Can One Really Tolerate A Neighbor?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2006-11-19 · 1:50:41 · 17,239 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsreligion-theologyecology-climateliberalism-political-correctnesscinema-art-culturesubjectivityethicscapitalismgeopolitics-warphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture exploring the inexistence of the big Other through the lenses of joke theory, belief, ecology, subjectivity, modernist painting, and the ethics of universality. He argues that liberal tolerance is a depoliticized ersatz for genuine political intervention, and that the culturalization of politics (Wendy Brown) masks real structures of exploitation. The talk closes with a defense of Kantian autonomous ethics and a critique of decentralized post-Marxist politics, insisting on the necessity of collective state-level decisions to address global crises. A Q&A covers Israel/Palestine, Deleuze versus Foucault among French leftists, capitalism's universality versus Bush's false universality, and ecology.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 24
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The structural absence of a foundation for the symbolic order, illustrated by the American convention of starting floors at 'one' and the missing 13th floor, closer to Lacan's truth than European 'groundedness'.
as “suspended belief”
Žižek's characterization of how we actually hold beliefs: not fully owning them as literally true but dwelling in an in-between where belief is accepted yet not taken seriously enough to act on.
as “ontologically imperfect universe”
Žižek's materialist gloss on quantum indeterminacy and digital-game architecture: reality is not fully constituted all the way down; get too close and it dissolves into fuzziness/void, which is also what modernist painting reveals.
Using Badiou's vocabulary: modernism (Schoenberg, Van Gogh) is an Event; postmodernism is not an advance but a regression, a return to pre-Event sensibility.
Žižek's counter-intuitive thesis that abstract modernist painting is more realist than naive realism because it exposes the pre-representational materiality (stains, patches) that constitutes depicted reality from within.
as “Badiou's ontology of multiplicity”
Being is primordially multiple-in-void, not composed of atomic ones; Žižek connects this to quantum fuzziness and to the anti-atomist lesson of modernist abstraction.
Not named explicitly, but functionally present as the abyss of the neighbor's desire that cannot be assimilated.
as “neighbor as Thing”
The neighbor is not a friendly alter ego but an impenetrable abyss of desire (Freudian das Ding), and all biographical 'personality' details are a cover over this threatening core.
Lacan's insight that at the innermost moment of authenticity the subject is at a distance from truth and is essentially lying, illustrated by the 9/11 phone-call thought experiment.
Lacan's concept that the symptom pre-exists what it is a symptom of; here used to articulate 'woman as symptom of man', she circulates as a support for male subjectivity.
Žižek's reading of Lacan: woman pre-exists man as his symptom, meaning she can authentically choose to remain a 'pure symptom' (e.g. a nun), whereas man depends on her as his support.
as “decaffeinated torture”
Sam Harris's thought-experiment of a 'truth pill' that causes subjective suffering while appearing externally as sleep, a 'torture without torture' in the series of decaf coffee, alcohol-free beer, fat-free cake.
Not foregrounded as a term in this talk, but implicitly present in discussion of jouissance-driven violence toward the neighbor.
as “new code of discretion”
Žižek's proposal (via Sloterdijk) that more global communication produces more conflict because we remain neighbors with incompatible enjoyment-universes; what is needed is more distance, more foreignness, not more dialogue.
Wendy Brown's concept (endorsed by Žižek) whereby genuinely political conflicts rooted in exploitation and inequality are re-coded as cultural differences requiring tolerance rather than structural change.
Hegel's thesis that agents pursuing narrow particular interests unknowingly actualize a universal dimension; Žižek deploys it to argue capitalism is genuinely (not merely ideologically) universal.
The Marxist concept that capitalist universality is not merely ideological but ontologically effective, it restructures life-worlds from within, as with Tibetan Buddhism becoming a 'hobby'.
Žižek's alternative to multicultural tolerance: the only genuine universality is sharing intolerances and joining particular struggles, not abstract respect for cultural difference.
Žižek's critical label for a Nietzschean-Lacanian reading that reduces ethics to authenticity and full engagement regardless of content, which he rejects as insufficient.
Ethics where the subject is responsible not only for doing duty but for determining what duty is, with no recourse to the big Other as guarantor, the ethics appropriate to an incomplete universe.
as “the Other of the Other”
Lacan's notion of a meta-guarantee behind the symbolic order; here illustrated by Isaac Asimov's 'Jokester' story, the fantasy of discovering the primordial author of all jokes is the ultimate figure of the big Other.
The contemporary condition in which the only way to mobilize people beyond expert administration is through some form of fear (immigrants, ecology, crime, God, technology) across the entire political spectrum.
The symbolic order conceived as a guarantee or ground; Žižek argues its inexistence is indexed by the groundlessness of the symbolic (no 'ground floor'), by joke structure, and by the suspended status of belief.
The standard ideological-critique move of unmasking apparently neutral universal norms as secretly privileging a particular group (white, male, propertied); Žižek accepts it but says it is only one side of the story.
Stories he reaches for 9
A Native American told Žižek he prefers 'Indian' to 'Native American' because 'Indian' is at least 'a monument to white stupidity', whereas 'Native American' implies the others are cultural Americans and he is part of nature.
“to be called Indian at least my name is a monument to white stupidity no they thought that they are in India better than part of”
Žižek searched Martin Luther King's major texts and found 'tolerance/intolerance' practically absent. King framed his struggle as one against inequality and injustice requiring political solutions, not tolerance, which Žižek uses to show that tolerance is always a substitute for failed politics.
“I downloaded from internet all the main texts of Martin Luther King... and I put search like tolerance intolerance practically absent”
Darian Leader's observation: in The X-Files, the constant alien activity 'out there' serves to cover the fundamental fact that nothing happens between Mulder and Scully. Applied by Žižek to the Da Vinci Code.
“why do so many things happen out there aliens attacking all the time... to cover up the fact that nothing happens here it's absolutely crucial that remember there is no sex between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson”
American hotels skip the 13th floor (listing 12 then 14), prompting Žižek to ask whom are you cheating, every observer knows 14 is really 13. Yet this 'cheating' is closer to Lacan's inexistence of the big Other than the European pretense of a symbolic ground.
“you cheat mostly you don't have a thirteenth floor you know it's twelve fourteen but from my naive European approach like whom are you cheating”
Mao argued in 1955 that even if US atom bombs blew up the earth, it would be 'hardly anything for the universe as a whole', a position Žižek reads as the only genuinely radical atheist-materialist stance, willing to put everything at risk.
“even if the United States atom bombs were so powerful that when dropped on China they would make a hole right through the earth or even blow the earth up that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole”
Our main energy source, oil, is itself the remnant of a prehistoric catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, which Žižek uses to illustrate that nature is not homeostasis but 'one big crazy catastrophe'.
“our main source of energy is oil you know what is oil it's the result the remainder of some catastrophe of unimaginable proportions”
In 'The End of Belief', Sam Harris proposes a pill that causes subjective suffering (making the subject confess) while appearing externally as a nap, 'decaffeinated torture'. Žižek argues this misses the Lacanian dimension of the neighbor as abyss.
“wouldn't it be wonderful you force him to take a pill the guy takes a nap awakens yeah yeah I confess everything you want”
In a Kabbalistic story, Rabbi Eliezer loses a debate with other sages; God intervenes on his behalf, but a sage dismisses God as an 'old stupid man who screwed up creation' with no right to debate, and God accepts the rebuke.
“this is an old stupid man who screwed up creation we are here among learned men this guy doesn't have any right even to debate here and the surprise is that God accepts it”
Žižek cites the Marx Brothers formula: 'This man looks and acts as if he believes but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes.' The difficulty of sincerely believing is what makes this the position of an idiot.
“this man looks acts like an idiot that this man looks and acts as if he believes but this shouldn't deceive you he really believes that's a very difficult position this is the position of an idiot”
Works invoked 14
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book in which he discusses Jean-Claude Milner's work on European antisemitism.
The Da Vinci Code film
Žižek defends the film (not the novel) as an inadvertent but effective psychoanalytic story about frigidity, primal-scene trauma, and the passage from Eros to Agape, with a genuinely authentic feminist resolution.
The Matrix film
Mentioned as inferior to The Thirteenth Floor for illustrating the same theme of simulated reality, though Žižek does not elaborate his criticism here.
Anti-Oedipus book
Co-cited with A Thousand Plateaus as an IDF theoretical reference, and as part of Žižek's broader engagement with Deleuze and Guattari.
Goldfinger film
Mentioned as a fantasy reference for the Q&A: Žižek wishes he had an ejector-seat button like in the Bond film to remove questioners he dislikes.
The X-Files tv
Via Darian Leader's reading: the absence of sex between Mulder and Scully is the structural void covered by constant alien activity, used as template for reading the Da Vinci Code.
The End of Faith book
Sam Harris's book; described as 'pretty horrible' for justifying torture and for dismissing moral proximity intuitions as evolutionary remainder, its 'truth pill' proposal is Žižek's target for the decaffeinated-torture argument.
A Thousand Plateaus book
Deleuze and Guattari's work is cited both as a target of IDF operational use (striated space, nomadic subjectivity for counter-insurgency) and as a genuine theoretical resource Žižek has tried to re-appropriate for Lacanians.
Leap of Faith film
Steve Martin's 1992 film about a fraudulent faith healer; used to illustrate how actual divine confirmation would destroy rather than affirm sincere belief.
Acknowledged as one of the great atheist books, and as Protestant atheism, but its Dreyfusian reading (life-world embeddedness) is rejected as the wrong diagnosis of our ecological predicament.
Forgiveness film
Film by Udi Aloni that Žižek presented at the Jerusalem Film Festival and in Ramallah; described as 'certainly not a Zionist film'.
Regulating Aversion book
Wendy Brown's book on tolerance; cited approvingly for the culturalization-of-politics critique, though Žižek argues it remains within a one-sided pseudo-Marxist ideology-critique.
New York Trilogy book
Paul Auster's meta-fictional device (the character 'Paul Auster' calling into his own novel) is cited as the bad version of modernist self-awareness, boring, superficial, merely reminding the reader it's fiction rather than disclosing materiality.
The Thirteenth Floor film
Preferred over The Matrix as a cinematic image of materialism: the protagonist reaches the literal edge of the simulated world, showing reality as ontologically incomplete.
People invoked 34
Samuel Huntington negative
His 'clash of civilizations' thesis is analyzed as the cultural supplement to Fukuyama's end of history, not its opposite, culture replaces ideology as the site of conflict when structural/economic antagonism is foreclosed.
Udi Aloni positive
Jewish Israeli filmmaker and friend; invited Žižek to present his film 'Forgiveness' at the Jerusalem Film Festival and in Ramallah; described as one of the few Jews advocating a one-state solution.
Umberto Eco positive
Cited for the observation that scientists outside their narrow discipline are often superstitious, supporting Žižek's point about the ambiguity of atheism.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
His framework of the other as infinite alterity (face, responsibility) is briefly dismissed as a 'false problem', whether to respect or tolerate the neighbor's otherness is the wrong question; the right answer is universality of struggle.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical reference throughout: the inexistence of the big Other, decentrement of subjectivity, the neighbor as Thing, woman as symptom of man, sinthome, and the formula 'have you acted in conformity with your desire' are all Lacanian coordinates Žižek deploys.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Cited for the biological/evolutionary insight that nature is not homeostatic balance but a series of catastrophes, supporting Žižek's radical ecology.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Cited twice: for the observation that in Christianity God himself becomes atheist (Christ's cry of dereliction), and for his proposal that poets should write at the level of scientific truth rather than naive perception.
Wendy Brown positive
Her book 'Regulating Aversion' is cited approvingly for the concept of culturalization of politics, but Žižek goes further, Brown remains caught in a too-primitive pseudo-Marxist logic of unmasking false universality without the Hegelian counter-move.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Žižek says he wrote a book re-appropriating Deleuze for Lacanians; in Q&A he defends Deleuze against those who try to drive a wedge between Deleuze (bad) and Foucault (good) in French debates over universalism vs. Jewish particularism. Deleuze identified as consistently opposed to the new philosophers from the start.
Francis Fukuyama negative
His 'end of history' thesis is not opposed to Huntington but complementary, together they describe a world where political economy is reduced to administration and conflict is displaced onto culture.
Paul Auster negative
His New York Trilogy's meta-fictional 'Paul Auster' phone call is cited as an example of boring, superficial modernist alienation effects, the bad version of modernism that merely reminds us it's a fiction, rather than disclosing pre-representational materiality.
Sam Harris negative
His book 'The End of Belief' is described as 'pretty horrible'; his dismissal of moral intuitions about physical proximity as evolutionary remainder is rejected as missing the Lacanian neighbor-dimension; his 'truth pill' is analyzed as 'decaffeinated torture'.
Stanley Fish positive
Described as an 'interesting liberal conservative' who 'says things which hit the mark'; defended affirmative action; his 'Fish's Law' (tolerance in inverse proportion to stakes) is discussed but Žižek says his own position is more radical.
Antonio Negri negative
Identified as a 'clear Catholic atheist' alongside Hardt; his post-Marxist 'poetry' of decentralized, emergent-property, anti-statist capitalism is explicitly rejected as wrong and dangerous.
Alain Badiou positive
Highly endorsed: his ontology of multiplicity-in-void is connected to quantum fuzziness and modernist painting; his concept of the Event is used to distinguish modernism (Event) from postmodernism (regression); positioned as a defender of universal politics against Jewish-identity particularism in French debates.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Implicitly associated (via followers) with the French trend of rejecting Deleuze and rehabilitating Foucault on pro-Israel grounds, an example of ex-Maoists betraying universalism for particularist identity politics.
Jean-Claude Milner negative
Formerly respected but now criticized for 'that ridiculous book' (about criminal tendencies of democratic Europe being antisemitic), which Žižek sees as a betrayal of Maoist universalism in favor of Jewish particularist identity politics.
Fredric Jameson positive
Identified as 'my friend Fred Jameson'; noted as 'getting a little bit soft old' but still a Marxist; his friendship with Stanley Fish at Duke is described.
Isaac Asimov positive
Two stories cited positively: 'Jokester' for the paranoiac fantasy of God as the primordial joke-author; a second story for the observation that being alone or not alone in the universe are both equally unbearable.
Félix Guattari positive
Co-author with Deleuze of A Thousand Plateaus, which is the surprising main reference of IDF counter-insurgency strategists, used to illustrate theory's recuperability.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Cited as an example of Jewish atheism, you can 'smell the Jew in it' even in his obviously atheist philosophy.
In the context of French universalism debates, Foucault is positioned by some as 'redeemable' (he supported Israel toward the end) against a 'bad' Deleuze, a distinction Žižek rejects, noting Foucault was initially seduced by the new philosophers while Deleuze was not.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Identified as a right-winger but respected; cited for the insight that every atheism bears the mark of its originating religion, and for the observation that more communication means more conflict, leading Žižek to endorse a 'new code of discretion'.
Martin Heidegger negative
The Heideggerian argument (via Dreyfus) that ecological catastrophe stems from technological alienation from the life-world is explicitly rejected: it is precisely embeddedness in the life-world that prevents us from confronting global warming. Being and Time is acknowledged as a great atheist book but as Protestant atheism.
Darian Leader positive
English Lacanian whose reading of X-Files (alien activity covers the void of absent sex between Mulder and Scully) is borrowed and applied to the Da Vinci Code.
Mao Zedong positive
His 1955 text arguing that nuclear annihilation of China would be 'hardly anything for the universe' is read as the only genuinely radical atheist-materialist political position, total willingness to put everything at risk.
Hannah Arendt negative
Criticized for taking Eichmann's self-description as a Kantian too seriously; for Žižek, Eichmann's defense is philosophically incoherent because genuine Kantian autonomy precludes externalizing duty onto the Führer.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Briefly invoked for the insight that it is equally impossible to be a genuine believer (to really believe) as to be a genuine atheist.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek identifies as a Marxist; Marx is cited for seeing capitalism's genuine universality and for the double-sided ideology critique. His Jewish atheism is noted.
Michael Hardt negative
Identified as Catholic atheist like Negri; Žižek notes that Hardt wanted to become a monk in his youth and that their theoretical framework (decentralized resistance) is rejected.
René Descartes positive
Cited as the true manifesto of modernity: the Cartesian move of recognizing that one's own culture must appear as arbitrary and contingent from a foreign gaze is the core of authentic multiculturalism.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited as co-author of the thesis that the subject is the Thing; his atheism identified as 'Jewish atheism' bearing the mark of the Jewish tradition.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central to the argument about two-sided ideology critique (false universality + cunning of reason), to the concept of genuine universality achieved through capitalism, and to the critique of postcolonial critics who only use the unmasking move.
Hubert Dreyfus negative
Named as 'Heideggerian California Heideggerian' whose reading of Sein und Zeit, stressing mind as embedded in life-world, irreducible to brain-in-a-vat, is the wrong diagnosis of the ecological problem.
What it argues
inexistence of the big Other and groundlessness of the symbolic orderfragility and suspended status of belief (atheism as secret of faith)ecology and the impossibility of really believing in catastrophetolerance as depoliticized ersatz for genuine political actionculturalization of politics and false universalitymodernist painting as ultra-realism and subjective autonomythe neighbor as abyss of otherness and source of violence
Dialectical moves 12
“Maybe you Americans are more right — being groundless, not having a ground floor, you are closer to the truth that the big Other doesn't exist.”
What looks like a deficiency (no symbolic ground) turns out to be the more truthful position: groundlessness is closer to the Lacanian inexistence of the big Other than European 'groundedness'.
“Atheism is the secret inner conviction of believers; the external ritual is what believers really believe in — not the content.”
The apparent opposition of sincere belief vs. atheism is reversed: what believers really rely on is ritual form, while their inner conviction is already atheist.
“It is truly difficult to be a true atheist; it is equally impossible to be a real believer.”
Both poles of the faith/atheism binary are symmetrically impossible, placing genuine religious or atheist conviction in a suspended, virtual space.
“The true materialist position is not that God doesn't exist but that reality itself is unfinished, fuzzy, ontologically incomplete — you don't need God to imagine it.”
Materialism is not the opposite of theology but the radicalization of the 'lazy God' thought: the incompleteness of reality is an ontological fact, not a divine attribute.
“The most abstract modernist painting is the most ultra-realist — not subjectivist blur but exposure of the stains that from within corrode the space of depicted reality.”
The apparent move away from reality in abstract art is actually a move deeper into it: abstraction discloses the pre-representational materiality underlying all representation.
“Far from being a supplement of personal truth, the 'personal idiosyncrasy' on a book's back cover is the fundamental lie — the core of the subject is an impenetrable Thing, not a collection of hobbies.”
What presents itself as intimate self-disclosure is a defensive cover over the abyss at the core of subjectivity.
“It appears that false universality masks particular interest; but the opposite mystification is equally operative — what seems like your mere particular interest is already a tool of universality working through you.”
Ideology critique has two directions: the familiar unmasking of false universality, but also the Hegelian 'cunning of reason' where particularity unknowingly actualizes the universal.
“The velvet curtain of culture has replaced the iron curtain of ideology — but far from overcoming ideological conflict, this means political antagonism now wears a cultural mask.”
Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' is not the opposite of Fukuyama's end of history but its continuation: the political returns as culture when the political is foreclosed.
“The opposite of fear is not calm enjoyment of your identity but terror — the willingness to accept the loss of what you are afraid to lose and become universal.”
The solution to the politics of fear is not reassurance but a more radical embrace of loss: abandon the particular identity you cling to rather than protecting it.
“You cannot even use duty as an excuse to do your duty — the true Kantian has to stand fully behind her duty with no alibi in the big Other.”
Authentic Kantian autonomy forecloses using 'I was only following orders' as a moral escape; self-legislation means full ownership of what you prescribe to yourself.
