Disorder Under Heaven.
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2019-10-07 · 1:31:10 · 11,420 words
psychoanalysissexuality-genderecology-climateideologyhegel-dialecticsliberalism-political-correctnesstechnology-ai-cyberspacecinema-art-culturefascism-populismscience-physicssubjectivity
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture touching on psychoanalysis and LGBT+ ideology, arguing that transgender experience paradoxically relies on essentialist language that deconstruction claims to refute. He pivots to ecology, diagnosing five ideological strategies that neutralize genuine ecological critique, from market solutions to personal responsibility, while holding up Greta Thunberg as an exemplary 'apostle' figure. The talk concludes with a Q&A covering Hong Kong, the Joker film, AI and the wired brain, quantum physics and the 'unfinished universe,' and Trump's impeachment as a symptom of liberal failure to confront systemic antagonism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 28
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “perversion of sexuality”
Freud's claim that human sexuality is immanently traversed by sado-masochist power games and the intertwining of pleasure and pain, what LGBT+ ideology tries to erase with a vision of authentic happy expression.
Freud's insight, repressed in contemporary discourse, that children are not sexually innocent but carry immanent polymorphous sexuality.
as “the plus as such”
Žižek's reinterpretation of the '+' in LGBT+ not as a list of additional identities but as pure human subjectivity itself, the excess that can never be captured by any fixed identity.
The hysterical subject's perpetual questioning, 'Why am I what you say I am?', is recast as the fundamental psychoanalytic model of ideological critique, and as the authentic stance of the '+' in LGBT+.
Marxist concept invoked as the essential tool for today: applied not only to obvious enemies (Trump) but also to the limits of liberal democratic critics who reproduce the same ideological traps.
The essentialist narrative transgender people use ('I was born in the wrong body') is described as a fiction that is nonetheless practically true because our symbolic practice retroactively posits such an a priori identity.
as “retroactive causality”
An effect that retroactively posits its own cause; used to explain how free decisions constitute essences that appear to pre-exist them, and how transgender identity works.
Hegel's concept invoked to explain how free acts retroactively constitute the essence they appear to express, used here to think gender identity and passionate love.
as “big Other”
Invoked humorously when a loud noise interrupts ('who was the big Other who intervened now?'), referencing the symbolic order that structures our experience.
as “eternity is historical”
True anti-essentialism does not deny eternal essences but holds that they emerge at a specific historical point and retroactively become eternal, a materialist reinterpretation of theological permanence.
as “view into hell”
The ideological function of media images of disaster and suffering: we are shown 'hell' (Somalia, Syria, etc.) so that we feel comfortable and grateful in our current liberal situation.
Distinguished from mere pleasure: passionate love, artistic creativity, and authentic engagement give nightmares and ruin peace, Žižek would never trade this 'hell' for comfortable happiness.
Fredric Jameson's concept, applied to The Handmaid's Tale: the series functions as a nostalgic celebration of current liberal-permissive society by depicting its dystopian absence.
as “fetish in politics”
The political fetish is the last thing one sees before confronting social antagonism, e.g. the figure of the Jew screens class struggle, and Trump screens liberal society's own contradictions.
as “toxic masculinity as medicalization”
Žižek argues that labeling political phenomena like male aggression as a medical-psychological category ('toxic masculinity') depoliticizes them in the same way homosexuality was pathologized historically.
Kierkegaard's distinction: the genius expresses inner wealth, while the apostle is a purely formal function bearing impersonal truth, used to characterize Greta Thunberg's mode of address.
as “five strategies of ecological obfuscation”
Žižek enumerates five ideological moves that neutralize ecological critique: simple denial, market solutions, techno-scientific optimism, Mother Earth naturalism, and personal responsibility.
as “ideology of personal responsibility”
The most pervasive ecological ideology: instead of systemic critique you are invited to recycle and buy organic, which makes you feel good while blocking radical social change.
as “Starbucks formula”
The commodification of ethical gesture: buy our product and the social/ecological 'price' is already included, letting the consumer be consumerist while feeling virtuous.
As opposed to evil traceable to corrupt individual motives, systemic evil is performed by honest, even idealistic individuals faithfully following institutional logic, the deeper horror of totalitarianism.
as “no ethnic cleansing without poetry”
Every instance of ethnic cleansing is accompanied by a poet, mythmaker, or religious leader who supplies the enabling narrative, truth is what we do, not the story we tell ourselves.
as “ethics of corruption”
The implicit logic of totalitarian officials who frame their willingness to commit atrocities as a higher ethical greatness, 'I sacrifice my soul, not just my life, for the cause.'
as “transcendental deconstructionism”
Žižek's critical label for continental philosophy's tendency to bracket all realist questions in favor of epistemological reflection on the conditions of possibility of discourse (Foucault paradigm).
as “unfinished universe”
Drawing on quantum physics, the claim that reality is ontologically incomplete, not merely epistemically inaccessible but genuinely not fully determined, used against historicism and for a new materialism.
Against philosophies of withdrawal and inner peace, Žižek celebrates the fall, the event, passion, love, as the primary ontological fact from which any appearance of prior wholeness is retroactively constructed.
as “atheist Christian”
Žižek's self-description: he takes the Christian event (God splitting with himself on the cross) as the ontological model for his celebration of division and the fall, without believing in the supernatural.
Direct neural connection to the digital universe (Neuralink paradigm) which would abolish the interface, and with it, the mediation, ambiguity, and failure on which human eroticism and spirit depend.
Reading popular/canonical texts 'against the grain': the official hero is ideologically sanctioned, but the real affirmation lies with the villain, applied to the Joker, Killmonger, and Bane.
Stories he reaches for 10
Starbucks used to display posters telling customers their purchase helps Guatemalan children or Amazon forests, the social price is pre-included so consumers can be consumerist while feeling virtuous.
“be consumerist, but consume us, because the social price is already included into it.”
After planning the Holocaust during the day, Heydrich would gather with three friends to play late Beethoven string quartets, for Žižek the most sacrilegious and revealing fact about systemic evil.
“In the evenings after planning Holocaust and all that stuff, he gathered with three other friends, string quartet, they were playing mostly late Beethoven string quartets.”
Himmler reportedly said every German is ready to sacrifice his life for Germany, but a truly great German sacrifices his soul, doing horrible things for the cause, embodying Žižek's 'ethics of corruption.'
“A true great German is ready to sacrifice his soul, to do horrible things for Germany.”
The cosmologist Steven Weinberg said: without religion good people do good things and bad people do bad things; you need religion to get good people to do bad things, Žižek's formula for where true ideology begins.
“You need something like religion to get good people do bad things. And that's where true ideology begins.”
Both Doctorow's novel and the film Billy Bathgate are poor, yet between two failures a specter of a perfect work emerges, used to explain why technological singularity cannot capture what human spirit produces through repeated failure.
“bad novel, bad movie, but in between a specter of a perfect novel or whatever emerges.”
In the 1980s, scientific consensus predicted European forests would be dead by now; instead there are more forests than in centuries, not disproving ecological crisis but showing its self-contradictory, tricky nature.
“in years Europe will be without forests. I'm sad to tell you today there are more forests in Europe than ever in the last years.”
You live your ordinary life; then you suddenly realize you are already in love, you never chose it in the present, illustrating Schelling's unconscious free decisions that retroactively constitute the subject.
“you don't fall in love, that's crucial; you realize that you are already in love.”
When Christ cries 'Father, why have you abandoned me?', God himself is briefly an atheist (Chesterton), Žižek reads this as God splitting with himself, the model for his ontology of the fall and division.
“what happens on the cross when Christ says: "Father, father, why have you abandoned me?" It means...God himself is for a brief moment an atheist.”
A high-ranking Chinese philosopher told Žižek that Deng Xiaoping said his greatest achievement was resisting the temptation to liberalize politics, a painful counter to naive liberal democracy.
“"No, that I resisted the temptation to go all the way and liberalize politics also."”
Žižek proposed to Hollywood contacts a Star Wars remake rehabilitating the Emperor and Darth Vader as progressive authoritarian leaders fighting reactionary feudal Jedi, extension of reading villains as authentic heroes.
“to do a new version of Star Wars rehabilitating the Emperor and Darth Vader as the progressive authoritarian leaders fighting a reactionary feudals like Jedi”
Works invoked 17
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own major work on Hegel; publishers doubted it would sell, but it outsells many of his short political books, cited with pride as evidence that serious theory still has an audience.
Antigone play
Antigone is Žižek's 'supreme example from tradition' of so-called toxic masculinity in the positive sense: she does not debate or compromise but insists absolutely on her position regardless of catastrophic consequences.
Criticized as the 'best example' of nostalgia for the present: it lets viewers enjoy depictions of women's torture while feeling virtuous, and never asks what is wrong with liberal society that produced Gilead.
Star Wars film
Žižek proposed a rehabilitation of the Emperor and Darth Vader as progressive authoritarian leaders fighting reactionary Jedi feudalism, another instance of the Straussian against-the-grain reading.
Billy Bathgate book
Even worse than the film in Žižek's view, yet together they conjure the specter of a perfect work, same point about failure and perfection as the film.
The Dark Knight film
The Joker is read via Strauss's against-the-grain method as the authentic hero who wants the masks to fall.
The Bad Sleep Well film
Kurosawa's 1960 Hamlet set in contemporary Japan: called Žižek's favorite Shakespeare adaptation, exemplifying authentic multiculturalism through productive distance from the original context.
Summa Theologica book
Called a 'masterpiece of medieval theology'; the specific argument on viewing hell from paradise is dismissed as 'stupid' and 'cheating.'
Bane is the film's true revolutionary; the 'socialist republic of Manhattan' is its real political content despite Dickensian-conservative official framing.
Won an Oscar but is not tough enough on communism: it traces evil to a corrupt individual (the minister's private lust) rather than to systemic functioning, the honest Stasi agent is also the system.
Joker (2019 film) film
Has not yet seen it (pirated copy unavailable); expects to read it sympathetically as the Joker figure being rehabilitated, discussed in context of incels and popular discourse.
Paradise Lost book
Cited alongside Strauss as an example of a canonical work where the real sympathy lies with the official villain (Satan).
A Higher Loyalty book
James Comey's memoir; illustrates that personal honesty and 'higher loyalty' do not prevent horrible systemic outcomes, an instance of ideology making good people do bad things.
Black Panther film
Redeemed only by reading Killmonger as the authentic hero; the good king's CIA escort at the UN signals the ideological truth the film almost makes explicit.
Captive State film
A modest science-fiction film with John Goodman that passed largely unnoticed; Žižek recommends it as one of the interesting films of the moment.
Good Bye, Lenin! film
Preferred over Das Leben der Anderen as more subtly critical: its message is that an honest communist's only solution is to go crazy, a more pessimistic, thus more truthful, verdict on the system.
Hakuchi (The Idiot) film
Kurosawa's 1951 adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot set in postwar Japan, called the best version of Dostoevsky Žižek knows, same multiculturalist point as the Shakespeare adaptations.
People invoked 33
Edward Snowden positive
Greatly appreciated; cited for the insight that focusing on obviously evil individuals is less dangerous than identifying evil inscribed in systemic functioning.
James Comey negative
Probably personally honest, but his book A Higher Loyalty illustrates that personal honesty does not prevent horrible systemic things from taking place.
His deathbed claim that his greatest achievement was resisting political liberalization is presented as a 'horrible' but possibly correct assessment of the post-Tiananmen situation.
Steven Weinberg positive
Quantum cosmologist; cited for the aphorism that religion is needed to get good people to do bad things, Žižek's formula for the locus of ideology.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my favorite Catholic theologian'; his reading of Christ's 'Why have you abandoned me?' as God briefly becoming an atheist is central to Žižek's atheist-Christian ontology.
Margaret Atwood negative
The Handmaid's Tale (both novel and series) is criticized as nostalgic ideological comfort for liberal society rather than genuine critique.
Judith Butler negative
Credited with personal respect but her Butlerian historicism and performative account of gender are directly contradicted by transgender people's own essentialist self-descriptions.
Donald Trump negative
Described as a 'guy without a moral compass,' immature, 'pretty transparent'; but the real target is liberals who use him as a fetish to avoid confronting structural antagonism.
Christopher Nolan positive
Admired for the Dark Knight trilogy's honest exposure of ideological ambiguity: official ideology is undermined by the films' own logic, making Joker and Bane the authentic figures.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
His singularity vision is criticized for presupposing that human thought, desire, and sexuality would survive unchanged in a state of direct mind-sharing, ignoring that these are constituted by finitude and mediation.
Alain Badiou positive
Called 'my good friend Alain Badiou'; his observation about women judges/police serving the new 'understanding' mode of power is incorporated into Žižek's critique of toxic-masculinity discourse.
Mentioned in a Q&A question alongside Latour and flat ontologies; Žižek acknowledges having positions on OOO but does not develop them in this talk.
E. L. Doctorow negative
Author of Billy Bathgate; Žižek found the novel disappointing, but together with the equally disappointing film it produces the specter of a perfect work, an example of the ontology of failure and perfection.
Fredric Jameson positive
Called 'my good friend Fred Jameson'; his concept of 'nostalgia for the present' is the key analytical tool applied to The Handmaid's Tale.
Bernie Sanders positive
His program is less radical than mid-20th-century European social democracy, yet in today's context even these modest demands can be explosive triggers for further change.
Cited for the 'soul sacrifice' formulation: a great German is ready to sacrifice not just his life but his soul for Germany, illustrates the 'ethics of corruption.'
Mentioned in passing as another Hegelian who holds the transcendental decision in tension with quantum physics.
Michel Foucault negative
Paradigm case of 'transcendental deconstructionism': he would answer the question 'Do I have an immortal soul?' by describing the episteme within which such a question is meaningful, suspending realist inquiry.
Briefly mentioned in a Q&A question about whether Žižek is more Millerian than Lacanian; not directly engaged.
Greta Thunberg positive
Greatly admired; interpreted as an apostle (Kierkegaard), as exhibiting so-called 'toxic masculinity' positively, and as a model for the kind of uncompromising address today demands.
His evening string quartet sessions while planning the Holocaust are the most 'sacrilegious' fact Žižek knows, the supreme illustration of evil inscribed into a system performed by aesthetically refined individuals.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited for the idea that true free decisions are unconscious and never happen in the present, used to explain gender and love as retroactive self-constitution.
Briefly mentioned as someone Žižek debated in London, to whom he made the point about China's explosive economic development.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
His distinction between genius and apostle is the central concept for understanding Thunberg's rhetorical mode.
Alan Turing positive
Held up as the victim of an earlier medicalization of a political phenomenon (homosexuality treated as pathology); parallel to current toxic-masculinity discourse.
Leo Strauss positive
His method of reading 'against the grain', the real sympathy of a text lies with its apparent villain, is applied to Batman, Black Panther, and Star Wars.
John Milton positive
Invoked alongside Strauss as a precursor of reading texts against the grain: Paradise Lost is clearly 'on the side of Satan' despite official framing.
Akira Kurosawa positive
His adaptations of Shakespeare (The Bad Sleep Well as Hamlet) and Dostoevsky (Hakuchi/The Idiot set in postwar Japan) are called the best versions of those works, exemplify authentic multiculturalism via productive distance.
Hugo Chávez negative
Described as 'Fidel Castro with money': his model worked only as long as there was money, and did not propose a viable new economic model.
Mentioned in a Q&A question about non-standard philosophy and the observation effect; Žižek does not give a direct answer, deflecting to a broader ontological point.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked as the founder of insights currently repressed by LGBT+ ideology, infantile sexuality, the perversion of desire, hysteria.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The concept of self-positing (Selbstsetzung) is central to the argument about gender identity; also implicit in the dialectical structure of the entire lecture.
