the globe today? Was Erdogan, the Turkish president, not defecating in public when in a recent paranoiac outburst he dismissed critics of his politics as traitors and foreign agents? Was Putin not defecating in public when, in a well-calculated public vulgarity, he three-four years ago, he threatened a critic of his Chechen politics with medical castration? It was an incredible obscenity, I remember, seen on TV. Putin said 'Why don't you visit us in Russia, we have doctors who can fit your problems there with your testicles and so on'. Was Sarkozy, French president before Hollande, not defecating in public when back in he snapped at a farmer who refused to shake his hand, 'Casse-toi, pauv' con'. A very soft translation of this would be 'Get lost, you bloody idiot', but the actual meaning is closer to something like 'Fuck you, prick'. And the list goes on. In a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, now in October Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Hitler only wanted to expel Jews from Germany, not to exterminate them. And that it was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian Grand Mufti, who persuaded Hitler to kill the Jews. The idea is that Husseini told Hitler that if he just expels the Jews from Europe they will come to Palestine. And then Hitler asked 'What should I do with them?' and Mufti replied 'Burn them'. Of course, it's total fiction. But I want to draw your attention to something else. To the fact that of course we are full of this type of stories. But what worries me is this stories, this obscene rumors. Till now they were kept private in a way. We didn't talk about it publicly. And I'm here quite a leftist moral conservative. I think it's a great catastrophe when you are allowed to talk publicly like this. The problem here is the problem of what Hegel called Sittlichkeit. It's not simply morality but it's unwritten rules, ethical customs. The thick background of unwritten rules of social life. It's not simply what is allowed and not allowed. It's something much more refined. It's, you know, because I'm so sorry I don't have more time to go into this, but what always fascinated me is how a set of social rules which keep together—or enable—the reproduction of certain social body is never composed just of explicit rules. You always get some kind of a higher level rules which tell you how to treat the explicit rules. Quite many social rules are meant to be violated. It's prohibited, but the message is 'Do it discreetly'. On the other hand, much more interesting, you get rules which allow you to do something on condition that you don't use—use this right. Like you are given freedoms with the silent understanding that you will not use this freedom. I mean, there are many examples from big politics even to daily life. Don't you have also here in Switzerland—I noticed this habit in my country, in United States—where let's say I invite you to dinner. And I have maybe—I'm not sure with you Swiss you never know, but let's say I have more money than you. Then it's of course we all know I will pay. But don't you have this custom that when the bill arrives, when I say I will pay, we have to play this social game that you say 'No, no, no, I will pay' and then the game goes on for some twenty seconds and at the end you concede 'Okay, if you insist, you pay'. But you see the paradox? We both know the outcome. I mean, you—we speak as if there is an actual choice for you to pay. But we both know that I will pay. And we have many manners like this where we are given a chance, although it is prohibited to take this chance. And I'm not denouncing this as some kind of a totalitarian trick. I claim that this is what makes a society alive. This gentle interaction of written and unwritten rules. And for me the tragedy of so-called political correctness is precisely that political correctness tries to do the right thing but in a wrong way. Political correctness perceives correctly that these public standards of decency are disintegrating. But it tries to explicitly—to explicitly regulate things. And so we lose this ethical substance of unwritten rules and everything's regulated. Instead, you know, 'Black' became 'African-Americans', 'Fat' becomes 'Weight challenge', 'Torture' becomes 'Enhanced interrogation technique', and my joking proposal was that 'Why shouldn't they then rape become enhanced seduction technique or whatever'. And I think that it's crucial to see how this politically correct gentrification of language—violence should disappear from it—is the obverse of the growing brutality in actual life. And it's not just at this level of manners that we are witnessing a decay, a regression in our social life. It's even generally in how paranoiac theories, conspiracy theories, which till now okay, we all love them, but we had the decency of keeping them secret. Now they are more and more publicly debated. Like the last example of madness—some American friends informed me on them. In the fall of a big military exercises called Jade Helm took place in Southwestern USA, Arizona, Texas and so on. And all of a sudden, because for quite accidental reasons at the same time some Walmart megastores were closed. The paranoia among right-wing populists was that—it's incredible. It was that Michelle Obama, not even Obama, when she visited China, she promised to the Chinese that President Obama at the end of his presidency will give those states as a present to China. And then the Walmart megastores were closed because they are already preparing their beds and habitat for the Chinese soldiers to occupy that. Now you will say this is crazy right-wing conspiracy. Maybe. But what is so sad is that even the leading Republicans were afraid to clearly say 'This is bullshit'. No. For example, the one who is now a presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, he said we should take this seriously and he demanded details from the Pentagon and so on and so forth. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, ordered the state guard to monitor military exercises. I mean, are they really getting ready to occupy Texas and so on and so forth? So this is how I react to the phenomenon of Donald Trump. The key is this one: I claim he is not a dangerous eccentric. What his excesses mask is his ordinariness. Namely, if you look effectively at his program—not these stupid racist, sexist provocations—he's just an old centrist Republican. Maybe he will even be—would have been—much better than some other Republicans. What he is masking with his excessive tasteless remarks is simply his vulgar—his vulgar ordinariness. So now you will say 'But why talk about politeness and public manners today when we are facing more pressing real problems?' Again, because I claim manners do matter. Especially today. Back in the 1960s when I was young, occasional vulgarities were associated with political left. Student revolutionaries like Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit often used common language to emphasize their contrast to official politics with its polished jargon and so on. Today vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative of the radical right. So that the left finds itself in a surprising position of a defender of decency and public manners. And I think the left should shamelessly use this role. That's maybe one way to fight to fight against radical right for the so-called silent majority. No, the left is protecting good manners today. The problem of course is that why do we have this explosion of conspiracy theories and so on? Because even if we are personally free in the sense of freedom of choice, the social process is becoming more and more non-transparent. Things are just taking certain turn and we don't even perceive ourselves as able to steer it, to control it. For example, I am extremely worried in quite naive sense. Are you aware that now we are maybe approaching if not a new world war but at least a new series of explosions of local wars? Turkey, Russia and so on and so on. I think we live in an extremely dangerous moment but we don't even think about a new peace movement or whatever, we just accept it. That's how things go. Which—that's my point. The obverse of our sense of individual freedom is that we accept a total non-transparency of social life. Things simply happen. There will be war and we don't think in the terms of how to prevent war, we think in the terms of how to squeeze out. Many of my friends already thinking: where should I emigrate? Should I go to South Argentina, should I go to Iceland? To New Zealand is popular in Slovenia now. How to get out. Now I come to my concluding paradox. This non-transparency is today often embodied in faces. Sometimes faces become symbols. Not symbols of a strong individual, but symbols of anonymous forces behind these faces. For example, the first such face a year ago was the stupidly smiling face of (I'm sorry if I pronounce the name incorrectly) Jeroen Dijsselbloem, President of the Eurogroup, the symbol of the European Union's brutal pressure on Greece. And my friend Varoufakis told me wonderful stories about this. How all the time media were full of this Dijsselbloem with his stupid smile explaining 'No sorry, we can't do this, we can't'. No one elected him. He was a totally anonymous bureaucrat there. Varoufakis even told me that when they were deciding the fate of Greece, Varoufakis said 'Can I get please the official minutes, record of this meeting?' And everyone was in a panic, they withdrew, you know bureaucrats, they come back and said 'Sorry we cannot do this because this is just a consultation, this meeting didn't really take place'. I mean it's total non-transparency. Then recently, when the big deal is the international trade deal, TTIP, there is a new face. A cold face of European Union Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, who when asked by a journalist how she could continue her promotion of TTIP in the face of massive public