“More communication means, above all, more conflict — what we need is not more dialogue but a new code of discretion, more distance, more foreignness.”
Global connectivity does not reduce neighbor-conflict but intensifies it; distance and non-intrusion are more politically productive than communicative transparency.
“In all other religions, only finite humans can be atheists; only in Christianity is this void inscribed into God himself — God becomes atheist at the moment of 'Father, why have you forsaken me?'”
Christianity's uniqueness is not its positive doctrine but that it internalizes the void of atheism into the divine itself, making God's own self-abandonment the theological core.
Claims 26
asserts
The inexistence of the big Other is closer to the truth of the symbolic order, and European 'groundedness' (starting floors at 'one') is ideologically misleading compared to American groundlessness.big Other / symbolic order
asserts
Belief is structurally suspended: even the most sincere religious believer would break down if God actually appeared, because belief requires the virtual, non-literal status of its object.belief / religion
asserts
Atheism is the secret inner conviction of most sincere believers, while atheists themselves practice quasi-superstitious rituals (horoscopes), making the distinction far more ambiguous than it appears.belief / atheism
asserts
The failure to act on ecological knowledge is not ignorance or corporate manipulation but a structural incapacity to truly believe what we know, because accepting it requires severing our embeddedness in the life-world.ecology / belief
asserts
Mao's argument that nuclear war would be a 'minor event for the solar system' is, despite its apparent madness, the only genuinely radical atheist-materialist position — a true willingness to put everything at risk.radical political position / ecology / atheism
rejects
The Heideggerian account that technological alienation severs us from our life-world embeddedness is precisely wrong: it is that embeddedness which prevents us from confronting global warming.Heidegger / Dreyfus / technology and ecology
asserts
Every atheism bears the mark of the religion out of which it grew — Spinoza and Freud are Jewish atheists, Heidegger is a Protestant atheist, Negri and Hardt are Catholic atheists.atheism / religion
asserts
Christianity is exceptional among religions because in it God himself (Christ on the cross) for a moment becomes atheist — this void is inscribed into God himself, not just into finite believers.Christianity / theology
asserts
Reality is ontologically incomplete — not just epistemologically limited — such that at a certain level of approach, things get fuzzy and dissolve into void, as in quantum indeterminacy, digital game architecture, and modernist painting.ontology / materialism / quantum physics
asserts
Postmodernism is a regression relative to modernism, not a further development; in Badiou's terms, modernism is an event and postmodernism is not.modernism / postmodernism / art
asserts
The biographical 'personal touch' appended to author bios (hobbies, idiosyncrasies) is a fundamental lie, because the core of the subject is an impenetrable Thing — the neighbor — not a collection of personal quirks.subjectivity / the subject as Thing
asserts
At the moment of authentic crisis (e.g. the 9/11 phone calls), subjects tend to lie rather than tell the truth, because decentrement means that intimacy with oneself is itself a form of self-deception.subjectivity / decentrement / psychoanalysis
rejects
Sam Harris's argument for proximity-based moral intuitions misses the point: what matters is not physical proximity but the structural proximity of the neighbor as abyss, which objectivist calculation cannot capture.Sam Harris / torture / ethics
asserts
Today, fear — of immigrants, ecological catastrophe, crime, technology, God — is the only available fuel for political mobilization beyond expert administration, across the entire political spectrum.politics / fear / contemporary condition
asserts
Tolerance is a depoliticized ersatz for genuine political intervention — an admission of political failure — not a political achievement; Martin Luther King did not frame his struggle as a struggle for tolerance.tolerance / liberalism
reframes
Wendy Brown is right that tolerance 'culturalizes' politics, but the critique of false universality she deploys is only one side of the story — the Hegelian opposite move (particular interest actualizing universality) is equally important.Wendy Brown / tolerance / ideology critique
asserts
Fukuyama's 'end of history' and Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' are not opposites but complements: cultural conflict is politics at the time of the end of history, where economic/structural antagonism is depoliticized.Fukuyama / Huntington / ideology
asserts
Capitalism is genuinely (not merely ideologically) universal in the strict Hegelian sense: it restructures subjects from within so they experience themselves as abstract universals, as evidenced by the erosion of Tibetan Buddhist identity.capitalism / universality / Hegel
asserts
There is no liberation outside modernity/capitalism; authentic multiculturalism requires the Cartesian experience of one's own particular identity as contingent, not substantial.modernity / multiculturalism / liberation
asserts
The only genuine universality available today is the universality of struggle — sharing intolerances and joining fights within and across cultures — not abstract tolerance of cultural difference.universality / politics / tolerance
asserts
Kantian ethics, properly understood (you are responsible for determining your duty, not just obeying it), is the only ethics adequate to a universe without the big Other.Kantian ethics / autonomy
rejects
Eichmann's defense ('I was a good Kantian following orders') is philosophically incoherent: a genuine Kantian cannot externalize duty onto the Führer because autonomy means you cannot use duty as an alibi for duty.Hannah Arendt / Eichmann / Kantian ethics
asserts
The IDF's use of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts (striated space, nomadic subjectivity) for counter-insurgency strategy illustrates how 'subversive' theory is always recuperable by capitalism and power.Deleuze and Guattari / theory and power
asserts
Against post-Marxist celebrations of decentralized resistance, large collective decisions mediated by the state are more necessary than ever, especially for ecological and economic crises.the state / Negri / anti-statism
asserts
Nature is not a balanced homeostasis disturbed by human activity but a series of catastrophes; there is nowhere to return, and this acceptance — not reassurance — is the ABC of radical ecology.ecology / nature / Stephen Jay Gould
asserts
The US intervention in Iraq has delivered Iraq politically to Iranian influence, making Bush functionally an Iranian agent from a conservative American realpolitik standpoint.Iraq war / US foreign policy
Quotes 20
“Maybe you are more right here because the price we pay we Europeans is that we believe in the ground more than you.”Slavoj Žižek · European groundedness as ideological trap vs. American groundlessness
“Jokes just pop up out of nowhere — you cannot invent a joke, a joke is somehow always already here. You say: did you hear that joke? You tell jokes.”Slavoj Žižek · jokes as objectified, authorless language events — figure of the big Other
“If a religious person were to experience something like God appearing to him — okay you are right, I exist — it would be a total breakdown for him, much worse than for an atheist.”Slavoj Žižek · belief as suspended — genuine confirmation would destroy the believer
“To be a rigorous unbeliever today you have to be a philosopher or perhaps a priest.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox that true atheism requires more effort than casual belief
“We have to dwell in this strange in-between of a belief which somehow is afraid to take itself seriously.”Slavoj Žižek · suspended belief as the universal structure of modern faith and atheism
“God mis-underestimated us — so that God thought fuck it why should I take care to constitute it all the way down where humans are too stupid... we were a little bit too smart for God.”Slavoj Žižek · materialist-theological joke: quantum fuzziness as God's lazy programming
“The true materialist task is to imagine this imperfectness of reality — you get close to it, it's not fully constituted, it gets fuzzy, it just dissolves into nothing.”Slavoj Žižek · ontological incompleteness as the basis of true materialism
“Modernism is an event; postmodernism is not.”Slavoj Žižek · Badiouian evaluation of the artistic rupture of modernism
“If there is a lesson of psychoanalysis it is that the core of the subject is the subject as the Thing — the neighbor is a thing, a thing means this impenetrable abyss of the other's desire.”Slavoj Žižek · the neighbor as Freudian das Ding — abyss rather than alter ego
“That's the sad lesson of psychoanalysis: that doesn't exclude a lie — when you are at your innermost yourself you are not yourself, you are basically lying.”Slavoj Žižek · decentrement of subjectivity — authenticity is a form of self-deception
“Tolerance is always an ersatz for political failure — it's a depoliticized politics.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal tolerance as substitute for genuine political intervention
“The iron curtain of ideology has been replaced by the velvet curtain of culture.”Slavoj Žižek · Huntington's formulation endorsed by Žižek: culture is the new form of ideological division
“More communication means at first above all more conflict — what we need is absolutely not more communication. We should begin more modestly with more distance.”Slavoj Žižek · new code of discretion — against communicative utopianism
“The same whites who fanatically support Native American and black rights are also always ready to patronizingly teach them — this apparent self-denial secretly reserves to us whites nonetheless the neutral position of universal judge.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal multicultural racism — the hidden universalism in performed self-negation
“The only universality that I admit is the universality of struggle — what I want to share with you is not universal tolerance, I want to share our shared intolerances.”Slavoj Žižek · universality of struggle as alternative to multicultural tolerance
“You cannot use even duty as an excuse to do your duty — you have to fully stand behind your duty, no guarantee in the big Other.”Slavoj Žižek · Kantian autonomy: no alibi in the Other, even for duty
“The opposite of fear is not not to be afraid and enjoy your identity — the opposite of fear is terror, the willingness to accept the loss of what you are afraid to lose and become universal.”Slavoj Žižek · terror as affirmative political concept — abandon the particular you cling to
“Nature is one big crazy catastrophe — our main source of energy is oil, which is the result, the remainder of some catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology: nature as catastrophe, not homeostasis
“I don't buy this post-modern poetry of decentralized emergent-property capitalism — we need to reassert big collective decisions. Without this we are lost.”Slavoj Žižek · against Negri-style anti-statism; for collective state-level action
“What Bush did is basically deliver Iraq politically to those who are — from a Stalinist view you can say he must be an Iranian agent.”Slavoj Žižek · US Iraq intervention as strategic self-destruction
Transcript 12 turns
Slavoj Žižek
First a sincere apology to all of you back there I mean if I I don't know what to do I would prefer to go up there to speak on the street or what I mean I it's like objectively we are constrained I'm sorry it's not my nature to play these games and neither is Jack's I'm grateful to Jack you know it's objective conditions how should I put it no Okay let me begin since as usual wait a minute I will take this out to measure the time because I'm afraid that I have too many things to say so I will try to watch your body language when you get tired Let me begin with a simple observation of a difference between United States and Europe you know how in Europe we count in a different way the floors what you start with one here no when you enter the house it's one in Europe it's ground floor we call it no and then you go up like first floor for us is you already climb up no Okay now it's easy to say that we Europeans are more grounded we have a ground you don't have a ground you are groundless you just go up but maybe you are more right here because the price we pay we Europeans is that we believe in the ground more than you you know where you can also feel this maybe another jump another feature which will bring me also to this groundlessness of the symbolic order which is I noticed another difference in hotels if they are higher than twelve floors here in the states you cheat mostly you don't have a thirteenth floor you know it's twelve fourteen but from my naive European approach like I asked myself but whom are you cheating every idiot or God observer knows that fourteen is really thirteen no like whom are you cheating again no ground but maybe you are here in this groundlessness closer to what Lacan aimed at when he talked about the inexistence of the big Other the big Other symbolic order doesn't exist one of the ways to approach this inexistence of the big Other would be jokes jokes in the sense of I think what is so mysterious for me about jokes do you notice a strange feature about jokes which is that first they are of course the idiosyncrasy creativity of language but at the same time they are totally objectified in the sense that it's count against the nature of joke of jokes to say now I will produce or invent a joke joke a joke is somehow always already here you say did you hear that joke you tell jokes I mean you know what I mean jokes just pop up out of nowhere you can which is why one of the nicest paranoiac fantasies that I know it's in an early sorry Isaac Asimov story Jokester where I think this is maybe the ultimate paranoiac dream the dream of what Lacan calls the Other of the Other as if it would have been possible to discover the primordial author of jokes this is maybe the most consistent atheist definition of God and the hypothesis of this story is precisely this one that a group of linguists develop a hypothesis that concerns the passage from animals apes their language or bees whatever you know their languages can be very complex but this functions at the level of pure designation no like you know all those bees who dance it means so much here and there and there is are flowers honey whatever but how do you pass from here to human language the idea is through a joke and animals can't tell jokes they can pass information very well not jokes so the idea is precisely that this is how God instilled that divine spark into humanity by telling them a joke they already had language humans which was kind of a ape-like or bees whatever signals you add a joke of course one can even play the game of that we know which is this joke I think the closest that comes is the one of do not eat from the tree of knowledge no which clearly has the structure of the joke its exact opposite but what I'm saying is that precisely this idea of the author of a joke behind underlining it is the maybe the ultimate figure of the big Other Okay another approach to this fragility groundlessness of the big Other would be the paradoxical status of belief I claim that belief is something very fragile in the sense that when you believe in something you don't really believe it in the sense of you really think that in reality it is like this and I claim this goes even maybe even especially for profound sincere however you innermost however you qualify them religious beliefs I claim that if a religious person were to experience something like God appearing to him now okay you are right I exist it would be a total breakdown for him much worse than for an atheist I think that the structure here is effectively like that of Marx brothers you know that famous this man looks acts like an idiot that this man looks and acts as if he believes but this shouldn't deceive you he really believes that's that's a very difficult position this is the position of an idiot which is why to get at this gap which is always in belief did you did you see maybe it's ten years ago even more ninety-two the film with Steve Martin Leap of Faith where again it's a con artist preacher who performs miracles which are all manipulated and so on healing people and then once he what he thought it's just his usual trick shocked he discovers that he really produced a miracle and he instantly breaks down I mean he escapes simply cannot stand it in other words I claim that there we have a kind of almost symmetric reversal atheism is the secret inner conviction of believers I think that almost every believer that I've spoken says okay I have my inner doubts but what reassures me is the external ritual like you know as if you put it into the ritual so you don't really have to believe what's more interesting is that most of my atheist incidentally this is why Umberto Eco was right when he wrote in a recent commentary I quote him I frequently met scientists who outside their own narrow discipline are superstitious to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today you have to be a philosopher or perhaps a a priest absolutely but on the other hand it's quite similar I claim with with atheists all my literally all maybe okay I don't do it maybe some others don't but the big majority you know haha atheist then absolutely the first thing they do in the newspaper they read horoscope or whatever and they laugh and so on but you need it so again the relationship is much more ambiguous precise here to quote again Isaac Asimov in another story he has a nice point when he says there are two possibilities either we are alone in the universe there is nobody or there is something aliens God or what he claims something very simple which I think is deeply true he claims both facts both situations are totally unbearable to us we cannot accept it would be a nightmare we would break down if aliens or God would really visited us but also we cannot accept it that there is nobody there so we have to dwell in this strange in-between of a belief which somehow is afraid to take itself seriously you know that theologians like to point out this fact which is also accepted by Lacan that we are naturally believers like it's very difficult to be a true atheist really a radical atheist but I think the least one can add to it is that is that it's also impossible as Kierkegaard knew very well to be a believer to really believe it to be a believer I would like to find a believer who when God would appear to him really who wouldn't break down who wouldn't break down I think belief is moves in a kind of a suspended status like you accept it but somehow you know it has a certain virtual status that it's not really true now what has this to do with the topic of neighbor and so on what I want to talk today let me give you already one topic one domain where we can nicely apply this fragile status of belief ecology I claim that it's precisely this belief which does not we do not take seriously but nonetheless accept it as our background this avowed even which is the ultimate cause of catastrophe namely okay all leftist writers critics protest all the time like why don't we do something about global warming and so on my God we know enough now those who try to account for this usually say either a okay but we cannot really be sure it's more complex we don't even know is it really global warming are we responsible for it or more a more leftist paranoiac version no that it's the big multinational companies who are responsible for pollution and who pay all these scientists to to inseminate doubt and so on no I think it's something else I think that we know but we are not ready to believe it violates too much our substantial beliefs in what sense imagine yourself you read a report and you know it's not that you don't know you know global warming and so on but then you know you look out you see sun flowers and so on and I claim we are as it were biologically wired to it you cannot really accept that this will disappear because our being itself disappears with it we cannot do it in order to do it this would be for me a definition of freedom free would be a human person a true atheist who can who is ready to make this step and at least one guy did it it's a crazy text Mao Zedong in fifty-five in his famous text the Chinese people why the Chinese people shouldn't be afraid of the American atom bomb namely what does he say does what's his argument the usual argument is of course the well-known one which is usually remembered this kind of a cynical wisdom oh fuck it we are one billion Chinese the Americans can bomb half a billion there will still be half a billion remaining but that's not Mao's point look how I quote it now literally look how it goes on but even if the United States atom bombs were so powerful that when dropped on China they would make a hole right through the earth or even blow the earth up that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole though it might be a minor event for the solar system it's a totally crazy position like where is he talking from don't be afraid because so what it is for the for the entire universe and so on I claim that this this totally crazy position where you are ready to put as it were everything at risk is the true radical position so why am I emphasizing this because you know the usual story that we hear which is what is ultimately responsible for global warming and so on for our ecological deadlocks are is the kind of technological alienation you know the story goes usually like this we at least in the West are so bent towards directed on on on technological exploitation scientific technological universe that we forget tend to forget that the ultimate most radical dimension and foundation of our being is this embeddedness in a certain life world this is for example most clearly developed with that Heideggerian California Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus no in his interpretation reading of Sein und Zeit Being and Time the idea being we should never forget that all these dreams of computer language and so on artificial intelligence forget something how our mind is not just brain in the vat it works as in interaction as embedded in a certain life world irreducibly linked to that one it's a position mind mind engaged in the world we cannot abstract from it I I am tempted to say unfortunately because I'm tempted to say this precisely is why we cannot take for example global warming warming seriously I claim that the situation is much more tragic it's not simply science which is to blame in order to truly confront global warming we have really to as it were cut off the links or somehow at least rationally problematize this our most if you want organic embeddedness we should do something which is maybe impossible to do that my preferred theologians Chesterton proposed he noticed a gap between poetry poetic universe and scientific results like how even if scientifically we know something to be not true our poetry remains at the level of naive perception like we know today that there is really no sunset I mean what really happens is that the earth makes a quarter of whatever more of a turn it's the earth which moves not sun not sunset but still we use that in a poetry and then Chesterton had a wonderful idea that the true task of poets today is to try and develop poetry at the level of these scientific results so that he uses this simple but I like it example that a true love letter should be not oh my darling let's meet at sunset but oh my darling let's meet at the last quarter of the turn of the earth or something like this you know to change that would be this I claim is needed in other words it is truly difficult to be an atheist although there are many versions of atheism Peter Sloterdijk who is a right-winger but nonetheless I respect him wait in one of his last books a wonderful remar- made a wonderful remark on how every atheism bears the mark of the religion out of which it grew through its negation to give you some examples isn't it true that when you read Spinoza or Freud sorry if this sounds antisemitic it's just my bad taste but you can smell the Jew in it how should I put it you know even if they are obviously like Freud atheists it's so obviously a Jewish atheism an atheism against the background embedded in the Jewish universe let's go on take Heidegger Being and Time no wonder he before writing it formally stepped out of the Catholic church because I claim and Sein und Zeit whatever you think about it Being and Time it is one of the great atheist books maybe one of the most radical but it's so clearly a Protestant atheism because you know all these topics of decision alone guilt anxiety and so on absolutely no place in Catholicism for this it's Protestant atheism then for some there is definitely a Catholic athe- atheism different versions even this kind of a conservative authoritarian Catholic atheism I mean it's almost a kind of obscene official ideology of Catholics that like they have a little bit of this also Catholics what most of my Jewish friends told me the same story about their experience how usually sometime in their adolescence they stopped to believe or become aware of it so they approached their rabbi and told him listen I have a problem I don't believe in God and at least so I was told the reply of the rabbi was always the same are you crazy I am rabbi I have nothing to do with God I am telling you about rules and so on what you believe has nothing to do with Judaism that's your private matter don't bother me with it and so on no Catholics have even more of this often you know this kind of a church is an organization like obey pray and so on what you think is your private matter don't bother me with it so we have it or we have a more Franciscan Catholicism for example somebody who certainly would consider himself an atheist Negri and Hardt both they are both so such clear Catholic atheists no wonder that this is their past do you know that Hardt told me that before becoming a theorist in his late puberty he wanted to be a monk but not just this jokish dream he did already the appropriate things and so on even Islam they have a long tradition very nice of the I was now told of their own atheism they even have a very nice word for atheists something like if you literally translate it those who believe in nothing it's a very nice term so I claim that nonetheless at the most radical level Christianity is an exception here as such at its most radical in what sense in all other religions as Chesterton pointed out in all other religions people also do not there are atheists people who do not believe in God only in Christianity that's Chesterton's beautiful reading God himself of course he refers to Christ at the cross Father why have you abandoned me God himself for a moment becomes atheist that is to say this dimension this void is inscribed into is inscribed directly into God himself and I think there is something of it already in the Judeo-Christian tradition itself this idea of imperfect God which you find for example in a wonderful Jewish story from from I think it's from Kabbalah the famous dispute between Rabbi Eliezer and some Mishnic sages about some theological point what happens then is that they have a debate and one of those who is losing the argument