Thomas Aquinas negative
His answer in Summa Theologica, that blessed souls see the damned for the glory of divine justice, is dismissed by Žižek as 'stupid' and 'cheating'; used as occasion to introduce the 'view into hell' motif.
What it argues
essentialist language in transgender experience vs. deconstructive performativityideology of personal ecological responsibility blocking systemic critiquethe apostle vs. genius distinction applied to Greta Thunbergsystemic evil vs. individual moral corruption in totalitarianismthe 'view into hell' as ideological comfort for liberal societiesTrump as fetish screening liberal antagonismthe unfinished/incomplete character of reality and quantum physics
Dialectical moves 13
“The true opposite of LGBT+ essentialism is not deconstruction but hysteria: to be 'plus as such' is already to be human subjectivity itself.”
Rather than expanding the list of identities, the authentic move is to inhabit the gap no identity can fill, psychoanalytic hysteria as the real '+.'
“The essentialist language transgender people use to describe their experience is a 'truthful fiction'—the fiction is false, but the practice it organizes is real and constitutes the essence retroactively.”
Apparent essentialism is not naïve but the retroactive structure of free self-positing: what looks like pre-existing essence is the product of the act that expresses it.
“Far from being a form of toxic masculinity, Greta Thunberg's traits—suppressing emotion, refusing compromise, risking everything—are simply what is required in certain situations; there is nothing masculine about them.”
What is condemned as a gendered pathology is in fact a universally necessary ethical stance, as shown by Antigone.
“We are not too anthropocentric in the ecological crisis; the critique of anthropocentrism is itself hypocritical—we care about Earth only insofar as it sustains human survival.”
The apparent renunciation of anthropocentrism conceals a deeper anthropocentrism: Earth is indifferent, only our environment is at stake.
“Personal ecological responsibility is ideology at its purest: the gesture that appears most conscientious is the one that most effectively blocks systemic critique.”
The more 'responsible' you feel as a consumer-recycler, the more efficiently ideology has neutralized you as a political agent.
“The Handmaid's Tale does not critique our society—it is our society's self-congratulation: a view into hell that makes us feel good about the liberal present.”
What presents itself as radical feminist dystopian critique functions as ideological comfort for liberal-permissive society.
“Trump is the liberal critics' fetish: he is the last thing they see before they would have to admit social antagonisms within the United States.”
Focus on Trump as a corrupt individual screens the structural contradictions of liberal society that produced him, he functions exactly as the Jew functions in antisemitism.
“The most dangerous evil is not evil pursued by corrupt individuals for obvious reasons; it is evil inscribed into the institutional functioning of the system itself.”
Honest, idealistic people doing horrible things within a functioning system are more dangerous than obvious villains, the real horror Stasi film Das Leben der Anderen fails to capture.
“True ethical greatness in totalitarian logic consists in being ready to violate even your basic ethical principles for the cause—corruption is recast as a higher ethics.”
The 'ethics of corruption' inverts normal morality: what looks like moral collapse from outside is experienced by the agent as moral superiority.
“It is not that we cannot know reality fully; reality is in itself not fully constructed—the universe is ontologically unfinished.”
Quantum indeterminacy is not an epistemic limitation but an ontological condition: the incompleteness belongs to reality itself, not to our instruments.
“You need something to disturb perfection so that retroactively the mirage of perfection emerges; if you remove the obstacle, you lose the perfection it was disturbing.”
Obstacles and imperfections are constitutive rather than contingent: eliminating the flaw eliminates the ideal it appeared to fall short of.
“God rejoins us; it is not that we rejoin God—God splits with himself on the cross.”
Christianity's true message is the self-division of the Absolute, not reunion with it, making God briefly an atheist and grounding Žižek's celebration of the fall.
“In the wired brain scenario, we will get the thing itself—direct spiritual contact—but lose the obstacle, and thereby lose the human spirit itself.”
Unmediated access eliminates the failure and ambiguity that constitute human experience, so the technological 'upgrade' destroys what it claims to perfect.
Claims 25
asserts
Many LGBT+ ideologists participate in the repression of basic Freudian insights, particularly the immanent perversion of sexuality, by substituting a naive vision of authentic self-expression for Freud's account of sexuality as traversed by power and pain.LGBT+ ideology and psychoanalysis
reframes
The '+' in LGBT+ should be understood not as an open list of additional identities but as the very structure of human subjectivity—the hysteric's irreducible excess over any given identity.LGBT+ plus sign / human subjectivity
asserts
Transgender people's essentialist self-description ('born in the wrong body') contradicts Butlerian performativity but is a 'truthful fiction'—it captures the retroactive structure by which our practice posits an essence that doesn't pre-exist it.transgender essentialism vs. deconstructive gender theory
asserts
An authentic transgender or LGBT subject is the closest we can get to a genuine ethical subjective stance.ethics of gender identity
rejects
Calling male aggression 'toxic masculinity' medicalizes a political-ideological phenomenon in exactly the way homosexuality was pathologized in the past, exemplified by the treatment of Alan Turing.toxic masculinity as a medical/psychological category
reframes
Greta Thunberg exemplifies the features the APA attributes to toxic masculinity—suppressing emotions, refusing compromise, risk-taking—demonstrating that these traits are not essentially masculine but necessary in certain situations.toxic masculinity / Greta Thunberg
asserts
Greta Thunberg functions as a Kierkegaardian apostle rather than a genius: she bears impersonal truth through repetition, not original insight.Greta Thunberg's mode of political address
asserts
Science tells us where ecological problems are but cannot supply political answers; there is no scientific politics.the limits of science in ecology
rejects
Ecological crisis is not about caring for nature but about a social reorganization maximizing conditions of human well-being; 'Earth' is indifferent and does not need protecting.anthropocentrism and Mother Earth ideology
asserts
The ideology of personal ecological responsibility (recycling, organic food, ethical consumerism) is ideology at its purest—it blocks systemic critique while offering an easy way to feel virtuous.personal responsibility as ecological ideology
rejects
The Handmaid's Tale (novel and series) functions as 'nostalgia for the present'—a view into dystopian hell that makes us grateful for liberal society without asking how liberal society produced the conditions for such a dystopia.The Handmaid's Tale as political critique
asserts
Trump is the liberal critics' fetish: focusing on him as a corrupt individual is the last thing they see before having to confront the social antagonisms within liberal society that made his rise possible.liberal critique of Trump
asserts
The true horror of totalitarianism is not the obviously corrupt individual but evil inscribed into the system itself and performed by honest, idealistic agents convinced they serve a higher cause.the nature of totalitarian evil
rejects
Populism of any kind, including left populism, is the worst possible political program: 'ordinary people' do not have the answers to today's complex problems.left and right populism
asserts
We are in a genuine deadlock on ecology: scientific processes are self-contradictory and the answers are not clear—honest admission of this is the precondition for real critique.the state of ecological politics
rejects
Continental philosophy's 'transcendental deconstructionism' (Foucault paradigm) evacuated all genuine ontological questions, which then returned through natural sciences—quantum physics, cognitive science.continental philosophy / historicism
asserts
The implication of quantum physics is that the universe is ontologically unfinished—reality is in itself incomplete, not merely epistemically inaccessible.quantum physics and ontology
rejects
To understand a work of art (e.g. Shakespeare), knowing its historical context is irrelevant and potentially harmful; the work is like unfinished reality, best read from productive distance.contextualist hermeneutics / identity politics
asserts
The wired brain (direct neural-digital interface) would destroy the mediation, ambiguity, and failure on which human eroticism, seduction, and spirit fundamentally depend.AI / Neuralink / technological singularity
rejects
Kurzweil's singularity cannot happen as imagined because it presupposes human thought and desire surviving unchanged despite the elimination of finitude and uncertainty that constitutes them.Ray Kurzweil / technological singularity
asserts
In the Nolan Batman trilogy, the Joker and Bane are the authentic heroes and the 'socialist republic of Manhattan' under Bane is a progressive revolutionary moment—the official ideology is undermined by the film's own content.Christopher Nolan's Batman films / popular cinema and ideology
asserts
Snowden's point stands: it is far more dangerous to identify evil that is inscribed into the institutional functioning of a system than evil traceable to obvious personal corruption.systemic vs. individual evil / Trump impeachment
reframes
China's explosive economic development by combining wild capitalism with a strong authoritarian state poses a challenge to Western leftists who oppose both—it cannot be dismissed but offers no model to emulate.China / capitalism and authoritarianism
asserts
Deng Xiaoping may have been right that resisting full political liberalization after Tiananmen prevented a worse outcome—a painful admission for a leftist.Chinese political reform / Deng Xiaoping
asserts
Very modest political demands (e.g. Bernie Sanders) can be more explosive and effective in today's context than apparent radical demands, because they trigger further processes.left strategy / pragmatic vs. radical politics
Quotes 19
“Hysteria is the fundamental form of critique of ideology. The hysterical question is: you—husband, master, society—you are telling me I am that. But why am I what you are saying that I am?”Slavoj Žižek · hysteria as ideological critique
“An authentic LGBT transgender subject is the closest we can get to something that I shamelessly call an authentic ethical subjective stance.”Slavoj Žižek · transgender as ethical subject
“Our practice retroactively presupposes or posits such an essence which doesn't exist in itself—this is the act of freedom, what Hegel called self-positing.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive self-positing of essence
“True anti-essentialism means that there are eternal essences, but they emerge at a certain historical point and retroactively they become eternal.”Slavoj Žižek · eternity is historical
“Not Earth, we are in trouble. Earth is indifferent. The Earth survived much worse disasters than the possible self-destruction of one of its species.”Slavoj Žižek · against Mother Earth ideology / anthropocentrism
“Ecology is not about caring for nature; it is about a social reorganization that would maximize the conditions of our well-being.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology as social reorganization
“This is ideology at its purest. Because it blocks radical social critique, it makes you personally responsible. But at the same time it offers you an easy way out. You recycle and shut up and everything will be okay.”Slavoj Žižek · personal responsibility as ideology
“There is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. People cannot—are very rarely simply evil. They need a strong myth.”Slavoj Žižek · narrative as enabler of atrocity
“Stories we are telling ourselves are lies, covering up what we are doing. The truth is what we are doing in social interaction, not the inner stories.”Slavoj Žižek · external action as truth, inner narrative as lie
“You need something like religion to get good people do bad things. And that's where true ideology begins.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology makes good people do bad things
“Cheap happiness and true creative—not even pleasure, this is not pleasure, this is full enjoyment—are incompatible.”Slavoj Žižek · jouissance vs. cheap happiness
“Fetish in politics is the last thing you see before you see social antagonism.”Slavoj Žižek · political fetish screens antagonism
“The point is not simply we don't fully know it; the point is it is in itself not fully constructed.”Slavoj Žižek · ontological incompleteness of reality
“Shakespeare was like unfinished reality. That's why—and this is for me the authentic multiculturalism.”Slavoj Žižek · authentic multiculturalism as reading across distance
“Truth is the fall itself. I want to celebrate the fall, the event is the fall, even in the most radical ontological sense.”Slavoj Žižek · the fall as ontological truth
“I love one and all of you can go to hell others. I want to celebrate division, one-sidedness, imbalance.”Slavoj Žižek · love as particular vs. universal; ontology of division
“In your book, have you put thought into the potential reach of a technological singularity... I think it cannot happen in the sense in which it is imagined.”Slavoj Žižek · singularity critique
“There is no flirting. Our mind just directly—'I want to fuck you,' 'yes okay let's do it' or whatever. It's over in a split, eroticism is over.”Slavoj Žižek · wired brain destroys eroticism
“We only need psychoanalysis to understand the stupidity of Democrats who made his election, Trump's, possible.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump as symptom of Democratic failure
Transcript 21 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here again, I think for the third or fourth time. I don't want to disappoint you, so let me make it clear, I will of course not stick to the title, Disorder Under Heaven, or it will be just a very specific disorder. I will be talking about the gender relations disorder and a little bit connected with the topic of ecology. Now, I will begin with what, as some of you may know, brought me so much trouble, and I don't care to think deeper into it—some critical remarks on LGBT+ and so on. Although partisans of LGBT+ like to dismiss psychoanalysis as out of date, many of them, I think, fully participate in the ongoing repression of basic Freudian insights. Are you aware how much of Freud is simply repressed, maybe we could use this term today? Just let me name one topic: infantile sexuality. In our obsession with priests and others molesting small children, the very idea that what if children in themselves are not so innocent is unmentionable. So, if psychoanalysis taught us anything, it is that human sexuality is immanently perverted, traversed by sado-masochist spins and power games. It is that in it, in sexuality, pleasure is inextricably interlinked with pain. What we get in many LGBT+ ideologies is the opposite of this insight: the naive view that if sexuality is not distorted by patriarchal, binary, and so on pressures, it becomes a happy space of authentic expression of our true selves. It is crucial to note how, in all their effort to historicize gender identities and to render visible their constructed nature, at least the LGBT+ theorists that I know accept the fact of gender identities the way they operate in our everyday ideology. Often, my impression is that they are just against the idea that there are two main gender identities, masculine and feminine; they simply want to enlarge the numbers. There are identities, and so on and so on. What I miss there is to, as it were, explode, problematize from within the very notion of gender identity. I don't have time to go in this direction today, let me just give you a hint. The beginning of a dialogue with LGBT+ would have been to problematize—I often deploy this idea, some of you maybe know it—the notion of plus. What does it mean, LGBT+? Usually, this plus is taken in a, sorry for this term, British empiricist way: we have many identities, bi, trigender, asexual, butch, whatever you want, butch, and so on. But how do we know that we are open enough? What is somebody comes and says, sorry, I don't recognize myself in your list? So, plus means "and all the others." Here for me already problems begin. I think that if we can learn something from the best of psychoanalysis and philosophy is that you can directly be a plus as such. This is human subjectivity. And that's what in psychoanalysis we call hysteria. Hysteria is the fundamental form of critique of ideology. The hysterical question is: you—husband, master, society—you are telling me I am that: your wife, your pupil, your servant. But why am I what you are saying that I am? Is this permanent questioning of my own position? This is why, please do not misunderstand my critical remarks on LGBT+; I immensely respect them. I think that an authentic LGBT transgender subject is the closest we can get to something that I shamelessly call an authentic ethical subjective stance. So, what should we do to get at this point? It is crucial to note how, in their effort to historicize gender identities and render visible their constructed nature, the LGBT ideologists, as far as I know—maybe I'm wrong, I'm trying to follow what goes on there—ignore a little bit too much the fact which again, I don't perceive it as a negative fact, but it's crucial to understand it philosophically, ethically, and politically, of what I cannot but designate as what falsely appears as essentialist language. I met many people who changed their sexual identity, mostly from masculine to feminine, although of course there are also changes in other directions. And I was so surprised how, almost with all of them, the language they used to account for their experience was what in deconstructionist jargon that I don't share, they called essentialism, essentialist