Digital Consortium Lecture - Reality as Materialized Ideology Inaugural lecture by Slavoj Zizek
Lecture · DigitalFUTURES ·
published 2021-06-12 · 1:52:09 · 13,706 words
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ideologypsychoanalysisecology-climatecommunism-socialismcinema-art-culturegeopolitics-warsexuality-genderfascism-populismliberalism-political-correctnesshistorydemocracycapitalismhegel-dialecticssubjectivityethicseveryday-lifephilosophy-general
Žižek opens by distinguishing his subjective self from his symbolic identity via Lacan's concept of symbolic castration, then honors his late friend Mark Cousins for his dignified humor. He argues that modern ecological ideology (citing Judith Butler) falsely posits human modesty, whereas true agency requires a 'universal' capacity to manage nature. He analyzes the material existence of ideology through examples like Santa Claus, Yugoslav socialism, and commodity fetishism, asserting that ideology functions precisely when subjects do not believe in it but act according to its rituals. He concludes by examining the spectral nature of force in Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses, using examples from architecture, military homophobia, and nuclear deterrence. Žižek analyzes the structural mechanics of ideology, arguing that prohibitions function by soliciting their own violation through regulated exceptions, creating a 'virtual real' power based on potency rather than actualization. He contrasts traditional ideological forms, which maintain a gap between public norms and an obscene underground, with contemporary 'obscene masters' like Trump who collapse this gap by breaking public decency rules while maintaining authority. He concludes that the left must reclaim moral decency and historical truth against the cynical relativism of populist right-wing politics. Žižek argues that capitalist ideology requires its own false representation to function, drawing on Marx's concept of fictitious capital. He critiques liberal direct democracy, proposing 'good alienation' through anonymous, representative institutions as the true space of freedom. He analyzes Trumpism as a symptom of 'stolen enjoyment' and white supremacist impotence, before addressing trauma as a permanent, ideological state rather than a discrete event, and the renunciation of immediate existence for symbolic mediation. Žižek responds to audience questions regarding architecture, ideology, and subjectivity, using an Argentinian linguistic joke to illustrate the traumatic nature of entry into language. He critiques Judith Butler’s performativity in favor of a Lacanian traumatic cut, then explores the ontology of architectural space through examples like the TARDIS and Mary Poppins’ bag, arguing that reality is inherently 'queer' and unbalanced. The segment concludes with tributes to recently deceased architects Mark Cousins and Michael Sorkin, and administrative announcements for the conference.
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The ideas in it 27
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The gap between the speaker's miserable bodily existence and the symbolic place/identity attributed to them by others (e.g., 'the philosopher').
as “Material Existence of Ideology”
The idea that ideology is not just a set of ideas or false consciousness, but exists in material rituals, practices, and institutional structures that function even when no one subjectively believes in them.
as “Universal Beings”
Marx's term for humans who can step outside themselves to perceive the natural totality; Žižek uses this to argue that caring for nature requires a 'gigantic' managerial role, not modesty.
Not merely an illusion, but a necessary structure; removing it causes the real of the capitalist economy to collapse.
The stance where subjects know very well what they are doing (e.g., the logic of capitalism) but nonetheless continue to do it; the illusion is in the practice, not the belief.
The set of claims necessary for an ideological edifice to function but which must remain unstated publicly; the hidden premise that sustains the visible ideology.
The concept that the most effective ideological force is not its direct use, but its potential or absence (spectral presence), which exerts a greater deterring effect than actual violence.
as “virtual real”
The power of an entity (like gold reserves or paternal authority) that exists only in its potentiality or the belief in its existence, rather than its actual physical presence or use.
as “universality with exceptions”
The structural formula of ideology where a general rule is immediately undermined by a series of specific exceptions, revealing that the true regulating power lies in the regulation of violations rather than the prohibition itself.
as “obscene underground”
The hidden, prohibited space of knowledge or practice that sustains the official order; traditionally, this gap between public norms and obscene knowledge stabilizes ideology, but today this gap is collapsing.
as “forced free choice”
A social mechanism (like politeness rituals) where one is given a choice on the condition that they make the 'correct' choice, illustrating how freedom is structured by prohibition.
as “obscene masters”
Contemporary political figures (e.g., Trump, Modi) who maintain authority not by upholding public decency, but by openly violating it, thereby collapsing the gap between the symbolic order and its obscene enjoyment.
as “big other”
The symbolic agency or public space of appearances and common decency that receives and validates our actions and complaints; its disintegration leads to social suicide when no one is ready to listen.
as “paradox of human desire”
The structure where one secretly desires something but is ashamed to admit it, such that having it imposed from the outside is experienced as brutal violence, revealing the gap between fantasy and reality.
Capital that relies on fiction; Marx's genius was introducing fiction into ideal schemes, showing fiction and empirical complications are simultaneous.
as “good alienation”
The paradoxical need for anonymous, non-transparent state systems (providing water, healthcare) which constitute the space of freedom, contrasting with the nightmare of direct, transparent local democracy.
as “Sitten”
Hegel's term for 'ethical life' or unwritten rules; Trump violated these unwritten rules while obeying written laws.
as “stolen enjoyment”
The fundamental theory of modern racism; the paranoid belief that a 'secret enjoyment' belongs to the Other (e.g., Jews, immigrants), justifying the claim that 'our way of life' is stolen.
A state where trauma is not a single event but a continuous condition (e.g., in failed states like Congo), leading to the inability to dream of a better society.
as “ideological trauma”
Trauma elevated to justify the status quo (e.g., Stalinism used as a warning against change); retroactive construction of past events as traumatic.
Violence mediated by symbolic fictions; being human requires renouncing immediate existence to be mediated by these fictions.
as “word in stone”
A reference to Albert Speer’s view that architecture materializes ideology, which Žižek contrasts with subversive occupation.
The claim that entry into language and subjectivity is not a playful multiplicity but a traumatic cut, opposing narratives of an original non-oppressive state.
The German term for thesis supervisor, used to describe his role in supervising Colin Ripley’s work on queerness in architecture.
The idea that reality is not balanced but is a 'reality of disturbed balance' or 'collapse of wave function,' where one element is privileged, fitting both queer theory and quantum physics.
as “collapse of wave function”
A quantum physics metaphor used to explain how reality exists through disturbance and imbalance rather than perfect balance.
as “outside is outside only from the inside”
An ontological principle derived from architecture: the exterior is defined by the interior perspective, not by a simple delimitation.
Stories he reaches for 8
Physicist Niels Bohr has a horseshoe above his door for luck. When asked why a scientist believes in superstition, he replies: 'I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.'
“Of course I don't believe in it, but I still, I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
Parents give Christmas presents claiming they are from Santa Claus, knowing it's a lie. The child knows it's a lie but pretends to believe to not disappoint the parents. This illustrates how ideology functions socially even if no one subjectively believes in it.
“I am not an idiot. I just pretend to believe in it to not to disappoint my parents”
In the Yugoslav army, official ideology was strictly homophobic, yet daily life was penetrated by homoerotic innuendos (e.g., 'smoke my prick' as a greeting). This shows how violent homophobia coexisted with a space penetrated by homosexual practice/innuendo.
“Instead of saying 'good morning,' we used the expression... 'smoke my prick.' And it even didn't act as a joke. It was simply to say hello.”
Freud's Wolfman witnessed his parents' intercourse at 1.5 years old, but it wasn't a trauma until he was 4-5 and reactivated it retroactively. This illustrates how trauma is often retroactively constructed.
“Retroactively when he was four, five, and was struggling with sexuality... he reactivated this trauma.”
Žižek argues that the existence of a sub-genre of Auschwitz and Srebrenica jokes is not bad taste, but proof that the events were too traumatic to deal with face-to-face. If one can report on it peacefully, it wasn't a trauma.
“That's why I fully understand... a whole sub-genre... of Auschwitz jokes.”
Contrasts Mussolini's fascist architecture (neo-imperial pastiche vs. modernist glass) and Stalinist 'wedding cake' buildings. Argues that architecture reveals the 'truth' of the ideology (hierarchy/authoritarianism) even when the official ideology claims equality.
“Architecture brought out the truth. If you said this in public... you would have disappeared in Gulag.”
A victim of rape is told by a policeman that her inconsistent report proves the trauma was real, because a non-traumatic event would be reported consistently. This illustrates the ambiguity of trauma and the role of comedy/jokes in dealing with it.
“if you can peacefully just report on it, it wasn't a trauma.”
A Yugoslav party official admits that the education system's 'success' is that it produces cynicism: people respect the rituals but do not take the ideology seriously, which is exactly what the regime wanted.
“We don't want people to believe. We want people just to respect the ritual, but not to take the ideology seriously.”
Works invoked 12
Capital book
Cited for the analysis of commodity fetishism and the phrase 'Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es'.
The Laws of Manu book
Used as an exemplary text of ideology to illustrate how prohibitions function through a series of exceptions.
Kill All Normies book
Cited by Angela Nagle to explain the shift from subversive obscenity to the rise of 'obscene masters' in contemporary politics.
American Beauty film
Mentioned by a questioner as an example of a character (homophobic man who is gay) illustrating repression.
Casa del Fascio artwork
Used as an architectural example of the contradiction in fascist ideology (modernism vs. pastiche).
Doctor Who tv
The TARDIS is used as an example of a space that is bigger on the inside.
Title of a course given by the organizer in the evening.
Cited for the argument that ideology has a material support in institutional networks and the spectral presence of force.
Mary Poppins film
Used as an example of spatial asymmetry (the bag) to illustrate the fundamental fact of human space.
Cited by Freud to argue that queerness/perversion is at the origin of human sexuality, not happy multiple perversity.
The Vikings tv
A 'mega-TV series' that Žižek 'almost liked' for its refusal to purify history, showing even 'good guys' committing brutal acts.
The Wolf Man paper
Freud's case study used to illustrate the retroactive nature of trauma.
People invoked 40
Colin Ripley positive
A gay student from Toronto who defended a thesis on queerness in architecture, linking sexual queerness to architectural formalism.
Used humorously to describe the length of time required to answer the audience's questions ('Fidel Castro answers, which means one hour minimum').
Li Shanying positive
Host of the event at Tongji University.
Philip Yuan positive
Host of the event at Tongji University.
Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly negative
An Australian Muslim cleric whose scandalous 'cat and meat' analogy is used to illustrate the 'Ideological Unconscious' of anti-feminism.
Narendra Modi positive
Grouped with Trump as an 'obscene person' who breaks rules of public decency.
Scheduled to speak in the 'Inclusive Futures' series.
Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction positive
Cited alongside Walter Benjamin regarding 'mass ornament' and mass culture.
Adolfo Coppedè positive
Architect of the Casa del Fascio (neo-imperial pastiche), used as a contrast to Terragni to show the contradiction of fascist ideology.
Deng Xiaoping positive
Used as an example of a political figure whose power is an 'obscene secret' known to all but forbidden to state publicly.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek follows Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, specifically using the concept of symbolic castration to explain the gap between the self and symbolic identity.
Mentioned by a questioner as a critic of images, with a paradoxical fascination in his own work.
Louis Althusser positive
Cited for his text on 'Ideological State Apparatuses' and the idea that ideology is buttressed by the spectral presence of force.
George W. Bush negative
Mentioned in the phrase 'Bush-Trump sense' of a failed state, implying a critique of their political era.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek quotes Butler's ecological stance ('modest role') only to refute it, arguing that her view leads to catastrophe by ignoring the 'gigantic' role humans must play in managing nature.
Donald Trump positive
Cited as the prime example of an 'obscene master' and 'cynical postmodern relativist' who breaks public decency rules to maintain authority.
Studied at the AA (Architectural Association) in Bedford Square.
Fredric Jameson positive
Mentioned as someone who thanked himself at the end of lectures, which Žižek suggests is a Hegelian trait.
Bernie Sanders positive
Described as the 'true moral majority' and 'traditional decent politician' whose stance of decency the left should adopt.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Cited for formulating the inner logic of 'cynical reason' (knowing what one does but doing it anyway).
Giuseppe Terragni positive
Architect of the Casa del Fascio (modernist glass house), used as an example of fascist architecture revealing the contradiction of the project.
Studied at the AA (Architectural Association) in Bedford Square.
Angela Nagle positive
Cited as the author of 'Kill All Normies', whose thesis on the shift from subversive obscenity to 'obscene masters' Žižek agrees with.
Mentioned by a questioner as someone seemingly anti-technology but with a repressed fascination for it.
Scheduled to speak in the 'Inclusive Futures' series.
Angela Merkel positive
Cited for a 'nice statement' that the greatness of a way of life is its ability to accept immigrants without being destroyed by them.
Christa Wolf positive
Mentioned as someone who argued 'maybe we also have to teach some thing the west,' against whom Habermas reacted.
Gottlob Frege positive
Referenced for his 'theory of numbers' where one arrives at one by counting zero, illustrating the necessity of the 'ground' (alienation).
Cited for the phrase 'word in stone' regarding architecture as materialized ideology.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited alongside Siegfried Kracauer regarding mass culture, mass spectacle, and the 'religious edge' of belief.
Connected to Michael Sorkin; was 'totally devastated' by his death.
A good friend of Žižek, recently deceased. Žižek praises his personal integrity, dignity, and humor.
Michael Sorkin positive
Recently deceased; Žižek dedicated his first pandemic book to him; great fan; had incredible stage presence.
Niels Bohr positive
Used in an anecdote about a horseshoe to illustrate how ideology functions even when one does not subjectively believe in it.
Scheduled to speak in the 'Inclusive Futures' series.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek criticizes Habermas for dismissing the disintegration of socialism as a 'catch-up process' and for reacting furiously against critics like Christa Wolf.
Joseph Stalin positive
Used in a thought experiment to illustrate the paradoxical structure of Soviet ideology, where announcing prohibitions was more dangerous than breaking them.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for concepts of commodity fetishism, 'universal beings', and the phrase 'Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' (They do not know, but they are doing it).
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the case of the 'Wolfman' to illustrate how trauma is retroactively constructed.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the key term 'Sitten' (ethical life/unwritten rules), which Trump violated.
Transcript 35 turns
unknown
Also the very daunting task of introducing Slavoj Zizek. Someone in many ways who needs no introduction because he is so well known. He's well known in the architectural community even though he hasn't given many talks in an architectural context. The first talk he did give, I should mention, was given at the Architectural Association in London, and arranged by Mark Cousins, one of the great architectural historians who sadly passed away in the last twelve months. And since then Slavoj, I published an article of his, from virtual reality to the virtualization of reality, about years ago, which remains a very relevant article. But this is one of the few times when we've had the privilege of having him present to an architectural audience, not totally architectural, there are many philosophers in this audience. To try and give an introduction to Slavoj is impossible. Those of you who are architects here, it's almost like trying to give an introduction to Rem Koolhaas. How can you possibly do that? Slavoj's sheer production in terms of books is astonishing alone, and I haven't read them all but I will say I have got several of them including his last three: Hegel in a Wired Brain and the two pandemic books. But I'm not going to say too much about Slavoj himself because his reputation stands for itself. He has become a colossus within the world of philosophy, a public intellectual the like of which the world hasn't seen for some time. And I wish we had some more here in the states where I'm based at the moment. He is somebody who, I think, breaks down boundaries and appeals beyond the realm of philosophy, beyond the world of psychoanalytic studies, and opens up the whole terrain in a most provocative and challenging way. Slavoj has been characterized, there are two terms used for him, one is the Elvis of cultural theory and the other one the most dangerous philosopher in the west. I want to pick up on the second one, partly because I had the unique experience the last time I was privileged to encounter Slavoj was at a conference in Zagreb in Croatia, anniversary of May '68, a festival of subversive cinema. And I happened to be on a roundtable discussion with Slavoj, and the third person on that roundtable discussion was a guy called Karl-Heinz Dellwo. Karl-Heinz Dellwo has a very interesting history. I often think that the word theorist, if you pronounce it with a German accent, it comes out as terrorist. And in this particular case, we were in a roundtable discussion with someone who was a convicted terrorist. He spent years in prison for the occupation of the German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, where one of the hostages was killed. And he was a convicted terrorist. And he read Adorno there. That's the reason why, and all other philosophers. That's the reason why he was on this roundtable discussion. But there can be only one thing more terrifying than being on a roundtable discussion with a convicted terrorist, and that is being on a roundtable with Slavoj Zizek. Who is, I would say, both terrifying and brilliant, maybe terrifyingly brilliant. But to be on a roundtable discussion was most terrifying. I was fortunate on that particular occasion in that I was asked three questions and I knew, I was lucky, I knew what Slavoj's standard response to those questions had been in the past. But such is his perversity, he was able to turn round and each time he said, "I completely agree with you but..." and then went off in a different sort of angle. Slavoj is for sure I think the most entertaining and also the most perverse and most provocative thinker we have today. It is a huge, huge honor to me personally and a great privilege I think for our audience to have him here today. I will say no more. I'm sure you're all here to hear Slavoj.