said wait a minute let's call God himself and God comes and then another guy says basically but I don't simplify very much says wait a minute this is an old stupid man who screwed up creation we are here among learned men this guy doesn't have any right even to debate here and the surprise is that God accepts it says oh sorry you are right sorry for intervening there is something in in Judeo-Christian tradition about it what is the underlying message ah now maybe more interesting things to you and surprise surprise being here out of my attitude to Jack I will even give a hint if I am able to as far as I understand it about visual arts here no what is materialism you know very simple you all know it let me just recapitulate you know what is the principle of uncertainty in quantum physics no you cannot measure the the velocity and the position of a particle at the same time at the same point now you know what's so problematic here it's not that you cannot measure it it's not just your epistemological limitation it's in the radical Copenhagen interpretation version it's an ontological limitation that is to say it's not that a particle really has a position and a velocity but we just cannot measure both it is that how should I put it reality is in itself undetermined in the sense of if you get too close to things you don't find some fundamental units things get fuzzy as if disappear into nothingness now let me make a jump to another topic but is connected you will see immediately the link that's my whole point having a small kid and trying to corrupt him so that I can do some work I am deeply involved in PC CD-ROM games and so on all this stuff and so on so what shocked me there so much is this how the universe we are dealing in there is an ontologically imperfect universe you know in what sense how for example you are immersed into digital reality there but let us say a war you shoot you look for the enemy and you see there a house but we know that the inside of the house is not programmed because it's not part of the game for you to enter the house or there is a person you kill but when you kill the person it's just a splash but you cannot cut the person and see the bones blood inside flesh because again it's not programmed sometimes it even is a little bit scary for me like with these newer games which have this close-up function you can approach it but then when you approach it too much you see something pretty horrifying that all of a sudden that faces are not real faces you know they turn into just abstract contours and it's pretty horrifying as if approaching you too much and see you are not human you know what I mean something monstrous emerges now I hope you got my point which is some theologians in a beautiful way I love this theory along the same lines of limitation stupidity of God proposed this reading what if the ultimate lesson of quantum physics is that we should read reality like this kind of a computer game so to cut a long story short what if in the same way that in a computer game you don't program the inside of the house because it's not part of the game you cannot enter it I mean if it is just a house in the background of course there are houses which you can enter that in the same way to cut a long story short short God underestimated us or to quote your beloved president mis-underestimated us so that God thought you got God had to program the universe for us human beings so he thought fuck it why should I take care to constitute it all the way down where humans are too stupid God made an estimation humans will be able to reach as far as the atoms beneath they will not able to go so why bother let's leave it fuzzy undetermined so we were a little bit too smart for God no progress too much where God was too lazy you know it's as if when you feel cheated for example imagine you buy a house with a garden then you go back and see it's not a garden it's just grass not even grass then the owner says you oh fuck sorry I thought you would be so so tired you wouldn't even go back no it's something like this now you will tell me but wait a minute but I have God here a subject who imagines ah that would be for me materialism isn't it possible this is the true materialist task for me at least to imagine this imperfectness of reality you get close to it it's not fully constituted it get fuzzy it just dissolves into nothing like in a film did you see it I think it's poetically better than Matrix did you see sorry I forgot who is the director even the actors more modest Thirteenth Floor basically the same as Matrix fantasy no the point is the guy learns reality in which we are is a digital reality but then they tell him if you go I don't know maybe you can correct me if you saw it somewhere in Nevada New Mexico where that if you go there you literally reach the end and it's a wonderful scene for me the guy goes there walks in a canyon and all of a sudden he sees earth is no longer earth just flat then slowly it passes into these purely abstract digital coordinates no it's kind of the end of reality he meets that fuzzy point so my point is that would be the true materialism to think again this unfinished character of reality as unfinished in itself you don't need God to imagine it reality can in itself be in this sense unfinished so what has this to do with painting I claim in a very primitive way that with my very primitive approach that the that when you approach too much image is that again you just see stains patches it's no longer full reality and I claim that that maybe this would be one of the functions of the modernist break that this that it a how should I put it it it's a radical you know we all know that with modernist painting reality even with the painting is realist like in the case of people like Edward Hopper or Munch and so on nonetheless reality as it were loses its transparency in the sense that the medium is reflected not in this primitive sense of you see the materiality it's a much more mysterious let's call it spiritual materiality but you somehow feel the stains and okay I will repeat it to make it clear although I make this point again and again in my books like very primitive example so well-known I am ashamed to mention it but look at the late Van Goghs you know that sun or yellow sun excessively yellow or blue sky excessively blue isn't it that when you look at it in abstract way sky blue is light you perceive it as void if you look at Van Gogh painting it has a certain strange massivity the void itself but be careful it's very mysterious massivity because of course it's not the massivity of the realistically depicted object. But it's also not the massivity simply of the color itself. It is as if how should I put it at the level of the depicted object itself it you know that's for me modernist painting it's not this stupidities of oh we must be aware that it's only an illusion so become aware I think this is the worst of modernism this this as if when I was young where it was a fashionable Marxist argument I'm still a Marxist but I don't buy that argument namely that to fall into the illusion of painting of a narrative is something bad no like bourgeois fetishism whatever so then you get this boring Paul Auster type by Paul Auster type I mean in his first novel alienation effects as if I I think it was in his first book first breakthrough New York Trilogy that he has these two you know a story of a detective what and then the phone rings and then the guy voice says hi here Paul Auster I want to intervene oh what a paradox we become aware that it's only as if we didn't know it or whatever no I don't I am not talking you get my point about that I'm not talking about this that you it's a it is as if I am very precise here it is as if you become aware of this massivity pre-representative materiality which as it were from within corrodes the very space of the fiction of depicted fiction so it's not just a perceptual limitation it is not as they put it oh modern painting is subjectivist it blurs our vision of reality no it's I claim all up the more abstract the more it is ultra-realist painting in this sense I draw a conclusion which with unfortunately you and all wouldn't agree my conclusion is reactionary modernist reactionary deep in my heart I'm still I must tell you a high modernist I think that something happened in music with Schönberg in painting are there delicacies with because I hate Picasso but that something happened with modernist break and that basically it's horrible to say but postmodernism I'm more and more convinced is a regression you know like to put it in Badiou's terms modernism is an event postmodernism is not okay I don't have time to develop it just to make you so that's a move you know we don't have time for minor points like the fate of modern painting and so on no what I wanted to say is that to draw attention to Badiou here this is what Badiou means with his multiplicity that precisely this fuzziness you know what's his ontology of multiplicity it is that multiplicity is fundamental ontological category this dispersal multiplicity of being but that's his point you cannot it's not multiplicity of ones you never get at atoms if you divide subdivide it just gets fuzzy it's void and that's a radical thought this is where I really appreciate Badiou because his ontology is an ontology of how should I put it the opposite of zero is not one but the primordial fact is multiple in a void and then one comes after multiple is not composed on one and then you can play this game of let's isolate the fundamental constituents no you can go on and on quanta on and on and then you get basically vibration of of nothing or whatever so again I think that this is the true breakthrough of modernism as such what are let me go on now what are the consequences of all this for subjectivity what kind of subjectivity fits this open universe of course it's an empty subjectivity we know it from Lacan but what does this mean let me tell you a personal story which I like because it's obscene of course recently a publisher asked me to do what I really hate which is you know how books usually have on the back cover information on the writer which then with some especially popular writers is supplemented by one two lines about personal idiosyncrasy no like I don't know John Irving does this that that and then the final lines he is also wrestler and does gardening and sailing whatever you want no so they asked me idiots to do it no Granta I think did it for that How to Read Lacan what I did is I proposed them but of course don't be afraid I don't do this but I wanted to test them no to to denounce the lie I put it this in his free time Professor Zizek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teaches his small son to pull legs off living spiders something like this you like do it no why because I claim that this supplement which should provide the personal idiosyncrasy is a fundamental lie this is maybe even the lie as such if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis it is that the core of the subject is as Freud Lacan put it after him the subject as the thing and that's the neighbor I'm slowly coming to my topic neighbor is a thing a thing means this impenetrable abyss of the other's desire and all this wealth of subjectivity I grow tulips I kill spiders and so on and so on I hate them just I don't kill them that all this all this is here to cover things up like at even let me tell you I was afraid to tell it at the other talk there in New York Public Library because it's a sensitive point here among party comrades I will risk it although to be clear it's meant in an absolutely respectful way way to avoid a misunderstanding one of the things that I don't like in United is you know how they overexploit that motive of what is the last thing people do when you have the last phone call no you call your beloved and tell them oh I love you and so on your wife husband children parents no and many people even gave a kind of a Catholic Paulinian twist to it you see it's almost empirically proven that when the whole world is falling apart for you even everything can become confused irrelevant what remains is love I'm more of a pessimist here I think and I can well imagine myself in that position and again this is no excuse for terrorists if anything it is the opposite if you ask me if anything it makes it more sharp it makes it more horrible what they did I claim that precisely in that totally desperate scary position you lie to yourself I would probably you know what I mean you just try to do something right to at the moment of death we like to die with somehow clear accounts to to in good memory and so on and so on I think at that point you lie now comes the ugly experiment but it's meant in a totally respectful way you know what would have been a truly atheist crazy thing to really tell the truth about that point for example sorry for the tastelessness but that's my point imagine somebody who okay it works only if what I will say now is true that then okay the plane is falling down you are married you call your wife husband and you say sorry darling now I'm falling down I will be dead in two minutes just so that it's clear to tell you the marriage was hell I wanted to divorce you bumf That would have been an act do that and I'm absolutely sure that many of the guys who died there were secretly cheating on their wives and so on but you know what I mean I'm not saying cheaply don't misunderstand me I'm not saying that they were flirting playing some stupid games they were terribly desperate and in this sense serious but that's the sad lesson of psychoanalysis that doesn't exclude a lie what this means is now we reach this what Lacan calls decentrement of subjectivity that when you are at your innermost yourself you are not yourself how should I put it you are you are lying basically that you are at a distance from truth which is why Lacan uses this words I will not go into this Millerian topic that you mentioned symptom sinthome and so on no in this sense at least for the male subject it is how I understand Lacan's well-known motto that woman is a symptom of man it doesn't mean oh woman is just my expression I project into her or whatever whatever it means something much more crazy the key point is that for Lacan the symptom pre-exists what it is a symptom of this would be for me a beautiful poetic beautiful poetic vision for example if woman is a symptom to imagine a free woman going around oh who wants me as a symptom like symptom in search of do you want me to be my symptom do you want me to be your symptom no and there even is a choice a very authentic one I claim to choose to remain an empty pure symptom this would be something for I don't know a nun or whatever which I think is a totally authentic position none of the dirty psychoanalytic tricks here oh that woman must be frustrated and so on I think this is false psychoanalysis it can be a very radical feminine position I will remain a pure symptom woman can do this man cannot do it it's man who it's much more dependent and needs a symptom to be for example in Argentina I was told there is a poet who in whose poetry there are clear shifts like thirty years ago he was kind of a conservative nationalist then when there were Montoneros he moved into radical terrorist left now he is a new ager and a friend of this guy told me it's simple he had three mistresses first a nationalist then no this is woman as a symptom of man he was depending on her she he did it in this way now let me shock you with my bad taste as they put it you heard nothing yet in this sense I am tempted to re-ad- to to celebrate to accept don't kill me the film not the novel Da Vinci Code now I don't buy of course not the theological aspect all this poor Christ has to copulate up there and so on I think that the best approach to this aspect would be the one developed apropos of X-Files by Darian Leader the English Lacanian you know when he made a wonderful simple insight maybe know he says why does in X-Files why do so many things happen out there aliens attacking all the time and so on no to cover up the fact that nothing happens here it's absolutely crucial that remember there is no sex between David Duchovny and who was Gillian Anderson no that's just to to blur up this fundamental fact of the void here what if we read in this exact way not as forget this divine dimension it's even very vulgar I mean it's a humiliation for me that first they promise some terrible discovery which shatters the very foundations of Christianity and then you learn what that Jesus was making love to Mary Magdalene I claim that secretly ninety-five percent of all Catholics know this and celebrate it what's the news if I may be a little bit obscene if you want the true scandal I hope at least it would be discovered that I don't know that Mary Magdalene was really a boy or a what that would be something you know but not this no but it's nonetheless not such a bad novel sorry film why what if you forget about that theological shit and approach it as a kind of a primitive simple but effective psychoanalytic story obviously the girl is frigid it's clear in the novel she is totally desexualized and the reason is even rendered clear she witnessed so-called primordial scene you remember once she returned home when she was young saw her dead grand-uncle paternal figure in some stupid pagan ritual whatever okay so the key is the same I think poor Jesus Christ has to copulate to cover up the fact that she does it's the same structure what I like in the film now is that what I was afraid is that it would fall into this Hollywood formula of creating a couple no that like when you know this disgusting male chauvinist wisdom women who don't low all a woman needs is the right man to shake her up a little bit and and so on they avoided this again no sex it's even a very nice conclusion you remember what's the solution she accepts her role as leader of that group in northern Scotland Scottish town I don't know where who believe in her that is to say I claim it's really a nice film if you read it this way about a passage from Eros to Agape from erotic to political love political in the sense of community and I like this very much that I think it's an authentic solution for a woman I don't think that all this city psychoanalysis oh she must be frustrated whatever is false it's even although he's an idiot but here it's good analysis that you know his message is not if you observe which is difficult I admit with Tom Hanks as an analyst no it's not it's not it's not oh my god frigid let's do something and she will do it herself and stop thinking that poor Christ has to do it or whatever no the film respect this okay but let me go now to the main line so we have this abyss of subjectivity in the sense of openness and so on of course our elementary reaction to this is fear especially today when the inexistence of the big Other is more marked than ever not only the inexistence of the symbolic big Other in the sense of this abyss of language which has no guarantee and so on but even I think what is truly horrifying if you ask me in ecology is this kind of how should I put it that nature itself as the ultimate big Other is disappearing in what sense phenomenologically what is for us nature it's some kind of a impenetrable density of our background but isn't it that the moment you can through through genome through biogenetic manipulations the moment you can intervene in nature into nature in this way nature itself turns into something how should I put it manipulable reproducible it's no longer nature in this sense of dense impenetrability now you will say but wait a minute we could do only a little bit of it yes but the loss is here in the same way as for example here I disagree with people who are afraid of all this psychological too radical psychopharmaco manipulations in the sense of if somebody manipulates your your features your innermost psychic feature through pills or even through more radical biogenetic manipulations you that it deprives you of your freedom it's much more tragic I think let us say I can change most primitive example your mood and so on with serotonin but if I can do it doesn't this prove that your previous attitude was not your freedom but it just depended on a different level of serotonin you know what I mean once you can do it the innocence is lost it's not a choice between freedom and unfreedom it's choice just between how should I put it blind dependence and the other kind of dependence so I think this is the ultimate horror and sorry I don't have time to develop it it would be so nice to go into this this is why I think Chernobyl was so horrible no it wasn't a simple catastrophe in nature the point was that as if the very texture of nature is disintegrated it's really as if to go back to that metaphor we see the stains for a moment you know it's not simply a catastrophe within nature so again no wonder that today when the big Other is dissolving in all ways even in politics the predominant mode of politics is fear what do I mean by this did you notice how not only the right-wingers but practically across the entire spectrum of positions if you we have let's call it zero level politics politics as expert administration and so on the only way today unfortunately at least in the Western developed countries to go a little bit up from it that is to say to mobilize people into some kind of a passionate movement is I claim unfortunately to mobilize them with reference to some kind of a fear it can be in a more right-wing mood fear of immigrants whatever it can be fear of ecology it can be victimization harassment again ecological catastrophes fear of state taxation fear of crime fear of God it's fear which mobilizes us and this fear again is ultimately or of course with science fear of all these technological experiments the fear here is principally the fear of what will happen with this fear which I think the fundamental fear of modern technology which is what it's not only that that modern science and technology are more powerful I think that there is a fundamental difference in the sense that previously science nonetheless wanted just to understand reproduce and so on the horror of modern science is that it can produce new forms of monsters and again this is not innocent like you have you know what was till now perceived as monstrosity all those cows with two heads or whatsoever all these freaks of nature now becomes the result so this is this fear that things will explode out of control but I claim as a Lacanian that nonetheless behind all this is fear of the neighbor and I claim that the big problem today is how to dominate control this explosive dimension of the neighbor now let me slowly approach conclusion slowly but not too slowly haha with a couple of examples one is if you remember a year ago it was New York Times best seller Sam Harris a book entitled The End of Belief and very appropriately this very book also of course justifies torture and it's pretty horrible but why maybe if you read book you know what it is about it starts with this simple observation we all know it that for most of us it is much easier to push a button which will kill ten thousand people one hundred thousand people out there you don't see it than to effectively torture a person here in front of you now Sam Harris point is that this type of moral ethical sensitivity is a blind instinctual reaction which is just a remainder of past ecology evolutionary outdated attitudes that it's a ecological sorry evolutionary remainder which we have to get rid of he even compares it with the moon illusion you like primitive people think moon is just a small circle up in the sky now we know it's quite large in the the same type of illusion predominates in our moral lives so he dismisses this very fundamental resistance disgust at torturing another being as literally the reasons for this resistance to torture are I trust every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion so he nonetheless admits that we have to live with it and then he proposes I think a pretty horrifying solution a kind of a truth pill not in the sense that that I think it was reported these days in the newspapers how scientists try to develop a truth pill not having to torture but truth pill which just torture but a kind of decaffeinated torture in what sense his idea is that to develop a pill which subjectively the person who takes the pill would suffer incredibly but from the outside it would appear that the person just took a nap and says he says wouldn't it be wonderful you force him to take a pill the guy takes a nap awakens yeah yeah I confess everything you want and so on no what's horrible here three things the first one the most obvious you know coffee yes but decaf coffee alcohol-free beer fat-free cakes and so on and now since I cannot resist vulgarity I cannot restrain from mentioning ultra vulgar vulgar example the contribution of Venezuela to it it's not a joke I read recently about two months ago that I will not pronounce words they are too vulgar for me but you know what beans are supposed to give you so-called winds or whatever okay the claim was that Venezuelan scientists developed a new variety of beans where you don't get winds so it's wonderful now we have decaf coffee with wind-free beans or whatever and the guy here offers us again decaffeinated coffee it's the same but there is a much more fundamental dimension here why is this reasoning wrong because I claim that when Sam Harris talks about this proximity is the other too close to us or not this he is too short there this proximity is not physical proximity it's the proximity precisely of the neighbor who can be too close even if he is far away and so on you know that's the definition of the neighbor that it's it intrudes so I claim that this argument only works if the other our the other human beings are no longer treated as neighbors they simply become objectivized in this field of calculation where you can say okay I torture you here to prevent greater number suffering of them the dimension of the neighbor gets lost so this is okay I have here maybe I shouldn't talk too long because what I wanted to develop here is how even our all our outbursts of violence are ultimately outbursts against the neighbor the neighbor being not simply the other person in front of us but the abyss of the other which can be detected only from our fantasmatic symbolic space and so on and so on which is why I'm here again following Sloterdijk in a slightly more pessimistic mood I think that it's easy to praise today's global capitalism oh one the whole world one big village we can communicate instantly with each other but the problem is since we are still neighbors each of us with with our own symbolic universe way of life way of enjoyment because of this to quote Sloterdijk more communication means at first above all more conflict which is why I think what we need today is absolutely not more communication I should understand you etc I think we should begin more modestly with more distance a a how should I put it a we need a new code of discretion we need to learn even to be more foreigners to to to ignore others more I think this is the great although the great art oh of course some boring Marxist would have say that that oh this is alienation it is but there is something to there is something to alienation okay let me nonetheless go on so that we nonetheless I slowly approach the end which would be that now comes the truly problematic part namely the following one our our solution to this proximity of the neighbor how to deal with it is tolerance today and if you permit me another quarter of an hour only