language. For example, people repeatedly tell me of this liberating effect, like a boy who became a girl told me: "Finally I have a body into which I should have been born." Now, are you aware how this runs against the usual deconstructive transgender ideology, which is—I say this with all my respect for her, personal respect—Judith Butlerian historicism? We don't have any essential fixed identities; every gender identity is the result of performative practices; we reconstruct them, we playfully, playfully change them all the time, and so on and so on. And I love this paradox: all of a sudden we get, at least in what they say—and I don't care how they justify it afterwards, that's what they say—this shameless use of essentialist language. It is as if—that's how they talk—it is as if I somewhere existed, at least in a purely virtual way, before I was born with a fixed identity, and it happened from time to time that then I was born into a wrong body. Finally through the transgender operation, I can find my own proper body. Now you will say this is a fiction. Of course it's a fiction, but it's, if I may put it like this, a truthful fiction. I'm an atheist; I don't believe we have an eternal nature which includes sexual identity before we were born. What I'm only saying is that in our sexual, symbolic, and so on practice, the way we act, we act as if we have such an a priori identity. That's, and that's this paradox of how our practice retroactively presupposes or posits such an essence which doesn't exist in itself, is the act of freedom, what Hegel called self-positing. For example, my other hero is—I like this news—who was the big other who intervened now? You know, recently I read—I like this crazy news in newspapers—that a guy in India, Robert something, I forgot his name but he's an Indian, is prosecuting his parents, put them to court. Why? Claiming they gave birth to him without asking him for permission. In some sense, he is right. We don't have a—this closed loop, it's a fiction but it's not simply an ideological fiction. This self, you know why it's not—I don't have time to go into it—simply a fiction? Because it is a fiction only if you presuppose that there is a full texture of fully determined reality. But the moment you accept that there are cracks in reality, that reality is in itself incomplete, then such retroactive loops where an effect retroactively posits its cause, such loops are possible. So, what I'm saying is that—let me give you another example—let's say something it's not fashionable to talk about today, passionate love. It's the same essential category. Of course it's contingent always, whom you fall in love into. But once you fall in love, it's essential. What do I mean by this? You never really choose it. You don't decide: "now I will fall in love." You just live your stupid daily life, maybe you have a one-night stand here and there, you drink whatever. Then all of a sudden, the catastrophe happens: you don't fall in love, that's crucial; you realize that you are already in love. This is what I'm talking about. And the great German idealist Schelling knew this perfectly when he realized, when he wrote that the true free decisions that constitute us are unconscious decisions. They never happen in the present. Like, all of a sudden I knew that I have decided. And I claim the choice of our sexual identity is something like that. And so again, for me, to really think our gender identity, how they are—I will not go now into the distinction which is crucial between sex and gender, of course—we have to think these two aspects together. A true materialist is not just a cheap historicist who says everything is historical and so on and so on. One has to add something, I don't have time to go into it, if you want to go into it read my last book and so on, is that eternity itself is historical. True anti-essentialism means that there are eternal essences, but they emerge at a certain historical point and retroactively, they retroactively they become eternal. Am I talking here the language of theology? Yes, proudly. Because I think that theology, reinterpreted in a materialist way, is an essential tool to read our predicament, today's most actual predicament. What do I mean by this? Let me go even into more obscure and problematic waters. Recently I was rereading Thomas Aquinas, his Summa Theologica, masterpiece of medieval theology, where Aquinas approaches a beautiful question. Allegedly, it's presumed by Catholic theologians that in paradise you will be almost not omnipotent but you will know everything. There will be except nature of God, no secrets. So, will you be allowed in paradise to see the suffering of those in hell? And Aquinas's answer is yes. But then he immediately confronts a problem: if yes, then how to unite this with the fact that by definition in paradise you will be happy all the time? How can you enjoy seeing the suffering of others? Aquinas proposes a stupid, I think invalid answer. His answer is that you, what will make you happy is not the suffering, but to witness the majesty of divine justice. I think that Aquinas is cheating here. In what sense? It's in what sense is it needed for you when you enjoy heaven to see the suffering of those in hell? Let me play a game with you and let's imagine we are in heaven. Let's face it, from what we know in all the description from all descriptions, it's a very boring place. You have all the nectar, meadows, happily, it must be terribly boring. So the way I imagine it is that after some years there, you become restless, you know, "is this the real life?" and so on. And then like some angels who take care of you began to worry and say, "Are you not satisfied here?" "Okay, let's take a look at what's down there in hell." So you take a look at that and "Okay, okay, it's better here," and so on. That's the function of it. But so my first point here is that this logic, that to enjoy your happiness you need a look at hell of those who are not as happy as they claim you are, those in power. Don't we live in exactly the same predicament? Our view into hell are the TV news where they warn you, "some scenes here may be unsuitable for you," children starving in Somalia, war in Syria, and so on and so on. It is as if we need those horrors in the news just to become aware of how happy we should be staying where we are. But so what's my view of this? You may be here shocked. My view is this one: what if we turn around the perspective and claim—that's my private dream—that maybe we got the wrong idea of hell? Maybe all the oil is there burning for barbecues, you drink, you have orgies, you are happy, and so on and so on. So my idea of hell is it's quite a nice place. And then once a week, a devil's manager comes to you and says, "Listen guys, we all know we have a good time here. But now for quarter of an hour we will be observed from heaven, so please pretend that you suffer horribly," and so on and so on. And now then after quarter of an hour, he says, "Okay, CNN cameras are off, you can enjoy it again." Now you think I'm kidding here. I am not. I think that cheap happiness and true creative—not even pleasure, this is not pleasure, this is full enjoyment—are incompatible. Let me return to my example that I gave you of love or artistic creativity and so on. It gives you nightmares, it doesn't make you happy. Again, to return to my example ten minutes ago, imagine living a peaceful life, maybe one-night stand here and there, you meet friends, drink, and then you passionately fall in love. Your peace is ruined. It's hell. But nonetheless, I would never exchange this hell for heaven. It's the same with artistic creativity and so on and so on. But back to my main point: why do we need this view of hell and how it functions as today's ideology? Now I will say something more which may really hurt you, some of you. That's why I don't like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and especially the TV version, the TV series. I think it's the best example of what my good friend Fred Jameson called nostalgia for the present. It paints with great pleasure—that's my—you know, all my friends, feminine also, when I ask them "do you follow the TV series?", they admitted to me that what really attracts them is the new ways how they screw, how they torture women there and so on. The new tricks, Republic of Gilead. But of course it's wonderful because it's legitimized: "I watch it to see the horror of fundamentalist rule," and so on. You are allowed to enjoy it fully. But the main point where I don't agree with it is that we are not yet there in Gilead. So what the series never does—and the novel—it's the series and the novel are one big nostalgia for the society, liberal permissive, in which we are. It's literally our view into hell to be glad in what nice society nonetheless we still live. The series, the novel, never asks the simple question: but how come that this our liberal society gave birth to Gilead? Or, to apply this to your predicament, that's my problem with just criticizing Donald Trump. Yes, he is a nightmare and so on. But how come that he succeeded in disturbing the liberal consensus? To get really rid of Trump, ask this question: what was wrong with our liberal consensus? That's why again I think that stories like Handmaid's Tale, they are just here to make us feel good about liberal, permissive and so on society. They don't ask the key question, which is again: what was wrong with, what is wrong with these societies? How was something like Donald Trump possible? Or to go a step further, you know Freudian notion of fetish, naive one—the last thing you see before you as a small boy notice that the girl doesn't have a penis, blah blah blah. Okay, let's give it a more accurate version. Fetish in politics is the last thing you see before you see social antagonism. This is why for example, the Jew, the figure of the Jew in antisemitism is a fetish. It's the last thing you see before you see class struggle antagonism. Jew is an ersatz for class struggle. It's the element which from outside introduces antagonism into our society. I think that there is something similar for, that I see in liberal critics of Donald Trump. He is their fetish: the last thing they see before they would have to admit social antagonisms in United States and how Trump exploited them. Let me go on now to my main line, which is: what does this mean for sexual difference or rather, what type of femininity can we imagine today which would really counteract the still predominant—I wouldn't say patriarchal, masculine mode of subjectivity? I claim we confront here great ideological traps, but I would like to focus on one person which is much maligned today, but I still, in spite of all the publicity that surrounds her, admire her: it's of course Greta Thunberg. Why do I like her? She is autistic. And I think that's her strength. That's what we need today. She is not the usual figure of femininity, dialogic, open to compromise, and so on and so on. No, if anything—that's now my provocation—she is an example of how the American Psychological—Psychiatric, sorry—Association described toxic masculinity. I quote the definition, I quote here: "Traits of so-called traditional masculinity like suppressing emotions and masking distress, often start early in life and have been linked to less willingness by boys and men to seek help, more risk-taking and aggression, possibly harming themselves and those with whom they interact." End of quote. So, I think all these features supposed to characterize toxic masculinity—suppressing emotions, masking distress, unwillingness to seek help, propensity to take risks, and so on and so on—my claim is first that there is nothing masculine about this. There are simply situations where you have to act like this. My supreme example from tradition of this type of toxic masculinity is Antigone, from Sophocles' play. Ismene is the traditional woman: compliant, compromise, blah blah blah. No, Antigone is toxically masculine. She doesn't debate, she just insists on her own, no matter what catastrophic consequences this will imply. And the same goes for Greta Thunberg. Let me elaborate this a little bit more. Why this attack on toxic masculinity? Of course, to avoid a misunderstanding, I'm totally opposed to any form of male violence and so on and so on. But I think it's not as innocent as it may appear to call this toxic masculinity, which is a medical term. Are we aware that we are doing the same as more than half a century ago they were doing in many countries, like they did to Alan Turing? You remember the guy, my God, who almost was the crucial guy breaking the Enigma code, saving us from Nazi rule. Then he was castrated, committed suicide and so on and so on. What toxic—what at that point they did to homosexuality, with toxic masculinity we are doing something similar. What: male violence, brutality. What is a political-ideological phenomenon, we medicalize it. No, this is not a medical phenomenon, male violence and so on and so on. Second thing: something is happening in our societies which I find a little bit suspicious. Namely, there is a new, let's call it conformist spirit where conflict is, aggressiveness, conflict and so on, is considered problematic. The idea is negotiations, dialogue, and so on and so on. And here the ruling ideology constructs a specific role for women. My good friend Alain Badiou described to me how, because his adopted son had some legal problems and he witnessed it, how often in modern, especially to deal with juvenile delinquents, you need a woman as a judge, even as a policewoman and so on and so on. Women are needed today to act as representatives of the new mode of power, which is no longer the brutal directly oppressive power but the more understanding power, the power which wants to help you, to re-educate you and so on and so on. So again, I think that this critique of toxic masculinity is part of an ideological transformation which I'm very suspicious of. I think that what we should do is to precisely see what positive aspect is obliterated by this critique of toxic masculinity. I see this again in the figure of Greta Thunberg. Let me explain what I mean by this. Greta, if you followed the news, did change quite a lot in the last year. She changed from the naive innocent girl saying that the emperor is naked to a smiling, aggressive, sharp-tongued demon almost. But her message remains the same: simple and repeated. One should recall here Kierkegaard's wonderful short text on the difference between genius and apostle, where Kierkegaard defines genius as an individual who is able to express or articulate his inner wealth, what is in him more than himself, his spiritual substance, in contrast to the apostle, who in himself does not matter at all. The apostle is a purely formal function of the one who dedicated his or her life to bearing witness to an impersonal truth. And I think that Greta, the way she acts, is an apostle. An apostle of truth. She does not bring forward some ingenious new insights. She just repeats the same simple message again and again. Talking about politicians, she said, "We have not taken to the streets for them to take selfies with us and tell us that they really, really admire what we do. We children are doing this to wake the adults up," and so on and so on. What Greta calls us to listen to is science, to take science seriously. But this does not mean that science also provides the political answer to what we are to do. Science just enables us to discern the contours of the deadlock in which we are: the catastrophic ecological implications of our economic development and so on and so on. But there is no scientific politics. So I think again, when Greta says "listen to science," she doesn't mean "scientific politics, this will give us answer." She just only means science will tell us where the problems are. So where are the problems? We often hear that in order to confront appropriately the threat of an ecological catastrophe, we have to renounce anthropocentrism and to conceive of ourselves, humanity, as a subordinated element in the great chain of being. We are just one species on our planet, but through our ruthless exploitation of its resources, we humanity are posing a threat to our Mother Earth. And Mother Earth is punishing us through global warming and other ecological threats. I think that one cannot but laugh at this vision. Not Earth, *we* are in trouble. Earth is indifferent. The Earth survived much worse disasters than the possible self-destruction of one of its species. Can we even imagine what catastrophes took place on Earth so that we have the energy today—oil, coal and so on and so on? No, Earth doesn't care. What is under threat is our environment, our habitat, the only one in which we can live. From the imagined standpoint of Earth, it would have been much better for its global ecosystem if we humanity disappear. So what is under threat in ecological crisis is our survival. Again, I find this critique of anthropocentrism for this reason totally hypocritical. They don't really care about Earth, they care about Earth which should remain such that we humanity will be able to survive. Earth is indifferent here. What we are after is an environment that would befit our survival. This is also why the true stakes of ecology are socio-political. Ecology is not about caring for nature; it is about a social reorganization that would maximize the conditions of our well-being. Now to conclude, I would like to say that what we can learn from Greta is the amount of ideology in our dealing with ecological topic. I see at least five strategies of how we obfuscate the true dimension of our ecological crisis. First it's simple ignorance—that's more or less the Donald Trump attitude. It's a marginal phenomenon, nature will take care of itself, don't worry. The second option is of course ideological option: leave the solution to the market, higher taxation of the polluters and so on and so on. Then there are further options. There is the scientific option, of course, like science will find new ways to resolve ecological pressures and so on and so on. Then, but the last two I find the most suspicious versions. One is this—how should I call it—the paradigm of Mother Earth and how we humanity were too arrogant, we disturbed a natural balance. So we should renounce our hubris, accept our modest place in natural hierarchy and so on and so on. This I