Courage of Hopelessness
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-03-24 · 2:12:13 · 17,174 words
ecology-climatecapitalismideologydemocracyfascism-populismgeopolitics-warliberalism-political-correctnesstechnology-ai-cyberspacecommunism-socialismhegel-dialecticsreligion-theologyrace-antisemitismsubjectivity
In a lecture titled 'The Courage of Hopelessness,' Žižek surveys the contemporary ethico-political situation through four interlocking crises: ecological catastrophe, terrorism and ISIS, geopolitical tensions, and the refugee crisis. He argues that genuine radical thought requires fully accepting hopelessness rather than retreating to comforting alternatives, and diagnoses the failure of mainstream liberal-left politics (what he calls 'leftist Fukuyamaism') as the root cause of right-wing populism. The Q&A extends into discussions of democracy's limits, the refugee question and multiculturalism, political correctness, internet of things and digital governance, and the absence of a positive left programme.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The social-psychological process by which an event first perceived as impossible (catastrophe, siege, Trump's victory) is rapidly absorbed into routine daily life, erasing the proper sense of what has actually occurred.
Naomi Klein's concept of capitalism exploiting catastrophes to clear social constraints and impose its agenda; Žižek invokes it to suggest that ecological disasters may actually boost rather than undermine capitalism.
Hegel's idea that historical agents pursuing their own ends unwittingly serve a larger purpose; Žižek applies it to show how the Chinese Cultural Revolution objectively prepared the ground for Deng Xiaoping's capitalist reforms.
The structure 'I know very well, but...' that Žižek identifies in two ecological forms: knowing we are trapped but not believing it enough to act, and knowing one's action is meaningless but compulsively acting anyway (buying organic food).
The ecological guilt-mechanism that addresses each individual as a priori indebted to Mother Nature and demands constant personal accounting (recycling, diet choices) in place of systemic political demands.
The Anthropocene condition in which humanity can no longer treat the Earth as an inexhaustible background for production but must take responsibility for it as a finite, fragile object we can inadvertently destroy.
Sloterdijk's formulation of the civilizational task: extending the discipline that states impose internally to relations between states and cultures, so that global cooperation replaces the permanent shadow of inter-state war.
as “collaborative commons”
Jeremy Rifkin's term for new modes of production and exchange beyond private property and market exchange, which Žižek treats as an embryonic post-capitalist formation within capitalism.
The network of interconnected devices that continuously collect and transmit data including on human beings; Žižek reads it as either a domain of radical emancipation or total algorithmic control of subjectivity.
The condition of digital products where reproduction costs approach zero, which Žižek identifies (following Rifkin) as one productive force undermining the logic of private property and market exchange.
Harari's term for the post-human being with god-like abilities enabled by biotechnology and algorithms; Žižek uses it as one pole of the coming bifurcation between those who ride progress and those left behind.
Harari's term (endorsed by Žižek) for the liberal subject who imposes a retrospective narrative consistency on the pandemonium of experience, the self that votes, consumes, and chooses, and that digital machines may represent better than it can itself.
Marx's concept of objective abstractions (value, capital) that actually regulate social reality rather than being mere mental constructs; Žižek uses it to explain the structural invisibility of capitalism's domination.
as “anti-Semitic Zionism”
Žižek's term for the contemporary ideological formation exemplified by Breivik and parts of the Trump coalition that supports Israeli state power against Arabs while simultaneously warning against Jewish domestic influence in the West.
as “Judeo-Muslim plot”
The paranoiac far-right conspiracy theory (which Žižek presents as the logically consistent endpoint of anti-Semitic Zionism) that Jews and Muslims are secretly cooperating to destroy Christian Europe.
as “fascist awakening”
Žižek's reading of right-wing populist 'awakening' rhetoric as a pseudo-awakening that, like the Freudian dreamer who wakes to avoid the dream's truth, continues to dream by evading the real antagonisms of global capitalism.
as “positive dogmatism”
Žižek's provocative term for the condition where certain basic rights (prohibition of rape, freedom of marriage) are accepted as non-negotiable axioms rather than perpetually re-litigated, which he defends as necessary against total relativism.
The stance of fully accepting that there is no discernible alternative rather than retreating to comforting utopian visions; Žižek (via Agamben) identifies this as the only genuine form of radical thought.
as “leftist Fukuyamaism”
Žižek's ironic label for the mainstream liberal-left position that accepts global capitalism as the horizon and seeks only to humanize it with more healthcare and social spending, without challenging its structural basis.
as “tolerable well-functioning alienation”
Žižek's preferred vision of society over the leftist myth of authentic local community: a society where impersonal structures function efficiently so that individuals are not obliged to deliberate endlessly about every collective arrangement.
Stories he reaches for 14
Žižek says he would sell his mother into slavery (safely, as she is dead) to see a film called 'V for Vendetta Part 2' showing what the revolutionaries actually do the next day, the true test of radical change is the day after, not the spectacular event.
“I am ready to sell my mother into slavery, and she is dead so I can say it safely, to see a movie called V for Vendetta Part... But what will happen then next day after the revolution wins?”
Jean-Pierre Dupuy was in Japan two days after Fukushima when the government faced potential evacuation of the entire Tokyo area; the rational solution, a deal with Russia to use part of Siberia, would have required transnational executive coordination that doesn't exist.
“The rational solution would be... to make a deal with Russia, to give part of Siberia.”
In a Politburo debate on whether communism will have money, left and right factions disagree; Stalin rejects both as deviations and proposes a dialectical synthesis, there will be no money AND there will be money, and when asked how, calmly explains: 'some will have money and others will not.'
“Stalin... proposes a dialectical synthesis: there will be no money and there will be money... some will have money and others will not have money.”
In Slovenia a Roma teenage girl fled to police to escape an arranged marriage; Roma community argued that arranged marriage is the very core of their communal identity and that abolishing it would destroy the community within two generations, posing the concrete problem of where respect ends.
Žižek found a quote from Heydrich praising Jews as industrious and capable, expressing desire for best cooperation with them, but 'not here'; they should have their state in Palestine. This he cites as an early instance of anti-Semitic Zionism.
“Jews are a great people, we want the best possible collaboration with them... just not here. They should have the right to their own state in Palestine.”
The Norwegian mass murderer Breivik was simultaneously a Zionist (supporting Israel as a barrier against Arab invasion) and an anti-Semite (warning against Jewish influence in the West), making him a case study of the contemporary anti-Semitic Zionist formation.
“He was literally an anti-Semitic Zionist.”
A tired father watching his dead son's coffin falls asleep and dreams the son approaches him on fire asking 'Father, can't you see I'm burning?', he awakens not because the external stimulus (overturned candle, real smoke) was too strong but because the dream's horror exceeded external reality.
“Father, can't you see I'm burning?”
The French Revolutionary Saint-Just said a revolutionary is like a ship's captain navigating uncharted waters with no compass, Žižek endorses this as the proper posture of improvisation over confident Marxist historical teleology.
A German debate raised the question of who gave Merkel the right to invite immigrants when a majority would have voted against it; Žižek uses this to argue that democratic transparency does not always produce better outcomes.
“Who gave Angela Merkel the right to call immigrants to come, to open the gates, when it was clear that on a referendum the majority of people would have been against?”
CNN ran a report celebrating new agricultural opportunities created by the melting of Greenland ice, exploiting the double meaning of 'green' (vegetation / ecology) to reframe a symptom of catastrophe as a positive ecological development.
“The obscenity of this report is not only that it focuses on the minor benefits of a global catastrophe.”
Fortuyn opposed Muslims precisely on liberal-progressive grounds (they are racist, anti-feminist), making him a 'politically correct anti-immigrant populist', evidence that today's populism is not straightforwardly fascist.
“He was, I cannot designate him other as a politically correct anti-immigrant populist.”
The siege of Sarajevo, considered unimaginable two weeks before it began, became normalized within days; residents assumed a short interruption and sent their children away for a week or two, not imagining the siege would last three years.
“The fact that a normal European city of half a million inhabitants will be encircled, starved, regularly bombed... was considered unimaginable just two weeks before.”
American researchers followed Trump voters, registered their opinions and habits, and found the machine not only predicted how they would vote but also how they should vote 'in accordance with their own true convictions', arguing the machine made better decisions.
“They predicted how in accordance with their own true convictions they should vote. And again, machine made a better decision.”
Orwell observed that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a superstitious token to prevent change from really taking place, like a smoker who is convinced he can quit, and for that very reason never will.
“Every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can really be changed.”
Works invoked 11
V for Vendetta film
Used to illustrate the problem of the day-after-the-revolution: Žižek says he would do anything to see 'V for Vendetta Part 2' showing what the revolutionaries actually do, as the true test of radical change.
Elysium film
Cited alongside Hunger Games as prophetically depicting the coming radical division between the technologically enhanced elite and those left behind.
The Hunger Games film
Cited alongside Elysium as a Hollywood blockbuster that already depicts the kind of radical social bifurcation (inside vs. outside) that Žižek sees as the probable endpoint of digital capitalism.
Homo Deus book
Harari's book; Žižek describes it as a 'popular book' and uses it for the analysis of the narrating self, algorithmic governance, and the approaching bifurcation between divine post-humans and digital machinery.
Žižek's own forthcoming book (at time of talk); he mentions it in the Q&A as containing a whole chapter on political correctness and the LGBTQ pronoun debate.
The Shock Doctrine book
Naomi Klein's book; Žižek endorses its thesis that capitalism exploits catastrophes and suggests it may explain how ecological disaster will serve as capitalism's greatest boost.
Freud's book; the dream of the burning son is drawn from it and used to analyze the structure of the 'fascist awakening', a pseudo-awakening that avoids the Real.
Europa book
Novel by Tim LaHaye depicting evil as a secret West European organization behind the EU and Arab terrorism; Žižek cites it as his 'absolute nightmare' and as evidence of the anti-European ideological formation supporting Trump.
Romeo and Juliet play
Žižek paraphrases Juliet's definition of love ('the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite') to describe the emancipatory potential of collaborative commons and digital exchange.
Sloterdijk's book providing the framework of Anthropocene and 'domestication of wild animal culture'; Žižek argues its conclusions point toward communism even against Sloterdijk's own politics.
Werner Herzog film; Žižek cites the title ('Even Dwarfs Started Small') in response to a report of an Israeli demonstration combining hijab-wearing women and Jewish sadomasochistic lesbians, acknowledging it as a beginning but gently deflating hopes that it represents more.
People invoked 29
Geert Wilders negative
Named alongside Le Pen as representing the true threat to Europe if they come to power, the end of whatever is good in the European legacy.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as 'my good friend I really appreciate him' and 'not any kind of naive leftist'; Žižek uses Dupuy's experience as an EU environmental committee member and his Fukushima anecdote to illustrate the need for transnational executive coordination.
Named as the focal target of right-wing paranoid conspiracy theories linking rich Jews to the 'organized Muslim invasion' of Europe.
Marine Le Pen negative
Her 'awakening' rhetoric is analyzed as a paradigm case of the pseudo-awakening that continues dreaming; described as a genuine threat to European emancipatory legacy.
Judith Butler negative
Described as 'my otherwise personal friend'; Žižek argues that Butler's performative self-deconstruction, presented as subversive, is actually the dominant mode of subjectivity in late capitalism.
Donald Trump positive
Treated as a symptom to be analyzed rather than simply opposed; Žižek argues Trump's blatant positions are less culpable than the liberal-left ideology that produced him.
Naomi Klein positive
Žižek endorses Klein's 'Shock Doctrine' argument that capitalism exploits catastrophes to clear social constraints and impose its agenda.
Yuval Noah Harari positive
Žižek relies on Harari's 'Homo Deus' for the analysis of the narrating self, algorithmic governance, and the coming bifurcation between Homo Deus and digital machinery.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just positive
Quoted for his image of the revolutionary as a ship's captain in uncharted waters with no compass, endorsed by Žižek as the model of improvisatory political action over teleological Marxism.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for his response at the London communism conference: pointing out that critics worried about the absence of Asians and women but nobody worried about the absence of workers.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Žižek cites Agamben's formulation 'thought is the courage of hopelessness' as the epigraph and guiding idea for his entire talk.
Pim Fortuyn positive
Cited as the best argument against classifying anti-immigrant populism as fascism: Fortuyn was a 'politically correct anti-immigrant populist' who opposed Muslims on liberal-progressive grounds.
Elon Musk positive
Cited as evidence that even prominent capitalists like Musk admit that market logic is coming to an end around intellectual property and collaborative commons.
George Orwell positive
Žižek opens with an Orwell quote on radicals using revolutionary rhetoric as a superstitious token to prevent real change; describes the insight as wonderful and as the key diagnosis of today's academic left.
Bernie Sanders positive
Cited as an example of an incredible phenomenon, someone who did what was considered unthinkable by mobilizing ordinary working-class people who might otherwise vote for Trump.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Mentioned as an example of a thinker/artist who sold himself as a commodity (task negotiator for his writing) while still doing genuinely important work, used to rebut the charge that Žižek is merely a commodity.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Žižek describes him as 'my very good friend' but raises a contradiction in his simultaneous support for refugee openness and democratic transparency of EU negotiations.
Anders Behring Breivik positive
Described as 'the crazy guy who was not so crazy for this'; used as the prime case study of anti-Semitic Zionism, simultaneously Zionist toward Israel and anti-Semitic toward European Jews.
Michel Foucault positive
Mentioned briefly via his analysis of modern power as regulation and classification, Žižek uses it to argue ironically that political correctness is the 'utmost crazy example' of exactly this Foucauldian regulatory power.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Žižek repeatedly notes Sloterdijk was meant to be present; takes seriously his 'What Happened in the 20th Century' framework of civilizing civilizations and Anthropocene, arguing its conclusions point toward a communist horizon even if Sloterdijk himself would reject the label.
Richard Sennett positive
Cited by Mrs. Heyer for his book on respect and his analysis of dealing with the strangeness of the other in multicultural cities.
Jeremy Rifkin positive
Žižek uses Rifkin's concept of 'collaborative commons' and 'zero marginal costs' as evidence of post-capitalist tendencies emerging within capitalism.
Tim LaHaye negative
Described as 'my favorite author in the sense of absolute nightmare'; cited for his novel Europa which locates evil in a secret West European organization running the EU, used to illustrate the anti-European ideological formation behind Trump.
Mao Zedong positive
The Maoist Cultural Revolution is analyzed dialectically as preparing capitalism; his aphorism 'great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent' is quoted approvingly as the closing sentiment.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited by Mrs. Heyer (in the Q&A) for the parvenu/pariah distinction and the concept of 'conscious pariah' as a model for navigating cultural identity without full assimilation or exclusion.
Reinhard Heydrich positive
Žižek cites a 1935 article by Heydrich praising Jewish industriousness while advocating their relocation to Palestine as an early precursor of anti-Semitic Zionism.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for his insight that fanatical capitalists are a real figure of religious belief, ready to stake everything for the self-reproduction of capital.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek dismisses the 'usual Habermasian dismissal of Sloterdijk as a kind of almost neo-fascist' as wrong and unfair.
Noam Chomsky negative
Žižek notes that Chomsky 'criticized me ferociously' for suggesting a Trump victory might renew the left; uses Chomsky's own 'End of History' article to show that the phenomena Chomsky lists have been ongoing for decades and Trump is only a step further.
What it argues
courage of hopelessness as political stanceecological catastrophe and its renormalizationfailure of liberal-left and leftist Fukuyamaismanti-immigrant populism vs. classical fascismdigital governance and the end of liberal selfhoodcommons, collaborative production, and post-capitalismlimits of democracy and the refugee question
Dialectical moves 12
“The true courage is not to imagine an alternative but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative. The dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice.”
Hope is recast as ideological evasion; real radicalism consists in dwelling in hopelessness rather than escaping it through utopian fantasy.
“The light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction.”
What appears as optimism is actually an oncoming catastrophe; conventional reassurance is a form of false consciousness.
“An event first experienced as impossible but not real becomes real but no longer impossible—once it occurs, it is renormalized.”
The passage from impossibility to normality is the ideological mechanism that prevents us from grasping the true dimensions of catastrophe.
“We like to be guilty, since if we are guilty then it all depends on us—so we can also save ourselves by changing our life.”
Taking personal responsibility for ecological catastrophe is a defense mechanism: it converts helplessness into agency and thereby avoids confronting real impotence.
“In a nice Hegelian move, when capitalism won over its external enemy and united the world, the division returned in its own space.”
Capitalism's triumph over communism did not eliminate division but relocated it internally: the new walls between rich and poor, West and refugee, are immanent to globalization itself.
“The Chinese Cultural Revolution's objective function was to create the conditions for Deng Xiaoping's capitalist opening—it cleared the slate of tradition and produced isolated individuals ready for capitalism.”
A revolutionary movement aimed at destroying capitalism was the dialectical instrument of capitalism's deepest implantation in China.
“This new fascism is democratically legitimized—so those who defend Brussels bureaucracy when it pressures Poland are defending non-democracy against democracy.”
The left finds itself paradoxically supporting undemocratic institutions against democratically legitimate governments it opposes, exposing the limit of the democracy/fascism binary.
“To have some old pro-worker legislation enacted you need right-wing populists in power; to get radical austerity politics enacted, the best thing is to have a radical left like Syriza in power.”
The political positions of left and right have inverted in practice: the nominal left implements austerity while the nominal right enacts welfare measures.
“The fascist awakening is: you awaken precisely in a way to continue to dream, to avoid the true trauma that determines you.”
Right-wing populist 'awakening' is structurally identical to the Freudian dreamer's false awakening, it prevents rather than enables confrontation with the Real.
“Fatalism is the only way towards freedom—we have to accept that we are doomed, and the only way out is not to play Catholic games of good works.”
The Protestant-style acceptance of predestination (we are heading for catastrophe) paradoxically releases the energy needed to actually change the situation.
“What Butler portrays as a subversive position—performative self-deconstruction, experimenting with identity—is simply the de facto predominant model of subjectivity in late capitalism.”
The apparently transgressive poststructuralist subject is not subversive but conformist: flexible self-reinvention is capitalism's preferred mode of selfhood.
“A certain mode of resistance is simply part of the global ideological game today. It's very safe to be resistant.”
Resistance, far from threatening the system, can be its most perfect internal supplement, a form of pseudo-transgression that leaves the structure intact.