opposition, she responded without shame: 'I do not take my mandate from the European people'. And in an unsurpassable act of irony her family name is a variation of Maelstrom, you know, A Descent into the Maelstrom, Edgar Allan Poe's story and so on and so forth. Because when people worry about democracy today, 'Can—will we survive the Muslim invasion?' and so on. I mean, I think we should worry much more about agreements like TTIP, which severely limit the—let's say—policy space for political intervention of democratically elected governments. The most dangerous element as you maybe know are so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlements. This means that unelected transnational corporations can dictate the policies of democratically elected governments. Let me give you an example. Swedish company, energy company Vattenfall is now suing German government for billions of euros over its decision to phase out nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster. This is for me a totally legitimate public health policy. Like there is a danger, if there is another catastrophe in Europe like Fukushima, so let's try to move out to gradually abandon nuclear energy. The argument is that when they (the Swedish company) invested in Germany, the conditions were different—tax, financial—and that this new regulation limits their chances of profit, so they want to be remunerated by billions of dollars and so on and so forth. This is just one example of what is going on. But okay, let me go to a the last example and here final part now we will see the true problem of freedom. Now a third anonymous face has emerged: Frans Timmermans, the first Vice-President of the European Commission, who in December scolded the Polish government for adopting a new law which poses a threat to the democratic constitutional order since this law subordinates constitutional court to the authority of government. Timmermans also condemned the new media law which enables the parliament to sack all executives at the country's public television and radio companies and so on and so forth. The ruling party justified this law as necessary to stifle unfair criticism of its actions. And in an immediate sharp reply the Polish government warned Brussels, quote: 'To exercise more restraint in instructing and cautioning the parliament and the government of a sovereign and democratic state'. Now what's the problem here? From the standard left-liberal view, it is of course inappropriate to put these three names into the same series. Dijsselbloem and Malmström personify the pressure of the Brussels bureaucrats on states and their democratically elected government, while Timmermans intervened to protect the basic democratic institutions—basic democratic institutions like independence of courts or free press from a government that overstepped its legitimate powers. That would be the counter-point. That Timmermans—but as the Polish side responded, is Timmermans not a EU, a European administrator lacking any democratic legitimization? And did he not exerted pressure on a democratically elected government of a sovereign state? I myself encountered a similar problem when I was recently, four months ago I think, answering questions from the readers of Süddeutsche Zeitung about the refugee crisis. And the question which attracted most attention—the question of a reader—concerned precisely democracy, of course with a right-wing populist twist. The question was: when Angela Merkel made her famous public appeal inviting hundreds of thousands of refugees into Germany, where was her democratic legitimation? What gave her the right to bring such a radical change to German life without democratic consultation? My point here of course is not to support anti-immigrant populists, but to clearly point out the limits of democratic legitimation. And the same goes for those who advocate radical opening of the borders. Are they aware that since our democracies are nation-state democracies, their demands equal suspension of democracy? A gigantic change should be allowed to affect a country without democratic consultation of its population. And we often hear about the democratic deficit of European Union. But we encounter there a similar problem. Now in his political movement—new—Varoufakis, otherwise my good friend (the name of the movement is DiEM) called for transparency of European Union decisions. But the problem is, since in many countries the majority of the public was against the reducing the Greek debt, rendering European negotiations public would make representatives of these countries—would make them advocate even tougher measures against Greece. We encounter here the old problem: what happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to vote for racist and sexist laws? I am not afraid to draw here the conclusion that emancipatory politics should not be bound by formal democratic procedures of legitimation. People quite often do not know what they want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing. There is no simple shortcut here. The context of this deadlock is the big bad wolf that is now emerging as the main threat in the eyes of the liberal left. The threat of new fascism embodied in anti-immigrant rightist populism. This scarecrow is perceived as the principal enemy against which we should all unite, from whatever remains of the radical left to mainstream liberal democrats. Europe is portrayed as a continent regressing towards a new fascism which feeds on the paranoiac hatred and fear of the external ethnic-religious enemy (mostly Muslims). While this new fascism is directly predominant in some post-communist East European countries (Hungary, Poland and so on), it is getting stronger and stronger also in many West European, much more developed countries. But I think it is here that we should not lose nerves and we should persist in the basic Marxist insight. This so-called fascism is strictly a secondary phenomenon engendered by its apparent opposite, the open liberal democratic universe. So the only way to truly defeat it is to overcome the immanent limitation of this liberal democratic universe. Plus, this fascism is something new, a truly democratic one. The prospect that we are facing now is the prospect of Europe with a revitalized democracy which will bring to power anti-immigrant populists. More generally, we should be suspicious about the tendency of the left to quickly brand any undesirable phenomenon as fascism. I doubt if this really—this new anti-immigrant populism—that it really deserves the name fascism. Again, the source of unease is the unpleasant fact that this new fascism is democratically legitimized. Leftist critics of European Union now find themselves in a strange predicament. On the one hand, they deplore the so-called democratic deficit of European Union and they propose plans to make more transparent the Brussels decision-making. On the other hand, they support the non-democratic Brussels administrators when they exert pressure on democratically legitimized new fascist tendencies. Furthermore, many leftist liberals like Habermas who bemoan the ongoing democratic—the ongoing decline of the European Union, I think they idealized the past of the European Union. The democratic European Union, the loss of which they bemoan, never existed. Recent European Union policy is simply a desperate attempt to make Europe fit for new global capitalism. The usual left-liberal critique of the European Union 'It's basically okay, just it has a little bit of a democratic deficit' betrays a certain naivety. They don't see that democratic deficit is a necessary part of the global structure. The problem namely is—there is a double problem here I think. The first problem is that the only way to actually fight global capitalism would be through some kind of transnational democracy. But I think that this cannot be done without changing the precisely global capitalist system. That capitalism is global but can only thrive in conditions of geopolitical conflict between different nation states and so on and so on. Nation states are not in decline. They are if anything getting stronger and stronger today. That will be our ruin. Look at United States, Russia, China and so on and so on. So I think that that the world which are approaching—we are approaching now is the world of global capitalism, free circulation of commodities, but this economic opening is accompanied by the growing separation in social spheres. More and more ethnic fundamentalism, more and more new forms of apartheid. I think that we are finally seeing how things like growing nationalism, relying on local traditions, are no obstacle to global capitalism. Global capitalism is inherently in this sense multiculturalist. It's the—not only easy but the most natural thing for global capitalism is to accommodate itself to local traditions. For example, in India, a Marxist friend of mine sent me—his name is Saroj Giri, great guy—how the most dynamic Indian new capitalists all go regularly to prayer to Hindu goddesses and so on and so on. It in China, the whole official ideology today is of course Confucianism, they even no longer talk about communism, the term they use is 'Harmonious Society' and so on and so on. Now the last problem I have with democracy (I'm not against democracy in the sense for some new totalitarianism but I think what we need if we want really to confront the problem Europe is in today) is to ask openly how our democracies effectively function. And my hypothesis is a very nasty one here. My hypothesis is that in a normally functioning parliamentary democracy people don't want really to decide. Or rather, they want the appearance of decision, but they want to be discreetly told what to choose. They want not to be—they don't want to lose their face. When people are really confronting a choice like they did in Greece, last elections, Syriza and so on, it's usually perceived as a crisis of democracy. So what I'm saying is that, you