think is the most dangerous version. Why? Because there is no natural order, there is no natural hierarchy. I cannot imagine anything more destructive than nature itself, which destroys its own ecosystems all the time. And the last version, the most dangerous, predominant even today of ecology, of ecological ideology, is the strategy of personal responsibility. How does—let's call it the power edifice address us? By power edifice I mean simply our ideology in which we live. When you raise the problem of criticizing the state, our industry and so on, the predominant answer is: okay, don't just criticize. What did you do all you can not to pollute nature? Did you do your duty? Did you put all Coke cans in a separate bag? Did you recycle all newspapers and so on and so on? This is ideology at its purest, I claim. Because it blocks radical social critique, it makes you personally responsible. But—nothing against it, of course we are responsible—but at the same time it offers you an easy way out. You recycle and shut up and everything will be okay. My ideal here—I'm sorry I use this story often—is the way they were years ago, they are no longer like that, is my ideal here is Starbucks. You remember years ago, now they are no longer doing it to that extent, whenever I entered a Starbucks coffee place you got a big poster telling something like of our coffee goes to Guatemala children, goes to save some Amazon forest," and so on and so on. It's a wonderful formula because the way to—what they are telling you is: be consumerist, but consume us, because the social price is already included into it. So the more—if you consume our products, you already do your duty towards environment and so on and so on. And I claim that we are here subtly manipulated in a very refined sense. In the sense that when we as a rule, when we act as ecologically conscious, are we aware that we are to an important part, I think even mostly, acting not to really do something about it, but to make us feel well that we are doing something about it? My old cynical example: why are you buying those rotten organic apples, even if they cost two times the good chemical polluted apples, whatever? It's not—I spoke with many people who bought them and they admitted to me they don't really believe that organic apples are really much better. But it makes you feel better: you see, I'm doing something for Mother Nature, I show solidarity, and so on and so on. This is where we find today ideology, ideology of everyday life. Now to make an even more pessimistic conclusion. Now you will say: okay, we should become aware of the ecological problem and act. Okay, act and do what? Do we even know what to do? I mean, I know that scientists are today playing with different versions like spraying the air with some chemical elements which will prevent the—all those dangerous things in sun rays to hit the Earth and so on, but everybody knows how risky these things are. We don't—how should I put it—we don't have a simple answer. And especially—now I will say for a leftist like me something horrible—that's why I oppose populism, even if it's especially if it's a leftist populism. I—if we can learn something from recent decade when populism became popular as it were, it's that yes, people do have their own complaints and so on and so on, worries, but the worst possible political program is: forget about big ideology, left, right, listen to ordinary people, listen to their problems, give them what they want, and so on and so on. Maybe we theorists don't know. But ordinary people also don't know. Did you—I don't believe that, I'm not a Maoist here, you know this old Maoist idea: go to ordinary people, learn from them, and so on and so on. Well, in most of Europe, if you go to ordinary people, they will tell you something like "throw the immigrants out" and so on and so on. And people tell me, "yes, because the ordinary people are manipulated." Yes, but we live manipulation, ideology—this is ideology in which we are. And that's why I claim, that's why one should not be afraid to be radical here. I am not an anti-democrat. I am just saying that solutions, especially in today's complex situation, solutions are not simple and clear. Like, for example, I had recently in London a debate with some partisans who still believe in Venezuela's Chavismo. And I told them, "Okay, I know, American boycott and so on and so on. But isn't it obvious that nonetheless, even if you take into account all the effects of American intervention and so on and so on, that nonetheless, to cut a long story short, Chávez did not propose a new viable model." Chávez was for me Fidel Castro with money. For some time it works, when the regime had enough money and so on. So we—that's the first honest thing to admit as far as I'm concerned—that we are in a serious deadlock and that it's not just that we don't get solutions because some ecologists are bribed by big companies and so on and so on, whatever. What happens today with Earth, it's extremely dangerous, but precisely because it's self-inconsistent, it's not clear what is happening. For example, the example that I like to use all the time: when I was young, in Europe there was a big slogan, very popular: *Waldsterben*, forests are dying. And there were exact scientific calculations: in years, they said, which means today, this was in years Europe will be without forests. I'm sad to tell you today there are more forests in Europe than ever in the last years. Does this mean that there is no ecological crisis? No, but it means that the process is much more tricky, self-contradictory and so on and so on. The answers are not clear. The only thing clear is that—and here Greta Thunberg is right—we need science. Not to provide solutions; we need science to identify problem, to see what is the—to see what is the problem. And this I think brings back to our starting point: we need more than ever today what I would have called in good old Marxist terms, critique of ideology. Not only with our enemies; it's ridiculously evident that for example, in what sense what Donald Trump and his guys are doing is ideology. But I think a true leftist should also do the opposite today: to ask when even liberal democratic critics of Trump are too limited and fall into the same trap. So to conclude, let me just give you one example. I mean, Trump is for me—let's avoid a misunderstanding—like a guy without a moral compass, kind of an immature guy, and so on. Not necessary to lose words on that. But you know what—what disturbs me deeply in the way this impeachment of Trump is now gaining momentum? It's easy to criticize Trump, he should be criticized, because we are obviously dealing with a single corrupted individual pursuing his own interests. And Edward Snowden, whom I greatly appreciate, pointed this out. He said: it's easy to criticize representatives of evil where you find clear motivations: this is an egotist, crazy guy, blah blah blah. What I find much more dangerous is to locate the evil which—evil: okay, violations of human rights and so on—which is inscribed into the very functioning of the system. So that you can have individuals who are in some sense very faithful, patriotic, you absolutely cannot identify any egotist motives in them and so on, but they are doing the same thing. I remember, this was my reproach to an old film which got an Oscar I think, everybody loves it, maybe you remember it, *Das Leben der Anderen*, *The Lives of Others*, the German one. And I communist—I was opposed to that film, not because he was too tough on communism, but because it was not tough enough. You know the story: an evil—it takes place in East Germany—an evil minister, to cut a long story short, wants to screw a beautiful wife of a playwright, and he orders the police to cover, to watch the writer, to find some incrimination so that the writer could be set and so on and so on. But you know, the presupposition is still that you need an evil individual who pursues his, her, their evil private goals to find evil. What about the evil inscribed into the system itself? The most dangerous things for me are not simple egotists who do evil for obvious reasons; it is evil inscribed into the institutional functioning. For example, what terrified me—to take the opposite example—in histories of Stalinism is when they were doing in—at the end of 1920s—enforced collectivization. They were doing horrible things. But many of them were honest individuals dedicated to communist thought, who thought "Oh my God, okay, this has to be done, it's horrible but it's—fidelity—my fidelity to a higher cause," and so on and so on. You know, I want to finish with a quote from the scientist, quantum cosmologist Steven Weinberg, I think. He said somewhere that if—without religion, good people would be doing good things and bad people would be doing bad things. You need something like religion to get good people do bad things. And that's where true ideology begins. For me, let me tell you something horrible: although the guy who published that book against Trump, the ex-FBI boss James Comey, I think—*A Higher Loyalty*, you know. Probably he is personally honest, I don't know. I'm just saying that this type of honesty in no way prevents horrible things taking place. So that's the first thing that we should drop. The second thing is—again, don't focus on private vices, on inner stories and so on and so on. The most disgusting wisdom that I know is the one which even some partisans of multiculturalism use, which is something like: "an enemy is somebody to whose story we were not ready to listen," something like that. My reaction is: oh thanks, so Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to his story or whatever? My point is not that if you listen to Hitler, you saw that he is really evil and so on and so on. My point is that the true ethical dimension is in what you do externally, not in the story you are telling yourself to do. That's why it fascinates me the extent to which all horrors—there is—my—this is my formula: there is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. I'm systematically looking not only in my own ex-countries, Bosnia—I'm from Slovenia but ex-Yugoslavia and so on—I looked at whatever you want in Rwanda and so on: every ethnic cleansing, there is usually some poet, religious leader, some mythmaker who provided a story. People cannot—are very rarely simply evil. They need a strong myth. So I don't believe in this stupidity of "let's see what he is doing, but maybe we don't understand what he is doing, let's look inside into his story." No, stories we are telling ourselves are lies, covering up what we are doing. The truth is what we are doing in social interaction, not the inner stories. So at this level, we should be active today. Sorry if I was a little bit too long and confused, but that's life. Thank you very much. I was struck by your comment about *The Lives of Others*. You were saying that it was too weak a criticism to focus on the evil communist party boss. But what I found most frightening about the film was that I found myself identifying with that communist party boss. Because the film had shown how daily life in that system was so corrupting, and so I was imagining if I had been sort of a dutiful party member, I would have tried to rise to the top and that the actions and compromises that I was making each day would have just wiped out all of my principles. And by the time I got to the top, I wouldn't have any principles, and then I would feel like, well I deserve something—so why not take that beautiful actress? I mean, it's sort of like and—and I wouldn't have any moral values to guide me to do anything else. And so I was feeling that it wasn't very specifically showing a system where just getting to the top would strip you of all your values and then you would be reduced to that kind of behavior. Okay, can I quickly, and then maybe you should stay there and if you'll reply to my reply. Because my point to refer to that film would be this one. You know, my point is that if there would not have been guys like that corrupted minister, if all Stasi would have been just like that guy who has to follow and observe the writer, the guy who at the end even steps on his side, the relatively honest Stasi agent—the system would have been exactly the same, maybe even worse. That's my point. That they are—I met them in my own youth, I lived in a communist system—I claim it was much more—the most dangerous were the guys who were, how should I put it, honestly patriotic in their corruption. You know where—okay, I will ask you, I'll tell you this: what fascinated me is a specific ethics of corruption which was like this, this is the implicit logic, it was like this: "We know we violate in our work certain basic ethical principles. But isn't this the true ethical greatness? That you are ready for the cause to violate even your basic ethical principles?" So the trick is that you don't experience your acts—horrible acts—as something corrupted, but as a sign of a much greater ethics: "I'm ready to—to—kill individual flowers for—for the greater cause." You know who put this nicely? Another German guy from the opposite camp, Heinrich Himmler, who said somewhere: every stupid German, almost in these terms, is ready to sacrifice his life for Germany. A true great German is ready to sacrifice his soul, to do horrible things for Germany. And this dimension—again, this dimension, this dimension I miss. This is for me the true horror of totalitarianism. For me it was not this guy sneering "Oh, I want to screw your wife" and so on. I knew communist functionaries—and Yugoslavia I was not a horrible case, it was relatively open—where functionaries were doing horrible things and then this shocked me: you meet them privately and you see they're quite nice guys, with refined taste. I met—I met secret policemen who enjoyed—I even now think that this is the main proof that God doesn't exist—how can such a horrible guy sincerely like Schoenberg, late Beethoven string quartets and so on? And I tried to convince myself it's a fake, they don't really understand. No, sorry, they did understand. You know which is for me the most depressing fact that I read about Reinhard Heydrich? In the evenings after planning Holocaust and all that stuff, he gathered with three other friends, string quartet, they were playing mostly late Beethoven string quartets. This is something so sacrilegious for me. But let me—I know we don't have time—you know that's why I almost prefer the other film which is, I think in a subtle way, more critical than this one of East Germany: *Good Bye, Lenin!* Because the message of that film is: if you are an honest communist, your own solution is to go crazy, to drop the—you know. It's in a subtle way a much more—a much more—a much more pessimistic version. So again, what interests me: this is what I don't trust again in that movie. The minister is for me the bad guy of the film, too obviously corrupt. What always fascinated me is people who are—they do horrible things, but if you talk to them, they are warm people, they cry when they see a cat mistreated or whatever and so on. Sorry, we cannot go on. Okay, let's take a question from the left side of the stage. I have a proposition and then a question. So in your work, as you say, we are living in the decay of transcendental finitude. And this is clear in many... Sorry, what do you mean by this? It's too complicated the term, although I... Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Please, yeah. Well, maybe we can sort of find out from examples, which I think are gender theory and ecological politics, but also historicism, spiritualism, these sort of things. And what is at work here I think is a crisis of what was once called nature philosophy. Sorry, crisis of nature? Nature, nature philosophy. As in 19th-century nature philosophy... *Naturphilosophie*, like, yeah, yeah. So we have lost, I think, an orientation towards a coherent structuring of what nature means. And in order to work through this problem, we have to reappropriate the concepts currently lost to what is basically sophism. Among these concepts are materialism, desire, world, body, whatever. And the task is now to see in these concepts the principle of their own contemporary degeneration, thereby returning them to their proper speculative vocation. So my question is this, which is also sort of on the proposition: what do you think the future is for this crisis of nature philosophy, unless you disagree, and what are some possible directions for the future of philosophy? Okay, I will try to be short. In strange way, although in a different direction than you, I agree with your problem. I think the tragedy of philosophy, at least the so-called continental philosophy—but now it's moving out with new realisms—that it was totally caught in what I call transcendental deconstructionism. It was this purely epistemological reflection. Like my old example, sorry if some of you know it: if you were to ask somebody like Michel Foucault, "Do I have an immortal soul?", his answer would have been: "I can only describe the episteme, the cognitive—the—the space of power and knowledge within which such a question is meaningful." You know, you suspend this realist question, you just describe different epistemological configurations and so on and so on. This is for me the most radical historicism. Like, you don't answer the question: "Is the universe finite?" The counterpoint would have been simply: but within what philosophical horizon can you even raise this question? And it's interesting how this naive realist questioning then returned in natural sciences: quantum physics, cognitive sciences, and so on and so on. What fascinates me is how today, if you want to know "Is the universe finite or infinite?", you don't ask philosophers, you ask quantum cosmologists. If you want to know today "Do we have a free will or not?", you don't ask philosophers, you ask cognitivists and brain scientists, and so on and so on. But it's a difficult question: how should philosophy do it and what point of nature? I still think that here for me the ultimate challenge is my view: the ontological implications of quantum physics. What—it's still an unsolved, unresolved question because, I'm sorry if I will now very briefly repeat an old story of mine, I think that the implication of quantum physics is still not perceived. It's something that I can only call unfinished universe.
Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here again, I think for the third or fourth time. I don't want to disappoint you, so let me make it clear, I will of course not stick to the title, Disorder Under Heaven, or it will be just a very specific disorder. I will be talking about the gender relations disorder and a little bit connected with the topic of ecology. Now, I will begin with what, as some of you may know, brought me so much trouble, and I don't care to think deeper into it—some critical remarks on LGBT+ and so on. Although partisans of LGBT+ like to dismiss psychoanalysis as out of date, many of them, I think, fully participate in the ongoing repression of basic Freudian insights. Are you aware how much of Freud is simply repressed, maybe we could use this term today? Just let me name one topic: infantile sexuality. In our obsession with priests and others molesting small children, the very idea that what if children in themselves are not so innocent is unmentionable. So, if psychoanalysis taught us anything, it is that human sexuality is immanently perverted, traversed by sado-masochist spins and power games. It is that in it, in sexuality, pleasure is inextricably interlinked with pain. What we get in many LGBT+ ideologies is the opposite of this insight: the naive view that if sexuality is not distorted by patriarchal, binary, and so on pressures, it becomes a happy space of authentic expression of our true selves. It is crucial to note how, in all their effort to historicize gender identities and to render visible their constructed nature, at least the LGBT+ theorists that I know accept the fact of gender identities the way they operate in our everyday ideology. Often, my impression is that they are just against the idea that there are two main gender identities, masculine and feminine; they simply want to enlarge the numbers. There are identities, and so on and so on. What I miss there is to, as it were, explode, problematize from within the very notion of gender identity. I don't have time to go in this direction today, let me just give you a hint. The beginning of a dialogue with LGBT+ would have been to problematize—I often deploy this idea, some of you maybe know it—the notion of plus. What does it mean, LGBT+? Usually, this plus is taken in a, sorry for this term, British empiricist way: we have many identities, bi, trigender, asexual, butch, whatever you want, butch, and so on. But how do we know that we are open enough? What is somebody comes and says, sorry, I don't recognize myself in your list? So, plus means "and all the others." Here for me already problems begin. I think that if we can learn something from the best of psychoanalysis and philosophy is that you can directly be a plus as such. This is human subjectivity. And that's what in psychoanalysis we call hysteria. Hysteria is the fundamental form of critique of ideology. The hysterical question is: you—husband, master, society—you are telling me I am that: your wife, your pupil, your servant. But why am I what you are saying that I am? Is this permanent questioning of my own position? This is why, please do not misunderstand my critical remarks on LGBT+; I immensely respect them. I think that an authentic LGBT transgender subject is the closest we can get to something that I shamelessly call an authentic ethical subjective stance. So, what should we do to get at this point? It is crucial to note how, in their effort to historicize gender identities and render visible their constructed nature, the LGBT ideologists, as far as I know—maybe I'm wrong, I'm trying to follow what goes on there—ignore a little bit too much the fact which again, I don't perceive it as a negative fact, but it's crucial to understand it philosophically, ethically, and politically, of what I cannot but designate as what falsely appears as essentialist language. I met many people who changed their sexual identity, mostly from masculine to feminine, although of course there are also changes in other directions. And I was so surprised how, almost with all of them, the language they used to account for their experience was what in deconstructionist jargon that I don't share, they called essentialism, essentialist language. For example, people repeatedly tell me of this liberating effect, like a boy who became a girl told me: "Finally I have a body into which I should have been born." Now, are you aware how this runs against the usual deconstructive transgender ideology, which is—I say this with all my respect for her, personal respect—Judith Butlerian historicism? We don't have any essential fixed identities; every gender identity is the result of performative practices; we reconstruct them, we playfully, playfully change them all the time, and so on and so on. And I love this paradox: all of a sudden we get, at least in what they say—and I don't care how they justify it afterwards, that's what they say—this shameless use of essentialist language. It is as if—that's how they talk—it is as if I somewhere existed, at least in a purely virtual way, before I was born with a fixed identity, and it happened from time to time that then I was born into a wrong body. Finally through the transgender operation, I can find my own proper body. Now you will say this is a fiction. Of course it's a fiction, but it's, if I may put it like this, a truthful fiction. I'm an atheist; I don't believe we have an eternal nature which includes sexual identity before we were born. What I'm only saying is that in our sexual, symbolic, and so on practice, the way we act, we act as if we have such an a priori identity. That's, and that's this paradox of how our practice retroactively presupposes or posits such an essence which doesn't exist in itself, is the act of freedom, what Hegel called self-positing. For example, my other hero is—I like this news—who was the big other who intervened now? You know, recently I read—I like this crazy news in newspapers—that a guy in India, Robert something, I forgot his name but he's an Indian, is prosecuting his parents, put them to court. Why? Claiming they gave birth to him without asking him for permission. In some sense, he is right. We don't have a—this closed loop, it's a fiction but it's not simply an ideological fiction. This self, you know why it's not—I don't have time to go into it—simply a fiction? Because it is a fiction only if you presuppose that there is a full texture of fully determined reality. But the moment you accept that there are cracks in reality, that reality is in itself incomplete, then such retroactive loops where an effect retroactively posits its cause, such loops are possible. So, what I'm saying is that—let me give you another example—let's say something it's not fashionable to talk about today, passionate love. It's the same essential category. Of course it's contingent always, whom you fall in love into. But once you fall in love, it's essential. What do I mean by this? You never really choose it. You don't decide: "now I will fall in love." You just live your stupid daily life, maybe you have a one-night stand here and there, you drink whatever. Then all of a sudden, the catastrophe happens: you don't fall in love, that's crucial; you realize that you are already in love. This is what I'm talking about. And the great German idealist Schelling knew this perfectly when he realized, when he wrote that the true free decisions that constitute us are unconscious decisions. They never happen in the present. Like, all of a sudden I knew that I have decided. And I claim the choice of our sexual identity is something like that. And so again, for me, to really think our gender identity, how they are—I will not go now into the distinction which is crucial between sex and gender, of course—we have to think these two aspects together. A true materialist is not just a cheap historicist who says everything is historical and so on and so on. One has to add something, I don't have time to go into it, if you want to go into it read my last book and so on, is that eternity itself is historical. True anti-essentialism means that there are eternal essences, but they emerge at a certain historical point and retroactively, they retroactively they become eternal. Am I talking here the language of theology? Yes, proudly. Because I think that theology, reinterpreted in a materialist way, is an essential tool to read our predicament, today's most actual predicament. What do I mean by this? Let me go even into more obscure and problematic waters. Recently I was rereading Thomas Aquinas, his Summa Theologica, masterpiece of medieval theology, where Aquinas approaches a beautiful question. Allegedly, it's presumed by Catholic theologians that in paradise you will be almost not omnipotent but you will know everything. There will be except nature of God, no secrets. So, will you be allowed in paradise to see the suffering of those in hell? And Aquinas's answer is yes. But then he immediately confronts a problem: if yes, then how to unite this with the fact that by definition in paradise you will be happy all the time? How can you enjoy seeing the suffering of others? Aquinas proposes a stupid, I think invalid answer. His answer is that you, what will make you happy is not the suffering, but to witness the majesty of divine justice. I think that Aquinas is cheating here. In what sense? It's in what sense is it needed for you when you enjoy heaven to see the suffering of those in hell? Let me play a game with you and let's imagine we are in heaven. Let's face it, from what we know in all the description from all descriptions, it's a very boring place. You have all the nectar, meadows, happily, it must be terribly boring. So the way I imagine it is that after some years there, you become restless, you know, "is this the real life?" and so on. And then like some angels who take care of you began to worry and say, "Are you not satisfied here?" "Okay, let's take a look at what's down there in hell." So you take a look at that and "Okay, okay, it's better here," and so on. That's the function of it. But so my first point here is that this logic, that to enjoy your happiness you need a look at hell of those who are not as happy as they claim you are, those in power. Don't we live in exactly the same predicament? Our view into hell are the TV news where they warn you, "some scenes here may be unsuitable for you," children starving in Somalia, war in Syria, and so on and so on. It is as if we need those horrors in the news just to become aware of how happy we should be staying where we are. But so what's my view of this? You may be here shocked. My view is this one: what if we turn around the perspective and claim—that's my private dream—that maybe we got the wrong idea of hell? Maybe all the oil is there burning for barbecues, you drink, you have orgies, you are happy, and so on and so on. So my idea of hell is it's quite a nice place. And then once a week, a devil's manager comes to you and says, "Listen guys, we all know we have a good time here. But now for quarter of an hour we will be observed from heaven, so please pretend that you suffer horribly," and so on and so on. And now then after quarter of an hour, he says, "Okay, CNN cameras are off, you can enjoy it again." Now you think I'm kidding here. I am not. I think that cheap happiness and true creative—not even pleasure, this is not pleasure, this is full enjoyment—are incompatible. Let me return to my example that I gave you of love or artistic creativity and so on. It gives you nightmares, it doesn't make you happy. Again, to return to my example ten minutes ago, imagine living a peaceful life, maybe one-night stand here and there, you meet friends, drink, and then you passionately fall in love. Your peace is ruined. It's hell. But nonetheless, I would never exchange this hell for heaven. It's the same with artistic creativity and so on and so on. But back to my main point: why do we need this view of hell and how it functions as today's ideology? Now I will say something more which may really hurt you, some of you. That's why I don't like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and especially the TV version, the TV series. I think it's the best example of what my good friend Fred Jameson called nostalgia for the present. It paints with great pleasure—that's my—you know, all my friends, feminine also, when I ask them "do you follow the TV series?", they admitted to me that what really attracts them is the new ways how they screw, how they torture women there and so on. The new tricks, Republic of Gilead. But of course it's wonderful because it's legitimized: "I watch it to see the horror of fundamentalist rule," and so on. You are allowed to enjoy it fully. But the main point where I don't agree with it is that we are not yet there in Gilead. So what the series never does—and the novel—it's the series and the novel are one big nostalgia for the society, liberal permissive, in which we are. It's literally our view into hell to be glad in what nice society nonetheless we still live. The series, the novel, never asks the simple question: but how come that this our liberal society gave birth to Gilead? Or, to apply this to your predicament, that's my problem with just criticizing Donald Trump. Yes, he is a nightmare and so on. But how come that he succeeded in disturbing the liberal consensus? To get really rid of Trump, ask this question: what was wrong with our liberal consensus? That's why again I think that stories like Handmaid's Tale, they are just here to make us feel good about liberal, permissive and so on society. They don't ask the key question, which is again: what was wrong with, what is wrong with these societies? How was something like Donald Trump possible? Or to go a step further, you know Freudian notion of fetish, naive one—the last thing you see before you as a small boy notice that the girl doesn't have a penis, blah blah blah. Okay, let's give it a more accurate version. Fetish in politics is the last thing you see before you see social antagonism. This is why for example, the Jew, the figure of the Jew in antisemitism is a fetish. It's the last thing you see before you see class struggle antagonism. Jew is an ersatz for class struggle. It's the element which from outside introduces antagonism into our society. I think that there is something similar for, that I see in liberal critics of Donald Trump. He is their fetish: the last thing they see before they would have to admit social antagonisms in United States and how Trump exploited them. Let me go on now to my main line, which is: what does this mean for sexual difference or rather, what type of femininity can we imagine today which would really counteract the still predominant—I wouldn't say patriarchal, masculine mode of subjectivity? I claim we confront here great ideological traps, but I would like to focus on one person which is much maligned today, but I still, in spite of all the publicity that surrounds her, admire her: it's of course Greta Thunberg. Why do I like her? She is autistic. And I think that's her strength. That's what we need today. She is not the usual figure of femininity, dialogic, open to compromise, and so on and so on. No, if anything—that's now my provocation—she is an example of how the American Psychological—Psychiatric, sorry—Association described toxic masculinity. I quote the definition, I quote here: "Traits of so-called traditional masculinity like suppressing emotions and masking distress, often start early in life and have been linked to less willingness by boys and men to seek help, more risk-taking and aggression, possibly harming themselves and those with whom they interact." End of quote. So, I think all these features supposed to characterize toxic masculinity—suppressing emotions, masking distress, unwillingness to seek help, propensity to take risks, and so on and so on—my claim is first that there is nothing masculine about this. There are simply situations where you have to act like this. My supreme example from tradition of this type of toxic masculinity is Antigone, from Sophocles' play. Ismene is the traditional woman: compliant, compromise, blah blah blah. No, Antigone is toxically masculine. She doesn't debate, she just insists on her own, no matter what catastrophic consequences this will imply. And the same goes for Greta Thunberg. Let me elaborate this a little bit more. Why this attack on toxic masculinity? Of course, to avoid a misunderstanding, I'm totally opposed to any form of male violence and so on and so on. But I think it's not as innocent as it may appear to call this toxic masculinity, which is a medical term. Are we aware that we are doing the same as more than half a century ago they were doing in many countries, like they did to Alan Turing? You remember the guy, my God, who almost was the crucial guy breaking the Enigma code, saving us from Nazi rule. Then he was castrated, committed suicide and so on and so on. What toxic—what at that point they did to homosexuality, with toxic masculinity we are doing something similar. What: male violence, brutality. What is a political-ideological phenomenon, we medicalize it. No, this is not a medical phenomenon, male violence and so on and so on. Second thing: something is happening in our societies which I find a little bit suspicious. Namely, there is a new, let's call it conformist spirit where conflict is, aggressiveness, conflict and so on, is considered problematic. The idea is negotiations, dialogue, and so on and so on. And here the ruling ideology constructs a specific role for women. My good friend Alain Badiou described to me how, because his adopted son had some legal problems and he witnessed it, how often in modern, especially to deal with juvenile delinquents, you need a woman as a judge, even as a policewoman and so on and so on. Women are needed today to act as representatives of the new mode of power, which is no longer the brutal directly oppressive power but the more understanding power, the power which wants to help you, to re-educate you and so on and so on. So again, I think that this critique of toxic masculinity is part of an ideological transformation which I'm very suspicious of. I think that what we should do is to precisely see what positive aspect is obliterated by this critique of toxic masculinity. I see this again in the figure of Greta Thunberg. Let me explain what I mean by this. Greta, if you followed the news, did change quite a lot in the last year. She changed from the naive innocent girl saying that the emperor is naked to a smiling, aggressive, sharp-tongued demon almost. But her message remains the same: simple and repeated. One should recall here Kierkegaard's wonderful short text on the difference between genius and apostle, where Kierkegaard defines genius as an individual who is able to express or articulate his inner wealth, what is in him more than himself, his spiritual substance, in contrast to the apostle, who in himself does not matter at all. The apostle is a purely formal function of the one who dedicated his or her life to bearing witness to an impersonal truth. And I think that Greta, the way she acts, is an apostle. An apostle of truth. She does not bring forward some ingenious new insights. She just repeats the same simple message again and again. Talking about politicians, she said, "We have not taken to the streets for them to take selfies with us and tell us that they really, really admire what we do. We children are doing this to wake the adults up," and so on and so on. What Greta calls us to listen to is science, to take science seriously. But this does not mean that science also provides the political answer to what we are to do. Science just enables us to discern the contours of the deadlock in which we are: the catastrophic ecological implications of our economic development and so on and so on. But there is no scientific politics. So I think again, when Greta says "listen to science," she doesn't mean "scientific politics, this will give us answer." She just only means science will tell us where the problems are. So where are the problems? We often hear that in order to confront appropriately the threat of an ecological catastrophe, we have to renounce anthropocentrism and to conceive of ourselves, humanity, as a subordinated element in the great chain of being. We are just one species on our planet, but through our ruthless exploitation of its resources, we humanity are posing a threat to our Mother Earth. And Mother Earth is punishing us through global warming and other