Claims 25
asserts
The true courage is not to imagine an alternative but to fully accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative; the dream of an alternative is theoretical cowardice.political hopelessness and radical thought
asserts
Ecological catastrophe undergoes rapid renormalization: what was first experienced as impossible becomes real but is then absorbed into routine life, erasing awareness of its true dimensions.ecology and social psychology
asserts
Our readiness to assume individual guilt for ecological catastrophe is itself a deceptive reassurance: if we are guilty we can also save ourselves, thus avoiding the more traumatic truth of our impotence.individual ecological responsibility and fetishist disavowal
asserts
The super-ego mechanism of individual ecological culpabilization (recycling, organic food) substitutes personal self-examination for systemic political demands and is immediately offset by an easy 'buy your way out' consumer option.ideology of environmentalism
asserts
In capitalism, personal greed is subordinated to the impersonal self-reproduction of capital itself; therefore moralizing anti-capitalism that targets individual greedy capitalists misses the structural point.capitalism and ideology
asserts
The Chinese Cultural Revolution's objective function was to prepare the conditions for Deng Xiaoping's capitalist opening by clearing the slate of tradition and producing isolated individuals ready for capitalism.Maoism and historical dialectic
asserts
To confront ecological dangers, intellectual property, and refugee flows requires moving beyond the market to large transnational organizations—what Žižek calls, despite Sloterdijk's objections, a communist horizon.communism and post-capitalism
rejects
Universal commodification (putting price tags on air, housework) is not the solution to ecological or social problems.environmental capitalism and universal commodification
rejects
The new right-wing anti-immigrant populism is not fascism in the classical sense: Muslims are not the new Jews but rather hyper-visible others, whereas fascist anti-Semitism targeted an invisible master who secretly pulls strings.labelling anti-immigrant populism as fascism
asserts
Today's anti-immigrant populism is a secondary phenomenon generated by the contradictions of liberal democracy itself, not an external threat to it; defeating it requires overcoming liberal democracy's immanent limitations.fascism, populism, and liberal democracy
asserts
When capitalism overcame its communist external enemy and unified the world, the division between inside and outside returned within global capitalism's own space—the new walls are immanent to globalization, not external to it.Berlin Wall, new walls, and Hegelian negation
asserts
A contemporary weird formation of anti-Semitic Zionism has emerged: supporting Israel as a bulwark against Islam while simultaneously warning against Jewish domestic influence in the West.anti-Semitism and Zionism
asserts
Trump is a symptom of what was false in mainstream liberal-left politics; fighting Trump without diagnosing this failure is mere symptom-treatment that leaves the underlying disease intact.Trump and liberal-left failure
asserts
Right-wing populist 'awakening' rhetoric is a pseudo-awakening: like Freud's dreaming father, these movements awaken only in order to continue dreaming and avoid confronting the real antagonisms of global capitalism.fascist awakening and ideology
asserts
Democracy as currently understood requires a certain basic homogeneity of shared values; where this homogeneity is absent, simple majority voting must be replaced by complex negotiation.democracy and multiculturalism
asserts
People are not necessarily right; more democracy or transparency does not automatically produce better outcomes, as shown by the case where closed Brussels negotiations were more favorable to refugees than public ones.democracy, transparency, and refugees
asserts
The liberal true self—the free agent who enacts what I really want—simply does not exist; digital machines can represent our own political opinions better than we can ourselves.liberal subjectivity and digital governance
asserts
The coming radical division will not be between capitalism and communism but between those who acquire divine biotechnological abilities and those who face extinction—far stronger than the old class division.digital capitalism and social bifurcation
asserts
Political correctness, as it actually functions, is a petit-bourgeois ideology that deflects real politico-economic struggles into the policing of correct terminology, and is not genuinely leftist.political correctness and ideology
rejects
What Judith Butler celebrates as subversive performative self-deconstruction is actually the predominant mode of subjectivity in late capitalism and is therefore not subversive at all.Butler's notion of performative subversion
asserts
A certain mode of resistance is part of the global ideological game today; it is very safe to be resistant, and resistance can fit ideally into the existing order.resistance as ideology
asserts
The left does not actually know what it is fighting for and needs to abandon the myth of authentic local community in favor of reinventing large-scale mega-bureaucratic global organizations.left programme and political strategy
asserts
Europe must reinvent itself or die; the true threat to the European emancipatory legacy comes not primarily from immigrants but from right-wing populists like Wilders and Le Pen, as well as from Trump and global neo-conservative powers.Europe and its emancipatory legacy
asserts
The fatalist acceptance that we are predestined to catastrophe is paradoxically the only path to freedom—a Protestant theological insight that functions politically as the precondition for real change.fatalism, freedom, and Protestantism
rejects
Multiculturalism as practiced often means de facto segregation: each group stays in its own neighborhood and maintains its own culture, which is not genuine integration or respect.multiculturalism
Quotes 20
“The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative. The dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice.”Slavoj Žižek · courage of hopelessness
“The true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction.”Slavoj Žižek · false optimism
“We like to be guilty, since if we are guilty, then it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our life.”Slavoj Žižek · ecological fetishist disavowal
“If there is something true in ecology, it's the insight that our Mother Earth is a terrible bitch. Catastrophes were going on before we humans came here, we have no safe place to return.”Slavoj Žižek · against ecological idealization of nature
“In capitalism personal greed is subordinated to the impersonal striving of the capital itself to reproduce and to expand.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism vs. individual greed
“Fanatic capitalists are a real figure—as already Walter Benjamin knew—of religious belief. They are ready to put at stake everything for their sacred goal of the expanded self-reproduction of capital.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism as religion
“This new fascism is democratically legitimized. Leftist critics find themselves defending the non-democratic Brussels administration when it exerts pressure on democratically legitimized new fascist tendencies.”Slavoj Žižek · paradox of left defending EU bureaucracy against democratic populism
“To get radical austerity politics enacted, the best thing is to have some radical left like Syriza in power.”Slavoj Žižek · left-right inversion in practice
“The liberal true self, the free agent which enacts what I really want, simply doesn't exist. And fully endorsing this inexistence means abandoning the basic individualist premise of liberal democracy.”Slavoj Žižek · end of liberal subjectivity
“Some will still have freedom while others will be totally regulated.”Slavoj Žižek · digital bifurcation of freedom
“People are not necessarily right. So when you plead for democracy, you should be very precise and careful about what you want.”Slavoj Žižek · limits of democracy
“Democracy as we know it works only if we can count on a certain basic shared set of values. The moment you don't have this presupposition, a different logic, the logic of complex negotiations, not simple voting, has to enter the game.”Slavoj Žižek · preconditions of democracy
“The fascist awakening is: you awaken precisely in a way to continue to dream, to avoid the true antagonisms of European Union that traverse our global capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · fascist awakening as false awakening
“Trump is a symptom of what was false in predominant liberal left... If you just fight Trump, you do what doctors call symptom treating: you have a serious disease, you take pills which ease the pain, but the illness remains.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump as symptom of liberal-left failure
“Political correctness, the way it effectively works, is simply a petit bourgeois ideology to deflect real politico-economic struggles with the struggle for correct words.”Slavoj Žižek · political correctness as bourgeois ideology
“What Butler portrays as a subversive position... is simply the de facto predominant model of subjectivity in late capitalism. I don't see anything subversive in this type of subjectivity.”Slavoj Žižek · Butler's performative subversion as capitalist subjectivity
“I want to live in a society of tolerable well-functioning alienation. That's my point!”Slavoj Žižek · against myth of authentic community
“An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to listen to. Yes, up to a certain point, but will you tell Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to him? The more you listen to him, the more you do discover that he is an enemy.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of naïve empathy ethics
“Under heaven there is great disorder, so the situation is excellent.”Slavoj Žižek · courage of hopelessness / Maoist dialectic
“It is only when we despair and don't know anymore what to do that change can be enacted. We have to go through this zero point of hopelessness.”Slavoj Žižek · hopelessness as condition of change
Transcript 96 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I’m glad, I hope this works. I’m glad to be here again, although my dream was to speak from the bed, and probably there is also the [unintelligible] something would have happened with that [unintelligible]. Okay. I hope you will not be too bored because I will really talk about what the title says, The Courage of Hopelessness, a kind of a quick overview of the ethico-political situation in which we are and what we can hope about, what we can do, what we should do. I would like to begin with what I see as the predominant attitude among today’s academic leftists. I think this attitude is the one which back in George Orwell described in a wonderful way. It’s a quote from George Orwell: “We all rail against class distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can really be changed.” End of quote. Orwell’s point is that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that should achieve the opposite, that should prevent the change from really taking place. Like today’s academic leftist who criticizes capitalist cultural imperialism but is in reality horrified at the idea that his field of study would really break down. The stance here is the same as that of the smoker convinced that he can stop smoking if he chooses to do so. The possibility of change is evoked to guarantee that it will not be acted upon. And I mean this literally. I read a short essay on smoking and they say that the very fact that you think that, oh, but I can stop smoking whenever I want, makes it sure that you will never stop smoking. It is only when we despair and don’t know anymore what to do that change can be enacted. We have to go through this zero point of hopelessness. The lesson of the 20th-century communism is that we have to gather the strength to fully assume this hopelessness. Giorgio Agamben said in a recent interview that thought is the courage of hopelessness. An insight which I think is especially pertinent for our historical moment when even the most pessimistic diagnostics as a rule finish with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative. The dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice. It functions as a fetish which prevents us from thinking to the end the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction. This train approaching us from the opposite direction assumed lately many forms. In the last year or so, troubles in our global capitalist paradise exploded at at least four levels: the renewed fundamentalist terrorist threat, the declaration of war against ISIS and so on; geopolitical tensions with and between non-European new powers, China, Russia and so on; the flow of refugees crossing the wall that separates us from them, or as Peter Sloterdijk, who unfortunately was not able to be here today, he uses the term cupola, like we in the privileged West live under a cupola and we do not even see this wall that separates us from the outside; and, of course, the last threat, ecology. So let me begin by ecology. In December smog in big Chinese cities became so thick that thousands fled into the countryside, trying to reach a place where one can still see blue sky. This airpocalypse affected half a billion people. For those who remained, moving around began to resemble life in a post-apocalyptic Hollywood blockbuster: people walking around with large gas masks in a smog where even nearby trees are invisible. A new category was thus added to the long list of refugees: from wars, droughts, tsunamis, earthquakes, economic crises, and so on—smog refugees. Now, perhaps the most surprising thing about this airpocalypse is its quick renormalization. After the authorities could no longer deny the problem, they tried to establish a new procedure which somehow enables people to continue their daily life by way of following new routines, as if the catastrophic smog is just a new fact of life. On designated days, you try to stay at home as much as possible, if necessary you walk around with masks. Children even in China, I read, rejoice in the news that on many days schools remain closed, an opportunity to stay at home and play. Making a trip to the countryside where the blue sky is still visible becomes a special occasion one looks forward to. There are already in China, I was told, dozens of agencies specialized in such one-day trips. They just promise they will take you to a place where you will see the sky. The important thing is, that's the official motto, not to panic and to maintain the appearance that in spite of all troubles, life goes for. One thing is sure: an extraordinary social and psychological change is taking place in front of our eyes. The impossible or unthinkable is becoming possible. An event first experienced as impossible but not real—the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe, which however probable we know it is, we do not believe that it will effectively take place—becomes real but no longer impossible. Once the catastrophe occurs, it is renormalized, perceived as part of the normal run of things. The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is the one between knowledge and belief. We know the ecological catastrophe and other catastrophes are possible, probable even, yet we do not believe they will really happen. Recall the same mechanism in another field: the years ago, a little bit more, the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. The fact that a normal European city of half a million inhabitants will be encircled, starved, regularly bombed, its citizens terrorized by sniper fire and so on, and that this will go on for three years, was considered unimaginable just two weeks before. It would have been extremely easy for Western powers to break the siege of Sarajevo and open a small safe corridor out of the city. When the siege began, even the citizens of Sarajevo thought this is a short-term event. They just, most of them, tried to send their children to safety for a week or two, then this mess will be over, they thought. And then very fast, the siege was normalized. This same passage from impossibility to normalization is clearly discernible now in the United States liberal establishment after Donald Trump’s victory. First they were in a panic, it cannot happen, once it happened it is renormalized. And this renormalization is very interesting. Already back in July CNN was showing a report "The Greening of Greenland," celebrating new opportunities that the melting of ice offers to Greenlanders. They can already grow vegetables in open land and so on. The obscenity of this report is not only that it focuses on the minor benefits of a global catastrophe. To add insult to injury, it plays on the double meaning of "green" in our public speech: green for vegetation, green for ecological concerns. So that the fact that more vegetation can grow on the Greenland soil because of the global warming is associated with the rising of ecological awareness. Are such phenomena not yet another example of how right Naomi Klein was when in her *Shock Doctrine* she described the way global capitalism exploits catastrophes to get rid of the old social constraints and impose its agenda on the slate cleared by the catastrophe? Perhaps the forthcoming ecological disasters, far from undermining capitalism, will serve as its greatest boost. I think again of this Hegel's idea of cunning of reason: you engage in doing something, the result is the opposite. This Hegelian logic is more valid than ever. Let's take a cold look at Chinese Cultural Revolution, Maoism in the sixties. What was his, if I may use this suspicious teleological term, what was the objective function of Cultural Revolution? Today I think is clear: to create the conditions for Deng Xiaoping reform, for the capitalist opening. What Cultural Revolution did is clear the slate of tradition, produce isolated individuals who were ready for the new onslaught of capitalism. What gets lost in this shift from impossibility to renormalization is the proper sense of what is going on, with all unexpected traps the catastrophe hides. For example, one of the unpleasant paradoxes of our predicament is that the very attempts to counteract ecological threats may contribute to the warming of the poles. The ozone hole helps shield the interior of the Antarctic from global warming, so if it will be healed, the Antarctic could quickly catch up with the warming of the rest of the Earth. One thing at least is sure. In the last decades, it was fashionable to talk about the predominant role of intellectual labor in our post-industrial societies. However, materiality is now reasserting itself with a vengeance in all its aspects, from the forthcoming struggle for scarce resources—water, food, energy, minerals—to environmental pollution. Now comes the more tricky part of my analysis. Even when we profess the readiness to assume our responsibility for ecological catastrophes, this can be a tricky strategy to avoid the true dimensions of the catastrophe. There is something deceptively reassuring in our readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment. We like to be guilty, since if we are guilty, then it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our life. What is really difficult for us, at least for us in the West, to accept is that we are reduced to a purely passive role of an impotent observer who can only sit and watch what his fate will be. To avoid such a situation, we are prone to engage in frantic obsessive activity: recycle old paper, buy organic food, whatever, just so that you can be sure that you are doing something, making your contribution. Like a football fan who supports his team in front of the TV screen at home, jumping and jumping from his seat in a superstitious belief that this will somehow influence the outcome. It is true that the typical form of fetishist disavowal apropos ecology is, I know very well that we are all trapped, but I don't really believe it, so I am not ready to do anything important to change my way of life. But there is also the opposite form of disavowal: I know very well that I cannot really influence the process which can lead to my ruin, like a volcanic outburst, but it is nonetheless too traumatic for me to accept this, so I cannot resist the urge to do something even if I know it is ultimately meaningless. I claim, is it not for this same reason that we buy organic food? Who really believes that the half-rotten and expensive organic apples are really healthier? The point is that by way of buying them, we do not just buy and consume a product, we simultaneously do something meaningful: show our care for Mother Earth, our global awareness, we participate in a large collective project and so on. I claim we have to finish with such games. The airpocalypse in China is a clear indication of the limits of our predominant environmentalism, this strange combination of catastrophism and routine, of guilt feeling and indifference. Ecology is today one of the major ideological battlefields, with a whole series of strategies to obfuscate the true dimension of the ecological threat. First, we still find with persons like Donald Trump simple ignorance: it’s a marginal phenomenon not worthy of our preoccupation, life of capital goes on, nature will take care of itself. Second position: science and technology can save us. Third position: leave the solution to the market, higher taxation of the polluters and so on. Fourth position: super-ego pressure on personal responsibility instead of large systemic measures. Each of us should do what he or she can: recycle, consume less, and so on. Fifth position, maybe the worst of them all: advocating a return to natural balance, to a more modest traditional life by means of which we renounce human hubris and become again respectful children of our Mother Earth. This whole paradigm of Mother Nature derailed by our hubris is wrong. As I always repeat, if there is something true in ecology, it’s the insight that our Mother Earth is a terrible bitch. Catastrophes were going on before we humans came here, we have no safe place to return. So, does the predominant ecological discourse not address us as a priori guilty, indebted to Mother Nature, under the constant pressure of the ideological ecological super-ego agency which addresses us in our individuality? The way ideology functions today when you complain about ecological threats is: but what did you do today to repay your debt to nature? Did you put all newspapers into a proper recycle bin? And all the bottles of beer or cans of Coke? Did you use your car when you could have used a bike or some means of public transport? Did you use air conditioning instead of just did you just open wide the windows instead of using air conditioning and so on and so forth? The ideological stakes of such individualization are easily discernible. I get lost in my own self-examination instead of raising much more pertinent global questions about our civilization. Plus, one should note how this individual culpabilization is immediately supplemented by a very easy way out: recycle, buy organic food, use renewable energy and so on and you no longer have to feel guilty, you can enjoy your life as usual. If I may use again, I even I think already used it in this very place, my favorite example Starbucks. Buy Starbucks cappuccino, they always emphasize: goes for some stupid Guatemala children, for some African jungle and so on. So you can remain a consumerist. It’s an ingenious strategy how the price of for catastrophes caused by consumerism is simply included into the price of the commodity. So you can go on. Another trap to be avoided is the moralizing anti-capitalism. All the talk about how capitalism is sustained by the egotist greed of individual capitalists for more power and wealth and so on. In reality I claim, in capitalism personal greed is subordinated to the impersonal striving of the capital itself to reproduce and to expand. So I think it's not that we need less egotism, we need maybe more enlightened egotism. I think that fanatic capitalists are real figure as already Walter Benjamin knew of religious belief. They are ready to put at stake everything for their sacred goal of the expanded self-reproduction of capital. Not to mention the fact that this individualized anti-capitalism, our media are full of anti-capitalism, no, this company is cheating, polluting environment, the other companies using slave labor and so on and children labor and so on and so on. Just to avoid more radical systemic questions. So what is to be done? As Lenin would have put it. And I’m here sad that Peter Sloterdijk, who is unfortunately not a Leninist, is not here, because I think he should be taken seriously. I absolutely reject the usual Habermasian dismissal of Sloterdijk as a kind of almost neo-fascist. In his last book, if it is the last, *What Happened in the 20th Century*, Sloterdijk provides his own outline of what is to be done. This outline is encapsulated by the titles of the first two essays in his book: *The Anthropocene* and *From the Domestication of Man to the Civilizing of Cultures*. Anthropocene, as we all know, designates a new epoch in the life of our planet in which we humans cannot any longer rely on the Earth as a reservoir ready to absorb the consequences of our productive activity. We cannot any longer afford to ignore the side effects, collateral damage of our productivity. These effects cannot any longer be reduced to the background of the figure of humanity. We have to accept that we live on a spaceship Earth, responsible and accountable for its conditions. Earth is no longer the impenetrable background or horizon of our productive activity, it emerges as another finite object which we can inadvertently destroy or transform to make it unlivable. This means that at the very moment when we become powerful enough to affect the most basic conditions of our life, we have to accept that we are just another species on a small planet. A new way to relate to our environments is necessary once we realize this. No longer a heroic worker expressing his/her/their creative potentials and drawing from the inexhaustible resources from our environments, but a much more modest agent collaborating with our environments, permanently negotiating a tolerable level of safety and stability. What matters in capitalist reproduction is the self-enhancing circulation focused on profit, and the collateral damage done to the environment is not included into the costs of production. It is in principle ignored. Even the attempts to take it into account through taxation or by way of directly putting a price tag on every natural resource cannot but misfire. Namely, do you know that one of the solutions which are debated today is a radical universalized capitalism. Like the idea is that everything should be commodified. Some crazy American environmental capitalists made this experiment: they tried to put a price tag even on air, on air, they claim I don't know so many trillions of billions of dollars, so we should treat it as another commodity and charge it. Feminists tried something, some feminists, similar years ago when I was young: they claimed that housework of the wife is not paid, so let's pay, let's account how much it costs and so on and so on. I don’t think this universal commodification is the solution. So, in order to establish a new mode of relating to our environments, a more radical politico-economic change will be necessary. What Sloterdijk calls the domestication of the wild animal culture. Namely, till now each culture disciplined or educated its own members and guaranteed civic peace among them in the guise of state power. But the relationship between different cultures and states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each state, each state of peace nothing more than a temporary truce. As Hegel conceptualized it, the entire ethics of state of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism: the readiness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation-state, which means that the wild barbarian relations between the states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within every state. Is today’s North Korea with its ruthless pursuit of nuclear weapons and rockets to hit with them distant targets, not the ultimate example of this logic of unconditional nation-state sovereignty? However, the moment we fully accept the fact that we live on a spaceship Earth, the task that urgently imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves, of imposing universal solidarity, cooperation among all human communities, a task rendered all the more difficult by the ongoing rise of sectarian religious and ethnic heroic violence and readiness to sacrifice oneself and the world for one's specific cause. The overcoming of capitalist expansionism, wide international cooperation and solidarity that should also be able to transform themselves into an executive power ready to violate state sovereignty, are these not all measures destined to protect our natural and cultural commons? So although I know that Sloterdijk would explode if I were to call him a communist, he is very anti-communist, I think that what he describes as our task, all the features point towards some kind of communism. They imply a communist horizon, the horizon of some global cooperation beyond state sovereignty, beyond global market. So what is to be done, again? Maybe one should follow the good old Marxist path and shift the focus from politics to the signs of post-capitalism that are clearly discernible within global capitalism itself, for example in the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin calls collaborative commons, a new mode of production and exchange which seems to leave behind private property and market exchange. One could thus conceive collaborative commons as the return at a higher level of the gift exchange. In collaborative commons, individuals are giving their products free