because this is now the fundamental part I think this category should be problematized the first thing to note and I refer here in a friendly but you will see later polemical way with the new book by Wendy Brown Regulating Aversion or Adversity I forgot but it's a good book although you see I have problems namely the first question to ask here is a very naive question why do we today it's a nice sign of times why do we today formulate as a problem of tolerance phenomena which thirty forty fifty years ago were not perceived as problems of tolerance let's say racism I made a stupid simple primitive experiment I downloaded from internet all the main texts of Martin Luther King the great figure of course anti-racist and I put search like tolerance intolerance practically absent I mean he didn't perceive his struggle against racism as struggle for tolerance it would have been for him ridiculous to claim I want white people to tolerate blacks it's ridiculous in the same way as it would be ridiculous I hope for us to say for a of a fem- for a feminist to say men should tolerate more women my God I explode here I would say every anything you want I am ready to to give equality to women but not to tolerate them okay but that's another story but you got my point tolerance is as Wendy Brown puts it very nicely tolerance is always an ersatz for political failure it's a depoliticized politics what a Martin Luther King's point was not tolerance or intolerance but his problem was inequality exploitation injustice whatever which demand properly political solution not intolerance intolerance or tolerance means basically to simplify it we can't really do anything so let's tolerate it and now let's go a little bit further then Brown Wendy Brown convincingly I think deploys develops the basic underlying operation to cut a long story short what she calls the culturalization of politics political differences differences conditioned by political inequality economic exploitation and so on are naturalized neutralized into cultural differences into different ways of life for example today not predominantly sorry not exclusively but predominantly the problem of Mexican workers here is not are they exploited state is do we tolerate their way of life blah blah blah it's politics is culturalized which is why I think there is no opposition between Fukuyama and the guy whose name that's nice signifying irony signals in itself one of the main diseases today Huntington's disease Huntington Clash of Civilizations I don't think that Clash of Civilizations as clash of cultures is precisely politics at the time of end of history where because allegedly properly economic other problems are now today a fact of rational administration and so on so the only source of conflicts of true passionate political conflicts is reduced to culture culture which is then in a way naturalized as something you cannot really change so we should need to tolerate it or as Huntington put it it's even nice formulation that today after the Cold War the iron curtain of ideology has been replaced by the velvet curtain of culture now what is problematic here first let me develop if you just allow me this the case against sorry the case for tolerance and then a critique of it like of course you are free if you are a woman to go fat and ugly or whatever but if you do it you pay a terrible price you exclude yourself from the sexual market and so on and so on like you know many choices that we are given given are effectively forced choices this would be okay one level then there is already that what I already mentioned culturalization of politics and so on and so on I accept this as a critic I also accept again this problematic nature of the freedom of choice how for example you remember this old debate of the Amish who protested when multiculturalist liberals claimed we just want your children to go to normal English English men Amish referred to like this I was told to non-Amish neighbors we want to give them only freedom of choice which they will learn in our school the same elementary education as others but Amish were right to pointed out that the moment you do this you already change them substantially like you know because the whole attitude towards community changes and so on and so on in other words in order to make out of a subject the subject of a freedom of choice in this liberal sense you already have to undermine his communal identity and change him into a liberal subject then of course he may have the freedom of choice but it's no longer authentic Amish culture it's just to make a parallel out of authentic Amish identity which is like let's make a Chinese identity eating Chinese food because it is part of your tradition if you remain Amish you remain an Amish who instead of Italian food prefers I don't know Chinese restaurant you know it's no longer substantial but now I come to my central concluding point the fundamental problem with Wendy Brown and critics of this liberal universal human right and freedom of choice and subject as universal subject is somewhere else they I claim remain caught in a certain too primitive pseudo-Marxist logic of critique of ideology which is the procedure of denouncing the false universality you know this big motive of what appears to be a neutral universal notion then is in reality or priv- really privileges a certain culture strata of people like this standard topic you know human rights are really not universal human rights they secretly give preference to not only to our civilization but to male white and of certain property people in our civilization you know the logic is for example it can be shown of course that it is like this and it is true that if you read closely the discourse of human rights it always had this catch like human rights are natural to every man but then they add in order in in so far as he or she truly is a reasonable human man and then you start no women sorry too passive too confused they are out no workers they have to work too hard they they don't have time to really reflect think they are out children are out savages are out criminals are out you go on on no but I claim two things should be opposed to this first this is only one side of the story of course there is a gap between let's say an ideological fiction of human universal human rights and how they truly function but nonetheless this very gap has its very positive aspects it open us a space for rewriting of it of course they were primordially fully only the rights of white males and so on but wait a minute we know the story first Mary Wollstonecraft why not us women then for me the most noble event of French Revolution which took place in Haiti Haiti Revolution immediately the blacks said why not us and so on and so on so that's my first counter-argument the second absolutely crucial one now I come to my point is that if you read closely the great idealist tradition of Hegel and so on which is fully assumed even by Marx it's that this is only one side of the story this denouncing universality as false universality we also have the opposite mystification which is much more interesting which is something that you perceive or think it's only your particular interest is already a tool for the actualization of universality in the sense that you see the nice it's not that formal universality masks your particular interest it's the opposite your particularity mask or you are not aware of the universal dimension of what you are doing I mean this is what Hegel calls the cunning of reason you think you follow your narrow interests you don't see the universal consequences of your acts this is what this is in what Marx sees the greatness of capitalism in the sense that you think you are working for your profit but capitalism has its own universal dimension is actually universal which is why I think it's totally wrong to play this game capitalism is Eurocentric and so on it is not it is universal in what sense universal in the strict Hegelian sense that is to say and that's crucial this is I think what all these postcolonial critics who play this game ooo they pretend to be universal but they are not what they miss as a capitalist subject you are universal not in the sense that you are up in the air universal but in the sense that in your own individual self-experience you relate yourself to yourself as universal primitive example which I repeat all the time let's say we are in medieval society you encounter there a knight you ask him what are you doing it would be totally meaningless for a knight to answer oh my profession is being a knight or a serf why because he didn't perceive himself the way we perceive ourselves based on the notion of profession which means I am in myself an abstract universal individual in the sense of what I am in my particular identity a professor this that it's basically something contingent not as it were part of my nature you know that this corporatist vision of society where we each have our role to play you look into you you just have to discover your inner divine vocation this is okay so you need that's for Marx true universality where you yourself experience yourself as in the core of your being universal in this sense capitalism is effectively universal in the sense that whenever it spreads it from within undermines each culture I mean Chinese are now finally discovering it in a very cynical way that you know they tried for thirty years whatever to destroy Tibetan identity first they did it in a primitive way no ruining their the the violence destroying temples terrorizing people it didn't work now they discovered with a simple capitalism it works much better people are still Tibetan Buddhists but as all the Buddhists sorry all the Tibetans I've met up and told me but the spirit is going out their Buddhism is no longer the substantial way of life it's allowed as a kind of a private private almost some a Buddhist told me very nicely it's a hobby you know like after work one builds models the other watches pornography I'm a Tibetan Buddhist no I mean it's socially neutralized this is the actual universality of capitalism and I claim we should accept it there is no liberation outside of it I think that authentic multiculturalism happens with people like Descartes I think still this is the big manifesto of modernity which we too absurd you know when Descartes says in the beginning of his I think meditations first foreign cultures appeared crazy idiosyncratic stupid to me but then I asked myself what if when I'm viewed from a foreign through a foreign gaze I also must appear to them stupid idiosyncratic and so on this I think the core of modernity this experience of your own identity particular identity as not stupid you don't have to hate it but as ultimately something contingent and I claim again that there is no authentic liberation there is even no feminism I claim the only feminism you get outside modernity is this primitive yin-yang feminism you know like we should reassert also the feminine aspect or whatever of course you were reassert it but look closely how they are down the foundation where the men stand no and so on no so I claim that this now brings me back to the official topic of what I was saying today the neighbor I claim that the way to break out of this eternal Levinasian problematic ooo neighbor abyss otherness should we respect it or not this is basically an and tolerate it or not it's a false problem we should embrace this radical universality and approach it how not as a kind of universal like it's not I am I you are you if we are different cultures but we share some common concerns it's I think in a in the form of a struggle what interests me is that not that I am my culture and you are yours what interests me is that my culture has some fights in it your culture has some fights in what I want to share you is not universal tolerance I want to share with you our shared intolerances like what if my the only universality that I admit is the universality of struggle in a way that's I think the presupposition of this cultural solipsism oh my god how do I know that I'm not imposing onto you my universals you know we cannot ever be sure every universality is fragile and so on I would say yes but the opposite also my particular identity also is fragile that is to say I am not fully myself and then can I share it with you it is I am not myself there is in the very core of me already a universality which surpasses me that's what gives us that's what gives us some hope that we are not only more particular than we think in the sense of even when we spoke about universal things we give them our personal color it's the opposite even when you think you are immersed only in your culture you are already universal the solipsism is false I'm sad that I don't have time for the last line of thought which was what kind of ethics fits it that what I will have because it's maybe for some of you not for me I am like Stalinist communist made of special stuff I can go on forever and so on but whatever no what I wanted to I'm really sad I'll just two minutes to tell you what what I wanted to develop for the end is to explain against this background of universality and the universal ethics is Kantian ethics why in what radical sense Kantian ethics fits it that is to say did you notice something strange how okay Lacan has this formula have you acted in conformity with your desire that is to say do not compromise betray your desire but how ambiguous this formula is and even more generally did you notice how psychoanalysis can be used to justify practically all options that we have today we have you have still some stupid anarchist psychoanalysts oh end oppression liberate it and everything will be okay I think they deserve to be shot for another why because the latest version of it is and it's not a joke first I thought it's some trick no like the same trick as and I was surprised to hear it that it's true it's really a nasty thing maybe some of you know it when I visited Israel recently a friend of mine told me something which I thought it's a bad joke then he told me I will convince you and I met an officer who showed me texts confirming it namely do you know that IDF Israel Defense Forces have a kind of a think tank academy where they develop strategies how to fight Intifada Palestinians you know where is one of their main but really main theoretical references Deleuze Guattari A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus they strictly use these terms you know striated space nomadic subjectivity space and so on it's strange things are strange how should I put it strange things are are going on yes so the same with psychoanalysis it's unbelievable you have psychoanalysts who believe in this sexual regulation you have liberal hedonist psychoanalysts all that psychoanalysis teach you is you know a little bit of and so on and so on then we have conservative psychoanalysts which claim the lesson of psychoanalysis today is that we lack symbolic authority which is why we have these narcissistic illnesses we should assert some kind of symbolic authority and so on and so on we have whatever you want we have liberal we have maybe the most cunning but which I disagree with and this is how unfortunately Lacan is usually read what I'm tempted to call immoral ethics kind of a Nietzschean ethics it doesn't matter what you do be authentic do it really be fully engaged I claim this one also does and then okay what I wanted to develop is this idea of Kantian ethics as a fully autonomous ethics as an ethics where as I repeated all the time you are not only responsible to do your duty you are even responsible to determine what is your duty this is the true ethics of incomplete universe the true ethics of you are not of of there is no big Other that you cannot even put onto the big Other the responsibility for developing for telling you this is your duty but you have to be fully responsible for it which is why as I already developed years ago in New York I think somewhere to conclude with this which is why I think that at one point Hannah Arendt was wrong she takes all too seriously that Adolf Eichmann's shit where he claimed but I was just a good Kantian I did my duty no a good Kantian cannot ever say this because the whole strategy of Eichmann was to as it were objectivize his duty what can I do I obeyed Führer that was my duty no you cannot do this you should be fully you are not allowed to as I put it in my old in one old books already you cannot use even duty as an excuse to do your duty I cannot tell you sorry I also don't like what I have to do but it's my duty no you have to fully stand behind your duty no guarantee in the big Other and for reasons that I cannot develop now I claim that out of this notion of autonomy I am here a very traditional German idealist modernist I claim that a wonderful theory of modern art especially visual art can be developed as that in the sense that that notion of stains that I mentioned before is precisely how should I put it art at the level of full subjective autonomy that you even how should I put it you cannot rely even on the medium you have to accept full responsibility okay I'm sorry if I was too long but that's life thank you very much okay let's then let's go a little bit maybe now as I usually say we have some ten minutes to pretend that there is democracy no I mean although as I already told you maybe I think my dream is you know you saw Goldfinger James Bond you remember that car no where you like wouldn't it be nice to have here a plan like this you ask me a bad question I push the button you go up and then okay but what can we say okay please just please be aggressive in I mean because I'm a little bit myopic and I miss hands and then I'm accused of sexism racism which is all true that I am there but okay sorry yeah please alright two questions oh my god okay I want to talk about language for a second for the the family fish family fish says it comes up with something calls Fish's Law which goes something like tolerance tolerance occurs in inverse proportion to something being at stake so if something is is not at stake it's easy to tolerate but when something is at stake tolerance disappears so so the argument for tolerance that you're making which I take to be the argument about tolerance that you're making I take to be Lenin's argument essentially the same you know is is one that's also embraced by some people on the right the people who are not afraid of anti-foundationalism somebody like Stanley Fish so I'm just wondering what you have to say about that first I wouldn't simply Fish is one of these interesting liberal conservatives who sometimes goes much further and says things which many leftist liberals are not ready to admit for example you know how he very intelligently and this an ordinary right-winger would not have done it don't forget that he very decidedly defended affirmative action for example now you know so he is a more complex figure he is a figure basically again that I like no wonder that if there is a Marxist here it's my friend Fred Jameson who incidentally now is getting a little bit soft old but nonetheless and incidentally when they were both for a couple of years at Duke they became the best friends because Fred told me precisely this he is of course he even he admitted to Fred Jameson he always voted Republican and so on but my god he says things which hit the mark and so on and so on but my point was nonetheless more radical because how should I put it of course I criticize tolerance but not on behalf of oh we don't tolerate what is important what is crucial what is relevant but my point is even a much stronger case how should I put it for a very brutal equality I I'm more and more turning into a kind of a proto-terrorist no not of course in the sense of terrorist attacks but in the sense of violent imposition of a universal will or whatever no and I think that this is for me the problem of tolerance that it's an ersatz of what we cannot do at like an so I think that in this sense maybe Stanley Fish should be supplemented that it's not only that we tolerate what is too important it's too pertinent it's also that what is too strong precisely too important too strong to really politically intervene into it we then solve it through tolerance we tolerate things where intervention would be too strong for us today no but so again I wonder if nonetheless because you know as you as you noticed my position is here more complex I'm not simply accepting this multi-culturalist which is then I know taken over by some right-wingers because there is a paradox here I'm well aware of this for example in France it's wonderful okay disgustingly wonderful to hear somebody like Le Pen whose line of thought is not I'm a racist but I'm a true multiculturalist all I want is for us French the same things that blacks Arabs have the right our cultural identity and I think there is a moment of truth in it not in the sense that the French are oppressed but in the sense that I was always suspicious of this liberal respect for others which is the inverted form of racism in what sense that the more the other is far away from us the more they are allowed to assert their particular like you know if you are a Native American I hate this word and I read somewhere that even Native Americans are now abandoning it they like to be the first people or whatever which is better you know because it's I spoke once with one Native American so-called and he told me if he were to choose between Native American and Indian he prefers Indian why a simple reason Native American is disgusting it's like ah and we others are cultural Americans you know what I mean like part of nature and he said to be called Indian at least my name is a monument to white stupidity no they thought that they are in India better than part of but okay Native Americans whatever they are far away it's good for them to assert their culture now then you come closer China Chinese blacks still goes a little bit more careful then you get Italians and so on it's problematic if you are white English you are practically accused a fascist if you say we have to read our blah blah but this is a lie I think a typical Hegelian lie in the sense of denounced by Hegel this apparent self-denial secretly reserves to us whites nonetheless the neutral position of universal judge we can we can negate our particular identity because we are universal which is why the same whites who fanatically support Native American black rights and so on are also always ready to patronizingly teach them and so on and so on so again I think there are enough signs to differentiate me on the other hand I don't have any problem learning from intelligent conservatives yes oh my god help me help me no this is these are these sex race problems and then I will be accused I think you were the first you I think but then there are two there yeah please I'm just I want it's a it's a note regarding the footnote you said which was a little bit disturbing to me so which part yeah the one and relation to the your visit to Israel first of all the notion like oh I visited Israel sounds to me like oh I visited Germany at the time of the Third Reich for me sounds in my ears like that yeah I see yeah and then the other is like putting Deleuze Guattari saying that well you know the idea breeds that which they might be bad but for me as an intellectual first of all Deleuze in his life was one of the the uh fine intellectuals French intellectuals who were outspokenly clear about his position in relation to that question well whatever it's gonna call Palestinian yeah yeah yeah yeah and then the other is like intellectually as an intellectual one one should not leave Deleuze up to the right to take him and do what whatever you know I don't know no first let me make things clear I'm sorry for that point but okay I was this summer there but let me be absolutely clear what I was doing there just to make it absolutely clear I went there first I was formally invited by the Jerusalem Film Festival to do what and then immediately problems exploded to present there the film by Udi Aloni Forgiveness which certainly is not a Zionist film he is one of the few of my Jewish