know, in monarchies when they were no longer absolute monarchies, this is even a great theoretical problem. The King should not decide, but how to save the face of the King. And I think the same problem we face today with our new King, ordinary people, voters in a democracy. Their face should be saved but they shouldn't be really allowed to decide. That's our paradox today. Domination is maybe stronger than ever but it absolutely should not appear openly as a domination. So let me conclude on a personal note. In contrast to many of my friends, I still refer positively to European emancipatory legacy. I'm a Eurocentrist. I of course don't have in mind European values in the predominant ordinary sense. What our media refer to when they talk about how our values are threatened by Islam and so on. I think that the greatest threat to what is worth saving from European legacy are precisely today's anti-immigrant populist defenders of Europe. I mean, Europe run by Pegida, Marine Le Pen and so on, that would no longer have been Europe. But on the other hand, to be blunt and direct, Plato's thought is a European event. Radical egalitarianism is a European notion. Communism is a European notion. The notion of modern subjectivity is European. When Alain Badiou celebrates the power of capitalism to disintegrate all communal ties, when in a strict Marxist sense, he detects in this disintegration the opening of the space for radical emancipation, he speaks strictly on behalf of the emancipatory European legacy. And this is I think a great struggle, one of the great struggles that goes on today in what remains of the left. There are so-called anti-eurocentric postcolonial thinkers who attack Badiou, me and other proponents of communism as all too European. They claim 'No, communism failed'. They claim that the only way to resist global capitalism is on behalf of local traditions. You have for example African postcolonial thinking, they find some tribes which said 'Oh, my voice is voice of a community of my tribe', so this is a good argument against European individualism and so on. You have some quite serious friends of mine who claim that there is some mysterious tribe in Amazon, deep in Amazon jungle, and they have some primordial wisdom which can resist global capitalism and so on and so on. So either we play this game or it's played by China today like Confucianism more—more better for human rights than Western individualism. So it's this communal resistance, local traditions and so on. On the other hand, it's the—and I know what fiasco communism was. But where I stick to communism paradoxically is in its great appraisal of capitalism. It was absolutely clear to Marx that the only new space for freedom is opened through capitalist disintegration. And I think Marx was absolutely vindicated with what goes on today where, with the rise of so-called Asian values capitalism (which has nothing to do with Asia, more with authoritarian forms of government), that we more and more see how perfectly ancient anti-global local traditions can be combined with global capitalism. They fit perfectly. The symbol for me today is for example Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, who is at the same time absolutely radical neoliberal in economy but at the same time pretty much a Hindu fanatic, local traditions and so on and so on. So here we have to make a decision. Do we resist global capitalism on behalf of some local traditions it undermines, or do we endorse the power of disintegration that pertains to global capitalism? And so that we are aware that only through this disintegration a new space of freedom emerges. That's why my hero is for example Malcolm X, the black leader. He was a political genius I claim. Why? You know what's Malcolm X? X stood for the fact that blacks were uprooted from their from their country in Africa, they had no family community background. They were torn brutally out of their culture. But Malcolm X saw it that this X is not just a negative feature. He never fell into this politically correct liberal stupidity which was embodied in some TV series popular, Alex Haley Roots, years ago, 'Oh, blacks they should return to Africa, find their roots there, oh I'm coming from that tribe' and so on and so on. No, Malcolm X saw this being cut off from your roots as a chance of new universal freedom. He made it quite clear. It's an ingenious trick of seeing the problem itself as part of a solution, as opening up the space of a solution. Which is why again, I think today at least reference to European legacy is important. Why? Not because I'm a conservative Eurocentrist. But I claim that today's global capitalism can survive quite well with less and less democracy. No wonder critique of Eurocentrism is so popular today. Because it fits perfectly to today's global capitalism. They all play the same game. Erdogan plays it, Putin plays it. Brutal capitalism combined with local local authoritarian regime legitimized with some crazy traditional local ideology, whatever: Orthodox Church, Islam. And this is why, with all the horrors that come out of European tradition, colonialism and so on and so on, I think that European legacy of emancipatory universality is something that is more precious than ever today. Thanks very much for your patience. Now—just one minute more. I was so glad when my friend Patrick told me there is no debate, because now I can say 'It's a total lie, hypocrisy, I'm so sad that we don't have time to debate' and so on, you know. Sorry? You are too—Yeah, yeah, but it's so nice, you know, this hypocrisy I love it. But I want nonetheless with you to clarify one detail because I'm now often accused—I was—I read today on the web that some Precht or how is he called, German philosopher, accused Sloterdijk and me of Nazism and so on. My God, they get it so wrong. What I really am horrified at—I will tell you, allow me just this, what I like in Switzerland. I know you did many crazy things and so on. Money, and my favorite Swiss fantasy is that: isn't it under your Alps there are some mysterious tunnels and cities where millions can move there in five hours or whatever? I also have my own beautiful fantasies about Switzerland. For example, I hope you don't know the joke. Years ago here in Zurich in some place on the other side of the river, I debated with my friends about—you know in Europe we identify certain sexual practices with certain countries. Like, if you say let's do it the Italian way, it usually means anal intercourse. If you say let's do it the Spanish way, it means man's penis between woman's breasts. So the debate was what would have been the Swiss way. And there was a big debate. And I think I gave a quite good proposal. Okay, feminists will not like it. You know what is Swiss Army knife? The knife with all those, no? My proposal is Swiss Army wife, you know: masturbates with one hand, with other like and so on. So that's my fantasy of Switzerland, okay. But you know why I mention this obscenity? No, no, I'm not losing my nerves. Because I think that only in this way, through a—maybe I failed here, but through this type of shared obscenities, can you really overcome racism. I think that without this risky step—it's very risky, you can fall into actual racism—into exchange obscenities, you are stuck with the politically correct official anti-racism, we we respect each other's. And what do I get then, you know in Switzerland, what do I get then? You teach me about yodeling, about your Spätzle or whatever. No, I want Swiss Army wife and so on. But the other thing is that what I like about you, maybe it's a myth, I don't know, I was told that you are not culturally too united with Swiss—the French Swiss. That you have a distance. I don't think this is bad. I think we should stop this eternal superego guilt feeling idea 'We don't understand each other enough' and so on. I mean, this is the ideology that—I mean, I want even more refugees in Europe. I just want to fight this human compassion 'We are all humans beneath the masks' ideology. For example, the most stupid proverb—and proverbs are generally extremely stupid—the most stupid proverb that I know and it's often quoted by today's multiculturalist is: 'The enemy is the one whose story you were not ready to hear'. Okay, it's easy to understand like, you know, I objectify the enemy, I I paint a crazy picture, but if I open myself to him, I will blah blah. But my counter-point is: really? How far do you go here? So it's good to learn that Hitler was our enemy because, you know, we were not ready to open our selves to history? No, what if—and that's the problem of the neighbor, Nächste, in biblical sense—what if a neighbor is a monster? What if—and the same holds for us, I'm not a racist here—I don't believe that we should penetrate deep into each other and then when you get some basic deep story 'Now I know what you are'. I have this psychoanalytically trained temptation that if you go too deep you find just a lot of shit and horror and so on. And I, you know, my ideal is not to live with other nations and 'Oh I understand you, tell me your stories, I would rather kill my'—no. My ideal is I live in a big building. There is a Vietnamese guy here, Spanish there, black guy there, Japanese there. And we politely ignore each other. From time to time a miracle happens. But this is very rare, you know, all of a sudden there is some communication. Usually I claim it has to be mediated through some dirty joke or small mean. But how can we understand others when we don't even understand ourselves? That would be my point. We we are not isolated entities and we have some inner myths and so on and so on. We really we ourselves don't know what we are. We are racist towards other, all—it's our racism towards others is always mediated by a mediated by an uncertainty, abyss, fear of what we are in ourselves. So I want—I think that the worst ideology today is this ideology of 'Open yourself up to the others, you will see they are people like us'. No they are not, because we ourselves are not people like us. We are monsters and so on. That's—that's the truly difficult thing to accept. That, you know, this is—No, okay I will gave you a nice example of this. When I was in Israel, media reported of a—all celebrated it, wonderful human contact. An Israeli anti-terrorist unit brutally invaded—a—entered in the middle of the night a Palestinian apartment, because they suspected that the father of the family who was suspected to be a terrorist is there. So what happened was that of course the guy was not there, only his wife and children, and a scared daughter started to shout. And mother called her 'Come Sara, come'. And then one of the invading soldiers, when he heard the name, discovered that but his daughter has the same name Sara. And he stepped towards the mother 'You see the photo? Oh, we have the daughter of the same name'. This is the most disgusting thing I can imagine. You know, all of a sudden the reality of of occupation, terror disappears. 'Oh beneath all that, we are all the same warm people'. No we are not. The reality ultimate is not the reality that we are all deep people behind. The reality is the reality of the struggle. I will now stop. Thank you.