into circulation. This emancipatory dimension of collaborative commons should of course be located into the context of the rise of what people call Internet of Things, combined with another result of today’s development of productive forces: the explosive rise of zero marginal costs. More and more products can be reproduced for no additional costs. However, I claim two mutually exclusive readings of Internet of Things impose themselves. Internet of Things as the domain of potential radical emancipation, a unique chance of combining freedom and collaboration where, to paraphrase Juliet’s definition of love from Shakespeare’s *Romeo and Juliet*, the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite. Versus Internet of Things as complete subversion into the divine digital other where I am deprived of my freedom of agency. But are these two readings really mutually exclusive? Are they not just two different views on the same reality? What are the things in this so much celebrated Internet of Things? They refer, as we all know, to a wide variety of devices such as heart monitoring implants, biochip transponders on farm animals, electric clams in coastal waters, automobiles with built-in sensors, DNA analysis devices for environmental food monitoring, and so on. These devices collect useful data with the help of various existing technologies and then automatically flow the data between other devices. Human individuals here are also things whose states and activities are continuously registered and transmitted without their knowledge: their physical movements, their financial transactions, their health, their eating and drinking habits, what they buy and sell, what they read, listen to, watch and so on. All is collected in digital networks which know ourselves better than we ourselves know ourselves. The problem is how will this explosion of the Internet of Things affect our the identity of our self? I here briefly rely on a popular book Yuval Harari’s *Homo Deus*. Harari describes how our self is composed of narratives which retroactively try to impose some consistency on the pandemonium of our experiences, obliterating experiences and memories which disturb these narratives. Ideology does not reside primarily in stories invented by those in power to deceive others. It resides in stories invented by ordinary subjects ourselves to deceive ourselves. But the pandemonium persists and the machines, the digital machines, will register the discord and will maybe be able to deal with this discord in a much more rational way than our conscious self. Say, when I have to decide to marry or not, the machine will register all the shifting attitudes that haunt me, my past pains, disappointments that I prefer to swipe under the carpet. And incidentally, an American computer scientist told me they already made this wonderful experiment: a couple of some couples who were thinking about marrying themselves accepted to be totally monitored, their activities, their statements and so on. And then without telling them, the scientist registered the computer’s advice. It was much better in the long term, appropriate than the wrong decision. Computer absolutely predicted this marriage will last, this marriage will not last and so on and so on. And why not extend this prospect even to political decisions? While myself can be easily seduced by a populist demagogue, the machine will take note of all my past frustrations, it will register the inconsistencies between my fleeting passions and my other opinions. So why should the machine not vote on my behalf? Again, my friends in United States already did the same experiment precisely with Trump voters and some others. They followed them, registered their opinions, their habits and so on, and then they not only predicted how they will vote, but they predicted how in accordance with their own true convictions they should vote. And again, machine made a better decision. So again, maybe this is the solution to get rid of the air polluters, no, computers to vote. Here’s loss. Okay. Why my again, so while brain sciences confirm the post-structuralist idea that we are stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, stories which are a confused bricolage, an inconsistent multiplicity of stories with no single self totalizing them, brain sciences seem to offer or promise at least a way out which is precisely because the machine which reads us all the time is blind without awareness, a mechanic algorithm, it can make decisions which are much more adequate than those made by human individuals. Much more adequate not only with regard to external reality but also and above all with regard to these individuals themselves, to what they want or need. A quote from Harari: “Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self and allows it to vote in the polling stations, in the supermarket and in the marriage market. For centuries this made good sense because though the narrating self believed in all kinds of fictions and fantasies, no alternative system knew me better. Yet once we have a system that really knows me better, it will be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of the narrating self. Liberal habits such as democratic election will become obsolete because Google will be able to represent even my own political opinions better than myself.” End of quote. One can make a very realistic case for this option. Scientists who advocate this option, they don't claim that the computer is omnipotent and infallible. No, it can make mistakes. It is simply that on average its decisions work substantially better than the decisions of our mind in many things. It makes better diagnosis than our average doctor and so on. Up to the exploding algorithmic trading on stock markets where programs that one can now download for free already outperform financial advisors. For example, I read recently that specialists on in a stockbroker’s advisers on Wall Street are in a panic because some two ordinary guys put on the market, you can freely download it, a program and it's proven that if you simply follow that program in your investments, the result on average is better than if you follow expensive expensive advisors. One thing is clear: the liberal true self, the free agent which enacts what I really want, simply doesn't exist. And fully endorsing this inexistence means abandoning the basic individualist premise of liberal democracy. So if development will render Homo sapiens obsolete, what will follow? One option is a post-human Homo Deus with abilities that are traditionally identified as divine, or the opposite option: a quasi-omnipotent digital machine. So it's either singularity, we will immerse ourselves into some kind of unified global awareness, or blind intelligence decoupled from our consciousness. My option here is that what will probably happen is a third possibility, a radical division much stronger than the class division within human societies. What do I mean by this? Among the best Soviet jokes that I remember from my youth is the one about a debate in the Politburo in high Stalinism, about money. Will there be money in communism or not? Leftists claimed that there will be no money since money belongs to capitalist alienation. And rightists claimed of course there will be money to facilitate exchange of products, you cannot have products without some measure of exchange without some measure of their value and it's natural to have money. Now comes the joke. Stalin intervenes, he rejects both views as wrong, as a rightist and leftist deviation, and proposes a dialectical synthesis: there will be no money and there will be money. Then the shocked members of the Politburo ask, but comrade Stalin, how will this function? And Stalin in his infinite genius calmly answers: well, it's easy, some will have money and others will not have money. We should apply in the same way to the dilemma: will the future be totally digitalized society still allow human freedom or will we all be just elements controlled by the digital machine? The answer is both at the same time: some will still have freedom while other others will be totally regulated. In the near future, biotechnology and computer algorithms will join their powers in producing bodies, brains and minds, with the gap exploding between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who not. Those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities while those left behind will face extinction. So again, what to do here? The first thing to do I think is to leave behind all the pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-rational talk about strategic risks that we have to assume, as well as the notion of historical time as the linear progress of evolution where at each moment we have to choose between different options. We have to accept this threat as our fate. It is not just a question of avoiding risks and making the right choices within the global situation. The true threat resides in this situation in its entirety, in our fate. If we continue to roll on the way we do now, we are doomed, no matter how carefully we proceed. So the solution is not to be very careful and avoid risks. In acting like this, we fully participate in the logic which leads to catastrophe. The solution is to fully become aware of the explosive set of interconnections which makes the entire situation dangerous. Once we do this, once we embrace the courage that comes with such hopelessness, we should embark on the long and difficult work of changing the coordinates of the entire situation. I don't have time here to go into very interesting theological consequences of this attitude, because I think that fatalism is the only way towards freedom. And I think Protestantism knew this. We have to accept that we are doomed and the only way out is not to play any of these Catholic games, you know, but maybe we are not if we do some good works. We are predestined, our fate is to approach a catastrophe, but we can change our fate. I don't have time to go into this theological aspect. So let me go into what are the consequences of this stance. I think that many sacred cows will have to fall here. Now let me commit a public suicide and finish with my pessimistic political analysis. One should render problematic what seems the most self-evident today for us: the calls for transparency of European Union decisions. Since in many countries the majority of the public was against the Greek debt reduction, rendering new negotiations public would make representatives of these countries advocate even tougher measures against Greece. You know what I mean? Like apropos how to deal with this is what shocks I even with my very good friend Yanis Varoufakis, I have this problem. He is at the same time for more opening towards refugees and for the transparency responsibility to the people of you alienated European bureaucracy. But it's a very tragic thing, don't play with this. I've spoken with some politicians who were part of these negotiations, and they told me, you know that it would have been much worse for refugees if the decision process in Brussels would have been totally transparent. And you if you follow the meetings in Brussels, you could see that, for example, it was with Slovene representative, I know, when the meetings because some of them were a little bit left-leaning, when the meetings in Brussels were closed, they tried to make it as good as possible for the refugees. When the meetings were public, ah, they were much more careful because they knew that, to cut a long story short, the majority of the people in at least the majority of European countries favor radical limitation of refugees of immigrants. And this is my first conclusion, a very brutal one: people are not necessarily right. So when you plead when you ask democracy, you should be for more democracy transparency, you should be very precise and careful about what you want. I claim democracy now in Europe has its own dangers. If by democracy we simply mean that the predominant opinion as it is now should be enacted. We have here the typical discontent, anxiety of European liberal left. It sees the threat, the biggest threat is for this liberal left the threat of new fascism embodied in anti-immigrant rightist populism. This scarecrow is perceived as the principal enemy against which we should all unite, from whatever remains of the radical left to mainstream liberal democrats. Europe is portrayed as a continent regressing towards a new fascism which feeds on the paranoiac hatred and fear of the external ethnic-religious enemy, mostly Muslims. While this new fascism is directly predominant in some post-communist East European countries, Hungary, Poland and so on, it is also getting stronger and stronger in many other countries where the view is that the Muslim refugees invasion poses a threat to the European legacy. It is here I think that we should not lose nerves and persist in the basic Marxist insight: this fascism is strictly a secondary phenomenon, engendered by its apparent opposite, the open liberal-democratic universe. So the only way to truly defeat it is to overcome the immanent limitations of the latter. Namely, this new fascism, as they call it, is—this is the paradox—is democratically legitimized. Leftist critics of European Union now find themselves in a strange predicament. On the one hand, they deplore the democratic deficit of the European Union and propose plans to make more transparent the decision-making in Brussels. On the other hand, they support the non-democratic Brussels administration when it exert pressure on democratically legitimized new, they call them, fascist tendencies. Like did you notice how the same critics of Europe who criticize Brussels bureaucracy when it proceeds, it protects interests of capital and so on and so on, were absolutely for Brussels bureaucracy when they could pressure on Poland, on the—I hate the Polish government the way they have it now, but let's face it: it's fully democratically elected government, rightist, anti-immigrant and so on, Eurocentric, but not only it has clearly the support of the majority, but even more, it's a very sad irony. It's one of the few governments today in Europe which lately enacted clear pro-workers legislation: like they lowered retirement, better credits for students, better healthcare and so on and so on. We effectively live in crazy times where to have some old pro-workers legislation enacted, you need right-wing populist in power, while the opposite lesson also goes, to get radical austerity politics enacted, the best thing is to have some radical left like Syriza in power. But another problem: is this fascism, this new fascism, anti-immigrant populism, really fascism? I think there are two wrong generalizations about today’s society circulating around. The first one is that we live in an era of universalized anti-Semitism. With the military defeat of fascism, the role once played by the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew is now played by any foreign group experienced as a threat to our identity: Latinos, Africans, and especially Muslims are in today’s Western society treated as the new Jews. The other wrong generalization is that the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the proliferation of new walls intended to separate us from the dangerous other: the wall separating Israel from the West Bank, the planned wall between United States and Mexico and so on. True, but I claim there is a key distinction between these two walls. The Berlin Wall stood for the Cold War division of the world, and although it was perceived as the barrier that keeps isolated the population of the totalitarian communist states, it also signaled that capitalism was not the only option, that an alternative to it, although a deeply flawed one, existed. The walls that are rising today are on the contrary walls whose construction was triggered by the very fall of the Berlin Wall, that is to say, the disintegration of the communist alternative. These new walls don't stand for the division between capitalism and communism but for the division which is strictly immanent to the global capitalist order itself. In a nice Hegelian move, when capitalism won over its external enemy and united the world, the division returned in its own space. As for the first generalization, universalized anti-Semitism, Muslims are today’s Jews and so on, there is rather obvious distinction I claim between fascism proper and today’s anti-immigrant populism. Let’s recall the basic premise of the Marxist analysis of capitalism. Capitalism is a reign of abstraction. In it, social relations are regulated, dominated by abstractions, which are not just subjective abstractions, abstractions performed by our minds, but objective abstractions, abstractions that rule social reality itself, what Marx called real abstraktion, real abstraction. These abstractions are part of our social experience. We directly experience our social life as regulated by impenetrable mechanisms which are beyond representation, which cannot be embodied in any individual. Even capitalists who replace the old master are enslaved by powers beyond their control. And the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew embodies this abstraction. It is the invisible master who secretly pulls the strings. Jews are fully integrated into our society, they deceivingly appear as one of us, so the problem and task is to clearly identify them. Muslim immigrants on the other hand are not today’s Jews. They are not invisible as the Jew is for the anti-Semitic subject. They are fully, even all too visible. They are clearly not integrated into our societies, and nobody claims they secretly pull the strings. If one sees in their so-called invasion of Europe a secret plot, then Jews have to be behind it. As you think I’m kidding here, but if you allow me just some five-ten minutes to conclude, the latest stage of pseudo-pro-Western racism already functions at this level. People claim that Trump’s politics is contradictory because on the one hand it flirts with Israel, supporting Israel against Palestinians, on the other hand it it refers it refers it is close to some homegrown anti-Semitism in United States. No, I think there is nothing new. We are witnessing today a weird phenomenon that I cannot but call anti-Semitic Zionism. Already you remember Breivik, the crazy guy who was not so crazy for this big involved in Norway who killed people at social democratic labor camp. He was literally an anti-Semitic Zionist. With regard to Israel he was a Zionist: yes, we should help Israel, it stands as a barrier against Arab invasion and so on, but here in the West he warned against too much too much Jewish influence. And the roots of this anti-Semitic Zionism are already in the Nazi party. I found a wonderful quote in an article written by Reinhard Heydrich in I think, where he says: Jews are a great people, we want the best possible collaboration with them, they are industrious, they will be successful, just not here. They should have the right to their own state in Palestine and once they move there we will have best relations with them, just not here. We have again the same re- and so because of this, it's this is literally true. I found already, I will not bore you now by quoting them, I found already a couple of examples of people who claim, because it's the only consequent paranoiac version, that if this what they claim invasion of Muslims is really an organized invasion, Jews must be behind it. I will not give you names, but what the popular target of right-wing press is George Soros for this, because he is a Jew, a rich Jew who supports immigrants. And for them, so for them it's a wonderful paranoiac theory, horrible of course, that they even some of them go so far as to say that all this Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just a mask to delude us Europeans, to cover up the true fact: they are one and the same force working together, Jews and Arabs to ruin Christian Europe. That we are dealing with Judeo-Muslim plot. Okay, maybe in the debate we come on further. What I’m saying is that this new fascism, as it is called like this, I’m not I don't like it of course I’m horrified at it, but to call it fascism I think means to commit a terrible mistake which is typical of the lazy leftists. They they see something bad happening, they don't want to think what is really new in this what is happening, so the easiest way is to apply this old word, oh it's fascism and so on. No, you yourself had a figure which is the best argument against: you remember he was killed years ago, Pim Fortuyn, your politician. He was, I cannot designate him other as a politically correct anti-immigrant populist. Because you know his argument against Muslims was precisely: they are not politically correct, they are racist, anti-feminist and so on and so on, this is why... So again, we have to think what is happening. The next thing, as already hinted at them, that we will have to think and rethink is the very notion of democracy, how can it work? A year and a half ago, I was involved in a debate in Germany where Süddeutsche Zeitung asked some viewers to ask me a question. And one of them asked me a simple question which is: who gave Angela Merkel the right to call immigrants to come, to open the gates, when it was clear that on a referendum the majority of people would have been against? Didn't she act in a totally, clearly non-democratic way? One has to admit she was, sorry not she, she was, yes, but that from purely democratic way a leader should follow the opinion, this doesn't go. So when people want more democracy in Europe, one should very precisely approach this problem again: what do we mean by democracy? Who should vote? Should immigrants also vote? Which immigrants? Those who are already here, those who are not not yet here and so on and so forth. You know people like to say, oh democracy, pluralist democracy, but I’m more and more a pessimist and my claim is that democracy as we know it, and that's what some people don't like to hear, works only if we can count on a certain basic shared set of values. Minority can submit itself to the will of majority only if they nonetheless share a certain set of cultural values, way of life and so on and so forth. The moment you don't have this presupposition, a certain homogeneity, a totally different, not totally different, a different logic, the logic of complex negotiations, not simple voting, has to has to enter has to enter the game. So just to finish, where are we today? We had a fake awakening in the United States. It's very interesting how Trump uses this term of awakening. Against political alienation, people have spoken, people awakened and so on and so forth. And Marine Le Pen and other European populist anti-immigrant politicians already use this term and claim: was, I quote Marine Le Pen, was the year the Anglo-Saxon world woke up with Trump and Brexit; I am certain, says Marine Le Pen, will be the year when the people of continental Europe wake up. End of quote. Just allow me briefly to finish. What does awakening mean here? In his *Interpretation of Dreams*, Freud reports on a rather terrifying dream: a tired father who was spending the night watching wake waking at the coffin of his young son who died, falls asleep and dreams that his son is approaching him all in flames, addressing at him the horrifying question, "Father, can't you see I'm burning?" Soon afterwards, father awakens and discovers that due to the overturned candle, the cloth of his dead son's shroud effectively caught fire. The smoke that he smelled while asleep was incorporated into the dream of the burning son to prolong his sleep. You know that's the intelligent Freudian version, that's how dreams work: you have an external, you know these stupid dreams where a phone rings and instead of awakening, you quickly construct a dream where I am reasoning part of it. So now we have the so why did the father finally awaken? Here we should be good Freudians: it’s not because the external signal became too strong, and you know, up to a certain point you can ignore the smoke, but when it gets to... No. Because father constructed a dream to postpone awakening, including the smoke into his dream, but then what he encountered in the dream was much much more horrible than external reality, this nightmarish apparition of his son reproaching him for betraying him. So the father awakened to avoid the real, the deepest truth of his being that he encountered in the dream. And I claim this exactly is the fascist awakening. You know you awaken but awakened precisely in a way to continue to dream, that is to say, to avoid the true trauma that determines you determines you, you continue to dream. That’s the problem with European anti-immigrant politicians who say Europe awaken wake up: no, their message is continue to dream, that is to say to avoid the true antagonisms of European Union that traverse our global capitalism. In the recent texts with the title "The End of History: The short strange era of human civilization would appear to be drawing to a close," Noam Chomsky reports on a set of phenomena which augur the likely end of the era of civilization. One should note that Chomsky, who criticized me ferociously for my idea that a Trump victory may lead to a renewed left, enumerates here phenomena—global warming, deforestation, war-zone devastations and so on—which are going on for decades. The most one can say is that Trump’s blatant denial of the ecological threat pushes the danger a step further. So that’s my point. Of course I am like crazy against Trump, but we should never forget that Trump is a symptom of what was false in predominant, I like to call it ironically, leftist Fukuyamaism. Because this was the basic attitude of the liberal left: we accept global capitalism the way it is, just make it a little bit more human, more healthcare, more this, more that. I claim that this liberal left lost and if we want really to get rid of Trump, it’s not enough just to fight Trump. If you just fight Trump, you do what I think doctors call symptom treating: you know you have a serious disease, you can take pills which just ease the pain, but the illness remains there. The only way to really fight Trump is, I claim, to ask what went wrong with our mainstream liberal democracy so that not only in United States but also in Europe Trump-ist phenomena are exploding. We should begin with this self-criticism of the liberal left. Because at one point Marine Le Pen hit the mark: will be the moment of truth for Europe. I am not a right-winger, but I claim really Europe is threatened today, not by immigrants primarily, secondary phenomenon, we should open our gates more to them, but are we aware what is happening? That this strange alliance, and it’s not just did the Russians meddle with American election and so on, but independently of this, you should read these ideologists who are behind Trump: their big enemy is simply European Union. Their enemy is the new global order, the new secret world government, they say, which is embodied in Europe. For example, my favorite author, favorite in the sense of absolute nightmare, Tim LaHaye, LaHaye or what, is one of these crazy neo-Christian writers who writes about about the end of time and so on and so on. He wrote a novel called *Europa* where he locates the evil into some secret West European organization which runs European Union and which is also behind Arab terrorism, behind all bad things and so on. So again, the enemy is Europe, united Europe. This is the an old theory, nothing to do with Putin, by Trump, this is... So I claim that Europe will either have to reinvent itself or die. In the years to come, the big battlefield will be in Europe, and at stake will be the very core of European emancipatory legacy. Don't fall into easy criticism of Eurocentrism, because at least it should give you to think how all neo-conservative powers participate in this irredecision. In China you have dozens of books in English even published about unilateral for example they claim European democracy is not good, we need a more deliberative democracy. Then I ask them, what do you mean by the deliberative democracy? Then answer was not just voting decision but deliberation. But then I nonetheless asked them, okay okay but at the end who will decide? So that’s the point: it’s simply a pre-democratic vision of a wise ruler should deliberate, ask people and then he decides and so on and so on. Again, I think that on the interest of global emancipation, now is the time to fight for European legacy. The European legacy is threatened not only by today’s Russia, Trump and so on, but also by our own right-wingers. My god, if people like Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen... we shouldn't say we must oppose them because of some multiculturalism. No, we must proudly say: people like Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, if they come to power, this is the end of Europe, of whatever is good to fight for in European legacy. They are the true threat to Europe. So we live in very difficult times, but to really conclude with my favorite Mao Zedong saying, you know when Mao said: under heaven there is great disorder, so the situation is excellent. Maybe precisely in such terrible moments something new will really emerge. But maybe not, who knows. Thank you very much. [The speaker sits down to applause] [Moderator:] Thank you, Mr. Žižek. Let’s start with the first question. Mr. Žižek, thank you very much for your lecture. I’m very curious what Mrs. Heyer thought of it. Could you maybe mention in this flow of words what highlight you would pick out? [Mrs. Heyer:] Well, I’ll begin with long, long, long [unintelligible]. Okay. I’m sorry. I like the idea that you say yes to the immigrants, no, yes to even more refugees. But I’m wondering whether we can do away with the humanitarian talk. I would say the humanitarian talk is very important also if we reflect on this large mondial problem of so many refugees and of course economic analysis are also important, but I would mix the both. So that’s one point. Then you said that we should try to do away with capitalism, and