Also the very daunting task of introducing Slavoj Zizek. Someone in many ways who needs no introduction because he is so well known. He's well known in the architectural community even though he hasn't given many talks in an architectural context. The first talk he did give, I should mention, was given at the Architectural Association in London, and arranged by Mark Cousins, one of the great architectural historians who sadly passed away in the last twelve months. And since then Slavoj, I published an article of his, from virtual reality to the virtualization of reality, about years ago, which remains a very relevant article. But this is one of the few times when we've had the privilege of having him present to an architectural audience, not totally architectural, there are many philosophers in this audience. To try and give an introduction to Slavoj is impossible. Those of you who are architects here, it's almost like trying to give an introduction to Rem Koolhaas. How can you possibly do that? Slavoj's sheer production in terms of books is astonishing alone, and I haven't read them all but I will say I have got several of them including his last three: Hegel in a Wired Brain and the two pandemic books. But I'm not going to say too much about Slavoj himself because his reputation stands for itself. He has become a colossus within the world of philosophy, a public intellectual the like of which the world hasn't seen for some time. And I wish we had some more here in the states where I'm based at the moment. He is somebody who, I think, breaks down boundaries and appeals beyond the realm of philosophy, beyond the world of psychoanalytic studies, and opens up the whole terrain in a most provocative and challenging way. Slavoj has been characterized, there are two terms used for him, one is the Elvis of cultural theory and the other one the most dangerous philosopher in the west. I want to pick up on the second one, partly because I had the unique experience the last time I was privileged to encounter Slavoj was at a conference in Zagreb in Croatia, anniversary of May '68, a festival of subversive cinema. And I happened to be on a roundtable discussion with Slavoj, and the third person on that roundtable discussion was a guy called Karl-Heinz Dellwo. Karl-Heinz Dellwo has a very interesting history. I often think that the word theorist, if you pronounce it with a German accent, it comes out as terrorist. And in this particular case, we were in a roundtable discussion with someone who was a convicted terrorist. He spent years in prison for the occupation of the German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, where one of the hostages was killed. And he was a convicted terrorist. And he read Adorno there. That's the reason why, and all other philosophers. That's the reason why he was on this roundtable discussion. But there can be only one thing more terrifying than being on a roundtable discussion with a convicted terrorist, and that is being on a roundtable with Slavoj Zizek. Who is, I would say, both terrifying and brilliant, maybe terrifyingly brilliant. But to be on a roundtable discussion was most terrifying. I was fortunate on that particular occasion in that I was asked three questions and I knew, I was lucky, I knew what Slavoj's standard response to those questions had been in the past. But such is his perversity, he was able to turn round and each time he said, "I completely agree with you but..." and then went off in a different sort of angle. Slavoj is for sure I think the most entertaining and also the most perverse and most provocative thinker we have today. It is a huge, huge honor to me personally and a great privilege I think for our audience to have him here today. I will say no more. I'm sure you're all here to hear Slavoj.
unknown
So welcome Slavoj in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Welcome.
So welcome Slavoj in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Welcome.
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. Just a brief introduction. It's a great honor for me to be with all of you. The only problem I have, but a nice problem, is when you mentioned Neil in your introduction that you attributed the most dangerous, all these philosopher and like, I cannot recognize myself in all these titles. I was tempted to look back like, are you talking to me? And why am I mentioning this? Because you know, in psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan which I follow, this gap between me in my miserable bodily existence and the symbolic place that you describe, you Neil as mine, this gap is called symbolic castration. I am never that. I have a certain symbolic identity, I cannot ever live up to it. This is for example, according to Lacan, the whole problem with authority. Father, other forms of authority. When you meet them they are never that and that's the problem we have. Second thing, yes, I would like to mention Mark Cousins, a good friend of mine, and especially with him I was aware of how even if it's a totally normal under quotation marks guy, death is never really normal, you know? It was a trauma. I praise Mark, do you know why? And I hope those among you who knew him are aware of this. He combined a sense of humor, friendly jokes and so on, with dignity and honesty. There are jokes which too easily slide into racism, bad taste, anti-feminist remarks and so on. He was for me almost the ideal of how to be humorous, not this stiff politically correct avoidance of jokes, but at the same time with great personal integrity and dignity. Now enough of this, I have a long text to deliver here so let me begin. Why Material Existence of Ideology? My title. Although, especially in the liberal west after many talk about the end of ideology, I think today ideologies are more alive than ever. Not just in the guise of new fundamentalisms, religious and others, but precisely among those who proclaim that we live in a post-ideological era. Because you know, an ideologist, if we use the term ideology in the Marxist sense of false consciousness and so on, no ideologist says in the first person "I am an ideologist," it's always some other who does this. So let me begin with an example that I recently used of how even apparent modest reliance on masks' ideology. We, although let's hope we are overcoming it, we still live in the era of pandemic. And the predominant form of thinking pandemic is something like this: In pandemic not only our social and economic tensions exploded. The pandemic also reminded us that we are part of nature, not its center. So we have to change our way of life. We have to limit our individualism, develop new solidarity, accept our modest place in the life on our earth. Let me read to you a short quote from Judith Butler where she articulates in a precise short way this stance. Quote: "An inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth that does not have humans at its center. We oppose environmental toxins not only so that we humans can live and breathe without fear of being poisoned, but also because the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own. As we dismantle the rigid forms of individuality in these interconnected times, we can imagine the smaller part that human worlds must play on this earth whose regeneration we depend upon and which in turn depends upon our smaller and more mindful role." End of quote. Now you will say "My god, it's a common sense nice, wise, modest statement." I have problems with it. I think it's too simple to insist that, quote again, "the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own." That is to say that we have to adopt a more modest role, we humanity, on our earth. Is it not that global warming and other ecological threats demand of us, on the contrary, collective interventions into our environment which will be incredibly powerful? Direct interventions into the fragile balance of forms of life. When we say that the rise of average temperature has to be kept below degrees Celsius, and when we talk and try to act following this insight, we talk and act as general managers of life on earth, not as one among other modest species. The regeneration of the earth obviously does not depend upon our smaller and more mindful role. It depends upon our gigantic role which is I think the truth beneath all the talk about our finitude and mortality. What we get here is the extreme form of the gap at work already in modern science and subjectivity. Modern science and subjectivity which aim at mastering nature are strictly codependent with the vision of humanity as just another species on the earth. If, as deep ecologists claim, we have to care also about the life of water and air, it means precisely that we are what Marx called universal beings, able to step outside ourselves, to as it were stand on our own shoulders and perceive ourselves as a minor moment of the natural totality. So you see the paradox. When you say we are not the only important thing on earth, all the interconnection of all life forms matters, this means that we are somewhere above perceiving this totality. This is the paradox we have to sustain in our crazy time. To accept that we are one among the species on earth and simultaneously to think and act as universal beings. To retreat into the comfortable modesty of our finitude and mortality is I think a path to catastrophe. Such a modesty is ultimately one of the modes of not thinking the pandemic. And today effectively thinking is very difficult. We live in a strange era. Religious and national fundamentalisms are rising, at the same time that cynical disbelief is rising. In such a moment, we should make a step back and instead of just analyzing the content of today's ideologies, we should focus on their more formal features. For example, my first point. What do we mean when we say that we believe or not in an ideology? Today more than ever we should bear in mind that there are beliefs which function socially even if no one really believes in them. This is absolutely a basic insight that we have to bear in mind. A simplistic European example. We give for Christmas, I don't, I'm a radical atheist, but we give for Christmas presents to our children and then we claim that these presents came from Santa Claus. But then if somebody asks us "do you really believe in Santa Claus?" I say "I am not crazy, I mean, I bought the present." Okay. Then try to do it, then ask your child: "Do you think this present was given to you by Santa Claus?" A sincere child will tell you: "Of course not, I am not an idiot. I just pretend to believe in it to not to disappoint my parents" and so on and so on. My point here is that there are beliefs which function socially in this way. They structure our reality even if no one personally believed in it. And so you will say this is an extreme example. Not quite. I remember from my youth in the socialist Yugoslavia, the official ideology of self-management socialism, at least in the last decade, was not taken seriously by party apparatchiks. And in this way it functioned perfectly. The apparatchiks got in panic when someone took the official ideology too seriously. This was for them the first step towards becoming a dissident. But this didn't mean that we didn't believe. We still obeyed the rituals, we acted as if we believe, and that's the paradox. The ideology functioned very well precisely insofar as we didn't really intimately believe in it. I noticed the same paradox in socialist education. Once, naive as I was, I asked a party apparatchik—Slovenia was a small republic, million people, so the party apparatchiks were not at the top there and you met them once a year on a parade, you could meet them on the street—I asked him: "But isn't our education a big failure? People don't really believe in it. The main result of education in high schools and so on was a kind of a cynicism. Don't take this seriously, politics is a whore, just go your own way, mind for yourself, don't get messed in politics." And then the guy, the apparatchik, was very sincere and he told me: "No, our education is a total success because that's what we really want. We don't want people to believe. We want people just to respect the ritual, but not to take the ideology seriously. So we achieve exactly what we want." And now I go into a little bit more serious waters. I here resume a line, but I think it's very important, which I already used in my books a couple of times. The same holds for what Marx calls commodity fetishism. I will quote the beginning of subdivision of the first chapter of Capital where Marx writes: quote, "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Now these lines should surprise us, since they turn around the standard procedure of demystifying an ideological myth. Marx does not claim in the usual way of enlightenment critique that the critical analysis should demonstrate how what appears a mysterious theological entity emerged out of the ordinary real-life process. He claims on the contrary that the task of the critical analysis is to unearth the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties in what appears at first sight just an ordinary object. So you see, Marx is not saying when you live in a bourgeois society you are caught in idealist illusions. No, he says, of course he knew, an ordinary bourgeois subject is very pragmatic, utilitarian. Money is just a piece of metal or paper which gives you right to a certain part of social product. But Marx says in your social practice you are treating money as if it is a magic object. You display your belief in your practice, even if subjectively you don't recognize it. Brought to the extreme, this stance culminates in a perverted universe in which we live today. And in this universe, my very reflective awareness of what I'm doing functions as a fetish which enables me to go on doing it. Here I will quote Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher, who formulated the inner logic of cynical reason. Cynics know very well what they are doing, nonetheless they are doing it. Or to quote Marx when Marx says in Capital, "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es." They don't know what they are doing but they are doing it. The point is not they are caught in idealist illusions, but they are doing something else. No, illusions are in what they are doing. And here permit me to quote a brief story about Niels Bohr, which I think I used about times only in my texts but it perfectly, sorry, perfectly describes the stance that I want to circumscribe here. You know, Niels Bohr was once asked by a friend: "Why do you have a horseshoe above your entrance door?" In Europe a horseshoe is a superstitious object which allegedly prevents evil spirits to enter the building. Like, "why do you have it there? Aren't you a scientist? You don't believe in it." You know what Niels Bohr answered? "Of course I don't believe in it, but I still, I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's how ideology functions today. It functions even better if you don't believe in it. So let me go on. To understand how ideology works, we should focus precisely on its material existence in rituals and so on. I used in a couple of my texts, in especially in one long text on architecture, and that's the only thing I will say about architecture, two examples. One is, you probably, I'm sure know all of you, the two opposed architectural designs of Casa del Fascio, the local headquarters of the Fascist Party in Mussolini's Italy. Adolfo Coppedè's neo-imperial pastiche and Giuseppe Terragni's highly modernist transparent glass house. This is a wonderful example of how ideology works because you have here the contrast between traditional pseudo-imperial Baroque style and this glass house. But this contradiction precisely describes the inherent contradiction of the fascist project. Fascism wants modernity in the form of a return to some more authoritarian organic past. The same thing goes for the Soviet Union. I always, I must admit, loved those Molotov University in Moscow or other examples of so-called Stalinist wedding cake Baroque buildings. Those high statues but like in many levels like a wedding cake. And you know what's so ironic with these buildings? That they immediately when you look at them bring out an association to a harsh hierarchic order. So although in Stalinism the official ideology was socialism, equality, freedom, you see the truth in architecture and not as a subversive act. You had to put it in architecture. Architecture brought out the truth. If you said this in public, "we are really a hierarchic society," bad for you, you would have disappeared in Gulag. But you would have also disappeared in Gulag if you were to avoid construct buildings in this way which openly display the authoritarian hierarchic nature of the society. So my point here is that the lesson of all this should be clear. An ideological identification, when we identify with an ideology, exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it. When somebody says "not everything is ideology, beneath the ideological mask I am also a human person," this is the very form of ideology. So when you have an ideological edifice which stages a certain image of man, of humanity, to get it, how it functions as ideology, you should absolutely always look in detail how this edifice functions in actual life. For example, sorry for this little bit of obscenity but this was almost for me an epiphany. When in and I served the military, Yugoslav army, I noticed a grotesque contradiction there. The ideology, explicit, of the army was strictly homophobic. Those declared gay were thrown out of the army. Before they were thrown out, for those couple of days waiting for the decision from general headquarters to come to dismiss them, they were usually beaten every night, despised and so on. Totally homophobic. But at the same time, I noticed the entire daily life of soldiers was totally penetrated by homoerotic innuendos. For example, in my unit, when you met a friend in the morning, instead of saying "good morning," we used the expression, sorry vulgarity, "pusi kurac," which means "smoke my prick." And it even didn't act as a, didn't function as a joke. It was simply to say hello. Okay, there were other small perversities. But this was for me the lesson, how violent brutal homophobia coexisted with a space totally penetrated with homosexual innuendos. So again, that's my first point here. How when you say "I adopt this ideology," the point is not just I, it's never "I simply believe in it." The point is always a very complex material practice where you materialize these beliefs but at the same time gain a distance towards them. That's my first point. The next feature of ideology is what I call ideological unconscious. An ideological edifice implies and relies on a set of claims which are necessary for its functioning but which should not be stated publicly. The example that I usually use here is that of an unpleasant incident in Australia. In the fall of Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric, caused a scandal when, after a group of Muslim men had been jailed for gang rape, he defended them. He said—this is a quote—"If you take uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, and the cats come and eat it, whose fault is it? The cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem." End of quote. This scandalous nature of the comparison between a woman who is not veiled and raw uncovered meat, I think distracted attention from another much more surprising premise underlying Al-Hilaly's argument. If a man rapes a woman, the woman is held responsible for the sexual conduct of the man, like she provoked him. Does this not imply that men are totally helpless when faced with what they perceive as a sexual provocation? That they are unable to resist it, precisely like a cat when it sees raw meat? So you know, if you just turn it around, read it this way, then Muslim anti-feminism, "make women responsible" and so on, really conceals almost its opposite. "We men are stupid. The only group which is able to act responsibly, control themselves, are women." Just this example. Then the next feature I want to emphasize is literally the material existence of ideology. And here things get complicated. In his classic text on "Ideological State Apparatuses," Louis Althusser makes the point about the material support of ideology. He claims that military, legal, and ideological apparatuses, institutional and educational machines and so on, and that they are always behind an ideology as its material support and that this aspect is ignored by Marxists from Marx onwards. That is to say, for traditional Marxists, materialism means that ideology, still conceived in an idealist way as a form of social consciousness, a domain of ideas, is grounded in the non-ideological material process of social reproduction. But what they ignore is