First a sincere apology to all of you back there I mean if I I don't know what to do I would prefer to go up there to speak on the street or what I mean I it's like objectively we are constrained I'm sorry it's not my nature to play these games and neither is Jack's I'm grateful to Jack you know it's objective conditions how should I put it no Okay let me begin since as usual wait a minute I will take this out to measure the time because I'm afraid that I have too many things to say so I will try to watch your body language when you get tired Let me begin with a simple observation of a difference between United States and Europe you know how in Europe we count in a different way the floors what you start with one here no when you enter the house it's one in Europe it's ground floor we call it no and then you go up like first floor for us is you already climb up no Okay now it's easy to say that we Europeans are more grounded we have a ground you don't have a ground you are groundless you just go up but maybe you are more right here because the price we pay we Europeans is that we believe in the ground more than you you know where you can also feel this maybe another jump another feature which will bring me also to this groundlessness of the symbolic order which is I noticed another difference in hotels if they are higher than twelve floors here in the states you cheat mostly you don't have a thirteenth floor you know it's twelve fourteen but from my naive European approach like I asked myself but whom are you cheating every idiot or God observer knows that fourteen is really thirteen no like whom are you cheating again no ground but maybe you are here in this groundlessness closer to what Lacan aimed at when he talked about the inexistence of the big Other the big Other symbolic order doesn't exist one of the ways to approach this inexistence of the big Other would be jokes jokes in the sense of I think what is so mysterious for me about jokes do you notice a strange feature about jokes which is that first they are of course the idiosyncrasy creativity of language but at the same time they are totally objectified in the sense that it's count against the nature of joke of jokes to say now I will produce or invent a joke joke a joke is somehow always already here you say did you hear that joke you tell jokes I mean you know what I mean jokes just pop up out of nowhere you can which is why one of the nicest paranoiac fantasies that I know it's in an early sorry Isaac Asimov story Jokester where I think this is maybe the ultimate paranoiac dream the dream of what Lacan calls the Other of the Other as if it would have been possible to discover the primordial author of jokes this is maybe the most consistent atheist definition of God and the hypothesis of this story is precisely this one that a group of linguists develop a hypothesis that concerns the passage from animals apes their language or bees whatever you know their languages can be very complex but this functions at the level of pure designation no like you know all those bees who dance it means so much here and there and there is are flowers honey whatever but how do you pass from here to human language the idea is through a joke and animals can't tell jokes they can pass information very well not jokes so the idea is precisely that this is how God instilled that divine spark into humanity by telling them a joke they already had language humans which was kind of a ape-like or bees whatever signals you add a joke of course one can even play the game of that we know which is this joke I think the closest that comes is the one of do not eat from the tree of knowledge no which clearly has the structure of the joke its exact opposite but what I'm saying is that precisely this idea of the author of a joke behind underlining it is the maybe the ultimate figure of the big Other Okay another approach to this fragility groundlessness of the big Other would be the paradoxical status of belief I claim that belief is something very fragile in the sense that when you believe in something you don't really believe it in the sense of you really think that in reality it is like this and I claim this goes even maybe even especially for profound sincere however you innermost however you qualify them religious beliefs I claim that if a religious person were to experience something like God appearing to him now okay you are right I exist it would be a total breakdown for him much worse than for an atheist I think that the structure here is effectively like that of Marx brothers you know that famous this man looks acts like an idiot that this man looks and acts as if he believes but this shouldn't deceive you he really believes that's that's a very difficult position this is the position of an idiot which is why to get at this gap which is always in belief did you did you see maybe it's ten years ago even more ninety-two the film with Steve Martin Leap of Faith where again it's a con artist preacher who performs miracles which are all manipulated and so on healing people and then once he what he thought it's just his usual trick shocked he discovers that he really produced a miracle and he instantly breaks down I mean he escapes simply cannot stand it in other words I claim that there we have a kind of almost symmetric reversal atheism is the secret inner conviction of believers I think that almost every believer that I've spoken says okay I have my inner doubts but what reassures me is the external ritual like you know as if you put it into the ritual so you don't really have to believe what's more interesting is that most of my atheist incidentally this is why Umberto Eco was right when he wrote in a recent commentary I quote him I frequently met scientists who outside their own narrow discipline are superstitious to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today you have to be a philosopher or perhaps a a priest absolutely but on the other hand it's quite similar I claim with with atheists all my literally all maybe okay I don't do it maybe some others don't but the big majority you know haha atheist then absolutely the first thing they do in the newspaper they read horoscope or whatever and they laugh and so on but you need it so again the relationship is much more ambiguous precise here to quote again Isaac Asimov in another story he has a nice point when he says there are two possibilities either we are alone in the universe there is nobody or there is something aliens God or what he claims something very simple which I think is deeply true he claims both facts both situations are totally unbearable to us we cannot accept it would be a nightmare we would break down if aliens or God would really visited us but also we cannot accept it that there is nobody there so we have to dwell in this strange in-between of a belief which somehow is afraid to take itself seriously you know that theologians like to point out this fact which is also accepted by Lacan that we are naturally believers like it's very difficult to be a true atheist really a radical atheist but I think the least one can add to it is that is that it's also impossible as Kierkegaard knew very well to be a believer to really believe it to be a believer I would like to find a believer who when God would appear to him really who wouldn't break down who wouldn't break down I think belief is moves in a kind of a suspended status like you accept it but somehow you know it has a certain virtual status that it's not really true now what has this to do with the topic of neighbor and so on what I want to talk today let me give you already one topic one domain where we can nicely apply this fragile status of belief ecology I claim that it's precisely this belief which does not we do not take seriously but nonetheless accept it as our background this avowed even which is the ultimate cause of catastrophe namely okay all leftist writers critics protest all the time like why don't we do something about global warming and so on my God we know enough now those who try to account for this usually say either a okay but we cannot really be sure it's more complex we don't even know is it really global warming are we responsible for it or more a more leftist paranoiac version no that it's the big multinational companies who are responsible for pollution and who pay all these scientists to to inseminate doubt and so on no I think it's something else I think that we know but we are not ready to believe it violates too much our substantial beliefs in what sense imagine yourself you read a report and you know it's not that you don't know you know global warming and so on but then you know you look out you see sun flowers and so on and I claim we are as it were biologically wired to it you cannot really accept that this will disappear because our being itself disappears with it we cannot do it in order to do it this would be for me a definition of freedom free would be a human person a true atheist who can who is ready to make this step and at least one guy did it it's a crazy text Mao Zedong in fifty-five in his famous text the Chinese people why the Chinese people shouldn't be afraid of the American atom bomb namely what does he say does what's his argument the usual argument is of course the well-known one which is usually remembered this kind of a cynical wisdom oh fuck it we are one billion Chinese the Americans can bomb half a billion there will still be half a billion remaining but that's not Mao's point look how I quote it now literally look how it goes on but even if the United States atom bombs were so powerful that when dropped on China they would make a hole right through the earth or even blow the earth up that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole though it might be a minor event for the solar system it's a totally crazy position like where is he talking from don't be afraid because so what it is for the for the entire universe and so on I claim that this this totally crazy position where you are ready to put as it were everything at risk is the true radical position so why am I emphasizing this because you know the usual story that we hear which is what is ultimately responsible for global warming and so on for our ecological deadlocks are is the kind of technological alienation you know the story goes usually like this we at least in the West are so bent towards directed on on on technological exploitation scientific technological universe that we forget tend to forget that the ultimate most radical dimension and foundation of our being is this embeddedness in a certain life world this is for example most clearly developed with that Heideggerian California Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus no in his interpretation reading of Sein und Zeit Being and Time the idea being we should never forget that all these dreams of computer language and so on artificial intelligence forget something how our mind is not just brain in the vat it works as in interaction as embedded in a certain life world irreducibly linked to that one it's a position mind mind engaged in the world we cannot abstract from it I I am tempted to say unfortunately because I'm tempted to say this precisely is why we cannot take for example global warming warming seriously I claim that the situation is much more tragic it's not simply science which is to blame in order to truly confront global warming we have really to as it were cut off the links or somehow at least rationally problematize this our most if you want organic embeddedness we should do something which is maybe impossible to do that my preferred theologians Chesterton proposed he noticed a gap between poetry poetic universe and scientific results like how even if scientifically we know something to be not true our poetry remains at the level of naive perception like we know today that there is really no sunset I mean what really happens is that the earth makes a quarter of whatever more of a turn it's the earth which moves not sun not sunset but still we use that in a poetry and then Chesterton had a wonderful idea that the true task of poets today is to try and develop poetry at the level of these scientific results so that he uses this simple but I like it example that a true love letter should be not oh my darling let's meet at sunset but oh my darling let's meet at the last quarter of the turn of the earth or something like this you know to change that would be this I claim is needed in other words it is truly difficult to be an atheist although there are many versions of atheism Peter Sloterdijk who is a right-winger but nonetheless I respect him wait in one of his last books a wonderful remar- made a wonderful remark on how every atheism bears the mark of the religion out of which it grew through its negation to give you some examples isn't it true that when you read Spinoza or Freud sorry if this sounds antisemitic it's just my bad taste but you can smell the Jew in it how should I put it you know even if they are obviously like Freud atheists it's so obviously a Jewish atheism an atheism against the background embedded in the Jewish universe let's go on take Heidegger Being and Time no wonder he before writing it formally stepped out of the Catholic church because I claim and Sein und Zeit whatever you think about it Being and Time it is one of the great atheist books maybe one of the most radical but it's so clearly a Protestant atheism because you know all these topics of decision alone guilt anxiety and so on absolutely no place in Catholicism for this it's Protestant atheism then for some there is definitely a Catholic athe- atheism different versions even this kind of a conservative authoritarian Catholic atheism I mean it's almost a kind of obscene official ideology of Catholics that like they have a little bit of this also Catholics what most of my Jewish friends told me the same story about their experience how usually sometime in their adolescence they stopped to believe or become aware of it so they approached their rabbi and told him listen I have a problem I don't believe in God and at least so I was told the reply of the rabbi was always the same are you crazy I am rabbi I have nothing to do with God I am telling you about rules and so on what you believe has nothing to do with Judaism that's your private matter don't bother me with it and so on no Catholics have even more of this often you know this kind of a church is an organization like obey pray and so on what you think is your private matter don't bother me with it so we have it or we have a more Franciscan Catholicism for example somebody who certainly would consider himself an atheist Negri and Hardt both they are both so such clear Catholic atheists no wonder that this is their past do you know that Hardt told me that before becoming a theorist in his late puberty he wanted to be a monk but not just this jokish dream he did already the appropriate things and so on even Islam they have a long tradition very nice of the I was now told of their own atheism they even have a very nice word for atheists something like if you literally translate it those who believe in nothing it's a very nice term so I claim that nonetheless at the most radical level Christianity is an exception here as such at its most radical in what sense in all other religions as Chesterton pointed out in all other religions people also do not there are atheists people who do not believe in God only in Christianity that's Chesterton's beautiful reading God himself of course he refers to Christ at the cross Father why have you abandoned me God himself for a moment becomes atheist that is to say this dimension this void is inscribed into is inscribed directly into God himself and I think there is something of it already in the Judeo-Christian tradition itself this idea of imperfect God which you find for example in a wonderful Jewish story from from I think it's from Kabbalah the famous dispute between Rabbi Eliezer and some Mishnic sages about some theological point what happens then is that they have a debate and one of those who is losing the argument said wait a minute let's call God himself and God comes and then another guy says basically but I don't simplify very much says wait a minute this is an old stupid man who screwed up creation we are here among learned men this guy doesn't have any right even to debate here and the surprise is that God accepts it says oh sorry you are right sorry for intervening there is something in in Judeo-Christian tradition about it what is the underlying message ah now maybe more interesting things to you and surprise surprise being here out of my attitude to Jack I will even give a hint if I am able to as far as I understand it about visual arts here no what is materialism you know very simple you all know it let me just recapitulate you know what is the principle of uncertainty in quantum physics no you cannot measure the the velocity and the position of a particle at the same time at the same point now you know what's so problematic here it's not that you cannot measure it it's not just your epistemological limitation it's in the radical Copenhagen interpretation version it's an ontological limitation that is to say it's not that a particle really has a position and a velocity but we just cannot measure both it is that how should I put it reality is in itself undetermined in the sense of if you get too close to things you don't find some fundamental units things get fuzzy as if disappear into nothingness now let me make a jump to another topic but is connected you will see immediately the link that's my whole point having a small kid and trying to corrupt him so that I can do some work I am deeply involved in PC CD-ROM games and so on all this stuff and so on so what shocked me there so much is this how the universe we are dealing in there is an ontologically imperfect universe you know in what sense how for example you are immersed into digital reality there but let us say a war you shoot you look for the enemy and you see there a house but we know that the inside of the house is not programmed because it's not part of the game for you to enter the house or there is a person you kill but when you kill the person it's just a splash but you cannot cut the person and see the bones blood inside flesh because again it's not programmed sometimes it even is a little bit scary for me like with these newer games which have this close-up function you can approach it but then when you approach it too much you see something pretty horrifying that all of a sudden that faces are not real faces you know they turn into just abstract contours and it's pretty horrifying as if approaching you too much and see you are not human you know what I mean something monstrous emerges now I hope you got my point which is some theologians in a beautiful way I love this theory along the same lines of limitation stupidity of God proposed this reading what if the ultimate lesson of quantum physics is that we should read reality like this kind of a computer game so to cut a long story short what if in the same way that in a computer game you don't program the inside of the house because it's not part of the game you cannot enter it I mean if it is just a house in the background of course there are houses which you can enter that in the same way to cut a long story short short God underestimated us or to quote your beloved president mis-underestimated us so that God thought you got God had to program the universe for us human beings so he thought fuck it why should I take care to constitute it all the way down where humans are too stupid God made an estimation humans will be able to reach as far as the atoms beneath they will not able to go so why bother let's leave it fuzzy undetermined so we were a little bit too smart for God no progress too much where God was too lazy you know it's as if when you feel cheated for example imagine you buy a house with a garden then you go back and see it's not a garden it's just grass not even grass then the owner says you oh fuck sorry I thought you would be so so tired you wouldn't even go back no it's something like this now you will tell me but wait a minute but I have God here a subject who imagines ah that would be for me materialism isn't it possible this is the true materialist task for me at least to imagine this imperfectness of reality you get close to it it's not fully constituted it get fuzzy it just dissolves into nothing like in a film did you see it I think it's poetically better than Matrix did you see sorry I forgot who is the director even the actors more modest Thirteenth Floor basically the same as Matrix fantasy no the point is the guy learns reality in which we are is a digital reality but then they tell him if you go I don't know maybe you can correct me if you saw it somewhere in Nevada New Mexico where that if you go there you literally reach the end and it's a wonderful scene for me the guy goes there walks in a canyon and all of a sudden he sees earth is no longer earth just flat then slowly it passes into these purely abstract digital coordinates no it's kind of the end of reality he meets that fuzzy point so my point is that would be the true materialism to think again this unfinished character of reality as unfinished in itself you don't need God to imagine it reality can in itself be in this sense unfinished so what has this to do with painting I claim in a very primitive way that with my very primitive approach that the that when you approach too much image is that again you just see stains patches it's no longer full reality and I claim that that maybe this would be one of the functions of the modernist break that this that it a how should I put it it it's a radical you know we all know that with modernist painting reality even with the painting is realist like in the case of people like Edward Hopper or Munch and so on nonetheless reality as it were loses its transparency in the sense that the medium is reflected not in this primitive sense of you see the materiality it's a much more mysterious let's call it spiritual materiality but you somehow feel the stains and okay I will repeat it to make it clear although I make this point again and again in my books like very primitive example so well-known I am ashamed to mention it but look at the late Van Goghs you know that sun or yellow sun excessively yellow or blue sky excessively blue isn't it that when you look at it in abstract way sky blue is light you perceive it as void if you look at Van Gogh painting it has a certain strange massivity the void itself but be careful it's very mysterious massivity because of course it's not the massivity of the realistically depicted object. But it's also not the massivity simply of the color itself. It is as if how should I put it at the level of the depicted object itself it you know that's for me modernist painting it's not this stupidities of oh we must be aware that it's only an illusion so become aware I think this is the worst of modernism this this as if when I was young where it was a fashionable Marxist argument I'm still a Marxist but I don't buy that argument namely that to fall into the illusion of painting of a narrative is something bad no like bourgeois fetishism whatever so then you get this boring Paul Auster type by Paul Auster type I mean in his first novel alienation effects as if I I think it was in his first book first breakthrough New York Trilogy that he has these two you know a story of a detective what and then the phone rings and then the guy voice says hi here Paul Auster I want to intervene oh what a paradox we become aware that it's only as if we didn't know it or whatever no I don't I am not talking you get my point about that I'm not talking about this that you it's a it is as if I am very precise here it is as if you become aware of this massivity pre-representative materiality which as it were from within corrodes the very space of the fiction of depicted fiction so it's not just a perceptual limitation it is not as they put it oh modern painting is subjectivist it blurs our vision of reality no it's I claim all up the more abstract the more it is ultra-realist painting in this sense I draw a conclusion which with unfortunately you and all wouldn't agree my conclusion is reactionary modernist reactionary deep in my heart I'm still I must tell you a high modernist I think that something happened in music with Schönberg in painting are there delicacies with because I hate Picasso but that something happened with modernist break and that basically it's horrible to say but postmodernism I'm more and more convinced is a regression you know like to put it in Badiou's terms modernism is an event postmodernism is not okay I don't have time to develop it just to make you so that's a move you know we don't have time for minor points like the fate of modern painting and so on no what I wanted to say is that to draw attention to Badiou here this is what Badiou means with his multiplicity that precisely this fuzziness you know what's his ontology of multiplicity it is that multiplicity is fundamental ontological category this dispersal multiplicity of being but that's his point you cannot it's not multiplicity of ones you never get at atoms if you divide subdivide it just gets fuzzy it's void and that's a radical thought this is where I really appreciate Badiou because his ontology is an ontology of how should I put it the opposite of zero is not one but the primordial fact is multiple in a void and then one comes after multiple is not composed on one and then you can play this game of let's isolate the fundamental constituents no you can go on and on quanta on and on and then you get basically vibration of of nothing or whatever so again I think that this is the true breakthrough of modernism as such what are let me go on now what are the consequences of all this for subjectivity what kind of subjectivity fits this open universe of course it's an empty subjectivity we know it from Lacan but what does this mean let me tell you a personal story which I like because it's obscene of course recently a publisher asked me to do what I really hate which is you know how books usually have on the back cover information on the writer which then with some especially popular writers is supplemented by one two lines about personal idiosyncrasy no like I don't know John Irving does this that that and then the final lines he is also wrestler and does gardening and sailing whatever you want no so they asked me idiots to do it no Granta I think did it for that How to Read Lacan what I did is I proposed them but of course don't be afraid I don't do this but I wanted to test them no to to denounce the lie I put it this in his free time Professor Zizek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teaches his small son to pull legs off living spiders something like this you like do it no why because I claim that this supplement which should provide the personal idiosyncrasy is a fundamental lie this is maybe even the lie as such if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis it is that the core of the subject is as Freud Lacan put it after him the subject as the thing and that's the neighbor I'm slowly coming to my topic neighbor is a thing a thing means this impenetrable abyss of the other's desire and all this wealth of subjectivity I grow tulips I kill spiders and so on and so on I hate them just I don't kill them that all this all this is here to cover things up like at even let me tell you I was afraid to tell it at the other talk there in New York Public Library because it's a sensitive point here among party comrades I will risk it although to be clear it's meant in an absolutely respectful way way to avoid a misunderstanding one of the things that I don't like in United is you know how they overexploit that motive of what is the last thing people do when you have the last phone call no you call your beloved and tell them oh I love you and so on your wife husband children parents no and many people even gave a kind of a Catholic Paulinian twist to it you see it's almost empirically proven that when the whole world is falling apart for you even everything can become confused irrelevant what remains is love I'm more of a pessimist here I think and I can well imagine myself in that position and again this is no excuse for terrorists if anything it is the opposite if you ask me if anything it makes it more sharp it makes it more horrible what they did I claim that precisely in that totally desperate scary position you lie to yourself I would probably you know what I mean you just try to do something right to at the moment of death we like to die with somehow clear accounts to to in good memory and so on and so on I think at that point you lie now comes the ugly experiment but it's meant in a totally respectful way you know what would have been a truly atheist crazy thing to really tell the truth about that point for example sorry for the tastelessness but that's my point imagine somebody who okay it works only if what I will say now is true that then okay the plane is falling down you are married you call your wife husband and you say sorry darling now I'm falling down I will be dead in two minutes just so that it's clear to tell you the marriage was hell I wanted to divorce you bumf That would have been an act do that and I'm absolutely sure that many of the guys who died there were secretly cheating on their wives and so on but you know what I mean I'm not saying cheaply don't misunderstand me I'm not saying that they were flirting playing some stupid games they were terribly desperate and in this sense serious but that's the sad lesson of psychoanalysis that doesn't exclude a lie what this means is now we reach this what Lacan calls decentrement of subjectivity that when you are at your innermost yourself you are not yourself how should I put it you are you are lying basically that you are at a distance from truth which is why Lacan uses this words I will not go into this Millerian topic that you mentioned symptom sinthome and so on no in this sense at least for the male subject it is how I understand Lacan's well-known motto that woman is a symptom of man it doesn't mean oh woman is just my expression I project into her or whatever whatever it means something much more crazy the key point is that for Lacan the symptom pre-exists what it is a symptom of this would be for me a beautiful poetic beautiful poetic vision for example if woman is a symptom to imagine a free woman going around oh who wants me as a symptom like symptom in search of do you want me to be my symptom do you want me to be your symptom no and there even is a choice a very authentic one I claim to choose to remain an empty pure symptom this would be something for I don't know a nun or whatever which I think is a totally authentic position none of the dirty psychoanalytic tricks here oh that woman must be frustrated and so on I think this is false psychoanalysis it can be a very radical feminine position I will remain a pure symptom woman can do this man cannot do it it's man who it's much more dependent and needs a symptom to be for example in Argentina I was