I think it’s a very nice dream, maybe a utopia, but I’m not so sure if we will ever be able to do it without capitalism. I mean money which makes the world go round, and that will probably continue for hundred or maybe thousands of years. But in the meantime, we can, and there is where I agree with you, we can try to find collaborative commons, as you called them. We can find ways to really stimulate the networks between people and maybe connected with the Internet of Things, so organize a kind of alternative world next to and maybe interwoven with the capitalist world. But I’m not convinced that capitalism will end very soon. So that’s kind of my first thoughts. Thank you. Well, the title of this discussion is "Respect." What would your definition be of respect? [Žižek:] Well, respect is the etymology means looking back, looking again, looking caring for, accounting for. So I would say in the first sense it is something that you look to others, that you and that’s maybe the first important thing with respect is that you see people. And then you have different ways of looking. I mean if I want to be respected, I could either try to develop my talents and become something that people respect. I can also pay respect to a person who is more interesting, or is more richer or whatever, to someone to whom I look up, [unintelligible] higher than me and I respect him. But it could also be that like in the case of refugees that you try to help people and maybe not in a way that you’re using the idea of charity but by really respecting them as equal persons who deserve our respect. So there are different ways of developing respect. [Moderator:] May I ask you, we choose the word "respect" because last year Mr. Žižek used the word very often. So the word respect actually implies also another value, and that is exactly as you say, we estimate somebody very highly, but it is also a making a distance. I say I respect you, but I mean in the same way you are different, so we are not equal. This is also implied in the word respect very strongly. If I say we are a unity, we are the same, very clear. If I say I respect you, there is some some gap coming in. This is in the word in the word respect [unintelligible] in German. So, so, so even Richard Sennett wrote a whole book on the word respect, and it is such a tricky concept because when I say to somebody, we do something together, we are the same, we are refugees, you can come, we are all equal, you come into our country, we are all do something together, or we say, we respect you but you are different, you do it in your own country. This is one part of the word respect. The other part came up this afternoon very strongly in the speech of Mr. Luijendijk, which was very strong. He said, I’m very left-wing but we need stronger borders. If we let in Egyptians now our identity will be will be swept very strongly. And you use also in the way when you talked about democracy, you said, well, democracy only works when when we have a certain certain basis, when the people in live together are understanding each other. When you say when you do this, it has implications because it means actually you you estimate a new border. And so this discussion is very strongly with with Mr. Luijendijk this afternoon, because he is looking actually for a new concept of community. Okay. This is I can react on that. [Žižek:] Okay. I’m trying to be because I usually talk too much, I admit, I’m first to admit. I will try to be as short as possible. Let me begin with first capitalism. No, I’m precisely I’m definitely not a utopian in the sense that I expect now some revolutions and so on and so on. I here follow, my god, you cannot expect Sloterdijk, he is probably some moderate liberal right-winger politically, of being utopian. But I was convinced by him and others that simply the global system that we have now forced, sorry, confronts a whole series of challenges. Ecology: you can do many things, I’m the first to admit, within capitalism, and I’m well aware that if anything, the 20th-century capitalists or today China are even with regard to ecology much worse than in polluting the environment and so on. But isn’t it clear that the only way to truly confront ecological dangers is in some way to move beyond market, to have a large even transnational organization? Second thing: all these all these processes, and I don't idealize them, I see their dangers, of of collaborative commons, of intellectual property and so on and so on. My god, I’m not alone here, even people like Elon Musk and so on, they admit that the market logic is coming to an end here. I think that intellectual property is not cannot really function. This the capitalism... and so I also I’m not fetishizing it, we abolish money or whatever, I don't care about that. I’m just claiming that to confront all these challenges, what I ironically referred to as leftist Fukuyamaism, that is to say is not enough that some kind of even trans-state global coordinations will be necessary. Let me give you an example which is my favorite. My good friend I really appreciate him and he is not any kind of naive leftist, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the French theorist of catastrophes. He is part of some mysterious European Union committee dealing with environment. So he told me he was there two days after Fukushima in Japan. And he told me that for one day Japanese government was in total panic because it looked that the pollution, radiation was so strong that they will be obliged to evacuate million people, the entire Tokyo area. Now, how do you do this? No place in Japan. The rational solution would be, but it’s crazy, to make a deal, I don't know, with Russia, to give part of Siberia. We will have to develop mechanisms for this. That’s all I’m saying. And I am I totally agree with you that the left today, maybe you can counter-attack but I don’t... really doesn't have a big plan. Like I was there on Occupy Wall Street and I asked people, okay you are against Wall Street profiteers, what do you want? And it was a total confusion of answers, from modest Keynesianism to more radical proposals. If I may use an old joke that I often use but I think I didn’t yet use it here. That’s my problem. Did you see the movie *V for Vendetta*? You know that Natalie Portman at the end the revolution crowd enters the parliament, people take over. Okay. My usual dirty joke is: I am ready to sell my mother into slavery, and she is dead so I can say it safely, to see a movie called *V for Vendetta Part But what will happen then next day after the revolution wins? What will they do? What new measures will they enact and so on and so on? I mean I’m sick and tired of these big event, million people on Tahrir Square, on Syntagma Square. But for me, and here if I understand you correctly we agree, the true measure of a radical change is the day after, when things return to normal. How do ordinary people see the change at this level? So I’m much more of a I agree with you, I don't have any great plan communism, whatever. I’m just saying in the long term, at least the way we have it today, capitalism will encounter limits. And I’m first to admit that we don't have a... Sorry, please. [Mrs. Heyer:] But don’t you don’t you just think that capitalism will adapt again and again to these new situations? [Žižek:] And but then we are really lost. It’s quite a serious possibility, I’m not an optimist. Then maybe what will happen is what we see in Hollywood blockbusters. By this I mean *Hunger Games*, *Elysium* and so on. And we are slowly approaching this, a kind of a radical society, those who are in, those who are out. Maybe this is the solution, you know? Because you know what I and I hope we share this realism. What I I hate this simple formulas. Like I had recently a debate with some people dealing with Middle East conflict, no? And they started to shout at me, "But don't you see that the struggle of Palestinian woman and of Muslims against Israeli occupation and the struggle for woman’s rights are basically the same struggle?" I told them, okay, it sounds very deep, but de facto they are not the same struggle. Because first you have many feminists who are have a certain skepticism against Islam. Then you have many Islamists who see modern feminism as the Western capitalist invention to it's things things are not so simple. What is the big dream of the left? To bring this third world protests, or other, together with our identity political protests, gay rights and so on and so on. I see this as an immense problem. And when people tell me, you know, but it’s happening, my friends in Israel tell me, you know last week there was a demonstration in a village near Tel Aviv where women in hijab demonstrated with Jewish sadomaso lesbians in all their colors. And I just quoted them the title of that wonderful title of that Werner Herzog film, *Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen* [Even Dwarfs Started Small], you know. Yes, this is the beginning towards, but it will remain probably that. Stand back. I’m sorry. [Mrs. Heyer:] Yeah, but what what you say about these resistance movements, whether they are women in a Muslim country or gay movements or women’s movements here, I would say that’s a kind of an old-fashioned idea that Foucault already explained in the 1980s where he analyzed where that we live in societies, capitalist, Western societies, where there are a lot of power structures that place us in specific political constellations, that fix us into our into specific identities, and he thought that the the most important thing to do is to resist, to find ways of opening up the the existing structures and find something new, I would almost say in your terms, create events. But the problem of this approach is that indeed after the event, after the resistance, and you saw that when Foucault went to Iran and he was very optimistic about the Iranian Revolution, and afterwards had to see that the orthodox autarchic regime took over and he had to see that revolution itself or these kind of movements do not bring itself a better world. And that I would say is a reason to look for ways how we can use the legacy of enlightenment and also with modernist notions like something of humanity, of dignity, of respect, how we can intermingle these enlightenment notions with a kind of resistance, but I wouldn’t I would say this resistance shouldn't only be kind of movements who are against something but do not find new a new vocabulary to find new political ways. [Moderator:] Do you have a suggestion? [Mrs. Heyer:] Yeah, I I would say that we we really need to reflect or speculate on how politics what politics can look like, and not only in terms of resistance, but also maybe we really need old ideas like solidarity, a notion that you used, to
I’m glad, I hope this works. I’m glad to be here again, although my dream was to speak from the bed, and probably there is also the [unintelligible] something would have happened with that [unintelligible]. Okay. I hope you will not be too bored because I will really talk about what the title says, The Courage of Hopelessness, a kind of a quick overview of the ethico-political situation in which we are and what we can hope about, what we can do, what we should do. I would like to begin with what I see as the predominant attitude among today’s academic leftists. I think this attitude is the one which back in George Orwell described in a wonderful way. It’s a quote from George Orwell: “We all rail against class distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can really be changed.” End of quote. Orwell’s point is that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that should achieve the opposite, that should prevent the change from really taking place. Like today’s academic leftist who criticizes capitalist cultural imperialism but is in reality horrified at the idea that his field of study would really break down. The stance here is the same as that of the smoker convinced that he can stop smoking if he chooses to do so. The possibility of change is evoked to guarantee that it will not be acted upon. And I mean this literally. I read a short essay on smoking and they say that the very fact that you think that, oh, but I can stop smoking whenever I want, makes it sure that you will never stop smoking. It is only when we despair and don’t know anymore what to do that change can be enacted. We have to go through this zero point of hopelessness. The lesson of the 20th-century communism is that we have to gather the strength to fully assume this hopelessness. Giorgio Agamben said in a recent interview that thought is the courage of hopelessness. An insight which I think is especially pertinent for our historical moment when even the most pessimistic diagnostics as a rule finish with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative. The dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice. It functions as a fetish which prevents us from thinking to the end the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction. This train approaching us from the opposite direction assumed lately many forms. In the last year or so, troubles in our global capitalist paradise exploded at at least four levels: the renewed fundamentalist terrorist threat, the declaration of war against ISIS and so on; geopolitical tensions with and between non-European new powers, China, Russia and so on; the flow of refugees crossing the wall that separates us from them, or as Peter Sloterdijk, who unfortunately was not able to be here today, he uses the term cupola, like we in the privileged West live under a cupola and we do not even see this wall that separates us from the outside; and, of course, the last threat, ecology. So let me begin by ecology. In December smog in big Chinese cities became so thick that thousands fled into the countryside, trying to reach a place where one can still see blue sky. This airpocalypse affected half a billion people. For those who remained, moving around began to resemble life in a post-apocalyptic Hollywood blockbuster: people walking around with large gas masks in a smog where even nearby trees are invisible. A new category was thus added to the long list of refugees: from wars, droughts, tsunamis, earthquakes, economic crises, and so on—smog refugees. Now, perhaps the most surprising thing about this airpocalypse is its quick renormalization. After the authorities could no longer deny the problem, they tried to establish a new procedure which somehow enables people to continue their daily life by way of following new routines, as if the catastrophic smog is just a new fact of life. On designated days, you try to stay at home as much as possible, if necessary you walk around with masks. Children even in China, I read, rejoice in the news that on many days schools remain closed, an opportunity to stay at home and play. Making a trip to the countryside where the blue sky is still visible becomes a special occasion one looks forward to. There are already in China, I was told, dozens of agencies specialized in such one-day trips. They just promise they will take you to a place where you will see the sky. The important thing is, that's the official motto, not to panic and to maintain the appearance that in spite of all troubles, life goes for. One thing is sure: an extraordinary social and psychological change is taking place in front of our eyes. The impossible or unthinkable is becoming possible. An event first experienced as impossible but not real—the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe, which however probable we know it is, we do not believe that it will effectively take place—becomes real but no longer impossible. Once the catastrophe occurs, it is renormalized, perceived as part of the normal run of things. The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is the one between knowledge and belief. We know the ecological catastrophe and other catastrophes are possible, probable even, yet we do not believe they will really happen. Recall the same mechanism in another field: the years ago, a little bit more, the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. The fact that a normal European city of half a million inhabitants will be encircled, starved, regularly bombed, its citizens terrorized by sniper fire and so on, and that this will go on for three years, was considered unimaginable just two weeks before. It would have been extremely easy for Western powers to break the siege of Sarajevo and open a small safe corridor out of the city. When the siege began, even the citizens of Sarajevo thought this is a short-term event. They just, most of them, tried to send their children to safety for a week or two, then this mess will be over, they thought. And then very fast, the siege was normalized. This same passage from impossibility to normalization is clearly discernible now in the United States liberal establishment after Donald Trump’s victory. First they were in a panic, it cannot happen, once it happened it is renormalized. And this renormalization is very interesting. Already back in July CNN was showing a report "The Greening of Greenland," celebrating new opportunities that the melting of ice offers to Greenlanders. They can already grow vegetables in open land and so on. The obscenity of this report is not only that it focuses on the minor benefits of a global catastrophe. To add insult to injury, it plays on the double meaning of "green" in our public speech: green for vegetation, green for ecological concerns. So that the fact that more vegetation can grow on the Greenland soil because of the global warming is associated with the rising of ecological awareness. Are such phenomena not yet another example of how right Naomi Klein was when in her *Shock Doctrine* she described the way global capitalism exploits catastrophes to get rid of the old social constraints and impose its agenda on the slate cleared by the catastrophe? Perhaps the forthcoming ecological disasters, far from undermining capitalism, will serve as its greatest boost. I think again of this Hegel's idea of cunning of reason: you engage in doing something, the result is the opposite. This Hegelian logic is more valid than ever. Let's take a cold look at Chinese Cultural Revolution, Maoism in the sixties. What was his, if I may use this suspicious teleological term, what was the objective function of Cultural Revolution? Today I think is clear: to create the conditions for Deng Xiaoping reform, for the capitalist opening. What Cultural Revolution did is clear the slate of tradition, produce isolated individuals who were ready for the new onslaught of capitalism. What gets lost in this shift from impossibility to renormalization is the proper sense of what is going on, with all unexpected traps the catastrophe hides. For example, one of the unpleasant paradoxes of our predicament is that the very attempts to counteract ecological threats may contribute to the warming of the poles. The ozone hole helps shield the interior of the Antarctic from global warming, so if it will be healed, the Antarctic could quickly catch up with the warming of the rest of the Earth. One thing at least is sure. In the last decades, it was fashionable to talk about the predominant role of intellectual labor in our post-industrial societies. However, materiality is now reasserting itself with a vengeance in all its aspects, from the forthcoming struggle for scarce resources—water, food, energy, minerals—to environmental pollution. Now comes the more tricky part of my analysis. Even when we profess the readiness to assume our responsibility for ecological catastrophes, this can be a tricky strategy to avoid the true dimensions of the catastrophe. There is something deceptively reassuring in our readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment. We like to be guilty, since if we are guilty, then it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our life. What is really difficult for us, at least for us in the West, to accept is that we are reduced to a purely passive role of an impotent observer who can only sit and watch what his fate will be. To avoid such a situation, we are prone to engage in frantic obsessive activity: recycle old paper, buy organic food, whatever, just so that you can be sure that you are doing something, making your contribution. Like a football fan who supports his team in front of the TV screen at home, jumping and jumping from his seat in a superstitious belief that this will somehow influence the outcome. It is true that the typical form of fetishist disavowal apropos ecology is, I know very well that we are all trapped, but I don't really believe it, so I am not ready to do anything important to change my way of life. But there is also the opposite form of disavowal: I know very well that I cannot really influence the process which can lead to my ruin, like a volcanic outburst, but it is nonetheless too traumatic for me to accept this, so I cannot resist the urge to do something even if I know it is ultimately meaningless. I claim, is it not for this same reason that we buy organic food? Who really believes that the half-rotten and expensive organic apples are really healthier? The point is that by way of buying them, we do not just buy and consume a product, we simultaneously do something meaningful: show our care for Mother Earth, our global awareness, we participate in a large collective project and so on. I claim we have to finish with such games. The airpocalypse in China is a clear indication of the limits of our predominant environmentalism, this strange combination of catastrophism and routine, of guilt feeling and indifference. Ecology is today one of the major ideological battlefields, with a whole series of strategies to obfuscate the true dimension of the ecological threat. First, we still find with persons like Donald Trump simple ignorance: it’s a marginal phenomenon not worthy of our preoccupation, life of capital goes on, nature will take care of itself. Second position: science and technology can save us. Third position: leave the solution to the market, higher taxation of the polluters and so on. Fourth position: super-ego pressure on personal responsibility instead of large systemic measures. Each of us should do what he or she can: recycle, consume less, and so on. Fifth position, maybe the worst of them all: advocating a return to natural balance, to a more modest traditional life by means of which we renounce human hubris and become again respectful children of our Mother Earth. This whole paradigm of Mother Nature derailed by our hubris is wrong. As I always repeat, if there is something true in ecology, it’s the insight that our Mother Earth is a terrible bitch. Catastrophes were going on before we humans came here, we have no safe place to return. So, does the predominant ecological discourse not address us as a priori guilty, indebted to Mother Nature, under the constant pressure of the ideological ecological super-ego agency which addresses us in our individuality? The way ideology functions today when you complain about ecological threats is: but what did you do today to repay your debt to nature? Did you put all newspapers into a proper recycle bin? And all the bottles of beer or cans of Coke? Did you use your car when you could have used a bike or some means of public transport? Did you use air conditioning instead of just did you just open wide the windows instead of using air conditioning and so on and so forth? The ideological stakes of such individualization are easily discernible. I get lost in my own self-examination instead of raising much more pertinent global questions about our civilization. Plus, one should note how this individual culpabilization is immediately supplemented by a very easy way out: recycle, buy organic food, use renewable energy and so on and you no longer have to feel guilty, you can enjoy your life as usual. If I may use again, I even I think already used it in this very place, my favorite example Starbucks. Buy Starbucks cappuccino, they always emphasize: goes for some stupid Guatemala children, for some African jungle and so on. So you can remain a consumerist. It’s an ingenious strategy how the price of for catastrophes caused by consumerism is simply included into the price of the commodity. So you can go on. Another trap to be avoided is the moralizing anti-capitalism. All the talk about how capitalism is sustained by the egotist greed of individual capitalists for more power and wealth and so on. In reality I claim, in capitalism personal greed is subordinated to the impersonal striving of the capital itself to reproduce and to expand. So I think it's not that we need less egotism, we need maybe more enlightened egotism. I think that fanatic capitalists are real figure as already Walter Benjamin knew of religious belief. They are ready to put at stake everything for their sacred goal of the expanded self-reproduction of capital. Not to mention the fact that this individualized anti-capitalism, our media are full of anti-capitalism, no, this company is cheating, polluting environment, the other companies using slave labor and so on and children labor and so on and so on. Just to avoid more radical systemic questions. So what is to be done? As Lenin would have put it. And I’m here sad that Peter Sloterdijk, who is unfortunately not a Leninist, is not here, because I think he should be taken seriously. I absolutely reject the usual Habermasian dismissal of Sloterdijk as a kind of almost neo-fascist. In his last book, if it is the last, *What Happened in the 20th Century*, Sloterdijk provides his own outline of what is to be done. This outline is encapsulated by the titles of the first two essays in his book: *The Anthropocene* and *From the Domestication of Man to the Civilizing of Cultures*. Anthropocene, as we all know, designates a new epoch in the life of our planet in which we humans cannot any longer rely on the Earth as a reservoir ready to absorb the consequences of our productive activity. We cannot any longer afford to ignore the side effects, collateral damage of our productivity. These effects cannot any longer be reduced to the background of the figure of humanity. We have to accept that we live on a spaceship Earth, responsible and accountable for its conditions. Earth is no longer the impenetrable background or horizon of our productive activity, it emerges as another finite object which we can inadvertently destroy or transform to make it unlivable. This means that at the very moment when we become powerful enough to affect the most basic conditions of our life, we have to accept that we are just another species on a small planet. A new way to relate to our environments is necessary once we realize this. No longer a heroic worker expressing his/her/their creative potentials and drawing from the inexhaustible resources from our environments, but a much more modest agent collaborating with our environments, permanently negotiating a tolerable level of safety and stability. What matters in capitalist reproduction is the self-enhancing circulation focused on profit, and the collateral damage done to the environment is not included into the costs of production. It is in principle ignored. Even the attempts to take it into account through taxation or by way of directly putting a price tag on every natural resource cannot but misfire. Namely, do you know that one of the solutions which are debated today is a radical universalized capitalism. Like the idea is that everything should be commodified. Some crazy American environmental capitalists made this experiment: they tried to put a price tag even on air, on air, they claim I don't know so many trillions of billions of dollars, so we should treat it as another commodity and charge it. Feminists tried something, some feminists, similar years ago when I was young: they claimed that housework of the wife is not paid, so let's pay, let's account how much it costs and so on and so on. I don’t think this universal commodification is the solution. So, in order to establish a new mode of relating to our environments, a more radical politico-economic change will be necessary. What Sloterdijk calls the domestication of the wild animal culture. Namely, till now each culture disciplined or educated its own members and guaranteed civic peace among them in the guise of state power. But the relationship between different cultures and states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each state, each state of peace nothing more than a temporary truce. As Hegel conceptualized it, the entire ethics of state of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism: the readiness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation-state, which means that the wild barbarian relations between the states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within every state. Is today’s North Korea with its ruthless pursuit of nuclear weapons and rockets to hit with them distant targets, not the ultimate example of this logic of unconditional nation-state sovereignty? However, the moment we fully accept the fact that we live on a spaceship Earth, the task that urgently imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves, of imposing universal solidarity, cooperation among all human communities, a task rendered all the more difficult by the ongoing rise of sectarian religious and ethnic heroic violence and readiness to sacrifice oneself and the world for one's specific cause. The overcoming of capitalist expansionism, wide international cooperation and solidarity that should also be able to transform themselves into an executive power ready to violate state sovereignty, are these not all measures destined to protect our natural and cultural commons? So although I know that Sloterdijk would explode if I were to call him a communist, he is very anti-communist, I think that what he describes as our task, all the features point towards some kind of communism. They imply a communist horizon, the horizon of some global cooperation beyond state sovereignty, beyond global market. So what is to be done, again? Maybe one should follow the good old Marxist path and shift the focus