I hope you can follow my English. Ich verstehe Deutsch, aber ich kann nicht gut genug Deutsch sprechen, so ist es. I just to begin, I would like to say that I'm in a big temptation to simply drop my talk and comment on what I heard here. Because I like very much—I know a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit of classical music. And I like in the musical accompaniment, or musical part to last performance, those a couple of times, four-five, I think, intervention, the trumpet from Fidelio. Are you aware what kind of a paradox that trumpet is? Leonore is ready to sacrifice herself and then the trumpet is like a mystical intervention. Everybody freezes: Freiheit. But what is this freedom? Correct me if I'm wrong. The words that we hear is then—is it Joachim or Rocco said, 'Herr Minister ist da, Herr Minister ist da'. So Minister brings freedom from King and so on. And this goes on. I mean, you know, this is for me from my perspective the central paradox of Freiheit, freedom, today. I'm more and more obsessed by what we call 'the morning after' which in English means after the night of drinking, you know. I'm less and less impressed by this great ecstatic moments. One million people on Tahrir Square, Gezi Square, Syntagma Square in Athens. Okay, okay. It's easy to do this. We all cry 'My God, the unity, we are all one with the people'. What happens the morning after? Did you see the film V for Vendetta? I would sell my mother into slavery to see part two of that film. You remember how the film ends? Revolution wins, we are all that guy with a mask and so on, people storm the parliament. Can you even imagine what happens the next day? Who takes over? Who takes power? How is it organized? and so on and so forth. And that's for me the ultimate tragedy, if you want, of the left. Look at what happened with Syriza. It won and now they are doing what a proper right-winger should be doing. They are doing it in an even more efficient way and so on and so forth. So, what is going on here? What can we do? I agree with basic thesis—but I don't want to go into it—with what I agree, don't agree with the performance that went on here before. Because if I got it correctly, you remember at the end, it was that hysterical shouting 'Freiheit', many voices, and then interrupted by uncanny protracted, prolonged moments of silence. I think that silence stood for Freiheit. Precisely when Freiheit loses, lost its singing voice. Because for me Freiheit is not ecstasy. Freiheit is Angst. Freiheit is not for me—that's the paradox. Our—and I will return to it later—our spontaneous today ideological notion of freedom is freedom of choice. As if the model of freedom is: you go to a patisserie and decide, strawberry cake or chocolate cake. No, for me the highest freedom—and I speak very ancient metaphysical language here—is freedom to do something, not out of a free choice but because you cannot do it otherwise, to put it simply. Let's take, say your country, pathetic example, is under occupation. And the greatest act of freedom is to join resistance, risk your life. But you don't reason: 'I have a choice now, do this, do that'. No, you do it because you cannot do it otherwise. Or let me give you another example, very pathetic one: falling in love. You never have a choice. I mean, if you look around, that girl, that girl or boy or animals so that you will not accuse me of metaphysical binary logic thinking, whatever. You never go around and make a choice 'I love you more than you'. The moment you do this, it's not love. Love is that you never fall in love. All of a sudden you discover that you are already in love. The choice is always already made. And that's the highest freedom maybe. But let's not get lost into it. I will now begin with the first paradox that I see of freedom today. Freedom, I mean here how we experience freedom. Did you notice—and this is what my title refers to—how in our universe, possible and impossible are distributed in a strange way when we speak about freedom. On the one hand, in the domain of personal freedoms or technology, the impossible is more and more possible. Or so we are told. Nothing is impossible. We can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions. And I mean it quite literally. Two years ago in New York I met an Ein Chirurg, a surgeon, whose specialty is to cut a penis into two. And somehow he can do it in such a refined way that a man can have sex with two women in the same way and so on and so on. Nothing is impossible. All archives of music are accessible to us. Going into space will be soon available for everyone—with money of course. There is the prospect of enhancing our physical, psychic abilities and so on and so on. You know the techno-gnostic perspective of achieving immortality by changing our identity into a software and we just download oneself from one to another hardware. So everything is possible here. But did you notice how everything is possible at this level? Person—intense personal experiences, technological, scientifically generated transformations. But on the other hand, in the domain of social and economic relations, our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which with the collapse of communist states, humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality. Which of course means capitalist reality. With all its impossibilities. So at the same time we are being told 'Maybe we will become immortal, you can enjoy any way you want' or whatever. But at the same time we are bombarded by a whole series of 'You cannot'. You cannot engage in large—in large collective acts. We are told if you do this we will end in totalitarian terror. We cannot keep alive old welfare state. It makes us non-competitive, it leads to economic crisis. We cannot isolate ourselves from global market and so on and so on. We even have the ideological version of this limitation, a leftist one. I noticed how ecology also tends to function like this. Namely, it feeds into this obsession with setting a limit. Temperature can raise—and I think this is totally irrational—we are told 'Global temperature for two degrees Celsius'. If it's more, it's the end of civilization, global warming and so on. So on the other hand, it's this desperate search for limit. For what we cannot do. So we live in strange times where—to put it in a funny way, one phrase—maybe we will become immortal, everything is possible, but it's not possible to raise taxes one percent to give more money to education. That's our reality. So maybe the time has come to rearrange our notions of possible and impossible. What is possible, what is impossible. Here is an extreme case of what is perceived as impossible today. Mario Monti—you know who he is—recently said, I quote: 'Those who govern must not allow themselves to be completely bound by parliamentarians.' End of quote. Which then is for Monti the higher force whose authority can suspend the decisions of a democratically elected body representative of the people. Already back in the answer was given by Hans Tietmeyer, at that time the governor of Deutsche Bundesbank, who praised national governments for preferring its—quote, a wonderful expression—'the permanent plebiscite of global markets to the plebiscite of the ballot box'. I think it's a wonderful ideological manipulation. Tietmeyer keeps the democratic rhetoric but he claims global markets are more democratic than parliamentary elections since the process of voting goes on in them permanently and is permanently reflected in market fluctuations. Not only every four years. And at the global level, not only within the limits of a nation state. So the underlying idea is that, freed from this higher control of markets and experts, parliamentary democratic decisions are irresponsible. True democracy is thus the democracy of the markets. And it's even true that a new form of religion is emerging here. Did you noticed how we are gradually entering an area of new animism. Market—although we all rationally know that market is just some kind of a hypostasized agency which doesn't really exist, it's a reified form of the chaotic result of our individual decisions, we nonetheless spontaneously talk as if market is a living being which reacts. We hear again and again, not in religious supplements to daily newspapers but in economic reports how 'Market expressed its worry', 'We should satisfy the demand of the market' and so on and so forth. As if it's a living being. This then is where we stand with regard to democracy and freedom. And I think the big economic-financial agreements like TiSA or TTIP are perfect examples of this state of things. The key decisions concerning our economy are negotiated and enforced in secrecy, out