ecological threats. I think that one cannot but laugh at this vision. Not Earth, *we* are in trouble. Earth is indifferent. The Earth survived much worse disasters than the possible self-destruction of one of its species. Can we even imagine what catastrophes took place on Earth so that we have the energy today—oil, coal and so on and so on? No, Earth doesn't care. What is under threat is our environment, our habitat, the only one in which we can live. From the imagined standpoint of Earth, it would have been much better for its global ecosystem if we humanity disappear. So what is under threat in ecological crisis is our survival. Again, I find this critique of anthropocentrism for this reason totally hypocritical. They don't really care about Earth, they care about Earth which should remain such that we humanity will be able to survive. Earth is indifferent here. What we are after is an environment that would befit our survival. This is also why the true stakes of ecology are socio-political. Ecology is not about caring for nature; it is about a social reorganization that would maximize the conditions of our well-being. Now to conclude, I would like to say that what we can learn from Greta is the amount of ideology in our dealing with ecological topic. I see at least five strategies of how we obfuscate the true dimension of our ecological crisis. First it's simple ignorance—that's more or less the Donald Trump attitude. It's a marginal phenomenon, nature will take care of itself, don't worry. The second option is of course ideological option: leave the solution to the market, higher taxation of the polluters and so on and so on. Then there are further options. There is the scientific option, of course, like science will find new ways to resolve ecological pressures and so on and so on. Then, but the last two I find the most suspicious versions. One is this—how should I call it—the paradigm of Mother Earth and how we humanity were too arrogant, we disturbed a natural balance. So we should renounce our hubris, accept our modest place in natural hierarchy and so on and so on. This I think is the most dangerous version. Why? Because there is no natural order, there is no natural hierarchy. I cannot imagine anything more destructive than nature itself, which destroys its own ecosystems all the time. And the last version, the most dangerous, predominant even today of ecology, of ecological ideology, is the strategy of personal responsibility. How does—let's call it the power edifice address us? By power edifice I mean simply our ideology in which we live. When you raise the problem of criticizing the state, our industry and so on, the predominant answer is: okay, don't just criticize. What did you do all you can not to pollute nature? Did you do your duty? Did you put all Coke cans in a separate bag? Did you recycle all newspapers and so on and so on? This is ideology at its purest, I claim. Because it blocks radical social critique, it makes you personally responsible. But—nothing against it, of course we are responsible—but at the same time it offers you an easy way out. You recycle and shut up and everything will be okay. My ideal here—I'm sorry I use this story often—is the way they were years ago, they are no longer like that, is my ideal here is Starbucks. You remember years ago, now they are no longer doing it to that extent, whenever I entered a Starbucks coffee place you got a big poster telling something like of our coffee goes to Guatemala children, goes to save some Amazon forest," and so on and so on. It's a wonderful formula because the way to—what they are telling you is: be consumerist, but consume us, because the social price is already included into it. So the more—if you consume our products, you already do your duty towards environment and so on and so on. And I claim that we are here subtly manipulated in a very refined sense. In the sense that when we as a rule, when we act as ecologically conscious, are we aware that we are to an important part, I think even mostly, acting not to really do something about it, but to make us feel well that we are doing something about it? My old cynical example: why are you buying those rotten organic apples, even if they cost two times the good chemical polluted apples, whatever? It's not—I spoke with many people who bought them and they admitted to me they don't really believe that organic apples are really much better. But it makes you feel better: you see, I'm doing something for Mother Nature, I show solidarity, and so on and so on. This is where we find today ideology, ideology of everyday life. Now to make an even more pessimistic conclusion. Now you will say: okay, we should become aware of the ecological problem and act. Okay, act and do what? Do we even know what to do? I mean, I know that scientists are today playing with different versions like spraying the air with some chemical elements which will prevent the—all those dangerous things in sun rays to hit the Earth and so on, but everybody knows how risky these things are. We don't—how should I put it—we don't have a simple answer. And especially—now I will say for a leftist like me something horrible—that's why I oppose populism, even if it's especially if it's a leftist populism. I—if we can learn something from recent decade when populism became popular as it were, it's that yes, people do have their own complaints and so on and so on, worries, but the worst possible political program is: forget about big ideology, left, right, listen to ordinary people, listen to their problems, give them what they want, and so on and so on. Maybe we theorists don't know. But ordinary people also don't know. Did you—I don't believe that, I'm not a Maoist here, you know this old Maoist idea: go to ordinary people, learn from them, and so on and so on. Well, in most of Europe, if you go to ordinary people, they will tell you something like "throw the immigrants out" and so on and so on. And people tell me, "yes, because the ordinary people are manipulated." Yes, but we live manipulation, ideology—this is ideology in which we are. And that's why I claim, that's why one should not be afraid to be radical here. I am not an anti-democrat. I am just saying that solutions, especially in today's complex situation, solutions are not simple and clear. Like, for example, I had recently in London a debate with some partisans who still believe in Venezuela's Chavismo. And I told them, "Okay, I know, American boycott and so on and so on. But isn't it obvious that nonetheless, even if you take into account all the effects of American intervention and so on and so on, that nonetheless, to cut a long story short, Chávez did not propose a new viable model." Chávez was for me Fidel Castro with money. For some time it works, when the regime had enough money and so on. So we—that's the first honest thing to admit as far as I'm concerned—that we are in a serious deadlock and that it's not just that we don't get solutions because some ecologists are bribed by big companies and so on and so on, whatever. What happens today with Earth, it's extremely dangerous, but precisely because it's self-inconsistent, it's not clear what is happening. For example, the example that I like to use all the time: when I was young, in Europe there was a big slogan, very popular: *Waldsterben*, forests are dying. And there were exact scientific calculations: in years, they said, which means today, this was in years Europe will be without forests. I'm sad to tell you today there are more forests in Europe than ever in the last years. Does this mean that there is no ecological crisis? No, but it means that the process is much more tricky, self-contradictory and so on and so on. The answers are not clear. The only thing clear is that—and here Greta Thunberg is right—we need science. Not to provide solutions; we need science to identify problem, to see what is the—to see what is the problem. And this I think brings back to our starting point: we need more than ever today what I would have called in good old Marxist terms, critique of ideology. Not only with our enemies; it's ridiculously evident that for example, in what sense what Donald Trump and his guys are doing is ideology. But I think a true leftist should also do the opposite today: to ask when even liberal democratic critics of Trump are too limited and fall into the same trap. So to conclude, let me just give you one example. I mean, Trump is for me—let's avoid a misunderstanding—like a guy without a moral compass, kind of an immature guy, and so on. Not necessary to lose words on that. But you know what—what disturbs me deeply in the way this impeachment of Trump is now gaining momentum? It's easy to criticize Trump, he should be criticized, because we are obviously dealing with a single corrupted individual pursuing his own interests. And Edward Snowden, whom I greatly appreciate, pointed this out. He said: it's easy to criticize representatives of evil where you find clear motivations: this is an egotist, crazy guy, blah blah blah. What I find much more dangerous is to locate the evil which—evil: okay, violations of human rights and so on—which is inscribed into the very functioning of the system. So that you can have individuals who are in some sense very faithful, patriotic, you absolutely cannot identify any egotist motives in them and so on, but they are doing the same thing. I remember, this was my reproach to an old film which got an Oscar I think, everybody loves it, maybe you remember it, *Das Leben der Anderen*, *The Lives of Others*, the German one. And I communist—I was opposed to that film, not because he was too tough on communism, but because it was not tough enough. You know the story: an evil—it takes place in East Germany—an evil minister, to cut a long story short, wants to screw a beautiful wife of a playwright, and he orders the police to cover, to watch the writer, to find some incrimination so that the writer could be set and so on and so on. But you know, the presupposition is still that you need an evil individual who pursues his, her, their evil private goals to find evil. What about the evil inscribed into the system itself? The most dangerous things for me are not simple egotists who do evil for obvious reasons; it is evil inscribed into the institutional functioning. For example, what terrified me—to take the opposite example—in histories of Stalinism is when they were doing in—at the end of 1920s—enforced collectivization. They were doing horrible things. But many of them were honest individuals dedicated to communist thought, who thought "Oh my God, okay, this has to be done, it's horrible but it's—fidelity—my fidelity to a higher cause," and so on and so on. You know, I want to finish with a quote from the scientist, quantum cosmologist Steven Weinberg, I think. He said somewhere that if—without religion, good people would be doing good things and bad people would be doing bad things. You need something like religion to get good people do bad things. And that's where true ideology begins. For me, let me tell you something horrible: although the guy who published that book against Trump, the ex-FBI boss James Comey, I think—*A Higher Loyalty*, you know. Probably he is personally honest, I don't know. I'm just saying that this type of honesty in no way prevents horrible things taking place. So that's the first thing that we should drop. The second thing is—again, don't focus on private vices, on inner stories and so on and so on. The most disgusting wisdom that I know is the one which even some partisans of multiculturalism use, which is something like: "an enemy is somebody to whose story we were not ready to listen," something like that. My reaction is: oh thanks, so Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to his story or whatever? My point is not that if you listen to Hitler, you saw that he is really evil and so on and so on. My point is that the true ethical dimension is in what you do externally, not in the story you are telling yourself to do. That's why it fascinates me the extent to which all horrors—there is—my—this is my formula: there is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. I'm systematically looking not only in my own ex-countries, Bosnia—I'm from Slovenia but ex-Yugoslavia and so on—I looked at whatever you want in Rwanda and so on: every ethnic cleansing, there is usually some poet, religious leader, some mythmaker who provided a story. People cannot—are very rarely simply evil. They need a strong myth. So I don't believe in this stupidity of "let's see what he is doing, but maybe we don't understand what he is doing, let's look inside into his story." No, stories we are telling ourselves are lies, covering up what we are doing. The truth is what we are doing in social interaction, not the inner stories. So at this level, we should be active today. Sorry if I was a little bit too long and confused, but that's life. Thank you very much. I was struck by your comment about *The Lives of Others*. You were saying that it was too weak a criticism to focus on the evil communist party boss. But what I found most frightening about the film was that I found myself identifying with that communist party boss. Because the film had shown how daily life in that system was so corrupting, and so I was imagining if I had been sort of a dutiful party member, I would have tried to rise to the top and that the actions and compromises that I was making each day would have just wiped out all of my principles. And by the time I got to the top, I wouldn't have any principles, and then I would feel like, well I deserve something—so why not take that beautiful actress? I mean, it's sort of like and—and I wouldn't have any moral values to guide me to do anything else. And so I was feeling that it wasn't very specifically showing a system where just getting to the top would strip you of all your values and then you would be reduced to that kind of behavior. Okay, can I quickly, and then maybe you should stay there and if you'll reply to my reply. Because my point to refer to that film would be this one. You know, my point is that if there would not have been guys like that corrupted minister, if all Stasi would have been just like that guy who has to follow and observe the writer, the guy who at the end even steps on his side, the relatively honest Stasi agent—the system would have been exactly the same, maybe even worse. That's my point. That they are—I met them in my own youth, I lived in a communist system—I claim it was much more—the most dangerous were the guys who were, how should I put it, honestly patriotic in their corruption. You know where—okay, I will ask you, I'll tell you this: what fascinated me is a specific ethics of corruption which was like this, this is the implicit logic, it was like this: "We know we violate in our work certain basic ethical principles. But isn't this the true ethical greatness? That you are ready for the cause to violate even your basic ethical principles?" So the trick is that you don't experience your acts—horrible acts—as something corrupted, but as a sign of a much greater ethics: "I'm ready to—to—kill individual flowers for—for the greater cause." You know who put this nicely? Another German guy from the opposite camp, Heinrich Himmler, who said somewhere: every stupid German, almost in these terms, is ready to sacrifice his life for Germany. A true great German is ready to sacrifice his soul, to do horrible things for Germany. And this dimension—again, this dimension, this dimension I miss. This is for me the true horror of totalitarianism. For me it was not this guy sneering "Oh, I want to screw your wife" and so on. I knew communist functionaries—and Yugoslavia I was not a horrible case, it was relatively open—where functionaries were doing horrible things and then this shocked me: you meet them privately and you see they're quite nice guys, with refined taste. I met—I met secret policemen who enjoyed—I even now think that this is the main proof that God doesn't exist—how can such a horrible guy sincerely like Schoenberg, late Beethoven string quartets and so on? And I tried to convince myself it's a fake, they don't really understand. No, sorry, they did understand. You know which is for me the most depressing fact that I read about Reinhard Heydrich? In the evenings after planning Holocaust and all that stuff, he gathered with three other friends, string quartet, they were playing mostly late Beethoven string quartets. This is something so sacrilegious for me. But let me—I know we don't have time—you know that's why I almost prefer the other film which is, I think in a subtle way, more critical than this one of East Germany: *Good Bye, Lenin!* Because the message of that film is: if you are an honest communist, your own solution is to go crazy, to drop the—you know. It's in a subtle way a much more—a much more—a much more pessimistic version. So again, what interests me: this is what I don't trust again in that movie. The minister is for me the bad guy of the film, too obviously corrupt. What always fascinated me is people who are—they do horrible things, but if you talk to them, they are warm people, they cry when they see a cat mistreated or whatever and so on. Sorry, we cannot go on. Okay, let's take a question from the left side of the stage. I have a proposition and then a question. So in your work, as you say, we are living in the decay of transcendental finitude. And this is clear in many... Sorry, what do you mean by this? It's too complicated the term, although I... Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Please, yeah. Well, maybe we can sort of find out from examples, which I think are gender theory and ecological politics, but also historicism, spiritualism, these sort of things. And what is at work here I think is a crisis of what was once called nature philosophy. Sorry, crisis of nature? Nature, nature philosophy. As in 19th-century nature philosophy... *Naturphilosophie*, like, yeah, yeah. So we have lost, I think, an orientation towards a coherent structuring of what nature means. And in order to work through this problem, we have to reappropriate the concepts currently lost to what is basically sophism. Among these concepts are materialism, desire, world, body, whatever. And the task is now to see in these concepts the principle of their own contemporary degeneration, thereby returning them to their proper speculative vocation. So my question is this, which is also sort of on the proposition: what do you think the future is for this crisis of nature philosophy, unless you disagree, and what are some possible directions for the future of philosophy? Okay, I will try to be short. In strange way, although in a different direction than you, I agree with your problem. I think the tragedy of philosophy, at least the so-called continental philosophy—but now it's moving out with new realisms—that it was totally caught in what I call transcendental deconstructionism. It was this purely epistemological reflection. Like my old example, sorry if some of you know it: if you were to ask somebody like Michel Foucault, "Do I have an immortal soul?", his answer would have been: "I can only describe the episteme, the cognitive—the—the space of power and knowledge within which such a question is meaningful." You know, you suspend this realist question, you just describe different epistemological configurations and so on and so on. This is for me the most radical historicism. Like, you don't answer the question: "Is the universe finite?" The counterpoint would have been simply: but within what philosophical horizon can you even raise this question? And it's interesting how this naive realist questioning then returned in natural sciences: quantum physics, cognitive sciences, and so on and so on. What fascinates me is how today, if you want to know "Is the universe finite or infinite?", you don't ask philosophers, you ask quantum cosmologists. If you want to know today "Do we have a free will or not?", you don't ask philosophers, you ask cognitivists and brain scientists, and so on and so on. But it's a difficult question: how should philosophy do it and what point of nature? I still think that here for me the ultimate challenge is my view: the ontological implications of quantum physics. What—it's still an unsolved, unresolved question because, I'm sorry if I will now very briefly repeat an old story of mine, I think that the implication of quantum physics is still not perceived. It's something that I can only call unfinished universe.