from politics to the signs of post-capitalism that are clearly discernible within global capitalism itself, for example in the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin calls collaborative commons, a new mode of production and exchange which seems to leave behind private property and market exchange. One could thus conceive collaborative commons as the return at a higher level of the gift exchange. In collaborative commons, individuals are giving their products free into circulation. This emancipatory dimension of collaborative commons should of course be located into the context of the rise of what people call Internet of Things, combined with another result of today’s development of productive forces: the explosive rise of zero marginal costs. More and more products can be reproduced for no additional costs. However, I claim two mutually exclusive readings of Internet of Things impose themselves. Internet of Things as the domain of potential radical emancipation, a unique chance of combining freedom and collaboration where, to paraphrase Juliet’s definition of love from Shakespeare’s *Romeo and Juliet*, the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite. Versus Internet of Things as complete subversion into the divine digital other where I am deprived of my freedom of agency. But are these two readings really mutually exclusive? Are they not just two different views on the same reality? What are the things in this so much celebrated Internet of Things? They refer, as we all know, to a wide variety of devices such as heart monitoring implants, biochip transponders on farm animals, electric clams in coastal waters, automobiles with built-in sensors, DNA analysis devices for environmental food monitoring, and so on. These devices collect useful data with the help of various existing technologies and then automatically flow the data between other devices. Human individuals here are also things whose states and activities are continuously registered and transmitted without their knowledge: their physical movements, their financial transactions, their health, their eating and drinking habits, what they buy and sell, what they read, listen to, watch and so on. All is collected in digital networks which know ourselves better than we ourselves know ourselves. The problem is how will this explosion of the Internet of Things affect our the identity of our self? I here briefly rely on a popular book Yuval Harari’s *Homo Deus*. Harari describes how our self is composed of narratives which retroactively try to impose some consistency on the pandemonium of our experiences, obliterating experiences and memories which disturb these narratives. Ideology does not reside primarily in stories invented by those in power to deceive others. It resides in stories invented by ordinary subjects ourselves to deceive ourselves. But the pandemonium persists and the machines, the digital machines, will register the discord and will maybe be able to deal with this discord in a much more rational way than our conscious self. Say, when I have to decide to marry or not, the machine will register all the shifting attitudes that haunt me, my past pains, disappointments that I prefer to swipe under the carpet. And incidentally, an American computer scientist told me they already made this wonderful experiment: a couple of some couples who were thinking about marrying themselves accepted to be totally monitored, their activities, their statements and so on. And then without telling them, the scientist registered the computer’s advice. It was much better in the long term, appropriate than the wrong decision. Computer absolutely predicted this marriage will last, this marriage will not last and so on and so on. And why not extend this prospect even to political decisions? While myself can be easily seduced by a populist demagogue, the machine will take note of all my past frustrations, it will register the inconsistencies between my fleeting passions and my other opinions. So why should the machine not vote on my behalf? Again, my friends in United States already did the same experiment precisely with Trump voters and some others. They followed them, registered their opinions, their habits and so on, and then they not only predicted how they will vote, but they predicted how in accordance with their own true convictions they should vote. And again, machine made a better decision. So again, maybe this is the solution to get rid of the air polluters, no, computers to vote. Here’s loss. Okay. Why my again, so while brain sciences confirm the post-structuralist idea that we are stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, stories which are a confused bricolage, an inconsistent multiplicity of stories with no single self totalizing them, brain sciences seem to offer or promise at least a way out which is precisely because the machine which reads us all the time is blind without awareness, a mechanic algorithm, it can make decisions which are much more adequate than those made by human individuals. Much more adequate not only with regard to external reality but also and above all with regard to these individuals themselves, to what they want or need. A quote from Harari: “Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self and allows it to vote in the polling stations, in the supermarket and in the marriage market. For centuries this made good sense because though the narrating self believed in all kinds of fictions and fantasies, no alternative system knew me better. Yet once we have a system that really knows me better, it will be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of the narrating self. Liberal habits such as democratic election will become obsolete because Google will be able to represent even my own political opinions better than myself.” End of quote. One can make a very realistic case for this option. Scientists who advocate this option, they don't claim that the computer is omnipotent and infallible. No, it can make mistakes. It is simply that on average its decisions work substantially better than the decisions of our mind in many things. It makes better diagnosis than our average doctor and so on. Up to the exploding algorithmic trading on stock markets where programs that one can now download for free already outperform financial advisors. For example, I read recently that specialists on in a stockbroker’s advisers on Wall Street are in a panic because some two ordinary guys put on the market, you can freely download it, a program and it's proven that if you simply follow that program in your investments, the result on average is better than if you follow expensive expensive advisors. One thing is clear: the liberal true self, the free agent which enacts what I really want, simply doesn't exist. And fully endorsing this inexistence means abandoning the basic individualist premise of liberal democracy. So if development will render Homo sapiens obsolete, what will follow? One option is a post-human Homo Deus with abilities that are traditionally identified as divine, or the opposite option: a quasi-omnipotent digital machine. So it's either singularity, we will immerse ourselves into some kind of unified global awareness, or blind intelligence decoupled from our consciousness. My option here is that what will probably happen is a third possibility, a radical division much stronger than the class division within human societies. What do I mean by this? Among the best Soviet jokes that I remember from my youth is the one about a debate in the Politburo in high Stalinism, about money. Will there be money in communism or not? Leftists claimed that there will be no money since money belongs to capitalist alienation. And rightists claimed of course there will be money to facilitate exchange of products, you cannot have products without some measure of exchange without some measure of their value and it's natural to have money. Now comes the joke. Stalin intervenes, he rejects both views as wrong, as a rightist and leftist deviation, and proposes a dialectical synthesis: there will be no money and there will be money. Then the shocked members of the Politburo ask, but comrade Stalin, how will this function? And Stalin in his infinite genius calmly answers: well, it's easy, some will have money and others will not have money. We should apply in the same way to the dilemma: will the future be totally digitalized society still allow human freedom or will we all be just elements controlled by the digital machine? The answer is both at the same time: some will still have freedom while other others will be totally regulated. In the near future, biotechnology and computer algorithms will join their powers in producing bodies, brains and minds, with the gap exploding between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who not. Those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities while those left behind will face extinction. So again, what to do here? The first thing to do I think is to leave behind all the pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-rational talk about strategic risks that we have to assume, as well as the notion of historical time as the linear progress of evolution where at each moment we have to choose between different options. We have to accept this threat as our fate. It is not just a question of avoiding risks and making the right choices within the global situation. The true threat resides in this situation in its entirety, in our fate. If we continue to roll on the way we do now, we are doomed, no matter how carefully we proceed. So the solution is not to be very careful and avoid risks. In acting like this, we fully participate in the logic which leads to catastrophe. The solution is to fully become aware of the explosive set of interconnections which makes the entire situation dangerous. Once we do this, once we embrace the courage that comes with such hopelessness, we should embark on the long and difficult work of changing the coordinates of the entire situation. I don't have time here to go into very interesting theological consequences of this attitude, because I think that fatalism is the only way towards freedom. And I think Protestantism knew this. We have to accept that we are doomed and the only way out is not to play any of these Catholic games, you know, but maybe we are not if we do some good works. We are predestined, our fate is to approach a catastrophe, but we can change our fate. I don't have time to go into this theological aspect. So let me go into what are the consequences of this stance. I think that many sacred cows will have to fall here. Now let me commit a public suicide and finish with my pessimistic political analysis. One should render problematic what seems the most self-evident today for us: the calls for transparency of European Union decisions. Since in many countries the majority of the public was against the Greek debt reduction, rendering new negotiations public would make representatives of these countries advocate even tougher measures against Greece. You know what I mean? Like apropos how to deal with this is what shocks I even with my very good friend Yanis Varoufakis, I have this problem. He is at the same time for more opening towards refugees and for the transparency responsibility to the people of you alienated European bureaucracy. But it's a very tragic thing, don't play with this. I've spoken with some politicians who were part of these negotiations, and they told me, you know that it would have been much worse for refugees if the decision process in Brussels would have been totally transparent. And you if you follow the meetings in Brussels, you could see that, for example, it was with Slovene representative, I know, when the meetings because some of them were a little bit left-leaning, when the meetings in Brussels were closed, they tried to make it as good as possible for the refugees. When the meetings were public, ah, they were much more careful because they knew that, to cut a long story short, the majority of the people in at least the majority of European countries favor radical limitation of refugees of immigrants. And this is my first conclusion, a very brutal one: people are not necessarily right. So when you plead when you ask democracy, you should be for more democracy transparency, you should be very precise and careful about what you want. I claim democracy now in Europe has its own dangers. If by democracy we simply mean that the predominant opinion as it is now should be enacted. We have here the typical discontent, anxiety of European liberal left. It sees the threat, the biggest threat is for this liberal left the threat of new fascism embodied in anti-immigrant rightist populism. This scarecrow is perceived as the principal enemy against which we should all unite, from whatever remains of the radical left to mainstream liberal democrats. Europe is portrayed as a continent regressing towards a new fascism which feeds on the paranoiac hatred and fear of the external ethnic-religious enemy, mostly Muslims. While this new fascism is directly predominant in some post-communist East European countries, Hungary, Poland and so on, it is also getting stronger and stronger in many other countries where the view is that the Muslim refugees invasion poses a threat to the European legacy. It is here I think that we should not lose nerves and persist in the basic Marxist insight: this fascism is strictly a secondary phenomenon, engendered by its apparent opposite, the open liberal-democratic universe. So the only way to truly defeat it is to overcome the immanent limitations of the latter. Namely, this new fascism, as they call it, is—this is the paradox—is democratically legitimized. Leftist critics of European Union now find themselves in a strange predicament. On the one hand, they deplore the democratic deficit of the European Union and propose plans to make more transparent the decision-making in Brussels. On the other hand, they support the non-democratic Brussels administration when it exert pressure on democratically legitimized new, they call them, fascist tendencies. Like did you notice how the same critics of Europe who criticize Brussels bureaucracy when it proceeds, it protects interests of capital and so on and so on, were absolutely for Brussels bureaucracy when they could pressure on Poland, on the—I hate the Polish government the way they have it now, but let's face it: it's fully democratically elected government, rightist, anti-immigrant and so on, Eurocentric, but not only it has clearly the support of the majority, but even more, it's a very sad irony. It's one of the few governments today in Europe which lately enacted clear pro-workers legislation: like they lowered retirement, better credits for students, better healthcare and so on and so on. We effectively live in crazy times where to have some old pro-workers legislation enacted, you need right-wing populist in power, while the opposite lesson also goes, to get radical austerity politics enacted, the best thing is to have some radical left like Syriza in power. But another problem: is this fascism, this new fascism, anti-immigrant populism, really fascism? I think there are two wrong generalizations about today’s society circulating around. The first one is that we live in an era of universalized anti-Semitism. With the military defeat of fascism, the role once played by the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew is now played by any foreign group experienced as a threat to our identity: Latinos, Africans, and especially Muslims are in today’s Western society treated as the new Jews. The other wrong generalization is that the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the proliferation of new walls intended to separate us from the dangerous other: the wall separating Israel from the West Bank, the planned wall between United States and Mexico and so on. True, but I claim there is a key distinction between these two walls. The Berlin Wall stood for the Cold War division of the world, and although it was perceived as the barrier that keeps isolated the population of the totalitarian communist states, it also signaled that capitalism was not the only option, that an alternative to it, although a deeply flawed one, existed. The walls that are rising today are on the contrary walls whose construction was triggered by the very fall of the Berlin Wall, that is to say, the disintegration of the communist alternative. These new walls don't stand for the division between capitalism and communism but for the division which is strictly immanent to the global capitalist order itself. In a nice Hegelian move, when capitalism won over its external enemy and united the world, the division returned in its own space. As for the first generalization, universalized anti-Semitism, Muslims are today’s Jews and so on, there is rather obvious distinction I claim between fascism proper and today’s anti-immigrant populism. Let’s recall the basic premise of the Marxist analysis of capitalism. Capitalism is a reign of abstraction. In it, social relations are regulated, dominated by abstractions, which are not just subjective abstractions, abstractions performed by our minds, but objective abstractions, abstractions that rule social reality itself, what Marx called real abstraktion, real abstraction. These abstractions are part of our social experience. We directly experience our social life as regulated by impenetrable mechanisms which are beyond representation, which cannot be embodied in any individual. Even capitalists who replace the old master are enslaved by powers beyond their control. And the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew embodies this abstraction. It is the invisible master who secretly pulls the strings. Jews are fully integrated into our society, they deceivingly appear as one of us, so the problem and task is to clearly identify them. Muslim immigrants on the other hand are not today’s Jews. They are not invisible as the Jew is for the anti-Semitic subject. They are fully, even all too visible. They are clearly not integrated into our societies, and nobody claims they secretly pull the strings. If one sees in their so-called invasion of Europe a secret plot, then Jews have to be behind it. As you think I’m kidding here, but if you allow me just some five-ten minutes to conclude, the latest stage of pseudo-pro-Western racism already functions at this level. People claim that Trump’s politics is contradictory because on the one hand it flirts with Israel, supporting Israel against Palestinians, on the other hand it it refers it refers it is close to some homegrown anti-Semitism in United States. No, I think there is nothing new. We are witnessing today a weird phenomenon that I cannot but call anti-Semitic Zionism. Already you remember Breivik, the crazy guy who was not so crazy for this big involved in Norway who killed people at social democratic labor camp. He was literally an anti-Semitic Zionist. With regard to Israel he was a Zionist: yes, we should help Israel, it stands as a barrier against Arab invasion and so on, but here in the West he warned against too much too much Jewish influence. And the roots of this anti-Semitic Zionism are already in the Nazi party. I found a wonderful quote in an article written by Reinhard Heydrich in I think, where he says: Jews are a great people, we want the best possible collaboration with them, they are industrious, they will be successful, just not here. They should have the right to their own state in Palestine and once they move there we will have best relations with them, just not here. We have again the same re- and so because of this, it's this is literally true. I found already, I will not bore you now by quoting them, I found already a couple of examples of people who claim, because it's the only consequent paranoiac version, that if this what they claim invasion of Muslims is really an organized invasion, Jews must be behind it. I will not give you names, but what the popular target of right-wing press is George Soros for this, because he is a Jew, a rich Jew who supports immigrants. And for them, so for them it's a wonderful paranoiac theory, horrible of course, that they even some of them go so far as to say that all this Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just a mask to delude us Europeans, to cover up the true fact: they are one and the same force working together, Jews and Arabs to ruin Christian Europe. That we are dealing with Judeo-Muslim plot. Okay, maybe in the debate we come on further. What I’m saying is that this new fascism, as it is called like this, I’m not I don't like it of course I’m horrified at it, but to call it fascism I think means to commit a terrible mistake which is typical of the lazy leftists. They they see something bad happening, they don't want to think what is really new in this what is happening, so the easiest way is to apply this old word, oh it's fascism and so on. No, you yourself had a figure which is the best argument against: you remember he was killed years ago, Pim Fortuyn, your politician. He was, I cannot designate him other as a politically correct anti-immigrant populist. Because you know his argument against Muslims was precisely: they are not politically correct, they are racist, anti-feminist and so on and so on, this is why... So again, we have to think what is happening. The next thing, as already hinted at them, that we will have to think and rethink is the very notion of democracy, how can it work? A year and a half ago, I was involved in a debate in Germany where Süddeutsche Zeitung asked some viewers to ask me a question. And one of them asked me a simple question which is: who gave Angela Merkel the right to call immigrants to come, to open the gates, when it was clear that on a referendum the majority of people would have been against? Didn't she act in a totally, clearly non-democratic way? One has to admit she was, sorry not she, she was, yes, but that from purely democratic way a leader should follow the opinion, this doesn't go. So when people want more democracy in Europe, one should very precisely approach this problem again: what do we mean by democracy? Who should vote? Should immigrants also vote? Which immigrants? Those who are already here, those who are not not yet here and so on and so forth. You know people like to say, oh democracy, pluralist democracy, but I’m more and more a pessimist and my claim is that democracy as we know it, and that's what some people don't like to hear, works only if we can count on a certain basic shared set of values. Minority can submit itself to the will of majority only if they nonetheless share a certain set of cultural values, way of life and so on and so forth. The moment you don't have this presupposition, a certain homogeneity, a totally different, not totally different, a different logic, the logic of complex negotiations, not simple voting, has to has to enter has to enter the game. So just to finish, where are we today? We had a fake awakening in the United States. It's very interesting how Trump uses this term of awakening. Against political alienation, people have spoken, people awakened and so on and so forth. And Marine Le Pen and other European populist anti-immigrant politicians already use this term and claim: was, I quote Marine Le Pen, was the year the Anglo-Saxon world woke up with Trump and Brexit; I am certain, says Marine Le Pen, will be the year when the people of continental Europe wake up. End of quote. Just allow me briefly to finish. What does awakening mean here? In his *Interpretation of Dreams*, Freud reports on a rather terrifying dream: a tired father who was spending the night watching wake waking at the coffin of his young son who died, falls asleep and dreams that his son is approaching him all in flames, addressing at him the horrifying question, "Father, can't you see I'm burning?" Soon afterwards, father awakens and discovers that due to the overturned candle, the cloth of his dead son's shroud effectively caught fire. The smoke that he smelled while asleep was incorporated into the dream of the burning son to prolong his sleep. You know that's the intelligent Freudian version, that's how dreams work: you have an external, you know these stupid dreams where a phone rings and instead of awakening, you quickly construct a dream where I am reasoning part of it. So now we have the so why did the father finally awaken? Here we should be good Freudians: it’s not because the external signal became too strong, and you know, up to a certain point you can ignore the smoke, but when it gets to... No. Because father constructed a dream to postpone awakening, including the smoke into his dream, but then what he encountered in the dream was much much more horrible than external reality, this nightmarish apparition of his son reproaching him for betraying him. So the father awakened to avoid the real, the deepest truth of his being that he encountered in the dream. And I claim this exactly is the fascist awakening. You know you awaken but awakened precisely in a way to continue to dream, that is to say, to avoid the true trauma that determines you determines you, you continue to dream. That’s the problem with European anti-immigrant politicians who say Europe awaken wake up: no, their message is continue to dream, that is to say to avoid the true antagonisms of European Union that traverse our global capitalism. In the recent texts with the title "The End of History: The short strange era of human civilization would appear to be drawing to a close," Noam Chomsky reports on a set of phenomena which augur the likely end of the era of civilization. One should note that Chomsky, who criticized me ferociously for my idea that a Trump victory may lead to a renewed left, enumerates here phenomena—global warming, deforestation, war-zone devastations and so on—which are going on for decades. The most one can say is that Trump’s blatant denial of the ecological threat pushes the danger a step further. So that’s my point. Of course I am like crazy against Trump, but we should never forget that Trump is a symptom of what was false in predominant, I like to call it ironically, leftist Fukuyamaism. Because this was the basic attitude of the liberal left: we accept global capitalism the way it is, just make it a little bit more human, more healthcare, more this, more that. I claim that this liberal left lost and if we want really to get rid of Trump, it’s not enough just to fight Trump. If you just fight Trump, you do what I think doctors call symptom treating: you know you have a serious disease, you can take pills which just ease the pain, but the illness remains there. The only way to really fight Trump is, I claim, to ask what went wrong with our mainstream liberal democracy so that not only in United States but also in Europe Trump-ist phenomena are exploding. We should begin with this self-criticism of the liberal left. Because at one point Marine Le Pen hit the mark: will be the moment of truth for Europe. I am not a right-winger, but I claim really Europe is threatened today, not by immigrants primarily, secondary phenomenon, we should open our gates more to them, but are we aware what is happening? That this strange alliance, and it’s not just did the Russians meddle with American election and so on, but independently of this, you should read these ideologists who are behind Trump: their big enemy is simply European Union. Their enemy is the new global order, the new secret world government, they say, which is embodied in Europe. For example, my favorite author, favorite in the sense of absolute nightmare, Tim LaHaye, LaHaye or what, is one of these crazy neo-Christian writers who writes about about the end of time and so on and so on. He wrote a novel called *Europa* where he locates the evil into some secret West European organization which runs European Union and which is also behind Arab terrorism, behind all bad things and so on. So again, the enemy is Europe, united Europe. This is the an old theory, nothing to do with Putin, by Trump, this is... So I claim that Europe will either have to reinvent itself or die. In the years to come, the big battlefield will be in Europe, and at stake will be the very core of European emancipatory legacy. Don't fall into easy criticism of Eurocentrism, because at least it should give you to think how all neo-conservative powers participate in this irredecision. In China you have dozens of books in English even published about unilateral for example they claim European democracy is not good, we need a more deliberative democracy. Then I ask them, what do you mean by the deliberative democracy? Then answer was not just voting decision but deliberation. But then I nonetheless asked them, okay okay but at the end who will decide? So that’s the point: it’s simply a pre-democratic vision of a wise ruler should deliberate, ask people and then he decides and so on and so on. Again, I think that on the interest of global emancipation, now is the time to fight for European legacy. The European legacy is threatened not only by today’s Russia, Trump and so on, but also by our own right-wingers. My god, if people like Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen... we shouldn't say we must oppose them because of some multiculturalism. No, we must proudly say: people like Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, if they come to power, this is the end of Europe, of whatever is good to fight for in European legacy. They are the true threat to Europe. So we live in very difficult times, but to really conclude with my favorite Mao Zedong saying, you know when Mao said: under heaven there is great disorder, so the situation is excellent. Maybe precisely in such terrible moments something new will really emerge. But maybe not, who knows. Thank you very much. [The speaker sits down to applause] [Moderator:] Thank you, Mr. Žižek. Let’s start with the first question. Mr. Žižek, thank you very much for your lecture. I’m very curious what Mrs. Heyer thought of it. Could you maybe mention in this flow of words what highlight you would pick out? [Mrs. Heyer:] Well, I’ll begin with