told there is a poet who in whose poetry there are clear shifts like thirty years ago he was kind of a conservative nationalist then when there were Montoneros he moved into radical terrorist left now he is a new ager and a friend of this guy told me it's simple he had three mistresses first a nationalist then no this is woman as a symptom of man he was depending on her she he did it in this way now let me shock you with my bad taste as they put it you heard nothing yet in this sense I am tempted to re-ad- to to celebrate to accept don't kill me the film not the novel Da Vinci Code now I don't buy of course not the theological aspect all this poor Christ has to copulate up there and so on I think that the best approach to this aspect would be the one developed apropos of X-Files by Darian Leader the English Lacanian you know when he made a wonderful simple insight maybe know he says why does in X-Files why do so many things happen out there aliens attacking all the time and so on no to cover up the fact that nothing happens here it's absolutely crucial that remember there is no sex between David Duchovny and who was Gillian Anderson no that's just to to blur up this fundamental fact of the void here what if we read in this exact way not as forget this divine dimension it's even very vulgar I mean it's a humiliation for me that first they promise some terrible discovery which shatters the very foundations of Christianity and then you learn what that Jesus was making love to Mary Magdalene I claim that secretly ninety-five percent of all Catholics know this and celebrate it what's the news if I may be a little bit obscene if you want the true scandal I hope at least it would be discovered that I don't know that Mary Magdalene was really a boy or a what that would be something you know but not this no but it's nonetheless not such a bad novel sorry film why what if you forget about that theological shit and approach it as a kind of a primitive simple but effective psychoanalytic story obviously the girl is frigid it's clear in the novel she is totally desexualized and the reason is even rendered clear she witnessed so-called primordial scene you remember once she returned home when she was young saw her dead grand-uncle paternal figure in some stupid pagan ritual whatever okay so the key is the same I think poor Jesus Christ has to copulate to cover up the fact that she does it's the same structure what I like in the film now is that what I was afraid is that it would fall into this Hollywood formula of creating a couple no that like when you know this disgusting male chauvinist wisdom women who don't low all a woman needs is the right man to shake her up a little bit and and so on they avoided this again no sex it's even a very nice conclusion you remember what's the solution she accepts her role as leader of that group in northern Scotland Scottish town I don't know where who believe in her that is to say I claim it's really a nice film if you read it this way about a passage from Eros to Agape from erotic to political love political in the sense of community and I like this very much that I think it's an authentic solution for a woman I don't think that all this city psychoanalysis oh she must be frustrated whatever is false it's even although he's an idiot but here it's good analysis that you know his message is not if you observe which is difficult I admit with Tom Hanks as an analyst no it's not it's not it's not oh my god frigid let's do something and she will do it herself and stop thinking that poor Christ has to do it or whatever no the film respect this okay but let me go now to the main line so we have this abyss of subjectivity in the sense of openness and so on of course our elementary reaction to this is fear especially today when the inexistence of the big Other is more marked than ever not only the inexistence of the symbolic big Other in the sense of this abyss of language which has no guarantee and so on but even I think what is truly horrifying if you ask me in ecology is this kind of how should I put it that nature itself as the ultimate big Other is disappearing in what sense phenomenologically what is for us nature it's some kind of a impenetrable density of our background but isn't it that the moment you can through through genome through biogenetic manipulations the moment you can intervene in nature into nature in this way nature itself turns into something how should I put it manipulable reproducible it's no longer nature in this sense of dense impenetrability now you will say but wait a minute we could do only a little bit of it yes but the loss is here in the same way as for example here I disagree with people who are afraid of all this psychological too radical psychopharmaco manipulations in the sense of if somebody manipulates your your features your innermost psychic feature through pills or even through more radical biogenetic manipulations you that it deprives you of your freedom it's much more tragic I think let us say I can change most primitive example your mood and so on with serotonin but if I can do it doesn't this prove that your previous attitude was not your freedom but it just depended on a different level of serotonin you know what I mean once you can do it the innocence is lost it's not a choice between freedom and unfreedom it's choice just between how should I put it blind dependence and the other kind of dependence so I think this is the ultimate horror and sorry I don't have time to develop it it would be so nice to go into this this is why I think Chernobyl was so horrible no it wasn't a simple catastrophe in nature the point was that as if the very texture of nature is disintegrated it's really as if to go back to that metaphor we see the stains for a moment you know it's not simply a catastrophe within nature so again no wonder that today when the big Other is dissolving in all ways even in politics the predominant mode of politics is fear what do I mean by this did you notice how not only the right-wingers but practically across the entire spectrum of positions if you we have let's call it zero level politics politics as expert administration and so on the only way today unfortunately at least in the Western developed countries to go a little bit up from it that is to say to mobilize people into some kind of a passionate movement is I claim unfortunately to mobilize them with reference to some kind of a fear it can be in a more right-wing mood fear of immigrants whatever it can be fear of ecology it can be victimization harassment again ecological catastrophes fear of state taxation fear of crime fear of God it's fear which mobilizes us and this fear again is ultimately or of course with science fear of all these technological experiments the fear here is principally the fear of what will happen with this fear which I think the fundamental fear of modern technology which is what it's not only that that modern science and technology are more powerful I think that there is a fundamental difference in the sense that previously science nonetheless wanted just to understand reproduce and so on the horror of modern science is that it can produce new forms of monsters and again this is not innocent like you have you know what was till now perceived as monstrosity all those cows with two heads or whatsoever all these freaks of nature now becomes the result so this is this fear that things will explode out of control but I claim as a Lacanian that nonetheless behind all this is fear of the neighbor and I claim that the big problem today is how to dominate control this explosive dimension of the neighbor now let me slowly approach conclusion slowly but not too slowly haha with a couple of examples one is if you remember a year ago it was New York Times best seller Sam Harris a book entitled The End of Belief and very appropriately this very book also of course justifies torture and it's pretty horrible but why maybe if you read book you know what it is about it starts with this simple observation we all know it that for most of us it is much easier to push a button which will kill ten thousand people one hundred thousand people out there you don't see it than to effectively torture a person here in front of you now Sam Harris point is that this type of moral ethical sensitivity is a blind instinctual reaction which is just a remainder of past ecology evolutionary outdated attitudes that it's a ecological sorry evolutionary remainder which we have to get rid of he even compares it with the moon illusion you like primitive people think moon is just a small circle up in the sky now we know it's quite large in the the same type of illusion predominates in our moral lives so he dismisses this very fundamental resistance disgust at torturing another being as literally the reasons for this resistance to torture are I trust every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion so he nonetheless admits that we have to live with it and then he proposes I think a pretty horrifying solution a kind of a truth pill not in the sense that that I think it was reported these days in the newspapers how scientists try to develop a truth pill not having to torture but truth pill which just torture but a kind of decaffeinated torture in what sense his idea is that to develop a pill which subjectively the person who takes the pill would suffer incredibly but from the outside it would appear that the person just took a nap and says he says wouldn't it be wonderful you force him to take a pill the guy takes a nap awakens yeah yeah I confess everything you want and so on no what's horrible here three things the first one the most obvious you know coffee yes but decaf coffee alcohol-free beer fat-free cakes and so on and now since I cannot resist vulgarity I cannot restrain from mentioning ultra vulgar vulgar example the contribution of Venezuela to it it's not a joke I read recently about two months ago that I will not pronounce words they are too vulgar for me but you know what beans are supposed to give you so-called winds or whatever okay the claim was that Venezuelan scientists developed a new variety of beans where you don't get winds so it's wonderful now we have decaf coffee with wind-free beans or whatever and the guy here offers us again decaffeinated coffee it's the same but there is a much more fundamental dimension here why is this reasoning wrong because I claim that when Sam Harris talks about this proximity is the other too close to us or not this he is too short there this proximity is not physical proximity it's the proximity precisely of the neighbor who can be too close even if he is far away and so on you know that's the definition of the neighbor that it's it intrudes so I claim that this argument only works if the other our the other human beings are no longer treated as neighbors they simply become objectivized in this field of calculation where you can say okay I torture you here to prevent greater number suffering of them the dimension of the neighbor gets lost so this is okay I have here maybe I shouldn't talk too long because what I wanted to develop here is how even our all our outbursts of violence are ultimately outbursts against the neighbor the neighbor being not simply the other person in front of us but the abyss of the other which can be detected only from our fantasmatic symbolic space and so on and so on which is why I'm here again following Sloterdijk in a slightly more pessimistic mood I think that it's easy to praise today's global capitalism oh one the whole world one big village we can communicate instantly with each other but the problem is since we are still neighbors each of us with with our own symbolic universe way of life way of enjoyment because of this to quote Sloterdijk more communication means at first above all more conflict which is why I think what we need today is absolutely not more communication I should understand you etc I think we should begin more modestly with more distance a a how should I put it a we need a new code of discretion we need to learn even to be more foreigners to to to ignore others more I think this is the great although the great art oh of course some boring Marxist would have say that that oh this is alienation it is but there is something to there is something to alienation okay let me nonetheless go on so that we nonetheless I slowly approach the end which would be that now comes the truly problematic part namely the following one our our solution to this proximity of the neighbor how to deal with it is tolerance today and if you permit me another quarter of an hour only because this is now the fundamental part I think this category should be problematized the first thing to note and I refer here in a friendly but you will see later polemical way with the new book by Wendy Brown Regulating Aversion or Adversity I forgot but it's a good book although you see I have problems namely the first question to ask here is a very naive question why do we today it's a nice sign of times why do we today formulate as a problem of tolerance phenomena which thirty forty fifty years ago were not perceived as problems of tolerance let's say racism I made a stupid simple primitive experiment I downloaded from internet all the main texts of Martin Luther King the great figure of course anti-racist and I put search like tolerance intolerance practically absent I mean he didn't perceive his struggle against racism as struggle for tolerance it would have been for him ridiculous to claim I want white people to tolerate blacks it's ridiculous in the same way as it would be ridiculous I hope for us to say for a of a fem- for a feminist to say men should tolerate more women my God I explode here I would say every anything you want I am ready to to give equality to women but not to tolerate them okay but that's another story but you got my point tolerance is as Wendy Brown puts it very nicely tolerance is always an ersatz for political failure it's a depoliticized politics what a Martin Luther King's point was not tolerance or intolerance but his problem was inequality exploitation injustice whatever which demand properly political solution not intolerance intolerance or tolerance means basically to simplify it we can't really do anything so let's tolerate it and now let's go a little bit further then Brown Wendy Brown convincingly I think deploys develops the basic underlying operation to cut a long story short what she calls the culturalization of politics political differences differences conditioned by political inequality economic exploitation and so on are naturalized neutralized into cultural differences into different ways of life for example today not predominantly sorry not exclusively but predominantly the problem of Mexican workers here is not are they exploited state is do we tolerate their way of life blah blah blah it's politics is culturalized which is why I think there is no opposition between Fukuyama and the guy whose name that's nice signifying irony signals in itself one of the main diseases today Huntington's disease Huntington Clash of Civilizations I don't think that Clash of Civilizations as clash of cultures is precisely politics at the time of end of history where because allegedly properly economic other problems are now today a fact of rational administration and so on so the only source of conflicts of true passionate political conflicts is reduced to culture culture which is then in a way naturalized as something you cannot really change so we should need to tolerate it or as Huntington put it it's even nice formulation that today after the Cold War the iron curtain of ideology has been replaced by the velvet curtain of culture now what is problematic here first let me develop if you just allow me this the case against sorry the case for tolerance and then a critique of it like of course you are free if you are a woman to go fat and ugly or whatever but if you do it you pay a terrible price you exclude yourself from the sexual market and so on and so on like you know many choices that we are given given are effectively forced choices this would be okay one level then there is already that what I already mentioned culturalization of politics and so on and so on I accept this as a critic I also accept again this problematic nature of the freedom of choice how for example you remember this old debate of the Amish who protested when multiculturalist liberals claimed we just want your children to go to normal English English men Amish referred to like this I was told to non-Amish neighbors we want to give them only freedom of choice which they will learn in our school the same elementary education as others but Amish were right to pointed out that the moment you do this you already change them substantially like you know because the whole attitude towards community changes and so on and so on in other words in order to make out of a subject the subject of a freedom of choice in this liberal sense you already have to undermine his communal identity and change him into a liberal subject then of course he may have the freedom of choice but it's no longer authentic Amish culture it's just to make a parallel out of authentic Amish identity which is like let's make a Chinese identity eating Chinese food because it is part of your tradition if you remain Amish you remain an Amish who instead of Italian food prefers I don't know Chinese restaurant you know it's no longer substantial but now I come to my central concluding point the fundamental problem with Wendy Brown and critics of this liberal universal human right and freedom of choice and subject as universal subject is somewhere else they I claim remain caught in a certain too primitive pseudo-Marxist logic of critique of ideology which is the procedure of denouncing the false universality you know this big motive of what appears to be a neutral universal notion then is in reality or priv- really privileges a certain culture strata of people like this standard topic you know human rights are really not universal human rights they secretly give preference to not only to our civilization but to male white and of certain property people in our civilization you know the logic is for example it can be shown of course that it is like this and it is true that if you read closely the discourse of human rights it always had this catch like human rights are natural to every man but then they add in order in in so far as he or she truly is a reasonable human man and then you start no women sorry too passive too confused they are out no workers they have to work too hard they they don't have time to really reflect think they are out children are out savages are out criminals are out you go on on no but I claim two things should be opposed to this first this is only one side of the story of course there is a gap between let's say an ideological fiction of human universal human rights and how they truly function but nonetheless this very gap has its very positive aspects it open us a space for rewriting of it of course they were primordially fully only the rights of white males and so on but wait a minute we know the story first Mary Wollstonecraft why not us women then for me the most noble event of French Revolution which took place in Haiti Haiti Revolution immediately the blacks said why not us and so on and so on so that's my first counter-argument the second absolutely crucial one now I come to my point is that if you read closely the great idealist tradition of Hegel and so on which is fully assumed even by Marx it's that this is only one side of the story this denouncing universality as false universality we also have the opposite mystification which is much more interesting which is something that you perceive or think it's only your particular interest is already a tool for the actualization of universality in the sense that you see the nice it's not that formal universality masks your particular interest it's the opposite your particularity mask or you are not aware of the universal dimension of what you are doing I mean this is what Hegel calls the cunning of reason you think you follow your narrow interests you don't see the universal consequences of your acts this is what this is in what Marx sees the greatness of capitalism in the sense that you think you are working for your profit but capitalism has its own universal dimension is actually universal which is why I think it's totally wrong to play this game capitalism is Eurocentric and so on it is not it is universal in what sense universal in the strict Hegelian sense that is to say and that's crucial this is I think what all these postcolonial critics who play this game ooo they pretend to be universal but they are not what they miss as a capitalist subject you are universal not in the sense that you are up in the air universal but in the sense that in your own individual self-experience you relate yourself to yourself as universal primitive example which I repeat all the time let's say we are in medieval society you encounter there a knight you ask him what are you doing it would be totally meaningless for a knight to answer oh my profession is being a knight or a serf why because he didn't perceive himself the way we perceive ourselves based on the notion of profession which means I am in myself an abstract universal individual in the sense of what I am in my particular identity a professor this that it's basically something contingent not as it were part of my nature you know that this corporatist vision of society where we each have our role to play you look into you you just have to discover your inner divine vocation this is okay so you need that's for Marx true universality where you yourself experience yourself as in the core of your being universal in this sense capitalism is effectively universal in the sense that whenever it spreads it from within undermines each culture I mean Chinese are now finally discovering it in a very cynical way that you know they tried for thirty years whatever to destroy Tibetan identity first they did it in a primitive way no ruining their the the violence destroying temples terrorizing people it didn't work now they discovered with a simple capitalism it works much better people are still Tibetan Buddhists but as all the Buddhists sorry all the Tibetans I've met up and told me but the spirit is going out their Buddhism is no longer the substantial way of life it's allowed as a kind of a private private almost some a Buddhist told me very nicely it's a hobby you know like after work one builds models the other watches pornography I'm a Tibetan Buddhist no I mean it's socially neutralized this is the actual universality of capitalism and I claim we should accept it there is no liberation outside of it I think that authentic multiculturalism happens with people like Descartes I think still this is the big manifesto of modernity which we too absurd you know when Descartes says in the beginning of his I think meditations first foreign cultures appeared crazy idiosyncratic stupid to me but then I asked myself what if when I'm viewed from a foreign through a foreign gaze I also must appear to them stupid idiosyncratic and so on this I think the core of modernity this experience of your own identity particular identity as not stupid you don't have to hate it but as ultimately something contingent and I claim again that there is no authentic liberation there is even no feminism I claim the only feminism you get outside modernity is this primitive yin-yang feminism you know like we should reassert also the feminine aspect or whatever of course you were reassert it but look closely how they are down the foundation where the men stand no and so on no so I claim that this now brings me back to the official topic of what I was saying today the neighbor I claim that the way to break out of this eternal Levinasian problematic ooo neighbor abyss otherness should we respect it or not this is basically an and tolerate it or not it's a false problem we should embrace this radical universality and approach it how not as a kind of universal like it's not I am I you are you if we are different cultures but we share some common concerns it's I think in a in the form of a struggle what interests me is that not that I am my culture and you are yours what interests me is that my culture has some fights in it your culture has some fights in what I want to share you is not universal tolerance I want to share with you our shared intolerances like what if my the only universality that I admit is the universality of struggle in a way that's I think the presupposition of this cultural solipsism oh my god how do I know that I'm not imposing onto you my universals you know we cannot ever be sure every universality is fragile and so on I would say yes but the opposite also my particular identity also is fragile that is to say I am not fully myself and then can I share it with you it is I am not myself there is in the very core of me already a universality which surpasses me that's what gives us that's what gives us some hope that we are not only more particular than we think in the sense of even when we spoke about universal things we give them our personal color it's the opposite even when you think you are immersed only in your culture you are already universal the solipsism is false I'm sad that I don't have time for the last line of thought which was what kind of ethics fits it that what I will have because it's maybe for some of you not for me I am like Stalinist communist made of special stuff I can go on forever and so on but whatever no what I wanted to I'm really sad I'll just two minutes to tell you what what I wanted to develop for the end is to explain against this background of universality and the universal ethics is Kantian ethics why in what radical sense Kantian ethics fits it that is to say did you notice something strange how okay Lacan has this formula have you acted in conformity with your desire that is to say do not compromise betray your desire but how ambiguous this formula is and even more generally did you notice how psychoanalysis can be used to justify practically all options that we have today we have you have still some stupid anarchist psychoanalysts oh end oppression liberate it and everything will be okay I think they deserve to be shot for another why because the latest version of it is and it's not a joke first I thought it's some trick no like the same trick as and I was surprised to hear it that it's true it's really a nasty thing maybe some of you know it when I visited Israel recently a friend of mine told me something which I thought it's a bad joke then he told me I will convince you and I met an officer who showed me texts confirming it namely do you know that IDF Israel Defense Forces have a kind of a think tank academy where they develop strategies how to fight Intifada Palestinians you know where is one of their main but really main theoretical references Deleuze Guattari A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus they strictly use these terms you know striated space nomadic subjectivity space and so on it's strange things are strange how should I put it strange things are are going on yes so the same with psychoanalysis it's unbelievable you have psychoanalysts who believe in this sexual regulation you have liberal hedonist psychoanalysts all that psychoanalysis teach you is you know a little bit of and so on and so on then we have conservative psychoanalysts which claim the lesson of psychoanalysis today is that we lack symbolic authority which is why we have these narcissistic illnesses we should assert some kind of symbolic authority and so on and so on we have whatever