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In the sense of ontologically unfinished. We live in a reality which—the point is not simply we don't fully know it; the point is it is in itself not fully constructed. Repeat me an old joke that maybe some of you know. I read in an introduction to philosophy a wonderful example which tries to clarify quantum physics through the example of—of—of video games. You know, in video games, the universe is not fully constructed. Like, you are shooting somebody in a video game; in the background, there is a forest. But if it's not part of the game that you can enter that forest, then that forest is not fully programmed. It's just blurred. Or there is a house on a street. If it's not part of the game that you can enter that house, then the inside of the house is not programmed. So, the idea is this one: that this uncertainty principle is more radical than Heisenberg thought. It's not just that we cannot measure particle and—particle's—position and velocity; it's that in itself it's open, it doesn't have all these properties. And now comes the beautiful ironic reading. It is as if, if we imagine God as the programmer, God—thought—thought that
In the sense of ontologically unfinished. We live in a reality which—the point is not simply we don't fully know it; the point is it is in itself not fully constructed. Repeat me an old joke that maybe some of you know. I read in an introduction to philosophy a wonderful example which tries to clarify quantum physics through the example of—of—of video games. You know, in video games, the universe is not fully constructed. Like, you are shooting somebody in a video game; in the background, there is a forest. But if it's not part of the game that you can enter that forest, then that forest is not fully programmed. It's just blurred. Or there is a house on a street. If it's not part of the game that you can enter that house, then the inside of the house is not programmed. So, the idea is this one: that this uncertainty principle is more radical than Heisenberg thought. It's not just that we cannot measure particle and—particle's—position and velocity; it's that in itself it's open, it doesn't have all these properties. And now comes the beautiful ironic reading. It is as if, if we imagine God as the programmer, God—thought—thought that
Slavoj Žižek
we are more stupid than we are. God thought humans are too stupid to move beyond the limit of atom, so why should I bother programming the inside of an atom? We, as it were, caught God with his pants down. We progressed into the domain where God was too lazy to fully—okay, but I'm—I'm—I'm an atheist. So my point is how to think this unfinished character of reality. And this has tremendous—this has beautiful implications even for—for example, this unfinished character. For example, this is for me authentic multiculturalism. Not we have different cultures, we respect—no, I don't—I hate my culture, I hate other cultures, that's not the point. What interests me is this one: here I am against historicism. One of the most stupid things that you can imagine is the idea that to understand Shakespeare, you must study his epoch and so on and so on. No, Shakespeare didn't understand himself and I think that from a certain distance today, we can read into Shakespeare—Shakespeare was like unfinished reality. That's why—and this is for me the authentic multiculturalism. Did you notice that—it surprised me—the best cinema versions of Shakespeares are not English ones. My favorite Shakespeare is Kurosawa from '61, version of *Hamlet*. The title of the movie is beautiful one: *Bad People Sleep Well* (*The Bad Sleep Well*). Set in contemporary Japan—a rich Japanese student returns from United States, his father is killed, uncle—but—but—the point is that how, you know, this is not just that we expand to—it's as if through this distance—or whatever—Kurosawa also did the best version of Dostoevsky that I know, *Idiot*, set in Japan '48, Hakuchi and so on. I like this idea—that's why incidentally I'm against identity politics—because there are no identities. To understand Shakespeare, you don't have to study England; you have precisely to forget about his context. I'm more and more convinced that to understand really a work of art, you should not know too much about its context. So I know I didn't answer your question fully, but what I would have felt is that I admit your topic: return to philosophy of nature, what does it mean materialism, body today? But I think that the answers are not the answers we were used to in the 19th century and so on and so on. That we have to radically rethink things. Professor Žižek, so you've just given this answer to quantum. I've never heard your response to François Laruelle's non-standard philosophy. Of course you have your response to... Sorry, Graham Harman? Well, you have your responses to the flat ontologies of Graham Harman and Latour. But, you know, this vision in one that Laruelle calls the observation effect, that the real is epistemically disclosed to us, but the quantum allows us that our observation affects the real. Um, you know, I mean my question was going to be about Jacques-Alain Miller and you being more of a Millerian than a Lacanian. But after hearing
we are more stupid than we are. God thought humans are too stupid to move beyond the limit of atom, so why should I bother programming the inside of an atom? We, as it were, caught God with his pants down. We progressed into the domain where God was too lazy to fully—okay, but I'm—I'm—I'm an atheist. So my point is how to think this unfinished character of reality. And this has tremendous—this has beautiful implications even for—for example, this unfinished character. For example, this is for me authentic multiculturalism. Not we have different cultures, we respect—no, I don't—I hate my culture, I hate other cultures, that's not the point. What interests me is this one: here I am against historicism. One of the most stupid things that you can imagine is the idea that to understand Shakespeare, you must study his epoch and so on and so on. No, Shakespeare didn't understand himself and I think that from a certain distance today, we can read into Shakespeare—Shakespeare was like unfinished reality. That's why—and this is for me the authentic multiculturalism. Did you notice that—it surprised me—the best cinema versions of Shakespeares are not English ones. My favorite Shakespeare is Kurosawa from '61, version of *Hamlet*. The title of the movie is beautiful one: *Bad People Sleep Well* (*The Bad Sleep Well*). Set in contemporary Japan—a rich Japanese student returns from United States, his father is killed, uncle—but—but—the point is that how, you know, this is not just that we expand to—it's as if through this distance—or whatever—Kurosawa also did the best version of Dostoevsky that I know, *Idiot*, set in Japan '48, Hakuchi and so on. I like this idea—that's why incidentally I'm against identity politics—because there are no identities. To understand Shakespeare, you don't have to study England; you have precisely to forget about his context. I'm more and more convinced that to understand really a work of art, you should not know too much about its context. So I know I didn't answer your question fully, but what I would have felt is that I admit your topic: return to philosophy of nature, what does it mean materialism, body today? But I think that the answers are not the answers we were used to in the 19th century and so on and so on. That we have to radically rethink things. Professor Žižek, so you've just given this answer to quantum. I've never heard your response to François Laruelle's non-standard philosophy. Of course you have your response to... Sorry, Graham Harman? Well, you have your responses to the flat ontologies of Graham Harman and Latour. But, you know, this vision in one that Laruelle calls the observation effect, that the real is epistemically disclosed to us, but the quantum allows us that our observation affects the real. Um, you know, I mean my question was going to be about Jacques-Alain Miller and you being more of a Millerian than a Lacanian. But after hearing
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your response to this quantum question, how do you—how do you contend with Laruellian non-standard philosophy? Because it's not—you can't give the same—if
your response to this quantum question, how do you—how do you contend with Laruellian non-standard philosophy? Because it's not—you can't give the same—if
Slavoj Žižek
you want to, you know, use quantum as this kind of theoretical fulcrum,
you want to, you know, use quantum as this kind of theoretical fulcrum,
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then you have to sort of back off from the transcendental decision. But Hegelians like Catherine Malabou and yourself still hold onto the transcendental decision. So there seems to be this taut line between quantum and the transcendental, because if we allow for, you know... It's a beautiful question but again, my God, you put me in an impossible position because it's a—it's a—it's a two hours' answer, at least. I—I cannot do it. What I would have said is that I would just have been here much more—I would have been much more careful here. My position is—that's why the title of one of my books, if we go into philosophy, is this absolute recoil and so on—is that, and I don't even—I don't want to go into it. I will just tell you a brief anecdote and then I stop. What do we mean by—you know, this is the eternal problem that I also get whenever I visit Korea and so on, that I misunderstand Buddhism and so on and so on. My answer is that Buddhism is great thing and so on, to abstract from the fact that Buddhism
then you have to sort of back off from the transcendental decision. But Hegelians like Catherine Malabou and yourself still hold onto the transcendental decision. So there seems to be this taut line between quantum and the transcendental, because if we allow for, you know... It's a beautiful question but again, my God, you put me in an impossible position because it's a—it's a—it's a two hours' answer, at least. I—I cannot do it. What I would have said is that I would just have been here much more—I would have been much more careful here. My position is—that's why the title of one of my books, if we go into philosophy, is this absolute recoil and so on—is that, and I don't even—I don't want to go into it. I will just tell you a brief anecdote and then I stop. What do we mean by—you know, this is the eternal problem that I also get whenever I visit Korea and so on, that I misunderstand Buddhism and so on and so on. My answer is that Buddhism is great thing and so on, to abstract from the fact that Buddhism
Slavoj Žižek
can be the best justification you can imagine for war crimes and so on, but that's another story. But you know, my position is this one, and that's what I aimed at when I mentioned that falling in love and so on. We have, I simplify to the utmost, philosophies which see reality as a mess, chaos, difference, and then you somehow withdraw from it and find inner peace. Like you see it all this distance, blessing. No, my point is that truth is the fall itself. I want to celebrate the fall, the event is the fall, even in the most radical ontological sense. And my point is that it's only through the fall that that what the fall is fall from emerges. Let me give you, to stop here, the most vulgar example which I used maybe even in this room already. Years ago I flirted with a lady who probably to seduce me, told me that when her last lover saw her naked, he told her that except for three four pounds too much, her body is perfect. I told her: just don't lose three four pounds. Because, you know, it's this subtle paradox: you need something to disturb perfection so that retroactively the mirage of perfection emerges. If you get rid of the obstacle, you also lose the perfection which was disturbed by the obstacle. So that would have been my—my ontology. I celebrate diversity, I celebrate the fall. That's why I'm an atheist Christian. For me what happens in Christianity is we don't rejoin God; God rejoins us, God splits with himself. You know what happens on the cross when Christ says: "Father, father, why have you abandoned me?" It means, as Gilbert Keith Chesterton, my favorite Catholic theologian put it, it means God himself is for a brief moment an atheist. I want to celebrate fall. What I like about love is not that "oh I love you all," fuck you, I don't love you all. I love one and all of you can go to hell others. I want to celebrate division, one-sidedness, imbalance and so on. That's my ontology, but I cannot go now, sorry, into what this means. Hello Doctor. I want to ask a question about Hong Kong. So many journalists have been saying that the movement is increasingly nationalist; it is to counteract the Chinese imperialism as they perceive. I wonder if you share this angle and should we approach this unique nationalism by situating it in the global revival of right-wing nationalism? First I must say—I'm not trying to squeeze out of it—that sympathetic as I am towards the protest movement, from what I can tell you is that first, I'm not as some people accuse me a conformist here. From what I know, some of you maybe know more about me in China than I do, I only know that about a year ago I was informed that because I signed some letter of protest propos the previous demonstrations there and I signed the letter in defense of—this is most interesting thing now happening, I get information from friends there—you know now Marxism is there officially again in: they are reprinting, distributing to students Mao, Marx, Lenin. But it's better for you, I'm told, not to read these texts. Because some of my friends there then tried to follow Marx very naively, got connected with workers who are poisoned and then they were arrested and so on. My point is that my books disappeared from bookstores, then now they are half back I was told, but at the same time students are afraid to quote me in their thesis. So my status is there in between. So of course I'm sympathetic to demonstrations and so on and so on. The only—you know, China is for me a mega problem, a mega tragedy. Look, I told this to—who-who, sorry that I was there—Jordan Peterson, from there. Namely, what I told him: listen, when people say "Oh, communism screwed up everything possible," I said sorry, was there ever in the history of humanity a more explosive economic development than in the last years in China? So many people lifted out of poverty and so on. And that's the lesson for us Western leftists. We in the 20th century, we hated—we hate two things: wild unbridled capitalist competition and strong authoritarian state. How the Chinese did it: precisely by combining these two, you know. So I'm not glad about this. I'm just—and so it's such a—what, what I just don't like, that's my only point of, I wouldn't say sympathy but suspicion about China. You know, it's so easy to criticize China for something we are doing here in a little bit more subtle way. For example, you know we all know those stories which are true incidentally: how in China
can be the best justification you can imagine for war crimes and so on, but that's another story. But you know, my position is this one, and that's what I aimed at when I mentioned that falling in love and so on. We have, I simplify to the utmost, philosophies which see reality as a mess, chaos, difference, and then you somehow withdraw from it and find inner peace. Like you see it all this distance, blessing. No, my point is that truth is the fall itself. I want to celebrate the fall, the event is the fall, even in the most radical ontological sense. And my point is that it's only through the fall that that what the fall is fall from emerges. Let me give you, to stop here, the most vulgar example which I used maybe even in this room already. Years ago I flirted with a lady who probably to seduce me, told me that when her last lover saw her naked, he told her that except for three four pounds too much, her body is perfect. I told her: just don't lose three four pounds. Because, you know, it's this subtle paradox: you need something to disturb perfection so that retroactively the mirage of perfection emerges. If you get rid of the obstacle, you also lose the perfection which was disturbed by the obstacle. So that would have been my—my ontology. I celebrate diversity, I celebrate the fall. That's why I'm an atheist Christian. For me what happens in Christianity is we don't rejoin God; God rejoins us, God splits with himself. You know what happens on the cross when Christ says: "Father, father, why have you abandoned me?" It means, as Gilbert Keith Chesterton, my favorite Catholic theologian put it, it means God himself is for a brief moment an atheist. I want to celebrate fall. What I like about love is not that "oh I love you all," fuck you, I don't love you all. I love one and all of you can go to hell others. I want to celebrate division, one-sidedness, imbalance and so on. That's my ontology, but I cannot go now, sorry, into what this means. Hello Doctor. I want to ask a question about Hong Kong. So many journalists have been saying that the movement is increasingly nationalist; it is to counteract the Chinese imperialism as they perceive. I wonder if you share this angle and should we approach this unique nationalism by situating it in the global revival of right-wing nationalism? First I must say—I'm not trying to squeeze out of it—that sympathetic as I am towards the protest movement, from what I can tell you is that first, I'm not as some people accuse me a conformist here. From what I know, some of you maybe know more about me in China than I do, I only know that about a year ago I was informed that because I signed some letter of protest propos the previous demonstrations there and I signed the letter in defense of—this is most interesting thing now happening, I get information from friends there—you know now Marxism is there officially again in: they are reprinting, distributing to students Mao, Marx, Lenin. But it's better for you, I'm told, not to read these texts. Because some of my friends there then tried to follow Marx very naively, got connected with workers who are poisoned and then they were arrested and so on. My point is that my books disappeared from bookstores, then now they are half back I was told, but at the same time students are afraid to quote me in their thesis. So my status is there in between. So of course I'm sympathetic to demonstrations and so on and so on. The only—you know, China is for me a mega problem, a mega tragedy. Look, I told this to—who-who, sorry that I was there—Jordan Peterson, from there. Namely, what I told him: listen, when people say "Oh, communism screwed up everything possible," I said sorry, was there ever in the history of humanity a more explosive economic development than in the last years in China? So many people lifted out of poverty and so on. And that's the lesson for us Western leftists. We in the 20th century, we hated—we hate two things: wild unbridled capitalist competition and strong authoritarian state. How the Chinese did it: precisely by combining these two, you know. So I'm not glad about this. I'm just—and so it's such a—what, what I just don't like, that's my only point of, I wouldn't say sympathy but suspicion about China. You know, it's so easy to criticize China for something we are doing here in a little bit more subtle way. For example, you know we all know those stories which are true incidentally: how in China
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you have that—how do you call this—patriotic status or whatever: each of the citizens gets a point if you pay debts, if you are a dissident you lose points, all that stuff. Yeah, but we are also doing it just in a—you know—just in a more subtle way and so on and so on. I think that we often use China again in a way to acquire safe distance towards something that we are also approaching to and so on. So in this sense I don't have any problems criticizing things in China. My pessimism is just this one. You know, maybe you know this story—I cannot tell you a guy who told this, may bring him brought into trouble—high-ranking Chinese philosopher told me that he knew the daughter of Deng Xiaoping. And she told him that when Deng Xiaoping was dying, some high functionaries visited him and asked him—to kiss his ass of course the question—"what was the greatest thing you did?" They thought the answer will be: opening up, reforms. He said, "No, that I resisted the temptation to go all the way and
you have that—how do you call this—patriotic status or whatever: each of the citizens gets a point if you pay debts, if you are a dissident you lose points, all that stuff. Yeah, but we are also doing it just in a—you know—just in a more subtle way and so on and so on. I think that we often use China again in a way to acquire safe distance towards something that we are also approaching to and so on. So in this sense I don't have any problems criticizing things in China. My pessimism is just this one. You know, maybe you know this story—I cannot tell you a guy who told this, may bring him brought into trouble—high-ranking Chinese philosopher told me that he knew the daughter of Deng Xiaoping. And she told him that when Deng Xiaoping was dying, some high functionaries visited him and asked him—to kiss his ass of course the question—"what was the greatest thing you did?" They thought the answer will be: opening up, reforms. He said, "No, that I resisted the temptation to go all the way and
Slavoj Žižek
liberalize politics also." The tragedy is that it's horrible, I'm not glad to say this, but what if he was right? I think that at that point after Tiananmen or before, to simply opt for political pluralism, I think it wouldn't end well. What does this mean? It's—I don't believe in this naive liberal vision. So what should we do? Should China be our model? No, absolutely not. But what do we have as an alternative and so on? So yes, I will protest, always sign protests for those in Hong Kong, although of course I was shocked when some of them then called Trump "save us from China" and so on. Wait a minute, be serious and so on. No, what I'm just saying is that it's not China as such that bothers me, it's that what bothers us in China, let's rather focus on ourselves and see where we are doing basically the same things just in more subtle way. I was interested in knowing how your talk will—or what you said during the talk—has an impact on notions of emancipation and empowerment essentially. You mentioned how the empowered liberal woman in a liberal democratic order will, herself, based on her position or based on the empowerment that she has gained, will be used to or essentially will be a—will herself become a part of creating new forms of oppression: the benevolent form of oppression that is emblematic of the new order. So there seems to be this tension between this idea of empowerment within the order and emancipation beyond it. But that is tricky because where does that sense of emancipation lie? How do you differentiate between these two terms in that aspect? It's a—it's a crucial question. But what I want to avoid is to keep these two aspects too much apart, because then you—I don't want to get stuck into this option of: either you are just a pragmatist and do small measures which change nothing, or you wait for the big event. I here remain a kind of a dialectical thinker where I think that often truly radical changes can be triggered by what appears just a small reform in the system. That's the lesson for me at least from the disintegration of the communist regimes and so on and so on. Sometimes the right thing to do is just to insist on small measures which can appear totally pragmatic, it doesn't mean anything, and but it triggers—it