long, long, long [unintelligible]. Okay. I’m sorry. I like the idea that you say yes to the immigrants, no, yes to even more refugees. But I’m wondering whether we can do away with the humanitarian talk. I would say the humanitarian talk is very important also if we reflect on this large mondial problem of so many refugees and of course economic analysis are also important, but I would mix the both. So that’s one point. Then you said that we should try to do away with capitalism, and I think it’s a very nice dream, maybe a utopia, but I’m not so sure if we will ever be able to do it without capitalism. I mean money which makes the world go round, and that will probably continue for hundred or maybe thousands of years. But in the meantime, we can, and there is where I agree with you, we can try to find collaborative commons, as you called them. We can find ways to really stimulate the networks between people and maybe connected with the Internet of Things, so organize a kind of alternative world next to and maybe interwoven with the capitalist world. But I’m not convinced that capitalism will end very soon. So that’s kind of my first thoughts. Thank you. Well, the title of this discussion is "Respect." What would your definition be of respect? [Žižek:] Well, respect is the etymology means looking back, looking again, looking caring for, accounting for. So I would say in the first sense it is something that you look to others, that you and that’s maybe the first important thing with respect is that you see people. And then you have different ways of looking. I mean if I want to be respected, I could either try to develop my talents and become something that people respect. I can also pay respect to a person who is more interesting, or is more richer or whatever, to someone to whom I look up, [unintelligible] higher than me and I respect him. But it could also be that like in the case of refugees that you try to help people and maybe not in a way that you’re using the idea of charity but by really respecting them as equal persons who deserve our respect. So there are different ways of developing respect. [Moderator:] May I ask you, we choose the word "respect" because last year Mr. Žižek used the word very often. So the word respect actually implies also another value, and that is exactly as you say, we estimate somebody very highly, but it is also a making a distance. I say I respect you, but I mean in the same way you are different, so we are not equal. This is also implied in the word respect very strongly. If I say we are a unity, we are the same, very clear. If I say I respect you, there is some some gap coming in. This is in the word in the word respect [unintelligible] in German. So, so, so even Richard Sennett wrote a whole book on the word respect, and it is such a tricky concept because when I say to somebody, we do something together, we are the same, we are refugees, you can come, we are all equal, you come into our country, we are all do something together, or we say, we respect you but you are different, you do it in your own country. This is one part of the word respect. The other part came up this afternoon very strongly in the speech of Mr. Luijendijk, which was very strong. He said, I’m very left-wing but we need stronger borders. If we let in Egyptians now our identity will be will be swept very strongly. And you use also in the way when you talked about democracy, you said, well, democracy only works when when we have a certain certain basis, when the people in live together are understanding each other. When you say when you do this, it has implications because it means actually you you estimate a new border. And so this discussion is very strongly with with Mr. Luijendijk this afternoon, because he is looking actually for a new concept of community. Okay. This is I can react on that. [Žižek:] Okay. I’m trying to be because I usually talk too much, I admit, I’m first to admit. I will try to be as short as possible. Let me begin with first capitalism. No, I’m precisely I’m definitely not a utopian in the sense that I expect now some revolutions and so on and so on. I here follow, my god, you cannot expect Sloterdijk, he is probably some moderate liberal right-winger politically, of being utopian. But I was convinced by him and others that simply the global system that we have now forced, sorry, confronts a whole series of challenges. Ecology: you can do many things, I’m the first to admit, within capitalism, and I’m well aware that if anything, the 20th-century capitalists or today China are even with regard to ecology much worse than in polluting the environment and so on. But isn’t it clear that the only way to truly confront ecological dangers is in some way to move beyond market, to have a large even transnational organization? Second thing: all these all these processes, and I don't idealize them, I see their dangers, of of collaborative commons, of intellectual property and so on and so on. My god, I’m not alone here, even people like Elon Musk and so on, they admit that the market logic is coming to an end here. I think that intellectual property is not cannot really function. This the capitalism... and so I also I’m not fetishizing it, we abolish money or whatever, I don't care about that. I’m just claiming that to confront all these challenges, what I ironically referred to as leftist Fukuyamaism, that is to say is not enough that some kind of even trans-state global coordinations will be necessary. Let me give you an example which is my favorite. My good friend I really appreciate him and he is not any kind of naive leftist, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the French theorist of catastrophes. He is part of some mysterious European Union committee dealing with environment. So he told me he was there two days after Fukushima in Japan. And he told me that for one day Japanese government was in total panic because it looked that the pollution, radiation was so strong that they will be obliged to evacuate million people, the entire Tokyo area. Now, how do you do this? No place in Japan. The rational solution would be, but it’s crazy, to make a deal, I don't know, with Russia, to give part of Siberia. We will have to develop mechanisms for this. That’s all I’m saying. And I am I totally agree with you that the left today, maybe you can counter-attack but I don’t... really doesn't have a big plan. Like I was there on Occupy Wall Street and I asked people, okay you are against Wall Street profiteers, what do you want? And it was a total confusion of answers, from modest Keynesianism to more radical proposals. If I may use an old joke that I often use but I think I didn’t yet use it here. That’s my problem. Did you see the movie *V for Vendetta*? You know that Natalie Portman at the end the revolution crowd enters the parliament, people take over. Okay. My usual dirty joke is: I am ready to sell my mother into slavery, and she is dead so I can say it safely, to see a movie called *V for Vendetta Part But what will happen then next day after the revolution wins? What will they do? What new measures will they enact and so on and so on? I mean I’m sick and tired of these big event, million people on Tahrir Square, on Syntagma Square. But for me, and here if I understand you correctly we agree, the true measure of a radical change is the day after, when things return to normal. How do ordinary people see the change at this level? So I’m much more of a I agree with you, I don't have any great plan communism, whatever. I’m just saying in the long term, at least the way we have it today, capitalism will encounter limits. And I’m first to admit that we don't have a... Sorry, please. [Mrs. Heyer:] But don’t you don’t you just think that capitalism will adapt again and again to these new situations? [Žižek:] And but then we are really lost. It’s quite a serious possibility, I’m not an optimist. Then maybe what will happen is what we see in Hollywood blockbusters. By this I mean *Hunger Games*, *Elysium* and so on. And we are slowly approaching this, a kind of a radical society, those who are in, those who are out. Maybe this is the solution, you know? Because you know what I and I hope we share this realism. What I I hate this simple formulas. Like I had recently a debate with some people dealing with Middle East conflict, no? And they started to shout at me, "But don't you see that the struggle of Palestinian woman and of Muslims against Israeli occupation and the struggle for woman’s rights are basically the same struggle?" I told them, okay, it sounds very deep, but de facto they are not the same struggle. Because first you have many feminists who are have a certain skepticism against Islam. Then you have many Islamists who see modern feminism as the Western capitalist invention to it's things things are not so simple. What is the big dream of the left? To bring this third world protests, or other, together with our identity political protests, gay rights and so on and so on. I see this as an immense problem. And when people tell me, you know, but it’s happening, my friends in Israel tell me, you know last week there was a demonstration in a village near Tel Aviv where women in hijab demonstrated with Jewish sadomaso lesbians in all their colors. And I just quoted them the title of that wonderful title of that Werner Herzog film, *Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen* [Even Dwarfs Started Small], you know. Yes, this is the beginning towards, but it will remain probably that. Stand back. I’m sorry. [Mrs. Heyer:] Yeah, but what what you say about these resistance movements, whether they are women in a Muslim country or gay movements or women’s movements here, I would say that’s a kind of an old-fashioned idea that Foucault already explained in the 1980s where he analyzed where that we live in societies, capitalist, Western societies, where there are a lot of power structures that place us in specific political constellations, that fix us into our into specific identities, and he thought that the the most important thing to do is to resist, to find ways of opening up the the existing structures and find something new, I would almost say in your terms, create events. But the problem of this approach is that indeed after the event, after the resistance, and you saw that when Foucault went to Iran and he was very optimistic about the Iranian Revolution, and afterwards had to see that the orthodox autarchic regime took over and he had to see that revolution itself or these kind of movements do not bring itself a better world. And that I would say is a reason to look for ways how we can use the legacy of enlightenment and also with modernist notions like something of humanity, of dignity, of respect, how we can intermingle these enlightenment notions with a kind of resistance, but I wouldn’t I would say this resistance shouldn't only be kind of movements who are against something but do not find new a new vocabulary to find new political ways. [Moderator:] Do you have a suggestion? [Mrs. Heyer:] Yeah, I I would say that we we really need to reflect or speculate on how politics what politics can look like, and not only in terms of resistance, but also maybe we really need old ideas like solidarity, a notion that you used, to
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reflect
reflect
Slavoj Žižek
about these kind of mondial global problems and not only trust on political resistance. [Žižek:] I totally, just very briefly, I cannot agree here more with you. I even wrote an attack on the notion of resistance which brought me a
about these kind of mondial global problems and not only trust on political resistance. [Žižek:] I totally, just very briefly, I cannot agree here more with you. I even wrote an attack on the notion of resistance which brought me a
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lot of trouble, because I claim that a lot of things which goes under the heading of resistance, you know, put it this way: a certain mode of resistance is simply part of the global ideological game today. It's very safe to be resistant. One can even argue that a certain
lot of trouble, because I claim that a lot of things which goes under the heading of resistance, you know, put it this way: a certain mode of resistance is simply part of the global ideological game today. It's very safe to be resistant. One can even argue that a certain
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type of resistance fits ideally... no? I will now try to provoke you, what you will say. You know my big problem with my otherwise
type of resistance fits ideally... no? I will now try to provoke you, what you will say. You know my big problem with my otherwise
Slavoj Žižek
personal
personal
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friend Judith Butler is... [Mrs. Heyer:] That’s a
friend Judith Butler is... [Mrs. Heyer:] That’s a
Slavoj Žižek
nice
nice
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philosopher. [Žižek:] Yes, but you know what’s my problem with her? What she portrays as her subversive position, that is to say she also likes to resist all the time, no? And the idea is that we still live in a patriarchally controlled universe and her positive mode of liberation is this performative self-deconstruction, you experiment, you change your identity. My problem with her view is a very brutal one: what she is describing is simply, I’m sorry for using this horrible old-fashioned Marxist term, the de facto predominant model of subjectivity in late capitalism. I don't see anything subversive in this type of subjectivity: you make experiments with yourself, today you are gay, then you are LGBTQ+ then whatever. This is today’s subjectivity. The predominant mode of subjectivity today is not the old Oedipal patriarchal authority. That’s that’s my that’s my... so I totally agree with you when you insist, my god, I’m for it, old European enlightenment and so on. I totally agree with you here. And I think that in this sense the big catastrophe was how a certain type of identity politics abandoned this universality and proposed as the highest act, fight for your particular
philosopher. [Žižek:] Yes, but you know what’s my problem with her? What she portrays as her subversive position, that is to say she also likes to resist all the time, no? And the idea is that we still live in a patriarchally controlled universe and her positive mode of liberation is this performative self-deconstruction, you experiment, you change your identity. My problem with her view is a very brutal one: what she is describing is simply, I’m sorry for using this horrible old-fashioned Marxist term, the de facto predominant model of subjectivity in late capitalism. I don't see anything subversive in this type of subjectivity: you make experiments with yourself, today you are gay, then you are LGBTQ+ then whatever. This is today’s subjectivity. The predominant mode of subjectivity today is not the old Oedipal patriarchal authority. That’s that’s my that’s my... so I totally agree with you when you insist, my god, I’m for it, old European enlightenment and so on. I totally agree with you here. And I think that in this sense the big catastrophe was how a certain type of identity politics abandoned this universality and proposed as the highest act, fight for your particular
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identity. I think that this is although they may... but maybe so we don't lose time, I’m sorry. I would just like to answer another point
identity. I think that this is although they may... but maybe so we don't lose time, I’m sorry. I would just like to answer another point
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of what that you raised. You see I will try to provoke you here and sincerely. I am not a bad arrogant teacher who asks you questions but already has the right answer. [Mrs. Heyer:] You know that the first time we met you said to me that you’re a male chauvinist pig. I just changed the answer. [Laughter] [Žižek:] No, no, I claim that in a certain way, what do you mean by male chauvinist pig?
of what that you raised. You see I will try to provoke you here and sincerely. I am not a bad arrogant teacher who asks you questions but already has the right answer. [Mrs. Heyer:] You know that the first time we met you said to me that you’re a male chauvinist pig. I just changed the answer. [Laughter] [Žižek:] No, no, I claim that in a certain way, what do you mean by male chauvinist pig?
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[Mrs. Heyer:] Use it in your own words. [Žižek:] Yeah, yeah, but obviously, okay, we are not idiots. I meant them in a certain ironic way and so on and so on, that these people like to call me like that. But let me make my point. Refugees you said, we must show respect to them. Here I see immediately as you probably know mega problems. You have a certain community of refugees, who have, let's face it and we also have them, their own way of life. Now part of that way of life is treating
[Mrs. Heyer:] Use it in your own words. [Žižek:] Yeah, yeah, but obviously, okay, we are not idiots. I meant them in a certain ironic way and so on and so on, that these people like to call me like that. But let me make my point. Refugees you said, we must show respect to them. Here I see immediately as you probably know mega problems. You have a certain community of refugees, who have, let's face it and we also have them, their own way of life. Now part of that way of life is treating
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women in a certain way. Okay, where does here respect? Because we had a concrete problem here in my own country Slovenia, I always repeat it years ago. The problem was this: in a Roma community, old fashioned politically correct term, Gypsy, Roma community, a girl run from her family, years old, to the police, seeking refuge, claiming that her father already married her to another guy, she didn’t want to marry and so on. And then of course, it was right, all the feminists took her side. But then the Roma community said, do you mean seriously with respect or not? They said, sorry, but arranged marriages is the very core that maintains the identity of our community. If you take this away from us, in one or maximum two generations, what remains are you can have out of folkloric dances and so on, but it’s over. So how would you solve these concrete problems? Where does respect end? What does it mean respect? I claim respect is not just accept them the way they are. [Mrs. Heyer:] There are two ways of dealing with respect towards refugees. The first is that as a European citizen, or maybe even a world citizen, you have to pay respect to each other citizen of the world, which means that we have a responsibility or have a solidarity with all the refugees in the world and are responsible to to develop a mondial global policy to deal with that problem. That’s one way of respect. The other is that you are confronted in daily life with people who have habits or ways of living which are totally foreign to your own. I’m not so sure that that’s only a question of being a migrant and a resident. I can also sometimes feel very strange next to my husband. I mean, strangeness is not really only related to being someone from another country or another culture.
women in a certain way. Okay, where does here respect? Because we had a concrete problem here in my own country Slovenia, I always repeat it years ago. The problem was this: in a Roma community, old fashioned politically correct term, Gypsy, Roma community, a girl run from her family, years old, to the police, seeking refuge, claiming that her father already married her to another guy, she didn’t want to marry and so on. And then of course, it was right, all the feminists took her side. But then the Roma community said, do you mean seriously with respect or not? They said, sorry, but arranged marriages is the very core that maintains the identity of our community. If you take this away from us, in one or maximum two generations, what remains are you can have out of folkloric dances and so on, but it’s over. So how would you solve these concrete problems? Where does respect end? What does it mean respect? I claim respect is not just accept them the way they are. [Mrs. Heyer:] There are two ways of dealing with respect towards refugees. The first is that as a European citizen, or maybe even a world citizen, you have to pay respect to each other citizen of the world, which means that we have a responsibility or have a solidarity with all the refugees in the world and are responsible to to develop a mondial global policy to deal with that problem. That’s one way of respect. The other is that you are confronted in daily life with people who have habits or ways of living which are totally foreign to your own. I’m not so sure that that’s only a question of being a migrant and a resident. I can also sometimes feel very strange next to my husband. I mean, strangeness is not really only related to being someone from another country or another culture.
Slavoj Žižek
But how to deal with this strangeness of the other, and there respect is a very important issue. And Richard Sennett has written in one of his books, I think it’s *Not Together* but an earlier book, that what is really important in today’s multicultural cities is that you’re able to deal with the strangeness of the other. And that means, and you said before that we shouldn't be different, or that equality would mean that you wouldn't be different. No, I would say that equality implies that everyone is different and can be strange. And if a newcomer in the Netherlands has strange habits, respect means that this strangeness is taken serious and is a starting point to start a dialogue with each other how again to find how again find common ground which organizes our place in community. And I mean that’s a very difficult thing to do, but I would say that as soon as someone is entering a community, you are paying respect to a person by starting a dialogue how to find new ways of living together. All very nice in a general term. Why I am term my down: what would you have done in the case of Roma girl to be here. I would not immediately start a discussion. So... I don't have time. The girl is there crying. [Žižek:] Yeah, I know, but that’s Tahrir Square! [Laughter] No, no, no, it isn’t marginal. [Mrs. Heyer:] I’ve been educated as a physician before being educated as a philosopher. As a physician, you always know that there are cases of emergency where you have to to act in a right way. And to do that in a right way, you have to anticipate on all these emergencies. That means if people are entering the Netherlands, you have to try to start the conversation with people about finding common new common grounds. And of course there will be situations in which at once there is a case where you have to deal... I mean those are the difficult situations, but I wouldn’t [unintelligible]. I have an essential tremor so it's always the we always have our deficits. So it's always difficult to keep a microphone. But I would I would say that the emergencies or the difficulties, the problems which are momentary, temporary, are not the ones on which we have to base our policies. We have to anticipate the difficulties, try to find common ground, and then of course in cases of problems, well, it sometimes will go wrong. [Žižek:] Okay, I don’t want to insist on this too much, but you know it’s not only I’m not here Islamophobic, just Muslims. The same problem I spoke with my lawyer friends was in the United States where federal government with regard to Amish people. Federal government insists on universal elementary education. And Amish people said, no, if you do this you ruin our community and so on and so on. So these are problems, what do you do? Okay, I'll put it in this way. I'll put it in a different way. We in our societies, and of course there may be an easy pro-Western bias or whatever, develop a certain notion of women’s rights and rights of sexual minorities, gays and so on and so on. Now, are we are they are not dinosaurs these notions. I have to defend my woman’s rights against other women. And I mean that’s the basis of philosophy that you are prepared to start again and again to explain what is valuable to you. I’m not sure because here I’m almost tempted, maybe I’m wrong to answer, but there are happy situations where we encounter something that I provocatively like to call positive dogmatism. Like to give you an example: I wouldn't like to live in a society where you have to fight again and again against rape. I would like to
But how to deal with this strangeness of the other, and there respect is a very important issue. And Richard Sennett has written in one of his books, I think it’s *Not Together* but an earlier book, that what is really important in today’s multicultural cities is that you’re able to deal with the strangeness of the other. And that means, and you said before that we shouldn't be different, or that equality would mean that you wouldn't be different. No, I would say that equality implies that everyone is different and can be strange. And if a newcomer in the Netherlands has strange habits, respect means that this strangeness is taken serious and is a starting point to start a dialogue with each other how again to find how again find common ground which organizes our place in community. And I mean that’s a very difficult thing to do, but I would say that as soon as someone is entering a community, you are paying respect to a person by starting a dialogue how to find new ways of living together. All very nice in a general term. Why I am term my down: what would you have done in the case of Roma girl to be here. I would not immediately start a discussion. So... I don't have time. The girl is there crying. [Žižek:] Yeah, I know, but that’s Tahrir Square! [Laughter] No, no, no, it isn’t marginal. [Mrs. Heyer:] I’ve been educated as a physician before being educated as a philosopher. As a physician, you always know that there are cases of emergency where you have to to act in a right way. And to do that in a right way, you have to anticipate on all these emergencies. That means if people are entering the Netherlands, you have to try to start the conversation with people about finding common new common grounds. And of course there will be situations in which at once there is a case where you have to deal... I mean those are the difficult situations, but I wouldn’t [unintelligible]. I have an essential tremor so it's always the we always have our deficits. So it's always difficult to keep a microphone. But I would I would say that the emergencies or the difficulties, the problems which are momentary, temporary, are not the ones on which we have to base our policies. We have to anticipate the difficulties, try to find common ground, and then of course in cases of problems, well, it sometimes will go wrong. [Žižek:] Okay, I don’t want to insist on this too much, but you know it’s not only I’m not here Islamophobic, just Muslims. The same problem I spoke with my lawyer friends was in the United States where federal government with regard to Amish people. Federal government insists on universal elementary education. And Amish people said, no, if you do this you ruin our community and so on and so on. So these are problems, what do you do? Okay, I'll put it in this way. I'll put it in a different way. We in our societies, and of course there may be an easy pro-Western bias or whatever, develop a certain notion of women’s rights and rights of sexual minorities, gays and so on and so on. Now, are we are they are not dinosaurs these notions. I have to defend my woman’s rights against other women. And I mean that’s the basis of philosophy that you are prepared to start again and again to explain what is valuable to you. I’m not sure because here I’m almost tempted, maybe I’m wrong to answer, but there are happy situations where we encounter something that I provocatively like to call positive dogmatism. Like to give you an example: I wouldn't like to live in a society where you have to fight again and again against rape. I would like to
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live in a society
live in a society
Slavoj Žižek
where the fact that you absolutely, if you are a man, don't rape women is accepted as a dogma. End of debate. [Mrs. Heyer:] Sorry, I I would really love to live in a society like that, but as a woman living in Amsterdam since the early 1970s, rape or being harassed is part of your everyday life and you have and you have to defend it again and again and again. [Žižek:] I agree, but at least we are... and even with only Dutch men, sorry. I know, I know here. But at least there is something: they are on the defensive in the sense that okay maybe now with this new anti-immigrant right, things can
where the fact that you absolutely, if you are a man, don't rape women is accepted as a dogma. End of debate. [Mrs. Heyer:] Sorry, I I would really love to live in a society like that, but as a woman living in Amsterdam since the early 1970s, rape or being harassed is part of your everyday life and you have and you have to defend it again and again and again. [Žižek:] I agree, but at least we are... and even with only Dutch men, sorry. I know, I know here. But at least there is something: they are on the defensive in the sense that okay maybe now with this new anti-immigrant right, things can
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happen. But nonetheless, at least publicly people have to pretend. Nobody
happen. But nonetheless, at least publicly people have to pretend. Nobody
Slavoj Žižek
dare, correct me if I’m wrong, maybe some new populists and so on, nobody dares to pretend that we should debate if under some conditions women can be raped and so on and so on. But still I think that what is not a particular phenomenon, let me return to the point.
dare, correct me if I’m wrong, maybe some new populists and so on, nobody dares to pretend that we should debate if under some conditions women can be raped and so on and so on. But still I think that what is not a particular phenomenon, let me return to the point.