of sight, with no public debate. In this way, the space for decisions of the democratically elected political agents is very limited. And the political process deals predominantly with issues towards which capital is indifferent, like cultural wars. I mean, with all my sympathy for gay rights, abortion rights and so on and so forth. I claim that—now I speak as an animist, as if capital is a person—I claim that capital quite likes these struggles. It means we leave big economic decisions behind and we fight cultural wars. This is why I think in our societies, free choice is elevated into a supreme value. Why? Because we live in a formally democratic society, society of freedom, which means that social control and domination can no longer appear directly as a limit on subject freedom. They have to appear as the very self-experience of free individuals. Now you will say how is this possible? That our very unfreedom appears to us that we experience it as our freedom. Where? There are many forms of this appearing of unfreedom in the guise of its opposite. For example, when we are deprived of universal health care, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice. Like the idea is, if you are automatically given universal health care, totalitarian state decides on it. But now you are given a free choice. Will you invest the surplus of your money—or your credit money—for health care, or will you go a holiday and so on and so on. You have a new freedom of choice. When we no longer can rely on a long-term employment and when we are compelled to search for a new precarious work every year, every second year, we are again told that we are given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover new unexpected creative potentials that lurked in our personality. I read—and this is the ultimate obscenity—in a some capitalist small-circulation journal in United States, a wonderful argumentation for precarious work which—that's the irony—explicitly referred to Judith Butler and all those who advocate this kind of an experimentally constructed nature of human identity. They say precarious works means new freedom. You are given a chance to reinvent yourself every year, every second year, your identity is no longer fixed by society and so on and so on. When we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become entrepreneurs of the self. Acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how he will invest the resources he possesses or borrowed. Into education, health, travel and so on and so on. That's the ideology today. We are all capitalists, even if you are a poor worker and you acquire, you get some credit, francs let us say, you are free to decide. Will you invest it into your education to earn more, will you invest it in your children's education, will you invest it in your health or will you simply spend it for a holiday? But the idea is that okay, I am investing my capitalist friend is investing billion. But who cares? It's just, as they were singing here, quantitative difference. We are all capitalists. So we more and more experience our freedom as what it effectively is, a burden that deprives us of the true choice, the choice of change. Because I think if the word Freiheit, freedom, has any actual meaning today, we have to move beyond this category of the freedom of choice. True freedom is not the freedom of choice. True freedom is the freedom to collectively change the very conditions of choice. What can you choose and so on. You know, that's what some at least neoliberals don't get. That in order for us to be actually free again (if this words have any meaning today), then quite a dense network of social conditions, rules, regulations should be enacted as the background for it. Freedom doesn't mean I do whatever I want. Freedom means if I feel I can take a walk during the night around Zurich. But what does this imply? That most people rely on certain respect, certain basic rules of safety, that I can rely on police protection and so on and so on. A whole network of things has to be here. And I don't have time to go into it further, I'm even more and more tempted to say that freedom is, in a good sense, a dogmatic category. We need—we say today we are being told we shouldn't be dogmatic. We should think critically about everything. Aye, aye. Usually, you know where I often hear this argument for non-dogmatic spirit? With American right-wing liberals who want to justify torture now. No, I think that the measure of the freedom of a society—freedom in a positive sense—is a certain healthy dogmatism. Now you will say I'm crazy, but let me give you an example. Let us say: would you like to live in a society where you would have to argue all the time that women shouldn't be raped? I mean, there is something wrong with this society. I would like to live in a society where, when some stupid man argues 'But you know, women really like it, they just pretend not to like it' and so on, that you don't have to argue. He is simply dismissed as not even funny, an eccentric idiot or whatever. The moment you have to argue about it, there is something wrong with this society. And that's what is also wrong at a more general level today with our ethical standards. For me, the fiasco was not that torture became acceptable, but that we even accepted the debate about it. This is for me a clear social regression. Twenty years ago, no one would even have been thinking about possibility of torture. Now if you are a cynic you would tell me, 'Yeah, but we all know torture was going on'. Ah, here as a good bourgeois well-mannered communist, I believe in superficial manners, in rules of politeness. We should absolutely reject this cynical argument. 'But torture is going on all the time, it's not just United States, Guantanamo, Russia, China, they are torturing like crazy, so isn't it better to openly admit it and set some rules about it?' I think absolutely no. Not only for the realist pragmatic reason that in this way, even more torture would have been going on. But, you know, let me be quite open. I can imagine myself torturing someone. In an extreme situation. Let's be ridiculous, let me improvise this totally ridiculous situation. My small daughter whom I love is kidnapped by terrorists and I have in my basement one mean terrorist who smiles at me 'Haha, I know where your daughter is'. Sorry for the tasteless example. But in such ridiculous example I can well imagine torturing him. But you see my point? It shouldn't be normalized. It should—even here I have some doubts, but at least, even if out of despair I were to torture the guy, it should have remained something totally unacceptable that I did out of despair. It shouldn't be normalized. So again, what then should we do apropos this deadlock where, again—and that's our basic paradox today—the more we are free at the level of personal freedoms—you can read what you want, more or less, you can travel where you want, you can get a job that you want, if you get it of course—but this freedom is more and more constrained by a more basic unfreedom. Like as if the social-economic system in which we live is if not the best possible, at least the least bad and you can't do anything there. How—what should we do in this deadlock? Again, exploding personal freedoms, even in China. It's quite paradoxical. They are now on the edge of allowing gay marriages, I heard, and so on and so on. So China is a good example of how these small private freedoms can coexist with very limited collective social freedoms. The first thing to do—I want to return to what I was just saying—the first thing to do I think is to impose certain limitations. A couple of months ago, Donald Trump—and he is one of us, in Slovenia he is very popular, you know why? Because Melania Trump, his wife, is a Slovene woman. So we Slovenians are one step from White House, okay. Donald Trump was unflatteringly compared to a man who noisily defecates in the corner of a room in which a respectful drinking party is going on. But are other Republican candidates for the US presidency substantially any better? I hope you remember a scene from Luis Buñuel's Le Fantôme de la liberté, in which relations between eating and excreting, shitting, are inverted. People sit at their toilets around the table, pleasantly talking while defecating, and then when they want to eat, they silently ask the housewife 'Where is that place, you know?' and she there, there, and as a dirty private secret you go there and quickly swallow some sandwiches. So my metaphor is, when I'm looking now at the presidential debates of Republican candidates, they look to me like a reunion in Buñuel's film, you know. But does the same not hold for many leading politicians around the globe today? Was Erdogan, the Turkish president, not defecating in public when in a recent paranoiac outburst he dismissed critics of his politics as traitors and foreign agents? Was Putin not defecating in public when, in a well-calculated public vulgarity, he three-four years ago, he threatened a critic of his Chechen politics with medical castration? It was an incredible obscenity, I remember, seen on TV. Putin said 'Why don't you visit us in Russia, we have doctors who can fit your problems there with your testicles and so on'. Was Sarkozy, French president before Hollande, not defecating in public when back in he snapped at a farmer who refused to shake his hand, 'Casse-toi, pauv' con'. A very soft translation of this would be 'Get lost, you bloody idiot', but the actual meaning is closer to something like 'Fuck you, prick'. And the list goes on. In a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, now in October Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Hitler only wanted to expel Jews from Germany, not to exterminate them. And that it was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian Grand Mufti, who persuaded Hitler to kill the Jews. The idea is that Husseini told Hitler that if he just expels the Jews from Europe