you want we have liberal we have maybe the most cunning but which I disagree with and this is how unfortunately Lacan is usually read what I'm tempted to call immoral ethics kind of a Nietzschean ethics it doesn't matter what you do be authentic do it really be fully engaged I claim this one also does and then okay what I wanted to develop is this idea of Kantian ethics as a fully autonomous ethics as an ethics where as I repeated all the time you are not only responsible to do your duty you are even responsible to determine what is your duty this is the true ethics of incomplete universe the true ethics of you are not of of there is no big Other that you cannot even put onto the big Other the responsibility for developing for telling you this is your duty but you have to be fully responsible for it which is why as I already developed years ago in New York I think somewhere to conclude with this which is why I think that at one point Hannah Arendt was wrong she takes all too seriously that Adolf Eichmann's shit where he claimed but I was just a good Kantian I did my duty no a good Kantian cannot ever say this because the whole strategy of Eichmann was to as it were objectivize his duty what can I do I obeyed Führer that was my duty no you cannot do this you should be fully you are not allowed to as I put it in my old in one old books already you cannot use even duty as an excuse to do your duty I cannot tell you sorry I also don't like what I have to do but it's my duty no you have to fully stand behind your duty no guarantee in the big Other and for reasons that I cannot develop now I claim that out of this notion of autonomy I am here a very traditional German idealist modernist I claim that a wonderful theory of modern art especially visual art can be developed as that in the sense that that notion of stains that I mentioned before is precisely how should I put it art at the level of full subjective autonomy that you even how should I put it you cannot rely even on the medium you have to accept full responsibility okay I'm sorry if I was too long but that's life thank you very much okay let's then let's go a little bit maybe now as I usually say we have some ten minutes to pretend that there is democracy no I mean although as I already told you maybe I think my dream is you know you saw Goldfinger James Bond you remember that car no where you like wouldn't it be nice to have here a plan like this you ask me a bad question I push the button you go up and then okay but what can we say okay please just please be aggressive in I mean because I'm a little bit myopic and I miss hands and then I'm accused of sexism racism which is all true that I am there but okay sorry yeah please alright two questions oh my god okay I want to talk about language for a second for the the family fish family fish says it comes up with something calls Fish's Law which goes something like tolerance tolerance occurs in inverse proportion to something being at stake so if something is is not at stake it's easy to tolerate but when something is at stake tolerance disappears so so the argument for tolerance that you're making which I take to be the argument about tolerance that you're making I take to be Lenin's argument essentially the same you know is is one that's also embraced by some people on the right the people who are not afraid of anti-foundationalism somebody like Stanley Fish so I'm just wondering what you have to say about that first I wouldn't simply Fish is one of these interesting liberal conservatives who sometimes goes much further and says things which many leftist liberals are not ready to admit for example you know how he very intelligently and this an ordinary right-winger would not have done it don't forget that he very decidedly defended affirmative action for example now you know so he is a more complex figure he is a figure basically again that I like no wonder that if there is a Marxist here it's my friend Fred Jameson who incidentally now is getting a little bit soft old but nonetheless and incidentally when they were both for a couple of years at Duke they became the best friends because Fred told me precisely this he is of course he even he admitted to Fred Jameson he always voted Republican and so on but my god he says things which hit the mark and so on and so on but my point was nonetheless more radical because how should I put it of course I criticize tolerance but not on behalf of oh we don't tolerate what is important what is crucial what is relevant but my point is even a much stronger case how should I put it for a very brutal equality I I'm more and more turning into a kind of a proto-terrorist no not of course in the sense of terrorist attacks but in the sense of violent imposition of a universal will or whatever no and I think that this is for me the problem of tolerance that it's an ersatz of what we cannot do at like an so I think that in this sense maybe Stanley Fish should be supplemented that it's not only that we tolerate what is too important it's too pertinent it's also that what is too strong precisely too important too strong to really politically intervene into it we then solve it through tolerance we tolerate things where intervention would be too strong for us today no but so again I wonder if nonetheless because you know as you as you noticed my position is here more complex I'm not simply accepting this multi-culturalist which is then I know taken over by some right-wingers because there is a paradox here I'm well aware of this for example in France it's wonderful okay disgustingly wonderful to hear somebody like Le Pen whose line of thought is not I'm a racist but I'm a true multiculturalist all I want is for us French the same things that blacks Arabs have the right our cultural identity and I think there is a moment of truth in it not in the sense that the French are oppressed but in the sense that I was always suspicious of this liberal respect for others which is the inverted form of racism in what sense that the more the other is far away from us the more they are allowed to assert their particular like you know if you are a Native American I hate this word and I read somewhere that even Native Americans are now abandoning it they like to be the first people or whatever which is better you know because it's I spoke once with one Native American so-called and he told me if he were to choose between Native American and Indian he prefers Indian why a simple reason Native American is disgusting it's like ah and we others are cultural Americans you know what I mean like part of nature and he said to be called Indian at least my name is a monument to white stupidity no they thought that they are in India better than part of but okay Native Americans whatever they are far away it's good for them to assert their culture now then you come closer China Chinese blacks still goes a little bit more careful then you get Italians and so on it's problematic if you are white English you are practically accused a fascist if you say we have to read our blah blah but this is a lie I think a typical Hegelian lie in the sense of denounced by Hegel this apparent self-denial secretly reserves to us whites nonetheless the neutral position of universal judge we can we can negate our particular identity because we are universal which is why the same whites who fanatically support Native American black rights and so on are also always ready to patronizingly teach them and so on and so on so again I think there are enough signs to differentiate me on the other hand I don't have any problem learning from intelligent conservatives yes oh my god help me help me no this is these are these sex race problems and then I will be accused I think you were the first you I think but then there are two there yeah please I'm just I want it's a it's a note regarding the footnote you said which was a little bit disturbing to me so which part yeah the one and relation to the your visit to Israel first of all the notion like oh I visited Israel sounds to me like oh I visited Germany at the time of the Third Reich for me sounds in my ears like that yeah I see yeah and then the other is like putting Deleuze Guattari saying that well you know the idea breeds that which they might be bad but for me as an intellectual first of all Deleuze in his life was one of the the uh fine intellectuals French intellectuals who were outspokenly clear about his position in relation to that question well whatever it's gonna call Palestinian yeah yeah yeah yeah and then the other is like intellectually as an intellectual one one should not leave Deleuze up to the right to take him and do what whatever you know I don't know no first let me make things clear I'm sorry for that point but okay I was this summer there but let me be absolutely clear what I was doing there just to make it absolutely clear I went there first I was formally invited by the Jerusalem Film Festival to do what and then immediately problems exploded to present there the film by Udi Aloni Forgiveness which certainly is not a Zionist film he is one of the few of my Jewish
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friends who is ready to advocate a who is still for a one state solution none of this separate and so on and to make a symbolic point we went first to Ramallah this was also his point the premiere should be there only then in Jerusalem and to make then a point further and my god it will sound cheap but it wasn't cheap the ticket namely I insisted that then when I was warned by people there that what really is Jerusalem Film Festival that is to say a kind of a false they present themselves as a how should I put it a place of peace and understanding in this crazy war zone or whatever but well they play a certain politics so I immediately insisted that I'm not a guest of the festival that I'm there strictly personally as invited by Udi Aloni to propagate his film and
friends who is ready to advocate a who is still for a one state solution none of this separate and so on and to make a symbolic point we went first to Ramallah this was also his point the premiere should be there only then in Jerusalem and to make then a point further and my god it will sound cheap but it wasn't cheap the ticket namely I insisted that then when I was warned by people there that what really is Jerusalem Film Festival that is to say a kind of a false they present themselves as a how should I put it a place of peace and understanding in this crazy war zone or whatever but well they play a certain politics so I immediately insisted that I'm not a guest of the festival that I'm there strictly personally as invited by Udi Aloni to propagate his film and
Slavoj Žižek
have nothing to do this was announced at the beginning of my talk there and even because of this I rejected all financial thing that's why I make this bad taste remark it wasn't cheap because I paid myself the trip there and the hotel and everything everything I wanted I wanted to make this absolutely clear there because my position here is that how should I put it many people this is for me the mystery of it many people noticed how something strange is happening now in the United States that people who as to their nature if I may put it in these stupid terms should be antisemetic are all of a sudden very pro-semitic I'm talking about these crazy fundamentalist right and I think there is only one solution to this enigma that and I mean this very naively not as a kind of a hypocrisy that if there is something great and noble in the Jewish tradition the present state of Israel is ruining it at fast as possible if the story goes on for ten twenty years Jews will be just another rather not even too friendly nation and so on the other thing that I learned in Israel is that you should distrust liberals I found much more you know the liberal story is ho ho stupid Jerusalem fundamentalists versus open of for of course they can be open because they are judenfrei in the sense of getting rid of Palestinians there are almost no Palestinians in Tel Aviv of course they are a little bit more liberal but I think they are much more hypocritical Tel Aviv people no wonder that most of the people who really cared for Palestinians beyond this you know the problem I'm well aware of it I wrote about it the problem with Israeli liberals is that they downplay the seriousness of it and present it as a matter you know it's just if we were to treat Palestinians a little bit better in a little bit more considerate way they they and the only almost the only people who were ready to take things more seriously are interestingly enough very even not only deeply attached to their Jewish tradition but even deep theologians for example I met a woman who appears in another movie by Udi Aloni a wonderful Jewish mystic theologian who is for one state solution very radical and so on and so on so I hope my position is clear my only limit I will tell you is this one that for example in let's take Iraq I of course am opposed to my god I wrote a book about it American intervention and it's a kind of a divine justice I mean how they can be they can be so stupid you will see now what is happening the ultimate objective result of American intervention is that politically as to political predominance Iraq is now in the Iranian sphere no if America withdraws the Shiite majority will be under Iranian at least political influence if not formally so in other words what Bush did is basically deliver Iraq politically to those who are in other words my god the the if I were to be a conservative American carrying for American imperialist interests my comment to now we will hang Saddam is okay who will now hang Bush because what he did I am very serious here is a how should I put it from a Stalinist view you can say he must be Iranian agent the result is so catastrophic there it's so catastrophic I mean and the price they are paying there we all know is for example Saddam yes Iraq I don't accept the solution of some of the leftists which is they attack American so they must be good I don't think this is the true problem the true problem is not Saddam was good but that for practically all the crimes that he is accused of now he was ten fifteen twenty years ago fully supported by the United States for example it I start to throw out because I have a bad memory in the sense of this kind of mean guy who remembers unpleasant things you know like the main accusation ho ho Saddam used poisonous gas in my bad memory I remember clearly about fifteen twenty years ago some non-government organization together with some third world nations tried to pass in United Nation a resolution condemning Saddam for the use of poisonous gases against his population guess who blocked the resolution United States now isn't it obscene that now they put him to court for the crimes that he committed not only with tolerance but with active protection by the United States did this so again here if you ask me I how should I put it the only thing that I regret and that was my impression from the visit there to Palestine is that is that and I think that the West is for example do you know and again my source here are big newspapers like Le
have nothing to do this was announced at the beginning of my talk there and even because of this I rejected all financial thing that's why I make this bad taste remark it wasn't cheap because I paid myself the trip there and the hotel and everything everything I wanted I wanted to make this absolutely clear there because my position here is that how should I put it many people this is for me the mystery of it many people noticed how something strange is happening now in the United States that people who as to their nature if I may put it in these stupid terms should be antisemetic are all of a sudden very pro-semitic I'm talking about these crazy fundamentalist right and I think there is only one solution to this enigma that and I mean this very naively not as a kind of a hypocrisy that if there is something great and noble in the Jewish tradition the present state of Israel is ruining it at fast as possible if the story goes on for ten twenty years Jews will be just another rather not even too friendly nation and so on the other thing that I learned in Israel is that you should distrust liberals I found much more you know the liberal story is ho ho stupid Jerusalem fundamentalists versus open of for of course they can be open because they are judenfrei in the sense of getting rid of Palestinians there are almost no Palestinians in Tel Aviv of course they are a little bit more liberal but I think they are much more hypocritical Tel Aviv people no wonder that most of the people who really cared for Palestinians beyond this you know the problem I'm well aware of it I wrote about it the problem with Israeli liberals is that they downplay the seriousness of it and present it as a matter you know it's just if we were to treat Palestinians a little bit better in a little bit more considerate way they they and the only almost the only people who were ready to take things more seriously are interestingly enough very even not only deeply attached to their Jewish tradition but even deep theologians for example I met a woman who appears in another movie by Udi Aloni a wonderful Jewish mystic theologian who is for one state solution very radical and so on and so on so I hope my position is clear my only limit I will tell you is this one that for example in let's take Iraq I of course am opposed to my god I wrote a book about it American intervention and it's a kind of a divine justice I mean how they can be they can be so stupid you will see now what is happening the ultimate objective result of American intervention is that politically as to political predominance Iraq is now in the Iranian sphere no if America withdraws the Shiite majority will be under Iranian at least political influence if not formally so in other words what Bush did is basically deliver Iraq politically to those who are in other words my god the the if I were to be a conservative American carrying for American imperialist interests my comment to now we will hang Saddam is okay who will now hang Bush because what he did I am very serious here is a how should I put it from a Stalinist view you can say he must be Iranian agent the result is so catastrophic there it's so catastrophic I mean and the price they are paying there we all know is for example Saddam yes Iraq I don't accept the solution of some of the leftists which is they attack American so they must be good I don't think this is the true problem the true problem is not Saddam was good but that for practically all the crimes that he is accused of now he was ten fifteen twenty years ago fully supported by the United States for example it I start to throw out because I have a bad memory in the sense of this kind of mean guy who remembers unpleasant things you know like the main accusation ho ho Saddam used poisonous gas in my bad memory I remember clearly about fifteen twenty years ago some non-government organization together with some third world nations tried to pass in United Nation a resolution condemning Saddam for the use of poisonous gases against his population guess who blocked the resolution United States now isn't it obscene that now they put him to court for the crimes that he committed not only with tolerance but with active protection by the United States did this so again here if you ask me I how should I put it the only thing that I regret and that was my impression from the visit there to Palestine is that is that and I think that the West is for example do you know and again my source here are big newspapers like Le
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Monde I think there was a note even in New York Times not some so-called loony leftist publications did we know that up till ten fifteen years ago United States and Israel supported Hamas why because no to introduce disunity among
Monde I think there was a note even in New York Times not some so-called loony leftist publications did we know that up till ten fifteen years ago United States and Israel supported Hamas why because no to introduce disunity among
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the Palestinians no like anything that hurt Arafat would be good no and what is the true dark story is how is the the saddest thing I think is the relative not absolute disappearance of secular leftist intelligentsia and people in Palestine which is absolutely a fact of Western politics they considered simply till ten years ago I don't know when this to be so they are really how should I put it harvesting the seeds of their own no so here my position is clear as to Deleuze my god let me be clear I totally agree with you I wrote a book for which many Deleuzians would like to kill by kind of trying to for Lacanians re-appropriate Deleuze all my point
the Palestinians no like anything that hurt Arafat would be good no and what is the true dark story is how is the the saddest thing I think is the relative not absolute disappearance of secular leftist intelligentsia and people in Palestine which is absolutely a fact of Western politics they considered simply till ten years ago I don't know when this to be so they are really how should I put it harvesting the seeds of their own no so here my position is clear as to Deleuze my god let me be clear I totally agree with you I wrote a book for which many Deleuzians would like to kill by kind of trying to for Lacanians re-appropriate Deleuze all my point
Slavoj Žižek
was only this one how this incredible how should I put it adaptive ability of modern capitalism my god you think you are subversive no and they can they can get it how even no and and what but what you said I'm well aware of because I know the situation in France where this Badiou can tell you all about it this most disgusting trend now there is a struggle there which is strictly a struggle between ex-Maoists Jews usually among those who remain faithful to their not Maoist but at least universal political past and those who bought the story political struggle universal is no longer an item today so let's move to protecting our Jewish identity to name the two main participants Alain Badiou as still universalist and Jean-Claude Milner whom I appreciated till ten fifteen years ago as the one who wrote that ridiculous book I talk about it in my Parallax View on the title is right it's like the criminal tendencies of modern democratic Europe something like this the thesis being that modern Europe is antisemitic and pursues Hitler's politics with other means so only this point I wanted to make in no way in no way discrediting Badiou quite on the contrary again my I think that figures like Badiou at sorry what I wanted to claim is that those bad guys let's call them the traitors of Maoist universalism it's typical how they draw exactly as you said the line of distinction between Foucault and Deleuze Deleuze is for them bad Foucault good why because Foucault towards the end so they claim started to support Israel more and so on like it's this opposition is clear I read in a journal I don't know who wrote it I think it was some follower of Bernard-Henri Levy a detailed analysis of why Deleuze should be totally rejected Foucault Michel Foucault can be redeemed the interesting thing you learn from there is nonetheless how because I am here totally for Badiou because it's typical when this disgusting phenomenon called the new philosophers emerged later he distanced but immediately for the first couple of months Foucault was seduced by them he supported them publicly Deleuze never from the very beginning he saw he saw what's the phenomenon there so again here I'm sorry if I put some how should I put it wrong wrong accents or whatever however it was however it was put but here no no here I know where things stand I'm just unfortunately no pessimist it's not the right thing to say but I think I see so many in the West with others and so on catastrophic decisions which not only Palestinians but many others will pay the price for it that's all okay sorry there were two there I think please but stand up and speak loud because I have problems with my ears I'm sorry yeah okay you mentioned two points that I found difficult to reconcile you mentioned sort of the the ersatzism of tolerance and how we should relate to our neighbor through our mutual experience of intolerance however how does that relate back to this idea of a politics of fear you know this negative politics of politics of conflict and also how do you sort of engage with people who use language of you know of mutual struggle of mutual intolerance but in a way that we would think generates intolerance for instance you know since Israel is a light topic uh you know like like the gays marching in Jerusalem and how like the big anecdote was that all the religious leaders of the world came together you know because they were like oh the gays shouldn't be marching in they're making me feel intolerant of us first when you say how tolerance fear and so on I think this is relatively easy to answer but okay let we do first the other one that is to say that solipsism and so on no my what I meant by that solipsism was a phenomenon which kind of embodies for me what is terrifying now I know I will sound almost a moral conservative now I read somewhere and first I thought it's a bad joke but again this is what always surprises you today you hear things which look a bad joke then you discover they are true no that's you know what is masturbathon it is what it says it started in San Francisco now it moved to England people coming together hundreds of them each pays ten dollars whatever they masturbate but each masturbate only him or herself and it's supposed to be a liberating experience and to make you feel even better the money goes for some humanitarian cause and so on and so on and the underlying ideology is the following one that in the old times the formula of oppression was sex but only for procreation now the formula is sex but only with a partner of oppression sex but only with love love is ideological oppressive category we should do it only for pleasure and at the level of pleasure as they put it you yourself or me I mean sorry not you are your own best lover so we should proudly assert and I find this so obscene this this is where we are the people masturbating like each is alone but this false shared loneliness exactly as Badiou would have put it you avoid any traumatic encounter no otherness masked with this charity or whatever this stupid conversion of this is tolerance this is the way I will make a crazy conclusion for me this is the way ideologists of tolerance would like to see but could to go back to your problem of fear identity and so on what's to cut a long story short what is for me wrong with wrong okay what is for me the I didn't have time to develop my crazy thought which will be in the text of course which I feel which is that for me the opposite of fear is not not to be fear to enjoy your identity the opposite of fear is terror for me I try to sorry affirm terror in the sense of the solution is not oh you don't have to be afraid you are what you are the solution is abandon that what you are afraid to lose accept the loss become universal you are fear you are afraid to lose your particular identity my position is not identity politics it's on the contrary what if you are so passionately protecting is in itself worthless abandon that I mean this is why as a point of madness I don't mean we should do that but as an attitude I refer to that crazy Mao so what solar minor disturbance in the solar system whatever no I think that again so again the solution is not simply don't fear be calm enjoy your life and so on and so on the solution is much more radical to to put it in Lacanian terms to accept that the big Other doesn't exist no guarantee no ground we are in the abyss even at the level of ecology the solution is not don't be afraid it will not be too bad somehow the earth will find its balance and we will get a little bit better we will screw the Chinese and Brazilians to produce less cars or whatever I mean with all my sympathy for rain forest did you notice how this hypocritical way we like to always find a third one who is then the cause oh my god Brazilians are cutting are damaging our lungs and so on while we are doing much worse things but the solution is for me the following one this would be for me the ABC of good radical ecology to accept that there is no natural balance there is no way nowhere to return first the lesson that I like from biologists like Stephen Jay Gould and so on is that this opposition of nature as some balanced homeostasis and then man disturbs balance with his their her activity this is purely ideological category of nature nature is one big crazy catastrophe a proof my god we live of this catastrophe our main source of energy is oil you know what is oil it's the result the remainder of some catastrophe of unimaginable proportions I think that's the first thing to learn about nature it's something terrifying how should I put it okay I take this a little bit too serious maybe for personal reasons because you know like two months ago somebody brought me a glass of real milk by this I mean what comes out of a cow immediately whatever I don't care okay so we have literally nowhere to return what I like is an ecological analysis which said that if all the human industry were to stop activity production that the earth is already to such an extent adapted to it that this would have caused probably a kind of a total total total around all the earth a catastrophe you know to accept this crazy openness ecology yes but it doesn't mean there is some base which