the proper material existence of ideology in ideological state apparatuses, in a complex institutional network of practices and rituals. It's an important point, but I think we should go here a step further. The real that sustains an ideology is ultimately spectral, virtual. What do I mean by this? Althusser himself knew that ideology, here comes a longer quote from Louis Althusser's text, that ideology quote, "is silently buttressed by the existence and presence of the public armed physical forces. That it is not fully visible or actively employed, that it very often intervenes only intermittently, or remains hidden and invisible. All this is simply one further form of its existence and action. One had to make a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. It is sufficient to deploy one's military force to achieve results that would normally have been achieved by sending the military force into action. We may go even further and say that one can also not make a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. When threats of brute force or the force of law subject the actors in a given situation to pressure, there is no longer any need to make a show of this force. There may be more to be gained from hiding it." End of quote. So first one makes a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. Then one does not make a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. What does this mean? First you avoid the direct use of force by replacing it with a mere show of force. Let's say in a tense situation in which authorities fear forceful popular demonstrations, they decide to parade columns of tanks through the popular quarters of a city, expecting that this show of the readiness to defend public order at any price will dissuade the protesters. But then there is no show of force. And the authorities expect that this absence will have an even more forceful deterring effect than the open display of force. Since the protesters know there is a police or military force ready to confront them, the very absence, invisibility of this force makes it all the more ominous and omnipotent. For example, is Israel not doing this for years? It gives hints that it has nuclear weapons but it never admits this publicly. Nuclear weapons are an exemplary case of threat of violence which works only as a potential threat. Its actual use would have meant a total destruction of all parties. Another example. When we do something wrong and expect our figure of authority to explode in fury and shout at us. If this figure does not explode but remains cold and column, the effect can be even more threatening since there is always something of the release of tension in a show of fury. The virtual real is also operative in financial gold reserves. You know, our banks have gold reserves, many of them in Fort Knox. But we never see or use those gold reserves. They play their function merely by the fact that we are aware that they are there as the ultimate guarantee of our currency or whatever. Imagine a situation that we would have discovered that there are no gold reserves in Fort Knox. Yes, the consequences would have been paradoxical. But if we don't know that, gold reserves work. They are all their actual power is in their potency. And everybody knows that this is also how, for example, paternal authority functions. A good father with true authority doesn't have to beat his children. He just looks at them in a slightly threatening way. And this is much more efficient than actually beating children. Because even if it can be painful, if you actually beat your children, there is something ridiculous, impotent in it. Again, the true power is the power which remains in potency, which is not fully actualized. The fourth feature of ideology that I would like to emphasize is how prohibitions function in ideology. I want to illustrate this by "The Laws of Manu," an ancient Indian text which is I think one of the most exemplary texts of ideology in the entire history of humanity. "The Laws of Manu" focus on everyday practices as the immediate materiality of ideology. How, what, where, with whom, when we eat, defecate, have sex, walk, enter building, work, make war, and so on. Here this text uses a complex panoply of tricks, displacement and compromises whose basic formula is that of universality with exceptions. "In principle yes, but..." And "The Laws of Manu" demonstrate a breathtaking ingenuity in accomplishing this task, with examples often coming dangerously close to the ridiculous. For example, there is a universal prohibition, or injunction: priests should study the Veda, sacred texts, they should not trade. But then they immediately have an exception. A priest can engage in trade, but he is not allowed to trade in certain things like sesame seed. Then again exception: he can trade in sesame seed but only in certain circumstances and so on and so on. So you always add an exception. So you state a general rule, to which the whole of the subsequent treatise constitutes nothing but a series of increasingly specific exceptions. A specific injunction is always stronger than a general one. So the true regulating power of a law does not reside in its direct prohibitions, in the division of our acts into permitted and prohibited, but in regulating the very violations of prohibitions. The law silently accepts that the basic prohibitions will be violated. It even discreetly solicits you to violate them. And then once you find yourself in this position of guilt, it tells you how to reconcile the violation with the law, by way of violating the prohibition in a regulated way. For example, at least in Catholicism—and my country is Slovenia, religiously, Catholic—of course the principal stance of the church is no sex outside marriage. But then, if you do it, you should at least confess it, you should struggle. You have a series of exceptions so that at the end basically you can do whatever you want just by obeying certain rules. And I think that almost all laws, prohibitions, function in this way. The worst thing you can do is not to violate the law. Because if you don't violate the law absolutely, then the power has no, basically no authority, no hold on you. You must violate it so that you feel guilty, responsible, and then the whole machinery of the law is how you should deal with this guilt of yours. That's traditional ideology. However, today, now we come to the true problem, ideology no longer functions like that. A rupture is taking place in what philosophers call the ethical substance of our life, what already in one of the kind introductions to me here was called this sense of community and so on. Now I come to my crucial point. Every order of culture implies its obscene underground. What one is not allowed to talk about publicly. This space of the obscene operates at multiple levels, from rumors about the dark side of the private life of political leaders and then the use of dirty language, indecent insinuations, to cases which are much more innocent and as such even more crucial. I will now take, maybe risky for some of you but totally respectful, example from People's Republic of China. I remember in the last years of Deng Xiaoping's life, some Chinese party apparatchik said in an interview with a foreign journalist that although he is officially retired, Deng still effectively leads China. He was immediately attacked for divulging, rendering public, a state secret. What was the joke here? The joke was that everybody knew this, that Deng Xiaoping really still pulls the strings. But you were not supposed to state this publicly. You were not supposed to state this publicly. And this is for me something very interesting, how often you have a gap between what is permitted and what is prohibited, but even what is prohibited you are supposed to know it and vice-versa, what is permitted you are supposed not to do it. For example, I read a good explanation of Stalin's era, how it functioned ideologically. The point is this one. Of course Stalinism was a repressive regime. It was prohibited to criticize Stalin and so on. So imagine a scene in Soviet Union, at a Central Committee meeting with Stalin there, some ordinary member raises his hands and begins to criticize Stalin. Of course, horrible, he would probably have been immediately arrested. But then imagine another guy taking word and saying, shouting at the guy who criticized Stalin: "Are you crazy? You are not permitted to criticize Stalin here!" I think this second guy would have been arrested even faster. Because it was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was maybe even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition. So for me, whenever we are dealing with social norms, prohibitions, injunctions, we are always moving between these two paradoxes. On the one hand, we have things that are prohibited but in an ambiguous way, you are effectively secretly solicited to do them. Especially, I think, okay today these things are no longer prohibited, but I remember half a century ago when I was young, officially you were discouraged to engage in sexuality in your puberty. But then friends told me that parents told them don't mess with girls if they were boys, with girls it was even worse prohibited. But then it regularly happened to my friends that when their parents discovered that they really didn't engage in sexual games with girls, they were disappointed. You know, the true order was not "don't play with girls," but "do it discreetly." So again, there are things which are prohibited but ideology expects you to discreetly to do it. And even more interesting, I think this is a basic feature of every ideology. Something you are allowed to do, you are freely a freedom, you are officially guaranteed that you should use it, but you are not allowed in actual life to do it. There are not only big theoretical examples or abstract global examples here, but it would interest me how you have in different countries different mechanisms on this. For example, in my country, when let's say I have a little bit more money than a friend of mine, I invite my friend to dinner. We both know absolutely that I will pay. But when the waiter arrives at the end with the bill, it's absolutely necessary ritual with us that my friend has to play the game: "No, allow me to pay, allow me at least to pay half of it." And we have to play this game for like half a minute, and then my friend of course says "Okay if you want you pay." But we have to play this game. Once I was very nasty, it was evil of me. And after my friend, who didn't have any money, said "Okay please allow me to pay," I did the worst thing possible. I told him "Okay, then you pay." Of course my friend didn't have any money, he was embarrassed, so he had to pretend that "Oh my God I forgot my credit card at home" and so on. But you know these things are crucial. This is the basic mechanism of politeness. You offer to do something on condition that this offer will not be accepted. I call this forced free choice. You are giving a choice on condition that you will make the right choice. And I claim that this is not an obscene, this is not a totalitarian mechanism. All manners are functioning in this way. But today, that's the horror of what is happening today, I think, today the gap between what an ideology explicitly says, social norms and so on, and its obscene underground is collapsing. What do I mean by this? I hope some of you read a book that I really like, Angela Nagle, "Kill All Normies." The thesis of the book is this one: traditionally, shameless obscenity worked as subversive, as an undermining of traditional domination, as depriving the master of his or her, their false dignity. I remember from my own youth how in the 1960s protesting students liked to use obscene words or make obscene gestures to embarrass figures of power and so they claimed denounce their hypocrisy. However, what we are getting today with the exploding obscenity is not the disappearance of authority, of master figures, but its forceful reappearance. We are getting something that was unimaginable decades ago: obscene masters. And here I would like to oppose at the level of functioning ideology today's China with Trump's United States. I cannot imagine a stronger contrast. China—and this is not a critique, I even find it more acceptable than this Trumpian obscenity—China emphasizes to save the appearances, public decency, public order. But the miracle of obscene persons like Trump or maybe Modi, Narendra Modi in India, is that they can break all these rules of public decency. Just imagine all the obscene acts by Donald Trump. He mockingly imitated even sexual pleasure, orgasm of an FBI lady that he hated and so on. And he still maintains his authority. What is happening here is what? The agency to which I referred when I told that story about Deng Xiaoping "we shouldn't say publicly that he still pulls the strings although in reality he did it," this agency is what in psychoanalytic theory we call the big other. The force of public appearances. Appearances are in this sense crucial. To give you a vulgar example. Take a small community of people. All of us privately do things which you shouldn't do in the public. We go to the toilet, we defecate, whatever you want. And we all know that others are doing it. But nonetheless, it's absolutely impolite, and I agree with this, I'm not soliciting you to do this, not to talk about this in public. Like, would you ever ask your friend: "how did your last defecation go? Was it okay?" This you don't do. Today I think this agency in front of which we should maintain appearances is with the new vulgar populism, this agency is disintegrating. What do I mean by this agency? I remember almost three decades ago when there was a war in Bosnia, many women were raped. And I spoke with some of them, because some of them came to Slovenia, they needed psychiatric care and so on. And it's what an interesting phenomenon, namely they survived the rape. What kept them alive, I always heard this same story. What kept them alive was the fact that they wanted to survive to tell the story. They needed an ideal witness like "I should return to my community and tell it to them. Once it will be received by this ideal witness, I will unburden myself." But then in many cases a horrible thing happened. They survived the rape but then they discovered that nobody is ready to listen to them. Some men reacted to their story in this obscene way: "Are you sure you were raped? Didn't you enjoy it a little bit?" or whatever. And at this point when they discovered that there is no big other to receive their message, their complaint, their report, you get suicides. Massive, you get massive suicides. And I think something similar is happening today. And it's a horrible phenomenon. That we no longer have, we have less and less some kind of a public space of common decency that you are not allowed to disrespect. At this level, I like to make a remark often publicly, that I am not a relativist historicist. I think that in publicly swearing, making obscene gestures, we are no longer subversive. So when traditionalists attack me: "you are postmodern relativist historicist," I tell them no, I tell them that if there ever was a relativist historicist cynical President of the United States it's Donald Trump. He is the most postmodern president, cynically mocking all authorities. And if there ever was a traditional decent politician it's Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is the true moral majority. Simple decency and so on. And that's what we need today. Today transgression, obscenity is no longer in. Let me now just conclude because as usual I have other things to say but I don't want to lose time. Let me just conclude with to give you another example that I like about how ideological oppression can be masked by false liberal self-assertion. For example, of course I support feminist defense against violence. But I have doubts about the ideology which is behind this movement of "only yes means yes." Every sexual intercourse must be in advance publicly asserted like "we both want to do it." In some states like New South Wales in Australia, I read, although nobody obeys it, but you even have to put it in a written or video-recorded way. You know, as some intelligent feminists pointed out, you know what's the problem here? That the whole point of sexuality is that precisely in a gentle sexual interplay, not only you don't know in advance what you want, how far you want to go, but such a demand even appears as very brutal. Like, is there anything and violent, asexual? Is there anything more brutal than to ask your partner: "okay let's make a list. What can I do? Kiss you, unbutton your blouse, do this, do that." No, the whole point of erotic game is this gentle space between what is said, what is not said. Does this mean that I advocate men who claim "okay she gave me signals although she didn't say it, I took it as a yes"? No, if anything, this attitude enables us to discover even more forms of violence. You know, because you may half-unconsciously give a signal that you want to do something, but in reality you are afraid to do it. You know what's the basic paradox of human desire? That you want something but are ashamed to publicly say "I want that." Or you secretly dream about something and the most horrible thing that can happen to you is to get this in reality. Many of us have obscene dreams that we are ashamed to report, to even think too much about them, but we absolutely cannot stand that somebody really does this to us. One of the most brutal forms of violence occurs when something that we secretly desire or fantasize about is imposed on us from the outside. So this is I think our space today. On the one hand of ideological struggles this neo-conservative populist public obscenity, dirty jokes and so on which is disgusting. On the other side the so-called politically correct attempt to regulate it by explicit rules. Which I think also is counter-productive. Along these lines, what especially worries me—and here I support political correctness—is how in United States but also in other countries there is now a whole legal movement in United States already in states of the United States. They are imposing, they have laws which are in some cases already accepted by the local senate or whatever, which prohibit teaching critical race studies, feminism and so on and so on with a very precise formulation. That they are divisive, that they are disturbing the fundamental national myths. Like they don't like children to be taught in school how the founding fathers of American revolution were really slave owners who were among the richest men in America. Like how many people know that George Washington was at that point the richest person in United States when he fought for independence? It's very paradoxical result. If you look at class structure of founding fathers, of those who fought for independence against English, they were in large majority from the top. The bottom, the poor, and the Native Americans Indians were mostly for the English. So to conclude, when traditional conservatives claim that, accuse us that we who follow contemporary theories advocate post-truth, that we don't respect factual truth and so on. No, I think today's conservatives, they really act as people who ignore the dimension of historical truth. Their point is we must maintain official myths, founding story, because even if they are not true they stabilize our social structure. But our answer should be that these founding myths are really divisive. They pretend to cover the entire society but some people, men, blacks, Mexicans and others are effectively in a subordinate position. In other words, I am not a postmodern relativist. I think postmodern relativism, cynical distance towards everything is today the stance of the modern populist right. And we the left should shamelessly adopt the stance of moral decency, truthfulness and so on, precisely what at some point we preferred to denounce as ideological conservatism and so on. We the left are today the only true conservatives in the good sense of the term, like stable ethical life, wisdom and so on. I am sorry if I was too long. Thank you very much for your patience. Slavoj, thank you. That was absolutely brilliant. I mean, a wonderful lecture. I've got a lot of comments myself... They should have been better, but yeah. No, no, it was fantastic. I just want to mention to everyone that if they have any questions, please send them into the question chat. I've got a couple of questions. One thing I... Are they yours or Stalinistically censored by you of the others? Yes, exactly, exactly. I thought you'd approve of that. So, one of the things I was just thinking when you were talking about your example of the kind of the homophobia in the Yugoslav army. I was, of course the wonderful example is American Beauty in terms