liberalize politics also." The tragedy is that it's horrible, I'm not glad to say this, but what if he was right? I think that at that point after Tiananmen or before, to simply opt for political pluralism, I think it wouldn't end well. What does this mean? It's—I don't believe in this naive liberal vision. So what should we do? Should China be our model? No, absolutely not. But what do we have as an alternative and so on? So yes, I will protest, always sign protests for those in Hong Kong, although of course I was shocked when some of them then called Trump "save us from China" and so on. Wait a minute, be serious and so on. No, what I'm just saying is that it's not China as such that bothers me, it's that what bothers us in China, let's rather focus on ourselves and see where we are doing basically the same things just in more subtle way. I was interested in knowing how your talk will—or what you said during the talk—has an impact on notions of emancipation and empowerment essentially. You mentioned how the empowered liberal woman in a liberal democratic order will, herself, based on her position or based on the empowerment that she has gained, will be used to or essentially will be a—will herself become a part of creating new forms of oppression: the benevolent form of oppression that is emblematic of the new order. So there seems to be this tension between this idea of empowerment within the order and emancipation beyond it. But that is tricky because where does that sense of emancipation lie? How do you differentiate between these two terms in that aspect? It's a—it's a crucial question. But what I want to avoid is to keep these two aspects too much apart, because then you—I don't want to get stuck into this option of: either you are just a pragmatist and do small measures which change nothing, or you wait for the big event. I here remain a kind of a dialectical thinker where I think that often truly radical changes can be triggered by what appears just a small reform in the system. That's the lesson for me at least from the disintegration of the communist regimes and so on and so on. Sometimes the right thing to do is just to insist on small measures which can appear totally pragmatic, it doesn't mean anything, and but it triggers—it
unknown
triggers—it triggers the big process. I don't believe in again waiting for the big moment, radical change and so on and so on. I—I—I believe in this weird combination of pragmatic politics, but when you make pragmatic choices which then trigger much more radical choices. I know I didn't
triggers—it triggers the big process. I don't believe in again waiting for the big moment, radical change and so on and so on. I—I—I believe in this weird combination of pragmatic politics, but when you make pragmatic choices which then trigger much more radical choices. I know I didn't
Slavoj Žižek
quite properly answer you, but that's my ideal—that's my ideal politics. That's why, for example, that's why I still believe up to a point in—take Bernie Sanders. Radical leftists are right to say, my God, but if you look close at his program, it's much less radical than so European social democracy, mainstream social democracy was half a century ago. Yes, but in today's situation, to say what was commonly accepted years ago is something which can lead further and so on and so on. You know, we live in paradoxical times where very modest demands can be much more explosive than apparent radical demands. I hate pseudo-radicals: those who demand radical action, but are fully aware that this means absolutely nothing. You just sit comfortably and criticize every—everybody else as being a compromiser and so on and so on. How do you think the rise of tech like AI and machine learning and 5G and potentially a technological singularity will reshape ideology in the next years? This is a beautiful question. I'm now writing a book on it. First, I don't think it's artificial intelligence as such which—what fascinates me is there are different names, Neuralink, wired brain, and so on. Because it basically means, to put it in very simple theoretical terms, till now in our dealing with the digital universe, we needed an interface. If the idea of wired brain—in the sense of our brain directly—our line of thoughts directly connected with digital universe directly—then this changes everything. This means that our brain is already an interface directly. And I think this changes everything radically. It's a good question that you ask what remains not only of ideology but of the whole, how should I put it, universe of rhetoric, of mediation and so on. Because the basic feature of human universe for me is that things succeed through failure: you try to do something, you fail, something else emerges, and even the whole point of eroticism is this: it's a systematized failure and so on. In your book, have you put thought into the potential reach of a technological singularity and how that would kind of affect the status quo and... First, singularity there I have problem. If you mean singularity in the sense of Ray Kurzweil and others and so on, I for reasons that I cannot explain now, I think it cannot happen in the sense in which it is imagined. Because I think that—I think that—you know what bothers me when I read Kurzweil and so on? He describes this universe—he somehow presupposes that although we will share intelligence, share awareness with others and so on and so on, that somehow we will still think and act in the same way we do now. But take just sexuality. I cannot imagine in what sense sexuality, the way we know it now, can survive in a universe where we can directly share our experiences. Our sexuality, through all the acts of seduction, flirting and so on, is absolutely rooted in our finitude, in our uncertainty—what, what do you want—the ambiguity of answer and so on and so on. Let's say we—and I don't want to be prosecuted as harasser later, so any of you—let's say we are flirting. Imagine we have a wired brain. There is no flirting. Our mind just directly—"I want to fuck you," "yes okay let's do it" or whatever. It's over in a split, eroticism is over. I think that the situation in the wired brain will be something that precisely what I described with that lady
quite properly answer you, but that's my ideal—that's my ideal politics. That's why, for example, that's why I still believe up to a point in—take Bernie Sanders. Radical leftists are right to say, my God, but if you look close at his program, it's much less radical than so European social democracy, mainstream social democracy was half a century ago. Yes, but in today's situation, to say what was commonly accepted years ago is something which can lead further and so on and so on. You know, we live in paradoxical times where very modest demands can be much more explosive than apparent radical demands. I hate pseudo-radicals: those who demand radical action, but are fully aware that this means absolutely nothing. You just sit comfortably and criticize every—everybody else as being a compromiser and so on and so on. How do you think the rise of tech like AI and machine learning and 5G and potentially a technological singularity will reshape ideology in the next years? This is a beautiful question. I'm now writing a book on it. First, I don't think it's artificial intelligence as such which—what fascinates me is there are different names, Neuralink, wired brain, and so on. Because it basically means, to put it in very simple theoretical terms, till now in our dealing with the digital universe, we needed an interface. If the idea of wired brain—in the sense of our brain directly—our line of thoughts directly connected with digital universe directly—then this changes everything. This means that our brain is already an interface directly. And I think this changes everything radically. It's a good question that you ask what remains not only of ideology but of the whole, how should I put it, universe of rhetoric, of mediation and so on. Because the basic feature of human universe for me is that things succeed through failure: you try to do something, you fail, something else emerges, and even the whole point of eroticism is this: it's a systematized failure and so on. In your book, have you put thought into the potential reach of a technological singularity and how that would kind of affect the status quo and... First, singularity there I have problem. If you mean singularity in the sense of Ray Kurzweil and others and so on, I for reasons that I cannot explain now, I think it cannot happen in the sense in which it is imagined. Because I think that—I think that—you know what bothers me when I read Kurzweil and so on? He describes this universe—he somehow presupposes that although we will share intelligence, share awareness with others and so on and so on, that somehow we will still think and act in the same way we do now. But take just sexuality. I cannot imagine in what sense sexuality, the way we know it now, can survive in a universe where we can directly share our experiences. Our sexuality, through all the acts of seduction, flirting and so on, is absolutely rooted in our finitude, in our uncertainty—what, what do you want—the ambiguity of answer and so on and so on. Let's say we—and I don't want to be prosecuted as harasser later, so any of you—let's say we are flirting. Imagine we have a wired brain. There is no flirting. Our mind just directly—"I want to fuck you," "yes okay let's do it" or whatever. It's over in a split, eroticism is over. I think that the situation in the wired brain will be something that precisely what I described with that lady
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of four pounds too much or whatever. We will get the thing itself, but immediate contact, spiritual with another, but we will lose the obstacle. Because the entire human spirit, the way I see it, is based on imperfection. You—let me give you the last example—okay, sorry I'm losing time—which I maybe used even in this room. I did you see the movie *Billy Bathgate*? Nicole Kidman, Dustin Hoffman and so on. It's based on Doctorow's novel, and I didn't like the movie, but it looked to me that I saw in
of four pounds too much or whatever. We will get the thing itself, but immediate contact, spiritual with another, but we will lose the obstacle. Because the entire human spirit, the way I see it, is based on imperfection. You—let me give you the last example—okay, sorry I'm losing time—which I maybe used even in this room. I did you see the movie *Billy Bathgate*? Nicole Kidman, Dustin Hoffman and so on. It's based on Doctorow's novel, and I didn't like the movie, but it looked to me that I saw in
Slavoj Žižek
it the traces of a great novel, like it missed to capture the spirit of the great novel. Okay, then I said let's read the novel. I'm sorry that I say this, the novel was even worse for me. So we have bad novel—I think so, I apologize if you don't—bad novel, bad movie, but in between a specter of a perfect novel or whatever emerges. And that's for what I don't see place in this in singularity. How through repeated failures, through two failures you repeat a failure and a specter of a perfect entity emerges. You take away the failures, you lose the perfection itself. I'm sorry. I can go on but I think there is another event at Yes, yes. You know what I hate? False leftists: when they get tired of debates, they always mention it's so hypocritical. They say "we would like to go on, but the poor cleaning ladies who are waiting to clean the room," you know. It's just they are too lazy to go on. Yes. So I hope this event is not a new version of those cleaning ladies. That's right, that's right. Yes, go ahead. I was wondering if I could get your opinion on the discourse and ideology surrounding the *Joker* movie that just came out and the figure of incels in popular culture. I will tell you something horrible. I break the law all the time. I only watch pirated movies and I didn't yet find a good pirate copy and so on. But let me tell
it the traces of a great novel, like it missed to capture the spirit of the great novel. Okay, then I said let's read the novel. I'm sorry that I say this, the novel was even worse for me. So we have bad novel—I think so, I apologize if you don't—bad novel, bad movie, but in between a specter of a perfect novel or whatever emerges. And that's for what I don't see place in this in singularity. How through repeated failures, through two failures you repeat a failure and a specter of a perfect entity emerges. You take away the failures, you lose the perfection itself. I'm sorry. I can go on but I think there is another event at Yes, yes. You know what I hate? False leftists: when they get tired of debates, they always mention it's so hypocritical. They say "we would like to go on, but the poor cleaning ladies who are waiting to clean the room," you know. It's just they are too lazy to go on. Yes. So I hope this event is not a new version of those cleaning ladies. That's right, that's right. Yes, go ahead. I was wondering if I could get your opinion on the discourse and ideology surrounding the *Joker* movie that just came out and the figure of incels in popular culture. I will tell you something horrible. I break the law all the time. I only watch pirated movies and I didn't yet find a good pirate copy and so on. But let me tell
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you something that may surprise you. This Wednesday, in two days, I will participate in a debate on superheroes at Princeton and there
you something that may surprise you. This Wednesday, in two days, I will participate in a debate on superheroes at Princeton and there
Slavoj Žižek
I want—I want—to go into it. Because of course in some sense the Joker we all love is of course from the second of this Nolan trilogy, Batman movies and so on and so on. I wonder to what extent am I reading the movie against the grain: that the Joker, he just wants the masks to fall. He is for me in some sense not a bad guy, but authentic hero. And I wonder to what extent these movies play what I call Leo Strauss's game. You know, Leo Strauss read Plato in this way: that although Plato in some dialogues officially celebrates the good guy, but really between the lines, it's the game already played by John Milton. It's clear that he is on the side of—of—of the Satan, you know, although officially not. And of course the way—the only way to redeem *Black Panther* for me, it's the same. How is the guy called who
I want—I want—to go into it. Because of course in some sense the Joker we all love is of course from the second of this Nolan trilogy, Batman movies and so on and so on. I wonder to what extent am I reading the movie against the grain: that the Joker, he just wants the masks to fall. He is for me in some sense not a bad guy, but authentic hero. And I wonder to what extent these movies play what I call Leo Strauss's game. You know, Leo Strauss read Plato in this way: that although Plato in some dialogues officially celebrates the good guy, but really between the lines, it's the game already played by John Milton. It's clear that he is on the side of—of—of the Satan, you know, although officially not. And of course the way—the only way to redeem *Black Panther* for me, it's the same. How is the guy called who
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loses, who dies at the end? Killmonger. Killmonger. Isn't it absolutely
loses, who dies at the end? Killmonger. Killmonger. Isn't it absolutely
Slavoj Žižek
clear that—and the movie makes it in some way even almost explicitly—that he is the authentic hero? Can it be more clear than, you remember how at the end when the good king makes a speech at United Nations, who is at his side benevolently smiling? The CIA agent and so on. It's like, fuck your this new black kingdom, authentic but protected by CIA as they make it clear. So in the same sense and I even I go very far here, not only this so I will watch the movie this with all my sympathy for Joker. I think Joker should be there rehabilitated. I go to the end here which is the third part of Christopher Nolan trilogy, *Dark Knight Returns* or whatever. *Rises*. Yes, where who is there the bad guy? That Kane or what? Bane. Yeah, he is the good—he is the revolutionary. The movie is for me about socialist republic of Manhattan which goes on. I mean I—of course there are all the compromises—and I even proposed to—to—some guys that I accidentally, I don't have connections there, made in Hollywood—now this will shock you, it will be too much for you—to—to—do a new version of *Star Wars* rehabilitating the—the—Emperor and Darth Vader as the progressive authoritarian leaders fighting a reactionary feudals like Jedi and so on and so on. You know, it's kind of an example—I always like to—and I think this is maybe in today's desperate times, Hollywood—I wouldn't say at its best, but at its most interesting—where it pursues a certain vision, but it is—that's my vision of Christopher Nolan. Of course the official ideology of *Dark Knight Rises* is, even explicitly all the references to Charles Dickens and so on, the novel etc., but he is honest enough to bring out this ambiguities, inconsistencies and so on and so on. So I'm just looking, but, but if you
clear that—and the movie makes it in some way even almost explicitly—that he is the authentic hero? Can it be more clear than, you remember how at the end when the good king makes a speech at United Nations, who is at his side benevolently smiling? The CIA agent and so on. It's like, fuck your this new black kingdom, authentic but protected by CIA as they make it clear. So in the same sense and I even I go very far here, not only this so I will watch the movie this with all my sympathy for Joker. I think Joker should be there rehabilitated. I go to the end here which is the third part of Christopher Nolan trilogy, *Dark Knight Returns* or whatever. *Rises*. Yes, where who is there the bad guy? That Kane or what? Bane. Yeah, he is the good—he is the revolutionary. The movie is for me about socialist republic of Manhattan which goes on. I mean I—of course there are all the compromises—and I even proposed to—to—some guys that I accidentally, I don't have connections there, made in Hollywood—now this will shock you, it will be too much for you—to—to—do a new version of *Star Wars* rehabilitating the—the—Emperor and Darth Vader as the progressive authoritarian leaders fighting a reactionary feudals like Jedi and so on and so on. You know, it's kind of an example—I always like to—and I think this is maybe in today's desperate times, Hollywood—I wouldn't say at its best, but at its most interesting—where it pursues a certain vision, but it is—that's my vision of Christopher Nolan. Of course the official ideology of *Dark Knight Rises* is, even explicitly all the references to Charles Dickens and so on, the novel etc., but he is honest enough to bring out this ambiguities, inconsistencies and so on and so on. So I'm just looking, but, but if you
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want interesting movies today, you know which one I like? Did you see it? Is it the right title? A modest science-fiction movie which passed more or less unnoticed with John Goodman called
want interesting movies today, you know which one I like? Did you see it? Is it the right title? A modest science-fiction movie which passed more or less unnoticed with John Goodman called
Slavoj Žižek
*Captive State*. I—you see it's typically didn't... Okay, let's drop it now, we don't have time. Apologies to those who stood in line throughout the Q&A, but that's all the time we have. Let me—yes. Thank you very much. I'm grateful to you. One last—no, something important, very—not another story, just—you know, publishers are telling me, I hated them years ago, "why don't you write a book on Donald Trump" and so on. "We need psychoanalysis to understand this madman." No, my answer was: Trump—it's pretty transparent what he is doing, we only need psychoanalysis to understand the stupidity of Democrats who made his election, Trump's, possible, you know. So what I'm saying is that don't lose trust in philosophy. And events like this, or the fact that for example publishers almost dropped me for my big fat book *Less Than Nothing*, they thought "who will buy it?" That book, pages on Hegel, is selling better than many of my short political books. And I'm really proud of that, of you. It's not true this propaganda today: there is no intellectual movement, people no longer read. No, there are still people who read theory and they
*Captive State*. I—you see it's typically didn't... Okay, let's drop it now, we don't have time. Apologies to those who stood in line throughout the Q&A, but that's all the time we have. Let me—yes. Thank you very much. I'm grateful to you. One last—no, something important, very—not another story, just—you know, publishers are telling me, I hated them years ago, "why don't you write a book on Donald Trump" and so on. "We need psychoanalysis to understand this madman." No, my answer was: Trump—it's pretty transparent what he is doing, we only need psychoanalysis to understand the stupidity of Democrats who made his election, Trump's, possible, you know. So what I'm saying is that don't lose trust in philosophy. And events like this, or the fact that for example publishers almost dropped me for my big fat book *Less Than Nothing*, they thought "who will buy it?" That book, pages on Hegel, is selling better than many of my short political books. And I'm really proud of that, of you. It's not true this propaganda today: there is no intellectual movement, people no longer read. No, there are still people who read theory and they
unknown
are our only hope, I think. Yes, thank you
are our only hope, I think. Yes, thank you
Slavoj Žižek
very much.
very much.