was only this one how this incredible how should I put it adaptive ability of modern capitalism my god you think you are subversive no and they can they can get it how even no and and what but what you said I'm well aware of because I know the situation in France where this Badiou can tell you all about it this most disgusting trend now there is a struggle there which is strictly a struggle between ex-Maoists Jews usually among those who remain faithful to their not Maoist but at least universal political past and those who bought the story political struggle universal is no longer an item today so let's move to protecting our Jewish identity to name the two main participants Alain Badiou as still universalist and Jean-Claude Milner whom I appreciated till ten fifteen years ago as the one who wrote that ridiculous book I talk about it in my Parallax View on the title is right it's like the criminal tendencies of modern democratic Europe something like this the thesis being that modern Europe is antisemitic and pursues Hitler's politics with other means so only this point I wanted to make in no way in no way discrediting Badiou quite on the contrary again my I think that figures like Badiou at sorry what I wanted to claim is that those bad guys let's call them the traitors of Maoist universalism it's typical how they draw exactly as you said the line of distinction between Foucault and Deleuze Deleuze is for them bad Foucault good why because Foucault towards the end so they claim started to support Israel more and so on like it's this opposition is clear I read in a journal I don't know who wrote it I think it was some follower of Bernard-Henri Levy a detailed analysis of why Deleuze should be totally rejected Foucault Michel Foucault can be redeemed the interesting thing you learn from there is nonetheless how because I am here totally for Badiou because it's typical when this disgusting phenomenon called the new philosophers emerged later he distanced but immediately for the first couple of months Foucault was seduced by them he supported them publicly Deleuze never from the very beginning he saw he saw what's the phenomenon there so again here I'm sorry if I put some how should I put it wrong wrong accents or whatever however it was however it was put but here no no here I know where things stand I'm just unfortunately no pessimist it's not the right thing to say but I think I see so many in the West with others and so on catastrophic decisions which not only Palestinians but many others will pay the price for it that's all okay sorry there were two there I think please but stand up and speak loud because I have problems with my ears I'm sorry yeah okay you mentioned two points that I found difficult to reconcile you mentioned sort of the the ersatzism of tolerance and how we should relate to our neighbor through our mutual experience of intolerance however how does that relate back to this idea of a politics of fear you know this negative politics of politics of conflict and also how do you sort of engage with people who use language of you know of mutual struggle of mutual intolerance but in a way that we would think generates intolerance for instance you know since Israel is a light topic uh you know like like the gays marching in Jerusalem and how like the big anecdote was that all the religious leaders of the world came together you know because they were like oh the gays shouldn't be marching in they're making me feel intolerant of us first when you say how tolerance fear and so on I think this is relatively easy to answer but okay let we do first the other one that is to say that solipsism and so on no my what I meant by that solipsism was a phenomenon which kind of embodies for me what is terrifying now I know I will sound almost a moral conservative now I read somewhere and first I thought it's a bad joke but again this is what always surprises you today you hear things which look a bad joke then you discover they are true no that's you know what is masturbathon it is what it says it started in San Francisco now it moved to England people coming together hundreds of them each pays ten dollars whatever they masturbate but each masturbate only him or herself and it's supposed to be a liberating experience and to make you feel even better the money goes for some humanitarian cause and so on and so on and the underlying ideology is the following one that in the old times the formula of oppression was sex but only for procreation now the formula is sex but only with a partner of oppression sex but only with love love is ideological oppressive category we should do it only for pleasure and at the level of pleasure as they put it you yourself or me I mean sorry not you are your own best lover so we should proudly assert and I find this so obscene this this is where we are the people masturbating like each is alone but this false shared loneliness exactly as Badiou would have put it you avoid any traumatic encounter no otherness masked with this charity or whatever this stupid conversion of this is tolerance this is the way I will make a crazy conclusion for me this is the way ideologists of tolerance would like to see but could to go back to your problem of fear identity and so on what's to cut a long story short what is for me wrong with wrong okay what is for me the I didn't have time to develop my crazy thought which will be in the text of course which I feel which is that for me the opposite of fear is not not to be fear to enjoy your identity the opposite of fear is terror for me I try to sorry affirm terror in the sense of the solution is not oh you don't have to be afraid you are what you are the solution is abandon that what you are afraid to lose accept the loss become universal you are fear you are afraid to lose your particular identity my position is not identity politics it's on the contrary what if you are so passionately protecting is in itself worthless abandon that I mean this is why as a point of madness I don't mean we should do that but as an attitude I refer to that crazy Mao so what solar minor disturbance in the solar system whatever no I think that again so again the solution is not simply don't fear be calm enjoy your life and so on and so on the solution is much more radical to to put it in Lacanian terms to accept that the big Other doesn't exist no guarantee no ground we are in the abyss even at the level of ecology the solution is not don't be afraid it will not be too bad somehow the earth will find its balance and we will get a little bit better we will screw the Chinese and Brazilians to produce less cars or whatever I mean with all my sympathy for rain forest did you notice how this hypocritical way we like to always find a third one who is then the cause oh my god Brazilians are cutting are damaging our lungs and so on while we are doing much worse things but the solution is for me the following one this would be for me the ABC of good radical ecology to accept that there is no natural balance there is no way nowhere to return first the lesson that I like from biologists like Stephen Jay Gould and so on is that this opposition of nature as some balanced homeostasis and then man disturbs balance with his their her activity this is purely ideological category of nature nature is one big crazy catastrophe a proof my god we live of this catastrophe our main source of energy is oil you know what is oil it's the result the remainder of some catastrophe of unimaginable proportions I think that's the first thing to learn about nature it's something terrifying how should I put it okay I take this a little bit too serious maybe for personal reasons because you know like two months ago somebody brought me a glass of real milk by this I mean what comes out of a cow immediately whatever I don't care okay so we have literally nowhere to return what I like is an ecological analysis which said that if all the human industry were to stop activity production that the earth is already to such an extent adapted to it that this would have caused probably a kind of a total total total around all the earth a catastrophe you know to accept this crazy openness ecology yes but it doesn't mean there is some base which
unknown
we ruined through too much industry and we have to return it there is nowhere to return no way back this is and this for me is then the opposite of fear that you accept that it's lost but that you accept this tragic position because there is no way to return but of course the first temptation here is then the New Age gnosticism no of course we should become nomadic virtual beings from one to another no we can't do this we are in this absolute deep shit deep deadlock how should I put it no maybe one more and then I'm somehow getting okay it's again my against my Stalinist principles but I'm getting tired you were asking about a violent imposition of universal
we ruined through too much industry and we have to return it there is nowhere to return no way back this is and this for me is then the opposite of fear that you accept that it's lost but that you accept this tragic position because there is no way to return but of course the first temptation here is then the New Age gnosticism no of course we should become nomadic virtual beings from one to another no we can't do this we are in this absolute deep shit deep deadlock how should I put it no maybe one more and then I'm somehow getting okay it's again my against my Stalinist principles but I'm getting tired you were asking about a violent imposition of universal
Slavoj Žižek
will you said that's what you're for yeah and I'm trying to distinguish because you also talked about capitalism being a kind of universal how is this kind of how would you distinguish it from like a kind of George Bush like via corporations and all of that kind of violent imposition of universality it's a false universality that one because more or less no yeah I see your point yeah yeah no my point is very simple yeah yeah no my point is here very simple one my point is that if you look at ecological crisis other crises and so on maybe I'm too naive here what I think is that the way precisely to beat phenomena like Bush and so on is not through some kind of all these local resistances and so on I claim in a very naive way that we shouldn't buy this post-modern poetry which unfortunately even Toni Negri buys of you know decentralized no longer capitalism from top down centralized but emergent properties cooperation multiple agents no true what we need is to co- is to reassert how should I call them big collective decisions I think without this we are lost now you will say it's not possible I didn't mean by imposing violent solution I didn't mean in the sense one nation imposes it on others what I mean is that we have a struggle you have a struggle let's see if how we can join our struggles the my universality is universality of struggles it's not the universality of I claim that my nation has a privileged like as as Bush put it democracy is God's gift to humanity but then the sub sub-premise America has the copyright to distribute this divine present or whatever no so I don't believe in this poetry of bad center empire versus marginal sites of resistance resistance here and there I sincerely believe that for ecological crisis for other problems that again we will meet to reassert more than ever because are we aware that even capitalism is moving in this direction I mean it's simply not true this mantra that we hear the time of the state is over and so on now there are corporations or what I claim that not only in the United States I don't think at any point in history state mechanisms were as strong as they are just look in the United States today all this spending for military spending and others this is state mediated spending I claim in with interventions in economy then with for example which is why I think California is a model in what sense not only in the cynical sense because a wonderful thing happened to me you remember two years ago they had some problems with electricity because of a fast privatization they had cuts of electricity and ah it was a poetic element I was there and then you know this disgusting patronizing understanding they asked me could you tell us from your experience how was it to live in this totalitarian communist society no eh they got it I said no when I want to remind my son how it was I bring him to California because we also had electricity shortcuts no you tell them to remind me how it was no but what I want to say is that no wonder some people in LA area or Orange County refer to it as Orange County People's Republic or what why because if you look at it they first water to survive there you need water allocation you have to bribe people it's state mediated then so much of the industry is war and so on state contracts I mean California is I think the closest you come to some kind of a crazy as it may sound People's Republic like socialized economy and so what I'm saying is that I don't buy this stupidity the state the it's so in ecology with all regulations and so on I don't think ever in the history of capitalism the state played such a role today with all these ecological aspects need for industry need for environment infrastructure and all that I mean the the role of state is so crucial so again I simply don't buy this story you know interaction of society decentralized who cares about the state more than ever the state is crucial we literally cannot survive I mean you can imagine still in the nineteenth century the state disappears somehow local communities would survive today you cannot imagine even it so again all I'm saying is that is that
will you said that's what you're for yeah and I'm trying to distinguish because you also talked about capitalism being a kind of universal how is this kind of how would you distinguish it from like a kind of George Bush like via corporations and all of that kind of violent imposition of universality it's a false universality that one because more or less no yeah I see your point yeah yeah no my point is very simple yeah yeah no my point is here very simple one my point is that if you look at ecological crisis other crises and so on maybe I'm too naive here what I think is that the way precisely to beat phenomena like Bush and so on is not through some kind of all these local resistances and so on I claim in a very naive way that we shouldn't buy this post-modern poetry which unfortunately even Toni Negri buys of you know decentralized no longer capitalism from top down centralized but emergent properties cooperation multiple agents no true what we need is to co- is to reassert how should I call them big collective decisions I think without this we are lost now you will say it's not possible I didn't mean by imposing violent solution I didn't mean in the sense one nation imposes it on others what I mean is that we have a struggle you have a struggle let's see if how we can join our struggles the my universality is universality of struggles it's not the universality of I claim that my nation has a privileged like as as Bush put it democracy is God's gift to humanity but then the sub sub-premise America has the copyright to distribute this divine present or whatever no so I don't believe in this poetry of bad center empire versus marginal sites of resistance resistance here and there I sincerely believe that for ecological crisis for other problems that again we will meet to reassert more than ever because are we aware that even capitalism is moving in this direction I mean it's simply not true this mantra that we hear the time of the state is over and so on now there are corporations or what I claim that not only in the United States I don't think at any point in history state mechanisms were as strong as they are just look in the United States today all this spending for military spending and others this is state mediated spending I claim in with interventions in economy then with for example which is why I think California is a model in what sense not only in the cynical sense because a wonderful thing happened to me you remember two years ago they had some problems with electricity because of a fast privatization they had cuts of electricity and ah it was a poetic element I was there and then you know this disgusting patronizing understanding they asked me could you tell us from your experience how was it to live in this totalitarian communist society no eh they got it I said no when I want to remind my son how it was I bring him to California because we also had electricity shortcuts no you tell them to remind me how it was no but what I want to say is that no wonder some people in LA area or Orange County refer to it as Orange County People's Republic or what why because if you look at it they first water to survive there you need water allocation you have to bribe people it's state mediated then so much of the industry is war and so on state contracts I mean California is I think the closest you come to some kind of a crazy as it may sound People's Republic like socialized economy and so what I'm saying is that I don't buy this stupidity the state the it's so in ecology with all regulations and so on I don't think ever in the history of capitalism the state played such a role today with all these ecological aspects need for industry need for environment infrastructure and all that I mean the the role of state is so crucial so again I simply don't buy this story you know interaction of society decentralized who cares about the state more than ever the state is crucial we literally cannot survive I mean you can imagine still in the nineteenth century the state disappears somehow local communities would survive today you cannot imagine even it so again all I'm saying is that is that
unknown
we should just how should I put it accept the struggle at that
we should just how should I put it accept the struggle at that
Slavoj Žižek
level what I don't buy is this
level what I don't buy is this
unknown
this alternate modernity dream
this alternate modernity dream
Slavoj Žižek
no like now I will say something horrible for some leftists with all my critique and I'm more critical than ever of the United States I'm very sorry to tell you but if I were to choose American or Chinese model of capitalism maybe I would choose American nonetheless because you know what what is China today it's something very strange it's basically a communist country where the main role of the Communist Party is to totally oppress the working class to make the field clear for unbridled capitalism the best place to be today if you want to be the most ruthless capitalist is China on condition that you don't mess with politics of course no forget about those Falun Gong sects and so on no this is because they didn't want to be controlled by state today China turned totally pro-religious they are openly saying because they know that in this explosive capitalist development you there are dangers of social disintegration and you need religion or some forms of traditional community spirit to prevent social explosion which is why they fully religions are literally sincerely it's not just a dark strategic tactical communist plot they support religions no the problem is two things an intellectual from China told me I hate told me you can criticize Marx whatever even communism as such in academia more or less okay maybe here rhetorically exaggerate but nonetheless then he told me but first don't mess with ecology too much you can do a little for example they told me that there are already big problems with that Yangtze or what yellow river dam no that first it's already leaking no point two they made because they didn't take into account some kind of moon moon power of attraction whatever it didn't simply raise the it level it the level of water was raised at a different how should I put it in the different angle so that to cut a long story short at one side they emptied a city but which didn't go under water on the other side a city which was supposed to like it's chaotic so you don't mess with that and finally the ultimate fear it's nice irony for a communist country to allow any kind of independent trade unions or whatever because you know the conditions are terrifying of the workers exploitation people die for example are you aware I read this these are official data that in China there are every year around two thousand disturbances by disturbances they mean something very precise they mean local unrests which are so strong that police cannot deal with them that army had to intervene so it's a traumatic situation so that what I'm saying okay okay we criticize United States politics I totally agree but let's not forget the problem is capitalism just to conclude with another nice joke which nonetheless I like a friend of mine was recently in China and visited a philosophy institute in now one of these four million anonymous cities which are a dozen in China that we don't know that even exist okay they made philosophy institute big building four stores and so on but below they still had a this kind of old socialist communist tradition you know a panneau a plate board where they announced the results no and he discovered my friend they still have a five-year plan in philosophy you know I love this idea like this year we develop this and that and now this I imagine then what a wonderful would have been to have a conversation with a Chinese philosopher researcher there and you ask him a simple question like does this table with all its qualities exist independently of my perception he would say I'm sorry this is part of the plan for you know we haven't yet like this bureaucratic there is something liberating in this idea I think to rely on bureaucracy sorry I am getting a little bit so maybe we should call it a day but history repeats itself and so on maybe we meet again
no like now I will say something horrible for some leftists with all my critique and I'm more critical than ever of the United States I'm very sorry to tell you but if I were to choose American or Chinese model of capitalism maybe I would choose American nonetheless because you know what what is China today it's something very strange it's basically a communist country where the main role of the Communist Party is to totally oppress the working class to make the field clear for unbridled capitalism the best place to be today if you want to be the most ruthless capitalist is China on condition that you don't mess with politics of course no forget about those Falun Gong sects and so on no this is because they didn't want to be controlled by state today China turned totally pro-religious they are openly saying because they know that in this explosive capitalist development you there are dangers of social disintegration and you need religion or some forms of traditional community spirit to prevent social explosion which is why they fully religions are literally sincerely it's not just a dark strategic tactical communist plot they support religions no the problem is two things an intellectual from China told me I hate told me you can criticize Marx whatever even communism as such in academia more or less okay maybe here rhetorically exaggerate but nonetheless then he told me but first don't mess with ecology too much you can do a little for example they told me that there are already big problems with that Yangtze or what yellow river dam no that first it's already leaking no point two they made because they didn't take into account some kind of moon moon power of attraction whatever it didn't simply raise the it level it the level of water was raised at a different how should I put it in the different angle so that to cut a long story short at one side they emptied a city but which didn't go under water on the other side a city which was supposed to like it's chaotic so you don't mess with that and finally the ultimate fear it's nice irony for a communist country to allow any kind of independent trade unions or whatever because you know the conditions are terrifying of the workers exploitation people die for example are you aware I read this these are official data that in China there are every year around two thousand disturbances by disturbances they mean something very precise they mean local unrests which are so strong that police cannot deal with them that army had to intervene so it's a traumatic situation so that what I'm saying okay okay we criticize United States politics I totally agree but let's not forget the problem is capitalism just to conclude with another nice joke which nonetheless I like a friend of mine was recently in China and visited a philosophy institute in now one of these four million anonymous cities which are a dozen in China that we don't know that even exist okay they made philosophy institute big building four stores and so on but below they still had a this kind of old socialist communist tradition you know a panneau a plate board where they announced the results no and he discovered my friend they still have a five-year plan in philosophy you know I love this idea like this year we develop this and that and now this I imagine then what a wonderful would have been to have a conversation with a Chinese philosopher researcher there and you ask him a simple question like does this table with all its qualities exist independently of my perception he would say I'm sorry this is part of the plan for you know we haven't yet like this bureaucratic there is something liberating in this idea I think to rely on bureaucracy sorry I am getting a little bit so maybe we should call it a day but history repeats itself and so on maybe we meet again