of movies, where the guy who is homophobic actually ends up being the gay one. But I was struck also by the example, the biggest critic of images, Jean Baudrillard. I went to an exhibition of his photographs which seemed totally paradoxical in its way. And the other example I want to kind of suggest is Paul Virilio. I read Paul Virilio and someone told me he is completely anti-technology, but I read him the opposite. It was almost like a repressed fascination that was coming out. And that leads me to a kind of difficult situation whereby how do we judge people in terms of their political labeling? Are we to judge them to say "I suspect that you're repressing a some kind of fascination"? Does politics in that sense mean so much anymore in terms of representational politics? Just to clarify a point. By representational politics you mean traditional politics with parliamentary representation, parties, or what do you mean by representational politics? I mean by, you know, I declare myself a liberal and yet I might be conservative or the opposite. That there may be a repression operation. We present ourselves in some way and maybe repress the realities as it were. Yeah, but you know, here I like to complicate things as an old Hegelian, even more than Marxist. You know what's for me so interesting here? That yes, we are dealing with this gap, representation and what it oppresses. But the true mystery is for me how what is oppressed cannot survive without its false representation. That it needs the false representation. And that's for me the big lesson of Marx. Marx was not an idiot. Marx knew very well that commodity fetishism is not just an illusion. It's an illusion but if you take it out, then the whole real of capitalist economy collapses. That's Marxist big insight. Although I have big criticism, many critical points to make about Marx. I think this is the lesson that we should take from him. And if there are still some old crazy half-Marxists there like me, that's why I will give you an insight what intelligent people are doing now: reading volume of Capital. Because volume volume is pure abstraction. Volume takes into account real life. Marx said you have this ideal self-reproduction described in volume but in order to have that, the whole network of things, money has to be available, material and so on, and this always empirically complicates things. But you know what's the genius of Marx? He doesn't just supplement these ideal schemes of volume with complex reality. He introduces fiction there. He says because of this we need not only fictitious capital, but fiction is necessary. Fiction and empirical complications are at the same time... But I thought you meant another thing about this representational problem because you know, I'm going in a slightly different direction that you didn't, but I think it's crucial. You know till now, and that's for me the mistake of those western maybe well-meaning liberals who celebrate all these Eastern European or whatever color, yellow, I don't know what colors they use, revolutions, you know? They are still too much like Habermas for me. Habermas directly dismissed disintegration of socialism as just a catch-up process. Like, "okay they didn't yet reach western liberal capitalist welfare state, so they just rejoined the west." Even Habermas, that's why he even furiously reacted against Christa Wolf and some others who said "maybe we also have to teach some thing the west," you know? But what we are getting now is something much more mysterious. It's signs of dissatisfaction in the east and in the west which are already a disappointment at western parliamentary liberal democracy itself. It is as if a level of social dissatisfaction is growing which simply cannot be translated into political forms that we have today. Look at the obvious example: yellow vests in France. They tried, they met Macron, they tried, and it wasn't possible simply to translate—I'm not totally on their side—but nonetheless my point is simply there was a strong movement of protest impossible to translate into traditional political space. Now to avoid a misunderstanding, I'm not saying here "yeah, we need a new direct pre-representational politics." No, now I will say something horrible for which I be accused of conservatism, of Stalinism and so on. My formula is: let's forget about this impossible dream of direct self-transparent democracy, local communities. I think leftists should shamelessly adopt today as their goal, yes that somebody from Lacan's basic logic of alienation. Yes, but my paradox is: we need good alienation. I don't want to live in a small community where every afternoon I would have to debate how we organize education of children, how do we get electricity. I want an anonymous, not fully transparent state or social system which provides water, electricity, healthcare, education. Which should of course be democratically controlled, but not in this direct sense. And I think this is the tendency today. Not just local communities. Think just about pandemic, about ecological threats. If anything, we need larger worldwide coordination. Not in the sense of world government. The society we live in today, a world government would have meant an unthinkable level of corruption if you ask me, you know. But global cooperation, larger forms of coordination will be necessary. So again, shamelessly my formula is good alienation. To become aware that yes, to be free, but you don't want to be free in this abstract space: "I do whatever I want" because then others are also free, we just kill each other. We need rules as the very space of freedom. Look, what is the notion of freedom today? It's when you speak freely, sorry when you think freely. But thinking freely is in language. To be free even in your thoughts, you have to internalize rules of language. Without that, you are totally mute. Or social freedom. Yes, but I have to count on the others to be free, that when I go out others will not beat me, attack me, that I can call police or whatever. You know, we should be all and especially what already one of the guys who introduced me nicely pointed out, this sense of community in the Hegelian sense of his key term Sitten, unwritten rules. What the most disgusting thing that Trump was doing was not so much to break the laws but to obey literally the laws but breaking violating all the unwritten rules. So I am of course for representational politics. There must be some way, and I accept it fully. Again my formula is some kind of, again I don't have a better term, good alienation. And be aware of, that's my critique of the United States. I used in one of my old books—I loved it—a wonderful observation. It's not as simple as that but basically: you know the big difference between United States and Europe is that in Europe when you enter a building, the ground level is zero, ground. And then first floor you walk up, you know. First floor is one above. But you know that in the United States you begin with one. First floor is ground floor. That's the problem with Americans, I claim. They don't know the function of the ground as substance, they immediately want to count. You know who has here the correct speculative solution? I was in Warsaw in a big hotel close to presidential building palace and I saw something unique, theoretically correct. You know how they had it there? You have a ground floor and then immediately go to second floor. You don't have a first floor. Because this is almost Frege's theory of numbers. That you arrive at one by counting zero as one, you know, so that the true one is already two. Let's take the lesson of this. That's the problem with American freedom. They are not aware enough of this necessity of minimal alienation. All the problems of Americans is that they want to, in a too simple way, to get rid of alienation and then you get Trump in power. Never forget how Trump in his inaugural speech legitimized himself in terms of non-representational politics. You remember he said literally "it's not just one party replacing the other party, you the people are now directly in power." Eh, and then you get him. Sorry, I am too long. Sorry. Let's leave space to others maybe. That was, I mean it was, could I just pick up just before we move on to other questions, on that question of Trump. I mean what I found interesting, I mean your discussion about belief is, is incredibly interesting and I was brought up a Catholic, right? And we used to go to church and we had this thing... I was not born in a Catholic country but I'm a Protestant if you ask me. Psychologically I'm a Protestant, yes. No but I was actually educated in a monastery off of... I'm not at all religious, but anyway, or maybe I am. But what is interesting to me is that in the Catholic Church you recite the creed, the credo "I believe in..." and you're forced to recite it in some way. So what I find interesting right now—and this is my own interpretation but I'm intrigued to know what you think about this—is in a way we get a kind of a reiteration of some of the concerns that Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer were talking about in terms of mass culture, a kind of religious edge to everything in some ways. You know, I mean the mass spectacle, the mass ornament and so on. So my question in some way is belief itself seems to me to be kind of therefore a religious kind of concept in many sort of ways. But I want, I would like you to precisely comment in relation to what you were saying before about Trump and the stolen election. Which is of course something that he knows is not true, and yet it is part of that discourse. How would you situate that claim, the election was stolen, in your discourse? Oh, it's wonderful example. Through the help of some of my American friends we elaborated a nice Lacanian theory of it. The fundamental theory of racism today is precisely stolen enjoyment. You know, like Trump's basic category is: "we have American way of life and then
Thank you very much. Just a brief introduction. It's a great honor for me to be with all of you. The only problem I have, but a nice problem, is when you mentioned Neil in your introduction that you attributed the most dangerous, all these philosopher and like, I cannot recognize myself in all these titles. I was tempted to look back like, are you talking to me? And why am I mentioning this? Because you know, in psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan which I follow, this gap between me in my miserable bodily existence and the symbolic place that you describe, you Neil as mine, this gap is called symbolic castration. I am never that. I have a certain symbolic identity, I cannot ever live up to it. This is for example, according to Lacan, the whole problem with authority. Father, other forms of authority. When you meet them they are never that and that's the problem we have. Second thing, yes, I would like to mention Mark Cousins, a good friend of mine, and especially with him I was aware of how even if it's a totally normal under quotation marks guy, death is never really normal, you know? It was a trauma. I praise Mark, do you know why? And I hope those among you who knew him are aware of this. He combined a sense of humor, friendly jokes and so on, with dignity and honesty. There are jokes which too easily slide into racism, bad taste, anti-feminist remarks and so on. He was for me almost the ideal of how to be humorous, not this stiff politically correct avoidance of jokes, but at the same time with great personal integrity and dignity. Now enough of this, I have a long text to deliver here so let me begin. Why Material Existence of Ideology? My title. Although, especially in the liberal west after many talk about the end of ideology, I think today ideologies are more alive than ever. Not just in the guise of new fundamentalisms, religious and others, but precisely among those who proclaim that we live in a post-ideological era. Because you know, an ideologist, if we use the term ideology in the Marxist sense of false consciousness and so on, no ideologist says in the first person "I am an ideologist," it's always some other who does this. So let me begin with an example that I recently used of how even apparent modest reliance on masks' ideology. We, although let's hope we are overcoming it, we still live in the era of pandemic. And the predominant form of thinking pandemic is something like this: In pandemic not only our social and economic tensions exploded. The pandemic also reminded us that we are part of nature, not its center. So we have to change our way of life. We have to limit our individualism, develop new solidarity, accept our modest place in the life on our earth. Let me read to you a short quote from Judith Butler where she articulates in a precise short way this stance. Quote: "An inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth that does not have humans at its center. We oppose environmental toxins not only so that we humans can live and breathe without fear of being poisoned, but also because the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own. As we dismantle the rigid forms of individuality in these interconnected times, we can imagine the smaller part that human worlds must play on this earth whose regeneration we depend upon and which in turn depends upon our smaller and more mindful role." End of quote. Now you will say "My god, it's a common sense nice, wise, modest statement." I have problems with it. I think it's too simple to insist that, quote again, "the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own." That is to say that we have to adopt a more modest role, we humanity, on our earth. Is it not that global warming and other ecological threats demand of us, on the contrary, collective interventions into our environment which will be incredibly powerful? Direct interventions into the fragile balance of forms of life. When we say that the rise of average temperature has to be kept below degrees Celsius, and when we talk and try to act following this insight, we talk and act as general managers of life on earth, not as one among other modest species. The regeneration of the earth obviously does not depend upon our smaller and more mindful role. It depends upon our gigantic role which is I think the truth beneath all the talk about our finitude and mortality. What we get here is the extreme form of the gap at work already in modern science and subjectivity. Modern science and subjectivity which aim at mastering nature are strictly codependent with the vision of humanity as just another species on the earth. If, as deep ecologists claim, we have to care also about the life of water and air, it means precisely that we are what Marx called universal beings, able to step outside ourselves, to as it were stand on our own shoulders and perceive ourselves as a minor moment of the natural totality. So you see the paradox. When you say we are not the only important thing on earth, all the interconnection of all life forms matters, this means that we are somewhere above perceiving this totality. This is the paradox we have to sustain in our crazy time. To accept that we are one among the species on earth and simultaneously to think and act as universal beings. To retreat into the comfortable modesty of our finitude and mortality is I think a path to catastrophe. Such a modesty is ultimately one of the modes of not thinking the pandemic. And today effectively thinking is very difficult. We live in a strange era. Religious and national fundamentalisms are rising, at the same time that cynical disbelief is rising. In such a moment, we should make a step back and instead of just analyzing the content of today's ideologies, we should focus on their more formal features. For example, my first point. What do we mean when we say that we believe or not in an ideology? Today more than ever we should bear in mind that there are beliefs which function socially even if no one really believes in them. This is absolutely a basic insight that we have to bear in mind. A simplistic European example. We give for Christmas, I don't, I'm a radical atheist, but we give for Christmas presents to our children and then we claim that these presents came from Santa Claus. But then if somebody asks us "do you really believe in Santa Claus?" I say "I am not crazy, I mean, I bought the present." Okay. Then try to do it, then ask your child: "Do you think this present was given to you by Santa Claus?" A sincere child will tell you: "Of course not, I am not an idiot. I just pretend to believe in it to not to disappoint my parents" and so on and so on. My point here is that there are beliefs which function socially in this way. They structure our reality even if no one personally believed in it. And so you will say this is an extreme example. Not quite. I remember from my youth in the socialist Yugoslavia, the official ideology of self-management socialism, at least in the last decade, was not taken seriously by party apparatchiks. And in this way it functioned perfectly. The apparatchiks got in panic when someone took the official ideology too seriously. This was for them the first step towards becoming a dissident. But this didn't mean that we didn't believe. We still obeyed the rituals, we acted as if we believe, and that's the paradox. The ideology functioned very well precisely insofar as we didn't really intimately believe in it. I noticed the same paradox in socialist education. Once, naive as I was, I asked a party apparatchik—Slovenia was a small republic, million people, so the party apparatchiks were not at the top there and you met them once a year on a parade, you could meet them on the street—I asked him: "But isn't our education a big failure? People don't really believe in it. The main result of education in high schools and so on was a kind of a cynicism. Don't take this seriously, politics is a whore, just go your own way, mind for yourself, don't get messed in politics." And then the guy, the apparatchik, was very sincere and he told me: "No, our education is a total success because that's what we really want. We don't want people to believe. We want people just to respect the ritual, but not to take the ideology seriously. So we achieve exactly what we want." And now I go into a little bit more serious waters. I here resume a line, but I think it's very important, which I already used in my books a couple of times. The same holds for what Marx calls commodity fetishism. I will quote the beginning of subdivision of the first chapter of Capital where Marx writes: quote, "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Now these lines should surprise us, since they turn around the standard procedure of demystifying an ideological myth. Marx does not claim in the usual way of enlightenment critique that the critical analysis should demonstrate how what appears a mysterious theological entity emerged out of the ordinary real-life process. He claims on the contrary that the task of the critical analysis is to unearth the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties in what appears at first sight just an ordinary object. So you see, Marx is not saying when you live in a bourgeois society you are caught in idealist illusions. No, he says, of course he knew, an ordinary bourgeois subject is very pragmatic, utilitarian. Money is just a piece of metal or paper which gives you right to a certain part of social product. But Marx says in your social practice you are treating money as if it is a magic object. You display your belief in your practice, even if subjectively you don't recognize it. Brought to the extreme, this stance culminates in a perverted universe in which we live today. And in this universe, my very reflective awareness of what I'm doing functions as a fetish which enables me to go on doing it. Here I will quote Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher, who formulated the inner logic of cynical reason. Cynics know very well what they are doing, nonetheless they are doing it. Or to quote Marx when Marx says in Capital, "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es." They don't know what they are doing but they are doing it. The point is not they are caught in idealist illusions, but they are doing something else. No, illusions are in what they are doing. And here permit me to quote a brief story about Niels Bohr, which I think I used about times only in my texts but it perfectly, sorry, perfectly describes the stance that I want to circumscribe here. You know, Niels Bohr was once asked by a friend: "Why do you have a horseshoe above your entrance door?" In Europe a horseshoe is a superstitious object which allegedly prevents evil spirits to enter the building. Like, "why do you have it there? Aren't you a scientist? You don't believe in it." You know what Niels Bohr answered? "Of course I don't believe in it, but I still, I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's