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Okay,
Okay,
Slavoj Žižek
we have a certain concept of feminine rights and so on and so on. So you will say when we I don't think we should be too open here that another group, which can be even one of our own groups or some religious fundamentalists, claim: no, we don’t believe in these women’s rights. I’m here for a certain level of oppression. Oppression in the sense that I think a society can say, now I don't like it because it's really an extreme case, but sorry, there are certain basic rights: freedom of choice, freedom of husband, freedom to leave your family, end of clitoridectomy, whatever whatever, where there is no debate. [Mrs. Heyer:] Yeah, but I would say if you look back in the 1950s, there was no there were many women who didn’t have the
we have a certain concept of feminine rights and so on and so on. So you will say when we I don't think we should be too open here that another group, which can be even one of our own groups or some religious fundamentalists, claim: no, we don’t believe in these women’s rights. I’m here for a certain level of oppression. Oppression in the sense that I think a society can say, now I don't like it because it's really an extreme case, but sorry, there are certain basic rights: freedom of choice, freedom of husband, freedom to leave your family, end of clitoridectomy, whatever whatever, where there is no debate. [Mrs. Heyer:] Yeah, but I would say if you look back in the 1950s, there was no there were many women who didn’t have the
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rights that we have today. [Žižek:] But this way there is something of progress! [Mrs. Heyer:] No, but this and if you look then how quickly it changed. And if you also realize how quickly incoming women are adapting to this freedom of Dutch women, you can see that this idea of emancipation and freedom is very contagious. So I I’m not sure that you really have to say, well, this is what we value, and everyone who doesn’t value immediately what we value should leave or shouldn’t be part of our society. I would say that’s the wrong direction. Many people enter, see the advantages of these kind of freedoms, take them over, or we have to discuss them and try to convince people of the importance of these ideas, and that could also be that we ourselves are sometimes convinced about their ideas. What... Okay. Okay. [Moderator:] Sorry. It’s time. You won? [Žižek laughs] No, I wasn’t listening. Okay. Sorry, it’s time for
rights that we have today. [Žižek:] But this way there is something of progress! [Mrs. Heyer:] No, but this and if you look then how quickly it changed. And if you also realize how quickly incoming women are adapting to this freedom of Dutch women, you can see that this idea of emancipation and freedom is very contagious. So I I’m not sure that you really have to say, well, this is what we value, and everyone who doesn’t value immediately what we value should leave or shouldn’t be part of our society. I would say that’s the wrong direction. Many people enter, see the advantages of these kind of freedoms, take them over, or we have to discuss them and try to convince people of the importance of these ideas, and that could also be that we ourselves are sometimes convinced about their ideas. What... Okay. Okay. [Moderator:] Sorry. It’s time. You won? [Žižek laughs] No, I wasn’t listening. Okay. Sorry, it’s time for
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questions and answers. We have two microphones. Here is one on the right side, I oh yeah, I see one on the left side too. Half an hour of questions and answers. [Žižek:] Before the questions come, just briefly. I agree more with you than you think. I especially liked what you said about the otherness, the impenetrable otherness. Because that’s for me the true novelty of the way I read of this Judaeo-Christian notion of neighbor. Neighbor is not the one who is like you. Neighbor is precisely you think you know someone, it can be your husband, your son, whatever. This is for me the key notion. You think you know someone but all of a sudden you discover there is an abyss. And that’s for me the true test. It’s easy here I totally agree with you. It’s easy to like
questions and answers. We have two microphones. Here is one on the right side, I oh yeah, I see one on the left side too. Half an hour of questions and answers. [Žižek:] Before the questions come, just briefly. I agree more with you than you think. I especially liked what you said about the otherness, the impenetrable otherness. Because that’s for me the true novelty of the way I read of this Judaeo-Christian notion of neighbor. Neighbor is not the one who is like you. Neighbor is precisely you think you know someone, it can be your husband, your son, whatever. This is for me the key notion. You think you know someone but all of a sudden you discover there is an abyss. And that’s for me the true test. It’s easy here I totally agree with you. It’s easy to like
Slavoj Žižek
immigrants when they give interviews and you see they are like you. But I would like to keep respect for them even when I cannot penetrate them, even when they they remain other. Here we totally agree. And that was my only point maybe I put it in an awkward way against humanitarianism. Because, you know, okay, let me give you the last one then debate blah blah. No, there is a saying which I find extremely stupid, wisdom at its most stupid: a saying "An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to listen to." Yes, up to a certain point, but wait a minute. Will you tell Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to...? No. The more you listen to him, the
immigrants when they give interviews and you see they are like you. But I would like to keep respect for them even when I cannot penetrate them, even when they they remain other. Here we totally agree. And that was my only point maybe I put it in an awkward way against humanitarianism. Because, you know, okay, let me give you the last one then debate blah blah. No, there is a saying which I find extremely stupid, wisdom at its most stupid: a saying "An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to listen to." Yes, up to a certain point, but wait a minute. Will you tell Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to...? No. The more you listen to him, the
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more
more
Slavoj Žižek
you do discover that he is an enemy. Everybody is not just an other whom we should learn to respect, blah blah. There are others who are enemies. Just to make it clear. [Moderator:] Your question. [Questioner:] I hate to have promised to interrupt you, Slavoj. As far as I can tell, you’re largely an opponent of political correctness. [Žižek:] Absolutely, yes. [Questioner:] But I just heard you say that there are some things that should be held as undebatable, as values that we hold that are sacred and not open to questioning. Isn’t that a form of political correctness of censorship? [Žižek:] No, absolutely not. Give me time
you do discover that he is an enemy. Everybody is not just an other whom we should learn to respect, blah blah. There are others who are enemies. Just to make it clear. [Moderator:] Your question. [Questioner:] I hate to have promised to interrupt you, Slavoj. As far as I can tell, you’re largely an opponent of political correctness. [Žižek:] Absolutely, yes. [Questioner:] But I just heard you say that there are some things that should be held as undebatable, as values that we hold that are sacred and not open to questioning. Isn’t that a form of political correctness of censorship? [Žižek:] No, absolutely not. Give me time
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to explain it. For example, let me can I give you one example of madness of political
to explain it. For example, let me can I give you one example of madness of political
Slavoj Žižek
correctness. In New York, I don't know state or city, I quote in my new book *The Courage of Hopelessness* which will be out, some committee for relations multicultural, I don't care, this committee provided the list of sexual identities claiming every person has the right to choose them and if you don't address them in such a way, you violate their human rights. And of course, it's very aggressively written: like man and woman are somewhere in the middle between bisexual, tri-sexual, asexual, butch, passive butch, name them and so on and so
correctness. In New York, I don't know state or city, I quote in my new book *The Courage of Hopelessness* which will be out, some committee for relations multicultural, I don't care, this committee provided the list of sexual identities claiming every person has the right to choose them and if you don't address them in such a way, you violate their human rights. And of course, it's very aggressively written: like man and woman are somewhere in the middle between bisexual, tri-sexual, asexual, butch, passive butch, name them and so on and so
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on. Then another madness, for
on. Then another madness, for
Slavoj Žižek
example in Canada three months ago, there was a big debate about and I
example in Canada three months ago, there was a big debate about and I
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take
take
Slavoj Žižek
this correctly I’m otherwise in deep sympathy with LGBTQ and so on, but nonetheless they had a debate on what of people who don't fit into this binary he-she. And they are now looking for a new third-person singular pronoun. Like let's say I’m LGBTQ, I don't want to be I don't recognize myself neither as he either as he or as she. And they are playing with ideas: one is to use, because Shakespeare used it once, to use "they" as a singular also. The other is to create a new word: like one is "zie" Z-I-E like and E. So if I’m I claim that this this type of arrogance, where you have a bureaucratic state body now which simply decides on a detailed legislation how to call people, and then this is not an advice, this is a measure for which at least in principle you have to be you have to be prosecuted for it. I am here I recognize
this correctly I’m otherwise in deep sympathy with LGBTQ and so on, but nonetheless they had a debate on what of people who don't fit into this binary he-she. And they are now looking for a new third-person singular pronoun. Like let's say I’m LGBTQ, I don't want to be I don't recognize myself neither as he either as he or as she. And they are playing with ideas: one is to use, because Shakespeare used it once, to use "they" as a singular also. The other is to create a new word: like one is "zie" Z-I-E like and E. So if I’m I claim that this this type of arrogance, where you have a bureaucratic state body now which simply decides on a detailed legislation how to call people, and then this is not an advice, this is a measure for which at least in principle you have to be you have to be prosecuted for it. I am here I recognize
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absolutely the problem, I’m totally
absolutely the problem, I’m totally
Slavoj Žižek
for LGBTQ, but in with a different twist: I claim that it's not simply that there are people who are masculine-feminine and then there are others who don't recognize themselves. Sexual identity as such is always antagonist, problematic and so on, and there is a moment of deep truth in this LGBTQ form. But okay I will not go into it. I I think, I don't have time to develop it now, there's a whole chapter in my new book, but I claim that political correctness for me, the way it
for LGBTQ, but in with a different twist: I claim that it's not simply that there are people who are masculine-feminine and then there are others who don't recognize themselves. Sexual identity as such is always antagonist, problematic and so on, and there is a moment of deep truth in this LGBTQ form. But okay I will not go into it. I I think, I don't have time to develop it now, there's a whole chapter in my new book, but I claim that political correctness for me, the way it
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effectively actually works, of course I agree with many of its actual points and so on, but that it's I don't even see why is it considered a leftist thing. Because often in American cultural wars, political correct people are referred to as crazy Marxists and so on. No! It's simply a petit bourgeois ideology to deflect real politico-economic struggles with the struggle for correct words and so on and so on. It's precisely a way to change how we speak in order not to change actual relations and so on and so on. I mean I can tell you this is very personal experience. I have many black friends, excellent relations with them. The way I talked with them we would have been all of us lynched immediately by politically correct people and so on and so on. I mean I cannot go again into entire reasoning today. But you know what’s the irony, you mentioned Foucault his idea of modern power which works through regulation, classification and so on. But isn't political correctness the way it works the utmost crazy example of this regulation through how do you call this, how do you call how you call and so on and so on? I mean there are behind of it power power power relations and so on and I am I am for all that. Let me give you an example, you will see it’s
effectively actually works, of course I agree with many of its actual points and so on, but that it's I don't even see why is it considered a leftist thing. Because often in American cultural wars, political correct people are referred to as crazy Marxists and so on. No! It's simply a petit bourgeois ideology to deflect real politico-economic struggles with the struggle for correct words and so on and so on. It's precisely a way to change how we speak in order not to change actual relations and so on and so on. I mean I can tell you this is very personal experience. I have many black friends, excellent relations with them. The way I talked with them we would have been all of us lynched immediately by politically correct people and so on and so on. I mean I cannot go again into entire reasoning today. But you know what’s the irony, you mentioned Foucault his idea of modern power which works through regulation, classification and so on. But isn't political correctness the way it works the utmost crazy example of this regulation through how do you call this, how do you call how you call and so on and so on? I mean there are behind of it power power power relations and so on and I am I am for all that. Let me give you an example, you will see it’s
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justified, because it concerns this place here. I got, I forgot to answer, I was ill, I’m very sorry, it was not meant as a disrespect, a message from some Amsterdam student, that's why I glad I’m glad that you are here, protesting that why am I participating
justified, because it concerns this place here. I got, I forgot to answer, I was ill, I’m very sorry, it was not meant as a disrespect, a message from some Amsterdam student, that's why I glad I’m glad that you are here, protesting that why am I participating
Slavoj Žižek
in this event here, this one, because there are no there are no non-Europeans, only one or two women and so on and so on. Okay, I claim this is an absolutely
in this event here, this one, because there are no there are no non-Europeans, only one or two women and so on and so on. Okay, I claim this is an absolutely
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crucial serious problem, although I must
crucial serious problem, although I must
Slavoj Žižek
say that my field, philosophy and
say that my field, philosophy and
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psychoanalysis, it’s not only you, if anything it’s one of the best developed in this sense. For example, since I’m a Hegelian, apart from one other book, all books on Hegel were written by women lately and so on and so on. So but you know what worries me so much? Alain Badiou, we had the same problem in the in the meeting we we had in London the first one on communism. And again some people said: no Asian Asian people here, not enough women and so on and so
psychoanalysis, it’s not only you, if anything it’s one of the best developed in this sense. For example, since I’m a Hegelian, apart from one other book, all books on Hegel were written by women lately and so on and so on. So but you know what worries me so much? Alain Badiou, we had the same problem in the in the meeting we we had in London the first one on communism. And again some people said: no Asian Asian people here, not enough women and so on and so
Slavoj Žižek
on. And then Alain Badiou said something
on. And then Alain Badiou said something
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very simple. He said: we are here communists as communists, it was a conference on communism for workers' rights and so on. How come that you worry why are there no Indians and Japanese here, and not even one worried that there are no workers here? That's automatic, that's okay, we can talk about workers' exploitation, they should not be here
very simple. He said: we are here communists as communists, it was a conference on communism for workers' rights and so on. How come that you worry why are there no Indians and Japanese here, and not even one worried that there are no workers here? That's automatic, that's okay, we can talk about workers' exploitation, they should not be here
Slavoj Žižek
and so on and so on. So it’s a much more complex topic, but I insist again: political correctness, precisely its excessive zeal how they try to neglect, it’s a defense they secretly know the they are the very model of what I thought when I wrote that Orwell. [Moderator:] Do you want also to give him a short answer? [Mrs. Heyer:] I was just wondering whether this isn't an answer to his question because no I didn’t answer his question. Then we can go to the second question on the other side. [Questioner:] Another question to Slavoj. I asked this question
and so on and so on. So it’s a much more complex topic, but I insist again: political correctness, precisely its excessive zeal how they try to neglect, it’s a defense they secretly know the they are the very model of what I thought when I wrote that Orwell. [Moderator:] Do you want also to give him a short answer? [Mrs. Heyer:] I was just wondering whether this isn't an answer to his question because no I didn’t answer his question. Then we can go to the second question on the other side. [Questioner:] Another question to Slavoj. I asked this question
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just minutes before but I think you didn’t have time to develop it. You’re saying that most of the problems that we are confronting today are problems of commons. And you’re also saying, if I
just minutes before but I think you didn’t have time to develop it. You’re saying that most of the problems that we are confronting today are problems of commons. And you’re also saying, if I
Slavoj Žižek
am correct, that you do not claim to have a solution to the problems of commons that we are facing today. So in this sense, for example, a really naive question: if you had students or an army of people, people at your disposal, what would you say to them in order to find a solution? Would you say read Marx all day, read Hegel all day, what would you say to them? [Žižek:] I I’m so sad that we don't
am correct, that you do not claim to have a solution to the problems of commons that we are facing today. So in this sense, for example, a really naive question: if you had students or an army of people, people at your disposal, what would you say to them in order to find a solution? Would you say read Marx all day, read Hegel all day, what would you say to them? [Žižek:] I I’m so sad that we don't
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have time because you see that's the paradox: you give me as an example the very situation which for me is part of a problem. What type
have time because you see that's the paradox: you give me as an example the very situation which for me is part of a problem. What type
Slavoj Žižek
of a
of a
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society, with what type
society, with what type
Slavoj Žižek
of relations of power in it, where a problem like where a problem like this can emerge? But
of relations of power in it, where a problem like where a problem like this can emerge? But
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let me nonetheless
let me nonetheless
Slavoj Žižek
try
try
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to answer you. First, that
to answer you. First, that
Slavoj Žižek
the problems are of commons, yes they are: ecology is a problem of commons, refugees are a problem of commons in the sense of in what sense we are all part of the same humanity space and so on, intellectual property is the key struggle today. We, our commons of symbolic exchange, Google and so on,
the problems are of commons, yes they are: ecology is a problem of commons, refugees are a problem of commons in the sense of in what sense we are all part of the same humanity space and so on, intellectual property is the key struggle today. We, our commons of symbolic exchange, Google and so on,
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that’s why they are a problem, because they
that’s why they are a problem, because they
Slavoj Žižek
privatize our the commons of our communication. That the broad problems today are problems of commons is relatively simple to develop. But but you know what I maybe how I would seriously begin to answer you. Your question is first now maybe this answer will shock you, but I would be afraid to say: why did you get these guys, I mean in bit total respect no irony, was there did you feel a sense of irony or not? Because I’m tempted to say: yes, what what bloody is so bad if they read Marx and Hegel?
privatize our the commons of our communication. That the broad problems today are problems of commons is relatively simple to develop. But but you know what I maybe how I would seriously begin to answer you. Your question is first now maybe this answer will shock you, but I would be afraid to say: why did you get these guys, I mean in bit total respect no irony, was there did you feel a sense of irony or not? Because I’m tempted to say: yes, what what bloody is so bad if they read Marx and Hegel?