they will come to Palestine. And then Hitler asked 'What should I do with them?' and Mufti replied 'Burn them'. Of course, it's total fiction. But I want to draw your attention to something else. To the fact that of course we are full of this type of stories. But what worries me is this stories, this obscene rumors. Till now they were kept private in a way. We didn't talk about it publicly. And I'm here quite a leftist moral conservative. I think it's a great catastrophe when you are allowed to talk publicly like this. The problem here is the problem of what Hegel called Sittlichkeit. It's not simply morality but it's unwritten rules, ethical customs. The thick background of unwritten rules of social life. It's not simply what is allowed and not allowed. It's something much more refined. It's, you know, because I'm so sorry I don't have more time to go into this, but what always fascinated me is how a set of social rules which keep together—or enable—the reproduction of certain social body is never composed just of explicit rules. You always get some kind of a higher level rules which tell you how to treat the explicit rules. Quite many social rules are meant to be violated. It's prohibited, but the message is 'Do it discreetly'. On the other hand, much more interesting, you get rules which allow you to do something on condition that you don't use—use this right. Like you are given freedoms with the silent understanding that you will not use this freedom. I mean, there are many examples from big politics even to daily life. Don't you have also here in Switzerland—I noticed this habit in my country, in United States—where let's say I invite you to dinner. And I have maybe—I'm not sure with you Swiss you never know, but let's say I have more money than you. Then it's of course we all know I will pay. But don't you have this custom that when the bill arrives, when I say I will pay, we have to play this social game that you say 'No, no, no, I will pay' and then the game goes on for some twenty seconds and at the end you concede 'Okay, if you insist, you pay'. But you see the paradox? We both know the outcome. I mean, you—we speak as if there is an actual choice for you to pay. But we both know that I will pay. And we have many manners like this where we are given a chance, although it is prohibited to take this chance. And I'm not denouncing this as some kind of a totalitarian trick. I claim that this is what makes a society alive. This gentle interaction of written and unwritten rules. And for me the tragedy of so-called political correctness is precisely that political correctness tries to do the right thing but in a wrong way. Political correctness perceives correctly that these public standards of decency are disintegrating. But it tries to explicitly—to explicitly regulate things. And so we lose this ethical substance of unwritten rules and everything's regulated. Instead, you know, 'Black' became 'African-Americans', 'Fat' becomes 'Weight challenge', 'Torture' becomes 'Enhanced interrogation technique', and my joking proposal was that 'Why shouldn't they then rape become enhanced seduction technique or whatever'. And I think that it's crucial to see how this politically correct gentrification of language—violence should disappear from it—is the obverse of the growing brutality in actual life. And it's not just at this level of manners that we are witnessing a decay, a regression in our social life. It's even generally in how paranoiac theories, conspiracy theories, which till now okay, we all love them, but we had the decency of keeping them secret. Now they are more and more publicly debated. Like the last example of madness—some American friends informed me on them. In the fall of a big military exercises called Jade Helm took place in Southwestern USA, Arizona, Texas and so on. And all of a sudden, because for quite accidental reasons at the same time some Walmart megastores were closed. The paranoia among right-wing populists was that—it's incredible. It was that Michelle Obama, not even Obama, when she visited China, she promised to the Chinese that President Obama at the end of his presidency will give those states as a present to China. And then the Walmart megastores were closed because they are already preparing their beds and habitat for the Chinese soldiers to occupy that. Now you will say this is crazy right-wing conspiracy. Maybe. But what is so sad is that even the leading Republicans were afraid to clearly say 'This is bullshit'. No. For example, the one who is now a presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, he said we should take this seriously and he demanded details from the Pentagon and so on and so forth. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, ordered the state guard to monitor military exercises. I mean, are they really getting ready to occupy Texas and so on and so forth? So this is how I react to the phenomenon of Donald Trump. The key is this one: I claim he is not a dangerous eccentric. What his excesses mask is his ordinariness. Namely, if you look effectively at his program—not these stupid racist, sexist provocations—he's just an old centrist Republican. Maybe he will even be—would have been—much better than some other Republicans. What he is masking with his excessive tasteless remarks is simply his vulgar—his vulgar ordinariness. So now you will say 'But why talk about politeness and public manners today when we are facing more pressing real problems?' Again, because I claim manners do matter. Especially today. Back in the 1960s when I was young, occasional vulgarities were associated with political left. Student revolutionaries like Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit often used common language to emphasize their contrast to official politics with its polished jargon and so on. Today vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative of the radical right. So that the left finds itself in a surprising position of a defender of decency and public manners. And I think the left should shamelessly use this role. That's maybe one way to fight to fight against radical right for the so-called silent majority. No, the left is protecting good manners today. The problem of course is that why do we have this explosion of conspiracy theories and so on? Because even if we are personally free in the sense of freedom of choice, the social process is becoming more and more non-transparent. Things are just taking certain turn and we don't even perceive ourselves as able to steer it, to control it. For example, I am extremely worried in quite naive sense. Are you aware that now we are maybe approaching if not a new world war but at least a new series of explosions of local wars? Turkey, Russia and so on and so on. I think we live in an extremely dangerous moment but we don't even think about a new peace movement or whatever, we just accept it. That's how things go. Which—that's my point. The obverse of our sense of individual freedom is that we accept a total non-transparency of social life. Things simply happen. There will be war and we don't think in the terms of how to prevent war, we think in the terms of how to squeeze out. Many of my friends already thinking: where should I emigrate? Should I go to South Argentina, should I go to Iceland? To New Zealand is popular in Slovenia now. How to get out. Now I come to my concluding paradox. This non-transparency is today often embodied in faces. Sometimes faces become symbols. Not symbols of a strong individual, but symbols of anonymous forces behind these faces. For example, the first such face a year ago was the stupidly smiling face of (I'm sorry if I pronounce the name incorrectly) Jeroen Dijsselbloem, President of the Eurogroup, the symbol of the European Union's brutal pressure on Greece. And my friend Varoufakis told me wonderful stories about this. How all the time media were full of this Dijsselbloem with his stupid smile explaining 'No sorry, we can't do this, we can't'. No one elected him. He was a totally anonymous bureaucrat there. Varoufakis even told me that when they were deciding the fate of Greece, Varoufakis said 'Can I get please the official minutes, record of this meeting?' And everyone was in a panic, they withdrew, you know bureaucrats, they come back and said 'Sorry we cannot do this because this is just a consultation, this meeting didn't really take place'. I mean it's total non-transparency. Then recently, when the big deal is the international trade deal, TTIP, there is a new face. A cold face of European Union Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, who when asked by a journalist how she could continue her promotion of TTIP in the face of massive public opposition, she responded without shame: 'I do not take my mandate from the European people'. And in an unsurpassable act of irony her family name is a variation of Maelstrom, you know, A Descent into the Maelstrom, Edgar Allan Poe's story and so on and so forth. Because when people worry about democracy today, 'Can—will we survive the Muslim invasion?' and so on. I mean, I think we should worry much more about agreements like TTIP, which severely limit the—let's say—policy space for political intervention of democratically elected governments. The most dangerous element as you maybe know are so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlements. This means that unelected transnational corporations can dictate the policies of democratically elected governments. Let me give you an example. Swedish company, energy company Vattenfall is now suing German government for billions of euros over its decision to phase out nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster. This is for me a totally legitimate public health policy. Like there is a danger, if there is another catastrophe in Europe like Fukushima, so let's try to move out to gradually abandon nuclear energy. The argument is that when they (the Swedish company) invested in Germany, the