how ideology functions today. It functions even better if you don't believe in it. So let me go on. To understand how ideology works, we should focus precisely on its material existence in rituals and so on. I used in a couple of my texts, in especially in one long text on architecture, and that's the only thing I will say about architecture, two examples. One is, you probably, I'm sure know all of you, the two opposed architectural designs of Casa del Fascio, the local headquarters of the Fascist Party in Mussolini's Italy. Adolfo Coppedè's neo-imperial pastiche and Giuseppe Terragni's highly modernist transparent glass house. This is a wonderful example of how ideology works because you have here the contrast between traditional pseudo-imperial Baroque style and this glass house. But this contradiction precisely describes the inherent contradiction of the fascist project. Fascism wants modernity in the form of a return to some more authoritarian organic past. The same thing goes for the Soviet Union. I always, I must admit, loved those Molotov University in Moscow or other examples of so-called Stalinist wedding cake Baroque buildings. Those high statues but like in many levels like a wedding cake. And you know what's so ironic with these buildings? That they immediately when you look at them bring out an association to a harsh hierarchic order. So although in Stalinism the official ideology was socialism, equality, freedom, you see the truth in architecture and not as a subversive act. You had to put it in architecture. Architecture brought out the truth. If you said this in public, "we are really a hierarchic society," bad for you, you would have disappeared in Gulag. But you would have also disappeared in Gulag if you were to avoid construct buildings in this way which openly display the authoritarian hierarchic nature of the society. So my point here is that the lesson of all this should be clear. An ideological identification, when we identify with an ideology, exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it. When somebody says "not everything is ideology, beneath the ideological mask I am also a human person," this is the very form of ideology. So when you have an ideological edifice which stages a certain image of man, of humanity, to get it, how it functions as ideology, you should absolutely always look in detail how this edifice functions in actual life. For example, sorry for this little bit of obscenity but this was almost for me an epiphany. When in and I served the military, Yugoslav army, I noticed a grotesque contradiction there. The ideology, explicit, of the army was strictly homophobic. Those declared gay were thrown out of the army. Before they were thrown out, for those couple of days waiting for the decision from general headquarters to come to dismiss them, they were usually beaten every night, despised and so on. Totally homophobic. But at the same time, I noticed the entire daily life of soldiers was totally penetrated by homoerotic innuendos. For example, in my unit, when you met a friend in the morning, instead of saying "good morning," we used the expression, sorry vulgarity, "pusi kurac," which means "smoke my prick." And it even didn't act as a, didn't function as a joke. It was simply to say hello. Okay, there were other small perversities. But this was for me the lesson, how violent brutal homophobia coexisted with a space totally penetrated with homosexual innuendos. So again, that's my first point here. How when you say "I adopt this ideology," the point is not just I, it's never "I simply believe in it." The point is always a very complex material practice where you materialize these beliefs but at the same time gain a distance towards them. That's my first point. The next feature of ideology is what I call ideological unconscious. An ideological edifice implies and relies on a set of claims which are necessary for its functioning but which should not be stated publicly. The example that I usually use here is that of an unpleasant incident in Australia. In the fall of Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric, caused a scandal when, after a group of Muslim men had been jailed for gang rape, he defended them. He said—this is a quote—"If you take uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, and the cats come and eat it, whose fault is it? The cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem." End of quote. This scandalous nature of the comparison between a woman who is not veiled and raw uncovered meat, I think distracted attention from another much more surprising premise underlying Al-Hilaly's argument. If a man rapes a woman, the woman is held responsible for the sexual conduct of the man, like she provoked him. Does this not imply that men are totally helpless when faced with what they perceive as a sexual provocation? That they are unable to resist it, precisely like a cat when it sees raw meat? So you know, if you just turn it around, read it this way, then Muslim anti-feminism, "make women responsible" and so on, really conceals almost its opposite. "We men are stupid. The only group which is able to act responsibly, control themselves, are women." Just this example. Then the next feature I want to emphasize is literally the material existence of ideology. And here things get complicated. In his classic text on "Ideological State Apparatuses," Louis Althusser makes the point about the material support of ideology. He claims that military, legal, and ideological apparatuses, institutional and educational machines and so on, and that they are always behind an ideology as its material support and that this aspect is ignored by Marxists from Marx onwards. That is to say, for traditional Marxists, materialism means that ideology, still conceived in an idealist way as a form of social consciousness, a domain of ideas, is grounded in the non-ideological material process of social reproduction. But what they ignore is the proper material existence of ideology in ideological state apparatuses, in a complex institutional network of practices and rituals. It's an important point, but I think we should go here a step further. The real that sustains an ideology is ultimately spectral, virtual. What do I mean by this? Althusser himself knew that ideology, here comes a longer quote from Louis Althusser's text, that ideology quote, "is silently buttressed by the existence and presence of the public armed physical forces. That it is not fully visible or actively employed, that it very often intervenes only intermittently, or remains hidden and invisible. All this is simply one further form of its existence and action. One had to make a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. It is sufficient to deploy one's military force to achieve results that would normally have been achieved by sending the military force into action. We may go even further and say that one can also not make a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. When threats of brute force or the force of law subject the actors in a given situation to pressure, there is no longer any need to make a show of this force. There may be more to be gained from hiding it." End of quote. So first one makes a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. Then one does not make a show of one's force so as not to have to make use of it. What does this mean? First you avoid the direct use of force by replacing it with a mere show of force. Let's say in a tense situation in which authorities fear forceful popular demonstrations, they decide to parade columns of tanks through the popular quarters of a city, expecting that this show of the readiness to defend public order at any price will dissuade the protesters. But then there is no show of force. And the authorities expect that this absence will have an even more forceful deterring effect than the open display of force. Since the protesters know there is a police or military force ready to confront them, the very absence, invisibility of this force makes it all the more ominous and omnipotent. For example, is Israel not doing this for years? It gives hints that it has nuclear weapons but it never admits this publicly. Nuclear weapons are an exemplary case of threat of violence which works only as a potential threat. Its actual use would have meant a total destruction of all parties. Another example. When we do something wrong and expect our figure of authority to explode in fury and shout at us. If this figure does not explode but remains cold and column, the effect can be even more threatening since there is always something of the release of tension in a show of fury. The virtual real is also operative in financial gold reserves. You know, our banks have gold reserves, many of them in Fort Knox. But we never see or use those gold reserves. They play their function merely by the fact that we are aware that they are there as the ultimate guarantee of our currency or whatever. Imagine a situation that we would have discovered that there are no gold reserves in Fort Knox. Yes, the consequences would have been paradoxical. But if we don't know that, gold reserves work. They are all their actual power is in their potency. And everybody knows that this is also how, for example, paternal authority functions. A good father with true authority doesn't have to beat his children. He just looks at them in a slightly threatening way. And this is much more efficient than actually beating children. Because even if it can be painful, if you actually beat your children, there is something ridiculous, impotent in it. Again, the true power is the power which remains in potency, which is not fully actualized. The fourth feature of ideology that I would like to emphasize is how prohibitions function in ideology. I want to illustrate this by "The Laws of Manu," an ancient Indian text which is I think one of the most exemplary texts of ideology in the entire history of humanity. "The Laws of Manu" focus on everyday practices as the immediate materiality of ideology. How, what, where, with whom, when we eat, defecate, have sex, walk, enter building, work, make war, and so on. Here this text uses a complex panoply of tricks, displacement and compromises whose basic formula is that of universality with exceptions. "In principle yes, but..." And "The Laws of Manu" demonstrate a breathtaking ingenuity in accomplishing this task, with examples often coming dangerously close to the ridiculous. For example, there is a universal prohibition, or injunction: priests should study the Veda, sacred texts, they should not trade. But then they immediately have an exception. A priest can engage in trade, but he is not allowed to trade in certain things like sesame seed. Then again exception: he can trade in sesame seed but only in certain circumstances and so on and so on. So you always add an exception. So you state a general rule, to which the whole of the subsequent treatise constitutes nothing but a series of increasingly specific exceptions. A specific injunction is always stronger than a general one. So the true regulating power of a law does not reside in its direct prohibitions, in the division of our acts into permitted and prohibited, but in regulating the very violations of prohibitions. The law silently accepts that the basic prohibitions will be violated. It even discreetly solicits you to violate them. And then once you find yourself in this position of guilt, it tells you how to reconcile the violation with the law, by way of violating the prohibition in a regulated way. For example, at least in Catholicism—and my country is Slovenia, religiously, Catholic—of course the principal stance of the church is no sex outside marriage. But then, if you do it, you should at least confess it, you should struggle. You have a series of exceptions so that at the end basically you can do whatever you want just by obeying certain rules. And I think that almost all laws, prohibitions, function in this way. The worst thing you can do is not to violate the law. Because if you don't violate the law absolutely, then the power has no, basically no authority, no hold on you. You must violate it so that you feel guilty, responsible, and then the whole machinery of the law is how you should deal with this guilt of yours. That's traditional ideology. However, today, now we come to the true problem, ideology no longer functions like that. A rupture is taking place in what philosophers call the ethical substance of our life, what already in one of the kind introductions to me here was called this sense of community and so on. Now I come to my crucial point. Every order of culture implies its obscene underground. What one is not allowed to talk about publicly. This space of the obscene operates at multiple levels, from rumors about the dark side of the private life of political leaders and then the use of dirty language, indecent insinuations, to cases which are much more innocent and as such even more crucial. I will now take, maybe risky for some of you but totally respectful, example from People's Republic of China. I remember in the last years of Deng Xiaoping's life, some Chinese party apparatchik said in an interview with a foreign journalist that although he is officially retired, Deng still effectively leads China. He was immediately attacked for divulging, rendering public, a state secret. What was the joke here? The joke was that everybody knew this, that Deng Xiaoping really still pulls the strings. But you were not supposed to state this publicly. You were not supposed to state this publicly. And this is for me something very interesting, how often you have a gap between what is permitted and what is prohibited, but even what is prohibited you are supposed to know it and vice-versa, what is permitted you are supposed not to do it. For example, I read a good explanation of Stalin's era, how it functioned ideologically. The point is this one. Of course Stalinism was a repressive regime. It was prohibited to criticize Stalin and so on. So imagine a scene in Soviet Union, at a Central Committee meeting with Stalin there, some ordinary member raises his hands and begins to criticize Stalin. Of course, horrible, he would probably have been immediately arrested. But then imagine another guy taking word and saying, shouting at the guy who criticized Stalin: "Are you crazy? You are not permitted to criticize Stalin here!" I think this second guy would have been arrested even faster. Because it was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was maybe even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition. So for me, whenever we are dealing with social norms, prohibitions, injunctions, we are always moving between these two paradoxes. On the one hand, we have things that are prohibited but in an ambiguous way, you are effectively secretly solicited to do them. Especially, I think, okay today these things are no longer prohibited, but I remember half a century ago when I was young, officially you were discouraged to engage in sexuality in your puberty. But then friends told me that parents told them don't mess with girls if they were boys, with girls it was even worse prohibited. But then it regularly happened to my friends that when their parents discovered that they really didn't engage in sexual games with girls, they were disappointed. You know, the true order was not "don't play with girls," but "do it discreetly." So again, there are things which are prohibited but ideology expects you to discreetly to do it. And even more interesting, I think this is a basic feature of every ideology. Something you are allowed to do, you are freely a freedom, you are officially guaranteed that you should use it, but you are not allowed in actual life to do it. There are not only big theoretical examples or abstract global examples here, but it would interest me how you have in different countries different mechanisms on this. For example, in my country, when let's say I have a little bit more money than a friend of mine, I invite my friend to dinner. We both know absolutely that I will pay. But when the waiter arrives at the end with the bill, it's absolutely necessary ritual with us that my friend has to play the game: "No, allow me to pay, allow me at least to pay half of it." And we have to play this game for like half a minute, and then my friend of course says "Okay if you want you pay." But we have to play this game. Once I was very nasty, it was evil of me. And after my friend, who didn't have any money, said "Okay please allow me to pay," I did the worst thing possible. I told him "Okay, then you pay." Of course my friend didn't have any money, he was embarrassed, so he had to pretend that "Oh my God I forgot my credit card at home" and so on. But you know these things are crucial. This is the basic mechanism of politeness. You offer to do something on condition that this offer will not be accepted. I call this forced free choice. You are giving a choice on condition that you will make the right choice. And I claim that this is not an obscene, this is not a totalitarian mechanism. All manners are functioning in this way. But today, that's the horror of what is happening today, I think, today the gap between what an ideology explicitly says, social norms and so on, and its obscene underground is collapsing. What do I mean by this? I hope some of you read a book that I really like, Angela Nagle, "Kill All Normies." The thesis of the book is this one: traditionally, shameless obscenity worked as subversive, as an undermining of traditional domination, as depriving the master of his or her, their false dignity. I remember from my own youth how in the 1960s protesting students liked to use obscene words or make obscene gestures to embarrass figures of power and so they claimed denounce their hypocrisy. However, what we are getting today with the exploding obscenity is not the disappearance of authority, of master figures, but its forceful reappearance. We are getting something that was unimaginable decades ago: obscene masters. And here I would like to oppose at the level of functioning ideology today's China with Trump's United States. I cannot imagine a stronger contrast. China—and this is not a critique, I even find it more acceptable than this Trumpian obscenity—China emphasizes to save the appearances, public decency, public order. But the miracle of obscene persons like Trump or maybe Modi, Narendra Modi in India, is that they can break all these rules of public decency. Just imagine all the obscene acts by Donald Trump. He mockingly imitated even sexual pleasure, orgasm of an FBI lady that he hated and so on. And he still maintains his authority. What is happening here is what? The agency to which I referred when I told that story about Deng Xiaoping "we shouldn't say publicly that he still pulls the strings although in reality he did it," this agency is what in psychoanalytic theory we call the big other. The force of public appearances. Appearances are in this sense crucial. To give you a vulgar example. Take a small community of people. All of us privately do things which you shouldn't do in the public. We go to the toilet, we defecate, whatever you want. And we all know that others are doing it. But nonetheless, it's absolutely impolite, and I agree with this, I'm not soliciting you to do this, not to talk about this in public. Like, would you ever ask your friend: "how did your last defecation go? Was it okay?" This you don't do. Today I think this agency in front of which we should maintain appearances is with the new vulgar populism, this agency is disintegrating. What do I mean by this agency? I remember almost three decades ago when there was a war in Bosnia, many women were raped. And I spoke with some of them, because some of them came to Slovenia, they needed psychiatric care and so on. And it's what an interesting phenomenon, namely they survived the rape. What kept them alive, I always heard this same story. What kept them alive was the fact that they wanted to survive to tell the story. They needed an ideal witness like "I should return to my community and tell it to them. Once it will be received by this ideal witness, I will unburden myself." But then in many cases a horrible thing happened. They survived the rape but then they discovered that nobody is ready to listen to them. Some men reacted to their story in this obscene way: "Are you sure you were raped? Didn't you enjoy it a little bit?" or whatever. And at this point when they discovered that there is no big other to receive their message, their complaint, their report, you get suicides. Massive, you get massive suicides. And I think something similar is happening today. And it's a horrible phenomenon. That we no longer have, we have less and less some kind of a public space of common decency that you are not allowed to disrespect. At this level, I