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Perfect! Why not? They would learn something. I’m not afraid even to say this, because in a deeper sense I don't think the solution
Perfect! Why not? They would learn something. I’m not afraid even to say this, because in a deeper sense I don't think the solution
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will come
will come
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from thinking in pragmatic terms, you know. We had too many too much pragmatic approach. If anything the solution will come from doing things which appear in a first guise totally unimportant and so on and so on. I believe here in improvisation, in here I am against at least the traditional image of Marxism. Marx thought he knew where things are coming. I think we are in a situation of total improvisation. I like my favorite of French Revolution Saint-Just who said a revolutionary is like a captain of a ship
from thinking in pragmatic terms, you know. We had too many too much pragmatic approach. If anything the solution will come from doing things which appear in a first guise totally unimportant and so on and so on. I believe here in improvisation, in here I am against at least the traditional image of Marxism. Marx thought he knew where things are coming. I think we are in a situation of total improvisation. I like my favorite of French Revolution Saint-Just who said a revolutionary is like a captain of a ship
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which navigates in unchartered waters with no compass and so on and so on. [Moderator:] Thank you very much, Žižek. Are we going to the
which navigates in unchartered waters with no compass and so on and so on. [Moderator:] Thank you very much, Žižek. Are we going to the
Slavoj Žižek
next question on this side? [Questioner:] Hello, hello. Can you hear me? Hello. I wanted to ask both of you, actually all of you, if you have ever met a refugee and if you had deep conversations with them. [Mrs. Heyer:] Yeah, I I went to the refugee camp in Nijmegen, what is it, one and a half year ago and I met there someone and we have become friends and we have have had last year very, very, very deep conversations, yeah. So I and um I have to say that it’s for me very good to understand that rather than immediately thinking that someone is very strange to you, that there are many similarities. And many people in Syria have have ideas, ways of living that are not so very strange to the Dutch way of living. So the idea that a person from an Islamic culture is completely different from our culture depends very much on the class that they come from in Syria, the background, the education and so on. So that’s something that was important to know. But more important for me, I wrote a book on people who stay behind and I realized after a certain time that the people that come to Europe are mostly the people who are very strong, intellectual, have
next question on this side? [Questioner:] Hello, hello. Can you hear me? Hello. I wanted to ask both of you, actually all of you, if you have ever met a refugee and if you had deep conversations with them. [Mrs. Heyer:] Yeah, I I went to the refugee camp in Nijmegen, what is it, one and a half year ago and I met there someone and we have become friends and we have have had last year very, very, very deep conversations, yeah. So I and um I have to say that it’s for me very good to understand that rather than immediately thinking that someone is very strange to you, that there are many similarities. And many people in Syria have have ideas, ways of living that are not so very strange to the Dutch way of living. So the idea that a person from an Islamic culture is completely different from our culture depends very much on the class that they come from in Syria, the background, the education and so on. So that’s something that was important to know. But more important for me, I wrote a book on people who stay behind and I realized after a certain time that the people that come to Europe are mostly the people who are very strong, intellectual, have
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money to come here. And the people
money to come here. And the people
Slavoj Žižek
that stay behind, like the mothers, the brothers, the smaller brothers and sisters, but also the comrades who are convinced that they will win the the fight against Assad, they are the ones who have stayed behind and they can’t come to Europe and they they
that stay behind, like the mothers, the brothers, the smaller brothers and sisters, but also the comrades who are convinced that they will win the the fight against Assad, they are the ones who have stayed behind and they can’t come to Europe and they they
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experience something that we here in Europe don't know anymore. I mean if one of our children would emigrate or leave Europe, we can still visit very easily visit them, whereas the people that stayed behind in Syria are really persons who have to face and they can't see their sons or family members again. So that’s but in the whole
experience something that we here in Europe don't know anymore. I mean if one of our children would emigrate or leave Europe, we can still visit very easily visit them, whereas the people that stayed behind in Syria are really persons who have to face and they can't see their sons or family members again. So that’s but in the whole
Slavoj Žižek
one and a half year it was for me completely clear how difficult it is to be a refugee and to become a new part of our political community. I’m curious to the reason you’re asking this, because you think the whole discussion is too abstract or...? [Questioner:] No, I’m asking because it’s further, it’s it’s normally assumed that refugees is almost like a label, it’s like a homogeneous group of people that are because they’re coming from Muslim countries they don’t treat well their wives or their women or their daughters or they are homophobic. And I think that’s completely wrong, that might be some of the people but some of the people are not and I was very curious to know if you had also Žižek had contact with any refugees and if they had any conversations with them because if you look at the actual issue, you can also have homophobic people in the Netherlands, are you going to kick them out? You’re going to have people that are sexist pigs in the Netherlands as well, are you going to kick them out? So the issue we’re we're really talking about abstracts of labels which are wrong and we keep talking and I heard it over and over again today them versus us and it’s almost in our we don’t even notice it so I just wanted to bring it to the attention because we keep doing that and I think this is fundamentally wrong in our conversations. Thank you. Thank you. [Žižek:] Yes, but nonetheless I think that in this case I don't know there are no generalities, they are not the same and so on and so forth. But like there is nonetheless I want now to defend abstractions precisely. I think there is a limit to this, no? Because I’m sorry if this will appear provocative, but the last time I had this conversation was with a defender of fascism, no? Who told me, but don’t put all fascists in the same bank package, you know. There are different people, there are also some of them even have Jewish friends and so on, all that stuff and so on and so on. So I’m for a certain and I’m well aware the problem is elsewhere, I’m well aware, my god, per capita statistically there is probably more homosexuality in an average Arab country than here. The problem is the status of homosexuality. It’s tolerated, even solicited somewhere, but you must stay out of public space. So we enter another topic here. But to answer directly this question: yes, of course all the refugees are not the same. But here things get complicated. Like a report from my own country Slovenia. Our racists in Slovenia, the worst, precisely fell in love with Syrian refugees in a very racist way. And Syrian refugees poor guys I don’t blame them participated in this game. Some of them reported to Slovene media, you know we are yours, we are post-European, but those bad Afghanistan and Pakistan they are the real fundamentalist crazy and so on and so on. So they embraced this idea that there are different refugees. Again, a Syrian educated refugee was in Slovenia the most beloved person by some right-wing media, you know, like with them we can do a deal they are almost like us. But to answer you a concrete question: first, yes I met them. And we you know how we became friends? I’m sorry to to give you another variation. Immediately we started to exchange sexual innuendoes and obscenities. And we ended as extreme friends. None of that bullshit, "I I I respect you, oh your culture," but "do you know what happens when a dog fucks a camel?" and so on. We went at this level we immediately became friendly and so on. And with a conversation that any self-respecting
one and a half year it was for me completely clear how difficult it is to be a refugee and to become a new part of our political community. I’m curious to the reason you’re asking this, because you think the whole discussion is too abstract or...? [Questioner:] No, I’m asking because it’s further, it’s it’s normally assumed that refugees is almost like a label, it’s like a homogeneous group of people that are because they’re coming from Muslim countries they don’t treat well their wives or their women or their daughters or they are homophobic. And I think that’s completely wrong, that might be some of the people but some of the people are not and I was very curious to know if you had also Žižek had contact with any refugees and if they had any conversations with them because if you look at the actual issue, you can also have homophobic people in the Netherlands, are you going to kick them out? You’re going to have people that are sexist pigs in the Netherlands as well, are you going to kick them out? So the issue we’re we're really talking about abstracts of labels which are wrong and we keep talking and I heard it over and over again today them versus us and it’s almost in our we don’t even notice it so I just wanted to bring it to the attention because we keep doing that and I think this is fundamentally wrong in our conversations. Thank you. Thank you. [Žižek:] Yes, but nonetheless I think that in this case I don't know there are no generalities, they are not the same and so on and so forth. But like there is nonetheless I want now to defend abstractions precisely. I think there is a limit to this, no? Because I’m sorry if this will appear provocative, but the last time I had this conversation was with a defender of fascism, no? Who told me, but don’t put all fascists in the same bank package, you know. There are different people, there are also some of them even have Jewish friends and so on, all that stuff and so on and so on. So I’m for a certain and I’m well aware the problem is elsewhere, I’m well aware, my god, per capita statistically there is probably more homosexuality in an average Arab country than here. The problem is the status of homosexuality. It’s tolerated, even solicited somewhere, but you must stay out of public space. So we enter another topic here. But to answer directly this question: yes, of course all the refugees are not the same. But here things get complicated. Like a report from my own country Slovenia. Our racists in Slovenia, the worst, precisely fell in love with Syrian refugees in a very racist way. And Syrian refugees poor guys I don’t blame them participated in this game. Some of them reported to Slovene media, you know we are yours, we are post-European, but those bad Afghanistan and Pakistan they are the real fundamentalist crazy and so on and so on. So they embraced this idea that there are different refugees. Again, a Syrian educated refugee was in Slovenia the most beloved person by some right-wing media, you know, like with them we can do a deal they are almost like us. But to answer you a concrete question: first, yes I met them. And we you know how we became friends? I’m sorry to to give you another variation. Immediately we started to exchange sexual innuendoes and obscenities. And we ended as extreme friends. None of that bullshit, "I I I respect you, oh your culture," but "do you know what happens when a dog fucks a camel?" and so on. We went at this level we immediately became friendly and so on. And with a conversation that any self-respecting
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politically
politically
Slavoj Žižek
correct guy would put us all to to Gulag
correct guy would put us all to to Gulag
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immediately. Point
immediately. Point
Slavoj Žižek
two, not only this: I
two, not only this: I
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even
even
Slavoj Žižek
know collaborate with them. For example, I had conflicts with them but they are basically my friends, you know that Slovene group, Laibach, Neue Slowenische Kunst. They did now something wonderful. You know Venice Biennale, each state has its pavilion, but they
know collaborate with them. For example, I had conflicts with them but they are basically my friends, you know that Slovene group, Laibach, Neue Slowenische Kunst. They did now something wonderful. You know Venice Biennale, each state has its pavilion, but they
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now somehow got the money
now somehow got the money
Slavoj Žižek
to build their own pavilion for
to build their own pavilion for
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Neue Slowenische Kunst virtual state. It would be and you know what they did, what we did? They will who they invited they made a wide action only refugees from Ethiopia and so on minimal education, all the curators of their exhibition will be refugees. And it was wonderful to do this operation. We are not utopian that something big will happen. But I claim this is the right procedure. Not treat them, oh we have to explain to you and so on.
Neue Slowenische Kunst virtual state. It would be and you know what they did, what we did? They will who they invited they made a wide action only refugees from Ethiopia and so on minimal education, all the curators of their exhibition will be refugees. And it was wonderful to do this operation. We are not utopian that something big will happen. But I claim this is the right procedure. Not treat them, oh we have to explain to you and so on.
Slavoj Žižek
Up to a certain point it works if you treat them simply as equal. We met them, we have a big exhibition they are curators and so on and some of them said, wonderful! That’s how, you know, up to a certain point this works as you said, you simply presuppose that some basic sometimes this miracle works: you can communicate with people if you simply presuppose that you can communicate with people and then don't fall into this bullshit, "Oh but they did their own culture but how do I know if they mean the same thing" and so on and so on. So yes I think then it works wonderfully and I totally agree with you that like there are thousands of Slovene people whom I who are much more foreigners to me than this couple of refugees. Thank you. [Moderator:] The next question. [Questioner:] Yeah, for Žižek. Oh my god, well [unintelligible]. If it goes like this I will ask you a question as a member of the public area. I very much like your suggestion of a return to enlightenment enlightenment values and universality as opposed to, you know, particularism. Because as you mentioned, not today but other times, um there's this liberal idea of multiculturalism, which basically means segregation. You know, you you stay in your own neighborhoods and you’re allowed to keep your own culture. And of course there’s problems between these particular particular ideologies, for example feminists and more fundamentalist Muslims and also Christians, of course. So don't you think that maybe, like you mentioned also that maybe you need a bit of oppression, you know, you
Up to a certain point it works if you treat them simply as equal. We met them, we have a big exhibition they are curators and so on and some of them said, wonderful! That’s how, you know, up to a certain point this works as you said, you simply presuppose that some basic sometimes this miracle works: you can communicate with people if you simply presuppose that you can communicate with people and then don't fall into this bullshit, "Oh but they did their own culture but how do I know if they mean the same thing" and so on and so on. So yes I think then it works wonderfully and I totally agree with you that like there are thousands of Slovene people whom I who are much more foreigners to me than this couple of refugees. Thank you. [Moderator:] The next question. [Questioner:] Yeah, for Žižek. Oh my god, well [unintelligible]. If it goes like this I will ask you a question as a member of the public area. I very much like your suggestion of a return to enlightenment enlightenment values and universality as opposed to, you know, particularism. Because as you mentioned, not today but other times, um there's this liberal idea of multiculturalism, which basically means segregation. You know, you you stay in your own neighborhoods and you’re allowed to keep your own culture. And of course there’s problems between these particular particular ideologies, for example feminists and more fundamentalist Muslims and also Christians, of course. So don't you think that maybe, like you mentioned also that maybe you need a bit of oppression, you know, you
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don’t live in a
don’t live in a
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society
society
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where
where
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you have to argue that rape is illegal. Isn't maybe the most actually tolerant and leftist
you have to argue that rape is illegal. Isn't maybe the most actually tolerant and leftist
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statement now is to say, you have to enforce secularism? [Žižek:] Here you know like here I would agree with you even if it sounds nice, but what does it mean practically? I’m here if I got this correctly here very practical. But I may appear a crazy Hegelian philosopher, but I am well aware of empirical... what does this mean, enforce secularism? At one level I agree with you, because I had this experience. Once I had a debate in London with some progressive Muslims, no? And they told me we are sick of this patronizing, like "even if you are Muslims you are can be good people like you." No, one of them told me: I want to be respected not in spite of my Islam but because of my Islam. And my answer was simple: no problem for me if you respect me not in spite of my atheism but because of my atheism. Here I touched a certain limit there. [Mrs. Heyer:] I I would also like to respond. Hannah Arendt makes a difference between the Jew who is a parvenu, a person who completely assimilates to the society where he is living, for example a person like Heinrich Heine, but and you also have the pariah, that’s the person who is excluded excluded because he is too strange. And then she says what we should be as Jews, we should be conscious pariahs, pariahs, is that the right pronunciation? Pariah, pariah, that’s true. We should be conscious pariahs, which means that you
statement now is to say, you have to enforce secularism? [Žižek:] Here you know like here I would agree with you even if it sounds nice, but what does it mean practically? I’m here if I got this correctly here very practical. But I may appear a crazy Hegelian philosopher, but I am well aware of empirical... what does this mean, enforce secularism? At one level I agree with you, because I had this experience. Once I had a debate in London with some progressive Muslims, no? And they told me we are sick of this patronizing, like "even if you are Muslims you are can be good people like you." No, one of them told me: I want to be respected not in spite of my Islam but because of my Islam. And my answer was simple: no problem for me if you respect me not in spite of my atheism but because of my atheism. Here I touched a certain limit there. [Mrs. Heyer:] I I would also like to respond. Hannah Arendt makes a difference between the Jew who is a parvenu, a person who completely assimilates to the society where he is living, for example a person like Heinrich Heine, but and you also have the pariah, that’s the person who is excluded excluded because he is too strange. And then she says what we should be as Jews, we should be conscious pariahs, pariahs, is that the right pronunciation? Pariah, pariah, that’s true. We should be conscious pariahs, which means that you
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are accepted as the person who is a Jew, who has in this case a certain religious background, a certain cultural background, and you want
are accepted as the person who is a Jew, who has in this case a certain religious background, a certain cultural background, and you want
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to be accepted as such, and not only if you are either a person who completely is is adopted or a person who is completely excluded. And for me that would be reason to say of course you shouldn't shouldn't enforce the secularism, of course, because it would exclude many people from our society.
to be accepted as such, and not only if you are either a person who completely is is adopted or a person who is completely excluded. And for me that would be reason to say of course you shouldn't shouldn't enforce the secularism, of course, because it would exclude many people from our society.
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[Moderator:] Thank you. Thank you very much, Žižek. Are we going to the next question on this side? [Questioner:] Yes, two very, very short questions. First, I do think we mostly know what we are fighting for and whom we are fighting, we just don't know how to fight. So how do we fight? Question number one. And the second question, Mr. Žižek, do you sometimes worry that your own thoughts and your own work, to a certain extent through conferences
[Moderator:] Thank you. Thank you very much, Žižek. Are we going to the next question on this side? [Questioner:] Yes, two very, very short questions. First, I do think we mostly know what we are fighting for and whom we are fighting, we just don't know how to fight. So how do we fight? Question number one. And the second question, Mr. Žižek, do you sometimes worry that your own thoughts and your own work, to a certain extent through conferences
Slavoj Žižek
like these or through publication, can also become a commodity that you can purchase like a cup of fair trade coffee? [Žižek:] It is already a commodity! [Laughter] Yes! Well, I don't think hopefully maybe I can I can be reduced to this. I mean what do you want to prove with this? Like Brecht, okay, you may not like him, but you know if there was a task negotiator selling his stuff and so on as a writer was Bertolt Brecht. So I don’t think that that you can approach at this level. What is if I am a commodity? The problem is as some people claim: can I be reduced to this in the sense of are the effects of my work reducible to this that people buy me thinking they are doing something subversive but it’s just the commodity of... and I think that I can give you empirical proof why I think I cannot be reduced to a commodity, that I do something which is at least slightly more dramatic. I don't want to go too far now, but let me give you just two-three examples. If you, I don't think you have to but just make a quick check, follow my English publications: did you notice that in
like these or through publication, can also become a commodity that you can purchase like a cup of fair trade coffee? [Žižek:] It is already a commodity! [Laughter] Yes! Well, I don't think hopefully maybe I can I can be reduced to this. I mean what do you want to prove with this? Like Brecht, okay, you may not like him, but you know if there was a task negotiator selling his stuff and so on as a writer was Bertolt Brecht. So I don’t think that that you can approach at this level. What is if I am a commodity? The problem is as some people claim: can I be reduced to this in the sense of are the effects of my work reducible to this that people buy me thinking they are doing something subversive but it’s just the commodity of... and I think that I can give you empirical proof why I think I cannot be reduced to a commodity, that I do something which is at least slightly more dramatic. I don't want to go too far now, but let me give you just two-three examples. If you, I don't think you have to but just make a quick check, follow my English publications: did you notice that in
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the
the
Slavoj Žižek
last years I was first prohibited in *New York Times*? Till five years ago they published a column, now I am out. Then I had a couple of columns in *Newsweek Digital*, prohibited. Then it was then in England, did you notice that already for three years I am prohibited in *The Guardian*, in *New Statesman* and in *London Review of Books*? So at least admit
last years I was first prohibited in *New York Times*? Till five years ago they published a column, now I am out. Then I had a couple of columns in *Newsweek Digital*, prohibited. Then it was then in England, did you notice that already for three years I am prohibited in *The Guardian*, in *New Statesman* and in *London Review of Books*? So at least admit
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this
this
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to me that
to me that
Slavoj Žižek
if my goal were to to be a commodity producer selling to myself I am not doing too good a job. My point is also that don't underestimate to what extent censorships still function. Like I even know the whole story: *Guardian* made a certain liberal left turn, more centrist liberal, so the moment I on
if my goal were to to be a commodity producer selling to myself I am not doing too good a job. My point is also that don't underestimate to what extent censorships still function. Like I even know the whole story: *Guardian* made a certain liberal left turn, more centrist liberal, so the moment I on
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my position on
my position on
Slavoj Žižek
LGBTQ and my position on refugees made made me instantly a persona non grata for this British liberal left. So no, if anything I am now on a suicidal path. It’s not... so I’m quite surprised and nicely surprised that here we can still do things the way we do it here. The last time I had a big talk like this in New York at Dead Socialist, whatever, and so on, there was organized opposition against me that tried to they
LGBTQ and my position on refugees made made me instantly a persona non grata for this British liberal left. So no, if anything I am now on a suicidal path. It’s not... so I’m quite surprised and nicely surprised that here we can still do things the way we do it here. The last time I had a big talk like this in New York at Dead Socialist, whatever, and so on, there was organized opposition against me that tried to they
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tried to interrupt me again and again. [Moderator:] Okay. And the first question, how do we fight? [Žižek:] Ah! Why do you worry about how do we fight? I see a problem even as some I mean I find here we found ways: for example look at an incredible phenomenon for me Bernie Sanders. He did something that was considered unthinkable: he mobilized people who would otherwise vote for Trump, I mean ordinary working-class populists and
tried to interrupt me again and again. [Moderator:] Okay. And the first question, how do we fight? [Žižek:] Ah! Why do you worry about how do we fight? I see a problem even as some I mean I find here we found ways: for example look at an incredible phenomenon for me Bernie Sanders. He did something that was considered unthinkable: he mobilized people who would otherwise vote for Trump, I mean ordinary working-class populists and
Slavoj Žižek
so on. I worry much even much more fundamentally about another thing. You claim we know. No, please inform me without any irony: I don't know what we are fighting for. What do we want? Again as you pointed out, do we want out of capitalism? Do we want what I ironically call leftist Fukuyamaism and so on? I mean, we have this last myth of the left: the left now denounced its post-fashionable in radical left to be against representative politics, against state socialism and so on, we still have
so on. I worry much even much more fundamentally about another thing. You claim we know. No, please inform me without any irony: I don't know what we are fighting for. What do we want? Again as you pointed out, do we want out of capitalism? Do we want what I ironically call leftist Fukuyamaism and so on? I mean, we have this last myth of the left: the left now denounced its post-fashionable in radical left to be against representative politics, against state socialism and so on, we still have
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this myth of local authentic pre-representative democracy, local communities deciding and so on
this myth of local authentic pre-representative democracy, local communities deciding and so on
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and so on. I hate that. I claim it's just a myth of an authentic life. If anything, we need to reinvent large-scale mega-bureaucratic organizations that will and that will that will learn how to act globally and so on and so on. And I don't know how to do it! So tell me
and so on. I hate that. I claim it's just a myth of an authentic life. If anything, we need to reinvent large-scale mega-bureaucratic organizations that will and that will that will learn how to act globally and so on and so on. And I don't know how to do it! So tell me
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if you know even what we are fighting for. I don't know. I know only this: that for me not only I don't this idea of local communities, people gather, decide their way of
if you know even what we are fighting for. I don't know. I know only this: that for me not only I don't this idea of local communities, people gather, decide their way of
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life, it's
life, it's
Slavoj Žižek
hell! [Laughter] I don't want to live there! I mean with in the morning we debate the afternoon a meeting, we decide how to raise our children, how to organize distribution of electricity and so on and so on. No! I want to live in a society of tolerable well-functioning alienation. That’s my point! I think alien where things just function like things. We don't know where we are fighting for. This is the end of the debate. Ah, I thank you all very much for your energy and attention, you too, all of you. Thank you very much. We have a short break and then we go on with the last block of the night. But we go on till half past twelve. You feel free? You feel free? No. I want to be free but... [Laughter] It’s another event, no? Feel free, yeah, it’s another event, yeah. Feel free. Thank you very much, all. [The speaker is escorted out to applause]
hell! [Laughter] I don't want to live there! I mean with in the morning we debate the afternoon a meeting, we decide how to raise our children, how to organize distribution of electricity and so on and so on. No! I want to live in a society of tolerable well-functioning alienation. That’s my point! I think alien where things just function like things. We don't know where we are fighting for. This is the end of the debate. Ah, I thank you all very much for your energy and attention, you too, all of you. Thank you very much. We have a short break and then we go on with the last block of the night. But we go on till half past twelve. You feel free? You feel free? No. I want to be free but... [Laughter] It’s another event, no? Feel free, yeah, it’s another event, yeah. Feel free. Thank you very much, all. [The speaker is escorted out to applause]