conditions were different—tax, financial—and that this new regulation limits their chances of profit, so they want to be remunerated by billions of dollars and so on and so forth. This is just one example of what is going on. But okay, let me go to a the last example and here final part now we will see the true problem of freedom. Now a third anonymous face has emerged: Frans Timmermans, the first Vice-President of the European Commission, who in December scolded the Polish government for adopting a new law which poses a threat to the democratic constitutional order since this law subordinates constitutional court to the authority of government. Timmermans also condemned the new media law which enables the parliament to sack all executives at the country's public television and radio companies and so on and so forth. The ruling party justified this law as necessary to stifle unfair criticism of its actions. And in an immediate sharp reply the Polish government warned Brussels, quote: 'To exercise more restraint in instructing and cautioning the parliament and the government of a sovereign and democratic state'. Now what's the problem here? From the standard left-liberal view, it is of course inappropriate to put these three names into the same series. Dijsselbloem and Malmström personify the pressure of the Brussels bureaucrats on states and their democratically elected government, while Timmermans intervened to protect the basic democratic institutions—basic democratic institutions like independence of courts or free press from a government that overstepped its legitimate powers. That would be the counter-point. That Timmermans—but as the Polish side responded, is Timmermans not a EU, a European administrator lacking any democratic legitimization? And did he not exerted pressure on a democratically elected government of a sovereign state? I myself encountered a similar problem when I was recently, four months ago I think, answering questions from the readers of Süddeutsche Zeitung about the refugee crisis. And the question which attracted most attention—the question of a reader—concerned precisely democracy, of course with a right-wing populist twist. The question was: when Angela Merkel made her famous public appeal inviting hundreds of thousands of refugees into Germany, where was her democratic legitimation? What gave her the right to bring such a radical change to German life without democratic consultation? My point here of course is not to support anti-immigrant populists, but to clearly point out the limits of democratic legitimation. And the same goes for those who advocate radical opening of the borders. Are they aware that since our democracies are nation-state democracies, their demands equal suspension of democracy? A gigantic change should be allowed to affect a country without democratic consultation of its population. And we often hear about the democratic deficit of European Union. But we encounter there a similar problem. Now in his political movement—new—Varoufakis, otherwise my good friend (the name of the movement is DiEM) called for transparency of European Union decisions. But the problem is, since in many countries the majority of the public was against the reducing the Greek debt, rendering European negotiations public would make representatives of these countries—would make them advocate even tougher measures against Greece. We encounter here the old problem: what happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to vote for racist and sexist laws? I am not afraid to draw here the conclusion that emancipatory politics should not be bound by formal democratic procedures of legitimation. People quite often do not know what they want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing. There is no simple shortcut here. The context of this deadlock is the big bad wolf that is now emerging as the main threat in the eyes of the liberal left. The threat of new fascism embodied in anti-immigrant rightist populism. This scarecrow is perceived as the principal enemy against which we should all unite, from whatever remains of the radical left to mainstream liberal democrats. Europe is portrayed as a continent regressing towards a new fascism which feeds on the paranoiac hatred and fear of the external ethnic-religious enemy (mostly Muslims). While this new fascism is directly predominant in some post-communist East European countries (Hungary, Poland and so on), it is getting stronger and stronger also in many West European, much more developed countries. But I think it is here that we should not lose nerves and we should persist in the basic Marxist insight. This so-called fascism is strictly a secondary phenomenon engendered by its apparent opposite, the open liberal democratic universe. So the only way to truly defeat it is to overcome the immanent limitation of this liberal democratic universe. Plus, this fascism is something new, a truly democratic one. The prospect that we are facing now is the prospect of Europe with a revitalized democracy which will bring to power anti-immigrant populists. More generally, we should be suspicious about the tendency of the left to quickly brand any undesirable phenomenon as fascism. I doubt if this really—this new anti-immigrant populism—that it really deserves the name fascism. Again, the source of unease is the unpleasant fact that this new fascism is democratically legitimized. Leftist critics of European Union now find themselves in a strange predicament. On the one hand, they deplore the so-called democratic deficit of European Union and they propose plans to make more transparent the Brussels decision-making. On the other hand, they support the non-democratic Brussels administrators when they exert pressure on democratically legitimized new fascist tendencies. Furthermore, many leftist liberals like Habermas who bemoan the ongoing democratic—the ongoing decline of the European Union, I think they idealized the past of the European Union. The democratic European Union, the loss of which they bemoan, never existed. Recent European Union policy is simply a desperate attempt to make Europe fit for new global capitalism. The usual left-liberal critique of the European Union 'It's basically okay, just it has a little bit of a democratic deficit' betrays a certain naivety. They don't see that democratic deficit is a necessary part of the global structure. The problem namely is—there is a double problem here I think. The first problem is that the only way to actually fight global capitalism would be through some kind of transnational democracy. But I think that this cannot be done without changing the precisely global capitalist system. That capitalism is global but can only thrive in conditions of geopolitical conflict between different nation states and so on and so on. Nation states are not in decline. They are if anything getting stronger and stronger today. That will be our ruin. Look at United States, Russia, China and so on and so on. So I think that that the world which are approaching—we are approaching now is the world of global capitalism, free circulation of commodities, but this economic opening is accompanied by the growing separation in social spheres. More and more ethnic fundamentalism, more and more new forms of apartheid. I think that we are finally seeing how things like growing nationalism, relying on local traditions, are no obstacle to global capitalism. Global capitalism is inherently in this sense multiculturalist. It's the—not only easy but the most natural thing for global capitalism is to accommodate itself to local traditions. For example, in India, a Marxist friend of mine sent me—his name is Saroj Giri, great guy—how the most dynamic Indian new capitalists all go regularly to prayer to Hindu goddesses and so on and so on. It in China, the whole official ideology today is of course Confucianism, they even no longer talk about communism, the term they use is 'Harmonious Society' and so on and so on. Now the last problem I have with democracy (I'm not against democracy in the sense for some new totalitarianism but I think what we need if we want really to confront the problem Europe is in today) is to ask openly how our democracies effectively function. And my hypothesis is a very nasty one here. My hypothesis is that in a normally functioning parliamentary democracy people don't want really to decide. Or rather, they want the appearance of decision, but they want to be discreetly told what to choose. They want not to be—they don't want to lose their face. When people are really confronting a choice like they did in Greece, last elections, Syriza and so on, it's usually perceived as a crisis of democracy. So what I'm saying is that, you know, in monarchies when they were no longer absolute monarchies, this is even a great theoretical problem. The King should not decide, but how to save the face of the King. And I think the same problem we face today with our new King, ordinary people, voters in a democracy. Their face should be saved but they shouldn't be really allowed to decide. That's our paradox today. Domination is maybe stronger than ever but it absolutely should not appear openly as a domination. So let me conclude on a personal note. In contrast to many of my friends, I still refer positively to European emancipatory legacy. I'm a Eurocentrist. I of course don't have in mind European values in the predominant ordinary sense. What our media refer to when they talk about how our values are threatened by Islam and so on. I think that the greatest threat to what is worth saving from European legacy are precisely today's anti-immigrant populist defenders of Europe. I mean, Europe run by Pegida, Marine Le Pen and so on, that would no longer have been Europe. But on the other hand, to be blunt and direct, Plato's thought is a European event. Radical egalitarianism is a European notion. Communism is a European notion. The notion of modern subjectivity is European. When Alain