like to make a remark often publicly, that I am not a relativist historicist. I think that in publicly swearing, making obscene gestures, we are no longer subversive. So when traditionalists attack me: "you are postmodern relativist historicist," I tell them no, I tell them that if there ever was a relativist historicist cynical President of the United States it's Donald Trump. He is the most postmodern president, cynically mocking all authorities. And if there ever was a traditional decent politician it's Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is the true moral majority. Simple decency and so on. And that's what we need today. Today transgression, obscenity is no longer in. Let me now just conclude because as usual I have other things to say but I don't want to lose time. Let me just conclude with to give you another example that I like about how ideological oppression can be masked by false liberal self-assertion. For example, of course I support feminist defense against violence. But I have doubts about the ideology which is behind this movement of "only yes means yes." Every sexual intercourse must be in advance publicly asserted like "we both want to do it." In some states like New South Wales in Australia, I read, although nobody obeys it, but you even have to put it in a written or video-recorded way. You know, as some intelligent feminists pointed out, you know what's the problem here? That the whole point of sexuality is that precisely in a gentle sexual interplay, not only you don't know in advance what you want, how far you want to go, but such a demand even appears as very brutal. Like, is there anything and violent, asexual? Is there anything more brutal than to ask your partner: "okay let's make a list. What can I do? Kiss you, unbutton your blouse, do this, do that." No, the whole point of erotic game is this gentle space between what is said, what is not said. Does this mean that I advocate men who claim "okay she gave me signals although she didn't say it, I took it as a yes"? No, if anything, this attitude enables us to discover even more forms of violence. You know, because you may half-unconsciously give a signal that you want to do something, but in reality you are afraid to do it. You know what's the basic paradox of human desire? That you want something but are ashamed to publicly say "I want that." Or you secretly dream about something and the most horrible thing that can happen to you is to get this in reality. Many of us have obscene dreams that we are ashamed to report, to even think too much about them, but we absolutely cannot stand that somebody really does this to us. One of the most brutal forms of violence occurs when something that we secretly desire or fantasize about is imposed on us from the outside. So this is I think our space today. On the one hand of ideological struggles this neo-conservative populist public obscenity, dirty jokes and so on which is disgusting. On the other side the so-called politically correct attempt to regulate it by explicit rules. Which I think also is counter-productive. Along these lines, what especially worries me—and here I support political correctness—is how in United States but also in other countries there is now a whole legal movement in United States already in states of the United States. They are imposing, they have laws which are in some cases already accepted by the local senate or whatever, which prohibit teaching critical race studies, feminism and so on and so on with a very precise formulation. That they are divisive, that they are disturbing the fundamental national myths. Like they don't like children to be taught in school how the founding fathers of American revolution were really slave owners who were among the richest men in America. Like how many people know that George Washington was at that point the richest person in United States when he fought for independence? It's very paradoxical result. If you look at class structure of founding fathers, of those who fought for independence against English, they were in large majority from the top. The bottom, the poor, and the Native Americans Indians were mostly for the English. So to conclude, when traditional conservatives claim that, accuse us that we who follow contemporary theories advocate post-truth, that we don't respect factual truth and so on. No, I think today's conservatives, they really act as people who ignore the dimension of historical truth. Their point is we must maintain official myths, founding story, because even if they are not true they stabilize our social structure. But our answer should be that these founding myths are really divisive. They pretend to cover the entire society but some people, men, blacks, Mexicans and others are effectively in a subordinate position. In other words, I am not a postmodern relativist. I think postmodern relativism, cynical distance towards everything is today the stance of the modern populist right. And we the left should shamelessly adopt the stance of moral decency, truthfulness and so on, precisely what at some point we preferred to denounce as ideological conservatism and so on. We the left are today the only true conservatives in the good sense of the term, like stable ethical life, wisdom and so on. I am sorry if I was too long. Thank you very much for your patience. Slavoj, thank you. That was absolutely brilliant. I mean, a wonderful lecture. I've got a lot of comments myself... They should have been better, but yeah. No, no, it was fantastic. I just want to mention to everyone that if they have any questions, please send them into the question chat. I've got a couple of questions. One thing I... Are they yours or Stalinistically censored by you of the others? Yes, exactly, exactly. I thought you'd approve of that. So, one of the things I was just thinking when you were talking about your example of the kind of the homophobia in the Yugoslav army. I was, of course the wonderful example is American Beauty in terms of movies, where the guy who is homophobic actually ends up being the gay one. But I was struck also by the example, the biggest critic of images, Jean Baudrillard. I went to an exhibition of his photographs which seemed totally paradoxical in its way. And the other example I want to kind of suggest is Paul Virilio. I read Paul Virilio and someone told me he is completely anti-technology, but I read him the opposite. It was almost like a repressed fascination that was coming out. And that leads me to a kind of difficult situation whereby how do we judge people in terms of their political labeling? Are we to judge them to say "I suspect that you're repressing a some kind of fascination"? Does politics in that sense mean so much anymore in terms of representational politics? Just to clarify a point. By representational politics you mean traditional politics with parliamentary representation, parties, or what do you mean by representational politics? I mean by, you know, I declare myself a liberal and yet I might be conservative or the opposite. That there may be a repression operation. We present ourselves in some way and maybe repress the realities as it were. Yeah, but you know, here I like to complicate things as an old Hegelian, even more than Marxist. You know what's for me so interesting here? That yes, we are dealing with this gap, representation and what it oppresses. But the true mystery is for me how what is oppressed cannot survive without its false representation. That it needs the false representation. And that's for me the big lesson of Marx. Marx was not an idiot. Marx knew very well that commodity fetishism is not just an illusion. It's an illusion but if you take it out, then the whole real of capitalist economy collapses. That's Marxist big insight. Although I have big criticism, many critical points to make about Marx. I think this is the lesson that we should take from him. And if there are still some old crazy half-Marxists there like me, that's why I will give you an insight what intelligent people are doing now: reading volume of Capital. Because volume volume is pure abstraction. Volume takes into account real life. Marx said you have this ideal self-reproduction described in volume but in order to have that, the whole network of things, money has to be available, material and so on, and this always empirically complicates things. But you know what's the genius of Marx? He doesn't just supplement these ideal schemes of volume with complex reality. He introduces fiction there. He says because of this we need not only fictitious capital, but fiction is necessary. Fiction and empirical complications are at the same time... But I thought you meant another thing about this representational problem because you know, I'm going in a slightly different direction that you didn't, but I think it's crucial. You know till now, and that's for me the mistake of those western maybe well-meaning liberals who celebrate all these Eastern European or whatever color, yellow, I don't know what colors they use, revolutions, you know? They are still too much like Habermas for me. Habermas directly dismissed disintegration of socialism as just a catch-up process. Like, "okay they didn't yet reach western liberal capitalist welfare state, so they just rejoined the west." Even Habermas, that's why he even furiously reacted against Christa Wolf and some others who said "maybe we also have to teach some thing the west," you know? But what we are getting now is something much more mysterious. It's signs of dissatisfaction in the east and in the west which are already a disappointment at western parliamentary liberal democracy itself. It is as if a level of social dissatisfaction is growing which simply cannot be translated into political forms that we have today. Look at the obvious example: yellow vests in France. They tried, they met Macron, they tried, and it wasn't possible simply to translate—I'm not totally on their side—but nonetheless my point is simply there was a strong movement of protest impossible to translate into traditional political space. Now to avoid a misunderstanding, I'm not saying here "yeah, we need a new direct pre-representational politics." No, now I will say something horrible for which I be accused of conservatism, of Stalinism and so on. My formula is: let's forget about this impossible dream of direct self-transparent democracy, local communities. I think leftists should shamelessly adopt today as their goal, yes that somebody from Lacan's basic logic of alienation. Yes, but my paradox is: we need good alienation. I don't want to live in a small community where every afternoon I would have to debate how we organize education of children, how do we get electricity. I want an anonymous, not fully transparent state or social system which provides water, electricity, healthcare, education. Which should of course be democratically controlled, but not in this direct sense. And I think this is the tendency today. Not just local communities. Think just about pandemic, about ecological threats. If anything, we need larger worldwide coordination. Not in the sense of world government. The society we live in today, a world government would have meant an unthinkable level of corruption if you ask me, you know. But global cooperation, larger forms of coordination will be necessary. So again, shamelessly my formula is good alienation. To become aware that yes, to be free, but you don't want to be free in this abstract space: "I do whatever I want" because then others are also free, we just kill each other. We need rules as the very space of freedom. Look, what is the notion of freedom today? It's when you speak freely, sorry when you think freely. But thinking freely is in language. To be free even in your thoughts, you have to internalize rules of language. Without that, you are totally mute. Or social freedom. Yes, but I have to count on the others to be free, that when I go out others will not beat me, attack me, that I can call police or whatever. You know, we should be all and especially what already one of the guys who introduced me nicely pointed out, this sense of community in the Hegelian sense of his key term Sitten, unwritten rules. What the most disgusting thing that Trump was doing was not so much to break the laws but to obey literally the laws but breaking violating all the unwritten rules. So I am of course for representational politics. There must be some way, and I accept it fully. Again my formula is some kind of, again I don't have a better term, good alienation. And be aware of, that's my critique of the United States. I used in one of my old books—I loved it—a wonderful observation. It's not as simple as that but basically: you know the big difference between United States and Europe is that in Europe when you enter a building, the ground level is zero, ground. And then first floor you walk up, you know. First floor is one above. But you know that in the United States you begin with one. First floor is ground floor. That's the problem with Americans, I claim. They don't know the function of the ground as substance, they immediately want to count. You know who has here the correct speculative solution? I was in Warsaw in a big hotel close to presidential building palace and I saw something unique, theoretically correct. You know how they had it there? You have a ground floor and then immediately go to second floor. You don't have a first floor. Because this is almost Frege's theory of numbers. That you arrive at one by counting zero as one, you know, so that the true one is already two. Let's take the lesson of this. That's the problem with American freedom. They are not aware enough of this necessity of minimal alienation. All the problems of Americans is that they want to, in a too simple way, to get rid of alienation and then you get Trump in power. Never forget how Trump in his inaugural speech legitimized himself in terms of non-representational politics. You remember he said literally "it's not just one party replacing the other party, you the people are now directly in power." Eh, and then you get him. Sorry, I am too long. Sorry. Let's leave space to others maybe. That was, I mean it was, could I just pick up just before we move on to other questions, on that question of Trump. I mean what I found interesting, I mean your discussion about belief is, is incredibly interesting and I was brought up a Catholic, right? And we used to go to church and we had this thing... I was not born in a Catholic country but I'm a Protestant if you ask me. Psychologically I'm a Protestant, yes. No but I was actually educated in a monastery off of... I'm not at all religious, but anyway, or maybe I am. But what is interesting to me is that in the Catholic Church you recite the creed, the credo "I believe in..." and you're forced to recite it in some way. So what I find interesting right now—and this is my own interpretation but I'm intrigued to know what you think about this—is in a way we get a kind of a reiteration of some of the concerns that Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer were talking about in terms of mass culture, a kind of religious edge to everything in some ways. You know, I mean the mass spectacle, the mass ornament and so on. So my question in some way is belief itself seems to me to be kind of therefore a religious kind of concept in many sort of ways. But I want, I would like you to precisely comment in relation to what you were saying before about Trump and the stolen election. Which is of course something that he knows is not true, and yet it is part of that discourse. How would you situate that claim, the election was stolen, in your discourse? Oh, it's wonderful example. Through the help of some of my American friends we elaborated a nice Lacanian theory of it. The fundamental theory of racism today is precisely stolen enjoyment. You know, like Trump's basic category is: "we have American way of life and then
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others are trying to steal it from us." Or even in a more refined way, what's the basic
others are trying to steal it from us." Or even in a more refined way, what's the basic
Slavoj Žižek
point of antisemitism? Some secret enjoyment by the
point of antisemitism? Some secret enjoyment by the
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Jews, you know. Like there—for example, I will evoke, I mention it two times in my books, the most sacred example: my own mother. Definitely not antisemitic explicitly. But once an old Jewish lady visited
Jews, you know. Like there—for example, I will evoke, I mention it two times in my books, the most sacred example: my own mother. Definitely not antisemitic explicitly. But once an old Jewish lady visited
Slavoj Žižek
her—I don't know who borrowed from whom some money—and then my mother told me after the Jewish lady left:
her—I don't know who borrowed from whom some money—and then my mother told me after the Jewish lady left:
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"this old lady is wonderful friend of mine, but did you notice a strange intense way with what kind of a pleasure she was counting the money?" You know, like this is everyday racism. These small pleasures which disturb you, either the other has them but it's inaccessible to you, or the other is taking them from you. And I think that
"this old lady is wonderful friend of mine, but did you notice a strange intense way with what kind of a pleasure she was counting the money?" You know, like this is everyday racism. These small pleasures which disturb you, either the other has them but it's inaccessible to you, or the other is taking them from you. And I think that
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unfortunately even the politically correct left in its rigorous dogmatism has a little bit of this. That now the new right stole the old pleasures of swearing, like making signs, being vulgar from us, you know. And this is how another paradoxical conclusion that I drew here—would you agree?—this is how I naively tried to distinguish between true fundamentalists who are good guys and these fake envious fundamentalists. American fundamentalists are fake fundamentalists. If they are fundamentalists religiously, they always are obsessed with the other's pleasure. What are the gays doing among themselves? What women have on... you know, you are bothered by the
unfortunately even the politically correct left in its rigorous dogmatism has a little bit of this. That now the new right stole the old pleasures of swearing, like making signs, being vulgar from us, you know. And this is how another paradoxical conclusion that I drew here—would you agree?—this is how I naively tried to distinguish between true fundamentalists who are good guys and these fake envious fundamentalists. American fundamentalists are fake fundamentalists. If they are fundamentalists religiously, they always are obsessed with the other's pleasure. What are the gays doing among themselves? What women have on... you know, you are bothered by the
Slavoj Žižek
other's enjoyment. But I spoke with some—I
other's enjoyment. But I spoke with some—I
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admit this to them, although I don't follow them—some Buddhists or in America I met some Amish people. I mean, I don't idealize them, they have the highest family rate [unintelligible]
admit this to them, although I don't follow them—some Buddhists or in America I met some Amish people. I mean, I don't idealize them, they have the highest family rate [unintelligible]
Slavoj Žižek
percentage. But they don't envy, they call them Englishmen, the normal Americans. No, they are just, "okay we have our truth, you have yours, no problem, no envy." You know. So for me today's fundamentalism is a fake, a total fake. It's not only that it's too fundamentalist, it's not even an effective fundamentalism. And that's why I think that this big Trumpian moment which means that attempt to occupy Congress building, you know, was this ultimate "let the people get power back, to get our life, to get our way of life back" and so on and so on. This idea of protecting our way of life. You know that my reproach to them is not "you are too arrogant." Aren't these people really, it is a very naive analysis, weak? They don't trust themselves. Angela Merkel, whom I don't idealize, once made a nice statement when she says "those who accuse immigrants of ruining our way of life, they really don't trust our way of life." She said our greatness is that we can accept immigrants and know that we are strong enough that we can tolerate it, that this will not destroy our way of life. I think one should focus on utter fear and impotence hidden behind this apparently arrogant white supremacy or whatever. So again my message to white supremacists is: be really that and we can go along nicely, trust yourself. What you are doing now is the way a guy who is totally in a panic, afraid, is acting, no? Sorry, did you mute yourself? Yes I did, sorry I did, okay. I wanted to just quickly, we have a series of questions here from the audience. Bringing one from architecture first of all, just to bring in the question of architecture itself, and there's a question from Marisabel Marat and her question is... oh sorry, I've just lost my screen. I will, sorry I've lost this, let me ask another question. So, okay, this is from Victoria Barbour: "In an age of immense emergence of trauma across different time-scales and spatial scales and the somatic effects on our nervous system of these gaps between explicit and implicit, how does one begin to heal this global society beyond temporary fixes at an individual or community level?" Very good question. All I can do now because my god all these questions are so good that they all ask for Fidel Castro answers, which means one hour minimum. You know with trauma, no, it's a typical ideological phenomenon in the sense that yes, we have immense real traumas. And the first note that I make here, I learned this when I visited countries like India, West Bank and so on, is this intelligent note of different personality. For us in the west trauma is usually a single event which disturbs your normal rhythm. Traumatic was 11th of September, an earthquake or whatever, it shakes your life and then let's return to normal. But they told me—and I met some emigrants from Afghanistan to Syria to Congo, a black guy who told me: "but sorry, for us it's a permanent trauma. Look at Congo. It's a failed state, but not in the Bush-Trump sense. It's a failed state why, Congo? Because precisely as such it's perfectly included in global capitalism. All those local warlords all have deals with foreign companies to export this precious minerals and so on." But what I want to say is that you know, we should get rid of this western temporality of trauma. What if trauma is a permanent state? What happens then? For example, I spoke with some people from those countries where nothing special happens, but it's trauma all the time. By "nothing special happens" I mean for our big media. Like Burkina Faso, Nigeria and so on. It's a permanent trauma and I heard from them a very sad thing. Some guys with whom I spoke told me: "we simply no longer even dream of a better society. It's too traumatic then, because to dream about a better society, you know..." So just to answer more precisely, I think the problem with the topic of trauma is that yes, there are actual traumas, but there are also traumas like ideological categories. In the sense that you not invent, but elevate something into a trauma to justify the way things are now as a defense against that trauma. For example, Stalinism certainly was a trauma. I mean maybe the greatest fiasco of political of 20th century. Why? Precisely because it wasn't the same as fascism and Nazism, there was a genuine emancipatory moment in October Revolution and so on. But then how could it have gone so terribly wrong? But isn't it clear that today Stalinism is mentioned as this type of general warning: "remember that trauma, don't try to change society too much"? That's the basic axiom of conservative neoliberalism. The lesson is if you make one step in this direction, with necessity you will end up in new Stalinism. And of course they gleefully use all these examples: "you see, Chavez he tried it in another way but it ended up the same." So I would say that you know, we should read here very carefully one of the greatest Freudian cases: Wolfman. The trauma is there as a small child, one year and a half allegedly he saw his parents doing a tergo coitus. But as Freud points out, when the child witnessed this, it wasn't a trauma, it was just some blind memory he didn't know what to do with it. Retroactively when he was four, five, and was struggling with sexuality, "what is it?", he reactivated this trauma. Although Holocaust is a mega-trauma. But don't, remember it became this only later in the sixties. It's incredible how little books there were on even among Jews. They tried just to, to forget it. And they... you know the other thing, now this will sound horrible, but I think one of the ways to deal with a trauma is comedy. I mean this in an extremely respectful way. That if it's really traumatic, it means you cannot talk about this in a cold way. That's why I understand women how horrified they are when they report a rape and the guy who investigates them, policeman or whoever, says: "but wait a minute, five minutes before you said something different. Your report is not consistent." Well, that means that it was really traumatic, you know what I mean, no? If you can peacefully just report on it, it wasn't a trauma. That's why I fully understand... you know that there is a whole sub-genre—that's what I fully understand—of Auschwitz jokes. I don't take this as a, as a, as a, as a bad taste humor, no. It just means it was too traumatic to deal with it face to face. And again, I discovered the same about Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia. So you know, trauma is not just something horrible that happened. There is a whole dimension of ambiguities here. Trauma can also be
percentage. But they don't envy, they call them Englishmen, the normal Americans. No, they are just, "okay we have our truth, you have yours, no problem, no envy." You know. So for me today's fundamentalism is a fake, a total fake. It's not only that it's too fundamentalist, it's not even an effective fundamentalism. And that's why I think that this big Trumpian moment which means that attempt to occupy Congress building, you know, was this ultimate "let the people get power back, to get our life, to get our way of life back" and so on and so on. This idea of protecting our way of life. You know that my reproach to them is not "you are too arrogant." Aren't these people really, it is a very naive analysis, weak? They don't trust themselves. Angela Merkel, whom I don't idealize, once made a nice statement when she says "those who accuse immigrants of ruining our way of life, they really don't trust our way of life." She said our greatness is that we can accept immigrants and know that we are strong enough that we can tolerate it, that this will not destroy our way of life. I think one should focus on utter fear and impotence hidden behind this apparently arrogant white supremacy or whatever. So again my message to white supremacists is: be really that and we can go along nicely, trust yourself. What you are doing now is the way a guy who is totally in a panic, afraid, is acting, no? Sorry, did you mute yourself? Yes I did, sorry I did, okay. I wanted to just quickly, we have a series of questions here from the audience. Bringing one from architecture first of all, just to bring in the question of architecture itself, and there's a question from Marisabel Marat and her question is... oh sorry, I've just lost my screen. I will, sorry I've lost this, let me ask another question. So, okay, this is from Victoria Barbour: "In an age of immense emergence of trauma across different time-scales and spatial scales and the somatic effects on our nervous system of these gaps between explicit and implicit, how does one begin to heal this global society beyond temporary fixes at an individual or community level?" Very good question. All I can do now because my god all these questions are so good that they all ask for Fidel Castro answers, which means one hour minimum. You know with trauma, no, it's a typical ideological phenomenon in the sense that yes, we have immense real traumas. And the first note that I make here, I learned this when I visited countries like India, West Bank and so on, is this intelligent note of different personality. For us in the west trauma is usually a single event which disturbs your normal rhythm. Traumatic was 11th of September, an earthquake or whatever, it shakes your life and then let's return to normal. But they told me—and I met some emigrants from Afghanistan to Syria to Congo, a black guy who told me: "but sorry, for us it's a permanent trauma. Look at Congo. It's a failed state, but not in the Bush-Trump sense. It's a failed state why, Congo? Because precisely as such it's perfectly included in global capitalism. All those local warlords all have deals with foreign companies to export this precious minerals and so on." But what I want to say is that you know, we should get rid of this western temporality of trauma. What if trauma is a permanent state? What happens then? For example, I spoke with some people from those countries where nothing special happens, but it's trauma all the time. By "nothing special happens" I mean for our big media. Like Burkina Faso, Nigeria and so on. It's a permanent trauma and I heard from them a very sad thing. Some guys with whom I spoke told me: "we simply no longer even dream of a better society. It's too traumatic then, because to dream about a better society, you know..." So just to answer more precisely, I think the problem with the topic of trauma is that yes, there are actual traumas, but there are also traumas like ideological categories. In the sense that you not invent, but elevate something into a trauma to justify the way things are now as a defense against that trauma. For example, Stalinism certainly was a trauma. I mean maybe the greatest fiasco of political of 20th century. Why? Precisely because it wasn't the same as fascism and Nazism, there was a genuine emancipatory moment in October Revolution and so on. But then how could it have gone so terribly wrong? But isn't it clear that today Stalinism is mentioned as this type of general warning: "remember that trauma, don't try to change society too much"? That's the basic axiom of conservative neoliberalism. The lesson is if you make one step in this direction, with necessity you will end up in new Stalinism. And of course they gleefully use all these examples: "you see, Chavez he tried it in another way but it ended up the same." So I would say that you know, we should read here very carefully one of the greatest Freudian cases: Wolfman. The trauma is there as a small child, one year and a half allegedly he saw his parents doing a tergo coitus. But as Freud points out, when the child witnessed this, it wasn't a trauma, it was just some blind memory he didn't know what to do with it. Retroactively when he was four, five, and was struggling with sexuality, "what is it?", he reactivated this trauma. Although Holocaust is a mega-trauma. But don't, remember it became this only later in the sixties. It's incredible how little books there were on even among Jews. They tried just to, to forget it. And they... you know the other thing, now this will sound horrible, but I think one of the ways to deal with a trauma is comedy. I mean this in an extremely respectful way. That if it's really traumatic, it means you cannot talk about this in a cold way. That's why I understand women how horrified they are when they report a rape and the guy who investigates them, policeman or whoever, says: "but wait a minute, five minutes before you said something different. Your report is not consistent." Well, that means that it was really traumatic, you know what I mean, no? If you can peacefully just report on it, it wasn't a trauma. That's why I fully understand... you know that there is a whole sub-genre—that's what I fully understand—of Auschwitz jokes. I don't take this as a, as a, as a, as a bad taste humor, no. It just means it was too traumatic to deal with it face to face. And again, I discovered the same about Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia. So you know, trauma is not just something horrible that happened. There is a whole dimension of ambiguities here. Trauma can also be
unknown
used as an ideological category. For example—let's go directly to antisemitism and what happens to Palestinians—I think both sides are up to a point making the same unacceptable conclusion. On the one hand some of the Israelis elevate Holocaust, which was into a mega-trauma, and then the conclusion is: nobody has to complain anything about us, we went through Holocaust, that's it, every critical... but Palestinians have the same. Close to my house here in Ljubljana, I found a graffiti pro-Palestinian: "If I were to live in Gaza today, I would also become a Holocaust denier." No, my point is that isn't it the opposite that is true? Isn't it
used as an ideological category. For example—let's go directly to antisemitism and what happens to Palestinians—I think both sides are up to a point making the same unacceptable conclusion. On the one hand some of the Israelis elevate Holocaust, which was into a mega-trauma, and then the conclusion is: nobody has to complain anything about us, we went through Holocaust, that's it, every critical... but Palestinians have the same. Close to my house here in Ljubljana, I found a graffiti pro-Palestinian: "If I were to live in Gaza today, I would also become a Holocaust denier." No, my point is that isn't it the opposite that is true? Isn't it
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that the whole ethical consistency today is the same? The struggle against antisemitism which is here in Europe, in United States, and the struggle for Palestinian rights on the West Bank must be part of the same struggle. The moment we abandon this position we can all kill ourselves. It's regression into barbarism. Sorry I know I didn't answer the question but I like to... Sorry you again... no now you are on, yes. Can we close? I'm slowly, slowly collapsing so can you like, you are our comrade Stalin, no? At the end you will say, make a conclusion "what we really wanted to say." Can you slowly approach your
that the whole ethical consistency today is the same? The struggle against antisemitism which is here in Europe, in United States, and the struggle for Palestinian rights on the West Bank must be part of the same struggle. The moment we abandon this position we can all kill ourselves. It's regression into barbarism. Sorry I know I didn't answer the question but I like to... Sorry you again... no now you are on, yes. Can we close? I'm slowly, slowly collapsing so can you like, you are our comrade Stalin, no? At the end you will say, make a conclusion "what we really wanted to say." Can you slowly approach your
Slavoj Žižek
final... Okay, let's have another one. This is from Marina, who is an architect from Buenos Aires, from Argentina. "If the power of mental violence, the idea of violence, terrifies us more than physical violence, and if virtual sex is more exciting than sex and physical contact in itself, are we renouncing our own existence?" In a way yes. I would conclude this: that being human means that in some sense you renounce your immediate existence, that your immediate existence counts only as mediated by symbolic fictions. But let me be clear here. I'm not playing this game of "symbolic violence is harsher" and so on. Wait a minute, I'm even afraid to dream about it. Like, if I were not to be tortured but if somebody were to torture another person really horribly tortured, the standard procedure I learned it from post-Yugoslav Bosnian war, you know this standard procedure? You cut a guy's balls, he has to eat them and so on. Standard stuff. I don't know how I would survive, I mean. Probably I would try to somebody to hypnotize me and make me erase this memory. So I'm not simply playing this game "oh symbolic is even more brutal." I know what brutal, what brutal violence means. And maybe there is even a little bit of a progress here. I just am watching now, approaching the end, you know that mega-TV series from a couple of years ago, The Vikings. You know what I almost liked in it? How they didn't do this usual purification of history where the, at least the good guys are relatively decent. No, in The Vikings even the guys who are presented as good guys, they rape, torture, burn and so
final... Okay, let's have another one. This is from Marina, who is an architect from Buenos Aires, from Argentina. "If the power of mental violence, the idea of violence, terrifies us more than physical violence, and if virtual sex is more exciting than sex and physical contact in itself, are we renouncing our own existence?" In a way yes. I would conclude this: that being human means that in some sense you renounce your immediate existence, that your immediate existence counts only as mediated by symbolic fictions. But let me be clear here. I'm not playing this game of "symbolic violence is harsher" and so on. Wait a minute, I'm even afraid to dream about it. Like, if I were not to be tortured but if somebody were to torture another person really horribly tortured, the standard procedure I learned it from post-Yugoslav Bosnian war, you know this standard procedure? You cut a guy's balls, he has to eat them and so on. Standard stuff. I don't know how I would survive, I mean. Probably I would try to somebody to hypnotize me and make me erase this memory. So I'm not simply playing this game "oh symbolic is even more brutal." I know what brutal, what brutal violence means. And maybe there is even a little bit of a progress here. I just am watching now, approaching the end, you know that mega-TV series from a couple of years ago, The Vikings. You know what I almost liked in it? How they didn't do this usual purification of history where the, at least the good guys are relatively decent. No, in The Vikings even the guys who are presented as good guys, they rape, torture, burn and so
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on. It really tries to bring out some of the manners of
on. It really tries to bring out some of the manners of
Slavoj Žižek
that time. And you see how horrible this is for us. So I'm not a total pessimist here with all the horrors that are happening today. But hopefully, things like—what were for example for me the absolute horrors of the 19th century. Britain did them. Irish famine. You know, millions, a couple of million died there. And you know what the British did in 1840s? They just isolated the area but all the time, Ireland was still exporting grain and so on. They said let's leave... and not to mention the unmentionable, the attack, Opium War. The attack on China. The justification was that if you prohibit trade with opium you attack trade which is blah blah. You know what's my first association there? So now Colombia and Mexico should declare war on United States because they are limiting, they are doing the same as China now, want to prevent the export of, import of opium, you know. So and not to mention even how to what extent what the British did in India. They had many famines there, millions died. But the, the British Empire at most isolated that
that time. And you see how horrible this is for us. So I'm not a total pessimist here with all the horrors that are happening today. But hopefully, things like—what were for example for me the absolute horrors of the 19th century. Britain did them. Irish famine. You know, millions, a couple of million died there. And you know what the British did in 1840s? They just isolated the area but all the time, Ireland was still exporting grain and so on. They said let's leave... and not to mention the unmentionable, the attack, Opium War. The attack on China. The justification was that if you prohibit trade with opium you attack trade which is blah blah. You know what's my first association there? So now Colombia and Mexico should declare war on United States because they are limiting, they are doing the same as China now, want to prevent the export of, import of opium, you know. So and not to mention even how to what extent what the British did in India. They had many famines there, millions died. But the, the British Empire at most isolated that
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area. Exactly what Stalin did incidentally in early 30s in India, in Ukraine. You know. So again, this interplay with fiction and reality and so on, it's a very complex domain where I even think that if you experience something in reality which is too cruel, brutal for our under quotation marks normal way of life, then you simply experience what Freud called Realitätsverlust. You lose the sense of reality. Because we should always remember that what we experience as ordinary reality implies a certain normal space of experience.
area. Exactly what Stalin did incidentally in early 30s in India, in Ukraine. You know. So again, this interplay with fiction and reality and so on, it's a very complex domain where I even think that if you experience something in reality which is too cruel, brutal for our under quotation marks normal way of life, then you simply experience what Freud called Realitätsverlust. You lose the sense of reality. Because we should always remember that what we experience as ordinary reality implies a certain normal space of experience.