Badiou celebrates the power of capitalism to disintegrate all communal ties, when in a strict Marxist sense, he detects in this disintegration the opening of the space for radical emancipation, he speaks strictly on behalf of the emancipatory European legacy. And this is I think a great struggle, one of the great struggles that goes on today in what remains of the left. There are so-called anti-eurocentric postcolonial thinkers who attack Badiou, me and other proponents of communism as all too European. They claim 'No, communism failed'. They claim that the only way to resist global capitalism is on behalf of local traditions. You have for example African postcolonial thinking, they find some tribes which said 'Oh, my voice is voice of a community of my tribe', so this is a good argument against European individualism and so on. You have some quite serious friends of mine who claim that there is some mysterious tribe in Amazon, deep in Amazon jungle, and they have some primordial wisdom which can resist global capitalism and so on and so on. So either we play this game or it's played by China today like Confucianism more—more better for human rights than Western individualism. So it's this communal resistance, local traditions and so on. On the other hand, it's the—and I know what fiasco communism was. But where I stick to communism paradoxically is in its great appraisal of capitalism. It was absolutely clear to Marx that the only new space for freedom is opened through capitalist disintegration. And I think Marx was absolutely vindicated with what goes on today where, with the rise of so-called Asian values capitalism (which has nothing to do with Asia, more with authoritarian forms of government), that we more and more see how perfectly ancient anti-global local traditions can be combined with global capitalism. They fit perfectly. The symbol for me today is for example Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, who is at the same time absolutely radical neoliberal in economy but at the same time pretty much a Hindu fanatic, local traditions and so on and so on. So here we have to make a decision. Do we resist global capitalism on behalf of some local traditions it undermines, or do we endorse the power of disintegration that pertains to global capitalism? And so that we are aware that only through this disintegration a new space of freedom emerges. That's why my hero is for example Malcolm X, the black leader. He was a political genius I claim. Why? You know what's Malcolm X? X stood for the fact that blacks were uprooted from their from their country in Africa, they had no family community background. They were torn brutally out of their culture. But Malcolm X saw it that this X is not just a negative feature. He never fell into this politically correct liberal stupidity which was embodied in some TV series popular, Alex Haley Roots, years ago, 'Oh, blacks they should return to Africa, find their roots there, oh I'm coming from that tribe' and so on and so on. No, Malcolm X saw this being cut off from your roots as a chance of new universal freedom. He made it quite clear. It's an ingenious trick of seeing the problem itself as part of a solution, as opening up the space of a solution. Which is why again, I think today at least reference to European legacy is important. Why? Not because I'm a conservative Eurocentrist. But I claim that today's global capitalism can survive quite well with less and less democracy. No wonder critique of Eurocentrism is so popular today. Because it fits perfectly to today's global capitalism. They all play the same game. Erdogan plays it, Putin plays it. Brutal capitalism combined with local local authoritarian regime legitimized with some crazy traditional local ideology, whatever: Orthodox Church, Islam. And this is why, with all the horrors that come out of European tradition, colonialism and so on and so on, I think that European legacy of emancipatory universality is something that is more precious than ever today. Thanks very much for your patience. Now—just one minute more. I was so glad when my friend Patrick told me there is no debate, because now I can say 'It's a total lie, hypocrisy, I'm so sad that we don't have time to debate' and so on, you know. Sorry? You are too—Yeah, yeah, but it's so nice, you know, this hypocrisy I love it. But I want nonetheless with you to clarify one detail because I'm now often accused—I was—I read today on the web that some Precht or how is he called, German philosopher, accused Sloterdijk and me of Nazism and so on. My God, they get it so wrong. What I really am horrified at—I will tell you, allow me just this, what I like in Switzerland. I know you did many crazy things and so on. Money, and my favorite Swiss fantasy is that: isn't it under your Alps there are some mysterious tunnels and cities where millions can move there in five hours or whatever? I also have my own beautiful fantasies about Switzerland. For example, I hope you don't know the joke. Years ago here in Zurich in some place on the other side of the river, I debated with my friends about—you know in Europe we identify certain sexual practices with certain countries. Like, if you say let's do it the Italian way, it usually means anal intercourse. If you say let's do it the Spanish way, it means man's penis between woman's breasts. So the debate was what would have been the Swiss way. And there was a big debate. And I think I gave a quite good proposal. Okay, feminists will not like it. You know what is Swiss Army knife? The knife with all those, no? My proposal is Swiss Army wife, you know: masturbates with one hand, with other like and so on. So that's my fantasy of Switzerland, okay. But you know why I mention this obscenity? No, no, I'm not losing my nerves. Because I think that only in this way, through a—maybe I failed here, but through this type of shared obscenities, can you really overcome racism. I think that without this risky step—it's very risky, you can fall into actual racism—into exchange obscenities, you are stuck with the politically correct official anti-racism, we we respect each other's. And what do I get then, you know in Switzerland, what do I get then? You teach me about yodeling, about your Spätzle or whatever. No, I want Swiss Army wife and so on. But the other thing is that what I like about you, maybe it's a myth, I don't know, I was told that you are not culturally too united with Swiss—the French Swiss. That you have a distance. I don't think this is bad. I think we should stop this eternal superego guilt feeling idea 'We don't understand each other enough' and so on. I mean, this is the ideology that—I mean, I want even more refugees in Europe. I just want to fight this human compassion 'We are all humans beneath the masks' ideology. For example, the most stupid proverb—and proverbs are generally extremely stupid—the most stupid proverb that I know and it's often quoted by today's multiculturalist is: 'The enemy is the one whose story you were not ready to hear'. Okay, it's easy to understand like, you know, I objectify the enemy, I I paint a crazy picture, but if I open myself to him, I will blah blah. But my counter-point is: really? How far do you go here? So it's good to learn that Hitler was our enemy because, you know, we were not ready to open our selves to history? No, what if—and that's the problem of the neighbor, Nächste, in biblical sense—what if a neighbor is a monster? What if—and the same holds for us, I'm not a racist here—I don't believe that we should penetrate deep into each other and then when you get some basic deep story 'Now I know what you are'. I have this psychoanalytically trained temptation that if you go too deep you find just a lot of shit and horror and so on. And I, you know, my ideal is not to live with other nations and 'Oh I understand you, tell me your stories, I would rather kill my'—no. My ideal is I live in a big building. There is a Vietnamese guy here, Spanish there, black guy there, Japanese there. And we politely ignore each other. From time to time a miracle happens. But this is very rare, you know, all of a sudden there is some communication. Usually I claim it has to be mediated through some dirty joke or small mean. But how can we understand others when we don't even understand ourselves? That would be my point. We we are not isolated entities and we have some inner myths and so on and so on. We really we ourselves don't know what we are. We are racist towards other, all—it's our racism towards others is always mediated by a mediated by an uncertainty, abyss, fear of what we are in ourselves. So I want—I think that the worst ideology today is this ideology of 'Open yourself up to the others, you will see they are people like us'. No they are not, because we ourselves are not people like us. We are monsters and so on. That's—that's the truly difficult thing to accept. That, you know, this is—No, okay I will gave you a nice example of this. When I was in Israel, media reported of a—all celebrated it, wonderful human contact. An Israeli anti-terrorist unit brutally invaded—a—entered in the middle of the night a Palestinian apartment, because they suspected that the father of the family who was suspected to be a terrorist is there. So what happened was that of course the guy was not there, only his wife and children, and a scared daughter started to shout. And mother called her 'Come Sara, come'. And then one of the invading soldiers, when he heard the name, discovered that but his daughter has the same name Sara. And he stepped towards the mother 'You see the photo? Oh, we have the daughter of the same name'. This is the most disgusting thing I can imagine. You know, all of a sudden the reality of of occupation, terror disappears. 'Oh beneath all that, we are all the same warm people'. No we are not. The reality ultimate is not the reality that we are all deep people behind. The reality is the reality of the struggle. I will now stop. Thank you.