Slavoj Žižek
Extremes shouldn't happen there, you know. Sorry, I know I didn't answer but it's a, it's a very nice question. And hello to Argentina. You know which are my favorite parts of Argentina? Forget about pampas and so on, Tierra del Fuego in the south. This is one of my absolutely ideal spaces. I don't like this pampas, they were... this Argentina was invented by the British travelers. The real Argentina is down to the south and back there for me. Sorry, to finish with an obscenity, you know which is... sorry just to conclude because I am now better. You know which is my, I like these jokes which are based on double meaning of words. What's for me Argentinian spirit? You know that the verb, the verb "coger," in ordinary Spanish it means just to look, to search for. In Argentinian Spanish "coger" is the F-word, no? Yes, "coger" somebody, a woman... yeah and so the joke is this one. A Spanish idiot guy comes to Buenos Aires and asks: "¿Dónde puedo coger un taxi?" And you know what's the answer he gets? "You can try in the exhaust fume although it's not the most pleasant way to do it." I'm getting obscene, maybe we should stop. Sorry. Can I just finish off Slavoj? I want to return to Mark Cousins and the AA as a kind of... there is a question in the chat: "Is your example of Stalinist architecture ideology as substratum? Is it materialized in architecture?" and so on. I want to just ask this question because the AA is a very interesting building. It's in Bedford Square, it's a house but it's converted into a school of architecture. You mean AA as such? You don't mean the senate, which is for me the English version of Stalinist architecture? You don't mean the senate, that one? Oh no no. Well there is a... yeah but what I find interesting is that the AA itself is a very conservative kind of square, Bedford Square, right? This kind of Regency, very polite and so on. And yet the house as a school of architecture has been producing the most subversive revolutionary architecture. That's where Rem Koolhaas, where Zaha Hadid studied and so on. And I guess the question really in some ways is we know that architecture can be let's say the word in stone, that was the way that Albert Speer's was. But then you get this kind of counter-movement and the way that I see it, it's through occupation or through inhabiting it in a certain way, it becomes subversive and becomes something different. It reminds me of how Judith Butler thinks about identity. Through performativity we can reinvent our physical body as it were through a certain performance, you know? So I wonder how you see that way of... Yeah here I would, sorry to interrupt this is important, here I would return to the question of the Argentinian lady before. I think that where I in a very friendly way disagree with Judith Butler is her idea that we have a kind of a playful multiplicity, you reinvent yourself and then patriarchy comes as a trauma. I think trauma is at the beginning. That's nonetheless my idea that the very becoming human, entering of language and so on, here I follow Lacan, is a traumatic cut. Also you remember that for Freud the beginning, this mythical beginning of human sexuality, is not some happy multiple perversity and so on. It's a trauma, it's a trauma. So I don't believe in original non-oppressive beginnings. I think trauma is at the beginning. Okay but that's another story, sorry finish I interrupted you. No I guess the question is, how can you if you see architecture as a form of materialized ideology as a word in stone as it was described before, how could you subvert it through certain practices by occupying a space as it were? I will only give you one reference. A guy who is gay, he's called Colin Ripley from Toronto I think. He just defended his thesis by me, no by me through me, I was his how do you call it thesis director, Doktorvater... on queerness in architecture. And it's a wonderful text, why? Because it doesn't go into this usual thing, queer... it remains at a formal level. He links queerness in sexuality, first his idea is that queerness is not a secondary education, that in a way heterosexual... this is the big lesson forgotten today of Freud. If you read his "Three Essays on Sexuality," his basic thesis is that this crazy queerness, what later is called perversions, is at the origin and that normality is a very complex and violent process of doubly alienating yourself from queerness itself. And then he goes in a wonderful way from here to architecture in a way which immediately resonates with me. He says that this big architecture obsession with, you know, straight walls and so on. What about all those things which you know they exist but in some way they are not part of your universe? Like sorry for the vulgarity, when you flush water or dispose of trash. In some sense it disappears from your universe. But for this you don't think. Or I like this in horror movies: this idea of the space between. If you have a wall with or a space separating one room with a space between the two sides of the wall where there you have mice, horrors, fears, dwarfs,
Extremes shouldn't happen there, you know. Sorry, I know I didn't answer but it's a, it's a very nice question. And hello to Argentina. You know which are my favorite parts of Argentina? Forget about pampas and so on, Tierra del Fuego in the south. This is one of my absolutely ideal spaces. I don't like this pampas, they were... this Argentina was invented by the British travelers. The real Argentina is down to the south and back there for me. Sorry, to finish with an obscenity, you know which is... sorry just to conclude because I am now better. You know which is my, I like these jokes which are based on double meaning of words. What's for me Argentinian spirit? You know that the verb, the verb "coger," in ordinary Spanish it means just to look, to search for. In Argentinian Spanish "coger" is the F-word, no? Yes, "coger" somebody, a woman... yeah and so the joke is this one. A Spanish idiot guy comes to Buenos Aires and asks: "¿Dónde puedo coger un taxi?" And you know what's the answer he gets? "You can try in the exhaust fume although it's not the most pleasant way to do it." I'm getting obscene, maybe we should stop. Sorry. Can I just finish off Slavoj? I want to return to Mark Cousins and the AA as a kind of... there is a question in the chat: "Is your example of Stalinist architecture ideology as substratum? Is it materialized in architecture?" and so on. I want to just ask this question because the AA is a very interesting building. It's in Bedford Square, it's a house but it's converted into a school of architecture. You mean AA as such? You don't mean the senate, which is for me the English version of Stalinist architecture? You don't mean the senate, that one? Oh no no. Well there is a... yeah but what I find interesting is that the AA itself is a very conservative kind of square, Bedford Square, right? This kind of Regency, very polite and so on. And yet the house as a school of architecture has been producing the most subversive revolutionary architecture. That's where Rem Koolhaas, where Zaha Hadid studied and so on. And I guess the question really in some ways is we know that architecture can be let's say the word in stone, that was the way that Albert Speer's was. But then you get this kind of counter-movement and the way that I see it, it's through occupation or through inhabiting it in a certain way, it becomes subversive and becomes something different. It reminds me of how Judith Butler thinks about identity. Through performativity we can reinvent our physical body as it were through a certain performance, you know? So I wonder how you see that way of... Yeah here I would, sorry to interrupt this is important, here I would return to the question of the Argentinian lady before. I think that where I in a very friendly way disagree with Judith Butler is her idea that we have a kind of a playful multiplicity, you reinvent yourself and then patriarchy comes as a trauma. I think trauma is at the beginning. That's nonetheless my idea that the very becoming human, entering of language and so on, here I follow Lacan, is a traumatic cut. Also you remember that for Freud the beginning, this mythical beginning of human sexuality, is not some happy multiple perversity and so on. It's a trauma, it's a trauma. So I don't believe in original non-oppressive beginnings. I think trauma is at the beginning. Okay but that's another story, sorry finish I interrupted you. No I guess the question is, how can you if you see architecture as a form of materialized ideology as a word in stone as it was described before, how could you subvert it through certain practices by occupying a space as it were? I will only give you one reference. A guy who is gay, he's called Colin Ripley from Toronto I think. He just defended his thesis by me, no by me through me, I was his how do you call it thesis director, Doktorvater... on queerness in architecture. And it's a wonderful text, why? Because it doesn't go into this usual thing, queer... it remains at a formal level. He links queerness in sexuality, first his idea is that queerness is not a secondary education, that in a way heterosexual... this is the big lesson forgotten today of Freud. If you read his "Three Essays on Sexuality," his basic thesis is that this crazy queerness, what later is called perversions, is at the origin and that normality is a very complex and violent process of doubly alienating yourself from queerness itself. And then he goes in a wonderful way from here to architecture in a way which immediately resonates with me. He says that this big architecture obsession with, you know, straight walls and so on. What about all those things which you know they exist but in some way they are not part of your universe? Like sorry for the vulgarity, when you flush water or dispose of trash. In some sense it disappears from your universe. But for this you don't think. Or I like this in horror movies: this idea of the space between. If you have a wall with or a space separating one room with a space between the two sides of the wall where there you have mice, horrors, fears, dwarfs,
unknown
whatever. He goes and then also all the these magic points of discontinuity. Like he uses this phenomenon to which I also often referred—you know this
whatever. He goes and then also all the these magic points of discontinuity. Like he uses this phenomenon to which I also often referred—you know this
Slavoj Žižek
how with some buildings? The model for me is the old—does it still exist, maybe the biggest bookstore in the world at some point?—Blackwell's in Oxford. Okay why? Because it's goes back, it's clear... but from the outside it looks a small house, then you enter it and as if magically it's much bigger from the inside, you know. All these asymmetries between inside and outside, interspaces, curved walls and so on. And from here he goes even into general ontology. How the only way for reality to exist is that there is no balanced reality, reality is queer, is a reality of disturbed balance. Which in a very metaphorical way fits perfectly with even quantum physics, you know that all reality is collapse of wave function, which means in a queer way one element is privileged and so on. That would be how I would have gone into all this background of architecture. What do you do with the space, all this... I especially like architecture, I quoted it in my architecture thing some where, you have inside and outside, but to look properly what the outside is supposed to be, you have to look at it from the inside, you know. And all this. That's why architecture interests me so much because it's in a way a very abstract thing. And as all good Hegelians and Marxists, I think the form matters. Truth is always in the form. Yeah, I'm reminded of Doctor Who and his TARDIS which is a police telephone box. You go inside it and suddenly it's an amazingly huge space, yeah. Ah no, you find this always even let's go to the, let's go to the most simple element. You know a stupid movie, you know Mary Poppins. She has that bag, which is a small bag but then what can she pull out of that bag? That's absolutely the fundamental fact of our human space. That also, it's not simply outside and then you cut, you delimit a certain space call it inside, but already outside is outside only from the inside. All that stuff, you know. Sorry I'm collapsing now, don't kill me. You are, you are. Just Slavoj, I want to just finally, finally, finally mention the other person apart from Mark Cousins we lost this year was Michael Sorkin. And of course you know Michael Sorkin through Joan Copjec... Oh my god I dedicated my first pandemic book to him. He was my, I was a great, great fan of him. And I spoke long on phone with Joan Copjec and so on, she was totally devastated. And Mark was another guy like Michael, like Mark Cousins, again very
how with some buildings? The model for me is the old—does it still exist, maybe the biggest bookstore in the world at some point?—Blackwell's in Oxford. Okay why? Because it's goes back, it's clear... but from the outside it looks a small house, then you enter it and as if magically it's much bigger from the inside, you know. All these asymmetries between inside and outside, interspaces, curved walls and so on. And from here he goes even into general ontology. How the only way for reality to exist is that there is no balanced reality, reality is queer, is a reality of disturbed balance. Which in a very metaphorical way fits perfectly with even quantum physics, you know that all reality is collapse of wave function, which means in a queer way one element is privileged and so on. That would be how I would have gone into all this background of architecture. What do you do with the space, all this... I especially like architecture, I quoted it in my architecture thing some where, you have inside and outside, but to look properly what the outside is supposed to be, you have to look at it from the inside, you know. And all this. That's why architecture interests me so much because it's in a way a very abstract thing. And as all good Hegelians and Marxists, I think the form matters. Truth is always in the form. Yeah, I'm reminded of Doctor Who and his TARDIS which is a police telephone box. You go inside it and suddenly it's an amazingly huge space, yeah. Ah no, you find this always even let's go to the, let's go to the most simple element. You know a stupid movie, you know Mary Poppins. She has that bag, which is a small bag but then what can she pull out of that bag? That's absolutely the fundamental fact of our human space. That also, it's not simply outside and then you cut, you delimit a certain space call it inside, but already outside is outside only from the inside. All that stuff, you know. Sorry I'm collapsing now, don't kill me. You are, you are. Just Slavoj, I want to just finally, finally, finally mention the other person apart from Mark Cousins we lost this year was Michael Sorkin. And of course you know Michael Sorkin through Joan Copjec... Oh my god I dedicated my first pandemic book to him. He was my, I was a great, great fan of him. And I spoke long on phone with Joan Copjec and so on, she was totally devastated. And Mark was another guy like Michael, like Mark Cousins, again very
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honest leftist,
honest leftist,
Slavoj Žižek
in good sense politically correct, but in an immense sense of humor, sarcasm and so on. And you know on which project he was working as a private obsession in the last years? How to make Manhattan self-subsistent, you know? That it can grow its own food, energy and so on. And he became obsessed by this idea. I love it, you know. No no no, he was a kind of, you know you have a few...
in good sense politically correct, but in an immense sense of humor, sarcasm and so on. And you know on which project he was working as a private obsession in the last years? How to make Manhattan self-subsistent, you know? That it can grow its own food, energy and so on. And he became obsessed by this idea. I love it, you know. No no no, he was a kind of, you know you have a few...
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and I especially didn't like because Mark Cousins was a little bit older than me but not Mark, because you know it is sad when your generation is starting to die. I like death to be something "oh we are not yet there," look so sad my mother whatever, but
and I especially didn't like because Mark Cousins was a little bit older than me but not Mark, because you know it is sad when your generation is starting to die. I like death to be something "oh we are not yet there," look so sad my mother whatever, but
Slavoj Žižek
when
when
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it's the turn on your generation it gets unpleasant, you know. But I can say to both of them, especially I know it for through Joan for Michael Sorkin, no, that there is great interest in him now. They want to do exhibition and all that stuff and so on. Maybe the paradox will be what happened... there is one story I think it's by Mark Twain, that a guy is a painter, not very successful, and then he learns that if you die your value goes up. So she fakes his own death so that then the prices of his paintings go up. With Michael,
it's the turn on your generation it gets unpleasant, you know. But I can say to both of them, especially I know it for through Joan for Michael Sorkin, no, that there is great interest in him now. They want to do exhibition and all that stuff and so on. Maybe the paradox will be what happened... there is one story I think it's by Mark Twain, that a guy is a painter, not very successful, and then he learns that if you die your value goes up. So she fakes his own death so that then the prices of his paintings go up. With Michael,
Slavoj Žižek
I mean it in very benevolent, something similar is happening. My only reproach, and I told Mark Cousins, to him is that he didn't write enough. I told him that if I were to be people's leader in a Stalinist republic he would go to Gulag for that. He behaved too much as a bourgeois individualist. Didn't he publish—maybe he wrote more but—he didn't publish a lot, no? He didn't no. But he gave the
I mean it in very benevolent, something similar is happening. My only reproach, and I told Mark Cousins, to him is that he didn't write enough. I told him that if I were to be people's leader in a Stalinist republic he would go to Gulag for that. He behaved too much as a bourgeois individualist. Didn't he publish—maybe he wrote more but—he didn't publish a lot, no? He didn't no. But he gave the
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most astonishing lectures on a Friday evening at the AA where the all the, the good of London, they all came together for these lectures and
most astonishing lectures on a Friday evening at the AA where the all the, the good of London, they all came together for these lectures and
Slavoj Žižek
he transcended, it wasn't just architects, it was everybody came together. He was, he had an incredible stage presence. His mother was a, was an actress. And he had this incredible potential to give lectures. They were mesmerizing, mesmerizing. I know, I know, yeah. Okay, so... Okay, so don't kill me. My great greetings to all of you and it was a pleasure. Thank you Slavoj. I just want to before, before switching, make a couple of announcements. Firstly that we are going to continue, this is the first of our "Inclusive Futures" things. We are going to continue tomorrow, actually every day at the same time, Sanford Kwinter then Manuel DeLanda will be on the following day, Erin Manning and so on. So we at the same time... there's also going to be a course that I'm giving myself which is going to be at in the... in the evening East Coast time called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Artificial Intelligence." The Hitchhiker's Guide to Artificial Intelligence. And then we will continue. I just want to say that the real purpose of this "Inclusive Futures" thing is really to open up education to democratize it. One of the things that we fundamentally believe in is we can use this platform to spread ideas, you know? And we believe that education is a human right and not a privilege of the wealthy. So I want to thank our speaker today, Slavoj Zizek, for the most astonishingly profound lecture which will be, we will upload it so you can play it again. Don't talk like that. When you talk like that, you know in my rhetoric, when you start to praise someone it's always second part "BUT." So I already see you sharpening your knife behind your back. No there's nothing behind
he transcended, it wasn't just architects, it was everybody came together. He was, he had an incredible stage presence. His mother was a, was an actress. And he had this incredible potential to give lectures. They were mesmerizing, mesmerizing. I know, I know, yeah. Okay, so... Okay, so don't kill me. My great greetings to all of you and it was a pleasure. Thank you Slavoj. I just want to before, before switching, make a couple of announcements. Firstly that we are going to continue, this is the first of our "Inclusive Futures" things. We are going to continue tomorrow, actually every day at the same time, Sanford Kwinter then Manuel DeLanda will be on the following day, Erin Manning and so on. So we at the same time... there's also going to be a course that I'm giving myself which is going to be at in the... in the evening East Coast time called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Artificial Intelligence." The Hitchhiker's Guide to Artificial Intelligence. And then we will continue. I just want to say that the real purpose of this "Inclusive Futures" thing is really to open up education to democratize it. One of the things that we fundamentally believe in is we can use this platform to spread ideas, you know? And we believe that education is a human right and not a privilege of the wealthy. So I want to thank our speaker today, Slavoj Zizek, for the most astonishingly profound lecture which will be, we will upload it so you can play it again. Don't talk like that. When you talk like that, you know in my rhetoric, when you start to praise someone it's always second part "BUT." So I already see you sharpening your knife behind your back. No there's nothing behind
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my back, at all, at all. But I also want to thank the Dean
my back, at all, at all. But I also want to thank the Dean
Slavoj Žižek
Li Shanying and Philip Yuan for hosting this, for Tongji University in China for
Li Shanying and Philip Yuan for hosting this, for Tongji University in China for
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hosting it. And also there's a huge team of people supporting this,
hosting it. And also there's a huge team of people supporting this,
Slavoj Žižek
an incredible amount of work went into this. So I want to thank them as well, and many of them are here today. Unbelievable. So... thank you Slavoj. You are not a true Hegelian. You know what you should do? Once I complained to Fred Jameson and he did it. As a true Hegelian, you should say "and finally I want to thank myself for the great work of coordinating." When you do this, I will recognize you as a Hegelian friend. In that case Slavoj, I'll pass that on. Thank you very much indeed. I drop now. Thank you Slavoj, this was wonderful. I hope that we will be able to, the architecture community will be able to engage with you more in the future and not just us but others because I think your message is such
an incredible amount of work went into this. So I want to thank them as well, and many of them are here today. Unbelievable. So... thank you Slavoj. You are not a true Hegelian. You know what you should do? Once I complained to Fred Jameson and he did it. As a true Hegelian, you should say "and finally I want to thank myself for the great work of coordinating." When you do this, I will recognize you as a Hegelian friend. In that case Slavoj, I'll pass that on. Thank you very much indeed. I drop now. Thank you Slavoj, this was wonderful. I hope that we will be able to, the architecture community will be able to engage with you more in the future and not just us but others because I think your message is such
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a powerful one and we need it even more today. Okay, thanks. Bye bye. Thank you
a powerful one and we need it even more today. Okay, thanks. Bye bye. Thank you
unknown
very much indeed. Thank you.
very much indeed. Thank you.